t spot--are the
great mining places, ancient and modern, which form so important a
feature of the life of the country on the Great Plateau.

Fabulous wealth of silver has been dug from these everlasting hills.
Grim and abandoned mine-mouths, far away like black dots upon the
slopes, and strange honeycombed galleries and caverns far beneath the
outcropping of the lodes, have vomited rich silver ore for centuries:
and the clang of miners' steel and the dropping candle are now, as
ever, the accompaniment of labour of these hardy _peones_. The very
church, perhaps, is redolent of mining, and was raised by some pious
delver in the bowels of the hill whereon it stands--a thank-offering
for some great luck of _open sesame_ which his saints afforded him.

But we will not linger here; Guanajuato and Zacatecas and Pachuca shall
be our theme in another chapter, and the tale of toil and silver which
they tell. For the moment the way lies down the Great Plateau, among
its intersecting ranges of hills, through the fertile valleys, which
alternate with the appalling sun-beat deserts.

The conditions of travel in this great land of Mexico--it is nearly two
thousand miles in length--are, perhaps, less arduous than in
Spanish-American countries generally. Mexico has lent itself well to
the building of railways in a longitudinal direction, upon the line of
least resistance from north-west to south-east, paralleling its general
Andine structure. Several great trunk lines thus connect the capital
City of Mexico and the southern part of the republic with the
civilisation of the United States, over this relatively easy route. Yet
the earliest railway of Mexico, that from Vera Cruz to the City of
Mexico, traverses the country in the most difficult direction,
transversely, rising from tide-water and the Atlantic littoral, and
ascending the steep escarpments of the Eastern Sierra Madre to fall
down into the lake-valley of Mexico, bringing outside civilisation to
that isolated interior world. But Mexico's singular topographical
position did not secure her from invasion. Three times the city on the
lakes has fallen to foreign invaders--the Spaniards of the Conquest,
the French of Napoleon, and the Americans of the United States. Indeed,
the flat and arid tableland stretching away for such interminable
distances to the north was formerly a more potent natural defence than
the Cordilleran heights which front on the Atlantic seas; and the axiom
of