Land without chimneys; or, the byways of Mexico

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

Still down the Lerma from Acambaro is the Hacienda de Robles extending thirty-three kilometers on each side of the river, and which furnishes hundreds of peons, and still further is the city of Irapuata, the perpetual home of the strawberry. For three hundred and sixty-five days in the year no train has ever passed Irapuata without strawberries being offered for sale, for in this rich valley it is perpetual seedtime and harvest. The whole year is springtime, and the energies of all the people are devoted to strawberries. It was Sydney Smith who said: “Doubtless God Almighty could have made a better berry than the strawberry, but God Almighty has never done so.” The fresas are all offered in a basket holding from one pint to three quarts, and are arranged with great care, so that the large ones shall all be on top. If you know your business you do not buy till the train is pulling out, and then a silver dime gets fresas, basket and all. When you consider that a Mexican dime is worth five and a half cents in Uncle Sam’s money, you can figure out the cost at leisure. The basket would sell at fifteen cents in the States, and the bottom does not punch up to the middle either. When I look at my pile of empty baskets, I wonder if I cheated the little pirates, but I get my balm in knowing that hundreds of people pay them the thirty or forty cents they first ask for them, which will enable them to strike a balance sheet. I know strawberries are perishable, and a twenty-five cent basket today will not be worth a dime by the next train time, which is next day, so I offer him the price a day in advance, which he would have to take tomorrow. He knows that I am “onto his curves,” as the baseball boys say, so we get along finely and always trade as the train begins to move and he realizes that it is now or never.

From the river and from wells dug in the valley irrigation makes this unusual fertility possible, and the old-time well-sweep is everywhere, with its long see-saw pole with a weight at one end and a bucket tied to the other. A ride of a mile on the horse-car is worth while. You will see what you see in almost every Mexican town, not a shade tree on the streets, and the brown, flat-roofed adobe houses without windows are anything but inviting. Of course there are fine churches, what town has not its Carmen and Merced and San Francisco? And of course its plaza and band-stand, and Sundays and every alternate evening in the week the government furnishes its citizens with music.

Irapuato is an important junction for trains going to the Pacific Coast, and is in the midst of a fertile valley that needs no Nile to enrich it, no augurs to propitiate the God of the harvest, no winter, no summer, this is Utopia.

Leaving Irapuato and Acambaro behind, we still follow the Lerma towards its source. We pass thousands and thousands of peons with their oxen plowing with a sharp stick, or treading out the grain on the harvest floor just as they did in Egypt three thousand years ago. Fat cattle and water-fowl and farms and landscape and shifting panorama give us an uncanny feeling that the thing is not real, that such a beautiful country is seen only in pictures, that some hallucination has taken hold upon us, so swiftly and charmingly do they change in their beauty. Were all of Mexico like the Vale of Lerma, it would be the fairest spot on earth. And then comes the sickening thought that the whole seven hundred miles of this paradise is in the possession of two or three dozen land owners that nothing on earth could prevail upon to sell to the small farmer. These land owners live either in Paris or Madrid, and support palaces in the old world from blood money of these debtridden Mexicans. More than that, they have had laws enacted to restrain their descendants from parting with the land, the rightful inheritance of the Indians who till it on sufferance, and are thus made aliens in the land of their birth.

In the distance is the fountain head of Rio Lerma, and now we see the snow cap of the Volcan de Toluca, and at its base the beautiful city of Toluca, the capital of the state of Mexico. Here within three hours of the city of Mexico, are two of the grandest natural wonders on earth, the precipice of Ocoyocac and El Volcan de Toluca. This city of twenty thousand inhabitants was built in 1533, and is upon the dividing line of the tropical country of tierra caliente and the mountainous tierra templada, so absolutely everything you have ever seen growing, will grow here. Its altitude is sufficient for wheat which grows in British America, and the warm winds from the Pacific make an eternal tropical summer for everything else. The buildings in the city are superior to most you have seen. The market-house with its pillars painted in Pompeiian colors is the finest in Mexico, and was once an exposition building. At the station vendors will offer you fruits and basket at such a price you wonder if they were stolen. Here too is a great market for baskets and bird cages, and the baskets are so closely woven they will hold water.

Here is the Instituto Liberario, the Harvard College of Mexico. Here grows the coral tree, whose graceful stem is six or seven feet high with pendant palm-shaped foliage, and crowned with vegetable coral of the deepest red, an exact counterpart of the Mediterranean article. Horse cars lead to the city along Calle Independencia, where stands a statue to Hidalgo et Libertador, and here the wealth of the Republic is displayed in its public buildings. Around the plaza is that universal arrangement of huge arches called portales or arcades, which enclose the sidewalk and support the second story. The average height is twelve or fifteen feet, and besides being a sidewalk, it is also used for vendors’ booths. Here are sold lace work and drawn work and feather work and carved work and onyx and souvenirs of all kinds.

Here is shown the fine residence of a rich haciendado who was once a great patron of the bull-ring and furnished many a toro bravo for the ring, and when the noble animals entered the arena with his colors dangling from their necks, the very walls shook with the loud huzzas. Once upon a time a famous bull fought his way back to life. The lances of the picadores broke and he killed all the horses. The banderilleros could not place the darts so he could not shake them from his shaggy neck, and the matadores lost their reputation and were hissed from the ring, because they could not place the sword. Here the old haciendado begged the president to not permit him to be lassoed and assassinated, but to give him his freedom. This was granted, and many years afterward when he died his skin was stuffed to adorn his master’s banquet hall.

Behind the city is the volcano, which can be explored in two days. The height is 16,156 feet and the top is no more than ten feet wide, and the crater contains a fathomless lake with a whirl-pool in the center. Standing here amid the eternal snows the earth is spread before you as is denied in any other part of the world. Three miles up in the air you stand and in the west you see the Pacific Ocean; across the Sierra Madres appear the snow-white top of Volcan Popocatapetl (smoking mountain) 17,685 feet high; Volcan Ixtaccihuatl (white woman) 15,714 high; Citlatepetl (mount of the star) 17,664 feet high; Nauchampatapetl (square rock) and Pirote’s Chest, peak answering peak, and still through the azure vista beyond lie the blue waters of the Mexican Gulf. Toluca is the fourth highest mountain in Mexico, being overtopped by Orizaba and the two named above. It is from these eternal reservoirs that the cities get their supplies of ice, and any day the Indians laden with their chilly burden descend among the human mozaics to furnish the American barrooms with their sine qua non at ten cents a pound.

Of course the usual churches and fine paintings must be seen, so we visit Tercer Orden, Carmen and Tecajec. And now we prepare to see a sight that has not a peer on the globe. Two engines are hitched to the train and we begin to climb the Sierra Madres. We stop at the little town of Ocoyocac, and in a half hour the train returns on the horse shoe curve one thousand perpendicular feet above the town. Not a bush nor a blade of grass interrupts the vision as we nervously look down one-fifth of a mile upon the toy-looking houses we could drop a stone upon. You instinctively hold your breath as we creep around this narrow trail blasted from the solid granite and marvel at the engineering that could ever dream of such possibilities. Far beyond over the plain of Toluca is a panorama that will abide with you forever, but which you can never describe. We soon come to the mills of JaJalpa and pass under the stone aqueduct more than a hundred feet high which curries the pure mountain water to the thirsty city below.

Every city near a mountain gets its water through these massive stone aqueducts that are built to last a thousand years. Up, up we slowly climb with our two locomotives until we reach Salazar and take a few minutes to raise steam for the final climb. At last we stop on the back-bone of the Sierras, at La Cima, (the summit) twenty-four miles from the capital, and 11,000 feet above the sea. Herein the Torrid Zone among the clouds the frost is white upon the rails, and the damp fog chills you to the marrow. There behind us is a rushing mountain torrent, the source of the river Lerma, just starting on its seven hundred mile journey to the Pacific. Here just in front of the locomotive is a fretful little brook that breaks into a thousand cascades in its journey to the Mexican Gulf. Forty miles to the south is a scene that defies description. A hundred miles to the south stand those mighty sentinels of the beautiful Nahuatl Valley, Popocatapetl and Ixtaccihuatl, in that clear atmosphere, almost in speaking distance. In the midst of the valley lie the silver lakes of Texcoco and Xochimilco, large enough to mirror those lofty sentinels and reflect their perpetual robes of white to the nymphs and naiads in the azure depths below.