From the hill of San Pedro, the City of Guadalajara and the Vale of the Lerma lie before you, and you notice what you have noticed a hundred times before, how like the hills of Palestine are the landscape. Take any series of pictures of the Holy Land and of Mexico, and no person who had not traveled in one or the other could tell the difference. The houses low, flat-roofed and painted white, the absence of trees and the naked plain force the resemblance every time a vista is opened.
Back to the city among those magnificent elms and to the Paseo. The Paseo! what would any Mexican city be without its Paseo, where fashionable people take their outing with such system and abandon? This Paseo extends for a mile along both sides of the Rio San Juan de Dios. There are also the Botanical gardens, and the Alameda, and the mint and state buildings with the finest of architecture, so unlooked for in this far-away place. Churches! ah yes, same old thing, even to the earthquake brand, and they are costly and beautiful. The cathedral was begun in 1561 and completed in 1618. Both towers were thrown down by an earthquake in 1818. Paintings without number adorn the wall. The Assumption, by Murillo, is a genuine master-piece. All the saints in this part of the vineyard have been remembered in the christening. There are El Sagraria, San Francisco, San Augustin, San Felipe, La Campania, Guadalupe, Mexicalt-zingo, Jesus Maria, Capuchinas, Santa Monica, El Carmen, San José de Analco, San Sebastian de Analco, La Parroqua de Jesus, San Juan de Dios, Aranzazu, La Soledad, San Diego, Belen, La Concepcion, La Trinidad y la Parroqua del Pilar, and I am tired of naming them; but if you will get an almanac and call off all the saints in the calendar, I will agree to find their churches christened and waiting for them in Guadalajara.
Nothing but a conscientious duty makes me go around among these old paintings, and what do I know about them? I stood in an art gallery once before a picture called “The Transfiguration;” my companion asked me how much was it worth. I sized up the gilt frame and measured the space it covered and said it must have cost ten dollars. He pointed to the name in one corner and said in disgust: “Don’t you see Raphael’s name on there? that picture is worth forty thousand dollars!” I dropped my catalogue to hold my palpitating heart in place and told him I knew better. Why, there were not ten yards of canvas in the whole thing, and the molding was not much over eight inches wide and there was not fifty feet of it, and I knew the price of molding and canvas too. Forty thousand dollars! who ever heard the like? “But it is not the frame, goosie, look at the picture!” I looked at it, and then I told him to look at the picture on the other side, at that Stag Fight, or at that fellow on the beech-log fishing, and “there’s a picture to look at.”
He cast a withering glance at me and said some words which sounded like this: “——!—--!!—--!!! natural born fool.” I stayed an hour trying to get educated enough to see the forty thousand dollars. Hundreds of people came, looked in the catalogue at the price and then showed their superior education. “Now, that’s what I call art.” “Just look at the expression.” “What an ensemble!” “Note the radiance of that halo!” I merely asked them what was it anyway. Some said it was the price, some said it was an original old master, and some said it was both. I saw hundreds of pictures I liked better, but I was out of style. I saw a beech forest with silver bark and purple and brown leaves that I thought was a gem, and some one turned up his nose in disgust and pointed to the price; only $25! bah! And then I wept because my art education had been so sadly neglected, and so I never miss an opportunity now to improve it. Now, when the guide strikes an attitude and proudly points to a painting and says: “Murillo!” I throw up both hands and step back a pace or two and say: “Murillo! Murillo! Ah, Murillo! Just look at that expression! What an ensemble!” Then I look at the guide’s face to see how I am getting along, and he looks happy, and then we pass on. Then he stops. “The Entombment, by Titian, $50,000.” Then I go into ecstacies and strike another attitude: “The Entombment! $50,000! Titian! $50,000! Ah, Titian! $50,000! That’s art!” When we stopped again I was just about to raise my hands again, and looked to him for my cue, but he said: “By a Mexican, $25.” “Oh!” I said in contempt. “Just a daub! Why in the name of Saint Peter doesn’t that man learn to paint!” That guide said I ought to make art my calling, and I do not know till this day what he meant.
Of course excursions outside of the city are in order. The cars lead to Tlacotalpan, about five kilometers away, a quaint old town that looks like Rip Van Winkle’s summer residence. The Falls of Juanacatlan are farther. You go by rail twelve miles to Castillo, and go by horse-car one league farther to the River Lerma. The river is over a hundred yards wide and the cascade is seventy-one feet high. In high water the falls are beautiful, but a huge flour-mill has been erected which draws most of the water through a flume when the river is low, at which time it is possible to walk across the rocks the entire distance above the falls. The mill was not completed when I was there, but judging by the name it bears, it will be a very correct and moral mill. The part of the name as completed reads: “The Mill of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary Magdalene;” and when the annex is added to the mill, I was assured that the rest of the name would be added, as at present there was not enough room. Between Castillo and the falls is a rich valley covered with fine beef cattle for the city market, and here can be witnessed some of the finest work of roping cattle to be found among cowboys. While in full gallop they can rope any foot of the animal that may be desired.
Above here the river Lerma passes through Lake Chapala, and as it emerges from the other side it bears the name of Rio Grande de Santiago. Surely baptism is a wonderful alembic that can make a saint of a muddy little river by one emersion only. But its good works follow it, and where it empties into the Pacific, behold the Bay of San Blas! It was from Lake Chapala that the Aztec migration began, 648 A. D., for the valley of Mexico, and on this march their name was changed from Aztecs to Mexicatls, in honor of their war-god, Mexitli. Soon after the river leaves the lake, and just beyond Guadalajara, it forms a wonderful canon, which for grandeur is not surpassed on this continent. The chasm is a narrow barranca two thousand feet down its perpendicular walls.
You stand on the brink in the tierra templada and behold the tiny, silver stream a full half mile below you in the tierra caliente, the hot lands of the Pacific. You will never see elsewhere such a work of nature as the canon de Rio Santiago. No, not even in the Colorado Canon. It seems as though the great Titans in play had spaded this great block of the continent from those perpendicular walls, and hurled it at the Cyclops in the sea.
