Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/76

 72, with the pyramid of ice ever cooling the fancy, if not the air. It will be the favorite resort as well of wanderers from the United States of the North.

The cars here begin to really climb the Cumbres; four thousand feet they accomplish in less than thirty miles. It is holding on by the eyelids.

 The boldest held their breath For a time."

As they go, step by step, up the sides of these gorges, which "open their ponderous and marble jaws" to swallow up that smoking, puffing insect which crawls like a beetle, its rings each separate car, along the almost precipitous sides of the huge barrancas, a hand thrust out on one side would touch the mountain, on the other stretch out over thousands of feet of empty space between it and the rocks below. The road is the finest bit of engineering on this, if not on any, continent.

The stage-road twenty miles from Orizaba is the grandest I have ever traveled. It is smooth and pleasant of itself. The crazy Mexican ponies that it took so long to start are off, at last, with a leap and a whirl, and the one-storied, if not one-horse, town is left behind. The way is nearly straight, very level, and lined on each side, at the distance of a mile or two, with a succession of cliffs. They stand out of the valley as sharp as if lifted up in frame-work by human hands. Their origin is clearly volcanic. The sharp cut, the iron-like look, the wave shape, the striated lines, like the lava of Vesuvius, all prove their origin. They are two to four thousand feet high, I should say, on a passing glance. The valley between is rich in every fruit and flower and shrub. Here is a river gliding along, fringed with heavy willows, larger and compacter of leaf than their temperate-zone brother, but of the same bending and hugging nature. No English river bank was ever more lovely in adornment, or more hidden from the passing eye. The hills are mostly rock, without the possibility of culture, but on some of them grasses and trees have sprung up, and goats and sheep find pasturage and shelter.