of
jungle and lagoon. In these great virgin forests tribes of monkeys find
their home, and the tapir and the cougar have their being. Mangroves,
palms, rubber-trees, mahogany, strange _flora_, and ungathered fruits
run riot amid this tropical profusion, and flourish and fall almost
unseen of man. And here the malarias of the lowlands lurk--those
bilious disorders which man is ever fighting and slowly conquering.
This is Mexico's _tierra caliente_.

But our way lies onwards towards the mountains. A wildness of
landscape, unpictured before, opens to the view. Here rise weird
rock-forms, Nature's cathedral towers and grim facades magnificent in
solitude and awe-inspiring, as by steep bridle-paths we take our way
along the valleys, and draw rein to gaze upon them. Ponderous and
sterile, these outworks and buttresses of the great Sierra Madre rise
upwards, fortifications reared against the march of tropic verdure
beneath, cloud-swathed above and bathed below by forest-seas. Born in
that high environment of rains and snows, rippling streams descend,
falling in cascades and babbling rapids adown romantic glens, and their
life-giving waters, with boisterous ripple or murmuring softly, take
their way over silver sand-bar and polished ledge of gleaming quartz or
marble, winding thence amid corridors of stately trees and banks of
verdant vegetation, to where they fill the irrigation-channels of
white-clad peasants, far away on the plains below.

Still onwards and upwards lies the way. One of the most remarkable
railways in the world ascends this steep zone, and serpentines among
sheer descents to gain the summits of abrupt escarpments, from which--a
remarkable feature of the topography of the eastern slope of
Mexico--the traveller looks down as into another country and climate,
upon those tropical valleys which he has left below. This is the
Mexican Vera Cruz railway.

[Illustration: THE ATLANTIC SLOPE: TUNNEL AND BRIDGE OF THE INFIERNILLO
CANYON, ON THE MEXICAN RAILWAY, IN THE STATE OF VERA CRUZ.]

Let us pause a moment and gain a comprehensive idea of the character of
Mexico's configuration and climate. It is to be recollected that
Mexico, like other lands of Western America, is a country of relatively
recent geological birth. The form of the country is remarkable. It
shares the topographical features of others of the Andine countries of
America--of tropical lowlands and temperate uplands, in which latter
nearness to the h