XI.
A GARDEN IN EDEN.
A Temptation.—Up the Mountains.—The Cross of Cortez.—Sight of the Town and Valley.—The downward Plunge.—A Lounge.—Church of Cortez.—The Enchanted Garden.—Idolatry.—The Market-place.—The Almanac against Protestantism.—Palace of Cortez.—The Indian Garden of Maximilian.—A Sugar Hacienda.—The latter End.—All Zones.
In Eden was a garden. Eden itself was paradise, but the paradise had an inner paradise to which the outer delights were the same as brass and iron to the gold and silver in the age of Solomon. So Mexico may be an Eden, but there is a garden eastward and southward in this Eden that makes its other beauties tame.
My stay was drawing to a close, and a temptation to unite a little pleasure with business was too much for my feeble will to resist. So far I had made only one excursion of which the Church was not the sole end and aim—that was the two days and a night to the Convent of El Desierto, and even there I could not resist the conceiving, if not the planning, of a camp-ground in its ancient and magnificent woods.
But a cave of huge dimensions, second only to the Mammoth of Kentucky, if second to that, is reported to be three days to the south, less than two days beyond Cuernervaca. A party of ladies and gentlemen arranged to visit the cave. I was invited to join them. I hardly saw how I could take four days for recreation. In addition to the two already taken out of the sixty spent here, this would make a week's vacation—altogether too much time to throw away in this luxuriating clime. But if we were going back to some Ante-romanistic usages as well as faith, we might utilize the cave for hermit purposes, as the Desierto grounds are to be utilized, I hope, for camp-meetings; but we can hardly get Methodists to im-
