Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/62

 58 shall eat them all up, and ship them to New York, and make this green, grand wilderness a desolation.

How sorry I am to be compelled to think that some Yankee speculator in lumber from Bangor to Brainerd will read these lines, and be up and off in the next steamer for Vera Cruz and the splendid woods of Chiquihuiti! Cortez did not sigh more for Mexican silver than these lumbermen will for these mahoganies, and rosewoods, and other equally polishable delights. Black-walnut will be of no account when the Mexican lumber reaches the Northern market. Give us a good fill, dear ancient forests, of your green delights, for the Yankee wood-sawyer is coming, and you will soon be no more.

The roadside is lined with immense palms, whose leaves are each themselves almost a covering for the body, while the castor-oil-tree spreads its broad wing along the way, hated of all youth, loved of not all doctors.

Convolvuli of every hue throw their vines and flowers over these palms and taller trees. Our old morning-glories were growing wild, and make our path a perpetual "pleached bower" of beauty. The orchids hang on the taller trees, or sit in nests in the crotch, parasitic plants of every color making the tree into nose-gays. They are a fungus, and seem to prefer decayed trees; perhaps themselves decay them. Some that are stripped of leaf and bark glow like a June rose-bed in the radiance of these curious plants. There are hundreds of varieties, and have attracted of late much attention from botanists, and have even got into literature.

About ten miles up, the road winds round a gorge that sinks hundreds of feet below, and whose upper side comes together in the Falls of Atoyac.

This is one of the most beautiful water-falls I have ever seen; I might say the most beautiful. It is not stripped of its trees, as is Minnehaha, who sits shivering in her nakedness, as unhappy as the Greek Slave. Nor does it come, like that, from a level landscape. The hills rise all around it a thousand feet and more.