A NEW CHARACTER.
Although, owing to its position on the shores of the Pacific, Sonora enjoys the blessings of the sea breeze, whose moisture at intervals refreshes the heated atmosphere; still, for three hours in the afternoon, the earth incessantly heated by the torrid sunbeams produces a crushing heat. At such times the country assumes a really desolate aspect beneath the cloudless sky, which seems an immense plate of red-hot iron. The birds suddenly cease their songs, and languidly hide themselves beneath the thick foliage of the trees, which bow their proud crests towards the ground. Men and domestic animals hasten to seek shelter in the houses, raising in their hurried progress a white, impalpable, and calcined dust, which enters mouth and nostrils. For some hours Sonora is converted into a vast desert from which every appearance of life and movement has disappeared.
Everybody is asleep, or at least reclining in the most shady rooms, with closed eyes, and with the body abandoned to that species of somnolency which is neither sleeping nor waking, and which from that very fact is filled with such sweet and voluptuous reveries—inhaling at deep draughts the artificial breeze produced by artfully contrived currents of air, and in a word indulging in what is generally called in the torrid zones a siesta.
These are hours full of enjoyment, of those sweet and beneficent influence on body and mind we busy, active Englishmen are ignorant, but which people nearer the sun revel in. The Italians call this state the dolce far niente, and the Turks, that essentially sensual race, keff.
Like that city in the "Arabian Nights," the inhabitants of which the wicked enchanter suddenly changed into statues by waving his wand, life seemed suddenly arrested at the Hacienda del Toro, for the silence was so profound: peons, vaqueros, craidos, everybody in fact, were enjoying their siesta. It was about three in the afternoon; but that indistinct though significant buzz which announces the awakening of the hour that precedes the resumption of labour was audible. Two gentlemen alone had not yielded to sleep, in spite of the crushing midday heat; but seated in an elegantly furnished cuarto, they had spent the hours usually devoted to slumber in conversation. The cause for this deviation from the ordinary custom must have been most serious. The Hispano-American, and especially the Mexican, does not lightly sacrifice those hours of repose during which, according to a Spanish proverb, only dogs and Frenchmen are to be seen in the sun.
Of these two gentlemen, one, Don Hernando de Moguer, is already known to us. Years, while stooping his back, had furrowed some wrinkles on his forehead, and mingled many silver threads with his hair; but the expression of his face, with the exception of a tinge of melancholy spread over his features by lengthened misfortunes, had remained nearly the same, that is to say, gentle and timid, although clever; slightly sarcastic and eminently crafty.
As for the person with whom Don Hernando was conversing at this moment, he deserves a detailed description, physically at least, for the reader will soon be enabled to appreciate his moral character. He was a short, plump man, with a rubicund face and apoplectic look, though hardly forty years of age. Still his hair, which was almost white, his deeply wrinkled forehead, and his grey eyes buried beneath bushy whiskers, gave him a senile appearance, harmonizing but little with the sharp gesticulation and youthful manner he affected. His long, thin, violet nose was bent like a parrot's beak over a wide mouth filled with dazzling white teeth; and his prominent cheekbones, covered with blue veins, completed a strange countenance, the expression of which bore a striking likeness to that of an owl.
This species of nutcracker, with his prominent stomach and short ill-hung limbs, whose whole appearance was most disagreeable, had such a mobility of face as rendered it impossible to read his thoughts on his features, in the event of this fat man's carcase containing a thought. His cold blue eyes were ever pertinaciously fixed on the person addressing him, and did not reveal the slightest emotion; in short, this man produced at the first contact that invariable antipathy which is felt on the approach of reptiles, and which, after nearer acquaintance, is converted into disgust and contempt.
He was a certain Don Rufino Contreras, one of the richest landowners in Sonora, and a year previously had been elected senator to the Mexican Congress for the province.