By sheer coincidence, our message to Werner had been seemingly confirmed. Following the news dispatch of this hold-up, which undoubtedly would reach Mazatlán, the notice of our murder would carry conviction. For the moment, we were delighted. Then the agent added:
“There may be no train for several weeks.”
And we found ourselves stranded in the filthiest hole in Mexico. Manzanillo’s streets were of thick sand, inadequately paved in spots with refuse or garbage, over which hovered millions of flies, and about which a host of black buzzards were picking and quarreling. The whole town was perched upon a narrow landspit between the murky bay and a still murkier lagoon, and backed by low hills whose scraggly jungle-growth the tropic sun had burned to a crisp. A few buildings of wood or plaster rose to the majesty of a second story; the others were low and of ramshackle structure, their driftwood composition varied occasionally by patches of flattened tin that had once done service as Standard Oil cans. The roofs were mainly of thatch. Interior decoration, as glimpsed through doorless doorways, was limited to pages from the local equivalents of the Police Gazette. Over the whole unsightly place there hung an odor of rotted fish, emanating from neighboring lagoons which had evaporated throughout the long dry season to nothing more than a crust of reddish scum.
The principal virtue of the leading hotel—a wobbly two-story edifice operated by a Chinaman—was that it possessed enough odors of its own to neutralize the fishy breezes from the lagoon. The food was nauseous and the water poisonous. The natives of the town quenched their thirst at the stagnant jungle pools by rolling up a leaf into the semblance of a funnel, poking it through the inch of scum that covered the water, and drinking the fluid beneath with ecstatic sucks. Cautious foreigners were forced to patronize the hotel bar, where the beer ascended in temperature from lukewarm in the morning to some degree near boiling point in mid-afternoon.
Determined to make the best of our indefinite residence, we looked about for amusement.
There was always the beach. Its sand was black, and the rollers assumed the shade of molasses. The women of the town, since Mexican women are too modest to wear short-skirted bathing suits, always took their bath in a clumsy white linen gown which reached to the ankles, but which, as soon as it was wet, became completely diaphanous. They were as dark, usually, as the beach, and the silhouette effect was highly educational.
When the sights of the waterfront had received due attention, we retired to the lagoons to hunt alligators. In the larger pools, which had not completely evaporated, we could see the corrugated tails of the big caymans tracing a leisurely path across the surface, and occasionally by making our way silently along the brush-grown shore, we could surprise a greenish-gray monster asleep on the mud-flats. Our diminutive pistols seemed to have little effect on their tough hide; our shots brought only a splash as the quarry plunged into the lagoon; a few bubbles would rise, and a muddy discoloration of the water would indicate that the alligator was safely imbedded in the loamy bottom of the pool. We tried to lasso one of them, with a loop of rope on the end of a pole, but the monster vanished, as usual, carrying with him the stoutest cord to be purchased in Manzanillo.
From alligator-hunting we turned to a study of natural history in general. The town and its environs offered plenty of material. One could scarcely walk the streets without shooing buzzards out of the way. Sooty black in color, with ashen-gray neck curved to suggest hunched shoulders, they hopped about with rocketing step, pouncing with hoggish squeals upon rotted carrion, and squabbling among themselves over its possession. One was tempted always to try the pistols on them, but they were protected by law, for without their services in disposing of the mess which Latin-American servants are accustomed to toss from the kitchen window, cities like Manzanillo would be altogether uninhabitable.
Of insects there was an infinite variety. We did not have to seek them; they sought us. One could not push through the jungle without being bitten by ants on the bushes. In the town itself, half the population seemed to find constant occupation in picking something out of the other half’s hair. The peon women would form a small circle, back to back, and perform this friendly little operation with one-hundred-per cent. efficiency. In the hotel room the scratchy noise of cockroaches scrambling up and down the wall lulled us to sleep each night.
Eustace, not content with this material for study, took up snakes in a serious fashion. He had once earned his way through college by feeding the reptiles in a neighboring zoo, and had formed a strange affection for them. He maintained that they recognized him as a friend and refused to bite. In Manzanillo he discovered a family of young serpents—squirmy green fellows which we could not identify but which the natives regarded as extremely venomous—whereupon he brought a handful of them to our room, and dumped his other possessions out of his suit-case to make a home for them. Later, when I absent-mindedly opened the same suit-case in search of cigars, and fled precipitately, our Chinese proprietor was greatly incensed because for days afterward the snakes would appear at the most unexpected moments in various parts of the establishment, to the terror of servants and guests.