AS we reached the opening, and I gazed upon the scene spread before me, I uttered an involuntary cry of admiration. Never had I beheld a more beautiful picture. Enclosed within an encircling ring of towering mountains was a valley perhaps thirty miles in diameter, a valley rich and verdant, with patches of dark woodland, with lush green meadows, and with a broad tranquil river winding through the centre and shimmering in the fading light of the setting sun. Fields of golden-yellow corn, or snowy cotton, of tobacco, alternated with acres of flowers--crimson, white, pink, mauve and scarlet, until the cultivated lands looked like a vast multicolored crazy-quilt. In every direction straight roads, bordered by stone walls and shade trees, divided the whole valley into even, symmetrical squares, and from where we stood, a broad highway led--straight as an arrow--to the great city that occupied the very centre of the valley. It was the hidden city, the city of Mictolan! Hundreds of low, one-storied houses glowed in the rosy light of the sunset. Here and there a taller, more imposing building rose above the others; four magnificent temples with enormous, intricate roof-combs towered, on their lofty pyramidal mounds, far above the lesser buildings, and even higher than these, surmounting an enormous “kus” or pyramid fully two hundred feet in height, with its gleaming, painted comb soaring another hundred feet in air, was a magnificent temple rising from the huge open plaza in the centre of the city. From where we stood, we could see the tiny forms of people moving about; strolling through the streets, lolling on the flat roofs of their houses, plodding from their labors in the fields towards thatched cottages embowered in flowering shrubs and trees, but all so silent, so still, that it seemed more like a picture thrown upon a screen than a reality. And as the last light of the sun faded and was gone, and twilight descended on the valley, a strange effulgence, a luminous glow overspread the city and the valley, seeming to come from nowhere, to be conjured from the air, and bathing the wondrous scene in a soft, mysterious light.