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CHAPTER XVIII. A LAND OF SCENIC WONDERS. t After thirty days' traveling by train and burro, through Sonora and this extraordinary land, I arrived here last night, filled with amazement and admiration for the wonderful work of God made manifest in the strange configuration of this land and in the marvels wrought by the hand of time. Dante Aligherie, when he breathed his last in the picturesque capital of the Exar chate, died 560 years too soon. If he were living to- day and travelled across this land of wonders, he would have seen upon the earth a region where Purgatory, Hell and Heaven had conspired to produce a bewildering viascope of all that is weird, terrible and awe- inspiring, side by side with the beautiful, the marvelous and romantic. With the possible exception of Sonora, in the Republic of Mex ico, to which geographically and ethnographically Ari zona belonged, there is not on the continent of America, perhaps not in the world, a land as full to repletion with all that is so fascinating in nature and startling to man. Only a few months ago, a sailing ship from Honolulu reported that the lava from Mount Matatutu, then in active eruption on the Island of Savaii, had covered thirty square miles, while in places the flowing stream was 200 feet high, and that in a part of the island a river of lava twelve miles wide was rushing to the ocean. The tale was laughed down and ridiculed in San Francisco, wEere the captain of the ship made his report. Yet here, almost on the boundary line of California, there are in disputable, positive and visible proofs of a volcanic |
