Sunday evening.
A long day. N. is at the Embassy; the house is quiet, except for water still dripping heavily from the roof. My Mexican sands are slipping, and this morning my eyes looked their last on the so-familiar beauty of the plateau. Early Mr. de S. and Mr. S. and myself started out from the city, down the shining Avenida San Francisco, through the Zócalo, past the palace, through the Calle de la Moneda, where the French troops entered in 1863, out past the San Lázaro station, on to what was once the ancient Aztec causeway.
There we met three fishermen, clad only in small breech-clouts, with long poles over their shoulders, on each end of which were small nets full of little fish. They were moving along silently, swiftly, the sun glistening on their wet bodies, just as from the night of time dark men have moved over that causeway.
We passed the sun-baked Peñon Viejo, with its clump of trees, its bits of cactus growing on its grassy sides, and the old Church of Santa Marta on a farther hill. On one side the road is bounded by the white tequesquite shores of Texcoco, with little piles of soda gathered up at intervals. On the other are the green, sweet-water shores of Lake Chalco, and the little lake of San Martu, so near the Texcoco lake that there is just room between for the railway and the motor road. At Los Reyes, about eighteen kilometers out of town, we branched off to Texcoco over a highway running through maize-planted fields, under the great cypresses and eucalyptus-trees of the Hacienda de Chapingo, along more corn-fields, till we bumped into Texcoco.
The usual Sunday market was in full blast around the portales of the Plaza, and there was a coming and going in the old church as I stepped in for a moment. Here Cortés lay by his mother and his daughter for over one hundred and fifty years. The little near-by chapel, with its antique baptismal font, was built by the Conqueror himself, and shows how limited were the means he had at his command when bivouacking in the "Athens of Mexico." As I bid farewell to these scenes of his romantic deeds and the long-time resting-place of his venturesome heart, I bethought me of his watchword:
Por el rey infinitas tierras
Y por Dios infinitas almas.
We went on toward the beautiful little village of Magdalena, entered through some wonderful plantings of organos cactus, and at the entrance was the little pink-and-blue pulque-shop, with its motto, so true of all things earthly, "Paso á paso se va llegando."[62]
The sun shone through the cypress and eucalyptus in the atrium of the lovely old church, and Indians, in clean, white clothes were going to Mass. There was an assortment of wide, flounced petticoats, quite striking in these days of tight skirts. All was as I had first seen it, except that some feet would never tread these paths again, while others were beginning to toddle about, and nature had blossomed and reblossomed, and I myself was to pass. That was all.
As we went on we seemed, for a while, to lose the volcanoes, but higher up on the great ridge they showed themselves again in all their splendor and the air got quite cold, communicating a sensation of excessive lightness and purity. The hills around are bare of vegetation.