Читать книгу On the Mexican Highlands, with a Passing Glimpse of Cuba - Edwards William Seymour - Страница 5

Mexico City, Mexico,

November 18th.

He llegado en esta ciudad, hoy, cerca las ocho de la mañana! The moment we crossed the Rio Grande we changed instantly from American twentieth century civilization to mediæval Latin-Indian. The Mexican town of Nuevo Laredo, the buildings, the women, the men, the boys, the donkeys, all were different. I felt as though I had waked up in another world. As we approached the station of the Mexican city, I noticed an old man riding upon his donkey. His saddle was fastened over the hips just above the beast’s tail, his feet trailed upon the ground. He sat there with immense dignity and self-possession, viewing with curiosity the gringos, who had come down from the land of the distant North. He silently watched us for some moments and then rode solemnly away, while I wondered by what hand of Providence it was he did not slide off behind.

From Nuevo Laredo to Monterey, which we reached at half past ten P. M., was all one flat mesquit and cactus-covered plain; sand, mesquit and cactus; cactus, sand and mesquit, mile after mile, till darkness fell upon us, when we could see no more. Monterey is the center of Mexico’s steel and iron industries, of large tobacco manufactories, of extensive breweries. It is the chief manufacturing city of modern Mexico. Our stay was brief, and I caught only a glimpse of a cloaked and high-sombreroed crowd, hurrying beneath the glare of electric lamps, and then we passed on toward the great interior plateau of the Mexican Highlands.

During the night it grew cold. I awoke shivering and called for blankets. In San Antonio the morning had been warm and, all day, south to Laredo and on to Monterey, the heat had been oppressive. It was cold when I left Kanawha, but the chilly air had not followed me beyond New Orleans, and I had there packed into my trunk all my warm clothing and checked it through to Mexico. Passing westward through Louisiana and Texas, the mild air was delightful and I was comfortable in my thinnest summer garments. Thus dreaming of orange groves and sunny tropics I fell asleep. Now I was shivering with a deadly chill, and the thin keen air cut like a scimiter. I pulled on my overcoat, which I fortunately still had with me, and slept fitfully till the day.

We crossed, during the night, the first great mountain range which shuts out the inland plateau of central Mexico from the lowland plains stretching eastward toward the Gulf and into Texas. We climbed many thousands of feet to Saltillo, where the mercury almost registered frost. Now we were descending the inner slopes of the barrier mountains, passing near the battle field of Buena Vista, where Zachary Taylor smote Santa Anna and his dark-skinned horde, and gained the fame which made him President of the United States. We were entering that vast desolate inland plain which stretches so many hundreds of miles south to Acambaro, where we should begin to climb again yet higher ranges, crossing them at last – at an altitude of eleven thousand feet, – before we should finally descend into the high cool valley of Anahuac to the City of Mexico.

About nine o’clock, we drew up at a wayside station for breakfast (almuerzo). If I had known it, I might have obtained my desayuno coffee and roll at an earlier hour upon the train. We were now upon a wide-stretching sandy level. A cold mist hung over us. The scorching sun was trying to penetrate this barrier. A band of Indians wrapped to their eyes in brilliant colored blankets of native make (zerapes), their high-peaked sombreros pulled over their eyes, with folded arms, silent as statues, stood watching us. I deliberately took their photograph. They did not smile or move. A group of Indian women sitting on the ground near these men were not so placid. They regarded the kodak as an evil mystery and hid their faces in their rebozos when I pointed my lens at them. The strange instrument smacked of witchcraft, and they would none of it. With rebozos still drawn, they got upon their feet and fled.

In another hour the bright white sun dissipated the mists. The sky was blue and cloudless. The track ran straight, with rarely a curve, mile after mile into the South. The land lay flat as a table, an arid plain, shut in by towering, verdureless mountains, ranging along the horizon on east and west. All day we thus sped south through illimitable wastes of sand, and sage brush and cactus, and a curious stunted palm, which lifted up a naked trunk with a single tuft of green at the very end. The landscape gave no sign of ever having been blessed by a drop of water, the barren prospect extending upon all sides in apparently unending monotony.

Now and then we passed a small station made of adoby brick. Now and then, a cluster of adoby dwellings centered about a low-roofed adoby church. At one place a half wild rancherro raced along beside the train on his broncho, vainly trying to keep the pace and wildly waving his sombrero as he fell behind. At the stations were always women and children, and the ever silent men standing like statues. They never moved, they never spoke, they never smiled; they gazed at us with blank astonishment. As we came further and further south, the extreme aridness of the landscape began to lessen. Cattle began to appear upon the plain, adoby villages became more frequent, the swarthy dark brown population became more numerous. Toward midafternoon, the towers, the high walls, the red tiled roofs of a great church, a cathedral, and a town of magnitude grew large before us. We drew up at a fine, commodious station, built of red sandstone. There, gathered to meet the train, were curious two-wheeled carts and antique carriages with high wheels, drawn by mules; many donkeys bearing burdens, some with men sitting upon their hips; a multitude of dark-faced Latins, men in high sombreros, the women with heads enveloped in rebozos or mantillas. We were at the station built a mile distant from the important city of San Louis Potosí, one of the great ore-smelting centers of Mexico, and a city of sixty thousand inhabitants. In the station we dined, and I ate my first Mexican fruits, one a sort of custard apple, and all delicious.

In the car with me sat a Mexican youth, who had evidently been studying and traveling in the States. He was dressed in the height of American fashion, and bore himself as a young gentleman of means. As he stepped from the train he was enveloped in the arms of another youth of about his own age. They clasped their right hands and patted each other on the small of the back with their left hands, and kissed each other’s cheeks, and then he was similarly embraced by a big stately man, over six feet in height, with a long gray beard, who carried himself with great dignity. The two were dressed in full Mexican costume, with tight-fitting pantaloones flaring at the bottom and laced with silver cording on the sides, short velvet jackets embroidered with gold lace, high felt hats with gold cords and tassels, and their monograms six inches high in burnished metal fastened on the side of the crown. Several peons seized the young man’s bags and American suit-case, and the party moved toward a six-mule carryall, set high on enormous wheels. The traveler was evidently the son of one of the great haciendados, whose estates lay perhaps fifty miles away. Only grandees of the first magnitude travel by carriage in Mexico.

Our colored porter, black as jet, was also in a happy mood. The first of his series of Mexican sweethearts had come to greet him, bringing him a basket of fruit. She was comely, with fine dark eyes, her long hair coiled beneath her purple rebozo. There is no color line in Mexico and Sam proved himself to be a great beau among the Mexican muchachas.

Sitting in the smoking compartment of my car, during the morning, I found myself in company with three Mexican gentlemen who entered at Monterey. They could speak no English. My Spanish was limited. But as we sat there I became conscious of a most friendly interchange of sentiment between us. They were demonstratively gracious. One of them offered me a fine cigar, the other insisted that I accept of his cigarettos, and they would accept none of mine until I first took one from them. They sent the porter for beer, and insisted that I share with them. They even got out at one of the way stations and bought fragrant light skinned oranges, and pressed me to share the fruit. I could not speak to them, nor they to me, but I became aware that they were members of the Masonic order. I wore my Master Mason’s badge. They displayed no outward tokens, but their glances and friendliness revealed their fraternal sentiments. They treated me with distinguished courtesy through all the journey to Mexico City, and at last said good-bye with evident regret. At a later time, I learned that a Mexican of the Masonic Fraternity wears no outward sign of his membership, owing to the hostility of the yet dominant Roman Church, while the Masonic bond is of peculiar strength by very reason of that animosity.

After leaving San Louis Potosí, the great inland plain which we had all day been traversing grew more and more broken. We came among small hills, with here and there deep ravines, and we began turning slightly toward the west and climbing by easy grades toward distant, towering mountains far upon the horizon to the south. Water now became more plentiful. We followed the course of a stream, wide, between high banks, where were long reaches of sand interspersed with well filled pools. There were adoby villages in increasing numbers, and here and there were little churches or chapels, each surmounted with a large cross. I counted more than a hundred of these chapels in the course of a few miles. It was as though the whole population had for centuries devoted its time to building these shrines. Some were dilapidated and in ill repair, others looked as though recently constructed. Each has its Madonna, and each is venerated and cared for by the family who may have erected it. It was eight o’clock and dark when we reached Acambaro where a good supper awaited us in the commodious station.

Just as the train was starting, I asked some questions of the American conductor and, after a little conversation with him, was surprised to find that he was a West Virginian from Kanawha. “Señor Brooks,” he said, who had grown up near “Coal’s Mouth,” now St. Albans. He was delighted to learn from me of Charleston and the Kanawha Valley, and hoped some day to return and see the home of his childhood. He now loved Mexico. Its dry and sunny climate had given him life, when in the colder latitude of West Virginia he would have perished.

During the night, while crossing the summit of the Sierra, at La Cima, – nearly eleven thousand feet above the sea, – it became intensely cold again, even colder than when we crossed the mountains near Saltillo. The chill again awoke me, when I discovered that we were rolling down into the valley of Anahuac toward the City of Mexico. We were soon below the mists and beneath a cloudless sky, yet I felt no undue heat, but rather, a quickening exhilaration in the pure, dry air. As we curved and twisted and descended the sharp grades, many vistas of exceeding beauty burst upon the eye. We were entering a wide valley of great fertility surrounded by lofty mountains, and to the far south, fifty miles away, the burnished domes of Popocatepetl and Ixtacciuhatl, lifted their ice crests into space, eighteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. Far beneath us glittered and glinted the waters of Lakes Tezcoco, Xochimilco and Chalco, once joined, but now separated, by the rescued land on which stood Tenochtitlan, the mighty capital of Montezuma, even yet to-day a city exceeding four hundred thousand souls (when Cortez conquered it, it is said to have held more than a million). Everywhere the eye rested upon fruitful land, tilled under irrigation, containing plantations of maguey, orchards of oranges and limes, and pomegranates, and groves of figs and olives – all forming a landscape where spring is perpetually enthroned.

Along the roads, trains of pack mules and burros, heavily laden, were toiling toward the great city, and many footfarers were bearing upon their backs enormous packs, the weight resting on the shoulders, and held in place by a strap about the forehead. When the Aztecs were lords of Mexico and Montezuma ruled, the horse, the ox, the ass, the sheep were unknown upon the American continent. All burdens and all freight were then carried upon the backs and shoulders of the Indians, who from their forefathers had inherited the hardy muscles and the right to bear the traffic of the land. And from these ancestors the Indian cargadores of to-day have received the astonishing strength, enabling them to bear these great loads with apparent ease; the Indian, with his jog-trot gait, carrying a hundred pounds upon his back a distance of fifty miles a day. A large part of the fruit, vegetables and tropical products displayed each day in the markets of the city are thus brought up from distant lowland plantations upon the backs of men. As we approached the city, nearer and nearer, the highways we ran beside or cut across were filled more and more with these pack trains and cargadores, and with men and women faring cityward.

We finally drew into a large newly-built station of white sandstone. Pandemonium reigned upon the platform alongside which we stopped. Men were embracing each other, slapping each other’s backs and kissing either cheek. Women flew into each other’s arms and children kissed their elders’ hands. We passed along through wide gateways and into a paved semicircular courtyard, where were drawn up carriages with bands of yellow or red or blue across the door. Those with yellow bands are cheap and dirty, those with blue bands mean a double fare and those with red bands are clean and make a reasonable charge, all of which is regulated by the Federal government. I entered one of the red-banded vehicles. The driver called two cargadores, who seized my steamer trunks, loaded them on their backs and ran along beside us. The horses started on a half gallop and when we reached the hotel, the cargadores, with the trunks upon their backs were there as well, less out of breath than the panting team, and each was gratified with a Mexican quarter for his pay (equal to an American dime), while my cochero swore in profuse Spanish because I did not pay him five times his legal fare.

I was come to the one-time palace of the Emperor Iturbide, and was welcomed by the American speaking Administrador, in softly accented Louisianian speech.