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

by Edward B. Tylor

It would never do to be late, and break our necks in one of the awkward water-courses that cut the plateau about in all directions; so we started homewards, soon having to unfasten great-coats and shawls from our saddles, to keep out the cold of the approaching sunset; and so we got back to the hospitable hacienda, and were glad to warm ourselves at the fire.

Next morning, we went off to get a view of the great barranca of Regla. A ride over the hills brought us to a wood of oaks, with their branches fringed with the long grey Spanish moss, and a profusion of epiphytes clinging to their bark, some splendidly in flower, showing the fantastic shapes and brilliant colours one sees in English orchid-houses. Cactuses of many species complete the picture of the vegetation in this beautiful spot. This is at the top of the barranca. Then imagine a valley a mile or two in width, with sides almost perpendicular and capped with basaltic pillars, and at the bottom a strip of land where the vegetation is of the deepest green of the tropics, with a river winding along among palm-trees and bananas. This great barranca is between two and three thousand feet deep, and the view is wonderful. We went down a considerable way by a zig-zag road, my companion collecting armfuls of plants by the way, but unfortunately losing his thermometer, which could not be found, though a long hunt for it produced a great many more plants, and so the trouble was not wasted. The prickly pear was covered with ripe purple fruit a little way down, and we refreshed ourselves with them, I managing—in my clumsiness—to get into my fingers two or three of the little sheaves of needles which are planted on the outside of the fruit, and thus providing myself with occupation for leisure moments for three or four days after in taking them out.

Many species of cactus, and the nopal, or prickly pear, especially, are full of watery sap, which trickles out in a stream when they are pierced. In these thirsty regions, when springs and brooks are dry, the cattle bite them to get at the moisture, regardless of the thorns. On the north coast of Africa the camels delight in crunching the juicy leaves of the same plant. I have often been amused in watching the camel-drivers’ efforts to get their trains of laden beasts along the narrow sandy lanes of Tangier, between hedges of prickly pears, where the camels with their long necks could reach the tempting lobes on both sides of the way.

In this thirsty season, while the cattle in the Mexican plains derive moisture from the cactus, the aloe provides for man a substitute for water. It frequently happened to us to go from rancho to rancho asking for water in vain, though pulque was to be had in abundance.

To attempt any description of the varied forms of cactus in Mexico would be out of the question. In the northern provinces alone, botanists have described above eight hundred species. The most striking we met with were the prickly pear (cactus opuntia), the órgano, the night-blowing cereus, the various mamillarias—dome-shaped mounds covered with thorns, varying in diameter from an inch to six or eight feet—and the greybeard, el viejo, “the old man,” as our guide called them, upright pillars like street-posts, and covered with grey wool-like filaments.

Getting to the top of the ravine again, we found an old Indian milking an aloe, which flourishes here, though a little further down the climate is too hot for it to produce pulque. This old gentleman had a long gourd, of the shape and size of a great club, but hollow inside, and very light. The small end of this gourd was pushed in among the aloe-leaves into the hollow made by scooping out the inside of the plant, and in which the sweet juice, the aguamiel, collects. By having a little hole at each end of the gourd, and sucking at the large end, the hollow of the plant emptied itself into the Acocote, (in proper Mexican, Acocotl, Water-throat), as this queer implement is called. Then the Indian stopped the hole at the end he had been sucking at, with his finger, and dexterously emptied the contents of the gourd into a pig-skin which he carried at his back. We went up with the old man to his rancho, and tested his pulque, which was very good, though we could not say the same of his domestic arrangements. It puzzled us not a little to see people living up at this height in houses built of sticks, such as are used in the hot lands, and hardly affording any protection from the weather, severe as it is here. The pulque is taken to market in pig-skins, which, though the pig himself is taken out of them, still retain his shape very accurately; and when nearly full of liquor, they roll about on their backs, and kick up the little dumpy legs that are left them, in the most comical and life-like way. When we went away we bought the old man’s acocote, and carried it home in triumph, and is it not in the Museum at Kew Gardens to this day? (See the illustration at [page 36].)

At the hacienda of Regla are to be seen on a large scale most of the processes which are employed in the extraction of silver from the ore—the beneficio, or making good, as it is called.

In the great yard, numbers of men and horses were walking round and round upon the “tortas,” tarts or pies, as they are called, consisting of powdered ore mixed with water, so as to form a circular bed of mud a foot deep. To this mud, sulphate of copper, salt, and quicksilver are added, and the men and mules walk round and round in it, mixing it thoroughly together, a process which is kept up, with occasional intervals of rest, for nearly two months. By that time the whole of the silver has formed an amalgam with the mercury, and this amalgam is afterwards separated from the earth by being trampled under water in troughs. We were surprised to find that men and horses could pass their lives in wading through mud containing mercury in a state of fine division without absorbing it into their bodies, but neither men nor horses suffer from it.

We happened to visit the melting-house one evening, while silver and lead were being separated by oxidizing the lead in a reverberatory furnace. Here we noticed a curious effect. The melted litharge ran from the mouth of the furnace upon a floor of damp sand, and spread over it in a sheet. Presently, as the heat of the mass vaporized the water in the sand below, the sheet of litharge, still slightly fluid, began to heave and swell, and a number of small cones rose from its surface. Some of these cones reached the height of four inches, and then burst at the top, sending out a shower of red-hot fragments. I removed one of these cones when the litharge was cool. It had a regidar funnel-shaped crater, like that which Vesuvius had until three or four years ago.

The analogy is complete between these little cones and those on the lava-field at the foot of the volcano of Jorullo, the celebrated “hornitos;” the concentric structure of which, as described by Burkart, proves that they were formed in precisely the same manner. Until lately, the formation of the great cone of Jorullo was attributed to the same kind of action as the hornitos, but later travellers have established the fact that this is incorrect. One of the De Saussure family, who was in Mexico a few years back, describes Jorullo as consisting of three terraces of basaltic lava, which have flowed one above another from a central orifice, the whole being surmounted by a cone of lapilli thrown up from the same opening, from which also later streams of lava have issued.