Patzcuaro is summery enough by day, but only the hardy would dress leisurely at dawn. A fog as thick as cheese, more properly a descended cloud, enveloped the place, a daily occurrence which the local authorities would have you think make it unusually healthful. An ancient cobbled road leads up and over the first rise, then degenerates to the usual Mexican camino, a trail twisting in and out along a chaos of rocks and broken ground. The fog hung long with us and made impossible pictures of the procession of Tarascan Indians coming in from Tzintzuntzan with every species of red pottery, from cups to immense water-jars, in great nets on the backs of horses, asses, men, and women. Beyond the railroad the trail picked its way, with several climbs over rocky spur-ends, along the marshy edge of the lake, which was so completely surrounded by mud and reeds that I had to leave unfulfilled my promised swim in it. The trip was made endless by the incessant chatter of the "doctor," who rattled on in English without a break; and when I switched him to German his tongue sped still faster, though fortunately more correctly. No wonder those become fluent linguists who can outdistance and outendure a man in his own tongue long before they have begun to learn it.

Along the way we picked up any amount of shining black obsidian, some in the form of arrow-heads and crude knives that bore out the statement that the Indians once even shaved with them. It was nearly eleven when we sighted, down among the trees on the lake shore, the squat church tower of the once capital of Michoacan. A native we spoke with referred to it as a "ciudad," but in everything but name it was a dead, mud-and-straw Indian village, all but its main street a collection of mud, rags, pigs, and sunshine, and no evidence of what Prescott describes as splendid ruins. Earthquakes are not unknown, and the bells of the church, old as the conquest of Michoacan, hang in the trees before it. Inside, an old woman left her sweeping to pull aside the curtains of the reputed Titian, a "Descent from the Cross," while I photographed it from the pulpit, for which privilege the young peon sexton appeared in time to accept a silver coin.

The German, with whom business always took precedence over pleasure, had gone to find the house of the priest. When I reached the door of it on the blank main street, he was sitting on a wooden bench in the hallway with a dozen old women and peons. We were admitted immediately after, as befitted our high social standing. A plump little padre nearing sixty, of the general appearance of a well-stuffed grain sack draped in black robes, but of rather impressive features—and wearing glasses—greeted us with formality. The "doctor" drew a black case from his pocket, went through some hocuspocus with a small mirror, and within two minutes, though his Spanish was little less excruciating than his English, had proved to the startled curate that the glasses he was wearing would have turned him stone-blind within a month but for the rare fortune of this great Berlin specialist's desire to visit the famous historical capital of the Tarascans. The priest smoked cigarette after cigarette while my companion fitted another pair of crystals and tucked the dangerous ones away in his own case—for the next victim. He did not even venture to haggle, but paid the two dollars demanded with the alacrity of a man who recognizes his good fortune, and to whom a matter of a few pesos more or less is of slight importance. For were there not a score of Indians waiting outside eager to pay as well for masses, confessions, and all the rest of his own hocuspocus? There followed a social chat, well liquefied, after which we took our ceremonious leave. Once outside, I learned the distressing fact that the shape of the padre's bows had required crystals costing twelve cents, instead of the customary nine-cent ones.

The German set off in the blazing noonday at his swiftest pace. He was obliged to be back at the hotel by three, for the dinner must be paid for whether eaten or not. I fell behind, glad of the opportunity. Many groups of peons were returning now, without their loads, but maudlin and nasty tempered with the mescal for which they had exchanged them. My automatic was within easy reach. The oculist had criticized it as far too small for Mexican travel. He carried himself a revolver half the size of a rifle, and filed the ends of the bullets crosswise that they might split and spread on entering a body. In the outskirts of Patzcuaro there came hurrying toward me a flushed and drunken peon youth with an immense rock in his hand. I reached for my weapon, but he greeted me with a respectful "Adios!" and hurried on. Soon he was overtaken by two more youths and dragged back to where an older peon lay in the middle of the road, his head mashed with a rock until trickles of brain protruded. The event seemed to cause little excitement. A few stood at their doors gazing with a mild sort of interest at the corpse, which still lay in the road when I turned a corner above.

Mules drag the tram-car of Patzcuaro laboriously up the three kilometers from the station to the main plaza, but gravitation serves for the down journey. When enough passengers had boarded it to set it in motion, we slid with a falsetto rumble down the cobbled road, a ragged boy leaning on the brake. Beyond the main railroad track a spur ran out on a landing-stage patched together out of old boards and rubbish. Peons were loading into an iron scow bags of cement from an American box-car far from home. Indians paddled about the lake in canoes of a hollowed log with a high pointed nose, but chopped sharp off at the poop. Their paddles were perfectly round pieces of wood, like churn-covers, on the end of long slim handles.

We were soon off for Morelia, capital of the State, across plains of cattle, with an occasional cut through the hills and a few brown ponds. At one station we passed two carloads of soldiers, westbound. They were nearly all mere boys, as usual, and like the policemen and rurales of the country struck one as unwisely entrusted with dangerous weapons. Morelia is seen afar off in the lap of a broad rolling plain, her beautiful cathedral towers high above all the rest. It was brilliant noonday when I descended and walked the mile into town.

The birthplace of Jose Morelos and of Yturbide, first emperor of Mexico, sits 6200 feet above the sea and claims 37,000 inhabitants. It is warm and brown with dust. Architecturally it is Mexican, with flat roofs and none of the overhanging eaves of Patzcuaro and Uruapan. From the "centro"—the nerve-center of the "torpid State," with two well-kept plazas, the plateresque cathedral of a pinkish stone worn faint and spotted with time, and the "seat of the powers of the State," all on the summit of a knoll—the entire town slopes gently down and quickly fades away into dirty, half-cobbled suburbs, brown and treeless, overrun with ragged, dust-tinted inhabitants, every street seeming to bring up against the low surrounding range. Its natural advantages are fully equal to those of Guadalajara, but here pulque grows and man is more torpid. All the place has a hopeless, or at least ambitionless, air, though in this splendid climate poverty has less tinge of misery and the appearance of a greater contentment with its lot. There is a local "poet's walk" that is not particularly poetic, a wild park beyond that is more so, and a great aqueduct over which sprawl enormous masses of the beautiful purple bourgainvillea. This ancient waterway resembles, but is far less striking than that of Segovia, for it runs across comparatively level ground and has only single arches of moderate height and too polished construction, instead of the massive cyclopean work of immense blocks of stone without mortar of its Spanish counterpart. Views and sunsets too often tempt the traveler in Mexico, or I might mention that from a little way out of town at the top of the road to Mexico City, where the cathedral towers all but reach the crest of the backing range, over which hung the ocher and light-pink and saffron-yellow clouds of the dying day.

The "Hotel Soledad" asserted its selectness by the announcement: "En este hotel no se admiten companias de comicos ni toreros," but the solitude of its wooden-floored beds at least was distinctly broken and often. The pompous, squeeze-centavo, old landlady sat incessantly in her place near the door between dining-room and kitchen, with a leather handbag from which she doled out, almost with tears, coppers for change and the keys to the larder, to the cringing servants and conferred long with them in whispers on how much she dared charge each guest, according to his appearance. But at least Mexico feeds well the traveler who is too hungry to be particular. He who will choose his dishes leads a sorry life, for the hotels are adamant in their fare and restaurants are almost unknown, except the dozens of little outdoor ones about the market-places where a white man would attract undue attention—if nothing less curable—among the "pela'os" that make up 80 per cent. of the population.

The passengers to Acambaro included two ladies of the fly-by-night species, who whiled away a somewhat monotonous journey by discussing the details of their profession with the admiring train-boy and drumming up trade in a coquettish pantomime. The junction town was in fiesta, and the second-class car of the evening train to Celaya was literally stacked high with peons and their multifarious bundles, and from it issued a stench like unto that of a congress of polecats. I rode seated on a brake, showers of cinders and the cold night air swirling about me, until the festive natives thinned down enough to give me admittance. By that time we were drawing into Celaya, also in the throes of some bombastic celebration.

Like many another Mexican city the traveler chances into when the central plaza is bubbling with night life, light, and music, Celaya turned out rather a disappointment in the sunny commonplace of day. Its central square is a little garden, but almost all the rest of the town is a monotonous waste of square, bare, one-story houses with ugly plaster facades and no roofs—at least to be seen—each differing a bit from its neighbor in height, like a badly drawn up company of soldiers. The blazing sun and thick dust characteristic of all the high central plateau are here in full force. Like most Spanish things—conquests, history, buildings—it looked more striking at a distance than when examined in detail.

Celaya is far-famed for its candy. All over the republic sounds the cry of "Cajetas de Celaya!" Mexico shows a great liking for sweets; no block is complete without its little stands or peregrinating hawkers of all manner of temptations to the sweet-toothed, ranging from squares of "fudge" in all colors of the rainbow to barber-pole sticks a half-yard long. The station was surrounded with soap-less old women, boys, and even men offering for sale all sizes of the little wooden boxes of the chief local product, in appearance like axle-grease, but delicious far beyond its looks, and with vendors of everything imaginable, to say nothing of a ragged, dirty multitude of all ages with no business there—nor anywhere else.

When I had spread out over two wooden seats of the big, bustling El Paso Limited I was quickly reminded of the grim, business-bent, American engineer in gray hair, the unlit half of a cigar clamped tightly between his teeth, of whom I had caught a half-conscious glance in the cab window. One could literally feel his firm American hand at the throttle as the heavy train gathered steady headway and raced away to the eastward. Across the car sat two handsome, solidly-knit young bull-fighters, their little rat-tail coletas peering from behind their square-cut hats. We sped steadily across the sun-flooded, dry, brown plateau, slightly rolling, its fields alternating between the dead tint of dry corn and newly plowed patches. Here for the first time were pulque producing fields of maguey, planted in long, straight, emerald-green rows.

As Irapuato for its strawberries, and Celaya for its sweets, so Queretaro is famed for its huge, cheap hats, of a sort of reed, large enough to serve as umbrellas, and for its opals. From the time he steps off the train here until he boards it again, the traveler, especially the "gringo," is incessantly pestered by men and boys offering for sale these worthless bright pebbles—genuine and otherwise. Here again are the same endless rows of one-story, stucco houses, intersecting cobbled and dust-paved streets, running to the four corners of the compass from a central plaza planted with tall, slim trees, the interwoven branches of which almost completely shade it. The cathedral houses, among other disturbing, disgusting, and positively indecent representations of the Crucifixion and various martyrdoms done in the Aztec style of bloody realism, a life-size Cristo with masses of long real hair and a pair of knee-length knit drawers for decency's sake. One might fancy the place weighed down by a Puritan censorship. The local museum contains among other rubbish of the past the keyhole through which Josefa whispered in 1810 the words that started the revolution against Spanish power! Here, too, is what purports to be an authentic photograph of the execution of Maximilian, theatrical to a Spanish degree, the three victims standing in their places, the once "Emperor of the Mexicans" holding a large crucifix, and several of the boy soldiers who executed them crowded eagerly into the corners of the picture. More impressive to the incredulous is the plain, tapering, wooden coffin in which the chief body was placed, the bottom half covered with faded blood and on one of the sides the plain, dull-red imprint of a hand, as if the corpse had made some post-mortem effort to rise from the grave. The portrait of the transplanted scion of Austria shows a haughty, I-am-of-superior-clay man, of a distinctly mediocre grade of intellect, with a forest of beard that strives in vain to conceal an almost complete absence of chin.

History records that the deposed ruler reached by carriage his last earthly scene in the early morning of June 19, 1867. I arrived as early, though afoot. It is a twenty-minute walk from the center of town across the flat, fertile vega, green with gardens, to the Cerro de las Campanas, a bare, stern, stony hill, somewhat grown with cactus bushes, maguey, and tough shrubs, rising perhaps seventy feet above the level of the town. It runs up gently and evenly from the south, but falls away abruptly in a cragged, rock precipice on the side facing Queretaro, providing the only place in the vicinity where poorly aimed bullets cannot whistle away across the plain. Before them, as they faced the youthful, brown file of soldiers in their many-patched and faded garb, the three had a comprehensive view of the town, chiefly trees and churches sufficient to house the entire populace several times over. Nine immense structures, each with a great dome and a tower or two—steeples are unknown in Mexico—stand out against the bare, brown, flat-topped range beyond that barely rises above the highest tower. The last scene he looked on must have struck the refuted emperor as typical of a country he was sorry then ever to have seen, in spite of his regal control of facial expression,—a hard, stony plateau, the fertility and riches of which succumb chiefly to an all-devouring priesthood. Cold lead plays too large a part in the history of Mexico, but certainly its most unjust verdict was not the extinction of the "divine right" in the person of this self-styled descendant of the Caesars at the hands of an Indian of Oaxaca. To-day a brown stone chapel, erected by Austria, stands where Maximilian fell, but the spot remains otherwise unchanged, and no doubt the fathers of these same peons who toiled now in the gardens of the vega under the morning sun lined the way through which the carriage bore to its American extinction a system foreign to the Western Hemisphere.



CHAPTER VI

TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY

The El Paso Limited picked me up again twenty-four hours later. Beyond Queretaro's ungainly aqueduct spread fields of tobacco, blooming with a flower not unlike the lily; then vast, almost endless stretches of dead, dry corn up low heights on either hand, and occasional fields of maguey in soldierly files. At San Juan del Rio, famous for its lariats, a dozen men and a woman stood in a row, some forty feet from the train, holding coils of woven-leather ropes of all sizes, but in glum and hopeless silence, while a policeman paced back and forth to prevent them from either canvassing the train-windows or crying their wares. Evidently some antinuisance crusade had invaded San Juan.

Mexico is a country of such vast vistas that a man might easily be taken and executed by bandits within plain sight of his friends without their being able to lend him assistance. Nowhere can one look farther and see nothing. Yet entire companies of marauders might lie in wait in the many wild rocky barrancos of this apparently level brown plain. Up and up we climbed through a bare, stone-strewn land, touched here and there with the green of cactus, sometimes with long vistas of maize, which here hung dead in its half-grown youth because of the failure of the summer rains. Fields of maguey continued. The air grew perceptibly cooler as we wound back and forth, always at good speed behind the American engineer, mounting to the upper plateau surrounding the capital, not through mountains but by a vast, steadily rising world. Sometimes long, unmortared stone fences divided the landscape, more often mile after unobstructed mile of slightly undulating brown plain, tinted here and there by maguey, rolled by us into the north.

A special train of soldiers, with a carload of arms and munitions, passed on the way to head off the latest revolted "general." The newspapers of the capital appeared, some rabidly "anti-American," stopping at nothing to stir up the excitable native against alleged subtle plans of the nation to the north to rob them of their territory and national existence, the more reputable ones with sane editorials imploring all Mexicans not to make intervention "in the name of humanity and civilization" necessary. The former sold far more readily. The train wound hither and yon, as if looking for an entrance to the valley of Mexico. Unfortunately no train on either line reaches ancient Anahuac by daylight, and my plan to enter it afoot, perhaps by the same route as Cortez, had been frustrated. A red sun was just sinking behind haggard peaks when we reached the highest point of the line—8237 feet above the sea—with clumps and small forests of stocky oaks and half Mexico stretching out behind us, rolling brown to distant bare ranges backed by others growing blue and purple to farthest distance. The scene had a late October aspect, and a chilling, ozone-rich wind blew. By dusk the coat I had all but thrown away in the sweltering North was more than needed. We paused at San Antonio, a jumble of human kennels thrown together of old cans, scraps of lumber, mud, stones, and cactus leaves, with huge stacks of the charcoal with the soot of which all the inhabitants were covered, even to the postmaster who came in person for the mail sack. That week's issue of a frivolous sheet of the capital depicted an antonino charcoal-burner standing before his no less unwashed wife, holding a new-born babe and crying in the slovenly dialect of the "pela'o": "Why, it is white! Woman, thou hast deceived me!"

At dark came Tula, ancient capital of the Toltecs, after which night hid all the scene there might have been, but for glimpses by the light of the train of the great tajo cut through the hills to drain the ancient valley of Anahuac. On we sped through the night, which if anything became a trifle warmer. Gradually the car crowded to what would have been suffocation had we not soon pulled in at Buena Vista station, to fight our way through a howling pandemonium of touts, many shouting English, among whom were the first Negroes I had seen in Mexico.

Mexico City was a great disappointment. The hotel only a block from the cathedral and the site of the great teocalli of the Aztecs, to which the German in Patzcuaro had directed me, differed not even in its smells from a Clark-street lodging-house in Chicago. The entire city with its cheap restaurants and sour smelling pulquerias uncountable, looked and sounded like a lower eastside New York turned Spanish in tongue. Even morning light discovered nothing like the charm of the rest of Mexico, and though I took up new lodgings en famille in aristocratic Chapultepec Avenue, with a panorama of snow-topped Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, her sleeping sister, and all the range seeming a bare gunshot away, the imagination was more inclined to hark back to the Bowery than to the great Tenochtitlan of the days of Cortez.

In a word, the capital is much like many another modern city, somewhat bleak, cosmopolitan of population, with strong national lines of demarkation, and a caste system almost as fixed as that of India, but with none of the romance the reader of Prescott, Mme. Calderon, and the rest expects. Since anarchy fell upon the land, even the Sunday procession of carriages of beauty in silks and jewels, and of rancheros prancing by in thousand-dollar hats, on silver-mounted and bejeweled saddles, has disappeared from the life of the capital. To-day the Mexican is not anxious to parade his wealth, nor even to venture it in business. He is much more minded to bury it in the earth, to hide it in his socks, to lay it up in the great republic to the north, where neither presidents corrupt nor Zapatistas break in and steal.

By day moderate clothing was comfortable, but the night air is sharp and penetrating, and he who is not dressed for winter will be inclined to keep moving. Policemen and street-car employees tie a cloth across their mouths from sunset until the morning warms. Ragged peons swarm, feeding, when at all, chiefly from ambulating kitchens of as tattered hawkers. The well-to-do Mexican, the "upper class," in general is a more churlish, impolite, irresponsible, completely inefficient fellow than even the countryman and the peon, in whom, if anywhere within its borders, lies the future hope of Mexico. To him outward appearance is everything, and the capital is especially overrun with the resultant hollow baubles of humanity.

There are a few short excursions of interest about the capital. Bandits have made several of them, such as the ascent of Popocatepetl, unpopular, but a few were still within the bounds of moderate safety. Three miles away by highway or street-car looms up the church of Guadalupe, the sacred city of Mexico. It is a pleasing little town, recalling Puree of the Juggernaut-car by its scores of little stands for the feeding of pilgrims—at pilgrimage prices. Here are evidences of an idolatry equal to that of the Hindu. Peons knelt on the floor of the church, teaching their babies to cross themselves in the long intricate manner customary in Mexico. A side room was crowded with cheap cardboard paintings of devotees in the act of being "saved" by the Virgin of Guadalupe—here a man lying on his back in front of a train which the Virgin in the sky above has just brought to a standstill; there a child being spared by her lifting the wheel of a heavy truck about to crush it. It would be hard to imagine anything more crude either in conception or execution than these signs of gratitude. To judge by them the Virgin would make a dramatist of the first rank; there was not a picture in which the miraculous assistance came a moment too soon, never & hero of our ancient, pre-Edison melodramas appeared more exactly "in the nick of time." The famous portrait of the miraculous being herself, over the high altar, is dimly seen through thick glass. Inside the chapel under the blue and white dome pilgrims were dipping up the "blessed" water from the bubbling well and filling bottles of all possible shapes, not a few of which had originally held American and Scotch whisky, that are sold in dozens of little stands outside the temple.

These they carry home, often hundreds of miles, to "cure" the ailments of themselves or families, or to sell to others at monopoly prices.

Good electric cars speed across amazingly fertile bottom lands crisscrossed by macadam highways to Xochimilco. Nearing it, the rugged foothills of the great mountain wall shutting in the valley begin to rise. We skirted Pedregal, a wilderness of lava hills serving as quarry, and drew up in the old Indian town, of a charm all its own, with its hoar and rugged old church and its houses built of upright cornstalks or reeds, with roofs of grass from the lake. Indians paddled about in clumsy, leaky boats through the canals among rich, flower-burdened islands, once floating.

Another car runs out to Popotla along the old Aztec causeway by which the Spaniards retreated on that dismal night of July 2, 1520. Now the water is gone and only a broad macadamed street remains. The spot where Alvarado made his famous pole-vault is near the Buena Vista station, but no jumping is longer necessary—except perhaps to dodge a passing trolley. Instead of the lake of Tenochtitlan days there is the flattest of rich valleys beyond. The "Tree of the Dismal Night," a huge cypress under which Cortez is said to have wept as he watched the broken remnants of his army file past, is now hardly more than an enormous, hollow, burned-out stump, with a few huge branches that make it look at a distance like a flourishing tree still in the green prime of life. The day was rainy and a cold, raw wind blew. The better-clad classes were in overcoats, and the peons in their cotton rags wound themselves in blankets, old carpets, newspapers, anything whatever, huddling in doorways or any suggestion of shelter. Cold brings far more suffering in warm countries than in these of real winters.

The comandante of notorious old Belen prison in the capital spoke English fluently, but he did not show pleasure at my visit. An under-official led me to the flat roof, with a bird's-eye view of the miserable, rambling, old stone building. Its large patios were literally packed with peon prisoners. The life within was an almost exact replica of that on the streets of the capital, even to hawkers of sweets, fruit-vendors, and the rest, while up from them rose a decaying stench as from the steerage quarters of old transatlantic liners. Those who choose, work at their trade within as outside. By night the prisoners are herded together in hundreds from six to six in the wretched old dungeon-like rooms. Nothing apparently is prohibited, and prisoners may indulge with impunity in anything from cigarettes to adultery, for which they can get the raw materials.

The excursion out to the Ajusco range, south of the city, was on the verge of danger. Zapata hung about Cuernavaca and marauders frequently approached the very outskirts of the capital. Under our knapsacks we struck upward through the stony village where the train had set us down, and along a narrow road that soon buried itself in pine forests. A bright clear stream came tumbling sharply down, and along this we climbed. A mile or more but we picked up at a thatched hut an Indian boy of ten as burden-bearer and guide, though we continued to carry most of our own stuff and to trust largely to our own sense of direction. Above came a three-hour climb through pine-forested mountains, such as the Harz might be without the misfortune of German spick and spanness. He who starts at an elevation of 7500 feet and climbs 4000 upward in a brief space of time, with a burden on his back, knows he is mounting. Occasionally a dull-gray glimpse of the hazy valley of Mexico broke through the trees; about us was an out-of-the-way stillness, tempered only by the sound of birds. About noon the thick forest of great pine trees ceased as suddenly as if nature had drawn a dead-line about the brow of the mountain. A foot above it was nothing but stunted oak growths and tufts of bunch-grass large as the top of a palm-tree. On the flat summit, with hints through the tree-tops below of the great vale of Anahuac, we halted to share the bulk of our burdens with the Indian boy, who had not brought his "itacate." The air was most exhilarating and clear as glass, though there was not enough of it to keep us from panting madly at each exertion. In the shade it was cold even in heavy coats; but merely to step out into the sunshine was to bask like lizards.

Our "guide" lost no time in losing us, and we started at random down the sharp face of the mountain to the valley 4000 feet almost directly below us. Suddenly a break in the trees opened out a most marvelous view of the entire valley of Mexico. Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl stood out as clearly under their brilliant white mantles of new-fallen snow as if they were not sixty but one mile away, every crack and seam fully visible, and the fancied likeness of the second to a sleeping woman was from this point striking. The contrast was great between the dense green of the pine forests and the velvety, brown plain with its full, shallow lakes unplumbed fathoms below. Farther down we came out on the very break-neck brink of a vast amphitheater of hills, with "las ventanas," huge, sheer, rock cliffs shaped like great cathedral windows, an easy stone-throw away but entirely inaccessible to any but an aviator, for an unconscionable gorge carpeted with bright green tree-tops lay between. I proposed descending the face of the cliff below us, and led the way down a thousand feet or more, only to come to the absolutely sheer rock end of things where it would have taken half the afternoon to drop to the carpet of forest below.

There was nothing to do but to climb out again and skirt the brink of the canyon. In the rare air we were certain a score of times of being about to drop dead from exhaustion, yet a two-minute rest always brought full recovery. Then came a wild scramble of an hour along sheer rocks thick-draped with moss that pealed off in square yards almost as often as we stepped on it, and threatened to drop us more than a half-mile to the tree-tops below. Climbing, clinging, and circling through a wilderness of undergrowth amid the vast forest of still, dense-green pines, but with such views of the valley of Mexico and the great snow-clads as to reward any possible exertion, we flanked at last the entire canyon. In the forest itself every inch of ground was carpeted with thick moss, more splendid than the weavings of any loom of man, into which the feet sank noiselessly. Everywhere the peaceful stillness was tempered only by a slight humming of the trees, and the songs of myriad birds, not a human being within screaming distance, unless some gang of bandits stalked us in the depth of the forest. More likely they were by now sodden with the aftermath of Sunday festivities, and anyway we were armed "hasta los dientes."

At length, as the day was nearing its close, we fell into what had once been a trail. It was moss-grown and wound erratically in and out among the trees, but went steadily down, very level compared to the work of the preceding hours, yet so steep we several times spread out at full length to slide a rod or more. The sun was setting when we came to the bottom of "las ventanas" only a couple thousand feet from where we had first caught sight of them hours before. Thereafter the trail moderated its pace and led us to the most beautiful thing of the day, a clear ice-cold stream at the bottom of the cliffs. We all but drank it dry. Then on out of the canyon and across a vast field of rye, back of which the great gorge stood like some immense stadium, with stalwart athletic pines filling all the seats. This is the spot where Wallace's "Fair God" burst forth upon the valley. We descended between immense walls of pines, half unseen in the dusk and framing a V-shaped bit of the vale of Anahuac, a perfect crimson fading to rose color, culminating in the pink-tinted snow-clads above.

At dark we left the boy at his hut, on the walls of which his father had just hung the two deer of that day's hunt. There was no hope of catching the afternoon train from Cuernavaca, and we laid plans to tramp on across the valley floor to Tizapan. But Mexican procrastination sometimes has its virtues, and we were delighted to find the station crowded with those waiting for the delayed convoy that ten minutes later was bearing us cityward through the cool highland night.

I had hoped to walk from Mexico City to the capital of Honduras. That portion of the route from former Tenochtitlan to Oaxaca and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, however, was not then a promising field for tramping by any one with any particular interest in arriving. I concluded to flank it by train. It was a chilly gray day when the little narrow-gage train bore us close by the miraculous temple of Guadalupe, with its hilltop cemetery and stone sails, and into the vast fields of maguey beyond. Peons and donkeys without number, the former close wrapped in their colored blankets, the latter looking as if they would like to be, enlivened the roads and trails. We skirted the shore of dull Lake Texcoco, once so much larger and even now only a few inches below the level of the flat plain, recalling that the Tenochtitlan of the Conquest was an island reached only by causeways. At San Juan Teotihuacan, the famous pyramids lost in the nebulous haze of pre-Toltec history bulked forth from the plain and for many miles beyond. The smaller, called that of the Moon, was a mere squat mound of earth. But the larger had lately been cleared off, and was now of a light cement color, rising in four terraces with a low monument or building on the summit. It contains about the same material as the pyramid of Cheops, but is larger at the base and by no means so high, thereby losing something of the majesty of its Egyptian counterpart.

A cheery sun appeared, but the air remained cool. Fields of maguey in mathematically straight lines stretched up and away out of sight over broad rolling ridges. I had put off the experience of tasting the product until I should reach Apam, the center of the pulque industry. At that station an old woman sold me a sort of flower-pot full of the stuff at two cents. I expected to taste and throw it away. Instead there came a regret that I had not taken to it long before. It was of the consistency and color of milk, with a suggestion of buttermilk in its taste and fully as palatable as the latter, with no noticeable evidence of intoxicating properties. No doubt this would come with age, as well as the sour stink peculiar to the pulquerias of the cities.

The train made a mighty sweep to the northward to escape from the central valley, bringing a much closer and better view of the two snow-clads, first on one, then on the farther side. By choice I should have climbed up over the "saddle" between them, as Cortez first entered the realms of Montezuma. A dingy branch line bore us off across broken country with much corn toward Puebla. On the left was a view of Malinche, famous in the story of the Conquest, its summit hidden in clouds. I was now in the Rhode Island of Mexico, the tiny State of Tlaxcala, the "Land of Corn," to the assistance from which Cortez owes his fame. The ancient state capital of the same name has been slighted by the railway and only a few decrepit mule-cars connect it with the outer world. I slighted these, and leaving my possessions in the station of Santa Ana, set off through a rolling and broken, dry and dusty, yet fertile country, with the wind rustling weirdly through the dead brown fields of corn. The inhabitants of the backward little capital were even more than usually indifferent to "gringoes," seldom giving me more than a glance unless I asked a question, and even leaving me to scribble my notes in peace in a shaded plaza bench.

There is nothing but its historical memories of special interest in Tlaxcala. It is a town of some 3000 inhabitants, a few hundred feet higher than Mexico City, with many ancient buildings, mostly of stone, often mere ruins, from the seams of surely half of which sprout grass and flowers, as they do between the cobbles of its streets and its large rambling plaza. I visited the old church on the site of which Christianity—of the Spanish brand—was first preached on the American continent. Here was the same Indian realism as elsewhere in the republic. One Cristo had "blood" pouring in a veritable river from his side, his face was completely smeared with it, his knees and shins were skinned and barked and covered with blood, which had even dripped on his toes; the elbows and other salient points were in worse condition than those of a wrestler after a championship bout, and the body was tattooed with many strange arabesques. There were other figures in almost as distressing a state. A god only ordinarily maltreated could not excite the pity or interest of the Mexican Indian, whose every-day life has its own share of barked shins and painful adversities. It was amusing to find this village, hardly larger than many a one about the home of Mexican hacendados, the capital of a State. But the squads of rurales and uniformed police and the civil employees of Government were very solemn with their responsibilities. I had seen it all in an hour or two and drifted back along the five lazy miles to Santa Ana. Tlaxcala lies between two gaunt broken ridges, with rugged chains all about it, yet the little State is by no means so completely fenced in by nature as the imagination that has fed on Prescott pictures.

Puebla, third city of Mexico, is even colder than the capital. The snow-clads of the latter look down upon it from the west, and far away to the east stands Orizaba, highest peak of Mexico. In the haze of sunset its great mantle of new-fallen snow stood out sharply, darker streaks that ran down through the lower reaches of snow dying out in nothingness, as the mountain did itself, for as a matter of fact the latter was not visible at all, but only the snow that covered its upper heights, surrounded above, below, and on all sides by the thin gray sky of evening. By night there was music in the plaza. But how can there be life and laughter where a half-dozen blankets are incapable of keeping the promenaders comfortable? In all the frigid town there was not a single fire, except in the little bricked holes full of charcoal over which the place does its cooking. Close to my hotel was the "Casa Serdan," its windows all broken and its stucco front riddled with bullet holes, for it was here that two brothers, barricading themselves against the government of Porfirio Diaz, spilled the first blood of the long series of revolutions and worse that has followed. Already the name of the street had been changed to "Calle de los Martires de Noviembre, 1910."

It is nearly three hours' walk from the plaza of Puebla to that of Cholula, the Benares of the Aztecs, and for him who rises early it is a cold one. What little romance remains would have fled had I made the trip by mule-car. As it was, I could easily drop back mentally into the days of the Conquest, for under the brilliant cloudless sky as I surmounted a bit of height there lay all the historic scene before me—the vast dipping plain with the ancient pyramid of Cholula, topped now by a white church with towers and dome, standing boldly forth across it, and beyond, yet seeming so close one half expected an avalanche of their snows to come down upon the town, towering Popocatepetl and her sister, every little vale and hollow of the "saddle" between clear as at a yard distance. Then to the left, Malinche and the rolling stony hills of Tlaxcala, along which the Spaniards advanced, with the beautiful cone of Orizaba rising brilliant and clear nearly a hundred miles away. The great rampart separating them from the cherished valley must have brought bated breath even to the hardy soldiers of Cortez.

This unsurpassed view accompanied all the rest of the peaceful morning walk. By nine I was climbing the great pyramid from the top of which the intrepid Spaniard tumbled down the ancient gods, and about which occurred the first of the many wholesale massacres of Indians on the American continent. To-day it is merely a large hill, overgrown on all sides with grass, trees, and flowers, and with almost nothing to bear out the tradition that it was man-built. From the top spreads a scene rarely surpassed. Besides the four mountains, the ancient and modern town of Cholula lies close below, with many another village, especially their bulking churches, standing forth on all sides about the rich valley, cut up into squares and rectangles of rich-brown corn alternating with bright green, a gaunt, low, wall-like range cutting off the entire circle of the horizon. The faint music of church bells from many a town miles away rode by on a wind with the nip of the mountain snows in it. But Prescott has already described the scene with a fidelity that seems uncanny from one who never beheld it except in his mind's eye.

To-day the pyramid is sacred to the "Virgin of the Remedies." Gullible pilgrims come from many leagues around to be cured of their ills, and have left behind hundreds of doll-like figures of themselves or the ailing limb or member made of candle wax that breaks to bits between the fingers. Then there are huge candles without number, martyrs and crucifixions, with all the disgusting and bloody features of elsewhere; every kind and degree and shape and size of fetish. Cholula needs badly another Cortez to tumble her gods down to the plain below and drive out the hordes of priests that sacrifice their flocks none the less surely, if less bloodily, than their Aztec predecessors.

A bright red sun came up as the train swung round to the eastward, hugging the flanks of Malinche, and rumbled away across a sandy, very dry, but fertile country, broken by huge barrancas or washouts, and often with maguey hedges. Most of my day was given up to Mr. —— come to think of it, I did not even get his name. He drifted into the train at the junction and introduced himself by remarking that it was not bad weather thereabouts. He was a tall, spare man of fifty, in a black suit rather disarranged and a black felt hat somewhat the worse for wear. He carried a huge pressed-cardboard "telescope" and wore a cane, though it hardly seemed cold enough for one. His language was that of a half-schooled man, with the paucity of vocabulary and the grammar of a ship's captain who had left school early but had since read much and lived more. Whenever a noun failed him, which was often, he filled in the blank with the word "proposition." Like myself, he traveled second-class because there was no fourth.

It may be that the biography which pieced itself unconsciously together as he talked needs a sprinkle of salt here and there, but it all had the earmarks of veracity. He was a Briton, once a surgeon in the British army, with the rank of captain, saw service with Roberts in Egypt, and was with Kitchener at the relief of Khartum. Later he served in India with the Scotch Grays. He looked the part, and had, moreover, the accent and scars to go with it. Glimpses through his conversation into the background beyond suggested he had since been in most parts of the world. He liked Argentina best and the United States least, as a place of residence. Practising as a physician and oculist, he had amassed a moderate fortune, all of which he had lost, together with his wife and child, and possibly a bit of his own wits, in the flood of Monterey. Since that catastrophe he had had no other ambition than to earn enough to drift on through life. With neither money nor instruments left, he took to teaching English to the wealthier class of Mexicans in various parts of the country, now in mission schools, now as private tutor. A Methodist institution in Queretaro had dispensed with his services because he protested against an order to make life unpleasant to those boys who did not respond with their spending money to a daily call for alms at the morning assembly. Six months ago he had drifted into a little town near San Marcos, wearing the title of "professor," and got together a class of private pupils, chief among them three daughters of a wealthy hacendado. Rebels came one day and in the exuberance that follows a full meal long delayed, with pulque embroidery, one of them fired two shots through the window not far from his venerable British head. The "professor" picked up a two-foot mahogany ruler, marched out into the plaza and, rapping the startled rebel over the skull, took his rifle away from him and turned it over to the delighted jefe politico. From then on his future seemed assured, for if the rest of the town was poor, the hacendado's wealth was only rivaled by his daughters' longing for English.

But life is a sad proposition at best. On the Monday preceding our meeting the "professor" sat with his pupils in the shade of the broad hacienda veranda when he saw two priests wandering toward the house "like Jews with a pack of clothing to sell." "It's all up with the Swede," he told himself according to his own testimony. The prophecy proved only too true. The padres had come to order that the three daughters be god-mothers to the "Cristo" (in the form of a gaudy doll) that was to be "born" in the town on Christmas eve and paraded to the cathedral of Puebla. As their ticket to heaven depended upon obedience, none of the faithful senoritas dreamed of declining the honor, even though it involved the expenditure of considerable of papa's good money and required them to spend most of the time until Christmas rehearsing for the ceremony and "praising the glory of God" with the priests in a room of the church, locked against worldly intruders. Naturally this left them no time for English. His mainstay gone, the "professor" threw up the sponge and struck out for pastures new, carrying his trunk-like "telescope" two hot and sandy leagues to catch this morning train.

At Esperanza the Briton went me one better on my own custom of "living on the country." To the enchiladas, large tortillas red with pepper-sauce and generously filled with onions, and the smaller tortillas covered with scraps of meat and boiled egg which we bought of the old women and boys that flocked about the train, he added a liter of pulque. Not far beyond, we reached Boca del Monte, the edge of the great plateau of Mexico. A wealth of scenery opened out. From the window was a truly bird's-eye view of the scattered town of Maltrata, more than two thousand feet almost directly below in the center of a rich green valley, about the edge of which, often on the very brink of the thick-clothed precipice, the train wound round and round behind the double-headed engine, traveling to every point of the compass in its descent. The town rose up to us at last and for the first time since mounting to San Luis Potosi two months before, I found myself less than a mile above sea-level. Instead of the often bare, wind-swept plateau, immense weeds of the banana family grew up about us, and a beautiful winding vale reeking with damp vegetation stretched before and behind us as we slid onward. High above all else and much farther away than it seemed, stood the majestic, snow-white peak of Orizaba. In mid-afternoon we descended at the city of that name.

It was large, but really a village in every feature of life. Here again were the broad eaves of one-story, tile-roofed houses, stretching well out over the badly cobbled streets, down the center of which ran open sewers. The place was unkempt and unclean, with many evidences of poverty, and the air so heavy and humid that vegetation grew even on the roofs. I wandered about town with the "professor" while he "sized it up" as a possible scene of his future labors, but he did not find it promising. By night Orizaba was still well above the tropics and the single blanket on the hotel cot proved far from sufficient even with its brilliant red hue.



CHAPTER VII

TROPICAL MEXICO

It is merely a long jump with a drop of two thousand feet from Orizaba to Cordoba. But the train takes eighteen miles of winding, squirming, and tunneling to get there. On the way is some of the finest scenery in Mexico. The route circles for miles the yawning edge of a valley dense with vegetation, banana and orange trees without number, with huts of leaves and stalks tucked away among them, myriads of flowers of every shade and color, and here and there coffee bushes festooned with their red berries. The dew falls so heavily in this region that the rank growth was visibly dripping with it.

At somnolent Cordoba I left the line to Vera Cruz for that to the southward. The car was packed with the dirty, foul-tongued wives and the children and bundles of a company of soldiers recently sent against the rebels of Juchitan. Ever since leaving Boca del Monte the day before I had been coming precipitously down out of Mexico. But there were still descents to be found, and the train raced swiftly without effort in and out through ever denser jungle, magnificent in colors, alive with birds, a land in each square yard of which the traveler felt a longing to pause and dwell for a while, to swing languidly under the trees, gazing at the snow peak of Orizaba now growing farther and farther away.

Our conveyance was a species of way-freight, which whiled away most of the day at a speed fittingly respectful to the scenery about us. With every station the population grew perceptibly more lazy. The alert, eager attitude of the plateau gave place to a languorous lethargy evident in both faces and movements. People seemed less sulky than those higher up, more communicative and approachable, but also, strangely enough, less courteous, apparently from laziness, a lack of the energy necessary for living up to the rules of that Mexican virtue. They answered readily enough, but abruptly and indifferently, and fell quickly into their customary somnolence. For a time we skirted the Rio Blanco, boiling away toward the sea. Oranges were so plentiful they hung rotting on the trees. The jungle was dense, though by no means so much so as those of the Far East. On either hand were hundreds of native shacks,—mongrel little huts of earth floors, transparent walls of a sort of corn-stalk, and a thick, top-heavy roof of jungle grass or banana leaves, set carelessly in bits of space chopped out of the rampant jungle. Now and then we passed gangs of men fighting back the vegetation that threatened to swallow up the track completely.

Beautiful palm-trees began to abound, perfectly round, slender stems supporting hundreds of immense leaves hanging edgewise in perfect arch shape, perhaps the most symmetrical of all nature's works. What is there about the palm-tree so romantic and pleasing to the spirits? Its whisper of perpetual summer, of perennial life, perhaps. Great luscious pineapples sold through the windows at two or three cents each. The peons of this region carried a machete in a leather scabbard, but still wore a folded blanket over one shoulder, suggesting chilly nights. The general apathy of the population began to manifest itself now in the paucity of hawkers at the stations. On the plateau the train seldom halted without being surrounded by a jostling crowd, fighting to sell their meager wares; here they either lolled in the shade of their banana groves, waiting for purchasers to come and inspect their displays of fruit, or they did not even trouble to offer anything for sale. Why should man work when his food drops year by year into his lap without even replanting? Moreover, flat noses and kinky hair were growing more and more in evidence.

Not all was jungle. As the mountains died down and faded away in the west there opened out many broad meadows in which were countless sleek cattle tended by somnolent herdsmen on horseback. Much sugar-cane grew, lengths of which were sold to the brawling soldiers' wives and the carload in general, which was soon reeking with the juice and chewed pulp. By afternoon jungle was a rarity and most of the country was a rich sort of prairie with cattle without number, and here and there an immense tree to break the monotony. These rich bottomlands that seemed capable of producing anything in unlimited quantities were almost entirely uncultivated. At several stations there bulked above the throng white men in appearance like a cross between farmers and missionaries, the older ones heavily bearded. For a time I could not catalogue them. Then, as we pulled out of one town, two of what but for their color and size I should have taken for peons raced for the last car-step, one shouting to the other in the strongest of Hoosier accents:

"Come on, Bud, let's jemp 'er!"

Which both did, riding some sixty feet, and dropped off like men who had at last had their one daily excitement. Inquiry proved that they belonged to a colony of Mormons that has settled in several groups in this region, where nature sets their creed a prolific example.

Unbroken prairies, in their tropical form, now stretched as far as the eye could reach, with just the shade of a shadowy range in the far west. The heat had not once grown oppressive during the day.

With dusk it turned almost cold. We wound slowly on into the damp, heavy night, a faint full moon struggling to tear itself a peep-hole through the clouds, and finally at ten, seat-sore with fifteen hours of slat-bench riding, pulled up at Santa Lucrecia.

It was just such a town as dozens of others we had passed that day; a plain station building surrounded unevenly by a score or so of banana-grove huts. Here ends the railroad southward, joining that across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. From the track of the latter a wooden sidewalk that rang drum-hollow under my heels led across a gully of unknown depth in the black night to the Hotel "El Sol Mejicano," standing-room for which had been gashed out of the jungle. It was a wooden and sheet-iron building on stilts, swarming even at night with dirty children, pigs, chickens, and yellow dogs, and presided over by a glassy-eyed, slatternly woman of French antecedents, the general shape of a wine-skin three-fourths full, and of a ghoulish instinct toward the purses of travelers. In one end were a dozen "rooms," separated by partitions reaching half way to the sheet-iron roof, and in the other a single combination of grocery and general store, saloon and pool-table, assorted filth and the other attributes of outposts of civilization. The chambers were not for rent, but only the privilege of occupying one of the several beds in each. These fortunately were fairly clean, with good springs and mosquito canopies, but with only a quilt for mattress—unless it was meant for cover—a single sheet, and the usual two little, round, hard mountainous pillows. Otherwise the cabins were wholly unfurnished, even to windows. The train that had brought us in spent the night bucking and jolting back and forth near by; even a barefoot servant walking anywhere in the building or on the veranda set the edifice rocking as in an earthquake; two Mexicans occupying the "room" next to my own—more properly, the one I helped occupy—bawled anecdotes and worse at the top of their voices most of the night; guests were hawking and spitting and coughing incessantly in various parts of the house; at three a servant began beating on the door with something in the nature of a sledge-hammer to know if I wished to take the train Atlantic-bound, and refused to accept a negative answer; my room-mate held the world's record for snoring; at the first suggestion of dawn every child, chicken, and assorted animal in the building and vicinity set up its greatest possible uproar; and I was half-frozen all night, even under all the clothing I possessed. Except for these few annoyances, I slept splendidly. There was at least the satisfaction of knowing that a traveling millionaire obliged to pass a night in Santa Lucrecia would spend it no better.

Everything was dripping wet when I fled back across the aerial sidewalk to the station. It was not hot, but there was a dense, heavy atmosphere in which one felt he could be as lively and industrious as elsewhere, yet found himself dragging listlessly around as the never-do-anything-you-don't-have-to inhabitants. Even the boyish train auditor had an irresponsible lackadaisical manner, and permitted all sorts of petty railway misdemeanors. The childishness of tropical peoples was evident on every hand. There was no second-class car on this line, but one third, all but empty when we started, evidently not because most bought first-class tickets but because the auditor was of the tropics. Endless jungle covered all the visible world, with only the line of rails crowding through it. The cocoanut palms and those top-heavy with what looked like enormous bunches of dates soon died out as we left the vicinity of the coast. At Rincon Antonio the car filled up, and among the new-comers were many of the far-famed women of Tehuantepec. Some were of striking beauty, almost all were splendid physical specimens and all had a charming and alluring smile. They dressed very briefly—a gay square of cloth about their limbs, carelessly tucked in at the waist, and a sleeveless upper garment that failed to make connections with the lower, recalling the women of Ceylon. The absence of any other garments was all too evident. Almost all wore in their jet-black hair a few red flowers, all displayed six inches or more of silky brown skin at the waist, and the majority wore necklaces of gold coins, generally American five and ten dollar gold pieces. To see one of them stretched out at full length on a seat, smoking a cigarette and in animated conversation with a man that five minutes before had been a total stranger, might have suggested a certain looseness of character. But this was denied by their facial expression, which bore out the claim of a chance acquaintance long resident among them that they are very frank, "simple," and friendly, but far more apt to keep within a well-defined limit than the average of tropical women. Tehuantepec, indeed, is the land of "woman's rights." The men having been largely killed off during the days of Diaz, the feminine stock is to-day the sturdier, more intelligent, and industrious, and arrogates to itself a far greater freedom than the average Mexican woman. Many of those in the car spoke the local Indian dialect, Zapoteca, but all seemed possessed of fluent Spanish.

Yet how different was all the carload from what we have come to consider "civilized" people. If the aim of humanity is to be happy in the present, then these languid, brown races are on the right track. If that aim is to advance, develop, and accomplish, they must be classed with the lower animals.

For a half hour before reaching Rincon Antonio, we had been winding with a little brawling river through a hilly gorge dense-grown with vegetation. The town was in the lull between two revolts. A bare four days before, a former chief and his followers had been taken by the populace and shot behind the water-tank beside where we paused at the station. A week later new riots were to break out. But today the place was sunk in its customary languor, and only a few bullet-ridden walls and charred ruins hinted its recent history.

I had pictured the Isthmus of Tehuantepec a flat neck of land from ocean to ocean. But the imagination is a deceitful guide. Beyond the town of the water-tank we wormed for miles through mountains higher than the Berkshires, resembling them indeed in form and wealth of vegetation, though with a tropical tinge. The jungle, however, died out, and the train crawled at a snail's pace, often looping back upon itself, through landscapes in which the organ-cactus was most conspicuous. Even here the great chain known as the Rockies and the Andes, that stretches from Alaska to Patagonia, imposes a considerable barrier between the two seas. There was a cosmopolitan tinge to this region, and the boinas of Basques mingled with the cast-iron faces of Americans and sturdy self-possessed Negroes under broad "Texas" hats. An hour beyond the hills, in a thick-wooded land, I dropped off at the town of Tehuantepec, an intangible place that I had some difficulty in definitely locating in the thickening darkness.

Here was a new kind of Mexico. In many things, besides the naked, brown waists of the women, it carried the mind back to Ceylon. There were the same reed and thatched huts, almost all surrounded by spacious yards fenced by corn-stalk walls through which the inmates could see easily but be seen with difficulty. Here, too, boys went naked until the approach of puberty; the cocoanut palms, the dense banana groves, even the huge earthen water-jars before the houses recalled the charming isle of the Singhalese, and if the people were less kindly to the stranger they were much more joyful and full of laughter than the Mexican of the plateau. In this perhaps they had more in common with the Burmese. The men, often almost white in color, wore few large hats, never one approaching those of the highlands. The hotter the sun, the smaller the hat, seems to be the rule in Mexico. Here it was hot, indeed; a dense, thick, tangible heat, that if it did not sap the strength suggested the husbanding of it.

A fiesta raged on the night of my arrival. The not too musical blare of a band drew me to a wide, inclined street paved in sand, at the blind end of which were seated five rows of women in as many gradations, and everywhere shuttled men and boys, almost all in white trousers, with a shirt of the same color, Chinese-fashion, outside it, commonly barefoot with or without sandals. A few even wore shoes. I hesitated to join the throng. The subconscious expectation of getting a knife or a bullet in the back grows second nature in Mexico. Few foreigners but have contracted the habit of stepping aside to let pass a man who hangs long at their heels. The approach of a staggering, talkative peon was always an occasion for alertness, and one that came holding a hand behind him was an object of undivided curiosity until the concealed member appeared, clutching perhaps nothing more interesting than a cigar or a banana. Mexicans in crowds, mixed with liquor and "religion," were always worth attention; and here was just such a mixture, for the fiesta was in honor of the Virgin, and the libations that had been poured out in her honor were generous. But the drink of Tehuantepec, whatever it might be—for pulque is unknown in the tropics—appeared to make its devotees merely gay and boisterous. The adults were friendly, even to an American, and the children shouted greetings to me as "Senor Gringo," which here is merely a term of nationality and no such opprobrious title as it has grown to be on the plateau.

A few rockets had suggested an incipient revolution while I was at supper. Now the scene of the festivities was enlivened by four huge set-pieces of fireworks, each with a bell-shaped base in which a man could ensconce himself to the waist. One in the form of a duck first took to human legs and capered about the square while its network of rockets, pin-wheels, sizzlers, twisters, cannon-like explosions, and jets of colored fire kept the multitude surging back and forth some twenty minutes, to the accompaniment of maudlin laughter and the dancing and screaming of children, while the band, frankly giving up its vain attempts to produce music, gazed with all eyes and blew an unattentive, never-ending rag-time of some two strains. A monster turkey took up the celebration where the charred and disheveled duck left off, capering itself into blazing and uproarious oblivion. The finale consisted of two gigantic figures of a man and a woman, with a marvelous array of all possible lights and noises that lasted a full half-hour, while the two barefoot wearers danced back and forth bowing and careering to each other. The aftermath ran far into the night, and brought to naught my plans to make up for the sleepless night before.

Though most of the inhabitants of Tehuantepec live on earth floors in reed and grass houses, there is scarcely a sign of suffering poverty. Little Spanish is heard among them, although even the children seem quite able to speak it. Their native Indian tongue differs from the Castilian even in cadence, so that it was easy to tell which idiom was being spoken even before the words were heard. It is the chief medium of the swarming market in and about the black shadows of a roof on legs. Here the frank and self-possessed women, in their brief and simple dress, were legion. Footwear is unknown to them, and the loose, two-piece, disconnected dress was augmented, if at all, with a black lace shawl thrown over the shoulders in the, to them, chilly mornings. But the most remarkable part of the costume, of decorative properties only, is the head-dress common to a large per cent, of the women in town. From the back of the otherwise bare head hangs to the waist an intricate contrivance of lace and ruffles, snow-white and starched stiff, the awful complications of which no mere male would be able to describe beyond the comprehensive statement that the ensemble much resembles a Comanche chief in full war regalia. Above this they carry their loads on their heads in a sort of gourd bowl decorated with flowers, and walk with a sturdy self-sufficiency that makes a veranda or bridge quake under their brown-footed tread. They are lovers of color, especially here where the Pacific breezes turn the jungle to the eastward into a gaunt, sandy, brown landscape, and such combinations as soft-red skirts and sea-blue waists, or the reverse, mingle with black shot through with long perpendicular yellow stripes. The striking beauties of many a traveler's hectic imagination were not in evidence. But then, it is nowhere customary to find a town's best selling sapotes and fish in the market-place, and at least the attractiveness ranked high compared with a similar scene in any part of the world, while cleanliness was far more popular than in the highlands to the north.

The foreigner in Mexico is often surprised at the almost impossibility of getting the entree into its family life. American residents of high position are often intimate friends for years of Mexican men in their cafes and male gatherings, without ever stepping across their thresholds. Much of the seclusion of the Moor still holds, even half a world distant from the land of its origin. Yet his racial pseudo-courtesy leads the Mexican frequently to extend an invitation which only long experience teaches the stranger is a mere meaningless formality. On the train from Cordoba I spent considerable time in conversation with a well-to-do youth of Tehuantepec, during which I was formally invited at least a dozen times to visit him at his home. He failed to meet me at the rendezvous set, but was effusive when I ran across him in the evening round of the plaza:

"Ah, amigo mio. Muy buenas noches. Como 'sta uste-e-e? So delighted! I was grieved beyond measure to miss you. I live in the Calle Reforma, number 83. There you have your own house. I am going there now. Do you not wish to accompany me? I have...."

"Yes, I should like to look in on you for a few moments."

"Ah, I was so sorry to miss you," he went on, standing stock still. "I must give you my address and you must write me, and I you."

There followed an exchange of cards with great formality and many protestations of eternal friendship; then an effusive hand-shake and:

"Mil gracias, senor. May you have a most pleasant voyage. Thanks again. So pleased to have met you. Adios. May you travel well. Hasta luego. Adios. Que le vaya bien," and with a flip of the hand and a wriggling of the fingers he was gone.

That evening I returned early to the "Hotel La Perla." Its entire force was waiting for me. This consisted of Juan, a cheery, slight fellow in a blue undershirt and speckled cotton trousers of uncertain age, who was waiter, chambermaid, porter, bath-boy, sweeper, general swipe, possibly cook, and in all but name proprietor; the nominal one being a spherical native on the down-grade of life who never moved twice in the same day if it could be avoided, leaving the establishment to run itself, and accepting phlegmatically what money it pleased Providence to send him. The force was delighted at the pleasure of having a guest to wait upon, and stood opposite me all through the meal, offering gems of assorted wisdom intermingled with wide-ranging questions. I called for an extra blanket and turned in soon after dark. There reigned a delicious stillness that promised ample reparation for the two nights past. Barely had I drowsed off, however, when there intruded the chattering of several men in the alleyway and yard directly outside my window. "They'll soon be gone," I told myself, turning over. But I was over-optimistic. The voices increased, those of women chiming in. Louder and louder grew the uproar. Then a banjo-like instrument struck up, accompanying the most dismally mournful male voice conceivable, wailing a monotonous refrain of two short lines. This increased in volume until it might be heard a mile away. Male and female choruses joined in now and then. In the snatches between, the monotonous voice wailed on, mingled with laughter and frequent disputes. I rose at last to peer out the window. In the yard were perhaps a half-hundred natives, all seated on the ground, some with their backs against the very wall of my room, nearly all smoking, and with many pots of liquor passing from hand to hand. Midnight struck, then one, then two; and with every hour the riot increased. Once or twice I drifted into a short troubled dream, to be aroused with a start by a new burst of pandemonium. Then gradually the sounds subsided almost entirely. My watch showed three o'clock. I turned over again, grateful for the few hours left ... and in that instant, without a breath of warning, there burst out the supreme cataclysm of a band of some twenty hoarse and battered pieces in an endless, unfathomable noise that never once paused for breath until daylight stole in at the window.

At "breakfast" I took Juan to task.

"Ah, senor," he smiled, "it is too bad. But yesterday a man died in the house next door, and his friends have come to celebrate."

"And keep the whole town awake all night?"

"Ay, senor, it is unfortunate indeed. But what would you? People will die, you know."

Sleep is plainly not indigenous to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

From the neighboring town of Gamboa there runs southward a railway known as the "Pan-American." Its fares are high and a freight-train behind an ancient, top-heavy engine drags a single passenger-car divided into two classes with it on its daily journey. The ticket-agent had no change, and did not know whether the end of the line was anywhere near Guatemala, though he was full of stories of the dangers to travelers in that country. A languid, good-natured crowd filled the car. We are so accustomed to think of lack of clothing as an attribute of savages that it was little short of startling to see a young lady opposite, naked to the waist but for a scanty and transparent suggestion of upper garment, read the morning newspaper and write a note with the savoir-faire of a Parisienne in her boudoir. She wore a necklace of American five-dollar gold pieces, with a pendant of twenties, the Goddess of Liberty and the date, 1898, on the visible side, and as earrings two older coins of $2.50. Nearly every woman in the car was thus decorated to some extent, always with the medallion side most in evidence, and one could see at a glance exactly how much each was worth.

In a long day's travel we covered 112 miles. At Juchitan the passengers thinned. Much of this town had recently been destroyed in the revolution, and close to the track stood a crowded cemetery with hundreds of gorged and somnolent zopilotes, the carrion-crow of Mexico, about it. The country was a blazing dry stretch of mesquite and rare patches of forest in a sandy soil, with huts so few that the train halted at each of them, as if to catch its breath and wipe the sweat out of its eyes. Once, toward noon, we caught a glimpse of the Pacific. But all the day there spread on either hand an arid region with bare rocky hills, a fine sand that drifted in the air, and little vegetation except the thorny mesquite. A few herds of cattle were seen, but they were as rare as the small towns of stone huts and frontiers-man aspect. The train passed the afternoon like a walker who knows he can easily reach his night's destination, and strolled leisurely into Tonola before sunset.

Beyond the wild-west hotel lay a sweltering sand town of a few streets atrociously cobbled. We had reached the land of hammocks. Not a hut did I peep into that did not have three or four swinging lazily above the uneven earth floor. In the center of the broad, unkempt expanse that served as plaza stood an enormous pochote, a species of cottonwood tree, and about it drowsed a Sunday evening gathering half seen in the dim light of lanterns on the stands of hawkers. On a dark corner three men and a boy were playing a marimba, a frame with dried bars of wood as keys which, beaten with small wooden mallets, gave off a weird, half-mournful music that floated slowly away into the heavy hot night. The women seemed physically the equal of those of Tehuantepec, but their dress was quite different, a single loose white gown cut very low at the neck and almost without sleeves. One with a white towel on her head and hanging loosely about her shoulders looked startlingly like an Egyptian female figure that had stepped forth from the monuments of the Nile. Their brown skins were lustrous as silk, every line of their lithe bodies of a Venus-like development and they stood erect as palm-trees, or slipped by in the sand-paved night under their four-gallon' American oilcans of water with a silent, sylph-like tread.

The train, like an experienced tropical traveler, started at the first peep of dawn. Tonola marked the beginning of a new style of landscape, heralding the woodlands of Guatemala. All was now dense and richly green, not exactly jungle, but with forests of huge trees, draped with climbing vines, interlarded with vistas of fat cattle by the hundreds up to their bellies in heavy green grass, herds of which now and then brought us almost to a standstill by stampeding across the track. In contrast to the day before there were many villages, a kind of cross between the jungle towns of Siam and the sandy hamlets of our "Wild West." A number had sawmills for the mahogany said to abound in the region. Now and then a pretty lake alive with wild fowl appeared in a frame of green. There were many Negroes, and not a few Americans among the ranchers, sawmill hands and railway employees, while John Chinaman, forbidden entrance to the country to the south, as to that north of the Rio Grande, put in a frequent appearance, as in all Mexico. It was a languorous, easy-going land, where day-before-yesterday's paper was news. The sulky stare of the Mexican plateau had completely disappeared, and in its place was much laughter and an unobtrusive friendliness, and a complete lack of obsequiousness even on the part of the peons, who elbowed their way in and out among all classes as if there were no question as to the equality of all mankind. The daily arrival of the train seemed to be the chief recreation of the populace, so that there were signs of protest if it made only a brief stop. But there was seldom cause for this complaint, for the swollen-headed old engine was still capable of so much more than the schedule required that it was forced to make a prolonged stay at almost every station to let Father Time catch up with us.

The rumor ran that those who would enter Guatemala must get permission of its consul in Tapachula. But our own representative at that town chanced to board the train at a wayside hamlet and found the papers I carried sufficient. Two fellow countrymen raced away into the place as the train drew in, and returned drenched with sweat in time to continue with our leisurely convoy. Dakin was a boyish man from the Northern States, and Ems a swarthy "Texican" to whom Spanish was more native than English, both wandering southward in quest of jobs, as stationary and locomotive engineers respectively. They rode first-class, though this did not imply wealth, but merely that Pat Cassidy was conductor. He was a burly, whole-hearted American, supporting an enormous, flaring mustache and, by his own admission, all the "busted" white men traveling between Mexico and Guatemala. While I kept the seat to which my ticket entitled me, he passed me with a look of curiosity not unmixed with a hint of scorn. When I stepped into the upholstered class to ask him a question he bellowed, "Si' down!" The inquiry answered, I rose to leave, only to be brought down again with a shout of, "Keep yer seat!" It is no fault of Cassidy's if a "gringo" covers the Pan-American on foot or seated with peons, or goes hungry and thirsty or tobaccoless on the journey; and penniless strangers are not conspicuous by their absence along this route. As a Virginia Negro at one of the stations put it succinctly, "If dey ain't black, dey'se white."

A jungle bewilderment of vegetation grew up about us, with rich clearings for little clusters of palm-leaf huts, jungles so dense the eye could not penetrate them. Laughing women, often of strikingly attractive features, peopled every station, perfect in form as a Greek statue, and with complexions of burnished bronze. Everywhere was evidence of a constant joy in life and of a placid conviction that Providence or some other philanthropist who had always taken care of them always would. Teeth were not so universally splendid as on the plateau, but the luminous, snapping black eyes more than made up for this less perfect feature.

Nightfall found us still rumbling lazily on and it was nearly an hour later that we reached Mariscal at the end of the line, four or five scattered buildings of which two disguised themselves under the name of hotels. Ems and I slept—or more exactly passed the night—on cots in one of the rooms of transparent partitions, while Dakin, who refused to accept alms for anything so useless, spread a grass mat among the dozen native women stretched out along the veranda.



CHAPTER VIII

HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA

The three of us were off by the time the day had definitely dawned. Ems carried a heavy suitcase, and Dakin an awkward bundle. My own modest belongings rode more easily in a rucksack. A mile walk along an unused railroad, calf-high in jungle grass, brought us to a wooden bridge across the wide but shallow Suchiate, bounding Mexico on the south. Across its plank floor and beyond ran the rails of the "Pan-American," but the trains halt at Mariscal because Guatemala, or more exactly Estrada Cabrera, does not permit them to enter his great and sovereign republic. Our own passage looked easy, but that was because of our inexperience of Central American ways. Scarcely had we set foot on the bridge when there came racing out of a palm-leaf hut on the opposite shore three male ragamuffins in bare feet, shouting as they ran. One carried an antedeluvian, muzzle-loading musket, another an ancient bayonet red with rust, and the third swung threateningly what I took to be a stiff piece of telegraph wire.

"No se pasa!" screamed the three in chorus, spreading out in skirmish line like an army ready to oppose to the death the invasion of a hostile force. "No one can pass the bridge!"

"But why not?" I asked.

"Because Guatemala does not allow it."

"Do you mean to say three caballeros with money and passports—and shoes are denied admittance to the great and famous Republic of Guatemala?"

"Not at all, senor, but you must come by boat. The Pope himself cannot cross this bridge."

It would have been unkind to throw them into the river, so we returned to a cluster of huts on the Mexican bank. Before it drowsed a half-dozen ancient and leaky boats. But here again were grave international formalities to be arranged. A Mexican official led us into one of the huts and set down laboriously in a ledger our names, professions, bachelordoms, and a mass of even more personal information.

"You are Catholic, senor," he queried with poised pen, eying me suspiciously.

"No, senor."

"Ah, Protestant," he observed, starting to set down that conclusion.

"Tampoco."

There came a hitch in proceedings. Plainly there was no precedent to follow in considering the application of so non-existent a being for permission to leave Mexico. The official smoked a cigarette pensively and idly turned over the leaves of the ledger.

"Sera ateo," said a man behind him, swelling his chest with pride at his extraordinary intelligence.

"That doesn't fill the bill either," I replied, "nor any other single word I can think of."

But the space for this particular item of information was cramped. We finally compromised on "Sin religion," and I was allowed to leave the country. A boatman tugged and poled some twenty minutes before we could scramble up the steep, jungle-grown bank beyond. At the top of it were scattered a dozen childish looking soldiers in the most unkempt and disheveled array of rags and lack thereof a cartoonist could picture. They formed in a hollow square about us and steered us toward the "comandancia," a few yards beyond. This was a thatched mud hut with a lame bench and a row of aged muskets in the shade along its wall. Another bundle of rags emerged in his most pompous, authoritative demeanor, and ordered us to open our baggage. Merely by accident I turned my rucksack face down on the bench, so there is no means of knowing whether the kodak and weapon in the front pockets of it would have been confiscated or held for ransom, had they been seen. I should be inclined to answer in the affirmative. In the hut our passports were carefully if unintelligently examined, and we were again fully catalogued. Estrada Cabrera follows with great precision the movements of foreigners within his boundaries.

In the sandy jungle town of Ayutla just beyond, two of us multiplied our wealth many times over without the least exertion. That Dakin did not also was only due to the unavoidable fact that he had no multiplicand to set over the multiplier. I threw down Mexican money to the value of $8.30 and had thrust upon me a massive roll of $150. The only drawback was that the bills had led so long and maltreated a life that their face value had to be accepted chiefly on faith, for a ten differed from a one only as one Guatemalan soldier differs from his fellows, in that each was much more tattered and torn than the other. After all there is a delicate courtesy in a government's supplying an illiterate population with illegible money; no doubt experience knows other distinguishing marks, such as the particular breeds of microbes that is accustomed to inhabit each denomination; for even inexperience could easily recognize that each was so infested. I mistake in saying this was the only drawback. There was another. The wanderer who drops into a hut for a banana and a bone-dry biscuit, washed down with a small bottle of luke-warm fizzling water, hears with a pang akin to heart-failure a languid murmur of "Four dollars, senor," in answer to his request for the bill. It is not easy to get accustomed to hearing such sums mentioned in so casual a manner.

A little narrow-gage "railway" crawls off through the jungle beyond Ayutla, but the train ran on it yesterday and to-morrow. To-day there was nothing to do but swing on our loads and strike off southward. The morning air was fresh and the eastern jungle wall threw heavy shade for a time. But that time soon came to an end and I plodded on under a sun that multiplied the load on my back by at least the monetary multiple of Guatemala. Ems and Dakin quickly demonstrated a deep dislike to tropical tramping, though both laid claim to the degree of T. T. T. conferred on "gringo" rovers in Central America. I waited for them several times in vain and finally pushed on to the sweltering, heat-pulsating town of Pahapeeta, where every hut sold bottled firewater and a diminutive box of matches cost a dollar. Grass huts tucked away in dense groves along the route were inhabited by all but naked brown people, kindly disposed, so it required no exertion, toward a passing stranger. Before noon the jungle opened out upon an ankle-deep sea of sand, across which I plowed under a blazing sun that set even the bundle on my back dripping with sweat.

But at least there was a broad river on the farther side of it that looked inviting enough to reward a whole day of tramping. The place was called Vado Ancho—the "Wide Wade"; though that was no longer necessary, for the toy railroad that operated to-morrow and yesterday had brought a bridge with it. I scrambled my way along the dense-grown farther bank, and found a place to descend to a big shady rock just fitted for a siesta after a swim. Barely had I begun to undress, however, when three brown and barefoot grown-up male children, partly concealed in astounding collections of rags, two with ancient muskets and the third with a stiff piece of wire, tore through the bushes and surrounded me with menacing attitudes.

"What are you doing here?" cried the least naked.

"Why the idle curiosity?"

"You are ordered to come to the comandancia."

I scrambled back up the bank and plodded across another sand patch toward a small collection of jungle huts, the three "soldiers" crowding close about me and wearing the air of brave heroes who had saved their country from a great conspiracy. Lazy natives lay grinning in the shade as I passed. One of the lop-shouldered, thatched huts stood on a hillock above the rest. When we had sweated up to this, a military order rang out in a cracked treble and some twenty brown scarecrows lined up in the shade of the eaves in a Guatemalan idea of order. About half of them held what had once been muskets; the others were armed with what I had hitherto taken for lengths of pilfered telegraph wire, but which now on closer inspection proved to be ramrods. Thus each arm made only two armed men, whereas a bit of ingenuity might have made each serve three or four; by dividing the stocks and barrels, for instance. The tatterdemalion of the treble fiercely demanded my passport, while the "army" quickly degenerated into a ragged rabble loafing in the shade.

I started to lay my rucksack on the bench along the wall, but one of the fellows sprang up with a snarl and flourished his ramrod threateningly. It was evidently a lese militarismus worthy of capital punishment for a civilian to pass between a pole supporting the eaves and the mud wall of the building. I was forced to stand in the blazing sunshine and claw out my papers. They were in English, but the caricature of an officer concealed his ignorance before his fellows by pretending to read them and at length gave me a surly permission to withdraw. No wonder Central America is a favorite locale for comic opera librettos.

I descended again to the river for a swim, but had not yet stretched out for a siesta when there came pushing through the undergrowth three more "soldiers," this time all armed with muskets.

"What's up now?"

"The colonel wants to see you in the comandancia."

"But I just saw your famous colonel."

"No, that was only the teniente."

When I reached the hilltop again, dripping with the heat of noonday, I was permitted to sit on an adobe brick in the sacred shade. The colonel was sleeping. He recovered from that tropical ailment in time, and a rumor came floating out that he was soon to honor us with his distinguished presence. The soldiers made frantic signs to me to rise to my feet. Like Kingslake before the Turkish pasha, I felt that the honor of my race and my own haughty dignity were better served by insisting on social equality even to a colonel, and stuck doggedly to the adobe brick. The rumor proved a false alarm anyway. No doubt the great man had turned over in his sleep.