Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/471

Rh palisades, and that night, when the moon came up and filled the great gap with mellow light, the view could not be recompensed by a month of ordinary scenes. Next morning I climbed the hill, above the compact castle and town, through a miserable village, with one street that led upward, and full of rocks and stones that had a tendency to send you downward. But the mozo said it was a buen camino, a good road; though a mozo always calls any road good that has holes in it less than four feet deep, and rocks you can climb over without a ladder. After a time we attained the table land again, from which we had descended into the gorge the day before. This portion is a great plain, thickly peppered with stones from some volcano, and in the distance are clumps of cedar and acacia, with here and there an oak. The air is fragrant with cedar odors, and the pastures might be those of the Massachusetts hills, but for the maguey along the walls.

And what am I going to see? A barranca. And a barranca is—a hole in the ground, a ravine lengthened out, and spread apart, and deepened, until it has ceased to be a ravine, or a gorge, or even a canon, but becomes a barranca. And this is the Barranca Grande, the largest one in the State, and perhaps in the country, miles across, and with walls twenty-five hundred feet deep, or high, according to whether you stand at top or bottom. The mozo leads the way to the brink of a precipice, and I look down into the barranca of the river from Regla. Steep walls of rock are under my feet, at the base of which is the accumulated detritus of centuries, sloping to the bottom, where a river meanders through groves of trees and green-carpeted alluvium. It must be a large river, though it looks a mere silver thread, and its roaring can be heard here, two thousand feet above it. Riding still farther on a couple of miles, over stone-strewn hills, I reached the highest prominence on the plateau, between the Regla barranca and one still grander, into which its river empties. Below me stretched the great barranca, pursuing a serpentine course from north to south, a broad vale of green, divided into fields and gardens, with dark green mango and orange trees shading a most luxuriant vegetation, and a