Patzcuaro is summery enough by day, but only the hardy would dress leisurely at dawn. A fog as thick as cheese, more properly a descended cloud, enveloped the place, a daily occurrence which the local authorities would have you think make it unusually healthful. An ancient cobbled road leads up and over the first rise, then degenerates to the usual Mexican camino, a trail twisting in and out along a chaos of rocks and broken ground. The fog hung long with us and made impossible pictures of the procession of Tarascan Indians coming in from Tzintzuntzan with every species of red pottery, from cups to immense water-jars, in great nets on the backs of horses, asses, men, and women. Beyond the railroad the trail picked its way, with several climbs over rocky spur-ends, along the marshy edge of the lake, which was so completely surrounded by mud and reeds that I had to leave unfulfilled my promised swim in it. The trip was made endless by the incessant chatter of the "doctor," who rattled on in English without a break; and when I switched him to German his tongue sped still faster, though fortunately more correctly. No wonder those become fluent linguists who can outdistance and outendure a man in his own tongue long before they have begun to learn it.
Along the way we picked up any amount of shining black obsidian, some in the form of arrow-heads and crude knives that bore out the statement that the Indians once even shaved with them. It was nearly eleven when we sighted, down among the trees on the lake shore, the squat church tower of the once capital of Michoacán. A native we spoke with referred to it as a "ciudad," but in everything but name it was a dead, mud-and-straw Indian village, all but its main street a collection of mud, rags, pigs, and sunshine, and no evidence of what Prescott describes as splendid ruins. Earthquakes are not unknown, and the bells of the church, old as the conquest of Michoacán, hang in the trees before it. Inside, an old woman left her sweeping to pull aside the curtains of the reputed Titian, a "Descent from the Cross," while I photographed it from the pulpit, for which privilege the young peon sexton appeared in time to accept a silver coin.
The German, with whom business always took precedence over pleasure, had gone to find the house of the priest. When I reached the door of it on the blank main street, he was sitting on a wooden bench in the hallway with a dozen old women and peons. We were admitted immediately after, as befitted our high social standing. A plump little padre nearing sixty, of the general appearance of a well-stuffed grain sack draped in black robes, but of rather impressive features—and wearing glasses—greeted us with formality. The "doctor" drew a black case from his pocket, went through some hocuspocus with a small mirror, and within two minutes, though his Spanish was little less excruciating than his English, had proved to the startled curate that the glasses he was wearing would have turned him stone-blind within a month but for the rare fortune of this great Berlin specialist's desire to visit the famous historical capital of the Tarascans. The priest smoked cigarette after cigarette while my companion fitted another pair of crystals and tucked the dangerous ones away in his own case—for the next victim. He did not even venture to haggle, but paid the two dollars demanded with the alacrity of a man who recognizes his good fortune, and to whom a matter of a few pesos more or less is of slight importance. For were there not a score of Indians waiting outside eager to pay as well for masses, confessions, and all the rest of his own hocuspocus? There followed a social chat, well liquefied, after which we took our ceremonious leave. Once outside, I learned the distressing fact that the shape of the padre's bows had required crystals costing twelve cents, instead of the customary nine-cent ones.
The German set off in the blazing noonday at his swiftest pace. He was obliged to be back at the hotel by three, for the dinner must be paid for whether eaten or not. I fell behind, glad of the opportunity. Many groups of peons were returning now, without their loads, but maudlin and nasty tempered with the mescal for which they had exchanged them. My automatic was within easy reach. The oculist had criticized it as far too small for Mexican travel. He carried himself a revolver half the size of a rifle, and filed the ends of the bullets crosswise that they might split and spread on entering a body. In the outskirts of Patzcuaro there came hurrying toward me a flushed and drunken peon youth with an immense rock in his hand. I reached for my weapon, but he greeted me with a respectful "Adiós!" and hurried on. Soon he was overtaken by two more youths and dragged back to where an older peon lay in the middle of the road, his head mashed with a rock until trickles of brain protruded. The event seemed to cause little excitement. A few stood at their doors gazing with a mild sort of interest at the corpse, which still lay in the road when I turned a corner above.
Mules drag the tram-car of Pátzcuaro laboriously up the three kilometers from the station to the main plaza, but gravitation serves for the down journey. When enough passengers had boarded it to set it in motion, we slid with a falsetto rumble down the cobbled road, a ragged boy leaning on the brake. Beyond the main railroad track a spur ran out on a landing-stage patched together out of old boards and rubbish. Peons were loading into an iron scow bags of cement from an American box-car far from home. Indians paddled about the lake in canoes of a hollowed log with a high pointed nose, but chopped sharp off at the poop. Their paddles were perfectly round pieces of wood, like churn-covers, on the end of long slim handles.
We were soon off for Morelia, capital of the State, across plains of cattle, with an occasional cut through the hills and a few brown ponds. At one station we passed two carloads of soldiers, westbound. They were nearly all mere boys, as usual, and like the policemen and rurales of the country struck one as unwisely entrusted with dangerous weapons. Morelia is seen afar off in the lap of a broad rolling plain, her beautiful cathedral towers high above all the rest. It was brilliant noonday when I descended and walked the mile into town.
The birthplace of José Morelos and of Yturbide, first emperor of Mexico, sits 6200 feet above the sea and claims 37,000 inhabitants. It is warm and brown with dust. Architecturally it is Mexican, with flat roofs and none of the overhanging eaves of Pátzcuaro and Uruapan. From the "centro"—the nerve-center of the "torpid State," with two well-kept plazas, the plateresque cathedral of a pinkish stone worn faint and spotted with time, and the "seat of the powers of the State," all on the summit of a knoll—the entire town slopes gently down and quickly fades away into dirty, half-cobbled suburbs, brown and treeless, overrun with ragged, dust-tinted inhabitants, every street seeming to bring up against the low surrounding range. Its natural advantages are fully equal to those of Guadalajara, but here pulque grows and man is more torpid. All the place has a hopeless, or at least ambitionless, air, though in this splendid climate poverty has less tinge of misery and the appearance of a greater contentment with its lot. There is a local "poet's walk" that is not particularly poetic, a wild park beyond that is more so, and a great aqueduct over which sprawl enormous masses of the beautiful purple bourgainvillea. This ancient waterway resembles, but is far less striking than that of Segovia, for it runs across comparatively level ground and has only single arches of moderate height and too polished construction, instead of the massive cyclopean work of immense blocks of stone without mortar of its Spanish counterpart. Views and sunsets too often tempt the traveler in Mexico, or I might mention that from a little way out of town at the top of the road to Mexico City, where the cathedral towers all but reach the crest of the backing range, over which hung the ocher and light-pink and saffron-yellow clouds of the dying day.
The "Hotel Soledad" asserted its selectness by the announcement: "En este hotel no se admiten compañías de cómicos ni toreros," but the solitude of its wooden-floored beds at least was distinctly broken and often. The pompous, squeeze-centavo, old landlady sat incessantly in her place near the door between dining-room and kitchen, with a leather handbag from which she doled out, almost with tears, coppers for change and the keys to the larder, to the cringing servants and conferred long with them in whispers on how much she dared charge each guest, according to his appearance. But at least Mexico feeds well the traveler who is too hungry to be particular. He who will choose his dishes leads a sorry life, for the hotels are adamant in their fare and restaurants are almost unknown, except the dozens of little outdoor ones about the market-places where a white man would attract undue attention—if nothing less curable—among the "pela'os" that make up 80 per cent. of the population.
The passengers to Acámbaro included two ladies of the fly-by-night species, who whiled away a somewhat monotonous journey by discussing the details of their profession with the admiring train-boy and drumming up trade in a coquettish pantomime. The junction town was in fiesta, and the second-class car of the evening train to Celaya was literally stacked high with peons and their multifarious bundles, and from it issued a stench like unto that of a congress of polecats. I rode seated on a brake, showers of cinders and the cold night air swirling about me, until the festive natives thinned down enough to give me admittance. By that time we were drawing into Celaya, also in the throes of some bombastic celebration.
Like many another Mexican city the traveler chances into when the central plaza is bubbling with night life, light, and music, Celaya turned out rather a disappointment in the sunny commonplace of day. Its central square is a little garden, but almost all the rest of the town is a monotonous waste of square, bare, one-story houses with ugly plaster facades and no roofs—at least to be seen—each differing a bit from its neighbor in height, like a badly drawn up company of soldiers. The blazing sun and thick dust characteristic of all the high central plateau are here in full force. Like most Spanish things—conquests, history, buildings—it looked more striking at a distance than when examined in detail.