Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/84

 80 Indian mistress of Cortez, who, more than all other persons, helped him to conquer. It is the haunt of robbers, and its caves are dens of thieves.

We stop only once to change horses and to buy some pretty steel trinkets, pushed into our faces by boys and men, who seem to find the only patronage for quite extensive steel works in these passing travelers. They offer little flat-irons, spurs, cuff-buttons, and other well-executed articles of embossed steel.

The towers of Puebla soon come to view, and a long, wide, dusty thoroughfare, poorly kept up, leads us to the vale where the sacred city lies, seemingly close at the base of Iztaccihuatl, but actually sixty miles from it. We pass the fort over which French and Mexicans fought, by churches and churches and churches, into narrow, busy, well-paved streets, to our hotel court-yard, whence, after the immeasurable dust has been measurably removed, we go to the depot and start for Mexico. As we shall return here again, we leave it for the present undescribed.

If you want to know that luxury of modern civilization, the rail-car, put between the beginning and ending of your journey a twenty-two hours' stretch of staging in a mountain land. Then you will relish it. How vast these plains outspread themselves! What a change from the narrow terrace of the coast and the tumbled-up steepness of the intermediate country! We climbed seven to eight thousand feet from the base of Chiquihuite to Tepeaca, a distance of not over one hundred and fifty miles. It was all Cumbres. Here we have prairies as fiat and broad as those of Illinois, but not as rich; yet, unlike them, bounded with magnificent hills, snow-covered and smoking, and black and comely. What would not Chicago give for just one of them? The road runs about a hundred miles through a dry, and lean, and level land.

At Epizaco, the halting-place and half-way house between Mexico and Puebla, we get a glimpse of the three snow peaks, the only place where I have seen them together. Orizaba lies low; his stony British stare being seen just above the horizon, while his