To-day was the feast of the Vírgen de los Remedios, once so important in "New Spain," and, as I had planned, Mr. de Soto and I made the pilgrimage there.
It was the first church Cortés built in Mexico, on the site of the Aztec temple, where he and his battered remnant halted to bind up their wounds after the retreat from Mexico City in the "Melancholy Night." We started out at eight o'clock, on a dazzling morning, rather weakly and apologetically within ourselves and to each other, in a carriage, which took us through the Paseo to Popotla and Tacuba and Azcapotzalco, where we descended and crossed some maguey-fields fringed by squat, half-ruined adobe huts.
We jumped endless ditches, made after the antique pattern, until we finally reached an uncovered horse-tramway, crowded with such specimens of the plebs as had the superfluous centavos for wheeled conveyances. We were finally deposited at San Bartolo Naucalpam, and then did the rest of the way, several kilometers, decently and fittingly on foot, climbing over the white, shining, pathless tepetate, which, with the pink tezontle, has been from all time the building material for Mexico City. We were in the foot-hills of the Sierra de las Cruces, covered with a scant vegetation, various kinds of cactus, or an occasional árbol de Perú.
The Indians seem to partake of this thinness of the soil, this strange, vanishing quality of light, this dissolving of horizons, this pulsing of colors. A generative, effective something is underneath all the unrest and disorder of the miserable political systems they seem to produce, and if a race is constantly being born into a world of wondrous light and color, it can persist in spite of everything else being impossible.
Indians were rapidly and silently approaching from all sides as we neared the church, which I had only seen pressed against the purple hills, wonderfully transfigured at sunset or catching the light in the morning hours. Mexico can hold the fancy quite independent of the work of man. But when one adds the activities of that creative, potent, Spanish race, infinitely inspired by the background already perfect, with the building materials, tepetate and tezontle, white and pink, giving them what they wanted to place against green and blue, the beauty of the result, wrapped in the strange transparence of the plateau, is not to be wondered at.
Everywhere we looked we found something that needed only to be framed to make a perfect picture, a dome (media naranja, half orange, they call the form), with its attendant belfry of reddish-gray lace against a hill, a group of Indians resting, with notes of red zarape, white trousers, peaked hat. Any spot can become a shop; there is just a spreading out of their wares, and though the jefe político of their special pueblo sees that they don't vend without a license, at least there is no rent.
A TYPICAL GROUP OF CORN-SELLERS
Photograph by Ravell
The basket-venders, the sandal-venders, the pottery-venders, the water-carriers, the carriers of glass jars of precious pulque, were out in force, and the candle-trade was going strong, as we ascended the crooked, crowded way to the patio. The buildings about were crumbling and neglected, and the smell of the pungent messes the Indians put into their tortillas was mingled with faint whiffs of incense.