To-day the pyramid is sacred to the "Virgin of the Remedies." Gullible pilgrims come from many leagues around to be cured of their ills, and have left behind hundreds of doll-like figures of themselves or the ailing limb or member made of candle wax that breaks to bits between the fingers. Then there are huge candles without number, martyrs and crucifixions, with all the disgusting and bloody features of elsewhere; every kind and degree and shape and size of fetish. Cholula needs badly another Cortez to tumble her gods down to the plain below and drive out the hordes of priests that sacrifice their flocks none the less surely, if less bloodily, than their Aztec predecessors.
A bright red sun came up as the train swung round to the eastward, hugging the flanks of Malinche, and rumbled away across a sandy, very dry, but fertile country, broken by huge barrancas or washouts, and often with maguey hedges. Most of my day was given up to Mr. —— come to think of it, I did not even get his name. He drifted into the train at the junction and introduced himself by remarking that it was not bad weather thereabouts. He was a tall, spare man of fifty, in a black suit rather disarranged and a black felt hat somewhat the worse for wear. He carried a huge pressed-cardboard "telescope" and wore a cane, though it hardly seemed cold enough for one. His language was that of a half-schooled man, with the paucity of vocabulary and the grammar of a ship's captain who had left school early but had since read much and lived more. Whenever a noun failed him, which was often, he filled in the blank with the word "proposition." Like myself, he traveled second-class because there was no fourth.
It may be that the biography which pieced itself unconsciously together as he talked needs a sprinkle of salt here and there, but it all had the earmarks of veracity. He was a Briton, once a surgeon in the British army, with the rank of captain, saw service with Roberts in Egypt, and was with Kitchener at the relief of Khartum. Later he served in India with the Scotch Grays. He looked the part, and had, moreover, the accent and scars to go with it. Glimpses through his conversation into the background beyond suggested he had since been in most parts of the world. He liked Argentina best and the United States least, as a place of residence. Practising as a physician and oculist, he had amassed a moderate fortune, all of which he had lost, together with his wife and child, and possibly a bit of his own wits, in the flood of Monterey. Since that catastrophe he had had no other ambition than to earn enough to drift on through life. With neither money nor instruments left, he took to teaching English to the wealthier class of Mexicans in various parts of the country, now in mission schools, now as private tutor. A Methodist institution in Querétaro had dispensed with his services because he protested against an order to make life unpleasant to those boys who did not respond with their spending money to a daily call for alms at the morning assembly. Six months ago he had drifted into a little town near San Marcos, wearing the title of "professor," and got together a class of private pupils, chief among them three daughters of a wealthy hacendado. Rebels came one day and in the exuberance that follows a full meal long delayed, with pulque embroidery, one of them fired two shots through the window not far from his venerable British head. The "professor" picked up a two-foot mahogany ruler, marched out into the plaza and, rapping the startled rebel over the skull, took his rifle away from him and turned it over to the delighted jefe político. From then on his future seemed assured, for if the rest of the town was poor, the hacendado's wealth was only rivaled by his daughters' longing for English.
But life is a sad proposition at best. On the Monday preceding our meeting the "professor" sat with his pupils in the shade of the broad hacienda veranda when he saw two priests wandering toward the house "like Jews with a pack of clothing to sell." "It's all up with the Swede," he told himself according to his own testimony. The prophecy proved only too true. The padres had come to order that the three daughters be god-mothers to the "Cristo" (in the form of a gaudy doll) that was to be "born" in the town on Christmas eve and paraded to the cathedral of Puebla. As their ticket to heaven depended upon obedience, none of the faithful señoritas dreamed of declining the honor, even though it involved the expenditure of considerable of papá's good money and required them to spend most of the time until Christmas rehearsing for the ceremony and "praising the glory of God" with the priests in a room of the church, locked against worldly intruders. Naturally this left them no time for English. His mainstay gone, the "professor" threw up the sponge and struck out for pastures new, carrying his trunk-like "telescope" two hot and sandy leagues to catch this morning train.
At Esperanza the Briton went me one better on my own custom of "living on the country." To the enchiladas, large tortillas red with pepper-sauce and generously filled with onions, and the smaller tortillas covered with scraps of meat and boiled egg which we bought of the old women and boys that flocked about the train, he added a liter of pulque. Not far beyond, we reached Boca del Monte, the edge of the great plateau of Mexico. A wealth of scenery opened out. From the window was a truly bird's-eye view of the scattered town of Maltrata, more than two thousand feet almost directly below in the center of a rich green valley, about the edge of which, often on the very brink of the thick-clothed precipice, the train wound round and round behind the double-headed engine, traveling to every point of the compass in its descent. The town rose up to us at last and for the first time since mounting to San Luís Potosí two months before, I found myself less than a mile above sea-level. Instead of the often bare, wind-swept plateau, immense weeds of the banana family grew up about us, and a beautiful winding vale reeking with damp vegetation stretched before and behind us as we slid onward. High above all else and much farther away than it seemed, stood the majestic, snow-white peak of Orizaba. In mid-afternoon we descended at the city of that name.
It was large, but really a village in every feature of life. Here again were the broad eaves of one-story, tile-roofed houses, stretching well out over the badly cobbled streets, down the center of which ran open sewers. The place was unkempt and unclean, with many evidences of poverty, and the air so heavy and humid that vegetation grew even on the roofs. I wandered about town with the "professor" while he "sized it up" as a possible scene of his future labors, but he did not find it promising. By night Orizaba was still well above the tropics and the single blanket on the hotel cot proved far from sufficient even with its brilliant red hue.
CHAPTER VII
TROPICAL MEXICO
It is merely a long jump with a drop of two thousand feet from Orizaba to Córdoba. But the train takes eighteen miles of winding, squirming, and tunneling to get there. On the way is some of the finest scenery in Mexico. The route circles for miles the yawning edge of a valley dense with vegetation, banana and orange trees without number, with huts of leaves and stalks tucked away among them, myriads of flowers of every shade and color, and here and there coffee bushes festooned with their red berries. The dew falls so heavily in this region that the rank growth was visibly dripping with it.
At somnolent Córdoba I left the line to Vera Cruz for that to the southward. The car was packed with the dirty, foul-tongued wives and the children and bundles of a company of soldiers recently sent against the rebels of Juchitan. Ever since leaving Boca del Monte the day before I had been coming precipitously down out of Mexico. But there were still descents to be found, and the train raced swiftly without effort in and out through ever denser jungle, magnificent in colors, alive with birds, a land in each square yard of which the traveler felt a longing to pause and dwell for a while, to swing languidly under the trees, gazing at the snow peak of Orizaba now growing farther and farther away.