At the Rancho Nuevo, the Spanish-Indian ladies of the kitchen promised us boiled chicken with our rice for the midday meal. One of the ladies, a stocky, swarthy Indian, with her agile son, started in hot chase after a long-legged active hen. The bird seemed to know its fate. Several short-haired dogs joining in the pursuit, the hen was captured. The mother brought it to me holding it up showing it to be fat and well-fed, and then, as she stood beside me, watching a caravan of pack animals on the moment just entering the courtyard, she calmly broke the thigh bone of each leg and the chief bone of each wing, so that escape became impossible, and proceeded right then and there to pick the chicken alive. She was evidently unconscious of any thought of cruelty. The legs and wings were broken in order that the bird might not run or fly away. It was picked alive as a matter of course. The sentiment of pity and tenderness for dumb things had never yet dawned upon her mind. The fowl destined for the pot, was as little considered as the wounded prisoner with his wrists tied tight to the neck and back, whom Don Louis’ soldiers that day were “transferring” to another jail.
COOLING THE HORSES—RANCHO NUEVO
Our Jefe Politico had been joined by two Spanish (Mexican) gentlemen, managers (superintendentes) of haciendas and we all dined together. We had the hen cooked with rice and then frijoles, and I gave them of my precious old Bourbon, which—“La agua de los Estados Unidos”—they pronounced “mas excellentemente” than their own mescal.
Here we rested until about 3:00 P. M., when we got away for the final descent into La Tierra Caliente. We came down very gradually for about an hour and then found ourselves at Agua Sarpo, a collection of a few huts on the brink of the plateau, whence we looked out over an aggregation of mountain peaks and ridges, valleys and deep plains, much as though you stood at the “Hawk’s Nest” in West Virgina, and looked out for a hundred miles over a country five thousand feet below, all that distant region bathed in lurid heat, verdant and luxuriant with tropical vegetation.
The summits below me were volcanic and the flat cone of Mexico’s last created volcano, Jorullo, thrown up to a height of nearly two thousand feet in a single night, September 29, 1759, and so graphically described by Humboldt, stood at our very feet—the extraordinarily clear atmosphere making the volcano and neighboring peaks and ranges look as though crowded hard against each other, although they were many of them miles apart.
My first herald of the approaching tropics was a paraquita gorgeous in emerald and scarlet and gold, sitting on a stump watching me intently, and then I noticed a flock of parrots tumbling in the air.
The road, a mere trail, was as steep as some of those which lead down from our Kanawha mines. We let the Jefe and his soldiers follow us, we taking the lead. Down we went and down, and down, hour after hour. We passed palm trees, multitudes of bananas, and coffee trees. There were many Indian huts by the wayside,—for we were on a famous, much traveled thoroughfare,—and at most of them a bottle or gourd of pulque and fruit were set out to tempt the traveler to buy.
When almost down we came to the hacienda Tejemanil, a great sugar estate, with an ancient mill run by water conveyed many miles from the plateau. Here we rested half an hour, the Jefe transacted some business, and we ate delicious oranges, small, in color a light yellow, and bursting with slightly acid juice.