It was the feast-day of the kings, los Reyes, when after my return to Mexico, I was again in the saddle, riding out from Mexico toward the village of Tezcuco. I had to take a by-way to avoid the Guadalupe road, which was blocked up in consequence of the holiday. In doing so, I had to leap a ditch or canal, in which both I and my horse came near closing our pilgrimage in a quagmire; but in time we were again upon the road. It is a dreary place about the hill of Tepeyaca, or Guadalupe, and if the Virgin had not smiled upon the barren hill and made roses grow out of it, it would be as uninviting as one of the hills of the valley of Sodom. This hill is now called the "Mountain of Crosses," for upon it, in 1810, the first insurgent, Hidalgo, the priest of Dolores, won a battle against the royal troops, which should have been followed up by an entry into Mexico; but Providence ordered it otherwise, and the forest of crosses that once covered it proclaimed a bloody slaughter without any results.
The shores of Tezcuco approach the hill in the wet season, leaving but a narrow margin for the road, but in the dry season this margin is greatly enlarged. I have already explained the composition of tequisquite, and the manner of its production; here it was lying in courses, or spots, as it had been left by the receding and drying up of the water during the present dry season. Little piles of it had been gathered up here and there to be taken to town for use, probably by the bakers or soap-boilers, who are said to pay fourteen shillings an aroba for it. Besides a little stunted grass, there was here no sign of vegetable life except a peculiar species of the cactus family, which resembled a mammoth beet without leaves, but bearing upon its top an array of vegetable knives that surrounded a most exquisite scarlet flower.
FATE OF ROBBERS.
There was another sight by the road side more in keeping with the gloomy thoughts which this desert plain excites: it was the dead bodies of three men, who had been condemned by a military commission for robbing a bishop. They were shot, and their bodies were placed on three gibbets as a warning to others. The bishop said he would have pardoned the robbery, but when they went to that extreme limit of depravity of searching within his shirt of sackcloth for concealed doubloons, it was more than a bishop could endure. The worthy ecclesiastic had renounced the world and all its vanities, and had put on the badges of poverty and self-mortification for $50,000 a year, and he wore the disguises that ought to have shielded him from the suspicion of being rich!
These military commissions are no new invention in Mexico, for that famous Count de Galvez, the Vice-king who built the castle of Chapultepec and deposed the Archbishop of Mexico, had a traveling military court, with chaplain and all spiritual aids, to accompany the dragoons that scoured the road in search of robbers. When a fellow was caught, court, chaplains, and dragoons made rapid work in dismissing him to his long resting-place, and saying a cheap mass for the repose of his soul, and then again they were ready for another enterprise. In this way the roads were made safe in the times of that Viceroy.
Had I known the real distance to Tezcuco, I ought to have abandoned the journey on account of the lameness of my horse. But either the Virgin Mary, or, more probably, the extreme purity of the atmosphere on these elevated plains, had deprived me of the power of measuring distance by the eye. This is excessively annoying to a traveler. He sees the object he is attempting to approach at an apparently moderate distance, plain in sight, and as he rides along, hour after hour, there it stands, just where it seemed to be when he first got sight of it. I finally reached my destination in good time for a dinner, and for as good a night's "entertainment for man and beast" as could be found in all the Republic of Mexico.
When I turned the head of the lake, I was close upon the track which Cortéz and his retreating band followed into the plains of Otumba. Poor wretches! what a time they must have had of it in this disconsolate retreat—wounded, jaded, like tigers bereft of their prey! They mourned for their companions slain, but most of all for the booty they had lost.
"They grieved for those that went down in the cutter,
And also for the biscuits and the butter:"
and hobbled on, as best they could, while the natives pursued them with hootings and volleys of inefficient weapons. Passing this point and turning to the north-east, they entered the plains of Otumba, where they encountered the whole undisciplined rabble of the Aztecs, and scattered them like chaff before the wind.