Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/400

388 everywhere, except such as the irrigating water afforded. It was well watered and very green, running up under the lee of the dark mountains, and spreading out in long levels of fertility. Where this water had not come, the soil lay white and dead, a corpse-like look. Where it came, it was overflowing with life.

The plains are about six miles across and ten miles in length, in sight of the white city at their south-western terminus.

A single rosy ray streamed up from behind the easternmost mountain like a finger, an index of the coming sun. Homer's figure, which Milton appropriates, as he does so much of Homer,

was suggested to my mind by this unusual spectacle. Anon a second broad ray joined its fellow, two fingers uplifted by the coming sun. The rose soon changed to yellow, shone through the openings of the hills, and sent its lustre across the lovely plain and upon the high and gracefully moulded mountains that shut that in. The richer line of Tennyson expressed the glory that followed:

I looked and was glad, for I bethought me, that coming light has already risen on my own land. It is not two hundred miles to the border. This rose and gold must have just illumined that fair clime. I prayed the prayer of Alexander Smith for this magnificent land:

The road is hard and smooth. Crosses appear quite frequently, and remind us of that long disease of the land, the violent death of its people, while dead mules and asses alike remind us of the late disease of its horses and their kin.

The mountains gather close to us. The open meadows