Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/77

Rh The pass is without parallel in any spot of Europe or America for its symmetry and grandeur. Interlachen has taller mountains, but not so perfect a valley. For a score of miles you never leave these mountain walls. Like the sphinx-lined pathway to Theban temples, they seem to guard the road to the distant capital. They end fittingly in true Spanish and Mexican grandeur, which is stately from beginning to end.

The Cumbres are their stopping-place. These, too, had been a part of the sup of horrors forced down the resisting will by those who would compel it to abandon its purpose.

We enter upon a still more romantic experience. The path winds up, back and forward, so frequently as almost to make it look from beneath like a series of parallel lines. This wall concludes the valley as completely as if it had been built by nature as a dam across its green river. There is a perfect pause. No way out of the valley in this direction but up this wall. It is not of rock, but of hard "earth burned in this ceaseless sun, and supporting a little herbage and a few trees. They also conclude the Tierras Calientes, or Hot Lands, of the shore and its first wide terrace.

The valley itself terminates exquisitely. It lies, a basin of green, between the hills, a mile or two wide, the most of it under culture, and cut into tiny strips of varied tint, brown, green, golden, according to its products. A bit of a village, with a small, dingy white church, is on its southern edge. As we climb the steep face of the mountain this smiling parterre lies lovely below. It looks not unlike the meadows of Northampton from the top of Holyoke, only our height is twice or thrice as great, and its breadth is not a fourth as large. The setting sun looks lovingly on this bit of rescued nature among the black and bare hills, and as we wind our way up, every new ascent makes it look the lovelier, as it grows the more diminutive. It is a baby landscape, and all the more charming for its infantile littleness.

The sun goes down as we go up, and by the time the top is reached, the baby, in its cradle of lofty hills, has gone into shadow and approaching sleep. A light twinkles from a window far down