Indians came aboard in merry, chattering groups. They were clad in brilliant rags, invariably tattered to shreds, yet blazing with scarlets and greens, and rivaling the plumage of the parrots and cockatoos that screamed at us from the bamboo thickets. They wore narrow-brimmed straw hats, of Guatemalan type, that seemed diminutive after the immense sombreros of central Mexico. Each had a hollow rod of cane slung over the shoulder—the local style of thermos bottle. And each was laden with an armful of infants.
The engineer waited patiently while babies were loaded and unloaded. Some of the Indians, embarking, would clamber aboard and receive the children passed up by friends through the windows. Others, disembarking, would clamber down and catch the children tossed to them by friends inside the cars. The confusion was astounding. Every one jabbered in a babel of native dialects. But the good humor of the warm countries always prevailed. Every one seemed eventually to find the right infant. And we would loaf onward through the wilderness, among rolling hills red with coffee berries, past the blue lagoons where schools of tiny fish leaped in silver showers, and wild fowl rose in flocks to skim across the placid waters.
Looking upon the quiet landscape, one would never have suspected that Mexico was on the eve of another chronic insurrection.
II
This railway was a link in the much-discussed Pan-American road, which dreamers hope may some day carry passengers from New York to Buenos Aires in a week. How soon the vision will ever become a reality is problematical. The existing links are few. European merchants, resenting the commercial advantages it would offer to Americans, are uniformly opposed to the project. And native governments, always suspicious of one another, particularly in Central America, fear its military possibilities.
III
Nightfall brought us to Tapachula, a pleasant little city in a rich plantation district.
A diminutive trolley, operated by a Ford engine, awaited us at the station. The motorman climbed out to crank it. The passengers crowded aboard. A host of hotel runners and porters attached themselves to roof, sides, and platform, until the car itself was invisible beneath its coating of humanity.
It rattled away upon wobbly tracks through a low-built plaster city—a city almost overpowering in its scent of coffee from the warehouses and drying floors—and landed us eventually at one of the most picturesque plazas in Mexico. It fairly blazed with color. Amid its green were masses of flowering purple bougainvillea. All about it were red-tiled roofs. Above it towered a grove of royal palms, tall and stately, and bursting far aloft into dark olive plumage, through which the façade of the inevitable aged cathedral gleamed white against a flaming tropic sunset.
The streets, bordered by high, narrow sidewalks, were rudely cobbled, and sloped to a central gutter. Horsemen with gay ponchos trailing behind them clattered over the rough stones. Long trains of burros plodded beneath sacks of coffee, driven by peons in scarlet rags. Tehuana girls, homeward bound from market, passed in their quaint costume, balancing earthenware jars above their turbaned heads.