“Why, then, club together, three or four families of you. These huge houses are quite spacious enough for the purpose.”
They only shook their heads incredulously; so simple a notion was quite beyond them. As their fathers lived before them, so they do, and will continue to do so for a long time to come. We gave a few coppers to the poor wretches to drink our health in pulque, which is excellent here, the maguey reaching sometimes twenty feet in diameter, and the leaves nine feet ten inches in length. I am told that some plants yield as much as 600 litres of liquid. The way the juice is extracted from the aloe is this: Every five years, just as the maguey is about to bloom, shooting up a long stalk crowned with its umbelliferous flowers, the cone forming the centre of the plant is taken out, leaving a hole, which soon fills with the sap of the leaves around it. Then a man with a bottle and a large skin plies daily from plant to plant, taking up the liquid with the bottle and pouring it into the skin, which, when full, he empties into an open receptacle, made of a bull’s hide stretched out on four poles. When the juice is sufficiently fermented, bitter herbs are added, and the pulque is then ready for sale.
Mezcal is a kind of brandy made from a smaller kind of aloe, not unlike a huge cabbage in shape. To prepare it, roots and leaves are left to soak until they are duly fermented; a calf’s head or the best part of a chicken is added to the compound previous to distillation. In the first case it is called mezcal cabecita; in the second, considered the finest in flavour, mezcal pechuga. The best Indian cognacs are manufactured at Jalisco.
CHURCH OF S. JUAN, TEOTIHUACAN.
S. Martin, where we are going to put up for the night, is situated on the driest spot in the valley, so that the only green things to be seen about it are its enormous hedges of aloe, shooting up from fifteen to twenty feet high, and so thick as to make them quite impassable. Our next stage is S. John of Teotihuacan, which was formerly a station for the numerous relays of mules plying to and from Mexico, when more than two thousand passed daily. Then every village had “mesones”[74] and an immense “corrale,” in which mules, horses, and donkeys were put up, whence the clapping of hands of the tortilleros was heard all day long, and copious libations to the Indian Bacchus were the reverse of edifying. But now all that is over. The railroad has turned S. Juan into a living tomb. The plaza is deserted, tiendas are silent, and windows only open when the tramping of some wretched donkey or a stray traveller disturb its solitude. Water, that first of commodities, is plentiful here, and great poplars, beautiful cedars, lend their cool shade, and make our walk to the church, which stands at the end of a noble avenue, quite enjoyable. This church is one of the finest to be seen in Mexico. The steeple, with its three orders of columns rising on three successive tiers, is striking for its elegance and fine proportions.
We alight here without much hope of being comfortable, for the only accommodation is a meson, with a courtyard giving access to bare rooms paved with bricks, devoid of any furniture, and where privacy is impossible, for anybody may come and lie alongside of you. Your ablutions have to be made at the well in presence of half the village congregated in the yard. When you are hungry you go to the “fonda” in the plaza, where the good man who keeps it does his best to cook you a nice dinner, which we eat to spare his feelings rather than because we like his menu. But if the cuisine left something to be desired, it was amply made up to us by the Municipality, and it was owing to their kindly help that we were able, within a few hours, to muster men in sufficient numbers to begin our operations.
