CHAPTER XXII

FLORA AND FAUNA 368

INDEX 387

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A MAYAN INDIAN _Frontispiece_

UNLOADING BANANAS _facing page_ 20

RURALES (MOUNTED POLICE) AT VERA CRUZ " " 20

EL CASTILLO, CHICHEN ITZA " " 84

THE CARACOL, CHICHEN ITZA " " 100

THE TENNIS COURT, CHICHEN ITZA " " 100

THE NUNNERY, CHICHEN ITZA " " 120

EL MECO, EAST COAST OF YUCATAN " " 144

ARCHED GATEWAY, LABNA " " 196

THE PALACE, SAYIL " " 196

THE PALACE, UXMAL " " 202

BAS-RELIEFS ON ALTAR AT COPAN _on page_ 209

FRIEZE, PIEDRAS NEGRAS _facing page_ 212

STELA AT COPAN " " 212

ELLIPTICAL TABLET IN STUCCO AT PALENQUE _on page_ 217

BAS-RELIEF OF PRIEST'S FIGURE, PALENQUE " " 220

BAS-RELIEF OF PRIEST'S FIGURE, PALENQUE " " 221

CARVING OF JAGUAR _facing page_ 240

COLOSSAL HEAD DISCOVERED BY AUTHORS AT

CANCUN " " 240

MAYAN ARCH _on page_ 264

THE NUNNERY, UXMAL (illustrating elaboration

of Mayan ornamentation) _facing page_ 268

STELAE AT COPAN " " 284

DAY SIGNS (HIEROGLYPHICS) _on pages_ 304-307

MONTH SIGNS ( " ) " " 307-310

YEAR AND CYCLE SIGNS (HIEROGLYPHICS) _on page_ 311

FAÇADE OF BUILDING AT KABAH _facing page_ 318

TYPES OF MAYAN WOMEN AND MEN " " 334

HACIENDA CHILDREN " " 356

INDEPENDENT INDIANS " " 356

HENEQUEN FIBRE IN DRYING-GROUND " " 366

THE FIBRE MILL " " 366

MAP AND PLANS

PLAN OF CANCUN RUINS _on page_ 151

PLAN OF FIRST GROUP OF RUINS, COZUMEL " " 179

PLAN OF SECOND GROUP OF RUINS, COZUMEL " " 181

GROUND PLAN OF PALACE, PALENQUE " " 215

MAP OF YUCATAN _facing page_ 386

THE AMERICAN EGYPT

CHAPTER I

A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF MEXICO

Most of us want to do what we are not doing. In the majority of human

hearts, deep down, is an intangible tormenting wish to go somewhere, to

see some land, to do something which is not in the programme drawn up

for us by the inexorable fate of birth and circumstance. Usually the

longing is crushed out by the juggernaut wheels of life's ponderous Car

of Necessity, which drives us all forward towards the Unknown in a set

groove from which the most desperate efforts never extricate us. We long

for the North Pole, we sigh for a trip to the Antarctic regions, we

dream of scaling the Mountains of the Moon, with the unreasoning longing

of children. We feel we shan't be happy till we get there, and ... we

are never happy. We go on longing and ... living in Brixton. Most of us

have not left Brixton; most of us never will.

We--the authors of this book--were not living in Brixton, but in quite

as commonplace a suburb when the torments of unfulfilled aspiration

seized us and shook us, as a terrier might a rat. The demon of

discontent shouted at us, grinned at us, sneered at us. "You hate this

suburb: clear out, go away!" it said. "Throw up your work and duty.

Burst through the fetters of the commonplace!" Well, we couldn't stand

it. We bore it for some weeks, and then "one midnight in the silence of

the sleeptime" we knocked the ashes out of our pipes, as we sat

mournfully facing each other over our suburban hearth, and from the

fullness of our tormented hearts we cried aloud, "We will go to

Yucatan!"

But our "leaving Brixton" was not suspicious enough in its suddenness to

alarm the tradesmen. Yucatan, that curiously unknown peninsula,

easternmost portion of the Republic of Mexico, which by reason of its

wondrous ruined cities has earned the title of "the Egypt of the New

World," had long been a dream of ours. We had put in years of study of

the very few and scarce books describing some of those ruins, and hard

work on the literature of the problems of Central American civilisation,

before we had the satisfaction of "leaving Brixton."

But everything comes to him who knows how to wait, and at last, in

pursuance of our resolution to shake the dust of the commonplace off our

feet, for a time at least, we found ourselves on a very dingy November

afternoon with two unwieldy packing-cases full of guns and saddlery, and

innumerable portmanteaux, standing on the Prince's Landing-stage,

Liverpool, staring out seaward into the dank mist where an old salt

declared our liner to lie. It was obvious he did not, for in a few

minutes a dropsical tug--it was almost as broad as it was long--fumed up

to the pierside and, hoisting the company's flag, invited us to go with

it trustingly into that mist from which we were destined to pass--though

that looked an impossibility--into the dazzling glories of the Eternal

Carib summer. Having posted our last wills and testaments and dying

wishes to our friends in seventeen envelopes, and given one more

pathetic glance at the sombre grey glories of the Liverpudlian capital

which stood out drear and grim behind us in the fading light, we

surrendered to the captain of the tug, in company with other

apprehensive-looking voyagers.

If you have never taken a long sea-voyage, and the etceteras and

discomforts of many months' travel in a land (the language of whose

inhabitants you have been for weeks trying to grapple with in

unintelligible grammars) loom awesome in your mind, there is something

positively terrifying in standing on the deck of a tender (as all

well-conducted liner-tugs insist on being called) on a damp, dark autumn

afternoon. Its grimy decks and its reek of oil offend you. Its chilly

bareness, its inhospitable, straight-backed wooden seats, the gaunt

nakedness of its wallowing outline, conjure up to your overwrought mind

vague comparisons with the bare, whitewashed execution-shed of which you

have read in the Yellow Press. You feel you are in a Nautical

Executionshed. You stand there shivering. You look back at the fast

fading friendly wooden joists of the landing-stage. You wish you had

never come. You feel as you do when you get into the dentist's room,

having earlier in the day telegraphed to him that you must have the

offending tooth out with gas. You see the deadly chair and the cylinder

of nitrous oxide and you feel that perhaps after all you could have

borne the toothache. Supposing (you shudder at the thought) something

went wrong and you never, never woke up. "There! Now please open your

mouth wide and breathe deeply." Oh no! Beg pardon! "Mind your toes

there, sir, please," from an energetic officer in gold-laced coat, as

the gangway flashes out from the steamship's black side like a snake's

tongue. A grinding, squeaking noise as the dropsical tug affectionately

rubs itself against the fenders which hang on the liner's side--a mad,

foaming maelstrom of grey sea-water, whitened as the screw reverses--a

Babel of orders and counter-orders, and--you are swallowed up into the

floating town; you are on board. You look wildly round: nothing will

save you now. The grim pilot in beaver cap stands on the bridge,

significant official, to see that no hitch occurs in the execution; the

steam whistle sounds mournful through the mist fast settling into fog;

the great engines, which are to work unceasingly for seventeen days and

nights, break out into a long moaning, groaning, thumping, as they start

upon their Sisyphean task, and ... you are off.

Nothing is ever as one expects it. We expected the Atlantic to be at

least riotously playful in November. We expected our boat (she was only

4,000 tons) to be tossed, as you flip an empty nutshell, by one great

bullying roller to another, in their titanic play. Not a bit of it. We

steamed down the Mersey, out into the Irish Channel, and though the good

ship _Floridian_ rolled (Jerusalem! we had to keep our eyes on the

children, for the deck was at 45° nearly all day: it was "All hands to

the kids!" to stop them slipping overboard), we eat and we drank and the

chill air off the Irish coast became balmy, and the mists broke and we

raised our caps to My Lord the Sun, whom we had not seen since the

summer; and, before we knew where we were, deck-chairs were out and

overcoats were off, and officers in white-drill uniforms paced a bridge

shaded by snowy awnings, and we leaned back and smoked dreamily in the

sunshine and rejoiced that we had "left Brixton."

Some nineteen days later we had just serenely entered on the second

course of our admirable daily breakfast when a friendly officer's face

appeared at the companion and uttered the monosyllable "land." It's a

stupid-enough-looking word when it gets itself written, but it can mean

a lot when for nearly three weeks you have not seen anything of it worth

talking about. We had become such sea-dogs; we had grown so used to our

daily prospect of dancing blue wavelets, of the sunbathed infinite

waters, darkling from sapphire to slaty grey at the horizon--our

horizon; we had sat so many nights contented under the awnings in the

moonlight, the exquisite tropic calm of the sea-night broken only by the

periodic music of the ship's bell with its haunting recitative "All's

well!" from the look-out man; lulled by the magic of the eternal Carib

summer, we had all so learnt in this rare fortnight the wisdom of the

lotus-eaters, eating the honey-sweet fruit of the tropic with never one

wish to go homeward, that it came as something approaching a shock to

us, that word "land." Why, we thought it was as extinct as the dodo!

Time and space seemed to have melted for us into a world of infinite

blues and golds and whites, a world peopled by merry porpoises, by

silver-bright flying-fish, and snowy sea-birds. Knives and forks

clattered down on to plates and an eager throng of those "whose island

home was far beyond the seas" dashed for the companion stairs. We rushed

on deck with something of the eagerness the great Christopher must have

felt as he hurried to his galleon-poop when the Spanish sailors saw from

the mast-head, as in a glass dimly, what they took to be the coast of a

New World.

There was not much to see. But stay! What is that which floats,

magically suspended, cloudlike, before the glass? You rub your eyes: you

dust the glass: you look again. Yes! right up in the sky there, as far

above the dark line of shore as the puffy white cloud-spots which dot

the boundless azure, is a triangle of rose-tinted white; and as you

stare the wonder of it all grips you. You see the sun glinting

dazzlingly on its eternal snows; you see the great rents and crevasses

seaming its sides; you see where the cloud-bank blots out and shrouds

its vast shoulders and flanks. It is Orizaba, mighty Orizaba, raising

its majestic head four miles into the infinite blue.

In the enthusiasm of the moment we all agreed, even those of us who had

suffered from the voyage (and they were few) that it was worth coming

six thousand miles to see such a sight; and we were all the better

pleased with ourselves and our luck because our good skipper, who had

sailed to Vera Cruz off and on for a quarter of a century, declared it

was only once in ten times that the great volcano condescended to expose

its marvellous beauties so well.

Vera Cruz is a town in travail. Its labour pains have seized it.

Accoucheur Sir Weetman Pearson at the bedside is assisting at the

delivery of a marinopolis--a City of the Sea. Majestic buildings are

breaking out amid squalid Spanish stuccoed houses, with frowsy

passage-ways and garbage-strewn courtyards, dating from Maximilian's day

and earlier. Quays and wharves, lighthouses and customs offices, plazas

and docks, broad asphalted roadways and stone houses, are rearing

themselves where once, ere Sir Weetman's stalwart navvy-elves did their

fairy work, were naught but pestilential marshes, spawning-ground for

the "Yellow Jack" mosquito, tiny fever scourge-bearer to the

panic-stricken inhabitants. As we steamed inside the great stone

breakwater built of cyclopean masonry, Vera Cruz's first line of defence

from the inroads of the deep, the impression one gets is that of the

incongruity of it all. The new Customs House and Oficina de Correos

(Post Office), palatial piles, stand out seaward on the plain, far away

from the green-shuttered, down-at-heel, ramshackle hovel-town, as if

ashamed of it all. What you do feel is that when the confinement is

satisfactorily completed, Vera Cruz will be a great city. To-day she is

still building-enterprise plus a plaza. Every Spanish-American town is a

town with a plaza: Vera Cruz is a plaza with a town. We will get there

in a minute, but meantime there are ropes being thrown from our liner to

the quaint yellow-faced Mexicans on the quay; the indicator-bell rings

from the bridge, the needle flies round to the magic word "Stop," and

the huge steel muscles of the great panting, tired engines are at rest

at last. It is a glorious day. The coast mists have melted away, and the

whites of the distant houses, the dark greens of the palm trees, the

flags of all nations fluttering on the shipping, make a vivid contrast

in the blaze of sun with their distant background of lofty sand-dunes

rolling westward in a horizon of glistening white towards Mexico City.

The quay at Vera Cruz is a kaleidoscope of international trade-life: a

spectacle unexampled in its way. Great steamships--their hatches burst

open--continuously belch out their many cargoes upon the wooden piers.

The clouds of dust, the reeking smell of toiling men, the screaming of

the steam whistles, the grinding and creaking of the winches, the cries

of the workers, the short, sharp words of command, the hoarse shouts in

a score of languages, and the jangling crash of iron rails or girders or

iron sheeting as each fresh load breaks from the winch on to the

heaped-up mass below, make up a veritable trade-hell. Niggers from

Jamaica and the States, the purple veins standing out like weals upon

their foreheads, strain and grunt under huge bales; Koreans, red-tinted,

flat-faced; Chinamen, their blue wide trousers tucked up to their knees;

Spaniards and Mexicans; Italians and Greeks; the dapper Japs, their

lithe bodies and small faces contrasting with Viking workmen from Sweden

and Norway; Creole lads with raven-hued curly hair and sunkissed faces,

their black velvet eyes alight with the lust of the south;

high-cheekboned, smooth-chinned Aztec Indians, ragged-garbed; sailors of

all races, blue-bloused, guernseyed, naked-chested, cheeks and necks

that golden bronze for which wind and sea are the only cosmetics, jostle

and push, laugh and curse, sweat and pant in their effort to live.

* * * * *

Nowhere can one see the inwardness of the harsh struggle for life better

than on Vera Cruz quay. Derelicts, wastrels, beachcombers, sinners and

sinned against, bloodshot-eyed drunkards and leaden-grey opium smokers

and eaters, strong and weak, healthful and sickly, men with faces of

vicious angels, men with faces of devils let loose from Hell, they have

come from the uttermost corners of the earth, these groaning, sweating,

reeking human beings, to fight in blistering sun and pestilential dust

for the right to live. Long, ordered lines of porters wheel their laden

trucks to the bonding sheds; long lines of porters wheel their empty

trucks, like passing trains, back to the gaping hatches of the giant

ships. Under great umbrellas of scarlet, yellow or green cottons,

jutting up like gigantic vari-coloured toadstools, sit portly Mexican

dames, coarse of face, ponderous in bosoms and stomachs, the

trestle-trays at their sides loaded with fulsome heaps of fly-marked

fruits, with sickly terrors of sugar and pastry (euphemistically known

as _pan dulce_, "sweet bread"), and sweetmeats of such unholy colours

that they look as if they had been dipped in the devil's own dye-pot.

There are no cabs in Vera Cruz. If there were it would make no real

difference to the unhappy traveller, for there is no roadway to the

quays' sides, and baggage is shouldered by one of the innumerable

rascally-faced Mexican touts or trundled in huge railway barrows down

the piers and jolted over execrable roads towards the barn-like

structure which does duty as terminus for the Central Mexican Railroad,

one of the most wonderful lines ever laid. A few hours in Vera Cruz is

enough to set the weary Briton humming perpetually the air of "Pay, pay,

pay." Everything in Mexico is a question of money, and everybody has his

or her price. It is often a large one, and a trade union of robbers has

decreed that you must pay a dollar (two shillings) a package to have

your baggage conveyed from quay to station, a distance of a quarter of a

mile. It does not matter how many or how few are your impedimenta, nor

the size of the package. The smallest must be paid for at the same rate,

though in the reverse case you do not score; for a very large package is

charged for at double rates. Unless you are content to drag portmanteaux

through the mob, you must 'foot' this first outrageous bill. A

fellow-passenger of ours travelling quietly with his wife paid

twenty-four shillings for the transporting of his kit.

The Customs House officials are fair-minded enough, and there is little

trouble for the stranger there. Everything obviously for personal use is

"passed" ungrudgingly with the single exception of silver plate or

ornaments. Our only difficulty lay in explaining in execrable Spanish to

_Señor el Aduanero_ (Mr. the Custom House Officer) that with a long tour

in primeval forests and cruises amid archipelagos of islets before us,

20 lb. weight of Cadbury's solid chocolate and two dozen tins of their

cocoa essence were moderate estimates of our personal needs in the

direction of this best of all nutriment. He scented trade; and it was

some minutes before we prevailed upon him to take his eagle eye off the

suspiciously glistening tins which meant such comfort for us in our

wanderings. Mournfully learning that our luggage would cost us sixteen

shillings to move into safety till we sailed again for Yucatan, we

entrusted it to an apparently honest Railway Agent with some misgivings.

Never let your baggage out of your sight at Vera Cruz. The contents are

often stolen in the very Customs House. The luggage porters interchange

their metal badges, too, so that while No. 29 takes your bag and swears

to meet you at the station, if you ever have the luck to see that

number again, you will honestly be obliged to admit to the police

authorities that the wearer is not the same fellow whom you employed and

... well,--the matter rests there and your stolen bag in Vera Cruz.

But here's the plaza, and your first glimpse of Mexican life. It is

dusty and frowsy enough--this stone-paved square with its tawdry green

and yellow-painted houses, its ill-laid roads broken by crevasses and

large holes under the flimsy tram lines where cobble stones have got

displaced; but there is just touch enough of the tropics to make it

fascinating. At its centre is a two-storeyed kiosk--bandstand above,

drinking-booth below. Under the deep shade of giant laurels, evergreen

oaks, tulip trees, palms and orange trees, stands an inner ring of

chairs and round tables; the outer circle is formed of iron garden-seats

backing on to the flower-beds, rich with scarlet-blossomed poinsettia,

twenty or thirty feet high, with yellow and purple bell-flower blooms,

with scarlet tulipans and a pale pink and white blossom of a

jasmine-like shape and size. Overhead in the thick leaves myriads of

_piches_--bright-eyed, sleek-feathered cousins of the English

blackbird--chatter, chatter, chatter till you wonder if they will ever

stop: the Veracruzian tells you they never do. On three sides of the

plaza the houses are arcaded; on the fourth is a hideously meretricious

pile of yellowish stone--the cathedral.

It is but 10 a.m., yet the sun is so fierce that the arcades are

curtained off with sunblinds reaching to the pavement edge. Within these

tunnels of stifling shade, Vera Cruz breakfasts at ten and dines at

five, and drinks all day. Tables for two, tables for four or more,

tables of metal or of wood, stained with ringed stains of wineglass or

coffee-cup are ranged up by the blinds, leaving a passage for strollers.

All day, almost all night at these tables sit men--men of all

conditions. It is the kaleidoscope of the quays, a shade higher and ...

lower. For the filthy, sweating nigger at the hatch-side catches

something--however little--of the majesty of toil. But these men, they

neither toil nor spin. They have come in from plantations where they are

almost kings, and they hold their glasses in fever-yellowed hands, and

leer at the passing women and girls, whose coarse beauty shrouded in

mantilla, whose plump powdered necks, and bosoms heaving opulent under

tawdry muslin frocks seem fitting part, the female complement to the

drink-sodden scene. But stay! there is a pleasanter sight, at that table

over there. It's worth a glance--you are glad to look away from the

wolfish-eyed victims of drink and debauchery at those two hearty English

skippers, tanned and bearded, who take their liquor like men, and talk

of their just completed "runs." They are in the place but not of it, and

somehow you think you catch an envious glance thrown their way by the

gaunt, blear-eyed creature who crawls past them after his fifth

cocktail.

In the streets the picturesque Mexican life is a-doing. The ranchero--so

tight of trouser that it looks as if his legs must have been melted and

run in hot into those grey pantaloons, like bullets in a

mould--silver-spurred, his huge Mother-Shipton-shaped felt hat

embroidered and bound with silver laces, his feet hidden in the great

leather pockets which serve as stirrups here, canters into the plaza on

a white Arab. Round the corner comes the milkman on a mule, his four

jars of milk bulking so large round his saddle that you wonder he can

get on or off. The raucous shouts of the Indians as their waggons jolt

and bump and rattle over the broken cobbles: the "_Mūla-mūla!_" of

the Mexican as he urges on the mules which draw the yellow varnished

tramcars down the rickety lines: the cracked treble note of the old

woman who thrusts her roll of lottery tickets into your face with the

eternal "_Por mañana_," and the loud insistent cry of the brown-faced,

barefoot, rascally-handsome newsboys, mingle into one inharmonious

chorus. On the shady seats of the plaza loll the ever-tired Mexican

workmen, smoking cigarettes. Twelve strikes, and the troop of _rurales_

in grey uniforms, with carbines and heavy revolvers--the mounted

police--ride out from their barracks to take their work of patrolling

the town. The townspeople gather and look, and then they sleep again;

while in their shirt-sleeves, cigar or cigarette between their lips,

Mexican clerks balance ledgers in banks and merchants' offices behind

lattice blinds, and a postmaster in white-drill trousers and coloured

silk vest sells you postage stamps between puffs of smoke.

The last few years have made a world of difference to Vera Cruz. A

decade back for three-quarters of the year it was plague-ridden. In the

dusty street-arteries, up and down which its vicious, frowsy life is

pumped forwards and backwards to its plaza-heart, you might have walked

and scarcely found one doorway without the great splashed crimson

cross--seal of the yellow-fever fiend within. To-day it is growing into

a health-resort, but even now sanitation is embryonic. Dustcarts,

gruesome guillotine-like tumbrils, parade the streets; and "gilded pools

a steed would sniff at" make road-crossings into fording-places where

you must leap from one broken cobble to another and stumble into chasms

of earth and unsightly ruts. But the gods have been good to this evil

little town. For there are armies of unpaid scavengers who parade the

streets, doing their work so silently and so perfectly that the

municipality has passed a law by which an injury to one of them is a

special crime and misdemeanour, heavily fined. These are the

_zopilotes_, as the Mexicans call the American turkey-buzzards,--to kill

one of which costs the murderer at least five dollars. Cadet branch of

the vulture family, in their skinny bald heads, their rusty black

moth-eaten feathers, their great splotchy claw-feet, their torn and

ragged wings hanging loose and low, Nature has given them just the dress

becoming such birds of hell. No! you did not believe birds could be so

ugly, birds could have such hateful eyes, such splay feet, such blotchy

beaks. They are everywhere: they perch on the cathedral towers, on the

balconies of houses: they ride on the dustcarts, fight for the

unspeakable in the gutters, tear at the rotting fish-head and settle in

scores round the carcase of a dog. A score of them amble in front of you

on the pavement, and hop their ungainly, hideous sideways hops as you

spurn them, veritable birds of Beelzebub, Lord of Flies.

But Vera Cruz has good reason to thank heaven for her flying dustbins,

and as they peer sideways at you out of their blinking rheumous eyes

they seem to know it. "We don't fear you, passer," you could imagine

them saying (though one of the uncanniest facts about these awful birds

is that they have no cry: they are as silent as the dead they filch and

feast on), "we are an essential part of this earth-hell: we are the

Devil's bailiffs." You see the birds in other Mexican towns and cities:

you see them in Yucatan perched on the walls of haciendas or in the

woods wrenching at the hide of a rotting cow, but they never seem to

personify evil as at Vera Cruz. And there is evil there! There is vice

in the air. Round the town clings an indescribable haunting sense of

sin--sin which is swinish and foul--not the dazzling vice of a Semiramis

Court, the glorified debaucheries of a Capri, but a dreary,

drink-sodden, fetid sin, clinging to the town like the noisome smell of

a charnel-house. Not that you see it. "There ain't no Ten Commandments"

at Vera Cruz; but you don't see them broken: you simply feel they don't

exist. Outward decorum here, as in most Mexican towns, is a feature.

Street women are banished to a special quarter, and the shops are

cleanly compared with some of Paris in the Rue de Rivoli or the

Boulevard de Montmartre. But the women and men, the girls and the boys,

have such faces and eyes that you feel that anything, everything, is

possible. Perhaps we do "the New City of the True Cross" injustice. All

trade-centres where the foreign sailor comes are much of a muchness. We

simply record our impressions. "Peradventure there be seven good men in

Vera Cruz." There are probably many score more, but one cannot help

wishing the streets did not smell so rancid.

Time was so much the essence of our tour that we decided to travel by

the night train to Moctezuma's capital--where our chief business was the

procuring of passports--despite the lamentations of acquaintances who

assured us we were throwing away the opportunity of a lifetime--the

sight of the train's climb of 8,000 feet in the sunlight. As it proved,

we had perhaps in some ways a really more awe-inspiring night spectacle;

for the moon, which had bathed the tropic seas night after night for us

in such gorgeous silver, had but just passed its full the very day of

our arrival in port.

When the tepid night settled down upon the plaza, we made a hurried meal

and, leaving the crowd still drinking, made our way to the station.

There are two trains every twenty-four hours each way between Mexico

City and Vera Cruz, and a few minutes after we reached the platform the

day train from the capital came lumbering in, the bell on its huge

Atlantic type of engine ringing mournfully. The same train starts back

within a few minutes--the engines only being changed--and the narrow

platform was quite the wrong place for the dreamer during the next few

moments, with the crowds clambering out of the huge corridor cars and a

mob of would-be passengers fighting to get in. In the mêlée one of us

slipped between the train and the platform, while the train was still

slowly moving, but was withdrawn by a friendly arm before the oncoming

bogey-wheel had passed over his foot and put a summary end to

explorations in Yucatan.

Railway fares in Mexico are cheap, and the carriages are nasty. Seats of

green leather with metal arm-rests (invention of railway-devil, surely)

are ranged, like the seats on a bus-top, each side of the car with an

avenue down the centre. A Pullman sleeping and breakfast compartment

always form part of the night trains. Otherwise there are firsts,

seconds, and thirds, the latter wooden-benched contrivances, designed

apparently with the set purpose of getting into the cubic space

available the wherewithal for as much potential human discomfort as

possible. Into these cars the Mexicans and Indians are climbing, a river

of strange colour--blankets of all shades and stripes, straw steeple

hats of every make for the men, the womenfolk bare-headed always--baskets

of fruit and breads, bottles of drink, and queer knotted

handkerchief-luggage reminiscent--without their cleanliness, though--of

those blue and black silk handkerchiefs in which "Jack" brings along his

spare jumper and flannel shirt when he "comes home again." For us in our

lordly "first"--its floors stained with a myriad expectorations, its

cushions bumpy and springless--there is gathering a motley gang of

Mexico's upper ten, among whom the diabolical bowler hat and those

impossible tweeds, which the foreigner, imitating our fashions, raises

God knows where, predominate over the Mexican dress. A minute before we

start our most interesting fellow-passenger arrives--a young man--his

straw steeple hat set rakishly on one side, his red-white-and-blue

blanket thrown round him and under one ear--closely followed by two

dark-garbed Mexicans. He is a prisoner, of whom more later, and, as the

whistle sounds, we see that his companions are engaged in making him

comfortable for the night by mooring him with glistening steel handcuffs

to the metal arm-rest of his seat.

We steam out into the still night air, the heavy train bumping and

jolting over level-crossings where stand groups of Mexican poor,

children, and dogs; past rows of adobe huts, palm-thatched, and frowsy

little _tiendas_ (general shops), where glimpses are caught in the

oil-flare of trays of unspeakable eatables. It is stifling in the

carriages, and we throw up the windows. The moon is rising, the night

air is warm and scented--scented with a strange pungent, spicy scent--an

indescribable perfume--the smell of the tropics. The train rolls heavily

on between dark masses of bush and stunted cactus, topped by waving

palm-leaves, and here and there banana plantations, heavy with the

grass-green fruit. This is the _tierra-caliente_, "the hot-lands," the

great belt of steaming miasmic country stretching some fifty miles ere

we begin the climb up to the highlands of Central Mexico. It is hard to

see much, but that long slope of undulating ground out there to the

left is a coffee plantation, the dark-green bushes dotting the rounded

hillside like tufts of wool on a Bushman's head. Now the train crawls,

as a fly on the edge of a teacup, round a fertile crater-like valley.

You can look right down into its green glories, where mid the leaves the

moonlight touches into quicksilver the boisterous river which bubbles

and froths like a Scotch stream in spate. Now we pass through acres of

forest banking up each side so high that it is all blackness; while

every few miles the mournful tolling of the engine bell heralds us into

a wayside village, the lights streaming through the doors of whitewashed

huts, and Indians, muffled to their eyes in blankets, standing in silent

groups by the railside.

At Rio Blanco we rattle past a great cotton factory, its myriad lights

twinkling into such a confusion of illumination that it looks like a

swarm of fireflies hovering amid the darkened houses and huts of the

town. For hours afterwards we are to see those twinkling lights,

thousands of feet below us in the valley, ever shifting their position

as the train winds its way round and again round the vast wooded sides

of the mountain range. This factory at Rio Blanco is one of the largest

cotton factories in Mexico, and during a recent winter was the scene of

one of those terrible "incidents" which prove how really superficial is

the civilisation of Mexico. The Company objected to their workmen buying

their provisions at the ordinary town stores and started a _tienda_ of

their own, where the goods sold were both more expensive and of inferior

quality. An order was issued that in future the "hands" must deal at the

Company's store. The men objected and went on strike. From the capital

comes down General Martinez, Vice-Secretary for War, thenceforward to be

known as "the Mexican Trepoff," and in one morning his troops shoot down

in cold blood 214 men loitering in the streets of Rio Blanco. Enough

that the "Iron Master" ordered it. No one disputes the yea or the nay of

Porfirio Diaz, maker of Modern Mexico. So the strike is over: labour is

scarce in Rio Blanco for a week or so; and Trepoff-Martinez travels back

to the capital to ride his fine Arab in Chapultepec Park and spend his

evenings at cards in the Jockey Club.

But for the time we lose sight of the factory. We are nearing the limits

of the hot-lands, and as you stare out into the night, barrener hills

and mounds, stone-speckled, are closing in on each side. Beyond them and

above them, blacker distant masses climb into the moonlit sky, ringing

round the landscape ahead till it looks as if our train, land-locked,

will soon have to come to a standstill. The plains, rich with their

harvests of cotton and coffee, of fruits, sugar-cane and olives, have

given place all round to mountains; and as we wind forward, heights,

rising mysterious, magical, wall us in from the rear till we seem as if

we were caught in a black devil's-punch-bowl. And then, like the fitting

knell to the apprehensive traveller's thoughts, the doleful engine bell

clangs sorrowfully backwards and forwards, and the great train rolls

into the station of Orizaba. Here in a bare stone-floored barn-room a

grossly obese Mexican (like the camel, he seems to have two or three

stomachs, his striped leather-belted cotton vest shows such huge

undulations of adipose tissue), assisted by a sickly yellow Indian lad,

swaddled in a red and white striped blanket, serves coffee, good coffee

too, and _pan dulce_, sweet bread, crusted with caraway seeds. And here,

too, the great climbing engines are awaiting us, snorting and blowing

off steam like angered bulls eager to charge the toreador-hills which

blot out the world ahead of us. We need both, for the train is to be cut

into two--one engine will not carry us safely up the perilous slope--and

the Pullman carriages in a few minutes rumble out ahead of us.

We have struck up a friendship with the car-conductor--a half-blood

nigger from Cuba, and a delightful companion, who speaks English well

and has already told us more about Mexico than a dozen encyclopedia

articles, and as, munching a last mouthful of roll, we climb into our

car, he gives us a friendly warning to be on the look-out in some

fifteen minutes for a queer sight, the Pullman half of the train

climbing the mountains above us. If you think of a mountain and then

draw round it in your mind a spiral line as if it was a vast cone-shaped

screw, you will gain an idea of what the two trains were going to do.

They were going to wind up from the valley round and round the scalped

faces of the mountains to a height of 8,000 feet above sea-level. Six

thousand feet of this alpine work is done in fifteen miles of rail after

leaving Orizaba Station during a space of two hours! A gradient of one

in thirteen and a fifth! It is pleasant to remember that this miracle of

engineering skill was achieved by Englishmen, and that in the long years

since, so perfect was their work, no serious accident has ever occurred.

The engine soon gets to grips with its titan task. Over us on the right

we see the vast mountains close,--towering upward as a huge wave looms

above the swimmer sunk in its trough,--those eternal hills up to the

barren fastnesses of which the gallant Cortes and his five hundred

climbed four centuries ago, after he had destroyed his boats at Vera

Cruz that there might be no looking backward. Slowly we wind round the

base of the mountain, then we bend back again on a new spiral till the

lights of Orizaba Station twinkle ahead of us instead of behind us. Once

more round and the cars tilt outward, outward, till it seems we are at

an impossible angle if we are to keep the metals. Two or three more

spirals, and we have won this first hill, and here is our next monster;

and as we bend round the last of the conquered one you look right across

the valley, hundreds of feet deep, to where absolutely opposite is the

meagre metal band running round the face of the still higher hill. Talk

of horse-shoe curves! So acute seems the bend that one wonders how the

most perfect bogey-wheels can take it. But we do take it, till we in the

front cars seem to be looking right into the hinder ones where huddle in

the dim light Indians as tightly packed as sardines in a tin. The

grinding of the brakes; the short sharp pants of the engine, the fierce

glare from its opened furnace, the figures of the stokers silhouetted

ink-black against the flame-red; the slow creak-creak as the wheels turn

and turn again to an ever new curve, make a scene unparalleled. Every

few minutes sinister figures, slouch-hatted, scarlet blankets thrown

round them to chin-height, men who in the dim light look terrifyingly

brigand-like, pass through the cars, in their hands swinging lamps.

These are the brake-men--two to a car--upon whose untiring nerve the

safety of the train largely hangs.

And now as we enter upon a new curve, sure enough right above, like some

giant glow-worm creeping sluggish up the hill, is the Pullman half of

our train. We have just caught sight of it, and it twinkles on the curve

ahead and twists and contorts itself round the hill till it seems to be

doubling back upon us. At one moment we are on the same curve, and not a

quarter of a mile separates the two trains. What if the Pullman brakes

gave? And then it has twisted itself out of our sight, only to reappear

a moving gleam of light in the black woodlands overhead. But look

eastward! What a sight! We have climbed over two thousand feet now, and

far below us stretch limitless the moonlit hot-lands. It is all black,

that distance, save where, a bed of light, the cotton factory of Rio

Blanco steals into view beneath that hill on the right. Now it twinkles

ahead, now behind us. Now we seem running past it again, but infinitely

far away; and then we lose it altogether and bend into a dark curve

between two hills. As we lean out of the windows the car tilts till we

see no permanent way beneath us. We look sheer down into a gorge which

cannot be less than five hundred feet deep. Away down there we see what

are huge trees: they look shrubs; a wide river which seems a brook,

broken here and there by waterfalls over rocks, as large as houses,

which look mere pebbles. Against the silvered sky rise, jagged-toothed,

line upon line of hills, roughly pointed, the cone shape of volcanoes,

and as we twist out of the black gorge--greatest sight of all!--rises

the vast apex of Orizaba, dwarfing the meaner masses around, her snowy

peak silvered by the moon into a diamond-brightness. Looking out across

that world of hills upon that queenly height one understands why men

have worshipped mountains.

But while we have been dodging from window to window like village

schoolboys on a treat-day, the lamps of the car have been shrouded in

green-baize hoods, and our Mexican fellow-travellers, indifferent to

Orizaba's majesty and the angle of the carriages, have stretched

themselves into all sorts of uneasy attitudes on the Procrustean seats,

and sleep. Even our good conductor, weary of cigarettes, has turned up

his collar, and with folded arms nods his peak-capped head till he is to

be roused by the jolting of the train into Esperanza. And it is getting

cold. Blasé with the wonders of the climb, we close the windows and,

unbuckling portmanteaux, gratefully wrap ourselves into rugs and

ulsters.

But our companions are not all sleeping. There are two of them very wide

awake, and they have much reason to be. The prisoner and his guard face

each other, smoking cigarettes, while the odd detective sleeps on the

next seat, his head pillowed on a thick hooded cloak rolled military

fashion. It is an armed peace between the guarded and the guardian, and

it is presently to develop into almost open war. But first a little of

the prisoner's history, and then for a look at him.

Vera Cruz State is rich in criminals, and you can get yourself murdered

very cheaply round about there. This fellow would have done it for you

for the ridiculous sum of two shillings (a dollar); but he can't oblige

you now, for he is going up to Mexico City to be shot. He is only

twenty-eight, yet he has committed six murders "on his own," and has had

as his accomplice in other crimes an older man, already in the hands of

the authorities, who is credited with twenty! This latter criminal, long

"wanted," was locally known as _El Tigre_ (The Tiger), and, cornered at

last, he suspected, as such knaves will, that his young friend had given

him away. So he gave as good as he thought he had got--such information

to the police as has resulted in that queerly small delicate hand over

there being anchored by nasty cold steel to the iron seat.

They are queerly delicate hands. We have seen him stroke his black hair

with the free one, and you would have taken it for a woman's, so light

was the build of the fingers, so small the darkened blue of the nails.

But if his claws are frail, he is a monster in very truth. His six

murders have been callous butcher-work enough. He has shot a pedlar for

the wretched dollar in his wallet; he has battered the brains out of an

aged traveller for half as much again, and for the Indian girl whom he

had made his mistress he had nothing but a knife buried to its hilt in

the soft brown breast which beat with love of this human fiend. Let us

pass down the car under pretext of necessity, and have a good look at

him. A rounded boyish face, black-browed, his dark eyes shaded by rich

black lashes, a full red sensuous mouth, bitten in at the corners in a

way which tells its tale of cynical, sensual selfishness, and shaded by

a boy's growth of moustache, he has just the vicious beauty calculated

to eat its way to the hearts of tropic maids, who like their northern

sisters long to have, but, unlike them, _must_ have. But look at the

shape of the bullet head and jutting brow! See the animal glare with

which he meets your curious stare! There's the murderer. Ye gods! it is

the face of a wolf as it lifts its grey muzzle, blood-spattered, from

the lamb's bleeding carcase. There is no mercy in those eyes: he is the

foe of all, he has ranged himself as enemy of mankind; and the jut of

the skull suggests the truth--how impotent we are in moulding our lives;

how we bring with us, ready written, the chapters of our eternal past to

shape our passing present somehow, somewhere, by hook or by crook, into

an escape into an eternal future. You would not dare say as you saw the

radiant man's health in him, the beauty of his flesh, that he was a lost

soul. But heavens! what a climb he has before him, a climb at which

these climbing engines of our train are as water-babies toddling over

sand-castles on the beach.

It was queer to watch him, to thus spend the night with a murderer, such

a murderer! It was fascinating to try to imagine his thoughts. Really

he seemed to have none; perhaps it was mercifully so ordained. No human

brain could surely bear a realisation of such crimes as his. A mental

numbness, Nature's anodyne, must overtake the brutal criminal, like the

sullen drowsiness of the man-eating tiger in his cage. He sat there,

nonchalantly puffing at interminable cigarettes which his captor handed

him, his red-white-and-blue blanket thrown round his shoulders and

contrasting vividly with the yellow-whiteness of the neck and dead-black

of his cropped head. He knew he was going to be shot.... But stay! Not

so fast! Perhaps he didn't. What's this? The detective leaps up, the

sleeping one wakes: they have sprung on the blanketed figure. What's all

the matter? Simply that as the young brute smoked and chatted he has

twisted and twisted his lithe, small hand till it slips from the

jarvies, and he sits there, as the train rolls heavily onward through

the mountain gorges, ready in a minute to spring out of the car-window

and be lost in the woods. But he is too late. Some jerk of the manacled

arm has aroused suspicion. The blanket is whipped off. The steel band

snaps again on that delicate wrist. The two detectives close up at his

sides. He says nothing; he never flinches, never moves. He has gambled

with his life and lost: now he has lost again, that's all; that and the

ounce of lead which awaits his savage heart in Mexico. He motions that

he will sleep, and as the train rattles into Esperanza and the chilling

air from the mountains makes your teeth chatter, he lies sound asleep,

his cruel face, almost beautiful in repose, pillowed on his rounded arm.

There are more coffee and sweet rolls to be had at Esperanza, what time

the climbing engine is unhooked and car-conductors--their collars to

their ears--stamp their feet and, cabman-fashion, beat their breasts to

keep warm. And then we are off again, this time fairly on the level, for

though we have still two thousand feet to climb ere we reach the dreary

plains around the capital, we have more than 150 miles in which to do

it. It is between one and two, and in the past six hours the temperature

has fallen thirty-five or forty degrees. We are glad to have the windows

closed, save at the quaint little Indian towns where on the low

platforms stand rows of Mexican porters looking for all the world like a

chorus of conspirators in a comic opera, their blankets drawn right

across their faces and mouths, yashmak-fashion, their steeple hats

towering black in the starlight.

For the next two hours or so the uplands roll dark and unbroken around

us. A cloud-mist lies on the country, and the brilliancy of the moon

seems fading. And then of a sudden--or was it that we had slept

awhile?--there climbs into the sky the herald star, Hesperus. Have you

watched many dawns? Have you noticed how Hesperus seems to put all other

stars out, like the lamplighter on his early morning visit to the street

lamps? He glitters so radiantly that positively the heavens seem one

star and a few light specks, and even the moon looks paler. He is

blazing his brightest now, a yellow-golden light like some giant

Brazilian diamond, and there, away there, far across the mountain tops,

the Wolf's Tail sweeps the horizon. The mist is rising, rolling away;

far off the shadowy hills lighten from black to grey, the sinking

cloud-banks are embroidered with a golden fringe, and the dim morning

light steals into the frowsy, dusty car, outlining the sleeping figures,

exposing with an unwelcome frankness the up-all-night look of our

unkempt neighbours, twisted into uncouth positions in their uneasy

sleep.

"...And in the East

God made Himself an awful rose of dawn."

Awful it is in its majesty--this waking of the sleeping world. It is

awful on the Essex marshes or viewed from a mean window in Clapham. But

here, what a spectacle! Heaped up, mass upon mass, the mountains took

the glad signal, blushing their grey tops into rose. Far behind us looms

Orizaba, no longer diamond-cold in her chastity of snow, but roseate

with a delicate pink, the tint of the neck-feathers of a wood-dove. Then

the rose of the sky turns to crimson, and far to our left the twin peaks

of Popocatapetl and Iztaccihuatl, towering above the nearer ranges, don

crimson crowns on their snow. In the months that were to come we were

destined to see many a dawn in many varied scenes. We were to watch from

a small sailing-boat the chill gold gleams steal over the face of the

ocean towards us; camped in some ruined temple we were to see "the swift

footsteps of the lovely light" sweep over miles of grey-green woodland,

reddening the carved porches and façades of palace and shrine, majestic

in their grey ruin; we were to wake in tropic forest to find the first

glories of the sun darting beams at us through arcades of tree network,

turning the myriad dewdrops on the leaves and branches into translucent

diamonds; but the wonder of that dawn amid Mexico's volcanoes has never

had, can never have, for us a rival spectacle.

* * * * *

With the light the face of the country altered as if the wand of an

agricultural wizard had been waved over it. The deep rich greens of the

hot-lands had gone. Instead were wide stretches of stony upland, barren

wastes of moor, spotted with swamp, hedged in by great scarped spikes of

volcanic grey stone, and by huge bald bluffs under which nestled here

and there clusters of adobe huts built round the plain white stone

churches standing in gardens shaded by olive and orange trees and bright

with the red-flowered wild pepper-bush. At the side pathetic little

cemeteries, the rudely cut wooden crosses on the graves fluttering their

faded coloured-paper wreaths and withered flowers. And here, waving pale

in the early light, are acres and acres of maguey, the giant cactus

rising more than man's height, from which is crushed out _pulque_, the

national drink of Mexico, a milky liquid tasting like sour ginger-beer.

And between these miles of cactus and stone are fields yellowing with

Indian corn, the picturesque figures of the Indian harvesters, grouped

round a mule-waggon or standing idle, sickle in hand, to watch our

train, brightening the landscape with their scarlet blankets. Mexico's

world is very much astir now, and, as we pull up at the next station,

scores of Indian women and girls, slatterns most, stand perilously near

the wheels, stretching out to the passengers at the passing windows

trays of weird foods, chopped meats wedged between ungainly, underdone

tortillas (the Indian maize biscuit bread), and the skinny, cooked limbs

of very much disarticulated fowls, sour-looking oranges and half-ripe

bananas, with tins of watery milk. On the platforms everywhere stood

_rurales_--country police--cloaked to the chin in bright scarlet

blankets, beneath which showed the tight grey trousers, silver-laced,

and the bright, burnished sheath of a sword, their hats sugar-loaf

shaped felts of grey ornamented with the metal numbers of their

district. In their hand, the butt end resting on the ground, they hold a

rifle. These fellows, in their tight breeches and neat monkey-jackets of

grey tailed at their waists like an Eton boy's, are fine figures, one of

the living testimonies to President Diaz's prudence; for they have one

and all been recruited from the ranks of those hordes of brigands which

thirty years back made Mexico the warmest place in the world to travel

in.

[Illustration: UNLOADING BANANAS, TAMPICO.

RURALES (MOUNTED POLICE) AT VERA CRUZ. ]

And now we are on the plain of Mexico, ringed round with small

cone-shaped hills, a plain of burnt-up grass on which small stunted

cattle, horses and donkeys were wandering, disconsolate, to find the

greenest spots. Here and there is a swampy place, and round where the

water had dried the slaty blue soil showed up in patches broken by the

giant flat-faced, oval leaf of the Nopal cactus, which is to Mexico what

the rose is to England, figuring in the national arms--viz. an eagle

perched on the Nopal with a writhing snake in its talons. By the rail

side runs a dusty road, and along this trot Indians, the men with packs

on their backs, the women with babies slung on their backs, while shabby

dogs scout around the party. Here is a waggon drawn by two mules jolting

into the suburban markets, and there is a mule loaded with empty

pulque-tins, his master seated literally on the animal's tail, returning

from his midnight visit to Moctezuma's city. It is all very picturesque,

and a little sad, as we rumble past the shabby Indian wayside huts, and

tiny brown boys and girls stand naked in the stony gardens to wave us a

greeting. All the Indians on the plain here look so unprosperous, and

the starved, ignoble nature of the place adds to one's impression of the

desolate life of a once great race.

But now we are nearing the plain's edge. Sparse huts of adobe and the

tents of rags stretched on crossed poles are giving place to stone

houses. Pretentious churches, gardens rich with fruit trees, mills and

factories, sidings occupied by heavily loaded luggage-trains, and the

crowds which board our cars at each station mark our approach to Mexico

City. We rattle on through miles of squalid suburbs, over level

crossings where frowsy gatherings of half-naked Indian women and

children watch, with animal apathy, the progress of the train, till as

eight strikes we enter the city lying within a ring of volcanic hills.

Viewed from the car window there is nothing in the least impressive

about Mexico City. A dreary stretch of commonplace Spanish houses,

flat-roofed, unrelieved by cupola or minaret, by tower or spire. The

station is as dull: a melancholy wooden structure, oval-roofed, somewhat

like the biggest engine-house at Crewe or Swindon. The first hint that

we are in a most unpromising land is the discovery that there is no

refreshment-room where breakfast can be had. But the Mexicans, we

remember, do not breakfast, and a shabby yellow door labelled "Café"

leads into a very squalid room where, at a wooden table, cups of coffee

and a basket of yesterday's or the day before yesterday's rolls are

brought to us by a slatternly big-bosomed Mexican dame, who has not yet

washed or combed her hair, and whose dirty, ungirt, betrained cotton

dress and cloth slippers, trodden down at the heels, make an

unattractive picture.

There are three types of cabs in Mexico City; the blue, the red, and the

yellow. The first charges the unwary voyager a dollar (two shillings)

for one and three-quarter miles, for which the red's fee is but half. In

cleanliness and comfort there is nothing to choose between the two. The

yellow cab is pestilential, as its fluttering quarantine paper flag

suggests. It is ramshackle and verminous, and, having earned an

ill-name, is dying out, destined soon to be as extinct as the dodo. We

hired a red cab, and rattled off through cobbled streets, lined with

small shops, broad, well-pavemented but garbage-littered, into the heart

of the city.

CHAPTER II

MEXICO CITY AND THE MEXICANS

Mexico city is a combination of Spanish squalor and Paris-cum-New-York

civilisation--very lightly veneered over in some places. It is some five

miles across, but its business life centres in a square mile. The

busiest streets are narrow--such as the Calle San Francisco, which is as

narrow as Cheapside and just as full of traffic. Mexico is thoroughly

cosmopolitan, and this is particularly noticeable in the matter of

trade. Thirty per cent. of the large shops and stores are American,

English and French; the greatest trading concerns are run by American

capital; railway and steamship offices, banks, hotels, restaurants, land

and mining companies, are in the majority of cases staffed and

engineered by foreigners. In the main streets typical Spanish buildings

have given way to often quite sky-scraping erections of obvious American

build--eight or nine-storeyed masses of flats and offices.

The most insistent impression one brings away from the city is the

constantly vivid contrast of an ostentatious civilisation (it is as

superficial as the breeding of a parvenu, as forced as the frigid air of

superiority of a suburban grande dame) with an Indian barbarism. Wealth

and luxury rub shoulders with the abject and savage poverty of the

wandering Indian poor. In the city of his forefathers, metamorphosed

beyond all recognition, the Indian lags superfluous--spectral, a very

Banquo at the feast. You walk in the Calle San Francisco on wonderfully

laid pavements, past shops a-glitter with jewels which would not shame

the gem windows of the Boulevard des Italiens, past

restaurants--veritable _maisons dorées_, with ornate porticoes in which

stalwart Spanish doorkeepers in gold-laced uniforms swing open the

portals of these gastronomic paradises for dames of high degree. You

watch an everlasting procession of wonderful carriages, glittering with

veneer, the black or white Arab horses curving glorious necks adorned

with silver and brass chains and trappings, and ... just under your very

nose, crawling out of the gutter to save his wretched blistered foot

from that rubber-tyred wheel, is such a blend of filth and poverty as

only a great luxurious city has the secret of manufacturing. Desolate,

his lank, uncombed black hair smarmed with sweat on his grimy forehead,

a blanket which you would gladly pay a sovereign not to touch thrown

round the stooping shoulders, ragged cotton drawers, tightening at the

calf--coolie fashion--and slit and rent in half a dozen places, showing

the dull, brown-red skin beneath, the thin, hunger-haunted face all

cheek-bones and lustreless black eyes, the descendant of Moctezuma's

warrior shambles and halts down the gutter edge. The Mexican beauty,

stepping daintily from that victoria, enamelled in rich cobalt blue and

black, to enter the French glove-shop, pulls her silken skirts tighter

round her plump figure. Was it for the benefit of that passing dandy, or

did she really condescend to see the Horror in the gutter? It's nothing,

Señorita: just a "noble savage" after a few centuries of civilisation.

In buildings of any really striking architectural beauty Mexico City is

curiously poor. The Iturbide Hotel--once the palace of the Emperor

Iturbide--is a fine example of the best Spanish house-building, with its

carved façade, its charmingly cool, balconied patio and its dignified

pillared stairways. The National Palace, at the gateways of which stand

shuffling, squat, unbusinesslike-looking Mexican soldiers--is a

two-storeyed quadrangular mass of yellow stone with no feature of

note--about as ornamental as the Privy Council Office in Whitehall. It

faces on the chief plaza, and thus confronts the cathedral--greatest

disappointment of all.

Pictures of this huge petrified triumph of Catholicism over Sun Worship

(for the church was built on the site of Moctezuma's gorgeous Temple of

the Sun) give a very false impression of grandeur. We had heard, too,

much of the marvels within. Nothing could be more disappointing. Perhaps

the pile suffers somewhat from its environment. The Grand Plaza is not

grand at all. It has no architectural merits; it is crowded with rows of

tramcars and bordered by mean-looking shops in stuffy arcades. Round the

cathedral run pavements bordered by poorly kept flower-beds and

ragroofed booths, and then within the cathedral close is a yard half

cobble, half mangy grass, wherein squat or sleep innumerable beggars,

fruit-sellers, lottery-ticket vendors, the very riff-raff of the

capital. The railings are broken in places, advertisement posters and

street-boy scrawlings disfigure the church walls, large pieces of the

surface of which are broken away. Polite language forbids a description

of what the surface of this God's acre is like: suffice it to say that

the indescribably filthy habits of the Mexicans render it no place for

the unwary walker. To an Englishman this precinct of their greatest

church, so vivid a contrast with the velvety lawns and cleanly sanctity

of such a cathedral precinct as that at Westminster Abbey, is eloquent

of the Mexican character.

The cathedral itself is a gigantic erection, but there is nothing in the

least pleasing about it. It seems a hotchpotch of architectural styles

(it was near a century a-building), like a dog with no pedigree, or

perhaps with too much pedigree--a little bit of everything and the rest

church. To any one who has stood in the roar of London's traffic on

Ludgate Hill and looked eastward upon the superb grey severity of St.

Paul's, such a building can mean little. But step inside, and it is

worse, far worse. What is it which so often makes the interiors of even

the larger Catholic churches so vulgar? It must be the gilt and colour,

the ostentatious striving after effect, the prostitution of what should

be divinely chaste to the lewd sensuality of the eye. Catholicism is a

sensuous creed. It has been said a million times, and it is a million

times true. The sincerely godly man should be able to worship his Maker

as well on the top of a Camberwell omnibus as in a cathedral.

Catholicism, cynical, knows the sincerely godly are few and far between,

and she holds her children to her by a tawdry dazzle, an incensed

meretriciousness. The interior of Mexico Cathedral was one of the

vulgarest sights it has ever been our misfortune to look on. It was

rankly, irretrievably vulgar. The great reredos towered towards the

domed roof, a shameless sheet of dazzling gold. Your eyes ached at it.

It may have cost £300,000, but to the true lover of churches it was

worth about twopence-halfpenny. The walls blazoned with gold-framed

pictures of the Virgin and Saints, not one, not two, but dozens, like

the ill-assorted pictures in a pork-packing millionaire's dining-room.

The merits of the paintings, if they had any, were lost in the

nauseating gold of their heavy frames. Croesus never loathed the

precious metal as we did, when, shading our eyes, we gazed up at the

abominable background of the High Altar. Smaller altars there were

everywhere around: innumerable saints in tawdry metal crowns fluttered

frowsy linens; coarsely realistic pictures of the Passion made you blush

for your Catholic fellow-creatures. Canopies of satin and brocade over

episcopal stalls and gilded marble pulpits brought to one's mind the

irony of it all: the gorgeous-vestmented priests daring to ape

vicegerency for Him who bade His ministers "go forth neither with purse

nor scrip." "Verily they toil not neither do they spin; yet Solomon,"

etc. Yes, right there on the ill-laid pavement kneels an Indian--his

arms outspread, his fanatic eyes lifted in an ecstasy of faith to the

gilding. He and thousands like him--"the hungry sheep, look up and are

not fed"; but the shepherds take care that the flocks feed them. They

have always got their cut of juicy mutton. Mexico is not alone. Alas!

Sacerdotalism has its dupes in every land. We walked out into the

sunshine, glad to remember that we had stood in the wonderful Abbey

nave, our eyes restful with its glorious grey chastity, our hearts

stilled with that holy calm which seems to bring so much nearer "the

peace of God which passeth all understanding."

But if Mexico is poor in buildings, she has features which certainly

entitle her to be called a great city. The superb Paseo (there are

others, but fine as they are they are dwarfed beside it) would alone

make a capital. Between two and three hundred feet wide, lined with a

double row of trees and beautifully kept flower-beds, its course broken,

here and there, by circuses where stand noble statues centring lawns of

velvety turf, it sweeps northward, a majestic thoroughfare, towards

Chapultepec--the Mexican Hyde Park--where stands the Castle (it does not

look like one), the summer residence of grim Porfirio Diaz. Nothing can

be finer than the view up this noble roadway, and praise is due to

authorities who have ordained that the banal electric tramcars shall

take with them into side streets the blighting vulgarity of their

whizzing bustle. At the entrance to the Paseo the cars turn humbly into

side turnings running parallel with this monarch of highways.

Another beautiful feature are the private houses. Along the Paseo and in

the broad _avenidas_ which branch off it are residences which really

deserve the adjective "ideal." Two-storeyed, flat-roofed, solid and yet

not pawky in their solidity, as most small buildings built substantially

are in danger of becoming; charming in their simplicity of design; the

long windows barred with artistically wrought iron; green sunblinds

drawn within; no basements, no areas, but raised solid some three feet

from the ground-level and approached by a short flight of steps; they

look like summerhouses of cool stone set in the frame of their exquisite

tropic gardens. You never see their occupants (the rich Mexicans,

especially the women, never walk out or show themselves until the hour

for driving in the Paseo or Chapultepec Park arrives), but you envy them

these charming dwellings. They are the very antipodes of the cheap,

run-up-anyhow heaps of bricks and mortar which we are too often content

to call houses.

* * * * *

The Mexican hotels are bad and expensive. Strictly speaking, they are

not hotels at all, but large pretentious "doss-houses"; for there are as

a rule no restaurants attached, no attempt made to cater for the

visitors, nor are there any public rooms for reading or writing. You

hire a frowsy room, for which you may quite likely at such a place as

the Hôtel de Jardin have to pay six dollars (twelve shillings) a night,

and the most the management will do for you is to provide a cup of

indifferent chocolate and a sweet roll in the morning, which matutinal

orgy, of course, is not included in the room rent. You must "hunt" your

food elsewhere. This has its advantages, but it has also grave

disadvantages, particularly as Mexico City is poorly equipped with

reasonably cheap, clean, eating-places; and after a week or so you get

restive and long for the coffee-room comforts of those residential

palaces, the English hotels. Nowhere in the world are hotels, surely, so

perfect as in England, so cheap, so homely, the staff so courteous.

Nowhere has the traveller lavished on him so many little comforts and

etceteras of daily life, the sumptuous reading-rooms, the writing

conveniences, all of which he never really appreciates till he is

condemned to live for a while among "hotel savages." We had been warned,

too, of darker horrors in Mexican hotels than the lack of an honest

breakfast or an easy-chair in which to read one's letters. Unbidden

guests shelter in even first-class establishments and nightly feast on

the visitors. So we stayed at the only decent hotel in the

city--according to all reports--the new American Hotel St. Francis at

the city end of the Paseo. This had a restaurant attached, where

excellent food was served to us by a perfectly charming Indian waiter,

whose smile at our attempts to talk to him was "sweetness and light." He

was not handsome--he had all the worst features of the Mongolian

type--high cheek-bones, flattish face; but when that man smiled, well,

you just felt a new optimism in the inherent goodness of human nature

steal on you. The St. Francis was built Spanish fashion with a

courtyard, the rooms facing on to three galleries, the courtyard forming

a lounge. As far as comfort went it was nowhere in comparison with the

commercial hotels in the provincial towns in England, but it sustained

its reputation of being free from vermin, and one's bed linen was

changed every day.

The climate of the city is very trying for any one with heart weakness.

Indeed, to even the robust the rarefied air at such a vast height as

8,000 feet brings a perpetual sense of being fagged out, and a

disagreeably insistent panting at the least exertion. We found all the

English residents suffered from a perpetual malaise, the "tired feeling"

of the tonic advertisements. Curiously enough, too, the immense

altitude, so far exceeding that of Davos Platz, does not protect the

phthisical and weak-lunged. The death rate from lung diseases is

terrific. The days are hot and the nights are often so cold that you

must wear your thickest overcoat or run the risk of pneumonia. A queer

result of this is that the streets are quite empty soon after dark. Till

nine you will see a few Indians, only their eyes visible above their

blankets, straggling along, or a Mexican in closed carriage will dash

past. But later the place becomes a city of the dead. Coming back from a

dinner we walked through street after street and never saw a soul (it

was only 10.30) save the police, who stand in the middle of the roads, a

lighted lantern on the ground between their boots.

The city is patrolled after dark by the Republican Guard, mounted on

sturdy Mexican cobs and armed with Winchesters, heavy revolvers, and

swords. These men stand no nonsense, and the consequence is that

outwardly the capital is one of the most orderly in the world. You

scarcely ever see a brawl, you never hear a voice raised in anger; and

yet the police are not officious. They do not fidget or bustle: they are

everywhere, but they are not obtrusive, and they are certainly most

courteous. We asked the way of one, and he directed us. Some fifty yards

on we heard some one running behind us, and turned to see, with

astonishment, the officer, who with many bows explained that he thought

we might have misunderstood, so he had run after us to personally put us

in the way. Surely politeness could no further go! Imagine a

twenty-stone City constable "sprinting" after a Frenchman who desired to

study the architectural glories of "Ze house of ze Lor Maire"! There is

no doubt we English are phlegmatic.

If a fight takes place in the streets, the police arrest everybody, not

only the principals and their seconds, but all the spectators. Thus a

perfectly harmless paterfamilias trudging back to his home, yielding for

a minute to the curiosity inherent in us all and peering over the heads

of the crowd at the struggling men, may find himself marched off to the

lock-up, where he must spend the night--for there is no bail system; and

next morning he is dragged off before a magistrate as an accessory to a

street row and fined according to the lying capacities of the police

officers concerned. In Mexico you must play the Levite and "pass by on

the other side."

The streets are at all times a human kaleidoscope: the dandy in European

dress; the smart Mexican horsemen in tasselled riding gear clattering

down the road; the trim cowboy with his grey trousers fitting like an

eel's skin, silver-buttoned, a coloured silk scarf round his neck, his

head adorned with steeple felt; the wizened Indian beldames in saffron

or blue cottons squatting at the church doors stretching out skinny

yellow hands for alms; tiny Indian girls carrying still tinier brothers

and sisters, and at every street corner bare-headed Indian matrons at

trestle stalls whereon are sweetmeats and fruits for sale. One of the

queerest sights are the funeral cars. Every corpse must by law be buried

within twenty-four hours of death, and almost all day long the

procession of tramcars is interrupted by the passing of the only type of

hearse they have in the capital, a hideous black and white contrivance

fitted with tram-wheels with three doors in a row admitting to three

shelves upon which the coffins stand. The poorer folk go to the cemetery

thus pigeonholed, the rich have a tram hearse which has a glass cover so

that the coffin can be seen. All day these monstrosities run out of the

city followed by a black-painted tramcar for the mourners. The

cemeteries are many miles out of the city and these mournful trams

follow the ordinary ones, a perpetual reminder to the gay crowds of the

vanity of human joys. At nightfall the streets are picturesque in the

extreme with the Indian handcarts and mule barrows carrying paper

lanterns (for every vehicle must have a light after dark), with the

weirdly quaint muffled figures of the Indians showing up in the fitful

gleams.

We must say a word about the Museum. It is a building just out of the

cathedral plaza, and is approached through a pretty courtyard filled

with palms and flowering shrubs. But within is the most melancholy

medley and muddle which it is possible to conceive. With opportunities

unexampled, with a wealth of treasures, the very finest of all Aztec and

Mayan relics, the curators, if one must misuse the word so sadly, have

proved themselves about as fit to arrange and govern a national museum

as schoolboys. There is literally no order; apparently no intelligence

at all has been exercised in the cataloguing of the exhibits; and the

elementary precaution of labelling each object with its place and date

of finding has been almost entirely ignored. Thus you come across a case

of ancient pottery obviously of all ages and from all parts of the

Republic, and this is called "Ancient Aztec Pottery," which a large part

of it is certainly not. Case after case witnesses to this ineptitude.

Nothing is labelled; or if it is, the label is patently incorrect. At

the door stand two cases facing each other. One is called "Forged

Pottery"; the other, "Genuine Pottery." Perhaps the egregious gentlemen

who have laboured to spoil what might have been one of the most

remarkable collections of an ancient civilisation existing will be

surprised to hear that they have got forged pottery in the genuine case

and vice versa. A typical catalogue entry is "279. _Fragments of Toltec

column_"; or "281 _to_ 283. _Three stone blocks. It has been supposed

that they formed part of gigantic caryatides_"; or "286. _El Indio

Triste. Strange human sculpture of melancholy aspect_"; or "93. _Aztec

Goddess Citlalinicue, according to Señor Troncoso. A square flat stone

with interesting reliefs on its two chief faces._" How illuminating to

be sure!

Here is the world-famous Aztec Calendar Stone found in the plaza in 1790

during some levelling operations, and the wonderfully carved Stone of

Sacrifice, also unearthed in the plaza a year later. Here, too, is the

much debated Chac Mool statue which Dr. Le Plongeon, of whom and whose

work we shall have occasion to speak later, found at Chichen Itza,

Yucatan. In the galleries above there is a hotchpotch of exhibits

ranging from a dreadfully poor picture of the Emperor Maximilian's

footman, the hair of General D. Vicente Guerrero (it is to be feared

that the world has long ago forgotten that he ever lost it), a "Marble

Bath Tub made of a single block, said to have belonged to the

Archduchess Carlotta," and "No. 63. Wooden Tub made of one piece,

presented to the Archduchess by Col. Juan B. Campos," to a plaster cast

of "the ideal man of Neanderthal," specimens of human skins tattooed,

Japanese armour and two human bodies naturally mummified. In truth, it

is a sorry spectacle, this National Museum of Mexico, and you wander out

of its bewildering galleries full of regret at the reckless way in which

a great chance has been thrown away; for no one can now hope to put

right what has been done wrong or to make the exhibition a good one.

The electric tram service of the city is excellent, and for a few

centavos you are transported miles into the many beautiful suburbs in

which the capital rejoices. Fairest of these is Chapultepec and its

park, where on a Sunday you can sit under the shade of giant laurels and

cypresses and listen to the really excellent music of the band of the

Republican Guard (the Mexican Life Guards). Chapultepec is historic.

There in 1847 the military cadets made their renowned stand against the

Americans, a glorious piece of fighting which is memorialised in a

statue group--the names of the fallen lads engraved on the plinth. The

castle--singularly un-castle-y--with somewhat the appearance of a

glorified hydropathic, stands on a rock about 150 feet high (Chapultepec

means "hill of the grasshopper"), the site of Moctezuma's summer palace.

Beneath it lie the palace grounds intersected by shady drives and

ornamental waters fringed with a wealth of flowering shrubs. From the

height you get an unexampled view, down the superb drive of the Paseo,

of the city ringed round with volcanic hills purpled with a sunny mist.

To the gate of the park an endless procession of trams comes, filled to

overflowing. Sunday is Chapultepec's great day, and all the sunny

afternoon laughing, gaily dressed crowds file through the paths or

linger round the bandstand; while the roadways are packed with slowly

moving lines of wonderful carriages drawn by really fine animals; and on

the shady unmacadamised edges of the carriageways canter as superb a

collection of riding horses as it would be possible to see in any

capital outside a horse show. There is no animal lovelier than a

well-bred horse, and though the Mexican steeds are small, they are--at

least the bulk of them in Chapultepec are--much Arabised and magnificent

creatures. The brilliant gloss of their skins, the clear, soft shining

eyes, the rhythmic power and grace of their limbs, the dainty perfection

of their movements, made the human crowds around them look quite mean,

even in their picturesque rainbow-hued clothes, for sartorial man is at

best a sloven. As we gazed on those proud heads and silky manes, and

watched the play of the muscles beneath the satin coats, we felt the

irony of that human phrase "the lower animals."

Northward from the Castle the country breaks into sunny uplands bordered

ten miles off by majestic masses of igneous rock, scarred and grey here,

there green with sprawling cactus undergrowth and stunted tree. Long

stretches of pampas grass, traversed by dusty roads, dispute possession

of this suburban pleasaunce with plantations of maguey--vistas of dark,

serried green broken here and there by a stone-built hacienda, a distant

patch of dazzling white in the sun's glare, ringed in with laurels and

evergreen oaks. It is a pretty picture, and you forgive the clouds of

dust, which rise at the hoofs of that file of pulque mules and which

envelop that herd of white goats shepherded by barefoot Indian lassies,

for the wealth of sunlight which enriches the landscape. Under the deep

shade of a hacienda portico a withered Indian woman squats Turk-fashion

before baskets of luscious oranges. They are four a penny, these "golden

apples," and with armfuls you perch yourself on the stone culvert of the

little bridge spanning the brook, once a mountain torrent on those

far-off hills, which gently murmurs through the maguey gardens, and

lunch like gods for fourpence.

Burke could not "find it in his heart to impeach a nation," but one is

sorely tempted to forget his advice in writing of the Mexicans. As a

people they are disagreeable. They are fulsomely polite, but it is just

that lip-service which sets the Englishman's back up. In his inimitable

verse Kipling has pointed out how politeness "takes" the English.

Cock the gun that is not loaded,

Cook the frozen dynamite,

But oh! beware my people, when my people grow polite.

It is quite true. The Englishman saves his politeness for his enemies.

The Mexicans are polite all the time, but beneath the veneer of this

nauseating oleaginous manner it takes no shrewd observer to see that as

a people they are possessed of the most unpleasant characteristics. They

are immense procrastinators. The cry of the country is _mañana_

(to-morrow) and _mañana_ never comes, if they can help it. Our visit to

the capital had as its object the obtaining of simple passports for the

exploration of North-eastern Yucatan. Yet, though the British Minister

very kindly interested himself in our tour and saw the President on the

matter, it took eight days for us to get these simple documents. Every

morning we had to waste hours at the Ministry of Public Instruction

badgering the Under-Secretary of State to carry out the very

instructions which we ourselves had heard given him days before by his

chief. The circumlocution methods of our War Office have deservedly

become a byword, but the amiable gentlemen who, like the fountains in

Trafalgar Square, "play from ten till four" in Whitehall, are veritable

miniature Roosevelts in strenuosity compared with Mexican officials. A

typical instance of their methods was witnessed by us. We were waiting

in the anteroom for our turn to see His Excellency the Minister when the

Under-Secretary hurried out to inquire as to a letter sent to the

department but which had never reached the Minister. A distinguished

elderly official, seated at a massive desk, was engaged in smoking a

cigarette and meditating on the Infinite between the puffs. He seemed

quite pained when the Under-Secretary suggested he had forgotten

anything. He had forgotten such a lot in his life that he felt he had a

right to complain that such a trifle as a mislaid letter should be

allowed to break the even tenor of his official hours. The

Under-Secretary returned to his room, and the distinguished official

(his conscience was evidently gnawing) looked suspiciously round and,

believing we did not see, opened a drawer of his desk, out of which he

took a bundle of unopened letters which appeared to represent the

official mail of the department for the past fortnight. With an ivory

paper-knife he ripped open one after the other, recklessly throwing them

back unread into his drawer until he found the one he sought, when he

bundled back the remainder unopened, and with a radiant expression of

pleased surprise, as of a man who had made an entirely unforeseen

discovery, he hastened into the Under-Secretary's room. The philosophic

calm with which he lit a fresh cigarette, on his return, and sank once

more into his padded chair, suggested that he had satisfied his

superior, perhaps even himself, that the blame rested with one of those

rascally clerks who were engaged at the time in a vigorous conversation

on nothing in particular in the courtyard.

Until 1876, when upon his distracted country Porfirio Diaz, innkeeper's

son and born ruler, descended as _deus ex machina_, the state of Mexico

may be summed up in the words "rapine, murder, and sudden death." But

though Mexico has had--and the bulk of her population has had reason

during the past thirty years to thank her lucky stars for him--an "Iron

Master," the quietude of the country is only skin-deep. Law and order is

represented by a blend of a rough-and-ready justice, a sort of legalised

lynch-law, with an official law-administration venal to a high degree.

With every second mestizo a born robber, Mexico is no place for tedious

processes with remands and committals to Assizes. A man caught

red-handed is usually dealt with on the spot. Such a case occurred while

we were visiting the capital. Two days after we had travelled on the

marvellous mountain railway, the guards of the day-train (which by the

way always takes the bullion to the coast and has a carriage-load of

soldiers attached as military convoy) saw, as they approached the

steepest descent, two fellows loitering on the line, presumably

wreckers. The train was stopped and the guards and the officer

commanding the convoy gave chase, and, coming up with the men, shot them

with their revolvers and kicked the bodies down the precipice. The sun

and the vultures do the rest, and on the re-arrival of the train in the

capital the matter may or may not be formally notified to the

Government.

Even to the casual observer the difficulty of governing Mexico must seem

inexpressibly great. President Diaz has succeeded not so much because he

does not know what mercy means or because a rifle bullet is his only

answer for those who question his authority, but because he is endowed

with superhuman tact. The iron heel, like that of Achilles, has its

vulnerable spot if pressed too hard upon a people's throat, and so he

has little dodges by which he appears to his subjects to exercise a

judicious clemency. If some redoubtable criminal is captured, some

monarch of murderers, Diaz knows well that among his thousands of

crime-loving fellow-countrymen the brute will have a large following.

His execution will mean the declaration of a vendetta against the

police. So he is put on his trial, condemned to death, and within

twenty-four hours the President commutes his sentence to one of twenty

years' incarceration in the Penitentiary. After about a week there, he

is taken out one evening, as usual, into the prison yard for exercise

under a small guard of soldiers. One of these sidles up to him and

suggests that as the night is dark he might make a bolt for it. The

convict believes it a genuine offer, sprints off, and is dropped at

thirty yards like a rabbit by the five or six soldiers who have been

waiting under the shadow of the further wall. The next morning the

official newspaper states, "Last night the notorious criminal So and So,

to whom His Excellency the President recently extended clemency, made an

attempt to escape while being exercised in the prison yard, and was shot

dead by the sentries." Thus everybody is pleased, except possibly the

convict, and the President, without the least odium to himself, has rid

the country of another blackguard.

Another stroke of real genius was the way in which he has succeeded in

setting thieves to catch thieves. When he became President, the country

was infested with bandits who stopped at nothing; but Diaz erected huge

gallows at the crossways all over Mexico, and the robbers found they had

to stop at those, and stop quite a long while till the zopilotes and

vultures had picked their bones to the blameless white to which good

Porfirio Diaz desired the lives of all his subjects to attain. After

some weeks of brisk hanging-business, Diaz played his trump card. He

proclaimed that all other bandits, known or unknown, who cared to

surrender would be enrolled as _rurales_, country police, and, garbed in

State uniform and armed with Winchesters, would spend the remainder of

their lives agreeably engaged in killing their recalcitrant comrades.

This temptation to spend their declining days in bloodshed, to which no

penalties were attached, was too much for many. Thus fifty per cent, of

Mexico's robbers turn police and murder the other fifty, and acute Diaz

has a body of men who and whose sons have proved, and sons' sons will

prove, the eternal wisdom of this hybrid Sphinx of a ruler.

But there is a comic side to Mexican justice. There is a Gilbertian

humour in the go-as-you-please style in which prisoners are treated. In

one crowded court, when the jury had retired to consider their verdict

the prisoner was engaged in walking up and down, hands in pockets,

cigarette in mouth, while the police, entirely oblivious to their

charge, smoked and chatted in another part of the court. We asked one

officer whether they were not afraid of the prisoner attempting an

escape; "Oh no," he said, "he'll wait for the verdict." Roadmaking is

practically always done by gangs of convicts, and, when they think they

have had enough work, they throw down their spades and picks, and

warders and everybody sit down on the roadside and enjoy a cigarette and

a chat. The British Minister told us that he had recently been shown

over the Penitentiary, in which at the moment there was a bloodthirsty

rascal whose record of crime would have shamed a Jack the Ripper. The

governor of the gaol entered into a long and friendly conversation with

him as to his wife and family, and, as the British Minister humorously

put it, "We were all but presented to him."

The daily life of the Mexicans begins before dawn, when they all get up,

apparently because it is a habit of which they cannot break themselves,

for they seem to have nothing to do except to crouch round swaddled up

in blankets and complain that it is "_mucho frio_." As soon as six

o'clock and daylight come they take their coffee and roll. Most Mexicans

are heavy eaters, but they reserve their gastronomic heroisms for a

later hour. Many, like the Arabs, have but one big meal a day, shortly

after noon, when they _do_ eat; so heavily indeed that the rest of their

day is spent, boa-constrictor fashion, sleeping off the gorge. Many

others eat at 10.30 and 5 o'clock. The cooking is Spanish, only a little

bit more so. Their favourite dishes are appalling stews, the greasy

garlicyness of which would frighten away the appetite of an English

schoolboy. One of the most popular is _morli_, the basis of which is

said to be turkey, but it is very cleverly disguised. Of course, in the

capital, foreign invasion has much modified the national fare, but the

bulk of the Mexican people live to-day, as they have for centuries past,

on black beans (frijoles), tortillas (flat cakes of half-baked maize,

first soaked and crushed), coffee without milk, red and green peppers, a

little pork, and occasionally a piece of very stringy beef. The wealthy

Mexicans never entertain in our sense, even among themselves. Such a

thing as a dinner party is unheard of in non-official circles. This is

probably due largely to their taste for secluding their womenfolk,

though it is not unfair to say that it is contributed to by their

disinclination for hospitality.

The above remarks refer to the Mexicans, not to the Indians, who, as far

as they can, live the lives their ancestors lived four centuries back,

mingling but not mixing with their half-bred Spanish masters. The

Mexican Indians are probably among the dirtiest people on God's earth,

with possibly an exception in favour of the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego,

the Eskimos, and thirty years ago in favour of the now extinct

Tasmanians. But the average Mexican, too, has the Spanish horror of

water, and though he will keep up appearances like a schoolboy who

washes down to where his Eton collar comes, he will shirk more serious

ablutions whenever possible. The profuse use of scents, especially among

men, is always a suspicious sign, and this is not lacking in Mexico. The

disregard of the people for bodily cleanliness is only matched by their

contempt for those elaborate sanitary arrangements which in most

European countries have done so much to make it possible for us

miserable mortals to forget the humiliating physical necessities of our

daily lives. Throughout the capital there are no public conveniences. An

indignant apologist for Mexico declared to us on the steamer coming home

that urinals did exist in the plaza near the cathedral. All we can say

is that we did not see them. An English friend of ours, far from his

hotel and in temporary distress, approached a passing Mexican señor with

the question, "_Donde es el escusado?_" To his dismay he was told that

there was no such place, but was courteously invited to the stranger's

house, in the course of his visit passing through the sitting-room,

where the wife and young daughters sat at needlework. All over the city

are the drinking-shops (_pulquerias_) where the beloved pulque is served

all day to a jostling, elbowing crowd of tight-trousered and bespurred

vaqueros (cowboys) and of the Mexican-cum-Indian city riff-raff who

stand round the filthy counters. The floor is usually earth, and the

corners of the shop are used by the customers to relieve themselves,

without a murmur from the publican or the slightest protest from any

one.

Nominally Mexico is a Republic: really she is nothing of the sort. There

is a Senate, a Chamber of Deputies, periodic elections of State

representatives, a Governor and Council in each State of the Federation;

but for upwards of a quarter of a century these have all been but pawns

on a chessboard--the player a man of such astounding nature that those

who laughed at Mrs. Alec Tweedie's description of him as "the greatest

man of the nineteenth century" laughed from the fullness of their

ignorance. Porfirio Diaz is an autocrat. He is an autocrat fiercer, more

relentless, more absolute than the Tsar of Russia, than any recent Tsar

has been, almost than Peter the Great himself. He is more: he is a born

ruler. He has played for the regeneration of his country. He has played,

but it is too much to say he has won. Nobody could win; but he has

chained the bloody dogs of anarchy and murder, chained them successfully

for so many years that there are some who forget that he has not killed

them outright. Diaz is literally living over a volcano: he is a

personified extinguisher of the fierce furnace of his country's

turbulence. But when death removes him, what then? The deluge, surely;

and after that one more apotheosis of the Monroe Doctrine, and the very

wholesome, if somewhat aggressive, Stars and Stripes. You must go to

Mexico and live among its people to know all this. It is singular how

little the English people know of the country. Only the other day a

veteran Anglo-Indian officer gravely asked us, "What is the exact

position of Mexico in the United States of America?" We simply gasped:

words failed in such an emergency. Before Diaz came, Mexico's history

was one of uninterrupted rapine, murder, and sudden death. Out of a

morass of blood he has made a garden: out of robbers he has made

citizens: out of bankruptcy he has made a revenue: out of the bitterest

civil strivings he has _almost_ made a nation.

He is nearly eighty: he is as upright as a dart: he has the face of a

sphinx with a jaw which makes you shudder. He rarely talks, he still

more rarely smiles. And yet the whole man expresses no false pride--no

"wind in the head." His icy superhumanly self-controlled nature is too

great to be moved by such petty things as pride and a vulgar joy in

power. In manner and in life he is simplicity itself. He rides

unattended in the Paseo: he comes down to the Jockey Club in the

afternoon, and the members just rise and bow, and the President picks up

his paper and sits quietly at the window reading. He dislikes all

ostentation: his food is simple: his clothes are almost always a plain

blue serge suit and dark tie: and in his winter home in the city he

lives as a simple citizen. But his power is literally limitless. The

Mexicans do not love him: nobody could love such a man. The lower

classes fear him unreasoningly; the upper classes fear him too, but it

is blended with a lively sense of what he means to Mexico. But mark you!

there is nothing of the bully about him. The bully is always weak, a

coward. If Diaz was arrogant, he would be assassinated in twenty-four

hours. He knows that. He knows the blood of the cattle he drives. Nobody

but a madman whips a blood horse; but he must have an iron wrist and a

good hold on the rein. And that is why one can safely describe Diaz as a

born ruler. He instinctively understands his subjects: he has not learnt

it, for he began thirty years ago. He was never educated in statecraft,

for indeed he had no education at all; he was merely the son of an

innkeeper, first sent to a Jesuit seminary, whence he ran away and

joined the army. No! the man's secret is an iron will and positively

miraculous tact. Whatever he does, whatever he orders, is always done so

nicely. Everybody knows it has got to be done. Nobody ever crossed Diaz

and lived to boast of so doing. But he gilds the pills he thinks his

people must swallow, and they gulp them down and look up with meek

smiles into that awful face.

Here is a little characteristic story of him. Some while back there was

an election of Governor of Yucatan. The Yucatecan people have always

been one of the most restive of the presidential team. They nominated a

man disagreeable to Diaz; he nominated a second. The election ballot

took place. The Yucatecan nominee was successful by an enormous

majority. The news is wired to Mexico City. Back comes the presidential

answer: "Glad to know my man elected: am sending troops to formally

inaugurate him." The troops came, and Diaz's man was formally installed.

To the Chamber of Deputies no one can be elected against the President's

wish. For the over-popular Governor of a State Diaz provides

distinguished employment elsewhere. Such a case occurred while we were

in Yucatan. Señor Olegario Molina, of whom we shall later speak more,

has been for some years deservedly popular in Merida, for he has done

much to improve it. President Diaz visited Merida recently, and on his

return appointed Señor Molina a Cabinet Minister. When he arrived in

Vera Cruz Molina found the presidential train awaiting him, and on

reaching Mexico City the President and the whole Cabinet had come to the

station to greet him, and drove him triumphantly to the Iturbide Hotel.

Charming courtesies! how favourably the presidential eyes beam on him!

Yes, but he is banished: as much banished as the shivering pauper Jew

workman turned away from the London Docks. He was too powerful: he is

safer in Mexico City, far away from the madding crowds who would

perchance have made him State dictator. A too popular Cabinet Minister,

again, is sent as Minister to Madrid: another is found essential to the

pacification of a turbulent State of Northern Mexico; and so the pretty

game goes on, and there is literally no kicking amongst the presidential

team.

But there are fiercer exhibitions of autocracy at which people only

hint, or of which they speak in whispers. There is no Siberia in Mexico,

but there are the equivalents of banishment and disappearance for those

who would challenge the authority of the Mexican Tsar. Even criticism is

tyrannically repressed. There is a Press, but the muzzling order has

long been in force, and recalcitrant editors soon see the inside of the

Penitentiary. General Diaz's present (second) wife is a daughter of a

prominent supporter of Lerdo de Tejada, who on the death of Juarez

assumed the presidency, but was expelled in 1876 by Diaz. The alliance

brought about an armed peace between the two men. But they tell this

story. One day an argument arose, and hot words followed. It was at a

meal; and when wine's in, wit's out. Diaz's father-in-law went far, and

half in jest half in earnest said, "Why, Porfirio, you almost tempt me

to turn rebel again." They all saw the President's face darken, but the

storm blew over. That night it is said that Madame Diaz had to go on to

her knees to her husband to beg for her father's life.

Such is the arbiter and autocrat of Mexico. What, then, is the state of

the country politically, and what will be her future? Mexico's great

weakness (she has many, but this overtops all others, and lowers

menacing on her political horizon) is that she is not a nation. There is

no true national feeling, and a moment's thought will show that the

circumstances of her population forbid the existence of such. On the one

side you have the Spanish Mexicans, the white population, representing

the purest European blood in the country. They are but some 19 per cent.

of a population of twelve million odd. Among them, and among them alone,

is patriotism in its highest sense to be expected or found. On the other

side you have the vast mestizo class--the half-castes--some 43 per

cent., and then the purer Indians, forming the remaining 38 per cent. Of

these three classes the characteristics are sufficiently marked to

destroy hope of any welding or holding together. The Spanish Mexicans

are sensual and apathetic, avaricious and yet indolent, inheriting a

full share of that Castilian pride and bigotry which has worked the

colonial ruin of Spain. Brave, with many of those time-honoured traits

of the proverbial Spanish don, they are yet a people inexorably "marked

down" by Fate in the international remnant basket. They have had their

day. Ye Gods! they have used it, too; but it is gone. The mestizos--near

half the population--have all the worst features of their Spanish and

Indian parents. Turbulent, born criminals, treacherous, idle, dissolute,

and cruel, they have the Spanish lust and the Indian natural cynicism,

the Spanish luxury of temperament with the Indian improvidence. These

are the true Mexicans; these are the unruled and unrulable hotchpotch

whom Diaz's iron hand holds straining in the leash: the dogs of rapine,

murder, and sudden death, whose cowardice is only matched by their

vicious treachery. And last there are the Indians, heartless, hopeless,

disinherited, enslaved, awaiting with sullen patience their deliverance

from the hated yoke of their Spanish masters, not a whit less abhorrent

to them because they have had four centuries in which to become

accustomed to it. The heterogeneity of Mexico's population is only

matched by the depth of the antagonism of each class to each in all

their most vital interests. To a common enemy Mexico can never present

an undivided front. Indeed it is not too much to say she can never have

a common enemy; and whencesoever the bolt comes it will find Mexico

unprepared, a land of ethnic shreds and patches, slattern in her policy,

slattern in her defence, her vitals preyed upon by the vultures of civil

strife. Of all lands she might best afford a realistic presentment of

the sad tale of the Kilkenny cats.

The potential wealth of Mexico is almost limitless, but the indolence of

the Mexican nature is inimical to its development. Under the iron rule

of Diaz the country has advanced, it is undeniable, in every direction.

Railway enterprise has opened up unheard-of possibilities in outlying

States; banking, though still crude (the bank rate is about 9 per

cent.), is becoming a feature of Mexican commerce; municipal life is

assuming that beneficent tendency which it has for years possessed in

most European countries; drainage and sanitation are receiving official

attention, and the welfare of the people is a plank, and a big one, in

the present policy. Last but not least, the educational tonic in doses

for an adult, perhaps too strong, is being given to a moribund people

under the supervision of an excellent Minister of Public Instruction,

Señor Justo Sierra. But bulk largely as this programme of progress does,

it is due to one fact and one alone--the supreme wisdom of the President

in welcoming the foreigner and his capital. Behind all the great schemes

of improvement one finds the foreigner. The excellent tram service of

the metropolis was until recently practically owned by the late Mr.

Alfred Beit and his firm; railroads are English or American built and

owned; new towns such as Coatzocoalcos are creations of such mechanical

geniuses as Sir Weetman Pearson. And this brings us to Mexico's second

great danger, which must inevitably shape her future. She may be said to

be largely in the hands of mortgagees. Of these the chief three are

England, America, and Germany; and their mutual positions are pregnant

with prophecy of what must come. The Germans have wrested from their

rivals much of the trade; especially have they worsted the French

retailers. But Germany has probably lent Mexico the last mark she will

ever get. The English are chiefly centred on the mining interests, and

sporadically in land and agriculture, and though the Mexican Government

would eagerly welcome large English loans, it is doubtful, very

doubtful, if they will be forthcoming. But American capital is rolling

in, rolling in like an inexorable tide of Fate. You have only to be in

Mexico a day or two to realise how irresistibly the country is sinking

into the power of the American investor, and how vain--and the more

vicious because of their vanity--are the efforts of Mexicans to avoid

looking upon the Gorgon head of Yankee hustle which is destined to turn

their somnolent national life, such as it is, into stone. If in Mexico

City you say you are an American, you soon find you represent a race

which is hated as much as it is dreaded. English, French, Germans are

all welcome, but Americans!... Mexico has more than a cloud on her

horizon. She has Texas and Arizona to remind her perpetually of her

fate. Never did spendthrift heir struggle more unavailingly in the hands

of Jews than does Mexico in the hands of her great neighbour.

Cassandra-like, we will prophesy unto you. Let us not be rash and

attempt to fix dates; but as certainly as day succeeds night, Mexico

will eventually form a part of the United States. It will probably be

sooner than is anticipated even by the clearest-headed men on both

sides of the Texan frontier. With the death of General Diaz, Mexico will

be plunged into Kilkenny strife. Nothing can save her. The North will go

like a field of sundried barley, fired in a gale of wind: the turbulent

North, where even now a life is worth nothing. Some Englishmen found a

rich claim recently, and sat down to work it. Presently warning came,

"You had better clear. The Mexican miners are going to 'do you in.'"

Well, the English went, and by a circuitous road, and it was a good

thing for them that they did, for a gang of "civilised" Mexicans were

waiting for them on the ordinary road, determined to knife them, not

content with kicking them out of their claim. That's the North to-day,

and the fear of Diaz's name just keeps the pot from boiling over; but

it's on the boil, right enough. Well then, the North will go into open

rebellion, and the situation will be complicated by a rising of the

Indians, who will be against everybody else. Mexico in her present

isolated independent condition needs a soldier ruler. Your Corrals and

Limantours, your Marischals and Sierras are good enough as Cabinet

Ministers, but they are not the men for the awful task which Porfirio

Diaz set himself thirty years back and has brought to temporary

perfection. Those who know Mexico best know there is no successor to

Diaz. The very installation of a new President will only add fury to the

internecine strife.

But Mexico cannot boil her pot as she likes. Other nations have helped

her with too many condiments and too much stock. American troops will

cross the frontier to protect American interests and capital; and when

they are once in they will stop there, as the English have in Egypt. It

will be a Protectorate, the maintenance of which will prove in the best

interests of England, Germany, and every other Power concerned. America

is inevitably marked out as the _dea ex machinâ_ when the social

earthquake in Mexico comes about. A few years, a few struggles, a bloody

civil war, a rising of the miserable Indian slaves in all the States,

and Mexico will vote herself inside the federation of which, despite her

struggles, she is already so completely a geographical part. The

Mexicans have a little weakness for calling their land South America.

Whatever else Mexico is she is not South America, and their eagerness to

alter stern geographical fact only underlines the fear which is in their

hearts.

When one remembers that by the Nicaraguan Treaty five miles each side

of the canal are definitely annexed by the United States; when one looks

at the ridiculously truncated appearance of the land of the Stars and

Stripes on the Map of the World; when one knows enough of the Mexicans

to foresee what must happen on Diaz's death; when one tots up the vast

amount of American wealth which is at stake in Mexico; when one

remembers that Mexico is without military or naval resources to resist

foreign interference (her army of twenty odd thousand is, as a fighting

force, a negligible quantity, and her navy consists of three old

gunboats and a training ship); when one realises that her difficulties

will find her with an empty treasure chest, living from hand to mouth on

a suicidal policy of a crushing excise system, stifling internal

commerce and forcing her people to look to other lands for countless

manufactures which they could tackle themselves; when one sees that the

last, the greatest resource of every country, an appeal to national

feeling, will be lost on ears deaf with the din of civil bloodshed, it

does not need much acumen to arrive at the conclusion that Mexico as a

separate State is doomed to extinction, and that the Stars and Stripes

will float over all America to the Panama Canal. Yucatan (which wished

to cede herself with Texas in 1845), Guatemala, Nicaragua, they must all

go, and into the atrophying veins of these dying Latin races will be

injected the honest virile life of a democracy triumphant, and Mexico,

for certain, will rise Phœ-like from the ashes of her hybrid

Spanish past.

CHAPTER III

YUCATAN AND HER HISTORY

It has ever been the fate of Yucatan to be misunderstood. Her very

christening was the result of a misunderstanding. Accounts vary as to

the exact place and time, and as to the Mayan words used; but there

seems little doubt that it was Cortes's first question of the Indians

who had gathered on the beach when he landed in 1517 that settled the

matter. He naturally asked what they called their country, and they as

naturally, not understanding a single syllable, returned, "_Matan c ubah

than_," "_Tec te than_," or some such words ("We do not understand"),

which were promptly taken by the invaders to be the country's name and

corrupted into "Yucatan." Bishop Landa, in his _Relación de las Cosas de

Yucatan_ (1556), credits Cordoba with the christening, and says the

incident took place at Cape Catoche, varying the Indian reply as "_Ci u

than!_" meaning "How well they speak!"

But fifteen years earlier Christopher Columbus had blundered worse, for

he had declared Yucatan an island, and the sight of a richly laden canoe

had persuaded the sanguine Spaniard that he had reached Eldorado at

last--hence Yucatan's early name among the Spanish of "Isla Rica." How

bitterly the brave Spanish pioneers paid for this error, laying down

their lives by scores to win a country which was all limestone bluffs

and dense rank forests, will be outlined directly in the brief account

we must give of Montejo's ill-fated expeditions. Here it is enough to

say that as soon as the land's barrenness was known, Spain's great

captains turned their backs on it. Thereafter for centuries Yucatan

passed through a series of misunderstandings, political and otherwise.

In her tangled woods and on her bare sunbaked limestone hills Central

American civilisation had, it is now known, reached its apogee, but more

than three hundred years were to pass before the peninsula reached its

archæological apotheosis. Ignorant and bigoted Spaniards, intent on

serving the interests of that ecclesiastical institution which the late

Professor Huxley once termed "The Bloody Wolf of Rome," swept away

temples and palaces, broke to pieces statues and idols, built bonfires

with bark writings and sacred books (each of which to-day the Trustees

of the British Museum would probably regard as cheap at a thousand

guineas), murdered, pillaged and destroyed, everybody, everything,

everywhere. So that while avaricious Spanish eyes were turned towards

the glittering temples of Moctezuma's capital and the goldmines of

Mexico, Palenque and Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Piedras Negras lay

crumbling and forgotten in their forests. Yucatan passed into a

backwater of history. The ancient annalists refer to her briefly or not

at all: the modern Encyclopedia usually deals with her claims for notice

laconically thus: "YUCATAN: see under MEXICO." Probably not fifteen per

cent. of Englishmen could tell you offhand her exact geographical

position, and of those fifteen per cent. there would be few whose

knowledge extends beyond a vague memory from schooldays that she is

physically a peninsula, and that the rattlesnake, the tapir and the

giant crested lizard--the iguana--haunt her forests.

And what wonder? Porfirio Diaz, sphinx-faced, granite-hearted, who for

thirty years has been dictator of Mexico, wielding a power as autocratic

as that of the Tsar--he, too, if reports are credible, knew little of

the easternmost portion of his realm till, a year or two ago, Yucatan's

Governor, ambitious of presidential patronage and fatally forgetful of

the fable of King Stork, begged the republican monarch to let the light

of his countenance shine for a while on his Yucatecan lieges. And no

sooner was it announced that the great Diaz would go than he received

countless letters, some anonymous, some from Governors of other States,

warning, imploring, declaring the Yucatecans to be little better than

savages and cut-throats, that the inestimable presidential life would be

not worth a moment's purchase when he landed at Progreso. Evidently his

subjects knew as little of Yucatan as did their ruler.[1]

President Diaz went, he saw, and he ... was staggered. Instead of the

uncouth band of savage rancheros, armed to the teeth, he found a

community of sybarites among whom the only difficulty was to find a man

who was not a millionaire or the son of one. Instead of a fever-haunted,

poverty-stricken, one-horse town, he found the "very loyal and noble

city" of Merida, a Paris in miniature for vivacity and luxury. As they

passed within the gates of one great hacienda or farm, the gardens lit

with myriads of coloured lights, Madame Diaz clapped her hands and cried

out gleefully, "Look, Porfirio! Surely we have never seen anything so

lovely!" Well might she so say, for that particular haciendado had

lavished 60,000 Mexican dollars (about £6,000) to dazzle the

presidential eyes for one short evening. But Merida is not Yucatan, and

the henequen millionaires of Merida strained every nerve and even their

Fortunatus purses to prevent their shrewd ruler from seeing, beneath the

surface, the social rottenness of the country. Of the amazing and

amusing efforts they made to throw dust in those terrible eyes we shall

have something to say later. What the President saw, we have seen--the

almost boundless wealth of Merida and the sybaritic life led by the

haciendados. But we have seen more: we have seen the real Yucatan. For

months we have wandered in her wilds. We have shared the huts with the

Indians: we have slung our hammocks in the forests: we have slept in the

palm-thatched cabins of the woodcutters: we have lived the fisherman's

life on the islets of the east coast, round which in the days of Cordoba

and Cortes cruised fleets of canoes, fruit and corn-laden. The primary

reason of our trip was archæological exploration, but the interest which

this volume must have as containing descriptions of those wondrous ruins

which have earned for Yucatan the title of "The Egypt of the New World"

will be, we believe, enhanced by that insight we are enabled to give

into the social state of a country which for nearly all is a "terra

incognita."

And now for a little history. It was on the 30th July, 1502, that

Christopher Columbus, near the island Guanaja in the Gulf of Honduras,

met a canoe paddled by twenty-five Indians and carrying as many women,

and a cargo of fruits, cotton cloths, copper hatchets, and pottery. The

men wore loin-cloths and the women were modestly draped in mantles of

cotton. By signs the great Spaniard gathered that they came from a rich

land to the westward. Such is the first knowledge the white world had of

Yucatan! Four years later Juan Diaz de Solis and Vincente Yañez Pinzon

sailed for Guanaja intent on completing the discoveries of Columbus.

Reaching Guanaja they steered westward and discovered the east coast of

Yucatan, convincing themselves that it was an island, but making no

landing.

On the 20th May, 1506, Columbus, a victim of injustice and neglect,

ended his splendid career in sadly lonely surroundings at Valladolid.

His two successors in the pioneer work of Yucatan's discovery came to

untimely ends, Yañez Pinzon dying in Spain a year later, while Diaz de

Solis was eaten by the Indians of Rio de la Plata. In 1511, more by bad

luck than good management, the Spaniards came again into contact with

Yucatan. Nuñez de Balboa, Alcalde of Darien, dispatched one Valdivia in

a caravel to Hayti for provisions and reinforcements. When nearing

Jamaica the ship was wrecked on the Alacranes Reefs, and the Spaniards,

to the number of twenty, took to the boats. Seven died of starvation,

and the rest, after days of exposure, were washed on to the eastern

coast of Yucatan. Here--though they were warmly welcomed--it can

scarcely be said that the reception accorded to them was one which they

appreciated. The Indians, making a feast-day of their arrival, swarmed

down on the beach and insisted on their coming at once to the village,

where, it is sad to relate, those who had been unlucky enough to

preserve a little adipose tissue in spite of the hardships they had

endured, were accorded the honour of becoming the "pièces de résistance"

at the banquet which the chief had commanded to celebrate their arrival.

The less plump ones were enclosed in glorified chicken coops, where they

were fattened with succulent viands until such a time as the chief

should be "disposed to put his lips to them."

Unwilling to await this distinction, the unfortunate Spaniards found an

opportunity one night of breaking the bars of the coop and taking to the

woods. Several died of exposure, but a few struggled through to the

territory of a neighbouring cacique, who appears to have been more of a

vegetarian. He rejoiced in the name of Hkin Cutz. The Spanish fugitives,

for some reason or other, perhaps because they made praiseworthy efforts

to pronounce his name, were taken into his service and well treated,

though an eight-hour day does not appear to have been part of Hkin

Cutz's programme. As Joshua, he said, "Let them live but let them be

hewers of wood and drawers of water unto my people." Under this system

all died but two, Gonzalo Guerrero, a swash-buckling soldier, as his

name suggests, and Jeronimo de Aguilar, a young priest. Guerrero (one

can picture him the thorough captain of industry, cynical, fearless,

taking his pleasure where he could) took to his new life like a duck to

water: fell in love with a Mayan girl, stripped off his clothes in

favour of a loin-cloth, painted his body and decorated his nose and ears

with stone rings, winding up with a very decent imitation of reverence

for the Stone Gods who had it all their own way in Hkin Cutz's kingdom.