A large portion of the country between those two towns belonged to the well-known General Santa Anna. The soil of his vast estate is fertile, but left to its natural fertility—the General being a shepherd, and said to have from forty to fifty thousand head of cattle in his pastures. He also acts the farmer, and takes in cattle to graze. His demand is certainly not high; and Yorkshire will be astonished to hear that he feeds them at forty dollars the hundred.
The ascent of the mountain range, and the varieties of the road, naturally keep the traveller on the qui vive. With the air singularly transparent, with the brightest of skies above, and the most varied of southern landscapes stretching to an unlimited extent below, the eye finds a continual feast. The city of Jalapa stands on the slope, throned on a shelf of the mountain 4000 feet above the sea, and with 4000 feet of the bold and sunny range above it. The whole horizon, except in the direction of Vera Cruz, is a circle of mountains, and towering above them all, at a distance of twenty-five miles, (which, from the clearness of the air, seems scarcely the fourth part of the distance,) rises the splendid cone of Orizaba. On the summit of the range stands Perote, a town connected with a strong fortress, perhaps the highest in position that the world exhibits—8500 feet above the shore.
Height makes the difference between heat and cold every where. In the middle of a summer which burns the blood in the human frame at Vera Cruz, men in Perote button their coats to the chin, and sleep in blankets. Thus winter is brought from the Poles to the Tropic, and the Mexican shivers under the most fiery sunshine of the globe.
The next stage is Puebla—eighty miles; the road passes over a vast plain generally without a sign of cultivation, as generally destitute of inhabitants, and with scarcely a tree, and scarcely a stream. It is difficult to know to what purpose this huge prairie can be turned, except to a field of battle. As the road approaches Puebla, there are farms erected by the town, and from which its wants are chiefly supplied. They produce wheat, barley, and Indian corn. The only fodder for horses is wheaten straw, but on this they contrive to “grow fat;” we are not called on to account for the phenomenon.
But every nation loves to intoxicate itself, and the Mexican boasts of the most nauseous invention for the purpose among the discoveries of man. Pulque, the national beverage, is the juice of the Agave Americana, fermented. The original process by which the fermentation is produced is one which we shall not venture to detail; but the liquor obtained from the section of the plant is drawn up by a rude syphon, and poured into dressed ox-hides. The taste is mawkish, and the smell is noisome. Yet, to the Mexican, it is nectar and ambrosia together. Pulque is to him meat, drink, and clothing, for without it the world has no pleasures. The most remarkable circumstance is, that it is without strength. Thus it wants the charm of brandy, which may madden, but which at least warms; or aquafortis, which the Pole and the Russ are said to drink as a qualifier of their excesses in train oil; but the Mexican would rather die, or even fight, than dispense with his pulque; and if Santa Anna had but put his warriors on short allowance of the national liquor before his last battle, and promised them double allowance after it, he would probably have been, at this moment, on the Mexican throne.
The Agave, called by the natives Maguey, is certainly an extraordinary instance of succulency, and an unrivalled acquisition to a thirsty population. A single plant of the Agave has been known to supply one hundred and fifty gallons of this sap. In good land it grows to an enormous size, the centre stem often thirty feet high, and twelve or fifteen inches in diameter at the bottom. When the plant is in flower, which occurs from seven to fifteen years old, the centre stem is cut off at the bottom, and the juice is collected.
Humbolt says, that a single plant will yield four hundred and fifty-two cubic inches of liquor in twenty-four hours, for four or five months, which would give upwards of four hundred gallons. How curious are the distributions of nature! All this profuse efflux of mawkish fluid would be thrown away in any other country. But nature has given the Mexican a palate for its enjoyment, and to him the draught is rapture.
Mexico is the land for the lovers of pumice-stone. The whole road from Vera Cruz to the capital is covered with remnants of lava. Every plain seems to have been burnt up by eruptions a thousand years old, or, according to the time-table of the geologist, from ten to ten thousand millions of years ago. With the mountain tops all on fire, and the plains waving with an inundation of flame, Mexico must have been a splendid, though rather an inconvenient residence, in the “olden time.”
Mexican agriculture has not yet attained the invention of an iron ploughshare; its substitute is primitive, and wooden. It evidently dates as far back as the times of the Dispersion. Nor, with thousands and tens of thousands of horses, have they yet discovered that a horse may be yoked to a plough. The Turks say, that the plague exists only where Mahometanism is the religion, and they seem to regard the distinction as a peculiar favour of Providence. It has been said by, or for, the Spaniards of the present day, that no railroad exists, nor, we presume, can exist, “where the Spanish language is spoken.” The late abortive attempts to make a railway from Bayonne to Madrid, so far prove the incompatibility of railways with the tongue of the Peninsula. A little effort of human presumption in Cuba, has been ventured on, in the shape of a brief railway, which already goes, as we are informed, at the rate of some half-dozen miles an hour. But as this is a dangerous speed to a Spaniard, we naturally suppose that the enterprise will be abandoned. But though the majority of the population, between drinking pulque and smoking cigars, find their hands completely full, one class is at least sufficiently active. Robbers in Mexico are what pedlars used to be in England; they keep up the life of the villages, plunder wherever they can, cheat where they cannot plunder, ride stout horses, and lead, on the whole, a varied, and sometimes a very gay life. One of the American travellers saw, at one of the villages where the stage changed horses, a dashing and picturesque figure, gaudily dressed, who rode by on a handsome horse richly caparisoned. On inquiring if the coachman knew him, the answer was, that he knew him perfectly well, and that he was the captain of a band of robbers, who had plundered the stage several times since the whip and reins had been in his hands. On the Americans urging the question, why he had not brought the robber to punishment, the answer was, “that he would be sure to be shot by some of the band the next time he passed the road;” the honour of Mexican thieves being peculiarly nice upon this point. It appeared that the dashing horseman had gone through the village on a reconnaissance, but probably not liking the obvious preparations of the travellers, had postponed the caption.
The mode of managing things in this somnolent country, is remarkable for its tranquillity. The American who narrates the circumstance, had taken with him from Vera Cruz four dragoons; but on accidentally enquiring on the road into the state of their arms, he found that but one carabine had a lock in fighting order, and even that one was not loaded; on which he dismissed the guard, and trusted to his companions, who were all well armed. The Mexican travellers, taking the matter in another way, never carry arms, but prepare a small purse “to be robbed of,” of which they are robbed accordingly. A few miles from Perote, the road winds round a high hill, and the passengers generally get out and walk. The Americans on this occasion had left their arms in the carriage, but their more prudent chief immediately ordered them to carry them in their hands, and in the course of the ascent, they pounced upon a group of ruffians whom the driver pronounced to be robbers; and who, but for their arms, would probably have attacked them. In less than a month after this, five or six Americans having left their arms in the stage at this spot, were attacked, and stript of every cent belonging to them.