Our Neighbor-Mexico/Chapter IV
IV.
THE HOT LANDS.
From Idleness to Peril.—Solitud.—Chiquihuiti.—Tropical Forests.—The Falls of Atoyac.—Wild Beasts non sunt.—Cordova and its Oranges.—Mount Orizaba.—Fortin.
Vera Cruz soon wearies. Even the generous hospitality of our consul, whose table and couch have been mine for days, could not make it lovely long. The mountains draw like the Loadstone Mountain of the "Arabian Nights." The consul-general comes from the capital, and by due persuasion is enticed not to wait for the president's return, but to climb back after the old fashion, the stage-coach and the robber; for though the railroad is finished, that does not insure one a ride over it. Until the president returns over it, no one can, except he gets passage in a dirt-car, and takes the mountain morning coldness, without shelter, and almost without a seat. How long we may have to wait for his return, quien sabe?—(who knows?)—the universal answer here to all inquiries, as mañana is to all orders. So we get as far as is allowed us on the railway, and then take to the stage.
There are several reasons prompting us to this course. The stage is a vanishing institution. A week or two hence there will be no staging between the sea-port and the capital. We must indulge it now or never. Then we are told it is exceedingly dangerous. Robbers abound, and they will not fail to lose their last opportunity to black-mail the coach. So it will give the romance of peril essential to a first-class excitement. It is also a horrible road, and men affirm that they would endure any torment they or their friends could be subject to, especially the latter, rather than make the trip again—and then go and make it. Why not we?
It has, too, the cumbres, or mountain precipices, so steep that we are led to imagine the stage will tumble off by sheer pull of gravitation and centre of motion; the passengers rolling down, back first, faster by much than they rolled up. The peril of those "who gather samphire, dreadful trade," must be encountered, or Mexico is not truly done.
And, lastly, the ride all night in a crowded coach full of garlic and tobacco and pulqui, and all abominable stenches, is set forth to frighten the novice from the attempt. But it only whets his appetite. The water feeds the flame, which has got so hot.
"The more thou dam'st it up the more it burns."
The ride in a coach full of dirty and offensive natives, over horrible roads, up precipices that incline the other way, they are so steep, among robbers, all night long—it shall be taken, and it is. Any thing to get out of Vera Cruz. That orange is sucked thrice dry.
My companion attends the governor's soirée in honor of the president until two of the morning, and I turn him out of bed at three to take the unwelcome trip. We start at about four, sleepily and snugly tucked away in the luxurious cushions of an English rail-carriage. For night-riding, or any other, this sort is superior to the low-backed seats of the American car, though inferior to our sleeping-coaches. A nice nap, and the day wakes up, and so do we. The landscape stands forth in its summer warmth of color. We are out on the Tierras Calientes, or Hot Lands. They are moderately level, seemingly thin of soil, but probably more dry than thin. The dog-tree abounds, and is in full blossom. Its white flowers look lovely, and make one fancy that something like peach-trees are growing wild over all the country. Solitud, some twenty-five miles out, is a station where coffee, cakes, bananas, and oranges are disposed of to the half-sleepy passengers. It was at this place that the French, English, and Spanish ambassadors held the convention which resulted in the invasion of Mexico by Maximilian. They made but little, in pocket or fame, by that attempt to resist the Americanizing of America. It will be the last effort put forth by Europe for the colonizing of this continent. From Isabella to Victoria, for nearly four hundred years, the attempt has been kept up. The seed is well sown. Its future growth must be from our own soil. The crowned heads must lay their crowns at the feet of this crownless one, on whose head are many crowns. The land lies idle and desolate for fifty miles. It is undoubtedly susceptible of culture, for rich tropical trees, with their heavy foliage, are not infrequent, and the open pastures are fit for grazing, and occasionally feed a few cattle. But the insecurity of property blights all the land. You can hardly cultivate bananas close to your door without fear of losing your crop through the wild marauders of the region. Life is of no consequence to them, compared with a few oranges or cocoa-nuts, and so the region is almost without inhabitant.
At the distance of about fifty miles the mountains draw near, the first terrace above the plains of the sea.
Chiquihuiti (pronounced Chee-kee-whee-tee) rises along the landscape, cutting the edge of the lowlands as sharply as a house-front cuts the land out of which it arises. This is the beginning of the table-lands of Mexico, and of the snow-capped volcanoes of Popocatepetl and Orizaba. We wind up into it, and are astonished by the profusion of its tropical verdure. The scanty gleanings of the lowlands had not prepared me for this superabundance. The gorges are deep, the heights lofty, and from lowest depth to topmost height there is a flood of green. Such trees and leaves I had not imagined possible in midsummer, and this was midwinter. The trees were compact together, some of familiar forms, such as oak and birch, but of unfamiliar richness. Others among them were new members of the family. The acacia-tree was the largest and the most prolific in species, and it spread itself in huge branches, and towered above its fellows as by natural mastery. Yet it is light of substance, and some of these iron-like woods undoubtedly and justly despise their vain brother. Many sorts of these hard woods are here, awaiting the horrid steam saw-mill that shall eat them all up, and ship them to New York, and make this green, grand wilderness a desolation.
How sorry I am to be compelled to think that some Yankee speculator in lumber from Bangor to Brainerd will read these lines, and be up and off in the next steamer for Vera Cruz and the splendid woods of Chiquihuiti! Cortez did not sigh more for Mexican silver than these lumbermen will for these mahoganies, and rosewoods, and other equally polishable delights. Black-walnut will be of no account when the Mexican lumber reaches the Northern market. Give us a good fill, dear ancient forests, of your green delights, for the Yankee wood-sawyer is coming, and you will soon be no more.
The roadside is lined with immense palms, whose leaves are each themselves almost a covering for the body, while the castor-oil-tree spreads its broad wing along the way, hated of all youth, loved of not all doctors.
Convolvuli of every hue throw their vines and flowers over these palms and taller trees. Our old morning-glories were growing wild, and make our path a perpetual "pleached bower" of beauty. The orchids hang on the taller trees, or sit in nests in the crotch, parasitic plants of every color making the tree into nose-gays. They are a fungus, and seem to prefer decayed trees; perhaps themselves decay them. Some that are stripped of leaf and bark glow like a June rose-bed in the radiance of these curious plants. There are hundreds of varieties, and have attracted of late much attention from botanists, and have even got into literature.
About ten miles up, the road winds round a gorge that sinks hundreds of feet below, and whose upper side comes together in the Falls of Atoyac.
This is one of the most beautiful water-falls I have ever seen; I might say the most beautiful. It is not stripped of its trees, as is Minnehaha, who sits shivering in her nakedness, as unhappy as the Greek Slave. Nor does it come, like that, from a level landscape. The hills rise all around it a thousand feet and more.
The sides of these hills from base to peak are densely covered with trees, whose leaves are almost a solid mass of green. The white water leaps from this green centre a hundred or two feet, into a curling, foaming river, and into a darkling mirror of a pool. The whole scene is embraced in one small circumference, and you seem to pause trembling on the bridge that spans a side of the ravine, before you plunge into a tunnel, hanging hundreds of feet
OLD BRIDGE OF ATOYAC.
above the lovely spectacle, with an admiration that is without parallel in any small fragment of American scenery. May the Mexican Government preserve the Falls of Atoyac and their enchanting surroundings from the knife and the factory of the spoiler.
Are there monkeys or wilder beasts in these woods, or parrots, or birds of paradise? Of course they will all tell you that they abound. But when you ask one if he ever saw any, he shrugs his shoulders.
One gentleman says: "I ate armadillo steaks in a cabin on top of that mountain overhanging the Falls of Atoyac but he did not kill the choice lizard, and so I receive his assertion with some incredulity. Every body says monkeys are here, but nobody says he has seen them. They say that they have retreated away from the railroad, a sad reflection on Darwin's theory; for should they not accept the higher life to which their posterity have attained, and begin themselves to build railroads, and cut down timber, and speculate in corner lots, and eat armadillo?
The parrot is here, but does not flash his plumage among the trees. Only on the perch of the ranchos do we see his beauty and hear his ugliness. The cougar is reported present; one gentleman, and he a man of veracity, declares he saw a young tiger, or old cat of this species, as he was resting his stage legs by a tramp up another spur of these mountains. But I think the real sight was when he sat at meat that day, and beheld on the table a roasted creature, with a great gray-yellow eye staring at him, and saying, "Come eat me, if you dare." Asking the waiter what it might be, he was answered, "El gato del monte" (the cat of the mountain). Like they of the Rimini story, who read no more that day, he ate no more that day. That cat was a reality. Whether the cougar was or no, you must judge. Quien sabe? and a shrug is all I say.
A run of a few miles through verdant fields, by coffee-haciendas and banana-groves and orange-orchards and tobacco-fields, and Cordova is reached.
This ancient city of Cortez lies in an open plain, surrounded by mountains. The railroad leaves it a little to the right, and in a deeper vale, so that only its dirty church towers and domes are visible to the eye. It is a decayed town, but under the stimulus of the railroad may revive, especially if pure Christianity can come in here to energize and educate its people. Pure Christianity has come in. The Methodist Episcopal Church has already lay preaching in this city, and a society well gathered. The redemption of this fine old Spanish town is begun. Let it go on to a millennial completeness.
The fruit-sellers at the dépôt give us six oranges for three cents, and as many bananas for the same money. A picayune goes a good way. The oranges are very delicious. Havana and even Joppa are dry to these juicy Cordovas. They bleed at every vein. It is almost impossible to prevent their flowing over your lips on to your garments, like Aaron's oil. Could they be got into our Northern market, they would drive the mean little sour Messina
ORANGE GROVE, CORDOVA.
and the thick-meshed fibrous Havana from the fruit-stalls. And why not? Vera Cruz and Cordova are nearer New York by twenty days than Messina, and not two days farther off than Havana. The fruit-boats that go to the Mediterranean of the Eastern Continent should come to the Mediterranean of the Western. Five thousand miles against a little more than five hundred, and this rich fruit against that lime, falsely called orange. Here lies the tropical garden of our land. Let us make it commercially our own.
This commerce is increasing. One haciendado, or farmer, west of the city of Mexico, sends to market one hundred and thirty thousand cargoes of oranges annually from his plantation. A cargo is a donkey burden, and weighs three hundred pounds. This makes almost twenty thousand tons. I give this tale as it was given to me. If you ask whether or no it is true, I answer, after the country's fashion, Quien sabe? You must remember that a hacienda often covers many square leagues, so that if devoted exclusively to this fruit, it could produce a vast quantity. Whether that statement be true or not, it is true that the fruit is the best of its sort I ever tasted, and that it could control the markets of America.
The plains about Cordova are very rich, and bear all manner of fruits the year round. The scenery is as grand as the soil is fertile. Mountains thousands of feet high rise on the west and north, green at the base, bare and black at the summit, while just before you, as you look and move westward, stands forth that perfect Orizaba.
I never remembered hearing of this mountain before, though a cultivated fellow-traveler informed me it was frequently referred to by English and Spanish writers. This statement set the memories and the wits of the listeners a-running, and a mass of quotations, as well adapted to this market as the "quotations" of change are to it, were fished up from, the English poets. Probably a like knowledge, or ignorance, would have given like results from Calderon, The Cid, Lopez de Vega, and other like celebrities. For instance, had not Byron said,
"Orizaba looks on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea?"
and also told us,
"He that would Orizaba climb will find
Its loftiest peak most clothed with mist and snow."
And Scott tells of his experience here, in the well-known poem beginning
"I climbed the dark brow of the tall Orizaba;"
though its brow is whiter than a blonde Caucasian's; and Sheridan Knowles makes Tell say,
"Orizaba's crags, I'm with you once again."
Emerson's "Monadnock" and Lowell's "Katahdin" are misprints for this splendor of a mountain. Surely English poetry is full of this name. Strange that one never saw it before.
It is worthy of its fame, for in this hollow among the hills it puts on especial majesty. You are well up to its base. The distant ocean and sea - port view is exchanged for one near at hand. Though still sixty miles away, it seems to rise at your very feet. How superbly it lifts its shining cone into the shining heavens! Clouds had lingered about it on our way hither, touching now its top, now swinging round its sides. But here they are burned up, and only this pinnacle of ice shoots up fourteen thousand feet before your amazed, uplifted eyes. Mont Blanc, at Chamouni, has no such solitariness of position, nor rounded perfection, nor rich surroundings. Every thing conspires to give this the chief place among the hills of earth. None these eyes have seen equals or approaches it in every feature. It will yet win the crowd from Europe to its grander shrine.
It is not difficult of ascent, in this being inferior to Europe's Mont Blanc, if that be an inferiority which makes its summit and the view therefrom accessible to ordinary daring.
The three Mexican volcanoes have been often under foot, though not till Cortez came was this achievement known. His men, in the exuberance of their superiority, scaled the peaks near the city, and astonished the natives by their feat. They brought back sulphur from the crater for the manufacture of powder, thus bringing the fatal mountain in more deathly shape home to the poor Aztec.
A run of five miles brings us as far as we are allowed to travel by rail; and Fortin concludes the luxurious cushions of a first-class car, and transfers us to the hard seats of a diligéncia. Misfortin it might be phonographically called, for here exit ease and pleasure, enter peril and pain.
V.
ON THE STAGE.
Our Companions.—Vain Fear.—The Plunge.—Coffee Haciendas.—Peon Life.—Orizaba City.—The Mountain-lined Passway.—The Cumbres.—The Last Smile of Day and the Hot Lands.—Night and Useless Terror.—"Two-o'clock-in-the-morning Courage."—Organ Cactus.—Sunrise.—The Volcano.—Into Puebla and the Cars.—The three Snow-peaks together.—Epizaco.—Pulqui.—"There is Mexico!"
Behold us at Fortin, paying eleven dollars for our stage fare to Puebla, and three more, lacking a quarter, for three valises of moderate weight; eating a hasty plate of soup and nice cutlets, with fried slips of potatoes, washed down with Mexican coffee, which is usually first-rate; not so here. "Stage is ready!" jabbers in Spanish a brown boy. All boys are brown here.
Our seats are taken in a Concord coach made in Mexico, a big, tough, lumbering, easy affair when the roads are easy; when they are rough, it jolts and jumps as if the spirit of the paving-stones inspired it with their madness when they are whirled by a mob. But it is made to stand the jumping as well as the rocks that rock it, and tosses its human contents as unconcernedly as a juggler his balls. There are only five passengers, the first giving out of the dismal programme so faithfully served up to the affrighted appetite. These five men were the two Yankees, who, of course, had neither garlic nor tobacco about them, though one of them smoked all the time, but they were the best of cigars, and three Mexican gentlemen, on their travels to see the inauguration, one a son of a senator from Yucatan, and one an archæologist, and his friend, a light, German-looking gentleman, who had just been exploring the regions of Ixmail, which Stephens has so well described and illustrated. So the second terror disappears. The gentry chat freely with the Spanish-speaking Yankee, and all goes merry as the presidential reception the night before.
The road that was said to be so fearfully and wonderfully not made, is broad and smooth the first ten miles. It winds down a steep hill for two or three miles. The torrid January sun pours its heat fiercely on the coach. The driver and his boy are in their shirt-sleeves, and the passengers wish they were. The drivers have skin and hair-covered overpants for the coming Cumbres and midnight. Cottages line the roadside, half hidden amidst huge
A PEON'S HOUSE
banana and coffee bushes, tall mango-trees, and flowers of every hue. The cottages are chiefly of cane, with sides not over four feet, and roofs rising ten to twenty feet, some even taller, giving them much coolness and airiness, the great desiderata. Brown women are busy at their household tasks, and brown children lie, like beetles, lazily in the shade or sun. The parrot screams and jabbers, and picks its handsome coat of its unhandsome parasites, poised on perches at times, but not always put in cages. Nature is jammed full of life. Who dreams of the snow-fall of death that now covers all that north country, and makes the poor so poor, shivering over their scanty fires? Are these poor not the poorer? you will ask. I fear the answer will be in your favor. And yet that does not make one like the ice and snow and zero atmosphere any the more. Give these poor New England's religion, and they will be vastly her superior in climatic conditions.
GREAT BRIDGE OF MALTRATA.
We plunge down the steep road, a race of the horses' heels with the coach's wheels as to which shall touch bottom first. The heels touched bottom all the time, and of course reached the bottom of the hill ahead of the wheels, but only a length ahead. High along the side of this exceedingly steep hill creeps the railroad, making some of its most surprising feats of engineering as it winds and leaps across this. chasm. It becomes almost circular in its twists and turns.
The coffee haciendas line the roadside. The bush is usually small, not over six or eight feet high, and spreading out like a bar berry-bush. The berry is scattered over it, having a reddish tint, sometimes quite light. It is picked of this color, and ripened to its familiar brown by exposure on mats. You see it spread out in the door-yards, for this is its harvest-time. The sun is too hot for the coffee-tree, and so they plant bananas and other taller and thick-leaved trees among it to shade it from the direct rays. It wants heat, but not light.
The Mexican coffee is among the best in the world, the best Colima berry at the west coast selling as high as a dollar and a half a pound. It is prepared very strong, and then served up with two-thirds hot milk, if you are not acclimated. As you become so, the proportion of milk disappears, until it is well-nigh all coffee. But the coffee-house boys always bring two pots, one of coffee, one of hot milk, and pour at your pleasure. Here, too, one of Dr. Holmes's proofs of the millennium is satisfactorily settled:
"When what we pay for, that we drink,
From juice of grape to coffee-bean."
The juice of grape is still here a fabulous beverage. Logwood is too plenty, and grapes too few. But the coffee is coffee. As Thurlow Weed says he always eats sausage serenely in Cincinnati, because there hog is cheaper than dog, so here coffee is more plentiful than chiccory or peas, and one can feel assured that he tastes the real article. It will become more and more an article of export, and replace the Rio berry, to which it is far superior in flavor and softness, even if it does not rival the Java and the Mocha. Among the beverages that will drive out the gross intoxicants, lager and whisky, is this pleasant Mexican coffee.
Orizaba has such an entrance as gave our critical companion a right to justify his charge against the road. The stones that once paved it lie knocked about on the surface. Deep holes abound.
VIEW OF ORIZABA.
and the stage reels to and fro among the stones and pits like a very drunken man, and the passengers follow its example. A half mile of such a tumble and we strike the pavement, which is not much better. The whipped-up mules fly over its boulders, and we jump up and down like a small boy on a high-trotting horse. The street is long—very long it seems to us—the houses of one story, and of no especial beauty that we could see in our unseemly dancing.
At last, "after much turmoil," we fly ferociously up to a long high wall, pierced with long high windows, well protected with long high bars, a single story, and striped prettily in fancy colors. At the big portal we stop, with a jounce worse than all that preceded, and beggars of every degree welcome us to the Hotel Diligencias of Orizaba. How they whine and grin and show off their horrid rags and sores! What a commentary on Romanism! It breeds these human vermin as naturally as the blankets of its worshipers do the less noisome sort. The more "piety," the more poverty; the more of workless faith, the more of this idle work.
The pieces of our broken bodies are put together after a fashion, and we stretch our legs an hour about the town. A live mill keeps the town chattering, and gives it an unusual Mexican activity. But for that, only earthquakes, of which it has a goodly share, and the arrival of the stage-coach, would make it sensible of motion. The houses are all of one story, because of these earthquakes. A Southern gentleman told me that once, when here, a wave came, and he rushed into the court, and clung to a post for protection, while the ground rocked like a sea. He never was so frightened in his life. Well it may cause fear, for the still and solid earth is about all the basis most people have for faith or any thing else.
The church here has a picture on its façade of a priest stopping with his hands a pillar half fallen, and a motto, which was too far up for my dim eyes to read, that probably told how he had by prayer prevented the falling of that church. Mr. Tyndall will have to come down and correct these errors of faith, for as Pope, modified, says (one might prove thus that he also knew of the great volcano near),
"If Orizaba totter from on high,
Shall gravitation cease if you go by?"
Why not? Here a church seems to have been upheld. If not churches, souls certainly have. The overfaith of Romanism is no worse than the underfaith of Tyndallism. Between the extremes lies the middle path of truth and safety.
A ravine goes through the town, luscious with tropical foliage and fruit. Above it hangs the chattering mill, which on its edge catches its water and busily makes the native wheat into flour. It was the first factory I had seen in Mexico, and therefore doubly interesting. Twenty-five dollars for a barrel of flour should generate more grist-mills and wheat-fields, if protection is the true policy. The narrow lanes run through banana gardens to the open fields, and grand black mountains rise close around, while the huge peak that gives the town its name towers, white and smiling in that golden midday, far above the clouds.
RIVER AT ORIZABA.
Orizaba is the favorite resort of the gentry of Mexico. Being on the railroad, it has outstripped its rivals, Jalapa and Cuernavaca, and bids fair to be the winter home of the big city. Some of the finest estates in the world are perched on its hills and hidden in its hollows. They enjoy the perpetual luxury of every tropical product, with the pyramid of ice ever cooling the fancy, if not the air. It will be the favorite resort as well of wanderers from the United States of the North.
The cars here begin to really climb the Cumbres; four thousand feet they accomplish in less than thirty miles. It is holding on by the eyelids.
"The boldest held their breath
For a time."
As they go, step by step, up the sides of these gorges, which "open their ponderous and marble jaws" to swallow up that smoking, puffing insect which crawls like a beetle, its rings each separate car, along the almost precipitous sides of the huge barrancas, a hand thrust out on one side would touch the mountain, on the other stretch out over thousands of feet of empty space between it and the rocks below. The road is the finest bit of engineering on this, if not on any, continent.
The stage-road twenty miles from Orizaba is the grandest I have ever traveled. It is smooth and pleasant of itself. The crazy Mexican ponies that it took so long to start are off, at last, with a leap and a whirl, and the one-storied, if not one-horse, town is left behind. The way is nearly straight, very level, and lined on each side, at the distance of a mile or two, with a succession of cliffs. They stand out of the valley as sharp as if lifted up in frame-work by human hands. Their origin is clearly volcanic. The sharp cut, the iron-like look, the wave shape, the striated lines, like the lava of Vesuvius, all prove their origin. They are two to four thousand feet high, I should say, on a passing glance. The valley between is rich in every fruit and flower and shrub. Here is a river gliding along, fringed with heavy willows, larger and compacter of leaf than their temperate-zone brother, but of the same bending and hugging nature. No English river bank was ever more lovely in adornment, or more hidden from the passing eye. The hills are mostly rock, without the possibility of culture, but on some of them grasses and trees have sprung up, and goats and sheep find pasturage and shelter.
The pass is without parallel in any spot of Europe or America for its symmetry and grandeur. Interlachen has taller mountains, but not so perfect a valley. For a score of miles you never leave these mountain walls. Like the sphinx-lined pathway to Theban temples, they seem to guard the road to the distant capital. They end fittingly in true Spanish and Mexican grandeur, which is stately from beginning to end.
The Cumbres are their stopping-place. These, too, had been a part of the sup of horrors forced down the resisting will by those who would compel it to abandon its purpose.
We enter upon a still more romantic experience. The path winds up, back and forward, so frequently as almost to make it look from beneath like a series of parallel lines. This wall concludes the valley as completely as if it had been built by nature as a dam across its green river. There is a perfect pause. No way out of the valley in this direction but up this wall. It is not of rock, but of hard "earth burned in this ceaseless sun, and supporting a little herbage and a few trees. They also conclude the Tierras Calientes, or Hot Lands, of the shore and its first wide terrace.
The valley itself terminates exquisitely. It lies, a basin of green, between the hills, a mile or two wide, the most of it under culture, and cut into tiny strips of varied tint, brown, green, golden, according to its products. A bit of a village, with a small, dingy white church, is on its southern edge. As we climb the steep face of the mountain this smiling parterre lies lovely below. It looks not unlike the meadows of Northampton from the top of Holyoke, only our height is twice or thrice as great, and its breadth is not a fourth as large. The setting sun looks lovingly on this bit of rescued nature among the black and bare hills, and as we wind our way up, every new ascent makes it look the lovelier, as it grows the more diminutive. It is a baby landscape, and all the more charming for its infantile littleness.
The sun goes down as we go up, and by the time the top is reached, the baby, in its cradle of lofty hills, has gone into shadow and approaching sleep. A light twinkles from a window far down there, like the smile of the eye before it closes in sleep, and the mountain valley of Orizaba, with its petite perfection of a termination, disappears from our view, perhaps forever; for the stagecoach gives way to the rail-coach, and leaves this grand defile on a side-track. Its path is on the northern side of these hills, through a like but not more lovely valley.
This summit properly concludes the Tierras Calientes. They are of two classes. The low flat belt which lies along the sea, and which extends back some fifty miles to the base of the mountains, and the first terrace of the hills. This terrace is about three thousand feet above the sea. It seems to engirt the whole Mexican range. It extends from Monterey to Oaxaca. Pronounce this "Whahaca," and you will find it easier to handle than it looks. On this shelf, not quite half-way up to the level of the capital, is found the most fruitful section of the country. Here are perched along the eastern side of the country such towns as Monterey, Jalapa, Cordova, Orizaba, Cuernavaca, and Oaxaca. This is the best region for the production of the banana, orange, coffee, sugar, and other semi-tropical fruits. The cocoa, pine-apple, rubber-tree, and other more tropical products belong to the plains by the sea.
This terrace, too, contains the favorite gardens of the land. Its cities have been the winter retreats of the rich men of the capital ever since the country was occupied by the Europeans. Jalapa lies the lowest, being sixty miles north-west of Vera Cruz. It is said to possess the finest view of gulf and mountain of any city. It was on the high-road to the capital before the railroad took a more southern route. Cortez passed up its pass, and Scott followed. To-day it is on a side-track. Its jalap, pronounced as it is spelled, brings grief to those children whose doctors adhere to the old practice. Should you adopt its Spanish pronunciation of halapa, you would avoid that disagreeable reminder.
Cordova and Orizaba are on the same side-hill, and are to-day the favorite resort of the Mexican gentry, the latter especially. Here, too, are the repair shops of the railroad, so that quite an English-speaking population is growing up about this spot. Cuernavaca, to the south, is on the same rich belt, and was the chosen seat of Cortez. We are yet four thousand feet from the top level of the land, though the crawl of an hour or two up the face of this dam has lessened that altitude.
Our mules have rested while this lesson on topography was being given, but they must now hurry forward, for night and danger are on us. Give your last glance into that deep south valley, that mountain-lined passway, that last of the villages of the Hot Lands.
A group of horsemen passed us when we were half-way up, red-jacketed, broad-and-slouched-hatted, well armed, dark, and dangerous looking. Were they spying out the contents of the coach? We easily change them into robbers; not so easily, however, as they may change themselves into that shape. Night comes swiftly down. One realizes the rapidity of the flight of Apollo in Homer—he came like night—in these tropical countries. Our three Mexicans are left at Orizaba, and their places are taken by a revolutionist general, with his carbine, and a Frenchwoman who had been hostess at a hotel most frequented by robbers on the pass from Puebla to Mexico, between Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl—not very encouraging comrades for weak nerves. Our first station is a great robber haunt. The Red Bridge it is called—whether from paint or blood, who knows? Fear says blood; fact, probably, paint.
The lady offers me a cigarette, which is graciously declined. She is offered in return a rich Cordova orange, hanging on its stem and among its green leaves. This is even more graciously accepted. But extremes meet. The next morning the orange was found knocking about the coach. So both the cigarette and Cordova failed of reaching the lips to which they were proffered. She lighted, and smoked, and expectorated as perfectly as the rebel general before her, and showed she was all ready to lead a revolution or vote for Lerdo, as circumstances and pesos might offer. The latter is the stronger circumstance here, as everywhere. Dollars outweigh scruples, whether of conscience or of the apothecary.
The unsuccessful revolutionist said the people were getting sick of Lerdo. He did nothing. They wanted railroads and emigration; he opposed both. He was Spanish, and not American. When some one told Diaz, the rival candidate, that he would be the next President, "No," said he, "there will never be another President. By that time I shall be an American citizen." This is, much of it, the talk of the outs against the ins—mere bosh—Diaz probably being as little of an American as Lerdo after he gets elected. Yet some say that railroad enterprises will receive a check, and that the new President will install himself with the Church and reactionary and anti-American party. I doubt it. He is too wise. If so, the revolution is only the surer, swifter, and completer. I believe he will verify his antecedents, and lead the country in liberty, education, and improvement.
Our general debarks at the next station, and leaves the stage to three of us. Each takes a seat and stretches out ad libitum. Dust piles in on us as a covering, and, through the mouth, covering the inside as well as outside of the body. The moon shines clearly. "Tres jolie pour le voyageur" says the French lady. (Very pleasant for the traveler.) Indeed it is. The hills stand out clearly. The cactus hugs the dusty road, as thick-set as an English hedge or New England bramble-bushes on a country roadside. Its tall leaves tower like huge crowns, and show not so much the richness of the soil as the intensity of the heat. The organ variety is quite frequent, and looks, as it lines the road in the gray moonlight, as if we were riding through Springfield Arsenal. This does not make the terror less, unless we change the feeling, and fancy our road is through a vast organ. That changes the night to music, though we can not quite complete the quotation, and say,
"The cares infesting the day
Have folded their tents like Arabs,
And silently stole away."
Cares, or fears, which are the soul of cares, still encamp about. A few shots from the sun will scatter them all. Here we are, six or seven thousand feet above the sea, and here flourish the huge-leaved plants that only hot-houses can raise in the upper States, and they at their best in but a puny shape. Crosses at the road-side show where some have been murdered, and help along our fears and faith with their memento mori.
THE ORGAN CACTUS.
The moon goes down as we drive at ten o'clock through the still streets of Saint Augustine, as still as when we leave them three hours later. Not a person or creature is abroad. The adobe huts are all closed, and every donkey ceases to bray and every dog to bark. The court-yard welcomes us, and a supper, not over-relished or over-relishable, and a bed, exceedingly relished. Out in that court-yard the tropical plants are diffusing their fragrance on the dark, soft, summer January air, as we hie us to our wished-for couch.
Three hours, and we are roused up, and are soon off. The mule-boy, well clad now against the cold, waves his flambeau, and the coach rattles out of the sleeping town.
The host has loaned us blankets and pillows, and we make our beds on the racking seats. The roads are bad here, and no mistake; at least they seem so in that two of the clock in the morning. Napoleon said that two-of-the-clock-in-the-morning courage was the most difficult to find. I agree with him. For the first time since starting I began to wish I had not come. The coach was cold, and knocked us about; the road was rough; the flambeau burned out; and aches and chills, and sleepiness without sleep, and perils by robbers, all made a mixture that required more than that sort of courage to face.
But we were in for it, and there was no retreat. Like Cortez, when climbing this same range, we had burned our boats behind us. Nulla vestigia retrorsum. So on we drag our slow length. The mules seem terribly lazy. We are sure that the mule-boy does not stone the head ones enough, nor the driver lash the rear ones. I had enjoyed (I fear I must confess it), when sitting on the top in the afternoon, seeing the boy shy stones at the three front mules. There are three tiers of mules—two in the hills, three before them, and three in front. The three leaders can not be reached by the driver's lash, and so the boy who accompanies him picks up a bag of stones, and lets them drive, one at a time, hitting the creature every time, and just where he aims—flank, neck, or ear. They did not seem to mind it much, cringing a little, and picking up a little, but not much of either.
The robbers do not make their appearance, the only disappointment we suffer. The weary hours drag along from two to five, when
"Night's candles are burned out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-top."
How great the change that comes over the tired half-sleepers! My companion had fulfilled one Scripture, and I, having compelled him to go with me to Orizaba, went twice the distance of his own accord. He wakes and chatters. Madame the cigarettist rouses and rises. As a fond lover said on a fonder occasion, "Up rose the sun, and up rose Emily," so is it here. Popocatepetl puts in his appearance and Iztaccihuatl. (I want you to learn to pronounce these, so I keep inserting them. Do not skip them; they are very easy when you get the hang of them. Take them just as they look, and look at them that you may take them, remembering that "hu" is like "wh.") How quiet and grand they look in their glittering whiteness; the former a rounded dome of the Orizaba type, the latter a range of peaks, with less form and comeliness. "Our Emily" lights her cigarette, and smokes as calmly as the smoking mountains, which do not smoke. I have seen no sign of a volcano in any of them. She is from near Strasbourg; and when she was told she was no longer French, but German, "No, no!" she exclaimed; Français toujours! L'Allemand barbare" But she was not French forever, and if Germany is barbarous, it succeeds.
The Indian village of Tepeaca is soon entered. A town when Cortez landed, and all Indian to-day, as is about all the rest of the country, it was a favorite place for him to retreat upon, and had no small influence in deciding his fortunes. It looks to-day as if it never could have influenced the fortune of the lowest nature, much less that of this lordly invader.
Soon the flame-shots come. The sun breaks suddenly and superbly on the black and weary night. Never before did I so feel the power of that other verse sung at the grave's mouth, the beginning of the night of death,
"Break from thy throne, illustrious Morn!"
What a shout will ring through the universe when that day triumphs forever over that long, long night of dusty death!
A cup of chocolate and a fresh roll, served by Indian dames, and we rattle down hill twenty-five to thirty miles, to Puebla. The fields open wide to the bases of the P. and I. aforesaid. You can pronounce them if they are not printed in full. Corn-stalks are standing in the fields, and in some instances the corn is being gathered. Melinchi, a high mountain anywhere but here, rises on our right, opposite the snow volcanoes. It is named for the favorite Indian mistress of Cortez, who, more than all other persons, helped him to conquer. It is the haunt of robbers, and its caves are dens of thieves.
We stop only once to change horses and to buy some pretty steel trinkets, pushed into our faces by boys and men, who seem to find the only patronage for quite extensive steel works in these passing travelers. They offer little flat-irons, spurs, cuff-buttons, and other well-executed articles of embossed steel.
The towers of Puebla soon come to view, and a long, wide, dusty thoroughfare, poorly kept up, leads us to the vale where the sacred city lies, seemingly close at the base of Iztaccihuatl, but actually sixty miles from it. We pass the fort over which French and Mexicans fought, by churches and churches and churches, into narrow, busy, well-paved streets, to our hotel court-yard, whence, after the immeasurable dust has been measurably removed, we go to the depot and start for Mexico. As we shall return here again, we leave it for the present undescribed.
If you want to know that luxury of modern civilization, the rail-car, put between the beginning and ending of your journey a twenty-two hours' stretch of staging in a mountain land. Then you will relish it. How vast these plains outspread themselves! What a change from the narrow terrace of the coast and the tumbled-up steepness of the intermediate country! We climbed seven to eight thousand feet from the base of Chiquihuite to Tepeaca, a distance of not over one hundred and fifty miles. It was all Cumbres. Here we have prairies as fiat and broad as those of Illinois, but not as rich; yet, unlike them, bounded with magnificent hills, snow-covered and smoking, and black and comely. What would not Chicago give for just one of them? The road runs about a hundred miles through a dry, and lean, and level land.
At Epizaco, the halting-place and half-way house between Mexico and Puebla, we get a glimpse of the three snow peaks, the only place where I have seen them together. Orizaba lies low; his stony British stare being seen just above the horizon, while his upland rivals stand out in all their proportions. He is lower, not because of actual inferiority, but because he is farther down this orange of earth. They are all of nearly equal height.
Here, too, we get not only our last look at Orizaba, but our first at a filthy habit of man. Old folks and children thrust into your noses, and would fain into your mouths, the villainous drink of the country—pulqui. It is the people's chief beverage. It tastes like sour and bad-smelling buttermilk, is white like that, but thin. They crowd around the cars with it, selling a pint measure for three cents. I tasted it, and was satisfied. It is only not so villainous a drink as lager, and London porter, and Bavarian beer, and French vinegar-wine, and Albany ale. It is hard to tell which of these is "stinkingest of the stinking kind."
How abominable are the tastes which an appetite for strong drink creates! The nastiest things human beings take into their mouths are their favorite intoxicants. If administered as medicines, they would never taste them, except under maternal and uxorial constraint. And yet the guzzlers of England, Germany, America, and Mexico pour down huge draughts of sour or bitter stuff, all for the drunk feeling that follows.
The pulqui is a white liquor found in the maguey, a species of the cactus. It grows eight years uselessly as a drink. That year it becomes yet more useless by depositing in its centre a bowl of this juice. If picked then, all right, or all wrong, rather. Just as this central bulb is beginning to swell with its coming juices, it is scooped out, and a hole big enough to hold a pail is made in the bottom of the middle of the plant. Into this cavity for three or four months the juice exudes, and is taken out by the pailful daily. If the plant is left alone, this bulb shoots into a stalk ten to twelve feet high, with a blossom. It is this blossom which is exhibited in our States as the century-plant a seven to ten years', and not a hundred years', blossom. Then it comes to seed and naught.
The chief traffic of the road is in carrying this stuff to Puebla and Mexico. It lies at the station in pig-skins and barrels, the pigs looking more hoggish than ever, as they lie on their backs and are tied at each leg and at the nose, stuffed full of this foolish stuff. It ferments fiercely, and the barrels are left uncorked and the pigs' noses unmuzzled to prevent explosion. You will see the natives sticking their noses into the hog's nose, and drinking the milk of this swinish cocoa-nut, even as they are clumping it on the platform. Never was like to like more strikingly exhibited than in such a union of hogs and men.
MAGUEY PLANT.
Thousands of acres are set out with the plant, a few feet apart, in every state of growth, from a month to its octave of years, when it sees its corruption, and the people begin theirs.
So have I seen, as Jeremy Taylor would say, the Connecticut Valley filled, from Hartford to Brattleborough, with a like large and deep green shrub, growing each by itself, putting forth broad leaves, not for the bowl of juice at its heart, but for the leaves themselves, which are not for food or drink, but for smoke. Shall the deacons and class-leaders and vestrymen of the only New England river valley find fault with these untrained and unchristianized Indians for making their soil to bring forth only one article, when they are in the same condemnation?
And worse—for this maguey plant is useful for many things, though it has one failing: the tobacco-plant is useful for nothing. They use its leaves for all sorts of purposes: twine and paper, even needle and thread, roof and shelter. It is the good demon of the Aztec house. Though it does get drunk once in eight years, it is sober all the rest of the time. Our maguey is nothing if not narcotizing. True Christianity will, we trust, cure that defect, and make Mexico and New England and the West, in its abuse of barley and rye, alike free from the perversion of the gifts of God to our own unrighteousness.
The train sweeps round the mountain range of P. and I., and we come to their western side. Puebla is on the east of them. The sun pours a flood of glory over yet more western summits. Our friend quietly says, "There is Mexico."
It does not take long to look and admire. It lies under the blaze, a dim mass of points of fire. Its surroundings overcome us with their grandeur. Twelve miles away, where he spoke that word, is the eastern extremity of the lake on whose western end the city is situated. The brown spurs of Iztaccihuatl lie close to the edge of the lake. The land about it is almost on a level with it; salt marshes, in which the white alkali makes them look like snow. All round the farther sides of the lake black mountains stand. Other lakes lie hidden from our eyes about their bases. The water flashes in the setting sun.
Up these lowest spurs close beside us Cortez climbed and saw the wondrous valley and its waters, prairies, hills, purple and snow mountains, and resplendent city, and he vowed that it should be subdued to the Cross. With fearful expenditure of blood he accomplished his purpose, and gave it a bloody cross, instead of bloody sacrifice of human life. Looking from a like point out of this car window, the product itself of true Christianity, may we not imitate Cortez, and pledge the city that lieth like the very mount of God, in magnificence unequaled by any capital of earth, and all the surrounding region, not to a persecuting and debilitating Christianity, but to one that comes without a sword, comes with an open Bible, a joyful experience, a holy life, education, comfort, refinement for all, the true Cross and Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, who created this scene and its inhabitants for His own praise and glory? May they soon all glorify Him!
Soon Otumba appears, where Cortez fought his greatest fight, without a gun, or pistol, or horse, reduced with a score of reckless followers to the level of his foes. As he debouched through yonder western hills on this broad plain, after the Noche Triste, he met here hundreds of thousands of the Aztecs in solid rank. Cutting his way through till his arm and sword failed, seeing the palanquin of the chief, rushing for it, and striking him dead, he sends a panic into the multitude, who let him through to these lower spurs round which we have just run, on whose farther side, looking toward Puebla, or Cholula then, dwelt his faithful allies, the Tlascalans, who received him, and helped him organize a victory that has continued until now.
Not far from Otumba stand forth two pyramids of earth, like those of Cholula, called the Sun and Moon, each several hundred feet square and high, on a geometric line with each other as perfect as a Hoosac Tunnel engineer could have carved them, each now surmounted with a tiny chapel, emblem of their conversion to the Roman faith. They are the only Aztec remains of mark in all the valley; and they are probably Toltec, an ante-Aztec race, to which that warlike people were indebted for all their arts and refinements, perhaps also for their horrid barbarities of worship.
Guadalupe now appears on the right, a sierra not three miles from the city, the most sacred mountain of Mexico or America, and the most profane. A via sacra ran from it to the town, on which the penitent myriads walked upon their knees. Now our train rushes along it, regardless of shrines and kneelers and other vanities of faith. The worshipers have accepted the situation, and ride to and from the favorite seat of their goddess in the railway car, even as pilgrimages are now going on over Europe in first and third class trains. The times change, and we change with them.
The city glitters in the light of the setting sun. Its last beams are gathering on the peaks of the silent Alps that stand forth on our eastern sky, as they had stood on the western when at Puebla. We have run clear round them. They change their light to color, grow rosy in that flush sent from between the saws of Ajusco on the west, and then turn to the awful white of death.
Ere that the Hotel Gillow has welcomed us to its comfortable chambers, and we are housed like Cortez in the Aztec capital.