I
The railway southward into the Isthmus of Tehuantepec was the worst in Mexico.
It had been constructed back in the days of Diaz, and apparently had not been repaired since that time. A rusty engine that wheezed with asthma dragged behind it a long succession of splintered freight cars, followed by an aged wooden passenger coach whose walls groaned and protested at every jolt, and swayed sidewise until the roof threatened to fall.
From Córdoba, on the main line, the track squirmed away with snake-like course into the tropical jungles of the coastal plain. At times it passed a pineapple farm or a banana plantation; usually it ran through unbroken forest. The vegetation was riotous. Moss covered the trees, plants sprouted from the moss, vines crept upward among the plants and dropped their creepers from the limbs, and a thousand other varieties of parasitic growths twined upward along the creepers. The rampageous wilderness encroached upon the track so aggressively that a passenger could not lean from the car windows; it grew up between the tracks, and sprouted from holes in the rotting ties.
Our progress was leisurely. First a freight car jumped the rail. We waited three hours while the engine left us and sought a wrecking crew. Then, as soon as the wrecking crew had corrected the difficulty and departed, the same car did the same thing, and continued to repeat, until we reached a siding, where the trainmen left it with all its contents, presumably to rot in the jungle.
Then there was more delay. Another train was expected from the opposite direction, but no one seemed to know just where we might meet it, so the engineer proceeded cautiously. We met it head-on at a dangerous curve, both engines stopping with a shriek of brakes, and bumping gently. The two train crews then engaged in heated argument as to which should back up ten miles to the nearest station to let the other pass. There was speculation among the passengers as to whether the debate would be settled with knives or by a pushing match between the two engines. The conductors finally tapped a telegraph wire, and consulted headquarters, and received a decision in favor of our own train. Thereupon the other backed, very slowly as though to maintain its dignity and give us as little satisfaction as possible, and ours followed a few feet behind, both engineers hurling Mexican curses at each other from the car windows.
As always, the native passengers took things with fatalistic unconcern. They expected to miss connections at Rio Blanco, and be another day or two upon their journey, but they merely shrugged their shoulders. One must take things as they come in travel, señor! So far, this had been an unusually good trip. Cars always jumped the rail on this line. It was not extraordinary to be stranded eighteen hours or so in the jungle here, without food and water—unless one took the precaution, observed by the more experienced travelers, of bringing provisions. They shrugged their shoulders again, lighted their cigarettes, and amused themselves at each delay by setting up a beer bottle in the jungle, and shooting at it with their big revolvers, which seemed to be quite as essential a part of a Mexican’s equipment to-day as in the more turbulent times of Carranza.
And, as always in Mexico, everything turned out all right. Although we crawled into Rio Blanco five hours late, it developed that the connecting train had been similarly delayed. There was a hurried lunch at a railway restaurant, where the waitresses had been blonds before the local supply of peroxide gave out but now wore the Princeton colors. Then the journey proceeded upon another line, which, if possible, was worse than the one before.
II
In the days of Diaz, the Mexican railways had been built by Americans, and were under American management.