Anahuac; Or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern. Ancient and Modern Paperback - 2009

From the publisher

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Before us and behind lay wide lakes, stretching from side to side of the valley; but the lake behind followed us as steadily as the one before us receded. It was only the mirage that tantalizes travellers in these scorched valleys, all the long eight months of the rainless season. It seemed beautiful at first, then monotonous; and long before the day was out we hated it with a most cordial and unaffected hatred. Soon a new appearance attracted our attention. First, clouds of dust, which gradually took a well-defined shape, and formed themselves into immense pillars, rapidly spinning round upon themselves, and travelling slowly about the plain. At one place, where several smaller valleys opened upon us, these sand-pillars, some small, some large, were promenading about by dozens, looking much like the genie when the fisherman had just let him out of the bottle, and saw him with astonishment beginning to shape himself into a giant of monstrous size. Indeed I doubt not that the story-teller was thinking of such sand-pillars when he wrote that wonderful description. You may see them in the East by thousands. As they moved along, they sucked up small stones, dust, and leaves; and our driver declared that they had been known to take the roofs off houses, and carry flocks of sheep into the air; but these that you see now, said he, are no great matter. We estimated the size of the largest at about four hundred feet in height, and thirty in diameter; and this very pillar, walking by chance against a house, most decidedly got the worst of it, and had its lower limbs knocked all to pieces. When the sun grows hot, the bare earth heats the air that lies upon it so much that an upward current rises from the whole face of the valley; and to supply its place the little valleys and ra...