Mexico, California and Arizona/Chapter 14
XIV.
POPOCATEPETL ASCENDED.
I.
I do not know whether I advise everybody to climb Popocatepetl. There it is always on the horizon, the highest mountain in North America, and one of the few highest in the world—standing inducement to the adventurous. Few accept it, however, though among those have done so are said to be ladies. I should somewhat doubt this, but, even if so, there seem to be some features of this ascent which make it uncertain whether the effort "pays" quite as well as Alpine mountaineering.
At any rate, if one will go, let him have all the particulars and the necessary outfit in advance, at the capital itself. Little aid or comfort will be found elsewhere on his way. The proper preliminary for ascending Popocatepetl is to find some one who has been there and knows all about it, and to bear in mind besides the few following points, for his informant will be sure to have forgotten them.
The feet are to be kept dry and warm, for there are hours of climbing in wet snow. This is, perhaps, best accomplished by superposed pairs of stout woollen stockings. The guides usually recommend strips of coarse cotton cloth, to be bound around in Italian contadino
fashion; but this is a delusion and a snare, and they mean it to be so. They consider, very justly, that if the
traveller can be made so uncomfortable as to quit the ascent before it is half accomplished they shall collect the price agreed upon and be saved a great part of their trouble.
There should be shoes provided with some arrangement of spikes in the soles, against the painful slipping backward. There should be a supply of food and warm covering for camping-out, since absolutely nothing is to be had, and the temperature is very cold at the shelter of Tlamaca, where probably two nights will have to be passed.
I accomplished the ascent with two companions. We had in the beginning such assurances of special assistance that it seemed about to be robbed of all its terrors. The volcano is regularly owned, and worked as a sulphur mine, by General Sanchez Ochoa, Governor of the Military School. We were put in charge of one of his superintendents, who was to see that we had every convenience, and that the malacate, or windlass, was put in order for us to descend into the crater. I surmise that this particular superintendent did not greatly care to encounter the needed hardships on his own account, for certain it is that in the sequel we were left short of many elementary necessities, and there was no malacate for the descent, nor any reference to it.
You arrive at Amecameca, forty miles from Mexico, by train. Everybody should go there. It is one of the loveliest of places, and has inns for the accommodation of visitors. Amecameca will one day be frequented from many climes, if I am not much mistaken. It has features like Interlaken. Cool airs are wafted down to it from the mountains, and its site resembles an Alpine vale. There are points of view in the vicinity whence a sharp minor peak separates itself from the main snow mass of
Popocatepetl, like the Silberhorn from the Jungfrau, at Interlaken. The streets are clean, and the houses almost all neatly lime-washed in white or colors. The market-place is a scene for an
opera—a long arcade, full of bright figures; behind this is a group of churches and court-yards; behind these the vast snow mountains, as at Chalco, but nearer. A little hill at the left, across a strip of maize-fields, is called the Sacro Monte, and has a sacred chapel of some kind. I climbed thither while the
negotiations for horses and guides were in their first tedious stage, and found a quaint Christ in the chapel, and a most
engaging view from its terrace.
II.
We set off with a captain, or chief guide, who called himself Domingo Tenario, and a peon guide, Marcellino Cardoba, who had worked three years at sulphur-mining in the volcano, he also acted as muleteer. We had four horses and a mule the whole for eight dollars a day. Domingo Tenario would also ascend the mountain for a dollar more. We were to be gone three days, the greater part of which the expedition consumes.
The first part of the way wound among softly undulating slopes, yellow with barley, out of which projected here and there an ancient pyramid, planted with a crop also. By the roadside grew charming white thistles, tall blue lupines, and columbines. We crossed arroyos, brooks, and barrancas, gorges. The aspect changed to that of an Alpine pasture. There were bunch grass, tender flowering mosses, and cattle feeding. An eccentric dog, who was attached, it seemed, to one of the horses, and had the ambition to ascend the mountain also, instead of saving his strength for it, here ran up and down and
bit at the heels of the herds in the most wasteful manner. It seems a small detail of an enterprise of pith and moment to mention, but "Perro," as we called him, for want of acquaintance with his name, if he had one, contrived a score of sage and amusing devices to attract an
attention to himself beyond his deserts. The horses were frescoed on the flanks with a kind of Eastlake decoration made up of the brands of successive owners.
The English landed proprietor in our small party occupied himself with collecting specimens, and soon had a kind of geological and botanical pudding in his satchel. The American engineer took observations with his barometer and thermometer. Crosses are set up at intervals along the way. These indicate places where a death by violence has occurred, but not always a death by the hand of man. Did the custom prevail of setting up a cross in New York, for instance, wherever a violent death had occurred, we too should have a liberal share of these emblems.
We entered the deep, solemn pine-woods; the night came on, and a sharp cold seemed to penetrate to the marrow. Buildings appeared in the gloom, with red flames dancing merrily through the windows. Aha! the rancho of Tlamaca, with hospitable fires made up, no doubt, expressly for our reception !
What a disappointment! The buildings proved to be but some shelters of rough boards, with plentiful interstices, and not a whole pane of glass. The cabin devoted to the uses of the superintendent contained but a single cot. The dancing flames were those from the process of
smelting the crude sulphur, which is done in brick furnaces in the principal structure. Two Indian boys stirred
the fires, and coughed in a distressing way all night long. We threw ourselves down to sleep among the sulphur-
sacks. One was choked by the fumes, if near the furnaces, and penetrated by the draughts through crevice and broken window-pane, if remote. Tlamaca is itself
12,500 feet above the sea, and its thermometer ranges about 40° Fahrenheit. Without other covering than a light rubber overcoat—for I had not been instructed to bring other—it was impossible to sleep. I went out and
the yard, sentry fashion, at three o'clock in the morning, as the only resource for keeping the blood in
circulation. It was moonlight, and I had the partial compensation of studying the volcano, bathed in a lovely silver radiance.
Mountains are rather given to making their poorest possible figure. Here we are, at this point, already 12,500 feet above the sea, and this is to be subtracted from the total. Shall we ever meet with a good, honest mountain rising its whole 19,673 feet at once, without these shuffling evasions? I fear not. They are only to be found in the designs of tyro pictorial art.
I say 19,673 feet, because so much General Ochoa insists that Popocatepetl is, by a late measurement with the barometer of Gay-Lussac. He even estimates 1700 feet more for the upper rim of the crater, which has never been scaled. I do not know that this has ever passed into any official form, but I had it from his own lips. The latest Mexican atlas makes it but 5400 metres, or 17,884: feet, which coincides with the measurement of Humboldt. I much prefer to rally to General Ochoa, for my part, and to believe that I have climbed a mountain of 21,373 feet, instead of one of a mere 17,884.
The barometer of our own expedition, unfortunately, stopped at 17,000 feet, the limit for which it was set—a limit which barometers are not often called upon to surpass. III.
We left the Rancho, at six in the morning, on horse back, and rode three hours toilsomely over rocks of basalt, and black sand. The poor animals suffered painfully, but we needed all our own strength for the later work, and could not spare them. They were left at a point called Las Cruces, where a cross tops a ledge of black, jaggedly-projecting volcanic rock. The lines of composition in this part of the ascent were noble and magnificent, the contrasts startling. Across the vast, black undulations, on which our shadows fell purple-black, appeared and disappeared in turn the rich red castellated Pico del Fraile, and the dazzling white breadths of the greater mountain engaging our efforts.
Backward from Las Cruces lay a dizzy view of the world below. Across was the height of Ixtacihuatl, the White Woman, keeping us company in our ascent. The valley of Mexico could be seen in one direction, the valley of Puebla, and even the peak of Orizaba, 150 miles away, in the other. Against the mysterious vastness stood the figures of our men and horses on the ledge of volcanic rock, as if in trackless space.
It was here that "Perro" charged down the slope after crows, which tantalized him and drifted lazily out of his reach, and so wasted his forces that he was obliged to abandon the expedition. Las Cruces was 14,150 feet up. The climb now began on foot, in a soft black sand. One of the leading difficulties of the climb is said to arise from the exceeding thinness of the air, which makes breathing difficult. I cannot say that I discriminated between this and the shortness of breath due to the natural fatigue. Isolated pinnacles of snow stood up like monuments the black sand, as precursors of the permanent snow-line. The cool snow-line was a luxury for the first few Moments. We sat down and lunched by it, and from here took our last views backward. Cumulus clouds presently filled up the valley with a symmetrical arrangenent like pavement. Such bits as appeared through furtive openings recalled the charming lines of Holmes's, in which a spirit, "homesick in heaven," looks back on the earth it has left:
"To catch perchance some flashing glimpse of green,
Or breathe some wild-wood fragrance, wafted through
The opening gates of pearl."
Up to this point—a little higher, let us say—the effort is rewarded. A view of
"the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof" has been had which could not be got elsewhere. But above this it has little more reward than that of being able to boast of it to your friends. A few steps in the snow, and imperfectly protected feet were sodden, numb with cold, and not to be dried again till the
final descent. There was a painful slipping and falling in the snow, and blood-marks were left by ungloved
hands. The grade is excessive, the top invisible. Who can estimate when he shall attain it. The prospect consists of jagged snow-pinnacles without cessation, an endless staircase of them reaching up into the sky. Sometimes, in the sun, all the pinnacles glitter; again, thick
fogs, like a gray smoke, gather round. There is no more casting yourself down now in warm scoriae and sand. If
you sit you are chilled. Yet rest you must continually. Every step is a calculation and an achievement. You
calculate that you will allow yourself a rest after ten, after twenty more. The snow is not dangerous; there
are no crevasses to fall into, as in the Alps; it is only monotonous and fatiguing. I seem to have gone on for
an hour after farther endurance was intolerable. The guides encourage
you—when they find that you really mean to go up—with the adjuration, "Poco á poco" (little by little); so that we paraphrased our mountain as "Poco-a-poco-catepetl."
Finally, with sighs and groans of labored effort, instead of the lightness with which one might be expected to salute a point of so extreme high heaven, we staggered over the edge of the crater at about two o'clock in the afternoon. I had doubted at one time whether the English landed proprietor would be able to reach it. He had grown purple in the face. Perhaps I had even hoped that he might need a friendly arm to assist him down again on the instant; but he said, with the true British tenacity,
"Oh, bless you, I am going to the top, you know."
And so he did.
IV.
It was a supreme moment. One seemed very near to eternity. It seemed easy to topple through the ice minarets guarding the brink, and down into the terrific chasm.
There is no comfort at the top when reached. It is frigidly cold. None of the expected heat comes up from the interior. An elemental war rages around, and it is no place for human beings. There is a kind of fearful exaltation. A slope of black sand descends some fifty
feet to an inner edge, broken by rocks of porphyry and flint, which the imagination tortures into fantastic shapes. Hence a sheer precipice drops two thousand feet, a vast ellipse in plan. There was snow in the bottom of the crater. Jets of steam spouted from ten sulfataras, or
sources, from which the native sulphur is extracted. The hands who work there are said to live in the shelter of caves, and remain for a month at a time without exit. They are lowered down by windlass, on a primitive contrivance they call a caballo de minas—horse of the mines.
The sulphur is hoisted in bags and slid down a long groove in the snow to the neighborhood of the rancho. It takes the palm in purity over all sulphurs in the
world. A company has been formed, it is said, for the purpose of working the deposits more effectually and utilizing the steam-power in the bottom for improved hoisting machinery.
The men were on strike at the time, as it happened, and the windlass was not in place, and was not adjusted. If it had been, and we had descended, we might have found the warmth for which we were well-nigh perishing. Snow began to drive from the heavy cloud-banks. When it snows the crater within is darkened, roarings are said to be heard, and strange-colored globules and flames play above the sulfataras.
"What if there should be an eruption?" suggested the alarmist of the party, as we began to beat our retreat from the untenable position.
"There has not been an eruption for at least seven thousand years," said the scientific member, with contempt. "A certain kind of lignite in the bottom, requiring that length of time to form, establishes it."
"So much the more reason, then," said the alarmist: "it is high time there was another."
With that we slipped and floundered down the snow-mountain with the same celerity with which Vesuvius is descended. We crossed again the black volcanic fields,
mounted our horses, and spent once more the night at Tlamaca, having learned by experience how to make it
slightly more comfortable than the other. The next day we rode back to Amecameca.
When Señor Llandesio, Professor of the Fine Arts at Mexico, made this ascent, as he did in 1866, he says that he found two attempts necessary before he succeeded. I have the pamphlet in which he describes it. "The guide and peon whispered together continually," he says, "which made me think they were going to play us some trick."
Sure enough, they did. After a good way up they represented that it was perilous, impossible, to go farther. He descended, and had taken his seat in the diligencia to return to Mexico, when he met another party, with more honest guides, and, turning back with them, this time succeeded. He describes a young man so fatigued on the mountain that he desired, with tears in his eyes, to be left to die. Another succumbed owing to the singular cause, that he had fancied that ardent spirits would have no effect in the peculiarly attenuated atmosphere, and had emptied nearly a whole bottle of brandy.
Señor Llandesio was told by the Indians that they believed in a genius of the mountain, whom they called Cuantelpostle. He was a queer little man, who dwelt
about the Pico del Fraile, helped the workmen at their labors when in a good humor, and embarrassed them as much as possible when in a bad. They said, also, that presents were offered by some to propitiate the volcano, for the purpose of obtaining rain, and the like. These
were buried in the sand, and the places marked by a flat stone. This practice may account for some of the discoveries of Charnay, who unearthed about the foot of the mountain much interesting pottery.