VII
Carranza not proving very prompt in answering his correspondence, we amused ourselves with a visit to the ancient pyramids of San Juan Teotihuacán—remnants of what had been a mighty empire before the Conquest—distant some twenty-eight miles from the Capital.
A leisurely train carried us there in something over an hour and a half. We descended at the station, expecting to be pounced upon by a dozen professional guides, but none molested us. Little barefoot children with spurious relics were our only assailants. We looked about for a conveyance and discovered the Toonerville Trolley. An individual asleep inside acknowledged that he was the conductor. He proved also to be the motorman, for having collected our fare, he aroused the mule, and the car jogged slowly away with swaying gait through lanes of cactus, toward the squatty figures of two pyramids, deceitfully small with distance and dwarfed by the mountains behind them.
But at length the cactus-hedge ceased, and upon our right appeared the ruins of a temple—the Temple of Quetzacoatl—a big square surrounded by heavy ramparts of earth and stone, wherein a group of workmen were restoring a wall lined with monster demon-heads and gargoyles carved of solid rock. And a few minutes later we were at the foot of the pyramids, no longer small and dwarfed, but looming skyward above us—pyramids which, if less imposing in stature than those of Egypt, excel them in the dimensions of their base, and may even antedate them, according to the estimates of some archeologists, by possibly a thousand or two thousand years.
THE MEXICAN PYRAMIDS PROBABLY ANTEDATE THOSE OF EGYPT BY A THOUSAND YEARS OR MORE
Speculation as to just how old they really are has kept many a scientist out of worse mischief, but seems to have accomplished little else. Thanks to the demolition by the fanatical Spaniards of the heathen writings they found in the Americas, practically nothing is known of their origin. It is believed that they antedate the Toltecs, and that they testify to the existence of an ancient race in Mexico, long since vanished to who-knows-where, that once surpassed in engineering skill and presumably in civilization the early peoples of the other Hemisphere.
So little had we read of them, and so free did they appear from exploitation as a tourist sight, that Eustace and I experienced almost the joy of personal discovery. But it was soon rudely shattered. For up drove an automobile from Mexico City’s leading hotel, and out climbed two other Americans.
They were recognizable immediately as Rotarians. They were both good fellows. They had met at the Regis, and in talking over business had discovered that both by profession were Realtors. They had found a mutual bond of interest in the fact that Mexico City, although it was a better burg than they had anticipated, had a less up-to-date garbage-disposal system than Long Branch, N.J., or Newburyport, Mass. They were now having a whale of a time kidding the guide good-naturedly about the shortcomings of his country, and were getting to like each other better every minute. Next week, upon their return home, each would tell his friends about the good scout he bumped into down in Mexico, and would exclaim, “It beats all how you meet people! The world’s a pretty small place after all!” And at Christmas, each would send the other a card playfully addressed “Senor.”
“So that’s what you brought us out here to see!” said the man from Long Branch.
The other drew out a guide-book and read:
“The pyramid of the Sun Tonatiuh Itzcuatl damn this language anyhow a truncated artificial mound 216 feet high by about 721 and 761 feet at the base divided into five pyramidal sections or terraces which narrow as they ascend. Now that we’ve seen that, where do we eat?”
We left them below while we started up the long flight of stone steps that led up the five terraces of the larger pyramid, The Sun. It had been partially restored, and its surface of many-colored rocks, each the size of a domesticated cobblestone, originally held together with adobe, now gleamed white with Portland Cement. Upon its lofty top, covered to-day by a flat rock, there had once been a gigantic statue of the Sun, cut from a block of porphyry, and ornamented with gold. And here the Aztec priests had probably plunged their arms into many a victim’s breast, to draw out a beating heart, and toss the body of the sacrifice down the steep rocky sides to the wasteland beneath.
It was very quiet now, with the restful calm that one finds only upon a mountain-top. One could look down upon miles and miles of rolling plain dotted with cactus of many shades of green, clustering sometimes in prickly forests, stretching away in two parallel lines to mark a trail, arranging themselves in military rows to indicate a pulque hacienda, gathering in a hedge about the low flat roof of an adobe homestead. Here or there rose the unfailing spires and dome of another lonely church. In the fields a yoke of oxen, plowing a cornfield, seemed scarcely to move. The sky above was of vivid blue, with puffy white clouds along the horizon. Sounds drifted up from the world below—the mooing of a cow, the cackle of a hen, the tap of a hammer—each very distinct, yet so softened by distance that it seemed not to interrupt the silence—as though it merely came from a far-away land wherewith one had severed connection.
Then the two tourists came panting up the steps.
“Damn those stairs, anyway. They ought to have a railing on each side.”
Eustace blandly suggested an elevator, but the sarcasm was lost.
“We’d have one, if this was in Newburyport. We’d have a regular train service out here, and we’d put in a modern cafeteria. Boy, but you could make money out of this thing, if you had it in the United States! You could hire a bunch of Irishmen and dress them up like Aztecs, have a couple of girls doing an Indian dance on top, charge a fifty-cent admission—why, man, you’d clean up a fortune!”
As we started down to catch the evening train back to the taxi-screeching City of Mexico, Babbitt and Kennicott were carving their initials on the flat rock atop the Pyramid of the Sun.