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As we ascended the valley, the vegetation, with the exception of a few pretty alpine flowers, became exceedingly scanty, and of quadrupeds, birds, or insects, scarcely one could be seen. The lofty mountains, their summits marked with a few patches of snow, stood well separated from each other, the valleys being filled up with an immense thickness of stratified alluvium.
As far as the relics of the old designs allow us to judge, it was done by an artist of the great Venetian school of the thirteenth century. Here is a mixture, still visible, of the Byzantine and the Saracenic. It is crowned with a circular pediment, now wreathed with vegetation, a bouquet, rose, brown, yellow, or blue, according to the season.
The finely pulverized rock was brought down in the irrigation water and spread out upon the fields in a thick layer, almost impervious to the growth of vegetation. Mit Simms, then a farmer near Safford, tells that the dried tailings upon his farm spread out in a smooth sheet, that could be broken like glass, with a blow from a hammer.
The land on the south side of the mountains was different in character to the wild northern plains. "Fields!" It did not require that identification from Lablet to point out what they had already seen. The section below was artificially divided into long narrow strips. But the vegetation growing on those strips was no different from the northern grass they had seen about the spacer.
The country around was pretty and novel to me, consisting of abrupt volcanic hills enclosing flat valleys or open plains. The hills were covered with a dense scrubby bush of bamboos and prickly trees and shrubs, the plains were adorned with hundreds of noble palm-trees, and in many places with a luxuriant shrubby vegetation.
Elsewhere, in various quarters of the globe, there may be sterile rocks, but there are none so adamant as to be altogether unfurrowed by the filaments engendered in the moist residuum of the condensed vapor; elsewhere there may be barren steeps, but none so rigid as not to afford some hold to vegetation, however low and elementary may be its type; but here all was bare, and blank, and desolate not a symptom of vitality was visible.
Conceive of such an arrangement when the whole is in flower, the milk-white blossoms of the coffee so abundant as to seem as though a cloud of snow had fallen there and left the rest of the vegetation in full verdure, while the air is as heavy with perfume as in an orange grove. The soil between here and Orizaba is considered to be of the richest and most fertile in all Mexico.
Dotted here and there along the shores of this bayou are the picturesque homes of the planters, made more attractive by the semi-tropical vegetation, the clustering vines, blooming roses, and bright green turf than they could ever be from mere architectural beauty, while their continuous course along the shore gives the idea of a long and prosperous village.
It will be sufficient to explain my reason for having assigned it to them, by the avowal, that I regard them in a twofold point of view: 1st, as the residue and product of vegetable and animal life; 2d, as manifesting the tendencies of the Life of Nature to vegetation or animalization.
Even amidst the rank productions of vice, they regerminate to a sort of imperfect vegetation, like some scattered hyacinths shooting up among the weeds of a ruined garden, that testify the former culture and amenity of the soil.
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