ering spring when the first sunbeams reached the damp
underbrush. Ants hurried about their daily toil, and when we ascended
the next ridge we saw various kinds of lizards flitting across the road
or basking on the wayside rocks, one of them a sort of dwarf iguana of a
moss-green tint, on which protective color it seemed to rely for its
safety, as its movements were as sluggish as those of a toad.

As we kept steadily up-hill, the sun seemed to mount very rapidly,
and, peak after peak, the summits of the upper Sierra rose into view.
Zempantepec, La Sirena, and the Nevada de Colcoyan towered above the
rest, the latter at least four thousand feet above the snow-line. Few
prospects on earth could efface the impression of that panorama. In the
Sierra de San Miguel our continent reproduces the Syrian Lebanon on a
grander scale. Septimius Severus, who vacillated between his throne and
the Elysian valleys of Daphne, would have renounced the empire of the
world for the mountain-gardens of the Val de Morillo, and the giants of
the cypress forests on the southeastern slope of the Sierra dwarf all
the cedars of Bashan and Hebron. The largest, though not the tallest,
of these trees, the cypress of Maria del Tule (twelve miles south of San
Miguel), which Humboldt calls the "oldest vegetable monument of our
globe," has a diameter of forty-two feet, a circumference of one hundred
and thirty-six feet near the ground and of one hundred and four feet
higher up, and measures two hundred and eighty-two feet between the
extremities of two opposite branches. Yet this tree has many rivals in
the Val de Morillo and near the sources of the Rio Verde, where groups
of grayish-green mountain-firs rise like hillocks above the surrounding
vegetation.

On our right extended the orange-gardens of Casa Blanca for two miles
along the base of the hill to a deep ravine, reappearing on the other
side, where their white-blooming tree-tops mingled with the copses of a
banana-plantation. Farther up, euphorbias and hibiscus prevailed, and
the upper limit of the foot-hills is marked by the paler green of the
cork-oak forests that cover the slopes of the sierra proper. In the
northeast this sierra becomes linked with the ramifications of the
central Cordilleras, and connected with our ridge by one of the
densely-wooded spurs that flank the plateau of the Llanos Ventosos. The
rocks at our feet belonged, therefore, to a mountain-chain that might be
called a lineal