Land without chimneys; or, the byways of Mexico

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

On the same wall hang the pictures of George Washington and the leaders of Mexican Independence, Iturbide, Hidalgo and Morelos. There is no room closed to the visitor, so we visit the President’s barber shop, reception room, library and the Hydrographic office where maps and charts are being made. All these rooms are furnished differently, and are as elegant and comfortable as even a president could wish. Nearby is the treasurer’s office, and how my feet clogged when I tried to go by! I just want to change money all the time; I know of no better way to get rich than to change money. Hand over one of Uncle Samuel’s ten-dollar bills, and get eighteen dollars and sixty cents back, is just doubling your money as fast as you can stow it away. It beats the lottery business all to pieces. So when I passed by the treasurer’s office I wanted to change money, but I was loaded down at that moment and could not. When you step into a restaurant and give a U.S. dollar for your dinner and get your dinner and another dollar in change, you want to eat some more.

In the courtyard is a curious plant that has a flower exactly in imitation of the human hand with all its fingers. It is the cheirostemon plaxanifolium or hand tree. Only three specimens exist in Mexico. As all the public buildings are under one roof, we soon find ourselves at the Post Office with its seven days wonders. No one goes to the window and inflicts upon the unoffending young lady that much abused old legend, “Is there a letter here for me?” O no, that is not the style. When the mail arrives, the letters are arranged alphabetically and numbered consecutively, then the list is typewritten and posted on the bulletin board, where he who runs may read. Beginning with No. 1 on the first day of the month, the numbers run to the end of the month and start over. The foreign list is published separate from the native. If you find your name on the bulletin you pass to the window and call for date and number only, and a book inside has a duplicate list. The letter is handed you, and you sign your name opposite the number of the letter, giving street, number and hotel. At the same time a policeman stands at your elbow, scrutinizing all persons and their handwriting, and qualifying himself to find you again if necessary in case of forgery. To an American the system may seem cumbersome, but he must remember that he is in a country where letters to the United States cost five cents, and I have seen domestic letters from one state to the other cost ten cents, as much as many people earn, so there is not much letter writing.

Then it has its advantage. Every time a clerk is called to the window, she knows there is a letter needed, and it saves the endless “yes, no, yes, no” all day long, and the sorting of hundreds of letters to look for the name of a person who is not expecting a letter at all, “but just thought I would ask you.” The system is infinitely better than that in Texas towns with a Mexican population. No Mexican signs his name without a flourish which obscures the name entirely sometimes, and besides, the Mexican names have a way of spelling themselves different from the pronunciation.

The Texas post-mistress lumps all Mexican mail in one box, and when a Mexican shows his head at the window she hands him all the Spanish literature on hand, and he takes what he wishes. If he is dishonest, he can purloin any mail he sees fit. The Mexican officials are very kind, and always try to keep a clerk who knows English. Of course she is always out when you need her most, but that does not detract from their good intentions; but the Spanish language is so easy a person can learn a hundred words a day, and if he knows Latin he has nearly half the language to start with.

Next door to the Post Office is the National Museum, the most wonderful repository in America, where ancient Mayan, Aztec and Toltec relics lie side by side with the civilization of today. Here are gods without number and idols by the thousand.

Strangest among these symbols is the ever-present serpent, that subtile being that has left its stamp in the mythology of the old world. Wherever native religions have had their sway, this symbol is certain to appear. It appears in Egypt, Greece, Assyria and among the superstitions of the Celts, Hindoos and Chinese, and here upon these ancient idols he is carved upon porphyry and granite in natural size and heroic dimensions, but always in coil, with the rattlesnake fangs and tail conspicuous.

Here is also the Aztec sacrificial stone of basalt, nine feet in diameter and three feet thick, within whose bloody arms, from Spanish authority, twenty-thousand victims were annually offered up. All of the Spanish under Cortez would have been killed upon that awful retreat of Noche Triste, were it not for the zeal of the Mexicans to capture them alive to offer as sacrifice rather than kill them in battle. The central figure of all this interesting collection is the calendar stone upon whose mysterious records the scholars of Europe and America have labored with only partial success. The stone is circular, is hewn from a solid piece of porphyry, and weighs fifty tons. How it ever reached this island is a mystery, when the people had no beasts of burden; how it was carved is a mystery as the people did not know iron. The greatest wonder is the inscription which accurately records the length of the solar, lunar and siderial year, calculated eclipses, and is a more perfect calendar than any European country possesses.

From this stone we learn that the Aztecs divided the year into 365 days; these were divided into 18 months of 20 days each, and, like the ancient Egyptians, they had 5 complementary days to make out 365. But the year is composed of six hours more than 365 days, and in America we add the six hours every four years and make leap-year. The Aztecs waited 52 years, and then interposed 13 days, or rather 12½, which brought the length of their tropical year to within the smallest fraction of the figures of our most skillful astronomers. Like the Persians and Egyptians, a cycle of 52 years was represented by a serpent, so prominent in mythology.

This interpolation of 25 days in every 104 years showed a nicer adjustment of civil to solar time than that presented by any European calendar, since more than five centuries must elapse before the loss of an entire day. Their astrological year was divided into months of 13 days each, and there were 13 years in their indications which contained each 365 periods of 18 days each. It is also curious that their number of lunar months of 13 days each were contained in a cycle of 52 years with the interpolation of 13 days (12½) should correspond exactly with the Great Sothic period of the Egyptians, viz: 1461. By means of this calendar, the priests kept their own records, regulated the festivals and sacrifices, and made all their astronomical calculations. They had the means of setting the hours with precision; the periods of the solstices and equinoxes and the transit of the sun across the zenith of Mexico. This stone was dug up in the great square in 1790 where it had lain buried since the Conquest in 1520, but its high scientific deductions are out of all proportion to the advance of the Aztec in other branches of learning, since the stone is more exact today than any European calendar in existence, therefore it must have been made by another race. The characters are in the Toltec language, but there are many points of it which the Toltecs copied from the Mayas of Yucatan, and the Mayas seem to have copied from the Egyptians, of which we shall speak in another chapter.

There are other relies more ancient than the Calendar Stone, and others more recent. There is the ideographic picture-writing, through which we learn the history of the race previous to the Conquest. Here is Montezuma’s shield, the armor worn by Cortez in the Conquest, his battle-flag, the statue of the war god Huitzilopochtle, Tula monoliths, the Goddess of Water, Palenque cross, Chacmol, and the finest carriage in the world, built by Maximilian for his Mexican capital. The body is painted red, the wheels are gilded, and the interior is lined with white silk brocade, heavily trimmed with silver and gold thread.