III
Nightfall brought us to Tapachula, a pleasant little city in a rich plantation district.
A diminutive trolley, operated by a Ford engine, awaited us at the station. The motorman climbed out to crank it. The passengers crowded aboard. A host of hotel runners and porters attached themselves to roof, sides, and platform, until the car itself was invisible beneath its coating of humanity.
It rattled away upon wobbly tracks through a low-built plaster city—a city almost overpowering in its scent of coffee from the warehouses and drying floors—and landed us eventually at one of the most picturesque plazas in Mexico. It fairly blazed with color. Amid its green were masses of flowering purple bougainvillea. All about it were red-tiled roofs. Above it towered a grove of royal palms, tall and stately, and bursting far aloft into dark olive plumage, through which the façade of the inevitable aged cathedral gleamed white against a flaming tropic sunset.
The streets, bordered by high, narrow sidewalks, were rudely cobbled, and sloped to a central gutter. Horsemen with gay ponchos trailing behind them clattered over the rough stones. Long trains of burros plodded beneath sacks of coffee, driven by peons in scarlet rags. Tehuana girls, homeward bound from market, passed in their quaint costume, balancing earthenware jars above their turbaned heads.
Before the commandancia which faced the plaza, six musicians were playing upon a marimba, the sweet-toned Central-American xylophone, standing shoulder to shoulder, all tattered and barefoot, playing so swiftly that their sticks were but streaks of light, yet playing with perfect rhythm, with beautiful harmonies, and with a verve that would have delighted the most blasé jazz-lover on Broadway. The horsemen paused to listen. The Tehuana girls lingered at the curb. Army officers in the bright uniforms of peace-time, were strolling through the plaza, flirting with the señoritas.
Mexico was quiet, and charming, even on the verge of revolution.