Still it was a pleasant three-hour ride in the brilliant sunshine, winding round and over the hills along pitching and tossing trails. Peons obsequiously lifted their hats when I passed, which they do not to a man afoot; a solemn stillness of rough-and-tumble mountains and valleys, with deep-shadowed little gorges scolloped out of the otherwise sun-flooded landscape, broad hedges of cactus and pitching paths, down which the animal picked its way with ease and assurance, alternated with mighty climbs over a dozen rises, each of which I fancied the last.
La Luz is a typical town of mountainous Mexico. A long, broken adobe village lies scattered along a precipitous valley, scores of "roads" and trails hedged with cactus wind and swoop and climb again away over steep hills and through deep _barrancos_, troops of peons and donkeys enlivening them; flowers give a joyful touch, and patches of green and the climate help to make the place reminiscent of the more thickly settled portions of Palestine. From the town we could see plainly the city of Leon, fourth in Mexico, and a view of the plain, less striking than that from "Pingüico," because of the range rising to cut it off in the middle distance. The mountains of all this region are dotted with round, white, cement monuments, the boundary marks of different mining properties. By Mexican law each must be visible from the adjoining two, and in this pitched and tumbled country this requires many.
Beyond the village we found, about the old Spanish workings, ancient, roofless, stone buildings with loop-holed turrets for bandits and niches for saints. These structures, as well as the waste dumped by the Spaniards, were being "repicked for values," and broken up and sent through the stamp-mill, the never-ending rumble of which sounded incessantly, like some distant water-fall; for with modern methods it pays to crush rock with even a few dollars a ton value in it, and the Americans of to-day mine much that the Spaniards with their crude methods cast aside or did not attempt to work. At a mine in the vicinity the ancient stone mansion serving as residence of the superintendent was torn down and sent through the stamping-mill, and a new one of less valuable rock erected. We descended 1600 feet into the mine of La Luz down a perfectly round, stone-lined shaft in a small iron bucket held by a one-inch wire cable and entirely in charge of peons--who fortunately either had nothing against us or did not dare to vent it.