immense hats giving the predominating hue. In the vast landscape was
much green, though more gray of outcropping rocks. Here and there a
lonely telegraph wire struck off dubiously across the rugged
country. Rocks as large as houses hung on the great hillsides, ready to
roll down and destroy at the slightest movement of the earth, like
playthings left by careless giant children. Along some rocky path far
down in the nearer valley a small horse of the patient Mexican breed,
under its picturesque, huge-hatted rider, galloped sure-footed up and
down steep faces of rock. Cargadores bent half double, with a rope
across their brows, came straining upward to the mine. Bands of peons
released from their underground labors paused here and there on the way
home to wager cigarettes on which could toss a stone nearest the next
mud puddle. Flocks of goats wandered in the growing dusk about swift
stony mountain flanks. Farther away was a rocky ridge beaten with
narrow, bare, crisscross trails, and beyond, the old Valenciana mine on
the flanks of the jagged range shutting off Dolores Hidalgo, appearing
so near in this clear air of the heights that it seemed a man could
throw a stone there; yet down in the valley between lay all Guanajuato,
the invisible, and none might know how many bandits were sleeping out
the day in their lurking-places among the wild, broken valleys and
gorges the view embraced. Down in its rock-tumbled valley spread the
scattered town of Calderon, and the knell of its tinny old church bells
came drifting up across the divide on the sturdy evening breeze, tinged
with cold, that seemed to bring the night with it, so silently and
coolly did it settle down. The immense plain and farther mountains
remained almost visible in the starlight, in the middle distance the
lamps of Silao, and near the center of the half-seen picture those of
Irapuato, while far away a faint glow in the sky marked the location of
the city of Leon.