[CHAPTER IV]
ANCIENT AND MODERN MEXICO
Of all the lands of the New World, none perhaps has impressed itself more on the imagination than the picturesque and enigmatical land of Mexico. It seems to stand, in our thoughts of distant countries, apart from all others, a riddle we cannot read, surrounded by a halo or mist of unreality, a region vague and shadowy as its Toltec ancestors.
Perhaps this view has in part arisen from the description of the Conquest by famous writers, which so greatly interested our forbears of the Victorian period, and by the romantic story-writers of the same era. But these matters alone would not account for the hazy atmosphere surrounding the old land of the Aztecs, which even the prosaic matters of trade and finance do not seem to lift. There are many English and American folk with commercial interests in Mexico, who draw perhaps, or in happier times there have drawn, dividends from their investment in mine, or railway, or other enterprise; but even this material standpoint fades into intangibility before the endeavour to form a true mental image of the land.
Who are the Mexicans, where does their country lie, what language do they speak, what dress do they wear? Geography and ethnology will furnish us with the most exact replies; the books of travellers will fill in abundant detail, but nevertheless, Mexico remains for us an enigma.
We shall not hope here successfully to dispel this mystery, even though we may have been there, traversed its varied surface, and lived among its people. To say that Mexico is the Egypt of the New World, whilst it is not untrue, is to deepen the atmosphere. The sandalled Indian creeps across his desert sands and irrigates them with his native torrents as he did in centuries past, lives in his wattle or adobe hut, and, if he no longer worships the sun, at least he stands before its morning rays to embrace its warmth—el capa de los pobres ("the poor man's cloak")—for poverty denies him other comfort. The rich man is clothed in fine textures of European model and may dwell in a palace, but beneath his modernized exterior are traits of the Orient, and the blood of the Moor, the Goth, the Vandal, the Roman, the Celt, the Semite, brought hither in the Spaniard, is mingled with that of the Aztec, who lived upon the great plateau and built his temples of strange and bloody worship.
No other American nation constitutes so wide a blending of original races. Spain itself was a veritable crucible of languages, peoples and creeds, whilst aboriginal Mexico contained a large number of tribes, each with their particular culture, or lack of such.[7] For Mexico, it is to be recollected, was not a land like the United States or Canada, which contained, relatively, but a few bands of Indians, without any particular form of government or developed institutions.