Land without chimneys; or, the byways of Mexico

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

TO the “Hot Lands,” we leave Puebla by the Inter-Oceanic railroad and make the wild ride to the city of Vera Cruz. The first part of the journey is across the mesa of burning sand and bare rocks. Soon after leaving the city we pass the mount of Malinche, which supplies the city with water. Malinche is the name given to Cortez soon after he reached Mexico, For miles and miles not a tree graces the landscape. Now and then a brilliant cluster of morning glories appear, but they are shrubs and not vines. The geranium also appears, and no longer a shrub, but almost a tree twenty feet high. Flocks of discouraged sheep and very earnest cattle seem to be devoting all their attention to eating sand and rocks. Of course it is contrary to custom for these animals to make a steady diet off this kind of fodder, but with my most earnest investigation it was all I saw for them to eat. A sparrow could be seen anywhere on any given acre of ground.

A few shepherds wrapped in serapes were constantly on the watch to keep the gaunt and restless wanderers within their imaginary boundaries, for it was contrary to custom to allow one flock to eat the sand that belongs to another. The miserable huts of the natives are measured by the length of the discarded cross-ties of the railroad. A quadrangle of these stuck a foot in the ground and thatched with maguey leaves and the citizen is “at home.” So is the donkey or whatever other animal he possesses. Sometimes he has several razorback pigs tethered by a foot to the end of a rope and they root in the ground and hone their backs against the cross-tie that answers for a door-post and are happy. As the train approaches a station, scores of women and girls press around the car windows beseeching the passengers to buy fruits at the first class cars, and cooked provisions at the second and third. The most of the first class passengers are Americans, and as a rule they do not invest heavily in Mexican provisions. They say it requires too much faith to eat them.

And pulque. How could we get along without the fragrant pulque? With a large earthen jar in her left hand, and a small one without handle in her right, she anxiously seeks purchasers. When a purchaser is found, down goes that right hand, fingers and all to the bottom of the jar, and as it comes up full, the white, ropy fluid frescoes with its sticky streamers everything in reach. In their anxiety to out-sell each other, the anxious eyes are scanning every window for engagements while the right hand mechanically is immersed to the wrist in the larger vessel. At one cent a drink, and often as many vendors as purchasers, two or three cents is the average revenue these people make from a train that passes only twice a day. It is sad to see the hungry pleading eyes of these half-naked women as they in vain offer their scanty wares to people who do not buy. I have bought food from one of these beggars and given it to another just to see them eat, and no starved beast could have shown greater hunger and zeal with which they picked up every crumb from the ground.

In the cities beggars are kept scarce by the police, but on these plateaux they swarm, and grown men and women will crowd around the train, and their clothing would not average two yards to the person. Only twice did I see beggars attempting to offer an equivalent for the alms they begged—at La Barca on the Mexican Central Road where two blind beggars with cracked voices and rheumatic guitars inflicted the painful combination upon the unoffending passengers. I think the grimaces were given without charge, and only the music was expected to be paid for, but I am sure my coppers were given for the heroic efforts of that face to reach the sublimity of the music. The face was always about three and a half flat keys below the instrument, and the much abused instrument made no attempt to catch up with that wonderful voice, but plodded along with her “reglar steady” for all pieces. Those three organizations covered the whole baseball diamond in their progress, but they all got together at the home base, and while the worthy Mrs. Beggar collected the pennies, the crowd cheered the first warbler and called for the second. Each one had the pitch that belonged to the other fellow’s songs, but the crowd got it all anyway so what was the difference? Anyway they were the only beggars that offered a quid pro quo and the crowd forgave them much, even as they had sinned much against the musical profession in traveling on the high C’s without any chart.

Out of pure charity I took one of the Mrs. Beggar aside and very softly asked her if she did not think an ordinary three-cornered file would help her husband’s voice and also his throat. The word “throat” was my Waterloo. Lifting her coal black eyes to mine she looked the thanks she uttered as she said: “Lord, señor, a thousand thanks, that is the very thing, he has not had a square meal today.” When will people learn that everything intended for the throat is not to be eaten? Such gross ignorance discourages my good Samaritan impulse and seriously interferes with my work as a reformer. The same thing happened at a restaurant where the same dish of butter had kept guard on the table so long that it was being consumed by its own inactivity, and was making itself felt further and further from its base of operations. Out of pure charity for my fellow boarders, I heroically made a martyr of myself and relieved the old guard which “died but never surrendered,” so the other fellows might have a fresh dish, and what was the result? Bismillah! that eagle-eyed waiter reported that I just actually made my living off that brand of butter, and next meal the old guard had been replaced by a whole pound of the same vintage but more vigorous and loud. Such ignorance leads people to misinterpret my noble motives. Now, here I was trying to make good music for coming generations, by offering that old lady a file to rasp down the nightingale’s fog horn, and she thinks I am so entranced with the unearthly music that I want to show my appreciation by giving them a cubic meal. Alas this thankless world! It was ever thus.

I said they were the only beggars that paid for their alms, but I make one exception. Between Guadalajara and San Pedro a beggar has a gold mine. Not what you would call a gold mine, but it is one for him. He has a fortune in his knees, which got on the wrong side of his legs, and as the street-car stops to change mules he painfully hobbles on crutches to the car, makes his exhibit, collects the coppers and hobbles back to his seat to wait for the next car, and he never utters a word. He has what ordinary people call “a sure thing.” He always made me think of the tramp and the dog. The dog found the tramp in the hay-mow and growled. The tramp said: “Good doggie, good doggie,” and the dog wagged his tail but kept growling. The tramp said: “It may be all right, but I don’t know which end to believe.” So every time my beggar friend turned his face away from the car, his knees and feet seemed to try to come back, and I did not know which end to believe. This beggar question is too large and has made me wander away from my subject. I was talking about the women sousing their dirty hands into the pulque, but small matters like that do not count. The old saw is still in vogue, that we must all eat our peck of dirt before we die, and so we in Mexico just eat our peck and get the dreaded duty from our minds.

There are many more miles of desert and pastures where the cattle still feed upon sand, and then we come to the fortress of San Juan de Los Llanos. In the midst of the desert where it never rains, and where there is no green thing in sight, lies this huge fortress of St. John of the Plains. For four hundred years this has been the King’s highway from the gulf to the capital, and all the treasures of gold and silver to Europe, and of merchandise from Europe have had to pass along here in caravans of pack-animals and armed escorts. This road was a veritable Captain Kidd’s treasure-house to the hundreds of bandits that have swarmed through this country, so it is no more of a policy than necessity that the soldiers are here.

We are now nearing the rim of the plateau and pass through miles of rich mining country until we leave the state of Puebla and enter the state of Vera Cruz. We are a hundred miles from the sea and eight thousand feet above it on the backbone of the Cordilleras. Around us is white frost, and in four hours we shall be in perpetual summer. We are above the clouds and everything is invisible. The clouds envelop the train like a pall, and we are conscious of only one thing; we are plunging down the mountain with breaks down, and with the descent of one hundred and thirty-three feet to the mile. A rift in the clouds discloses a semi-tropical forest, and upon every tree are myriads of beautiful orchids of blue, red, scarlet, orange—every color and in the greatest profusion. A thousand feet below is a little town we are trying to reach. The train approaches it first on this side and then on that, and winds down the mountain in a kind of spiral, and at last stops at the station. Above us is the track we have just left, and if a rock was loosed from it, it would fall upon the roof of the train at the station. There is one place on the road where a stone dropped from a car window would hit the track at two separate levels. It is a journey one never wants to take twice by daylight. If you pass the dangers at night you save the nervous speculation as to what would happen if a wheel should break on the brink of a chasm a thousand feet deep, and a floating cloud conceals the nature of the rocks you would land upon in the awful depths below.

Every few hundred yards by the track are wooden crosses and stone cairns. I ask my neighbor: “Porque las cruces?” He devotedly crosses himself and mentions them as unfortunate meeting places of travelers and bandits, and after the meeting the traveler still remained. Every one who passes considers it his duty to add a stone to the cairn.

At the stations the half-clad natives, shivering in the chill mountain air, offer food and beautiful flowers for sale. Orange blossoms from the valley and a dozen other rare blossoms the foreigner has never seen, and the beautiful orchids with the roots done up in leaves are offered for a real, (12½ cents) which would cost five or six dollars at an American florist’s.