Mexico
in similar or greater profusion, but at less altitude.

[Footnote 8: See my book, "The Andes and the Amazon."]

Among the remarkable ruins of this nature, in Oaxaca, are those of
Monte Alban, near the capital city of Oaxaca. Here are entire crests of
mountains, cut away into terraces, quadrangles, and courts, and their
great extent and strange environment create a sense of awe and
amazement in the beholder. The utter abandonment and sense of solitude;
the high ridges, thousands of feet above the valley, which, dim and
distant through the atmospheric haze, glimmers below; the vast expanse
of sky and landscape, without a sound or touch of life, invests the
remains of those seemingly unreal or fairy cities of prehistoric man
with a sense of mystery and unfathomed time. Pyramid after pyramid,
terrace after terrace, the latter from 500 to 1,000 feet in length,
extend along the ridge of the Alban hill--the numerous truncated
pyramids rising, like the playthings of some prehistoric giant, from
the levelled places. The beholder may imagine the chain of Teocallis
which crowned them, lighted up at night by the glare of the
never-extinguished sacred fires, as the thronging multitude of the
great population of those barbaric peoples of pre-Columbian Mexico
pressed along the streets below. He may fill in, in his mind's eye, the
picture, fanciful and unreal, as if borrowed from the pages of some
Eastern romance, were it not that the actual vestiges of that time are
before him. Vast labour--probably directed by autocratic mandate
without heed of native life, and working throughout generations--must
have been employed to collect and raise up in place the stone, and
earth, and _adobe_ material of these pyramids, and to make the great
levellings and excavations upon these inaccessible summits. They were
cities, as well as mere places of religious ceremony, and a large
number of people must have dwelt in these "mansions in the skies."

[Illustration: PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF MITLA; FACADE OF THE HALL
OF THE COLUMNS. (The steps have been "restored" by the photographer.)]

In the same State of Oaxaca are the famous ruins of Mitla, pride of the
archaeology of Mexico, situated some thirty miles from the state
capital of Oaxaca. These famous ruins of Mitla are of a different
character to the pyramidal structures of Monte Alban, although they
have a low pyramidal base and were built mainly for religious purposes,
it is probable,