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Show BY PATH AND TBAIL. 37 mer, and from the mesa, midway between the mountains and the valley of the Urique, the season was marking, on a brilliant chromatic scale, the successive zones of vege tation as they rose in regular gradations from the tropic floor. The atmosphere had the crystalline transparency which belongs to mountain air, and through it the scen ery assumed a vividness of color and grandeur of out line which imparted to the mind a sense of exaltation, " Till the dilating soul, enwrapt, transfused Into the mighty vision passing there As in her natural form, swelled vast to heaven. ' ' The appearance instantaneously disclosed was that of an abandoned city, a wilderness of ruined buildings left standing in an endless solitude. It was a phantom city within which a human voice was never heard, where coy otes and foxes starved and where scorpions, tarantulas and horned toads increased and multiplied. The land around was broken into terraces, and looked like a city wrecked by the Goths and long ago abandoned. For here was^ a forest of cathedral spires, of towers, great arches and architraves, battlements, buttresses and flying buttresses, dismantled buildings and wondrous domes. There are times, as the sun is declining, when these domes and cathedral towers glow with sheen of burnished gold or repose ' neath a coloring of soft pur ple or a mantle of fiery vermilion. And how did these weird and ghostly monuments originate^ who raised them in this wilderness and when were their foundations laid? Here is the story as it was told to me. When a mass or body of air becomes very warm from the direct rays |
