La Luz is a typical town of mountainous Mexico. A long, broken adobe village lies scattered along a precipitous valley, scores of "roads" and trails hedged with cactus wind and swoop and climb again away over steep hills and through deep barrancos, troops of peons and donkeys enlivening them; flowers give a joyful touch, and patches of green and the climate help to make the place reminiscent of the more thickly settled portions of Palestine. From the town we could see plainly the city of Leon, fourth in Mexico, and a view of the plain, less striking than that from "Pingüico," because of the range rising to cut it off in the middle distance. The mountains of all this region are dotted with round, white, cement monuments, the boundary marks of different mining properties. By Mexican law each must be visible from the adjoining two, and in this pitched and tumbled country this requires many.
Beyond the village we found, about the old Spanish workings, ancient, roofless, stone buildings with loop-holed turrets for bandits and niches for saints. These structures, as well as the waste dumped by the Spaniards, were being "repicked for values," and broken up and sent through the stamp-mill, the never-ending rumble of which sounded incessantly, like some distant water-fall; for with modern methods it pays to crush rock with even a few dollars a ton value in it, and the Americans of to-day mine much that the Spaniards with their crude methods cast aside or did not attempt to work. At a mine in the vicinity the ancient stone mansion serving as residence of the superintendent was torn down and sent through the stamping-mill, and a new one of less valuable rock erected. We descended 1600 feet into the mine of La Luz down a perfectly round, stone-lined shaft in a small iron bucket held by a one-inch wire cable and entirely in charge of peons—who fortunately either had nothing against us or did not dare to vent it.
CHAPTER IV
BOUND ABOUT LAKE CHAPALA
With the coming of November I left Guanajuato behind. The branch line down to Silao was soon among broad plains of corn, without rocks even along the flat, ragged, country roads, bringing to mind that it was long since I had walked on level and unobstructed ground. The crowding of the second-class car forced me to share a bench with a chorus girl of the company that had been castilianizing venerable Broadway favorites in Guanajuato's chief theater. She was about forty, looked it with compound interest, was graced with the form of a Panteón mummy, and a face—but some things are too horrible even to be mentioned in print. Most of the way she wept copiously, apparently at some secret a pocket mirror insisted on repeating to her as often as she drew it out, and regained her spirits only momentarily during the smoking of each of several cigarettes. Finally she took to saying her beads in a sepulchral, moaning voice, her eyes closed, and wagging her head from side to side in the rhythm of her professional calling, until we pulled into the one-story, adobe, checkerboard town. All the troupe except the two "stars" rode second-class, dressed much like peons, and carried their possessions in misshapen bundles under their arms. If the one performance I had seen was typical, this was far better treatment than they deserved.
The express from El Paso and the North set me down in the early night at Irapuato, out of the darkness of which bobbed up a dozen old women, men, and boys with wailing cries of "Fresas!" For this is the town of perennial strawberries. The basket of that fruit heaped high and fully a foot in diameter which sat before me next morning as we rambled away westward toward Guadalajara cost cuatro reales—a quarter, and if the berries grew symmetrically smaller toward the bottom, an all-day appetite by no means brought to light the tiniest. The way lay across a level land bathed in sunshine, of extreme fertility, and watered by harnessed streams flowing down from the distant hills. All the day one had a sense of the richness of nature, not the prodigality of the tropics to make man indolent, but just sufficient to give full reward for reasonable exertion. The rich, black, fenceless plains were burnished here and there with little shallow lakes of the rainy season, and musical with wild birds of many species. Primitive well-sweeps punctuated the landscape, and now and then the church towers of some adobe village peered through the mesquite trees. In the afternoon grazing grew more frequent and herds of cattle and flocks of goats populated all the scene. Within the car and without, the hats of the peons, with all their sameness, were never exactly alike. Each bore some individuality, be it in shape, shade, material, or manner of wearing, as distinct as among the fair sex in other lands; and that without resorting to decorating them with flowers, vegetables, or dead birds. Some wore around them ribbons with huge letters proposing, "Viva ——" this or that latest aspirant to the favor of the primitive-minded "pela'o," but these were always arranged in a manner to add to rather than detract from the artistic ensemble. Many a young woman of the same class was quite attractive in appearance, though thick bulky noses robbed all of the right to be called beautiful. They did not lose their charms, such as they were, prematurely, as do so many races of the South, and the simplicity of dress and hair arrangement added much to the pleasing general effect.
As night descended we began to pant upward through low hills, wooded, but free from the rocks and boulders of a mining region, and in the first darkness drew up at Guadalajara, second city of Mexico. It is a place that adorns the earth. Jalisco State, of which this is the capital, has been called the Andalusia of Mexico, and the city is indeed a Seville of the West, though lacking in her spontaneity of life, for this cruder people is much more tempered with a constant fear of betraying their crudeness and in consequence much weighed down by "propriety." But its bright, central plaza has no equal to the north. Here as the band plays amid the orange trees heavy with ripening fruit, the more haughty of the population promenade the inner square, outside which stroll the peons and "lower classes"; though only custom seems responsible for the division. One misses in Mexico the genuine democracy of Spain. The idea of a conquered race still holds, and whoever has a strain of white in his veins—or even in the hue of his collar—considers it fitting to treat the Indian mass with a cold, indifferent tone of superiority. Yet in the outer circle the unprejudiced observer found more pleasing than within. One was reminded of Mark Twain's suggestion that complexions of some color wear best in tropical lands. In this, above all, the women of the rebozo were vastly superior to those who stepped from their carriages at about the beginning of the third number and took to parading, the two sexes in pairs marching in opposite directions at a snail's pace. The "women of the people" had more sense of the fitness of things than to ape the wealthy in dress, like the corresponding class in our own land, and their simplicity of attire stood out in attractive contrast to the pasty features and unexercised figures in "Parisian" garb of the inner circle.
Guadalajara has the requisites of a real city. Its streets are well paved with macadam, and it even possesses garbage wagons. Indeed, in some respects it has carried "progress" too far, as in the case of the winking electric sign of Broadway proportions advertising a camisería—a local "shirtery," before which fascinated peons from the distant villages stand gazing as at one of the seven wonders of the universe. Beggars are few and there is none of the oppressive poverty of other Mexican cities. This, it is agreed, is due not merely to the extreme fertility of Jalisco, but to the kindness of nature in refusing to produce the maguey in the vicinity, so that drunkenness is at its lowest Mexican ebb and the sour stink of pulque shops nowhere assails the nostrils. For this curse of the peon will not endure long transportation. An abundance of cheap labor makes possible many little conveniences unknown in more industrial lands, and the city has a peaceful, soothing air and temperature, due perhaps to its ideal altitude of six thousand feet, that makes life drift along like a pleasant dream.
But its nights are hideous. The Mexican seems to relish constant uproar, and if Guadalajara is ever to be the open-air health resort for frayed nerves and weakened lungs it aspires to, there must come a diligent suppression of unnecessary noises. As the evening gathering evaporates, leaving the plaza sprinkled with a few dreamy mortals and scattered policemen eating the lunch their wives bring and share with them, pandemonium seems to be released from its confinement. First these same preservers of law and order take to blowing their hair-raising whistles at least every ten minutes from one to another back and forth through every street, as if mutually to keep up their courage. Scores of the gilded youth on the way home from "playing the bear" before their favorite rejas join together in bands to howl into the small hours their glee at the kindness of life, the entire stock of street-cars seems to be sent out nightly on some extended excursion with orders never to let their gongs fall silent, and long before dawn even the few who have succeeded in falling into a doze are snatched awake by an atrocious din of church-bells sufficient in number to supply heaven, nirvana, the realm of houris, and the Irish section of purgatory, with enough left over to furnish boiling pots for the more crowded section of the Hereafter. Then with a dim suggestion of dawn every living dog and fighting-cock, of which each inhabitant appears to possess at least a score, joins the forty thousand vendors of forty thousand different species of uselessness howling in at least as many different voices and tones, each a bit louder than all the others, until even an unoccupied wanderer concludes that sleep is an idle waste of an all too short existence.
I brought up a day of random wandering in state's prison. The Penitenciaría of Guadalajara is a huge, wheel-shaped building in the most modern style of that class of architecture. The bullet-headed youth in soldier's uniform and the complexion of a long-undusted carpet, leaning on his musket at the entrance, made no move to halt me, and I stepped forth on a patio forested with orange trees, to find that most of the public had preceded me, including some hundred fruit, tortilla, cigarette, and candy vendors. Here was no sign of prisoners. I approached another stern boy armed like a first-class cruiser in war time and he motioned upward with his gun barrel. The dwelling of the comandante faced the patio on the second-story corridor. His son, aged five, met me with the information: