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Show 22 BY PATH AND TRAIL. foundations of these hills, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Late in the afternoon we came out from a dense forest of lofty pines and at once we stood upon the very edge of the precipice and gazed into and across the " Gran Barranca. " My position was on a broad rock platform overhanging the great canyon, and from it I looked down a sheer three thousand feet to where the palms and pines meet and part again. Here was the zone of separation, the pine moving up to the " tierra fria," the cold land, and the palm sloping down to its own home, the ' ' lierra caliente," the hot land. The melancholy murmur of the winds ascending from the sepulchre of the silent river, flowing three thousand feet below, but made the sense of loneliness more oppressive. From the table of the mountain that sloped above me and down to the waters of the dark- red river below, was six thousand feet of almost perpendicular depth. Away to the south was the Vale of the Churches, so- called from the weird architectural monuments carved and left standing in the wilderness by the erratic and mysterious action of the winds intermittently at work for ages. From where I was standing the mining camp of El Bosario appeared as if pitched in an open plain, but it is really on a promontory between two " barrancas " or ravines, and beyond it the land is broken and falls away in terraces till it meets the purple mountains of Sahuar-ipa. Indeed, the little village on this tremendous ridge is surrounded by lofty mountains. Looking down and be yond where the graceful palms have placed themselves, just where an artist would have them in the foreground of his picture, the view is a revelation. Far away is the long mountain range, gashed with ominous wounds, out |