PREFACE.
THIS book is not sent forth to fill a long-felt want; nor does the author hope to convince all his readers to his way of looking at the social and religious problems of Mexico.
As a teacher of modern languages, the author went to Mexico solely for the purpose of mastering the language, but the remembrance of that enjoyable stay allured him like a bird of passage when the spring has come, and so he returned to study the people.
If what he has written will help any one to better understand our next door neighbor, his humble efforts have not been in vain.
CHAPTER I.
THE SAN JUAN VALLEY.
DID it ever occur to the American reader that there lives a people numbering twelve millions, who know not the comforts of the fire-place, nor the discomforts of soot and chimney-swallows? And yet there lives just such a people at our very doors; just across the Rio Grande, in that strange land of romance and fiction, where the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries go hand-in-hand and never unite; where the variation in temperature is less than at any other place on the globe; where an ancient race live among the ruined temples and pyramids of a race they know not of; where the traveler finds mouldering ruins of hewn stone engraved with figures and animals that have no likeness anywhere else, except amid the ruins of Egypt; it is here you find the Land Without Chimneys. The land of Montezuma; the spoil of Cortez; the treasure-house of Spain; the modern Mexico, where fact and fancy so mingle with romance and fable, that we hardly know when we have reached historical data.
When the Spaniards reached Mexico in 1518, they found that the Toltec history, done in picture-writing, was the most reliable source of information obtainable in this strange fairy-land.
From these idiographic paintings we learn that the Aztecs, or Mexicans, entered the valley from the north about 1200 A. D. Before the Aztecs came, the valley was occupied by the Chicimecs, and before they had pitched their tents around their capital hill, Chapultepec, the Toltecs had ruled supreme.
The Toltecs, being exiled from Tollan, their ancient capital near lake Tulare, wandered a hundred and twenty years, until, in 667, A. D., they came to the bank of a river, where they founded another city which they called Tollan, or Tula, in honor of their ancient capital. The ruins of this ancient city lie twenty-five miles from the city of Mexico. During the reign of their eighth king, a famine drove the Toltecs south, whither many emigrated to Yucatan and Guatemala, where the Toltec language is still spoken. But before the Toltecs, there lived in Yucatan the Maya race, the most ancient in Mexico, whose tradition dates to the year 793 B.C., when they arrived in Yucan by water from Tulapam. Here tradition is lost until we examine the ancient ruins and pyramids of Uxmal and Copan, whose walls are nine feet thick and covered with the finest facades found in America; and then language fails us as we gaze upon the massive walls of the pyramid of Copan, containing twenty-six million cubic feet of stone brought from a distant quarry, whose base is six hundred twenty-four feet by eight hundred nine feet, and a tower one hundred eighty-four feet, built of massive blocks of stone, and surmounted by two huge trees rooted in its mold.
Within the inside are statues and hieroglyphics and inscriptions which tell to the world their history, but they speak in an unknown tongue, which may tell us of their Tulapam on the lost Atlantis. In despair, we give up the riddle of the first people of Mexico, and take a nearer view of the present inhabitants. The country is divided into three parts—the coast region called tierra calienta, where the tropical sun makes life a burden, and engenders that scourge of Mexico, el vomito, or yellow fever.