Instead, within a Pullman Palace Car
At ease reclining and at peace with all,
We conquer space while romance groweth dull
Under the languor of the April air.
—William E. Pabor.
“El Moro, sir,—breakfast nearly ready, sir!”
I had only closed my eyes an instant before, I was sure, yet then I had been lying quietly in the station at Alamosa, away over on the other side of the Sangre de Cristo. I couldn’t remember anything of the transition. Then it was night; now it was morning. Time and space had been an utter blank for ten hours and a hundred miles.
Drawing aside my window curtain and gazing out over gray plains, my eyes caught instantly the bluish outlines of a grander castle and fortress than ever traveler on Rhine or Danube glanced upon. Almost a twelve-month before the Madame and I had spent a sunny day at St. Augustine, where the old square, four-bastioned fort stood grim on the shore of a foam-flecked and laughing sea. Here was a copy of that fortress a thousand times as large,—sloping walls, outer works, bastions, towers and all; you might almost see the huge guns, standing rigid and ready on the magnificent parapet. This was El Moro. It was miles and miles away, and a hundred cities had room to cluster about it and take its name without crowding one another. It is the most magnificent model of a half ruined, antique, but altogether glorious fortress in the whole wide world.
At El Moro are some of the great coal mines of this carboniferous state; but to put the matter Hibernically, they are half a dozen miles away up in the hills. We went up there on an engine which drew behind it a box-car load of Mexicans, men and women, who all squatted down on their heels on the car floor and were quite happy, chattering like magpies. It is a very miserable class of Mexicans, for the most part, that one sees in this part of the state. The fathers and mothers of most of them were peons of the wealthy Spaniards, who, under the old regime, owned all this region as pasturage for their flocks and herds.