he rocks, or, clewing himself up,
rolls over the cliff to escape his pursuer. Herds of cattle, half wild,
roam through the glassy glades or over the tufted ridges, lowing for
water; and black vultures (zopilotes) sail through the cloudless
heavens, waiting for some scene of death to be enacted in the thickets
below.

Here, too, I pass through scenes of cultivation. Here is the hut of the
peon and the rancho of the small proprietor; but they are structures of
a more substantial kind than in the region of the palm. They are of
stone. Here, too, is the hacienda, with its low white walls and
prison-like windows; and the pueblita, with its church and cross and
gaily-painted steeple. Here the Indian corn takes the place of the
sugarcane, and I ride through wide fields of the broad-leafed
tobacco-plant. Here grow the jalap and the guaiacum, the sweet-scented
sassafras and the sanitary copaiba.

I ride onward, climbing steep ridges and descending into chasms
(_barrancas_) that yawn deeply and gloomily. Many of these are
thousands of feet in depth; and the road that enables me to reach their
bottoms is often no more than a narrow ledge of the impending cliff,
running terrace-like over a foaming torrent.

Still onward and upward I go, until the "foot-hills" are passed, and I
enter a defile of the mountains themselves--a pass of the Mexican Andes.

I ride through, under the shadow of dark forests and rocks of blue
porphyry. I emerge upon the other side of the sierra. A new scene
opens before my eyes--a scene of such soft loveliness that I suddenly
rein up my horse, and gaze upon it with mingled feelings of admiration
and astonishment. I am looking upon one of the "valles" of Mexico,
those great table-plains that lie within the Cordilleras of the Andes,
thousands of feet above ocean-level, and, along with these mountains,
stretching from the tropic almost to the shores of the Arctic Sea.

The plain before me is level, as though its surface were liquid. I see
mountains bounding it on all sides; but there are passes through them
that lead into other plains (_valus_). These mountains have no
foot-hills. They _stand up_ directly from the plain itself, sometimes
with sloping conical sides--sometimes in precipitous cliffs.

I ride into the plain and survey its features. There is no resemblance
to the land I have left--the _tierra caliente_. I am now in the _tierra
templada_. New objects present themselves--a new asp