Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/466

450 the side of the coach, were changed; but this officer rode with us all the way, his fiery, little steed never flagging or halting to rest for a moment from morning to night. The road was fearfully dusty, and the coach mules, coach-wheels, and the horses of the guard, kept us in such a cloud of the sacred soil all the way, that no single individual was recognizable after we had gone a mile or two.

I wish I could present my readers with a picture of that peculiar and characteristic cortege, as we swept along the road from Puebla to Orizaba. Every color of the rainbow flashed in the costumes of the guard or the trappings of the horses. The men were wrapped to the eyes in scarfs and serapes to guard their faces and throats from the—to them—extreme cold, though we found it too warm to wear overcoats when sitting still, in the open coach. All the natives of this country thus protect themselves against the air, even in the warmest seasons, and the women you meet on the road have their faces, in most cases, all covered except the eyes, with their blue or black rebosas.

We left Palmar at 8, December 24th, for Orizaba, having only sixteen Spanish leagues to go. For the first six leagues the country was dusty, dry as the Californias during the dry season, and uninteresting. Then all in an instant the scene changed as if by magic. At a sharp turn in the road we came upon the brink of a great cañon, like that of the American River above Colfax on the Central Pacific Railway in California. The sides of the cañon were wooded and green, and very precipitous. Down at the bottom of this cañon, from twelve hundred to eighteen hundred feet below us, we could see many great cotton-laden wagons drawn by twenty to thirty mules each, coming up from Vera