“Oh, we’ll take care of that,” Walker Jamieson waved these difficulties aside as though they didn’t amount to anything. “I’ve got a camera in the car, and, if you want, I’ll show you how to get the best results. I’m in your debt anyway,” he whispered.
“Do you mean that about the camera and everything?” Nan was incredulous.
“Mean it? It’s a promise, isn’t it?” Walker drew Alice into the conversation.
She nodded her head happily. She knew, if Nan didn’t, that Walker had made a hobby of photography and just the year before, had won a prize in a national show.
“We’ll begin, just as soon as we get back in that car,” Jamieson promised further. “When we get to Mexico City, we’ll buy some more films and the camera is yours to do with as you will until we return to the States.”
So, because of an impulsive wish and an impulsive promise, Nan began almost immediately to develop a hobby that, even before her Mexican adventure was over, was going to have amazing consequences.
From Tamazunchale to Mexico City, the drive was quite another experience. The road now was hewn out of sheer mountain rock. The car climbed and climbed, until the girls’ ears felt strange and Bess declared that she could hardly breathe. She forgot this, however, when they, upon Alice’s insistence, this time, got out again. All around them, huge mountain peaks rose to great heights making them all, except, perhaps, Adair MacKenzie, feel small and insignificant.
Straight down below them they saw rivers and waterfalls that looked small and white and unimportant, like a thread that some mighty hand had dropped carelessly in the greenness. Then they got in the car, went down the mountainside again, and they came to a lovely white village in a fertile green valley.
Here they stopped and ate.
“Can’t understand this jargon,” Adair MacKenzie laid the menu that had been given him down and looked utterly disgusted.