I
It was another four days’ journey to Mexico City—a journey directly eastward and a trifle skyward.
Mexico is a mountainous country—so loftily mountainous that one has only to travel upward to pass in turn through every variety of climate and every type of landscape.
The road led from Manzanillo through the hot coastal plain—through palm-land and swamp-land where sweating, semi-naked peons waded knee-deep in pools formed overnight by the first downpour of a tropic rainy season—to Colima, a conventional little city at the base of a snow-tipped volcano—into the highlands through tortuous defiles where the cane gave way to maize and the jungle-growth to cactus—past tiny villages of adobe huts clustering about a huge white church that dwarfed the rugged gullies—into a climate of eternal spring—to Guadalajara, the second largest and the most delightful city of the republic, where orange trees were golden throughout the year—and beyond, to the wide expanses of Mexico’s high plateau—to a land of vast, gloomy spaces and lonely grandeur—the grandeur of rolling yellow plains stretching to a distant horizon rimmed with jagged peaks, where at twilight the purple shadows crept upward toward an azure sky—to a country desolate and superb, and a trifle wintry.
THE ORANGE TREES IN GUADALAJARA’S PLAZA WERE GOLDEN THROUGHOUT THE YEAR
To the stay-at-home American, Mexico is only a sun-scorched desert. In reality, it is a land of everything—of sandy wastes, of rugged mountains, of rank tropical jungles, of temperate valleys—of lowlands bathed in moist tropic heat, of midlands where strawberries are always ripe, even of highlands swept eternally by chilling winds. Yet always there is some intangible spirit about it that makes it unmistakably Mexico, especially upon the bleak plateau.