Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond

h as they did at the time of the Conquest, did not even speak Spanish, they were unfriendly to whites, and above all dangerously superstitious on the subject of p

ra after ten! My compatriot had twice fallen foul of the vigilant police there and been roundly mulcted-once the bolt of the hired carriage in which he was riding broke, the conveyance turned turtle, mashed his foot, and covered

o crowded the way during the first hour, were not friendly, but neither did they show any dangerous propensities, and never failed in greeting if spoken to first. There were many of them of pure aboriginal blood. The stony road climbed somewh

first set forth. The land was fertile, with much corn. In time road and river bed parted company, though only after several attempts, like old gossips, and the former took to climbing upward through thin forests of pine in which the wind whispered an imitation of some distant, small waterfall. For some miles there were no houses. Up and down a

their belief, common to many uncivilized races, being that once their image is reproduced any fate that befalls it must occur to them in

ot?" I

ied to break up the clods of the field rather loosely and with a deter

arne de carnero, tortillas and water, all for five cents. The weak-kneed table was spread with a white cloth, there were several awkward, shallow, home-made chairs, and against the wall a large primitive sideboard with glistening brown earthen pots and carefully polished plates and bowls. When I had photographed the interior, la senora ask

than a hundred Indians of both sexes and every age that could stand on its own legs were harvesting. It was a communal corn-field, of which there are many in this region. They picked the ears from the dry stalks still standing and, tossing them into baskets, heaped them

e weapon I carried in sight been a huge six-shooter, even without cartridges, it would probably have been more effective than the toy automatic well loaded. As the group passed, howling drunkenly, a veritable giant of a fellow suddenly jumped toward me with an oath. I drew my putative weapon, and at the same moment the hand I had guessed to be full of rock appeared with an enormous revolver, shining new. With drunken flourishes the peon invited me to a duel. I kept him unostentatiously covered but continued serenely on my way. To have shown fear would have been as dangerous as for a lion-tamer in the cage with his pets. On the other hand, to have killed or seriously wounded one of the group would in all likel

. But it is a double danger to the wandering "gringo," for the reason above mentioned, while the native who kills a foreigner not infrequently esca

ind me. It was a quaint little town in a lap of valley surrounded by pined hills and with the overhanging Japanese eaves peculiar to the region. The inhabitants were entirely peons and Indians, none in "E

dressed for a turn through the town. It swarmed with liquor-shops. Apparently any one with nothing else to do could set up a little drunkery or street-stand without government interference. There was no pulque, the maguey being unknown to the region, but bottled mescal and aguardiente de ca?a amply made up for it. It seemed uncanny that one could talk with ease to these unlettered dwellers in the wilderness in the same tongue learned in a peaceful class-r

es of a curiously formed mountain to the east, and to rend and tear the heavy fog banks hanging over the town and valley. Peons tight-wrapped in their blankets from eyes to knees slippe

to show man had passed that way before. Huge birds circled majestically over the wooded hills and valleys of which the trail caught frequent brief but wide vistas. The road would have just suited Hazlitt, for it never left off winding, both in a

nes. Then an unraveled trail led gradually downward, fell in with a broad sandy "road" that descended more sharply to a still swifter cobbled way, and about me grew up a land reminiscent of Ceylon, with many frail wooden h

ern costume and to judge from the crowd of boys that gathered round me as I wrote my notes in a plaza bench, the arrival of a white man in this largely Indian town was an event not to be slighted. There was a general air of mor

ral portion all the rooms open on sun-flooded, inner gardens and whole orchards within which pass almost all the family activities, even to veranda dining-rooms in the edge of the shade. Dense groves of banana and coffee trees surround most of the uncrowded, adobe dwellings. In the outskirts the houses are of wood, with sharp-peaked roofs, and little hovels of mud a

rd reality of life that runs beneath, when man shows himself less kindly than nature. A man offered to sell me for a song a tract bordering the river, with a "house" ready for occupancy, and had the place and all that goes with it been portable we sh

n sunny pools, there were even horses being scrubbed in the transparent stream, and below all this others dipped their drinking water. Here and ther

er and threw them on the stone floor. They were neither struck nor stunned in any way. When they were so placed that their throats hung over the rivulet, a butcher made one single quick thrust with a long knife near the collarbone and into the heart. Boys caught the blood in earthen bowls as it gushed forth and handed it to various women hanging over the enclosing wall. The animal gave a few agonized bellows, a few kicks, and died. E

ecstatic glee at the oft-repeated drama. Death, especially a bloody one, appeared to awaken a keen enjoyment, to quicken the sluggard pulse of even this rather peaceful Tarascan tribe. One could easily fancy them watching with the same ebullient joy the dying struggles of helpless human beings butchered in the same way. The killing of the trussed and fallen animal over the rivulet recalled the cutting out of the heart of human victims on the sacrificial stones amid the plaudits of the Aztec multitude and the division of

ver, never passed the door of a church even at a distance without raising their hats. Twice during the day I passed groups of women of the peon class carrying in procession several framed chrom

copious tears, while on the ground beside him were the remnants of a glazed pot and a broad patch of what had once been native firewater mingled with the thirsty sand. Some distance on I heard a cry as of a hunted human being and turned to see the pot remnants and the patch in

ur or five times what would have been the distance in a straight line and uncovering broad vistas of plump-formed mountains shaggy with trees, and vast, hollowed-out valleys flooded with corn. Soon there were endless pine forests on every hand, with a thick, oak-like undergrowth. A labyrinth of loops one above another brought us to Ajambarán and a bit of level track, with no mountains in the landscape because we stood on the summit of them. Little Lake Zirahuén, surrounded on all sides by sloping hills, half pine, half corn, gleamed with an emeral

The man who baedekerized Mexico says it is a "very difficult" trip afoot. Perhaps it would be to him. From the central line of flat stones there ran out, every yard, at right angles, lines of stones a bit smaller, the space b

shaded by enormous ash-like trees with neither flowers, shrubs, nor fountains to detract from their atmosphere of roominess. About them run portales, arcades with pillars that seem at least to antedate Noah, and massive stone benches green with age and water-logged with constant shade, as are also the ancient stone sidewalks under the trees and the overhanging roofs of one-story houses supported by carved beams. Along these wanders a chief

fourteen stations of plastered mud niches along the way. From the aged, half-circular, stone bench on the summit is another of the marvelous views that abound in Mexico. It was siesta-time, and not a human being was in sight to break the spell. The knoll fell away in bushy precipitousness to the plain below. As I reached the top, two tra

r range, one behind the other, to the dimmest blue distance. Swinging round the horizon, skipping the lake, the eye took in a continuous procession of hills, more properly the upper portions of mountains, losing their trees toward the east and growing more and more bare and reddish-brown, until it fell again on the doddering old town napping in its hollow down the slope. B

over its slightly humped middle. Then there is Xanicho, pitched high in mound-shape, suggestive of Capri, rocky, bare, reddish-brown, and about its bottom, like a narrow band on a half-sunken Mexican hat, a long thin town of white walls and tiled roofs visible in all detail, a church towering above the rest to form the bow of the ribbon. It is strange how the human plant grows everywhere and anywhere, even on a patch of rock thrust forth out

in the far west, and from which a soft wind tore off now and then tiny pieces that floated slowly eastward. The same breeze tempered the sunny stillness of the

had escaped in the garb of a peon, leaving most of his possessions behind. Now he wandered from town to town, hanging up his shingle a few days in each as an oculist. His hotel room was a museum. None can rival the wandering Teuton in the systematic collecting, at its lowest possible cost, of everything that could by any stretch of the imagination ever be of service to a traveler. This one possessed only a rucksack and a blanket-wrapped bundle, but in them he carried more than the average American would be caught in possession of in his own home. There were worn and greasy notebooks full of detailed information of the road, the cheapest hotels of every known town of Mexico, with the lowest possible price and the idiosyncrasies of their proprietors that m

broken ground. The fog hung long with us and made impossible pictures of the procession of Tarascan Indians coming in from Tzintzuntzan with every species of red pottery, from cups to immense water-jars, in great nets on the backs of horses, asses, men, and women. Beyond the railroad the trail picked its way, with several climbs over rocky spur-ends, along the marshy edge of the lake, which was so completely surrounded

hoacán. A native we spoke with referred to it as a "ciudad," but in everything but name it was a dead, mud-and-straw Indian village, all but its main street a collection of mud, rags, pigs, and sunshine, and no evidence of what Prescott describes as splendid ruins. Earthquakes are not unknown, and the bells of th

t through some hocuspocus with a small mirror, and within two minutes, though his Spanish was little less excruciating than his English, had proved to the startled curate that the glasses he was wearing would have turned him stone-blind within a month but for the rare fortune of this great Berlin specialist's desire to visit the famous historical capital of the Tarascans. The priest smoked cigarette after cigarette while my companion fitted another pair of crystals and tucked the dangerous ones away in his own case-for the next victim. He did not even venture to

oculist had criticized it as far too small for Mexican travel. He carried himself a revolver half the size of a rifle, and filed the ends of the bullets crosswise that they might split and spread on entering a body. In the outskirts of Patzcuaro there came hurrying toward me a flushed and drunken peon youth with an immense rock in his hand. I reached for my weapon, but he greeted me with

down the cobbled road, a ragged boy leaning on the brake. Beyond the main railroad track a spur ran out on a landing-stage patched together out of old boards and rubbish. Peons were loading into an iron scow bags of cement from an American bo

f soldiers, westbound. They were nearly all mere boys, as usual, and like the policemen and rurales of the country struck one as unwisely entrusted with dangerous weapons. Morelia

less, overrun with ragged, dust-tinted inhabitants, every street seeming to bring up against the low surrounding range. Its natural advantages are fully equal to those of Guadalajara, but here pulque grows and man is more torpid. All the place has a hopeless, or at least ambitionless, air, though in this splendid climate poverty has less tinge of misery and the appearance of a greater contentment with its lot. There is a local "poet's walk" that is not particularly poetic, a wild park beyond that is more so, and a great aqueduct over which sprawl enormous masses of the beautiful purple bourgainvillea. This

n, with a leather handbag from which she doled out, almost with tears, coppers for change and the keys to the larder, to the cringing servants and conferred long with them in whispers on how much she dared charge each guest, according to his appearance. But at least Mexico feeds well the traveler who is too hungry to be particul

ime. The junction town was in fiesta, and the second-class car of the evening train to Celaya was literally stacked high with peons and their multifarious bundles, and from it issued a stench like unto that of a congress of polecats. I rode

den, but almost all the rest of the town is a monotonous waste of square, bare, one-story houses with ugly plaster facades and no roofs-at least to be seen-each differing a bit from its neighbor in height, like a badly drawn up company

he sweet-toothed, ranging from squares of "fudge" in all colors of the rainbow to barber-pole sticks a half-yard long. The station was surrounded with soap-less old women, boys, and even men offering for sale all sizes of the little wooden b

window. One could literally feel his firm American hand at the throttle as the heavy train gathered steady headway and raced away to the eastward. Across the car sat two handsome, solidly-knit young bull-fighters, their little rat-tail coletas peering from behind their square-cu

dral houses, among other disturbing, disgusting, and positively indecent representations of the Crucifixion and various martyrdoms done in the Aztec style of bloody realism, a life-size Cristo with masses of long real hair and a pair of knee-length knit drawers for decency's sake. One might fancy the place weighed down by a Puritan censorship. The local museum contains among other rubbish of the past the keyhole through which Josefa whispered in 1810 the words that started the revolution against Spanish power! Here, too, is what purports to be an authentic photograph of the execution of Maximilian, theatrical to a Spanish degree, the three victims standing in their plac

e plain. Before them, as they faced the youthful, brown file of soldiers in their many-patched and faded garb, the three had a comprehensive view of the town, chiefly trees and churches sufficient to house the entire populace several times over. Nine immense structures, each with a great dome and a tower or two-steeples are unknown in Mexico-stand out against the bare, brown, flat-topped range beyond that barely rises above the highest tower. The last scene he looked on must have struck the refuted emperor as typical of a country he was sorry then ever to have seen, in spite of his regal control of facial expression,-a hard, stony plateau, the ferti