The road led from Manzanillo through the hot coastal plain—through palm-land and swamp-land where sweating, semi-naked peons waded knee-deep in pools formed overnight by the first downpour of a tropic rainy season—to Colima, a conventional little city at the base of a snow-tipped volcano—into the highlands through tortuous defiles where the cane gave way to maize and the jungle-growth to cactus—past tiny villages of adobe huts clustering about a huge white church that dwarfed the rugged gullies—into a climate of eternal spring—to Guadalajara, the second largest and the most delightful city of the republic, where orange trees were golden throughout the year—and beyond, to the wide expanses of Mexico’s high plateau—to a land of vast, gloomy spaces and lonely grandeur—the grandeur of rolling yellow plains stretching to a distant horizon rimmed with jagged peaks, where at twilight the purple shadows crept upward toward an azure sky—to a country desolate and superb, and a trifle wintry.
THE ORANGE TREES IN GUADALAJARA’S PLAZA WERE GOLDEN THROUGHOUT THE YEAR
To the stay-at-home American, Mexico is only a sun-scorched desert. In reality, it is a land of everything—of sandy wastes, of rugged mountains, of rank tropical jungles, of temperate valleys—of lowlands bathed in moist tropic heat, of midlands where strawberries are always ripe, even of highlands swept eternally by chilling winds. Yet always there is some intangible spirit about it that makes it unmistakably Mexico, especially upon the bleak plateau.
II
The haunting melancholy of the high altitude seemed to have affected the natives.
Below, on the coast, the poverty-stricken Indians had appeared contented and happy. On the tableland they were very solemn. A peon marching behind his little burro wore the same stolid, pack-animal expression as the beast itself. There was no animation in the faces. The greater part of the masculine population sat upon the station platforms, wrapped in blankets and meditation, waiting only for another day to pass.
The women, more energetic than the men, still besieged the car windows, offering for sale the local products, not in the cheery manner of the lowland women, but hopelessly and mournfully, as though they expected that no one would buy. Unimaginative as the men-folks, they all sold the same article—whatever article some more energetic ancestor, many years before, had sold in their particular village. At Irapuato it was strawberries; at Celaya a species of fudge in tiny wooden boxes; at Queretaro opals from the neighboring mines; at San Juan del Rio lariats and ropes.
They waited in a bedraggled group as the train pulled in. They all advanced toward the same window. When the first customer did not buy, they shrugged their shoulders and turned away. Gradually it would dawn upon them that there were other passengers, and they would drift out along the sides of the other cars, holding up their baskets in mute appeal.
“It is pulque,” explained a Mexican fellow-passenger. “They are all sodden with it here. Que borachos! What drunkards!”