"Picture a gorge some 3000 feet deep with a trail blown out of its perpendicular cliffs and right through 25 spurs which were too difficult to circumvent, where a single miss-step means death. That is the sort of approach to the silver mine which I visited during the past summer," said Professor D. H. McLaughlin in an interview with the CRIMSON yesterday morning.

Professor McLaughlin went to Mexico last summer as geologist for a corporation which owns a rich silver mine on the Mess Central, a huge table and near the border of Durango and Sinalon, two native states on the West Coast.

"The silver is refined by the cyanide process," he continued, "and is packed out about 78 miles by mule-back in the form of bricks. That trail is no little promenade even in the daytime; but we found ourselves on it one evening in the pitch dark and rain with five miles of the hardest stretch before us. It is no fund picking your way along with a roaring torrent about 1000 feet directly below you.

"The Mesa Centrala is riddled with these tremendous gorges. The change in climate as you descend is remarkable. The mine was up on the rim in a forest of pine trees; but down below where the ore was carried by an aerial tramway, the jungle was full of parrots and monkeys.

"The natives are an amusing lot. A few years ago the height of their ambition was to be a two-gun man; but we taught them how to play basketball, and the whole town is crazy about it. The village hero is the captain of the leading basketball team and they all agree that nowadays one basket from mid-floor is worth three really dramatic murders."