Later.
Presidio, in the cañon of the Rio Blanco.
I have been absorbed in watching the tropical jungles, where form is eliminated. Every tree is choked or cloaked by some sort of enveloping convolvuli; every wall has its formless abundant covering. No silhouettes anywhere, no "cut" to anything—which is why all this richness could, I imagine, get monotonous.
Tierra Blanca, 3.30.
In the "blazing tropics"! A heavy, hot atmosphere comes in at the window. All along there has been much sitting of a dark race under banana-trees, where not even a change of position seems necessary in order to be fed.
We have had a long wait here at Tierra Blanca, which is the junction of a branch line to Vera Cruz, and I have been watching station life. It's very highly colored. Here and there appears an unmistakably American face—the "exploiters" some would call them; but it seems to me they gather up all this vague splendor, this endless abundance, into something definite, with benefits to the greater number, though some get "left," of course.
There is a decided note of carpe diem transposed into orange, scarlet, and black, which all the coming and going of men, women, and children with baskets of coffee-beans doesn't do away with. In the tropics the white man is king, be he Yankee, Spaniard, or Northman, and it is part of the lure. The abundances of Mother Earth are for his harvesting; a strange, native race seems there to do him honor, render him service, asking only in return enough of the abundance to keep soul in body for the allotted span.
We have just passed the broad Rio Mariposa (Butterfly River), and are at a place called "Obispo." Indian women are holding up baskets of the most gorgeous fruits, babes on their backs, cigarettes in their mouths. We are near the celebrated Valle Nacional. I remember some terrible articles in one of the magazines about the human miseries in the working of the tobacco-factories, herds of men, women, and children locked together into great sheds at night during tropical storms, enslavements, separations. It's easy to hope it is not so, but I dare say it is.
We are zigzagging through dense jungle with the gaudiest splashes of color. Flashy birds are flying about. Sometimes one wonders if it is bird or flower. All the green is studded with bright spots. There are great, flat, meadow-like spaces, the soil looking rich enough to bear food for all the hungry millions of the earth, and numberless cattle are grazing over it. But oh! the inexpressible slipshodness of the human abodes! Anything perishable, nearest at hand, sugar-cane stalks, palm leaves, continue to compose the dwellings; and oh! the crowds of children, of human beings, just as slipshod, just as perishable!
The sun is setting. Great pink brushes of cirrus are covering the sky, against a blue that hates to give way, but in a moment I know it will be dark.
Later.