The smell of the wattle at Lichtenberg
Riding in in the rain.
But there is no rain in Mexico all the winter long and all odors that come on the air are warm. Trees with scarlet flowers bend over us. The pomegranate hangs its rosy fruit, the coffee berries ripen on the shrubs, and trees that know no fall, no nakedness of limb, hang everlasting canopies of green. We ride gayly over plowed cornfields and along the borders of plantations where sugar canes chatter with the wind.
Then anon towards noon we descry a settlement veiled in verdure, and like a green knoll rising above it the vast upper story of a mighty tree. There is no need to ask. It must be Tule and its tree. And we ride by narrow shady lanes between banana palms, date palms, and flowering shrubs, crisscross from the highway to the tree.
Behold a great cliff of wood, gray like a willow or an ash, with an underbark of nut-fiber color, going upward in a grand sweep to the branches. At the five bays of the tree one might build five fair-sized houses.
All is silent, all is beautiful round about it. A beggar only is sitting under the tree. The large white church behind it reflects a blaze of sunshine. A bougainvillæa, twenty feet high, is one mass of crimson bloom all attended by bees and wasps. The solid white wall which runs round with blockhouse at one corner is unimpaired. On the white façade of the high broad church are painted tall Moorish decorations in an intense royal blue, tall slender mosques of gleaming blue, and big, red, empty niches for saints beside them.
The tree lifts its voluminous green bulk higher than the church, but all its branches, all its stems and leaves, hang as it were in reverence to the high-placed figure of the Virgin. It is plume-leaved, and the tree is held sacred by many tribes as the tree of mourning. It has the grand dignity of sorrow for the dead.
What a tree! A hundred horses could stand under it. Halfway up, in the midst of the giant growth, starts straight and bolt upright, a new tree, larger itself than any King Charles' Oak, larger even than that tree in Palestine under which the Greek monks tell you Abraham and Sarah entertained their Lord. The German Baron Humboldt, famous traveler in his day, scratched his name on it in the year 1802, the only name, the only vandalism which has been permitted. It is a perfect tree in full maturity, the same species of cypress as the Tree of the Dreadful Night at Mexico City, but in incomparably better condition and much larger and older. If it could tell its story, the lingering of Cortes and his men in its shade would be but a page. For it must ever have attracted the attention of whoever passed that way. The old cities like Mitla, twenty miles away, are choked in dust. But with the freshness of spring the tree lives on.
Outside the walled churchyard which holds the tree is the town plaza swarming with wasps but without gardens or bandstand or any of the common adornments of such places, not even a statue of Juarez. But there is an old portal and one shut shop bearing the curious name of La Vuelta al Mundo, the Return to the World. But they have all gone their way, those who sat under the tree in ages past, and none return to tell us how it was in their day.