Tall dark cypresses—the ancient ahuehuetes sacred to Aztec memory—rise like cathedral spires from the chinampas of Xochimilco and double themselves in the mirror-still canal water below, a lone boatman poling a flower-laden trajinera just visible at the left bank in this hauntingly beautiful silver-gelatin real-photo postcard. Xochimilco's floating gardens are among the last remnants of the vast lake-island agricultural system that sustained the Aztec empire, and by the 1920s they had become one of Mexico City's most visited excursions, romanticized in photographs and tourist literature alike. This RPPC—numbered 449 in what appears to be a numbered series by an unidentified Mexico City studio—has suffered significant silver-mirroring and oxidation along its edges, giving the cypresses an otherworldly blue-silver halo that paradoxically intensifies the image's dreamlike quality. The back is blank and unmailed.