A profile view of some of these ranges and isolated peaks gives some very grotesque as well as picturesque views, and imaginative people of the Southwest fancy they see many silhouette designs in the crests of the mountains. Faces seem to predominate, and especially is Montezuma's face quite lavishly distributed over this region. I think I can recall at least a half dozen of them in the Southwest since I first visited there in 1867. This unfortunate Aztec monarch must have had a very rocky looking face, or his descendants must have thought exceeding well of him to sculpture him so often, even in fancy, upon the mountain crests.
I went into a little face-making business of my own, so as to keep along in the custom of the country while I was there. The most southerly peak of the Florida range had quite a well-defined face, upturned to the sky, that, to my imagination, looked more like the well-known face of Benjamin Franklin than any other of nature's sculpturing so often portrayed in mountains when assisted by the fancy of man.
Before leaving Las Palomas our material underwent inspection by the customs officials, and no people could have been more polite and considerate than were these officers toward us, giving us our necessary papers without putting us to the inconvenience of unpacking our many boxes and bundles. There is this peculiarity about Mexican frontier customs: after passing the first one you are by no means through with them, for the next two, three, or even four towns may also have customhouse officers. I was in a Mexican town, La Ascencion, and had a wagon unloaded before I knew they had a customhouse. I expected to be shot at reveille the next morning; but instead they politely passed all my personal baggage without even asking to see it, simply examining the papers received at the first customhouse.
After leaving Las Palomas our course lay southward across a high _mesa_, or table-land, until we reached the Boca Grande River. The scenery along the Boca Grande is picturesque and somewhat peculiar. The river bottom is flat, very wide, and rich in soil; but on the flanks rise the Mexican mountains sheer out of the plains. To the west are the Sierra Madres, covered with snow on the highest peaks, making some of the most beautiful views I have ever seen as presented from different points along the river's course. One of them, Pacheco Peak, in the Boca Grande range (named after the Mexican Minister of the Interior), is shown in the illustration. Slight spurs and _mesa_ lands extend from the sierras in the valleys and often reach the river bank, thereby forcing the road over them, but affording a foundation that any macadamized highway in our own country might emulate. Some of these ridges were ornamented with groupings of cactus (of the oquetilla variety), if their presence can be called an ornament. Imagine a dozen fishing rods, from ten to fifteen feet in length, all radiating from a central point like a bouquet of bayonets, and each rod holding hundreds of spikes throughout its length. You will thus have a faint idea of the appearance of a bunch of oquetilla cactus. These bunches seem to prefer growing along the rocky crests in rows of tolerable regularity that, to a person at a distance, suggest the work of human hands.