Down, down we go, through dark canons and over spider bridges and below the clouds. Now our wraps are uncomfortably warm and we lay them aside and open the windows. From every where comes the odors of rare tropical flowers and the iridescent rays of beautiful butterflies, and we are half down the mountain at Jalapa (Halapa). Jalapa is a city of fifteen thousand population, and was once the capital of Vera Cruz and has much to endear it to the tourist. As the train stops you enter a street-car drawn by six mules which will carry you to town on the hillside of Meniltepec. When you wish to come back to the train, the brakes are set and the car will bring you back itself, and the mules will be down after a while to draw it back. It is a regular toboggan affair, and you feel as if you were shooting the chutes, were it not for the heavy bumpers that would stop you were the brakes to give way. I think the Mexican style of carrying the babies slung over the back must have originated in Jalapa. If a nurse should undertake to roll a baby carriage, and while talking to a policeman should let the buggy get a start down any street, it would shoot the chute for Vera Cruz on an incline of thirty degrees.
Before the Inter-Oceanic Rail Road was completed the street-cars ran to Vera Cruz, seventy miles away, and all the company had to do was to mass their mules in Vera Cruz and their cars in Jalapa and start the cars on schedule time with enough brakemen to prevent a hot box. The streets are not quite as crooked as a corkscrew, and not quite as straight as a cow-trail when she is grazing, and starting from the top, each first floor window looks out upon its neighbor’s house-top. It rains here about eight days in the week. The town is four thousand feet above sea level, and just behind it is the Copre de Perote peak, thirteen thousand four hundred and three feet high, and plenty high to catch the rain clouds from the gulf. When they strike the jagged edge of this toboggan slide which holds Jalapa, they simply disgorge and go back for another load. They seem to be a very faithful, conscientious set of clouds that put in a good day’s work and never grumble about working over-time or the agitation of an eight hour system. I got tired carrying my umbrella. It would rain half an hour and sunshine half an hour till the next cloud got snagged on that mountain, and so between them there was no rest for my umbrella. I am always full of good motives and advice, and the same work a lawyer wants ten dollars for, I distribute with a lavish ha—mouth. Armed with my good intentions and my dripping umbrella, I called upon a member of the city council and suggested the idea of filing off the rough edges of the mountain so it would not snag the clouds and drench the people so often, but my words and good intentions were all wasted. Those citizens have been sliding down hill so long and been drawn up again by mules, they have no energy whatever, and would never climb that mountain till they got street-cars up there. And besides, if the cloud system was altered they would have to establish a different sewer-system, and that means work, and of course they would not.
These clouds have done one thing though, they have banished the thatch roof, and every house is built of stone and roofed with half-cylindrical brick tiles which project a full yard over the eaves. This constant drizzle has killed the usefulness of the old and tried friend—the almanac. You don’t have to ask when it will rain for you know it will rain in half an hour. Then it is no pleasure looking in the almanac to see when the first frost will fall so we can gather chestnuts or pecans, because frost never comes, and fall never comes, and winter never comes, but it just stays one eternal spring. The trees are always green and if a leaf falls another grows in its place, and if you pluck an orange another blossom springs out immediately, and if you cut a bunch of bananas, a new shoot starts up for another stem, and as fast as you pick the coffee berry, a perfect shower of snow white blossoms appear.
There is absolutely no season. Four crops of corn can be grown, allowing ninety days to each crop. Sugar and coffee and tobacco are the main crops. The state of Vera Cruz borders the gulf for five hundred miles with an average width of seventy-five, and in all that territory, the soil does nothing but push things out. The Indian takes a sharp stick and makes a hole in the ground and drops a grain of corn, covering it with his foot, and ninety days afterwards he gathers his crop, and that is absolutely all he does in the way of labor. A banana stem will spring up eight or ten inches in diameter with several bunches of bananas and eighty to the bunch. He gathers them and knocks the stalk down and presto! another springs from the roots, and this he does perpetually.
The coffee plant is the most beautiful plant in this region, and bears till the slender branches touch the ground. The fruit is like our cherries or plums, and the natives eat it as we do cherries, and only the seed is sold for drinking. All around Jalapa in the forest grows the vanilla vine so dear to the cake and ice-cream fraternity. The vine grows all over the forest like grape vines, and is not cultivated. The flowers are greenish yellow with spots of white, and the pods grow in pairs like snap-beans, six inches long and as large as your finger. They are first green and then yellow, and when fully ripe are brown. The pods are dried in the sun and then touched up with palm oil to make them shine. The Indians make a good living by gathering the pods and selling them in Jalapa, which is the chief market for vanilla. They also gather from these woods sarsaparilla, which has its home here. All druggists keep on their shelves a drug called Jalap, which grows here and gets its name from the old town of Jalapa. With pine-apples and plantains and limes and apricots and pomegranates and bread fruit and sugar and coffee and tobacco all growing at their doors, what wonder is it that the people all say, “Jalapa is a bit of heaven dropped down to earth.” All they need is a tree to grow hammocks ready-made and swinging, and the millennium has come. It is situated near the foot of the volcano of Orizaba, the second highest mountain in America outside of Alaska, and the rich hills and valleys are covered with vast heaps of volcanic tufa and ashes which are natural fertilizers.
The American army on its march from Vera Cruz stopped here to shoot the chutes—and the natives—and exchange hospitality with them. The natives have a very vivid recollection of that visit, and on the principal street stands a tall granite monument with this inscription:
“SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THE NATION’S HEROES
WHO DIED IN DEFENSE OF THEIR COUNTRY
AGAINST THE AMERICAN INVASION IN 1847.”
The thing is so absolutely true and incisive that most Americans who read it like to quietly slip off to another street where there is no grim accuser. Every time he looks dispassionately back at that war he feels like the big bully who slugged the little boy in the street just because the boy had spunk enough to fight back, and then took all his apples. California, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona must always feel like blood money to the American people, as they were taken from Mexico to extend slave territory.
Santa Anna was born in this town, and the reckless traveling up and down these toboggan streets must have given him his dare-devil spirit which marked every stage of his eventful life.
Jalapa is the summer resort of the moneyed people of Vera Cruz. Every May when the Yellow Fever awakes from his sleep in Vera Cruz, the brave citizens in a body back up the hill to Jalapa and shake their fists at him and dare him to cross the line, and the fever does not dare. They would simply pull a plug out of one of their special clouds and flood him back to the sea. There must have always been a city here: behind the present city are stone pyramids fifty feet high, and countless foundations of stone walls laid in cement. There are oak trees four feet in diameter growing through pavements laid in hewn stone and cement. The architecture is different from that of the Aztec, and there is neither language nor tradition as to who built these ancient ruins. They lie towards the coast between Jalapa and Orizaba.