Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/483

Rh long resident in Mexico, had said to me, coming up on the train from Vera Cruz: "So long as these people can earn a real a day on the railroads, they will not listen to the pronunciamiento of any revolutionary chief."

From the bridge we took the graded railroad bed to the end of our journey. The scenery was mainly that peculiar to the dry hills, except where the aqueduct traced its fruitful course, or in the river-bottom. Now and then we were obliged to turn aside for an unfinished culvert, or walk our horses over frail bridges of brush, earth, and poles, and occasionally the "Cuidado!" of our guide would warn us of a bad place in the road to be avoided; but at the appointed time we reached Tula, over fifty miles from Mexico, and the centre of a populous State. In this town we found friends to welcome us, for it was the headquarters of the superintendent of construction and his party. Here I found a few friends who had left New York with me two months previous, and who had come on here while I stopped in Yucatan.

Surrounded by hills of apparently basaltic rock, the little city of Tula is compactly built of stone, taken, probably, from the ruins of Indian cities. It has a pleasant little plaza, containing a garden of flowers, with a fountain bubbling up in the centre of a stone basin. The town was formerly of great importance to the Spanish invaders and settlers, and here they built their most holy and noble cathedral, dating (if we can believe the inscription on the wall) from the year 1553. It is a magnificent building, with lofty groined ceiling, and with a collection of paintings that appear to possess great merit, as well as antiquity. One especially, of the Virgin supporting the dead Christ, is less a caricature than is generally seen in these holy pictures. There is on her face an expression of real suffering; pity, compassion, and all the yearning of a mother's bleeding heart, are most admirably depicted. A wall, that once served the purpose of defence, surrounds this great cathedral, and