CHAPTER XXIII APPROACHING MEXICO FROM THE NORTH
It came as a pleasant surprise, upon entering Mexican territory, to receive gold coins in exchange for paper money. Mexico since 1920 has had a gold and silver currency and no bank notes. All the depreciated paper has been withdrawn from circulation, and there is that much wealth in the Estados Unidos Mexicanos which obtains in no European country to-day, a stability of the value of money.
One certainly feels as if one had in one's possession something real—with a pocketful of handsome gold pieces. The bright silver peso is rather heavy in the pocket, it is true, but one does not soon tire of looking at the coinage and rejoicing in it. When one has traveled round Europe with locally printed francs and wads of worthless crowns and marks, and even in the United States with its many shredded and grease-stricken one-dollar bills, one feels a due astonishment that Mexico in one respect is showing the world its way. Unfortunately however the new "Bank of Issue" is to begin printing bank-notes again very soon.
The ten-peso piece with "Independencia y Libertad" cut into its unmilled edge reminds of the Russian ten-rouble bits. But the Mexican twenty pesos, worth two guineas or ten dollars, is a beautiful and distinctive gold piece with its impress of the elaborate and detailed "Calendar Stone" of the Aztecs.
Mexico has triumphed over the currency trouble, but like Europe and the United States she still has the passport disease, requiring photographs and fees before you enter the land. The United States, however, has exerted her power and influence to remove this obstruction as far as her own nationals are concerned. American citizens go back and forth at will without show of visa. The British Foreign Office could achieve the same result, but is, I am told, too idle. It may seem a small matter to those who do not travel, but it is an undoubted convenience. The sudden demand for photographs often delays the British traveler twenty-four hours at El Paso or Laredo. And he naturally asks himself why he should pay ten shillings while his American neighbor gets in free.
For us these matters were arranged at El Paso. Here my wife and I spent a few days, met Duncan Aikman working on the El Paso Times, and with his hospitable assistance we viewed the frontier city. I learned from him that Wilfrid Ewart had broken his journey to New Orleans at this point and had decided to take a ten-day trip into Mexico. The tickets of the Southern Pacific Railroad give travelers special facilities for doing that. It enables Americans to get a drink if they wish. Ewart, I found, had bought a round trip ticket to take him to Mexico City and then back to Texas by a different route—by San Luis Potosi and Laredo.
I at once felt some apprehension for my friend. "I do hope he comes to no harm," I exclaimed.
"He'll be all right," said Aikman. "I have given him an introduction to the Governor of Chihuahua, General Enriquez. Mexico has become much quieter."
I was much struck by the contrast between El Paso and the Spanish city opposite it. El Paso grows and spreads on the desert like some super cactus barbed with every barb of civilization. It is amazing in its artificiality, its unwontedness. I have been in frontier cities between the Turkestan Desert and Mongolia—low, squalid, utterly unblessed by God or man. But El Paso on the Mexican line is nothing like them. The sidewalks of New York and Chicago are continued there; the line of their housetops against the Texas sky barely attenuates.