Page:The Rambler in Mexico.djvu/59

 Rh League after league we moved forward in ecstasy. Every turn disclosed another matchless picture. It was here a grove of old and shattered trees of enormous growth bent over the surface of the river under the load of moss and flowering parasites which drew nourishment and life from their fibres; their outstretched arms, struggling, as it were, in the interminable folds of the vines and creepers, whose festoons and garlands of flowers, fruit, or pods, entwined every bough to the highest twig. There again rose a thicket of flowering shrubs of all hues, glistening in morning dew, over which the insects and butterflies were gloating in the bright sun; and such butterflies—the rainbow is dull and colourless in comparison!

Farther, the high gray precipice swept down perpendicularly, with its red, purple, and gray hues, innumerable weather stains, and lichens, reflected in the still surface of the stream; while its sheets of bare rock unveiled to the gaze of the passer-by, in the hundreds of thin strata, twisted, broken, entwined, and distorted into a thousand shapes, a page of nature's secret doings, which could not be contemplated without a feeling of awe. The upper portions of the precipices, where they broke down from the forested slope of the mountains above, were frequently overgrown with long strings of strong wiry grass, or by a peculiar species of cactus which rose like a whitish green column perpendicularly from the ledges.

Then came the little opening at the entrance of some lateral valley, with its Indian hamlet, strips of cultivation fully exposed to the broad sun, and groups of rich and sunny bananas, half shrouding the simple cabins of the poor natives: or, as a contrast, one of those dens of rubbish, situated under the shade of a beetling crag, in which everything seemed devoted to putrid destruction; where you moved in twilight through a mass of decaying vegetation; where no living thing sported, and the passenger breathed the chill and humid damp of death, rottenness, and decay.