Anahuac Part 8

We had an unpleasant visit the same night. The custom of the Casa Grande was that after dark a watchman patrolled all night, giving a long blast every quarter of an hour on one of these same doleful Mexican whistles, to show that ho was not sleeping on his rounds. This was for the outside. Inside the house, _pour surcroit de precaution_, a servant came round to see that every one was in his room; and having satisfied himself of this, let loose in the courtyard two enormous bulldogs, which were the terror of the household and of the whole neighbourhood. On this particular night, a noise at our own door woke me from a sound sleep; and I had the pleasure of seeing a creature walk deliberately in, looking huge and terrific in the moonlight. The beast had been into the stable two nights before, and had pinned a cow which was there, keeping his hold upon her till next morning, when he was got off by the keeper. With this specimen of the bulldog's abilities fresh in my recollection, I preferred not making any attempt to resent his impertinent intrusion, but lay still, till he had satisfied himself with walking about the room and sniffing at our beds, when he lay down on my carpet; I soon fell asleep again, and next morning he was gone.

The foreigners in Mexico seem to delight in fierce bull-dogs. The Casa Grande at Tezcuco is not by any means the only place where they form part of the garrison. One English acquaintance of ours in the Capital kept two of these beasts up in his rooms, and not even the servants dared go up, unless the master was there.

Every one who has read Prescott's 'Mexico' will recollect Nezahualcoyotl, the king of Tezcuco; and the palaces he built there for his wives, and his poets, and the rest of his great court. These palaces were built chiefly of mud bricks; and time and the Spaniards have dealt so hardly with them, that even their outlines can no longer be traced. Traces of two large teocallis are just visible, and Mr.

Bowring has some burial mounds in his grounds which will be examined some day. There is a Mexican calendar built into the wall of one of the churches; and, as we walked about the streets of the present town, we noticed stones that must have been sculptured before the Spaniards brought in their broken-down cla.s.sic style, and so stopped the development of native art. As for the rest of old Tezcuco, it has "become heaps." Wherever they dig ditches or lay the foundations of houses, you may see the ground full of its remains.

As I said before, when speaking of the stuccoed floors near Teotihuacan, the acc.u.mulation of alluvial soil goes on very rapidly and very regularly all over the plains of Mexico and Puebla, where everything favours its deposit; and the human remains preserved in it are so numerous that its age may readily be seen. We noticed this in many places, but in no instance so well as between Tezcuco and the hacienda of Miraflores. There a long ditch, some five feet deep, had just been cut in antic.i.p.ation of the rainy season. As yet it was dry, and, as we walked along it, we found three periods of Mexican history distinctly traceable from one end to the other. First came mere alluvium, without human remains. Then, just above, came fragments of obsidian knives and bits of unglazed pottery. Above this again, a third layer, in which the obsidian ceased, and much of the pottery was still unglazed; but many fragments were glazed, and bore the unmistakable Spanish patterns in black and yellow.

It is a pity that these alluvial deposits, which give such good evidence as to the order in which different peoples or different states of society succeeded one another on the earth, should be so valueless as a means of calculating the time of their duration; but one can easily see that they must always be so, by considering how the thickness of the deposits is altered by such accidents as the formation of a mud-bank, or the opening of a new channel,--things that must be continually occurring in districts where this very acc.u.mulation is going on. The only place where any calculation can be based upon its thickness is on the banks of the Nile, where its acc.u.mulations round the ancient monuments may perhaps give a criterion as to the time which has elapsed since man ceased to clear away the deposits of the river.[13]

As an instance of the tendency of alluvial deposits to entomb such monuments of former ages, I must mention the temple of Segeste, which stands on a gentle slope among the hills of northern Sicily. I had heard talk of the graceful proportions of this Doric temple, built by the Greek colonists; and great was my surprise, on first coming in sight of it, to see a pediment supported by two rows of short squat columns, without bases, and rising directly from the ground. A nearer inspection showed the cause of this extraordinary distortion. The whole slope had risen full six feet during the 2500 years, or so, that have elapsed since its desertion; and the temple now stands in a large oblong pit, which has lately been excavated. As we left the spot, and turned to see it again a few yards off, the beautiful symmetry of the whole had disappeared again.

To return to Tezcuco. Some three or four miles from the town stands the hill of Tezcotzinco, where Nezahualcoyotl had his pleasure-gardens; and to this hill we made an excursion early one morning, with Mr. Bowring for our guide. We did not go first to Tezcotzinco itself, but to another hill which is connected with it by an aqueduct of immense size, along which we walked. The mountains in this part are of porphyry, and the channel of the aqueduct was made princ.i.p.ally of blocks of the same material, on which the smooth stucco that had once covered the whole, inside and out, still remained very perfect. The channel was carried, not on arches, but on a solid embankment, a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet high, and wide enough for a carriage-road.

The hill itself was overgrown with brushwood, aloes, and p.r.i.c.kly pears, but numerous roads and flights of steps cut in the rock were distinguishable. Not far below the top of the hill, a terrace runs completely round it, whence the monarch could survey a great part of his little kingdom. On the summit itself I saw sculptured blocks of stone; and on the side of the hill are two little circular baths, cut in the solid rock. The lower of the two has a flight of steps down to it; the seat for the bather, and the stone pipe which brought the water, arc still quite perfect.

His majesty used to spend his afternoons here on the shady side of the hill, apparently sitting up to his middle in water, like a frog, if one may judge by the height of the little seat in the bath. If, as some writers say, these were only tanks with streams of running water, and not baths at all, why the steps cut in their sides, which are just large enough and high enough for a man to sit in? No water has come there for centuries now; and the morning-sun nearly broiled us, till we got into a sort of cave, excavated in the hill, it is said, with an idea of finding treasure. It seems there was once a Mexican calendar cut in the rock at this spot; and some white people who were interested in such matters, used to come to see it, and poke curiously about in search of other antiquities. Naturally enough, the Indians thought that they expected to find treasure; and with a view of getting the first chance themselves, they cut down the calendar, and made this large excavation behind it.

Here we sat in the shade, breakfasting, and hearing Mr. Bowring's stories of the art of medicine as practised in the northern states of Mexico, where decoction of s.h.i.+rt is considered an invaluable specific when administered internally; and the recognised remedy for lumbago is to rub the patient with the drawers of a man named John. No doubt the latter treatment answers very well!

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD MEXICAN BRIDGE NEAR TEZCUCO.]

There is an old Mexican bridge near Tezcuco which seems to be the original _Puente de las Bergantinas_, the bridge where Cortes had the brigantines launched on the lake of Tezcuco. This bridge has a span of about twenty feet, and is curious as showing how nearly the Mexicans had arrived at the idea of the arch. It is made in the form of a roof resting on two b.u.t.tresses, and composed of slabs of stone with the edges upwards, with mortar in the interstices; the slabs being sufficiently irregular in shape to admit of their holding together, like the stones of a real arch. One may now and then see in Europe the roofs of small stone hovels made in the same way; but twenty feet is an immense span for such a construction. I have seen such buildings in North Italy, in places where the limestone is so stratified as to furnish rough slabs, three or four inches thick, with very little labour in quarrying them out. In Kerry there are ancient houses and churches roofed in the same way. What makes the Tezcuco bridge more curious is that it is set askew, which must have made its construction more difficult.

The brigantines which the Spaniards made, and transported over the mountains in such a wonderful manner, fully answered their purpose, for without them Mexico could hardly have been taken. After the Conquest they were kept for years, for the good service they had done; but vessels of such size do not seem to have been used upon the lake since then; and I believe the only sailing craft at present is Mr. Bowring's boat, which the Indians look at askance, and decidedly decline to imitate. It is true that, somewhere near the city, there is moored a little steamer, looking quite civilized at a distance. It never goes anywhere, however; and I have a sort of impression of having heard that when it was first made they got up the steam once, but the conduct of the machinery under these circ.u.mstances was so extraordinary and frantic that no one has ventured to repeat the experiment.

Before we left Tezcuco, we went in a boat to explore Mr. Bowring's salt-works, which are rather like the salines of the South of France.

Patches of the lake are walled off, and the water allowed to evaporate, which it does very rapidly under a hot sun, and with only three-fourths of the pressure of air upon it that we have at the sea-level. The lake-water thus concentrated is run into smaller tanks. It contains carbonate and sesquicarbonate of soda, and common salt. The addition of lime converts the sesquicarbonate of soda into simple carbonate, and this is separated from the salt by taking advantage of their different points of crystallization. The salt is partly consumed, and partly used in the extraction of silver from the ore, and the soda is bought by the soap-makers.

Humboldt's remarks on the small consumption of salt in Mexico are curious. The average amount used with food is only a small fraction of the European average. While the Tlascalans were at war with the Aztecs, they had to do without salt for many years, as it was not produced in their district. Humboldt thinks that the chile which the Indians consume in such quant.i.ties acts as a subst.i.tute. It is to be remembered that the soil is impregnated with both salt and natron in many of these upland districts, and the inhabitants may have eaten earth containing these ingredients, as they do for the same purpose in several places in the Old World.

We disembarked after sailing to the end of these great evaporating pans, and found horses waiting to take us to the Bosque del Contador.

This is a grand square, looking towards the cardinal points, and composed of ahuehuetes, grand old deciduous cypresses, many of them forty feet round, and older than the discovery of America. My companion, not content with buying collections at secondhand, wished to have some excavations made on his own account, and very judiciously fixed on this spot, where, though there were no buildings standing, the appearance of the ground and the mounds in the neighbourhood, together with the historical notoriety of the place, made it probable that something would be found to repay a diligent search. This expectation was fully realized, and some fine idols of hard stone were found, with an infinitude of pottery and small objects.

When I look through my notes about Tezcuco, I do not find much more to mention, except that a favourite dish here consists of flies' eggs fried. These eggs are deposited at the edge of the lake, and the Indians fish them out and sell them in the market-place. So large is the quant.i.ty of these eggs, that at a spot where a little stream deposits carbonate of lime, a peculiar kind of travertine is forming which consists of ma.s.ses of them imbedded in tho calcareous deposit.

The flies[14] which produce these eggs are called by the Mexicans "_axayacatl_" or "water-face." There was a celebrated Aztec king who was called Axayacatl; and his name is indicated in the picture-writings by a drawing of a man's face covered with water. The eggs themselves are sold in cakes in the market, pounded and cooked, and also in lumps _au naturel_, forming a substance like the roe of a fish. This is known by the characteristic name of "_ahuauhtli_", that is "water-wheat."[15]

The last thing we did at Tezcuco, was to witness the laying down of a new line of water-pipes for the saltworks. This I mention because of the pipes, which were exactly those introduced into Spain by the Moors and brought here by tho Spaniards. These pipes are of glazed earthenware, taper at one end, and each fitting into the large end of the next. The cement is a mixture of lime, fat, and hair, which gets hard and firm when cold, but can be loosened by a very slight application of heat. A thousand years has made no alteration in the way of making these pipes. Here, however, the ground is so level that one great characteristic of Moorish waterworks is not to be seen. I mean the water-columns which are such a feature in the country round Palermo, and in other places where the system of irrigation introduced by the Moorish invaders is still kept up. These are square pillars twenty or thirty feet high, with a cistern at the top of each, into which the water from the higher level flowed, and from which other pipes carried it on; the sole object of the whole apparatus being to break the column of water, and reduce the pressure to the thirty or forty feet which the pipes of earthenware would bear.

This subject of irrigation is very interesting with reference to the future of Mexico. We visited two or three country-houses in the plateaux, where the gardens are regularly watered by artificial channels, and the result is a vegetation of wonderful exuberance and beauty, converting these spots into oases in the desert. On the lower levels of the tierra templada where the sugar-cane is cultivated, a costly system of water-supply has been established in the haciendas with the best results. Even in the plains of Mexico and Puebla, the grain-fields are irrigated to some small degree. But notwithstanding this progress in the right direction, the face of the country shows the most miserable waste of one of the chief elements of the wealth and prosperity of the country, the water.

In this respect, Spain and the high lands of Mexico may be compared together. There is no scarcity of rain in either country, and yet both are dry and parched, while the number and size of their torrent-beds show with what violence the mountain-streams descend into lakes or rivers, rather agents of destruction than of benefit to the land.

Strangely enough, both countries have been in possession of races who understood that water was the very life-blood of the land, and worked hard to build systems of arteries to distribute it over the surface. In both countries, the warlike Spaniards overcame these races, and irrigating works already constructed were allowed to fall to ruin.

When the Moriscos were expelled from their native provinces of Andalusia and Granada, their places were but slowly filled up with other settlers, so that a great part of their aqueducts and watercourses fell into decay within a few years. These new colonists, moreover, came from the Northern provinces, where the Moorish system of culture was little understood; and, incredible as it may seem, though they must have had ocular evidence of the advantages of artificial irrigation, they even neglected to keep in repair the water-channels on their own ground. Now the traveller, riding through Southern Spain, may see in desolate barren valleys remains of the Moorish works which centimes ago brought fertility to grain-fields and orchards, and made the country the garden of Europe.

There was another nation who seem to have far surpa.s.sed both Moors and Aztecs in the magnitude of their engineering-works for this purpose.

The Peruvians cut through mountains, filled up valleys, and carried whole rivers away in artificial channels to irrigate their thirsty soil. The historians' accounts of these water-works as they were, and even travellers' descriptions of the ruins that still remain, fill us with astonishment. It seems almost like some strange fatality that this nation too should have been conquered by the same race, the ruin of its great national works following immediately upon the Conquest.

Spain is rising again after long centuries of degradation, and is developing energies and resources which seem likely to raise it high among European nations, and the Spaniards are beginning to hold their own again among the peoples of Europe. But they have had to pay dearly for the errors of their ancestors in the great days of Charles the Fifth.

The ancient Mexicans were not, it is true, to be compared with the Spanish Arabs or the Peruvians in their knowledge of agriculture and the art of irrigation; but both history and the remains still to be found in the country prove that in the more densely populated parts of the plains they had made considerable progress. The ruined aqueduct of Tetzcotzinco which I have just mentioned was a grand work, serving to supply the great gardens of Nezahualcoyotl, which covered a large s.p.a.ce of ground and excited the admiration of the Conquerors, who soon destroyed them, it is said, in order that they might not remain to remind the conquered inhabitants of their days of heathendom.

Such works as these seem, however, not to have extended over whole provinces as they did in Spain. In the thinly peopled mountain-districts, the Indians broke up their little patches of ground with a hoe, and watered them from earthen jars, as indeed they do to this day.

The Spaniards improved the agriculture of the country by introducing European grain, and fruit-trees, and by bringing the old Roman plough, which is used to this day in Mexico as in Spain, where two thousand years have not superseded its use or even altered it. Against these improvements we must set a heavy account of injury done to the country as regards its cultivation. The Conquest cost the lives of several hundred thousand of the labouring cla.s.s; and numbers more were taken away from the cultivation of the land to work as slaves for the conquerors in building houses and churches, and in the silver-mines.

When the inhabitants were taken away, the ground went out of cultivation, and much of it has relapsed into desert. Even before the Conquest, Mexico had been suffering for many years from incessant wars, in which not only thousands perished on the field of battle, but the prisoners sacrificed annually were to be counted by thousands more, while famine carried off the women and children whose husbands and fathers had perished. But the slaughter and famine of the first years of the Spanish Conquest far exceeded anything that the country had suffered before.

At the time of the Conquest of Mexico the Spaniards let the native irrigating-works fall into decay; and they took still more active measures to deprive the land of its necessary water, by their indiscriminate destruction of the forests on the hills that surround the plains. When the trees were cut down, the undergrowth soon perished, and the soil which had served to check the descending waters in their course was soon swept away. During the four rainy months, each heavy shower sends down a flood along the torrent-bed which flows into a river, and so into the ocean, or, as in the Mexican valley, into a salt lake, where it only serves to injure the surrounding land. In both cases it runs away in utter waste.

In later years the Spanish owners of the soil had the necessity of the system impressed upon them by force of circ.u.mstances; and large sums were spent upon the construction of irrigating channels, even in the outlying states of the North.

In the American territory recently acquired from Mexico history has repeated itself in a most curious way. We learn from Froebel, the German traveller, that the new American settlers did not take kindly to the system of irrigation which they found at work in the country. They were not used to it, and it interfered with their ideas of liberty by placing restrictions upon their doing what they pleased on their own land. So they actually allowed many of the water-ca.n.a.ls to fall into ruins. Of course they soon began to find out their mistake, and are probably investing heavily in water-supply by this time. We ought not to be too severe upon the Spaniards of the sixteenth century for an economical mistake which we find the Americans falling into under similar circ.u.mstances in the nineteenth.

CHAPTER VII.

CUERNAVACA. TEMISCO. XOCHICALCO.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SPANISH-MEXICAN SADDLE AND ITS APPURTENANCES.]

Much too soon, as we thought, the day came when we had arranged to leave Tezcuco and return to Mexico, to prepare for a journey into the tierra caliente. On the evening of our return to the capital there was a little earthquake, but neither of us noticed it; and thus we lost our one chance, and returned to England without having made acquaintance with that peculiar sensation.

The purchase of horses and saddles and other equipments for our journey, gave us an opportunity of poking about into out-of-the-way corners of the city, and seeing some new phases of Mexican life; and certainly we made the most of the chance. We made acquaintance with horse-dealers, who brought us horses to try in the courtyard of the great house of our friends the English merchants in the Calle Seminario, and there showed off their paces, walking, pacing, and galloping. To trot is considered a disgusting vice in a Mexican horse; and the universal subst.i.tute for it here is the _paso_, a queer shuffling run, first, the two legs on one side together, and then the other two. You jolt gently up and down without rising in the stirrups; and when once you are used to it the paso is not disagreeable, and it is well suited to long mountain-journeys. Horses in the United States are often trained to this gait, and are known as "pacing" horses.

Another peculiarity in the training of Mexican horses is, that many of them are taught to "rayar," that is, to put their fore-feet out after the manner of mules going down a pa.s.s; and slide a short distance along the ground, so as to stop suddenly in the midst of a rapid gallop. To practise the horses in this feat, the jockey draws a lino ("_raya_") on the ground, and teaches them to stop exactly as they reach it, and whirl round in the opposite direction. This performance is often to be seen on the paseo, and other places, where smart young gentlemen like to show off themselves and their horses; but it is only a fancy trick, and they acknowledge that it spoils the animal's fore-legs.

After much bargaining and chaffering we bought three horses for ourselves and our man Antonio, giving eight, seven, and four pounds for them. This does not seem much to give for good hackneys, as these were; but they were not particularly cheap for Mexico. While we were at Tezcuco, Mr. Christy used to ride one of Mr. Bowring's horses, a pretty little chestnut, which carried him beautifully, and had cost just eleven dollars, or forty-six s.h.i.+llings. It had been bought of the horse-dealers who come down every year from the almost uninhabited states of Chihuahua, Durango, and Cohahuila, on the American frontier, where innumerable herds of horses, all but wild, roam over boundless prairies, feeding on the tall coa.r.s.e gra.s.s. Their keep costs so little, that the breeders are not compelled, as in England, to break them in and sell them at the earliest possible moment, and they let the young colts roam untamed till they are five or six years old. Their great strength and power of endurance in proportion to their size is in great measure to be ascribed to this early indulgence.

It is very clear that when a horse is to be sold for somewhere between two and six pounds, the breeder cannot afford to spend much time in breaking him in. The rough-rider lazos him, puts on the bridle with its severe bit, and springs upon his back in spite of kicking and plunging.

The horse gallops furiously off across country of his own accord, but when his pace begins to flag, the great vaquero spurs come into requisition, and in an hour or two he comes back to the corral dead beat and conquered once for all. It is easy to teach him his paces afterwards. The anquera--as it is called--is put on his haunches, to cure him of trotting, and to teach him the paso instead. It is a leather covering fringed with iron tags, which is put on behind the saddle, and allows the horse to pace without annoying him; but the least approach to a trot brings the pointed tags rattling upon his haunches. We bought one of these anqueras at Puebla. It was very old, and curiously ornamented with carved patterns. In the last century, these anqueras were a regular part of Mexican horse-equipment; but now, except in horse-breaking yards or old curiosity-shops, they are seldom to be seen.

Almost all the Mexican horses descend from the Arab breed--the gentlest and yet the most spirited in the world, which have not degenerated since the Spaniards brought them over in the early days of the Conquest, but retain unchanged their small graceful shape, their swiftness, and their power of bearing fatigue. There seem really to be no large horses bred in the country. Instead of jolting about in a carriage drawn by eight or ten mules, with harness covered with silver and gold--as rich Mexicans used to do, the proper thing now is to have a pair of tall carriage-horses, like ours in England; and these are brought at great expense from the United States, and by the side of the graceful little Mexicans they look as big and as clumsy as elephants.

Our saddles were of the old Moorish pattern, of monstrous size and weight, very comfortable for the rider, but, I fear, much less so for the horse, whose back often gets sadly galled, in spite of the thick padding and the two or three blankets that are put on underneath. These saddles run into high peaks behind and before, so that you can hardly fall out of them, even when you go to sleep in the saddle on a long journey, as many people habitually do. In front, the saddle rises into a pummel which is made of hard wood, and is something like a large mushroom with its stalk. Round this the end of the lazo is wound, after the noose has been thrown. All Mexican saddles are provided with these heads in front, and have, moreover, several pairs of little thongs attached to them on each side, which serve to tie on bags, whips, water-gourds, and other odds and ends. Behind the seat of the saddle are more straps, where cloaks and serapes are fastened; and in case of need even a carpet-bag will travel there. We were in the habit of returning from our expeditions with our horses so covered with the plants and curiosities we had collected, that it became no easy matter to get our legs safely over the horses' backs, into their proper places among the cl.u.s.ters of miscellanea. Our acquaintances used to compare us to the perambulating butchers' shops, which are a feature in Mexican streets, and consist of a horse with a long saddle covered with hooks, and on every hook a joint.

The flaps of our saddles, the great spatterdashes that protected our feet from the mud, and the broad stirrup-straps were covered with carved and embossed patterns; indeed almost all leather-work is decorated in this way, and the saddle-makers delight in ornamenting their wares with silver plates and bosses; so that it was not surprising that our saddles and bridles should have cost, though second-hand, nearly as much as the horses.

In books of travels in Mexico up to the beginning of the present century, one of the staple articles of wondering description was the gorgeous trappings of the horses, and the spurs, bits, and stirrups of gold and silver. The costumes have not changed much, but the taste for such costly ornaments has abated; and it is now hardly respectable to have more than a few pounds worth of bullion on one's saddle or around one's hat, or to wear a hundred or so of b.u.t.tons of solid gold down the sides of one's leather trousers, with a very questionable cotton calzoncillo underneath.

The horses' bits are made with a ring, which pinches the under-lip when the bridle is tightened, and causes great pain when it is pulled at all hard. At first sight it seems cruel to use such bits, but the system works very well; and the horses, knowing the power their rider has over them, rarely misbehave themselves. One rides along with the loop at the end of the twisted horse-hair bridle hanging loose on one finger, so that the horse's mouth is much less pulled about than with the bridles we are accustomed to in England. When it is necessary to guide the horse, the least pressure is enough; but, as a general rule, the little fellow can find his way as well as his rider can. We used continually to let our reins drop on our horses' necks, and jog on careless of pits and stumbling-blocks. I have even seen my companion take out his pocket-book, and improve the occasion by making notes and sketches as he went.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SPANISH-MEXICAN BIT, WITH ITS RING AND CHAINS. LENGTH 9 INCHES, WIDTH 5-1/2 INCHES.]