A MAYAN INDIAN.
[Frontispiece.]
THE
AMERICAN EGYPT
BY
CHANNING ARNOLD
AND
FREDERICK J. TABOR FROST
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS, MAP AND PLANS
LONDON
HUTCHINSON & CO.
PATERNOSTER ROW
1909
To
ALICE ALTHEA ARNOLD
[PREFACE]
In publishing the present volume, it is our privilege to produce the first book ever written by Englishmen on Yucatan—that Egypt of the New World, where, it is now generally admitted, Central American Civilisation reached its apogee—and to be, for the present at least, the only Englishmen who can claim to have explored the uncivilised north-eastern portions of the Peninsula and the islands of her eastern coast. Mr. A. P. Maudslay, who in 1889 made a lengthy stay at and a detailed survey of Chichen, has done yeoman service to Central American archæology by his years of patient work (alas! too little appreciated) in Guatemala, in the Usumacinta district and Southern Mexico.
Work, and wonderful work, has been done in civilised Yucatan by bands of earnest labourers from the States, from Germany, and from France. Among these the most notable is the late J. L. Stephens, the American traveller, who visited Yucatan in 1842, and who is justly regarded as the Father of Mayan archæology. In his footsteps has followed, during recent years, Mr. Edward H. Thompson, one of the most painstaking and accomplished of American archæologists. France has been represented by M. Desiré Charnay, and latterly by Count Perigny. Of the German field-workers the most assiduous have been Professor Seler, T. Maler, and K. Sapper; while all who wish to see the Mayan problem solved must pay a meed of thanks to the eminent Professor Forstemann for his attempts to decipher the inscriptions, even if they feel, as do we, that he has allowed his enthusiasm to lead him too far astray on a will-o'-the-wisp path of inquiry and theory.
The problem reviewed in this volume is a profoundly interesting one. The ethnology of the Americas presents a problem as yet unsolved. The average ethnologist has been content to label the vast affiliated hordes and tribes of the two Americas "Mongolian." But the American ethnological puzzle is deepened by the existence of what is known as the Mayan civilisation and its many ramifications throughout Central America. Whence came these building races? What cradle-land is one to assign to architects whose achievements often rival in grandeur the monuments of Egypt? How is one to believe that they were ordinary members, or members at all, of that great affiliated race of American Indians whose ideas of building were represented in the north by the snow-house of the Eskimo and the wigwam of the Sioux, and in the south by the leaf-shelters of the cannibal inhabitants of the forests of Brazil?
In the later chapters of this volume we endeavour to analyse the evidence which we and others have collected on this thorny Mayan problem. We cannot too strongly urge that the time has come to drop once and for all the Toltec theory. We know that we are thus taking up a position in direct opposition to four-fifths of the students and scholars who have worked in the field; but we are as convinced that the race which built the ruined palaces and temples of Yucatan is not a vanished race as we are convinced that the Toltec theory is a gross error.
And if we are obstinate as to the origin of Mayan civilisation, we fear we must be charged, too, with gross obstinacy in the matter of deciding the age of the ruins. We would like to believe, with those more sanguine, that the wonderful structures have a history rivalling Memphis or Syene. But we cannot believe it, and we hope that those who read this volume will acquit us of coming to this very disappointing decision on flimsy grounds. In such matters no grounds but practical ones are to be trusted, and we claim that an expert builder's careful examination of the ruins, after due allowance is made for the friability of the limestone used in such a climate as Yucatan enjoys, will prove to any open-minded inquirer that the oldest building still standing, so to speak, intact, has not seen more than six centuries.
In the present volume it has been impossible to do more than "open the case" for the theory we propound, viz. that America's first architects were Buddhist immigrants from Java and Indo-China. To attempt to prove this would require much time and money; but, alas! archæology is not such a popular and paying science as will allow those without large means at their disposal to follow up their theories.
We should need many months of careful study in Java, the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon and India. If investigations there proved satisfactory, the next step would be to follow the route we have suggested as that taken by the migrators in a vessel as similar as possible to those it may be presumed they employed. Along the route a more minute study of the archæological remains on the islands of the Caroline and Marshall groups than has yet been undertaken could be made. Thence the voyage would be continued to the American mainland, where a thorough investigation of the country between the coast and Copan would probably yield valuable data. But such an expedition would require an outlay of thousands of pounds and would occupy two or three years, much of which would have to be spent under such hardships as only enthusiasts could contemplate.
C. A.
F. J. T. F.
London, 1908.
[CONTENTS]
| PAGE | |
| CHAPTER I | |
| A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF MEXICO | [1] |
| CHAPTER II | |
| MEXICO CITY AND THE MEXICANS | [23] |
| CHAPTER III | |
| YUCATAN AND HER HISTORY | [45] |
| CHAPTER IV | |
| FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF YUCATAN | [57] |
| CHAPTER V | |
| A YUCATECAN BREAKFAST, AND OTHER "SIGHTS" | [71] |
| CHAPTER VI | |
| AMID THE PALACES OF THE ITZAS | [82] |
| CHAPTER VII | |
| VALLADOLID AND AFTER | [104] |
| CHAPTER VIII | |
| IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CORTES | [127] |
| CHAPTER IX | |
| EL MECO TO PUERTO MORELOS | [143] |
| CHAPTER X | |
| IN SEARCH OF THE MAYAN MECCA | [164] |
| CHAPTER XI | |
| ON THE SOUTHERN SIERRAS | [185] |
| CHAPTER XII | |
| COPAN AND QUIRIGUA | [204] |
| CHAPTER XIII | |
| PALENQUE, MENCHÉ, AND ON THE USUMACINTA | [214] |
| CHAPTER XIV | |
| THE ANCIENT MAYANS | [226] |
| CHAPTER XV | |
| WHO WERE THE MAYANS? | [242] |
| CHAPTER XVI | |
| WHO WERE AMERICA'S FIRST ARCHITECTS? | [257] |
| CHAPTER XVII | |
| THE AGE OF THE RUINS | [283] |
| CHAPTER XVIII | |
| HIEROGLYPHICS AND PAINTINGS | [298] |
| CHAPTER XIX | |
| SLAVERY ON THE HACIENDAS | [321] |
| CHAPTER XX | |
| YUCATAN AS IT IS TO-DAY AND THE YUCATECANS | [337] |
| CHAPTER XXI | |
| THE GREEN GOLD OF YUCATAN | [361] |
| 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 | " | " | [213] |
| 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 bareheaded 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, landlocked, 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.
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 sun-blinds 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 bareheaded 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 Phœnix-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 loincloth, 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.
But Aguilar was an idealist, and though, true to his Church's teaching, casuist enough to keep on the right side of Hkin Cutz, he treasured a hope of some day, somehow, returning to Spain and its Catholic joys. With a view to hastening this consummation he so devoutly wished, he took the Saints into his confidence, and, satisfied of their assistance, promised at all costs to preserve that chastity which is believed by the credulous to be still—as it doubtless always has been—the brightest jewel in the crown of the Catholic priesthood. Aguilar's misogynistic tendencies do not seem to have much troubled Hkin Cutz; but his successor Ahmay was distinctly uxorious, and in addition appears to have been something of a humorist. Aguilar's lack of appreciation of his maidens worried him somewhat, and he determined to find out whether it was the lack of opportunity or the lack of taste. When the young priest was not cutting wood or drawing water, he was sent out fishing, going overnight to the coast and sleeping on the beach till dawn, when the fish were feeding. One day Ahmay ordered him to the coast, but as a mark of his favour told him to take as his companion a very beautiful girl of fourteen, to whom the cunning cacique gave instructions that she was to "fish" for Aguilar while he—poor innocent—was seeking his lord's breakfast. Aguilar did not much care for his girl comrade, but he did not dare to refuse: so off they started, the chief first loading his faithful servant with warm garments for the night journey and a sort of en tout cas bedspread. As the coast was not far distant, and the travellers had not much to say to each other, they got over the ground so quickly that the night was not far spent when they reached Aguilar's fishing "pitch." Seeing his companion was sleepy, he gallantly made a bed for her in the woods with the wraps Ahmay had so thoughtfully provided, and then went off to the beach and lay down on the sand. But the temptations of St. Anthony were not in it with those to which that Indian minx subjected the young priest till dawn, and thus it is the more gratifying to learn that he was able to keep his arrangement with the Saints, whereby he passed into the highest favour with Ahmay, who, poor weak mortal that he was, was convinced that Aguilar was a very exceptional young man. This is a Spanish story, and must be taken with a big pinch of salt.
But to return to more serious history. Undeterred by their predecessors' misfortunes, the Spanish undertook a third expedition to Yucatan. On the 8th February, 1517, Francis Hernandez de Cordoba, with one hundred and ten soldiers and three ships, sailed from Cuba, and on the twentieth day sighted an island. On their approach five large canoes put off. Signs of friendship prevailed on some thirty of the Indians to come on board Cordoba's ships, and there such amicable relations were established that the Spaniards landed, finding to their surprise every sign of a considerable civilisation. For the first time Europeans saw stone buildings in America. In the temple, approached by well-laid steps, they saw incense being burnt in front of stone and wooden idols, while files of women ministrants chanted near the altars. Hence Cordoba christened the island "Isla de Mujeres" (Isle of Women). Another version has it that the Spaniards found gigantic female figures of stone at the south end of the island, but our careful search of the island and a consultation of its records do not support this version. Thence he sailed to the most northerly point of Yucatan, where he was welcomed by the chief, who came out with his people in twelve canoes and repeatedly exclaimed, "Connex c otoch" ("Come to our Town"), which the Spaniards believed the name of the place: hence Cape Catoche, as the point is still called.
The Spaniards, led by the treacherous cacique, landed, and were soon attacked in a thick wood by a body of Indians armed with stone axes, bows, and lances of wood hardened by fire, their faces and bodies painted, wearing on their arms an armour of plaited cotton, beating a war tune on turtle-shells and blowing horns of conch-shells. Cordoba lost twenty men, and many of the Indians were killed. Returning to their ships, the Spaniards sailed on to a point where at the mouth of the river was a large Indian town called by the natives Kimpech, the modern Campeachy. Farther on a disastrous fight took place which ended in the loss of fifty Spaniards and the retreat of Cordoba. He himself received twelve arrow-wounds, and but one soldier escaped unhurt. Within ten days of his reaching Havana, Cordoba died of his wounds. This signal disaster did not, however, deter enterprising Spaniards from looking longingly towards this veritable will o' the wisp, La Isla Rica. In 1518 an expedition led by Juan de Grijalva sailed from Matanzas. This resulted in the discovery of the island of Cozumel and a fairly complete reconnaissance of the coastline of Yucatan. A third expedition, commanded by the great Cortes, left Cuba on the 18th February, 1519, made first for Cozumel; and thence, cruising round the north-east coast, the Spaniards continued their voyage as far as what is to-day the city of Vera Cruz, where the glittering promise of Mexico once and for all removed the great Spanish captain from Yucatecan history.
But in Cortes's suite was one Francisco Montejo, a gentleman of Seville. To him, on the 8th December, 1526, a grant was made for the conquest of the "islands" of Yucatan and Cozumel. Fitting out a small armada, he sailed from Seville in May, 1527, with 380 troops. He made first for Cozumel, where he landed in September of that year, establishing friendly relations with the chief, Naum Pat. Thence, taking with him an Indian guide, he sailed to the east coast. With bombastic prematureness the royal standard was planted on the beach, and amid cries of "Viva España!" the whole country claimed for the King of Spain. But Montejo was merely beginning his troubles. A disastrous march through the dense pathless bush—his troops footsore and fever-stricken, hunger and thirst their constant comrades—ended in a battle in which, with fearful losses, the invaders barely held their own. A retreat followed; but, undismayed, in 1528 Montejo with the remnant of his army marched on Chichen Itza. The old chroniclers contradict one another as to this expedition to Chichen. We believe Montejo made but one, though time would allow for two visits and two temporary settlements there, as some writers believe. In the metropolis of the Itza tribe a friendly reception at first was accorded him; but he unwisely divided his forces by dispatching his captain, Alonzo Davila, with some foot and horse to the westward. Thus weakened he was soon driven out of Chichen, and forced to the sea at Campeachy. Davila fared no better. Arrived in the dominions of a neighbouring cacique, his request for provisions was fiercely answered by the latter, who said he "would send them fowls on spears, and maize on arrows." After two years of weary struggle with hunger and fever, harassed the while by Indians, Davila rejoined his chief at Campeachy. Nothing had been achieved: Yucatan was still unconquered. Montejo now returned to Cuba for reinforcements, and, thus heartened, he made an attack on Tabasco, leaving a few Spanish at Campeachy. These few, weakened by privations, were after some years reduced to an effective force of five only. The camp was abandoned. Gonzales Nieto, who had planted the flag amid such bombastic shoutings on the eastern beach nine years earlier, was the last to leave. In 1535 not a single Spaniard remained in Yucatan.
Two years later Montejo, whose attempt on Tabasco had signally failed, returned to the attack, landing at Champoton, where once more the Spanish flag was raised. The Indians, grown shrewd, left the heat and General Malaria to do their skirmishing, and when Montejo's camp had become a hospital, a pitched battle all but drove the Spaniards into the sea. Worse than this, the rumours of the wealth of Peru and Mexico, of the dazzling conquests of Cortes and Pizarro, caused desertions (for the poverty of Yucatan had now become notorious), and one by one Montejo's men slunk off. Nineteen stalwarts at last were all that were left at Champoton. Montejo sent his son to Cuba with urgent requests for relief. In 1539 stores and men arrived, and Montejo, distrusting his own fortune, placed the conquest of Yucatan in his son's hands. The latter marched out from Champoton, gave battle to the Indians, and completely routed them. Advancing into the land, in one day three fights took place, the Indian dead being so numerous that they literally obstructed the roadway. After a march of many months, during which his troops suffered incredible hardships and fought their way almost league by league, Montejo reached the great city of Tihoo early in 1541.
A preliminary victory ensured the invaders some months of peace. But the clouds were gathering: the caciques formed a confederation, and on the 11th of June a final battle took place. Little reliance can be placed on the figures, but if they are anywhere near the truth, the pious historian, Father Cogolludo of the Franciscan Friars, may be forgiven for exclaiming, in an ecstasy of faith, "Divine power works more than human valour!" For the Spanish mustered but 200, while the Indians, it is alleged, were 70,000 strong! Be that as it may, the Spanish firearms won the day, and the 6th January, 1542, saw the formal founding of the city of Merida, built out of the stones and on the ruined site of Tihoo. The Indians never rallied; and the brutal work of enslaving them was thenceforth to be pursued with few interruptions. In 1561 French pirates attacked Campeachy and entered Merida, and in 1575 English buccaneers sacked the city. Forced to withdraw, they renewed their attack in 1606, but unsuccessfully. In 1632 the Dutch appeared on the scene, and two years later British pirates made a descent on the coast. For the next half-century Yucatan was the prey of pirates, and Merida was attacked again in 1684. Meanwhile the country had been constituted a Spanish province under a Captain-General; a see of Merida was created, and Spanish towns built on the ruins of the Indian pueblos.
The internal history of the peninsula from 1684 during the next century and a half is a story of Spanish cruelty and bigotry, of Franciscan arrogance and vandalism. The Spanish settlers, not content with the conquest and enslaving of the Indians, busied themselves in the destruction of everything—buildings, books, statues—which had to do with earlier days. Towns were built on the ruins of Indian villages; large churches—the majority now in ruins—were constructed, for the most part, out of the stones of Indian palaces, and the great haciendas were formed and worked by gangs of miserable natives whose spirit was broken.
In 1824 Yucatan, which had borne its fair share in the War of Independence against Spain of the previous year, became a Federal State. Amicable relations with Mexico were interrupted in 1829 and again in 1840, when heavy taxation brought about an armed revolt. In the June of the latter year the rebels drove the Federal forces out of Yucatecan territory, and independence was declared. In 1843 General Santa Ana, the head of Mexico, by a successful campaign forced Yucatan into the Federation once more. In 1847 a serious Indian revolt occurred, and this was not suppressed till 1853, when a treaty of peace was signed granting autonomy to the Indians of the east. A year later trouble broke out again, but in 1860 an army 3,000 strong attacked and captured Chan Santa Cruz, the Indian capital. The town was almost at once, however, retaken by the natives with a loss of 1,500 whites, and until 1901 it remained in the hands of the Mayans. Of the war which was then declared against these stalwarts, of the injustice of its inception, and of the barbarous methods now being employed against them, we shall speak later. The Mexican Government have done their best to hide from the outside world what exactly is happening in far Eastern Yucatan, but despite official discouragement we penetrated the district and are in a position to tell the whole story.
Of the authentic history of Yucatan previous to the Conquest it might almost be written as succinctly as in the famous chapter "Snakes in Iceland": there is none. Even its ancient name is in dispute, though there is little doubt it was "Maya." Columbus is the first to record that name. For the first half-century or so after the founding of Merida, the Spanish vandals were far too busy, in their ruthless Christian zeal, with the destruction of the Mayan towns and palaces, with the butchering of men and the outraging of women, to give much thought to the past of the unfortunate race which they were bent on degrading and enslaving. Bishop Landa, one of the earliest of the Catholic bishops of Yucatan, bears terrible evidence on this point. The Indian chiefs were burnt alive in many instances; women, after outrage and gross and filthy indignities, were hanged, their babies being hanged on their feet—thus making gibbets of the mothers' bodies. Landa says that there is no doubt that until his countrymen arrived chastity was dearly prized among the Mayans: death being the penalty for both young man and maiden proved unchaste before marriage. To-day Mayan morality in all towns and centres where the Indians are in contact, or have long been in contact, with the whites is loose in the extreme. Prostitution is terribly common, practically universal.
When, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the task of collecting historical data was undertaken, naturally enough the Indians consulted had little to give but a hotchpotch of tradition and legend. With an alacrity positively suspicious the so-called books of Chilan Balam cropped up in all directions. Each important township had one of these almost worthless compilations based on the musty memories of garrulous old Mayans, who thus sought to ingratiate themselves with the domineering Franciscan friars. The Mayan hieroglyphics were, as they still are, undecipherable, the temple records and picture writings had been burnt, and the oldest Indian assisting at the manufacture of these tradition books must have been in long clothes or the Mayan equivalent when Cortes landed. Yet this lack of credibility has not prevented many who have laboured earnestly and long in the field of Mayan archæology from spoiling their work by plunging into the muddied tideway of date and legend and emerging convinced of much for which there is not a tittle of real evidence. Most of the tradition books agree in ascribing Central American civilisation to the Toltec nation, and "Toltec" has become the rallying cry, the shibboleth of those who struggle to unravel the past of Central America. Learned professors from Berlin and Dresden; enthusiastic young men from Harvard and other American universities; foreign and native writers and students, clamber or tumble headlong over the Toltec fence. With the perverse persistence of the National School child, whose memory of dates is restricted to "William the Conqueror, 1066," at which moment its infantile mind supposes England, London, the Tower, the Zoo, and Madame Tussaud's to have come into instant being, so "648 A.D. Toltecs arrived at Tula or Tulapan" crops up in everything these good people write. King Charles I.'s head never worried Mr. Dick half as much as the Toltec bogey worries them.
Where Tula or Tulapan was, is, or ever has been: where the Toltecs sprang from; what ethnical affinities they possessed; whether they were kin to those affiliated tribes which have most certainly inhabited the Americas since prehistoric times; how they came to have cut-and-dried building specifications in what were equivalent to their breeches' pockets, they never stop to tell us. One professor glibly remarks, assuming his Toltec premiss, "While this [the Toltec] race was still quite at a low stage of civilisation the Aztecs advanced out of the north from at least 26° north latitude." No conjurer ever produced rabbit from silk hat with more assurance than the professor produces the Aztecs "out of the north." That "at least" is distinctly precious. Was ever such begging of the question? The Aztecs were builders, too! Where did they get their knowledge? They certainly would have difficulty to find a hint of it in the vast North American Continent. The truth is that, stripped of all nonsensical fetish-worship, there is not an iota of real evidence for this Toltec theory. No Toltec nationality ever existed; and the explanation of that civilisation which differentiates the Mayan peoples and their Aztec neighbours from the natives of the rest of the Americas is to be sought, as we endeavour to demonstrate in Chapter XV., in an altogether different direction.
Well then, we have no real pre-Conquest history. All that seems certain is that in Yucatan no kingship in the true sense existed. The land was ruled by caciques (chiefs), each the head of a tribe or tribal family. As is natural in such a régime, the predominating power was not always in the same hands. About 1436 (Bishop Landa, writing in 1556, gives the date, and this agrees with native tradition) the tyranny of the Cocomes who ruled over the great city of Mayapan caused a rebellious confederation of lesser caciques, which ended in the overthrow of the Cocomes family and the destruction of Mayapan. This—the great event of the more recent pre-Spanish history of Yucatan—was followed by the uprise of the chief of Chichen Itza, who thenceforward till the Conquest maintained predominance. These, the only dates upon which reliance can be placed, fit in well with the date which we are inclined to assign to the superb ruins of Chichen, which we describe in detail in a later chapter.