It was very quiet now, with the restful calm that one finds only upon a mountain-top. One could look down upon miles and miles of rolling plain dotted with cactus of many shades of green, clustering sometimes in prickly forests, stretching away in two parallel lines to mark a trail, arranging themselves in military rows to indicate a pulque hacienda, gathering in a hedge about the low flat roof of an adobe homestead. Here or there rose the unfailing spires and dome of another lonely church. In the fields a yoke of oxen, plowing a cornfield, seemed scarcely to move. The sky above was of vivid blue, with puffy white clouds along the horizon. Sounds drifted up from the world below—the mooing of a cow, the cackle of a hen, the tap of a hammer—each very distinct, yet so softened by distance that it seemed not to interrupt the silence—as though it merely came from a far-away land wherewith one had severed connection.
Then the two tourists came panting up the steps.
“Damn those stairs, anyway. They ought to have a railing on each side.”
Eustace blandly suggested an elevator, but the sarcasm was lost.
“We’d have one, if this was in Newburyport. We’d have a regular train service out here, and we’d put in a modern cafeteria. Boy, but you could make money out of this thing, if you had it in the United States! You could hire a bunch of Irishmen and dress them up like Aztecs, have a couple of girls doing an Indian dance on top, charge a fifty-cent admission—why, man, you’d clean up a fortune!”
As we started down to catch the evening train back to the taxi-screeching City of Mexico, Babbitt and Kennicott were carving their initials on the flat rock atop the Pyramid of the Sun.
VIII
A week drifted past, and Sunday arrived.
On that, of all days, Mexico City was most typically Mexican.
The aristocrats paraded themselves in the parks; the middle-classes went picnicking; the peons went to church.