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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and
+Honduras, by Harry A. Franck
+#2 in our series by Harry A. Franck
+
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+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras
+       Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond
+
+Author: Harry A. Franck
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7072]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 6, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAMPING IN MEXICO ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Jim O'Connor, Charles Aldarondo,
+Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO, GUATEMALA AND HONDURAS
+
+
+Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond
+
+
+By Harry A. Franck
+
+
+Author Of
+  "A Vagabond Journey Around The World,"
+  "Zone Policeman 88,"
+  etc.
+
+Illustrated With Photographs By The Author
+
+
+To The Mexican Peon With Sincerest Wishes For His Ultimate Emancipation
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+This simple story of a journey southward grew up of itself. Planning a
+comprehensive exploration of South America, I concluded to reach that
+continent by some less monotonous route than the steamship's track; and
+herewith is presented the unadorned narrative of what I saw on the
+way,--the day-by-day experiences in rambling over bad roads and into
+worse lodging-places that infallibly befall all who venture afield south
+of the Rio Grande. The present account joins up with that of five months
+on the Canal Zone, already published, clearing the stage for a larger
+forthcoming volume on South America giving the concrete results of four
+unbroken years of Latin-American travel.
+
+Harry A. Franck.
+New York, May, 1916.
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+   I  INTO THE COOLER SOUTH
+
+  II  TRAMPING THE BYWAYS
+
+ III  IN A MEXICAN MINE
+
+  IV  ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAPALA
+
+   V  ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACÁN
+
+  VI  TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY
+
+ VII  TROPICAL MEXICO
+
+VIII  HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA
+
+  IX  THE UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS
+
+   X  THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+A street of Puebla, Mexico, and the Soledad Church.
+
+The first glimpse of Mexico. Looking across the Rio Grande at Laredo.
+
+A corner of Monterey from my hotel window.
+
+A peon restaurant in the market-place of San Luís Potosí.
+
+A market woman of San Luís Potosí.
+
+Some sold potatoes no larger than nuts.
+
+A policeman and an arriero.
+
+The former home, in Dolores Hidalgo, of the Mexican "Father of his
+Country".
+
+Rancho del Capulín, where I ended the first day of tramping in Mexico.
+
+View of the city of Guanajuato.
+
+Fellow-roadsters in Mexico.
+
+Some of the pigeon-holes of Guanajuato's cemetery.
+
+A _pulque_ street-stand and one of its clients.
+
+Prisoners washing in the patio of the former "Alóndiga".
+
+Drilling with compressed-air drills in a mine "heading".
+
+As each car passed I snatched a sample of its ore.
+
+Working a "heading" by hand.
+
+Peon miners being searched for stolen ore as they leave the mine.
+
+Bricks of gold and silver ready for shipment. Each is worth something
+like $1250.
+
+In a natural amphitheater of Guanajuato the American miners of the
+region gather on Sundays for a game of baseball.
+
+Some of the peons under my charge about to leave the mine.
+
+The easiest way to carry a knapsack--on a peon's back.
+
+The ore thieves of Peregrina being led away to prison.
+
+One of Mexico's countless "armies".
+
+Vendors of strawberries at the station of Irapuato.
+
+The wall of Guadalajara penitentiary against which prisoners are shot.
+
+The liver-shaking stagecoach from Atequisa to Chapala.
+
+Lake Chapala from the estate of Ribero Castellanos.
+
+The head farmer of the estate under an aged fig-tree.
+
+A Mexican village.
+
+Making glazed floor tiles on a Mexican estate.
+
+Vast seas of Indian corn stretch to pine-clad hills, while around them
+are guard-shacks at frequent intervals.
+
+Interior of a Mexican hut at cooking time.
+
+Fall plowing near Patzcuaro.
+
+Modern transportation along the ancient highway from Tzintzuntzan, the
+former Tarascan capital.
+
+In the church of ancient Tzintzuntzan is a "Descent from the Cross"
+ascribed to Titian.
+
+Indians waiting outside the door of the priest's house in Tzintzuntzan.
+
+A corner of Morelia, capital of Michoacán, and its ancient aqueduct.
+
+The spot and hour in which Maximilian was shot, with the chapel since
+erected by Austria.
+
+The market of Tlaxcala, the ancient inhabitants of which aided Cortez in
+the conquest of Mexico.
+
+A _rural_ of the state of Tlaxcala on guard before a barracks.
+
+A part of Puebla, looking toward the peak of Orizaba.
+
+Popocatepetl and the artificial hill of Cholula on which the Aztecs had
+a famous temple, overthrown by Cortez.
+
+A typical Mexican of the lowlands of Tehuantepec.
+
+A typical Mexican boy of the highlands.
+
+Looking down on Maltrata as the train begins its descent.
+
+A residence of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
+
+On the banks of the Coatzacoalcos, Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
+
+Women of Tehuantepec in the market-place.
+
+On the hillside above Tehuantepec are dwellings partly dug out of the
+cliffs.
+
+A rear-view of the remarkable head-dress of the women of Tehuantepec,
+and one of their decorated bowls.
+
+A woman of northern Guatemala.
+
+A station of the "Pan-American" south of Tehuantepec.
+
+An Indian boy of Guatemala on his way home from market.
+
+Three "gringoes" on the tramp from the Mexican boundary to the railway
+of Guatemala.
+
+Inside the race-track at Guatemala City is a relief map of the entire
+country.
+
+One of the jungle-hidden ruins of Quiraguá.
+
+The last house in Guatemala, near the boundary of Honduras.
+
+A woman shelling corn for my first meal in Honduras.
+
+A vista of Honduras from a hillside, to which I climbed after losing the
+trail.
+
+A resident of Santa Rosa, victim of the hook-worm.
+
+The chief monument of the ruins of Copán.
+
+I topped a ridge and caught sight at last of Santa Rosa, first town of
+any size in Honduras.
+
+Soldiers of Santa Rosa eating in the market-place.
+
+Christmas dinner on the road in Honduras.
+
+Several times I met the families of soldiers tramping northward with all
+their possessions.
+
+A fellow-roadster behind one of my cigars.
+
+An arriero carrying a bundle of Santa Rosa cigars on his own back as he
+drives his similarly laden animals.
+
+The great military force of Esperanza compelled to draw up and face my
+camera.
+
+The prisoners in their chains form an interested audience across the
+street.
+
+Honduras, the Land of Great Depths.
+
+A corner of Tegucigalpa.
+
+The "West Pointers" of Honduras in their barracks, a part of the
+national palace.
+
+View of Tegucigalpa from the top of Picacho.
+
+Repairing the highway from Tegucigalpa to the Coast.
+
+A family of Honduras.
+
+Approaching Sabana Grande, the first night's stop on the tramp to the
+coast.
+
+A beef just butchered and hung out in the sun.
+
+A dwelling on the hot lands of the Coast, and its scantily clad
+inhabitants.
+
+Along the Pasoreal River.
+
+The mozo pauses for a drink on the trail.
+
+One way of transporting merchandise from the coast to Tegucigalpa.
+
+The other way of bringing goods up to the capital.
+
+The garrison of Amapala.
+
+Marooned "gringoes" waiting with what patience possible at the "Hotel
+Morazán," Amapala.
+
+Unloading cattle in the harbor of Amapala.
+
+The steamer arrives at last that is to carry us south to Panama.
+
+We lose no time in being rowed out to her.
+
+MAP
+
+The Author's Itinerary
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTO THE COOLER SOUTH
+
+You are really in Mexico before you get there. Laredo is a
+purely--though not pure--Mexican town with a slight American
+tinge. Scores of dull-skinned men wander listlessly about trying to sell
+sticks of candy and the like from boards carried on their heads. There
+are not a dozen shops where the clerks speak even good pidgin English,
+most signs are in Spanish, the lists of voters on the walls are chiefly
+of Iberian origin, the very county officers from sheriff down--or
+up--are names the average American could not pronounce, and the
+saunterer in the streets may pass hours without hearing a word of
+English. Even the post-office employees speak Spanish by preference and
+I could not do the simplest business without resorting to that tongue.
+I am fond of Spanish, but I do not relish being forced to use it in my
+own country.
+
+On Laredo's rare breeze rides enough dust to build a new world. Every
+street is inches deep in it, everything in town, including the minds of
+the inhabitants, is covered with it. As to heat--"Cincinnati Slim" put
+it in a nutshell even as we wandered in from the cattleyards where the
+freight train had dropped us in the small hours: "If ever hell gets full
+this'll do fine for an annex."
+
+Luckily my window in the ruin that masqueraded as a hotel faced such
+wind as existed. The only person I saw in that institution during
+twenty-four hours there was a little Mexican boy with a hand-broom,
+which he evidently carried as an ornament or a sign of office. It seemed
+a pity not to let Mexico have the dust-laden, sweltering place if they
+want it so badly.
+
+I had not intended to lug into Mexico such a load as I did. But it was a
+Jewish holiday, and the pawnshops were closed. As I passed the lodge on
+the north end of the bridge over the languid, brown Rio Grande it was a
+genuine American voice that snapped: "Heh! A nickel!"
+
+Just beyond, but thirty-six minutes earlier, the Mexican official
+stopped me with far more courtesy, and peered down into the corners of
+my battered "telescope" without disturbing the contents.
+
+"Monterey?" he asked.
+
+"Sí, señor."
+
+"No revólver?" he queried suspiciously.
+
+"No, señor," I answered, keeping the coat on my arm unostentatiously
+over my hip pocket. It wasn't a revolver; it was an automatic.
+
+The man who baedekerized Mexico says Nuevo Laredo is not the place to
+judge that country. I was glad to hear it. Its imitation of a
+street-car, eight feet long, was manned by two tawny children without
+uniforms, nor any great amount of substitute for them, who smoked
+cigarettes incessantly as we crawled dustily through the baked-mud
+hamlet to the decrepit shed that announced itself the station of the
+National Railways of Mexico. It was closed, of course. I waited an hour
+or more before two officials resplendent in uniforms drifted in to take
+up the waiting where I had left off. But it was a real train that pulled
+in toward three, from far-off St. Louis, even if it had hooked on behind
+a second-class car with long wooden benches.
+
+For an hour we rambled across just such land as southern Texas, endless
+flat sand scattered with chaparral, mesquite, and cactus; nowhere a sign
+of life, but for fences of one or two barb-wires on crooked sticks--not
+even bird life. The wind, strong and incessant as at sea, sounded as
+mournful through the thorny mesquite bushes as in our Northern winters,
+even though here it brought relief rather than suffering. The sunshine
+was unbrokenly glorious.
+
+Benches of stained wood in two-inch strips ran the entire length of our
+car, made in Indiana. In the center were ten double back-to-back seats
+of the same material. The conductor was American, but as in Texas he
+seemed to have little to do except to keep the train moving. The
+auditor, brakeman, and train-boy were Mexicans, in similar uniforms, but
+of thinner physique and more brown of color. The former spoke fluent
+English. The engineer was American and the fireman a Negro.
+
+Far ahead, on either side, hazy high mountains appeared, as at sea. By
+the time we halted at Lampazos, fine serrated ranges stood not far
+distant on either hand. From the east came a never-ceasing wind,
+stronger than that of the train, laden with a fine sand that crept in
+everywhere. Mexican costumes had appeared at the very edge of the
+border; now there were even a few police under enormous hats, with tight
+trousers and short jackets showing a huge revolver at the hip. Toward
+evening things grew somewhat greener. A tree six to twelve feet high,
+without branches, or sometimes with several trunk-like ones, growing
+larger from bottom to top and ending in a bristling bunch of leaves,
+became common. The mountains on both sides showed fantastic peaks and
+ridges, changing often in aspect; some, thousands of feet high with flat
+tableland tops, others in strange forms the imagination could animate
+into all manner of creatures.
+
+A goatherd, wild, tawny, bearded, dressed in sun-faded sheepskin, was
+seen now and then tending his flock of little white goats in the sand
+and cactus. This was said to be the rainy season in northern Mexico.
+What must it be in the dry?
+
+Toward five the sun set long before sunset, so high was the mountain
+wall on our right. The sand-storm had died down, and the sand gave way
+to rocks. The moon, almost full, already smiled down upon us over the
+wall on the left. We continued along the plain between the ranges, which
+later receded into the distance, as if retiring for the night. Flat,
+mud-colored, Palestinian adobe huts stood here and there in the
+moonlight among patches of a sort of palm bush.
+
+Monterey proved quite a city. Yet how the ways of the Spaniard appeared
+even here! Close as it is to the United States, with many American
+residents and much "americanizado," according to the Mexican, the city
+is in architecture, arrangement, customs, just what it would be a
+hundred miles from Madrid; almost every little detail of life is that of
+Spain, with scarcely enough difference to suggest another country, to
+say nothing of another hemisphere. England brings to her colonies some
+of her home customs, but not an iota of what Spain does to the lands she
+has conquered. The hiding of wealth behind a miserable facade is almost
+as universal in Mexico of the twentieth century as in Morocco of the
+fourth. The narrow streets of Monterey have totally inadequate sidewalks
+on which two pedestrians pass, if at all, with the rubbing of
+shoulders. Outwardly the long vista of bare house fronts that toe them
+on either side are dreary and poor, every window barred as those of a
+prison. Yet in them sat well-dressed señoritas waiting for the lovers
+who "play the bear" to late hours of the night, and over their shoulders
+the passerby caught many a glimpse of richly furnished rooms and flowery
+patios beyond.
+
+The river Catalina was drier than even the Manzanares, its rocky bed,
+wide enough to hold the upper Connecticut, entirely taken up by mule and
+donkey paths and set with the cloth booths of fruit sellers. As one
+moves south it grows cooler, and Monterey, fifteen hundred feet above
+sea-level, was not so weighty in its heat as Laredo and southern
+Texas. But, on the other hand, being surrounded on most sides by
+mountains, it had less breeze, and the coatless freedom of Texas was
+here looked down upon. During the hours about noonday the sun seemed to
+strike physically on the head and back whoever stepped out into it, and
+the smallest fleck of white cloud gave great and instant relief. From
+ten to four, more or less, the city was strangely quiet, as if more than
+half asleep, or away on a vacation, and over it hung that indefinable
+scent peculiar to Arab and Spanish countries. Compared with Spain,
+however, its night life and movement was slight.
+
+Convicts in perpendicularly striped blue and white pajamas worked in the
+streets. That is, they moved once every twenty minutes or so, usually
+to roll a cigarette. They were without shackles, but several guards in
+brown uniforms and broad felt hats, armed with thick-set muskets, their
+chests criss-crossed with belts of long rifle cartridges, lolled in the
+shade of every near-by street corner. The prisoners laughed and chatted
+like men perfectly contented with their lot, and moved about with great
+freedom. One came a block to ask me the time, and loafed there some
+fifteen minutes before returning to his "labor."
+
+Mexico is strikingly faithful to its native dress. Barely across the
+Rio Grande the traveler sees at once hundreds of costumes which in any
+American city would draw on all the boy population as surely as the
+Piper of Hamelin. First and foremost comes always the enormous hat,
+commonly of thick felt with decorative tape, the crown at least a foot
+high, the brim surely three feet in diameter even when turned up
+sufficient to hold a half gallon of water. That of the peon is of
+straw; he too wears the skintight trousers, and goes barefoot but for a
+flat leather sandal held by a thong between the big toe and the rest. In
+details and color every dress was as varied and individual as the shades
+of complexion.
+
+My hotel room had a fine outlook to summer-blue mountains, but was
+blessed with neither mirror, towel, nor water. I descended to the
+alleyway between "dining-room" and barnyard, where I had seen the
+general washbasin, but found the landlady seated on the kitchen floor
+shelling into it peas for our _almuerzo_. This and the evening
+_comida_ were always identically the same. A cheerful but
+slatternly Indian woman set before me a thin soup containing a piece of
+squash and a square of boiled beef, and eight hot corn tortillas of the
+size and shape of our pancakes, or _gkebis_, the Arab bread, which
+it outdid in toughness and total absence of taste. Next followed a
+plate of rice with peppers, a plate of tripe less tough than it should
+have been, and a plate of brown beans which was known by the name of
+_chile con carne_, but in which I never succeeded in finding
+anything carnal. Every meal ended with a cup of the blackest coffee.
+
+Out at the end of calle B a well-worn rocky path leads up to a ruined
+chapel on the summit of a hill, the famous Obispado from which the city
+was shelled and taken by the Americans in 1847. Below, Monterey lies
+flat, with many low trees peering above the whitish houses, all set in a
+perfectly level plain giving a great sense of roominess, as if it could
+easily hold ten such cities. At the foot of the hill, some three hundred
+feet high, is an unoccupied space. Then the city begins, leisurely at
+first, with few houses and many gardens and trees, thickening farther
+on. All about are mountains. The Silla (Saddle), a sharp rugged height
+backing the city on the right, has a notch in it much like the seat of a
+Texas saddle; to the far left are fantastic sharp peaks, and across the
+plain a ragged range perhaps fifteen miles distant shuts off the view.
+Behind the chapel stand Los Dientes, a teeth or saw-like range
+resembling that behind Leceo in Italy. Only a young beggar and his
+female mate occupied the ruined chapel, built, like the town, of whitish
+stone that is soft when dug but hardens upon exposure to the air. They
+cooked on the littered floor of one of the dozen rooms, and all the
+walls of the chamber under the great dome were set with pegs for birds,
+absent now, but which had carpeted the floor with proof of their
+frequent presence.
+
+At five the sun set over the city, so high is the Dientes range, but for
+some time still threw a soft light on the farther plain and hills.
+Compared with our own land there is something profoundly peaceful in
+this climate and surroundings. Now the sunshine slipped up off the
+farther ranges, showing only on the light band of clouds high above the
+farther horizon, and a pale-faced moon began to brighten, heralding a
+brilliant evening.
+
+Fertile plains of corn stretched south of the city, but already dry, and
+soon giving way to mesquite and dust again. Mountains never ceased, and
+lay fantastically heaped up on every side. We rose ever higher, though
+the train kept a moderate speed. At one station the bleating of a great
+truckload of kids, their legs tied, heaped one above the other, was
+startlingly like the crying of babies. We steamed upward through a
+narrow pass, the mountains crowding closer on either hand and seeming to
+grow lower as we rose higher among them. The landscape became less
+arid, half green, with little or no cactus, and the breeze cooled
+steadily. Saltillo at last, five thousand feet up, was above the reach
+of oppressive summer and for perhaps the first time since leaving
+Chicago I did not suffer from the heat. It was almost a pleasure to
+splash through the little puddles in its poorly paved streets. Its
+plazas were completely roofed with trees, the view down any of its
+streets was enticing, and the little cubes of houses were painted all
+possible colors without any color scheme whatever. Here I saw the first
+_pulquerías_, much like cheap saloons in appearance, with swinging
+doors, sometimes a pool table, and a bartender of the customary
+I-tell-yer-I'm-tough physiognomy. Huge earthen jars of the fermented
+cactus juice stood behind the bar, much like milk in appearance, and was
+served in glazed pots, size to order. In Mexico _pulquería_ stands
+for saloon and _peluquería_ for barber-shop, resulting now and then
+in sad mistakes by wandering Yankees innocent of Spanish.
+
+There were a hundred adult passengers by actual count, to say nothing of
+babies and unassorted bundles, in the second-class car that carried me
+on south into the night. Every type of Mexican was represented, from
+white, soft, city-bred specimens to sturdy countrymen so brown as to be
+almost black. A few men were in "European" garb. Most of them were
+dressed _á la peón_, very tight trousers fitting like long
+leggings, collarless shirts of all known colors, a gay _faja_ or
+cloth belt, sometimes a coat--always stopping at the waist. Then last,
+but never least, the marvelous hat. Two peons trying to get through the
+same door at once was a sight not soon to be forgotten. There were felt
+and straw hats of every possible grade and every shade and color except
+red, wound with a rich band about the crown and another around the
+brim. Those of straw were of every imaginable weave, some of rattan,
+like baskets or veranda furniture. The Mexican male seems to be able to
+endure sameness of costume below it, but unless his hat is individual,
+life is a drab blank to him. With his hat off the peon loses seven
+eights of his impressiveness. The women, with only a black sort of thin
+shawl over their heads, were eminently inconspicuous in the forest of
+hatted men.
+
+Mournfully out of the black drizzling night about the station came the
+dismal wails of hawkers at their little stands dim-lighted by pale
+lanterns; "_Anda pulque!_" Within the car was more politeness--or
+perhaps, more exactly, more unconscious consideration for others--than
+north of the Rio Grande. There were many women among us, yet all the
+night through there was not a suggestion of indecency or
+annoyance. Indian blood largely predominated, hardy, muscular,
+bright-eyed fellows, yet in conduct all were _caballeros_. Near me
+sat a family of three. The father, perhaps twenty, was strikingly
+handsome in his burnished copper skin, his heavy black hair, four or
+five inches long, hanging down in "bangs" below his hat. The mother was
+even younger, yet the child was already some two years old, the
+chubbiest, brightest-eyed bundle of humanity imaginable. In their fight
+for a seat the man shouted to the wife to hand him the child. He caught
+it by one hand and swung it high over two seats and across the car, yet
+it never ceased smiling. The care this untutored fellow took to give
+wife and child as much comfort as possible was superior to that many a
+"civilized" man would have shown all night under the same
+circumstances. Splendid teeth were universal among the peons. There was
+no chewing of tobacco, but much spitting by both sexes. A delicate,
+child-like young woman drew out a bottle and swallowed whole glassfuls
+of what I took to be milk, until the scent of pulque, the native
+beverage, suddenly reached my nostrils.
+
+The fat brown auditor addressed señora, the peon's wife, with the
+highest respect, even if he insisted on doing his duty to the extent of
+pushing aside the skirts of the women to peer under the long wooden
+bench for passengers. A dispute soon arose. Fare was demanded of a
+ragged peon for the child of three under his arm. The peon shook his
+head, smiling. The auditor's voice grew louder. Still the father smiled
+silently. The ticket collector stepped back into the first-class car and
+returned with the train guard, a boyish-looking fellow in peon garb from
+hat to legging trousers, with a brilliant red tie, two belts of enormous
+cartridges about his waist, in his hand a short ugly rifle, and a
+harmless smile on his face. There was something fascinating about the
+stocky little fellow with his half-embarrassed grin. One felt that of
+himself he would do no man hurt, yet that a curt order would cause him
+to send one of those long steel-jacketed bullets through a man and into
+the mountain side beyond. Luckily he got no such orders. The auditor
+pointed out the malefactor, who lost no time in paying the child's
+half-fare.
+
+This all-night trip must be done sooner or later by all who enter Mexico
+by way of Laredo, for the St. Louis-Mexico City Limited with its
+sleeping-car behind and a few scattered Americans in first-class is the
+only one that covers this section. Residents of Vanegas, for example,
+who wish to travel south must be at the station at three in the morning.
+
+Most of the night the train toiled painfully upward. As a man scorns to
+set out after a hearty meal with a lunch under his arm, so in the
+swelter of Texas I had felt it foolish to be lugging a bundle of heavy
+clothing. By midnight I began to credit myself with foresight. The
+windows were closed, yet the land of yesterday seemed far behind
+indeed. I wrapped my heavy coat about me. Toward four we crossed the
+Tropic of Cancer into the Torrid Zone, without a jolt, and I dug out my
+gray sweater and regretted I had abandoned the old blue one in an empty
+box-car. Twice I think I drowsed four minutes with head and elbow on my
+bundle, but except for two or three women who jack-knifed on the long
+bench no one found room to lie down during the long night.
+
+From daylight on I stood in the vestibule and watched the drab landscape
+hurry steadily past. No mountains were in sight now because we were on
+top of them. Yet no one would have suspected from the appearance of the
+country that we were considerably more than a mile above sea-level. The
+flat land looked not greatly different from that of the day before. The
+cactus was higher; some of the "organ" variety, many of the "Spanish
+bayonet" species, lance-like stalks eight to ten feet high. The rest was
+bare ground with scattered mesquite bushes. Had I not known the altitude
+I might have attributed the slight light-headedness to a sleepless
+night.
+
+Certainly a hundred ragged _cargadores_, hotel runners, and boys
+eager to carry my bundle attacked me during my escape from the station
+of San Luis Potosi at seven, and there were easily that many carriages
+waiting, without a dozen to take them. The writer of Mexico's Baedeker
+speaks of the city as well-to-do. Either it has vastly changed in a few
+years or he wrote it up by absent treatment. Hardly a town of India
+exceeds it in picturesque poverty. Such a surging of pauperous humanity,
+dirt, and uncomplaining misery I had never before seen in the Western
+Hemisphere. Plainly the name "republic" is no cure for man's ills. The
+chief center was the swarming market. Picture a dense mob of several
+thousand men and boys, gaunt, weather-beaten, their tight trousers
+collections of rents and patchwork in many colors, sandals of a soft
+piece of leather showing a foot cracked, blackened, tough as a hoof, as
+incrusted with filth as a dead foot picked up on a garbage heap, the
+toes always squirting with mud, the feet not merely never washed but the
+sandal never removed until it wears off and drops of its self. Above
+this a collarless shirt, blouse or short jacket, ragged, patched, of
+many faded colors, yet still showing half the body. Then a dull,
+uncomplaining, take-things-as-they-come face, unwashed, never
+shaved--the pure Indian grows a sort of dark down on his cheeks and the
+point of the chin, the half-breeds a slight beard--all topped by the
+enormous hat, never missing, though often full of holes, black with
+dirt, weather-beaten beyond expression.
+
+Then there were fully as many women and girls, even less fortunate, for
+they had not even sandals, but splashed along barefoot among the small
+cold cobblestones. Their dress seemed gleaned from a rag-heap and their
+heads were bare, their black hair combed or plastered flat. Children of
+both sexes were exact miniatures of their elders. All these wretches
+were here to sell. Yet what was for sale could easily have been tended
+by twenty persons. Instead, every man, woman, and child had his own
+stand, or bit of cloth or cobblestone on which to spread a few scanty,
+bedraggled wares. Such a mass of silly, useless, pathetic articles, toy
+jars, old bottles, anything that could be found in all the dump-heaps of
+Christendom. The covered market housed only a very small percentage of
+the whole. There was a constant, multicolored going and coming, with
+many laden asses and miserable, gaunt creatures bent nearly double under
+enormous loads on head or shoulders. Every radiating narrow mud-dripping
+street for a quarter-mile was covered in all but the slight passageway
+in the center with these displays. Bedraggled women sat on the cobbles
+with aprons spread out and on them little piles of six nuts each, sold
+at a centavo. There were peanuts, narrow strips of cocoanut, plantains,
+bananas short and fat, sickly little apples, dwarf peaches, small wild
+grapes, oranges green in color, potatoes often no larger than marbles,
+as if the possessor could not wait until they grew up before digging
+them; cactus leaves, the spines shaved off, cut up into tiny squares to
+serve as food; bundles of larger cactus spines brought in by hobbling
+old women or on dismal asses and sold as fuel, _aguacates_, known
+to us as "alligator pears" and tasting to the uninitiated like
+axle-grease; pomegranates, pecans, cheeses flat and white, every species
+of basket and earthen jar from two-inch size up, turnips, some cut in
+two for those who could not afford a whole one; onions, flat slabs of
+brown, muddy-looking soap, rice, every species of _frijole_, or
+bean, shelled corn for tortillas, tomatoes--_tomate coloradito_,
+though many were tiny and green as if also prematurely gathered--peppers
+red and green, green-corn with most of the kernels blue, lettuce,
+radishes, cucumbers, carrots, cabbages, melons of every size except
+large, string-beans, six-inch cones of the muddiest of sugar, the first
+rough product of the crushers wound in swamp grass and which prospective
+purchasers handled over and over, testing them now and then by biting
+off a small corner, though there was no apparent difference; sausages
+with links of marble size, everything in the way of meat, tossed about
+in the dirt, swarming with flies, handled, smelled, cut into tiny bits
+for purchasers; even strips of intestines, the jaw-bone of a sheep with
+barely the smell of meat on it; all had value to this gaunt community,
+nothing was too green, or old, or rotten to be offered for
+sale. Chickens with legs tied lay on the ground or were carried about
+from day to day until purchasers of such expensive luxuries
+appeared. There were many men with a little glass box full of squares of
+sweets like "fudge," selling at a half-cent each; every possible odd and
+end of the shops was there; old women humped over their meager wares,
+smoking cigarettes, offered for sale the scraps of calico left over from
+the cutting of a gown, six-inch triangles of no fathomable use to
+purchasers. There were entire blocks selling only long strips of leather
+for the making of sandals. Many a vendor had all the earmarks of
+leprosy. There were easily five thousand of them, besides another market
+on the other side of the town, for this poverty-stricken city of some
+fifty thousand inhabitants. The swarming stretched a half mile away in
+many a radiating street, and scores whose entire stock could not be
+worth fifteen cents sat all day without selling more than half of it. An
+old woman stopped to pick up four grains of corn and greedily tucked
+them away in the rags that covered her emaciated frame. Now and then a
+better-dressed _potosino_ passed, making purchases, a peon, male or
+female, slinking along behind with a basket; for it is a horrible breach
+of etiquette for a ten-dollar-a-month Mexican to be publicly seen
+carrying anything.
+
+One wondered why there was not general suicide in such a community of
+unmitigated misery. Why did they not spring upon me and snatch the purse
+I displayed or die in the attempt? How did they resist eating up their
+own wares? It seemed strange that these sunken-chested, hobbling, halt,
+shuffling, shivering, starved creatures should still fight on for
+life. Why did they not suddenly rise and sack the city? No wonder those
+are ripe for revolution whose condition cannot be made worse.
+
+Policemen in sandals and dark-blue shoddy cap and cloak looked little
+less miserable than the peons. All about the covered market were peon
+restaurants, a ragged strip of canvas as roof, under it an ancient
+wooden table and two benches. Unwashed Indian women cooked in several
+open earthen bowls the favorite Mexican dishes,--_frijoles_ (a stew
+of brown beans), chile con carne, rice, stews of stray scraps of meat
+and the leavings of the butcher-shops. These were dished up in brown
+glazed jars and eaten with strips of tortilla folded between the
+fingers, as the Arab eats with _gkebis_. Indeed there were many
+things reminiscent of the markets and streets of Damascus, more customs
+similar to those of the Moor than the Spaniard could have brought over,
+and the brown, wrinkled old women much resembled those of Palestine,
+though their noses were flatter and their features heavier.
+
+Yet it was a good-natured crowd. In all my wandering in it I heard not
+an unpleasant word, not a jest at my expense, almost no evidence of
+anti-foreign feeling, which seems not indigenous to the peon, but
+implanted in him by those of ulterior motives. Nor did they once ask
+alms or attempt to push misery forward. The least charitable would be
+strongly tempted to succor any one of the throng individually, but here
+a hundred dollars in American money divided into Mexican centavos would
+hardly go round. Here and there were pulquerías full of besotted,
+shouting men--and who would not drink to drown such misery?
+
+There was not a male of any species but had his colored blanket, red,
+purple, Indian-yellow, generally with two black stripes, the poorer with
+a strip of old carpet. These they wound about their bodies, folding them
+across the chest, the arms hugged together inside in such a way as to
+bring a corner across the mouth and nose, leaving their pipe-stem legs
+below, and wandered thus dismally about in the frequent spurts of cold
+rain. Now and then a lowest of the low passed in the cast-off remnants
+of "European" clothes, which were evidently considered far inferior to
+peon garb, however bedraggled. Bare or sandaled feet seemed impervious
+to cold, again like the Arab, as was also this fear of the raw air and
+half covering of the face that gave a Mohammedan touch, especially to
+the women. To me the atmosphere was no different than late October in
+the States. The peons evidently never shaved, though there were many
+miserable little barber-shops. On the farther outskirts of the hawkers
+were long rows of shanties, shacks made of everything under the sun,
+flattened tin cans, scraps of rubbish, two sticks holding up a couple of
+ragged bags under which huddled old women with scraps of cactus and
+bundles of tiny fagots.
+
+Scattered through the throng were several "readers." One half-Indian
+woman I passed many times was reading incessantly, with the speed of a
+Frenchman, from printed strips of cheap colored paper which she offered
+for sale at a cent each. They were political in nature, often in verse,
+insulting in treatment, and mixed with a crass obscenity at which the
+dismal multitude laughed bestially. Three musicians, one with a rude
+harp, a boy striking a triangle steel, sang mournful dirges similar to
+those of Andalusia. The peons listened to both music and reading
+motionless, with expressionless faces, with never a "move on" from the
+policeman, who seemed the least obstrusive of mortals.
+
+San Luís Potosí has many large rich churches, misery and pseudo-religion
+being common joint-legacies of Spanish rule. Small chance these
+creatures would have of feeling at home in a place so different from
+their earthly surroundings as the Christian heaven. The thump of church
+bells, some with the voice of battered old tin pans, broke out
+frequently. Now and then one of these dregs of humanity crept into
+church for a nap, but the huge edifices showed no other sign of
+usefulness. On the whole there was little appearance of "religion." A
+few women were seen in the churches, a book-seller sold no novels and
+little literature but "mucho de religión," but the great majority gave
+no outward sign of belonging to any faith. Priests were not often seen
+in the streets. Mexican law forbids them to wear a distinctive costume,
+hence they dressed in black derbies, Episcopal neckbands, and black
+capes to the ankles. Not distinctive indeed! No one could have guessed
+what they were! One might have fancied them prize-fighters on the way
+from training quarters to bathroom.
+
+There is comparative splendor also in San Luís, as one may see by peeps
+into the lighted houses at night, but it is shut in tight as if fearful
+of the poor breaking in. As in so many Spanish countries, wealth shrinks
+out of sight and misery openly parades itself.
+
+Out across the railroad, where hundreds of ragged boys were riding
+freight cars back and forth in front of the station, the land lay flat
+as a table, some cactus here and there, but apparently fertile, with
+neither sod to break nor clearing necessary. Yet nowhere, even on the
+edge of the starving city, was there a sign of cultivation. We of the
+North were perhaps more kind to the Indian in killing him off.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+TRAMPING THE BYWAYS
+
+Heavy weather still hung over the land to the southward. Indian corn,
+dry and shriveled, was sometimes shocked as in the States. The first
+field of maguey appeared, planted in long rows, barely a foot high, but
+due in a year or two to produce pulque, the Mexican scourge, because of
+its cheapness, stupefying the poorer classes. When fresh, it is said to
+be beneficial in kidney troubles and other ailments, but soon becomes
+over-fermented in the pulquerías of the cities and more harmful than a
+stronger liquor.
+
+Within the car was an American of fifty, thin and drawn, with huddled
+shoulders, who had been beaten by rebel forces in Zacatecas and robbed
+of his worldly wealth of $13,000 hidden in vain in his socks. Numbers of
+United States box-cars jolted across the country end to end with
+Mexican; the "B. & O." behind the "Norte de Méjico," the "N. Y. C.,"
+followed by the "Central Mejicano." Long broad stretches of plain, with
+cactus and mesquite, spread to low mountains blue with cold morning
+mist, all but their base hung with fog. Beyond Jesús María, which is a
+sample of the station names, peons lived in bedraggled tents along the
+way, and the corn was even drier. The world seemed threatening to dry up
+entirely. At Cartagena there began veritable forests of cactus trees,
+and a wild scrub resembling the olive. Thousands of _tunas_, the
+red fruit of the cactus, dotted the ground along the way. The sun
+sizzled its way through the heavy sky as we climbed the flank of a rocky
+range, the vast half-forested plain to the east sinking lower and lower
+as we rose. Then came broken country with many muddy streams. It was
+the altitude perhaps that caused the patent feeling of exhilaration, as
+much as the near prospect of taking again to the open road.
+
+As the "garrotero" ("twister," or "choker" as the brakeman is called in
+Mexico) announced Dolores Hidalgo, I slipped four cartridges into my
+automatic. The roadways of Mexico offered unknown possibilities. A
+six-foot street-car drawn--when at all--by mules, stood at the station,
+but I struck off across the rolling country by a footpath that probably
+led to the invisible town. A half-mile lay behind me before I met the
+first man. He was riding an ass, but when I gave him "Buenos días," he
+replied with a whining: "Una limosnita! A little alms, for the love of
+God." He wore a rosary about his neck and a huge cross on his
+chest. When I ignored his plea he rode on mumbling. The savage bellow of
+a bull not far off suggested a new possible danger on the road in this
+unfenced and almost treeless country. More men passed on asses, mules,
+and horses, but none afoot. Finally over the brown rise appeared Dolores
+Hidalgo; two enormous churches and an otherwise small town in a
+tree-touched valley. The central plaza, with many trees and hedges
+trimmed in the form of animals, had in its center the statue of the
+priest Hidalgo y Costilla, the "father of Mexican independence." A block
+away, packed with pictures and wreathes and with much of the old
+furniture as he left it, was the house in which he had lived before he
+started the activities that ended in the loss of his head.
+
+Well fortified at the excellent hotel, I struck out past the patriot
+priest's house over an arched bridge into the open country. As in any
+unknown land, the beginning of tramping was not without a certain mild
+misgiving. The "road" was only a trail and soon lost itself. A boy
+speaking good Spanish walked a long mile to set me right, and valued his
+services at a _centavo_. A half-cent seemed to be the fixed fee for
+anything among these country people. A peon carrying a load of
+deep-green alfalfa demanded as much for the privilege of photographing
+him when he was "not dressed up." He showed no sign whatever of
+gratitude when I doubled it and added a cigarette.
+
+The bright sun had now turned the day to early June. The so-called road
+was a well-trodden sandy path between high cactus hedges over rolling
+country. An hour out, the last look back on Dolores Hidalgo showed also
+mile upon mile of rolling plain to far, far blue sierras, all in all
+perhaps a hundred square miles visible. There were many travelers,
+chiefly on foot and carrying bundles on their heads. The greeting of
+these was "Adiós," while the better-to-do class on horse or mule back
+used the customary "Buenas tardes!" Thirst grew, but though the country
+was broken, with many wash-outs cutting deep across the trail, the
+streams were all muddy. Now and then a tuna on the cactus hedges was
+red ripe enough to be worth picking and, though full of seeds, was at
+least wet. It was harder to handle than a porcupine, and commonly left
+the fingers full of spines. Two men passed, offering _dulces_, a
+species of native candy, for sale. I declined. "Muy bien, give us a
+cigarette." I declined again, being low in stock. "Very well, adiós,
+señor," they replied in the apathetic way of their race, as if it were
+quite as satisfactory to them to get nothing as what they asked.
+
+The Rancho del Capulin, where night overtook me, was a hamlet of eight
+or ten houses, some mere stacks of thatch, out of the smoky doorway of
+which, three feet high, peered the half-naked inmates; others of adobe,
+large bricks of mud and chopped straw, which could be picked to pieces
+with the fingers.
+
+From one of the kennels a woman called out to know if I would eat. I
+asked if she could give lodging also and she referred me to her husband
+inside. I stopped to peer in through the doorway and he answered there
+was not room enough as it was, which was evident to the slowest-witted,
+for the family of six or eight of all ages, more or less dressed, lying
+and squatted about the earth floor dipping their fingers into bowls of
+steaming food, left not a square foot unoccupied. He advised me to go
+"beg license" of the "señora" of the house farther on, a low adobe
+building with wooden doors.
+
+"There is nothing but the place opposite," she answered.
+
+This was a sort of mud cave, man-made and door-less, the uneven earth
+floor covered with excrement, human and otherwise. I returned to peer
+into the mat-roofed yard with piles of corn-stalks and un-threshed
+beans, and met the man of the house just arriving with his labor-worn
+burros. He was a sinewy peasant of about fifty, dressed like all country
+peons in shirt and tight trousers of thinnest white cotton, showing his
+brown skin here and there. As he hesitated to give me answer, the wife
+made frantic signs to him from behind the door, of which the cracks were
+inches wide. He caught the hint and replied to my request for lodging:
+
+"Only if you pay me three centavos."
+
+Such exorbitance! The regulation price was perhaps one. But I yielded,
+for it was raining, and entered, to sit down on a heap of unthreshed
+beans. The woman brought me a mat three feet long, evidently destined
+to be my bed. I was really in the family barnyard, with no end walls,
+chickens overhead and the burros beyond. The rain took to dripping
+through the mat roof, and as I turned back toward the first hut for the
+promised frijoles and tortillas the woman called to me to say she also
+could furnish me supper.
+
+The main room of the house was about ten by ten, with mud walls five
+feet high, a pitched roof of some sort of grass with several holes in
+it. In the center of the room was a fireplace three feet high and four
+square, with several steaming glazed pots over a fire of _encinal_
+fagots. The walls were black with soot of the smoke that partly wandered
+out of an irregular hole in the farther end of the room. The
+eight-year-old son of the family was eating corn-stalks with great
+gusto, tearing off the rind with his teeth and chewing the stalk as
+others do sugar-cane. I handed him a loaf of potosino bread and he
+answered a perfunctory "Gracias," but neither he nor any of the family
+showed any evidence of gratitude as he wolfed it. The man complained
+that all the corn had dried up for lack of rain. The woman set before me
+a bowl of "sopita," with tortillas, white cheese, and boiled whole
+peppers. A penniless peon traveler begged a cigarette and half my
+morning loaf, and went out into the night and rain to sleep in the
+"chapel," as the mud cave across the way was called. There several
+travelers had settled down for the night. A girl of seventeen or so
+splashed across from it to beg "a jar of water for a poor prostitute,"
+apparently announcing her calling merely as a curious bit of
+information.
+
+The family took at last to eating and kept it up a full hour, meanwhile
+discussing me thoroughly. Like most untutored races, they fancied I
+could not understand their ordinary tones. When they wished to address
+me they merely spoke louder. It is remarkable how Spain has imposed her
+language on even these wild, illiterate Indians as England has not even
+upon her colonies. As the rain continued to pour, I was to sleep in the
+kitchen. Drunken peons were shouting outside and the family seemed much
+frightened, keeping absolute silence. The four by two door with its
+six-inch cracks was blocked with a heavy pole, the family retired to the
+other room, and I stretched out in the darkness on the unsteady wooden
+bench, a foot wide, my head on my knapsack. I was soon glad of having a
+sweater, but that failed to cover my legs, and I slept virtually not at
+all through a night at least four months long, punctuated by much
+howling of dogs.
+
+It was still pitch dark when the "senora" entered, to spend a long time
+getting a fire started with wet fagots. Then she began making
+_atole_. Taking shelled corn from an earthen jar, she sprinkled it
+in the hallow of a stone and crushed it with much labor. This was put
+into water, strained through a sieve, then thrown into a kettle of
+boiling water. It was much toil for little food. Already she had labored
+a full hour. I asked for coffee, and she answered she had none but would
+buy some when the "store" opened. It grew broad daylight before this
+happened and I accepted atole. It was hot, but as tasteless as might be
+the water from boiled corn-stalks. There had been much discussion,
+supposedly unknown to me, the night before as to how much they dared
+charge me. The bill was finally set at twelve centavos (six cents),
+eight for supper, three for lodging, and one for breakfast. It was
+evidently highly exorbitant, for the family expressed to each other
+their astonishment that I paid it without protest.
+
+At the very outset there was a knee-deep river to cross, then miles of a
+"gumbo" mud that stuck like bad habits. My feet at times weighed twenty
+pounds each. Wild rocky hillsides alternated with breathless
+climbs. Many cattle were scattered far and wide over the mountains, but
+there was no cultivation. I passed an occasional _rancho_,
+villages of six or seven adobe or thatch huts, with sometimes a ruined
+brick chapel. Flowers bloomed thickly, morning glories, geraniums,
+masses of a dark purple blossom. The "road" was either a mud-hole or a
+sharp path of jagged rolling stones in a barren, rocky, tumbled
+country. Eleven found me entering another rancho in a wild valley. My
+attempts to buy food were several times answered with, "Más arribita"--
+"A little higher up." I came at last to the "restaurant." It was a
+cobble-stone hut hung on a sharp hillside, with a hole two feet square
+opening on the road. Two men in gay sarapes, with guns and belts of huge
+cartridges, reached it at the same time, and we squatted together on the
+ground at an angle of the wall below the window and ate with much
+exchange of banter the food poked out to us. The two had come that
+morning from Guanajuato, whither I was bound, and were headed for
+Dolores. It was the first time I had any certain information as to the
+distance before me, which had been variously reported at from five to
+forty leagues. We ate two bowls of frijoles each, and many tortillas and
+chiles. One of the men paid the entire bill of twenty-seven centavos,
+but accepted ten from me under protest.
+
+Beyond was a great climb along a stony, small stream up into a blackish,
+rocky range. The sun shone splendidly, also hotly. Apparently there was
+no danger to travelers even in these wild parts. The peons I met were
+astonishingly incurious, barely appearing to notice my existence. Some
+addressed me as "jefe" (chief), suggesting the existence of mines in the
+vicinity. If I drew them into conversation they answered merely in
+monosyllables: "Sí, señor." "No, jefe." Not a word of Indian dialect
+had I heard since entering the country. Two hours above the restaurant a
+vast prospect of winding, tumbled, rocky valley and mountain piled upon
+mountain beyond opened out. From the summit, surely nine thousand feet
+up, began the rocky descent to the town of Santa Rosa, broken by short
+climbs and troublesome with rocks. I overtook many donkeys loaded with
+crates of cactus fruit, railroad ties, and the like, and finally at
+three came out in sight of the famous mining city of Guanajuato.
+
+It would take the pen of a master to paint the blue labyrinth of
+mountains heaped up on all sides and beyond the long, winding city in
+the narrow gorge far below, up out of which came with each puff of wind
+the muffled sound of stamp-mills and smelters. As I sat, the howling of
+three drunken peons drifted up from the road below. When they reached
+me, one of them, past forty, thrust his unwashed, pulque-perfumed face
+into mine and demanded a cigarette. When I declined, he continued to beg
+in a threatening manner. Meanwhile the drunkest of the three, a youth of
+perhaps seventeen, large and muscular, an evil gleam in his eye, edged
+his way up to me with one arm behind him and added his demands to that
+of the other. I suddenly pulled the hidden hand into sight and found in
+it a sharp broken piece of rock weighing some ten pounds. Having
+knocked this out of his grasp, I laid my automatic across my knees and
+the more sober pair dragged the belligerent youth on up the mountain
+trail.
+
+For an hour the way wound down by steep, horribly cobbled descents, then
+between mud and stone huts, and finally down a more level and wider
+cobbled street along which were the rails of a mule tramway. The narrow
+city wound for miles along the bottom of a deep gully, gay everywhere
+with perennial flowers. The main avenue ran like a stream along the
+bottom, and he who lost himself in the stair-like side streets had only
+to follow downward to find it again as surely as a tributary its main
+river. Masses of rocky mountains were piled up on all sides.
+
+The climate of Guanajuato is unsurpassed. Brilliant sunshine flooded
+days like our early June, in which one must hurry to sweat in the noon
+time, while two blankets made comfortable covering at night. This is
+true of not only one season but the year around, during which the
+thermometer does not vary ten degrees. July is coldest and a fireplace
+not uncomfortable in the evening. An American resident who went home to
+one of the States bordering on Canada for his vacation sat wiping the
+sweat out of his eyes there, when one of his untraveled countrymen
+observed:
+
+"You must feel very much at home in this heat after nine years in
+Mexico."
+
+Whereupon the sufferer arose in disgust, packed his bag, and sped south
+to mosquitoless coolness.
+
+The evening air is indescribable; all nature's changes of striking
+beauty; and the setting sun throwing its last rays on the Bufa, the
+salient points of that and the other peaks purple with light, with the
+valleys in deep shadow, is a sight worth tramping far to see.
+
+I drifted down along the gully next morning, following the main street,
+which changed direction every few yards, "paved" with three-inch
+cobbles, the sidewalks two feet wide, leaving one pedestrian to jump off
+it each time two met. A diminutive streetcar drawn by mules with
+jingling bells passed now and then. Peons swarmed here also, but there
+was by no means the abject poverty of San Luis Potosi, and Americans
+seemed in considerable favor, as their mines in the vicinity give the
+town its livelihood. I was seeking the famous old "Alóndiga," but the
+policeman I asked began looking at the names of the shops along the way
+as if he fancied it some tobacco booth. I tried again by designating it
+as "la cárcel." He still shook his head sadly. But when I described it
+as the place where Father Hidalgo's head hung on a hook for thirteen
+years, a great light broke suddenly upon him and he at once abandoned
+his beat and led me several blocks, refusing to be shaken off. What I
+first took for extreme courtesy, however, turned out to be merely the
+quest of tips, an activity in which the police of most Mexican cities
+are scarcely outdone by the waiters along Broadway.
+
+The ancient building was outwardly plain and nearly square, more massive
+than the rest of the city. High up on each of its corners under the
+rusted hooks were the names of the four early opponents of Spanish rule
+whose heads had once hung there. Inside the corridor stood the statue of
+the peon who is said to have reached and fired the building under cover
+of the huge slab of stone on his back. When I had waited a while in the
+anteroom, the _jefe político_, the supreme commander of the city
+appointed by the governor of the State, appeared, the entire roomful of
+officials and visitors dropping their cigarettes and rising to greet him
+with bared heads. He gave me permission to enter, and the
+_presidente_, a podgy second jailor, took me in charge as the iron
+door opened to let me in. The walls once red with the blood of Spaniards
+slaughtered by the forces of the priest of Dolores had lost that tint in
+the century since passed, and were smeared with nothing more startling
+than a certain lack of cleanliness. The immense, three-story, stone
+building of colonial days enclosed a vast patio in which prisoners
+seemed to enjoy complete freedom, lying about the yard in the brilliant
+sunshine, playing cards, or washing themselves and their scanty clothing
+in the huge stone fountain in the center. The so-called cells in which
+they were shut up in groups during the night were large chambers that
+once housed the colonial government. By day many of them work at weaving
+hats, baskets, brushes, and the like, to sell for their own benefit,
+thus being able to order food from outside and avoid the mess brought in
+barrels at two and seven of each afternoon for those dependent on
+government rations. Now and then a wife or feminine friend of one of
+the prisoners appeared at the grating with a basket of food. Several of
+the inmates were called one by one to the crack of an iron door in the
+wall to hear the sentence the judge had chosen to impose upon them in
+the quiet of his own home; for public jury trial is not customary in
+Spanish America.
+
+In the fine gallery around the patio, in the second-story, we were
+joined by an American from Colorado, charged with killing a Mexican, but
+who seemed little worried with his present condition or doubtful of his
+ultimate release. From the flat roof, large enough for a school
+playground, there spread out a splendid view of all the city and its
+surrounding mountains. There were, all told, some five hundred
+prisoners. A room opening on the patio served as a school for convicts,
+where a man well advanced in years, bewhiskered and of a decidedly
+pedagogical cast of countenance in spite of his part Indian blood, sat
+on his back, peering dreamily through his glasses at the seventy or more
+pupils, chiefly between the ages of fifteen and twenty, who drowsed
+before him.
+
+There is a no less fine view from the hill behind, on which sits the
+Panteon, or city cemetery. It is a rectangular place enclosing perhaps
+three acres, and, as all Guanajuato has been buried here for centuries,
+considerably crowded. For this reason and from inherited Spanish custom,
+bodies are seldom buried, but are pigeonholed away in the deep niches
+two feet square into what from the outside looks to be merely the
+enclosing wall. Here, in more exact order than prevails in life, the
+dead of Guanajuato are filed in series, each designated by a
+number. Series six was new and not yet half occupied. A funeral ends by
+thrusting the coffin into its appointed pigeonhole, which the Indian
+employees brick up and face with cement, in which while still soft the
+name of the defunct and other information is commonly rudely scratched
+with a stick, often with amateur spelling. Here and there is one in
+English:--"My Father's Servant--H. B." Some have marble headpieces with
+engraved names, and perhaps a third of the niches bear the information
+"En Perpetuidad," indicating that the rent has been paid up until
+judgment day. The majority of the corpses, however, are dragged out
+after one to five years and dumped in the common bone-yard, as in all
+Spanish-speaking countries. The Indian attendants were even then opening
+several in an older series and tossing skulls and bones about amid
+facetious banter. The lower four rows can be reached readily, but not a
+few suffer the pain of being "skied," where only those who chance to
+glance upward will notice them.
+
+There were some graves in the ground, evidently of the poorer Indian
+classes. Several had been newly dug, unearthing former occupants, and a
+grinning skull sat awry on a heap of earth amid a few thigh bones and
+scattered ribs, all trodden under sandaled foot-prints. In one hole lay
+the thick black hair of what had once been a peon, as intact as any
+actor's wig. There is some property in the soil of Guanajuato's Panteón
+that preserves bodies buried in the ground without coffins, so that its
+"mummies" have become famous. The director attended me in person and,
+crossing the enclosure, opened a door in the ground near the fourth
+series of niches, where we descended a little circular iron
+stairway. This opened on a high vaulted corridor, six feet wide and
+thirty long. Along this, behind glass doors, stood some hundred more or
+less complete bodies shrouded in sheets. They retained, or had been
+arranged, in the same form they had presented in life--peon carriers
+bent as if still under a heavy burden, old market women in the act of
+haggling, _arrieros_ plodding behind their imaginary burros. Some
+had their mouths wide open, as if they had been buried alive and had
+died shouting for release. One fellow stood leaning against a support,
+like a man joking with an elbow on the bar, a glass between his fingers,
+in the act of laughing uproariously. Several babies had been placed
+upright here and there between the elders. Most of the corpses wore old
+dilapidated shoes. In the farther end of the corridor were stacked
+thighbones and skulls surely sufficient to fill two box-cars, all facing
+to the front. I asked how many deaths the collection represented, and
+the director shrugged his shoulders with an indifferent "Quién sabe?" He
+who would understand the Mexican, descendant of the Aztecs, must not
+overlook a certain apathetic indifference to death, and a playful manner
+with its remains.
+
+Once on earth again, I gave the director a handful of coppers and
+descended to the town, motley now with market-day. The place swarmed
+with color; ragged, unwashed males and females squatted on the narrow
+sidewalks with fruit, sweets, gay blankets and clothing, cast-off shoes
+and garments, piles of new sandals, spread out in the street before
+them. Amid the babel of street cries the most persistent was
+"Agua-miel!"--"Honey water," as the juice of the maguey is called during
+the twelve hours before fermentation sets in. From twelve to thirty-six
+hours after its drawing it is intoxicating; from then on, only fit to be
+thrown away. But the sour stench from each pulquería and many a passing
+peon proved a forced longevity. Several lay drunk in the streets, but
+passers-by stepped over or around them with the air of those who do as
+they hope to be done by. Laughter was rare, the great majority being
+exceedingly somber in manner. Even their songs are gloomy wails,
+recalling the Arabs. A few children played at "bull-fight," and here and
+there two or three, thanks to the American influence, were engaged in
+what they fancied was baseball. But for the most part they were not
+playful. The young of both Indians and donkeys are trained early for the
+life before them. The shaggy little ass-colts follow their mothers over
+the cobbled streets and along mountain trails from birth, and the peon
+children, wearing the same huge hat, gay sarape, and tight breeches as
+their fathers, or the identical garb of the mothers, carry their share
+of the family burden almost from infancy. Everything of whatever size or
+shape was carried on the backs or heads of Indians with a supporting
+strap across the forehead. A peon passed bearing on his head the corpse
+of a baby in an open wooden coffin, scattered with flowers. Trunks of
+full size are transported in this way to all parts of the mountain town,
+and the Indian who carries the heaviest of them to a mine ten miles away
+and two thousand feet above the city over the rockiest trails considers
+himself well paid at thirty cents. Six peons dog-trotted by from the
+municipal slaughter-house with a steer on their backs: four carried a
+quarter each; one the head and skin; and the last, heart, stomach, and
+intestines. Horseshoers worked in the open streets, using whatever shoes
+they had on hand without adjustment, paring down the hoofs of the animal
+to fit them. Here and there a policeman on his beat was languidly
+occupied in making brushes, like the prisoners of the Alóndiga, and two
+I saw whiling away the time making lace! Several of them tagged my
+footsteps, eager for some errand. One feels no great sense of security
+in a country whose boyish, uneducated, and ragged guardians of order
+cringe around like beggar boys hoping for a copper.
+
+Saturday is beggar's day, when those who seek alms more or less
+surreptitiously during the week are permitted to pass in procession
+along the shops, many of which disburse on this day a fixed sum, as high
+as twenty dollars, in copper centavos. Now and then the mule-cars bowled
+over a laden ass, which sat up calmly on its haunches, front feet in the
+air, until the obstruction passed. All those of Indian blood were
+notable for their strong white teeth, not one of which they seem ever to
+lose. In the church a bit higher up several bedraggled women and
+pulque-besotted peons knelt before a disgusting representation of the
+Crucifixion. The figure had real hair, beard, eyebrows, and even
+eyelashes, with several mortal wounds, barked knees and shins, half the
+body smeared with red paint as blood, all in all fit only for the
+morgue. Farther on, drowsed the post-office, noted like all south of the
+Rio Grande for its unreliability. Unregistered packages seldom arrive at
+their destination, groceries sent from the States to American residents
+are at least half eaten en route. A man of the North unacquainted with
+the ways of Mexico sent unregistered a Christmas present of a dozen
+pairs of silk socks. The addressee inquired for them daily for
+weeks. Finally he wrote for a detailed description of the hectic lost
+property, and had no difficulty in recognizing at least two pairs as the
+beak-nosed officials hitched up their trousers to tell him again nothing
+whatever had come for him. Not long before my arrival a Mexican
+mail-car had been wrecked, and between the ceiling and the outer wall
+were found over forty thousand letters postal clerks had opened and
+thrown there.
+
+I drifted into an "Escuela Gratuita para Niños." The heavy, barn-like
+door gave entrance to a cobbled corridor, opening on a long schoolroom
+with two rows of hard wooden benches on which were seated a half hundred
+little peons aged seven to ten, all raggedly dressed in the identical
+garb, sandals and all, of their fathers in the streets, their huge straw
+hats covering one of the walls. The _maestro_, a small,
+down-trodden-looking Mexican, rushed to the door to bring me down to the
+front and provide me with a chair. The school had been founded some six
+months before by a woman of wealth, and offered free instruction to the
+sons of peons. But the Indians as always were suspicious, and for the
+most part refused to allow their children to be taught the "witchcraft"
+of the white man. The teacher asked what class I cared to hear and then
+himself hastily suggested "cuentitas." The boys were quick at figures,
+at least in the examples the maestro chose to give them, but he declined
+to show them off in writing or spelling. Several read aloud, in that
+mumbled and half-pronounced manner common to Mexico, the only
+requirement appearing to be speed. Then came a class in "Historia
+Santa," that is, various of the larger boys arose to spout at full
+gallop and the distinct enunciation of an "El" train, the biblical
+account of the creation of the world, the legends of Adam and Eve, Cain
+and Abel, and Noah's travels with a menagerie, all learned by rote. The
+entire school then arose and bowed me out.
+
+A visit to a mixed school, presided over by carelessly dressed maidens
+of uncertain age and the all-knowing glance of those who feel the world
+and all its knowledge lies concentrated in the hollow of their hands,
+showed a quite similar method of instruction. On the wall hung a great
+lithograph depicting in all its dreadful details the alleged horrors of
+"alcoolismo." Even the teachers rattled off their questions with an
+atrocious, half-enunciated pronunciation, and he must have been a
+Spanish scholar indeed who could have caught more than the gist of the
+recited answers. This indistinctness of enunciation and the Catholic
+system of learning by rote instead of permitting the development of
+individual power to think were as marked even in the _colegio_,
+corresponding roughly to our high schools. Even there the professor
+never commanded, "More distinctly!" but he frequently cried, "Faster!"
+
+On the wall of this higher institution was a stern set of rules, among
+which some of the most important were:
+
+"Students must not smoke in the presence of professors," though this was
+but mildly observed, for when I entered the study room with the director
+and his assistant, all of us smoking, the boys, averaging fifteen years
+of age, merely held their lighted cigarettes half out of sight behind
+them until we passed. Another rule read: "Any student frequenting a
+tavern, café chantant, or house of ill-fame may be expelled." He might
+run that risk in most schools, but none but the Latinized races would
+announce the fact in plain words on the bulletin-boards. The director
+complained that the recent revolutions had set the school far back, as
+each government left it to the next to provide for such secondary
+necessities.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+IN A MEXICAN MINE
+
+A classmate of my boyhood was superintendent of the group of mines round
+about Guanajuato. From among them we chose "Pingüico" for my temporary
+employment. The ride to it, 8200 feet above the sea, up along and out of
+the gully in which Guanajuato is built, and by steep rocky trails
+sometimes beside sheer mountain walls, opens out many a marvelous vista;
+but none to compare with that from the office veranda of the mine
+itself. Two thousand feet below lies a plain of Mexico's great
+table-land, stretching forty miles or more across to where it is shut
+off by an endless range of mountains, backed by chain after blue chain,
+each cutting the sky-line in more jagged, fantastic fashion than the
+rest, the farther far beyond Guadalajara and surely more than a hundred
+miles distant, where Mexico falls away into the Pacific. On the left
+rises deep-blue into the sky the almost perfect flattened cone of a lone
+mountain. Brilliant yet not hot sunshine illuminated even the far
+horizon, and little cloud-shadows crawled here and there across the
+landscape. The rainy season had left on the plain below many shallow
+lakes that reflected the sun like immense mirrors. From the veranda it
+seemed quite flat, though in reality by no means so, and one could all
+but count the windows of Silao, Irapuato, and other towns; the second,
+though more than twenty miles away, still in the back foreground of the
+picture. Thread-like, brown trails wound away over the plain and up
+into the mountains, here and there dotted by travelers crawling ant-like
+along them a few inches an hour. Take the most perfect day of late May
+or early June in our North, brush off the clouds, make the air many
+times fresher and clearer, add October nights, and multiply the sum
+total by 365, and it is more easily understood why Americans who settle
+in the Guanajuato region so frequently remain there.
+
+The room I shared with a mine boss was of chilly stone walls and floor,
+large and square, with a rug, two beds, and the bare necessities. The
+mine mess, run by a Chinaman, furnished meals much like those of a
+25-cent restaurant in Texas, at the rate of $5 a week. No Mexican was
+permitted to eat with the Americans, not even with the "rough-necks."
+When the whistle blew at seven next morning, some forty peons, who had
+straggled one by one in the dawn to huddle up together in their red
+sarapes among the rocks of the drab hillside, marched past the
+timekeeper, turning over their blankets at a check counter, and with
+their lunches, of the size of the round tortilla at the bottom and four
+to six inches high, in their handkerchiefs, climbed into the six-foot,
+iron ore-bucket until it was completely roofed with their immense straw
+hats. Near by those of the second night-shift, homeward bound, halted,
+to stand one by one on a wooden block with outstretched arms to be
+carefully searched for stolen ore by a tried and trusted fellow-peon. A
+pocketful of "high-grade" might be worth several dollars. The American
+"jefe" sat in the hoisthouse, writing out requisitions for candles,
+dynamite, and kindred supplies for the "jefecitos," or straw bosses, of
+the hundred or more peons still lined up before the shaft. With the last
+batch of these in the bucket, we white men stepped upon the platform
+below it and dropped suddenly into the black depths of the earth, with
+now and then a stone easily capable of cracking a skull bounding swiftly
+with a hollow sound past us back and forth across the shaft.
+
+Not infrequently in the days to come some accident to the hoist-engine
+above left us to stand an hour or more packed tightly together in our
+suspended four-foot space in unmitigated darkness. For this and other
+reasons no peon was ever permitted to ride on the platform with an
+American. Twelve hundred feet down we stepped out into a winding, rock
+gallery nearly six feet wide and high, where fourteen natives were
+loading rock and mud into iron dump-cars and pushing them to a near-by
+chute. Even at this depth flies were thick. A facetious boss asserted
+they hatched on the peons. My task here was to "sacar muestras"--"take
+samples," as it was called in English. From each car as it passed I
+snatched a handful of mud and small broken rock and thrust it into a
+sack that later went to the assay office to show what grade of ore the
+vein was producing.
+
+Once an hour I descended to a hole far beneath by a rope ladder, life
+depending on a spike driven in the rock above and a secure handhold, for
+the handful of "pay dirt" two peons were grubbing down out of a lower
+_veta_, a long narrow alleyway of soft earth and small stones that
+stretched away into the interior of the mountain between solid walls of
+rock. No inexperienced man would have supposed this mud worth more than
+any other. But silver does not come out of the earth in minted dollars.
+
+In the mine the peons wore their hats, a considerable protection against
+falling rocks, but were otherwise naked but for their sandals and a
+narrow strip of once white cloth between their legs, held by a string
+around the waist. Some were well-built, though all were small, and in
+the concentrated patch of light the play of their muscles through the
+light-brown skins was fascinating. Working thus naked seemed so much
+more dangerous; the human form appeared so much more feeble and soft,
+delving unclothed in the fathomless, rocky earth. Many a man was marked
+here and there with long deep scars. It was noticeable how character,
+habits, dissipation, which show so plainly in the face, left but little
+sign on the rest of the body, which remained for the most part smooth
+and unwrinkled.
+
+The peons were more than careless. All day long dynamite was tossed
+carelessly back and forth about me. A man broke up three or four sticks
+of it at a time, wrapped them in paper, and beat the mass into the form
+of a ball on a rock at my feet. Miners grow so accustomed to this that
+they note it, if at all, with complete indifference, often working and
+serenely smoking seated on several hundred pounds of explosives. One
+peon of forty in this gang had lost his entire left arm in a recent
+explosion, yet he handled the dangerous stuff as carelessly as ever.
+Several others were mutilated in lesser degrees. They depend on charms
+and prayers to their favorite saint rather than on their own
+precautions. Every few minutes the day through came the cry: "'Stá
+pegado!" that sent us skurrying a few feet away until a dull, deafening
+explosion brought down a new section of the vein. Not long before, there
+had been a cave-in just beyond where we were working, and the several
+men imprisoned there had not been rescued, so that now and then a skull
+and portions of skeleton came down with the rock. The peons had first
+balked at this, but the superintendent had told them the bones were
+merely strange shapes of ore, ordered them to break up the skulls and
+throw them in with the rest, and threatened to discharge and blackball
+any man who talked of the matter.
+
+By law a Mexican injured in the mine could not be treated on the spot,
+but must be first carried to Guanajuato--often dying on the way--to be
+examined by the police and then brought back to the mine hospital. Small
+hurts were of slight importance to the peons. During my first hour
+below, a muddy rock fell down the front of a laborer, scraping the skin
+off his nose, deeply scratching his chest and thighs, and causing his
+toes to bleed, but he merely swore a few round oaths and continued his
+work. The hospital doctors asserted that the peon has not more than one
+fourth the physical sensitiveness of civilized persons. Many a one
+allowed a finger to be amputated without a word, and as chloroform is
+expensive the surgeon often replaced it with a long draught of
+_mescal_ or _tequila_, the native whiskies.
+
+Outwardly the peons were very deferential to white men. I could rarely
+get a sentence from them, though they chattered much among themselves,
+with a constant sprinkling of obscenity. They had a complete language of
+whistles by which they warned each other of an approaching "jefe,"
+exchanged varied information, and even entered into discussion of the
+alleged characteristics of their superiors in their very presence
+without being understood by the uninitiated. Frequently, too, amid the
+rumble of the "veta madre" pouring down her treasures, some former
+Broadway favorite that had found its way gradually to the theater of
+Guanajuato sounded weirdly through the gallery, as it was whistled by
+some naked peon behind a loaded car. A man speaking only the pure
+Castilian would have had some difficulty in understanding many of the
+mine terms. Many Indian words had crept into the common language, such
+as "chiquihuite" for basket.
+
+Some seventy-five cars passed me during the morning. Under supervision
+the peons worked at moderately good speed; indeed, they compared rather
+favorably with the rough American laborers with whom I had recently
+toiled in railroad gangs, in a stone-quarry of Oklahoma, and the
+cotton-fields of Texas. The endurance of these fellows living on corn
+and beans is remarkable; they were as superior to the Oriental coolie as
+their wages to the latter's eight or ten cents a day. In this case, as
+the world over, the workmen earned about what he was paid, or rather
+succeeded in keeping his capacity down to the wages paid him. Many
+galleries of the mine were "worked on contract," and almost all gangs
+had their self-chosen leader. A peon with a bit more standing in the
+community than his fellows, wearing something or other to suggest his
+authority and higher place in the world--such perhaps as the pink shirt
+the haughty "jefecito" beside me sported--appeared with twelve or more
+men ready for work and was given a section and paid enough to give his
+men from fifty to eighty cents a day each and have something over a
+dollar left for himself. Miners' wages vary much throughout Mexico, from
+twelve dollars a month to two a day in places no insuperable distances
+apart. Conditions also differ greatly, according to my experienced
+compatriots. The striking and booting of the workmen, common in some
+mines, was never permitted in "Pingüico." In Pachuca, for example, this
+was said to be the universal practice; while in the mines of Chihuahua
+it would have been as dangerous as to do the same thing to a stick of
+dynamite. Here the peon's manner was little short of obsequious
+outwardly, yet one had the feeling that in crowds they were capable of
+making trouble and those who had fallen upon "gringoes" in the region
+had despatched their victims thoroughly, leaving them mutilated and
+robbed even of their clothing. The charming part of it all was one could
+never know which of these slinking fellows was a bandit by avocation and
+saving up his unvented anger for the boss who ordered him about at his
+labors.
+
+It felt pleasant, indeed, to bask in the sun a half hour after dinner
+before descending again. Toward five I tied and tagged the sacks of
+samples and followed them, on peon backs, to the shaft and to the world
+above with its hot and cold shower-bath, and the Chinaman's promise,
+thanks to the proximity of Irapuato, of "stlaybelly pie." Though the
+American force numbered several of those fruitless individuals that
+drift in and out of all mining communities, it was on the whole of
+rather high caliber. Besides "Sully the Pug," a mere human animal, hairy
+and muscular as a bear, and two "Texicans," as those born in the States
+of some Mexican blood and generally a touch of foreign accent are
+called, there were two engineers who lived with their "chinitas," or
+illiterate _mestizo_ Mexican wives and broods of peon children down
+in the valley below the dump-heap. Caste lines were not lacking even
+among the Americans in the "camp," as these call Guanajuato and its
+mining environs. More than one complained that those who married Mexican
+girls of unsullied character and even education were rated "squaw-men"
+and more or less ostracized by their fellow countrymen, and especially
+country-women, while the man who "picked up an old rounder from the
+States" was looked upon as an equal. The speech of all Mexico is
+slovenly from the Castilian point of view. Still more so was that of
+both the peon and the Americans, who copied the untutored tongue of the
+former, often ignorant of its faults, and generally not in the least
+anxious to improve, nor indeed to get any other advantage from the
+country except the gold and silver they could dig out of it. Laborers
+and bosses commonly used "pierra" for piedra; "sa' pa' fuera" for to
+leave the mine, "croquesí" for I believe so, commonly ignorant even of
+the fact that this is not a single word. In the mess-hall were heard
+strange mixtures of the two languages, as when a man rising to answer
+some call shouted over his shoulder: "Juan, deja mi pie alone!" Thanks
+to much peon intercourse, almost all the Americans had an unconsciously
+patronizing air even to their fellows, as many a pedagogue comes to
+address all the world in the tone of the schoolroom. The Mexican, like
+the Spaniard, never laughs at the most atrocious attempts at his tongue
+by foreigners, and even the peons were often extremely quick-witted in
+catching the idea from a few mispronounced words. "The man with the
+hair----," I said one day, in describing a workman I wished summoned;
+and not for the moment recalling the Castilian for curly, I twirled my
+fingers in the air.
+
+"Chino!" cried at least a half-dozen peons in the same breath.
+
+Small wonder the Mexican considers the "gringo" rude. An American boss
+would send a peon to fetch his key or cigarettes, or on some equally
+important errand; the workman would run all the way up hill and down
+again in the rarified air, removing his hat as he handed over the
+desired article, and the average man from the States would not so much
+as grunt his thanks.
+
+The engineers on whom our lives depended as often as we descended into
+or mounted from the mine, had concocted and posted in the engine-room
+the following "ten commandments":
+
+"Notice To Visitors And Others
+
+"Article 1. Be seated on the platform. It is too large for the engineer
+anyway.
+
+"Art. 2. Spit on the floor. We like to clean up after you.
+
+"Art. 3. Talk to the engineer while he is running. There is no
+responsibility to his job.
+
+"Art. 4. If the engineer does not know his business, please tell him. He
+will appreciate it.
+
+"Art. 5. Ask him as many questions as you like. He is paid to answer
+them.
+
+"Art. 6. Please handle all the bright work. We have nothing to do but
+clean it.
+
+"Art. 7. Don't spit on the ceiling. We have lost the ladder.
+
+"Art. 8. Should the engineer look angry don't pay any attention to
+him. He is harmless.
+
+"Art. 9. If you have no cigarettes take his. They grow in his garden.
+
+"Art. 10. If he is not entertaining, report him to the superintendent
+and he will be fired at once."
+
+On the second day the scene of my operations was changed to the eighth
+level, a hundred feet below that of the first. It was a long gallery
+winding away through the mountain, and connecting a mile beyond with
+another shaft opening on another hill, so that the heavy air was
+tempered by a constant mild breeze.
+
+Side shafts, just large enough for the ore-cars to pass, pierced far
+back into the mountain at frequent intervals. Back in these it was
+furnace hot. From them the day-gang took out 115 car-loads, though the
+chute was blocked now and then by huge rocks that must be "shot" by a
+small charge of dynamite stuck on them, a new way of "shooting the
+chutes" that was like striking the ear-drums with a club.
+
+The peons placed in each gallery either a cross or a lithograph of the
+Virgin in a shrine made of a dynamite-box, and kept at least one candle
+always burning before it. In the morning it was a common sight to see
+several appear with a bunch of fresh-picked flowers to set up before the
+image. Most of the men wore a rosary or charm about the neck, which they
+did not remove even when working naked, and all crossed themselves each
+time they entered the mine. Not a few chanted prayers while the cage was
+descending. As often as they passed the gallery-shrine, they left off
+for an instant the vilest oaths, in which several boys from twelve to
+fourteen excelled, to snatch off their hats to the Virgin, then
+instantly took up their cursing again. Whenever I left the mine they
+begged the half-candle I had left, and set it up with the rest. Yet they
+had none of the touchiness of the Hindu about their superstitions, and
+showed no resentment whatever even when a "gringo" stopped to light his
+cigarette at their improvised "altars."
+
+Trusted miners hired to search the others for stolen ore as they leave
+the shaft were sometimes waylaid on the journey home and beaten almost
+or quite to death. Once given a position of authority, they were harsher
+with their own kind than were the white men. The scarred and seared old
+"Pingüico" searcher, who stood at his block three times each twenty-four
+hours, had already killed three men who thus attacked him. Under no
+provocation whatever would the peons fight underground, but lay for
+their enemies only outside. A shift-boss in a neighboring mine remained
+seven weeks below, having his food sent down to him, and continued to
+work daily with miners who had sworn to kill him once they caught him on
+earth. One of our engineers had long been accustomed at another mine to
+hand his revolver to the searcher when the shift appeared and to arm
+himself with a heavy club. One day the searcher gave the superintendent
+a "tip," and when the hundred or more were lined up they were suddenly
+commanded to take off their _huarachas_. A gasp of dismay sounded,
+but all hastily snatched off their sandals and something like a bushel
+of high-grade ore in thin strips lay scattered on the ground. But a few
+mornings later the searcher was found dead half way between the mine and
+his home.
+
+Some of the mines round about Guanajuato were in a most chaotic state,
+especially those of individual ownership. The equipment was often so
+poor that fatal accidents were common, deaths even resulting from rocks
+falling down the shafts. Among our engineers was one who had recently
+come from a mine where during two weeks' employment he pulled out from
+one to four corpses daily, until "it got so monotonous" he resigned. In
+that same mine it was customary to lock in each shift until the
+relieving one arrived, and many worked four or five shifts, thirty-two
+to forty hours without a moment of rest, swallowing a bit of food now
+and then with a sledge in one hand. "High-graders," as ore-thieves are
+called, were numerous. The near-by "Sirena" mine was reputed to have in
+its personnel more men who lived by stealing ore than honest
+workmen. There ran the story of a new boss in a mine so near ours that
+we could hear its blasting from our eighth level, long dull thuds that
+seemed to run through the mountain like a shudder through a human body,
+who was making his first underground inspection when his light suddenly
+went out and he felt the cold barrel of a revolver against his temple. A
+peon voice sounded in the darkness close to his ear:
+
+"No te muevas, hijo de----, si quieres vivir!"
+
+Another light was struck and he made out some twenty peons, each with a
+sack of "high-grade," and was warned to take his leave on the
+double-quick and not to look around on penalty of a worse fate than that
+of Lot's wife.
+
+Bandit gangs were known to live in out-of-the-way corners of several
+mines, bringing their blankets and tortillas with them and making a
+business of stealing ore. Not even the most experienced mining engineer
+could more quickly recognize "pay dirt" than the peon population of
+Guanajuato vicinity.
+
+Though he is obsequious enough under ordinary circumstances, the mine
+peon often has a deep-rooted hatred of the American, which vents itself
+chiefly in cold silence, unless opportunity makes some more effective
+way possible. Next on his black-list comes the Spaniard, who is reputed
+a heartless usurer who long enjoyed protection under Diaz. Third,
+perhaps, come the priests, though these are endured as a necessary evil,
+as we endure a bad government. The padre of Calderón drifted up to the
+mine one day to pay his respects and drink the mine health in good
+Scotch whisky. Gradually he brought the conversation around to the
+question of disobedience among the peons, and summed up his advice to
+the Americans in a vehement explosion:
+
+"Fine them! Fine them often, and much!
+
+"Of course," he added, as he prepared to leave, "you know that by the
+laws of Mexico and the _Santa Iglesia_ all such fines go to the
+church."
+
+Intercourse between the mine officials and native authorities was almost
+always sure to make it worth while to linger in the vicinity. My
+disrespectful fellow countrymen were much given to mixing with the most
+courteous Spanish forms of speech asides in English which it was well
+the pompous native officials did not understand. I reached the office
+one day to find the chief of police just arrived to collect for his
+services in guarding the money brought out on pay-day.
+
+"Ah, senor mio," cried the superintendent, "Y como esta usted? La
+familia buena? Y los hijos--I'll slip the old geaser his six bones and
+let him be on his way--Oh, sí, señor. Cómo no? Con muchísimo gusto--and
+there goes six of our good bucks and four bits and--Pues adiós, muy
+señor mio! Vaya bien!--If only you break your worthless old neck on the
+way home--Adiós pues!"
+
+After the shower-bath it was as much worth while to stroll up over the
+ridge back of the camp and watch the night settle down over this
+upper-story world. Only on the coast of Cochinchina have I seen sunsets
+to equal those in this altitude. Each one was different. To-night it
+stretched entirely across the saw-toothed summits of the western hills
+in a narrow, pinkish-red streak; to-morrow the play of colors on
+mountains and clouds, shot blood-red, fading to saffron yellow, growing
+an ever-thicker gray down to the horizon, with the unrivaled blue of the
+sky overhead, all shifting and changing with every moment, would be
+hopelessly beyond the power of words. Often rain was falling in a spot
+or two far to the west, and there the clouds were jet black. In one
+place well above the horizon was perhaps a brilliant pinkish patch of
+reflected sun, and everything else an immensity of clouded sky running
+from Confederate gray above to a blackish-blue that blended with range
+upon range to the uttermost distance.
+
+There was always a peculiar stillness over all the scene. Groups of
+sandaled mine peons wound noiselessly away, a few rods apart, along
+undulating trails, the red of their sarapes and the yellow of their
+immense hats giving the predominating hue. In the vast landscape was
+much green, though more gray of outcropping rocks. Here and there a
+lonely telegraph wire struck off dubiously across the rugged
+country. Rocks as large as houses hung on the great hillsides, ready to
+roll down and destroy at the slightest movement of the earth, like
+playthings left by careless giant children. Along some rocky path far
+down in the nearer valley a small horse of the patient Mexican breed,
+under its picturesque, huge-hatted rider, galloped sure-footed up and
+down steep faces of rock. Cargadores bent half double, with a rope
+across their brows, came straining upward to the mine. Bands of peons
+released from their underground labors paused here and there on the way
+home to wager cigarettes on which could toss a stone nearest the next
+mud puddle. Flocks of goats wandered in the growing dusk about swift
+stony mountain flanks. Farther away was a rocky ridge beaten with
+narrow, bare, crisscross trails, and beyond, the old Valenciana mine on
+the flanks of the jagged range shutting off Dolores Hidalgo, appearing
+so near in this clear air of the heights that it seemed a man could
+throw a stone there; yet down in the valley between lay all Guanajuato,
+the invisible, and none might know how many bandits were sleeping out
+the day in their lurking-places among the wild, broken valleys and
+gorges the view embraced. Down in its rock-tumbled valley spread the
+scattered town of Calderón, and the knell of its tinny old church bells
+came drifting up across the divide on the sturdy evening breeze, tinged
+with cold, that seemed to bring the night with it, so silently and
+coolly did it settle down. The immense plain and farther mountains
+remained almost visible in the starlight, in the middle distance the
+lamps of Silao, and near the center of the half-seen picture those of
+Irapuato, while far away a faint glow in the sky marked the location of
+the city of Leon.
+
+Excitement burst upon the mess-table one night. Rival politicians were
+to contend the following Sunday for the governorship of the State, and
+the "liberal" candidate had assured the peons that he would treble their
+wages and force the company to give them full pay during illness, and
+that those who voted for his rival were really casting ballots for "los
+gringos" who had stolen away their mines. All this was, of course, pure
+campaign bunco; as a matter of fact the lowest wages in all the mines of
+Mexico were in those belonging to the then "liberal" President of the
+republic, and accident pay would have caused these insensible fellows to
+drop rocks on themselves to enjoy its benefits. For several mornings
+threatening political posters had appeared on the walls of the company
+buildings. But this time word came that "liberal" posters had been stuck
+up in the galleries of the mine itself. The boss sprang to his feet, and
+without even sending for his revolver went down into the earth. An hour
+or more later he reappeared with the remnants of the posters. Though
+the mine was populated with peons and there was not then another
+American below ground, they watched him tear down the sheets without
+other movement than to cringe about him, each begging not to be believed
+guilty. Later a peon was charged with the deed and forever forbidden to
+work in the mines of the company. The superintendent threatened to
+discharge any employee who voted for the "liberal" candidate, and,
+though he could not of course know who did, their dread of punishment no
+doubt kept many from voting at all.
+
+Work in the mine never ceased. Even as we fell asleep the engine close
+at hand panted constantly, the mild clangor of the blacksmith-shop
+continued unbroken, cars of rock were dumped every few minutes under the
+swarming stars, the mine pulse beat unchanging, and far down beneath our
+beds hundreds of naked peons were still tearing incessantly at the rocky
+entrails of the earth.
+
+Though the mine throbbed on, I set off one sunny Sunday morning to walk
+to town and the weekly ball game. It was just warm enough for a summer
+coat, a breeze blew as at sea, an occasional telephone pole was singing
+as with contentment with life in this perfect climate. Groups of
+brownish-gray donkeys with loads on their backs passed me or crawled
+along far-away trails, followed by men in tight white trousers, their
+striped and gay-colored sarapes about their bodies and their huge hats
+atop. Over all was a Sunday stillness, broken only by the occasional
+bark of a distant dog or a cockcrow that was almost musical as it was
+borne by on the wind. Everywhere were mountains piled into the
+sky. Valenciana, where so many Spaniards, long since gone to whatever
+reward awaited them, waxed rich and built a church now golden brown with
+age, sat on its slope across the valley, down in which no one would have
+guessed huddled a city of some 60,000 inhabitants. Much nearer and a
+bit below drowsed the old town of Calderón, home of many of our peons, a
+bright red blanket hung over a stone wall giving a splash of brilliancy
+to the vast stretch of grayish, dull-brown, and thirsty green. The road
+wound slowly down and ever down, until the gullies grew warmer as the
+rising mountains cut off the breeze and left the sun in undisputed
+command. Along the way were flowers uncountable, chiefly large, white,
+lily-like blossoms growing on a bush, then thick patches of
+orange-yellow. Horsemen, Mexicans on burros, peon men, women, and
+children afoot were legion. There were no Americans, though I passed
+one huge Negro with a great black beard who gave me "Good morning" from
+his horse in the tone of a man who had not met an equal before in some
+time. At length appeared the emerald-green patch of the upper Presa,
+with its statue of Hidalgo, and the café-au-lait pond that stores the
+city's water, and over the parapet of which hung _guanajuatenses_
+watching with wonder the rowboat of the American hospital doctor, the
+only water craft the great majority of them have ever seen.
+
+A natural amphitheater encloses the ball-ground in which were gathered
+the wives of Americans, in snowy white, to watch a game between teams
+made up chiefly of "gringoes" of the mines, my one-time classmate still
+at short-stop, as in our schoolboy days, thanks to which no doubt
+Guanajuato held the baseball championship of Mexico. Like the English
+officials of India, the Americans in high places here were noticeable
+for their youth, and, at least here on the ball-ground, for their
+democracy, known to all by their boyhood nicknames, yet held almost in
+reverence by the Mexican youths that filled in the less important
+positions. At the club after the game the champion Mexican player
+discoursed on the certainty of ultimate American intervention and
+expressed his own attitude with:
+
+"Let it come, for I am not a politician but a baseball player."
+
+It was election day, and I passed several doorways, among them that of
+the company stable, in which a half-dozen old fossils in their most
+solemn black garb crouched dreamily over wooden tables with registers,
+papers, and ink bottles before them. Now and then a frightened peon
+slunk up hat in hand to find whether they wished him to vote, and how,
+or to see if perhaps he had not voted already--by absent treatment. The
+manager of one of the mines had come into the office of the jefe
+pólitico of his district the night before and found the ballots already
+made out for the "liberal" candidate. He tore them up and sent his own
+men to watch the election, with the result that there was a strong
+majority in that precinct in favor of the candidate more pleasing to the
+mine owners. The pulquerias and saloons of the peons had been closed,
+but not the clubs and resorts of the white men. In one of these I sat
+with the boss, watching him play a game of stud poker. A dissipated
+young American, who smoked a cigar and a cigarette at the same time, was
+most in evidence, a half Comanche Indian of an utterly impassive
+countenance did the dealing, and fortunes went up and down amid the
+incessant rattle of chips far into the morning. At three the boss broke
+away, nine dollars to the good, while the proprietor of the place ended
+with an enormous heap of chips in front of him; another American, making
+out to him a check for $90, and calling for his horse, rode back to his
+mine to earn it--the shoes of the horse clanking on the cobbles in the
+silence of the night and passing now and then a policeman's lantern set
+in the middle of the street, while that official huddled in his white
+uniform in a dark corner, ostensibly keeping guard.
+
+On another such a day I turned back about dusk up the gorge on the
+return to the mine. The upper park where the band had played earlier was
+now completely deserted. The road was nearly five miles long; the trail,
+sheer up the wild tumble of mountains before me, little more than
+two. This was vaguely reputed dangerous, but I was not inclined to take
+the rumor seriously.
+
+Black night fell. Soon I came upon the vanguard of the day-shift from
+"Pingüico," straggling down the face of the mountain, shouting and
+whistling to each other in their peculiar language. Some carried torches
+that flashed along the mountain wall above me and threw long quaint
+shadows of the tight-trousered legs. The grade was more than forty-five
+degrees, with much slipping and sliding on unseen rocks. Two or three
+groups had passed when one of the men recognized me and with a "Buenas
+noches, jefe!" insisted on giving me the torch he carried, a mine candle
+with a cloth wrapped around it as a protection in the strong wind. I had
+soon to cast this away, as it not only threatened to burn my hand but
+left the eyes unable to pierce the surrounding wall of darkness. In the
+silence of the night there came to mind the assertion of by no means our
+most timorous engineer, that he never passed over this trail after dark
+without carrying his revolver cocked in his hand. My fellow countrymen
+of the region all wore huge "six-shooters" with a large belt of
+cartridges always in sight, less for use than the salutary effect of
+having them visible, in itself a real protection. Conditions in Mexico
+had led me to go armed for the first time in my travels; or more
+exactly, to carry one of the "vest pocket automatics" so much in
+vogue--on advertising pages--in that season. My experienced fellow
+Americans refused to regard this weapon seriously. One had made the
+very fitting suggestion that each bullet should bear a tag with the
+devise, "You're shot!" An aged "roughneck" of a half-century of Mexican
+residence had put it succinctly: "Yer travel scheme's all right; but
+I'll be ---- ---- if I like the gat you carry." However, such as it was,
+I drew it now and held it ready for whatever it might be called upon to
+attempt.
+
+A half hour of heavy climbing brought me to the summit, with a strong
+cool breeze and a splendid view of the spreading lights of Guanajuato in
+the narrow winding gully far below. The trail wound round a peak and
+reached the first scattered huts of Calderón just as a number of shots
+sounded not far away. These increased until all the dogs for miles
+around took up the hue and cry. The shots multiplied, with much shouting
+and uproar, soon sounding on both sides and ahead and behind me, while
+the whistling language shrilled from every gully and hillside. Evidently
+drunken peons were harmlessly celebrating their Sunday holiday, but the
+shots sounded none the less weirdly out of the black night as I stumbled
+on over the rocky, tumbled country, for the only smooth way thereabouts
+was the Milky Way faintly seen overhead. Gradually the shooting and
+shouting drifted behind me and died out as I surmounted the last knoll
+and descended to bed. It was only at breakfast next morning that I
+learned I had serenely strolled through a pitched battle between bandits
+that haunted the recesses of the mountains about Calderón and the town
+which, led by its jefe político, had finally won the bout with four
+outlaw corpses to its credit. It was my luck not to have even a
+bullet-hole through my cap to prove the story. There were often two or
+three such battles a week in the vicinity.
+
+That morning I was given a new job. The boss led the way, candle in
+hand, a half mile back through the bowels of the mountain, winding with
+the swinging of the former ore vein. This alone was enough to get
+hopelessly lost in, even without its many blind-alley branches. Now and
+then we came upon another shaft-opening that seemed a bottomless hole a
+few feet in diameter in the solid rock, from far down which came up the
+falsetto voices and the stinking sweat of peons, and the rap, rap of
+heavy hammers on iron rock-bars. But we had only started. Far back in
+the gallery we took another hoist and descended some two hundred feet
+more, then wound off again through the mountain by more labyrinthian
+burrowings in the rock, winding, undulating passages, often so low we
+must crawl on hands and knees, with no other light than the flickering
+candles half-showing shadowy forms of naked, copper-colored beings; the
+shadows giving them often fiendish faces and movements, until we could
+easily imagine ourselves in the realms of Dante's imagination. In time
+we came to a ladder leading upward into a narrow dark hole, and when the
+ladder ended we climbed on our bellies some forty feet higher up a ledge
+of rock to another "heading." Along this we made our way another
+hundred yards or more to where a dozen naked peons were operating
+compressed-air drills, then wormed our way like snakes over the
+resultant debris to the present end of the passage, where more peons
+were drilling by hand, one man holding a bar of iron a few feet long
+which another was striking with a five-pound sledge that luckily never
+missed its mark. This was indeed working in Mexico. It would have been
+difficult to get farther into it; and a man could not but dully wonder
+if he would ever get out again.
+
+We were evidently very close to the infernal regions. Here, indeed,
+would have been a splendid setting for an orthodox hell. Peons whose
+only garment was the size of a postcard, some even with their hats off,
+glistened all over their brown bodies as under a shower-bath. In five
+minutes I had sweated completely through my garments, in ten I could
+wring water out of my jacket; drops fell regularly at about half-second
+intervals from the end of my nose and chin. The dripping sweat formed
+puddles beneath the toilers, the air was so scarce and second-hand every
+breath was a deep gasp; nowhere a sign of exit, as if we had been walled
+up in this narrow, low-ceiled, jagged-rock passageway for all time.
+
+My work here was to take samples from the "roof." A grinning peon who
+called himself "Bruno Básques" (Vásquez) followed me about, holding his
+hat under the hammer with which I chipped bits of rock from above, back
+and forth across the top of the tunnel, every few feet. The ore ran very
+high in grade here, the vein being some six feet of whitish rocky
+substance between sheer walls of ordinary rock. It struck one most
+forcibly, this strange inquisitiveness of man that had caused him to
+prowl around inside the earth like a mole, looking for a peculiar kind
+of soil or stone which no one at first sight could have guessed was of
+any particular value. The peons, smeared all over with the drippings of
+candle-grease, worked steadily for all the heat and stuffiness. Indeed,
+one could not but wonder at the amount of energy they sold for a day's
+wages; though of course their industry was partly due to my "gringo"
+presence. We addressed them as inferiors, in the "tu" form and with the
+generic title "hombre," or, more exactly, in the case of most of the
+American bosses, "húm-bray." The white man who said "please" to them, or
+even showed thanks in any way, such as giving them a cigarette, lost
+caste in their eyes as surely as with a butler one might attempt to
+treat as a man. I tried it on Bruno, and he almost instantly changed
+from obsequiousness to near-insolence. When I had put him in his place
+again, he said he was glad I spoke Spanish, for so many "jefes" had
+pulled his hair and ears and slapped him in the face because he did not
+understand their "strange talk." He did not mention this in any spirit
+of complaint, but merely as a curious fact and one of the many
+visitations fate sees fit to send those of her children unluckily born
+peons. His jet black hair was so thick that small stones not only did
+not hurt his head as they fell from under my hammer, but remained buried
+in his thatch, so that nearly as many samples were taken from this as
+from the roof of the passage.
+
+Thus the sweat-dripping days passed, without a hint of what might be
+going on in the world far above, amid the roar and pounding of air and
+hand-drills, the noisy falling of masses of rock as these broke it
+loose, the constant ringing of shovels, the rumble of iron ore-cars on
+their thread-like rails, cries of "'stá pegado!" quickly followed by the
+stunning, ear-splitting dynamite blast, screams of "No vás echar!" as
+some one passed beneath an opening above, of "Ahora sí!" when he was out
+of danger; the shrill warning whistling of the peons echoing back and
+forth through the galleries and labyrinthian side tunnels, as the crunch
+of shoes along the track announced the approach of some boss; the
+shouting of the peons "throwing" a loaded car along the track through
+the heavy smoke-laden air, so thick with the smell of powder and thin
+with oxygen that even experienced bosses developed raging headaches, and
+the Beau Brummel secretary of the company fell down once with dizziness
+and went to bed after the weekly inspection.
+
+When the first day was done I carried the ten sacks of samples--via
+Bruno's shoulders--through the labyrinth of corridors and shafts to be
+loaded on a car and pushed to the main shaft, where blew a veritable
+sea-breeze that gave those coming from the red-hot pockets a splendid
+chance for catching cold which few overlooked. In the _bodega_, or
+underground office, I changed my dripping garments for dry ones, but
+waited long for the broken-down motor to lift me again finally to pure
+air. In the days that followed I was advanced to the rank of car-boss in
+this same level, and found enough to do and more in keeping the tricky
+car-men moving. A favorite ruse was to tip over a car on its way to the
+chute and to grunt and groan over it for a half-hour pretending to lift
+it back on the rails; or to tuck away far back in some abandoned "lead"
+the cars we needed, until I went on tours of investigation and ferreted
+them out.
+
+During the last days of October I drew my car-boss wages and set out to
+follow the ore after it left the mine. From the underground chutes it
+was drawn up to the surface in the iron buckets, dumped on "gridleys"
+(screens made of railroad rails separated a like width) after weighing,
+broken up and the worthless rock thrown out on the "dump," a great
+artificial hill overhanging the valley below and threatening to bury the
+little native houses huddled down in it. A toy Baldwin locomotive
+dragged the ore trains around the hill to the noisy stamp-mill spreading
+through another valley, with a village of adobe huts overgrown with
+masses of purple flowers and at the bottom a plain of white sand waste
+from which the "values" had been extracted. The last samples I had taken
+assayed nine pounds of silver and 23 grams of gold to the ton. The
+carloads were dumped into bins at the top of the mill.
+
+The nature of the country had been taken advantage of in the building,
+which hung twelve stories high on the steep hillside, making gravitation
+the chief means of transportation during the refining process. Rocks
+were screened into one receptacle and broken up by hand. The finer stuff
+went direct to the stamps. Stones of ordinary size were spread by
+machinery on a broad leather belt that passed three peon women, who
+picked out and tossed away the oreless stones. Their movements were
+leisurely, but they were sharp-eyed and very few worthless bits got by
+the three of them. A story below, the picked material went under
+deafening stamps weighing tons and striking several blows a second,
+while water was turned in to soften the material. This finally ran down
+another story in liquid form into huge cylinders where it was rolled and
+rolled again and at last flowed on, smelling like mortar or wet lime,
+onto platforms of zinc constantly shaking as with the ague and with
+water steadily flowing over them. Workmen about the last and most
+concentrated of these were locked in rooms made of chicken-wire. Below,
+the stuff flowed into enormous vats, like giants' washtubs, and was
+stirred and watered here for several days until the "values" had settled
+and were drawn off at the bottom. There were three stories, or some
+thirty, of these immense vats. The completed process left these full of
+white sand which a pair of peons spent several days shoveling out and
+carrying down into the valley.
+
+The "values" were next run down into smaller vats and treated with zinc
+shavings, precipitating a 50 per cent. pure metal, black in color, which
+was put into melting-pots in a padlocked room overseen by an
+American. Here it was cast in large brick molds, these being knocked off
+and the metal left to slack, after which it was melted again and finally
+turned into gray-black blocks of the size and form of a paving-brick, 85
+per cent. pure, about as heavy as the average lady would care to lift,
+and worth something like $1250 each. Two or four of these were tied on
+the back of a donkey and a train of them driven under guard to the town
+office, whence they were shipped to Mexico City, and finally made into
+those elusive things called coins, or sundry articles for the
+vainglorious, shipped abroad or stolen by revolutionists. On this same
+ground the old colonial Spaniards used to spread the ore in a cobbled
+patio, treat it with mercury, and drive mules round and round in it for
+weeks until they pocketed whatever was left to them after paying the
+king's fifth and the tithes of the church.
+
+My rucksack on the back of a peon--and it is astonishing how much more
+easily one's possessions carry in that fashion; as if it were indeed
+that automatic baggage on legs I have long contemplated inventing--I set
+off to the neighboring mine of "Peregrina." As the peon was accustomed
+to carry anything short of a grand piano, he did not complain at this
+half-day excursion under some twenty pounds. Being drawn out, he grew
+quite cheery on this new fashion of carrying--"when the load is not
+much." In the cool morning air, with a wind full of ozone sweeping
+across the high country, the trail lay across tumbled stretches of rocky
+ground, range behind range of mountains beyond and a ruined stone hut or
+corral here and there carrying the memory back to Palestine. For a half
+hour we had Guanajuato in full sight in its narrow gully far below. Many
+donkeys pattered by under their loads of encinal fagots, the ragged,
+expressionless drivers plodding silently at their heels.
+
+Ahead grew the roar of "Peregrina's" stamp-mill, and I was soon winding
+through the gorge-hung village. According to the manager, I had chosen
+well the time of my coming, for there was "something doing." We strolled
+about town until he had picked up the jefe político, a handsome Mexican,
+built as massive as an Aztec stone idol, under a veritable haystack of
+hat, who ostensibly at least was a sworn friend of the mining
+company. With him we returned to the deafening stamp-mill and brought up
+in the "zinc room," where the metal is cast into bricks. Here the
+stealing of ore by workmen is particularly prevalent, and even the
+searching by the trusty at the gate not entirely effective, for even the
+skimming off of the scum leaves the floor scattered with chips of silver
+with a high percentage of gold which even the American in charge cannot
+always keep the men from concealing. Hence there occurs periodically the
+scene we were about to witness.
+
+When the native workmen of the "zinc room" enter for the day, they are
+obliged to strip in one chamber and pass on to the next to put on their
+working clothes, reversing the process when they leave. To-day all five
+of them were herded together in one dressing-room, of which, the three
+of us being admitted, the door was locked. The jefe político, as the
+government authority of the region, set about searching them, and as his
+position depended on the good-will of the powerful mining company, it
+was no perfunctory "frisking." The ragged fellows were called up one by
+one and ordered to strip of blouses, shirts, and trousers, and even
+_huarachas_, their flat leather sandals, the jefe examining
+carefully even the seams of their garments. Indeed, he even searched the
+hairs of their bodies for filings of "high-grade."
+
+The men obeyed with dog-like alacrity, though three of them showed some
+inner emotion, whether of guilt, fear, or shame, it was hard to
+guess. Two had been carefully gone over without the discovery of
+anything incriminating, when the jefe suddenly snatched up the hat of
+the first and found in it a knotted handkerchief containing a scrap of
+pure metal some two inches long. From then on his luck increased. The
+fourth man had been fidgeting about, half disrobing before the order
+came, when all at once the local authority turned and picked up a piece
+of ore as large as a silver dollar, wrapped in paper, which the fellow
+had surreptitiously tossed away among a bunch of mats against the
+wall. The jefe cuffed him soundly and ordered him to take off his
+shoes--he was the only one of the five sporting that luxury--and
+discovered in the toe of one of them a still larger booty. The last of
+the group was a cheery little fellow barely four feet high, likable in
+spite of his ingrained lifetime lack of soap. He showed no funk, and
+when ordered to undress turned to the "gringo" manager with: "Me too,
+jefe?" Then he quickly stripped, proving himself not only honest but
+the biggest little giant imaginable. He had a chest like a wine-barrel
+and legs that resembled steel poles, weighed fifty-two kilos, yet
+according to the manager, of whom he was one of the trusties, frequently
+carried four-hundred-pound burdens up the long hill below the mine. The
+jefe found something tied up in his old red cloth belt, but little
+Barrel-chest never lost his smile, and the suspicious lump proved to be
+a much-folded old chromo print of some saint.
+
+"What's he got that for?" asked the manager.
+
+"To save him from the devil," sneered the jefe, wadding it up and
+tossing it back at him.
+
+When he was dressed again the little giant was sent to town for
+policemen, a sign of confidence which seemed greatly to please him. For
+a half hour we smoked and joked and discussed, like so many cattle in
+the shambles, the three prisoners, two found guilty and the third
+suspected, who stood silent and motionless against the wall. Three
+policemen in shoddy uniforms, armed with clubs and enormous revolvers
+sticking out through their short coat-tails, at length appeared, of the
+same class and seeming little less frightened than the prisoners. They
+were ordered to tie ropes about the waists of the criminals and stood
+clutching these and the tails of the red sarapes, when the jefe
+interrupted some anecdote to shout the Spanish version of:
+
+"What in ---- are you waiting for?"
+
+They dodged as if he had thrown a brick, and hurried their prisoners
+away to the cold, flea-ridden, stone calaboose of the town, where in all
+probability they lay several months before their case was even called
+up; while the manager and I ascended to his veranda and flower-grown
+residence and sat down to a several course dinner served by a squad of
+solemn servants. As in many another land, it pays to be a white man in
+Mexico.
+
+Stealing is rarely a virtue. But it was not hard to put oneself in the
+place of these wretches and catch their point of view that made such
+thievery justifiable. As they saw it, these foreigners had made them go
+down into their own earth and dig out its treasures, paid them little
+for their labors, and searched them whenever they left that they should
+not keep even a little bit of it for themselves. Now they had made
+their own people shut them up because they had picked up a few dollars'
+worth of scraps left over from the great burro-loads of which, to their
+notion, the hated "gringoes" were robbing them. Like the workingmen of
+England, they were only "getting some of their own back." They were no
+doubt more "aficionados al pulque" and gambling than to their families,
+but so to some extent were the "gringoes" also, and they were by no
+means the only human beings who would succumb to the same temptation
+under the same circumstances.
+
+The ancient "Peregrina" mine was different from "Pingüico." Here we
+entered by a level opening and walked down most of the two thousand
+feet, much of it by narrow, slimy, slippery, stone steps, in some places
+entirely worn away by the bare feet of the many generations of peons
+that as slaves to the Spaniards of colonial days used to carry the ore
+up on their backs from the very bottom of the mine. "Peregrina"
+mountain was almost another Mammoth Cave, so enormous are the caverns
+that have been "stoped out" of it in the past four centuries. In many a
+place we could see even with several candles only the ground underfoot
+and perhaps a bit of the nearest sidewall; the rest was a dank,
+noiseless, blank space, seeming square miles in extent. For three hours
+we wandered up and down and in and out of huge unseen caves, now and
+then crawling up or down three or four hundred foot "stopes" on hands
+and knees, by ladders, stone steps, or toe-holes in the rock. Through it
+all it was raining much of the time in torrents--in the mine, that is,
+for outside the sun was shining brightly--with mud underfoot and streams
+of water running along much of the way; and, unlike the sweltering
+interior of "Pingüico," there was a dank dungeon chill that reached the
+marrow of the bones. Even in the shafts which we descended in buckets,
+cold water poured down upon us, and, far from being naked, the miners
+wore all the clothing they possessed. Here the terror of the peons was
+an old American mine-boss rated "loco" among them, who went constantly
+armed with an immense and ancient revolver, always loaded and reputed of
+"hair trigger," which he drew and whistled in the barrel whenever he
+wished to call a workman. A blaze crackling in the fireplace was
+pleasant during the evening in the manager's house, for "Peregrina" lies
+even higher above the sea than "Pingüico"; but even here by night or day
+the peons, and especially the women, went barefoot and in thinnest garb.
+
+A native horse, none of which seem noted for their speed, carried me out
+to the famous old mining town of La Luz, where the Spaniards first began
+digging in this region. The animal made little headway forward, but
+fully replaced this by the distance covered up and down. To it a trot
+was evidently an endeavor to see how many times and how high it could
+jump into the air from the same spot. The ancient Aztecs, seeing us
+advancing upon them, would never have made the mistake of fancying man
+and horse parts of the same animal. Moreover, the pesky beast had an
+incurable predilection for treading, like a small boy "showing off," the
+extreme edge of pathways at times not six inches from a sheer fall of
+from five hundred to a thousand feet down rock-faced precipices.
+
+Still it was a pleasant three-hour ride in the brilliant sunshine,
+winding round and over the hills along pitching and tossing
+trails. Peons obsequiously lifted their hats when I passed, which they
+do not to a man afoot; a solemn stillness of rough-and-tumble mountains
+and valleys, with deep-shadowed little gorges scolloped out of the
+otherwise sun-flooded landscape, broad hedges of cactus and pitching
+paths, down which the animal picked its way with ease and assurance,
+alternated with mighty climbs over a dozen rises, each of which I
+fancied the last.
+
+La Luz is a typical town of mountainous Mexico. A long, broken adobe
+village lies scattered along a precipitous valley, scores of "roads" and
+trails hedged with cactus wind and swoop and climb again away over steep
+hills and through deep _barrancos_, troops of peons and donkeys
+enlivening them; flowers give a joyful touch, and patches of green and
+the climate help to make the place reminiscent of the more thickly
+settled portions of Palestine. From the town we could see plainly the
+city of Leon, fourth in Mexico, and a view of the plain, less striking
+than that from "Pingüico," because of the range rising to cut it off in
+the middle distance. The mountains of all this region are dotted with
+round, white, cement monuments, the boundary marks of different mining
+properties. By Mexican law each must be visible from the adjoining two,
+and in this pitched and tumbled country this requires many.
+
+Beyond the village we found, about the old Spanish workings, ancient,
+roofless, stone buildings with loop-holed turrets for bandits and niches
+for saints. These structures, as well as the waste dumped by the
+Spaniards, were being "repicked for values," and broken up and sent
+through the stamp-mill, the never-ending rumble of which sounded
+incessantly, like some distant water-fall; for with modern methods it
+pays to crush rock with even a few dollars a ton value in it, and the
+Americans of to-day mine much that the Spaniards with their crude
+methods cast aside or did not attempt to work. At a mine in the vicinity
+the ancient stone mansion serving as residence of the superintendent was
+torn down and sent through the stamping-mill, and a new one of less
+valuable rock erected. We descended 1600 feet into the mine of La Luz
+down a perfectly round, stone-lined shaft in a small iron bucket held by
+a one-inch wire cable and entirely in charge of peons--who fortunately
+either had nothing against us or did not dare to vent it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+BOUND ABOUT LAKE CHAPALA
+
+With the coming of November I left Guanajuato behind. The branch line
+down to Silao was soon among broad plains of corn, without rocks even
+along the flat, ragged, country roads, bringing to mind that it was long
+since I had walked on level and unobstructed ground. The crowding of the
+second-class car forced me to share a bench with a chorus girl of the
+company that had been castilianizing venerable Broadway favorites in
+Guanajuato's chief theater. She was about forty, looked it with compound
+interest, was graced with the form of a Panteón mummy, and a face--but
+some things are too horrible even to be mentioned in print. Most of the
+way she wept copiously, apparently at some secret a pocket mirror
+insisted on repeating to her as often as she drew it out, and regained
+her spirits only momentarily during the smoking of each of several
+cigarettes. Finally she took to saying her beads in a sepulchral,
+moaning voice, her eyes closed, and wagging her head from side to side
+in the rhythm of her professional calling, until we pulled into the
+one-story, adobe, checkerboard town. All the troupe except the two
+"stars" rode second-class, dressed much like peons, and carried their
+possessions in misshapen bundles under their arms. If the one
+performance I had seen was typical, this was far better treatment than
+they deserved.
+
+The express from El Paso and the North set me down in the early night at
+Irapuato, out of the darkness of which bobbed up a dozen old women, men,
+and boys with wailing cries of "Fresas!" For this is the town of
+perennial strawberries. The basket of that fruit heaped high and fully a
+foot in diameter which sat before me next morning as we rambled away
+westward toward Guadalajara cost _cuatro reales_--a quarter, and if
+the berries grew symmetrically smaller toward the bottom, an all-day
+appetite by no means brought to light the tiniest. The way lay across a
+level land bathed in sunshine, of extreme fertility, and watered by
+harnessed streams flowing down from the distant hills. All the day one
+had a sense of the richness of nature, not the prodigality of the
+tropics to make man indolent, but just sufficient to give full reward
+for reasonable exertion. The rich, black, fenceless plains were
+burnished here and there with little shallow lakes of the rainy season,
+and musical with wild birds of many species. Primitive well-sweeps
+punctuated the landscape, and now and then the church towers of some
+adobe village peered through the mesquite trees. In the afternoon
+grazing grew more frequent and herds of cattle and flocks of goats
+populated all the scene. Within the car and without, the hats of the
+peons, with all their sameness, were never exactly alike. Each bore some
+individuality, be it in shape, shade, material, or manner of wearing, as
+distinct as among the fair sex in other lands; and that without
+resorting to decorating them with flowers, vegetables, or dead
+birds. Some wore around them ribbons with huge letters proposing, "Viva
+----" this or that latest aspirant to the favor of the primitive-minded
+"pela'o," but these were always arranged in a manner to add to rather
+than detract from the artistic ensemble. Many a young woman of the same
+class was quite attractive in appearance, though thick bulky noses
+robbed all of the right to be called beautiful. They did not lose their
+charms, such as they were, prematurely, as do so many races of the
+South, and the simplicity of dress and hair arrangement added much to
+the pleasing general effect.
+
+As night descended we began to pant upward through low hills, wooded,
+but free from the rocks and boulders of a mining region, and in the
+first darkness drew up at Guadalajara, second city of Mexico. It is a
+place that adorns the earth. Jalisco State, of which this is the
+capital, has been called the Andalusia of Mexico, and the city is indeed
+a Seville of the West, though lacking in her spontaneity of life, for
+this cruder people is much more tempered with a constant fear of
+betraying their crudeness and in consequence much weighed down by
+"propriety." But its bright, central plaza has no equal to the
+north. Here as the band plays amid the orange trees heavy with ripening
+fruit, the more haughty of the population promenade the inner square,
+outside which stroll the peons and "lower classes"; though only custom
+seems responsible for the division. One misses in Mexico the genuine
+democracy of Spain. The idea of a conquered race still holds, and
+whoever has a strain of white in his veins--or even in the hue of his
+collar--considers it fitting to treat the Indian mass with a cold,
+indifferent tone of superiority. Yet in the outer circle the
+unprejudiced observer found more pleasing than within. One was reminded
+of Mark Twain's suggestion that complexions of some color wear best in
+tropical lands. In this, above all, the women of the rebozo were vastly
+superior to those who stepped from their carriages at about the
+beginning of the third number and took to parading, the two sexes in
+pairs marching in opposite directions at a snail's pace. The "women of
+the people" had more sense of the fitness of things than to ape the
+wealthy in dress, like the corresponding class in our own land, and
+their simplicity of attire stood out in attractive contrast to the pasty
+features and unexercised figures in "Parisian" garb of the inner circle.
+
+Guadalajara has the requisites of a real city. Its streets are well
+paved with macadam, and it even possesses garbage wagons. Indeed, in
+some respects it has carried "progress" too far, as in the case of the
+winking electric sign of Broadway proportions advertising a
+_camisería_--a local "shirtery," before which fascinated peons from
+the distant villages stand gazing as at one of the seven wonders of the
+universe. Beggars are few and there is none of the oppressive poverty of
+other Mexican cities. This, it is agreed, is due not merely to the
+extreme fertility of Jalisco, but to the kindness of nature in refusing
+to produce the maguey in the vicinity, so that drunkenness is at its
+lowest Mexican ebb and the sour stink of pulque shops nowhere assails
+the nostrils. For this curse of the peon will not endure long
+transportation. An abundance of cheap labor makes possible many little
+conveniences unknown in more industrial lands, and the city has a
+peaceful, soothing air and temperature, due perhaps to its ideal
+altitude of six thousand feet, that makes life drift along like a
+pleasant dream.
+
+But its nights are hideous. The Mexican seems to relish constant uproar,
+and if Guadalajara is ever to be the open-air health resort for frayed
+nerves and weakened lungs it aspires to, there must come a diligent
+suppression of unnecessary noises. As the evening gathering evaporates,
+leaving the plaza sprinkled with a few dreamy mortals and scattered
+policemen eating the lunch their wives bring and share with them,
+pandemonium seems to be released from its confinement. First these same
+preservers of law and order take to blowing their hair-raising whistles
+at least every ten minutes from one to another back and forth through
+every street, as if mutually to keep up their courage. Scores of the
+gilded youth on the way home from "playing the bear" before their
+favorite _rejas_ join together in bands to howl into the small
+hours their glee at the kindness of life, the entire stock of
+street-cars seems to be sent out nightly on some extended excursion with
+orders never to let their gongs fall silent, and long before dawn even
+the few who have succeeded in falling into a doze are snatched awake by
+an atrocious din of church-bells sufficient in number to supply heaven,
+nirvana, the realm of houris, and the Irish section of purgatory, with
+enough left over to furnish boiling pots for the more crowded section of
+the Hereafter. Then with a dim suggestion of dawn every living dog and
+fighting-cock, of which each inhabitant appears to possess at least a
+score, joins the forty thousand vendors of forty thousand different
+species of uselessness howling in at least as many different voices and
+tones, each a bit louder than all the others, until even an unoccupied
+wanderer concludes that sleep is an idle waste of an all too short
+existence.
+
+I brought up a day of random wandering in state's prison. The
+_Penitenciaría_ of Guadalajara is a huge, wheel-shaped building in
+the most modern style of that class of architecture. The bullet-headed
+youth in soldier's uniform and the complexion of a long-undusted carpet,
+leaning on his musket at the entrance, made no move to halt me, and I
+stepped forth on a patio forested with orange trees, to find that most
+of the public had preceded me, including some hundred fruit, tortilla,
+cigarette, and candy vendors. Here was no sign of prisoners. I
+approached another stern boy armed like a first-class cruiser in war
+time and he motioned upward with his gun barrel. The dwelling of the
+_comandante_ faced the patio on the second-story corridor. His son,
+aged five, met me with the information:
+
+"Papá 'stá dormido."
+
+But he was misinformed, for when his mother introduced me into the
+parlor, father, in shirt-sleeves, was already rubbing the sleep out of
+his eyes and preparing to light the first after-siesta cigarette. When
+my impressiveness had penetrated his reawakening intellect, he prepared
+me a document which, reduced to succinct English, amounted to the
+statement that the prison and all it contained was mine for the asking.
+
+A whiff of this sesame opened like magic the three immense iron doors
+through anterooms in charge of trusties, in prison garb of the material
+of blue overalls and caps shaped like a low fez. Inside, a "preso de
+confianza" serving as turnkey led the way along a great stone corridor
+to a little central patio with flowers and a central fountain babbling
+merrily. From this radiated fifteen other long-vaulted passages,
+seeming each fully a half mile in length; for with Latin love of the
+theatrical the farther ends had been painted to resemble an endless
+array of cells, even the numbers being continued above the false doors
+to minute infinity. Besides these imaginary ones there were some forty
+real places of confinement on each side of each corridor,
+three-cornered, stone rooms with a comfortable cot and noticeable
+cleanliness. The hundred or more convicts, wandering about or sitting in
+the sun of the patio, were only locked in them by night. Whenever we
+entered a corridor or a room, two strokes were sounded on a bell and all
+arose and stood at attention until we had passed. Yet the discipline was
+not oppressive, petty matters being disregarded. The corridor of those
+condemned to be shot was closed with an iron-barred gate, but the
+inmates obeyed with alacrity when my guide ordered them to step forth to
+be photographed.
+
+One of the passageways led to the _talleres_ or workshops, also
+long and vaulted and well-lighted by windows high up in the curve of the
+arched roof.
+
+These showed the stone walls to be at least four feet thick, yet the
+floor was of earth. On it along the walls sat men weaving straw ribbons
+to be sewn into hats on the American sewing-machines beyond. In side
+rooms were blacksmith, carpenter, and tinsmith shops in which all work
+was done by hand, the absence of machinery suggesting to the trusty in
+charge that Mexico is "muy pobre" as compared with other lands. Convicts
+were obliged to work seven hours a day. Scattered through the building
+were several small patios with patches of sun, in which many prisoners
+were engaged in making ingenious little knickknacks which they were
+permitted to sell for their own benefit. The speciality of one old
+fellow under life sentence was a coin purse with the slightly
+incongruous device, "Viva la Independencia!"
+
+There was a complete absence of vicious faces, at least faces more so
+than those of the great mass of peons outside. I recalled the assertions
+of cynical American residents that all Mexicans are criminals and that
+those in jail were only the ones who have had the misfortune to get
+caught. Certainly there was nothing in their outward appearance to
+distinguish the inmates from any gathering of the same class beyond
+prison walls. Off one corridor opened the bath patio, large, and gay
+with sunshine and flowers, with a large swimming pool and several
+smaller baths. The prisoners are required to bathe at least every
+Sunday. Within the penitentiary was a garden of several acres, on the
+walls above which guards patroled with loaded muskets and in which
+prisoners raised every species of fruit and vegetable known in the
+region. The institution indeed was fully self-supporting. The kitchen
+was lined with huge vats into which bushels of beans, corn, and the like
+were shoveled, and like the prison tailor, shoe, and barber shops, was
+kept in excellent order. Several short-time prisoners, among them many
+boys, volunteered to stand in appropriate attitudes before the heavy
+wall at the end of a three-cornered court where condemned men are shot
+at three paces in the dawn of many an early summer day. In one corridor
+the prison band, entirely made up of prisoners, was practising, and when
+I had been seated in state on a wooden bench they struck up several
+American favorites, ending with our national hymn, all played with the
+musical skill common to the Mexican Indian, even among those unable to
+read a note. On the whole the prison was as cheery and pleasant as
+fitted such an institution, except the women's ward, into which a
+vicious-looking girl admitted me sulkily at sight of the comandante's
+order. A silent, nondescript woman of forty took me in charge with all
+too evident ill-will and marched me around the patio on which opened the
+rooms of female inmates, while the fifty or more of them left off their
+cooking and washing for the male prisoners and stood at disgruntled
+attention in sullen silence. Their quarters were noticeably dirtier than
+those of the men. My guide took leave of me at the first of the three
+iron doors, having still to postpone his exit a year or more, and these
+again, fortunately, swung on their hinges as if by magic to let pass
+only one of the thousand of us within.
+
+On the mule-car that dragged and jolted us out to the "Niagara of
+Mexico" were three resident Germans who strove to be "simpático" to the
+natives by a clumsy species of "horse play." Their asininity is worth
+mention only because among those laughing at their antics was a peon who
+had been gashed across the hand, half-severing his wrist, yet who sat on
+the back platform without even a rag around the wound, though with a
+rope tourniquet above. Two gray and decrepit policemen rode with him and
+half way out stopped at a stone hut to arrest the perpetrator of the
+deed and bring him along, wrapped in the customary red sarape and
+indifference.
+
+The waterfall over a broad face of rock was pleasing but not
+extraordinary, and swinging on my rucksack I struck off afoot. The
+lightly rolling land was very fertile, with much corn, great droves of
+cattle, and many shallow lakes, its climate a pleasant cross between
+late spring and early fall. From El Castillo the path lay along the
+shimmering railroad, on which I outdid the train to Atequisa station.
+
+The orange vendors lolling here under the shade of their hats gave the
+distance to Chapala as fifteen miles, and advised me to hire a horse or
+take passage in the stage. This primitive bone-shaker, dark-red in
+color, the body sitting on huge leather springs, was drawn by four teams
+of mules in tandem, and before revolution spread over the land was
+customarily packed to the roof and high above it with excursionists to
+Mexico's chief inland watering-place. Now it dashed back and forth
+almost empty.
+
+I preferred my own legs. A soft road led between orange-groves--at the
+station were offered for sale seedless oranges compared to which those
+of California are pigmies--to the drowsing town of Atequisa. Through one
+of its crumbling stone gates the way spread at large over its sandy,
+sun-bathed plaza, then contracted again to a winding wide trail, rising
+leisurely into the foothills beyond. A farmer of sixty, homeward bound
+to his village of Santa Cruz on a loose-eared ass, fell in with me. He
+lacked entirely that incommunicative manner and half-resentful air I had
+so often encountered in the Mexican, and his country dialect whiled away
+the time as we followed the unfenced "road" around and slowly upward
+into hills less rugged than those about Guanajuato and thinly covered
+with coarse grass and small brush. Twenty-one years ago he had worked
+here as _mozo_ for "gringoes," my compatriots. They had offered
+him a whole peso a day if he would not get married. But "he and she both
+wanted," so "qué quiera usté'"? They had started farming on a little
+piece of rocky ridge. He would point it out to me when we came
+nearer. By and by he had bought another piece of land for fifty pesos
+and then _poco á poco_ for forty pesos some more. Then for
+twenty-four pesos and fifty centavos he had bought a cow, and the
+_vaca_ before long gave them a fine calf and twelve
+_cuartillos_ of milk a day. So that he was able to buy another
+heifer and then an ox and finally another ox and--
+
+Whack! It took many a thump and prod and "Bur-r-r-r-r-r-o!" to make the
+pretty little mouse-colored donkey he was riding keep up with me--and
+what did I think he paid for him? Eighteen pesos! Sí, señor, ní más ní
+menos. A bargain, eh? And for the other one at home, which is larger,
+only twenty-two pesos, and for the one _they_ stole from him,
+fifteen pesos and a bag of corn. And once _they_ stole all three of
+the _burritos_ and he ran half way to Colima and had them arrested
+and got the _animalitos_ back. So that now he had two oxen--pray
+God they were still safe--and two burros and three pieces of land and a
+good wife--only yesterday she fell down and broke her arm and he had had
+to cut sticks to tie it up and she would have to work without using it
+for a long time--
+
+Whack! "Anda bur-r-r-r-r-ro!" and once he owned it he never could get
+himself to sell an animalito. They were sometimes useful to plow and
+plant anyway, and this life of _sembrar_ and _cosechar_ was
+just the one for him. The cities, bah!--though he had been twice to
+Guadalajara and only too glad to get away again--and wasn't I tired
+enough to try the burrito a while, I should find her pace smooth as
+sitting on the ground. No? Well, at least if I got tired I could come
+and spend the night in his _casita_, a very poor little house, to
+be sure, which he had built himself long ago, soon after they were
+married, but there I would be in my own house, and his wife--or perhaps
+now he himself--would _ordeñar la vaca_ and there would be fresh
+milk and--
+
+So on for some seven or eight miles. Here and there the road passed
+through an open gate as into a farmyard, though there were no adjoining
+fences to mark these boundaries of some new hacienda or estate. From the
+highest point there was a pretty retrospect back on Atequisa and the
+railroad and the broad valley almost to far-off Guadalajara, and ahead,
+also still far away, Lake Chapala shimmering in the early
+sunset. Between lay broad, rolling land, rich with flowers and
+shrubbery, and with much cultivation also, one vast field of ripening
+Indian corn surely four miles long and half as wide stretching like a
+sea to its surrounding hills, about its edge the leaf and branch shacks
+of its guardians. Maize, too, covered all the slope down to the
+mountain-girdled lake, and far, far away on a point of land, like Tyre
+out in the Mediterranean, the twin towers of the church of Chapala stood
+out against the dimming lake and the blue-gray range beyond.
+
+Two leagues off it the peasant pointed out the ridge that hid his casita
+and his animalitos and his good wife--with her broken arm now--and
+regretting that I would not accept his poor hospitality, for I must be
+tired, he rode away down a little barranca walled by tall bushes with
+brilliant masses of purple, red, and pink flowers and so on up to the
+little patch of corn which--yes, surely, I could see a corner of it from
+here, and from it, if only I would come, I should see the broad blue
+view of Chapala lake, and--My road descended and went down into the
+night, plentifully scattered with loose stones. Before it had grown
+really dark I found myself casting a shadow ahead, and turned to find an
+enormous red moon gazing dreamily at me from the summit of the road
+behind. Then came the suburbs and enormous ox-carts loaded with
+everything, and donkeys without number passing silent-footed in the
+sand, and peons, lacking entirely the half-insolence and pulque-sodden
+faces of Guanajuato region, greeted me unfailingly with "Adiós" or
+"Buenas noches."
+
+But once in the cobble-paved village I must pay high in the "Hotel
+Victor"--the larger ones being closed since anarchy had confined the
+wealthy to their cities--for a billowy bed and a chicken centuries old
+served by waiters in evening dress and trained-monkey manners. The free
+and easy old _casa de asistencia_ of Guadalajara was far more to my
+liking. But at least the landlord loaned me a pair of trunks for a
+moonlight swim in Lake Chapala, whispering some secret to its sandy
+beaches in the silence of the silver-flooded night.
+
+It is the largest lake in Mexico, second indeed only to Titicaca among
+the lofty sheets of water of the Western world. More than five thousand
+feet above the sea, it is shallow and stormy as Lake Erie. Waves were
+dashing high at the foot of the town in the morning. Its fishermen are
+ever fearful of its fury and go to pray for a safe return from every
+trip before their patron St. Peter in the twin-spired village church up
+toward which the lake was surging this morning as if in anger that this
+place of refuge should be granted its legitimate victims.
+
+Its rage made the journey by water I had planned to Ribera Castellanos
+inadvisable, even had an owner of one of the little open boats of the
+fishermen been willing to trust himself on its treacherous bosom, and by
+blazing eleven I was plodding back over the road of yesterday. The
+orange vendors of Atequisa gathered around me at the station, marveling
+at the strength of my legs. In the train I shared a bench with a
+dignified old Mexican of the country regions, who at length lost his
+reserve sufficiently to tell me of the "muy amigo gringo" whose picture
+he still had on the wall of his house since the day twenty-seven years
+ago when my compatriot had stopped with him on a tour of his native
+State, carrying a small pack of merchandise which gave him the entrée
+into all houses, but which he purposely held at so high a price that
+none would buy.
+
+From Ocotlán station a broad level highway, from which a glimpse is had
+of the sharp, double peak of Colima volcano, runs out to Ribera
+Castellanos. Sam Rogers was building a tourist hotel there. Its broad
+lawn sloped down to the edge of Lake Chapala, lapping at the shores like
+some smaller ocean; from its verandas spread a view of sixty miles
+across the Mexican Titicaca, with all vacation sports, a perennial
+summer without undue heat, and such sunsets as none can describe. The
+hacienda San Andrés, also American owned, embraced thousands of acres of
+rich bottom land on which already many varieties of fruit were producing
+marvelously, as well as several mountain peaks and a long stretch of
+lake front. The estate headquarters was like some modern railway
+office, with its staff of employees. In the nearby stables horses were
+saddled for us and we set off for a day's trip all within the confines
+of the farm, under guidance of the bulky Mexican head overseer in all
+his wealth of national garb and armament.
+
+For miles away in several directions immense fields were being plowed by
+dozens of ox-teams, the white garments of the drivers standing out
+sharply against the brown landscape. Two hours' riding around the lagoon
+furnishing water for irrigation brought us to a village of some size,
+belonging to the estate. The wife of one of the bee-tenders emerged
+from her hut with bowls of clear rich honey and tortillas, and the
+manner of a serf of medieval times before her feudal lord. The bees
+lived in hollow logs with little thatched roofs. For several miles more
+the rich bottom lands continued. Then we began to ascend through bushy
+foothills, and cultivation dropped behind us, as did the massive head
+overseer, whose weight threatened to break his horse's back. Well up we
+came upon the "chaparral," the hacienda herdsman, tawny with sunburn
+even to his leather garments. He knew by name every animal under his
+charge, though the owners did not even know the number they possessed. A
+still steeper climb, during the last of which even the horses had to be
+abandoned, brought us to a hilltop overlooking the entire lake, with the
+villages on its edge, and range after range of the mountains of Jalisco
+and Michoacán. Our animals were more than an hour picking their way
+down the stony trails between all but perpendicular cornfields, the
+leaves of which had been stripped off to permit the huge ear at the top
+the more fully to ripen. A boulder set in motion at the top of a field
+would have been sure death to the man or horse it struck at the bottom.
+
+The hotel launch set me across the lake next morning. From the
+rock-tumbled fisher-town of La Palma an arriero pointed out to me far
+away across the plains of Michoacán a mountain of striking resemblance
+to Mt. Tabor in Palestine, as the landmark on the slopes of which to
+seek that night's lodging. The treeless land of rich black loam was flat
+as a table, yet the trail took many a turn, now to avoid the dyke of a
+former governor and Porfirio Diaz, who planned to pump dry this end of
+the lake, now for some reason only those with Mexican blood in their
+veins could fathom. Peons were fishing in the irrigating ditches with
+machetes, laying their huge, sluggish victims all but cut in two on the
+grass behind them.
+
+Noon brought Sahuayo, a large village in an agricultural district, in
+one of the huts of which ten cents produced soup, pork, frijoles,
+tortillas, and coffee, to say nothing of the tablecloth in honor of so
+unexpected a guest and a dozen oranges for the thirst beyond. The new
+trail struck off across the fields almost at right angles to the one
+that had brought me. I was already on the hacienda Guaracha, largest of
+the State of Michoacán, including within its holdings a dozen such
+villages as this, but the owner to whom I bore a letter lived still
+leagues distant. Dwellers on the estate must labor on it when required
+or seek residence elsewhere, which means far distant. All with whom I
+spoke on the subject, native or foreigners, seemed agreed that the peon
+prefers this plan to being thrown on his own responsibility.
+
+The traveler could easily fancy himself in danger in this vast fenceless
+and defenseless space. Enormous herds were visible for miles in every
+direction, bulls roamed here and there, bellowing moodily, cattle and
+horses by hundreds waded and grazed in the shallow swamps across which
+the dyked path led. All the brilliant day "Mt. Tabor" stood forth in
+all its beauty across the plain in this clear air, and the sun brought
+sweat even at more than a mile above the sea.
+
+I was in the very heart of Birdland. These broad, table-flat stretches
+of rich plateau, now half inundated, seemed some enormous outdoor
+aviary. Every species of winged creature one had hoped ever to see even
+in Zoo cages or the cases of museums seemed here to live and fly and
+have its songful being. Great sluggish _zopilotes_ of the horrid
+vulture family strolled or circled lazily about, seeking the scent of
+carrion. Long-legged, snow-white herons stood in the marshes. Great
+flocks of small black birds that could not possibly have numbered less
+than a hundred thousand each rose and fell and undulated in waves and
+curtains against the background of mountains beyond, screening it as by
+some great black veil. There were blood-red birds, birds blue as
+turquoise, some of almost lilac hue, every grassy pond was overspread
+with wild ducks so tame they seemed waiting to be picked up and
+caressed, eagles showed off their spiral curves in the sky above like
+daring aviators over some admiring field of spectators; everywhere the
+stilly hum of semi-tropical life was broken only by the countless and
+inimitable bird calls.
+
+As my shadow grew ungainly, the dyked path struck across a long wet
+field against the black soil of which the dozens of white-clad peons
+with their mattocks gleamed like grains of rice on an ebony surface.
+Beyond, it entered foothills, flanked a peak, and joined a wide road
+leading directly to an immense cluster of buildings among trees. The sun
+was firing the western horizon. From every direction groups of
+white-garbed peons were drawing like homing pigeons toward this center
+of the visible landscape. I reached it with them and, passing through
+several massive gates, mounted through a corral or cobbled stable yard
+with many bulky, two-wheeled carts and fully two hundred mules, then up
+an inclined, cobbled way through a garden of flowers to the immense
+pillared veranda with cement floor of the owner's hacienda residence.
+
+The building was in the form of a hollow square, enclosing a flowery
+patio as large as many a town plaza. Don Diego was not at home, nor
+indeed were any of his immediate family, who preferred the urban
+pleasures of Guadalajara. The Indian door-tender brought me to "Don
+Carlos," a fat, cheerful man of forty in a white jacket, close-fitting
+trousers, and an immense revolver attached to the left side of his broad
+and heavily weighted cartridge-belt. I presented my letter of
+introduction from an American friend of the owner and was soon entangled
+in the coils of Mexican pseudo-politeness. Don Carlos tore himself
+away from his priceless labors as manager of the hacienda and took me up
+on the flat roof of the two-story house, from which a fine view was had
+for miles in all directions; indeed, nearly a half of the estate could
+be seen, with its peon villages, its broad stretches of new-plowed
+fields, and the now smokeless chimney of the sugar mill among the trees.
+
+The interest of the manager did not extend beyond the cut-and-dried
+formalities common to all Mexicans. In spite of his honeyed words, it
+was evident he looked upon me as a necessary evil, purposely come to the
+hacienda to seek food and lodging, and to be gotten rid of as soon as
+possible, compatible with the sacred Arabian rules of hospitality. I had
+not yet learned that a letter of introduction in Latin America, given on
+the slightest provocation, is of just the grade of importance such
+custom would warrant. Not that Don Carlos was rude. Indeed, he strove
+outwardly to be highly _simpático_. But one read the insincerity
+underneath by a kind of intuition, and longed for the abrupt but
+honestly frank Texan.
+
+The two front corners of the estate residence were taken up by the
+hacienda store and church respectively--a handy arrangement by virtue of
+which whatever went out the pay window to the peons (and it was not
+much) came in again at one or the other of the corner doors. Adjoining
+the building and half surrounding it was an entire village, with a
+flowery plaza and promenades for its inhabitants. The owners of the
+estate were less churlishly selfish than their prototypes in our own
+country, in that they permitted the public, which is to say their own
+workmen and families, to go freely anywhere in the family residence and
+its patio, except into the dwelling-rooms proper.
+
+When darkness came on we sat in the piazza garden overlooking the
+mule-yard. The evening church service over, the estate priest came to
+join us, putting on his huge black "Texas" hat and lighting a cigarette
+on the chapel threshold. He wore an innumerable series of long black
+robes, which still did not conceal the fact that the curve from chest to
+waist was the opposite of that common to sculptured figures, and his
+hand-shake was particularly soft and snaky. He quickly took charge of
+the conversation and led it into anecdotes very few of which could be
+set down by the writers of modern days, denied the catholic privileges
+of old Boccaccio and Rabelais.
+
+Toward eight supper was announced. But instead of the conversational
+feast amid a company of educated Mexican men and women I had pictured to
+myself during the day's tramp, I was led into a bare stone room with a
+long, white-clothed table, on a corner of which sat in solitary state
+two plates and a salt cellar. A peon waiter brought an ample, though by
+no means epicurean, supper, through all which Don Carlos sat smoking
+over his empty plate opposite me, alleging that he never ate after
+noonday for dread of taking on still greater weight, and striving to
+keep a well-bred false politeness in the voice in which he answered my
+few questions. He had spent a year in a college of New Jersey, but had
+not even learned to pronounce the name of that State. Having pointed
+out to me the room I was to occupy, he excused himself for a
+"momentito," and I have never seen him since.
+
+Evidently horrified at the sight of a white man, even if only a
+"gringo," traveling on foot, the manager had insisted on lending me a
+horse and mozo to the railroad station of Moreno, fifteen miles distant,
+but still within the confines of the hacienda. It may be also that he
+gave orders to have me out of his sight before he rose. At any rate it
+was barely three when a knock at the door aroused me and by four I
+stumbled out into the black starlit night to find saddled for me in the
+mule-corral what might by a considerable stretch of the word be called a
+horse. The mozo was well mounted, however, and the family chauffeur,
+carrying in one hand a basket of eggs he had been sent to fetch the
+estate owner in Guadalajara, rode a magnificent white animal. Without
+even the formal leave-taking cup of coffee, we set off on the road to
+the eastward. For road in Mexico always read--at best a winding stretch
+of dried mud with narrow paths meandering through the smoother parts of
+it, the whole tumbled everywhere with stones and rocks and broken by
+frequent unexpected deep cracks and stony gorges. My "horse" was as
+striking a caricature of that species of quadruped as could have been
+found in an all-night search in the region, which indeed there was
+reason to believe had been produced in just that manner. But at least it
+had the advantage of being unable to keep up with my companions, leaving
+me alone behind in far more pleasant company.
+
+We wound through several long peon villages, mere grass huts on the bare
+earth floors of which the inhabitants lay rolled up in their blankets. I
+had not been supplied with spurs, essential to all horsemanship in
+Mexico, and was compelled at thirty second intervals to prick up the
+jade between my legs with the point of a lead pencil, the only weapon at
+hand, or be left behind entirely. As the stars dimmed and the horizon
+ahead took on a thin gray streak, peons wrapped in their sarapes passed
+now and then noiselessly in their soft leather _huarachas_ close
+beside me. In huts along the way frowsy, unwashed women might be heard
+already crushing in their stone mortars, under stone rolling-pins, maize
+for the morning atole and tortillas, while thick smoke began to wander
+lazily out from the low doorways. Swiftly it grew lighter until suddenly
+an immense red sun leaped full-grown above the ragged horizon ahead,
+just as we sighted an isolated station building in the wilderness that
+now surrounded us on all sides.
+
+A two-car train rambled through a light-wooded, half-mountainous
+country, stopping at every collection of huts to pick up or set down a
+peon or two, and drew up at length in Zamora. It was a populous,
+flat-roofed, ill-smelling, typical Mexican city of checkerboard pattern,
+on the plaza of which faced the "Hotel Morelos," formerly the "Porfirio
+Diaz," but with that seditious name now carefully painted over. Being
+barely a mile above sea-level, the town has a suggestion of the tropics
+and the temperature of midday is distinctly noticeable.
+
+Zamora ranks as the most fanatical spot in Michoacán, which is itself
+so throttled by the church that it is known as the "estado torpe," the
+torpid State. Its bishop is rated second in all Mexico only to that of
+the sacred city of Guadalupe. Here are monasteries, and monks, and
+nuns in seclusion, priests roam the streets in robes and vestments,
+form processions, and display publicly the "host" and other
+paraphernalia of their faith; all of which is forbidden by the laws of
+Mexico. When I emerged from the hotel, every person in sight, from
+newsboys to lawyers in frock coats, was kneeling wherever he happened
+to be, on his veranda, on the sidewalk, or in the middle of the
+street, his hat laid on the ground before him, facing a high churchman
+in flowing robes and a "stove-pipe" hat strutting across the plaza
+toward the cathedral. Traveling priests wear their regalia of office
+as far as Yurécuaro on the main line, changing there to civilian garb.
+
+Nor is the power of the church here confined to things spiritual. Vast
+portions of the richest sections of the State are church owned, though
+ostensibly property of the lawyers that control them. Holding the
+reins, the ecclesiastics make it impossible for companies to open up
+enterprises except under their tutelage. The population of the State is
+some eighty per cent, illiterate, yet even foreigners find it impossible
+to set up schools for their own employees. The women _of all
+classes_ are almost without exception illiterate. The church refuses
+to educate them, and sternly forbids any one else to do so. An American
+Catholic long resident reported even the priests ignorant beyond belief,
+and asserted that usury and immorality was almost universal among the
+churchmen of all grades. The peasants are forced to give a tenth of all
+they produce, be it only a patch of corn, to the church, which holds its
+stores until prices are high, while the poverty-stricken peon must sell
+for what he can get. Those married by the church are forbidden to
+contract the civil ceremony, though the former is unlawful and lack of
+the latter makes their children legally illegitimate. The local form of
+worship includes many of the barbaric superstitions of the Indians
+grafted on the stems of Catholicism, and weird pagan dances before the
+altar are a part of many a _fiesta_. The town has already churches
+sufficient to house easily all the population, yet an immense new
+cathedral is building. The purpose of its erection, according to the
+bishop, is "for the greater glorification of God."
+
+I spent two days with the American superintendent of "Platanal," the
+electric plant run by water power a few miles out of town through fields
+of head-high maize. The night before my arrival bandits had raided the
+establishment and one of them had been killed. The president of Zamora
+had profusely thanked the "gringo" in charge when he presented himself
+in town with the body. On pay-day the manager went and came from the
+bank with two immense revolvers and a loaded rifle.
+
+The current supplied by the rapids of "Platanal" is carried on
+high-tension wires to several cities far distant, including Guanajuato,
+a hundred miles away. Let the dynamo here break down and the cage of
+"Pingüico" mine hangs suspended in its shaft and Stygian darkness falls
+in the labyrinth below. In the rainy season lightning causes much
+trouble, and immense flocks of birds migrating south or north, according
+to the period of year, keep the repair gangs busy by flying against the
+wires and causing short circuits through their dead bodies. Woodpeckers
+eat away the wooden cross-pieces on the iron towers with disheartening
+rapidity. The company is philanthropically inclined toward its
+employees. Even the peons are given two weeks' vacation on full pay,
+during which many rent a patch of land on the mountainside to plant with
+corn. A savings bank system is maintained, strict sanitation is insisted
+upon in the houses furnished by the company, and the methods of the
+haciendas of the region, of paying the peon the lowest possible wages
+for his labor and produce and selling to him at the highest possible
+prices at the estate store, thereby keeping him in constant debt and a
+species of slavery, are avoided. The result is a permanent force of
+high Mexican grade. All attempts of the company to introduce schools,
+however, even on its own property, have been frustrated by the powerful
+churchmen. A bright young native in the plant was an expert at figures,
+which he had been surreptitiously taught by his "gringo" superior, but
+he could not sign his name.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACÁN
+
+My compatriot strongly opposed my plan of walking to Uruapan--at least
+without an armed guard! The mountains were full of bandits, the Tarascan
+Indians, living much as they did at the time of the Conquest, did not
+even speak Spanish, they were unfriendly to whites, and above all
+dangerously superstitious on the subject of photography. There are
+persons who would consider it perilous to walk the length of Broadway,
+and lose sight even of the added attraction of that reputed drawback.
+
+I was off at dawn. Hundreds of Indians from the interior had slept in
+scattered groups all along the road to town, beside the produce they had
+come to sell on market day. For it is against the law to be found out of
+doors in Zamora after ten! My compatriot had twice fallen foul of the
+vigilant police there and been roundly mulcted--once the bolt of the
+hired carriage in which he was riding broke, the conveyance turned
+turtle, mashed his foot, and covered his face with blood, and he was
+imprisoned and fined for "escándalo." On another occasion he spent some
+time in jail because his mozo behind him accidentally knocked over the
+lantern of a policeman set in the middle of the street.
+
+But let us leave so straight-laced a spot behind. The rocky "road"
+could not hold to the same opinion for a hundred consecutive yards, but
+kept changing its mind as often as it caught sight of some new corner of
+the landscape. The Indians, who crowded the way during the first hour,
+were not friendly, but neither did they show any dangerous propensities,
+and never failed in greeting if spoken to first. There were many of them
+of pure aboriginal blood. The stony road climbed somewhat to gain
+Tangantzicuaro, then stumbled across a flatter country growing more
+wooded to Chilota, a large town with a tiny plaza and curious,
+overhanging eaves, reminiscent of Japan, stretching down its
+checker-board streets in all directions.
+
+The trail, which had gone a mile or more out of its way to visit the
+place, no sooner left it than it fell abruptly into the bed of what in
+other weather would have been a rocky mountain torrent, and set off with
+it in a totally new direction, as if, having fallen in with congenial
+company, it had entirely forgotten the errand on which it had first set
+forth. The land was fertile, with much corn. In time road and river bed
+parted company, though only after several attempts, like old gossips,
+and the former took to climbing upward through thin forests of pine in
+which the wind whispered an imitation of some distant, small
+waterfall. For some miles there were no houses. Up and down and in and
+out of valleys thin with pine we wandered, with now and then a rough
+shelter of rubbish and thatch, halting places of traveling Indians or
+the guard-houses of their fields, while the sky ahead was always filled
+half-way up by peaks of many shapes wooded in every inch with brightest
+evergreens. Michoacán is celebrated for its forests.
+
+The population showed no great difference from the peasants elsewhere. I
+ran early into their superstitions against photography, however, their
+belief, common to many uncivilized races, being that once their image is
+reproduced any fate that befalls it must occur to them in person. When I
+stepped into a field toward a man behind his wooden plow, he said in a
+very decided tone of voice, "No, señor, no quiero!"
+
+"Why not?" I asked.
+
+"Porque no quiero, señor," and he swung the sort of small adze he
+carried to break up the clods of the field rather loosely and with a
+determined gleam in his eye. I did not want the picture so badly as all
+that.
+
+There was no such objection in the straggling town made of thatch and
+rubbish I found along the way early in the afternoon. The hut I entered
+for food had an unleveled earth floor, many wide cracks in the roof, and
+every inch within was black with soot of the cooking-stove--three large
+stones with a steaming earthen pot on them. There was _carne de
+carnero_, tortillas and water, all for five cents. The weak-kneed
+table was spread with a white cloth, there were several awkward,
+_shallow_, home-made chairs, and against the wall a large primitive
+sideboard with glistening brown earthen pots and carefully polished
+plates and bowls. When I had photographed the interior, la senora asked
+if I would take a second picture, and raced away to another hut. She
+soon returned with a very small and poor amateur print of two peons in
+Sunday dress. One of them was her son, who had been killed by a falling
+pine, and the simple creature fancied the magic contrivance I carried
+could turn this tiny likeness into a life-size portrait.
+
+Beyond, were more rocks and wooded mountains, with vast seas of Indian
+corn stretching to pine-clad cliffs, around the "shores" of which were
+dozens of make-shift shacks for the guardians against theft of the
+grain. Later I passed an enormous field of maize, which more than a
+hundred Indians of both sexes and every age that could stand on its own
+legs were harvesting. It was a communal corn-field, of which there are
+many in this region. They picked the ears from the dry stalks still
+standing and, tossing them into baskets, heaped them up in various parts
+of the field and at little temporary shanties a bit above the general
+level on the surrounding "coast." As I passed, the gang broke up and
+peons in all colors, male, female, and in embryo, went away in all
+directions like a scattering flock of birds.
+
+Thus far there had been no suggestion of the reputed dangers of the
+road. But trouble is never far off in Mexico, since the failure of its
+rapidly changing governments to put down bands of marauders has given
+every rascal in the country the notion of being his own master. The sun
+was just setting when, among several groups coming and going, I heard
+ahead five peons, maudlin with mescal, singing and howling at the top of
+their voices. As they drew near, one of them said something to his
+companions about "armas." I fancied he was expressing some idle drunken
+wonder as to whether I was armed or not, and as he held a hand behind
+him as if it might grasp a rock, I kept a weather eye on him as we
+approached. Had the weapon I carried in sight been a huge six-shooter,
+even without cartridges, it would probably have been more effective than
+the toy automatic well loaded. As the group passed, howling drunkenly, a
+veritable giant of a fellow suddenly jumped toward me with an oath. I
+drew my putative weapon, and at the same moment the hand I had guessed
+to be full of rock appeared with an enormous revolver, shining new. With
+drunken flourishes the peon invited me to a duel. I kept him
+unostentatiously covered but continued serenely on my way. To have
+shown fear would have been as dangerous as for a lion-tamer in the cage
+with his pets. On the other hand, to have killed or seriously wounded
+one of the group would in all likelihood have meant at least a
+none-too-well-housed delay of several years in my journey, for the
+courts of Mexico seldom admit pleas of provocation from a "gringo." The
+group bawled after me and finally, when I was nearly a hundred yards
+beyond, the fellow fired four shots in my general direction. But as his
+bright new weapon, like so many furnished his class by our enterprising
+arms factories, was made to sell rather than to shoot, and his
+marksmanship was distinctly tempered with mescal fumes, the four bullets
+harmlessly kicked up the dust at some distance on as many sides of me,
+with danger chiefly to the several groups of frightened peasants
+cowering behind all the rocks and rises of ground in the vicinity.
+
+The dangers of the road in Mexico are chiefly from peons mixed with
+fire-water. When he is sober, the native's attitude verges on the
+over-cautious. But it is a double danger to the wandering "gringo," for
+the reason above mentioned, while the native who kills a foreigner not
+infrequently escapes with impunity, and "gun toting" is limited now
+among all classes of the men only by the disparity between their wealth
+and the price of a weapon.
+
+As I passed on over the rise of ground ahead, huddled groups of men,
+women, and children fell in after me as if for protection from their own
+people. At dusk I entered Paracho with a good thirty miles behind
+me. It was a quaint little town in a lap of valley surrounded by pined
+hills and with the overhanging Japanese eaves peculiar to the region.
+The inhabitants were entirely peons and Indians, none in "European"
+dress. The vision of being carried into the place with a few stray bits
+of lead lodged in one's anatomy was not alluring, and the dark dirty
+little _cárcel_ on the plaza looked equally uninteresting.
+
+I turned in at the "Mesón de la Providencia." The keeper gave his
+attention chiefly to his little liquor and corn shop wide-opening on the
+street. There were several large rooms above, however, facing the great
+corral where mules and asses were munching and arrieros had spread their
+straw and blankets for the night, and in at least one of them was not
+merely a wooden-floored cot but two sheets to go with it. I bathed in
+the tin washbasin and turned out redressed for a turn through the town.
+It swarmed with liquor-shops. Apparently any one with nothing else to do
+could set up a little drunkery or street-stand without government
+interference. There was no pulque, the maguey being unknown to the
+region, but bottled mescal and aguardiente de caña amply made up for
+it. It seemed uncanny that one could talk with ease to these unlettered
+dwellers in the wilderness in the same tongue learned in a peaceful
+class-room of the far North. A towsled woman or child drifted now and
+then into the mesón shop to buy a Mexican cent's worth of firewood. The
+woman who kept the shanty _fonda_ down the street boasted of having
+lived nineteen months in California in her halcyon days, but was obliged
+to borrow enough of me in advance to buy the ingredients of the scanty
+supper she finally prepared. By eight the corral was snoring with
+arrieros and I ascended to my substantial couch.
+
+A wintry cold of the highlands hung over Paracho when dawn crawled in to
+find me shivering under a light blanket. As I left the place behind, the
+sun began to peer through the crest pines of a curiously formed mountain
+to the east, and to rend and tear the heavy fog banks hanging over the
+town and valley. Peons tight-wrapped in their blankets from eyes to
+knees slipped noiselessly past. There was a penetrating chill in the
+air, the fields were covered white with what seemed to be hoar frost,
+and the grassy way was wet with dew as after a heavy shower.
+
+Within half an hour the way began to rise and soon entered an immense
+pine forest without a sign of habitation. Tramping was delightful
+through what seemed a wild, untamed, and unteutonized Harz, with only
+the faint road and an occasional stump to show man had passed that way
+before. Huge birds circled majestically over the wooded hills and
+valleys of which the trail caught frequent brief but wide vistas. The
+road would have just suited Hazlitt, for it never left off winding, both
+in and out through the whispering forest and in and out of itself by
+numberless paths, often spreading over a hundred yards of width, and
+rolling and pitching like a ship at sea. As in most of Mexico, wheeled
+traffic would here have been impossible.
+
+By eight I could stuff my coat into my knapsack. The day's journey was
+short, and twice I lay an hour on a grassy knoll gazing at the birds and
+leisurely drifting clouds above and listening to the soft whispering of
+the pines. Then an unraveled trail led gradually downward, fell in with
+a broad sandy "road" that descended more sharply to a still swifter
+cobbled way, and about me grew up a land reminiscent of Ceylon, with
+many frail wooden houses on either side among banana groves, fruit for
+sale before them, and frequent streams of clear water babbling past.
+But it was only half-tropical, and further down the way was lined with
+huge trees resembling the elm.
+
+Uruapan was just high enough above the real tropics to be
+delightful. The attitude of its people, too, was pleasing. If not
+exactly friendly, they lacked that sour incommunicativeness of the
+higher plateau. Very few were in modern costume and to judge from the
+crowd of boys that gathered round me as I wrote my notes in a plaza
+bench, the arrival of a white man in this largely Indian town was an
+event not to be slighted. There was a general air of more satisfaction
+with life in the languid country place where nature rewards all labor
+quickly and well, and where nearly all have gardens and orchards of
+their own to make them independent of working for others at a scanty
+wage.
+
+Its plaza lies a bit higher than the rest of the town, and from it
+straight streets of one-story houses, all of different slope, flow
+gently down, to be lost a few blocks away in greenery. The roofs of tile
+or a long untapered shingle are not flat, as elsewhere, but with a slope
+for the tropical rains. Patio life is well developed. Within the blank
+walls of the central portion all the rooms open on sun-flooded, inner
+gardens and whole orchards within which pass almost all the family
+activities, even to veranda dining-rooms in the edge of the shade. Dense
+groves of banana and coffee trees surround most of the uncrowded, adobe
+dwellings. In the outskirts the houses are of wood, with sharp-peaked
+roofs, and little hovels of mud and rubbish loll in the dense-black cool
+shadows of the productive groves and of the immense trees that are a
+feature of the place. Flowers bloom everywhere, and all vegetation is
+of the deepest green. On every side the town dies away into domesticated
+jungle beyond which lie such pine forests, vast corn fields, and
+washed-out trails as on the way thither from Zamora.
+
+There is not a "sight" of the slightest importance in Uruapan. But the
+place itself is a sight worth long travel, with its soft climate like
+the offspring of the wedded North and South, a balmy, gentle existence
+where is only occasionally felt the hard reality of life that runs
+beneath, when man shows himself less kindly than nature. A man offered
+to sell me for a song a tract bordering the river, with a "house" ready
+for occupancy, and had the place and all that goes with it been portable
+we should quickly have come to terms. For Uruapan is especially a beauty
+spot along the little Cupatitzio, where water clearer than that of Lake
+Geneva foams down through the dense vegetation and under little bridges
+quaint and graceful as those of Japan.
+
+The sanitary arrangements, of course, are Mexican. Women in bands wash
+clothes along the shady banks, both sexes bathe their light-chocolate
+skins in sunny pools, there were even horses being scrubbed in the
+transparent stream, and below all this others dipped their drinking
+water. Here and there the water was led off by many little channels and
+overhead wooden troughs to irrigate the gardens and to run little mills
+and cigarette factories.
+
+In the outskirts I passed the city slaughter-house. A low atone wall
+separated from the street a large corral; with a long roof on posts, a
+stone floor, and a rivulet of water down through it occupying the center
+of the compound. The cattle, healthy, medium-sized steers worth fifteen
+dollars a head in this section, were lassoed around the horns and
+dragged under the roof, where another dexterously thrown noose bound
+their feet together and threw them on the stone floor. They were neither
+struck nor stunned in any way. When they were so placed that their
+throats hung over the rivulet, a butcher made one single quick thrust
+with a long knife near the collarbone and into the heart. Boys caught
+the blood in earthen bowls as it gushed forth and handed it to various
+women hanging over the enclosing wall. The animal gave a few agonized
+bellows, a few kicks, and died. Each was quickly skinned and quartered,
+the more unsavory portions at once peddled along the wall, and
+bare-headed Indians carried a bleeding quarter on their black thick hair
+to the hooks on either side of pack horses which boys drove off to town
+as they were loaded. There the population bought strips and chunks of
+the still almost palpitating meat, ran a string through an end of each
+piece, and carried it home under the glaring sun.
+
+All this is commonplace. But the point of the scene was the quite
+evident _pleasure_ all concerned seemed to take in the unpleasant
+business. Most of us eat meat, but we do not commonly find our
+recreation in slaughter-houses. Here whole crowds of boys, dogs, and
+noisy youths ran about the stone floor, fingering the still pulsating
+animal, mimicking its dying groans amid peals of laughter, wallowing in
+its ebbing blood, while fully as large an assemblage of women, girls,
+and small children hung over the wall in a species of ecstatic glee at
+the oft-repeated drama. Death, especially a bloody one, appeared to
+awaken a keen enjoyment, to quicken the sluggard pulse of even this
+rather peaceful Tarascan tribe. One could easily fancy them watching
+with the same ebullient joy the dying struggles of helpless human beings
+butchered in the same way. The killing of the trussed and fallen animal
+over the rivulet recalled the cutting out of the heart of human victims
+on the sacrificial stones amid the plaudits of the Aztec multitude and
+the division of the still quivering flesh among them, and the vulgar
+young fellows running around, knife in hand, eager for an opportunity to
+use them, their once white smocks smeared and spattered with blood,
+brought back the picture of the savage old priests of the religion of
+Montezuma. The scene made more comprehensible the preconquest customs
+of the land, as the antithesis of the drunken and excited Indian to the
+almost effeminate fear of the same being sober makes more clear that
+inexplicable piece of romance, the Conquest of Mexico.
+
+There is less evidence of "religion" in Uruapan than in Zamora. Priests
+were rarely seen on the streets and the church bells were scarcely
+troublesome. Peons and a few of even higher rank, however, never passed
+the door of a church even at a distance without raising their
+hats. Twice during the day I passed groups of women of the peon class
+carrying in procession several framed chromo representations of Saint
+Quién Sabe, bearing in his arms an imaginary Christ child, all of them
+wailing and chanting a dismal dirge as they splashed along through the
+dust in their bare feet.
+
+A Tragedy: As I returned in the soft air of sunset from the clear little
+river boiling over its rocks, I passed in a deep-shaded lane between
+towering banana, coffee, and larger trees about three feet of Mexican in
+sarape and overgrown hat rooted to a certain spot and shedding copious
+tears, while on the ground beside him were the remnants of a glazed pot
+and a broad patch of what had once been native firewater mingled with
+the thirsty sand. Some distance on I heard a cry as of a hunted human
+being and turned to see the pot remnants and the patch in the self-same
+spot, but the hat and the three feet of Mexican under it were speeding
+away down the lane on wings of terror. But all in vain, for behind
+stalked at even greater speed a Mexican mother, gaining on him who fled,
+like inexorable fate, not rapidly but all too surely.
+
+The only train out of Uruapan leaves at an unearthly hour. The sun was
+just peering over the horizon, as if reconnoitering for a safe entrance,
+when I fought my way into a chiefly peon crowd packed like a log-jam
+around a tiny window barely waist high, behind which some unseen but
+plainly Mexican being sold tickets more slowly than American justice in
+pursuit of the wealthy. For a couple of miles the way lay across a flat
+rich land of cornfields, pink with cosmos flowers. Then the train began
+to creak and grind upward at dog-trot pace, covering four or five times
+what would have been the distance in a straight line and uncovering
+broad vistas of plump-formed mountains shaggy with trees, and vast,
+hollowed-out valleys flooded with corn. Soon there were endless pine
+forests on every hand, with a thick, oak-like undergrowth. A labyrinth
+of loops one above another brought us to Ajambarán and a bit of level
+track, with no mountains in the landscape because we stood on the summit
+of them. Little Lake Zirahuén, surrounded on all sides by sloping
+hills, half pine, half corn, gleamed with an emerald blue. The train
+half circled it, at a considerable distance, giving several broad
+vistas, each lower than the preceding, as we climbed to an animated
+box-car station higher still. From there we began to descend. Over the
+divide was a decided change in the landscape; again that dry, brown,
+thinly vegetated country of most of the Mexican highlands. Miles before
+we reached the town of the same name, beautiful Lake Pátzcuaro burst on
+our sight through a break in the hills to the left, and continued to
+gladden the eyes until we drew up at the station.
+
+While the rest of the passengers repaired to the mule-tram, I set off
+afoot for the town, a steady climb of two miles by a cobbled road, up
+the center of which runs a line of large stones worn flat by generations
+of bare feet. The man who baedekerized Mexico says it is a "very
+difficult" trip afoot. Perhaps it would be to him. From the central
+line of flat stones there ran out, every yard, at right angles, lines of
+stones a bit smaller, the space between being filled in with small
+cobbles, with grass growing between them. The sun was powerful in this
+thin atmosphere of more than seven thousand feet elevation. I was barely
+settled in the hotel when the mule-tram arrived.
+
+Patzcuaro is one of the laziest, drowsiest, most delightful pimples on
+the earth to be found in a long search. It has little in common with
+Uruapan. Here is not a suggestion of the tropics, but just a large
+Indian village of mud and adobe houses and neck-breaking, cobbled
+streets, a town older than time, sown on and about a hillside backed by
+pine-treed peaks, with several expanses of plazas, all grown to grass
+above their cobbled floors, shaded by enormous ash-like trees with
+neither flowers, shrubs, nor fountains to detract from their atmosphere
+of roominess. About them run _portales_, arcades with pillars that
+seem at least to antedate Noah, and massive stone benches green with age
+and water-logged with constant shade, as are also the ancient stone
+sidewalks under the trees and the overhanging roofs of one-story houses
+supported by carved beams. Along these wanders a chiefly peon
+population, soft-footed and silent, with a mien and manner that seems to
+murmur: "If I do not do it to-day there is tomorrow, and next week, and
+the week after." The place is charming; not to its inhabitants perhaps,
+but to us from a land where everything is distressingly new. To the man
+who has anything to do or a desire to do anything, Patzcuaro would be
+infernal; for him who has nothing to do but to do nothing, it is
+delightful.
+
+Those who wish may visit crooning old churches more aged than the plays
+of Shakespeare. Or one may climb to "Calvary." The fanatical
+inhabitants, abetted by the wily priests, have named a road, "very rocky
+and very hilly," according to the Mexican Baedeker, leading to a knoll
+somewhat above the town, the "via dolorosa," and have scattered fourteen
+stations of plastered mud niches along the way. From the aged,
+half-circular, stone bench on the summit is another of the marvelous
+views that abound in Mexico. It was siesta-time, and not a human being
+was in sight to break the spell. The knoll fell away in bushy
+precipitousness to the plain below. As I reached the top, two trains,
+bound back the way I had come, left the station two miles away, one
+behind the other, and for a long time both were plainly visible as they
+wound in and out away through the foothills, yet noiseless from here as
+phantoms, and no blot on the landscape, since all colors, even that of a
+railroad cutting, blended into the soft-brown whole.
+
+The scene was wholly different from that about Uruapan, 1700 feet
+lower. There was very little green, and nothing at all of jungle; only a
+sun-faded brown tapestry backed by a jumble of low mountains covered
+with short bristling pines. Here and there a timid, thin-blue peak
+peered over a depression in the chain. A panoramic glance, starting from
+the west, showed range after range, one behind the other, to the dimmest
+blue distance. Swinging round the horizon, skipping the lake, the eye
+took in a continuous procession of hills, more properly the upper
+portions of mountains, losing their trees toward the east and growing
+more and more bare and reddish-brown, until it fell again on the
+doddering old town napping in its hollow down the slope. Below the
+abrupt face of "Calvario," the plain, with a few patches of still green
+corn alternating with reddish plowed fields, but for the most part
+humped and bumped, light wooded with scrub pine, was sprinkled with
+mouse-sized cattle, distinct even to their spots and markings in this
+marvelous, clear air of the highlands, lazily swinging their tails in
+summer contentment.
+
+But the center of the picture, the picture, indeed, for which all the
+rest served as frame, was Lake Pátzcuaro. It is not beautiful, but
+rather inviting, enticing, mysterious for its many sandy promontories,
+its tongues of mountains cutting off a farther arm of the lake with the
+old Tarascan capital, and above all for its islands. One of these is
+flat, running out to sand at either end, and with something of an old
+town among the trees that cover its slightly humped middle. Then there
+is Xanicho, pitched high in mound-shape, suggestive of Capri, rocky,
+bare, reddish-brown, and about its bottom, like a narrow band on a
+half-sunken Mexican hat, a long thin town of white walls and tiled roofs
+visible in all detail, a church towering above the rest to form the bow
+of the ribbon. It is strange how the human plant grows everywhere and
+anywhere, even on a patch of rock thrust forth out of the sea. A bit to
+the east and farther away lies a much smaller island of similar shape,
+apparently uninhabited. Farther still there stands forth from the water
+a bare precipitous rock topped by a castle-like building suggesting
+Chillon; and beyond and about are other islands of many shapes, but all
+flat and gray-green in tint, some so near shore as to blend with the
+promontories and seem part of the mainland, thereby losing their
+romance.
+
+Over all the scene was a light-blue, transparent sky, flecked only with
+a few snow-white whisps of clouds, like bits of the ostrich plume that
+hung over Uruapan in the far west, and from which a soft wind tore off
+now and then tiny pieces that floated slowly eastward. The same breeze
+tempered the sunny stillness of the "Calvario," broken occasionally by
+the song of a happy shepherd boy in the shrub-clad hills and the
+mellow-voiced, decrepit, old church bells of Pátzcuaro below.
+
+Some miles away from the town, at the far end of Lake Pátzcuaro, behind
+the hills, lies the ancient Indian village of Tzintzuntzan, at the time
+of the Conquest the residence of the chief of the Tarascans and ruler of
+the kingdom of Michoacán, which was not subdued until ten years after
+the fall of Mexico. I planned to visit it next day. As I strolled around
+the unkempt plaza grande in a darkness only augmented by a few weak
+electric bulbs of slight candle-power, with scores of peons, male and
+female, wrapped like half-animated mummies in their blankets, even to
+their noses, I fell in with a German. He was a garrulous,
+self-complacent, ungraceful man of fifty, a druggist and "doctor" in a
+small town far down in Oaxaca State until revolutions began, when he had
+escaped in the garb of a peon, leaving most of his possessions
+behind. Now he wandered from town to town, hanging up his shingle a few
+days in each as an oculist. His hotel room was a museum. None can rival
+the wandering Teuton in the systematic collecting, at its lowest
+possible cost, of everything that could by any stretch of the
+imagination ever be of service to a traveler. This one possessed only a
+rucksack and a blanket-wrapped bundle, but in them he carried more than
+the average American would be caught in possession of in his own
+home. There were worn and greasy notebooks full of detailed information
+of the road, the cheapest hotels of every known town of Mexico, with the
+lowest possible price and the idiosyncrasies of their proprietors that
+might be played upon to obtain it, the exact café where the beer glasses
+grew tallest, the expenditures that might be avoided by a foresighted
+manipulation; there were shoes and slippers, sleeping garments for each
+degree of temperature, a cooking outfit, a bicycle-lamp with a chimney
+to read by, guns, gun-oil, gun-cleaners, flannel cloth to take the place
+of socks for tramping, vaseline to rub on the same--it would be madness
+to attempt a complete inventory, but he would be inventive indeed who
+could name anything that Teutonic pack did not contain in some
+abbreviated form, purchased somewhere second hand at a fourth its
+original cost. The German had learned that the parish priest of
+Tzintzuntzan wore glasses, and we parted agreed to make the trip
+together.
+
+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 Michoacán. 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 Michoacán, 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 "Adiós!" 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 Pátzcuaro 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 José 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 Pátzcuaro 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 compañías de cómicos 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 Acámbaro 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 Querétaro,
+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 Cæsars 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
+Querétaro'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 Anáhuac. 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 Pátzcuaro 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. Calderón, 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 Belén 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 Anáhuac, 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 pulquerías 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 Mártires 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 Querétaro 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
+político. 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 señoritas dreamed of declining the honor, even
+though it involved the expenditure of considerable of papá'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 Luís Potosí 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 Córdoba. 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 Córdoba 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 Río
+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 aërial 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 "Señor 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
+cafés 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 Córdoba 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 mío. Muy buenas noches. Como 'stá uste-e-é? 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, señor. May you have a most pleasant voyage. Thanks
+again. So pleased to have met you. Adiós. May you travel well. Hasta
+luego. Adiós. 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, señor," 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 Juchitán 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 Tonolá 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. Tonolá 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, señor," he queried with poised pen, eying me
+suspiciously.
+
+"No, señor."
+
+"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.
+
+"Será 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 religión," 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, señor," 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 _lèse 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.
+
+By and by the lieutenant came to say the commander was in his office,
+and led the way there. At the second door of the mud-and-straw building
+he paused to add in an awe-struck whisper:
+
+"Take off your hat and wait until he calls you in."
+
+Instead I stepped toward the entrance, but the teniente snatched at the
+slack of my shirt with a gasp of terror:
+
+"Por Diós! Take off your revolver! If the colonel sees it...."
+
+I shook him off and, marching in with martial stride and a haughty
+carelessness of attitude, sat down in the only chair in the room except
+that occupied by the commander, with a hearty:
+
+"Buenas tardes, colonel."
+
+He was a typical guatemalteco in whole trousers and an open shirt, but
+of some education, for he was writing with moderate rapidity at his
+homemade desk. He also wore shoes. His manner was far more reasonable
+than that of his illiterate underlings, and we were soon conversing
+rationally. He appeared to know enough English to get the gist of my
+passport, but handed it back with the information that I should have
+official Guatemalan permission to exist within the confines of his
+eighteen-for-a-dollar country.
+
+"You carry an apparatus for the making of photographs," he went
+on. "Suppose you had taken a picture of our fortress and garrison here?"
+
+"Gar--How's that, señor?"
+
+"It is the law of all countries, as you know, not to allow the
+photographing of places of military importance. Even the English would
+arrest you if you took a picture of Gibraltar."
+
+It was careless of me not to have noted the striking similarity of this
+stronghold to that at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Both stand on
+hills.
+
+"And where do I get this official permission?"
+
+"Impossible."
+
+"Yet necessary?"
+
+But I still carried Mexican cigarettes, a luxury in Guatemala, so we
+parted friends, with the manners of a special envoy taking leave of a
+prime minister. The only requirement was that I should not open my
+kodak within sight of this hotbed of military importance. I all but
+made the fatal error of passing between the sacred eave-post and the
+wall upon my exit, but sidestepped in time to escape unscathed, and left
+the great fortress behind and above me.
+
+After all I had been far more fortunate than a fellow countryman I met
+later, who had had a $200 camera smashed by this same ragged "garrison."
+
+Siesta time was past and I struck on out of town. In the last hut an
+old woman called out to know why I had gone down to the river, and
+showed some suspicion at my answer.
+
+"There are so many countries trying to get our war plans," she
+explained.
+
+A trail wide enough for single-wheeled vehicles crowded its way between
+jungle walls. In the breathless, blazing sunshine the sweat passed
+through my rucksack and into my formal city garments beyond, carrying
+the color of the sack with it. For some time no one was abroad except a
+dripping "gringo" and a rare cargador in barely the rags necessary to
+escape complete nakedness, who greeted me subserviently and gave me most
+of the road. The Indians of the region were inferior in physique to
+those of the Mexican plateau, ragged beyond words, and far from handsome
+in appearance. Their little thatched huts swarmed, however, and almost
+all displayed something to sell, chiefly strong native liquor in bottles
+that had seen long and varied service. There was nothing to eat but
+oranges green in color. The way was often strewn with hundreds of huge
+orange-colored ones, but they were more sour than lemons and often
+bitter. A tropical downpour drove me once into the not too effective
+shelter of the jungle, and with sunset a drizzle set in with a promise
+of increase. A woodchopper had told me I could not reach my proposed
+destination that night, but I pressed forward at my best pace up hill
+and down through an all but continuous vegetation and surprised myself
+by stumbling soon after dark upon electric-lighted Coatepeque, the first
+real town of Guatemala, and not a very real one at that.
+
+However, a burly American ran a hotel where the bill for supper and
+lodging was only $15, and if the partitions of my room were bare they
+were of mahogany, as were also the springs of the bed. The pilfering of
+an extra mattress softened this misfortune somewhat, and toward morning
+it grew cool enough to stop sweating. When I descended in the morning,
+Ems and Dakin were sitting over their coffee and eggs. They had paid $5
+each to ride in a covered bullock cart from Vado Ancho--and be churned
+to a pulp.
+
+Reunited, we pushed on in the morning shadows. Ems and Dakin divided
+the weight of the former's suitcase; but even after the "Texican" had
+thrown away two heavy books on locomotive driving, both groaned under
+their loads. The sun of Guatemala does not lighten the burdens of the
+trail. Ems had boarded the bullock cart the proud possessor of a bar of
+soap, but this morning he found it a powder and sprinkled it along the
+way. Soap is out of keeping with Guatemalan local color anyway. Dense
+forests continued, but here almost all had an undergrowth of coffee
+bushes. Some of the largest coffee _fincas_ of Guatemala lie along
+this road, producing annually to hundreds of thousands in gold. Such
+prosperity was not reflected in the population and toilers. The natives
+were ragged, but friendly, every man carrying a machete, generally in a
+leather scabbard, and the women almost without exception enormous loads
+of fruit. They were weak, unintelligent, pimple-faced mortals, speaking
+an Indian dialect and using Spanish only with difficulty. Ragged Indian
+girls were picking coffee here and there, even more tattered carriers
+lugged it in sacks and baskets to large, cement-floored spaces near the
+estate houses, where men shoveled the red berries over and over in the
+sun and old women hulled them in the shade of their huts.
+
+Jungle trees, often immense and polished smooth as if they had been
+flayed of their bark, gave us dense cool shade, scented by countless
+wild flowers. But en cambio the soft dirt road climbed and wound and
+descended all but incessantly, gradually working its way higher, until
+we could look out now and then over hundreds of square miles of hot
+country with barely a break in all its expanse of dense, steaming
+vegetation. Coffee continued, but alternated now with the slender trees
+of rubber plantations, with their long smooth leaves, and already
+scarred like young warriors long inured to battle. The road was really
+only an enlarged trail, not laid out, but following the route of the
+first Indian who picked his way over these jungled hills. Huts were
+seldom lacking; poor, ragged, cheerful Indians never. In the afternoon
+the trail pitched headlong down and around through a rock-spilled
+barranco with two sheer walls of the densest jungle and forest shutting
+it in. Where it crossed a stream, Dakin and I found a shaded, sandy
+hollow scooped out behind a broad flat rock in the form of a huge
+bathtub of water, clearer than any adjective will describe. Ems, whose
+swarthy tint and strong features suggested the opposite, was the least
+able to endure the hardships of the road, and lay lifeless in the shade
+at every opportunity.
+
+The road panted by a rocky zigzag up out of the ravine again and on over
+rough and hilly going. Here I fell into conversation with an Indian
+finca laborer, a slow, patient, ox-like fellow, to whom it had plainly
+never occurred to ask himself why he should live in misery and his
+employers in luxury. He spoke a slow and labored, yet considerable,
+Spanish, of which he was unable to pronounce the f or v; saying "pinca"
+for finca and "pale" for vale. Those of his class worked from five to
+five shoveling coffee or carrying it, with two hours off for breakfast
+and _almuerzo_, were paid one Guatemalan dollar a day, that is, a
+fraction over five cents in our money, and furnished two arrobas (fifty
+pounds) of corn and frijoles and a half-pound of salt a month. Yet there
+are no more trustworthy employees than these underpaid fellows. As
+pay-day approaches, one of these same ragged Indians is given a grain
+sack and a check for several thousand dollars gold and sent to the town
+where the finca owner does his banking, often several days' distant. The
+sack half filled with the ragged bills of the Republic and their
+customary microbes, the Indian shoulders it and tramps back across the
+country to the estate, stopping at night in some wayside hut and tossing
+the sack into a corner, perhaps to leave it for hours while he visits
+his friends in the vicinity. Yet though both the messenger and his hosts
+know the contents of his bundle, it is very rare that a single illegible
+_billete_ disappears en route.
+
+We plodded on into the night, but Ems could only drag at a turtle-pace,
+and it became evident we could not make Retalhuleu without giving him
+time to recuperate. The first large hut in the scattered village of
+Acintral gave us hospitality. It was earth-floored, with a few homemade
+chairs, and a bed with board floor. Though barely four feet wide, this
+was suggested as the resting-place of all three of us after a supper of
+jet-black coffee, native bread, and cheese. Dakin and I found it more
+than crowded, even after Ems had spread a _petate_, or grass-mat,
+on the ground. The room had no door, and women and girls wandered
+indifferently in and out of it as we undressed, one mite of barely six
+smoking a huge black cigar in the most business-like manner. The place
+was a species of saloon, like almost every hut along the road, and the
+shouting of the family and their thirsty townsmen seldom ceased even
+momentarily until after midnight.
+
+Having occasion to be in Guatemala City that day, I rose at two and,
+swallowing a cup of black coffee and two raw eggs and paying a bill of
+$12, struck out to cover the two long leagues left to Retalhuleu in time
+to catch the six-o'clock train. The moon on its waning quarter had just
+risen, but gave little assistance during an extremely difficult
+tramp. All was blackest darkness except where it cast a few silvery
+streaks through the trees, the road a mere wild trail left by the rainy
+season far rougher than any plowed field, where it would have been only
+too easy to break a leg or sprain an ankle. Bands of dogs, barking
+savagely, dashed out upon me from almost every hut. Besides four small
+rivers with little roofed bridges, there were many narrower streams or
+mud-holes to wade, and between them the way twisted and stumbled up and
+down over innumerable hills that seemed mountains in the unfathomable
+darkness. When I had slipped and sprawled some two hours, a pair of
+Indians, the first to be found abroad, gave the distance as "dos
+leguas," in other words, the same as when I had started. I redoubled my
+speed, pausing only once to call for water where a light flickered in a
+hut, and seemed to have won the race when at the edge of the town I came
+to a river that required me to strip to the waist. As I sprinted up the
+hill beyond, the sound of a departing train drifted out of the darkness
+ahead and an Indian informed me that it had been scheduled to leave at
+five. Fortunately I continued, for it turned out to be a freight, and
+the daily passenger left at six, so that just as the east began to turn
+gray I was off on the long ride to the capital.
+
+The train takes twelve hours to make this run of 129 miles by a
+three-foot-gage railroad, stopping at every cluster of huts along the
+way. The third-class coach was little more than a box-car with two rough
+benches along its sides. The passengers were unprepossessing; most of
+them ragged, all of them unclean, generally with extremely bad teeth,
+much-pimpled faces, emaciated, and of undeveloped physique, their eyes
+still possessing some of the brightness but lacking the snap and glisten
+of those of Tehuantepec and the plateau. Many were chrome-yellow with
+fever. Ragged officers of law and disorder were numerous, often in bare
+feet, the same listless inefficiency showing in their weak,
+unproductive, unshaven features. The car grew so crowded I went to sit
+on the platform rail, as had a half-dozen already, though large signs on
+the door forbade it.
+
+It was after noon when we reached the first important town,
+Esquintla. Here the tropics ended and the train began to climb, so
+slowly we could have stepped off anywhere, the vegetation visibly
+changing in character with every mile. On the now crowded platform two
+natives alternately ordered American beer of the train-boy, at $5 a
+bottle! At Palin we were assailed by tattered vendors of all manner of
+fruit, enormous pineapples selling for sixty guatemalteco
+cents. Amatitlan also swarmed with hawkers, but this time of candy in
+the form of animals of every known and imaginable species. Thereafter we
+wound round beautiful Lake Amatitlan, a dark, smooth stretch of water,
+swarming with fish and bottomless, according to my fellow platformers,
+flanked by sloping, green, shrub-clad banks that reflected themselves in
+it. The train crossed the middle of the lake by a stone dyke and climbed
+higher and ever higher, with splendid views of the perfect cone-shaped
+volcanoes Agua and Panteleón that have gradually thrown themselves up to
+be the highest in Guatemala and visible from almost every part of the
+republic. It was growing dark when the first houses of Guatemala City
+appeared among the trees, and gradually and slowly we dragged into the
+station. A bare-footed policeman on the train took the names and
+biographies of all on board, as another had already done at Esquintla,
+and we were free to crowd out into the ragged, one-story city with its
+languid mule-cars.
+
+In the "Hotel Colon" opposite Guatemala's chief theater and shouldering
+the president's house, which is tailor-shop and saloon below, the daily
+rate was $12. The food was more than plentiful, but would have been an
+insult to the stomach of a harvest-hand, the windowless room was musty
+and dirty, the walls splashed, spotted, and torn, and the bed was by far
+the worst I had occupied south of the Rio Grande, having not only a
+board floor but a mattress that seemed to be stuffed with broken and
+jagged rocks. Notwithstanding all which I slept the clock round.
+
+If there is any "sight" in Guatemala City besides its slashing sunlight
+and its surrounding volcanoes, and perhaps its swarms of Indians
+trotting to and from the market on Sundays, it is the relief map of the
+entire Republic inside the race-course. This is of cement, with real
+water to represent the lakes and oceans and (when it is turned on) the
+rivers. Every town, railway, and trail of any importance is marked, an
+aid to the vagabond that should be required by law of every country. On
+it I picked out easily the route of my further travels. The map covers a
+space as large as a moderate-sized house and is seen in all its details
+from the two platforms above it. Its only apparent fault is that the
+mountains and volcanoes are out of all proportion in height. But
+exaggeration is a common Central-American failing.
+
+The city is populous, chiefly with shoeless inhabitants, monotonously
+flat, few buildings for dread of earthquake being over one story, even
+the national palace and cathedral sitting low and squat. An elevation of
+five thousand feet gives it a pleasant June weather, but life moves with
+a drowsy, self-contented air. Its people are far more obliging than the
+average of Mexico and have little or none of the latter's sulkiness or
+half-insolence. Here reigns supreme Estrada Cabrera; exactly where very
+few know, for so great is his dislike to assassination that he jumps
+about incessantly from one of his one-story residences to another,
+perhaps, as his people assert, by underground passages, for he is seldom
+indeed seen in the flesh by his fond subjects. In less material
+manifestations he is omnipresent and few are the men who have long
+outlived his serious displeasure. A man of modest ability but of
+extremely suspicious temperament, he keeps the reins of government
+almost entirely in his own hands, running the country as if it were his
+private estate, which for some years past it virtually has been. It is a
+form of government not entirely unfitted to a people in the bulk utterly
+indifferent as to who or what rules them so they are left to loaf in
+their hammocks in peace, and no more capable of ruling themselves than
+of lifting themselves by their non-existent boot-straps. Outwardly life
+seems to run as smoothly as elsewhere, and the casual passer-by does not
+to his knowledge make the acquaintance of those reputed bands of
+adventurers from many climes said to carry out swiftly and efficiently
+every whispered command of Guatemala's invisible ruler.
+
+On Sunday a bull-fight was perpetrated in the _plaza de toros_
+facing the station. It was a dreary caricature of the royal sport of
+Spain. The plaza was little more than a rounded barnyard, the four gaunt
+and cowardly animals with blunted horns virtually lifeless, picadors and
+horses were conspicuous by their absence, and the two matadors were not
+even skilful butchers. A _cuadrilla_ of women did the "Suerte de
+Tancredo" on one another's backs--as any one else could have on his head
+or in a rocking-chair--and the only breath of excitement was when one
+of the feminine _toreras_ got walked on by a fear-quaking animal
+vainly seeking an exit. All in all it was an extremely poor newsboys'
+entertainment, a means of collecting admissions for the privilege of
+seeing to-morrow's meat prepared, the butchers skinning and quartering
+the animals within the enclosure in full sight of the disheveled
+audience.
+
+The train mounted out of the capital with much winding, as many as three
+sections of track one above another at times, and, once over the range,
+fell in with a river on its way to the Atlantic. The country grew dry
+and Mexican, covered with fine white dust and grown with cactus. At
+Zacapa, largest town of the line, Dakin was already at work in a
+machine-shop on wheels in the railroad yards, and Ems was preparing to
+take charge of one of the locomotives. Descending with the swift
+stream, we soon plunged into thickening jungle, growing even more dense
+than that of Tehuantepec, with trees, plants, and all the stationary
+forms of nature struggling like an immense multitude fighting for life,
+the smaller and more agile climbing the sturdier, the weak and
+unassertive trampled to death underfoot on the dank, sunless ground. We
+crossed the now considerable river by a three-span bridge, and entered
+the banana country. English-speaking Negroes became numerous, and when
+we pulled in at the station of Quiraguá, the collection of bamboo
+shanties I had expected was displaced by several new and modern
+bungalows on the brow of a knoll overlooking the railroad. Here was one
+of the great plantations of the United Fruit Company. From the veranda
+of the office building broad miles of banana plants stretched away to
+the southern mountains. Jamaican Negroes were chiefly engaged in the
+banana culture, and those from our Southern States did the heavier and
+rougher work. Their wages ran as high as a dollar gold a day, as against
+a Guatemalan peso for the native peons of the coffee estates in other
+sections. Much of the work was let out on contract. There were a
+number of white American employees, college-trained in some cases, and
+almost all extremely youthful. The heat here was tropical and heavy, the
+place being a bare three hundred feet above sea-level where even
+clothing quickly molds and rots. My fellow countrymen had found the most
+dangerous pastimes in this climate to be drinking liquor and eating
+bananas, while the mass of employees more often came to grief in the
+feuds between the various breeds of Negroes and with the natives.
+
+In the morning a handcar provided with a seat and manned by two muscular
+Carib Negroes carried me away through the banana jungle by a private
+railroad. The atmosphere was thick and heavy as soured milk. A
+half-hour between endless walls of banana plants brought me to a
+palm-leaf hut, from which I splashed away on foot through a riot of wet
+jungle to the famous ruins of Quiraguá. Archeologists had cleared a
+considerable square in the wilderness, still within the holdings of the
+fruit company, felling many enormous trees; but the place was already
+half choked again with compact undergrowth. There were three immense
+stone pillars in a row, then two others leaning at precarious angles,
+while in and out through the adjacent jungle were scattered carved
+stones in the forms of frogs and other animals, clumsily depicted, a
+small calendar stone, and an immense carved rock reputed to have been a
+place of sacrifice. Several artificial mounds were now mere stone hills
+overgrown with militant vegetation, as were remnants of old stone
+roadways. Every stone was covered with distinct but crudely carved
+figures, the most prominent being that of a king with a large Roman nose
+but very little chin, wearing an intricate crown surmounted by a
+death's-head, holding a scepter in one hand and in the other what
+appeared to be a child spitted on a toasting fork. All was of a species
+of sandstone that has withstood the elements moderately well, especially
+if, as archeologists assert, the ruins represent a city founded some
+three thousand years ago. Some of the faces, however, particularly those
+toward the east and south from which come most of the storms, were worn
+almost smooth and were covered with moss and throttling
+vegetation. Through it all a mist that was virtually a rain fell
+incessantly, and ground and jungle reeked with a clinging mud and
+dripping water that soaked through shoes and garments.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS
+
+The train carried me back up the river to Zacapa, desert dry and
+stingingly hot with noonday. Report had it that there was a good road
+to Jocotán by way of Chiquimula, but the difference between a "buen
+camino" and a mere "road" is so slight in Central America that I
+concluded to follow the more direct trail. The next essential was to
+change my wealth into Honduranean silver, chiefly in coins of one
+_real_, corresponding in value to an American nickel; for financial
+transactions were apt to be petty in the region ahead of me. In the
+collection I gathered among the merchants of Zacapa were silver dollars
+of Mexico, Salvador, Chile, and Peru, all of which stand on terms of
+perfect equality with the peso of Honduras, worth some forty cents. My
+load was heavier, as befitted an exit from even quasi-civilization. The
+rucksack was packed with more than fourteen pounds, not counting kodak
+and weapon, and for the equivalent of some thirty cents in real money I
+had acquired in the market of Guatemala City a hammock, more exactly a
+sleeping-net, made of a species of grass by the Indians of Cobán.
+
+Under all this I was soon panting up through the once cobbled village of
+Zacapa and across a rising sand-patch beyond, cheered on by the parting
+information that the last traveler to set out on this route had been
+killed a few miles from town for the $2 or so he carried. Mine would not
+have been any particular burden in a level or temperate country, but
+this was neither. The sun hung so close it felt like some immense
+red-hot ingot swinging overhead in a foundry. The road--and in Central
+America that word seldom represents anything better than a rocky,
+winding trail with rarely a level yard--sweated up and down sharp
+mountain faces, picking its way as best it could over a continual
+succession of steep lofty ridges. Even before I lost the railway to view
+I was dripping wet from cap to shoes, drops fell constantly from the end
+of my nose, and my eyes stung with salt even though I plunged my face
+into every stream. My American shoes had succumbed on the tramp to
+Retalhuleu and the best I had been able to do in Guatemala City was to
+squander $45 for a pair of native make and chop them down into
+Oxfords. These, soaked in the jungle of Quiraguá, now dried iron-stiff
+in the sun and barked my feet in various places.
+
+I had crossed four ranges and was winding along a narrow, dense-grown
+valley when night began to fall. The rumors of foul play led me to keep
+a hand hanging loose near my weapon, though the few natives I met seemed
+friendly enough. Darkness thickened and I was planning to swing my
+hammock among the trees when I fell upon the hut of Coronado Cordón. It
+was a sieve-like structure of bamboo, topped by a thick palm-leaf roof,
+with an outdoor mud fireplace, and crowded with dogs, pigs, and roosted
+fowls. Coronado himself, attired in the remnants of a pair of cotton
+trousers, greeted me from his hammock.
+
+"May I pass the night with you?"
+
+"To be sure, señor. You may sleep on this bench under the roof."
+
+But I produced my hammock and he swung it for me from two bamboo rafters
+of the low projecting eaves, beside his own and that of a horseman who
+had also sought hospitality, where a steady breeze swept through. His
+wife squatted for an hour or more over the fireplace, and at length I
+sat down--on the ground--to black coffee, frijoles, tortillas, and a
+kind of Dutch cheese.
+
+Long before morning I was too cold, even under most of the contents of
+my pack, to sleep soundly. It was December and the days were short for
+tramping. This one did not begin to break until six and I had been
+awake and ready since three. Coronado slept on, but his señora arose
+and, covering her breasts with a small apron, took to grinding corn for
+tortillas. These with coffee and two eggs dropped for a moment in hot
+water, after a pin-hole had been broken in each, made up my breakfast,
+and brought my bill up to nearly eleven cents.
+
+I was off in the damp dawn. Any enumeration of the rocky, slippery,
+twisting trails by which I panted up and over perpendicular mountain
+ridges under a burning sun without the shadow of a cloud, would be
+wearisome. Sweat threatened to ruin even the clothing in my bundle, it
+soaked even belt and holster, rusting the weapon within it, and leaving
+a visible trail behind me. Once, at the careless nod of an Indian, I
+strained up an all but perpendicular slope, only to have the trail end
+hundreds of feet above the river in a fading cow-path and leave me to
+climb down again. Farther on it dodged from under my feet once more and,
+missing a reputed bridge, forced me to ford a chest-deep river which all
+but swept me away, possessions and all, at the first attempt.
+
+Jocotán, on the farther bank, was a lazy, sunbaked village the chief
+industry of which seemed to be swinging in hammocks, though I did manage
+to run to earth the luxury of a dish of tough meat. Comotán was close
+beyond, then came two hours straight up to a region of pine-trees with
+vistas of never-ending mountains everywhere dense-forested, the few
+adobe or bamboo huts tucked in among them being as identically alike as
+the inhabitants. These were almost obsequious peons, wearing a sort of
+white pajamas and moderate-sized straw hats, all strangely clean. Each
+carried a machete, generally with a curved point, and not a few had
+guns. Toward evening I struck a bit of level going amid dense vegetation
+without a breath of air along the bank of a river that must be forded
+lower down, which fact I took advantage of to perpetrate a general
+laundering. This proved unwise, for the sun went down before the
+garments had dried and left me to lug on along the stream those the
+unexacting customs of the country did not require me to put on
+wet. Every hundred yards the trail went swiftly down into the stony bed
+of a tributary, with or without water, and clambered breathlessly out
+again. A barked heel had festered and made every other step painful.
+
+It was more than an hour after dark that I sweated into the _aldea_
+of Chupá, so scattered that as each hut refused me lodging I had to
+hobble on a considerable distance to the next. The fourth or fifth
+refusal I declined to accept and swung my hammock under the eaves. A
+woman was cooking on the earth floor for several peon travelers, but
+treated me only with a stony silence. One of the Indians, however, who
+had been a soldier and was more friendly or less suspicious of
+"gringoes," divided with me his single tortilla and bowl of
+frijoles. The family slept on dried cowskins spread on the bare earth.
+
+Food was not to be had when I folded my hammock and pushed on at
+daylight. One of a cluster of huts farther up was given over to a squad
+of "soldiers," garrisoning the frontier, and an officer who would have
+ranked as a vagabond in another country sold me three tortillas and a
+shellful of coffee saved from his rations. Another cluster of huts
+marked the beginning of a stiff rocky climb, beyond which I passed
+somewhere in a swampy stretch of uninhabited ground the invisible
+boundary and entered Honduras, the Land of Great Depths.
+
+It was indeed. Soon a vast mountain covered with pine forest rose into
+the sky ahead and two hours of unbroken climbing brought me only to the
+rim of another great wooded valley scolloped out of the earth and down
+into which I went all but headfirst into the town of Copán. Here, as I
+sat in a fairly easy chair in the shaded corner of a barnyard among
+pigs, chickens, and turkeys while my tortillas were preparing, I got the
+first definite information as to the tramp before me. Tegucigalpa, the
+capital, was said to be fifteen days distant by mule. On foot it might
+prove a trifle less. But if transportation in the flesh was laborious
+and slow, the ease of verbal communication partly made up for it. A
+telegram to the capital cost me the sum total of one real. It should
+have been a real and a quarter, but the telegraph operator had no
+change!
+
+Beyond the town I found with some difficulty the gate through which one
+must pass to visit the ancient ruins of Copán. Once inside it, a path
+led through jungle and tobacco fields and came at length to a great
+artificial mound, originally built of cut-stone, but now covered with
+deep grass and a splendid grove of immense trees, until in appearance
+only a natural hill remained. About the foot of this, throttled by
+vegetation, lay scattered a score or more of carved stones, only one or
+two of which were particularly striking. Summer solitude hovered over
+all the scene.
+
+Back again on the "camino real" I found the going for once ideal. The
+way lay almost level along a fairly wide strip of lush-green grass with
+only a soft-footed, eight-inch path marking the route, and heavy jungle
+giving unbroken shade. Then came a hard climb, just when I had begun to
+hear the river and was laying plans for a drink and a swim, and the
+trail led me far up on the grassy brow of a mountain, from which spread
+a vast panorama of pine-clad world. But the trails of Honduras are like
+spendthrift adventurers, struggling with might and main to gain an
+advantage, only wantonly to throw it away again a moment later. This one
+pitched headlong down again, then climbed, then descended over and
+again, as if setting itself some useless task for the mere pleasure of
+showing its powers of endurance. It subsided at last in the town of
+Santa Rita, the comandante of which, otherwise a pleasant enough fellow,
+took me for a German. It served me right for not having taken the time
+to shave my upper lip. He had me write my name on a slip of paper and
+bade me adiós with the information that if "my legs were well oiled" I
+could make the hacienda Jarral by nightfall.
+
+I set a good pace along the flat, shaded, grassy lane beside the river,
+promising myself a swim upon sighting my destination. But the tricky
+trail suddenly and unexpectedly led me far up on a mountain flank and
+down into Jarral without again catching sight or sound of the
+stream. There were three or four palm-leaf huts and a large, long
+hacienda building, unspeakably dirty and dilapidated. The estate
+produced coffee, heaps of which in berry and kernel stood here and there
+in the dusk. The owner lived elsewhere; for which no one could blame
+him. I marched out along the great tile-floored veranda to mention to
+the stupid _mayordomo_ the relationship of money and food. He
+referred me to a filth-encrusted woman in the cavern-like kitchen, where
+three soiled and bedraggled babies slept on a dirtier reed mat on the
+filthy earth floor, another in a hammock made of a grain sack and two
+pieces of rope, amid dogs, pigs, and chickens, not to mention other
+unpleasantnesses, including a damp dungeon atmosphere that ought early
+to have proved fatal to the infants. When she had sulkily agreed to
+prepare me tortillas, I returned to ask the way to the river. The
+mayordomo cried out in horror at the notion of bathing at night,
+pointing out that there was not even a moon, and prophesying a fatal
+outcome of such foolhardiness and gringo eccentricity. His appearance
+suggested that he had also some strong superstition against bathing by
+day.
+
+I stumbled nearly a mile along to-morrow's road, stepping now and then
+into ankle-deep mud puddles, before reaching the stream, but a plunge
+into a stored-up pool of it was more than ample reward. "Supper" was
+ready upon my return, and by asking the price of it at once and catching
+the woman by surprise I was charged only a legitimate amount. When I
+inquired where I might swing my hammock, the enemy of bathing pointed
+silently upward at the rafters of the veranda. These were at least ten
+feet above the tiled floor and I made several ineffectual efforts before
+I could reach them at all, and then only succeeded in hanging my
+sleeping-net so that it doubled me up like a jack-knife. Rearranging it
+near the corner of the veranda, I managed with great effort to climb
+into it, but to have fallen out would have been to drop either some
+eight feet to the stone-flagged door or twenty into the cobbled and
+filthy barnyard below. The chances of this outcome were much increased
+by the necessity of using a piece of old rope belonging to the hacienda,
+and a broken arm or leg would have been pleasant indeed here in the
+squalid wilderness with at least a hundred miles of mule-trail to the
+nearest doctor.
+
+Luckily I only fell asleep. Several men and dirtier boys, all in what
+had once been white garments, had curled up on bundles of dirty mats and
+heaps of bags all over the place, and the night was a pandemonium of
+their coughing, snoring, and night-maring, mingled with the hubbub of
+dogs, roosters, turkeys, cattle, and a porcine multitude that snuggled
+in among the human sleepers. The place was surrounded by wet, pine-clad
+mountains, and the damp night air drifting in upon me soon grew cold and
+penetrating.
+
+Having had time to collect her wits, the female of the dungeon charged
+me a quadrupled price for a late breakfast of black coffee and pin-holed
+eggs, and I set off on what turned out to be a not entirely pleasant
+day's tramp. To begin with I had caught cold in a barked heel, causing
+the cords of the leg to swell and stiffen. Next I found that the
+rucksack had worn through where it came in contact with my back; third,
+the knees of the breeches I wore succumbed to the combination of sweat
+and the tearing of jungle grasses; fourth, the garments I carried
+against the day I should again enter civilization were already rumpled
+and stained almost beyond repair; and, fifth, but by no means last, the
+few American bills I carried in a secret pocket had been almost effaced
+by humidity and friction. Furthermore, the "road" completely surpassed
+all human powers of description. When it was not splitting into a
+half-dozen faint paths, any one of which was sure to fade from existence
+as soon as it had succeeded in leading me astray in a panting chase up
+some perpendicular slope, it was splashing through mud-holes or small
+rivers. At the first stream I squandered a half-hour disrobing and
+dressing again, only to find that some two hundred yards farther on it
+swung around once more across the trail. Twice it repeated that stale
+practical joke. At the fourth crossing I forestalled it by marching on,
+carrying all but shirt and hat,--and got only sunburn and stone-bruises
+for my foresight, for the thing disappeared entirely. Still farther on I
+attempted to save time by crossing another small river by a series of
+stepping-stones, reached the middle of it dry-shod, looked about for the
+next step, and then carefully lay down at full length, baggage and all,
+in the stream as the stone turned over under my feet. But by that time I
+needed another bath.
+
+An old woman of La Libertad, a collection of mud huts wedged into a
+little plain between jungled mountain-sides, answered my hungry query
+with a cheery "Cómo no!" and in due time set before me black beans and
+blacker coffee and a Honduranean tortilla, which are several times
+thicker and heavier than those of Mexico and taste not unlike a plank of
+dough.
+
+Though often good-hearted enough, these children of the wilderness have
+no more inkling of any line between dirt and cleanliness, nor any more
+desire to improve their conditions, themselves, or their surroundings,
+which we of civilized lands think of as humanity's privilege and
+requirement, than the mangy yellow curs that slink in and out between
+their legs and among their cooking pots. I had yet to see in Honduras a
+house, a garment, a single possession, or person that was anything short
+of filthy.
+
+As I ate, a gaunt and yellow youth arrived with a rag tied about his
+brow, complaining that a fever had overtaken him on a steep mountain
+trail and left him helpless for hours. I made use for the first time of
+the small medicine case I carried. Then the old woman broke in to
+announce that her daughter also had fever. I found a child of ten
+tossing on a miserable canvas cot in the mud hut before which I sat, her
+pulse close to the hundred mark. When I had treated her to the best of
+my ability, the mother stated that a friend in a neighboring hut had
+been suffering for more than a week with chills and fever, but that she
+was "embarrassed" and must not take anything that might bring that
+condition prematurely to a head. I prescribed not without some layman
+misgiving. Great astonishment spread throughout the hamlet when I
+refused payment for my services, and the old woman not only vociferously
+declined the coin I proffered for the food, but bade me farewell with a
+vehement "Diós se lo pagará"--whether in Honduranean change or not she
+did not specify. The majority of the inhabitants of the wilds of
+Honduras live and die without any other medical attention than those of
+a rare wandering charlatan or pill-peddler.
+
+Beyond was a rising path through dense steaming jungle, soon crossed by
+the ubiquitous river. Across it, near a pretty waterfall, the trail
+climbed up and ever up through jungle and forest, often deep in mud and
+in places so steep I had to mount on all fours, slipping back at each
+step like the proverbial frog in the well. A splendid virgin forest
+surrounded me, thick with undergrowth, the immense trees whispering
+together far above. A half-hour up, the trail, all but effaced, was cut
+off by a newly constructed rail fence tied together with vines run
+through holes that had been pierced in the buttresses of giants of the
+forest. There was no other route in sight, however, and I climbed the
+obstruction and sweated another half-hour upward. A vista of at least
+eight heavily wooded ranges opened out behind me, not an inch of which
+was not covered with dense-green treetops. Far up near the gates of
+heaven I came upon a sun-flooded sloping clearing planted with tobacco,
+and found a startled peon in the shade of a make-shift leaf hut. Instead
+of climbing the hill by this private trail, I should immediately have
+crossed the river again more than an hour below and continued on along
+it!
+
+When he had recovered from the fright caused by so unexpected an
+apparition, the Indian yielded up his double-bodied gourd and made no
+protest when I gurgled down about half the water he had carried up the
+mountain for his day's thirst. That at least was some reward for the
+useless climb, for there is no greater physical pleasure than drinking
+one's fill of clear cold water after a toilsome tropical tramp. I
+crashed and slid down to the river again and picked up once more the
+muddy path along it between dense walls of damp jungle. It grew worse
+and worse, falling in with a smaller stream and leaping back and forth
+across it every few yards, sometimes permitting me to dodge across like
+a tight-rope walker on wet mossy stones, more often delaying me to
+remove shoes and leggings. An hour of this and the scene changed. A vast
+mountain wall rose before me, and a sharp rocky trail at times like
+steps cut by nature in the rock face led up and up and still forever
+upward. A score of times I seemed to have reached the summit, only to
+find that the trail took a new turn and, gathering up its skirts,
+climbed away again until all hope of its ever ceasing its sweating
+ascent faded away. After all it was perhaps well that only a small
+portion of the climb was seen at a time; like life itself, the appalling
+sight of all the difficulties ahead at once might discourage the climber
+from ever undertaking the task.
+
+It was near evening when I came out in a slight clearing on what was at
+last really the summit. Vast forests of whispering pine-trees surrounded
+me, and before and behind lay an almost endless vista of heavily wooded,
+tumbled mountains, on a low one of which, near at hand but far below,
+could be seen the scattered village of San Augustín. There was still a
+long hour down the opposite face of the mountain, with thinner pine
+forests and the red soil showing through here and there; not all down
+either, for the trail had the confirmed habit of falling into bottomless
+sharp gullies every few yards and struggling out again up the steepest
+of banks, though the privilege of thrusting my face into the clear
+mountain stream at the bottom of each made me pardon these monotonous
+vagaries. After surmounting six or eight such mountain ranges in a day,
+under a sun like ours of August quadrupled and some twenty pounds of
+awkward baggage, without what could reasonably be called food, to say
+nothing of festered heels and similar petty ailments, the traveler comes
+gradually by nightfall to develop a desire to spend ten minutes under
+the electric fans of a "Baltimore Lunch."
+
+Yet with all its difficulties the day had been more than enjoyable,
+wandering through endless virgin forests swarming with strange and
+beautiful forms of plant and bird life, with rarely a habitation or a
+fellow-man to break the spell of pure, unadulterated nature. For break
+it these did. As the first hut of San Augustín intruded itself in the
+growing dusk there ran unbidden through my head an ancient refrain:
+
+"Plus je vois l'homme, plus j'aîme mon chien."
+
+Nearer the center of the collection I paused to ask a man leaning
+against his mud doorway whether he knew any one who would give me
+posada. The eagerness with which he offered to do so himself gave me
+visions of an exorbitant bill in the morning, but it turned out that he
+was merely anxious for the "honor" of lodging a stranger. This time I
+slept indoors. My host himself swung my hammock from two of the beams in
+his large, single-room house made of slats filled in with mud. Though a
+man of some education, subscriber to a newspaper of Salvador and an
+American periodical in Spanish, and surrounded by pine forests, it
+seemed never to have occurred to him to try to better his lot even to
+the extent of putting in a board floor. His mixture of knowledge and
+ignorance was curious. He knew most of the biography of Edison by heart,
+but thought Paris the capital of the United States and the population of
+that country 700,000.
+
+In the house the only food was tortillas, but across the "street" meat
+was for sale. It proved to be tough strips a half-inch square of
+sun-dried beef hanging from the rafters. I made another suggestion, but
+the woman replied with a smile half of amusement half of sorrow that all
+the chickens had died. A few beans were found, and, as I ate, several
+men drifted into the hut and gradually and diffidently fell to asking
+strange and childish questions. It is hard for those of us trained to
+democracy and accustomed to intercourse only with "civilized" people to
+realize that a bearded man of forty, with tall and muscular frame, may
+have only an infantile grade of intelligence, following the conversation
+while it is kept on the plane of an eight-year-old intellect, but
+incapable of grasping any real thought, and staring with the
+open-mouthed naïveté of a child.
+
+Tobacco is grown about San Augustín, and every woman of the place rolls
+clumsy cigars and cigarettes as incessantly as those of other parts knit
+or sew. The wife and daughter of my host were so engaged when I
+returned, toiling leisurely by the light of pine splinters; for rural
+Honduras has not yet reached the candle stage of progress. For a
+half-real I bought thirty cigarettes of the size of a lead-pencil, made
+of the coarse leaves more fitted to cigars. The man and wife, and the
+child that had been stark naked ever since my arrival, at length rolled
+up together on a bundle of rags on the dank earth floor, the daughter of
+eighteen climbed a knotched stick into a cubbyhole under the roof, and
+when the pine splinter flickered out I was able for the first night in
+Honduras to get out of my knee-cramping breeches and into more
+comfortable sleeping garments. The festered heel gave me considerable
+annoyance. A bread and milk poultice would no doubt have drawn the fever
+out of it, but even had any such luxury been obtainable I should have
+applied it internally. During the night I awoke times without number.
+Countless curs, that were to real dogs what these people are to
+civilized races, howled the night hideous, as if warning the village
+periodically of some imaginary danger, suggested perhaps by the scent of
+a stranger in their midst. Sometime in the small hours two youths,
+either drunk or enamored of the bedraggled senorita in the cubbyhole
+above, struck up a mournful, endless ballad of two unvarying lines, the
+one barely heard, the other screeching the eternal refrain until the
+night shuddered with it. All the clothing I possessed was not enough to
+keep me warm both above and below.
+
+One of the chief difficulties of the road in Honduras is the
+impossibility of arousing the lazy inhabitants in time to prepare some
+suggestion of breakfast at a reasonably early hour. For to set off
+without eating may be to fast all the hot and laborious day. The sun was
+already warm when I took up the task of picking my way from among the
+many narrow, red, labyrinthian paths that scattered over the hill on
+which San Augustín reposes and radiated into the rocky, pine-forested,
+tumbled mountain world surrounding it. Some one had said the trail to
+Santa Rosa was easy and comparatively level. But such words have strange
+meanings in Honduras. Not once during the day did there appear a level
+space ten yards in length. Hour after hour a narrow path, one of a score
+in which to go astray, worn in the whitish rock of a tumbled and
+irregular series of soft sandstone ridges with thin forests of pine or
+fir, clambered and sweated up and down incessantly by slopes steeper
+than any stairway, until I felt like the overworked chambermaid of a
+tall but elevator-less hotel. My foot was much swollen, and to make
+things worse the region was arid and waterless. Once I came upon a
+straggling mud village, but though it was half-hidden by banana and
+orange groves, not even fruit could be bought. Yet a day or two before
+some scoundrel had passed this way eating oranges constantly and
+strewing the trail with the tantalizing peelings; a methodical, selfish,
+bourgeois fellow, who had not had the humane carelessness to drop a
+single fruit on all his gluttonous journey.
+
+When I came at last, at the bottom of a thigh-straining descent, upon
+the first stream of the day, it made up for the aridity behind, for the
+path had eluded me and left me to tear through the jungle and wade a
+quarter mile before I picked up the trail again. Refreshed, I began a
+task before which I might have turned back had I seen it all at once.
+Four mortal waterless hours I toiled steeply upward, more than twenty
+times sure I had reached the summit, only to see the trail, like some
+will-o'-the-wisp, draw on ahead unattainably in a new direction. I had
+certainly ascended four thousand feet when I threw myself down at last
+among the pines of the wind-swept summit. A draught from the gourd of a
+passing peon gave me new life for the corresponding descent. Several of
+these fellow-roadsters now appeared, courteous fellows, often with black
+mustaches and imperial à la Napoleon III, who raised their hats and
+greeted me with a sing-song "Qué se vaya bien," yet seemed remarkably
+stupid and perhaps a trifle treacherous. At length, well on in the
+afternoon, the road broke through a cutting and disclosed the welcome
+sight of the town of Santa Rosa, its white church bulking above all else
+built by man; the first suggestion of civilization I had seen in
+Honduras.
+
+The suggestion withered upon closer examination. The place did not know
+the meaning of the word hotel, there was neither restaurant, electric
+light, wheeled vehicles, nor any of the hundred and one things common to
+civilized towns of like size. After long inquiry for lodging, I was
+directed to a pharmacy. The connection was not apparent until I found
+that an American doctor occupied there a tiny room made by partitioning
+off with a strip of canvas stretched on a frame a part of the public
+hallway to the patio. He was absent on his rounds; which was fortunate,
+for his Cuban interpreter not merely gave me possession of the "room"
+and cot, but delivered to me the doctor's supper of potatoes, rice, an
+imitation of bread, and even a piece of meat, when it arrived from a
+market-place kitchen. Here I spent Sunday, with the extreme lassitude
+following an extended tramp in the hungry wilderness. The doctor turned
+up in the afternoon, an imposing monument of a man from Texas with a
+wild tangle of dark-brown beard, and the soft eyes and gentle manners of
+a girl. He had spent some months in the region, more to the advantage of
+the inhabitants than his own, for disease was far more wide spread than
+wealth, and the latter was extremely elusive even where it
+existed. Hookworm was the second most common ailment, with cancer and
+miscarriages frequent. The entire region he had found virtually given
+over to free love. The grasping priests made it all but impossible for
+the poorer classes to marry, and the custom had rather died out even
+among the well-to-do. All but two families of the town acknowledged
+illegitimate children, there was not a priest nor a youth of eighteen
+who had not several, and more than one widow of Honduranean wealth and
+position whose husband had long since died continued to add yearly to
+the population. The padre of San Pedro, from whose house he had just
+come, boasted of being the father of eighty children. All these things
+were common knowledge, with almost no attempt at concealment, and indeed
+little notion that there might be anything reprehensible in such
+customs. Every one did it, why shouldn't any one? Later experience
+proved these conditions, as well as nearly 90 per cent. of complete
+illiteracy, common to all Honduras.
+
+The only other industry of Santa Rosa is the raising of tobacco and the
+making of a tolerably good cigar, famed throughout Honduras and selling
+here twenty for a real. Every hut and almost every shop is a cigar
+factory. The town is four thousand feet above sea-level, giving it a
+delightful, lazy, satisfied-with-life-just-as-it-is air that partly
+makes up for its ignorance, disease, and unmorality. The population is
+largely Indian, unwashed since birth, and with huge hoof-like bare feet
+devoid of sensation. There is also considerable Spanish blood, generally
+adulterated, its possessors sometimes shod and wearing nearly white
+cotton suits and square white straw hats. In intelligence the entire
+place resembles children without a child's power of imitation. Except
+for the snow-white church, the town is entirely one-story, with tile
+roofs, a ragged flowery plaza, and straight streets, sometimes cobbled,
+that run off down hill, for the place is built on a meadowy knoll with a
+fine vista of hills and surrounded by an immensely rich land that would
+grow almost anything in abundance with a minimum of cultivation.
+
+The one way of getting an early start in Honduras is to make your
+purchases the night before and eat them raw in the morning. Christmas
+day had barely dawned, therefore, when I began losing my way among the
+undulating white rock paths beyond Santa Rosa. Such a country brings
+home to man his helplessness and unimportance before untamed nature. I
+wished to be in Tegucigalpa, two hundred miles away, within five days;
+yet all the wealth of Croesus could not have brought me there in that
+time. As it was, I had broken the mule-back record, and many is the
+animal that succumbs to the up and down trails of Honduras. This one
+might, were such triteness permissible, have been most succinctly
+characterized by a well-known description of war. It was rougher than
+any stone-quarry pitched at impossible angles, and the attraction of
+gravity for my burden passed belief. To this I had been forced to add
+not merely a roll of silver reales but my Christmas dinner, built up
+about the nucleus of a can of what announced itself outwardly as pork
+and beans. Talgua, at eleven, did not seem the fitting scene for so
+solemn a ceremony, and I hobbled on, first over a tumble-down stone
+bridge, then by a hammock-bridge to which one climbed high above the
+river by a notched stick and of which two thirds of the cross-slats were
+missing, while the rest cracked or broke under the 185 pounds to which I
+subjected them.
+
+I promised myself to pitch camp at the very next clear stream. But the
+hammock-bridge once passed there began a heart-breaking climb into
+bone-dry hills, rolling with broken stones, and palpitating with the
+heat of an unshaded tropical sun. Several times I had perished of thirst
+before I came to a small sluggish stream, only to find its water deep
+blue with some pollution. In the end I was forced to overlook this
+drawback and, finding a sort of natural bathtub among the blazing rocks,
+fell upon what after all proved to be a porkless feast. The doctor's
+treatment had reduced the swelling in foot and ankle, but the wound
+itself was more painful than ever and called for frequent soaking. In
+midafternoon I passed a second village, as somnolent as the belly-gorged
+zopilotes that half-jumped, half-flew sluggishly out of the way as I
+advanced. Here was a bit of fairly flat and shaded going, with another
+precarious hammock-bridge, then an endless woods with occasional sharp
+stony descents to some brawling but most welcome stream, with
+stepping-stones or without. Thus far I had seen barely a human being all
+the day, but as the shades of evening grew I passed several groups of
+arrieros who blasted my hopes of reaching Gracias that night, but who
+informed me that just beyond the "rio grande" was a _casita_ where
+I might spend the night.
+
+It was sunset when I came to the "great river," a broad and noisy though
+only waist-deep stream with two sheer, yet pine-clad rock cliffs more
+striking than the Palisades of the Hudson. A crescent moon was peering
+over them when I passed the swinging bridge swaying giddily to and fro
+high above the stream, but on the steep farther bank it lighted up only
+a cruel disappointment. For the "casita" was nothing but a roof on
+wabbly legs, a public rest-house where I might swing my hammock but go
+famished to bed. I pushed on in quest of a more human habitation. The
+"road" consisted of a dozen paths shining white in the moonlight and
+weaving in and out among each other. No sign of man appeared, and my
+foot protested vehemently. I concluded to be satisfied with water to
+drink and let hunger feed upon itself. But now it was needed, not a
+trickle appeared. Once I fancied I heard a stream babbling below and
+tore my way through the jungle down a sharp slope, but I had only caught
+the echo of the distant river. It was well on into the night when the
+welcome sound again struck my ear. This time it was real, and I fought
+my way down through clutching undergrowth and stone heaps to a stream,
+sluggish and blue in color, but welcome for all that, to swing my
+hammock among stone heaps from two elastic saplings, for it was just my
+luck to have found the one spot in Honduras where there were no trees
+large enough to furnish shelter. Luckily nothing worse than a heavy dew
+fell. Now and then noisy boisterous bands of natives passed along the
+trail from their Christmas festivities in the town ahead. But whereas a
+Mexican highway at this hour would have been overrun with drunken peons
+more or less dangerous to "gringoes," drink seemed to have made these
+chiefly amorous. Still I took good care to arrange myself for the night
+quietly, if only to be able to sleep undisturbed. Once, somewhere in the
+darkest hours, a drove of cattle stampeded down the slope near me, but
+even as I reached for my weapon I found it was not the band of peons
+from a dream of which I had awakened. The spot was some 1500 feet lower
+than Santa Rosa, but still so sharp and penetrating is the chill of
+night in this region in contrast to the blazing, sweating days that I
+did not sleep a moment soundly after the first hour of evening.
+
+An hour's walk next morning brought me to Gracias, a slovenly,
+nothing-to-do-but-stare hamlet of a few hundred inhabitants. After I had
+eaten all the chief hut could supply, I set about looking for the
+shoemaker my already aged Guatemalan Oxfords needed so badly. I found
+the huts where several of them lived, but not where any of them
+worked. The first replied from his hammock that he was sick, the second
+had gone to Tegucigalpa, the third was "somewhere about town if you have
+the patience to wait." Which I did for an hour or more, and was rewarded
+with his turning up to inform me that he was not planning to begin his
+labors again so soon, for only yesterday had been Christmas.
+
+Over the first hill and river beyond, I fell in with a woman who carried
+on an unbroken conversation as well as a load on her head, from the time
+she accepted the first cigar until we had waded the thigh-deep "rio
+grande" and climbed the rocky bank to her hut and garden. At first she
+had baldly refused to allow her picture to be taken. But so weak-willed
+are these people of Honduras that a white man of patience can in time
+force them to do his bidding by sheer force of will, by merely looking
+long and fixedly at them. Many the "gringo" who has misused this power
+in Central America. Before we reached her home she had not only posed
+but insisted on my stopping to photograph her with her children "dressed
+up" as befitted so extraordinary an occasion. Her garden was unusually
+well supplied with fruit and vegetables, and the rice boiled in milk she
+served was the most savory dish I had tasted in Honduras. She refused
+payment, but insisted on my waiting until the muleteers she had charged
+for their less sumptuous dinner were gone, so they should not discover
+her unpatriotic favoritism.
+
+During the afternoon there was for a time almost level going, grassy and
+soft, across gently dipping meadows on which I left both mule-trains and
+pedestrians behind. Houses were rare, and the fall of night threatened
+to leave me alone among vast whining pine forests where the air was
+already chill. In the dusk, however, I came upon the hut of Pablo
+Morales and bespoke posada. He growled a surly permission and addressed
+hardly a word to me for hours thereafter. The place was the most filthy,
+quarrelsome, pig and chicken overrun stop on the trip, and when at last
+I prepared to swing my hammock inside the hut the sulky host informed me
+that he only permitted travelers the _corredor_. Two other
+guests--ragged, soil-encrusted arrieros--were already housed within, but
+there were at least some advantages in swinging my own net outside from
+the rafters of the eaves. Pigs jolted against me now and then and before
+I had entirely fallen asleep I was disturbed by a procession of dirty
+urchins, each carrying a blazing pine stick, who came one by one to look
+me over. I was just settling down again when Pablo himself appeared, an
+uncanny figure in the dancing light of his flaming torch. He had heard
+that I could "put people on paper," and would I put his wife on paper in
+return for his kindness in giving me posada? Yes, in the morning. Why
+couldn't I do it now? He seemed strangely eager, for a man accustomed to
+set mañana as his own time of action. His surly indifference had
+changed to an annoying solicitude, and he forced upon me first a
+steaming tortilla, then a native beverage, and finally came with a large
+cloth hammock in which I passed the night more comfortably than in my
+own open-work net.
+
+In the morning heavy mountain clouds and a swirling mist made
+photography impossible, but my host was not of the grade of intelligence
+that made this simple explanation possible. He led the way into the
+windowless hut, in a corner of which lay a woman of perhaps thirty in a
+dog-litter of a bed enclosed by curtains hung from the rafters. The
+walls were black with coagulated smoke. The woman, yellow and emaciated
+with months of fever, groaned distressingly as the curtains were drawn
+aside, but her solicitous husband insisted on propping her up in bed and
+holding her with an arm about the shoulders while I "put them both on
+paper." His purpose, it turned out, was to send the picture to the
+shrine of "la Virgen de los Remedios" that she might cure the groaning
+wife of her ailment, and he insisted that it must show "bed and all and
+the color of her face" that the Virgin might know what was required of
+her. I went through the motions of taking a photograph and explained as
+well as was possible why it could not be delivered at once, with the
+added information to soften his coming disappointment that the machine
+sometimes failed. The fellow merely gathered the notion that I was but a
+sorry magician at best, who had my diabolical hocuspocus only
+imperfectly under control, and he did not entirely succeed in keeping
+his sneers invisible. I offered quinine and such other medicines as were
+to be found in my traveling case, but he had no faith in worldly
+remedies.
+
+By nine the day was brilliant. There was an unusual amount of level
+grassy trail, though steep slopes were not lacking. During the morning I
+passed several bands of ragged soldiers meandering northward in rout
+order and some distance behind them their bedraggled women and children,
+all afoot and carrying their entire possessions on their heads and
+backs. Frequently a little wooden cross or a heap of stones showed where
+some traveler had fallen by the wayside, perhaps at the hands of his
+fellow-man; for the murder rate, thanks largely to drink and vendettas,
+is high in Honduras. It might be less if assassins faced the death
+penalty, instead of being merely shut within prisons from which an
+active man could soon dig his way to freedom with a pocket-knife, if he
+did not have the patience to wait a few months until a new revolution
+brought him release or pardon.
+
+The futility of Honduranean life was illustrated here and there. On some
+vast hillside capable of producing food for a multitude the eye made out
+a single _milpa_, or tiny corn-field, fenced off with huge slabs of
+mahogany worth easily ten times all the corn the patch could produce in
+a lifetime--or rather, worth nothing whatever, for a thing is valuable
+only where it is in demand. At ten I lost the way, found it again, and
+began an endless, rock-strewn climb upward through pines, tacking more
+times than I could count, each leg of the ascent a toilsome journey in
+itself. Not the least painful of road experiences in Honduras is to
+reach the summit of such a range after hours of heavy labor, to take
+perhaps a dozen steps along the top of the ridge, and then find the
+trail pitching headlong down again into a bottomless gorge, from which
+comes up the joyous sound of a mountain stream that draws the thirsty
+traveler on at double speed, only to bring him at last to a rude bridge
+over a precipitous, rock-sided river impossible to reach before
+attacking the next slope staring him in the face.
+
+Luckily I foraged an imitation dinner in San Juan, a scattering of mud
+huts on a broad upland plain, most of the adult inhabitants of which
+were away at some work or play in the surrounding hills. Cattle without
+number dotted the patches of unlevel meadows, but not a drop of milk was
+to be had. Roosters would have made the night a torture, yet three eggs
+rewarded the canvassing of the entire hamlet. These it is always the
+Honduranean custom to puncture with a small hole before dropping into
+hot water, no doubt because there was no other way of getting the
+universal uncleanliness into them. Nor did I ever succeed in getting
+them more than half cooked. Once I offered an old woman an extra real if
+she would boil them a full three minutes without puncturing them. She
+asserted that without a hole in the end "the water could not get in to
+cook them," but at length solemnly promised to follow my orders
+implicitly. When the eggs reappeared they were as raw as ever, though
+somewhat warm, and each had its little punctured hole. I took the cook
+to task and she assured me vociferously that "they broke themselves."
+Apparently there was some superstition connected with the matter which
+none dared violate. At any rate I never succeeded in being served
+un-holed eggs in all rural Honduras.
+
+Not only have these people of the wilderness next to nothing to eat, but
+they are too indolent to learn to cook what they have. The thick, doughy
+tortillas and half-boiled black beans, accompanied by black, unstrained
+coffee with dirty crude sugar and without milk, were not merely
+monotonous, but would have been fatal to civilized man of sedentary
+habits. Only the constant toil and sweat, and the clear water of
+mountain stream offset somewhat the evil effects under which even a
+horseman would probably have succumbed. The inhabitants of the
+Honduranean wilds are distinctly less human in their habits than the
+wild men of the Malay Peninsula. For the latter at least build floors
+of split bamboo above the ground. Without exaggeration the people of
+this region were more uncleanly than their gaunt and yellow curs, for
+the latter carefully picked a spot to lie in while the human beings
+threw themselves down anywhere and nonchalantly motioned to a guest to
+sit down or drop his bundle among fresh offal. They literally never
+washed, except by accident, and handled food and filth alternately with
+a child-like blandness.
+
+I was just preparing to leave San Juan when a woman came from a
+neighboring hut to request my assistance at a child-birth! In this
+region all "gringoes" have the reputation of being physicians, and the
+inhabitants will not be undeceived. I forcibly tore myself away and
+struck for the surrounding wilderness.
+
+From soon after noon until sunset I climbed incessantly among tumbled
+rocks without seeing a human being. A cold wind howled through a vast
+pine forest of the highest altitude of my Honduranean journey--more than
+six thousand feet above sea-level. Night fell in wild solitude, but I
+could only plod on, for to sleep out at this height would have been
+dangerous. Luckily a corner of moon lighted up weirdly a moderately wide
+trail. I had tramped an hour or more into the night when a flickering
+light ahead among the trees showed what might have been a camp of
+bandits, but which proved to be only that of a group of muleteers, who
+had stacked their bales of merchandise around three sides under an
+ancient roof on poles and rolled up in their blankets close to the
+blazing wood fire they had built to the leeward of it.
+
+They gave no sign of offering me place and I marched on into the howling
+night. Perhaps four miles beyond I made out a cluster of habitations
+pitched on the summit and slope of a hill leaning toward the trail with
+nothing above it on any side to break the raging wind. An uproar of
+barking dogs greeted my arrival, and it was some time before an inmate
+of one of the dark and silent huts summoned up courage to peer out upon
+me. He emerged armed with a huge stick and led the way to a miserable
+hovel on the hilltop, where he beat on the door and called out that an
+"hombrecito" sought posada. This opened at last and I entered a mud
+room in one end of which a fire of sticks blazed fitfully. A woman of
+perhaps forty, though appearing much older, as is the case with most
+women of Honduras, lay on a wooden bed and a girl of ten huddled among
+rags near the fire. I asked for food and the woman ordered the girl to
+heat me black coffee and tortillas. The child was naked to the waist,
+though the bitter cold wind howled with force through the hut, the walls
+and especially the gables and roof of which were far from whole. The
+woman complained of great pain in her right leg, and knowing she would
+otherwise groan and howl the night through in the hope of attracting the
+Virgin's attention, I induced her to swallow two sedative pills. The
+smoke made me weep as I swung my hammock from two soot-blackened
+rafters, but the fire soon went out and I awoke from the first doze
+shivering until the hut shook. The temperature was not low compared with
+our northern winters, but the wind carried a penetrating chill that
+reached the marrow of the bones. I rose and tried unsuccessfully to
+relight the fire. The half-naked girl proved more skilful and I sat
+huddled on a stool over the fire, alternately weeping with the smoke and
+all but falling into the blaze as I dozed. The pills had little effect
+on my hostess. I gave her three more, but her Honduranean stomach was
+evidently zinc-lined and she groaned and moaned incessantly. I returned
+to my hammock and spent several dream-months at the North Pole before I
+was awakened at first cockcrow by the old woman kneeling on the earth
+floor before a lithograph of the Virgin surrounded by withered pine
+branches, wailing a singsong prayer. She left off at length with the
+information that her only hope of relief was to make a pilgrimage to the
+"Virgen de los Remedios," and ordered the girl to prepare coffee. I paid
+my bill of two reales and gave the girl one for herself, evidently the
+largest sum she had ever possessed, if indeed she remained long in
+possession of it after I took my hobbling and shivering departure.
+
+A cold and wind-swept hour, all stiffly up or down, brought me to
+Esperanza, near which I saw the first wheeled vehicle of Honduras, a
+contraption of solid wooden wheels behind gaunt little oxen identical
+with those of northwest Spain even to the excruciating scream of its
+greaseless axle. In the outskirts two ragged, hoof-footed soldiers
+sprang up from behind the bushes of a hillside and came down upon me,
+waving their muskets and screaming:
+
+"A'onde va? D'onde viene? Have you a pass to go through our department?"
+
+"Yes, from your consul in Guatemala."
+
+They did not ask to read it, perhaps for a reason, but permitted me to
+pass; to my relief, for the old woman had announced that smallpox was
+raging in her town of Yamaranguila and its people were not allowed to
+enter Esperanza. This proved to be a place of considerable size, of
+large huts scattered over a broad grassy plain in a sheltered valley,
+with perhaps five thousand inhabitants but not a touch of
+civilization. Crowds of boys and dirty ragged soldiers followed me,
+grinning and throwing salacious comments as I wandered from house to
+house trying to buy food. At a corner of the plaza the comandante called
+to me from his hut. I treated him with the haughty air of a superior,
+with frequent reference to my "orders from the government," and he
+quickly subsided from patronizing insolence to humility and sent a
+soldier to lead me to "where food is prepared for strangers." Two
+ancient crones, pottering about a mud stove in an open-work reed kitchen
+through which the mountain wind swept chillingly, half-cooked an
+enormous slab of veal, boiled a pot of the ubiquitous black coffee, and
+scraped together a bit of stale bread, or more exactly cake, for _pan
+dulce_ was the only species that the town afforded. A dish of
+tomatoes of the size of small cherries proved far more appetizing, after
+they had been well washed, but the astonishment with which the aged pair
+watched me eat them suggested that the tradition that held this fruit
+poison still reigns in Esperanza.
+
+Back once more in the comandancia I resolved to repay the soldiers
+scattered about town for their insolence in the one way painful to the
+Honduranean--by making them exert themselves. Displaying again my
+"government order," I demanded a photograph of the garrison of Esperanza
+with the comandante, its generals, colonels, lieutenants, and all the
+lesser fry at the head; and an imperative command soon brought the
+entire force of fifty or more hurrying barefoot and startled, their
+ancient muskets under their arms, from the four somnolent corners of the
+city. I kept them maneuvering a half-hour or so, ostensibly for
+photographic reasons, while all the populace looked on, and the
+_reos_, or department prisoners in their chains, formed a languid
+group leaning on their shovels at the edge of the plaza waiting until
+their guards should be returned to them.
+
+At ten I reshouldered my stuff and marched out in a still cold, cloudy,
+upland day, the wondering inhabitants of Esperanza staring awe-stricken
+after me until I disappeared from view. A few miles out I met two pure
+Indians, carrying oranges in nets on their backs, the supporting strap
+across their foreheads. To my question they admitted the fruit was for
+sale, though it is by no means uncommon in Central America for
+countrymen to refuse to sell on the road produce they are carrying to
+town for that purpose. I asked for a real's worth. Luckily they
+misunderstood, for the price was "two hands for a medio," and as it was
+I had to leave lying on the grass several of the ten fine large oranges
+one of the aborigines had counted on his fingers and accepted a
+two-and-a-half cent piece for with a "Muchas gracias, amigo." Farther on
+I met scores of these short, thick-set Indians, of both sexes and all
+ages, straining along over mountain trails for forty or fifty miles from
+their colonies to town each with at most a hundred and fifty oranges
+they would there scarcely sell for so high a price.
+
+Beyond a fordable, ice-cold stream a fairly good road changed to an
+atrocious mountain trail in a labyrinth of tumbled pine-clad ridges and
+gullies, on which I soon lost my way in a drizzling rain. The single
+telegraph wire came to my rescue, jumping lightly from moss-grown stick
+to tall slender tree-trunk across vast chasms down into and out of which
+I had to slip and slide and stumble pantingly upward in pursuit. Before
+dark I was delighted to fall upon a trail again, though not with its
+condition, for it was generally perpendicular and always thick with
+loose stones. A band of arrieros cooking their scanty supper under a
+shelter tent asserted there were houses some two leagues on, but for
+hours I hobbled over mountains of pure stone, my maltreated feet wincing
+at every step, without verifying the assertion. Often the descents were
+so steep I had to pick each footstep carefully in the darkness, and more
+than one climb required the assistance of my hands. A swift stream all
+but swept me off my feet, and in the stony climb beyond I lost both
+trail and telegraph wire and, after floundering about for some time in a
+swamp, was forced to halt and swing my hammock between two saplings
+under enormous sheer cliffs that looked like great medieval castles in
+the night, their white faces spotted by the trees that found foothold on
+them. Happily I had dropped well down out of the clouds that hover about
+Esperanza and the cold mountain wind was now much tempered. The white
+mountain wall rising sheer from my very hips was also somewhat
+sheltering, though it was easy to dream of rocks being dropped from
+aloft upon me.
+
+I had clambered a steep and rocky three hours next morning before I came
+upon the first evidences of humanity, a hut on a little tableland, with
+all the customary appurtenances and uncleanliness. Black unstrained
+coffee and tortillas of yellow hue gradually put strength enough in my
+legs to enable them to push me on through bottomless rocky barrancas,
+and at length, beyond the hamlet of Santa María, up one of the highest
+climbs of the trip to the long crest of a ridge thick with whispering
+pines and with splendid views of the "Great Depths," dense in woodland,
+on either side as far as the eye could reach. Muleteers passed
+frequently, often carrying on their own backs a bundle of the Santa Rosa
+cigars with which their animals were laden. Except for her soldiers,
+accustomed to "show off" before their fellows, every person I had met in
+Honduras had been kindly and courteous--if dirty--and never with a hint
+of coveting my meager hoard. Beggars seemed as unknown as
+robbers--perhaps from lack of initiative and energy. From Esperanza on,
+the Indian boys I met driving mules or carrying nets of oranges all
+folded their hands before them like a Buddhist at prayer when they
+approached me, but instead of mumbling some request for alms, as I
+expected, they greeted me with an almost obsequious "Adiós" and a faint
+smile. How the "little red schoolhouse" is lacking in this wooded
+mountainland! Not merely was the immense majority entirely illiterate,
+but very few of them had even reached the stage of desiring to learn. A
+paucity of intelligence and initiative made all intercourse monotonously
+the same. The greeting was never a hearty, individual phrase of the
+speaker's own choosing, but always the invariable "Adiós, Buenos días,
+tardes or noche," even though I had already addressed some inquiry to
+them. Replies to questions of distance were as stereotyped, with the
+diminutive _ito_ beloved of the Central Americans tacked on
+wherever possible:
+
+"Larguita 'stá! A la vueltita no más! Está cerquita! De día no llega! A
+la tardecita llega. Ay no masito! A la oracióncita llega--"
+
+Nothing could bring them down from these glittering generalities to a
+definite statement of distance, in leagues or hours, and to reach a
+place reported "Just around the little corner" was as apt to mean a half
+day's tramp as that it was over the next knoll.
+
+In the _aldea_ of Tutule I fell in with Alberto Suaza, a pleasant
+appearing, all but white Honduranean, who had once been in the army and
+was now returning on horseback from some government errand. The hamlet
+slumbered on a slope of a little leaning valley backed by a wooded
+mountain ridge, all but a few of the inhabitants being engaged in coffee
+culture in the communal tract up over the hill when we arrived. Suaza
+picketed his diminutive animal before the hut of a friend, in which we
+shared two eggs and coffee and turned in together. Unfortunately I let
+my companion persuade me against my better judgment to lay aside my
+hammock and sleep on his "bed," a sun-dried ox-hide thrown on the earth
+floor, on my side of which, "because he was more used to hard beds than
+those señores gringoes," he spread most of the _colchón_
+(mattress)--which consisted of two empty grainsacks. Either these or the
+painfully thin blanket over us housed a nimble breed I had miraculously
+escaped thus far on the journey, robbing me of the much-needed sleep the
+incessant barking of a myriad of dogs, the itching of mosquito bites,
+the rhinoceros-like throat-noises of the family, and the rock hardness
+of the floor would probably otherwise have pilfered. The man of the
+house had stripped stark naked and, wrapping a red blanket about him,
+lay down on a bare wooden bed to pass the night apparently in perfect
+comfort. Soft mortals indeed are we of civilized and upholstered lands.
+
+Suaza made no protest when I paid the bill for both, and by seven we
+were off, he riding his tiny horse until we were out of sight of the
+town, then dismounting to lead it the rest of the day. He had announced
+himself the possessor of an immensely rich aunt on whose hacienda we
+should stop for "breakfast," and promised we should spend the night
+either in the gold mine of which she was a chief stockholder or at her
+home in La Paz, which I gathered to be a great mansion filled with all
+the gleanings of that lady's many trips to Europe and the States. I had
+long since learned the Latin American's love of personal
+exaggeration. But Suaza was above the Honduranean average; he not only
+read with comparative ease but cleaned his finger nails, and I looked
+forward with some eagerness to a coming oasis of civilization in the
+hitherto unsoftened wilderness.
+
+It was an ideal day for tramping, cloudy yet bright, with a strong fresh
+wind almost too cold for sitting still and across a country green and
+fragrant with endless forest, and after the climb back of Tutule little
+more than rolling. It was noon before we came upon the new mud-and-tiled
+house of the cattle-tender of "dear aunty's" hacienda, and though the
+meal we enjoyed there was savory by Honduranean standards, it was not so
+completely Parisian as I had permitted myself to anticipate. That I was
+allowed to pay for it proved nothing, for the employees of the wealthy
+frequently show no aversion to accepting personal favors.
+
+Not far beyond we came out on the edge of a tableland with a splendid
+view of the valley of Comayagua, far below, almost dead level, some ten
+miles wide and thirty long, deep green everywhere, with cloud shadows
+giving beautiful color effects across it in the jumble of green
+mountains with the purple tinge of distance beyond which lay
+Tegucigalpa. At the same time there began the most laborious descent of
+the journey, an utterly dry mountain face pitched at an acute angle and
+made up completely of loose rock, down which we must pick every step and
+often use our hands to keep from landing with broken bones at the
+bottom. The new buildings of the mine were in plain sight almost
+directly below us from the beginning, yet we were a full two hours in
+zigzagging by short legs straight down the loose-stone slope to
+them. The American manager was absent, but in the general store of the
+company I had not only the pleasure of spending an hour in the first
+thoroughly clean building I had seen in Honduras, but of speaking
+English, for the two Negro youths in charge of the place were natives of
+Belize, or British Honduras, and were equally fluent in my own tongue or
+Spanish, while their superiority in personal condition over the natives
+was a sad commentary on the boasted advantage of the republican form of
+government.
+
+The thirsty, rock-sown descent continued, bringing us at last with
+aching thighs to the level of the vast valley, more than four thousand
+feet below the lodging-places of the few days past. Suaza mounted his
+horse and prepared to enter his native La Paz in style. So often had
+kingly quarters promised me by the self-styled sons of wealth in Latin
+America gradually degenerated to the monotonous tortilla level of
+general conditions that I had not been able entirely to disabuse myself
+of an expectation of disappointment. Sure enough, where the trail broke
+up into a score of paths among mud huts and pig wallows, my companion
+paused in the dark to say:
+
+"Perhaps after all it will be better to take you right to my house for
+to-night. One always feels freer in one's father's house. My aunt might
+be holding some social affair, or be sick or--But we will surely call at
+her mansion to-morrow, and--"
+
+"Como usted quiera?" I answered, swallowing my disappointment. At least
+his father's house should be something above the ordinary.
+
+But to my astonishment we stopped a bit farther on in the suburbs before
+one of the most miserable mud hovels it had been my misfortune to run
+across in Honduras, swarming with pigs, yellow curs, and all the
+multitudinous filth and disarray indigenous to the country. The coldest
+of welcomes greeted us, the frowsy, white-bearded father in the noisome
+doorway replying to the son's query of why there was no light with a
+crabbed:
+
+"If you want light why don't you come in the daytime?"
+
+My companion told a boy of the family to go buy a candle, and his
+scrawny, unkempt mother bounded out of the hut with the snarl of a
+miser:
+
+"What do you want a candle for?"
+
+The boy refused to go and Suaza tied his horse to a bush and went in
+quest of one himself. I mentioned supper, hinting at my willingness to
+pay for anything that could be furnished, but to each article I
+suggested came the monotonous, indifferent Honduranean answer, "No hay."
+After much growling and an extended quarrel with her son, the woman set
+on a corner of a wabbly-legged table, littered with all manner of
+unsavory junk, two raw eggs, punctured and warmed, a bowl of hot water
+and a stale slab of _pan dulce_, a cross between poor bread and
+worse cake. I wandered on into the town in the hope of finding some
+imitation of a hotel. But though the place had a population of several
+thousand, it was made up exclusively of mud huts only two or three of
+which were faintly lighted by pine-splinters. The central plaza was a
+barren, unlighted pasture, a hut on the corner of which was reputed to
+be a shop, but when I had beaten my way into it I found nothing for sale
+except bottles of an imitation wine at monopoly prices. In my disgust I
+pounded my way into every hovel that was said to be a tienda. Not an
+edible thing was to be found. One woman claimed to have fruit for sale,
+and after collecting a high price for them she went out into the patio
+and picked a half-dozen perfectly green oranges.
+
+"But what do people eat and drink in La Paz? Grass and water?" I
+demanded.
+
+But the bedraggled population was not even amenable to crude sarcasm,
+and the only reply I got was a lazy, child-like:
+
+"Oh, each one keeps what he needs to eat in his own house."
+
+Here was a town of a size to have been a place of importance in other
+lands, yet even the mayor lived with his pigs on an earth
+floor. Statistics of population have little meaning in Honduras. The
+place recalled a cynical "gringo's" description of a similar town, "It
+has a hundred men, two hundred women, and 100,000 chuchos "--the generic
+term in Central America for yellow curs of all colors. Why every family
+houses such a swarm of these miserable beasts is hard to guess. Mere
+apathy, no doubt, for they are never fed; nor, indeed, are the pigs that
+also overrun every household and live, like the dogs, on the offal of
+the patio or backyard that serves as place of convenience. They have at
+least the doubtful virtue of partly solving the sewer problem, which is
+not a problem to Honduraneans. A tortilla or other food held carelessly
+is sure to be snatched by some cat, pig, or dog; a bundle left unwatched
+for a moment is certain to be rooted about the floor or deposited with
+filth. These people utterly lack any notion of improvement. A child or
+an animal, for instance, climbs upon the table or into a dish of food.
+When the point is reached at which it is unavoidable, the person nearest
+shouts, throws whatever is handy, or kicks at the offender; but though
+the same identical performance is repeated a score of times during a
+single meal, there is never any attempt to correct the culprit, to drive
+it completely off, or remove the threatened dish from the danger zone. A
+people inhabiting a land that might be a garden spot of the earth drift
+through their miserable lives in identically the same fashion as their
+gaunt and mangy curs.
+
+There was a great gathering of the neighboring clans in the Suaza hut
+next morning, while my companion of the day before enlarged upon what he
+fancied he knew about his distinguished guest. Among those who crowded
+the place were several men of education, in the Honduranean
+sense,--about equal to that of a poorly trained American child in the
+fourth grade. But there was not one of them that did not show a monkey
+curiosity and irresponsibility in handling every article in my pack; my
+sweater--"Ay qué lindo!" my papers--"How beautiful!" an extremely
+ordinary shirt--"How soft and fine! How costly!" and "How much did this
+cost?--and that?" Suaza displayed my medicine-case to the open-mouthed
+throng--and would I give mother some pills for her colic, and would I
+please photograph each one of the family--and so on to the end of
+patience. There was no mention made of the wealthy aunt and her mansion
+after the day dawned. The invitation to spend a few days, "as many as
+you like," amid the luxuries of Paris and the Seven Seas had tapered
+down to the warmed eggs and black coffee, the only real food I ate being
+that I had bought in a house-to-house canvass in the morning. I had
+distributed pills to most of the family and several neighbors and
+photographed them, at the request of the man of many promises, had paid
+his bills on the road since our meeting; while I prepared my pack, he
+requested me to send him six prints each of the pictures, some postals
+of New York, a pair of pajamas such as I carried, "and any other little
+things I might think he would like," including long weekly letters, and
+as I rose to take my leave and asked what I owed him, he replied with a
+bland and magnanimous smile:
+
+"You owe me nothing whatever, señor,--only to mamá," and dear mamá
+collected about what a first-class hotel would have for the same length
+of time.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS
+
+A monotonous wide path full of loose stones led through dry, breathless
+jungle across the valley floor to Comayagua. The former capital of the
+republic had long held a place in my imagination, and the distant view
+of it the day before from the lofty rim of the valley backed by long
+blue ranges of mountains had enhanced my desire to visit the place, even
+though it lay somewhat off the direct route. But romance did not long
+survive my entrance. For the most part it was merely a larger
+collection of huts along badly cobbled or grass-grown streets common to
+all "cities" of Honduras. A stub-towered, white-washed cathedral, built
+by the Spaniards and still the main religious edifice of Honduras, faced
+the drowsy plaza; near it were a few "houses of commerce," one-story
+plaster buildings before which hung a sign with the owner's name and
+possibly some hint of his business, generally that of hawking a few
+bolts of cloth, straw hats, or ancient and fly-specked cheap products
+from foreign parts. The town boasted a place that openly receives
+travelers, but its two canvas cots and its rafters were already occupied
+by several snobbish and gawkily dressed young natives bound from the
+north coast to the capital.
+
+The chief of telegraphs finally led me to the new billiard-hall, where a
+lawyer in a frock coat and the manners of a prime minister admitted he
+had an empty shop in which I could swing my hammock. When he had
+finished his game, he got a massive key and a candle and led the way in
+person to a small hut in a side street, the rafters uncomfortably high
+above the tile floor, on which I was fortunate to have a newspaper to
+spread before depositing my bundle. The lawyer took leave of me with
+the customary "At your orders; here you are in your own house," and
+marched ministerially away with the several pompous friends who had
+accompanied him. But a few moments later, having shaken them off, he
+returned to collect ten cents--one real for rent and another for the
+candle. It was the first lodging I had paid since leaving Guatemala
+City. As I doubled up in my ill-hung hammock, the dull thump of a
+distant guitar and the explosion of a rare firecracker broke the
+stillness of New Year's eve, while now and then there drifted to my ears
+the sound of a band in the main plaza that tortured the night at
+intervals into the small hours.
+
+Comayagua by day was a lazy, silent place, chiefly barefoot, the few
+possessors of shoes being gaudily dressed young men whose homes were
+earth-floored huts. The place had the familiar Central American air of
+trying to live with the least possible exertion; its people were a
+mongrel breed running all the gamut from black to near-white. There were
+none of the fine physical specimens common to the highlands of Mexico,
+and the teeth were notably bad. A few of the soldiers, in blue-jean
+uniforms with what had once been white stripes, faded straw hats, and
+bare feet, were mountain Indians with well-developed chests; for
+military service--of the catch-them-with-a-rope variety--is compulsory
+in Honduras. But the population in general was anemic and stunted. Two
+prisoners were at work in the streets; more properly they sat smoking
+cigarettes and putting a finger cautiously to their lips when I passed
+in silent request not to wake up their guard, who was sound asleep on
+his back in the shade, his musket lying across his chest. The town had
+one policeman, a kinky-haired youth in a white cap and a pale light gray
+cotton uniform, who carried a black club and wore shoes! The
+_cartero_, or mailman, was a barefoot boy in faded khaki and an
+ancient straw hat, who wandered lazily and apparently aimlessly about
+town with the week's correspondence in hand, reading the postals and
+feeling the contents of each letter with a proprietary air. The sun was
+brilliant and hot here in the valley, and there was an aridity that had
+not been suggested in the view of it from the heights above.
+
+It was no place to spend New Year's, however, stiff and sore though I
+was from the hardships of the road, and toward lazy, silent noonday I
+wandered on along the trail to the modern capital, hoping that it, at
+least, might have real beds and a hotel, and perhaps even white
+inhabitants. The battered old church bells were thumping as I topped the
+slight rise that hid the town from view, and it was four hours later
+that I saw or heard the next human being, or any other evidence of his
+existence except a stretch of barb-wire and one lone telegraph wire
+sagging from one crooked stick to another. The four stony dry but flat
+leagues along the valley floor had brought me to San Antonio, all the
+population of which was loafing and mildly celebrating New Year's, as
+they would celebrate any other possible excuse not to work. Here I
+obtained water, and new directions that led me off more toward the east
+and the heaped-up mountains that lay between me and Tegucigalpa. On all
+sides spread a dry, bushy land, aching for cultivation. I had the good
+fortune to fall in with a river so large I was able to swim three
+strokes in one of its pools, and strolled with dusk into the town of
+Flores on the edge of the first foothills of the ranges still to be
+surmounted.
+
+Though still a lazy naked village, this one showed some hint of the
+far-off approach of civilization. Animals were forbidden the house in
+which I passed the night, and its tile-floor was almost clean. This
+latter virtue was doubly pleasing, for the rafters above were so high
+that even when I had tied my hammock by the very ends of the ropes I
+could only climb in by mounting a chair and swinging myself up as into a
+trapeze; and if I must break a leg it would be some slight compensation
+to do so on a clean floor. How much uncleanliness this simple little
+30-cent net had kept me up out of since the day I bought it in Guatemala
+City!
+
+Like many of the tasks of life, this one grew easier toward its
+termination. A moderate day's walk, not without rocky climbs and
+_bajadas_, but with considerable stretches of almost level going
+across solitary wind-cooled plains, brought me to Támara. A passing
+company of soldiers had all but gutted the village larder, but at dusk
+in the last hut I got not only food but meat, and permission to swing my
+hammock from the blackened rafters of the reed kitchen, over the open
+pots and pans. Incidentally, for the first time in Honduras prices were
+quadrupled in honor of my being a foreigner. Civilization indeed was
+approaching.
+
+Half way up the wooded ridge beyond I met the sun mounting from the
+other side, fell in soon after with a real highway, and at eleven caught
+the first sight of Tegucigalpa, the "City of the Silver Hills," capital
+of the Sovereign and Independent Republic of Honduras. It was no very
+astounding sight; merely what in other lands would have been considered
+a large village, a chiefly one-story place with a whitewashed church,
+filling only a small proportion of a somewhat barren valley surrounded
+by high rocky and partly wooded hills. I marched down through
+Comayagüela in all the disreputableness of fifteen days on the trail,
+across the little bridge of a few arches over a shallow river which to
+Honduraneans far and wide is one of the greatest works of man, and into
+the park-like little central plaza, with its huge arbor of purple
+bourgainvillea.
+
+The "Hotel Jockey Club" was not all that the imagination might have
+pictured, but at least there Was the satisfaction of knowing that any
+stranger in town, be he "gringo" or president-elect, famous or infamous,
+rich or honest, could stop nowhere else. Among its luxuries was a
+"bath," which turned out to be a massive stone vessel in the basement
+with a drizzle of cold water from a faucet above that was sure to run
+dry about the time the victim was well soaped; its frontiersman rooms
+were furnished with little more than weak-kneed canvas cots, and the
+barefoot service of the dining-room was assisted by all the dogs, fowls,
+and flies of the region. But there lay two hungry weeks of Central
+American trail behind me and for days to come I ate unquestioningly
+anything that came within reach of my fingers, of whatever race, color,
+or previous condition of servitude.
+
+Just around the corner--as everything is in this miniature capital--the
+American Legation delivered the accumulated mail of a month, and the
+pair of real shoes I had had the happy thought of sending to myself here
+months before. This bit of foresight saved me from hobbling on to the
+coast barefoot. I had arrived just in time to attend one of
+Tegucigalpa's gala events, the inspection of her newly reformed police
+force. "It is set for three," said the legation secretary, "so come
+around about three-thirty." Just around another corner we entered
+toward four the large dusty patio of a one-story building of mud blocks,
+against the adobe wall of which were lined up something over a hundred
+half-frightened, half-proud Honduranean Indians in brand new, dark-blue
+uniforms and caps, made in Germany, and armed with black night-sticks
+and large revolvers half-hidden in immense holsters. We took the places
+of honor reserved for us at a bench and table under the patio veranda
+beside the chief of police, an American soldier of fortune named Lee
+Christmas. He was a man nearing fifty, totally devoid of all the
+embroidery of life, golden toothed and graying at the temples, but still
+hardy and of youthful vigor, of the dress and manner of a well-paid
+American mechanic, who sat chewing his black cigar as complacently as if
+he were still at his throttle on the railroad of Guatemala. Following
+the latest revolution he had reorganized what, to use his own words, had
+been "a bunch of barefooted apes in faded-blue cotton rags" into the
+solemn military company that was now to suffer its first formal
+inspection. The native secretary, standing a bit tremulously in the edge
+of the shade, called from the list in his hand first the name of
+Christmas himself, then that of the first assistant, and his own, he
+himself answering "present" for each of these. Next were the
+commanders, clerks, under-secretaries, and the like in civilian garb,
+each, as his name was pronounced, marching past us hat in hand and
+bowing profoundly. Last came the policemen in uniform. As the secretary
+read his title and first name, each self-conscious Indian stepped
+stiffly forth from the ranks, throwing a foot, heavy with the
+unaccustomed shoe, high in the air and pounding the earth in the new
+military style taught him by a willowy young native in civilian dress
+who leaned haughtily on his cane watching every movement, made a
+sharp-cornered journey about the sun-flooded yard and bringing up more
+or less in front of his dreaded chief, gave a half turn, raised the
+right leg to the horizontal with the grace of an aged ballet dancer long
+since the victim of rheumatism, brought it down against the left like
+the closing of a heavy trapdoor, saluted with his night-stick and
+huskily called out his own last name, which Christmas checked off on the
+list before him without breaking the thread of the particular anecdote
+with which he chanced at that moment to be entertaining us.
+
+"I tried to get 'em to cut out this ---- ---- German monkey business of
+throwing their feet around," confided the chief sadly, "but it's no use,
+for it's in the ---- ---- military manual."
+
+Judged by Central American standards the force was well trained. But the
+poor Indians and half-breeds that made up its bulk were so overwhelmed
+with the solemnity of the extraordinary occasion that they were even
+more ox-like in their clumsiness and nearer frightened apes in demeanor
+than in their native jungles. The quaking fear of making a mis-step
+caused them to keep their eyes riveted on the lips of our compatriot,
+from which, instead of the words of wrath they no doubt often imagined,
+issued some such remark as:
+
+"Why ---- ---- it, W----, one of the bums I picked up along the line one
+day in Guatemala told me the best ---- ---- yarn that--"
+
+Nor could they guess that the final verdict on the great ceremony that
+rang forth on the awe-struck silence as the chief rose to his feet was:
+
+"Well, drop around to my room in the hotel when you want to hear the
+rest of it. But if you see the sign on my door,' Ladies Only To-day,'
+don't knock. The chambermaid may not have finished her official visit."
+
+The climate of Tegucigalpa leaves little to be desired. Otherwise it is
+merely a large Central American village of a few thousand inhabitants,
+with much of the indifference, uncleanliness, and ignorance of the rest
+of the republic. Priests are numerous, wandering about smoking their
+cigarettes and protected from the not particularly hot sun by broad hats
+and umbrellas. One lonely little native sheet masquerades as a
+newspaper, the languid little shops, often owned by foreigners, offer a
+meager and ancient stock chiefly imported and all high in price; for it
+takes great inducement to make the natives produce anything beyond the
+corn and beans for their own requirements. The "national palace" is a
+green, clap-boarded building, housing not only the president and his
+little reception-room solemn with a dozen chairs in cotton shrouds, but
+congress, the ministry, and the "West Point of Honduras," the
+superintendent of which was a native youth who had spent a year or two
+at Chapultepec. Against it lean barefooted, anemic "soldiers" in misfit
+overalls, armed with musket and bayonet that overtop them in height. The
+main post-office of the republic is an ancient adobe hovel, in the
+cobwebbed recesses of which squat a few stupid fellows waiting for the
+mule-back mail-train to arrive that they may lock up in preparation for
+beginning to look over the correspondence mañana. It is not the custom
+to make appointments in Tegucigalpa. If one resident desires the
+presence of another at dinner, or some less excusable function, he
+wanders out just before the hour set until he picks up his guest
+somewhere. By night the town is doubly dead. The shops put up their
+wooden shutters at dusk, the more energetic inhabitants wander a while
+about the cobbled streets, dim-lighted here and there by arc-lights, the
+cathedral bells jangle at intervals like suspended pieces of scrap-iron,
+arousing a chorus of barking dogs, and a night in which two blankets are
+comfortable settles down over all the mountainous, moon-flooded region.
+There is not even the imitation of a theater, the plaza concert on
+Sunday evenings, in which the two sexes wander past each other in
+opposite directions for an hour or two, being the only fixed
+recreation. A man of infinite patience, or who had grown old and weary
+of doing, might find Tegucigalpa agreeable; but it would soon pall on
+the man still imbued with living desires.
+
+The fitting shield of Honduras would be one bearing as motto that
+monotonous phrase which greets the traveler most frequently along her
+trails, "No hay." The country is noted chiefly for what "there is not."
+Everywhere one has the impression of watching peculiarly stupid children
+playing at being a republic. The nation is a large farm in size and a
+poorly run one in condition. The wave of "liberty" that swept over a
+large part of the world after the French Revolution left these wayward
+and not over-bright inhabitants of what might be a rich and fertile land
+to play at governing themselves, to ape the forms of real republics, and
+mix them with such childish clauses as come into their infantile
+minds. The chief newspaper of the republic resembles a high-school
+periodical, concocted by particularly thick-headed students without
+faculty assistance or editing. A history of their childish governmental
+activities would fill volumes. In 1910 all the copper one-centavo coins
+were called in and crudely changed to two-centavo pieces by surcharging
+the figure 2 and adding an s, a much smaller one-centavo coin being
+issued. The "government" may have made as much as $50 by the
+transaction. Not long before my arrival, the current postage-stamps,
+large quantities of which had been bought by foreign firms within the
+country, were suddenly declared worthless, and the entire accumulated
+correspondence for the next steamer returned to the senders, instead of
+at least being forwarded to destination under excess charges.
+Foreigners established the first factory Tegucigalpa had ever known,
+which was already employing a half-hundred of the pauperous inhabitants
+in the making of candles, when the "government" suddenly not only put a
+heavy duty on stearine but required the payment of back duty on all that
+had already been imported. An Englishman came down from the mines of San
+Juancito embued with the desire to start a manual-training school in the
+capital. He called on the mulatto president and offered his services
+free for a year, if the government would invest $5000 in equipment. The
+president told him to come back mañana. On that elusive day he was
+informed that the government had no such sum at its disposal,
+
+"I have saved up $2500 myself," replied the Englishman, "which I will
+lend the government for the purpose, if it will add a like amount."
+
+But when mañana came again, the president expressed his regrets that the
+national treasury could not endure such a strain.
+
+The best view of Tegucigalpa is had from Picacho, a long ridge from back
+in the mountains, ending in a blunt nose almost sheer above the
+city. Whoever climbs it recognises the reason for the native saying, "He
+who holds Picacho sleeps in the palace." Its town-side face is almost
+precipitous, and on every hand spread rolling, half-bare upland
+mountains. All but sheer below, in the lowest depression of the visible
+world, sits the little capital, rather compact in the center, then
+scattered along the little river and in the suburb of Comayaguela
+beyond it. The dull-red tile roofs predominate, and the city is so
+directly below that one can see almost to the bottom of every tree-grown
+patio. A few buildings are of two stories, and the twin-towers of the
+little white cathedral stand somewhat above the general level. But most
+noticeable of any is the fact that all the vast broken plain surrounding
+it far and wide lies almost entirely uncultivated, for the most part
+neither cleared nor inhabited, crossed by several roads and trails, most
+conspicuous of all the two white ribbons by one of which I had arrived
+from the north and the other of which was already inviting me onward to
+the coast and new climes.
+
+A fellow-gringo, bound for the Pacific exit on a miniature horse, packed
+away my baggage on his cargo mule and left me to walk unhampered. A
+highway some fifty feet wide and white with dust struck off uncertainly
+toward the southwest, a splendid highway once, built for automobiles by
+the combined efforts of the government and an American mining company
+farther up in the hills, but now suffered to fall here and there into a
+disrepair that made it as useless for such traffic as a mountain trail.
+The first day of thirty miles brought us to Sabana Grande, with a
+species of hotel. During the second, there were many down-grade
+short-cuts, full of loose stones and dusty dry under the ever warmer
+sun, with the most considerable bridge in Honduras over the Pasoreal
+River, and not a few stiff climbs to make footsore my entrance into the
+village of Pespire. Here was a house that frankly and openly displayed
+the sign "Restaurante," in a corner of which travelers of persuasive
+manners might be furnished _tijeras_, scissor-legged canvas cots on
+which to toss out the night; for Pespire is far below Tegucigalpa and on
+the edge of the blazing tropics.
+
+For which reason we rose at three to finish the half-day of sea-level
+country left us. The stars hung brilliant and a half moon lighted up a
+way that was hot even at this hour. From sunrise on huge lizards
+scurried up among the wayside rocks as we passed, and sat torpid,
+staring at us with their lack-luster eyes. Natives wearing spurs on
+their hoof-like bare feet rode by us now and then, and mule-trains or
+screaming wooden carts crawled past on their way up to the capital. All
+traffic between Tegucigalpa and the outside world passes either over
+this route or the still longer trail from Puerto Cortez, on the north
+coast, from which a toy railroad limps a few miles inland before losing
+its courage and turning back. By daylight the fantastic ranges of the
+interior had disappeared and the last low foothill soon left us to plod
+on straight across a dust-dry sandy plain with brown withered grass and
+mesquite bushes, among which panted scores of cattle. Honduras runs so
+nearly down to a point on its Pacific side that the mountains of both
+Salvador and Nicaragua stood out plainly to the right and left.
+
+By sweltering ten we were swimming in the Pacific before the scattered
+village of San Lorenzo, though there was visible only a little arm of
+the sea shut in by low bushy islands. It was our good fortune not to
+have to charter by telegraph and at the expense of a Honduranean fortune
+means of transportation to the island port of Amapala; for before we
+could seek the shelter of our sun-faded garments a launch put in for a
+party that had been forming for several days past. The passengers
+included a shifty-eyed old priest in charge of two nuns, the rules of
+whose order forbade them to speak to men, and the mozo of an influential
+Honduranean who had shot a man the night before and was taking advantage
+of his master's personal friendship with the judge of the district. The
+launch wound between bushy banks and came out at last on a rich-blue bay
+shut off in the far distance by several jagged black volcanic islands,
+toward one of which it wheezed a hot and monotonous three hours. This
+was "Tiger's Island," named evidently from the one moth-eaten specimen
+that had once been landed here by a passing circus. At a narrow wooden
+wharf of this we at length gradually tied up. Ragged, barefoot soldiers
+stopped us to write our pedigrees, as if we were entering some new
+country, and addressed us in monkey signs instead of the Spanish of
+which experience had convinced them all traveling foreigners were
+ignorant.
+
+Amapala is a species of outdoor prison to which all travelers to or from
+Honduras on the Pacific side are sentenced for a term varying in length
+according to their luck, which is generally bad. Those who do not sleep
+in the park toss out their imprisonment on a bedstead of woven ropes in
+a truly Honduranean building that disguises itself under the name of
+"Hotel Morazán," the slatternly keeper of which treats her helpless
+inmates with the same consideration as any other prison warden devoid of
+humanity or oversight. The steamer I awaited was due before I arrived,
+but day after day I lay marooned on the blazing volcanic rock without a
+hint as to its whereabouts. Not even exercise was possible, unless one
+cared to race up and down the sharp jagged sides of the sea-girt
+volcano. The place ranks high as an incubator of malignant fevers and
+worse ailments, and to cap the climax the ice-machine was broken
+down. It always is, if the testimony of generations of castaways is to
+be given credence. Our only available pastime was to buy a soap-boxful
+of oysters, at the cost of a quarter, and sit in the narrow strip of
+shade before the "hotel" languidly opening them with the only available
+corkscrew, our weary gaze fixed on the blue arm of water framed by the
+shimmering hot hills of Salvador by which tradition had it ocean craft
+sometimes came to the rescue.
+
+But all things have an end, even life imprisonment, and with the middle
+of January we awoke one morning to find a steamer anchored in the
+foreground of the picture that had seared itself into our memories. All
+day long half-naked natives' waded lazily back and forth from the beach
+to the clumsy tenders, exchanging the meager products of the country for
+ill-packed merchandise from my own. Night settled down over their
+unfinished task, the self-same moon came out and the woven-rope cots
+again creaked and groaned under unwilling guests. But by noon next day we
+had swung our hammocks under the awning of the forecastlehead and were
+off along the tropical blue Pacific for Panama.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and
+Honduras, by Harry A. Franck
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAMPING IN MEXICO ***
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