The night was cold, almost frosty. On these high tablelands, a mile and a half above the sea, the radiation of the sun’s heat is rapid and, the year round, by morning the thermometer is usually close to thirty-nine degrees (Fahrenheit).
We were up betimes, out of the town, and among cultivated fields and orchards and pine and oak woods again, before the sun became at all oppressive.
As yet, I have not seen many birds in Mexico, only the waterfowl along the lakes and a few finches in the thickets along the way. To-day we have traveled in company with many ravens. Tame and companionable they are, so usual is the sight of mules and men along this frequented highway.
Santa Clara is close to the height of land. Seven thousand two hundred feet above the sea, my aneroid declared, and from that altitude we began to descend. The thirty miles to Ario is one steady decline, a gradual fall of twelve hundred feet.
This whole country hereabout is held in vast _haciendas_ of thousands of acres, and is chiefly owned by nonresident landowners who rarely, if ever, visit their possessions, but trust entirely to overseers to manage and work them and wring an income from the hapless peon. It is a land of great fertility. Only the most primitive methods of agriculture are employed, and work is done in the most inefficient way. Yet huge incomes are withdrawn from the land, and spent by the distant _haciendado_ in his city home in Mexico, or in Paris, or Madrid. These lands are said to be marketable (buyable) at about ten dollars (Mexican) per acre, say four dollars in United States money. As I have been riding along, viewing mile after mile of this superb fertility in a climate temperate all the year around, I have pondered much on what a garden it might have been, and it yet may be, if ever the thrifty American shall have it in possession.
Toward noon we began to gain a wider view of the landscape opening before us toward the south and west. Our altitude was steadily lessening and, many miles distant, seemingly, there was a sudden falling away of the land to profound and indefinite depths, whence came the impression of tropical verdure, the whole expanse backed on the horizon by blue and jagged lines of lofty mountain chains, peaks and summits which sometimes pierced the zenith, far to the southwest. They were the mighty Cordilleras of Guerrero, a hundred miles away and barring from view the Pacific Ocean just beyond. On a day wholly clear, it is said, the snow-capped cones of Colima may be seen, also, far to the northwest, but gaze as we might we could catch no glimpse of the mighty volcano.