January 13th, 7.30 a.m.
At last, yesterday, the train came, and, clutching at our veils, we were blown into it, and after another unexplained delay started off in an American-built car like our ordinary ones. Its name was "Quincy"! In the old days, Aunt L. went everywhere on horseback. We passed various little wind-swept villages. Jordan was the name of one of them, seeming, in the sandy, New-Testament-looking spot, just the right name. Two beautiful Tehuantepec women got into the train there, kindly sitting near us. I was fascinated by their clothes, and much more interested in them than they were in us.
The unfamiliar cadence of the Zapoteca gave them a complete touch of foreignness. One of them wore a beautiful, strange, complicated head-dress of stiff pleated and ruffled lace, which, I later discovered, does not at all interfere with the carrying on their heads of the large, shallow, brightly painted gourds. Her skirts were long and deeply flounced, but looped up at the waist, just a tucking in of the lower hem of the flounce, with the rest of the stuff flowing away in a most lovely line. The other woman had on a beautiful necklace of irregular-shaped gold coins, and with her flashing teeth and dark eyes, and a brilliant, low-cut, full jacket, with a yellow handkerchief twisted turbanwise around her head, made a picture I could not take my eyes from. I felt as colorless as a shadow, and I told Aunt L. she looked like a blue-and-gray Copenhagen vase strayed into a Moorish room.
Just before getting into Tehuantepec we came upon a beautiful grove of cocoanut-palms, high and graceful, above the rest of the vegetation, and the little nestling huts and houses. All about are jungles containing strange creeping things, and strange fevers and kindred creeping ills.
As the train passed slowly down the principal street, it seemed to me I looked out on a race of queens, tall, stately, with their lovely costumes. The men seemed undersized and sort of "incidental" in the landscape, but those beautiful women walking up and down their sandy streets were a revelation. Aunt L. says they possess not only the beauty, but the brains of the race. Former generations of Tehuantepec men, fitter mates for these queens than the specimens I saw, were mostly killed off in the various wars of "independence," and I understand the population is kept up by fortuitous but willing males from other places.
Everything was color; gorgeous splashes of yellow and black, and red and orange and blue against the shifting, sandy streets. A picturesque, creamy Palacio Municipal faces the plaza, and there were many churches—mostly showing earthquake vicissitudes. An old fortress, once the headquarters of Diaz, gives a last suggestive note to the whole.
Glorious memories of Don Porfirio hang all over this part of the world, where he is adored and mourned. I must say Madero's face looked positively childish in the jefatura at Juchitan, as it confronted the stern, clever visage of the great Indian. Even the cheap, highly colored lithograph could not do away with his look of distinction and power. He was, in his young days, military governor of Tehuantepec, and at one time jefe político. A French savant and traveler, l'Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, remembering him then, said he was the most perfect type he had ever seen, and what he imagined the kingly hero Cuauhtemoc to have been.
When we got out of the train at Salina Cruz, a whirl-wind caught us and blew us down the platform. I saw very little of the town on the way to the British Consulate, where we were to lunch, as I was bent double by the wind and blinded by the sand.
Mr. Buchanan and his wife were waiting to receive us. Mr. B.'s kind but shrewd blue eyes, altruistic brow, and welcoming hand-clasp show him at first sight to be what Aunt L. says he is, "pure gold." She has found him through years the best of friends and wisest of advisers. The consulate is on one of the sandy ridges that the town seems largely composed of, and Mrs. Buchanan has arranged it with taste and comfort after our ideas, with books and flowers and easy-chairs. But one look from the high bow window and you know at once where you are, with irrepressible cacti and palm-trees peeking in at you.
I tried sitting on the sheltered side of the veranda for a few minutes while waiting for lunch, that my eyes might "receive" the Pacific, but I was glad to go in-doors again. Mr. B. says the wind blows that way six or seven months in the year. Yesterday was one of its "best."