But my fellow passengers were cheerful.
“It is a frightful place,” they agreed. “But wait, señor, wait! To-night you shall be at Tehuantepec—in the land of marvelous women! So big, so strong, so beautiful! They do all the work, while a man has but to lie in the shade and rest. You will like Tehuantepec, señor!”
IV
The noon train carried me over a better road, across a range of mountains, and down the sandy slopes of the Pacific coast, into an oasis of waving coco-palms, and dropped me in the city of the far-famed Indian vamps.
The entire female population was lined up at the station, each with a basket of cocoanuts.
I had already heard much about their attractiveness, for every travel writer makes it a point to rave about them. They are described always as “sloe-eyed queens of the tropics, with the figures of a golden-bronze Venus, clad in oriental garments of vivid color that do not quite meet at the waist.” They are said to be of passionate and jealous nature. But for several years I had been hearing, throughout my travels, of women somewhere just ahead who were like that, wherefore I was not surprised, upon descending to the station platform at Tehuantepec, to discover that the far-famed beauties were smoking eight-inch cigars.
A few of the younger ones were handsome. Their skin was a light brown, their eyes large and dark, their hair long and jet-black, their teeth white and regular, their lips red and sensual. They were a trifle larger than most tropical Indians, with magnificent, sturdy figures. But at least two-thirds of them were pock-marked. And although they wore the costume described—a little jacket of brilliant color, and a short skirt also of brilliant hue—most of the garments did meet at the waist, and those that showed a brief strip of Tehuana lady were worn by extremely aged Tehuana lady, and were not at all romantic. For what was sturdiness in the younger maidens became monstrous bulk in their elders. They were majestically fat, solidly fat, with a weight that must have amounted to three hundred pounds each. The writers had told the truth about their figures. They had all the truck-horse characteristics of the Venus de Milo herself.
I looked upon them with awe. I stood for a moment upon the platform, reviewing the stories I had heard of their passionate nature, and their aggressiveness toward the males who fell into their clutches. And even as I reviewed these stories, the women, having seen me, made a concerted rush. But having surrounded me, they merely removed their eight-inch cigars from their far-famed lips, and chorused:
“Buy my cocoanuts, señor! Two cocoanuts for five cents!”