The American Egypt Part 7

On the site of the ancient Indian village of Labcah La Compania Agricola has built itself a settlement which it has rechristened Solferino. On our arrival there we had the kindest welcome possible from the Cuban superintendent, who entertained us at a hastily improvised lunch what time he insisted on sending on in advance of us a message to the officials at the sugar plantation some ten miles off to prepare them for our visit. The company is one of the richest in Yucatan, chiefly owing to the great saline lagoons over which we had pa.s.sed, from which is extracted rough salt, for the sale of which they practically have a monopoly throughout Northern and Western Yucatan, exporting large quant.i.ties as well to Vera Cruz and other ports on the Mexican gulf.

They have also undertaken chicle-cutting, and at Solferino are opening up many acres of woodland for plantations of cocoa, cotton, and banana.

This latter settlement showed every sign of their growing prosperity, being quite the model village, with trim huts fronting on to large corrals filled with cattle and mules. Thence late in the afternoon we started for their sugar farm, which is the industry latest initiated, but in which, as we afterwards learnt, there is not so much profit as their enterprise deserves, because of the cheap American sugars which are rapidly becoming a vast import throughout Yucatan.

Heading northward again, we were soon once more among the swamps, the forests thinning off and giving place to a low-lying country, just the steaming hot, miasmic soil for sugar. A few miles further and we entered the first plantations, each side of us stretching acres of the rusty-green rush-like plants topping the purple yellowy canes, each plantation marked with a board bearing the date of planting and the number of _mecates_[4] in the patch. Ahead of us we soon saw the tall brick chimney of the sugar mill, and then, as far as the eye could see, sugar-cane stretched on either side of the track till we entered the settlement. First a street of wooden huts, each built up on a platform two feet from the ground, and reached by a few wood steps like those of a bathing-machine, and then a wide clearing; on one side the sugar mill, a huge shed-like erection, on the other the large one-storeyed bungalow, built of Mexican cedar, the administrative building of the plantation.

Here we were greeted by the chief administrator of the Company with such courteous kindness as made us feel deeply the disadvantage we laboured under in being such poor Spanish scholars. Senor Sanchez was but fifty, though he looked an old man. The stooping shoulders, the thin wasted figure, the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, the dried yellow skin, told only too sadly their tale of bitter battle waged with the fever fiend.

For here where sugar grows men wither, and the little cemetery, lying a mile seaward behind the mill and established but a few years, could already boast a larger census than the settlement.

We were invited within to a room which was roomy enough, but not room-like in that it had no furniture, save half a dozen rocking-chairs.

The walls were bare, and the boarded floor was innocent of carpet or matting and unseemly with a myriad expectorations. Here we were introduced to the staff, a group of Cubans, rough, bearded men in flannel s.h.i.+rts and leather-belted linen trousers grimy with coal dust and engine grease. These were the engineers; most of them men who had worked on plantations in Cuba before the Spanish-American War but had found their occupation gone owing to the dislocation of plantation work there, and so had come across to Yucatan. They were rough enough, but a real relief after the hypocritically civil Yucatecans, who had so far done their best to ruin our tour. After a general conversation, if indeed it deserves that adjective, seeing that we had to shoot the Spanish conversational rabbit as it dodged from rocking-chair to rocking-chair, a move was made to view the engines. The chief director of the Company is a henequen millionaire and s.h.i.+powner, and no money had been spared to make the plant perfect. A powerful American type of vertical engine of the very latest make worked the huge crusher and the centrifugal machine which separates the sugar from the mola.s.ses. It was Sat.u.r.day afternoon and the mill was not working, but the "hands" were loafing round, and we were struck with the number of Koreans. The administrator told us that he had quite a village of these. They are good workmen, easily satisfied, and stand the climate well. Another figure that attracted our attention was a huge bewhiskered n.i.g.g.e.r, who on seeing us was all smiles. He proved to be from Belize, British Honduras, and of course spoke good English. He was almost childishly proud of his rights as a British subject, and told us that he had served in one of the West Indian regiments. He said he liked the English soldier, and that the officers were always kind and treated the black man well. As we shook his hand in parting, we were glad to learn that he was happy, liked his work, and was fairly treated. The bulk of the men employed are Mexicans. As the administrator explained, the great difficulty of the Company is the dearth of labour: "_Poca gente_, _poca gente_," he kept on repeating ("There are very few people"); for the Indians around, who have been terribly thinned off by Mexican ma.s.sacres, will not work. These Mexican labourers are a good-for-nothing, discontented, idle lot, and the _calabozo_, or prison-hut, close to the engine house, usually contained one or more of these recalcitrants.

Drink is the great evil among them, and the most severe restrictions are in force limiting the amount of liquor they can obtain from the Company's store during the day. At sunset dinner was served in an inner room opening out upon the filthiest yard imaginable. There pigs, dogs, cats, turkeys, ducks, and chickens ran riot and trespa.s.sed into the dining-room to see what good things the Senores had for dinner. Nothing is stranger than the Spaniard's disregard for those comforts of cleanliness which can fill even the humblest home with "sweetness and light." Here was our host,--a Spanish Cuban of good birth, with the manners of a prince, courteous, kindly, cultured,--content to dine off a tablecloth so stained and filthy and thick with grime that a Pickford's van boy would resent such a cover for his humble board at Cafe Lockhart or Pearce-and-Plenty. It was nothing to him and his genial, intelligent subordinates that the mustard-pot was dark with dead flies, and that ugly grease spots decorated the cloth, which was ringed with the stains of myriad winegla.s.ses. They were all living like pigs and indeed with them, for the porkers came in and rooted under the table for the crumbs that fell from the rich men. And we were rich as far as food was concerned, for they gave us an excellent dinner of chicken and rice, beef, pork, omelette, boiled plantains and sweet potatoes, with pineapple as desert, the waiters being two Mexican boys who wore their straw hats and blankets all through their dinner-duties.

The next morning we took our coffee with the administrator, sitting round the same fly-marked cloth. It was a lesson in Spanish dignity and how a man may tower above his surroundings to hear this grim fever-stricken Spanish gentleman talk history and politics in an almost stately old-world fas.h.i.+on amid such squalor. He insisted that we should stay to take breakfast with him at eleven, and we were glad we did, for we witnessed a curious scene well worth seeing. The previous evening the men had received their week's wages. As we had sipped our coffee we had heard the young Cuban clerk eternally calling "Antonio Rodriguez,"

"Lucio Perez," and such names; and then the c.h.i.n.k of Mexican silver as the money, hard enough earned in those steaming h.e.l.l-hot sugar swamps, was paid through the little iron-barred pigeon-hole. But there was one of these fellows who had gone away discontented. Each man is paid according to the amount of cane he cuts. This fellow, who had only been employed a fortnight, had cut none because he declared he had been engaged as an overseer, not a hand labourer. But during the two weeks he had had food and drink supplied him on credit, and now he had come up for pay. The clerk told him, naturally enough, that he would be paid when he did some work, and not before. So shortly after breakfast the man appeared before the pay-office to once more air his wrongs. The clerk referred the case to the administrator, who was talking with us, and the latter crossed over to the office. A minute later we heard angry voices, and then, to our amazement, the administrator dashed out of his office through the room where we sat and simply rushed at the grumbler.

The latter backed off as Senor Sanchez made for him, apparently to kick or strike him.

Calling out threats, he disappeared, and we thought the scene was over; but it was obviously only a dress rehearsal, for he presently reappeared brandis.h.i.+ng his machete. It was really quite exciting: the man was evidently going to run amuck. He was a st.u.r.dy fellow too, bullet-headed, bulldog-jawed, evil-eyed: just the man for mischief. There was quite a panic in the office. One old clerk picked up a long pole, the administrator seized a workmanlike walking-stick; but the coolest of the lot was a young Cuban who, with hands in his trouser pockets, went forward to parley with the man. It seemed that the outburst of the administrator had been due to the man's personal insolence, and that he had then ordered him to surrender his machete. This he was now brandis.h.i.+ng, and it certainly looked like murder; but it was soon obvious that there was more cheap melodrama than business about the fellow. He went down on one knee and appealed to heaven to witness that he would rather give up his life than his machete; and then, as the young unarmed Cuban approached him, he got up and retreated a few steps further. But in such matters he who retires is lost, and slowly but surely round him were extending, like the horns of a Zulu impi, a semicircle of officials, in the centre the administrator, his fever-yellowed face grey now, but with anger, not fear, his whole emaciated figure expressive of an almost demoniacal rage. So the fellow made a bolt for it to his hut; and when, some half an hour later, we started for the coast, we saw him, as we looked back, disarmed and being led in by the plantation police to cool his heels for forty-eight hours in the calabozo.

The few miles which separated the sugar plantation from the sea were a kind of tropical saltings, mud and spa.r.s.e gra.s.s alive with small land-crabs which galloped in hundreds to gain the shelter of boulder or fallen tree-trunk as we approached. With the utmost courtesy Senor Sanchez had insisted upon providing us with a boat for our journey to Holboch, lying four miles from the little rickety wooden quay which const.i.tutes the Company's port of Chiquila. Holboch--sixteen miles long, low-lying, narrow--is quite the island of one's tropical dreams, a harmony of sparkling sand, blue sea, and palm-trees. An avenue of palms leads to the fisher-settlement, a square of wood huts, painted bright blue and white, built round a plaza of sand. We had the bad luck to arrive at the moment when the fisher folk were about to launch themselves upon a sea of dissipation in celebration of the New Year.

Thus there were few who wished to launch on the other sea. But Yucatecans will do anything for money, and we soon found a boat, a dory of three tons, "La Esperanza," and a captain. Short, stout, bow-legged, with rolling rollicking walk and eyes twinkling under s.h.a.ggy eyebrows, a big flap hat worn rakishly over one eye, he was such a ludicrous mixture of the truculent and the comic that we christened him "the amiable smuggler." But no Yucatecan can keep his word, and our new friend's amiability was not proof against this racial failing. Thus, having settled the terms overnight for the boat which was to take us round Cape Catoche, we were astonished to find him at our hut-door the next morning declaring he must have another four dollars a day. It was all the fault of the New Year festivities. The poor fellow wanted to get drunk, and he felt that if this could not be, he must receive heavy compensation. We compromised the matter by adding one dollar to the daily pay and agreeing to postpone our sailing till the New Year was in. We very foolishly advanced him and the two other Yucatecans who were to form our crew thirty dollars, and paid for our mistake by being obliged to spend the rest of the day watching the dipsomaniacal trio to check their Gadarenic descent into senselessness.

The Holbochians were not quite replicas of those proverbial South Sea Islanders who gained a precarious living by taking in each other's was.h.i.+ng; but their relations were, if anything, even more intimate; for everybody appeared to be everybody else's brother, sister, cousin or aunt. We were told that the whole village--some three hundred--represented the ramifications of practically only two families, and the sickly pallor of some of the boys and girls suggested that this inbreeding was already making its evil influence felt. There was not an Indian in the place. It was a community of Yucatecan fishermen, as indeed are most of the inhabited islands as far south as Ascension Bay.

They lead an easy-going, loiter life; swinging the sunny hours away in their hammocks, and loafing the evenings away drinking in the tiny spirit-stores presided over by a huge, bloated Dutch immigrant and his equally fat frau, or love-making among the thorn-bushes on the beach.

Occasionally they fish or take a job as one of the hands of the small trading schooners which ply from Progreso to Cozumel; but life is cheap, and they do as little honest work as they reasonably can.

This indeed is the average Yucatecan; an easy-going creature, fond of women, fonder of drink, and fondest of dancing. If there is anything which awakens the Yucatecan soul, it is the charms of _la baile_ (the ball). The Holbochians took it rather hardly that we had descended upon them at such an intempestive moment. They would have so much liked to have given themselves wholeheartedly to the congenial task of d.o.g.g.i.ng the footsteps of "los Americanos," as they insisted upon calling us, and jeering us at intervals; but they really had scarcely time to spare, for the whole village was agog over the New Year's Eve Ball. Most Yucatecan villages have dancing halls; Holboch had. It was a large palm-leaf-thatched open shed at the corner of the plaza, wood-floored.

Round it were ranged wood benches; from the centre roof-pole hung two or three oil lamps, and the decorations were flags. Dancing began at about eight.

The American traveller Stephens was loud in his praises of Yucatecan dancing. Perhaps it has altered in the last sixty years. It certainly seemed to us the dullest performance we had ever witnessed. Those mechanical toys, metal trays upon which are fixed several couples of tin figures which, when wound up, go slowly round and round in a melancholy way on the same spot, give about the best idea of a Yucatecan dance.

There is no life, no spirited movement, no gaiety in the entertainment.

Perhaps this is really the fault of the orchestra. It is difficult even to speak of Yucatecan music without a shudder. It is curious that a people so devoted to dancing, even if it is only of the humming-top type, should have no music in them. They seem to be ignorant of air, tune, or time. Their dance music is one long droning chant, flat, stale, and unprofitable, absolutely maddening in its reiteration, reminiscent of childhood's jest about "the tune the cow died to." The band at Holboch consisted of a kettledrum and a concertina. There was no fixed orchestra; anybody who was handy beat the drum, and everybody in turn had a go at the concertina; each performer adding his little best to the musicless horror of the noise. There appeared to be no fixed step; some couples hopped round, some went round with a sliding slither, and others seemed to be walking round rapidly. As long as the music lasted the men's faces bore a look of concentrated earnestness, the girls' that of submissive boredom. When the music stopped, the girls were placed on the benches, and the men walked out into the plaza and stood staring at them. We were much interested in one performer, a young fellow of about twenty. We had seen him earlier in the day engaged in bathing in a pail, a method of ablution requiring much persistence. And now, in the most spotless of linen breeches and coloured cotton vest, he had thrown himself heart and soul into the evening's enjoyment. He danced as long as the drum beat, and then he put his partner upon the shelf, and came out into the plaza and mopped his forehead till the drum began again.

We bore with the scene for some hours, because we held a "watching brief" in the interests of the cruise of the "Esperanza"; for our "amiable smuggler" was very drunk, and we hoped, by keeping an eye on him, to prevent him from becoming drunker and pa.s.sing into a comatose condition. He delivered himself into our hands, for he came up and invited us to dance with him, and as we were due to start soon after midnight we made this outrageous proposal an excuse for putting him in charge of the Jefe, who promised to see him into his hammock for a few hours' sleep before we wanted him. The second man was so far gone that there was no reasoning with him. We had to let him lie where he was in the plaza and trust to the night air to bring him round by the time we sailed. With the third sailor, who was sober, we took the boat round to where the deeper water allowed of her being ballasted and loaded.

By the time the boat was ready it was fast approaching midnight. The dance was over; the girls had left their shelves and gone home to their hammocks; the lamps were out; and a few belated revellers were straggling about or lying senseless on the sand, which glistened snow-white in the moonlight. We found our skipper in his hut. He had pulled himself together, and he came with us to find the first mate. The latter was in his hammock in a drunken sleep, and refused to answer to our repeated knockings. We were for starting without him; but the amiable smuggler said he had advanced him ten dollars and he had got to come. He evidently knew his man, for he called out some opprobrious words in Spanish. We did not catch what they were; but a well-trained ferret never made a rabbit bolt from his hole as quick as those choice epithets brought the toper from his hammock. The hut door burst open, and before the captain could realise he had overdone it, the fuddled Nicolas rushed at him and hit him full in the face. In a moment all was disorder. The wives of the combatants rushed out to act as seconds, and half a dozen neighbours tumbled from their hammocks and rushed over to see the battle. But a Yucatecan prize-fight under Queensberry rules did not form part of our programme, and we successfully intervened, seizing the struggling men, and held on to them till they had spluttered out the worst of their rage, when the storm ceased as suddenly as it had begun and they fell upon each other's necks, calling each other "_bueno amigo_" (good friend). Escorting them down to the boat and leaving them to get the sail up, we returned to our hut, shouldered our baggage, and carried it to the beach. As the New Year came in, we were thigh-deep in the tepid water, a pale eau-de-Nil in the moonlight, wading backwards and forwards to the "Esperanza." It was nearly two, however, before we got under way, and the dawn of the New Year's Day found us but some ten miles down the coast.

The sh.o.r.es we now explored were historic indeed. We were retracing the course of Cortes as he cruised round from the island of Cozumel, whither we were bound. But if they were historic, they were singularly uninteresting. The woods come down to within a few feet of the beach, woods which never deserve the t.i.tle of forests and yet are so impenetrable that no one who has not tried to cut his way through would believe it. About midday we made a landing near to where it was said ruins existed, and cut our way through two miles of bush. Ruins we found, but they were of no moment, and if they were Indian they were certainly post-Conquest. It was a broiling hot day, and our eyes suffered from the sand-glare. On reaching the beach again, we were tempted to have a bathe, though this is risky work at any part of the coast of Yucatan, for there are more sharks to the square mile than there are probably in any other part of the world. But it was far too hot for us to be very prudent, and we had a delicious plunge, coming out none too soon though, for while we were putting on our s.h.i.+rts we saw Master Shark showing his fins a yard or two from where we had been revelling in the green water.

We made many landings, but they were quite disappointing in their results. Cape Catoche itself is a low spit of sand separated from the mainland by a shallow channel about a quarter of a mile wide. Here a light has been recently installed. The whole region for miles round is desolation. Just beyond the cape the coastline breaks into a large bay, an immense wooded oval of shallow water, guarded seaward by a natural breakwater of sand and entered by two narrow waterways, east and west.

This great inlet, framed in thick woods, its sunlit, gently rippling surface dotted with beds of reeds and straggling water-flowers, is the haunt of the sea birds. As we stole into their solitude, vast flocks of ibis, of gulls, black duck, sandpipers, and the hideous brown pelicans rose and made off; while, fairest of all sights in the brilliant light, was a flight of flamingoes, a pink cloud pa.s.sing overhead.

There can be little doubt that this bay was the scene of that first landing of Cortes on the American mainland which was destined so largely to shape the future of Central America. It was curious to land and wander in the desolate woods, the battle-ground of four centuries past, picturing to oneself the romance of it all. Further eastward we put in to examine some ruins which showed above the trees. They proved to be those of a Catholic church and monastery, probably eighteenth-century work. The church was full of bats, which fluttered down from the mildewed walls frightened at the unwonted intrusion. Here and there along the coast southward from the cape we found signs of ancient Indian settlements. The ruins were in no way majestic, but were probably relics of outlying fisher settlements, and only interesting because significant of the building zeal of the pre-Conquest Indians. This great sweep of coastline must have ever been what it is to-day--swampy and impa.s.sable; in no way inviting to the establishment of large cities such as Chichen and Uxmal, but used rather as a vast hunting ground by the tribes of the interior.

Even in typical tropic weather there is much discomfort in life in a three-ton boat. So far the weather had been perfect; and once round the cape, we got the full benefit of the trade-winds which blow here all the year round. As Dryden in his _Annus Mirabilis_ writes:

"But now, the Cape once doubled, fear no more; A constant trade wind will securely blow And gently lay us on the spicy sh.o.r.e."

Our "spicy sh.o.r.e" was the fruitful island of Cozumel, of the fertile beauty of which we had heard such glowing accounts; but once round the cape, our troubles proved by no means over. After a few days the weather broke. The night was perfect. A full moon bathed the quiet sea and the wooded coasts in a wonderful silver light, and as we stared up into the sky from our bed of sand-ballast sacks in the bottom of the boat, it seemed as if the stars had never shone so brightly. But with the dawn we ran into the fringe of what is known in the Gulf of Mexico as a "norther"; and the weather ahead looked so dirty that we took refuge in a tiny islet called Isla Arena (Sand Island). It was an ideally lonely Robinson Crusoey spot. A few deserted huts marked it as the occasional home of pa.s.sing fishermen. We swung our hammocks in that which had the most water-tight thatch, and then walked round the island with the guns in search of duck. In the centre was a touching little cemetery; a square of sand humbly marked off with sea-sh.e.l.ls; the graves--six of them--each with a rudely fas.h.i.+oned wooden cross; and black spirit-bottles, which had once served as flower vases, stood around. It is a wild life these Yucatecan fishermen often lead, and as we stood bare-headed by this "Garden of Sleep," those haunting lines on Stevenson's Samoan tomb came to our minds:

"Here he lies where he longed to be.

Home is the fisherman, home from the sea; The hunter home from the hill."

Here they rested, lulled by the eternal sigh of the ocean so long their home.

The weather had scarcely improved when towards dawn we made a start for Isla de Mujeres. Had we known what was ahead of us, we should have made Sand Island our home for yet another day, till the sea had had time to quiet down. In the deep gloom which heralded the approach of another day we tacked round Cayo Sucio (Dirty Point) and pa.s.sed Rat and Pelican Keys, two miniature isles. The sea was rough and choppy, and a mile or so out a nasty squall came up and we hove to, taking in all sail, the little boat pitching and tossing like a walnut sh.e.l.l, while we crouched under mackintosh sheets to keep as dry as was possible. Thence, when the sky cleared, we had a straight run down the coast. The amiable smuggler had ominously talked of a _via angusta_ (narrow way); but our Spanish was so limited that his explanations were lost on us, and his uneasiness, as he stared weatherwards, we took for the nervousness all Yucatecans show in any risk.

It was about an hour after dawn that away to our left--so far that it sounded like the last thunder-mutterings of a storm long past--we heard a low murmuring. We looked seaward, and the captain pointed to the horizon with the words "_las rocas_." Across the dreary waste of water, its night-grey yielding to a sickly green in the chill morning glare, it was at first hard to see anything. Then, as we stared, we saw at first a long, thin, black line, white-topped, starting leftwards some five miles off and running in till its end was lost in the rollers ahead. Evenly marked it seemed, like the black and white painting on a giant s.h.i.+p's hull. And then, in the minutes as we neared, the white became broken into cloudlets, showing up quick in succession like smoke of an engine above the edge of a railway cutting. And quickly the murmuring turned into a booming, like the hum of a great city's traffic heard from afar; and the booming into a low intense thunder. And as we pa.s.sed into the tumbling waters, the even lines were gone and we saw an endless belt of black coral rock closing our whole horizon. The "Esperanza" was heading for the reef at seven knots. We ran to within half a mile; and the thunder of the Atlantic, as it broke upon the demon-shaped jags of coral, bursting in clouds of spray forty feet high, was like the dry roaring of wild beasts. The tiller went round, and we veered a point or two more into the wind; and then straight ahead we saw why the amiable smuggler had steered up so close. To our right a smaller line of reef, some two hundred yards long, bent out from the sh.o.r.e to meet the three-mile leftward curve. Between the sh.o.r.e and the coral was no safe way even for boats of three feet draught such as ours. Ahead lay the only way--between the deadly corals.

It was _la via angusta_, and to us landlubbers it looked like the gate of a water-h.e.l.l; an ocean fiend's cauldron of bubbling, leaping grey water. As the two lines of rock closed in on us, the sea rolled down from the seaward reefs in great slate-coloured foamless rollers. From the level of the little boat they looked like moving hills. The wind was blowing fresh on the quarter, and the skipper had put the boat towards the bigger reef lest we should be blown clean on the smaller. There was not a dog's chance for us if we capsized, and an inchtwist wrong of the helm and we must. One second we sank low between rollers, looking down a lead-grey alley-way of water. The next we were flung up, light as an egg-sh.e.l.l, on the crest of a wave, balancing there long enough to measure with straining eyes the distance between us and the h.e.l.l of coral. The next half-hour seemed the longest we had ever lived. It looked as if nothing but a miracle of seamans.h.i.+p could save the boat. We heard the captain mutter a prayer to the Virgin, and the sailors, their yellow faces now ashen-grey, crouched for'ad clinging to the shrouds, the spray soaking their thin cottons. When we ran once more into the open Atlantic, we cared not for the fiercer waves which charged us, breaking over the bows and drenching us, for we had faced what was worse than open sea. These reefs, the "graveyard of the Yucatan Channel," are the terror of the locality; and when, wet and numbed, we reached the picturesque little pueblo of Dolores in Isla de Mujeres three miles further on, the Yucatecan fishermen collected, amazed, on the beach to hear how an open boat had lived through the deadly pa.s.sage on such a morning.

We had risked much to visit the island; but archaeologically it was not worth it. Here it was that the Spaniards in 1517 got their very first sight of those stone buildings of Central America which were as much a marvel to them as they are to us to-day. The historians of the Conquest describe a temple of stone, surrounded by fruit trees and sweet-scented shrubs, and approached by well-laid steps. Within, the air was heavy with the smell of incense which burnt in stone and earthenware vessels before female idols clothed in cotton petticoats with the bosoms "decently covered." Before these images were well-ordered files of women-ministrants, who served in the temple. Hence Cordoba called the island Isla de Mujeres--Isle of Women. But all this old-time glory has disappeared. The only village edges with its whitewashed huts, their doors painted a light blue or green, the shallow semicircle of sand which forms the islet's only anchorage; behind this row of cottages the tiny cross-streets are almost knee-deep in its pale yellow glitter. Away southward stretches a barren waste, six miles long and never much more than a mile wide, of rock and sand, over which clambers a coa.r.s.e-leafed sea-vine, a coa.r.s.er thistly plant, with here and there a clump of fan-palms. Only at the extreme southern end on a rocky bluff stands a relic of the dead people. It is a solid-built structure about 18 feet square on the outside, and containing two rooms 14 feet by 6 each. There is no ornamentation or hieroglyphics on it, but outside, facing east, are two stone ledges, like plinths for statues, upon which, local rumour has it, once stood two gigantic statues of women. Near at hand is a small Spanish watch-tower, all to pieces, a contrast to the well-preserved Indian stone-work.

We intended making the island a base for further exploration of the east coast, and hired a hut which stood at the end of the village on a steep rock. The reefs had so completely shattered the nerves of our crew that they declared it impossible to proceed to Cozumel in the "Esperanza."

Our belief in the proverbial halcyon calm of tropic seas had also been much shaken by our morning's experiences, and we were inclined to agree with the frightened sailors. So, paying them up to the next morning, we discharged them, determining to hire a larger boat for the rest of our cruise. But this was not the denouement which the amiable smuggler hoped or wished, and he insolently declared that we must pay him for so many more days as it took him to return to the island of Holboch. When we refused, he muttered something about reporting us to the Jefe and disappeared. We thought no more about it, and busied ourselves in settling in to our new quarters. About half an hour later we were sitting in our hammocks polis.h.i.+ng our top boots with soft soap, when a long scraggy-looking man arrived who declared himself to be a policeman.

He certainly did not look like one, but he brought a message from the Jefe Politico that "_los otros hombres_" (the other men) were to appear before that functionary at two o'clock. This was altogether too much for our British blood. We had so far throughout our tour borne the Yucatecan fool as gladly as we could, but now our cup was running over. In an outburst of Spanish, utterly ungrammatical, but very much to the point, we consigned him and all Jefes to an even warmer place than Isla de Mujeres, and bade him return with all speed to his chief and tell that gentleman that we were not "the other men," but British subjects, bearing pa.s.sports from the Federal Government; that nothing would induce us to appear at two or at any other hour, and that if the Jefe wanted to see us he would have to come to us, not we go to him. We were very angry, and the miserable Yucatecan creature backed out of our hut abashed.

We considered the incident closed, and continued polis.h.i.+ng our boots.

But about half an hour later, noticing a commotion at our hut door we looked out and, to our amazement, found a dense crowd a.s.sembled led by a fat Yucatecan, wearing a pith helmet. This was Senor El Jefe, and behind him, ranged in the order of their rank, were all the officials of the island. In the background stood the scraggy policeman, who certainly thought that we were now about to meet the due reward of our temerity in flouting the thunderbolts of this Caribbean island-Jove and to be hanged, drawn and quartered to "make a Yucatecan holiday." We invited the Jefe into the hut, and in a few sentences explained that we intended no personal affront to him, seeing that until that moment we had never had the pleasure of clapping eyes on him. But that the insolence of the message was such as, in Dogberry's words, was "most tolerable and not to be endured"; and that we therefore could not apologise for our refusal to obey it. The Jefe, as we afterwards learnt, was a thorough old rogue, but he had a fund of common sense. In a few minutes we had explained to him that the amiable smuggler had already been paid his full wages and we were shaking hands all round, the Jefe a.s.suring us that the message had been misdelivered: that he had used the word _supplica_ (supplicates), not _manda_ (demands), in citing us to his court. It was delightful to watch the evident chagrin of the policeman and the barefooted crowd who had hoped to see "los Ingleses" haul down their colours.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] _Mecate_--a Mexican square measure equal to about one-tenth of an acre.

CHAPTER IX

EL MECO TO PUERTO MORELOS

Across the shallow blue harbour of Isla de Mujeres and a four-mile stretch of the Yucatan Channel, clear as crystal, its small rippling waves flecked to foam by the trade winds, lies the eastern mainland of Yucatan. Here on the low wooded sh.o.r.e, in direct line with the southern point of the island, are the ruins of El Meco. Our new boat was some two or three tons heavier than the "Esperanza." Our captain and its owner was a Yucatecan fisherman, Lucio Sanchez, who some years before, to avoid service in the National Guard, had migrated to Key West and become an American citizen. He had now returned to his native island, had taken unto himself a Yucatecan wife, and was the happy father of four children. In all our dealings with him, which extended over several weeks, we found him scrupulously honest, and in all ways a marked contrast to his detestable fellow-countrymen. If this were the result of two years' residence at Key West, it is surely a happy augury of the improvement which is likely to take place in the Yucatecan people when they form, as they inevitably will, a portion, however unworthy, of the Land of the Stars and Stripes.

Besides Lucio our crew consisted of his half-brother, a handsome black-eyed lad of sixteen, who looked far older and rejoiced in the girlish name of Dolores, and a middle-aged Yucatecan sailor whose name was Pedro Paz. With a new stock of provisions, and with a welcome addition of elbow-room compared with the "cabined, cribbed confinement"

of the tiny "Esperanza," we made our start in the highest spirits. The run across took less than an hour, and opposite a sandy bay a mile north of the ruins we anch.o.r.ed. The coast for the most part here is shelving coral rock, and even small sailing-boats dare not go right in; landing always being a matter of wading. We could see the main ruin, a pyramid, showing above the woods some little way inland, and as there are no paths hereabouts, and we knew we should have to cut our way, we were all armed with machetes. We stopped under a clump of cocoa palms on the beach--one of our sailors s.h.i.+nning up for the green fruit--and had a delightful drink of the water; and then tramped down the rocky sh.o.r.e till we came opposite the ruins.

But we had no sooner plunged into the woods than we discovered we had not got them to ourselves. They were thickly populated, and the natives were the most savage and inhospitable we had yet met. The air was simply filled with mosquitoes, which evidently regarded our arrival as the occasion for a "_dia de fiesta_," and started stinging our faces, hands, and arms till their pestilent persistence nearly maddened us. If there is anything to urge you to work in such a spot where the least movement causes the sweat to run down you in rivulets, it is mosquitoes. While your machete is at work and the bush tops and branches fall around you, the midget fiends keep off a bit. Thus goaded into frenzied activity, we were not long in reaching El Meco.

It is a pyramid faced with stone, but, unlike that at Chichen, it is built in perpendicular terraces, each smaller than the one below, giving its sides the appearance of a gigantic stairway, save that the ledges are not of equal height or width. On the east side there had been a staircase, now ruined. We scrambled up, clinging on to the gnarled roots and branches of trees growing from it, and once on the top a refres.h.i.+ng sea breeze greeted us, for the time driving our persecutors away. To make anything like accurate measurements the dense overgrowth had to be first cut away, and we stripped off our coats and revolver belts and set to with a will. The building, which our energetic a.s.sault on the vegetation disclosed, was now roofless. It had consisted of two rectangular rooms running north and south. At the top of the stairs on the east, forming the doorway of the first chamber, stood two pillars 18 inches in diameter. The inner room had two stone platforms about 4 feet high, probably altars: for there is no doubt that all the strictly pyramidal buildings of Central America were religious in character. We say "strictly pyramidal" to differentiate these temples from the other buildings of Yucatan which are, almost without exception, erected on mounds. While making our measurements one of us, tape in hand, nearly touched a snake which was hiding in a crevice in the wall. He was quite small, of a ringed black and brown colour, but Lucio declared him one of the deadliest of all snakes. He called it _calom_. We tickled the reptile's tail with a machete, and he squirmed deeper into the wall and disappeared.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RUINS OF EL MECO, EASTERN YUCATAN.]

A queerer occupant of this ancient temple was a huge hermit crab, which by a miracle of persistence had climbed the pyramid and was hidden under a tree-root. These uncanny creatures are everywhere on the islands and along the coast of Yucatan. They live in large whelk-sh.e.l.ls, moving from one to another as their growth demands a larger tenement. All you can see of them is a great red hairy claw, which is used to close the entrance of the sh.e.l.l. When disturbed they make a shrill noise like the faint chirping of a bird--by rubbing, it is said, the ridged surface of the last joint of the right great claw against the sharp edge of the second joint. The woodlands of the islands were full of them, and of course they were frequent on the beaches; but it did seem curious to find this big fellow so much up in the world. His family removals, necessitating a descent of the pyramid and a journey of at least half a mile through the bush to the beach, where he would have a choice of whelk-sh.e.l.ls, must have been undertakings before which all but the stoutest crab hearts would have quailed.

Climbing out on to the face of the ruin, we found its height to be 48 feet. Descending, we discovered on the south side of the pyramid on the ground-level a tiny chamber 5 feet high and 8 feet long, the door about 3 feet high and 2-1/2 wide. Remains of such a room existed on the left.

In other ruins we were struck again and again with the smallness of the doorways and the lowness of the roofs. There are so many buildings of the kind in Yucatan that a ludicrous belief is current among the natives that the builders of the ruins were dwarfs. There is of course nothing in such a theory. These tiny rooms at El Meco were probably sleeping-chambers for the guardian priests. In the woods around we found three other buildings much ruined, the pillars formed of rounded monoliths each some 6 feet high. Our investigations had taken some time, and it would be quite unsafe to estimate how many times we had been bitten. Some idea may be gained of the number of mosquitoes "engaged" by the fact that we counted over three dozen on one coat-sleeve. We were right glad to reach the sh.o.r.e and get on board, though with smarting faces and itching hands.

A run of an hour down the coast brought us to the northern end of Cancun Island. Seaward, owing to surf and coral, it is difficult to land, but it is separated from the mainland by a series of narrow channels opening into several broad bays, almost land-locked sea lakes. At the entrance are sandspits running out from island and sh.o.r.e, forming the narrowest of channels, perhaps six feet wide. It is such difficulties of navigation and the discomforts of small-boat life which have kept other travellers away and permitted us the privilege of being the first to thoroughly explore these islands. Once past the sandspits you enter a truly tropic creek. The water is a beech-leaf green and clear as gla.s.s; the laurel-hued mangrove trees grow far into the stream, their brown snake-like roots showing feet above the water. Perched upon these weird trees are wild-fowl and fis.h.i.+ng-birds, while, where the mud has silted up between the roots and formed a ledge, lie alligators blinking their evil-looking eyes in the blazing light. Below you in the green crystal depths you see turtle floating, and the giant picuda, with pike-like jaws, chasing the little fishes.