Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/375

 that the fair ladies of Mexico were constrained to seek them out. All, alas! have departed,—fountains, flowers, monks, and stately dames and gallants. The ruins remain, and the forests, for the conservation of which latter, as tending to preserve the supply of water flowing to the city, the government has recently passed necessary laws.

After groping through the subterranean passages, which wound beneath the principal buildings, and may have been used by the accursed Dominicans—who once inhabited here after the departure of the Carmelites—as places of torture or imprisonment for their religious victims, we entered the chapel. How changed in the lapse of two centuries and a half! Where hung that sacred picture of Our Lady of Carmel, and those silver lamps, are now but bare walls, defaced with many an inscription and the smoke of vandal fires. Beneath the central dome, where the light sifts through and enlivens the gloom, is a brick furnace once used for the smelting of glass, fragments of which, and much wood for fuel, lie about on the broken pavement. There are passages in these walls in which one might easily lose himself, wells and cistern that may be the entrances to subterranean labyrinths, and cells and vaults that may once have heard many a groan.

To find a stream in the hills of far-off Mexico that recalled a mountain torrent of New England, spanned by just such a bridge as artists love to draw across our foaming brooks, was something that drew us all into the valley after the fortunate discoverer. One touch of such a bit of nature made us all united at once upon this charming dell as the place to lunch in. The hampers were accordingly opened here, and each member of the party, provided with half a chicken and a bottle of ale, sat down contentedly to the feast. After the repast, the photographer of the party secured—in the conventional language of his profession—the shadow of that bridge, ere the substance faded from our sight, and then we hastened to the convent and our donkeys.

Though with a prospect before them of home and a stable, those donkeys of ours were loath to move in any direction. It