my face to the window, raising the heavy leather curtain, which the wind was beating against the window-frame; it looked like night. Above us, the tempest, with its thousand black wings, beat against space; its electric bellowings, rumbled from the hills to the sea, and the lightning, like a gleaming sword tearing open the bosom of the clouds, revealed to us, within, the livid entrails of the storm.
We were literally in the midst of a cataract, which, precipitating itself from the clouds, rebounded from the mountain summit, and rushed, with torrential fury, down the slopes.
“I am drenched in oceans of perspiration,” said my companion to me in French, “and I have an oven inside of me.”
“Go to sleep,” I replied, “and all this will pass,” and, joining example to counsel, I wrapped myself in my cloak and closed my eyes.
Two hours later the tempest had passed, drifting to the west, over the wooded heights. It was five in the evening and the declining sun was nearing the last low-lying patches of cloud. The light, penetrating through the exuberant vegetation, colored everything with a marvelous variety of hues, which melted into a glow of gold and emerald. To the east an infinite sheet of verdure extended itself, following all the folds and irregularities of the mountain mass, flecked here and there with the delicate and brilliant green of banana patches, and undulating over that stairway of giants, became blue with distance and broke like a sea against the broad strip of sand of the Vera Cruz coast. The road which we had followed in our ascent, wound like a serpent among trees, which scarcely distinguished their foliage masses amid the dense curtain of vines and creepers, passed over a lofty bridge, descended in broad curves to a little settlement of wooden buildings, and went, between dense and tangled patches of briers, to confound itself with the bit of railroad which led from the foot of the mountain to the port. At the bottom of the picture,