The hum of insects soon mingled with the bird-voices of our forest. To and fro, in fitful flight, flashed the _libellas_, the glitter-winged dragon-flies, and a few large papilios flopped lazily through the dew-drenched foliage. No gnats up here, but thousands of tiny, honey-seeking wasps and midges, and bright-winged grasshoppers that rose with a fluttering spring when the first sunbeams reached the damp underbrush. Ants hurried about their daily toil, and when we ascended the next ridge we saw various kinds of lizards flitting across the road or basking on the wayside rocks, one of them a sort of dwarf iguana of a moss-green tint, on which protective color it seemed to rely for its safety, as its movements were as sluggish as those of a toad. As we kept steadily up-hill, the sun seemed to mount very rapidly, and, peak after peak, the summits of the upper Sierra rose into view. Zempantepec, La Sirena, and the Nevada de Colcoyan towered above the rest, the latter at least four thousand feet above the snow-line. Few prospects on earth could efface the impression of that panorama. In the Sierra de San Miguel our continent reproduces the Syrian Lebanon on a grander scale. Septimius Severus, who vacillated between his throne and the Elysian valleys of Daphne, would have renounced the empire of the world for the mountain-gardens of the Val de Morillo, and the giants of the cypress forests on the southeastern slope of the Sierra dwarf all the cedars of Bashan and Hebron. The largest, though not the tallest, of these trees, the cypress of Maria del Tule (twelve miles south of San Miguel), which Humboldt calls the "oldest vegetable monument of our globe," has a diameter of forty-two feet, a circumference of one hundred and thirty-six feet near the ground and of one hundred and four feet higher up, and measures two hundred and eighty-two feet between the extremities of two opposite branches. Yet this tree has many rivals in the Val de Morillo and near the sources of the Rio Verde, where groups of grayish-green mountain-firs rise like hillocks above the surrounding vegetation.