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

by Edward B. Tylor

In spite of the splendid climate, a great portion of the Valley of Mexico is anything but fertile; for the soil is impregnated with salt and soda, which in many places are so abundant as to form, when the water evaporates, a white efflorescence on the ground, which is called tequesquite, and regularly collected by the Indians. Some of it is stopped on its way down from the higher ground, by the evaporation of the water that was carrying it; and some is left by the lake itself, in its frequent floodings of the ground in its neighbourhood. So small is the difference of level between the lake and the plain that surrounds it, that the slightest rise in the height of the water makes an immense difference in the size of the lake; and even a strong wind will drive the water over great tracts of ground, from which it retires when the gale ceases. It must have been this, or something similar, that set Cortes upon writing home to Spain that the lakes were like inland seas, and even had tides like the ocean. Of course, this impregnation with salts is ruinous to the soil, which will produce nothing in such places but tufts of coarse grass; and the shores of the lake are the most dismal districts one can imagine. All the lakes, however, are not so salt as Tezcuco; Chalco, for instance, is a fresh-water lake, and there the fertility of the shores is very great, as I have already had occasion to notice.

As soon as the novelty of this kind of travelling had worn off, we began to find it dull, and retired under our awning to breakfast and bitter beer; which latter luxury, thanks to a suitable climate and an English brewer, is very well understood in Mexico, and is even accepted as a great institution by the Mexicans themselves.

We were just getting into a drowsy state, when an unusual bustle among the crew brought us out of our den, and we found that three hours of assiduous poling had taken us half-way across the lake, just six miles—a good test of the value of the Aztec system of navigation. Here was a wooden cross set up in the water; and here, from time out of mind, the boatmen have been used to sing a little hymn to the Madonna, by whose favour we had got so far, and hoped to get safe to the end of our voyage. Very well they sang it too, and the scene was as striking as it was unexpected to us. It seemed to us, however, to be making a great matter of crossing a piece of water only a few feet deep; but Mr. Millard assured us, that when a sudden gale came on, it was a particularly unpleasant place to be afloat in a Mexican canoe, which, being flat-bottomed, has no hold at all on the water, and from its shape is quite unmanageable in a wind. He himself was once caught in this way, and kept out all night, with a “heavy sea” on the lake, the boat drifting helplessly, and threatening to overturn every moment, and that in places where the water was quite deep enough to drown them all. The Indians lost their heads entirely, and throwing down their poles fell on their knees, and joined in the chorus with the women and children and the rest of the helpless brown people, beating their breasts, and presenting medals and prints of our Lady of Guadalupe to each wave as it dashed into them. The wind dropped, however, and Mr. Millard got safe to Tezcuco next morning; but, instead of receiving sympathy for his misfortunes when he got there, found that the idea of a tempest on the lake was reckoned a mere joke, and that the drawing-room of the Casa Grande had been decorated with a fancy portrait of himself, hanging to the half-way cross, with his legs in the water, and underneath, a poetical description of his sufferings to the tune of “Malbrouke s’en va-t-en guerre, ne sais quand reviendra.”

More poling across the lake, and then another little canal, also constructed since the diminishing of the water of the lake (which once came close to the city), and along which our Indians towed us. Then came a short ride, which brought us to the Casa Grande, where Mrs. Bowring received us with overflowing hospitality. We went off presently into the town, to see the glassworks. In a country where all things imported have to be carried in rough waggons, or on mules’ backs, and over bad roads, it would be hard if it did not pay to make glass; and, accordingly, we found the works in full operation. The soda is produced at Mr. Bowling’s works close by, the fuel is charcoal from the mountains, and for sand they have a substitute, which I never heard of or saw anywhere else. It seems that a short distance from Tezcuco there is a deposit of hydrated silica, which is brought down in great blocks by the Indians; and this, when calcined, answers the purpose perfectly, as there is scarcely any iron in it. In its natural state it resembles beeswax in colour.

It is worth while to describe the Casa Grande, which is strikingly different from our European notions of the “great house” of the village. As we enter by the gate, we find ourselves in a patio—an open quadrangle surrounded by a covered walk—a cloister in fact, into which open the rooms inhabited by the family. The second quadrangle, which opens into the first, is devoted to stables, kitchen, &c. The outer wall which surrounds the whole is very thick, and the entire building is built of mud bricks baked in the sun, and has no upper storey at all. It is a Pompeian house on a large scale, and suits the climate perfectly. The Aztec palaces we read so much of were built in just the same way. The roofs slope inwards from the sides of the quadrangle, and drain into the open space in the middle. One afternoon, a tremendous tropical rain-storm showed us how necessary it was to have the covered walk round the quadrangle raised considerably above this open square in the middle, which a few minutes of such rain converted into a pond.

As for ourselves, we spent many very pleasant days at the Casa Grande, and thoroughly approved of the arrangement of the house, except that the four corners of the patio were provokingly alike, and the doors of the rooms also, so that we were as much bothered as the captain of the forty thieves to find our own doors, or any door except Mr. Millard’s, whose name was indicated—with more regard to pronunciation than spelling—with a 1 and nine 0’s chalked on it.

In spite of a late evening spent in very pleasant society, we were up early next morning, ready for an excursion to the Pyramids of Teotihuacán, some sixteen miles off, or so, under the guidance of one of Mr. Bowring’s men. The road lies through the plain, between great plantations of magueys, for this is the most renowned district in the Republic for the size of its aloes, and the quality of the pulque that is made from them. We stopped sometimes to examine a particularly large specimen, which might measure 30 feet round, and to see the juice, which had collected in the night, drawn out of the great hollow that had been cut to receive it, in the heart of the plant. The Indians have a great fancy for making crosses, and the aloe lends itself particularly to this kind of decoration. They have only to cut off six or eight inches of one leaf, and impale the piece on the sharp point of another, and the cross is made. Every good-sized aloe has two or three of these primitive religious emblems upon it.

Several little torrent-beds crossed the road, and over them were thrown old-fashioned Spanish stone bridges, as steep as the Rialto, or the bridge on the willow-patterned plates.

Before going to see the pyramids, we visited the caves in the hill-side not far from them, whence the stone was brought to build them. It is tetzontli, the porous amygdaloid which abounds among the porphyritic hills, a beautiful building-stone, easily worked, and durable. There was a large space that seemed to have been quarried out bodily, and into this opened numerous caves. We left our horses at the entrance, and spent an hour or two in hunting the place over. The ground was covered with pieces of obsidian knives and arrow-heads, and fragments of what seemed to have been larger tools or weapons; and we found numbers of hammer-heads, large and small, mostly made of greenstone, some whole, but most broken.

We find two sorts of stone hammers in Europe. Solid hammers belong to the earliest period. They are made of longish rolled pebbles; some are shaped a little artificially, and are grooved round to hold the handle, which was a flexible twig bent double and with the two ends tied together, so as to keep the stone head in its place. The hammers of a later period of the “stone age” are shaped more like the iron ones our smiths use at the present day, and they have a hole bored in the middle for the handle. In Brittany, where Celtic remains are found in such abundance, it is not uncommon to see stone hammers of the latter kind hanging up in the cottages of the peasants, who use them to drive in nails with. They have an odd way of providing them with handles, by sticking them tight upon branches of young trees, and when the branch has grown larger, and has thus rivetted itself tightly on both sides of the stone head, they cut it off, and carry home the hammer ready for use.