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

pread fields of tobacco, blooming with a flower not unlike the lily; then vast, almost endless stretch

oils of woven-leather ropes of all sizes, but in glum and hopeless silence, while a policeman paced back and forth to prevent

ain. Up and up we climbed through a bare, stone-strewn land, touched here and there with the green of cactus, sometimes with long vistas of maize, which here hung dead in its half-grown youth because of the failure of the summer rains. Fields of maguey continued. The air grew perceptibly cooler as we wound back and forth, always at good speed

ce to the valley of Mexico. Unfortunately no train on either line reaches ancient Anahuac by daylight, and my plan to enter it afoot, perhaps by the same route as Cortez, had been frustrated. A red sun was just sinking behind haggard peaks when we reached the highest point of the line-8237 feet above the sea-with clumps and small forests of stocky oaks and half Mexico stretching out behind us, rolling brown to distant bare ranges backed by others growing blue and purple to farthest distance. The scene had a late October aspect, and a chilling, ozone-rich wind blew. By dusk the coat I had all bu

he hills to drain the ancient valley of Anáhuac. On we sped through the night, which if anything became a trifle warmer. Gradually the car crowded to what would have been suffocation h

y with its cheap restaurants and sour smelling pulquerias uncountable, looked and sounded like a lower eastside New York turned Spanish in tongue. Even morning light discovered nothing like the charm of the rest of Mexico, and though I took up new lodgings en famille in ari

the rest expects. Since anarchy fell upon the land, even the Sunday procession of carriages of beauty in silks and jewels, and of rancheros prancing by in thousand-dollar hats, on silver-mounted and bejeweled saddles, has disappeared from the life of the capital. To-day t

the morning warms. Ragged peons swarm, feeding, when at all, chiefly from ambulating kitchens of as tattered hawkers. The well-to-do Mexican, the "upper class," in general is a more churlish, impolite, irresponsible, completely inefficient f

es to cross themselves in the long intricate manner customary in Mexico. A side room was crowded with cheap cardboard paintings of devotees in the act of being "saved" by the Virgin of Guadalupe-here a man lying on his back in front of a train which the Virgin in the sky above has just brought to a standstill; there a child being spared by her lifting the wheel of a heavy truck about to crush it. It would be hard to imagine anything more crude either in conception or execution than these signs of gratitude. To judge by them the Virgin would make a dramatist of the first r

, to "cure" the ailments of themselves or fami

ey begin to rise. We skirted Pedregal, a wilderness of lava hills serving as quarry, and drew up in the old Indian town, of a charm all its own, with its hoar and rugged old church and its ho

d of the lake of Tenochtitlan days there is the flattest of rich valleys beyond. The "Tree of the Dismal Night," a huge cypress under which Cortez is said to have wept as he watched the broken remnants of his army file past, is now hardly more than an enormous, hollow, burned-out stump, with a few huge branches that make it look at a distance like a flourishing t

prisoners. The life within was an almost exact replica of that on the streets of the capital, even to hawkers of sweets, fruit-vendors, and the rest, while up from them rose a decaying stench as from the steerage quarters of old transatlantic liners. Those who choose, work at their trad

ust largely to our own sense of direction. Above came a three-hour climb through pine-forested mountains, such as the Harz might be without the misfortune of German spick and spanness. He who starts at an elevation of 7500 feet and climbs 4000 upward in a brief space of time, with a burden on his back, knows he is mounting. Occasionally a dull-gray glimpse of the hazy valley of Mexico broke through the trees; about us was an out-of-the-way stillness, tempered only by the sound of birds. About noon the thick forest of great pine trees ceased as suddenly as if nature had drawn a

d seam fully visible, and the fancied likeness of the second to a sleeping woman was from this point striking. The contrast was great between the dense green of the pine forests and the velvety, brown plain with its full, shallow lakes unplumbed fathoms below. Farther down we came out on the very break-neck brink of a vast amphitheater of hills, with "las ventanas," huge, sheer, rock cliffs shaped like grea

han a half-mile to the tree-tops below. Climbing, clinging, and circling through a wilderness of undergrowth amid the vast forest of still, dense-green pines, but with such views of the valley of Mexico and the great snow-clads as to reward any possible exertion, we flanked at last the entire canyon. In the forest itself every inch of ground was carpeted with thick moss, more splendid than the weavings o

"las ventanas" only a couple thousand feet from where we had first caught sight of them hours before. Thereafter the trail moderated its pace and led us to the most beautiful thing of the day, a clear ice-cold stream at the bottom of the cliffs. We all but drank it dry. Then on out of the canyon and across a vast field of rye, back of which the great gorge sto

n train from Cuernavaca, and we laid plans to tramp on across the valley floor to Tizapan. But Mexican procrastination sometimes has its virtues, and we were

of maguey beyond. Peons and donkeys without number, the former close wrapped in their colored blankets, the latter looking as if they would like to be, enlivened the roads and trails. We skirted the shore of dull Lake Texcoco, once so much larger and even now only a few inches below the level of the flat plain, recalling that the Tenochtitlan of the Conquest was an island reached only by causeways. At San Juan Teotihuacan, the famous pyramids lost in the nebulous haze of

f the pulque industry. At that station an old woman sold me a sort of flower-pot full of the stuff at two cents. I expected to taste and throw it away. Instead there came a regret that I had not taken to it long before. It was of the consistency and col

f Malinche, famous in the story of the Conquest, its summit hidden in clouds. I was now in the Rhode Island of Mexico, the tiny State of Tlaxcala, the "Land of Corn," to the assistance from which Cortez owes his fame. The ancient state capital of the same name has been slighted by the railway and only a few decrepit mule-cars connect it with the outer world. I slighted these, and leaving my possessions in

od" pouring in a veritable river from his side, his face was completely smeared with it, his knees and shins were skinned and barked and covered with blood, which had even dripped on his toes; the elbows and other salient points were in worse condition than those of a wrestler after a championship bout, and the body was tattooed with many strange arabesques. There were other figures in almost as distressing a state. A god only ordinarily maltreated could not excite the pity or interest of the Mexican Indian, whose every-day life has its own share of barked shins and p

s not visible at all, but only the snow that covered its upper heights, surrounded above, below, and on all sides by the thin gray sky of evening. By night there was music in the plaza. But how can there be life and laughter where a half-dozen blankets are incapable of keeping the promenaders comfortable? In all the frigid town there was not a single fire, except in the little bricked holes full of charcoal over which

ht there lay all the historic scene before me-the vast dipping plain with the ancient pyramid of Cholula, topped now by a white church with towers and dome, standing boldly forth across it, and beyond, yet seeming so close one half expected an avalanche of their snows to come down upon the town, towering Popocatepetl and her sister, every little vale and hollow of th

and flowers, and with almost nothing to bear out the tradition that it was man-built. From the top spreads a scene rarely surpassed. Besides the four mountains, the ancient and modern town of Cholula lies close below, with many another village, especially their bulking churches, standing forth on all sides about the rich valley, cut up into squares and rectangles of ric

ber made of candle wax that breaks to bits between the fingers. Then there are huge candles without number, martyrs and crucifixions, with all the disgusting and bloody features of elsewhere; every kind and degree and shape and

he train at the junction and introduced himself by remarking that it was not bad weather thereabouts. He was a tall, spare man of fifty, in a black suit rather disarranged and a black felt hat somewhat the worse for wear. He carried a huge pressed-cardboard "telescope" and wore a cane, though it hardly seemed cold enough for one. His

rate fortune, all of which he had lost, together with his wife and child, and possibly a bit of his own wits, in the flood of Monterey. Since that catastrophe he had had no other ambition than to earn enough to drift on through life. With neither money nor instruments left, he took to teaching English to the wealthier class of Mexicans in various parts of the country, now in mission schools, now as private tutor. A Methodist institution in Querétaro had dispensed with his services because he protested against an order to make life unpleasant to those boys who did not respond with their spending money to a daily call for alms at the morning assembly. Six months ago he had drifted into a little town n

hat the three daughters be god-mothers to the "Cristo" (in the form of a gaudy doll) that was to be "born" in the town on Christmas eve and paraded to the cathedral of Puebla. As their ticket to heaven depended upon obedience, none of the faithful se?oritas dreamed of declining the honor, even though it involved the expenditure of considerable of papá's good money and required them to spend

opened out. From the window was a truly bird's-eye view of the scattered town of Maltrata, more than two thousand feet almost directly below in the center of a rich green valley, about the edge of which, often on the very brink of the thick-clothed precipice, the train wound round and round behind the double-headed engine, traveling to every point of the compass in its descent. The town rose up to us at last and for the first time since mounting to

ers. The place was unkempt and unclean, with many evidences of poverty, and the air so heavy and humid that vegetation grew even on the roofs. I wandered about town with the "professor" while he "sized it up" as a po