That brown horizontal line is not the earth, although it’s damn near as dense. It is the smog layer over Mexico City, and it started appearing about an hour before the plane landed.
As an Angeleno, I can only shake my head in defeat. The clouds in the distance seem to be skimming half-in and half-out of the smog layer, like shallow draft boats on a scummy lake.
This was taken early on a Sunday morning, – which you would think would be a good day for smog, since the strict Catholics don’t run their big smog-belching factories on Sundays. I will take a similar pic when we leave here on Thursday, to see if there is any distance.