For a half hour before reaching Rincon Antonio, we had been winding with a little brawling river through a hilly gorge dense-grown with vegetation. The town was in the lull between two revolts. A bare four days before, a former chief and his followers had been taken by the populace and shot behind the water-tank beside where we paused at the station. A week later new riots were to break out. But today the place was sunk in its customary languor, and only a few bullet-ridden walls and charred ruins hinted its recent history.
I had pictured the Isthmus of Tehuantepec a flat neck of land from ocean to ocean. But the imagination is a deceitful guide. Beyond the town of the water-tank we wormed for miles through mountains higher than the Berkshires, resembling them indeed in form and wealth of vegetation, though with a tropical tinge. The jungle, however, died out, and the train crawled at a snail's pace, often looping back upon itself, through landscapes in which the organ-cactus was most conspicuous. Even here the great chain known as the Rockies and the Andes, that stretches from Alaska to Patagonia, imposes a considerable barrier between the two seas. There was a cosmopolitan tinge to this region, and the boinas of Basques mingled with the cast-iron faces of Americans and sturdy self-possessed Negroes under broad "Texas" hats. An hour beyond the hills, in a thick-wooded land, I dropped off at the town of Tehuantepec, an intangible place that I had some difficulty in definitely locating in the thickening darkness.
Here was a new kind of Mexico. In many things, besides the naked, brown waists of the women, it carried the mind back to Ceylon. There were the same reed and thatched huts, almost all surrounded by spacious yards fenced by corn-stalk walls through which the inmates could see easily but be seen with difficulty. Here, too, boys went naked until the approach of puberty; the cocoanut palms, the dense banana groves, even the huge earthen water-jars before the houses recalled the charming isle of the Singhalese, and if the people were less kindly to the stranger they were much more joyful and full of laughter than the Mexican of the plateau. In this perhaps they had more in common with the Burmese. The men, often almost white in color, wore few large hats, never one approaching those of the highlands. The hotter the sun, the smaller the hat, seems to be the rule in Mexico. Here it was hot, indeed; a dense, thick, tangible heat, that if it did not sap the strength suggested the husbanding of it.
A fiesta raged on the night of my arrival. The not too musical blare of a band drew me to a wide, inclined street paved in sand, at the blind end of which were seated five rows of women in as many gradations, and everywhere shuttled men and boys, almost all in white trousers, with a shirt of the same color, Chinese-fashion, outside it, commonly barefoot with or without sandals. A few even wore shoes. I hesitated to join the throng. The subconscious expectation of getting a knife or a bullet in the back grows second nature in Mexico. Few foreigners but have contracted the habit of stepping aside to let pass a man who hangs long at their heels. The approach of a staggering, talkative peon was always an occasion for alertness, and one that came holding a hand behind him was an object of undivided curiosity until the concealed member appeared, clutching perhaps nothing more interesting than a cigar or a banana. Mexicans in crowds, mixed with liquor and "religion," were always worth attention; and here was just such a mixture, for the fiesta was in honor of the Virgin, and the libations that had been poured out in her honor were generous. But the drink of Tehuantepec, whatever it might be—for pulque is unknown in the tropics—appeared to make its devotees merely gay and boisterous. The adults were friendly, even to an American, and the children shouted greetings to me as "Señor Gringo," which here is merely a term of nationality and no such opprobrious title as it has grown to be on the plateau.
A few rockets had suggested an incipient revolution while I was at supper. Now the scene of the festivities was enlivened by four huge set-pieces of fireworks, each with a bell-shaped base in which a man could ensconce himself to the waist. One in the form of a duck first took to human legs and capered about the square while its network of rockets, pin-wheels, sizzlers, twisters, cannon-like explosions, and jets of colored fire kept the multitude surging back and forth some twenty minutes, to the accompaniment of maudlin laughter and the dancing and screaming of children, while the band, frankly giving up its vain attempts to produce music, gazed with all eyes and blew an unattentive, never-ending rag-time of some two strains. A monster turkey took up the celebration where the charred and disheveled duck left off, capering itself into blazing and uproarious oblivion. The finale consisted of two gigantic figures of a man and a woman, with a marvelous array of all possible lights and noises that lasted a full half-hour, while the two barefoot wearers danced back and forth bowing and careering to each other. The aftermath ran far into the night, and brought to naught my plans to make up for the sleepless night before.
Though most of the inhabitants of Tehuantepec live on earth floors in reed and grass houses, there is scarcely a sign of suffering poverty. Little Spanish is heard among them, although even the children seem quite able to speak it. Their native Indian tongue differs from the Castilian even in cadence, so that it was easy to tell which idiom was being spoken even before the words were heard. It is the chief medium of the swarming market in and about the black shadows of a roof on legs. Here the frank and self-possessed women, in their brief and simple dress, were legion. Footwear is unknown to them, and the loose, two-piece, disconnected dress was augmented, if at all, with a black lace shawl thrown over the shoulders in the, to them, chilly mornings. But the most remarkable part of the costume, of decorative properties only, is the head-dress common to a large per cent, of the women in town. From the back of the otherwise bare head hangs to the waist an intricate contrivance of lace and ruffles, snow-white and starched stiff, the awful complications of which no mere male would be able to describe beyond the comprehensive statement that the ensemble much resembles a Comanche chief in full war regalia. Above this they carry their loads on their heads in a sort of gourd bowl decorated with flowers, and walk with a sturdy self-sufficiency that makes a veranda or bridge quake under their brown-footed tread. They are lovers of color, especially here where the Pacific breezes turn the jungle to the eastward into a gaunt, sandy, brown landscape, and such combinations as soft-red skirts and sea-blue waists, or the reverse, mingle with black shot through with long perpendicular yellow stripes. The striking beauties of many a traveler's hectic imagination were not in evidence. But then, it is nowhere customary to find a town's best selling sapotes and fish in the market-place, and at least the attractiveness ranked high compared with a similar scene in any part of the world, while cleanliness was far more popular than in the highlands to the north.
The foreigner in Mexico is often surprised at the almost impossibility of getting the entree into its family life. American residents of high position are often intimate friends for years of Mexican men in their cafés and male gatherings, without ever stepping across their thresholds. Much of the seclusion of the Moor still holds, even half a world distant from the land of its origin. Yet his racial pseudo-courtesy leads the Mexican frequently to extend an invitation which only long experience teaches the stranger is a mere meaningless formality. On the train from Córdoba I spent considerable time in conversation with a well-to-do youth of Tehuantepec, during which I was formally invited at least a dozen times to visit him at his home. He failed to meet me at the rendezvous set, but was effusive when I ran across him in the evening round of the plaza:
"Ah, amigo mío. Muy buenas noches. Como 'stá uste-e-é? So delighted! I was grieved beyond measure to miss you. I live in the Calle Reforma, number 83. There you have your own house. I am going there now. Do you not wish to accompany me? I have…."
"Yes, I should like to look in on you for a few moments."
"Ah, I was so sorry to miss you," he went on, standing stock still. "I must give you my address and you must write me, and I you."