The perspective seems unduly fore-shortened, and mountain peaks which are really twenty-five miles away, appear to be within an hour’s walk. After your law of optics has been restored, you discover that no prettier spot could have been chosen for a city than that for Monterey.
Founded three hundred and thirty-five years ago, upon an elevation 1700 feet above the sea, the seasons are so nearly alike that December is as pleasant as May.
In the western part of the city are the homes of the wealthy; beautiful houses in shaded gardens where tropical birds and flowers have their home, and where spraying fountains and living streams of water remind one of the tales of fairy-land. Just beyond these homes is the Bishop’s Palace, the last fortification to succumb to the American army of invasion when the city was taken. Around the palace are many cannon, some half-buried beneath the soil, and one with the unbelched shot still imbedded in its throat where, for fifty years it has lain in mute testimony of that unequal struggle which General Grant called “The most unholy war in all history.”
Across the valley, three miles as the crow flies, are the famous hot springs of Topo Chico, at the base of a mountain of black marble, which, in building material, shows a beautiful stripe of alabastine whiteness.
It was here the daughter of Montezuma and the élite of the Valley of Mexico came to bathe and chase dull care away, after the whirl of the court in the capital city of Tenochtitlan, long before the coming of the white man.
At a temperature of 106° F. the water bursts forth in a heroic stream that bears testimony of the intense fires that hurl it forth.
This reminds us that there is hardly a city in Mexico that has not its hot water baths, and it need not excite surprise, when three of the loftiest volcanoes in the world stand guard over the valley; Orizaba in the east and Popocatapetl and Ixtacihuatl in the south, the highest standing 17,782 feet above the sea.
The water of Topo Chico, after serving the baths, is carried through the valley in irrigating ditches. Leaving the horse-cars which brought us from the city, we are enticed across the beautiful meadows to a grove of palms and tropical flowers, and find ourselves at the lofty walls of an enclosure which at first gives the impression of a penitentiary, but which you afterwards learn is a “Campo Santo,” or cemetery.
We walk around the forbidding walls until we come to a massive iron gate, and through its opening we see a forest of wooden crosses which tell their own tale, but the sexton will tell another.
“A relic of by-gone days was he,
And his hair was white as the foaming sea.”