Mexico and Its Religion. Robert Anderson Wilson
furnished by the road itself. It was all wilderness. Yet the graceful features of the creepers, hanging from branch to branch of the sycamores, and the shady arbors formed by their dense foliage, looked as though a gardener's hand could be traced in so much regularity; yet it was only Nature's own gardening, where the wild birds might build their nests, and breed, and sing without fear of disturbance. How often have I dismounted, while riding along such a forest, by the side of some running brook, and while my horse was feeding I have almost fallen asleep under the soothing influence which such an atmosphere produces upon a traveler, heated by fast riding under a vertical sun. It is one of those happy sensations that can not well be described, nor can it be appreciated by those who have not experienced it. Poets have exhausted their power in painting the beauties of scenes where all the senses are satiated with enjoyment. Yet this voluptuous gratification is soon alloyed by the evils that remind us that Paradise is not to be found upon this earth. Here is seen the whole animal kingdom busily laboring for the destruction of its kind. Reptiles prey upon each other; parasitic plants fix themselves upon trees and suck up the sap of their existence; and man, while he enjoys to a surfeit these bounties of nature, must watch narrowly against the venom and the poison that comes to mar his pleasure, and teach him the wholesome lesson that true happiness is only found in Heaven. We are now at our journey's end.
CHAPTER IV.
Jalapa.—The extraordinary Beauty and Fertility of this Spot.—Jalap, Sarsaparilla, Myrtle, Vanilla, Cochineal, and Wood of Tobasco.—The charming Situation of Jalapa.—Its Flowers and its Fruits.—Magnificent Views.—The tradition that Jalapa was Paradise.—A speck of War.—The Marriage of a Heretic.—A gambling Scene in a Convent.
Byron's lines, in the opening of "The Bride of Abydos" are gorgeous enough:
"Know ye the land of the cedar and vine,
Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;
Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppress'd with perfume,
Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gull in their bloom;
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit,
And the voice of the nightingale never is mute."
But the poet would have given them a still more luxuriant coloring had he ever ascended the table-land of the tropics, and visited Jalapa, the spot which the natives insist was the site of the original Paradise. Paradise, jalapa, and myrtle, sound well enough together, and do not clash with the native tradition in relation to this delightful spot.
PRODUCTIONS OF THE VALLEYS.
We were now more than four thousand feet above the sea, on an extensive plateau, half-way up the mountain. The beautiful convolvulus jalapa does not flourish here, but is brought from the Indian villages of Colipa and Maqautla, situated in the valleys that run among the hills. The myrtle, whose grain is the spice of Tobasco, is produced in the forests by the river Boriderus; the smilax, whose root is the true sarsaparilla, grows deep down in the humid and umbrageous ravines of the Cordilleras; and cocoa comes from Acayucan. From the ever-green forests of Papantla and Nautla comes the epidendrum vanilla, whose odoriferous fruit is used as a perfume. Thus these characteristic productions of the country come from the mysterious valleys of the neighboring mountain, where, nearly a thousand years before any of the present generation was born, flourished an unknown race of men as civilized as were the people of Palmyra or of Egypt, as vast ruins in the forests of Misantla and Papantla clearly indicate: a race unknown to the degenerate Indians, who now wander about the ruined edifices and isolated pyramids of these cities, lost in the forest, as they are to us. A thousand years have passed away—their history has perished forever. The old books say that the delicate little scarlet insect, cochineal, was once a product of this district, and Jalapa was its proper market, and the mart of all the other peculiar productions of the neighboring region, because it was the town on the high land nearest to the sea-port.
JALAPA.
Jalapa early became an important position to which foreign goods were brought to be exchanged for silver and gold, jalap, sarsaparilla, vanilla, spice of Tobasco, cocoa, cochineal, and woods of various colors.
It is the beauty of the place itself, and the unsurpassed magnificence of its mountain-scenery, that throws such a charm around Jalapa. The transparency of its atmosphere makes the snow-crowned Orizaba and Perote, in the coast range of mountains, appear close at hand, with their dense forests of perpetual foliage, moistened incessantly by the clouds driven upon them from the ocean. High up in the region of perpetual moisture, Jalapa has a soil intensely luxuriant, and is beyond the reach of those parasitic plants of the low lands, that fix themselves upon other plants and trees, and eat out their very life, as the malarias do that of the human being. Roses of the most choice varieties grow spontaneously by the roadside, or creep over the walls. Nature, the parent of architects, has here shaped all her trees upon the most exquisite models. The very twig planted in a hedge, if left to itself, grows up into a tree which gracefully inclines its head like a weeping willow; while a mammoth white bell, or trumpet flower, hangs pendent from the extremity of every limb, each flower larger and more beautiful than our favorite house lily, and giving forth a richer odor than the rose. From the exquisite delicacy and richness of the fruit which this plant (the chirimoya) bears, and the danger arising from eating of it too freely, it is not unfrequently called the tree of the forbidden fruit; sometimes also it is called the custard plant.
THE PARADISE OF JALAPA.
Among the pleasing sights which we beheld was an orange orchard, in which I did not see a single tree that was not delicately and gracefully formed. In this profusion of nature I saw our own favorite flowers. A tiny crimson rose was creeping about in every place, while the large pink rose, which grew so rank, was clinging to an old wall and in full blossom; and many other varieties of crimson, white, yellow, and scarlet roses grow here without care; the morning-glory and honey-suckle are wild flowers here; the sweet-william, the lady-slipper, and all the flowers that we cultivate in summer, appear here to be spontaneous productions of nature. Even that sweetest and most beautiful of flowers, the passion-flower, with its mystical cross and five protruding seeds, was running over a frame, and yielding a profusion of blossoms, and a fruit—the granada—which almost equals in richness and delicacy the fruit of the chirimoya. But all the natural wonders of this town are not yet enumerated; for the fruits as well as the flowers of every climate flourish in Jalapa. There are strawberries, of the largest size, growing beside a coffee-tree the tree being filled with coffee-berries. Peach-trees were in full blossom in November, beside apricots and chirimoyas, while potatoes flourish among the bulbous productions of a tropical climate. The people of the town take a pride in its natural beauty; and there are no filthy alleys, no squalid poverty, or uncleanly hovels. Every house appears to be of stone; the walls neatly whitewashed, and bordered with pink, red, blue, green, or yellow; and the streets are fashioned to suit the grounds, without regard to checker-board regularity.
I stood in an upper story of the house of a Mr. Todd, on the opposite side of the little stream that runs in front of the town, and looked out from that favored position. The sun had just escaped from the folds of an imprisoning cloud, and was shining full upon the beautiful town and hill. The unabsorbed moisture on the leaves gave them an additional lustre. The green peering up every where amidst the whitened walls; the graceful form of the trees, where their outline could be traced; the curiously shaped roofs of the old stone churches, with buttresses and towers; the college of San Francisco, a curiously fashioned pile of buildings, standing out above all others; the hill behind the town, the lofty mountain of Perote, on its left flank, on whose top the sky seemed to rest—all combined to give credibility to that which has been said of the beauty of Jalapa by an old Spanish author—that Jalapa was "a piece of heaven let down to earth." This figure was afterward applied to Naples, and the remark was added—"See Naples, and die." But the Jalapanos say, "See Jalapa, and pray for immortality, that