"Adios," you reply.
The trouble clears from his face; he is perfectly happy.
"Adios, adios," he exclaims and hops on like a frog amid the bare brown feet of the Indians and the polished boots of Mexicans and Americans.
Tran-tan-tan goes the band all the while, and the Zapotec bandmaster with narrowed waist and rigid little head and shoulders looks like Juarez himself. And the rattle of the gourds is like tambourines struck on the knees of dancing girls.
8. Under the Great Tree of Tule
The greatest tree in the Americas, though not the highest, is in the far south of Mexico at Tule, some ten miles from Oaxaca; the highest and perhaps the oldest is to be found among the Californian sequoias. But in girth and grandeur the cypress of our Lady of Tule has no rival. The Aztecs called it the Ahuehuetl, but it was a fine old tree at the dawn of their history. It must have been a great tree in the time of the Toltecs and was before them too. Perhaps some Emperor planted it two thousand years ago. Who can say?
Cortes and his horsemen, on their way to Honduras, stood under it four centuries ago, and their followers built a chapel there beside it, that men might fitly turn from a marvelous creation to a marvelous Creator.
It is a pleasant ride from the city in the early hours of the morning. The Zapotecs found us horses (with hooded stirrups and corded bridles) and my wife and I rode out to Tule. It was market-day in the city and we threaded our way through innumerable Indians and droves of asses laden with panniers.
The astonishment of the Indian women at seeing a lady in riding attire was very amusing. They for their part pick up their long flounced cotton skirts and sit with their bare feet balanced on the asses' shoulders. Flanked by baskets and sitting on heaps of merchandise on the ass's back, so they ride to market, often suckling a baby the while. But one of their sex astride! "Good Saint Anne!"—"Jesus Maria!"—"Look sister!"—"Adios!" Their conventions were not our conventions. They carried pigs strung by the legs to the asses' sides and dangling turkeys and fowls. They brought pots innumerable and baskets of eggs and tomatoes and alligator pears. Some Indians on foot plunged through the dust, and waddling all across the broad highway the asses came on in droves.
When we had ridden out of this turmoil into the fresher air we were in a land of wild mimosa and that "smell of wattle" of which Kipling has written memorable words—