Anahuac Part 11

A ride of two or three hours from the hacienda brought us into a mountainous district, and there we found the village of Cacahuamilpan on the slope of a hill. In the midst of neat trim gardens stood the little white church, and the ranches of the inhabitants, cottages of one room, with walls of canes which one can see through in all directions, and roofs of thatch, with the ground smoothed and trodden hard for a floor. Everything seemed clean and prosperous, and there was a bright sunny look about the whole place; but to Englishmen, accustomed to the innumerable appliances of civilized life, it seems surprising how very few and simple are the wants of these people. The inventory of their whole possessions will only occupy a few lines. The _metate_ for grinding or rubbing down the maize to be patted out into tortillas, a few calabashes for bottles, and pieces of calabashes for bowls and cups, prettily ornamented and painted, and hanging on pegs round the walls. A few palm-leaf mats (petates) to sleep upon, some pots of thin unglazed earthenware for the cooking, which is done over a wood-fire in the middle of the floor. A chimney is not necessary in houses which are like the Irishman's coat, consisting princ.i.p.ally of holes. A wooden box, somewhere, contains such of the clothes of the family as are not in wear. There is really hardly anything I can think of to add to this catalogue, except the agricultural implements, which consist of a wooden spade, a hoe, some sharp stakes to make the drills with, and the machete--which is an iron bill-hook, and serves for pruning, woodcutting, and now and then for less peaceful purposes.

Sometimes one sees women weaving cotton-cloth, or _manta_, as it is called, in a loom of the simplest possible construction; or sitting at their doors in groups, spinning cotton-thread with the _malacates_, and apparently finding as much material for gossip here as elsewhere.

The Mexicans spun and wove their cotton-cloth just in this way before the Conquest, and malacates of baked clay are found in great numbers in the neighbourhood of the old Mexican cities. They are simple, like very large b.u.t.ton-moulds, and a thin wooden skewer stuck in the hole in the middle makes them ready for use. Such spindles were used by the lake-men of Switzerland, but the earthen heads were not quite the same in shape, being like b.a.l.l.s pierced with a hole, as are those at present used in Mexico.

The Indians here had not the dull sullen look we saw among those who inhabit the colder regions; and, though belonging to the same race, they were better formed and had a much freer bearing than their less fortunate countrymen of the colder districts.

Our business in the village was to get guides for the cavern. While some men were gone to look for the Alcalde, we walked about the village, and finally encamped under a tree. One of our men had got us a bag full of fruit,--limes, zapotes, and nisperos, which last are a large kind of medlar, besides a number of other kinds of fruit, which we ate without knowing what they were. Though rather insipid, the limes are deliciously refres.h.i.+ng in this thirsty country; and they do no harm, however enormously one may indulge in them. The whole neighbourhood abounds in fruit, and its name _Cacahuamilpan_ means "the plantation of _cacahuate_ nuts."

It soon became evident that the Alcalde was keeping us waiting as a matter of dignity, and to show that, though the white men might be held in great estimation elsewhere, they did not think so much of them in this free and independent village. At last a man came to summon us to a solemn audience. In a hut of canes, the Alcalde, a little lame Indian, was sitting on a mat spread on the ground in the middle, with his escribano or secretary at his left hand. Other Indians were standing outside at the door. The little man scarcely condescended to take any notice of us when we saluted him, but sat bolt upright, positively bursting with suppressed dignity, and the escribano inquired in a loud voice what our business was. We told him we wanted guides to the cave, which he knew as well as we did; but instead of answering, he began to talk to the Alcalde. We quite appreciated the pleasure it must have been to the two functionaries to show off before us and their a.s.sembled countrymen, who were looking on at the proceedings with great respect; and we had not minded affording them this cheap satisfaction; but at last the joke seemed to be getting stale, so we proceeded some to sit and some to lie down at full length, and to go on eating limes in the presence of the August company. Thereupon they informed us what would be the cost of guides and candles, and we eventually made a bargain with them and started on foot.

On looking at the map of the State of Mexico, there is to be seen a river which stops suddenly on reaching the mountains of Cacahuamilpan, and begins again on the other side, having found a pa.s.sage for itself through caves in the mountain for six or seven miles. Not far from the place where this river flows out of the side of the hill, is a path which leads to the entrance of the cave. A long downward slope brought us into the first great vaulted chamber, perhaps a quarter of a mile long and eighty feet high; then a long scramble through a narrow pa.s.sage, and another hall still grander than the first. At the end of this hall is another pa.s.sage leading on into another chamber. Beyond this we did not go. As it was, we must have walked between one and two miles into the cavern, but people have explored it to twice this distance, always finding a repet.i.tion of the same arrangement, great vaulted chambers alternating with long pa.s.sages almost choked by fallen rocks. In one of the pa.s.sages, I think the last we came to, the roaring of the river in its subterranean bed was distinctly audible below us.

Excepting the great cave of Kentucky, I believe there is no stalact.i.tic cavern known so vast and beautiful as this. The appearance of the largest hall was wonderful when some twenty of our Indian guides stationed themselves on pinnacles of stalagmite, each one holding up a blazing torch, while two more climbed upon a great ma.s.s at one end called the altar, and burnt Bengal lights there; the rest stood at the other extremity of the cave sending up rockets in rapid succession into the vaulted roof, and making the millions of grotesque incrustations glitter as if they had been ma.s.ses of diamonds: All the quaint shapes that are found in such caverns were to be seen here on the grandest scale, columns, arched roof, organ-pipes, trees, altars, and squatting monsters ranged in long lines like idols in a temple. There may very well be some truth in the notion that the origin of Gothic architecture was in stalact.i.tes of a limestone cavern, so numerous and perfect are the long slender columns crowned with pointed Gothic arches.

Our procession through the cave was a picturesque one. We carried long wax altar-candles and our guides huge torches made of threads of aloe-fibre soaked in resin and wrapped round with cloth, in appearance and texture exactly like the legs and arms of mummies. As we went, the Indians sang Mexican songs to strange, monotonous, plaintive tunes, or raced about into dark corners shouting with laughter. They talked about adventures in the cave, to them of course the great phenomenon of the whole world; but it did not seem, as far as we could hear, that they a.s.sociated with it any recollections of the old Aztec divinities and the mystic rites performed in their honour.

No fossil bones have been found in the cavern, nor human remains except in one of the pa.s.sages far within, where a little wooden cross still marks the spot where the skeleton of an Indian was found. Whether he went alone for mere curiosity to explore the cave, or, what is more likely, with an idea of finding treasure, is not known; nothing is certain but that his candle was burnt out while he was still far from the entrance, and that he died there. I said no fossil remains had been found, but the level floors of the great halls are continually being raised by fresh layers of stalagmite from the water dropping from the roof, and no one knows what may lie under them. These floors are in many places covered with little loose concretions like marbles, and these concretions in the course of time are imbedded in the horizontal layers of the same material.

As we left the entrance hall and began to ascend the sloping pa.s.sage that leads to daylight, we saw an optical appearance which, had we not seen it with our own eyes, we could never have believed to be a natural effect of light and shade. To us, still far down in the cave, the entrance was only illuminated by reflected light; but as the Indians reached it, the direct rays of sunlight fell upon them, and their white dresses shone with an intense phosphoric light, as though they had been self-luminous. It is just such an effect that is wanting in our pictures of the Transfiguration, but I fear it is as impossible to paint it upon canvas as to describe it in words.

Next morning our friend Don Guillermo said good-bye to us, and started to return post-haste to his affairs in the capital. We stayed a few days longer at Cocoyotla, never tiring of the beautiful garden with its groves of orange-trees and cocoanut-palms, and the river which, running through it, joins the stream that we heard rus.h.i.+ng along in the cavern, to flow down into the Pacific.

On Sunday morning the priest arrived on an ambling mule, the favourite clerical animal. They say it is impossible to ride a mule unless you are either an arriero or a priest. Not that it is by any means necessary, however, that he should ride a mule. I shall not soon forget the jaunty young monk we saw at Tezcuco, just setting out for a country festival, mounted on a splendid little horse, with his frock tucked up, and a pair of hairy goat-skin _chaparreros_ underneath, a broad Mexican hat, a pair of monstrous silver spurs, and a very large cigar in his mouth. The girls came out of the cottage doors to look at him, as he made the fiery little beast curvet and prance along the road; and he was evidently not insensible to the looks of admiration of these young ladies, as they m.u.f.fled up their faces in their blue rebozos and looked at him through the narrow opening.

Nearly two hundred Indians crowded into the church to ma.s.s, and went through the service with evident devotion. There are no more sincere Catholics in the world than the Indians, though, as I have said, they are apt to keep up some of their old rites in holes and corners. The administradors did not trouble themselves to attend ma.s.s, but went on posting up their books just outside the church-door; in this, as in a great many other little matters, showing their contempt for the brown men, and adding something every day to the feeling of dislike they are regarded with.

We speak of the Indians still keeping up their ancient superst.i.tious rites in secret, as we often heard it said so in Mexico, though we ourselves never saw anything of it. The Abbe Clavigero, who wrote in the last century, declares the charge to be untrue, except perhaps in a few isolated cases. "The few examples of idolatry," he says, "which can be produced are partly excusable; since it is not to be wondered at that rude uncultured men should not be able to distinguish the idolatrous wors.h.i.+p of a rough figure of wood or stone from that which is rightly paid to the holy images." (There are people who would quite agree with the good Abbe that the distinction is rather a difficult one to make.) "But how often has prejudice against them declared things to be idols which were really images of the saints, though shapeless ones!

In 1754 I saw some images found in a cave, which were thought to be idols; but I had no doubt that they were figures representing the mystery of the Holy Nativity."

A good ill.u.s.tration of the wholesale way in which the early Catholic missionaries went about the work of conversion is given in a remark of Clavigero's. There is one part of the order of baptism which proceeds thus: "Then the Priest, wetting his right thumb with spittle from his mouth, and touching therewith in the form of a cross the right ear of the person to be baptized, &c." The Mexican missionaries, it seems, had to leave out this ceremony, from sheer inability to provide enough of the requisite material for their crowds of converts.

After ma.s.s we rode out to a mound that had attracted our attention a day or two before, and which proved to be a fort or temple, or probably both combined. There were no remains to be found there except the usual fragments of pottery and obsidian. Then we returned to the hacienda to say good-bye to our friends there, before starting on our journey back to Mexico. All the population were hard at work amusing themselves, and the shop was doing a roaring trade in gla.s.ses of aguardiente. The Indian who had been our guide for some days past had opened a Monte bank with the dollars we had given him, and was sitting on the ground solemnly dealing cards one by one from the bottom of a dirty pack, a crowd of gamblers standing or sitting in a semicircle before him, silently watching the cards and keeping a vigilant eye upon their stakes which lay on the ground before the banker. Other parties were busy at the same game in other parts of the open s.p.a.ce before the shop, which served as the great square for the colony.

Under the arcades in front of the shop a fandango was going on, though it was quite early in the afternoon. A man and a woman stood facing each other, an old man tinkled a guitar, producing a strange, endless, monotonous tune, and the two dancers stamped with their feet, and moved their arms and bodies about in time to the music, throwing themselves into affected and voluptuous att.i.tudes which evidently met with the approval of the bystanders, though to us, who did not see with Indian eyes, they seemed anything but beautiful. When the danseuse had tired out one partner, another took his place. An admiring crowd stood round or sat on the stone benches, smoking cigarettes, and looking on gravely and silently, with evident enjoyment. Just as we saw it, it would go on probably through half the night, one couple, or perhaps two, keeping it up constantly, the rest looking on and refres.h.i.+ng themselves from time to time with raw spirits. Though inferior to the Eastern dancing, it resembled it most strikingly, my companion said. It has little to do with the really beautiful and artistic dancing of Old Spain, but seems to be the same that the people delighted in long before they ever saw a white man. Montezuma's palace contained a perfect colony of professional dancers, whose sole business was to entertain him with their performances, which only resembled those of the Old World because human nature is similar everywhere, and the same wants and instincts often find their development in the same way among nations totally separated from each other.

We left the natives to their amus.e.m.e.nt, and started on our twenty miles ride. By the time the evening had fairly begun to close in upon us, we crossed the crest of a hill and had a dim view of a valley below us, but there were no signs of Chalma or its convent. We let our horses find their way as well as they could along the rocky path, and got down into the valley. A light behind us made us turn round, and we saw a grand sight. The coa.r.s.e gra.s.s on a large hill further down the valley had been set fire to, and a broad band of flame stretched right across the base of the hill, and was slowly moving upwards towards its top, throwing a lurid glare over the surrounding country, and upon the clouds of smoke that were rising from the flames. Every now and then we turned to watch the line of fire as it rose higher and higher, till at last it closed in together at the summit with one final blaze, and left us in the darkness. We dismounted and stumbled along, leading our horses down the precipitous sides of the deep ravines that run into the valley, mounting again to cross the streams at the bottom, and clambering up on the other side to the level of the road. At last a turn in the valley showed lights just before us, and we entered the village of Chalma, which was illuminated with flaring oil-lamps in the streets, where men were hard at work setting up stalls and booths of planks. It seemed there was to be a fair next day.

They showed us the way to the _meson_[16] and there we left Antonio with the horses, while the proprietor sent an idiot boy to show us the way to the convent, for our inspection of the meson decided us at once on seeking the hospitality of the monks for the night. We climbed up the hill, went in at the convent-gate, across a courtyard, along a dim cloister, and through another door where our guide made his way out by a different opening, leaving us standing in total darkness. After a time another door opened, and a good-natured-looking friar came in with a lamp in his hand, and conducted us upstairs to his cell. I think our friend was the sub-prior of the convent. His cell was a very comfortable bachelor's apartment, in a plain way, vaulted and whitewashed, with good chairs and a table and a very comfortable-looking bed.

We sat talking with him for a long while, and heard that the fair next day would be attended by numbers of Indians from remote places among the mountains, and that at noon there would be an Indian dance in the church. It is not the great festival, however, he said. That is once a year; and then the Indians come from fifty miles round, and stay here several days, living in the caves in the rock just by the town, buying and selling in the fair, attending ma.s.s, and having solemn dances in the church. We asked him about the ill feeling between the Indians and the whites. He said that among the planters it might be as we said, but that in the neighbourhood of his convent the respect and affection of the Indians for the clergy, whether white or Indian, was as great as ever. Then we gossipped about horses, of which our friend was evidently an amateur, and when the conversation flagged, he turned to the table in the middle of the room and handed us little bowls made of calabashes, prettily decorated and carved, and full of sweetmeats.

There were ten or twelve of these little bowls on the table, each with a different kind of "tuck" in it. We inquired where all those good things came from, and learnt that making them was one of the favourite occupations of the Mexican nuns, who keep their brethren in the monasteries well supplied. At last the good monk went away to his duties and left us, when I could not resist the temptation of having a look at the little books in blue and green paper covers which were lying on the table with the sweetmeat-bowls and the venerable old missal. They proved to be all French novels done into Spanish, and "Notre-Dame de Paris" was lying open (under a sheet of paper); so I conclude that our visit had interrupted the sub-prior while deep in that improving work.

Presently a monk came to conduct us down into the refectory, and there they gave us an uncommonly good supper of wonderful Mexican stews, red-hot as usual, and plenty of good Spanish wine withal. The great dignitaries of the cloister did not appear, but some fifteen or twenty monks were at table with us, and never tired of questioning us--exactly in the same fas.h.i.+on that the ladies of the harem questioned Dona Juana.

We delighted them with stories of the miraculous Easter fire at Jerusalem, and the illumination of St. Peter's, of the Sistine chapel and the Pope, and we parted for the night in high good humour.

Next morning a monk attached himself to us as our cicerone, a fine young fellow with a handsome face, and no end of fun in him.

Now that we saw the convent by daylight, we were delighted with the beauty of its situation. The broad fertile valley grows narrower and narrower until it becomes a gorge in the mountains; and here the convent is built, with the mountain-stream running through its beautiful gardens, and turning the wheel of the convent-mill before it flows on into the plain to fertilize the broad lands of the reverend fathers.

When we had visited the gardens and the stables, our young monk brought us back to the great church of the convent, where we took our places near the monks, who had mustered in full force to be present at the dancing. Presently the music arrived, an old man with a harp, and a woman with a violin; and then came the dancers, eight Indian boys with short tunics and head-dresses of feathers, and as many girls with white dresses, and garlands of flowers on their heads. The costumes were evidently intended to represent the Indian dresses of the days of Montezuma, but they were rather modernized by the necessity of wearing various articles of dress which would have been superfluous in old times. They stationed themselves in the middle of the church, opposite the high altar, and, to our unspeakable astonishment, began to dance the polka. Then came a waltz, then a schottisch, then another waltz, and finally a quadrille, set to unmitigated English tunes. They danced exceedingly well, and behaved as though they had been used to European ball-rooms all their lives. The spectators looked on as though it were all a matter of course for these brown-skinned boys and girls to have acquired so singular an accomplishment in their out-of-the-way village among the mountains. As for us we looked on in open-mouthed astonishment; and when, in the middle of the quadrille, the harp and violin struck up no less a tune than "The King of the Cannibal Islands," we could hardly help bursting out into fits of laughter. We restrained ourselves, however, and kept as grave a countenance as the rest of the lookers-on, who had not the faintest idea that anything odd was happening. The quadrille finished in perfect order; each dancer took his partner by the hand and led her forward; and so, forming a line in front of the high altar, they all knelt down, and the rest of the congregation followed their example; there was a dead silence in the church for about the s.p.a.ce of an Ave Maria, then everyone rose, and the ceremony was over.[17]

Our young monk asked permission of his superior to take us out for a walk, and we went down together to the convent-mill. There we saw the mill, which was primitive, and the miller, who was burly; and also something much more worth seeing, at least to our young acquaintance, who tucked up his skirts and ran briskly up a ladder into the upper regions, calling to us to follow him. A door led from the granary into the miller's house, and the miller's daughter happened, of course entirely by chance, to be coming through that way. A very pretty girl she was too, and I never in my life saw anything more intensely comic than the looks of intelligence that pa.s.sed between her and the young friar when he presented us. It was decidedly contrary to good monastic discipline it is true, and we ought to have been shocked, but it was so intolerably laughable that my companion bolted into the granary to examine the wheat, and I took refuge in a violent fit of coughing. Our nerves had been already rudely shaken by the King of the Cannibal Islands, and this little scene of convent-life fairly finished us.

We asked our young friend what his day's work consisted of, and how he liked convent-life. He yawned, and intimated that it was very slow. We enquired whether the monks had not some parochial duties to perform, such as visiting the sick and the poor in their neighbourhood. He evidently wondered whether we were really ignorant, or whether we were "chaffing" him, and observed that that was no business of their's, the curas of the villages did all that sort of thing. "Then, what have you to do?" we said. "Well," he said, "there are so many services every day, and high ma.s.s on Sundays and holidays; and besides that, there's--well, there isn't anything particular. It's rather a dull life. I myself should like uncommonly to go and travel and see the world, or go and fight somewhere." We were quite sorry for the young fellow when we shook hands with him at parting, and he left us to go back to his convent.

We had been clambering about the hill, seeing the caves with which it is honeycombed, but at present they were uninhabited. At the time of the great festival, when they are full of Indian families, the scene must be a curious one.

The monks had hospitably pressed us to stay till their mid-day meal, but we preferred having it at the shop down in the village, so as to start directly afterwards. Here the people gave us a regular reception, entertained us with their best, and could not be prevailed upon to accept any payment whatever. The proprietor of the meson sat down before the barley-bin which served him for a desk, and indited a long and eloquent letter of introduction for us to a friend of his in Oculan, who was to find a night's lodging for us. Before he sealed up the despatch he read it to us in a loud voice, sentence by sentence. It might have been an autograph letter from King Philip to some foreign potentate. Armed with this important missive, we mounted our horses, shook hands with no end of well-wishers, and rode off up the valley.

For a little while our path lay through a sort of suburb of Chalma, houses lying near one another, each surrounded by a pleasant garden, and both houses and people looking prosperous and cheerful. Our directions for finding the way were simple enough. We were to go up the valley past the Cerra de los Atambores, "the hill of drums," and the great _ahuehuete_. What the Cerra de los Atambores might be, we could not tell, but when we had followed the valley for an hour or so, it came into view. On the other side of the stream rose a precipitous cliff, several hundred feet high, and near the top a perpendicular wall of rock was carved with rude designs. People have supposed, it seems, that these carvings represented drums, and hence the name.

Had we known of the place before, we should have made an effort to explore it, and copy the sculptured designs; but now it was too late, and from the other side of the valley we could not make out more than that there seemed to be a figure of the sun among them.

A little further on we came to the "Ahuehuete." The name means a deciduous cypress, a common tree in Mexico, and of which we had already seen such splendid specimens in the grove near Tezcuco, and in the wood of Chapoltepec. This was a remarkable tree as to size, some sixty feet round at the lower part where the roots began to spread out. A copious spring of water rose within the hollow trunk itself, and ran down between the roots into the little river. All over its spreading branches were fastened votive offerings of the Indians, hundreds of locks of coa.r.s.e black hair, teeth, bits of coloured cloth, rags, and morsels of ribbon. The tree was many centuries old, and had probably had some mysterious influence ascribed to it, and been decorated with such simple offerings long before the discovery of America. In Brittany the peasants still keep up the custom of hanging up locks of their hair in certain chapels, to charm away diseases; and there it is certain that the Christians only appropriated to their own wors.h.i.+p places already held sacred in the estimation of the people.

Oculan is a dismal little place. We found the great man of the village standing at his door, but our letter to him was dishonoured in the most decided manner. He read the epistle, carefully folded it up and pocketed it, then pointed in the direction of two or three houses on the other side of the way, and saying he supposed we might get a lodging over there, he wished us good-day and retired into his own premises. The landlord of "over there" was very civil. He had a shed for the horses, and could give us palm-mats to sleep upon on the floor, or on the shop-counter, which was very narrow, but long enough for us both; and this latter alternative we chose.

We walked up to the top of a hill close by the village, and were surveying the country from thence, keeping a sharp look-out all the while for Mexican remains in the furrows. For a wonder, we found nothing but some broken spindle-heads; but, while we were thus occupied, two Indians suddenly made their appearance, each with his _machete_ in his hands, and wanted to know what we were doing on their land. We pacified them by politeness and a cigar apiece, but we were still evidently objects of suspicion, and they were quite relieved to see us return to the village. There, an old woman cooked us hard-boiled eggs and tortillas, and then we went tranquilly to bed on our counter, with our saddles for pillows, and our serapes for bed-clothes.

All the way from Cocoyotla our height above the sea had been gradually increasing; and soon after we started from Oculan next morning, we came to the foot of one of the grand pa.s.ses that lead up into the high lands, where the road mounts by zig-zag turns through a splendid forest of pines and oaks, and at the top of the ascent we were in a broad fertile plain as high or higher than the valley of Mexico. It was like England to ride between large fields of wheat and barley, and to pick blackberries in the hedges. It was only April, and yet the grain was almost ready for the sickle, and the blackberries were fully ripe.

Fresh green gra.s.s was growing in the woods under the oak-trees, and the banks were covered with Alpine strawberries.

We are in the great grain-district of the Republic. Wheat is grown for the supply of the large towns, and barley for the horses. Green barley is the favourite fodder for the horses in the Mexican highlands, and in the hotter districts the leaves of young Indian corn. Oats are to be seen growing by chance among other grain, but they are never cultivated. Though wheat is so much grown upon the plains, it is not because the soil and climate are more favourable than elsewhere for such culture. In the plains of Toluca and Tenancingo the yield of wheat is less than the average of the Republic, which is from 25- to 30-fold, and in the cloudy valleys we pa.s.sed through near Orizaba it is much greater. Labour is tolerably cheap and plentiful here, however; and then each large town must draw its supplies of grain from the neighbouring districts, for, in a country where it pays to carry goods on mules' backs, it is clear that grain cannot be carried far to market.

In the question of the population of Mexico, one begins to speculate why--in a country with a splendid climate, a fertile soil, and almost unlimited s.p.a.ce to spread in, the inhabitants do not increase one-half so fast as in England, and about one-sixth as fast as their neighbours of the United States. One of the most important causes which tend to bring about this state of things is the impossibility of conveying grain to any distance, except by doubling and trebling its price. The disastrous effects of a failure of the crop in one district cannot be remedied by a plentiful harvest fifty miles off; for the peasants, already ruined by the loss of their own harvest, can find neither money nor credit to buy food brought from a distance at so great an expense.

Next year may be fruitful again, but numbers die in the interval, and the const.i.tutions of a great proportion of the children never recover the effects of that one year's famine.

We left the regular road and struck up still higher into the hills, riding amongst winding roads with forest above and below us, and great orchids of the most brilliant colours, blue, white, and crimson, s.h.i.+ning among the branches of the oak-trees. The boughs were often breaking down with the bulbs of such epiphytes; but as yet it was early in the season, and only here and there one was in flower. At the top of the hill, still in the midst of the woods, is the Desierto, "the desert," the place we had selected for our noon-day halt. There are many of these Desiertos in Mexico, founded by rich people in old times.

They are a kind of convent, with some few resident ecclesiastics, and numbers of cells for laymen who retire for a time into this secluded place and are received gratuitously. They spend a week or two in prayer and fasting, then confess themselves, receive the sacrament, and return into the world. The situation of this quiet place was well chosen in the midst of the forest, and once upon a time the cells used to be full of penitents; but now we saw no one but the old porter, as we walked about the gardens and explored the quadrangle and the rows of cells, each with a hideous little wood-cut of a martyr being tortured, upon the door.

Thence we rode down into the plain, looking down, as we descended, upon a hill which seemed to be an old crater, rising from the level ground; and then our path lay among broad fields where oxen were ploughing, and across marshes covered with coa.r.s.e gra.s.s, until we came to the quaint little town of Tenancingo. There we found the _meson_; and the landlord handed us the key of our room, which was square, whitewashed, and with a tiled floor. There was no window, so we had to keep the door open for light. The furniture consisted of three articles,--two low tables on four legs, made of rough planks, and a bracket to stick a candle in.

The tables were beds after the manner of the country; but, as a special attention to us, the patron produced two old mattresses; the first sight of them was enough for us, and we expelled them with shouts of execration. We had to go to a shop in the square to get some supper; and on our return, about nine o'clock, our man Antonio remarked that he was going to sleep, which he did at once in the following manner. He took off his broad-brimmed hat and hung it on a nail, tied a red cotton handkerchief round his head, rolled himself up in his serape, lay down on the flags in the courtyard outside our door, and was asleep in an instant. We retired to our planks inside and followed his example.

The next afternoon we reached Toluca, a large and prosperous town, but with little noticeable in it except the arcades (portales) along the streets, and the hams which are cured with sugar, and are famous all over the Republic. Our road pa.s.sed near the Nevado de Toluca, an extinct snow-covered volcano, nearly 15,000 feet above the sea. It consists entirely of grey and red porphyry, and in the interior of its crater are two small lakes. We were not sorry to take up our quarters in a comfortable European-looking hotel again, for roughing it is much less pleasant in these high alt.i.tudes--where the nights and mornings are bitterly cold--than in the hotter climate of the lower levels.

Our next day's ride brought us back to Mexico, crossing the corn-land of the plain of Lerma, where the soil consists of disintegrated porphyry from the mountains around, and is very fertile. Lerma itself is the worst den of robbers in all Mexico; and, as we rode through the street of dingy adobe houses, and saw the rascally-looking fellows who were standing at the doors in knots, with their horses ready saddled and bridled close by, we got a very strong impression that the reputation of the place was no worse than it deserved. After Lerma, there still remained the pa.s.s over the mountains which border the valley of Mexico; and here in the midst of a dense pine-forest is Las Cruzes, "the crosses," a place with an ugly name, where several robberies are done every week. We waited for the Diligence at some little gla.s.s-works at the entrance of the pa.s.s, and then let it go on first, as a sop to those gentlemen if they should be out that day. I suppose they knew pretty accurately that no one had much to lose, for they never made their appearance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SPANISH-MEXICAN SPURS. _From 5 to 6 inches long, with rowels from 2-1/2 to 3 inches in diameter. The broad instep-strap of embossed leather is also shewn. (From Mr. Christy's Collection)_]

CHAPTER IX.

ANTIQUITIES. PRISON. SPORTS.