Guapo, in front of the mule, now ran forward upon the ledge, and looked around the buttress of rock. Then, turning suddenly, he waved his hand, and shouted back,—
“No more, master; you may come on—the road is clear!”
CHAPTER XIII.
THE LONE CROSS IN THE FOREST.
After two more days of fatiguing travel, the road parted from the bank of the river, and ran along the ridge of a high mountain spur in a direction at right angles to that of the Andes themselves. This spur continued for several miles, and then ended abruptly. At the point where it ended, the path, which for the whole of the day had been scarcely traceable, also came to an end. They were now of course in a forest-covered country—in the Ceja de la Montaña—that is, the forest that covers the foot-hills of the mountains. The forest of the plains, which were yet lower down, is known as the “Montaña” proper.
During that day they had found the road in several places choked up with underwood, and Guapo had to clear it with his macheté—a sort of half-sword, half-knife, used throughout all Spanish America, partly to cut brushwood and partly as a weapon of defence. Where the ridge ended, however, what had once been a road was now entirely overgrown—vines and llianas of large size crossed the path. Evidently no one had passed for years. A road existed no longer; the luxuriant vegetation had effaced it.
This is no unusual thing on the borders of the Montaña. Many a settlement had existed there in former times, and had been abandoned. No doubt the road they had been following once led to some such settlement that had long since fallen into ruin.
It is a melancholy fact that the Spanish-Americans—including the Mexican nation—have been retrograding for the last hundred years. Settlements which they have made, and even large cities built by them, are now deserted and in ruins; and extensive tracts of country, once occupied by them, have become uninhabited, and have gone back to a state of nature. Whole provinces, conquered and peopled by the followers of Cortez and Pizarro, have within the last fifty years been retaken from them by the Indians: and it would be very easy to prove, that had the descendants of the Spanish conquerors, been left to themselves, another half century would have seen them driven from that very continent which their forefathers so easily conquered and so cruelly kept. This re-conquest on the part of the Indian races was going on in a wholesale way in the northern provinces of Mexico. But it is now interrupted by the approach of another and stronger race from the East—the Anglo-American.