Excerpt from Abdalla the Moor and the Spanish Knight: A Romance of Mexico The hum of the city came faintly to his car; the church towers flung their long shadowscver the gardened roofs; the Wildfowl flapped the white wing over the distant sheets of water, which stretched, in a chain, from Chalco to San Cristobal; the shouts of Indian boatmen were heard, at a distance, on the canal of La Viga, and the dark forms of others, trotting along the causeway that borders it, were seen returning to their huts among the Chinampas. Quiet stole over the valley; the lizard crept to his hole; the bat woke up in the ruined chambers of the viceroy's palace, that crowns the hill of Chapoltepec, or started away from his den among the leaves Of those mossy, majestic, and indeed colossal, cypresses, which, at its base, overshadow the graves Of Aztec kings and sultanas. At last, the vesper bells sounded in the city, and the sun stooped under the western hills, leaving his rays still glittering, with such hues as are only seen in a land of mountains, on the grand peaks Of Popocatepetl and the White Woman, the farthest but yet the noblest summits Of all in that girdle Of moun tain magnificence, which seems to shut out Mexico from the rest of the world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.