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

by Edward B. Tylor

The celebrated cascade of Regla is just behind the hacienda. There is a sort of basin, enclosed on three sides by a perpendicular wall of basaltic columns, some eighty feet high. On the side opposite the opening, a mountain stream has cut a deep notch in this wall, and pours down in a cascade. The basaltic pillars rest upon an undisturbed layer of basaltic conglomerate five feet thick, and that upon a bed of clay. The place is very picturesque; and two great Yuccas which project over the waterfall, crowned with their star-like tufts of pointed leaves, have a strange effect. These basalt-columns are very regular, with from five to eight sides; and are almost black in colour. They have a curiously well-defined circular core in the middle, five or six inches in diameter. This core is light grey, almost white. The Indians bring down numbers of short lengths or joints of the columns, and they are used at the hacienda in making a primitive kind of ore-crushing mill, in which they are dragged round and round by mule-power, on a floor also of basalt.

When we had visited the falls we took leave of our hospitable friend, and set off to return to the Real. We stopped at San Miguel, another of the haciendas of the Company, where the German barrel-process is worked. Just behind the hacienda is the Ojo de Agua—the Eye of Water—a beautiful basin, surrounded by a green sward and a wood of oaks and fir-trees. A little stream takes its rise from the spring which bubbles up into this basin, and the name “Ojo de Agua,” is a general term applied to such fountain-heads. When one looks down from a high hill upon one of these Eyes of Water, one sees how the name came to be given, and indeed, the idiom is thousands of years older than the Spanish tongue, and belongs as well to the Hebrew and Arabic. A Mexican calls a lake atezcatl, Water-Mirror, an expressive word, which reminds one of the German Wasserspiegel.

Soon after nightfall we got back to the English inn, and went to bed without any further event happening, except the burning of some outhouses, which we went out to see. The custom of roofing houses with pine-shingles (“tacumeniles”), and the general use of wood for building all the best houses, make fires very common here. During the few days we spent in the Real district, I find in my notebook mention of three fires which we saw. We spent the next day in resting, and in visiting the mine-works near at hand. The day after, an Englishman who had lived many years at the Real offered to take us out for a day’s ride; and the Company’s Administrador lent us two of his own horses, for the poor beasts from Pachuca could hardly have gone so far. The first place we visited was Peñas Cargadas, the “loaded rocks.” Riding through a thick wood of oaks and pines, we came suddenly in view of several sugar-loaf peaks, some three hundred feet high, tapering almost to a point at the top, and each one crowned with a mass of rocks which seem to have been balanced in unstable equilibrium on its point,—looking as though the first puff of wind would bring them down. The pillars were of porphyritic conglomerate, which had been disintegrated and worn away by wind and rain; while the great masses resting on them, probably of solid porphyry, had been less affected by these influences. It was the most curious example of the weathering of rocks that we had ever seen. From Peñas Cargadas we rode on to the farm of Guajalote, where the Company has forests, and cuts wood and burns charcoal for the mines and the refining works. Don Alejandro, the tenant of the farm, was a Scotchman, and a good fellow. He could not go on with us, for he had invited a party of neighbours to eat up a kid that had been cooked in a hole in the ground, with embers upon it, after Sandwich Island fashion. This is called a barbacoa—a barbecue. We should have liked to be at the feast, but time was short, so we rode on to the top of Mount Jacal, 12,000 feet above the sea, where there was a view of mountains and valleys, and heat that was positively melting. Thence down to the Cerro de Navajas, the “hill of knives.” It is on the sides of this hill that obsidian is found in enormous quantities. Before the conquerors introduced the use of iron, these deposits were regularly mined, and this place was the Sheffield of Mexico.

We were curious to see all that was to be seen; for Mr. Christy’s Mexican collection, already large before our visit, and destined to become much larger, contained numbers of implements and weapons of this very peculiar material. Any one who does not know obsidian may imagine great masses of bottle-glass, such as our orthodox ugly wine-bottles are made of, very hard, very brittle, and—if one breaks it with any ordinary implement—going, as glass does, in every direction but the right one. We saw its resemblance to this portwine-bottle-glass in an odd way at the Ojo de Agua, where the wall of the hacienda was armed at the top, after our English fashion, apparently with bits of old bottles, but which turned out to be chips of obsidian. Out of this rather unpromising stuff the Mexicans made knives, razors, arrow- and spear-heads, and other things, some of great beauty. I say nothing of the polished obsidian mirrors and ornaments, nor even of the curious masks of the human face that are to be seen in collections, for these were only laboriously cut and polished with jewellers’ sand, to us a common-place process.

STONE SPEAR-HEADS AND OBSIDIAN KNIVES AND ARROW-HEADS, FROM MEXICO.

1. Flame shaped Arrow-head; obsidian: Teleohuacán. 2. Arrow-head; opake obsidian: Teleohuacán. 3. Knife or Razor of Obsidian; shown in two aspects; Mexico. 4. Leaf-shaped Knife or Javelin-head; obsidian: from Real Del Monte. 5. Spear-head of Chalcedony; one of a pair supposed to be spears of State: found in excavating for the Casa Grande, Tezcuco. (This peculiar opalescent chalcedony occurs as concretions, sometimes of large size, in the trachytic lavas of Mexico.)

Cortes found the barbers at the great market of Tlatelolco busy shaving the natives with such razors, and he and his men had experience of other uses of the same material in the flights of obsidian-headed arrows which “darkened the sky,” as they said, and the more deadly wooden maces stuck all over with obsidian points, and of the priests’ sacrificial knives too, not long after. These things were not cut and polished, but made by chipping or cracking off pieces from a lump. This one can see by the traces of conchoidal fracture which they all show.

The art is not wholly understood, for it perished soon after the Conquest, when iron came in; but, as far as the theory is concerned, I think I can give a tolerably satisfactory account of the process of manufacture. In the first place, the workman who makes gun-flints could probably make some of the simpler obsidian implements, which were no doubt chipped off in the same way. The section of a gun-flint, with its one side flat for sharpness and the other side ribbed for strength, is one of the characteristics of obsidian knives. That the flint knives of Scandinavia were made by chipping off strips from a mass is proved by the many-sided prisms occasionally found there, and particularly by that one which was discovered just where it had been worked, with the knives chipped off it lying close by, and fitting accurately into their places upon it.