text:  Presently the sun rose higher and a flood of light illumined the whole valley which lay some few hundred feet below us--a perfect garden such as no northern imagination could picture forth; a garden of sugar-canes cotton and nopal-trees intermixed with thickets of pomegranate and strawberry-trees and groves of orange fig and lemon giants of their kind shooting up to a far greater height than the oak attains in the States--every tree a perfect hothouse a pyramid of flowers covered with bloom and blossom to its topmost spray