I came home and ordered a room to be prepared for Vera Estañol, as, of course, he must remain with us until he can be shipped to the States or to Europe. I imagine that the clean bed and the hot water and the reading-lamp and desk will look very pleasant, after three months in jail. N. wrote and signed a letter to Huerta, in which he guarantees that Vera Estañol will not mix in politics and will immediately leave the country with his family. He is one of the most prominent and gifted lawyers in the republic, liberal and enlightened, and head of the Evolucionista party. N. was out until midnight trying to find the President, to get the final order for his release, but was, in the end, obliged to give it up. The old man has ways of disappearing when no one can track him to ground. This morning, N. is after him again, and, I suppose, will bring Vera Estañol to the house, whence he will take the well-worn route of hastily departing patriots to Vera Cruz.
Yesterday afternoon Mrs. Tozzer, Mr. Seeger, and I motored out beyond Azcapotzalco, where Tozzer and Hay are excavating. Anywhere one digs in these suburbs may be found countless relics of Aztec civilization. Azcapotzalco was once a teeming center, a great capital, and there were then, as now, many cypress groves. One of them is still supposed to be haunted by Marina, Cortés’ Indian love.
Built on the site of the temple, teocalli, is an interesting old Dominican church of the sixteenth century; its great patio, planted with olive and cypress trees is inclosed by a pink scalloped wall, marvelously patiné. Here the Indians came in masses, were baptized, had their wounds bound up, their ailments treated, their strifes allayed, by the patient friars. As we went slowly over the broken, neglected road little boys offered us beads and idols and bits of pottery, which are so abundant in the fields that it is scarcely necessary to dig for them. T. and C. H., for their work, simply chose a likely-looking sun-baked mound, planted with maguey, like dozens of others, and with twenty-five or thirty picturesque and untrustworthy descendants of Montezuma (one skips back six or seven hundred years with the greatest ease when one looks at them) they dug out an old palace. When we demanded regalitos (presents), our friends drew, unwillingly, from their dusty pockets some hideous heads and grotesque forms, caressed them lovingly, and then put them back, unable, when it came to the scratch, to part with them.
THE “DIGGINGS” (AZCAPOTZALCO)
THE PYRAMID OF SAN JUAN TEOTIHUACAN
It is a heavenly spot. Here and there a pink belfry showed itself, its outline broken by a dead black cypress; the marvelous, indescribable hills, both near and far, swam in a strange transparency.
We sat long among the grubby, mixed Toltec and Aztec ruins, and made tea, and, in what may have been some patrician’s parlor, watched the sun go down in a blaze of colors, reappearing, as it were, to fling a last, unexpected glory over the snow-covered volcanoes and the violet hills. Every shaft of maguey was outlined with light, the whole universe a soft spectrum. A mysterious, blue-lined darkness fell upon us as we drove toward the city.