after all, our safety. Undoubtedly, we did risk something in coming hither, and once and again half regretted our temerity. But it paid.
We take another climb in the morning to another summit—a two-hours-and-thirty-minutes' tramp, very different from the two-thirty of the racer. But the result was different; for we gained health and appetite, and a glorious prospect in our two-thirty toil up the face of the mountain. Before us and far beneath lay the high, uplifted plains of Anahuac, with the city on its breast, a dazzling diamond. The two snow-peaks blazed more brightly than the city they inclose; and all the valley, its lakes, meadows, and mountains, cities and hamlets, burned in the torrid flame. A slight smoke, the first I have seen, left some of the remoter ranges less distinct. Yet the Sierra of Real del Monte, eighty miles away, was not afar off, and more distant ranges girt the horizon. Below us the cleared knolls were patched off into pastures by hedges of maguey, whose dark, broad leaves, even at this height, were visibly glossy and green.
It was less recherche than the one the night previous. The convent was not the centre of the scene, nor the woods the circumference. They were put one side, as the city had been in that picture. I prefer the seclusiveness of the first; and, if I were rich, would give an order quickly to some of these deft artists, of whom Mexico has many, to put that beauty on the canvas. The Falls of Atoyac, on the mountain rim of the Sierra Caliente, and the Convent of El Desierto are the true perfections of loveliness so far beheld in this country; and it is hard to say which of the two is chief. This has the superiority in the mingling with its woods and ravines, man and history and the Mexic plain; that, in its dancing water-fall, plunging into a green basin, whose walls of tropical luxuriance rise two thousand feet above the white-sprayed bottom. Who will give me both? The greedy spirit cries, who? And echo
"The green silence doth displace"
with a mocking "who?"
Desierto has never had its desert in fame, though not without it.
