| ORIZABA, CAPPED WITH PERPETUAL SNOW: VIEW ON THE MEXICAN RAILWAY AT CORDOVA. |
But away from the railways, and the roads where diligencias ply their lumbering and dusty course, the saddle is the only, and indeed the most characteristic, mode of travel; and the arriero and his string of pack-mules is the common carrier, and the mountain road or dusty desert trail the means of communication from place to place. Along these the horseman follows, day after day, his hard but interesting road, for to the lover of Nature and incident the saddle ever brings matter of interest unattainable by other means of locomotion. The glorious morning air, the unfolding panorama of landscape—even the desert and the far-off mountain spur which he must round ere evening falls, are sources, of exhilaration and interest. The simple people and their quaint dwellings, where in acute struggle for life with Nature they wrest a living from rocks and thorns—are these not subjects, even, worthy of some passing philosophical thought? Not a hilltop in the vicinity of any human habitations—be they but the wretched jacales or wattle-huts of the poorest peasants—but is surmounted by a cross: not a spring or well but is adorned with flowers in honour of that patron saint whose name it bears; and not a field or hamlet or mine but has some religious nomenclature or attribute. For the Mexicans are a race into which the religion of the Conquistadores penetrated indelibly, whose hold upon them time scarcely unlooses. The creeds of the priests, moreover, are interwoven with the remains of Aztec theistic influence, and the superstitions of both systems hold the ignorant peasantry of Mexico in enduring thrall. Much of beauty and pathetic quaintness there is in this strong religious sentiment, which no thinking observer will deride; much of retrograde ignorance, which he will lament to see.
The Great Plateau tapers away towards the south, terminating in the Valley of Mexico, bounded by the snowy Cordillera of Anahuac. Within this range are two great volcanic uplifts, two beautiful mountain peaks, crowned with perpetual snow—the culminating orographical features of the Sierras, and the highest points in Mexico. The loftiest of these is Popocatepetl, "the smoking mountain," and its companion is Ixtaccihuatl, the "sleeping woman," both of poetical Indian nomenclature. These beautiful solitary uplifts rise far above the canyons and forests at their bases: penetrate the clouds which sometimes wreath them, terminating in a porcelain-gleaming summit of perpetual snow. The mid-day sun flashes upon them, rendering them visible from afar, and its declining rays paint them with that carmine glow known to the Andine and Alpine traveller, which arrests his vision as evening falls. So fell, indeed, the morning rays of the orb of day upon the burnished golden breastplates of the image set on the sacred pyramid of Teotihuacan: the sun-god, Tonatiuah, as in the shadowy Toltec days he faced the flashing east.
Prehistoric fact and fable press hard upon us as we approach the famous Valley of Mexico and its fine capital. This is the region where that singular "stone age" flourished, of pyramid-building and stone-shaping peoples. Here both geology and history have written their pages, as if Nature and Fate had conspired together to mark epochs of time and space in ancient temple, dead revolution, and slumbering volcano. And now below us lies the City of Mexico. From the wooded uplands and hill-summits—redolent of pine and exhilarating with the tonic air—which form the rim of the valley, the panorama of the capital and its environs lies open to the view. Plains crossed by white streaks of far-off roads, intersecting the chequered fields of green alfalfa and yellow maize; haciendas and villages embowered in luxuriant foliage; the gleam of domes and towers, softened in the glamour of distance and bathed by a reposeful atmosphere and mediæval tints—such is Mexico, this fair city of the West.
| PINE-CLAD HILLS FORMING THE RIM OF THE VALLEY OF MEXICO, 8,000 FEET ELEVATION ABOVE SEA-LEVEL. |
The City of Mexico, like most centres of human habitation in whatever part of the world, is most beautiful when seen from afar, and in conjunction with Nature's environment. But the old Aztec city, the dark, romantic seat of the viceroys, the theatre of revolutionary struggle, and the modern centre of this important Mexican civilisation, is a really handsome and attractive city. Indeed, the capitals of many Spanish-American republics, and their civilisation and social régime, are often in the nature of a revelation to the traveller from Europe or the United States, who has generally pictured a far more primitive State. With its handsome institutions and public buildings, and extensive boulevards and parks, and characteristic social, literary, and commercial life, the City of Mexico may be described as Americo-Parisian, and it is rapidly becoming a centre of attraction for United States tourists, who, avid of historical and foreign colour, descend thither in Pullman-car loads from the north. The city lies some three miles from the shore of Lake Texcoco, which, with that of Chalco and others, forms a group of salt- and fresh-water lagoons in the strange Valley of Mexico. At the time of the Conquest the city stood upon an island, connected with the mainland by the remarkable stone causeways upon which the struggles between the Spaniards and the Aztecs took place, during the siege of the city at the time of the Conquest. But these lakes, after the manner of other bodies of water, generally, in the high elevations of the American Cordilleras—Titicaca, in Peru, to wit—are gradually perishing by evaporation, their waters diminishing century by century. The Valley of Mexico, however, of recent years has received an artificial hydrographic outlet in the famous drainage canal and tunnel, which conducts the overflow into a tributary of the Panuco river, and so to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Valley of Mexico is surrounded by volcanic hills, forming a more recent formation of the Andine folds, of which the Sierra Madres compose the Mexican Cordilleras. We have now to cross this, for our faces are set towards the Pacific Ocean. We ascend and pass the Western Sierra Madre, the divortia aquarum of the Pacific watershed, leaving the intra-montane plateau of Anahuac and the mesa central behind us. Again the climate changes as the downward journey is begun, and again the tierra caliente is approached. The culminating peaks—the beautiful Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl—sink now below the eastern horizon, but as we journey to the west Colima's smoking cone will rise before the view. The descent from the highlands to the west coast is even more rapid than to the east, and the temperate climate of the valleys, and the bitter cold of the early morning on the uplands, soon give place to tropical conditions. Extensive forests of oak and pine, clothing the sides of the canyons and barrancas of the high Sierra Madre, are succeeded by the profuse vegetation of the torrid zone. Down in the soft regions of the west, where tropical agriculture yields its plentiful and easily-won harvests, are romantic old haciendas and villages hidden away in the folds of the landscape, such as are a delight to the traveller and the lover of the picturesque. The "happy valley" of Cuernavaca is reached by railway from the capital, but beyond this the road to the seaboard is still that ancient trail which Cortes used, which descends to Acapulco, for the railway builders have not yet completed their works to the Pacific waters.
Away from the main route of travel lie sequestered old sugar estates, and villages of romantic and picturesque charm, yet untouched by speculator or capitalist. Antique piles of stone buildings are there, redolent of that peculiar poetry of the pastoral life of Mexico in the tropics. The old Spaniards built well; their solid masonry defies the centuries; and their most prosaic structures were invested with an architectural charm which the rapid money-seeker of to-day cares little for, in his corrugated iron and temporary materialism. Near to the arches, columns, and turrets of the old haciendas the garden lies, replete with strange fruits and flowers. The gleam of oranges and limes comes from the tangled groves; grapes and pomegranates vie with each other in unattended profusion. The iguana sports among the old stone walls of the great garden, and humming-birds and butterflies hover in the subtle atmosphere. The tropic sunset throws a peaceful glamour and serenity over all. The cocoanut palms, with feathery grace above and slender column upward rearing, stir not against their ethereal setting as we watch, and the passing water in the old aqueduct scarce breaks the tropic silence, or if, perchance, it whisper, murmurs of centuries past, a low refrain.
But we shall journey away from the haunts of man again, and penetrate the deep dark barrancas and little-known mountain-fastnesses of the western slope of the State of Guerrero. Here are great uninhabited and unexplored stretches of country, rugged and wild, replete with matters of interest, whether for hunter, sportsman, or archæologist. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a region offering so varied a nature of resource and interest in any part of the world, except possibly in the still less accessible wilds of the Amazonian slopes of the Peruvian Andes. The botanist will find on this Pacific side of Mexico an unstudied flora, and the ethnologist and the antiquarian a number of native races, speaking strange separate languages; and the ruins of thousands of the habitations of prehistoric man. The climate in these rugged regions ranges from the heat of the fierce tropical sun to the bitter cold of the mountain summits. Abundant bosques or forests of oak cover the higher regions, and the wild and broken nature of the country renders it difficult to traverse, and calls for the adventurous spirit of the pioneer and explorer, without which the traveller will but meet with discomfort and danger.