Through the kindness of Don Augustin Becerra there was sent out from Urique to the orange plantation a very large mule for my personal comfort. This animal was of the pinto variety and a fine traveler. After my desperate encounters with "Old Steamboat" it was positive luxury to ride him. He had some faults, however; he was fresh and fast, so kept well in advance of the rest of the train. When we neared this particularly dangerous place my mule took up a gentle trot and went pounding around the curve in a way that almost turned my hair gray, and I know we all breathed more freely after getting away from the perilous spot.
The Mexican town of Urique, numbering some three thousand people, was first established in 1612, years before the first pilgrim landed on Plymouth Rock, and yet it is as unknown as though in the interior of Africa. That living cave and cliff dwellers should be found but a little way off from the rough and even dangerous trail that leads to the secluded town which no one troubled himself to report to the world outside, shows what a wonderful isolation can exist and still be called civilization. The only way out of and into the town was on the back of the melancholy mule, and an old resident told me he believed that three-fourths of the people had never seen a wagon, not even the wooden carts of the Mexicans that so remind one of scriptural times; certainly no wagon or cart was ever hauled through the streets of Urique. In this deep barranca there is just room enough for the Urique River (a beautiful stream), and alongside of it, straggling out for a couple of miles or more, a row of houses hugging the banks of the stream, then a narrow street and a similar row of houses crowded up on the slope of the mountain. Back of this rise abruptly the steep, broken crests of the Sierra Madres. On the opposite side of the river there is only room now and then for a chance house that clings to the steep sides of the hills or burrows into them.
URIQUE FROM THE RIVER.
We rode with a great clatter up the single street lying white and still in the noonday sun, and had we not known that preparations had been made for us—as our arrival was anticipated by Don Augustin Becerra—we might have mistaken the place for a deserted village. After riding a mile through the street we reached a little plaza about twenty-five feet square, where the mountains receded and made room for this level little patch of ground. Here one of the great wooden doors of the apparently deserted houses opened and our host came forth, followed by a number of others. By the time the whole party reached the plaza there were one or two hundred Mexicans congregated to welcome us and see us alight. As there were no accommodations of any sort in the town for travelers, Don Augustin Becerra, with the graceful courtesy of a Mexican gentleman, had moved out of his own home and literally placed his whole house and all it contained at our disposal; and this was done as though it were the most commonplace thing in the world, and without the least sign of ostentatious politeness. I doubt very much whether any American under the same circumstances would have done as much. His father, Don Buenaventura Becerra, lived here also, and both united in showering on us the most acceptable acts of hospitality during our whole stay; and these were doubly welcome, coming as they did in such a spontaneous and wholly unexpected manner.
