on the south,
TROPICO DE CANCER.
ZONA TORRIDA.
Out of respect to your early teaching in geography you ought to perspire and be exceeding warm in the Torrid Zone, and see all kinds of gay-plumaged birds and jungles of flowers, but the hammer of the iconoclast has shattered one of your long cherished dreams.
The sun was shining upon a landscape over which clouds never hover. You pull your overcoat around you on this cold July day, and look through your closed windows for the other canard—the landscape. The landscape is all there according to the book, and for that you are thankful, but how changed! As far as the eye can reach and ten times farther are beautiful rock-colored rocks, and dust-colored dust and thorny thorns and dust-hidden sky. Where are the flowers? Never were any. And the birds? Never will be any. Not a blade of grass nor a chirp of insect. For forty miles around, or as far as the eye can reach is the dry, parched dust, and the chaparral, sere and yellow.
After a hundred and fifty miles of desert, how welcome is the oasis! Bocas is its name, and the last stopping-place before we reach the great city of San Luis Potosi.
Las Bocas is a fine hacienda and recalls old feudal times along the Rhine. Here is a fine old castle with its walled enclosure, its beautiful arched bridge and its herds and flocks and gardens and retinue. By the railroad track is a distillery for making liquid lava from the aloe or maguey plant, which is sold under the name of mescal for the purpose of making men drunk. Those who know say it will eat the lining out of a lead-pipe stomach. I saw a case of delirium tremens which it is guaranteed to give, and I can only liken it to a caged hyena after Lent.
Away in the distance is the snow-white trail of a stone wall, which winds its tortuous path many leagues away to encircle the hacienda de Las Bocas, while within its bounds and feeding upon the rocks and thorns are the thousands of cattle that maintain its opulence. How that kind of food can work such wonders is beyond my ken. When I was in school I learned that cattle have four stomachs. I think one would be quite sufficient for all the food a cow can get from a cactus bush, and a couple of millstones might be helpful in digesting the rocks. No one told me that the rocks were positively a part of the bill of fare, but I pointed to ten miles of rocks enclosed by a wall and asked a man why they fenced in the rocks, and he said it was a pasture, and he ought to know, as he is a native and to the manner born.
Four hundred and seventy-five miles from the Rio Grande, and the only trees seen were upon the little oases watered by tiny streams. We leave the plateau and climb the mountain into the city of San Luis de Potosi.
CHAPTER III.
SAN LUIS POTOSI.
AND no more satisfactory city can be visited than San Luis, situated in the crater of a fertile valley, while its suburbs extend to the rich silver mines of the mountains which give it name.