Cruz is how to find the way out of it. Until 1806 the road from this city to the capital—a distance of over two hundred and sixty miles—was little better than a mule-path. The Mexican Railway, which now links the two cities, is one of the greatest marvels of engineering skill in the world. It was thirty-six years in building, and was opened on New Year's Day, 1873. Crossing the arid levels of the tierra caliente ("hot lands") bordering the Gulf, the road reaches a point about forty-five miles west of Vera Cruz, when it suddenly begins to climb the first terrace or the foothills of that great mountain-mass crowded into the taper-end of North America. The air grows cold and bracing and every breath is laden with the perfume of innumerable flowers. The roadside is lined with lofty palms. Morning-glories of luxuriant growth, with rainbow-tinted flowers, run riot among the trees, and orchids, or plants of the air, finding no room in the teeming soil beneath, take wings like strange bright birds and nestle on the crotches of the trees or cling to their branches.
The road lies through vast coffee-plantations as rich in fruit and flower and leaf as though they were in their own native Asia. Fields of corn overtop the low-roofed Indian huts, which, half hidden in the waving verdure, seem to be surrounded by some glittering phalanx of old-time warriors with tossing plumes and robes of green. Here perpetual summer reigns, and the fruits and the flowers of every zone flourish side by side. Four times each year the reaper may follow the sower and gather crops yielding from one hundredfold to four hundredfold. On the skirts of Orizaba there are majestic forests of mahogany, rosewood and other valuable trees. Here and there in some quiet valley or on the
