8. Under the Great Tree of Tule
The greatest tree in the Americas, though not the highest, is in the far south of Mexico at Tule, some ten miles from Oaxaca; the highest and perhaps the oldest is to be found among the Californian sequoias. But in girth and grandeur the cypress of our Lady of Tule has no rival. The Aztecs called it the Ahuehuetl, but it was a fine old tree at the dawn of their history. It must have been a great tree in the time of the Toltecs and was before them too. Perhaps some Emperor planted it two thousand years ago. Who can say?
Cortes and his horsemen, on their way to Honduras, stood under it four centuries ago, and their followers built a chapel there beside it, that men might fitly turn from a marvelous creation to a marvelous Creator.
It is a pleasant ride from the city in the early hours of the morning. The Zapotecs found us horses (with hooded stirrups and corded bridles) and my wife and I rode out to Tule. It was market-day in the city and we threaded our way through innumerable Indians and droves of asses laden with panniers.
The astonishment of the Indian women at seeing a lady in riding attire was very amusing. They for their part pick up their long flounced cotton skirts and sit with their bare feet balanced on the asses' shoulders. Flanked by baskets and sitting on heaps of merchandise on the ass's back, so they ride to market, often suckling a baby the while. But one of their sex astride! "Good Saint Anne!"—"Jesus Maria!"—"Look sister!"—"Adios!" Their conventions were not our conventions. They carried pigs strung by the legs to the asses' sides and dangling turkeys and fowls. They brought pots innumerable and baskets of eggs and tomatoes and alligator pears. Some Indians on foot plunged through the dust, and waddling all across the broad highway the asses came on in droves.
When we had ridden out of this turmoil into the fresher air we were in a land of wild mimosa and that "smell of wattle" of which Kipling has written memorable words—
The smell of the wattle at Lichtenberg
Riding in in the rain.
But there is no rain in Mexico all the winter long and all odors that come on the air are warm. Trees with scarlet flowers bend over us. The pomegranate hangs its rosy fruit, the coffee berries ripen on the shrubs, and trees that know no fall, no nakedness of limb, hang everlasting canopies of green. We ride gayly over plowed cornfields and along the borders of plantations where sugar canes chatter with the wind.
Then anon towards noon we descry a settlement veiled in verdure, and like a green knoll rising above it the vast upper story of a mighty tree. There is no need to ask. It must be Tule and its tree. And we ride by narrow shady lanes between banana palms, date palms, and flowering shrubs, crisscross from the highway to the tree.
Behold a great cliff of wood, gray like a willow or an ash, with an underbark of nut-fiber color, going upward in a grand sweep to the branches. At the five bays of the tree one might build five fair-sized houses.
All is silent, all is beautiful round about it. A beggar only is sitting under the tree. The large white church behind it reflects a blaze of sunshine. A bougainvillæa, twenty feet high, is one mass of crimson bloom all attended by bees and wasps. The solid white wall which runs round with blockhouse at one corner is unimpaired. On the white façade of the high broad church are painted tall Moorish decorations in an intense royal blue, tall slender mosques of gleaming blue, and big, red, empty niches for saints beside them.
The tree lifts its voluminous green bulk higher than the church, but all its branches, all its stems and leaves, hang as it were in reverence to the high-placed figure of the Virgin. It is plume-leaved, and the tree is held sacred by many tribes as the tree of mourning. It has the grand dignity of sorrow for the dead.
What a tree! A hundred horses could stand under it. Halfway up, in the midst of the giant growth, starts straight and bolt upright, a new tree, larger itself than any King Charles' Oak, larger even than that tree in Palestine under which the Greek monks tell you Abraham and Sarah entertained their Lord. The German Baron Humboldt, famous traveler in his day, scratched his name on it in the year 1802, the only name, the only vandalism which has been permitted. It is a perfect tree in full maturity, the same species of cypress as the Tree of the Dreadful Night at Mexico City, but in incomparably better condition and much larger and older. If it could tell its story, the lingering of Cortes and his men in its shade would be but a page. For it must ever have attracted the attention of whoever passed that way. The old cities like Mitla, twenty miles away, are choked in dust. But with the freshness of spring the tree lives on.
Outside the walled churchyard which holds the tree is the town plaza swarming with wasps but without gardens or bandstand or any of the common adornments of such places, not even a statue of Juarez. But there is an old portal and one shut shop bearing the curious name of La Vuelta al Mundo, the Return to the World. But they have all gone their way, those who sat under the tree in ages past, and none return to tell us how it was in their day.
So—we to our horses once more, leaving, like the others, the Tree behind like old Time itself.