place
for a few weeks, it will be found to have undergone a curious molecular
change, and to have become quite soft and weak, or, as the workmen call
it, dead. We ought to be quite sure whether lying for centimes under
ground may not have made some similar change in bronze.

I have seen many prickly pears in different places, but never such
specimens as those that were growing among the stones in this old
quarry. They had gnarled and knotted trunks of hard wood, and were as
big as pollard-oaks; their age must have been immense; but,
unfortunately, one could not measure it, or it would have been a good
criterion of the age of the quarry, which had not only been excavated
but abandoned before their time. In one of the caves was a human
skeleton, blanched white and clean, and near it some one has stuck a
cross, made of two bits of stick, in the crevices of a heap of stones.

Returning to the entrance of the quarry, well loaded with stone hammers
and knives, we sat down to breakfast, in a cave, where our man had
established himself with the horses. An attempt on my part to cut
German sausage with an obsidian knife proved a decided failure.

We had already been struck by the appearance of the two pyramids of
Teotihuacan, when we passed by Otumba on our way to Mexico. The hills
which skirt the plain are so near them as to diminish their apparent
size; but even at a distance they are conspicuous objects. Now, when we
came close to them, and began by climbing to their summits, and walking
round their terraces, to measure ourselves against them, we began
gradually to realize their vast bulk; and this feeling continually grew
upon us. Modern architecture strives to unite the greatest possible
effect with the least cost; and the modern churches of southern Europe
and Spanish America, with their fine tall facades fronting the street,
and insignificant little buildings behind, show this idea in its
fullest development. Pyramids are built with no such object, and make
but little show in proportion to their vast mass of material; but then
one gets from them a sense of solid magnitude that no other building
gives, however vast its proportions may be. Neither of us had ever seen
the Egyptian pyramids. Even in Mexico these of Teotihuacan are not the
largest; for, though the pyramid of Cholula is no higher, it covers far
more ground. Were these monuments in Egypt, they would only rank, from
their size, in the second class.

As has oft