In the afternoon we started—­ourselves, our guide, and an Indian to carry cloaks, &c. up the mountain.  We soon left the cultivated region, and entered upon the pine-forest, which we never left during our afternoon journey.  One of the first showers of the rainy season came down upon us as we rode through the forest.  It only lasted half an hour, but it was a deluge.  In a shower of the same kind at Tezcuco, a day or two before, rain to the amount of 1-1/10 inches fell in the hour.  By dusk we reached the highest habitation in North America, the place where the sulphur used to be sublimed from the pumice brought down from the crater.  This place was shut up, for the undertaking has been abandoned; but in a rancho close by we found some Indian women and children, and there we took up our quarters.  The rancho was a circular hut, built and thatched with reeds, though in the midst of a pine-forest; and presently a smart shower began, which came in upon us as though the roof had been a sieve.

The Indian women were kneeling all the evening round the wood-fire in the centre of the hut, baking tortillas and boiling beans and coffee in earthen pots.  The wood was green, and the place was full of suffocating smoke, except within eighteen inches of the ground, where lay a stratum of purer air.  We were obliged to lie down at once, upon mats and serapes, for we could not exist in the smoke; and as often as we raised ourselves into a sitting posture, we had to dive down again, half suffocated.  The line of demarcation was so accurately drawn that it was like the Grotto del Cane, only reversed.

After a primitive supper in earthen bowls, we lay round the fire, listening to the talk of our men and the Indian women.  It was mostly about adventures with wolves, and about the sulphur-workings, now discontinued.  The weather had cleared, and as we lay we could see the stars shining in through the roof.  About three in the morning I awoke, feeling bruised all over, as was natural after sleeping on a mat on the ground.  Moreover, the fire had gone out, and it was horribly cold, as well it might be at 13,000 feet above the sea.  I shook some one up to make up the fire, and went out into the open air.  It was nearly full moon; but the moonlight was very different from what we can see in England, even on the clearest nights.  On the plateau of Mexico, the rarity and dryness of the air are such that distant objects are seen far more distinctly than at the level of the sea, and the European traveller’s measurements of distance by the eye are always too small.  The sunlight and moonlight, for the same reason, are more intense than at lower levels.  Here, at about the same elevation as the top of the Jungfrau, the effect was far more striking, and I shall never forget the brilliant flood of light that illuminated that grand scene.  Far down below I could see the plain, with houses and fields dimly visible.  At the bottom of the slope began the dark pine-forest, which