IV
My return was as uneventful as my flight.
I rather expected each Mexican I met to exclaim, “So you’re the fellow that wrote all those dastardly things about my country!” Apparently a few had forgotten my articles. The others had not heard of them.
I landed at Vera Cruz, and went up to the capital over the same railway—up through gorges luxuriant with forests of banana, past the snow-capped peak of Orizaba looming mistily out of the clouds, through tunnels and over bridges, along mountain sides where one looked down upon checkerboard farms as though one glimpsed them from an airplane, across the magnificent plateau where yellow wasteland stretched away to a purple horizon, and into the roar and bustle of Mexico City.
The capital had changed but little. If anything, it was noisier than before. Advertising posters defaced every wall. The taxis had multiplied like guinea pigs. Radios added a new note to the discord of modern progress. The señoritas had bobbed their hair. Old Barlow alone remained the same.
I stopped just long enough to make inquiries about Eustace. Since our parting, over four years ago, I had never heard a word from him.
“No one has!” said Old Barlow. “You were the lucky one that time. The other lad just disappeared—like I predicted both of you would. Just vanished, God knows where!”
I went back down the railway to Córdoba, to continue southward alone through Mexico and Central America.