The American Egypt Part 1

The American Egypt.

by Channing Arnold and Frederick J. Tabor Frost.

PREFACE

In publis.h.i.+ng the present volume, it is our privilege to produce the first book ever written by Englishmen on Yucatan--that Egypt of the New World, where, it is now generally admitted, Central American Civilisation reached its apogee--and to be, for the present at least, the only Englishmen who can claim to have explored the uncivilised north-eastern portions of the Peninsula and the islands of her eastern coast. Mr. A. P. Maudslay, who in 1889 made a lengthy stay at and a detailed survey of Chichen, has done yeoman service to Central American archaeology by his years of patient work (alas! too little appreciated) in Guatemala, in the Usumacinta district and Southern Mexico.

Work, and wonderful work, has been done in civilised Yucatan by bands of earnest labourers from the States, from Germany, and from France. Among these the most notable is the late J. L. Stephens, the American traveller, who visited Yucatan in 1842, and who is justly regarded as the Father of Mayan archaeology. In his footsteps has followed, during recent years, Mr. Edward H. Thompson, one of the most painstaking and accomplished of American archaeologists. France has been represented by M. Desire Charnay, and latterly by Count Perigny. Of the German field-workers the most a.s.siduous have been Professor Seler, T. Maler, and K. Sapper; while all who wish to see the Mayan problem solved must pay a meed of thanks to the eminent Professor Forstemann for his attempts to decipher the inscriptions, even if they feel, as do we, that he has allowed his enthusiasm to lead him too far astray on a will-o'-the-wisp path of inquiry and theory.

The problem reviewed in this volume is a profoundly interesting one. The ethnology of the Americas presents a problem as yet unsolved. The average ethnologist has been content to label the vast affiliated hordes and tribes of the two Americas "Mongolian." But the American ethnological puzzle is deepened by the existence of what is known as the Mayan civilisation and its many ramifications throughout Central America. Whence came these building races? What cradle-land is one to a.s.sign to architects whose achievements often rival in grandeur the monuments of Egypt? How is one to believe that they were ordinary members, or members at all, of that great affiliated race of American Indians whose ideas of building were represented in the north by the snow-house of the Eskimo and the wigwam of the Sioux, and in the south by the leaf-shelters of the cannibal inhabitants of the forests of Brazil?

In the later chapters of this volume we endeavour to a.n.a.lyse the evidence which we and others have collected on this th.o.r.n.y Mayan problem. We cannot too strongly urge that the time has come to drop once and for all the Toltec theory. We know that we are thus taking up a position in direct opposition to four-fifths of the students and scholars who have worked in the field; but we are as convinced that the race which built the ruined palaces and temples of Yucatan is not a vanished race as we are convinced that the Toltec theory is a gross error.

And if we are obstinate as to the origin of Mayan civilisation, we fear we must be charged, too, with gross obstinacy in the matter of deciding the age of the ruins. We would like to believe, with those more sanguine, that the wonderful structures have a history rivalling Memphis or Syene. But we cannot believe it, and we hope that those who read this volume will acquit us of coming to this very disappointing decision on flimsy grounds. In such matters no grounds but practical ones are to be trusted, and we claim that an expert builder's careful examination of the ruins, after due allowance is made for the friability of the limestone used in such a climate as Yucatan enjoys, will prove to any open-minded inquirer that the oldest building still standing, so to speak, intact, has not seen more than six centuries.

In the present volume it has been impossible to do more than "open the case" for the theory we propound, viz. that America's first architects were Buddhist immigrants from Java and Indo-China. To attempt to prove this would require much time and money; but, alas! archaeology is not such a popular and paying science as will allow those without large means at their disposal to follow up their theories.

We should need many months of careful study in Java, the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon and India. If investigations there proved satisfactory, the next step would be to follow the route we have suggested as that taken by the migrators in a vessel as similar as possible to those it may be presumed they employed. Along the route a more minute study of the archaeological remains on the islands of the Caroline and Marshall groups than has yet been undertaken could be made.

Thence the voyage would be continued to the American mainland, where a thorough investigation of the country between the coast and Copan would probably yield valuable data. But such an expedition would require an outlay of thousands of pounds and would occupy two or three years, much of which would have to be spent under such hards.h.i.+ps as only enthusiasts could contemplate.

C. A.

F. J. T. F.

LONDON, 1908.

CHAPTER I

A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF MEXICO

Most of us want to do what we are not doing. In the majority of human hearts, deep down, is an intangible tormenting wish to go somewhere, to see some land, to do something which is not in the programme drawn up for us by the inexorable fate of birth and circ.u.mstance. Usually the longing is crushed out by the juggernaut wheels of life's ponderous Car of Necessity, which drives us all forward towards the Unknown in a set groove from which the most desperate efforts never extricate us. We long for the North Pole, we sigh for a trip to the Antarctic regions, we dream of scaling the Mountains of the Moon, with the unreasoning longing of children. We feel we shan't be happy till we get there, and ... we are never happy. We go on longing and ... living in Brixton. Most of us have not left Brixton; most of us never will.

We--the authors of this book--were not living in Brixton, but in quite as commonplace a suburb when the torments of unfulfilled aspiration seized us and shook us, as a terrier might a rat. The demon of discontent shouted at us, grinned at us, sneered at us. "You hate this suburb: clear out, go away!" it said. "Throw up your work and duty.

Burst through the fetters of the commonplace!" Well, we couldn't stand it. We bore it for some weeks, and then "one midnight in the silence of the sleeptime" we knocked the ashes out of our pipes, as we sat mournfully facing each other over our suburban hearth, and from the fullness of our tormented hearts we cried aloud, "We will go to Yucatan!"

But our "leaving Brixton" was not suspicious enough in its suddenness to alarm the tradesmen. Yucatan, that curiously unknown peninsula, easternmost portion of the Republic of Mexico, which by reason of its wondrous ruined cities has earned the t.i.tle of "the Egypt of the New World," had long been a dream of ours. We had put in years of study of the very few and scarce books describing some of those ruins, and hard work on the literature of the problems of Central American civilisation, before we had the satisfaction of "leaving Brixton."

But everything comes to him who knows how to wait, and at last, in pursuance of our resolution to shake the dust of the commonplace off our feet, for a time at least, we found ourselves on a very dingy November afternoon with two unwieldy packing-cases full of guns and saddlery, and innumerable portmanteaux, standing on the Prince's Landing-stage, Liverpool, staring out seaward into the dank mist where an old salt declared our liner to lie. It was obvious he did not, for in a few minutes a dropsical tug--it was almost as broad as it was long--fumed up to the pierside and, hoisting the company's flag, invited us to go with it trustingly into that mist from which we were destined to pa.s.s--though that looked an impossibility--into the dazzling glories of the Eternal Carib summer. Having posted our last wills and testaments and dying wishes to our friends in seventeen envelopes, and given one more pathetic glance at the sombre grey glories of the Liverpudlian capital which stood out drear and grim behind us in the fading light, we surrendered to the captain of the tug, in company with other apprehensive-looking voyagers.

If you have never taken a long sea-voyage, and the etceteras and discomforts of many months' travel in a land (the language of whose inhabitants you have been for weeks trying to grapple with in unintelligible grammars) loom awesome in your mind, there is something positively terrifying in standing on the deck of a tender (as all well-conducted liner-tugs insist on being called) on a damp, dark autumn afternoon. Its grimy decks and its reek of oil offend you. Its chilly bareness, its inhospitable, straight-backed wooden seats, the gaunt nakedness of its wallowing outline, conjure up to your overwrought mind vague comparisons with the bare, whitewashed execution-shed of which you have read in the Yellow Press. You feel you are in a Nautical Executionshed. You stand there s.h.i.+vering. You look back at the fast fading friendly wooden joists of the landing-stage. You wish you had never come. You feel as you do when you get into the dentist's room, having earlier in the day telegraphed to him that you must have the offending tooth out with gas. You see the deadly chair and the cylinder of nitrous oxide and you feel that perhaps after all you could have borne the toothache. Supposing (you shudder at the thought) something went wrong and you never, never woke up. "There! Now please open your mouth wide and breathe deeply." Oh no! Beg pardon! "Mind your toes there, sir, please," from an energetic officer in gold-laced coat, as the gangway flashes out from the steams.h.i.+p's black side like a snake's tongue. A grinding, squeaking noise as the dropsical tug affectionately rubs itself against the fenders which hang on the liner's side--a mad, foaming maelstrom of grey sea-water, whitened as the screw reverses--a Babel of orders and counter-orders, and--you are swallowed up into the floating town; you are on board. You look wildly round: nothing will save you now. The grim pilot in beaver cap stands on the bridge, significant official, to see that no hitch occurs in the execution; the steam whistle sounds mournful through the mist fast settling into fog; the great engines, which are to work unceasingly for seventeen days and nights, break out into a long moaning, groaning, thumping, as they start upon their Sisyphean task, and ... you are off.

Nothing is ever as one expects it. We expected the Atlantic to be at least riotously playful in November. We expected our boat (she was only 4,000 tons) to be tossed, as you flip an empty nutsh.e.l.l, by one great bullying roller to another, in their t.i.tanic play. Not a bit of it. We steamed down the Mersey, out into the Irish Channel, and though the good s.h.i.+p _Floridian_ rolled (Jerusalem! we had to keep our eyes on the children, for the deck was at 45 nearly all day: it was "All hands to the kids!" to stop them slipping overboard), we eat and we drank and the chill air off the Irish coast became balmy, and the mists broke and we raised our caps to My Lord the Sun, whom we had not seen since the summer; and, before we knew where we were, deck-chairs were out and overcoats were off, and officers in white-drill uniforms paced a bridge shaded by snowy awnings, and we leaned back and smoked dreamily in the suns.h.i.+ne and rejoiced that we had "left Brixton."

Some nineteen days later we had just serenely entered on the second course of our admirable daily breakfast when a friendly officer's face appeared at the companion and uttered the monosyllable "land." It's a stupid-enough-looking word when it gets itself written, but it can mean a lot when for nearly three weeks you have not seen anything of it worth talking about. We had become such sea-dogs; we had grown so used to our daily prospect of dancing blue wavelets, of the sunbathed infinite waters, darkling from sapphire to slaty grey at the horizon--our horizon; we had sat so many nights contented under the awnings in the moonlight, the exquisite tropic calm of the sea-night broken only by the periodic music of the s.h.i.+p's bell with its haunting recitative "All's well!" from the look-out man; lulled by the magic of the eternal Carib summer, we had all so learnt in this rare fortnight the wisdom of the lotus-eaters, eating the honey-sweet fruit of the tropic with never one wish to go homeward, that it came as something approaching a shock to us, that word "land." Why, we thought it was as extinct as the dodo!

Time and s.p.a.ce seemed to have melted for us into a world of infinite blues and golds and whites, a world peopled by merry porpoises, by silver-bright flying-fish, and snowy sea-birds. Knives and forks clattered down on to plates and an eager throng of those "whose island home was far beyond the seas" dashed for the companion stairs. We rushed on deck with something of the eagerness the great Christopher must have felt as he hurried to his galleon-p.o.o.p when the Spanish sailors saw from the mast-head, as in a gla.s.s dimly, what they took to be the coast of a New World.

There was not much to see. But stay! What is that which floats, magically suspended, cloudlike, before the gla.s.s? You rub your eyes: you dust the gla.s.s: you look again. Yes! right up in the sky there, as far above the dark line of sh.o.r.e as the puffy white cloud-spots which dot the boundless azure, is a triangle of rose-tinted white; and as you stare the wonder of it all grips you. You see the sun glinting dazzlingly on its eternal snows; you see the great rents and creva.s.ses seaming its sides; you see where the cloud-bank blots out and shrouds its vast shoulders and flanks. It is Orizaba, mighty Orizaba, raising its majestic head four miles into the infinite blue.

In the enthusiasm of the moment we all agreed, even those of us who had suffered from the voyage (and they were few) that it was worth coming six thousand miles to see such a sight; and we were all the better pleased with ourselves and our luck because our good skipper, who had sailed to Vera Cruz off and on for a quarter of a century, declared it was only once in ten times that the great volcano condescended to expose its marvellous beauties so well.

Vera Cruz is a town in travail. Its labour pains have seized it.

Accoucheur Sir Weetman Pearson at the bedside is a.s.sisting at the delivery of a marinopolis--a City of the Sea. Majestic buildings are breaking out amid squalid Spanish stuccoed houses, with frowsy pa.s.sage-ways and garbage-strewn courtyards, dating from Maximilian's day and earlier. Quays and wharves, lighthouses and customs offices, plazas and docks, broad asphalted roadways and stone houses, are rearing themselves where once, ere Sir Weetman's stalwart navvy-elves did their fairy work, were naught but pestilential marshes, sp.a.w.ning-ground for the "Yellow Jack" mosquito, tiny fever scourge-bearer to the panic-stricken inhabitants. As we steamed inside the great stone breakwater built of cyclopean masonry, Vera Cruz's first line of defence from the inroads of the deep, the impression one gets is that of the incongruity of it all. The new Customs House and Oficina de Correos (Post Office), palatial piles, stand out seaward on the plain, far away from the green-shuttered, down-at-heel, ramshackle hovel-town, as if ashamed of it all. What you do feel is that when the confinement is satisfactorily completed, Vera Cruz will be a great city. To-day she is still building-enterprise plus a plaza. Every Spanish-American town is a town with a plaza: Vera Cruz is a plaza with a town. We will get there in a minute, but meantime there are ropes being thrown from our liner to the quaint yellow-faced Mexicans on the quay; the indicator-bell rings from the bridge, the needle flies round to the magic word "Stop," and the huge steel muscles of the great panting, tired engines are at rest at last. It is a glorious day. The coast mists have melted away, and the whites of the distant houses, the dark greens of the palm trees, the flags of all nations fluttering on the s.h.i.+pping, make a vivid contrast in the blaze of sun with their distant background of lofty sand-dunes rolling westward in a horizon of glistening white towards Mexico City.

The quay at Vera Cruz is a kaleidoscope of international trade-life: a spectacle unexampled in its way. Great steams.h.i.+ps--their hatches burst open--continuously belch out their many cargoes upon the wooden piers.

The clouds of dust, the reeking smell of toiling men, the screaming of the steam whistles, the grinding and creaking of the winches, the cries of the workers, the short, sharp words of command, the hoa.r.s.e shouts in a score of languages, and the jangling crash of iron rails or girders or iron sheeting as each fresh load breaks from the winch on to the heaped-up ma.s.s below, make up a veritable trade-h.e.l.l. n.i.g.g.e.rs from Jamaica and the States, the purple veins standing out like weals upon their foreheads, strain and grunt under huge bales; Koreans, red-tinted, flat-faced; Chinamen, their blue wide trousers tucked up to their knees; Spaniards and Mexicans; Italians and Greeks; the dapper j.a.ps, their lithe bodies and small faces contrasting with Viking workmen from Sweden and Norway; Creole lads with raven-hued curly hair and sunkissed faces, their black velvet eyes alight with the l.u.s.t of the south; high-cheekboned, smooth-chinned Aztec Indians, ragged-garbed; sailors of all races, blue-bloused, guernseyed, naked-chested, cheeks and necks that golden bronze for which wind and sea are the only cosmetics, jostle and push, laugh and curse, sweat and pant in their effort to live.

Nowhere can one see the inwardness of the harsh struggle for life better than on Vera Cruz quay. Derelicts, wastrels, beachcombers, sinners and sinned against, bloodshot-eyed drunkards and leaden-grey opium smokers and eaters, strong and weak, healthful and sickly, men with faces of vicious angels, men with faces of devils let loose from h.e.l.l, they have come from the uttermost corners of the earth, these groaning, sweating, reeking human beings, to fight in blistering sun and pestilential dust for the right to live. Long, ordered lines of porters wheel their laden trucks to the bonding sheds; long lines of porters wheel their empty trucks, like pa.s.sing trains, back to the gaping hatches of the giant s.h.i.+ps. Under great umbrellas of scarlet, yellow or green cottons, jutting up like gigantic vari-coloured toadstools, sit portly Mexican dames, coa.r.s.e of face, ponderous in bosoms and stomachs, the trestle-trays at their sides loaded with fulsome heaps of fly-marked fruits, with sickly terrors of sugar and pastry (euphemistically known as _pan dulce_, "sweet bread"), and sweetmeats of such unholy colours that they look as if they had been dipped in the devil's own dye-pot.

There are no cabs in Vera Cruz. If there were it would make no real difference to the unhappy traveller, for there is no roadway to the quays' sides, and baggage is shouldered by one of the innumerable rascally-faced Mexican touts or trundled in huge railway barrows down the piers and jolted over execrable roads towards the barn-like structure which does duty as terminus for the Central Mexican Railroad, one of the most wonderful lines ever laid. A few hours in Vera Cruz is enough to set the weary Briton humming perpetually the air of "Pay, pay, pay." Everything in Mexico is a question of money, and everybody has his or her price. It is often a large one, and a trade union of robbers has decreed that you must pay a dollar (two s.h.i.+llings) a package to have your baggage conveyed from quay to station, a distance of a quarter of a mile. It does not matter how many or how few are your impedimenta, nor the size of the package. The smallest must be paid for at the same rate, though in the reverse case you do not score; for a very large package is charged for at double rates. Unless you are content to drag portmanteaux through the mob, you must 'foot' this first outrageous bill. A fellow-pa.s.senger of ours travelling quietly with his wife paid twenty-four s.h.i.+llings for the transporting of his kit.

The Customs House officials are fair-minded enough, and there is little trouble for the stranger there. Everything obviously for personal use is "pa.s.sed" ungrudgingly with the single exception of silver plate or ornaments. Our only difficulty lay in explaining in execrable Spanish to _Senor el Aduanero_ (Mr. the Custom House Officer) that with a long tour in primeval forests and cruises amid archipelagos of islets before us, 20 lb. weight of Cadbury's solid chocolate and two dozen tins of their cocoa essence were moderate estimates of our personal needs in the direction of this best of all nutriment. He scented trade; and it was some minutes before we prevailed upon him to take his eagle eye off the suspiciously glistening tins which meant such comfort for us in our wanderings. Mournfully learning that our luggage would cost us sixteen s.h.i.+llings to move into safety till we sailed again for Yucatan, we entrusted it to an apparently honest Railway Agent with some misgivings.

Never let your baggage out of your sight at Vera Cruz. The contents are often stolen in the very Customs House. The luggage porters interchange their metal badges, too, so that while No. 29 takes your bag and swears to meet you at the station, if you ever have the luck to see that number again, you will honestly be obliged to admit to the police authorities that the wearer is not the same fellow whom you employed and ... well,--the matter rests there and your stolen bag in Vera Cruz.

But here's the plaza, and your first glimpse of Mexican life. It is dusty and frowsy enough--this stone-paved square with its tawdry green and yellow-painted houses, its ill-laid roads broken by creva.s.ses and large holes under the flimsy tram lines where cobble stones have got displaced; but there is just touch enough of the tropics to make it fascinating. At its centre is a two-storeyed kiosk--bandstand above, drinking-booth below. Under the deep shade of giant laurels, evergreen oaks, tulip trees, palms and orange trees, stands an inner ring of chairs and round tables; the outer circle is formed of iron garden-seats backing on to the flower-beds, rich with scarlet-blossomed poinsettia, twenty or thirty feet high, with yellow and purple bell-flower blooms, with scarlet tulipans and a pale pink and white blossom of a jasmine-like shape and size. Overhead in the thick leaves myriads of _piches_--bright-eyed, sleek-feathered cousins of the English blackbird--chatter, chatter, chatter till you wonder if they will ever stop: the Veracruzian tells you they never do. On three sides of the plaza the houses are arcaded; on the fourth is a hideously meretricious pile of yellowish stone--the cathedral.

It is but 10 a.m., yet the sun is so fierce that the arcades are curtained off with sunblinds reaching to the pavement edge. Within these tunnels of stifling shade, Vera Cruz breakfasts at ten and dines at five, and drinks all day. Tables for two, tables for four or more, tables of metal or of wood, stained with ringed stains of winegla.s.s or coffee-cup are ranged up by the blinds, leaving a pa.s.sage for strollers.

All day, almost all night at these tables sit men--men of all conditions. It is the kaleidoscope of the quays, a shade higher and ...

lower. For the filthy, sweating n.i.g.g.e.r at the hatch-side catches something--however little--of the majesty of toil. But these men, they neither toil nor spin. They have come in from plantations where they are almost kings, and they hold their gla.s.ses in fever-yellowed hands, and leer at the pa.s.sing women and girls, whose coa.r.s.e beauty shrouded in mantilla, whose plump powdered necks, and bosoms heaving opulent under tawdry muslin frocks seem fitting part, the female complement to the drink-sodden scene. But stay! there is a pleasanter sight, at that table over there. It's worth a glance--you are glad to look away from the wolfish-eyed victims of drink and debauchery at those two hearty English skippers, tanned and bearded, who take their liquor like men, and talk of their just completed "runs." They are in the place but not of it, and somehow you think you catch an envious glance thrown their way by the gaunt, blear-eyed creature who crawls past them after his fifth c.o.c.ktail.

In the streets the picturesque Mexican life is a-doing. The ranchero--so tight of trouser that it looks as if his legs must have been melted and run in hot into those grey pantaloons, like bullets in a mould--silver-spurred, his huge Mother-s.h.i.+pton-shaped felt hat embroidered and bound with silver laces, his feet hidden in the great leather pockets which serve as stirrups here, canters into the plaza on a white Arab. Round the corner comes the milkman on a mule, his four jars of milk bulking so large round his saddle that you wonder he can get on or off. The raucous shouts of the Indians as their waggons jolt and b.u.mp and rattle over the broken cobbles: the "_Mula-mula!_" of the Mexican as he urges on the mules which draw the yellow varnished tramcars down the rickety lines: the cracked treble note of the old woman who thrusts her roll of lottery tickets into your face with the eternal "_Por manana_," and the loud insistent cry of the brown-faced, barefoot, rascally-handsome newsboys, mingle into one inharmonious chorus. On the shady seats of the plaza loll the ever-tired Mexican workmen, smoking cigarettes. Twelve strikes, and the troop of _rurales_ in grey uniforms, with carbines and heavy revolvers--the mounted police--ride out from their barracks to take their work of patrolling the town. The townspeople gather and look, and then they sleep again; while in their s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, cigar or cigarette between their lips, Mexican clerks balance ledgers in banks and merchants' offices behind lattice blinds, and a postmaster in white-drill trousers and coloured silk vest sells you postage stamps between puffs of smoke.

The last few years have made a world of difference to Vera Cruz. A decade back for three-quarters of the year it was plague-ridden. In the dusty street-arteries, up and down which its vicious, frowsy life is pumped forwards and backwards to its plaza-heart, you might have walked and scarcely found one doorway without the great splashed crimson cross--seal of the yellow-fever fiend within. To-day it is growing into a health-resort, but even now sanitation is embryonic. Dustcarts, gruesome guillotine-like tumbrils, parade the streets; and "gilded pools a steed would sniff at" make road-crossings into fording-places where you must leap from one broken cobble to another and stumble into chasms of earth and unsightly ruts. But the G.o.ds have been good to this evil little town. For there are armies of unpaid scavengers who parade the streets, doing their work so silently and so perfectly that the munic.i.p.ality has pa.s.sed a law by which an injury to one of them is a special crime and misdemeanour, heavily fined. These are the _zopilotes_, as the Mexicans call the American turkey-buzzards,--to kill one of which costs the murderer at least five dollars. Cadet branch of the vulture family, in their skinny bald heads, their rusty black moth-eaten feathers, their great splotchy claw-feet, their torn and ragged wings hanging loose and low, Nature has given them just the dress becoming such birds of h.e.l.l. No! you did not believe birds could be so ugly, birds could have such hateful eyes, such splay feet, such blotchy beaks. They are everywhere: they perch on the cathedral towers, on the balconies of houses: they ride on the dustcarts, fight for the unspeakable in the gutters, tear at the rotting fish-head and settle in scores round the carcase of a dog. A score of them amble in front of you on the pavement, and hop their ungainly, hideous sideways hops as you spurn them, veritable birds of Beelzebub, Lord of Flies.

But Vera Cruz has good reason to thank heaven for her flying dustbins, and as they peer sideways at you out of their blinking rheumous eyes they seem to know it. "We don't fear you, pa.s.ser," you could imagine them saying (though one of the uncanniest facts about these awful birds is that they have no cry: they are as silent as the dead they filch and feast on), "we are an essential part of this earth-h.e.l.l: we are the Devil's bailiffs." You see the birds in other Mexican towns and cities: you see them in Yucatan perched on the walls of haciendas or in the woods wrenching at the hide of a rotting cow, but they never seem to personify evil as at Vera Cruz. And there is evil there! There is vice in the air. Round the town clings an indescribable haunting sense of sin--sin which is swinish and foul--not the dazzling vice of a Semiramis Court, the glorified debaucheries of a Capri, but a dreary, drink-sodden, fetid sin, clinging to the town like the noisome smell of a charnel-house. Not that you see it. "There ain't no Ten Commandments"

at Vera Cruz; but you don't see them broken: you simply feel they don't exist. Outward decorum here, as in most Mexican towns, is a feature.

Street women are banished to a special quarter, and the shops are cleanly compared with some of Paris in the Rue de Rivoli or the Boulevard de Montmartre. But the women and men, the girls and the boys, have such faces and eyes that you feel that anything, everything, is possible. Perhaps we do "the New City of the True Cross" injustice. All trade-centres where the foreign sailor comes are much of a muchness. We simply record our impressions. "Peradventure there be seven good men in Vera Cruz." There are probably many score more, but one cannot help wis.h.i.+ng the streets did not smell so rancid.

Time was so much the essence of our tour that we decided to travel by the night train to Moctezuma's capital--where our chief business was the procuring of pa.s.sports--despite the lamentations of acquaintances who a.s.sured us we were throwing away the opportunity of a lifetime--the sight of the train's climb of 8,000 feet in the sunlight. As it proved, we had perhaps in some ways a really more awe-inspiring night spectacle; for the moon, which had bathed the tropic seas night after night for us in such gorgeous silver, had but just pa.s.sed its full the very day of our arrival in port.

When the tepid night settled down upon the plaza, we made a hurried meal and, leaving the crowd still drinking, made our way to the station.

There are two trains every twenty-four hours each way between Mexico City and Vera Cruz, and a few minutes after we reached the platform the day train from the capital came lumbering in, the bell on its huge Atlantic type of engine ringing mournfully. The same train starts back within a few minutes--the engines only being changed--and the narrow platform was quite the wrong place for the dreamer during the next few moments, with the crowds clambering out of the huge corridor cars and a mob of would-be pa.s.sengers fighting to get in. In the melee one of us slipped between the train and the platform, while the train was still slowly moving, but was withdrawn by a friendly arm before the oncoming bogey-wheel had pa.s.sed over his foot and put a summary end to explorations in Yucatan.

Railway fares in Mexico are cheap, and the carriages are nasty. Seats of green leather with metal arm-rests (invention of railway-devil, surely) are ranged, like the seats on a bus-top, each side of the car with an avenue down the centre. A Pullman sleeping and breakfast compartment always form part of the night trains. Otherwise there are firsts, seconds, and thirds, the latter wooden-benched contrivances, designed apparently with the set purpose of getting into the cubic s.p.a.ce available the wherewithal for as much potential human discomfort as possible. Into these cars the Mexicans and Indians are climbing, a river of strange colour--blankets of all shades and stripes, straw steeple hats of every make for the men, the womenfolk bare-headed always--baskets of fruit and breads, bottles of drink, and queer knotted handkerchief-luggage reminiscent--without their cleanliness, though--of those blue and black silk handkerchiefs in which "Jack" brings along his spare jumper and flannel s.h.i.+rt when he "comes home again." For us in our lordly "first"--its floors stained with a myriad expectorations, its cus.h.i.+ons b.u.mpy and springless--there is gathering a motley gang of Mexico's upper ten, among whom the diabolical bowler hat and those impossible tweeds, which the foreigner, imitating our fas.h.i.+ons, raises G.o.d knows where, predominate over the Mexican dress. A minute before we start our most interesting fellow-pa.s.senger arrives--a young man--his straw steeple hat set rakishly on one side, his red-white-and-blue blanket thrown round him and under one ear--closely followed by two dark-garbed Mexicans. He is a prisoner, of whom more later, and, as the whistle sounds, we see that his companions are engaged in making him comfortable for the night by mooring him with glistening steel handcuffs to the metal arm-rest of his seat.

We steam out into the still night air, the heavy train b.u.mping and jolting over level-crossings where stand groups of Mexican poor, children, and dogs; past rows of adobe huts, palm-thatched, and frowsy little _tiendas_ (general shops), where glimpses are caught in the oil-flare of trays of unspeakable eatables. It is stifling in the carriages, and we throw up the windows. The moon is rising, the night air is warm and scented--scented with a strange pungent, spicy scent--an indescribable perfume--the smell of the tropics. The train rolls heavily on between dark ma.s.ses of bush and stunted cactus, topped by waving palm-leaves, and here and there banana plantations, heavy with the gra.s.s-green fruit. This is the _tierra-caliente_, "the hot-lands," the great belt of steaming miasmic country stretching some fifty miles ere we begin the climb up to the highlands of Central Mexico. It is hard to see much, but that long slope of undulating ground out there to the left is a coffee plantation, the dark-green bushes dotting the rounded hillside like tufts of wool on a Bushman's head. Now the train crawls, as a fly on the edge of a teacup, round a fertile crater-like valley.

You can look right down into its green glories, where mid the leaves the moonlight touches into quicksilver the boisterous river which bubbles and froths like a Scotch stream in spate. Now we pa.s.s through acres of forest banking up each side so high that it is all blackness; while every few miles the mournful tolling of the engine bell heralds us into a wayside village, the lights streaming through the doors of whitewashed huts, and Indians, m.u.f.fled to their eyes in blankets, standing in silent groups by the railside.

At Rio Blanco we rattle past a great cotton factory, its myriad lights twinkling into such a confusion of illumination that it looks like a swarm of fireflies hovering amid the darkened houses and huts of the town. For hours afterwards we are to see those twinkling lights, thousands of feet below us in the valley, ever s.h.i.+fting their position as the train winds its way round and again round the vast wooded sides of the mountain range. This factory at Rio Blanco is one of the largest cotton factories in Mexico, and during a recent winter was the scene of one of those terrible "incidents" which prove how really superficial is the civilisation of Mexico. The Company objected to their workmen buying their provisions at the ordinary town stores and started a _tienda_ of their own, where the goods sold were both more expensive and of inferior quality. An order was issued that in future the "hands" must deal at the Company's store. The men objected and went on strike. From the capital comes down General Martinez, Vice-Secretary for War, thenceforward to be known as "the Mexican Trepoff," and in one morning his troops shoot down in cold blood 214 men loitering in the streets of Rio Blanco. Enough that the "Iron Master" ordered it. No one disputes the yea or the nay of Porfirio Diaz, maker of Modern Mexico. So the strike is over: labour is scarce in Rio Blanco for a week or so; and Trepoff-Martinez travels back to the capital to ride his fine Arab in Chapultepec Park and spend his evenings at cards in the Jockey Club.

But for the time we lose sight of the factory. We are nearing the limits of the hot-lands, and as you stare out into the night, barrener hills and mounds, stone-speckled, are closing in on each side. Beyond them and above them, blacker distant ma.s.ses climb into the moonlit sky, ringing round the landscape ahead till it looks as if our train, land-locked, will soon have to come to a standstill. The plains, rich with their harvests of cotton and coffee, of fruits, sugar-cane and olives, have given place all round to mountains; and as we wind forward, heights, rising mysterious, magical, wall us in from the rear till we seem as if we were caught in a black devil's-punch-bowl. And then, like the fitting knell to the apprehensive traveller's thoughts, the doleful engine bell clangs sorrowfully backwards and forwards, and the great train rolls into the station of Orizaba. Here in a bare stone-floored barn-room a grossly obese Mexican (like the camel, he seems to have two or three stomachs, his striped leather-belted cotton vest shows such huge undulations of adipose tissue), a.s.sisted by a sickly yellow Indian lad, swaddled in a red and white striped blanket, serves coffee, good coffee too, and _pan dulce_, sweet bread, crusted with caraway seeds. And here, too, the great climbing engines are awaiting us, snorting and blowing off steam like angered bulls eager to charge the toreador-hills which blot out the world ahead of us. We need both, for the train is to be cut into two--one engine will not carry us safely up the perilous slope--and the Pullman carriages in a few minutes rumble out ahead of us.