The Mexican hotels are bad and expensive. Strictly speaking, they are not hotels at all, but large pretentious "doss-houses"; for there are as a rule no restaurants attached, no attempt made to cater for the visitors, nor are there any public rooms for reading or writing. You hire a frowsy room, for which you may quite likely at such a place as the Hôtel de Jardin have to pay six dollars (twelve shillings) a night, and the most the management will do for you is to provide a cup of indifferent chocolate and a sweet roll in the morning, which matutinal orgy, of course, is not included in the room rent. You must "hunt" your food elsewhere. This has its advantages, but it has also grave disadvantages, particularly as Mexico City is poorly equipped with reasonably cheap, clean, eating-places; and after a week or so you get restive and long for the coffee-room comforts of those residential palaces, the English hotels. Nowhere in the world are hotels, surely, so perfect as in England, so cheap, so homely, the staff so courteous. Nowhere has the traveller lavished on him so many little comforts and etceteras of daily life, the sumptuous reading-rooms, the writing conveniences, all of which he never really appreciates till he is condemned to live for a while among "hotel savages." We had been warned, too, of darker horrors in Mexican hotels than the lack of an honest breakfast or an easy-chair in which to read one's letters. Unbidden guests shelter in even first-class establishments and nightly feast on the visitors. So we stayed at the only decent hotel in the city—according to all reports—the new American Hotel St. Francis at the city end of the Paseo. This had a restaurant attached, where excellent food was served to us by a perfectly charming Indian waiter, whose smile at our attempts to talk to him was "sweetness and light." He was not handsome—he had all the worst features of the Mongolian type—high cheek-bones, flattish face; but when that man smiled, well, you just felt a new optimism in the inherent goodness of human nature steal on you. The St. Francis was built Spanish fashion with a courtyard, the rooms facing on to three galleries, the courtyard forming a lounge. As far as comfort went it was nowhere in comparison with the commercial hotels in the provincial towns in England, but it sustained its reputation of being free from vermin, and one's bed linen was changed every day.
The climate of the city is very trying for any one with heart weakness. Indeed, to even the robust the rarefied air at such a vast height as 8,000 feet brings a perpetual sense of being fagged out, and a disagreeably insistent panting at the least exertion. We found all the English residents suffered from a perpetual malaise, the "tired feeling" of the tonic advertisements. Curiously enough, too, the immense altitude, so far exceeding that of Davos Platz, does not protect the phthisical and weak-lunged. The death rate from lung diseases is terrific. The days are hot and the nights are often so cold that you must wear your thickest overcoat or run the risk of pneumonia. A queer result of this is that the streets are quite empty soon after dark. Till nine you will see a few Indians, only their eyes visible above their blankets, straggling along, or a Mexican in closed carriage will dash past. But later the place becomes a city of the dead. Coming back from a dinner we walked through street after street and never saw a soul (it was only 10.30) save the police, who stand in the middle of the roads, a lighted lantern on the ground between their boots.
The city is patrolled after dark by the Republican Guard, mounted on sturdy Mexican cobs and armed with Winchesters, heavy revolvers, and swords. These men stand no nonsense, and the consequence is that outwardly the capital is one of the most orderly in the world. You scarcely ever see a brawl, you never hear a voice raised in anger; and yet the police are not officious. They do not fidget or bustle: they are everywhere, but they are not obtrusive, and they are certainly most courteous. We asked the way of one, and he directed us. Some fifty yards on we heard some one running behind us, and turned to see, with astonishment, the officer, who with many bows explained that he thought we might have misunderstood, so he had run after us to personally put us in the way. Surely politeness could no further go! Imagine a twenty-stone City constable "sprinting" after a Frenchman who desired to study the architectural glories of "Ze house of ze Lor Maire"! There is no doubt we English are phlegmatic.
If a fight takes place in the streets, the police arrest everybody, not only the principals and their seconds, but all the spectators. Thus a perfectly harmless paterfamilias trudging back to his home, yielding for a minute to the curiosity inherent in us all and peering over the heads of the crowd at the struggling men, may find himself marched off to the lock-up, where he must spend the night—for there is no bail system; and next morning he is dragged off before a magistrate as an accessory to a street row and fined according to the lying capacities of the police officers concerned. In Mexico you must play the Levite and "pass by on the other side."
The streets are at all times a human kaleidoscope: the dandy in European dress; the smart Mexican horsemen in tasselled riding gear clattering down the road; the trim cowboy with his grey trousers fitting like an eel's skin, silver-buttoned, a coloured silk scarf round his neck, his head adorned with steeple felt; the wizened Indian beldames in saffron or blue cottons squatting at the church doors stretching out skinny yellow hands for alms; tiny Indian girls carrying still tinier brothers and sisters, and at every street corner bareheaded Indian matrons at trestle stalls whereon are sweetmeats and fruits for sale. One of the queerest sights are the funeral cars. Every corpse must by law be buried within twenty-four hours of death, and almost all day long the procession of tramcars is interrupted by the passing of the only type of hearse they have in the capital, a hideous black and white contrivance fitted with tram-wheels with three doors in a row admitting to three shelves upon which the coffins stand. The poorer folk go to the cemetery thus pigeonholed, the rich have a tram hearse which has a glass cover so that the coffin can be seen. All day these monstrosities run out of the city followed by a black-painted tramcar for the mourners. The cemeteries are many miles out of the city and these mournful trams follow the ordinary ones, a perpetual reminder to the gay crowds of the vanity of human joys. At nightfall the streets are picturesque in the extreme with the Indian handcarts and mule barrows carrying paper lanterns (for every vehicle must have a light after dark), with the weirdly quaint muffled figures of the Indians showing up in the fitful gleams.
We must say a word about the Museum. It is a building just out of the cathedral plaza, and is approached through a pretty courtyard filled with palms and flowering shrubs. But within is the most melancholy medley and muddle which it is possible to conceive. With opportunities unexampled, with a wealth of treasures, the very finest of all Aztec and Mayan relics, the curators, if one must misuse the word so sadly, have proved themselves about as fit to arrange and govern a national museum as schoolboys. There is literally no order; apparently no intelligence at all has been exercised in the cataloguing of the exhibits; and the elementary precaution of labelling each object with its place and date of finding has been almost entirely ignored. Thus you come across a case of ancient pottery obviously of all ages and from all parts of the Republic, and this is called "Ancient Aztec Pottery," which a large part of it is certainly not. Case after case witnesses to this ineptitude. Nothing is labelled; or if it is, the label is patently incorrect. At the door stand two cases facing each other. One is called "Forged Pottery"; the other, "Genuine Pottery." Perhaps the egregious gentlemen who have laboured to spoil what might have been one of the most remarkable collections of an ancient civilisation existing will be surprised to hear that they have got forged pottery in the genuine case and vice versa. A typical catalogue entry is "279. Fragments of Toltec column"; or "281 to 283. Three stone blocks. It has been supposed that they formed part of gigantic caryatides"; or "286. El Indio Triste. Strange human sculpture of melancholy aspect"; or "93. Aztec Goddess Citlalinicue, according to Señor Troncoso. A square flat stone with interesting reliefs on its two chief faces." How illuminating to be sure!
Here is the world-famous Aztec Calendar Stone found in the plaza in 1790 during some levelling operations, and the wonderfully carved Stone of Sacrifice, also unearthed in the plaza a year later. Here, too, is the much debated Chac Mool statue which Dr. Le Plongeon, of whom and whose work we shall have occasion to speak later, found at Chichen Itza, Yucatan. In the galleries above there is a hotchpotch of exhibits ranging from a dreadfully poor picture of the Emperor Maximilian's footman, the hair of General D. Vicente Guerrero (it is to be feared that the world has long ago forgotten that he ever lost it), a "Marble Bath Tub made of a single block, said to have belonged to the Archduchess Carlotta," and "No. 63. Wooden Tub made of one piece, presented to the Archduchess by Col. Juan B. Campos," to a plaster cast of "the ideal man of Neanderthal," specimens of human skins tattooed, Japanese armour and two human bodies naturally mummified. In truth, it is a sorry spectacle, this National Museum of Mexico, and you wander out of its bewildering galleries full of regret at the reckless way in which a great chance has been thrown away; for no one can now hope to put right what has been done wrong or to make the exhibition a good one.
The electric tram service of the city is excellent, and for a few centavos you are transported miles into the many beautiful suburbs in which the capital rejoices. Fairest of these is Chapultepec and its park, where on a Sunday you can sit under the shade of giant laurels and cypresses and listen to the really excellent music of the band of the Republican Guard (the Mexican Life Guards). Chapultepec is historic. There in 1847 the military cadets made their renowned stand against the Americans, a glorious piece of fighting which is memorialised in a statue group—the names of the fallen lads engraved on the plinth. The castle—singularly un-castle-y—with somewhat the appearance of a glorified hydropathic, stands on a rock about 150 feet high (Chapultepec means "hill of the grasshopper"), the site of Moctezuma's summer palace. Beneath it lie the palace grounds intersected by shady drives and ornamental waters fringed with a wealth of flowering shrubs. From the height you get an unexampled view, down the superb drive of the Paseo, of the city ringed round with volcanic hills purpled with a sunny mist. To the gate of the park an endless procession of trams comes, filled to overflowing. Sunday is Chapultepec's great day, and all the sunny afternoon laughing, gaily dressed crowds file through the paths or linger round the bandstand; while the roadways are packed with slowly moving lines of wonderful carriages drawn by really fine animals; and on the shady unmacadamised edges of the carriageways canter as superb a collection of riding horses as it would be possible to see in any capital outside a horse show. There is no animal lovelier than a well-bred horse, and though the Mexican steeds are small, they are—at least the bulk of them in Chapultepec are—much Arabised and magnificent creatures. The brilliant gloss of their skins, the clear, soft shining eyes, the rhythmic power and grace of their limbs, the dainty perfection of their movements, made the human crowds around them look quite mean, even in their picturesque rainbow-hued clothes, for sartorial man is at best a sloven. As we gazed on those proud heads and silky manes, and watched the play of the muscles beneath the satin coats, we felt the irony of that human phrase "the lower animals."
Northward from the Castle the country breaks into sunny uplands bordered ten miles off by majestic masses of igneous rock, scarred and grey here, there green with sprawling cactus undergrowth and stunted tree. Long stretches of pampas grass, traversed by dusty roads, dispute possession of this suburban pleasaunce with plantations of maguey—vistas of dark, serried green broken here and there by a stone-built hacienda, a distant patch of dazzling white in the sun's glare, ringed in with laurels and evergreen oaks. It is a pretty picture, and you forgive the clouds of dust, which rise at the hoofs of that file of pulque mules and which envelop that herd of white goats shepherded by barefoot Indian lassies, for the wealth of sunlight which enriches the landscape. Under the deep shade of a hacienda portico a withered Indian woman squats Turk-fashion before baskets of luscious oranges. They are four a penny, these "golden apples," and with armfuls you perch yourself on the stone culvert of the little bridge spanning the brook, once a mountain torrent on those far-off hills, which gently murmurs through the maguey gardens, and lunch like gods for fourpence.
Burke could not "find it in his heart to impeach a nation," but one is sorely tempted to forget his advice in writing of the Mexicans. As a people they are disagreeable. They are fulsomely polite, but it is just that lip-service which sets the Englishman's back up. In his inimitable verse Kipling has pointed out how politeness "takes" the English.