rose from
among flat roofs and verdure tufts, and pointed upward to a sky as soft
and warm as over the Tuscan hills. Other spires were Gothic, and others
truncated, but the temples that gave character to the whole were those
of Byzantine domes. Lighted by the sun's level rays of early morning,
their mosaic colors glittered as in some bright glare of Algeria, but
were relieved by the town's cooling fringe of green and the palms of
many plazas within. It might have been a Moorish city, in Happy Arabia
called paradise, a city of fountains, and wooded glens, like haunts of
mythical fauns. Queretero once boasted a coat of arms, granted by a
condescending Spanish monarch, and for loyalty to the hoary order of
king and church she in those old days described herself as Very Noble
and Royal. Stern cuirassed conquistadores held her as a key to the
nation's heart, as a buckler for the capital, and lately the French did
also. And now the Hapsburg had come to a welcome of garlands, and called
her his "querida."

But however excellently Queretero served as a base of military
operations, as a besieged place pocketed among hills her aspect altered
woefully. She was like an egg clutched in the talons of an eagle. On
north and east and south the hills swept perilously near, a low,
convenient range, with only a grass plain a few miles wide separating
them from the town below. On north and east the heights were already
sprinkled with Escobedo's tents and cannon. They commanded the only two
strongholds of the besieged, as well as the town itself, which lay
between. One stronghold was the Cerro de las Campanas, a wedge-shaped
hill on the northwestern edge of the town, which held nothing but
trenches. On the northwestern edge was the other stronghold, the mound
of Sangremal, which fell away as a steep bluff to the grassy plain
below. From the bluff, across the plain, to the hills opposite,
stretched a magnificent aqueduct. On the mound's commodious summit of
tableland there was the Plaza de la Cruz, also the Church de la Cruz,
and an old Franciscan hive, called the monastery de la Cruz. Here
Maximilian established himself in a friar's lonely cell. On the north a
small river skirted the town, on the south, where nothing intervened
between the grassy plain and the wooded Alameda, the besiegers found the
most vulnerable flank.

On this side investment began with the arrival of Corona and Regules,
and soon after, of General Riva Palacio. The Re