necessities.



CHAPTER III

IN A MEXICAN MINE

A classmate of my boyhood was superintendent of the group of mines round
about Guanajuato. From among them we chose "Pingueico" for my temporary
employment. The ride to it, 8200 feet above the sea, up along and out of
the gully in which Guanajuato is built, and by steep rocky trails
sometimes beside sheer mountain walls, opens out many a marvelous vista;
but none to compare with that from the office veranda of the mine
itself. Two thousand feet below lies a plain of Mexico's great
table-land, stretching forty miles or more across to where it is shut
off by an endless range of mountains, backed by chain after blue chain,
each cutting the sky-line in more jagged, fantastic fashion than the
rest, the farther far beyond Guadalajara and surely more than a hundred
miles distant, where Mexico falls away into the Pacific. On the left
rises deep-blue into the sky the almost perfect flattened cone of a lone
mountain. Brilliant yet not hot sunshine illuminated even the far
horizon, and little cloud-shadows crawled here and there across the
landscape. The rainy season had left on the plain below many shallow
lakes that reflected the sun like immense mirrors. From the veranda it
seemed quite flat, though in reality by no means so, and one could all
but count the windows of Silao, Irapuato, and other towns; the second,
though more than twenty miles away, still in the back foreground of the
picture. Thread-like, brown trails wound away over the plain and up
into the mountains, here and there dotted by travelers crawling ant-like