VIII
Yet Mexico always weathers her storms.
Even in revolution, unless one chances to be caught at the particular scene of the disturbance, this land is supremely tranquil.
In Tapachula the only evidence of the turmoil was an ever-lengthening line of brown-faced prisoners sitting crossed-legged on the street before the commandancia, picking with their machetes at the rank weeds that grew up among the cobblestones.
As in Hermosillo a moon smiled down over the low flat roofs. The lilting song of the marimba echoed hauntingly through the dim streets. And the plaintive notes of a gendarme’s whistle assured the world that all was well.
CHAPTER XII
UP AND DOWN GUATEMALA
I
From Tapachula to the Guatemalan border, there was a train every two or three days, provided traffic warranted so much service.
It took me through a bamboo forest, and dropped me at Suchiate, a straggling village of thatched huts beside a muddy river, where I had my first experience with the formalities attendant upon the crossing of a Central-American frontier.
First one had to secure permission from the Mexican authorities to leave their country. In a whitewashed shed three leisurely gentlemen in their shirt sleeves were viséing passports. Before they would proceed, one had to obtain stamps, procurable only at another shack, located as always in these countries at the opposite end of town, and reached by trudging through deep sand beneath a broiling sun. And when, after half an hour or more, one returned with the stamps, there were questions: