Anahuac : or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern

by Edward B. Tylor

I am afraid the Spanish American has not always a very strict regard for truth.

These gentlemen had indeed got off easily, as the driver said; for the last diligence from Vera Cruz, with our steamboat acquaintances in it, had been stopped just outside this very town of Huamantla as they left it before daylight in the morning. The robbers were but three, but they had plundered the unfortunate travellers as effectually as thirty could have done. Now, all this was very pretty to hear as a tale, but not satisfactory to travellers who were going by the same road the next morning; and in the disagreeable barrack-room where our beds stood in long lines, we, the nine passengers of the “up” diligence, held a council, standing, like Mr. Macaulay’s senators, and there decided on a most Christian line of conduct—that when the three bore down upon us, and the muzzle of the inevitable escopeta was poked in at our window, we would descend meekly, and at the command of “boca abajo,” (“mouth downwards,”) we would humiliate ourselves with our noses in the dirt, and be robbed quietly. Having thus decided beforehand, according to the etiquette of the road, whether we were to fight or submit, and being tired with a long day’s journey, we all turned in, and were fast asleep in a moment.

It seemed that almost directly afterwards the dirtiest man possible came round, and shook us till we were conscious; and we washed in the customary saucers, by the light of a real, flaring, smoking, Spanish lamp with a beak, exactly what the Romans used in Pompeii, except that this is of brass, not bronze.

With our eyes still half-shut we crawled into the kitchen for our morning chocolate, and demanded our bill. Such a bill! One of us, a stout Spaniard, sent for the landlord and abused him in a set speech. The “patron” divested his countenance of every trace of expression, scratched his head through his greasy nightcap, and stood listening patiently. The stout man grew fiercer and fiercer, and wound up with a climax. “If we meet with the robbers,” said he, rolling himself up in his great cloak, “we must tell them that we have passed through your worship’s hands, and there is none left for them.” The landlord bowed gravely, saw us into the diligence, and hoped we should have a fortunate journey, and meet with no novelty on the road. A “novelty” in Spanish countries means a misfortune.

We met with no “novelty,” though, when we looked out of the window in the early dawn and spied three men with muskets, following us at a short distance, we thought our time had come, and watches and valuables were plunged into boots and under seats, and through slits into the padding of the diligence; but the three men came no nearer, and we supposed them to be an escort of soldiers. When it was light the difficulty was to recover the valuables—no easy matter, so securely had they been hidden.

We heard afterwards of a little peculiarity which distinguished the robbers of Huamantla. It seems that no less a personage than the parish priest was accustomed to lead his parishioners into action, like the Cornish parson in old times when a ship went ashore on the coast. What has become of his reverence since, I do not know. He is very likely still in his parish, carrying on his double profession, unless somebody has shot him. I wonder whether it is sacrilege to shoot a priest who is also a highwayman, as it used to be to kill a bishop on the field of battle.

We are at last on the high lands of Mexico, the districts which at least three different races have chosen to settle in, neglecting the fertile country below. A sharp turn in the road brings its fairly out into the plain; and then on our left are the two snowy mountains that lie at the edge of the valley of Mexico, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, famous in all Mexican books. Like Orizaba of yesterday, they seem to rise from the plain close to us; and from the valley between them there pours down upon us such a flood of icy wind, that, though windows are pulled up and great-coats buttoned round our throats, we shiver piteously, and our teeth fairly chatter till we get out of the river of cold air; and then comes hot sunshine and dust again.

Anxious to make sure that we have really got into the land of Aztec civilization, Mr. Christy gets down from the diligence, and hunting about for a few minutes by the road-side, returns in triumph with a broken arrowhead of obsidian. A deep channel cut by a water-course gives us our first idea of the depth of the soil; for these plateaus were once nothing but deep hollows among the mountains, which rain and melted snow, bringing down fragments of porphyry and basalt—partly in their original state and partly decomposed—have filled up and formed into plains. Signs of volcanic action are abundant. To say nothing of the two great mountains we have just left behind, there is a hill of red volcanic tufa just beyond us; and still further on, though this is anticipating, our road passes over the lava-field at the foot of the little volcano of Santa Barbara.

There is a population here at any rate, village after village; and between them are great plantations of maize and aloes; for this is the district where the best pulque in Mexico is made, the “llanos de Apam.” It is the Agave Americana, the same aloe that is so common in southern Europe, where indeed it flowers, and that grows in our gardens and used to have the reputation of flowering once in a hundred years. I do not exaggerate when I say that we saw hundreds of thousands of them that day, planted in long regular lines. Among them were walking the Indian “tlachiqueros,” each with his pigskin on his back, and his long calabash in his hand, milking such plants as were in season.