The town has numerous churches and old convent buildings—the latter now confiscated and converted into public schools—but not much else worth seeing. The population numbers ten thousand.
Next day, the 13th of Nov., we drove the same distance over a wide, prairie-like, uncultivated plain, and a lava-field of twenty miles in width, the road through which was fearfully rough. This old lava underlies the soil—the rich, black loam, of the country—at a depth of three to six feet, for many square leagues. We had been passing over such beds, or "flows," from time to time, on all the journey from Colima. Where so much of this material could have come from, is a mystery, at this day.
We were now at an elevation of forty-five hundred feet above the sea, and steadily ascending. Here, the American Aloe, Maguey, Century, Mescal, or Pulque plant, as it is termed in different localities, grows to an immense size—much larger than in the tierre caliente—and is planted out in regular order, in extensive fields, all along the road. Many of the plants were sending out their blossom stalks, ten to twenty feet in height, looking, for all the world, like telegraph poles at a distance, and like gigantic asparagus sprouts when near at hand; and a few were bursting into blossom. This is the "Century plant," which, Northern people have so long believed blooms but once in a hundred years, but, which matures here, in from five to ten years. It blooms but once, the stalk being cut out to form a reservoir for the milky sap which accumulates therein, and is drawn out to be converted into pulque and mescal. From each old plant, five or six "suckers"—each of which will produce a new plant—spring up, and are
