For the next two hours or so the uplands roll dark and unbroken around us. A cloud-mist lies on the country, and the brilliancy of the moon seems fading. And then of a sudden--or was it that we had slept awhile?--there climbs into the sky the herald star, Hesperus. Have you watched many dawns? Have you noticed how Hesperus seems to put all other stars out, like the lamplighter on his early morning visit to the street lamps? He glitters so radiantly that positively the heavens seem one star and a few light specks, and even the moon looks paler. He is blazing his brightest now, a yellow-golden light like some giant Brazilian diamond, and there, away there, far across the mountain tops, the Wolf's Tail sweeps the horizon. The mist is rising, rolling away; far off the shadowy hills lighten from black to grey, the sinking cloud-banks are embroidered with a golden fringe, and the dim morning light steals into the frowsy, dusty car, outlining the sleeping figures, exposing with an unwelcome frankness the up-all-night look of our unkempt neighbours, twisted into uncouth positions in their uneasy sleep. "...And in the East God made Himself an awful rose of dawn." Awful it is in its majesty--this waking of the sleeping world. It is awful on the Essex marshes or viewed from a mean window in Clapham. But here, what a spectacle! Heaped up, mass upon mass, the mountains took the glad signal, blushing their grey tops into rose. Far behind us looms Orizaba, no longer diamond-cold in her chastity of snow, but roseate with a delicate pink, the tint of the neck-feathers of a wood-dove. Then the rose of the sky turns to crimson, and far to our left the twin peaks of Popocatapetl and Iztaccihuatl, towering above the nearer ranges, don crimson crowns on their snow. In the months that were to come we were destined to see many a dawn in many varied scenes. We were to watch from a small sailing-boat the chill gold gleams steal over the face of the ocean towards us; camped in some ruined temple we were to see "the swift footsteps of the lovely light" sweep over miles of grey-green woodland, reddening the carved porches and façades of palace and shrine, majestic in their grey ruin; we were to wake in tropic forest to find the first glories of the sun darting beams at us through arcades of tree network, turning the myriad dewdrops on the leaves and branches into translucent diamonds; but the wonder of that dawn amid Mexico's volcanoes has never had, can never have, for us a rival spectacle. * * * * *