But for the time we lose sight of the factory. We are nearing the limits of the hot-lands, and as you stare out into the night, barrener hills and mounds, stone-speckled, are closing in on each side. Beyond them and above them, blacker distant masses climb into the moonlit sky, ringing round the landscape ahead till it looks as if our train, land-locked, will soon have to come to a standstill. The plains, rich with their harvests of cotton and coffee, of fruits, sugar-cane and olives, have given place all round to mountains; and as we wind forward, heights, rising mysterious, magical, wall us in from the rear till we seem as if we were caught in a black devil's-punch-bowl. And then, like the fitting knell to the apprehensive traveller's thoughts, the doleful engine bell clangs sorrowfully backwards and forwards, and the great train rolls into the station of Orizaba. Here in a bare stone-floored barn-room a grossly obese Mexican (like the camel, he seems to have two or three stomachs, his striped leather-belted cotton vest shows such huge undulations of adipose tissue), assisted by a sickly yellow Indian lad, swaddled in a red and white striped blanket, serves coffee, good coffee too, and _pan dulce_, sweet bread, crusted with caraway seeds. And here, too, the great climbing engines are awaiting us, snorting and blowing off steam like angered bulls eager to charge the toreador-hills which blot out the world ahead of us. We need both, for the train is to be cut into two--one engine will not carry us safely up the perilous slope--and the Pullman carriages in a few minutes rumble out ahead of us. We have struck up a friendship with the car-conductor--a half-blood nigger from Cuba, and a delightful companion, who speaks English well and has already told us more about Mexico than a dozen encyclopedia articles, and as, munching a last mouthful of roll, we climb into our car, he gives us a friendly warning to be on the look-out in some fifteen minutes for a queer sight, the Pullman half of the train climbing the mountains above us. If you think of a mountain and then draw round it in your mind a spiral line as if it was a vast cone-shaped screw, you will gain an idea of what the two trains were going to do. They were going to wind up from the valley round and round the scalped faces of the mountains to a height of 8,000 feet above sea-level. Six thousand feet of this alpine work is done in fifteen miles of rail after leaving Orizaba Station during a space of two hours! A gradient of one in thirteen and a fifth! It is pleasant to remember that this miracle of engineering skill was achieved by Englishmen, and that in the long years since, so perfect was their work, no serious accident has ever occurred.