The novelties and wonders that were each day disclosed, were remarked by no one with more satisfaction than by Don Amador de Leste. He rejoiced when, ascending among the mountains, the fens and sand-hills of the coast were exchanged for picturesque lakes and romantic crags; when the oak woods and pine forests began to stretch their verdant carpets over the hill-sides; when, standing among the colossal ruins of some shivered peak, he cast his eye over glen and valley, glittering with verdure and fertility, far away to the majestic ridges over whose hazy sides tumbled the foamy fall, or crept the lazy cloud, while among their gorges glistened the distant cones of snow. Now he admired the ferns, lifting their arborescent heads, like palms, among other strange trees; now, as he exchanged the luxuriant slopes for those volcanic deserts which strew the base of Perote with lava and cinders, he beheld the broad nopal, and the gigantic maguey, rearing their massive leaves over the fissures, while a scorched forest withered and rotted above. Sometimes, while pursuing his weary way over these mountain _paramos_, or deserts, he advanced bewildered, as what seemed a fair and spacious lake withdrew its vapoury waters from before him, and revealed a parched and barren expanse of sand. The journey was an alternation of mountain and valley, forest and plain, with sometimes a pleasant little Indian village, and, twice or thrice, a town of no mean magnitude and splendour, rising in pleasant nooks among the horrors of the waste. Over this rugged region it was not possible to drag the ordnance and heavy stores, with which Cortes was now abundantly provided, without much labour and delay; and it was not until about the time of the summer solstice, more than a month after the fall of Zempoala, that, at the close of a pleasant day, the new invaders laid their eyes, for the first time, on Tlascala,--the capital of that warlike republic, which, for the singular object, as certain historians have conjectured, of preserving an enemy to exercise their armies, as well as to furnish victims for their gods, the Mexican monarchs permitted to subsist in the heart of their empire.