SPECIMENS OF NATIVE TEXTILES AND EMBROIDERY (No. 1)
SPECIMENS OF NATIVE TEXTILES AND EMBROIDERY (No. 2)
Whilst we were watching the groups in the Plaza our attention was attracted by the sound of music, and three shabby-looking fat ladinos came in sight, playing violin, trombone, and drum, and heralding a procession of gaily-dressed Indians. Some of the men wearing long gowns trimmed with red, with turbans wound round their heads, bore on their shoulders a platform supporting the image of a Saint, which was being carried round the town on its way to the church, there to be deposited for the night in readiness for the fiesta on the morrow. Then followed others who may have been priests or were perhaps only officials of a “cofradia” or brotherhood, for their costumes were not orthodox priestly garments, and then a number of women dressed in clean huipils and enaguas, and wearing long white veils, with the part covering the head thickly embroidered in white silk. Each woman carried a lighted candle in her hand, wrapped round with a green canna-leaf to shade it from the wind. We followed the procession through the streets to the church, where the image was deposited, and the women (still candle in hand, but each with the canna-leaf placed on the top of her shawl, neatly folded by her side) knelt in a circle and sang a hymn before the procession dispersed.
We returned to find our room swept but hardly clean, and after a very bad supper were not sorry to turn into our comfortable camp-beds.
A BARRANCA.
Early next morning we went on our way to Godines, and soon began the descent of a great barranca, where the path was so exceedingly steep and bad that we were glad to dismount and scramble down on foot. It was a beautiful walk, winding down through thick woods, but, alas! nearly all the trees by the roadside, within reach, had had their trunks burnt or scorched by camp-fires or been otherwise maltreated, and many of them had fallen and lay rotting where they fell. Here and there a general clearing, or “roza,” which spares nothing, was in progress, preparatory to planting corn, and it seems as though within a few years all the fine timber will have disappeared from the lake region unless some better mode of cultivation is introduced. At present the Indians merely scratch the surface of the ground with a hoe, or, on the level plains, with a primitive wooden plough, and they abandon a plantation after a few crops have been taken off of it. In the Altos, where the population is large, the cultivators have to return to their fallows after a short interval, but wherever there is woodland near at hand they attack it recklessly, sacrificing all the timber trees without scruple. This system of shifting their cornfields has received the sanction of immemorial usage; and although I am told that the Government has repeatedly attempted to prohibit the wasteful “rozas,” the local authorities are too indifferent or too partial to enforce its commands; and the conservative Indians fail to see that whilst in olden times the forest was protected by the enormous amount of labour which had to be expended in felling a tree with a stone axe, nowadays, with cheap machetes and American axes, the growth of ages disappears in a few hours.