Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/342

330 is a hollow that has a bit of a white chapel, a few brown huts, a green sweet sward, and a glimmering of water; how I wish for a drop of it to cool my parched tongue, and wish in vain! Shall I ever have a like powerless craving from the opposite of this summit? Christ forbid! yet if another feared lest, having preached to others, he himself should be a castaway, how much more I! The basin looked, among these hard, stern, rough mountains, like the "Luck of Roaring Camp" among its hard, stern, rough protectors; only these mountains never swore, nor drank, nor gambled, nor murdered, nor were in any respect unfit protectors to the babe they embosomed. Would that their human imitators were as human!

They assume strange shapes. One of them lifts itself out an encompassing plain, like a bowl bottom side up and the bottom broken off, so that you can look into its hollow from its ragged edge, down side up. Others bend themselves in huge concentric arcs that look like the same bowl, with one-half of its already beheaded, or bebottomed, portion cut away from it, exposing to view the inside of the remaining part—a hollow hemisphered, truncated cone. Others look after the fashion of hills elsewhere, only handsomer, very smooth domes and cones of glistening rock. Among them glided, like huge mottled snakes, pastures brown and gray with stones and winter herbage, waiting the rains that shall clothe these rocky fields in "a mist of greenness," the mottled snake turning to its greener kindred. So precious are the bits of soil in this almost soilless region that you can trace the boundary lines of these patches far up the sides of the mountains.

Far away to the north and east, the grand plains above Queretaro roll out, a scroll written over with industry and its rewards. It will be yet better written, when this age shall be a palimpsest for the one, near at hand, of equal rights, higher faith, universal culture, and social reform. How intense the solitude of these mountains; how profound their silence! It is a stillness that can be felt. Not a bird wings its way across the summits, or sends an echo along their sides; not an insect hums. No leaves