Celaya is far-famed for its candy. All over the republic sounds the cry of "Cajetas de Celaya!" Mexico shows a great liking for sweets; no block is complete without its little stands or peregrinating hawkers of all manner of temptations to the sweet-toothed, ranging from squares of "fudge" in all colors of the rainbow to barber-pole sticks a half-yard long. The station was surrounded with soap-less old women, boys, and even men offering for sale all sizes of the little wooden boxes of the chief local product, in appearance like axle-grease, but delicious far beyond its looks, and with vendors of everything imaginable, to say nothing of a ragged, dirty multitude of all ages with no business there—nor anywhere else.
When I had spread out over two wooden seats of the big, bustling El Paso Limited I was quickly reminded of the grim, business-bent, American engineer in gray hair, the unlit half of a cigar clamped tightly between his teeth, of whom I had caught a half-conscious glance in the cab window. One could literally feel his firm American hand at the throttle as the heavy train gathered steady headway and raced away to the eastward. Across the car sat two handsome, solidly-knit young bull-fighters, their little rat-tail coletas peering from behind their square-cut hats. We sped steadily across the sun-flooded, dry, brown plateau, slightly rolling, its fields alternating between the dead tint of dry corn and newly plowed patches. Here for the first time were pulque producing fields of maguey, planted in long, straight, emerald-green rows.
As Irapuato for its strawberries, and Celaya for its sweets, so Queretaro is famed for its huge, cheap hats, of a sort of reed, large enough to serve as umbrellas, and for its opals. From the time he steps off the train here until he boards it again, the traveler, especially the "gringo," is incessantly pestered by men and boys offering for sale these worthless bright pebbles—genuine and otherwise. Here again are the same endless rows of one-story, stucco houses, intersecting cobbled and dust-paved streets, running to the four corners of the compass from a central plaza planted with tall, slim trees, the interwoven branches of which almost completely shade it. The cathedral houses, among other disturbing, disgusting, and positively indecent representations of the Crucifixion and various martyrdoms done in the Aztec style of bloody realism, a life-size Cristo with masses of long real hair and a pair of knee-length knit drawers for decency's sake. One might fancy the place weighed down by a Puritan censorship. The local museum contains among other rubbish of the past the keyhole through which Josefa whispered in 1810 the words that started the revolution against Spanish power! Here, too, is what purports to be an authentic photograph of the execution of Maximilian, theatrical to a Spanish degree, the three victims standing in their places, the once "Emperor of the Mexicans" holding a large crucifix, and several of the boy soldiers who executed them crowded eagerly into the corners of the picture. More impressive to the incredulous is the plain, tapering, wooden coffin in which the chief body was placed, the bottom half covered with faded blood and on one of the sides the plain, dull-red imprint of a hand, as if the corpse had made some post-mortem effort to rise from the grave. The portrait of the transplanted scion of Austria shows a haughty, I-am-of-superior-clay man, of a distinctly mediocre grade of intellect, with a forest of beard that strives in vain to conceal an almost complete absence of chin.
History records that the deposed ruler reached by carriage his last earthly scene in the early morning of June 19, 1867. I arrived as early, though afoot. It is a twenty-minute walk from the center of town across the flat, fertile vega, green with gardens, to the Cerro de las Campanas, a bare, stern, stony hill, somewhat grown with cactus bushes, maguey, and tough shrubs, rising perhaps seventy feet above the level of the town. It runs up gently and evenly from the south, but falls away abruptly in a cragged, rock precipice on the side facing Querétaro, providing the only place in the vicinity where poorly aimed bullets cannot whistle away across the plain. Before them, as they faced the youthful, brown file of soldiers in their many-patched and faded garb, the three had a comprehensive view of the town, chiefly trees and churches sufficient to house the entire populace several times over. Nine immense structures, each with a great dome and a tower or two—steeples are unknown in Mexico—stand out against the bare, brown, flat-topped range beyond that barely rises above the highest tower. The last scene he looked on must have struck the refuted emperor as typical of a country he was sorry then ever to have seen, in spite of his regal control of facial expression,—a hard, stony plateau, the fertility and riches of which succumb chiefly to an all-devouring priesthood. Cold lead plays too large a part in the history of Mexico, but certainly its most unjust verdict was not the extinction of the "divine right" in the person of this self-styled descendant of the Cæsars at the hands of an Indian of Oaxaca. To-day a brown stone chapel, erected by Austria, stands where Maximilian fell, but the spot remains otherwise unchanged, and no doubt the fathers of these same peons who toiled now in the gardens of the vega under the morning sun lined the way through which the carriage bore to its American extinction a system foreign to the Western Hemisphere.
CHAPTER VI
TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY
The El Paso Limited picked me up again twenty-four hours later. Beyond Querétaro's ungainly aqueduct spread fields of tobacco, blooming with a flower not unlike the lily; then vast, almost endless stretches of dead, dry corn up low heights on either hand, and occasional fields of maguey in soldierly files. At San Juan del Rio, famous for its lariats, a dozen men and a woman stood in a row, some forty feet from the train, holding coils of woven-leather ropes of all sizes, but in glum and hopeless silence, while a policeman paced back and forth to prevent them from either canvassing the train-windows or crying their wares. Evidently some antinuisance crusade had invaded San Juan.
Mexico is a country of such vast vistas that a man might easily be taken and executed by bandits within plain sight of his friends without their being able to lend him assistance. Nowhere can one look farther and see nothing. Yet entire companies of marauders might lie in wait in the many wild rocky barrancos of this apparently level brown plain. Up and up we climbed through a bare, stone-strewn land, touched here and there with the green of cactus, sometimes with long vistas of maize, which here hung dead in its half-grown youth because of the failure of the summer rains. Fields of maguey continued. The air grew perceptibly cooler as we wound back and forth, always at good speed behind the American engineer, mounting to the upper plateau surrounding the capital, not through mountains but by a vast, steadily rising world. Sometimes long, unmortared stone fences divided the landscape, more often mile after unobstructed mile of slightly undulating brown plain, tinted here and there by maguey, rolled by us into the north.
A special train of soldiers, with a carload of arms and munitions, passed on the way to head off the latest revolted "general." The newspapers of the capital appeared, some rabidly "anti-American," stopping at nothing to stir up the excitable native against alleged subtle plans of the nation to the north to rob them of their territory and national existence, the more reputable ones with sane editorials imploring all Mexicans not to make intervention "in the name of humanity and civilization" necessary. The former sold far more readily. The train wound hither and yon, as if looking for an entrance to the valley of Mexico. Unfortunately no train on either line reaches ancient Anahuac by daylight, and my plan to enter it afoot, perhaps by the same route as Cortez, had been frustrated. A red sun was just sinking behind haggard peaks when we reached the highest point of the line—8237 feet above the sea—with clumps and small forests of stocky oaks and half Mexico stretching out behind us, rolling brown to distant bare ranges backed by others growing blue and purple to farthest distance. The scene had a late October aspect, and a chilling, ozone-rich wind blew. By dusk the coat I had all but thrown away in the sweltering North was more than needed. We paused at San Antonio, a jumble of human kennels thrown together of old cans, scraps of lumber, mud, stones, and cactus leaves, with huge stacks of the charcoal with the soot of which all the inhabitants were covered, even to the postmaster who came in person for the mail sack. That week's issue of a frivolous sheet of the capital depicted an antonino charcoal-burner standing before his no less unwashed wife, holding a new-born babe and crying in the slovenly dialect of the "pela'o": "Why, it is white! Woman, thou hast deceived me!"
At dark came Tula, ancient capital of the Toltecs, after which night hid all the scene there might have been, but for glimpses by the light of the train of the great tajo cut through the hills to drain the ancient valley of Anáhuac. On we sped through the night, which if anything became a trifle warmer. Gradually the car crowded to what would have been suffocation had we not soon pulled in at Buena Vista station, to fight our way through a howling pandemonium of touts, many shouting English, among whom were the first Negroes I had seen in Mexico.