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Anahuac : or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern

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Title: Anahuac : or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern

Author: Edward B. Tylor


        
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                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANAHUAC : OR, MEXICO AND THE MEXICANS, ANCIENT AND MODERN ***

[Illustration]




Anahuac

or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern

by Edward Burnett Tylor


1861


TABLE OF CONTENTS.


INTRODUCTION.
ITINERARY.

CHAPTER I.

Cuba. Volantes. A Cuban Railway. Voyage. Passports. Isle of Pines.
Mosquitos. Pirates. Runaway slaves. Baths of Santa Fé. Alligators. The
Cura. Missionary Priest. Florida Colonists. Blacks in the West Indies.
Chinese and African slaves.

CHAPTER II.

Players and Political Adventurers. Voyage. Yucatan. Slave-trade in
Natives. The Ten Tribes. Vera Cruz. Don Ignacio Comonfort. Mexican
Politics. Casualties. The City of the Dead. Turkey-buzzards. Northers.
The “temperate region.” Cordova. The Chipi-chipi. The “cold region.”
Mirage. Sand-pillars. The rainy season. Plundered passengers.
Robber-priest. Aztec remains. Aloe-fields. Houses of mud-bricks. Huts
of aloes. Mexican churches. Mexican roads. Making pulque.

CHAPTER III.

Palace-hotel of Yturbide. Site and building of Mexico. Changes in the
Valley of Mexico. Dearth of Trees. Architecture. Drunkenness. Fights.
Rattles. Judas’s Bones. Burning Judas. Churches in Holy Week. Streets.
Barricades. People. Women. The cypress of Chapultepec. Old-fashioned
coaches. The canal of Chalco. Canoe-travelling. “Reasonable people.”
Taste for flowers. The “Floating Gardens.” Promenade. Flooded streets.
Earthquakes.

CHAPTER IV.

Tacubaya. Humming-birds and butterflies. Aztec feather-work. Bullfight.
Lazoing and colearing. English in Mexico. Hedge of organ-cactus.
Pachuca. Cold in the hills. Rapid evaporation. Mountain-roads. Real del
Monte. Guns and pistols. Regla. The father-confessor in Mexico. Morals
of servitude. Cornish miners. Dram-drinking. Salt-trade. The Indian
market. Indian Conservatism. Sardines. Account-keeping. The great
Barranca. Tropical fruits. Prickly pears. Their use. The
“Water-Throat.” Silver-works. Volcano of Jorullo. Cascade of Regla.
“Eyes of Water.” Fires. The Hill of Knives. Obsidian implements.
Obsidian mines. The Stone-age. The loadstone-mountain of Mexico.
Unequal Civilization of the Aztecs. Silver and commerce of Mexico.
Effect of Protection-duties. Silver mines. The Aztec numerals.

CHAPTER V.

A Revolution. Siege and Capitulation of Puebla. Military Statistics.
Highway-robbery. Reform in Mexico. The American war. Mexican army. Our
Lady of Guadalupe. Miracles. The rival Virgins. Sacred lottery-ticket.
Literature in Mexico. The clergy and their system of Education in
Mexico. The Holy Office. Indian Notions of Christianity.

CHAPTER VI.

To Tezcuco. Indian Canoes. Sewer-canal. Water-snakes. Salt-lakes. A
storm on the lake. Glass-works. Casa Grande. Quarries. Stone Hammers.
Use of Bronze in stone-cutting in Mexico and Egypt. Prickly Pears.
Temple-pyramids of Teotihuacán. Sacrifice of Spaniards. Old Mexico.
Market of Antiquities. Police. Bull-dogs. Accumulation of Alluvium.
Tezcotzinco. Ancient baths and bridge. Salt and salt-pans. Fried
flies’-eggs. Water-pipes. Irrigation. Agriculture in Mexico. History
repeats itself.

CHAPTER VII.

Horses and their training. Saddles and bits. The Courier. Leather
clothes. The Serape. The Rag-fair of Mexico, Thieves. Gourd
water-bottles. Ploughing. Travelling by Diligence. Indian carriers.
Mules. Breakfast. Bragadoccio. Robbers. Escort. Cuernavaca. Tropical
Vegetation. Sugar-cane. Temisco. Sugar-hacienda. Indian labourers. The
evensong. The Raya. Strength of the Indians. Xochicalco. Ruins of the
Pyramid. Sculptures. Common ornaments. The people of Mexico and Central
America. Their civilization. Pear-shaped heads. Miacatlán.

CHAPTER VIII.

Cocoyotla. Indian labourers. Political Condition of the Indians. Indian
Village and huts. Cotton-spinning. The Indian Alcalde. Great Cave of
Cacahuamilpán. Optical phenomenon. Monk on horseback. Religion of the
Indians. Idols. Baptism by wholesale. Village amusements. Dancing.
Chalma. The meson and the convent. Church-dances. The miller’s
daughter. Young friar. The Hill of Drums. Sacred cypress-tree. Oculan.
Change of climate. Grain-districts of Mexico. The Desierto. Tenancingo.
Toluca. Lerma. Robbers.

CHAPTER IX.

Museum. Fate of Antiquities. War-God. Sacrificial Stone. Mexican words
naturalized in Europe, &c. Chamber of Horrors. Aztec Art. Wooden Drums.
Aztec Picture-writings. The “Man-flaying” Mr. Uhde’s Collection. Mr.
Christy’s Collection. Bones of Giants. Cortes’ Armour. Mexican
Calendar-stone. Aztec Astronomy. Mongol Calendar. Peculiarities of
Aztec Civilization. The Prison at Mexico. No “Criminal class.”
Prison-discipline. The Garotte. Mexican law-courts. Statistics. The
Compadrazgo. Leperos and Lepers. Lazoing the bull. Cockfighting.
Gambling. Monte. The fortunate Miners.

CHAPTER X.

A travelling companion. Mexicans who live by their wits. Jackal-masks,
&c. Mexican words used in the United States. Miraflores.
Cotton-factory. Sacred Mount and Cypress-tree. Rainy Season. Ascent of
Popocatepetl. The Crater. View of Anahuac. Descent from Popocatepetl.
Plain of Puebla. Snow-blindness. Hospitable Shopkeeper. Morality of
Smuggling. Pyramid and Antiquities of Cholula. Hybrid Legends of
Mexico. Genuine Legends. Old-world analogies among the Aztecs.

CHAPTER XI.

Puebla. The Pasadizos. Revolutions in Mexico. Festival of Corpus
Christi. Mexican clergy. Their incomes and morals. Scourging. Religion
of the People. Anomalous constitution of the Republic. The horse-bath.
Debt-slaves or peons. Great fortunes in Mexico. Amozoque. Spurs.
Nopalucán. Orizaba. Robbers. Locusts. Indian village. Inroads of
Civilization. Lawsuits. Native Aristocracy. The vapour-bath. Scanty
population. Its explanation. Unhealthy habits. Epidemics. Intemperance.
Pineapples. Potrero. Negros. Mixed races. “Painted men.”

CHAPTER XII.

Barrancas. Indian trotting. Flowers. Armadillo. Fire-flies. Singular
Fandango. Epiphytes. The Junta. Indian Life. Decorative Art. Horses.
Jalapa. Anglo-Mexicans. Insect-life. Monte. Fate of Antonio. Scorpion.
White Negress. Cattle. Artificial lighting. Vera Cruz. Further Journey.
St. Thomas’s. Voyage to England. Future destinies of Mexico.

APPENDIX.
I. The Manufacture of Obsidian Knives.
II. On the Solar Eclipses recorded in the Le Tellier MS.
III. Table of Aztec roots.
IV. Glossary.
V. Ancient Mexican mosaic work (in Mr. Christy’s Collection).
VI. Dasent’s Essay on the Ethnographical value of Popular Tales and
Legends.

INDEX.


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:

PLATES:

 Cascade of Regla. _From a photograph by J. Bell, Esq._ Porter and
 Baker in Mexico.
 Indians bringing Country Produce to Market.
 Indians in a Rancho, making and baking Tortillas.
 Map to illustrate Messrs. Tylor and Christy’s journeys and excursions
 in Mexico.

WOODCUTS:

_(The cuts of smaller objects of antiquity, and articles at present in
use, have been drawn from specimens in the Collection of Henry Christy,
Esq.)_


 Indian Tlachiquero, collecting juice of the Agave for Pulque.
 View of Part of the Valley of Mexico.
 Water-carrier and Mexican Woman at the Fountain.
 Group of Mexican Ecclesiastics.
 Stone Spear-heads, and Obsidian Knives and Arrow-heads, from Mexico.
 Fluted Prism of Obsidian, and Knife-flakes.
 Mexican Arrow-heads of Obsidian.
 Aztec Stone-knife, with wooden handle, inlaid with mosaic work.
 Aztec Head in Terra-cotta.
 The Rebozo and the Serape.
 Aztec Bridge near Tezcuco.
 Spanish-Mexican Saddle and appendages.
 Spanish-Mexican Bit, with ring and chain.
 Sculptured Panel, from Xochicalco. _(After Nebel)_.
 Small Aztec Head in Terra-cotta.
 Ixtacalco Church.
 Spanish-Mexican Spurs.
 Goddess of War. _(After Nebel)_.
 Three Views of a Sacrificial Collar or Clamp, carved out of hard
 stone.
 Two Views of a Mask, carved out of hard stone.
 Ancient Bronze Bells.
 Spanish-Mexican Cock-spurs.
 Leather Sandals.
 Mexican Costumes. _(After Nebel)_.
 View of Orizaba.
 Indians of the Plateau. _(After Nebel)_.

[Illustration: THE CASCADE OF REGLA. _From a Photograph by J.
Ball Esq. of the Hacienda de Regla. March 1856._]




INTRODUCTION.


The journey and excursions in Mexico which have originated the
narrative and remarks contained in this volume were made in the months
of March, April, May, and June of 1856, for the most part on horseback.
The author and his fellow-traveller enjoyed many advantageous
opportunities of studying the country, the people, and the antiquities
of Mexico, owing to the friendly assistance and hospitality which they
received there. With this aid they were enabled to accomplish much more
than usually falls to the lot of travellers in so limited a period; and
they had the great advantage too, of being able to substantiate or
correct their own observations by the local knowledge and experience of
their friends and entertainers.

Visiting Mexico during a lull in the civil turmoil of that lamentably
disturbed Republic, they were fortunate in being able to avail
themselves of that peaceable season in making excursions to remarkable
places and ruins, and examining the national collection of antiquities,
and other objects of interest,—an opportunity that cannot have occurred
since owing to the recommencement of civil war in its worst form.

The following are some of the chief points of interest in these Notes
on Mexico, which are either new or treated more fully than hitherto:

1. The evidence of an immense ancient population, shewn by the
abundance of remains of works of art (treated of at pages 146-150), is
fully stated here.

2. The notices and drawings of Obsidian knives and weapons (at page 95,
&c., and in the Appendix) are more ample than any previously given.

3. The treatment of the Mexican Numerals (at page 108) is partly new.

4. The proofs of the highly probable sophistication of the document in
the Library at Paris, relative to Mexican eclipses, have not previously
been advanced (see Appendix).

5. The notices of objects of Mexican art, &c., in the chapter on
Antiquities, and elsewhere (including the Appendix), are for the most
part new to the public.

6. The remarks on the connection between pure Mexican art and that of
Central America, in the chapter on Xochicalco, are in great part new.

7. The singular native bridge at Tezcuco (page 153) is another novelty.

The order in which places and things were visited is shewn in the
annexed Itinerary, or sketch of the journeys and excursions described.




ITINERARY.


Journey 1. Cuba. Havana. Batabano. Isles of Pines. Nueva Gerona. Baños
de Santa Fé. Back to Havana. _Pages_ 1-14.

Journey 2. Havana. Sisal. Vera Cruz. _Pages_ 15-18.

Journey 3. Vera Cruz. Cordova. Orizaba. Huamantla. Otumba. Guadalupe.
Mexico. _Pages_ 18-38.

Journey 4. Mexico to Tacubaya and Chapultepec, and back. _Pages_ 55-58.

Journey 5. Mexico to Santa Anita and back. _Pages_ 59-65.

Journey 6. Mexico. Guadalupe. Pachuca. Real del Monte. Regla.
Atotonilco el Grande. Soquital and back to Real del Monte. Real del
Monte to Mount Jacal and Cerro de Navajas (obsidian-pits), and back to
Real del Monte. Pachuca. Guadalupe. Mexico. _Pages_ 72-105.

Journey 7. Mexico to Tisapán. Ravine of Magdalena. Pedrigal
(lava-field), and back. _Pages_ 118-120.

Journey 8. Mexico to Tezcuco. Pages 129—162. Tezcuco to Pyramids of
Teotihuacán and back. Pages 136—146. Tezcuco to Tezcotzinco (the
so-called “Montezuma’s Bath,” &c.). Aztec Bridge, and back to Tezcuco.
_Pages_ 152-153. Tezcuco to Bosque del Contador (the grove of
ahuehuetes, where excavations were made.) _Pages_ 154-156. Tezcuco to
Mexico. _Page_ 62.

Journey 9. Mexico. San Juan de Dios. La Guarda. Cuernavaca. Temisco.
Xochicalco. Miacatlán. Cocoytla. _Pages_ 172-195. Cocoytla to village
and cave of Cacahuamilpán and back. _Pages_ 196-205. Cocoytla to
Chalma. Oculán. El Desierto. Tenancingo. Toluca. Lerma. Las Cruzes.
Mexico. _Pages_ 214-220.

Journey 10. Mexico to Tezcuco. Miraflores. Amecameca. Popocatepetl. San
Nicolas de los Ranchos. Cholula. Puebla. Amozoque. Nopaluca. San
Antonio de abajo. Orizaba. Amatlán. El Potrero. Cordova. San Andrés.
Chalchicomula. La Junta. Jalapa. Vera Cruz. West Indies and Home.
_Pages_ 260- 327.


Illustration: MAP OF PART OF MEXICO TO ILLUSTRATE A JOURNEY FROM
VERA CRUZ TO MEXICO AND BACK & EXCURSIONS IN THE COUNTRY, By Messrs.
E.B. Tylor & H. Cristy.




CHAPTER I.
THE ISLE OF PINES.


In the spring of 1856, I met with Mr. Christy accidentally in an
omnibus at Havana. He had been in Cuba for some months, leading an
adventurous life, visiting sugar-plantations, copper-mines, and
coffee-estates, descending into caves, and botanizing in tropical
jungles, cruising for a fortnight in an open boat among the
coral-reefs, hunting turtles and manatis, and visiting all sorts of
people from whom information was to be had, from foreign consuls and
Lazarist missionaries down to retired slave-dealers and assassins.

As for myself, I had been travelling for the best part of a year in the
United States, and had but a short time since left the live-oak forests
and sugar-plantations of Louisiana. We agreed to go to Mexico together;
and the present notes are principally compiled from our
memorandum-books, and from letters written home on our journey.

Before we left Cuba, however, we made one last excursion across the
island, and to the _Isla de Pinos_—the Isle of Pines—off the southern
coast. A volante took us to the railway-station. The volante is the
vehicle which the Cubans specially affect; it is like a Hansom cab, but
the wheels are much taller, six and a half feet high, and the black
driver sits postillion-wise upon the horse. Our man had a laced jacket,
black leather leggings, and a pair of silver spurs fastened upon his
bare feet, which seemed at a little distance to have well polished
boots on, they were so black and shiny.

The railway which took us from Havana to Batabano had some striking
peculiarities. For a part of the way the track passed between two walls
of tropical jungle. The Indian fig trees sent down from every branch
suckers, like smooth strings, which rooted themselves in the ground to
draw up more water. Acacias and mimosas, the seiba and the mahagua,
with other hard-wood trees innumerable, crowded close to one another;
while epiphytes perched on every branch, and creepers bound the whole
forest into a compact mass of vegetation, through which no bird could
fly. We could catch the strings of convolvulus with our walking-sticks,
as the train passed through the jungle. Sometimes we came upon a swamp,
where clusters of bamboos were growing, crowned with tufts of pointed
leaves; or had a glimpse for a moment of a group of royal palms upon
the rising ground.

We passed sugar-plantations with their wide cane-fields, the
sugar-houses with tall chimneys, and the balconied house of the
administrador, keeping a sharp look out over the village of
negro-cabins, arranged in double lines.

In the houses near the stations where we stopped, cigar-making seemed
to be the universal occupation. Men, women, and children were sitting
round tables hard at work. It made us laugh to see the black men
rolling up cigars upon the hollow of their thighs, which nature has
fashioned into a curve exactly suited to this process.

At Batabano the steamer was waiting at the pier, and our passports and
ourselves were carefully examined by the captain, for Cuba is the
paradise of passport offices, and one cannot stir without a visa. For
once everybody was _en règle_, and we had no such scene as my companion
had witnessed a few days before.

If you are a married man resident in Cuba, you cannot get a passport to
go to the next town without your wife’s permission in writing. Now it
so happened that a respectable brazier, who lived at Santiago de Cuba,
wanted to go to Trinidad. His wife would not consent; so he either got
her signature by stratagem, or, what is more likely, gave somebody
something to get him a passport under false pretences.

At any rate he was safe on board the steamer, when a middle-aged
female, well dressed, but evidently arrayed in haste, and with a face
crimson with hard running, came panting down to the steamer, and rushed
on board. Seizing upon the captain, she pointed out her husband, who
had taken refuge behind the other passengers at a respectful distance;
she declared that she had never consented to his going away, and
demanded that his body should be instantly delivered up to her. The
husband was appealed to, but preferred staying where he was. The
captain produced the passport, perfectly _en règle_, and the lady made
a rush at the document, which was torn in half in the scuffle. All
other means failing, she made a sudden dash at her husband, probably
intending to carry him off by main force. He ran for his life, and
there was a steeplechase round the deck, among benches, bales, and
coils of rope; while the passengers and the crew cheered first one and
then the other, till they could not speak for laughing. The husband was
all but caught once; but a benevolent passenger kicked a camp-stool in
the lady’s way, and he got a fresh start, which he utilized by climbing
up the ladder to the paddle-box. His wife tried to follow him, but the
shouts of laughter which the black men raised at seeing her
performances were too much for her, and she came down again. Here the
captain interposed, and put her ashore, where she stood like black-eyed
Susan till the vessel was far from the wharf, not waving her lily hand,
however, but shaking her clenched fist in the direction of the
fugitive.

To return to our voyage to the Isle of Pines.—All the afternoon the
steamer threaded her way cautiously among the coral-reefs which rose
almost to the surface. Sometimes there seemed scarcely room to pass
between them, and by night navigation would have been impossible. We
were just in the place where Columbus and his companions arrived on
their expedition along the Cuban coast, to find out what countries lay
beyond. They sailed by day, and lay to at night, till their patience
was worn out. Another day or two of sailing would have brought them to
where the coast trends northwards; but they turned back, and Columbus
died in the belief that Cuba was the eastern extremity of the continent
of Asia.

The Spaniards call these reefs “cayos,” and we have altered the name to
“keys,” such as _Key West_ in Florida, and _Ambergris Key_ off Belize.

It was after sunset, and the phosphorescent animals were making the sea
glitter like molten metal, when we reached the Isle of Pines, and
steamed slowly up the river, among the mangroves that fringe the banks,
to the village of Nueva Gerona, the port of the island. It consisted of
two rows of houses thatched with palm-leaves, and surrounded by wide
verandahs; and between them a street of unmitigated mud.

As we walked through the place in the dusk, we could dimly discern the
inhabitants sitting in their thatched verandahs, in the thinnest of
white dresses, gossipping, smoking, and love-making, tinkling guitars,
and singing seguidillas. It was quite a Spanish American scene out of a
romance. There was no romance about the mosquitos, however. The air was
alive with them. When I was new to Cuba, I used to go to bed in the
European fashion; and as the beds were all six inches too short, my
feet used to find their way out in the night, and the mosquitos came
down and sat upon them. Experience taught us that it was better to lie
down half-dressed, so that only our faces and hands were exposed to
their attacks.

The Isle of Pines used to be the favourite resort of the pirates of the
Spanish main; indeed there were no other inhabitants. The creeks and
rivers being lined with the densest vegetation, a few yards up the
winding course of such a creek, they were lost in the forest, and a
cruiser might pass within a few yards of their lurking-place, and see
no traces of them. Captain Kyd often came here, and stories of his
buried treasures are still told among the inhabitants. Now the island
serves a double purpose; it is a place of resort for the Cubans, who
come to rusticate and bathe, and it serves as a settlement for those
free black inhabitants of Florida who chose to leave that country when
it was given up to the United States. One of these Floridanos
accompanied us as our guide next day to the Baños de Santa Fé.

When we left the village we passed near the mangrove trees, which were
growing not only near the water but in it, and like to spread their
roots among the thick black slime which accumulates so fast in this
country of rapid vegetable growth, and as rapid decomposition. In Cuba,
the mangoe is the abomination of the planters, for they supply the
runaway slaves with food, upon which they have been known to subsist
for months, whilst the mangroves give them shelter. A little further
inland we found the guava, a thick-spreading tree, with smooth green
leaves. From its fruit is made guava-jelly, but as yet it was not ripe
enough to eat.

In the middle of the island we came upon marble-quarries. They are
hardly worked now; but when they were first established, a number of
emancipados were employed there. What emancipados are, it is worth
while to explain. They are Africans taken from captured slavers, and
are set to work under government inspection for a limited number of
years, on a footing something like that of the apprentices in Jamaica,
in the interregnum between slavery and emancipation. In Cuba it is
remarked that the mortality among the emancipados is frightful. They
seldom outlive their years of probation. The explanation of this piece
of statistics is curious. The fact is that every now and then, when an
old man dies, they bury him as one of the emancipados, whose register
is sent in to the Government as dead; while the negro himself goes to
work as a slave in some out-of-the-way plantation where no tales are
told.

We left the marble-quarries, and rode for miles over a wide savannah.
The soil was loose and sandy and full of flakes of mica, and in the
watercourses were fragments of granite, brought down from the hills.
Here flourished palm trees and palmettos, acacias, mimosas, and
cactuses, while the mangoe and the guava tree preferred the damper
patches nearer to the coast. The hills were covered with the pine-trees
from which the island has its name; and on the rising ground at their
base we saw the strange spectacle of palms and fir trees growing side
by side.

Where we came upon a stream, the change in the vegetation was
astonishing. It was a sudden transition from an English, plantation of
fir trees into the jungle of the tropics, full of Indian figs, palms,
lancewood, and great mahagua[1] trees, all knotted together by endless
creepers and parasites; while the parrots kept up a continual
chattering and screaming in the tree-tops. The moment we left the
narrow strip of tropical forest that lined the stream we were in the
pine wood. Here the first two or three feet of the trunks of the pine
trees were scorched and blackened by the flames of the tall dry
savannah-grass, which grows close round them, and catches fire several
times every year. Through the pine forest the conflagration spreads
unobstructed, as in an American prairie; but it only runs along the
edge of the dense river-vegetation, which it cannot penetrate.

 [1] The mahagua tree furnishes that curious fibrous network which is
 known as _bast_, and used to wrap bundles of cigars in. The mahogany
 tree is called _caoba_ in Spanish, apparently the original Indian
 name, as the Spaniards probably first became acquainted with it in
 Cuba. Is our word “mahogany” the result of a confusion of words, and
 corrupted from “mahagua?”


The Baños de Santa Fé are situated in a cleared space among the fir
trees. The baths themselves are nothing but a cavity in the rock, into
which a stream, at a temperature of about 80°, continually flows. A
partition in the middle divides the ladies from the gentlemen, but
allows them to continue their conversation while they sit and splash in
their respective compartments.

The houses are even more quaint than the bathing-establishment. The
whole settlement consists of a square field surrounded by little
houses, each with its roof of palm leaves and indispensable verandah.
Here the Cubans come to stay for months, bathing, smoking cigarettes,
flirting, gossiping, playing cards, and strumming guitars; and they
seemed to be all agreed on one point, that it was a delightful
existence. We left them to their tranquil enjoyments, and rode back to
Nueva Gerona.

Next morning we borrowed a gun from the engineer of the steamboat, and
I bought some powder and shot at a shop where they kept two young
alligators under the counter for the children to play with. The creeks
and lagoons of the island are full of them, and the negroes told us
that in a certain lake not far off there lived no less a personage than
“the crocodile king”—“_el rey de los crocodilos_;” but we had no time
to pay his majesty a visit. Two of the Floridan negroes rowed us up the
river. Even at some distance from the mouth, sting-rays and jelly-fish
were floating about. As we rowed upwards, the banks were overhung with
the densest vegetation. There were mahogany trees with their curious
lop-sided leaves, the copal-plant with its green egg-like fruit, from
which copal oozes when it is cut, like opium from a poppy-head, palms
with clusters of oily nuts, palmettos, and guavas. When a palm-tree on
the river-bank would not grow freely for the crowding of other trees,
it would strike out in a slanting direction till it reached the clear
space above the river, and then shoot straight upwards with its crown
of leaves.

We shot a hawk and a woodpecker, and took them home; but, not many
minutes after we had laid them on the tiled floor of our room, we
became aware that we were invaded. The ants were upon us. They were
coming by thousands in a regular line of march up our window-sill and
down again inside, straight towards the birds. When we looked out of
the window, there was a black stripe lying across the court-yard on the
flags, a whole army of them coming. We saw it was impossible to get the
skins of the birds, so threw them out of the window, and the advanced
guard faced about and followed them.

On the sand in front of the village the Castor-oil plant flourished,
the _Palma Christi_; its little nuts were ripe, and tasted so innocent
that, undeterred by the example of the boy in the Swiss Family
Robinson, I ate several, and was handsomely punished for it. In the
evening I recounted my ill-advised experiment to the white-jacketed
loungers in the verandah of the inn, and was assured that I must have
eaten an odd number! The second nut, they told me with much gravity,
counteracts the first, the fourth neutralizes the third, and so on ad
infinitum.

We made two clerical acquaintances in the Isle of Pines. One was the
Cura of New Gerona, and his parentage was the only thing remarkable
about him. He was not merely the son of a priest, but his grandfather
was a priest also.

The other was a middle-aged ecclesiastic, with a pleasant face and an
unfailing supply of good-humoured fun. Everybody seemed to get
acquainted with him directly, and to become quite confidential after
the first half-hour; and a drove of young men followed him about
everywhere. His reverence kept up the ball of conversation continually,
and showed considerable skill in amusing his auditors and drawing them
out in their turn. It is true the jokes which passed seemed to us mild,
but they appeared to suit the public exactly; and indeed, the Padre was
quite capable of providing better ones when there was a market for
them.

We found that though a Spaniard by birth, he had been brought up at the
Lazarist College in Paris, which we know as the training-school of the
French missionaries in China; and we soon made friends with him, as
everyone else did. A day or two afterwards we went to see him in
Havana, and found him hard at his work, which was the superintendence
of several of the charitable institutions of the city—the Foundling
Hospital, the Lunatic Asylum, and others. His life was one of incessant
labour, and indeed people said he was killing himself with over-work,
but he seemed always in the same state of chronic hilarity; and when he
took us to see the hospitals, the children and patients received him
with demonstrations of great delight.

I should not have said so much of our friend the Padre, were it not
that I think there is a moral to be got out of him. I believe he may be
taken as a type, not indeed of Roman Catholic missionaries in general,
but of a certain class among them, who are of considerable importance
in the missionary world, though there are not many of them. Taking the
Padre as a sample of his class, as I think we may—judging from the
accounts of them we meet with in books, it is curious to notice, how
the point in which their system is strongest is just that in which the
Protestant system is weakest, that is, in social training and
deportment. What a number of men go to India with the best intentions,
and set to work at once, flinging their doctrines at the natives before
they have learnt in the least to understand what the said natives’
minds are like, or how they work,—dropping at once upon their pet
prejudices, mortally offending them as a preliminary step towards
arguing with them; and in short, stroking the cat of society backwards
in the most conscientious manner. By the time they have accomplished
this satisfactory result, a man like our Cuban Padre, though he may
have argued but little and preached even less, would have a hundred
natives bound to him by strong personal attachment, and ready to accept
anything from him in the way of teaching.

We paid a regular round of visits to the Floridan settlers, and were
delighted with their pleasant simple ways. It is not much more than
thirty years since they left Florida, and many of the children born
since have learnt to speak English. The patches of cultivated land
round their cottages produce, with but little labour, enough vegetables
for their subsistence, and to sell, procuring clothing and such
luxuries as they care for. They seemed to live happily among
themselves, and to govern their little colony after the manner of the
Patriarchs.

Whether any social condition can be better for the black inhabitants of
the West Indies, than that of these settlers, I very much doubt. They
are not a hard-working people, it is true; but hard work in the climate
of the tropics is unnatural, and can only be brought about by unnatural
means. That they are not sunk in utter laziness one can see by their
neat cottages and trim gardens. Their state does not correspond with
the idea of prosperity of the political economist, who would have them
work hard to produce sugar, rum, and tobacco, that they might earn
money to spend in crockery and Manchester goods; but it is suited to
the race and to the climate. If we measure prosperity by the enjoyment
of life, their condition is an enviable one.

I think no unprejudiced observer can visit the West Indies without
seeing the absurdity of expecting the free blacks to work like slaves,
as though any inducement but the strongest necessity would ever bring
it about. There are only two causes which can possibly make the blacks
industrious, in our sense of the word,—slavery, or a population so
crowded as to make labour necessary to supply their wants.

In one house in the Floridan colony we found a _ménage_ which was
surprising to me, after my experience of the United States. The father
of the family was a white man, a Spaniard, and his wife a black woman.
They received us with the greatest hospitality, and we sat in the porch
for a long time, talking to the family. One or two of the mulatto
daughters were very handsome; and there were some visitors, young white
men from the neighbouring village, who were apparently come to pay
their devoirs to the young ladies. Such marriages are not uncommon in
Cuba; and the climate of the island is not unfavourable for the mixed
negro and European race, while to the pure whites it is deadly. The
Creoles of the country are a poor degenerate race, and die out in the
fourth generation. It is only by intermarriage with Europeans, and
continual supplies of emigrants from Europe, that the white population
is kept up.

On the morning of our departure we climbed a high hill of limestone,
covered in places with patches of a limestone-breccia, cemented with
sandstone, and filling the cavities in the rock. All over the hill we
found doubly refracting Iceland-spar in quantities. Euphorbias, in
Europe mere shrubs, were here smooth-limbed trees, with large flowers.
From the top of the hill, the character of the savannahs was well
displayed. Every water-course could be traced by its narrow line of
deep green forest, contrasting with the scantier vegetation of the rest
of the plain.

As we steamed out of the river, rows of brilliant red flamingos were
standing in the shallow water, fishing, and here and there a pelican
with his ungainly beak. Our Chinese crew were having their meal of rice
when we walked forward, and the national chopsticks were hard at work.
We talked to several of them. They could all speak a little Spanish,
and were very intelligent.

The history of these Chinese emigrants is a curious one. Agents in
China persuade them to come out, and they sign a contract to work for
eight years, receiving from three to five dollars a month, with their
food and clothing. The sum seems a fortune to them; but, when they come
to Cuba, they find to their cost that the value of money must be
estimated by what it will buy. They find that the value of a black
labourer is thirty dollars a month, and they have practically sold
themselves for slaves; for there is no one to prevent the masters who
have bought the contract for their work from treating them in all
respects as slaves. The value of such a contract—that is, of the
Chinaman himself, was from £30 to £40 when we were in the island.
Fortunately for them, they cannot bear the severe plantation-work. Some
die after a few days of such labour and exposure, and many more kill
themselves; and the utter indifference with which they commit suicide,
as soon as life seems not worth having, contributes to moderate the
exactions of their masters. A friend of ours in Cuba had a Chinese
servant who was impertinent one day, and his master turned him out of
the room, dismissing him with a kick. The other servants woke their
master early next morning, with the intelligence that the Chinese had
killed himself in the night, to expiate the insult he had received.

Of African slaves brought into the island, the yearly number is about
15,000. All the details of the trade are matter of general notoriety,
even to the exact sum paid to each official as hush-money. It costs a
hundred dollars for each negro, they say, of which a gold ounce (about
£3 16s.) is the share of the Captain-general. To this must be added the
cost of the slave in Africa, and the expense of the voyage; but when
the slave is once fairly on a plantation he is worth eight hundred
dollars; so it may be understood how profitable the trade still is, if
only one slaver out of three gets through.

The island itself with its creeks and mangrove-trees is most favourable
for their landing, if they can once make the shore; and the Spanish
cruisers will not catch them if they can help it. If a British cruiser
captures them, the negroes are made emancipados in the way I have
already explained.

Hardly any country in the world is so thoroughly in a false position as
England in her endeavours to keep down the Cuban slave-trade, with the
nominal concurrence of the Spanish government, and the real vigorous
opposition of every Spaniard on the island, from the Captain-General
downwards. Even the most superficial observer who lands for an hour or
two in Havana, while his steamer is taking in coals, can have evidence
of the slave-trade brought before his eyes in the tattooed faces of
native Africans, young and middle-aged, in the streets and markets;
just as he can guess, from the scored backs of the negroes, what sort
of discipline is kept up among them.

We slept on board the steamboat off the pier of Batabano, and the
railway took us back to Havana next morning.




CHAPTER II.
HAVANA TO VERA CRUZ—VERA CRUZ TO MEXICO.


On the 8th of March, we went on board the “Méjico” steamer,
American-built, and retaining her American engineers, but in other
respects converted into a Spanish vessel, and now lying in the harbour
of Havana bound for Vera Cruz, touching at Sisal in Yucatan. At eight
o’clock we weighed anchor, and were piloted through the narrow passage
which leads out of the harbour past the castle of El Morro and the fort
of Cabañas, the view of whose ramparts and batteries caused quite a
flourish of trumpets among our Spanish fellow-passengers, who firmly
believe in their impregnability.

Among our fellow-passengers were a company of fifth-rate comedians,
going to Merida by way of Sisal. There was nothing interesting to us
about them. Theatrical people and green-room slang vary but little over
the whole civilized world. There were two or three Spanish and French
tradesmen going back to Mexico. They talked of nothing but the dangers
of the road, and not without reason as it proved, for they were all
robbed before they got home. Several of the rest were gamblers or
political adventurers, or both, for the same person very often unites
the two professions out here. Spain and the Spanish American Republics
produce great numbers of these people, just as Missouri breeds
border-ruffians and sympathizers. But the ruffian is a good fellow in
comparison with these well-dressed, polite scoundrels, who could have
given Fielding a hint or two he would have been glad of for the
characters of Mr. Jonathan Wild and his friend the Count.

On the morning of the third day of our voyage we reached Sisal, and as
soon as the captain would let us we went ashore, in a canoe that was
like a flat wooden box. This said captain was a Catalan, and a surly
fellow, and did not take the trouble to disguise the utter contempt he
felt for our inquisitive ways, which he seemed quite to take pleasure
in thwarting. It was the only place we were to see in Yucatan, a
country whose name is associated with ideas of tropical fruits, where
you must cut your forest-path with a machete, and of vast ruins of
deserted temples and cities, covered up with a mass of dense
vegetation. But here there was nothing of this kind. Sisal is a
miserable little town, standing on the shore, with a great salt-marsh
behind it. It has a sort of little jetty, which constitutes its claim
to the title of _port_; and two or three small merchant-vessels were
lying there, taking in cargoes of logwood (the staple product of the
district), mahogany, hides, and deerskins. The sight of these latter
surprised us; but we found on enquiry that numbers of deer as well as
horned cattle inhabit the thinly-peopled districts round the shores of
the Mexican Gulf, and flourish in spite of the burning climate, except
when a year of drought comes, which kills them off by thousands.

One possible article of export we examined as closely as opportunity
would allow, namely, the Indian inhabitants. There they are, in every
respect the right article for trade:—brown-skinned, incapable of
defending themselves, strong, healthy, and industrious; and the creeks
and mangrove-swamps of Cuba only three days’ sail off. The plantations
and mines that want one hundred thousand men to bring them into full
work, and swallow aborigines, Chinese, and negroes
indifferently—anything that has a dark skin, and can be made to
work—would take these Yucatecos in any quantity, and pay well for them.
And once on a sugar-estate or down a mine, when their sham registers
are regularly made out, and the Governor has had his ounce of gold
apiece for passing them, and his subordinates their respective rights,
who shall get them out again, or even find them?

This idea struck us as we sat looking at the Indians hard at work,
loading and unloading; and finding an intelligent Spaniard, we fell to
talking with him. Indians had been carried off to Cuba, he said, but
very few, none since 1854, when two Englishmen came to the coast with a
schooner on pretence of trading, and succeeded in getting clear off
with a cargo of seventy-two natives on board. But being caught in a
heavy gale of wind, they put in for safety—of all places in the
world—into the British port of Belize. There some one found out what
their cargo consisted of, the vessel was seized, the Indians sent back,
and the two adventurers condemned to hard labour, one for four years,
the other for two and a half. In a place where the fatigue and exposure
of drill and mounting guard is death to a European soldier, this was
most likely a way of inflicting capital punishment, slow, but pretty
sure.[2]

 [2] We heard talk elsewhere, however, of a war going on in the
 interior of the country between the white inhabitants and the Indian
 race; the apparent object of the whites being to take Indian
 prisoners, and ship them off for slaves to Cuba.


When the Spaniards came to these countries, as soon as they had leisure
to ask themselves what could be the origin of the people they found
there, the answer came at once, “the lost tribes of Israel,” of course.
And as we looked at these grave taciturn men, with their brown
complexions, bright eyes, and strikingly aquiline noses, it did not
seem strange that this belief should have been generally held,
considering the state of knowledge on such matters in those days. We
English found the ten tribes in the Red men of the north; Jews have
written books in Hebrew for their own people, to make known to them
that the rest of their race had been found in the mountains of Chili,
retaining unmistakable traces of their origin and conversing fluently
in Hebrew; and but lately they turned up, collected together and
converted to Christianity, on the shores of the Caspian. The last two
theories have their supporters at the present day. Crude as most of
these ideas are, one feels a good deal of interest in the first inquiry
that set men thinking seriously about the origin of races, and laid the
foundation of the science of ethnology.

Our return on board was a long affair, for there was a stiff breeze,
almost in our teeth; and our unwieldy craft was obliged to make tack
after tack before we could reach the steamer. Great Portuguese
men-of-war were floating about, waiting for prey; and we passed through
patches of stringy gulf-weed, trailing out into long ropes. The water
was hot, the thermometer standing at 84° when we dipped it over the
side.

On the morning of the 12th, when we went on deck, there was a grand
sight displayed before us. No shore visible, but a heavy bank of clouds
on the horizon; and, high above them, towering up into the sky, the
snowy summit of Orizaba, a hundred and fifty miles off.

Before noon, we are entering the harbour of Vera Cruz. The little
island and fort of San Juan de Ulúa just opposite the wharfs, the
island of Sacrificios a little farther to the left. A level line of
city-wall along the water’s edge; and, visible above it, the flat roofs
of the houses, and the towers and cupolas of many churches. All grey
stone, only relieved by the colored Spanish tiles on the church-roofs,
and a flag or two in the harbour. Not a scrap of vegetation to be seen,
and the rays of a tropical sun pouring down upon us.

Established in the Casa de Diligencias, we deliberated as to our
journey to Mexico. The diligences to the capital, having been stopped
for some months on account of the disturbed state of the country, had
just begun to run again, avoiding Puebla, which was being besieged. We
were anxious to be off at once; but Mr. Christy sagaciously remarking
that the robbers would know of the arrival of the steamer, and would
probably take the first diligence that came afterwards, we booked our
places for the day after.

We were very kindly received by the English merchants to whom my
companion had letters, and we set ourselves to learn what was the real
state of things in Mexico.

On an average, the Presidency of the Republic of Mexico had changed
hands once every eight months for the last ten years; and Don Ignacio
Comonfort had stepped into the office in the previous December, on the
nomination of his predecessor the mulatto general Alvarez, who had
retired to the southern provinces with his army.

President Comonfort, with empty coffers, and scarcely any real
political power, had felt it necessary to make some great effort to get
popularity for himself and his government. He had therefore adopted the
policy of attacking the _fueros_, the extraordinary privileges of the
two classes of priests and soldiers, which had become part of the
constitution under the first viceroys, and which not even the war of
independence, and the adoption of republican forms, ever did away with.
Neither class is amenable to the civil tribunals for debt or for any
offences.[3] The clergy have immense revenues, and much spiritual
influence among the lower classes; and as soon as they discovered the
disposition of the new President, they took one Don Antonio Haro y
Tamirez, set him up as a counter-President, and installed him at
Puebla, the second city of the Republic, where priests swarm, and
priestly influence is unbounded. At the same time, they tried a
pronunciamiento in the capital; but the President got the better of
them after a slight struggle, and marched all his regular soldiers on
Puebla. At the moment of our arrival in the country, the siege of this
city was going on quite briskly, ten thousand men being engaged,
commanded by forty-three general officers.

 [3] They must be judged by courts whose members belong to their own
 body, and in these special tribunals one can imagine what sort of
 justice is meted out to complainants and creditors. Comonfort’s hope
 was to conciliate the mass of the people by attempting to relieve them
 of this enormous abuse. I believe he was honest in his intentions, but
 unfortunately the people had already had to do with too many
 politicians who were to redress their wrongs and inaugurate a reign of
 liberty. They had found very little to come of such movements, but
 extra-taxation and civil war, which left them worse off than they were
 before, and the patriots generally turned out rather more greedy and
 unprincipled than the others; so it was not to be wondered at that no
 one came forward to give any very energetic support to the new
 President.


Whenever anything disagreeable is happening in the country, Vera Cruz
is sure to get its full share. A month before our arrival, one Salcedo,
who was a prisoner in the castle of San Juan de Ulúa, talked matters
over with the garrison, and persuaded them to make a pronunciamiento in
favour of the insurgents. They then summoned the town to join their
cause, which it declined doing for the present; and the castle opened
fire upon it, knocking about some of the principal buildings, and doing
a good deal of damage. A 30-pound shot went through the wall of our
hotel, taking off the leg of an unfortunate waiter who was cleaning
knives, and falling into the patio, or inner court. A daub of fresh
plaster just outside our bedroom door indicated the spot; and the
British Consul’s office had a similar decoration. The Governor of the
city could offer no active resistance, but he cut off the supplies from
the island, and in three or four days Salcedo—finding himself out of
ammunition, and short of water—surrendered in a neat speech, and the
revolution ended.

We have but a short time to stay in Vera Cruz, so had better make our
observations quickly; for when we come back again there will be a sun
nearly in the zenith, and yellow fever—at the present moment hardly
showing itself—will have come for the summer; under those
circumstances, the unseasoned foreigner had better lie on his back in a
cool room, with a cigar in his mouth, and read novels, than go about
hunting for useful information.

There are streets of good Spanish houses in Vera Cruz, built of white
coral-rock from the reefs near the shore, but they are mildewed and
dismal-looking. Outside the walls is the Alameda; and close by is a
line of houses, uninhabited, mouldy, and in ruins. We asked who built
them. “Los Españoles,” they said.

Even now, when the “nortes” are blowing, and the city is comparatively
healthy, Vera Cruz is a melancholy place, with a plague-stricken look
about it; but it is from June to October that its name, “the city of
the dead”—la ciudad de los muertos—is really deserved. In that season
comes an accumulation of evils. The sun is at its height; there is no
north wind to clear the air; and the heavy tropical rains—more than
three times as much in quantity as falls in England in the whole
year—come down in a short rainy season of four months. The water
filters through the sand-hills, and forms great stagnant lagoons; a
rank tropical vegetation springs up, and the air is soon filled with
pestilential vapours. Add to this that the water is unwholesome; the
city too is placed in a sand-bath which keeps up a regular temperature,
by accumulating heat by day and giving it out into the air by night, so
that night gives no relief from the stifling closeness of the day. No
wonder that Mr. Bullock, the Mexican traveller, as he sat in his room
here in the hot season, heard the church-bells tolling for the dead
from morning to night without intermission; for weeks and weeks, one
can hardly even look into the street without seeing a funeral.

We turned back through the city, and walked along watching the
Zopilotes—great turkey-buzzards—with their bald heads and foul
dingy-black plumage. They were sitting in compact rows on parapets of
houses and churches, and seemed specially to affect the cross of the
cathedral, where they perched, two on each arm, and some on the top.
When some offal was thrown into the streets, they came down leisurely
upon it, one after another; their appearance and deportment reminding
us of the undertaker’s men in England coming down from the hearse at
the public-house door, when the funeral is over. In all tropical
America these birds are the general scavengers, and there is a heavy
fine for killing them.[4]

 [4] No one ill uses them but the dogs, who drive them away when
 anything better than usual is met with, and they have to stand round
 in a circle, waiting for their turn.


Scarcely any one is about in the streets this afternoon, except a gang
or two of convicts dragging their heavy chains along, sweeping and
mending the streets. This is a punishment much approved of by the
Mexican authorities, as combining terror to evil-doers with advantage
to the community. That it puts all criminals on a level, from murderers
down to vagrants, does not seem to be considered as a matter of much
consequence.

At the city-gate stands a sentry—the strangest thing I ever saw in the
guise of a soldier—a brown Indian of the coast, dressed in some rags
that were a uniform once, shoeless, filthy in the extreme, and armed
with an amazing old flint-lock. He is bad enough to look at, in all
conscience, and really worse than he looks, for—no doubt—he has been
pressed into the service against his will, and hates white men and
their ways with all his heart. Of course he will run away when he gets
a chance; and, though he will be no great loss to the service, he will
add his mite to the feeling of hatred that has been growing up for
these so many years among the brown Indians against the whites and the
half-cast Mexicans. But more of this hereafter.

One step outside the gate, and we are among the sand-hills that stretch
for miles and miles round Vera Cruz. They are mere shifting
sand-mounds; and, though some of them are fifty feet high, the fierce
north wind moves them about bodily. The Texans know these winds well,
and call them “northers.” They come from Hudson’s Bay to the Gulf of
Mexico, right down the Continent of North America, over a level plain
with hardly a hill to obstruct their course, the Rocky Mountains and
the Alleghanies forming a sort of trough for them. When the “norte”
blows fiercely you can hardly keep your feet in the streets of Vera
Cruz, and vessels drag their anchors or break from their moorings in
the ill-protected harbour, and are blown out to sea—lucky if they
escape the ugly coral-reefs and sand-banks that fringe the coast. There
are a few bushes growing outside the walls, and there we found the
Nopal bush, the great prickly pear—the same that has established itself
all round the shores of the Mediterranean—growing in crevices of rocks,
and cracks in lava-beds, and barren places where nothing else will
live. But what made us notice these Nopals was, that they were covered
with what looked like little white cocoons, out of which, when they
were pressed, came a drop of deep crimson fluid. This is the cochineal
insect, but only the wild variety; the fine kind, which is used for
dye, and comes from the province of Oajaca, miles off, is covered only
with a mealy powder. There the Indians cultivate great plantations of
Nopals, and spread the insects over them with immense care, even
removing them, and carrying them up into the mountains in baskets when
the rainy season begins in the plains, and bringing them back when it
is over.

On Friday, the 14th of March, at three o’clock in the morning, we took
our places in a strong American-built diligence, holding nine inside,
and began our journey by being dragged along the railroad—which was
commenced with great energy some time ago, and got fifteen miles on its
way to the capital, at which point it has stopped ever since. When day
broke we had left the railroad, and were jolting along through a
parched sandy plain, thinly covered with acacias, nopals, and other
kinds of cactus, bignonias, and the great tree-euphorbia, with which we
had been so familiar in Cuba, with its smooth limbs and huge white
flowers. At last we reached the first hill, and began gently to ascend.
The change was wonderful. Once out of the plain, we are in the midst of
a tropical forest. The trees are crowded close together, and the
convolvulus binds their branches into an impassable jungle, while ferns
and creepers weave themselves into a dense mass below; and here and
there a glimpse up some deep ravine shows great tree-ferns, thirty feet
high, standing close to the brink of a mountain-stream, and flourishing
in the damp shade.

Indian Ranchos become more frequent as we ascend; and the
inhabitants—squatting on the ground, or leaning against the
door-posts—just condescend to glance at us as we pass, and then return
to their meditations, and their cigarettes, if they happen to have any.
These ranches are the merest huts of canes, thatched with palm-leaves;
and close by each a little patch of ground is enclosed by a fence of
prickly cactus, within which are growing plantains, with their large
smooth leaves and heavy ropes of fruit, the great staple of the “tierra
caliente.”

Our road winds along valleys and through pass after pass; and now and
then a long zig-zag brings us out of a valley, up to a higher level.
The air grows cooler, we are rapidly changing our climate, and
afternoon finds us in the region of the sugar-cane and the
coffee-plant. We pass immense green cane-fields, protected from the
visits of passing muleteers and peasants by a thick hedge of thorny
coffee-bushes. The cane is but young yet; but the coffee-plant, with
its brilliant white flowers, like little stars, is a beautiful feature
in the landscape.

At sunset we are rattling through the streets of the little town of
Cordova. There is such a thoroughly Spanish air about the place, that
it might be a suburb of the real Cordova, were it not for the crowds of
brown Indians in their scanty cotton dresses and great flat-brimmed
hats, and the Mexican costumes of the whiter folks. Low whitewashed
houses, with large windows to the street, protected by the heavy
iron-gratings, like cages, that are so familiar to travellers in
Southern Europe. Inside the grating are the ladies of the family,
outside stand their male acquaintance, and energetic gossiping is going
on. The smoky little lamp inside gives us a full view of the interior.
Four whitewashed walls; a table; a few stiff-backed chairs; a virgin or
saint resplendent in paint and tinsel; and, perhaps, two or three
coloured engravings, red, blue, and yellow.

A few hours in the dark, and we reach Orizaba. We have changed our
climate for the last time to-day, and have reached that district where
tobacco flourishes at an altitude of 4,000 feet above the sea. But of
this we see nothing, for we are off again long before daylight; and by
the time that external objects can be made out we find ourselves in a
new region. A valley floored with rich alluvial soil from the hills
that rise steeply on both sides, their tops shrouded in clouds. Signs
of wonderful fertility in the fields of maize and barley along the
roadside. The air warm, but full of mist, which has already penetrated
our clothes and made them feel damp and sticky. “Splendid country,
this, Señores,” said an old Mexican, when he had twisted himself round
on his seat to get a good stare at us. “It seems so,” said I, “judging
by the look of the fields, but it is very unpleasantly damp just now.”
“Just now,” said the old gentleman, echoing my words, “it is always
damp here. You see that drizzling mist; that is the chipi-chipi. Never
heard of the chipi-chipi! Why it is the riches and blessing of the
country. Sometimes we never see the sun here for weeks at a time, and
it rains a little every day nearly; but look at the fields, we get
three crops a year from them where you have but one on the fields just
above. And it is healthy, too; look at those fellows at work there.
When we get up to the Llanos you will see the difference.”

The valley grew narrower as we drove on; and at last, when it seemed to
end in a great ravine, we began to climb the steep hill by a zig-zag
road. Soon the air grows clearer again, the sunshine appears and gets
brighter and brighter, we have left the mist behind, and are among
ranges of grand steep hills, covered with the peculiar vegetation of
the plateau,—Cactus, Opuntia, and the Agave Americana. In the trough of
the valley lies a regular opaque layer of white clouds, hiding the
fields and cottages from our view. We have already passed the zone of
perpetual moisture, whose incessant clouds and showers are caused by
the stratum of hot air—charged with water evaporated from the
gulf—striking upon the mountains, and there depositing part of the
aqueous vapour it contains.

You may see the same thing happening in almost every mountainous
district; but seldom on so grand a scale as here, or with so little
disturbance from other agents. Yesterday was passed in the “tierra
caliente,” the hot country; our journey of to-day and to-morrow is
through the “tierra templada” and the “tierra fría,” the temperate and
the cold country. Here a change of a few hundred feet in altitude above
the sea, brings with it a change of climate as great as many degrees of
latitude will cause, and in one day’s travel it is possible to descend
from the region of eternal snow to the utmost heat of the tropics. Our
ascent is more gradual; but, though we are three days on the road, we
have sometimes scarcely time to notice the different zones of
vegetation we pass through, before we change again.

To make the account of the journey from the coast to Mexico somewhat
clearer, a few words must be said about the formation of the country,
as shown in a profile-map or section. The interior of Mexico consists
of a mass of volcanic rocks, thrust up to a great height above the
sea-level. The plateau of Mexico is 8,000 feet high, and that of Puebla
9,000 feet. This central mass consists principally of a greyish
trachytic porphyry, in some places rich in veins of silver-ore. The
tops of the hills are often crowned with basaltic columns, and a soft
porous amygdaloid abounds on the outskirts of the Mexican valley.
Besides this, traces of more recent volcanic action abound, in the
shape of numerous extinct craters in the high plateaus, and immense
“pedrigals” or fields of lava not yet old enough for their surface to
have been disintegrated into soil. Though sedimentary rocks occur in
Mexico, they are not the predominant feature of the country. Ridges of
limestone hills lie on the slopes of the great volcanic mass toward the
coast; and at a still lower level, just in the rise from the flat
coast-region, there are strata of sandstone. On our road from Vera Cruz
we came upon sandstone immediately after leaving the sandy plains; and
a few miles further on we reached the limestone, very much as it is
represented in Burkart’s profile of the country from Tampico upwards
towards San Luis Potosi. The mountain-plateaus, such as the plains of
Mexico and Puebla, are hollows filled up and floored with horizontal
strata of tertiary deposits, which again are covered by the constantly
accumulating layers of alluvium.

Our heavy pull up the mountain-side has brought us into a new scene.
Every one knows how the snow lies in the valleys of the Alps, forming a
plain which slopes gradually downward towards the outlet. Imagine such
a valley ten miles across, with just such a sloping plain, not of snow
but of earth. There has been no rain for months, and the surface of the
ground is parched and cracked all over. There is hardly a tree to be
seen except clumps of wood on the mountain-sides miles off,—no
vegetation but tufts of coarse grass, among which herds of
disconsolate-looking cattle are roaming; the vaqueros, (herdsmen) are
cantering about after them on their lean horses, with their lazos
hanging in coils on their left arms, and now and then calling to order
some refractory beast who tries to get away from the herd, by sending
the loop over his horns or letting it fall before him as he runs, and
hitching it up with a jerk round his hind legs as he steps within it.
But the poor creatures are too thirsty and dispirited just now to give
any sport, and the first touch of the cord is enough to bring them back
to their allegiance.

From the decomposed porphyry of the mountains carbonate of soda comes
down in solution to the valleys. Much of this is converted into natron
by the organic matter in the soil, and forms a white crust on the
earth. More of the carbonate of soda, mixed in various proportions with
common salt, drains continually out in the streams, or filters into the
ground and crystallizes there. This is why there is not a field to be
seen, and the land is fit for nothing but pasture. But when the rains
come on in a few months, say our friends in the diligence, this dismal
waste will be a luxuriant prairie, and the cattle will be here by
thousands, for most of them are dispersed now in the lower regions of
the tierra templada where grass and water are to be had.

My companion and I climb upon the top of the diligence to spy out the
land. The grand volcano of Orizaba had been hidden from us ever since
that morning when we saw it from far out at sea, but now it rises on
our left, its upper half covered with snow of dazzling whiteness,—a
regular cone, for from this side the crater cannot be seen. It looks as
though one could walk half a mile or so across the valley and then go
straight up to the summit, but it is full thirty miles off. The air is
heated as by a furnace, and as we jolt along the road the clouds of
dust are suffocating. We go full gallop along such road as there is,
banging into holes, and across the trenches left by last year’s
watercourses, until we begin to think that it must end in a general
smash. We came to understand Mexican roads and Mexican drivers better,
even before we got to the capital.

Before us and behind lay wide lakes, stretching from side to side of
the valley; but the lake behind followed us as steadily as the one
before us receded. It was only the mirage that tantalizes travellers in
these scorched valleys, all the long eight months of the rainless
season. It seemed beautiful at first, then monotonous; and long before
the day was out we hated it with a most cordial and unaffected hatred.

Soon a new appearance attracted our attention. First, clouds of dust,
which gradually took a well-defined shape, and formed themselves into
immense pillars, rapidly spinning round upon themselves, and travelling
slowly about the plain. At one place, where several smaller valleys
opened upon us, these sand-pillars, some small, some large, were
promenading about by dozens, looking much like the genie when the
fisherman had just let him out of the bottle, and saw him with
astonishment beginning to shape himself into a giant of monstrous size.
Indeed I doubt not that the story-teller was thinking of such
sand-pillars when he wrote that wonderful description. You may see them
in the East by thousands. As they moved along, they sucked up small
stones, dust, and leaves; and our driver declared that they had been
known to take the roofs off houses, and carry flocks of sheep into the
air; “but these that you see now,” said he, “are no great matter.” We
estimated the size of the largest at about four hundred feet in height,
and thirty in diameter; and this very pillar, walking by chance against
a house, most decidedly got the worst of it, and had its lower limbs
knocked all to pieces.

When the sun grows hot, the bare earth heats the air that lies upon it
so much that an upward current rises from the whole face of the valley;
and to supply its place the little valleys and ravines that open into
it pour in each its stream of cooler air; and wherever two of these
streams, flowing in different directions, strike one another, a little
whirlwind ensues, and makes itself manifest as a sand-pillar. The
coachman’s “molino de viento,” as he called it, may very well have
happened, but it must have been a whirlwind on a large scale, caused by
the meeting of great atmospheric currents, not by the little apparatus
we saw at work.

There seems to be hardly a village in the plain; and the only buildings
we see for miles are the herdsmen’s houses of stone, flat-roofed, dark
inside, and uninviting in their appearance, and the great cattle-pens,
the corrals, which seem absurdly too large for the herds that we have
yet seen; but in two or three months there will be rain, the ground
will be covered with rank grass, the corrals will be crowded with
cattle every evening; the mirage will depart when real water comes,
dust and sand-pillars will be no longer to be seen, and all the nine
horses and mules of the diligence-team, floundering, splashing, and
kicking, will hardly keep the heavy coach from settling down
inextricably in the mire. And so on until October, and then the season
of water, “la estación de las aguas,” will cease, and things will be
again as they are now.

In the usual course of travel to the capital, the second night would
have been passed at Puebla. This is the second city of the Republic,
and numbers some 70,000 inhabitants. As it was then in revolt, and
besieged by the President and his army, we made a detour to the north
when about 20 miles from it, in order to sleep for a few hours at
Huamantla, a place with a most evil reputation for thieves and vermin;
and about ten at night we drove into the court-yard of a dismal-looking
inn. Three or four dirty fellows stood round as we alighted, wrapped in
their serapes—great woollen blankets, the universal wear of the
Mexicans of the plateaus. One end of the serape was thrown across from
shoulder to shoulder, and hid the lower part of their faces; and the
broad-brimmed Mexican sombrero was slouched over their eyes; we
particularly disliked the look of them as they stood watching us and
our baggage going into the inn. A few minutes after, we returned to the
court-yard to complete our observation of them, but they were all gone.

A party of Spaniards and Mexicans were at the other table in the sala
when we marched in, and as soon as we had taken off the edge of our
fierce hunger, we began to compare notes with them. “Had a pleasant
journey from Mexico?” They all answered at once, delighted to find an
audience to whom to tell their sorrows, as men always are under such
circumstances. It appeared that they had reached Huamantla an hour or
two before us, and to their surprise and delight no robbers had
appeared. But between the outskirts of the town and the inn, the cords
behind the diligence were cut, and every particle of luggage had
disappeared. At the inn-gate they got out and discovered their loss.
They set upon the Administrador of the diligence-company, who
sympathized deeply with them, but had no more substantial comfort to
offer. They declared the driver must have been an accomplice, and the
driver was sent for, for them to wreak their fury upon. He appeared
with his mouth full of beans, and told them, as soon as he could speak,
that they ought to be very thankful they had come off so easily, and,
looking at them with an expression of infinite disgust, returned to his
supper; they followed his example, and seemed to have at last found
consolation in hot dishes and Catalan wine. It was wonderful to hear of
the fine things that were in the lost portmanteaus,—the rings, the gold
watches, the rouleaux of dollars, the “papers of the utmost
importance.”

I am afraid the Spanish American has not always a very strict regard
for truth.

These gentlemen had indeed got off easily, as the driver said; for the
last diligence from Vera Cruz, with our steamboat acquaintances in it,
had been stopped just outside this very town of Huamantla as they left
it before daylight in the morning. The robbers were but three, but they
had plundered the unfortunate travellers as effectually as thirty could
have done. Now, all this was very pretty to hear as a tale, but not
satisfactory to travellers who were going by the same road the next
morning; and in the disagreeable barrack-room where our beds stood in
long lines, we, the nine passengers of the “up” diligence, held a
council, standing, like Mr. Macaulay’s senators, and there decided on a
most Christian line of conduct—that when the three bore down upon us,
and the muzzle of the inevitable escopeta was poked in at our window,
we would descend meekly, and at the command of “boca abajo,” (“mouth
downwards,”) we would humiliate ourselves with our noses in the dirt,
and be robbed quietly. Having thus decided beforehand, according to the
etiquette of the road, whether we were to fight or submit, and being
tired with a long day’s journey, we all turned in, and were fast asleep
in a moment.

It seemed that almost directly afterwards the dirtiest man possible
came round, and shook us till we were conscious; and we washed in the
customary saucers, by the light of a real, flaring, smoking, Spanish
lamp with a beak, exactly what the Romans used in Pompeii, except that
this is of brass, not bronze.

With our eyes still half-shut we crawled into the kitchen for our
morning chocolate, and demanded our bill. Such a bill! One of us, a
stout Spaniard, sent for the landlord and abused him in a set speech.
The “patron” divested his countenance of every trace of expression,
scratched his head through his greasy nightcap, and stood listening
patiently. The stout man grew fiercer and fiercer, and wound up with a
climax. “If we meet with the robbers,” said he, rolling himself up in
his great cloak, “we must tell them that we have passed through your
worship’s hands, and there is none left for them.” The landlord bowed
gravely, saw us into the diligence, and hoped we should have a
fortunate journey, and meet with no novelty on the road. A “novelty” in
Spanish countries means a misfortune.

We met with no “novelty,” though, when we looked out of the window in
the early dawn and spied three men with muskets, following us at a
short distance, we thought our time had come, and watches and valuables
were plunged into boots and under seats, and through slits into the
padding of the diligence; but the three men came no nearer, and we
supposed them to be an escort of soldiers. When it was light the
difficulty was to recover the valuables—no easy matter, so securely had
they been hidden.

We heard afterwards of a little peculiarity which distinguished the
robbers of Huamantla. It seems that no less a personage than the parish
priest was accustomed to lead his parishioners into action, like the
Cornish parson in old times when a ship went ashore on the coast. What
has become of his reverence since, I do not know. He is very likely
still in his parish, carrying on his double profession, unless somebody
has shot him. I wonder whether it is sacrilege to shoot a priest who is
also a highwayman, as it used to be to kill a bishop on the field of
battle.

We are at last on the high lands of Mexico, the districts which at
least three different races have chosen to settle in, neglecting the
fertile country below. A sharp turn in the road brings its fairly out
into the plain; and then on our left are the two snowy mountains that
lie at the edge of the valley of Mexico, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl,
famous in all Mexican books. Like Orizaba of yesterday, they seem to
rise from the plain close to us; and from the valley between them there
pours down upon us such a flood of icy wind, that, though windows are
pulled up and great-coats buttoned round our throats, we shiver
piteously, and our teeth fairly chatter till we get out of the river of
cold air; and then comes hot sunshine and dust again.

Anxious to make sure that we have really got into the land of Aztec
civilization, Mr. Christy gets down from the diligence, and hunting
about for a few minutes by the road-side, returns in triumph with a
broken arrowhead of obsidian. A deep channel cut by a water-course
gives us our first idea of the depth of the soil; for these plateaus
were once nothing but deep hollows among the mountains, which rain and
melted snow, bringing down fragments of porphyry and basalt—partly in
their original state and partly decomposed—have filled up and formed
into plains. Signs of volcanic action are abundant. To say nothing of
the two great mountains we have just left behind, there is a hill of
red volcanic tufa just beyond us; and still further on, though this is
anticipating, our road passes over the lava-field at the foot of the
little volcano of Santa Barbara.

There is a population here at any rate, village after village; and
between them are great plantations of maize and aloes; for this is the
district where the best pulque in Mexico is made, the “llanos de Apam.”
It is the _Agave Americana_, the same aloe that is so common in
southern Europe, where indeed it flowers, and that grows in our gardens
and used to have the reputation of flowering once in a hundred years. I
do not exaggerate when I say that we saw hundreds of thousands of them
that day, planted in long regular lines. Among them were walking the
Indian “tlachiqueros,” each with his pigskin on his back, and his long
calabash in his hand, milking such plants as were in season.

[Illustration: INDIAN TLACHIQUERO, COLLECTING JUICE OF THE AGAVE FOR
PULQUE.]

The fine buildings of the haciendas, and more especially the churches,
contrast strongly with the generality of houses, all of one story,
built of adobes (mud-bricks dried in the sun), with flat roofs of sand
and lime resting on wooden rafters, and the naked ground for a floor,
all dark, dirty, and comfortless. There are even many huts built
entirely of the universal aloe. The stems of wild aloes which have been
allowed to flower are stuck into the ground, side by side, and pieces
of leaves tied on outside them with aloe-fibre. These cut leaves are
set like tiles to form a roof, and pegged down with the thorns which
grow at their extremities. Picturesque and cheap, though hardly
comfortable, for we are in the “tierra fría” now, and the mornings and
evenings in winter are often bitterly cold.

But the churches! Is it possible that they can belong to these wretched
filthy little cottages. As black Sam, our driver, a runaway Texan
slave, suggested, it looked as though the villagers might pull down
their houses and locate themselves and their families in their
churches. We thought of Mr. Ruskin, who has somewhere expressed an
earnest desire that all the money and energy that England has wasted in
making railroads, had been spent in building churches; and we wished he
had been here to see his principles carried out.

I have travelled on rough roads in my time, but on such a road as this
never. My companion refused for a time to award the premium of badness
to our thoroughfare; but, just while we were discussing the question
and recounting our experience of bone-smashing highways, we reached a
pass where the road consisted of a series of steps, nearly a foot in
depth, down which steps we went at a swinging trot, holding on for our
lives, in terror lest the next jerk should fairly wrench our arms out
of their sockets, while we could plainly hear the inside passengers
howling for mercy, as they were shot up against the roof which knocked
them back into their seats. Aching all over, we reached level ground
again, and Mr. Christy withdrew his claims, and agreed that no road
anywhere else could possibly be so bad as a Mexican road; a decision
which later experiences only served to confirm.

Our start, every time we changed horses, was a sight to see. Nine
half-broken horses and mules, in a furious state of excitement, were
harnessed to our unwieldy machine; the helpers let go, and off they
went, kicking, plunging, rearing, biting, and screaming, into ruts and
watercourses that were like the trenches they make for gas-pipes in
London streets, with our wheels on one side on a stone wall, and in a
pit on the other, and Black Sam leaning back with his feet on the
board, waiting with perfect tranquillity until the animals had got rid
of their superfluous energy and he could hold them in. We were always
just going to have some frightful accident, and always just missed it.
The last stage before we reached Otumba, a small dusky urchin ran
across the road just before us. How Black Sam contrived to pull up I
cannot tell, though, indeed, his arms were about the size of an
ordinary man’s thighs; but he did, and they got the child out from the
horses’ feet quite unhurt.

It was at the inn where we stopped to breakfast that we made our first
acquaintance with the great Mexican institutions—tortillas and pulque.
The pulque was being brewed on a large scale in an adjoining building.
The vats were made of cow-skins (with the hair inside), supported by a
frame of sticks; and in them was pulque in every stage, beginning with
the sweet aguamiel—honeywater—the fresh juice of the aloe, and then the
same in different degrees of fermentation till we come to the _madre
pulque_, the mother pulque, a little of which is used like yeast, to
start the fermentation, and which has a combined odour of gas-works and
drains. Pulque, as you drink it, looks like milk and water, and has a
mild smell and taste of rotten eggs. Tortillas are like oat-cakes, but
made of Indian corn meal, not crisp, but soft and leathery. We thought
both dreadfully nasty for a day or two; then we could just endure them;
then we came to like them; and before we left the country we wondered
how we should do without them.




CHAPTER III.
CITY OF MEXICO.


[Illustration: VIEW OF PART OF THE VALLEY OF MEXICO.]

Some thirty years ago, Don Agustín Yturbide, the first and last Emperor
of Mexico, found that he wanted a palace wherein to house his
newly-fledged dignity; and began to build one accordingly, in the high
street of Mexico, close to the great convent of San Francisco. It could
not have been nearly finished when its founder was shot: and it became
the _Hotel d’Yturbide_. We are now settled in it, in very comfortable
quarters. There is a restaurant down below, where the son of the late
Yturbide dines daily, and everybody points him out to us, and moralises
over him.

Mr. Christy’s drawer-roll of letters of introduction has produced an
immediate crop of pleasant acquaintances, whose hospitality is
boundless. We are not idle, far from it; and a long day’s work is
generally followed by a social dinner, and an evening spent in noting
down the results of our investigations.

Prescott’s _Conquest of Mexico_ has been more read in England than most
historical works; and the Mexico of Montezuma has a well-defined idea
attached to it. The amphitheatre of dark hills surrounding the level
plain, the two snowy mountain-peaks, the five lakes covering nearly
half the valley, the city rising out of the midst of the waters, miles
from the shore, with which it was connected by its four causeways, the
straight streets of low flat-roofed houses, the numbers of canals
crowded with canoes of Indians going to and from the market, the
floating gardens moved from place to place, on which vegetables and
flowers were cultivated, the great pyramid up which the Spanish army
saw their captured companions led in solemn procession, and sacrificed
on the top—all these are details in the mental picture.

Much of this has changed since the Spaniards first saw it. Cortes tried
all ordinary means to overcome the desperate obstinacy with which the
Aztecs defended their capital. The Spaniards conquered wherever they
went; but, as they moved forward, the Mexicans closed in again behind,
and from every house-top showers of darts, arrows, and stones were
poured down upon them. Cortes resolved upon the utter demolition of the
city. He was grieved to destroy it, he said, for it was the most
beautiful thing in the whole world; but there was no alternative. He
moved slowly towards the great teocalli, his fifty thousand Tlascalan
allies following him, throwing down every house, and filling the canals
with the ruins. When the conquest was finished, but one district of the
city was left standing, and in it were crowded a quarter of the
population, miserable famished wretches, who had surrendered when their
king was taken. All that was left besides was a patch of swampy ground
strewed with fragments of walls, a few pyramids too large for present
destruction, and such great heaps of dead bodies that it was impossible
to get from place to place without walking over them.

Cortes had resolved that a new city should be built, but it was not so
easy to decide where it was to be. The Aztecs, it seemed, had not
originally established themselves on the spot where Mexico was built.
When they came down from the north country, and across the hills into
the valley of Mexico, they were but an insignificant tribe, and as yet
mere savages. They settled down in one place after another, and were
always driven out by the persecutions of the neighbouring tribes. At
last they took possession of a little group of swampy islands in the
lake of Tezcuco; and then at last, safe from their enemies, they
increased and multiplied, and became a great and powerful nation.

The first beginnings of Mexico, a cluster of huts built on wooden
piles, must have borne some likeness to those curious settlements of
early tribes in the shallow part of the lakes of Switzerland and the
British Isles, of which numerous remains are still to be found. As the
nation increased in numbers, Tenochtitlán, as the inhabitants called
their city (they called themselves _Tenochques_), came to be a great
city of houses built on piles, with canals running through the straight
streets, along which the natives poled their flat-bottomed canoes. The
name which the Spaniards gave to the city, the “Venice of the New
World,” was appropriate, not only to its situation in the midst of the
water, with canals for thoroughfares, but also to the history of the
causes which led to its being built in such a situation.

The habit of building houses upon piles, which was first forced upon
the people by the position they had chosen, was afterwards followed as
a matter of taste, just as it is in Holland. Even after the Aztecs
became masters of the surrounding country, they built towns round the
lake, partly on the shore, and partly on piles in the water. The
Spanish chroniclers mention Iztapalapán, and many other towns, as built
in this way. Like the Swiss tribes, the early inhabitants of Mexico
depended much upon their fishing, for which their position gave them
great facilities.

If you look at the arms of the Mexican Republic, on a passport or a
silver dollar, you will see a representation of a rock surrounded by
water. On the rock grows a cactus, and on the cactus sits an eagle with
a serpent in his beak. The story is that the wandering tribe preserved
a tradition of an oracle which said that when they should find an
eagle, holding a serpent, and perched on a cactus growing out of a
rock, then they should cease their wanderings. On an island in the lake
of Tezcuco, they found eagle, serpent, cactus, and rock, as described,
and they settled there in due course. What fragment of truth is hidden
in this myth it is hard to say. Tenochtitlán means “The Stone-cactus
place;” and the Aztec picture-writings express its name by a hieroglyph
of a prickly pear growing on a rock. Putting this history out of the
question, the Aztecs had excellent reasons for choosing this peculiar
site for their city; but these reasons were not equally valid in the
case of the new invaders. For them the surrounding salt-water was not
needed as a protection, and was merely a nuisance. Every year, when the
lake rose, the place was flooded, with enormous damage to the property
of the inhabitants; and sometimes an inundation of greater depth than
usual threatened as complete a destruction as Cortes and the Tlascalans
had made. At the best of times, the site was a salt-swamp, an ugly
place to build upon. And, lastly, all the fresh water must be brought
from the hills by aqueducts, which an enemy would cut off without
difficulty, as the Spaniards themselves had done during the siege. Now
Cortes was certainly not ignorant of all this, and he knew of many
places on the rising ground close by, where he could found his new city
under more favourable circumstances. He deliberated four or five months
on the matter, and at last decided in favour of the old site, giving as
his reason that “the city of Tenochtitlán had become celebrated, its
position was wonderful, and in all times it had been considered as the
capital and mistress of all these provinces.”

The invaders were old hands at slave-driving, and so hard did they
drive the conquered Mexicans, that in four years there had arisen a
fine Spanish city, with massive stone houses of several storeys, having
the indispensable inner courts, flat roofs, and grated windows,—every
man’s house literally his castle, when once the great iron
entrance-gates were closed. The Indians had, of course, been converted
en masse, and churches were being built in all directions. The great
pyramid where Huitzilopochtli, the God of war, was worshipped, had been
razed to the ground, and its great sculptured blocks of basalt were
sunk in the earth as a foundation for a cathedral. The old lines of the
streets, running toward the four points of the compass, were kept to;
and to this it is that the present Mexico is indebted for much of its
beauty. Most of the smaller canals were filled up, and the
thoroughfares widened for carriages, things of course unknown to the
Mexicans, who had no beasts of burden. In the suburbs the natives
settled themselves after their own fashion, baking adobes, large mud
bricks, in the sun, and building with them one-storey houses with flat
roofs, much as they do at the present day. And thus a new Mexico,
nearly the same as that we are now exploring, came to be planted in the
midst of the waters. Three centuries have elapsed since; the city has
grown larger, churches, convents, and public buildings have increased,
but the architectural character of the place has scarcely altered. It
is the situation that has changed. The lake of Tezcuco is four miles
off, though the causeways which once connected the city with the dry
land still exist, and have even been enlarged. They look like
railway-embankments crossing the low ground, and serve as dykes when
there is a flood, a casualty which still often happens.

This change is interesting to the student of physical geography; and
Humboldt’s account of the causes which have brought it about is full
and explicit. When Mexico had been built a few years, the frightful
inundations which threatened its very existence at length awoke the
Spaniards to a sense of the mistake that had been made in placing
themselves but a few feet above the lowest level of the valley, in such
a way that, from whatever point the flood might come, they were sure to
get the benefit of it. The Spanish authorities at home, with their
usual sagacity, sent over peremptory orders that the city should be
abandoned, and a new capital built at Tacubaya—a proposal something
like intimating to the inhabitants of Naples that their position, at
the foot of Mount Vesuvius, was most dangerous, and that they must
leave it and settle somewhere else. In those days the valley was a
complete basin, with no outlet—at least not one worth mentioning; and
the heavy tropical rains and the melted snow from the mountains, poured
vast quantities of water into it. Had the valley been at the level of
the sea, it would simply have become a great lake, surrounded by hills;
but at three thousand feet higher, the atmosphere is rarefied, and
evaporation goes on with such rapidity as to keep the accumulation of
water in check. So the affair had adjusted itself in this wise, that
the land and the five lakes should divide the valley about equally
between them. It became necessary to alter this state of things, and a
passage was cut at a place where the hills were but little above the
level of the highest lake. The history of this passage, the famous
“Desague de Huehuetoca,” is instructive enough, but it has been written
so threadbare that I cannot touch it. Suffice it to say, that by this
means a constant outlet was made for the lake of Zumpango, the highest
of the five, and for the Rio de Guatitlán, a stream which formerly ran
into it.

So much for one cause of the change in the present appearance of the
city. Then the Spaniards were great cutters down of forests. They
rather liked to make their new country bear a resemblance to the arid
plains of Castile, where, when you arrive in Madrid, people ask you
whether you noticed _the tree_ on the road; and moreover, as they
wanted wood, they cut it, without troubling themselves to plant for the
benefit of future generations. Now, when the trees were cut down, the
small plants which grew in their shade died too, and left the bare
earth to serve as a kind of natural evaporating apparatus. And, between
these two causes, it has come to pass that the extent of the lakes has
been so much reduced, and that Mexico stands on the dry land—if,
indeed, that may be called dry land, where you cannot dig a foot
without coming to water.

During the Tertiary period the whole valley of Mexico was one great
lake. Whether the proportion of water to land had adjusted itself
before the country was inhabited, or whether during historical times
the lakes were still gradually diminishing by the excess of evaporation
over the quantity of water supplied by rain and snow, is an open
question. At any rate the two causes I have mentioned will account for
the changes which have taken place since the conquest.

Taking it as a whole, Mexico is a grand city, and, as Cortes truly
said, its situation is marvellous. But as for the buildings, I should
be sorry to inflict upon any one who may read these sketches, a
detailed description of any one of them. It is a thousand pities that,
just at the time when the Italians and Spaniards were most zealous in
church-building, so very questionable an architectural taste should
have been prevalent.

The churches and convents in Mexico belong to that kind of renaissance
style that began to flourish in southern Europe in the sixteenth
century, and has held its ground there ever since. High façades abound,
with pilasters crowned by elaborate Corinthian capitals, forming a
curious contrast with the mean little buildings crouched behind the
tall front. In the doors of the churches outside, and the chapels
within, one is constantly coming upon that peculiar construction which
consists of what would be an arch, resting on two pillars, were not the
keystone wanting. Columns with shafts elaborately sculptured, and
twisted marble pillars of the bed-post pattern, are to be seen by
hundreds, very expensive in material and workmanship, but unfortunately
very ugly; while the numbers of puffy cherubs, inside and out, remind
the Englishman of the monuments of St. Paul’s.

As to the interior decoration of the churches, the richer ones are
crowded with incongruous ornaments to a wonderful degree. Gold, silver,
costly marbles, jewels, stucco, paint, tinsel, and frippery are all
mixed up together in the wildest manner. We found the inside of the
churches to be generally the worst part of them. The Cathedral, for
instance, is really a very grand building when seen from a little
distance, with its two high towers and its cupola behind. I was greatly
edified by finding it described in the last book of Mexican travels I
have read, as built in the purest Doric style.

The Minería, or School of Mines, is a fine building, something after
the manner of Somerset House on a small scale. As for the famous Plaza
Mayor, the great square, it is a very great square indeed, large enough
to review an army in, and large enough to damage by its size the effect
of the cathedral, and to dwarf the other buildings that surround it
into mere insignificance. However, one thing is certain, that we have
not come all this way to see Spanish architecture and great squares,
but must look for something more characteristic.

I have said we arrived in Mexico on the eve of Palm Sunday, and next
morning we proceeded to consult with one of our newly-made
acquaintances as to our prospects for the ensuing Holy Week. This
gentleman, a man who took a practical view of things, mentioned a
circumstance which led him to expect that the affair would go off with
éclat. The Mexicans, both the nearly white Mestizos and the Indians of
pure race, delight in pulque. The brown people are grave and silent in
their sober state, but pulque stirs up their sluggish blood, and they
get into a condition of positive enjoyment. But very soon after this
comes a state of furious intoxication, and a general scuffle is a
common termination to a drinking-bout. Fortunately, the Indians are not
a bloodthirsty people; and, though every man carries a knife or
machete, or—if he can get nothing better—a bit of hoop-iron tempered,
sharpened, and fixed into a handle, yet nothing more serious than cuffs
and scratches generally ensues. Even if severe wounds are given, the
Indian has many chances in his favor, for his organization is somewhat
different from that of white men, and he recovers easily from wounds
that would kill any European outright.

The lower orders of the half-breed population are also given to
pulque-drinking, but with far more serious consequences. Unlike the
pure Indians, they are a hot-blooded and excitable race, and
drunkenness with them is utter madness while it lasts. Knives are drawn
at the very beginning of a squabble, and scarcely an evening passes
without one or two bodies of men killed in these drunken mêlées being
carried to the Police Cuartel in the great square. On Sundays and
holidays the number increases; but on this Palm Sunday there were
fourteen, not killed in one great battle, but brought in by ones and
twos, from different parts of the city. It was this little piece of
statistics that induced our friend to conclude that the citizens of
Mexico had made up their minds to enjoy themselves thoroughly, and that
Holy Week would be a grand affair. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of
the Semana Santa have only this to distinguish them from ordinary days,
that the churches are crowded with men and women waiting their turn at
the confessional; and that in the afternoons the old promenade of Las
Vigas, down in the Indian quarter by the canal of Chalco, is patronized
by fashionable Mexico, which, except on some four or five special days,
frequents the new Alameda. The sight of these confessionals, so
constantly filled, prompts one to ask—why just before Easter? Just
after would be more appropriate; for as we find the Glasgow people much
worse on Sundays than on week-days, so the Mexican population, not very
virtuous at the best of times, are specially and particularly wicked
when the great Church-festivals come round. The name of Shrove Tuesday
survives in our Calendar, to remind us of the time when we also used to
go to be shriven before Easter.

On Thursday at noon mass is over, the bells cease to ring, the organs
in the churches are silent, and all carriages disappear from the
streets, except the dusty Diligence which, like French law, “est
athée,” and cares nothing for fasts or festivals. Now we come to
understand the wonderful wooden machine like a water-wheel, which was
put up yesterday on one tower of the Cathedral. We had asked people in
the great square, just below, what it was, but could get no answer
except that it was _la Matraca_, the rattle, for to-morrow. And now we
found that, the church bells being incapacitated, this rattle does duty
instead, striking the hours, and occasionally going off into furious
fits of clattering, without apparent reason, for ten minutes at a time,
till the two men who worked it, who were either convicts or soldiers in
fatigue-dress, were tired out. It was not this one rattle only that was
disturbing the public peace that day and the next. Everybody was
walking about with a rattle, and working it like mad, and all over the
city there was a noise like the sound of the back-scratchers at
Greenwich Fair, or of an American forest when the woodpeckers are busy.
These little rattles stand for Judas’s bones, and all good Catholics
express in this odd way their desire to break them. They do the same
thing in Italy, but it is not so prominent a part of the celebration as
in Mexico, where old and young, rich and poor, all do their part in it.
As soon as we found out what it all meant, we bought matracas for
ourselves, and joined the rest of the world in their noisy occupation.
The breaking of his bones is but a preliminary measure. In the square a
fair is being held, in the booths of which the great articles of trade
now are Judas’s bones, of many patterns, at all prices, and Judas
himself in pasteboard, who is to be carried about and insulted till
Saturday morning, and then, hanging up by a string, is to burst asunder
by means of a packet of powder and a slow match in his inside, and
finally to perish in a bonfire.

The first sight of these pasteboard Judases convinced us of one thing,
that we had unexpectedly come upon the old custom, of which our
processions and burning of Guy Fawkes in England are merely an
adaptation. After giving up the old custom as a Popish rite, what a
bright idea to revive it in this new shape, and to give the boys
something to carry about, bang, blow up, and make a final bonfire of,
and all in the Protestant interest! There was another thing to be
noticed about the Judases. The makers had evidently tried to vary them
as much as they could; and, by that very means, had shown how
impossible it was to them to strike out anything new. There were two
types; one was the Neapolitan _Polichinello_, whom we have naturalised
as _Punch_; and the other the God _Pan_, with his horns, and hoofs, and
tail, whom the whole Christian world has recognised as the devil, for
these many ages. Well, some took one type and some the other; and a few
tried to combine the two, of course spoiling both. But, beyond this,
their power of invention could not go. They were always trying to
conceal the old idea, and could do no more than to distort it. We could
see through their flimsy pretensions to originality much as a
schoolmaster recognises the extracts from the encyclopaedia in his
boys’ essays.

As with this Judas trade, so it is with other more important arts and
sciences in this country. The old types descend, almost unchanged, from
generation to generation. Everything that is really Mexican is either
Aztec or Spanish. Among the Spanish types we may separate the Moorish.
Our knowledge of Mexico is not sufficient to enable us to analyse the
Aztec civilization, so we must be content with these three classes. I
will not go further into the question here, for occasions will
continually occur to show how—for three centuries at least—the
inhabitants of Mexico, both white and brown, have taken their ideas at
second-hand, always copying but never developing anything.

All this time my companion and I have been walking about the streets;
in evening-dress, as the etiquette of the place demands, on these three
days, from the “better classes.” The Mexican ladies may be
advantageously studied just now in their church-going black silk dress
and mantilla, one of the most graceful costumes in the world. It is not
often that one has the chance of seeing them out of doors, except
hurrying to and from Mass in the morning, or in carriages on the
Alameda; but on these festival days one meets them by hundreds. They do
not contrast favorably with the ladies of Cadiz and Seville. The
mixture of Aztec blood seems to have detracted from the beauty of the
Spanish race; the dryness of the atmosphere spoils their complexions;
and the monstrous quantity of capsicums that are consumed at every meal
cannot possibly leave the Mexican digestion in its proper state.

We dined that day with Don José de A., who, though Spanish-American by
birth, was English by education and feeling, and had known my
companion’s family well. Our dinner was half English, half Mexican; and
the favourite dishes of the country were there, to aid in our
initiation into Mexican manners and customs. The cooks at the inns,
mindful of our foreign origin, had dealt out the red pepper with a
sparing hand; but to-day the dish of “mole” was the genuine article,
and the first mouthful set as coughing and gasping for breath, while
the tears streamed down our faces, and Don Pepe and Don Pancho gravely
continued their dinner, assuring us that we should get quite to like it
in time. _Pepe_ and _Pancho_, by the way, are short for José and
Francisco. Dinner over, it was time to visit the churches, to which
people crowd by thousands, this evening and to-morrow, to see the
monuments, as they are called. Pancho departed, being on duty as escort
to his sisters; and we having, by Pepe’s advice, left our watches and
valuables in his room, and put our handkerchiefs in our breast-pockets,
started with him. Mr. Christy, always on the look-out for a new seed or
plant, had taken possession of the seeds of two _mameis_, which are
fleshy fruits—as big as cocoa-nuts—each containing a hard smooth seed
as large as a hen’s egg. These not being of great value, he put one in
each tail-pocket of his coat. When we got out, we found the streets
full of people, hurrying from one church to another, anxious to get as
many as possible visited in the evening. We went first to the monastery
of San Francisco, close to our hotel, the largest, and perhaps the
richest convent in the country. Entering through a great gate, we find
ourselves in a large courtyard, full of people, who are visiting—one
after another—the four churches which the establishment contains, going
in at one door and out at the other. At the door of the largest church,
stands a tall monk, soliciting customers for the rosaries of
olive-wood, crosses, and medals from Jerusalem, which are displayed on
a stall close by—shouting in a stentorian voice, every two or three
minutes, “He who gives alms to Holy Church, shall receive plenary
indulgence, and deliver one soul from purgatory.” We bought some, but
there did not seem to be many other purchasers. Indeed, we found, when
we had been longer in the country, that a few pence would buy all sorts
of church indulgences, from the permission to eat meat on fast-days up
to plenary absolution in the hour of death; and the trade, once so
flourishing here, is almost used up. The churches were hung with black,
and lighted up; and in each was a “monument,” a kind of bower of green
branches decorated with flowers, mirror’s, and gold and silver
church-plate, and supposed to stand for the Garden of Gethsemane.
Inside was reclining a wax figure of our Saviour, gaudily dressed in
silk and velvet; and there were also representations of the Last
Supper, with wax-work figures as large as life. To visit and criticise
these “monuments” was the object of the sort of pilgrimage people were
making from church to church, and they seemed thoroughly to enjoy it.
It was not a superfluous precaution that we had taken, in leaving our
valuables in a place of safety, for, on our exit from the first church,
we found that Pepe had lost his handkerchief and a cigar-case, which he
had stowed away in an inner pocket, and Mr. Christy had been relieved
of one of his mamei seeds by some “lepero” who probably took it for a
snuff-box. His feelings must have been like those of the English
pickpocket in Paris, when he robbed the Frenchman of the article he had
pocketed with so much care, and found it was a lump of sugar. And so
relieved of further care for our worldly goods, we went through with
the work of seeing monuments, till we were tired and disgusted with the
whole affair, and at last went home to bed.

Next day, appropriate sermons in the churches, processions in the
afternoon, in which wax figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary were
carried by men got up in fancy dresses as soldiers and centurions, and
so called penitents, walking covered with black shrouds and veils, with
small round holes to look through, or in the yellow dress and
extinguisher cap, both with flames and devils painted on them. These
are exactly the costumes worn in old times, the first by the familiars
of the Inquisition, and the second by the criminals it condemned; and
the sight of them set us thinking of the processions they used to
figure in, when the Holy Office was flourishing at Santo Domingo, a
little way down the street where we are standing.

In the evening the Crucifixion is represented in wax in the churches,
and the visiting goes on as the night before; and the next morning is
the Sábado de Gloria, the Saturday which ends Lent. We go to the
Jesuits’ church in the morning to hear the last sermon. Since Thursday
at noon, as the organs have been silenced, harps and violins have taken
their places. The sermon is long and prosy, and we rejoice that it is
the last. Then the service of the day goes on until they come to the
“Gloria in excelsis.” The organ peals out again, the black
curtain—which has hidden the high altar—parts in the middle, and
displays a perfect blaze of gold and jewels: all the bells in the city
begin to ring: the carriages, which have been waiting ready harnessed
in court yards, pour out into the streets: the lumbering hackney
coaches go racing to the great square, striving to get the first fare
for luck: the Judases, which have been hanging all the morning out of
windows and across streets, are set light to as the first bell begins
to ring, and fizzing and popping burst all to pieces, and then are
thrown into a heap in the street, where a bonfire is made of them, and
the children join hands and dance round it. So Holy Week ends.

[Illustration: THE PORTER AND THE BAKER IN MEXICO. (From Models
made by Native Artists)]

The arrangement of the day in Mexico is this. Early in the morning your
servant knocks at your door, and brings in a little cup of coffee or
chocolate and a small roll, which _desayuno_—literally breakfast—you
discuss while dressing. Going down into the courtyard, you find your
horse waiting for you, and off you go for an hour or two’s ride, and
back to a dejeuner-à-la-fourchette somewhere between ten and one
o’clock. Then you have seven or eight hours before dinner, so that a
good deal of work may be got into a day so divided. Things are managed
very differently in country places, but this is the fashion in the
capital among the higher class, that is, of course, the class of people
who put on dress-coats in the evening.

When we had been a day or two in Mexico, we took our first ride to
Tacubaya and Chapultepec. Mexican saddles and bridles were a novelty to
us, but when we come to describe our Mexican and his appurtenances it
will be time enough to speak of them.

The barricades in the streets constructed during the last revolution of
two or three weeks back had not yet been removed, but an opening at one
side allowed men and horses to get past. Carriages had to go round, an
easy matter in a city built as this is in squares like a chess-board.
The barricades mount two guns each, and as the streets are quite
straight they can sweep them in both directions, to the whole length of
their range. As in Turin, you can look backward and forward along the
straight streets from every part of the city, and see mountains at each
end. The suburbs of the city are quite as repulsive as our first
glimpse of them led us to expect; and, as far as one could judge by the
appearance of the half-caste inhabitants, it is not good to go there
alone after dark. Here is the end of the aqueduct of Chapultepec, the
Salto del Agua; and—crowded round it—a thoroughly characteristic group
of women and water-carriers, filling their great earthen jars with
water, which they carry about from house to house. The women are simply
and cheaply dressed, and though not generally pretty, are very graceful
in their movements. Their dress consists of a white cotton under-dress,
a coloured cotton skirt, generally blue, brown, or grey, with some
small pattern upon it, but never brilliant in colour, and a rebozo,
which is a small sober-coloured cotton shawl, long and narrow. This
rebozo passes over the back of the head, where it is somehow fixed to a
back hair-comb, and the two ends hang down over the shoulders in front;
or, more often, one end is thrown over the opposite shoulder, so that
the young lady’s face is set in it, like a picture in a frame. Add to
this a springy step, the peculiarly unconstrained movement in walking
which comes of living in the open air and wearing a loose dress, a
pleasant pale face, small features, bright eyes, small hands and feet,
little slippers and no stockings, and you have as good a picture of a
Mexican half-caste girl as I can give. A book of Mexican engravings,
however, will give a much better idea of her. Then we went past the
great prison, the Acordada, and out at the gate (we had purposely gone
out of our way to see more of the city), and so into the great
promenade, the Paseo or Alameda. The latter is the Spanish name for
this necessary appendage to every town. It comes from _álamo_, which
means a poplar. Imagine a long wide level road, a mile or so long,
generally so chosen as to have a fine view, with footpaths on each
side, lines of poplar trees, a fountain at each end and a statue in the
middle, and this description will stand pretty nearly for almost every
promenade of the kind I have seen in Spain or Spanish America.

[Illustration: Water-carrier and a Mexican Woman, at the Fountain]

Tacubaya is a pleasant place on the side of the first hills that begin
to rise towards the mountain-wall of the valley. Here rich Mexicans
have country-houses in large gardens, which are interesting from the
immense variety of plants which grow there, though badly kept up, and
systematically stripped by the gardeners of the fruit as it gets
ripe—for their own benefit, of course. From Tacubaya we go to
Chapultepec (Grasshopper Mountain), which is a volcanic hill of
porphyry rising from the plain. On the top is the palace on which the
viceroy Galvez expended great sums of money some seventy years ago,
making it into a building which would serve either as a palace or as a
fortress in cases of emergency. Though the Americans charged up the
hill and carried it easily in ’47, it would be a very strong place in
proper hands. It is a military school now. On the hill is the famous
grove of cypresses—ahuehuetes[5]—as they are called, grand trees with
their branches hung with fringes of the long grey Spanish moss—barba
Española—Spanish beard. I do not know what painters think of the effect
of this moss, trailing in long festoons from the branches of the trees,
but to me it is beautiful; and I shall never forget where I first saw
it, on a bayou of the Mississippi, winding through the depths of a
great forest in the swamps of Louisiana.[6] In this grove of
Chapultepec, there were sculptured on the side of the hill, in the
solid porphyry, likenesses of the two Montezumas, colossal in size. For
some reason or other, I forget now what, one of the last Spanish
viceroys thought it desirable to destroy them, and tried to blow them
up with gunpowder. He only partially succeeded, for the two great
bas-reliefs were still very distinguishable as we rode past, though
noseless and considerably knocked about.

 [5] Ahuehuete, pronounced _a-hwe-hwete_. Thus, Anahuac is pronounced
 _Ana-hwac;_ and Chihuahua, _Chi-hwa-hwa_.


 [6] In the Swiss Alps, between 4,000 and 5,000 feet above the sea,
 there is a similar plant to be seen fringing the branches of the
 pine-trees; but it only grows to the length of a few inches, and will
 hardly bear comparison to the long trailing festoons of the Spanish
 moss, often fifteen or twenty feet in length.


We went home to breakfast with our friends, and looked at the
title-deeds of their house in crabbed Spanish of the sixteenth century,
and the great Chinese treasure-chest, still used as the strong-box of
the firm, with an immense lock, and a key like the key of Dover castle.
Fine old Chinese jars, and other curiosities, are often to be found in
Mexico; and they date from the time when the great galleon from Manila,
which was called “el nao”—the ship—to distinguish it from all other
ships, came once a year to Acapulco.

After breakfast, business hours begin; so we took ourselves off to
visit the canal of Chalco, and the famous floating gardens—as they are
called. On our way we had a chance of studying the conveyances our
ancestors used to ride in, and availed ourselves of it. In books on
Spanish America, written at the beginning of this century, there are
wonderful descriptions of the gilt coaches, with six or eight mules, in
which the great folks used to drive in state on the promenades. They
are exactly the carriages that it was the height of a lady’s ambition
to ride in, in the days of Sir Charles Grandison, and Mr. Tom Jones.
Here, in Mexico, they were still to be found, after they had
disappeared from the rest of the habitable globe; and even now, though
the private carriages are all of a more modern type, there are still
left a few of these amazing vehicles, now degraded to the cab-stand;
and we got into one that was embellished with sculptured Cupids—their
faces as much mutilated as the two Montezumas—and with the remains of
the painting and gilding, which once covered the whole affair, just
visible in corners, like the colouring of the ceilings of the Alhambra.
We had to climb up three high steps, and haul ourselves into the body
of the coach, which hung on strong leather straps; springs belong to a
later period. By the time we had got to the Paseo de las Vigas we were
glad enough to get out, wondering at the sacrifice of comfort to
dignity those highly respectable grandees must have made, and not
surprised at the fate of some inquisitive travellers who have done as
we did, and have been obliged to stop by the qualms of sea-sickness. At
the bridge we chartered a canoe to Santa Anita. This Santa Anita is a
little Indian village on the canal of Chalco, and to-day there is to be
a festival there. For this, however, we shall be too early, as we have
to be back in time to see Mexico turn out for a promenade on the Paseo
de las Vigas, and then to go out to dinner. So we must just take the
opportunity of looking at the Indian population as they go up and down
the canal in canoes, and see their gardens and their houses. However,
as the Indian notion of a festival consists in going to mass in the
morning, and getting drunk and fighting in the afternoon, we are
perhaps as well out of it. We took our passage to Santa Anita and back
in a canoe—a mere flat-bottomed box with sloping sides, made of boards
put together with wooden pegs. There was a mat at the stern for us to
squat upon, and an awning over our heads. An old Indian and his son
were the crew; and they had long poles, which they set against the
banks or the bottom of the shallow canal, and so pushed us along.
Besides these two, an old woman with two little girls got in, as we
were starting—without asking our leave, by the way—and sat down at the
other end of the canoe. Of course, the old woman began to busy herself
with the two little girls, in the usual occupation of old women here,
during their idle moments; and though she left off at our earnest
request, she evidently thought us very crotchety people for objecting.

The scene on the canal was a curious one. There were numbers of boats
going up and down; and the Indians, as soon as they caught sight of an
acquaintance, began to shout out a long string of complimentary
phrases, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in Mexican: “How is your
worship this morning?” “I trust that I have the happiness of seeing
your worship in good health.” “If there is anything I can have the
honour of doing for your worship, pray dispose of me,” and so forth;
till they are out of hearing. All this is accompanied by a taking-off
of hats, and a series of low bows and complimentary grimaces. As far as
we could ascertain, it is all mere matter of ceremony. It may be an
exaggeration of the formal, complimentary talk of the Spaniards, but
its origin probably dates further back.

The Indians here no longer appeared the same dull, melancholy men whom
we had seen in the richer quarter of the town. There they were under a
strong feeling of constraint, for their language is not understood by
the whites and mestizos; and they, for their part, know but little
Spanish; and besides, there is very little sympathy between the two
classes. One thing will shew this clearly enough. By a distinct line of
demarcation, the Indians are separated from the rest of the population,
who are at least partly white. These latter call themselves “gente de
razón”—people of reason,—to distinguish themselves from the Indians,
who are people without reason. In common parlance the distinction is
made thus: the whites and mixed breed are “gente”—_people_,—the brown
men being merely “Indios”—Indians—and not people at all.

Here, in their own quarter, and among their own people, they seem
talkative enough. We can only tell what they are chattering about when
they happen to speak Spanish, either for our benefit, or to show off
their proficiency in that tongue. People who can speak the Aztec
language say that their way of forming compound words gives constant
occasion for puns and quibbles, and that the talk of the Indians is
full of such small jokes. In this respect they differ exceedingly from
the Spaniards, whose jests are generally about _things_, and seldom
about their _names_, as one sees by their almost always bearing
translation into other languages.

Most of the canoes were tastefully decorated with flowers, for the
Aztecs have not lost their old taste for ornamenting themselves, and
everything about them, with garlands and nosegays. The fruits and
vegetables they were carrying to market were very English in their
appearance. Mexico is supplied with all kinds of tropical fruits, which
come from a distance; but the district we are now in only produces
plants which might grow in our own country—barley, potatoes, cabbages,
parsnips, apples, pears, plums, peaches, and so forth, but scarcely
anything tropical in its character. One thing surprises us, that the
Indians, in a climate where the mornings and evenings are often very
chilly, should dress so scantily. The men have a general appearance of
having outgrown their clothes; for the sleeves of the kind of
cotton-shirt they wear only reach to their elbows, and their trousers,
of the same material, only fall to their knees. To these two garments
add a sort of blanket, thrown over the shoulders, a pair of sandals,
and a palm-leaf hat, and the man is dressed. His skin is brown, his
limbs muscular—especially his legs—his lips thick, his nose Jewish, his
hair coarse, black, and hanging straight down. The woman’s dress is as
simple as the man’s. She has on a kind of cotton sack, very short in
the sleeves, and very open at the shoulders, and some sort of a skirt
or petticoat besides. Sometimes she has a folded cotton cloth on her
head, like a Roman contadina; but, generally, nothing covers her thick
black hair, which hangs down behind in long twisted tails.

In old times, when Mexico was in the middle of a great lake, and the
inhabitants were not strong enough to hold land on the shores, they
were driven to strange shifts to get food. Among other expedients, they
took to making little floating islands, which consisted of rafts of
reeds and brushwood, on which they heaped mud from the shores of the
lakes. On the banks of the lake of Tezcuco the mud was, at first, too
full of salt and soda to be good for cultivation; but by pouring the
water of the lake upon it, and letting it soak through, they dissolved
out most of the salts, and the island was fit for cultivation, and bore
splendid crops of vegetables.[7] These islands were called _chinampas_,
and they were often large enough for the proprietor to build a hut in
the middle, and live in it with his family. In later times, when the
Mexicans came to be no longer afraid of their neighbours, the chinampas
were not of much use; and when the water was drained off, and the city
stood on dry land, one would have supposed that such a troublesome and
costly arrangement would have been abandoned. The Mexican, however, is
hard to move from the customs of his ancestors; and we have Humboldt’s
word for it, that in his time there were some of these artificial
islands still in the lake of Chalco, which the owners towed about with
a rope, or pushed with a long pole. They are all gone now, at any rate,
though the name of _chinampa_ is still applied to the gardens along the
canal. These gardens very much resemble the floating islands in their
construction of mud, heaped on a foundation of reeds and branches; and
though they are not the real thing, and do not float, they are
interesting, as the present representatives of the famous Mexican
floating gardens. They are narrow strips of land, with a frontage of
four or five yards to the canal, and a depth of one hundred, or a
hundred and fifty yards. Between the strips are open ditches; and one
principal occupation of the proprietor seems to be bringing up mud from
the bottom of the ditch with a wooden shovel, and throwing it on the
garden, in places where it has sunk. The reason of the narrowness of
the strips is that he may be able to throw mud all over them from the
ditches on either side.

 [7] Chalco was and is a freshwater lake, and here they had not even
 this to do.


While we are busy observing all these matters, and questioning our
boatmen about them, we reach Santa Anita. Here there are swampy lanes
and more swampy gardens, a little village of Indian houses, three or
four pulque-shops, and a church. Outside the pulque-shops are
fresco-paintings, representing Aztec warriors carousing, and draining
great bowls of pulque. These were no specimens of Aztec art, however,
but seemed to be copied (by some white or half-caste sign-painter,
probably) from the French coloured engravings which represent the
events of the Conquest. These extraordinary works of art are to be seen
everywhere in this country, where, of all places in the world, one
would have thought that people would have noticed that the artist had
not the faintest idea of what an Aztec was like, but supposed that his
limbs and face and hair were like an European’s. Here, with the real
Aztec standing underneath, the difference was striking enough. One
ought not to be too critical about these things, however, when one
remembers the pictures of shepherds and shepherdesses that adorn our
English farmhouses. We drank pulque at the sign of _The Cacique_, and
liked it, for we had now quite got over our aversion to its putrid
taste and smell. I wonder that our new faculty of pulque-drinking did
not make us able to relish the suspicious eggs that abound in Mexican
inns, but it had no such effect, unfortunately.

Our canoe took us back to the Promenade of Las Vigas, which is a long
drive, planted with rows of trees, and extends along the last mile or
two of the canal. Indeed, its name comes from the beam (Viga) which
swings across the canal at the place where the canoes pay toll. This
was the great promenade, once upon a time; but the new Alameda has
taken away all the promenaders to a more fashionable quarter, except on
certain festival days, three or four times in the year, when it is the
correct thing for society to make a display of itself—on horseback or
in carriages—in this neglected Indian quarter. We had happened upon one
of these festival days; so, as we crawled along the side-path, tired
and dusty, we had a good opportunity of seeing the Mexican beau monde.
The display of really good carriages was extraordinary; but it must be
recollected that many families here are content to live miserably
enough at home, if they can manage to appear in good style at the
theatre and on the promenade. This is one reason why so many of the
Mexicans who are so friendly with you out of doors, and in the cafés,
are so very shy of letting you see the inside of their houses. They
say, and very likely it is true, that among the richer classes, it is
customary to put a stipulation in the marriage-contracts, that the
husband shall keep a carriage and pair, and a box at the theatre, for
his wife’s benefit. The horsemen turned out in great style, and the
foreigners were fully represented among them. It was noticeable that
while these latter generally adopted the high-peaked saddle, and the
jacket, and broad-brimmed felt hat of the country, and looked as though
the new arrangements quite suited them, the native dandies, on the
other hand, were prone to dressing in European fashion, and sitting
upon English saddles—in which they looked neither secure nor
comfortable.

We walked home past the old Bull-ring, now replaced by a new one near
the new promenade, and found, to our surprise, that in this quarter of
the town many of the streets were under water. We knew that the level
of the lake of Tezcuco had been raised by a series of three very wet
seasons, but had no idea that things had got so far as this. Of course
the ground-floors had to be abandoned, and the people had made a raised
pathway of planks along the street, and adopted various contrivances
for getting dryshod up to their first floors; and in some places canoes
were floating in the street. The city looked like this some two hundred
years ago, when Martinez the engineer tried an unfortunate experiment
with his draining tunnel at Huehuetoca, and flooded the whole city for
five years. It was by the interference, they tell us, of the patroness
of the Indians, our Lady of Guadalupe, who was brought from her own
temple on purpose, that the city was delivered from the impending
destruction. A number of earthquakes took place, which caused the
ground to split in large fissures, down which the superfluous water
disappeared. For none of her many miracles has the Virgin of Guadalupe
got so much credit as for this. To be sure, it is not generally
mentioned in orthodox histories of the affair, that she was brought to
the capital a year or two before the earthquakes happened.

Talking of earthquakes, it is to be remembered that we are in a
district where they are of continual occurrence. If one looks carefully
at a line of houses in a street, it is curious to see how some walls
slope inwards, and some outwards, and some are cracked from top to
bottom. There is hardly a church-tower in Mexico that is not visibly
out of the perpendicular. Any one who has noticed how the walls of the
Cathedral of Pisa have been thrown out of the perpendicular by the
settling down of the foundations, will have an idea of the general
appearance of the larger buildings of Mexico. On different occasions
the destruction caused by earthquakes has been very great. By the way,
the liability of Mexico to these shocks, explains the peculiarity of
the building of the houses. A modern English town with
two-or-three-storied houses, with their thin brick walls, would be laid
in ruins by a shock which would hardly affect Mexico. Here, the houses
of several storeys have stone walls of such thickness that they resist
by sheer strength; and the one-storey mud houses, in the suburbs, are
too low to suffer much by being shaken about. A few days before we
arrived here, our friends Pepe and Pancho were playing at billiards in
the Lonja,[8] the Merchants’ Exchange; and Pepe described to us the
feeling of utter astonishment with which he saw his ball, after
striking the other, go suddenly off at an absurd angle into a pocket.
The shock of an earthquake had tilted the table up on one side. While
we were in Mexico there was a slight shock, which set the chandeliers
swinging, but we did not even notice it. In April, a solemn procession
goes from the Cathedral, on a day marked in the Calendar as the
“Patrocinio de Señor San Jose”, to implore the “Santissimo Patriarca”
to protect the city from earthquakes (temblores). In connection with
this subject there is an opinion, so generally received in Mexico that
it is worth notice. Everybody there, even the most educated people,
will tell you that there is an earthquake-season, which occurs in
January or February; and that the shocks are far more frequent than at
any other time of the year. My impression is that this is all nonsense;
but I should like to test it with a list of the shocks that have been
felt, if such a thing were to be had. It does not follow that, because
the Mexicans have such frequent opportunities of trying the question,
they should therefore have done so. In fact, experience as to popular
beliefs in similar matters rather points the other way. I recollect
that in the earthquake districts of southern Italy, when shocks were of
almost daily occurrence, people believed that they were more frequent
in the middle four hours of the night, from ten to two, than at other
times. Of course, this proved on examination to be quite without
foundation. To take one more case in point. How many of our
almanack-books, even the better class of them, contain prophecies of
wet and fine weather, deduced from the moon’s quarters! How long will
it be before we get rid of this queer old astrological superstition?

 [8] The “Lonja” is a feature in the commercial towns of Spanish
 America. It is not only the Merchants’ Exchange, but their club,
 billiard-room, and smoking-room; in fact, their “lounge,” and I fancy
 the two words are connected with one another.


We made a few rough observations of the thermometer and barometer
during our stay in Mexico. The barometer stands at about 22½ inches,
and our thermometer gave the boiling point of water at 199 degrees. We
could never get eggs well boiled in the high lands, and attributed
this, whether rightly or not I cannot say, to the low temperature of
boiling water.


[Illustration: Group of Ecclesiastics, Mexico.]




CHAPTER IV.
TACUBAYA. PACHUCA. REAL DEL MONTE.


We went one morning to the house of our friend Don Pepe, and were
informed by the servant as we entered the courtyard that the niño, the
child, was up stairs waiting for us. “The Child” seemed an odd term to
apply to a young man of five and twenty. The young ladies, in the same
way are called the nias, and keep the appellation until they marry.

We went off with the niño to his uncle’s house at Tacubaya, on the
rising ground above Mexico. In the garden there we found a vegetation
such as one would find in southern Europe—figs, olives, peaches, roses,
and many other European trees and flowers—growing luxuriantly, but
among them the passion-flower, which produces one of the most delicious
of fruits, the granadita, and other semi-tropical plants. The live
creatures in the garden, however, were anything but European in their
character. There were numbers of immense butterflies of the most
brilliant colours; and the garden was full of hummingbirds, darting
backwards and forwards with wonderful swiftness, and dipping their long
beaks into the flowers. They call them chupa-mirtos—myrtle-suckers, and
the Indians take them by blowing water upon them from a cane, and
catching them before they have recovered from the shock. One day we
bought a cage full of them, and tried to keep them alive in our room by
feeding them with sugar and water, but the poor little things pined
away. In old times the Mexicans were famous for their ornaments of
humming-bird’s feathers. The taste with which they arranged feathers of
many shades of colour, excited the admiration of the conquerors; and
the specimens we may still see in museums are beautiful things, and
their great age has hardly impaired the brilliancy of their tints. This
curious art was practised by the highest nobility, and held in great
esteem, just as working tapestry used to be in Europe, only that the
feather-work was mostly done by men. It is a lost art, for one cannot
take much account of such poor things as are done now, in which,
moreover, the designs are European. In this garden at Tacubaya we saw
for the first time the praying Mantis, and caught him as he sat in his
usual devotional attitude. His Spanish name is “el predicador,” the
preacher.

We got back to Mexico in time for the Corrida de Toros. The bull-ring
was a large one, and there were many thousands of people there; but as
to the spectacle itself, whether one took it upon its merits, or merely
compared it with the bull-fights of Old Spain, it was disgusting. The
bulls were cautious and cowardly, and could hardly be got to fight; and
the matadors almost always failed in killing them; partly through want
of skill, partly because it is really harder to kill a quiet bull than
a fierce one who runs straight at his assailant. To fill up the measure
of the whole iniquitous proceeding, they brought in a wretch in a white
jacket with a dagger, to finish the unfortunate beasts which the
matador could not kill in the legitimate way. It was evidently quite
the regular thing, for the spectators expressed no surprise at it.

After the bull-fight proper was finished, there came two or three
supplementary performances, which were genuinely Mexican, and very well
worth seeing. A very wild bull was turned into the ring, where two
lazadores, on beautiful little horses, were waiting for him. The bull
set off at full speed after one of the riders, who cantered easily
ahead of him; and the other, leisurely untying his lazo, hung it over
his left arm, and then, taking the end in his light hand, let the cord
fall through the loop into a running noose, which he whirled two or
three times round his head, and threw it so neatly that it settled
gently down over the bull’s neck. In a moment the other end of the cord
was wound several times round the pummel of the saddle, and the little
horse set off at full speed to get ahead of the bull. But the first
rider had wheeled round, thrown his lazo upon the ground, and just as
the bull stepped within the noose, whipped it up round his hind leg,
and galloped off in a contrary direction. Just as the first lazo
tightened round his neck, the second jerked him by the leg, and the
beast rolled helplessly over in the sand. Then they got the lazos off,
no easy matter when one isn’t accustomed to it, and set him off again,
catching him by hind legs or fore legs just as they pleased, and
inevitably bringing him down, till the bull was tired out and no longer
resisted. Then they both lazo’d him over the horns, and galloped him
out, amid the cheers of the spectators. The amusements finished with
the “colear.” This is quite peculiar to Mexico, and is done on this
wise. The coleador rides after the bull, who has an idea that something
is going to happen, and gallops off as fast as he can go, throwing out
his hind legs in his awkward bullish fashion. Now, suppose you are the
coleador, sitting in your peaked Mexican saddle, that rises behind and
before, and keeps you in your seat without an effort on your part. You
gallop after the bull, and when you come up with him, you pull as hard
as you can to keep your horse back; for, if he is used to the sport, as
almost all Mexican horses are, he is wild to get past, not noticing
that his rider has got no hold of the toro. Well, you are just behind
the bull, a little to the left of him, and out of the way of his hind
legs, which will trip your horse up if you don’t take care; you take
your right foot out of the stirrup, catch hold of the end of the bull’s
tail (which is very long), throw your leg over it, and so twist the end
of the tail round your leg below the knee. You have either got the
bridle between your teeth or have let it go altogether, and with your
left hand you give your horse a crack with the whip; he goes forward
with a bound, and the bull, losing his balance by the sudden jerk
behind, rolls over on the ground, and gets up, looking very
uncomfortable. The faster the bull gallops, the easier it is to throw
him over; and two boys of twelve or fourteen years of age coleared a
couple of young bulls in the arena, in great style, pitching them over
in all directions. The farmers and landed proprietors are immensely
fond of both these sports, which the bulls—by the way—seem to dislike
most thoroughly; but this exhibition in the bull-ring was better than
what one generally sees, and the leperos were loud in their expressions
of delight.

When we had been a week or two in the city of Mexico, we decided upon
making an excursion to the great silver mining district of the Real del
Monte. Some of our English friends were leaving for England, and had
engaged the whole of the Diligence to Pachuca, going from thence up to
the Real, and thence to Tampico, with all the pomp and circumstance of
a train of carriages and an armed escort. We were invited to go with
them as far as Pachuca; and accordingly we rose very early on the 28th
of March, got some chocolate under difficulties, and started in the
Diligence, seven grown-up people, and a baby, who was very good, and
was spoken of and to as “leoncito.” On the high plateaus of Mexico, the
children of European parents grow up as healthy and strong as at home;
it is only in the districts at a lower elevation above the sea, on the
coasts for instance, that they do not thrive. Mr. G., who was leaving
Mexico, was the head of a great merchant-house, and it was as a
compliment to him and Mrs. G. that we were accompanied by a party of
English horsemen for the first two or three leagues. Englishmen take
much more easily to Mexican ways about horses than the Mexicans do to
ours, and a finer turn-out of horses and riders than our amateur escort
could hardly have been found in Mexico. There was our friend Don
Guillermo, who rode a beautiful horse that had once belonged to the
captain of a band of robbers, and had not its equal in the city for
swiftness; and Don Juan on his splendid little brown horse Pancho,
lazoing stray mules as he went, and every now and then galloping into a
meadow by the roadside after a bull, who was off like a shot the moment
he heard the sound of hoofs. I wonder whether I shall ever see them
again, those jovial open-hearted countrymen of ours. At last our
companions said good-bye, and loaded pistols were carefully arranged on
the centre cushion in case of an attack, much to the edification of my
companion and myself, as it rather implied that, if fighting were to be
done, we two should have to sit inside to be shot at without a chance
of hitting anybody in return.

The hedges of the Organ Cactus are a feature in the landscape of the
plains, and we first saw them to perfection on the road between Mexico
and Pachuca. This plant, the Cereus hexagonus, grows in Italy in the
open air, but seems not to be turned to account anywhere except in
Mexico for the purpose to which it is particularly suited. In its wild
state it grows like a candelabrum, with a thick trunk a few feet high,
from the top of which it sends out shoots, which, as soon as they have
room, rise straight upwards in fluted pillars fifteen or twenty feet in
height. Such a plant, with pillars rising side by side and almost
touching one another, has a curious resemblance to an organ with its
pipes, and thence its name “órgano.”

To make a fence, they break off the straight lateral shoots, of the
height required, and plant them closely side by side, in a trench,
sufficiently deep to ensure their standing firmly; and it is a curious
sight to see a labourer bearing on his shoulder one of these vegetable
pillars, as high as himself, and carefully guarding himself against its
spines. A hedge perfectly impassable is obtained at once; the cactus
rooting so readily, that it is rare to see a gap where one has died.
The villagers surround their gardens with these fences of cactus, which
often line the road for miles together. Foreigners used to point out
such villages to us, and remark that they seemed “well organized,” a
small joke which unfortunately bears translation into all ordinary
European languages, and was inflicted without mercy upon us as new
comers.

We reached Pachuca early in the afternoon, and took up our quarters in
the inn there, and our friends went on to Real del Monte.

This little town of Pachuca has long been a place of some importance in
the world, as regards mining-operations. The Aztecs worked silver-mines
here, as well as at Tasco, long before the Spaniards came, and they
knew how to smelt the ore. It is true that, if no better process than
smelting were known now, most of the mines would scarcely be worth
working; but still, to know how to extract silver at all was a great
step; and indeed at that time, and for long after the Conquest, there
was no better method known in Europe. It was in this very place that a
Spaniard, Medina by name, discovered the process of amalgamation with
mercury, in the year 1557, some forty years after the invasion. We went
to see the place where he first worked his new process, and found it
still used as a “hacienda de beneficio” (establishment for extracting
silver from the ore.) So few discoveries in the arts have come out of
Mexico, or indeed out of any Spanish colony, that we must make the most
of this really very important method, which is more extensively used
than any other, both in North and South America. As for the rest of the
world, it produces, comparatively, so little silver, that it is
scarcely worth taking into account.

We had forgotten, when we went to bed, that we were nearly seven
hundred feet higher than Mexico; but had the fact brought to our
remembrance by waking in the middle of the night, feeling very cold,
and finding our thermometer marking 40 degrees Fahr.; whereupon we
covered ourselves with cloaks, and the cloaks with the strips of carpet
at our bedsides, and went to sleep again.

We had hired, of the French landlord, two horses and a mozo to guide
us, and sorry hacks they were when we saw them in the morning. It was
delightful to get a little circulation into our veins by going at the
best gallop our horses would agree to; for we were fresh from hot
countries, and not at all prepared for having our hands and feet numbed
with cold, and being as hoarse as ravens—for the sore throat which is
the nuisance of the district, and is very severe upon new comers, had
not spared us. Evaporation is so rapid at this high altitude that if
you wet the back of your hand it dries almost instantly, leaving a
smart sensation of cold. One may easily suppose, that when people have
been accustomed to live under the ordinary pressure of the air, their
throats and lungs do not like being dried up at this rate; besides
their having, on account of the rarity of the air, to work harder in
breathing, in order to get in the necessary quantity of oxygen.

Coughs seem very common here, especially among the children, though
people look strong and healthy, but in the absence of proper statistics
one cannot undertake to say whether the district is a healthy one or
not.

For a wonder we have a good road, and this simply because the Real del
Monte Company wanted one, and made it for themselves. How unfortunate
all Spanish countries are in roads, one of the most important first
steps towards civilization! When one has travelled in Old Spain, one
can imagine that the colonists did not bring over very enlightened
ideas on the subject; and as the Mexicans were not allowed to hold
intercourse with any other country, it is easy to explain why Mexico is
all but impassable for carriages. But if the money—or half of it—that
has been spent in building and endowing churches and convents had been
devoted to road-making, this might have been a great and prosperous
country.

For some three hours we rode along among porphyritic mountains, getting
higher at every turn, and enjoying the clear bright air. Now and then
we met or passed a long recua (train) of loaded mules, taking care to
keep the safe side of the road till we were rid of them. It is not
pleasant to meet a great drove of horned cattle in an Alpine pass, but
I really think a recua of loaded mules among the Andes is worse. A
knowing old beast goes first, and the rest come tumbling after him
anyhow, with their loads often projecting a foot or two on either side,
and banging against anybody or anything. Then, wherever the road is
particularly narrow, and there is a precipice of two or three hundred
feet to fall over, one or two of them will fall down, or get their
packs loose, and so block up the road, and there is a general scrimmage
of kicking and shoving behind, till the arrieros can get things
straight again. At last we reach the top of a ridge, and see the little
settlement of Real del Monte below us. It is more like a Cornish mining
village than anything else; but of course the engine-houses, chimneys,
and mine-sheds, built by Cornishmen in true Cornish fashion, go a long
way towards making up the resemblance. The village is built on the
awkwardest bit of ground possible, up and down on the side of a steep
ravine, one house apparently standing on the roof of another; and it
takes half a mile of real hard climbing to get from the bottom of the
town to the top.

We put up our horses at a neat little inn kept by an old Englishwoman,
and walked or climbed up to the Company’s house. We made several new
acquaintances at the Real, though we left within a few hours, intending
to see the place thoroughly on our return.

One peculiarity of the Casa Grande—the great house of the Company—was
the warlike appearance of everybody in it. The clerks were posting up
the ledgers with loaded revolvers on the desk before them; the
manager’s room was a small arsenal, and the gentlemen rode out for
exercise, morning and evening, armed to the teeth. Not that there is
anything to be apprehended from robbers—indeed I should like to see any
of the Mexican ladrones interfering with the Cornish miners, who would
soon teach them better manners. I am inclined to think there is a
positive pleasure in possessing and handling guns and pistols, whether
they are likely to be of any use or not. Indeed, while travelling
through the western and southern States of America, where such things
are very generally carried, I was the possessor of a five-barrelled
revolver, and admit that I derived an amount of mild satisfaction from
carrying it about, and shooting at a mark with it, that amply
compensated for the loss of two dollars I incurred by selling it to a
Jew at New Orleans.

We rode on to Regla, soon finding that our guide had never been there
before; so, next morning, we kept the two horses and dismissed him with
ignominy. A fine road leads from the Real to Regla, for all the
silver-ore from the mines is conveyed there to have the silver
separated from it. My notes of our ride mention a great water-wheel:
sections of porphyritic rocks, with enormous masses of alluvial soil
lying upon them: steep ravines: arroyos, cut by mountain-streams, and
forests of pine-trees—a thoroughly Alpine district altogether. At Regla
it became evident that our letter of introduction was not a mere
complimentary affair. There is not even a village there; it is only a
great hacienda, belonging to the Company, with the huts of the workmen
built near it. The Company, represented by Mr. Bell, received us with
the greatest hospitality. Almost before the letter was opened our
horses and mozo were off to the stables, our room was ready, and our
dinner being prepared as fast as might be. What a pleasant evening we
had, after our long day’s work! We had a great wood-fire, and sat by
it, talking and looking at Mr. Bell’s photographs and minerals, which
serve as an amusement in his leisure-hours. The Company’s Administrador
leads rather a peculiar life here. There is no want of work or
responsibility; he has two or three hundred Indians to manage, almost
all of whom will steal and cheat without the slightest scruple, if they
can but get a chance; he has to assay the ores, superintend a variety
of processes which require the greatest skill and judgment, and he is
in charge of property to the value of several hundred thousand pounds.
Then a man must have a constitution of iron to live in a place where
the air is so rarefied, and where the temperature varies thirty and
forty degrees between morning and noon. As for society, he must find it
in his own family; for even the better class of Mexicans are on so
different a level, intellectually, from an educated Englishman, that
their society bores him utterly, and he had rather be left in solitude
than have to talk to them. Well, it is a great advantage to travellers
that circumstances fix pleasant people in such out-of-the-way places.

One necessary part of a hacienda is a church. The proprietors are
compelled by law to build one, and pay the priest’s fees for mass on
Sundays and feast-days. Now, almost all the English one meets with
engaged in business, or managing mines and plantations, are Scotch, and
one may well suppose that there is not much love lost between them and
the priests. The father confessor plays an important part in the great
system of dishonesty that prevails to so monstrous an extent throughout
the country. He hears the particulars of the thefts and cheatings that
have been practised on the proprietor who builds his church and pays
for his services, and he complacently absolves his penitents in
consideration of a small penance. Not a word about restitution; and
just a formal injunction to go and sin no more, which neither priest
nor penitent is very sincere about. The various evils of the Roman
Catholic system have been reiterated till the subject has become
tiresome, but this particular practice is so contrary to the simplest
notions of morality, and has produced such fearful effects on the
character of this nation, that one cannot pass it by without notice. If
the Superintendent should roast the parish priest in front of the
oxidising furnace, till he confessed all he knew about the thefts of
his parishioners from the Company, he would tell strange stories,—how
Juan Fernandez carried off sixpennyworth of silver in each car every
day for a month; and how Pedro Alvarado (the Indian names have almost
disappeared except in a few families, and Spanish names have been
substituted) had a hammer with a hollow handle, like the stick that
Sancho Panza delivered his famous judgment about, and carried away
silver in it every day when he left work; and how Vasco Nuñez stole the
iron key from the gate (which cost two dollars to replace), walking
twenty miles and losing a day’s work in order to sell it, and
eventually getting but twopence for it; and plenty more stories of the
same kind. The Padre at Regla, we heard, was not given to preaching
sermons, but had lately favoured his congregation with a very striking
one, to the effect that the Company paid him only three dollars a time
for saying mass, and that he ought to have four.

Almost every traveller who visits Mexico enlarges on the dishonesty
which is rooted in the character of the people. That they are worse now
in this respect than they were before the Conquest is highly probable.
Their position as a conquered and enslaved people, tended, as it always
does, to foster the slavish vices of dissimulation and dishonesty. The
religion brought into the country by the Spanish missionaries concerned
itself with their belief, and left their morals to shift for
themselves, as it does still.

In the mining-districts stealing is universal. Public feeling among the
Indians does not condemn it in the least, quite the contrary. To steal
successfully is considered a triumph, and to be found out is no
disgrace. Theft is not even punishable. In old times a thief might be
put in the stocks; but Burkart, who was a mining-inspector for many
years, says that in his time, some twenty years ago, tins was
abolished, and I believe the law has not been altered since. It is a
miserable sight to see the Indian labourers searched as they come out
of the mines. They are almost naked, but rich ore packs in such a small
compass, and they are so ingenious in stowing it away, that the
doorkeepers examine their mouths and ears, and their hair, and
constantly find pieces that have been secreted, while a far greater
quantity escapes. It is this system of thieving that accounts for the
existence of certain little smelting-sheds, close to the works of the
Company, who look at them with such feelings as may be imagined. These
places profess to smelt ore from one or two little mines in the
neighbourhood, but their real object is no secret. They buy the stolen
bits of rich ore from the Indian labourers, giving exactly half the
value for it.

Of course, we must not judge these Mexican labourers as though we had a
very high standard of honesty at home. That we should see workmen
searched habitually in England, at the doors of our national
dock-yards, is a much greater disgrace to us. And not merely a
disgrace, but a serious moral evil, for to expose an honest man to such
a degradation is to make him half a thief already.

People who know the Indian population best assure us that their lives
are a perpetual course of intrigue and dissimulation. Always trying to
practise some small fraud upon their masters, and even upon their own
people, they are in constant fear that every one is trying to overreach
them. They are afraid to answer the simplest question, lest it should
be a trap laid to catch them. They ponder over every word and action of
their European employers, to find out what hidden intrigue lies
beneath, and to devise some counter-plot. Sartorius says that when he
has met an Indian and asked his name, the brown man always gave a false
one, lest the enquirer should want to do him some harm.

Never did any people show more clearly the effects of ages of servitude
and oppression; but, hopeless as the moral condition of this mining
population seems, there is one favourable circumstance to be put on
record. The Cornish miners, who have been living among them for years,
have worked quite perceptibly upon the Indian character by the example
of their persevering industry, their love of saving, and their utter
contempt for thieves and liars. Instead of squandering their wages, or
burying them in the ground, many of the Indian miners take their
savings to the Banks; and the opinions of the foreigners are
gradually—though very slowly—altering the popular standard of honesty,
the first step towards the moral improvement of the Mexican population.

In the morning we went off for an excursion, having got a lively young
fellow from the hacienda in exchange for our stupid mozo. There was
hoar frost on the ground, and the feeling of cold was intense at first;
but the sun began to warm the ground about eight o’clock, and we were
soon glad to fasten our great coats and shawls to our saddles. Three
leagues took us to the town of Atotonilco[9] el Grande, which gives its
name to the plateau we were crossing. Here we are no longer in the
valley of Mexico, which is separated from this plain by the mountains
of the Real del Monte. We rode on two leagues more to the village of
Soquital[10] where, it being Sunday, we found the inhabitants—mostly
Indians—amusing themselves by standing in the sun, doing nothing. I can
hardly say “doing nothing,” though, for we went into the tienda, or
shop, and found a brisk trade going on in raw spirits. _Tienda_, in
Spanish, means a tent or booth. The first shops were tents or booths at
fairs or in market-places; and thence “tienda” came to mean a shop in
general; a derivation which corresponds with that of the word “shop”
itself. Such of the population as had money seemed to drop in at
regular intervals for a dram, which consisted of a small wine-glassful
of white-corn-brandy, called _chinguerito_. We tasted some, while the
people at the shop were frying eggs and boiling beans for our
breakfast; and found it so strong that a small sip brought tears into
our eyes, to the amusement of the bystanders. It seemed that everybody
was drinking who could afford it; from the old men and women to the
babies in their mothers’ arms; everybody had a share, except those who
were hard up, and they stood about the door looking stolidly at the
drinkers. There was nothing like gaiety in the whole affair; only a
sort of satisfaction appeared in the face of each as he took his dose.
It is the drinkers of pulque who get furiously drunk, and fight; here
it is different. These drinkers of spirits are not much given to that
enormous excess that kills off the Red Indians; indeed, they are seldom
drunk enough to lose their wits, and they never have delirium tremens,
which would come upon a European, with much less provocation. They get
into a habit of daily—almost hourly—dram-drinking, and go on, year
after year, in this way; seeming, as far as we could judge, to live a
long while, such a life as it is. As we mounted our horses and rode on,
we agreed that we had seldom seen a more melancholy and depressing
sight.

 [9] Atotonilco, “Hot-water-place,” so called from the hot springs in
 the neighbourhood.

 [10] Soquital, “Clay-place,” from the potter’s clay which abounds in
 the district. Earthenware is the staple manufacture here.

We met some arrieros, who had brought up salt from the coast; and they,
seeing that we were English, judged we had something to do with mines,
and proposed to sell us their goods. The price of salt here is actually
three-pence per lb., in a district where its consumption is immense, as
it is used in refining the silver ore. It must be said, however, that
this is an unusual price; for the muleteers have been so victimised by
their mules being seized, either by the government or the rebels (one
seems about as bad as the other in this respect), that they must have a
high price to pay them for the risk. Generally seven reals, or 3s. 6d.
per arroba of 25 lbs. is the price. This salt is evaporated in the
salinas of Campeche, taken by water to Tuzpan, and then brought up the
country on mules’ backs—each beast carrying 300 lbs. Of course, this
salt is very coarse and very watery; all salt made in this way is. It
suits the New Orleans people better to import salt from England, than
to make it in this way in the Gulf of Mexico, though the water there is
very salt, and the sun very hot. The fact, that it pays to carry salt
on mules’ backs, tells volumes about the state of the country. At the
lowest computation, the mules would do four or five times as much work
if they were set to draw any kind of cart—however rough—on a
carriageable road. It is true that there is some sort of road from here
to Tampico, but an English waggoner would not acknowledge it by that
name at all; and the muleteers are still in possession of most of the
traffic in this district, as indeed they are over almost all the
country.

It was mid-day by this time; and, as we could not get to the Rio Grande
without taking our chance for the night in some Indian rancho, we
turned back. The heat had become so oppressive that we took off our
coats; and Mr. Christy, riding in his shirt-sleeves and holding a white
umbrella over his head, which he had further protected with a turban,
declared that even in the East he had not had so fatiguing a ride. We
passed through Soquital, and there the natives were idling and drinking
spirits as before, and seemed hardly to have moved since we left. This
plateau of Atotonilco el Grande, called for shortness Grande, is, like
most of the high plains of Mexico, composed mostly of porphyry and
obsidian, a valley filled up with débris from the surrounding
mountains, which are all volcanic, embedded in reddish earth. The
mountain-torrents—in which the water, so to speak, comes down all at
once, not flowing in a steady stream all the year round as in
England—have left evidences of their immense power in the ravines with
which the sides of the hills, from their very tops downward, are
fluted.

These fluted mountain-ridges resemble the “Kamms” (combs) of the Swiss
Alps, called so from their toothed appearance.

We had met numbers of Indians, bringing their wares to the Sunday
market in the great square of Atotonilco el Grande; and when we reached
the town on our way home, business was still going on briskly; so we
put up our horses, and spent an hour or two in studying the people and
the commodities they dealt in. It was a real old-fashioned Indian
market, very much such as the Spaniards found when they first
penetrated into the country. A large proportion of the people could
speak no Spanish, or only a few words. The unglazed pottery, palm-leaf
mats, ropes and bags of aloe-fibre, dressed skins, &c., were just the
same wares that were made three centuries ago; and there is no
improvement in their manufacture. This people, who rose in three
centuries from the condition of wandering savages to a height of
civilization that has no equal in history—considering the shortness of
the time in which it grew up—have remained, since the Conquest, without
making one step in advance. They hardly understand any reason for what
they do, except that their ancestors did things so—they therefore must
be right. They make their unglazed pottery, and carry it five and
twenty miles to market on their heads, just as they used to do when
there were no beasts of burden in the country. The same with their
fruits and vegetables, which they have brought great distances, up the
most difficult mountain-paths, at a ruinous sacrifice of time and
trouble, considering what a miserable sum they will get for them after
all, and how much even of this will be spent in brandy. By working on a
hacienda they would get double what their labour produces in this way,
but they do not understand this kind of reasoning. They cultivate their
little patches of maize, by putting a sharp stick into the ground, and
dropping the seed into the hole. They carry pots of water to irrigate
their ground with, instead of digging trenches. This is the more
curious, as at the time of the Conquest irrigation was much practised
by the Aztecs in the plains, and remains of water-canals still exist,
showing that they had carried the art to great perfection. They bring
logs of wood over the mountains by harnessing horses or mules to them,
and dragging them with immense labour over the rough ground. The idea
of wheels or rollers has either not occurred to them, or is considered
as a pernicious novelty.

It is very striking to see how, while Europeans are bringing the newest
machinery and the most advanced arts into the country, there is
scarcely any symptom of improvement among the people, who still hold
firmly to the wisdom of their ancestors. An American author, Mayer,
quotes a story of a certain people in Italy, as an illustration of the
feeling of the Indians in Mexico respecting improvements. In this
district, he says that the peasants loaded their panniers with
vegetables on one side, and balanced the opposite pannier by filling it
with stones; and when a traveller pointed out the advantage to be
gained by loading both panniers with vegetables, he was answered that
their forefathers from time immemorial had so carried their produce to
market, that they were wise and good men, and that a stranger showed
very little understanding or decency who interfered in the established
customs of a country. I need hardly say that the Indians are utterly
ignorant; and this of course accounts to a great extent for their
obstinate conservatism.

There were several shops round the market-place at Grande, and the
brandy-drinking was going on much as at Soquital. The shops in these
small towns are general stores, like “the shop” in coal- and
iron-districts in England. It is only in large towns that the different
retail-trades are separated. One thing is very noticeable in these
country stores, the certainty of finding a great stock of sardines in
bright tin boxes. The idea of finding _Sardines à l’huile_ in Indian
villages seemed odd enough; but the fact is, that the difficulty of
getting fish up from the coast is so great that these sardines are not
much dearer than anything else, and they go a long way. Montezuma’s
method of supplying his table with fresh fish from the gulf, by having
relays of Indian porters to run up with it, is too expensive for
general use, and there is no efficient substitute. It is in consequence
of this scarcity of fish, that Church-fasts have never been very
strictly kept in Mexico.

[Illustration: HIEROGLYPHICS.]

The method of keeping accounts in the shops—which, it is to be
remembered, are almost always kept by white or half-white people,
hardly ever by Indians—is primitive enough. Here is a score which I
copied, the hieroglyphics standing for dollars, half-dollars, medios or
half-reals, cuartillos or quarter-reals, and tlacos—or clacos—which are
eighths of a real, or about ¾d. While account-keeping among the
comparatively educated trades-people is in this condition, one can
easily understand how very limited the Indian notions of calculation
are. They cannot realize any number much over ten; and
twenty—cempoalli—is with them the symbol of a great number, as a
hundred was with the Greeks. There is in Mexico a mountain called in
this indefinite way “Cempoatepetl”—the twenty-mountain. Sartorius
mentions the Indian name of the many-petaled
marigold—“cempoaxochitl”—the twenty-flower. We traded for some trifles
of aloe-fibre, but soon had to count up the reckoning with beans.

I have delayed long enough for the present over the Indians and their
market; so, though there is much more to be said about them, I will
only add a few words respecting the commodities for sale, and then
leave them for awhile.

There seemed to be a large business doing in costales (bags) made of
aloe-fibre, for carrying ore about in the mines. True to the traditions
of his ancestors, the Indian much prefers putting his load in a bag on
his back, to the far easier method of wheeling it about. Lazos sold at
one to four reals, (6d. to 2s.) according to quality. There are two
kinds of aloe-fibre; one coarse, _ichtli_, the other much finer,
_pito_; the first made from the great aloe that produces pulque, the
other from a much smaller species of the same genus. The stones with
which the boiled maize is ground into the paste of which the universal
tortillas are made were to be had here; indeed, they are made in the
neighbourhood, of the basalt and lava which abound in the district. The
metate is a sort of little table, hewn out of the basalt, with four
little feet, and its surface is curved from the ends to the middle. The
metalpile is of the same material, and like a rolling-pin. The
old-fashioned Mexican pottery I have mentioned already. It is
beautifully made, and very cheap. They only asked us nine-pence for a
great olla, or boiling-pot, that held four or five gallons, and no
doubt this was double the market-price. I never so thoroughly realized
before how climate is altered by altitude above the sea as in noticing
the fruits and vegetables that were being sold at this little market,
within fifteen or twenty miles of which they were all grown. There were
wheat and barley, and the piñones (the fruit of the stone-pine, which
grows in Italy, and is largely used instead of almonds); and from these
representatives of temperate climates the list extended to bananas and
zapotes, grown at the bottom of the great barrancas, 3,000 or 4,000
feet lower in level than the plateau, though in distance but a few
miles off. Three or four thousand miles of latitude would not give a
greater difference.

It would never do to be late, and break our necks in one of the awkward
water-courses that cut the plateau about in all directions; so we
started homewards, soon having to unfasten great-coats and shawls from
our saddles, to keep out the cold of the approaching sunset; and so we
got back to the hospitable hacienda, and were glad to warm ourselves at
the fire.

Next morning, we went off to get a view of the great barranca of Regla.
A ride over the hills brought us to a wood of oaks, with their branches
fringed with the long grey Spanish moss, and a profusion of epiphytes
clinging to their bark, some splendidly in flower, showing the
fantastic shapes and brilliant colours one sees in English
orchid-houses. Cactuses of many species complete the picture of the
vegetation in this beautiful spot. This is at the top of the barranca.
Then imagine a valley a mile or two in width, with sides almost
perpendicular and capped with basaltic pillars, and at the bottom a
strip of land where the vegetation is of the deepest green of the
tropics, with a river winding along among palm-trees and bananas. This
great barranca is between two and three thousand feet deep, and the
view is wonderful. We went down a considerable way by a zig-zag road,
my companion collecting armfuls of plants by the way, but unfortunately
losing his thermometer, which could not be found, though a long hunt
for it produced a great many more plants, and so the trouble was not
wasted. The prickly pear was covered with ripe purple fruit a little
way down, and we refreshed ourselves with them, I managing—in my
clumsiness—to get into my fingers two or three of the little sheaves of
needles which are planted on the outside of the fruit, and thus
providing myself with occupation for leisure moments for three or four
days after in taking them out.

Many species of cactus, and the nopal, or prickly pear, especially, are
full of watery sap, which trickles out in a stream when they are
pierced. In these thirsty regions, when springs and brooks are dry, the
cattle bite them to get at the moisture, regardless of the thorns. On
the north coast of Africa the camels delight in crunching the juicy
leaves of the same plant. I have often been amused in watching the
camel-drivers’ efforts to get their trains of laden beasts along the
narrow sandy lanes of Tangier, between hedges of prickly pears, where
the camels with their long necks could reach the tempting lobes on both
sides of the way.

In this thirsty season, while the cattle in the Mexican plains derive
moisture from the cactus, the aloe provides for man a substitute for
water. It frequently happened to us to go from rancho to rancho asking
for water in vain, though pulque was to be had in abundance.

To attempt any description of the varied forms of cactus in Mexico
would be out of the question. In the northern provinces alone,
botanists have described above eight hundred species. The most striking
we met with were the prickly pear (cactus opuntia), the órgano, the
night-blowing cereus, the various mamillarias—dome-shaped mounds
covered with thorns, varying in diameter from an inch to six or eight
feet—and the greybeard, _el viejo_, “the old man,” as our guide called
them, upright pillars like street-posts, and covered with grey
wool-like filaments.

Getting to the top of the ravine again, we found an old Indian milking
an aloe, which flourishes here, though a little further down the
climate is too hot for it to produce pulque. This old gentleman had a
long gourd, of the shape and size of a great club, but hollow inside,
and very light. The small end of this gourd was pushed in among the
aloe-leaves into the hollow made by scooping out the inside of the
plant, and in which the sweet juice, the aguamiel, collects. By having
a little hole at each end of the gourd, and sucking at the large end,
the hollow of the plant emptied itself into the Acocote, (in proper
Mexican, _Acocotl_, Water-throat), as this queer implement is called.
Then the Indian stopped the hole at the end he had been sucking at,
with his finger, and dexterously emptied the contents of the gourd into
a pig-skin which he carried at his back. We went up with the old man to
his rancho, and tested his pulque, which was very good, though we could
not say the same of his domestic arrangements. It puzzled us not a
little to see people living up at this height in houses built of
sticks, such as are used in the hot lands, and hardly affording any
protection from the weather, severe as it is here. The pulque is taken
to market in pig-skins, which, though the pig himself is taken out of
them, still retain his shape very accurately; and when nearly full of
liquor, they roll about on their backs, and kick up the little dumpy
legs that are left them, in the most comical and life-like way. When we
went away we bought the old man’s acocote, and carried it home in
triumph, and is it not in the Museum at Kew Gardens to this day? _(See
the illustration at page 36.)_

At the hacienda of Regla are to be seen on a large scale most of the
processes which are employed in the extraction of silver from the
ore—the _beneficio_, or making good, as it is called.

In the great yard, numbers of men and horses were walking round and
round upon the “tortas,” tarts or pies, as they are called, consisting
of powdered ore mixed with water, so as to form a circular bed of mud a
foot deep. To this mud, sulphate of copper, salt, and quicksilver are
added, and the men and mules walk round and round in it, mixing it
thoroughly together, a process which is kept up, with occasional
intervals of rest, for nearly two months. By that time the whole of the
silver has formed an amalgam with the mercury, and this amalgam is
afterwards separated from the earth by being trampled under water in
troughs. We were surprised to find that men and horses could pass their
lives in wading through mud containing mercury in a state of fine
division without absorbing it into their bodies, but neither men nor
horses suffer from it.

We happened to visit the melting-house one evening, while silver and
lead were being separated by oxidizing the lead in a reverberatory
furnace. Here we noticed a curious effect. The melted litharge ran from
the mouth of the furnace upon a floor of damp sand, and spread over it
in a sheet. Presently, as the heat of the mass vaporized the water in
the sand below, the sheet of litharge, still slightly fluid, began to
heave and swell, and a number of small cones rose from its surface.
Some of these cones reached the height of four inches, and then burst
at the top, sending out a shower of red-hot fragments. I removed one of
these cones when the litharge was cool. It had a regidar funnel-shaped
crater, like that which Vesuvius had until three or four years ago.

The analogy is complete between these little cones and those on the
lava-field at the foot of the volcano of Jorullo, the celebrated
“hornitos;” the concentric structure of which, as described by Burkart,
proves that they were formed in precisely the same manner. Until
lately, the formation of the great cone of Jorullo was attributed to
the same kind of action as the hornitos, but later travellers have
established the fact that this is incorrect. One of the De Saussure
family, who was in Mexico a few years back, describes Jorullo as
consisting of three terraces of basaltic lava, which have flowed one
above another from a central orifice, the whole being surmounted by a
cone of lapilli thrown up from the same opening, from which also later
streams of lava have issued.

The celebrated cascade of Regla is just behind the hacienda. There is a
sort of basin, enclosed on three sides by a perpendicular wall of
basaltic columns, some eighty feet high. On the side opposite the
opening, a mountain stream has cut a deep notch in this wall, and pours
down in a cascade. The basaltic pillars rest upon an undisturbed layer
of basaltic conglomerate five feet thick, and that upon a bed of clay.
The place is very picturesque; and two great Yuccas which project over
the waterfall, crowned with their star-like tufts of pointed leaves,
have a strange effect. These basalt-columns are very regular, with from
five to eight sides; and are almost black in colour. They have a
curiously well-defined circular core in the middle, five or six inches
in diameter. This core is light grey, almost white. The Indians bring
down numbers of short lengths or joints of the columns, and they are
used at the hacienda in making a primitive kind of ore-crushing mill,
in which they are dragged round and round by mule-power, on a floor
also of basalt.

When we had visited the falls we took leave of our hospitable friend,
and set off to return to the Real. We stopped at San Miguel, another of
the haciendas of the Company, where the German barrel-process is
worked. Just behind the hacienda is the Ojo de Agua—the Eye of Water—a
beautiful basin, surrounded by a green sward and a wood of oaks and
fir-trees. A little stream takes its rise from the spring which bubbles
up into this basin, and the name “Ojo de Agua,” is a general term
applied to such fountain-heads. When one looks down from a high hill
upon one of these Eyes of Water, one sees how the name came to be
given, and indeed, the idiom is thousands of years older than the
Spanish tongue, and belongs as well to the Hebrew and Arabic. A Mexican
calls a lake _atezcatl_, Water-Mirror, an expressive word, which
reminds one of the German _Wasserspiegel_.

Soon after nightfall we got back to the English inn, and went to bed
without any further event happening, except the burning of some
outhouses, which we went out to see. The custom of roofing houses with
pine-shingles (“tacumeniles”), and the general use of wood for building
all the best houses, make fires very common here. During the few days
we spent in the Real district, I find in my notebook mention of three
fires which we saw. We spent the next day in resting, and in visiting
the mine-works near at hand. The day after, an Englishman who had lived
many years at the Real offered to take us out for a day’s ride; and the
Company’s Administrador lent us two of his own horses, for the poor
beasts from Pachuca could hardly have gone so far. The first place we
visited was Peñas Cargadas, the “loaded rocks.” Riding through a thick
wood of oaks and pines, we came suddenly in view of several sugar-loaf
peaks, some three hundred feet high, tapering almost to a point at the
top, and each one crowned with a mass of rocks which seem to have been
balanced in unstable equilibrium on its point,—looking as though the
first puff of wind would bring them down. The pillars were of
porphyritic conglomerate, which had been disintegrated and worn away by
wind and rain; while the great masses resting on them, probably of
solid porphyry, had been less affected by these influences. It was the
most curious example of the weathering of rocks that we had ever seen.
From Peñas Cargadas we rode on to the farm of Guajalote, where the
Company has forests, and cuts wood and burns charcoal for the mines and
the refining works. Don Alejandro, the tenant of the farm, was a
Scotchman, and a good fellow. He could not go on with us, for he had
invited a party of neighbours to eat up a kid that had been cooked in a
hole in the ground, with embers upon it, after Sandwich Island fashion.
This is called a _barbacoa_—a barbecue. We should have liked to be at
the feast, but time was short, so we rode on to the top of Mount Jacal,
12,000 feet above the sea, where there was a view of mountains and
valleys, and heat that was positively melting. Thence down to the Cerro
de Navajas, the “hill of knives.” It is on the sides of this hill that
obsidian is found in enormous quantities. Before the conquerors
introduced the use of iron, these deposits were regularly mined, and
this place was the Sheffield of Mexico.

We were curious to see all that was to be seen; for Mr. Christy’s
Mexican collection, already large before our visit, and destined to
become much larger, contained numbers of implements and weapons of this
very peculiar material. Any one who does not know obsidian may imagine
great masses of bottle-glass, such as our orthodox ugly wine-bottles
are made of, very hard, very brittle, and—if one breaks it with any
ordinary implement—going, as glass does, in every direction but the
right one. We saw its resemblance to this portwine-bottle-glass in an
odd way at the Ojo de Agua, where the wall of the hacienda was armed at
the top, after our English fashion, apparently with bits of old
bottles, but which turned out to be chips of obsidian. Out of this
rather unpromising stuff the Mexicans made knives, razors, arrow- and
spear-heads, and
other things, some of great beauty. I say nothing of the polished
obsidian mirrors and ornaments, nor even of the curious masks of the
human face that are to be seen in collections, for these were only
laboriously cut and polished with jewellers’ sand, to us a common-place
process.

[Illustration: STONE SPEAR-HEADS AND OBSIDIAN KNIVES AND ARROW-HEADS,
FROM MEXICO.]

1. Flame shaped Arrow-head; obsidian: Teleohuacán. 2. Arrow-head; opake
obsidian: Teleohuacán. 3. Knife or Razor of Obsidian; shown in two
aspects; Mexico. 4. Leaf-shaped Knife or Javelin-head; obsidian: from
Real Del Monte. 5. Spear-head of Chalcedony; one of a pair supposed to
be spears of State: found in excavating for the Casa Grande, Tezcuco.
(This peculiar opalescent chalcedony occurs as concretions, sometimes
of large size, in the trachytic lavas of Mexico.)


Cortes found the barbers at the great market of Tlatelolco busy shaving
the natives with such razors, and he and his men had experience of
other uses of the same material in the flights of obsidian-headed
arrows which “darkened the sky,” as they said, and the more deadly
wooden maces stuck all over with obsidian points, and of the priests’
sacrificial knives too, not long after. These things were not cut and
polished, but made by chipping or cracking off pieces from a lump. This
one can see by the traces of conchoidal fracture which they all show.

The art is not wholly understood, for it perished soon after the
Conquest, when iron came in; but, as far as the theory is concerned, I
think I can give a tolerably satisfactory account of the process of
manufacture. In the first place, the workman who makes gun-flints could
probably make some of the simpler obsidian implements, which were no
doubt chipped off in the same way. The section of a gun-flint, with its
one side flat for sharpness and the other side ribbed for strength, is
one of the characteristics of obsidian knives. That the flint knives of
Scandinavia were made by chipping off strips from a mass is proved by
the many-sided prisms occasionally found there, and particularly by
that one which was discovered just where it had been worked, with the
knives chipped off it lying close by, and fitting accurately into their
places upon it.

Now to make the case complete, we ought to find such prisms in Mexico;
and, accordingly, some months ago, when I examined the splendid Mexican
collection of Mr. Uhde at Heidelberg, I found one or two. No one seemed
to have suspected their real nature, and they had been classed as
maces, or the handles of some kind of weapon.

[Illustration: Fluted Prism of Obsidian: the core from which flakes
have been struck off]

I should say from memory that they were seven or eight inches long, and
as large as one could conveniently grasp; and one or both of them, as
if to remove all doubt as to what they were, had the stripping off of
ribbons not carried quite round them, but leaving an intermediate strip
rough. There is another point about the obsidian knives which requires
confirmation. One can often see, on the ends of the Scandinavian flint
knives, the bruise made by the blow of the hard stone with which they
were knocked off. I did not think of looking to this point when at Mr.
Uhde’s museum, but the only obsidian knife I have seen since seems to
be thus bruised at the end.

[Illustration: Aztec Knives or Razors. Long narrow Flakes of
Obsidian, having a single face on one side and three facets on the
other.]

Once able to break his obsidian straight, the workman has got on a long
way in his trade, for a large proportion of the articles he has to make
are formed by planes intersecting one another in various directions.
But the Mexican knives are generally not pointed, but turned up at the
end, as one may bend up a druggist’s spatula. This peculiar shape is
not given to answer a purpose, but results from the natural fracture of
the stone.

Even then, the way of making several implements or weapons is not
entirely clear. We got several obsidian maces or lance-heads—one about
ten inches long—which were taper from base to point, and covered with
taper flutings; and there are other things which present great
difficulties. I have heard on good authority, that somewhere in Peru,
the Indians still have a way of working obsidian by laying a bone wedge
on the surface of a piece, and tapping it till the stone cracks. Such a
process may have been used in Mexico.

We may see in museums beautiful little articles made in this
intractable material, such as the mirrors and masks I have mentioned,
and even rings and cups. But, as I have said, these are mere
lapidaries’ work.

The situation of the mines was picturesque; grand hills of porphyritic
rock, and pine-forest everywhere. Not far off is the broad track of a
hurricane, which had walked through it for miles, knocking the great
trees down like ninepins, and leaving them to rot there. The vegetation
gave evident proof of a severe climate; and yet the heat and glare of
the sun were more intolerable than we had ever felt it in the region of
sugar-canes and bananas. About here, some of the trachytic porphyry
which forms the substance of the hills had happened to have cooled,
under suitable conditions, from the molten state into a sort of slag or
volcanic glass, which is the obsidian in question; and, in places, this
vitreous lava—from one layer having flowed over another which was
already cool—was regularly stratified.

The mines were mere wells, not very deep; with horizontal workings into
the obsidian where it was very good and in thick layers. Round about
were heaps of fragments, hundreds of tons of them; and it was clear,
from the shape of these, that some of the manufacturing was done on the
spot. There had been great numbers of pits worked; and it was from
these “minillas,” little mines, as they are called, that we first got
an idea how important an element this obsidian was in the old Aztec
civilization. In excursions made since, we travelled over whole
districts in the plains, where fragments of these arrows and knives
were to be found, literally at every step, mixed with morsels of
pottery, and here and there a little clay idol. Among the heaps of
fragments were many that had become weathered on the upper side, and
had a remarkable lustre, like silver. Obsidian is called _bizcli_ by
the Indians, and the silvery sort is known as _bizcli platera_.[11]
They often find bits of it in the fields; and go with great secrecy and
mystery to Mr. Bell, or some other authority in mining matters, and
confide to him their discovery of a silver-mine. They go away angry and
unconvinced when told what their silver really is; and generally come
to the conclusion that he is deceiving them, with a view of throwing
them off the scent, that he may find the place for himself, and cheat
them of their share of the profits—just what their own miserable morbid
cunning would lead them to do under such circumstances.

 [11] The book-name for obsidian is _itztli_, a word which seems to
 mean originally “sharp thing, knife,” and thence to have been applied
 to the material knives are made of. Obsidian was also called
 _itztetl_, knife-stone. But no Indian to whom I spoke on the subject
 would ever acknowledge the existence of such a word as _itztli_ for
 obsidian, but insisted that it was called _bizcli_, which is
 apparently the corrupt modern pronunciation of another old name for
 the same mineral, _petztli_, shiny-stone.

[Illustration: Mexican Arrow-heads of Obsidian.]

The family-likeness that exists among the stone tools and weapons found
in so many parts of the world is very remarkable. The flint-arrows of
North America, such as Mr. Longfellow’s arrow-maker used to work at in
the land of the Dacotahs, and which, in the wild northern states of
Mexico, the Apaches and Comanches use to this day, might be easily
mistaken for the weapons of our British ancestors, dug up on the banks
of the Thames. It is true that the finish of the Mexican obsidian
implements far exceeds that of the chipped flint and agate weapons of
Scandinavia, and still more those of England, Switzerland, and Italy,
where they are dug up in such quantities, in deposits of alluvial soil,
and in bone-caves in the limestone rocks. But this higher finish we may
attribute partly to the superiority of the material; for the Mexicans
also used flint to some extent, and their flint weapons are as hard to
distinguish by inspection as those from other parts of the world. We
may reasonably suppose, moreover, that the skill of the Mexican
artificer increased when he found a better material than flint to work
upon. Be this as it may, an inspection of any good collection of such
articles shows the much higher finish of the obsidian implements than
of those of flint, agate, and rock-crystal. They say there is an
ingenious artist who makes flint arrow-heads and stone axes for the
benefit of English antiquarians, and earns good profits by it: I should
like to give him an order for ribbed obsidian razors and spear-heads; I
don’t think he would make much of them.

[Illustration: Aztec Knife of Chalcedony, mounted on a wooden handle,
which is shaped like a human figure with its face appearing through an
eagle-head mask, and has been inlaid with mosaic work of malachite,
shell, and turquoise. Length 12½ inches.[12]]

 [12] The unique Knife figured at page 101 and two masks incrusted with
 a similar mosaic work (of turquoise and obsidian) are in Mr. Christy’s
 collection; and a mask and head of similar workmanship are in the
 collection at Copenhagen. These are the only known examples of this
 advanced style of Aztec art.
    The whole once belonged probably to one set, brought to Europe soon
    after the Conquest of Mexico. The two at Copenhagen were obtained
    at a convent in Rome; and, of the other three, two were for a long
    period in a collection at Florence, and the other was obtained at
    Bruges, where it was most probably brought by the Spaniards during
    their rule in the Low Countries.

The wonderful similarity of character among the stone weapons found in
different parts of the world has often been used by ethnologists as a
means of supporting the theory that this and other arts were carried
over the world by tribes migrating from one common centre of creation
of the human species. The argument has not much weight, and a larger
view of the subject quite supersedes it.

We may put the question in this way. In Asia and in Europe the use of
stone tools and weapons has always characterized a very low state of
civilization; and such implements are only found among savage tribes
living by the chase, or just beginning to cultivate the ground and to
emerge from the condition of mere barbarians. Now, if the Mexicans got
their civilization from Europe, it must have been from some people
unacquainted with the use of iron, if not of bronze. Iron abounds in
Mexico, not only in the state of ore, but occurring nearly pure in
aerolites of great size, as at Cholula, and at Zacatecas, not far from
the great ruins there; so that the only reason for their not using it
must have been ignorance of its qualities.

The Arabian Nights’ story of the mountain which consisted of a single
loadstone finds its literal fulfilment in Mexico. Not far from Huetamo,
on the road towards the Pacific, there is a conical hill composed
entirely of magnetic iron-ore. The blacksmiths in the neighbourhood,
with no other apparatus than their common forges, make it directly into
wrought iron, which they use for all ordinary purposes.

Now, in supposing civilization to be transmitted from one country to
another, we must measure it by the height of its lowest point, as we
measure the strength of a chain by the strength of the weakest link.
The only civilization that the Mexicans can have received from the Old
World must have been from some people whose cutting implements were of
sharp stone, consequently, as we must conclude by analogy, some very
barbarous and ignorant tribe.

From this point we must admit that the inhabitants of Mexico raised
themselves, independently, to the extraordinary degree of culture which
distinguished them when Europeans first became aware of their
existence. The curious distribution of their knowledge shows plainly
that they found it for themselves, and did not receive it by
transmission. We find a wonderful acquaintance with astronomy, even to
such details as the real cause of eclipses,—and the length of the year
given by intercalations of surprising accuracy; and, at the same time,
no knowledge whatever of the art of writing alphabetically, for their
hieroglyphics are nothing but suggestive pictures. They had carried the
art of gardening to a high degree of perfection; but, though there were
two kinds of ox, and the buffalo at no great distance from them, in the
countries they had already passed through in their migration from the
north, they had no idea of the employment of beasts of burden, nor of
the use of milk. They were a great trading people, and had money of
several kinds in general use, but the art of weighing was utterly
unknown to them; while, on the other hand, the Peruvians habitually
used scales and weights, but had no idea of the use of money.

To return to the stone knives; the Mexicans may very well have invented
the art themselves, as they did so many others; or they may have
received it from the Old World. The things themselves prove nothing
either way.

The real proof of their having, at some early period, communicated with
inhabitants of Europe or Asia rests upon the traditions current among
them, which are recorded by the early historians, and confirmed by the
Aztec picture-writings; and upon several extraordinary coincidences in
the signs used by them in reckoning astronomical cycles. Further on I
shall allude to these traditions.

On the whole, the most probable view of the origin of the Mexican
tribes seems to be the one ordinarily held, that they really came from
the Old World, bringing with them several legends, evidently the same
as the histories recorded in the book of Genesis. This must have been,
however, at a time, when they were quite a barbarous, nomadic tribe;
and we must regard their civilization as of independent and far later
growth.

We rode back through the woods to Guajalote, where the Mexican cook had
made us a feast after the manner of the country, and from her
experience of foreigners had learnt to temper the chile to our
susceptible throats. Decidedly the Mexicans are not without ideas in
the matter of cookery. We stayed talking with the hospitable Don
Alejandro and his sister till it was all but dark, and then rode back
to the Real, admiring the fire-flies that were darting about by
thousands, and listening to our companion’s stories, which turned on
robberies and murders—-as stories are apt to do in wild places after
dark. But, save an escape from being robbed some twenty years back, and
the history of an Indian who was murdered just here by some of his own
people, for a few shillings he was taking home, our friend had not much
reason to give for the two huge horse-pistols he carried, ready for
action. His story of the death of a German engineer in these parts is
worth recording here. He was riding home one dark night, with a
companion; and, trusting to his knowledge of the country, tried a short
cut through the woods, among the old open mines near the Regla road.
They had quite passed all the dangerous places, he thought, so he gave
his horse the spur, and plunged sheer down a shaft, hundreds of feet
deep. His friend pulled up in time, and got home safely.

We had one more day among the mines, and then went back to Pachuca, and
next day to Mexico in the Diligence. Everywhere the same hospitality
and good-natured interest in us and our doings, often shown by people
with whom we had hardly the slightest acquaintance. Travelling here is
very different from what it is in a country on which the shadow of
Murray’s H

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