IX.
A DAY AND NIGHT AT EL DESIERTO.
A Point of View.—The Woods: their Peril and Preservation.—How we got here.—Chapultepec.—Tacubaya.—Santa Fé.—Contadera.—Guajimalpa.—The Forest.—The Shot.—Solitude.—The Ruin.—Its Inquisition.—A Bowl of Song.—Moonlight Pleasure and all-night Horror.—Morning Glories.—Its History.—A more excellent Way.—Home again.
Let me have Turner's pencil for a moment. How your black and white would burn! On this rock, high and lifted up, come and sit. You are panting from the long pull and the steep pull up the gorge; but you forget it all in the landscape, near and remote, that lies under your eye. It is torrid and temperate at a glance. Could we see round that lofty point, we could add and frigid also; for there sit the snow peaks that bring the north pole to the equator. But these apart, the scene is one of exquisite beauty and grandeur. The gorge beneath us is lined on both sides with munificent pines, firs, and hemlocks; not stinted and spindled, as they are on our northern hills, nor clipped and shaven, but in all their original, untrimmed, uncut magnificence. In the midst of them sits a castle-like ruin, such as the Rhine seldom affords, England seldomer, and other lands never. Its gray walls, thick and high, its several domes and turrets, its archways and entrances are of the best Rhine quality. It is on a cleared point that is well above the bottom of the valley and yet well below our towering observatory. It is a reminiscence of feudal times in looks and situation, and one could easily transfer himself almost three hundred years backward, when its foundations were laid.
It is not a castle, though very like a castle; but a convent, built in 1606, the year before the first permanent English colony was planted on this continent, and quite a while before the English col-
