[1] While in Mexico City we visited in vain all the map shops and Government offices in search of a map of Yucatan. All the maps available were those based on the Mapa de la Peninsula (1887), which we have proved to be hopelessly inaccurate.
[CHAPTER IV]
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF YUCATAN
A sea of greengage green, broken by scarce a ripple save where a shark's fin curves up shiny black in the blazing sun; a semicircle of pale sand, fringed by brown and mahogany-red boarded barns of warehouses, with here and there a gaunt brick chimney; a thin belt of palm trees; three wooden jetties, and beyond, houses stuccoed white and salmon-pink: this is our first sight of Yucatan's only port, Progreso. There is no harbour, for the shallows stretch far seaward, and steamers of any draught dare not come within five miles of the coast.
The outward and visible signs of the town have scarcely come distinctly into view, and we have barely lost sight in the heat mist of the monster form of our liner, anchored miles in our wake, when the panting tug has come alongside the pier and we are for the first time face to face with Yucatecans. A Yucatecan crowd is a pleasant sight to look upon. Personal cleanliness, bright-coloured vests and spotless linen breeches are a welcome change for the traveller who comes from a Mexican port. The Yucatecan and the Mexican, too, are physically very unlike, and the difference is all in favour of the former. The crowd which awaits the tug is a bright, clean-faced, orderly crowd, and as we step ashore, the luggage touts, many of them remarkably intelligent-looking and handsome fellows, take your "No, muchas gracias," for an answer, which is more than you can say for the evil-smelling, vulture-faced, blackmailing gang who throng the quays at such ports as Vera Cruz and Tampico. Alas! months of sojourn in the land of the Mayans are to alter the first favourable impressions of that Progreso crowd. Verily are Yucatecans "Whited Sepulchres"!
And here perhaps it would be as well to define a Yucatecan. The population of Yucatan, speaking broadly, consists of two classes, slaves and savages. The former are the Indians, by centuries of brutality degraded and robbed of that spirit which made them foes worthy of Cortes's prowess, but still a kindly, hospitable people for whom every English heart must feel a keen sympathy. The savages are the Yucatecans, the mongrel people resulting from the early unions of the Spanish with the Indian women; and if the epithet seems harsh, we would ask our readers to reserve judgment till they have finished this volume. The tint of the Yucatecan is that of a half-baked biscuit, but the eyes are black-brown and often small, and the lank black hair suggests the Indian crossings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
At the end of the jetty a lofty lich-gate of wood houses Señores los Aduaneros, Messrs. the Customs House Officers. But our passports are from headquarters and bear a Cabinet Minister's seal, so our baggage is soon passed. Over the Customs House gate might be written, varying Dante's terrible line, "All hope of cleanliness abandon, ye who enter here": for once inside Progreso town you must do battle with tropical dust at its worst. Through the railway yard, where the sun beats down with a blistering heat on trucks, mules, and men, you make your way to the train through filthy little arcaded streets, your boots disappearing at each footstep in the ill-smelling, garbage-littered compound, your eyes smarting in the clouds of it you kick up. The station is a barn, the railway a three-foot gauge, the cars are rickety, low-roofed, cane-seated yellow wood affairs. From engine to brake van the train is American-made. There seems little to choose in comfort between the classes, but for the sake of more elbow-room we "plunge" our three centavos a kilometre (the usual first-class fare all over Yucatan), a fraction less than a penny a mile, distinctly cheap if the rolling stock were better.
As the little train jolts through the outskirts of the town, ringing its bell, the dust it raises blending with the resinous smoke from the wood fire of its engine, naked yellow babies look up from their play in the dirt and scamper into shelter, while female faces peer out between the iron bars which do duty for glass windows in the one-storeyed-high flat-roofed houses. Northern Yucatan is as level as an Essex marsh, and the line runs through miles of country at first glance quite English with its dense covering of small trees like nut bushes and silver birches. Nature has been niggard of soil to the whole peninsula, but perhaps it is around Progreso that you realise most that the Yucatecan must be content to sow his seed in the "stony ground." The sundried undergrowth is of cactus, stunted shrubs, and sea grasses. Here and there this breaks to give way to swamps, rich in purple and white orchids and golden water plants, fair to look on as the sun touches the water between the waving rushes, but surely enough the happy breeding-ground of the "Yellow Jack" mosquito. Then come fields of henequen or hemp, "the Green Gold of Yucatan,"—the plants like huge green pineapples with waxy green feathers on top,—enclosed within grey stone walls like those of Scotland.
As we near the capital (the distance is but twenty-five miles) the carriages fill up, and you squeeze closer into your caned seat for two to make room for some fat Yucatecan or his ill-shaped, chalk-faced powdered dame. In the suburbs of Merida (there are miles of them) the rail runs between rows of native huts, palm-leaf thatched frameworks of wood upon which red earth is plastered and then stuccoed or whitewashed. Each has its garden, evidently the despair of its owner, for dogs, pigs, and fowls dispute possession of it with tin cans and refuse. But even in these unfavourable surroundings tropic Nature beautifies with the greeny-gold leaf of the banana and the heavy-hanging greener crown of the cocoanut palm. Over all rises a strange vista. Merida might well be called the "City of Windmills." On each side of the train you see the horizon literally crowded with air motors for pumping water from the limestone, and you hear it whispered in a tone of pride by a Yucatecan to his neighbour that there are in Yucatan's capital 6,000 of these eyesores.