A WILD FIG TREE—LA PLAYA
We were now on a level of palm orchards, whence the dried palm leaves are shipped to the highlands in great bales. Then we came to another hacienda, a farm of a hundred thousand acres, La Playa, where the Jefe and his company with their doomed prisoner took the diverging road to La Huacana. Finally, we came to a broad valley, the valley of El Rio de la Playa, black with volcanic sand, called the mal pais (bad land), this being the immediate region once devastated by the terrible eruption of volcano Jorullo. Here were extensive banana groves, strange tropical trees quite new to me, orchids and palms and a stretch of several miles of indigo and watermelon cultivation. We then crossed another divide and came down again just as the big hot sun dove behind the mountains and precipitated the night. It was pitch dark when we entered the hacienda La Cuyaco and dismounted, four thousand eight hundred feet below Ario, six thousand feet below Santa Clara and yet some one thousand two hundred feet above the sea.
This night we slept on rawhide springs, a piece of matting for a mattress. We were in the tropics. I was forbid to touch water, even to wash. Our supper was chocolate, (delicious), tortillas and eggs. Parrots and two large gray doves and a gold finch hung in cages in the patio where we ate. All were new to me. A baby swung in a cradle suspended from the ceiling and the father, Izus, the keeper of the courtyard, held another. He had thirteen children.
We took off our thick clothes—(it had been difficult to endure them all the afternoon)—I put on a gauze underwear and linen, and slept without the burden of a blanket. In the morning we set out early, but the sun was fiercely hot by nine o’clock. For some fifteen miles we now traversed a wide valley. We were away from the neighborhood of Jorullo and its scattered volcanic sands, and had entered the mineral belt. A ledge bearing copper and silver ran through the courtyard of the hacienda. I tripped against it when going to supper.
And thereby hangs a tale: Not long ago, it seems, an itinerant American—one of those casual countrymen of mine who now and then retreat to Mexico, when the law at home gives too hot chase—dropped in at the hacienda toward the close of a hot day and asked for lodging. He was hospitably received, as is the custom, and when the great bell clanged for supper, he left his sleeping room and made his way across the courtyard.
VOLCANO DE JORULLO
Walking carelessly, he stubbed his toe against the unruly ledge and limping into the dining room, his host apologized for the presence of so ill located a ledge of obtruding rock. The guest declared his hurt a trifling matter, and the incident was forgotten. The next morning, he was seen knocking the ledge with a hammer and he put samples of the rock in his pocket before he went away.
Many months passed by and all memory of the casual American had vanished from men’s minds. Recently, however, an officer connected with the Department de Mineria of the Mexican Government, dined at the hacienda and politely informed the superintendente, that an American had “denounced” (i. e. filed claim to) the ledge of mineral running through the courtyard, and had received title thereto along with the right to occupy as much of the adjacent surface as might be necessary to work the mine.