Nan Sherwood on the Mexican Border Part 10

"Can't understand this jargon," Adair MacKenzie laid the menu that had been given him down and looked utterly disgusted.

"No sense in their making it like this," he continued as though it was a personal insult that anyone should presume to speak or write any other language than English. "Can't see how they can understand it themselves."

In the end, it was Walker Jamieson who did the ordering. "How about some nice mode de guajolote?" he grinned at Nan and her friends as he put the question. "It's turkey to you," he explained when they laughed, "stuffed turkey to be exact and a choice bit here. With it, we'll have tortillas, the Mexican subst.i.tute for bread, and frijoles, the favorite Mexican bean. Sound all right?"

The girls nodded as they tried to find the items on their own menus. And Adair MacKenzie grunted that he would take the same.

The meal wasn't entirely a success. Nan and her friends enjoyed it, but Adair MacKenzie grumbled throughout despite all that Alice could do to mollify him.

"Never mind, daddy," she said at last, "in a couple of more days we'll be at the hacienda--"

"Yes, and that housekeeper of ours better be there, or I'll fire her."

Adair was off again.

Alice restrained a smile. For twenty years now, Adair had been firing the housekeeper and for twenty years she had been running him and his house just as she pleased. It was a joke that the motherly old lady and Alice shared.

"She'll be there," Alice tried to rea.s.sure him, "and so will that Chinese cook that we have heard so much about."

Nan and the rest looked up from their turkey, half expecting a story, but Alice said nothing further. They finished the meal in silence and followed Adair to the car.

Then, by way of Zimapan, an attractive hillside village, remembered ever afterwards by the girls for its huge cacti, some more than thirty-five feet high, they continued on toward Mexico City. They pa.s.sed through Tasquillo, and then over a sandy road between other tall cacti to Ixmiquilpan, a picturesque town where native Indians were tending sheep and spinning along the streets.

Here Nan took a picture, the first of many she was to take, of the girls as they stood in a market where they had just bought some gayly woven baskets. The sight of the Indians brought more stories to Walker's mind and so, in the few miles that lay between them and their stopping place for the night, he told more tales.

He told stories of buried treasure left by the Aztecs in deep underground chambers, of turquoise and jade that was more lovely than any the modern world has discovered. He told of gold so plentiful that it had no value, of great temples that American Museums were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild.

He knew all the stories, because, since his early childhood, spent in California where Mexican labor was plentiful because it was cheap, he had been interested in the country.

When, on the third day of their journey, they approached Mexico City, Walker Jamieson was in a particularly expansive mood, one designed to keep their minds off the question of what word they would find from Rhoda in the capital.

"Below you, ladies and gentlemen," he said with a great sweep of his arm, "you see Mexico City, the capital of this surprising republic of Mexico. There you will find romance, adventure, everything."

CHAPTER XI

A LEGEND

"Mexico City," he went on, as though he were a guide introducing a party of tourists to its first sight of a city, "lies, as you can see from here, in a mountain valley on the Great Central Plateau. Constructed on a former lake by those Aztecs who once made of this whole region a grand and glorious place, it was called by them 'Tenocht.i.tlan', an Aztec word meaning 'Belonging to the property of the Temple.'

"When the Spaniards conquered Tenocht.i.tlan, they found grand palaces and elegant homes under the shadow of the mountains that lie all about.

They found gardens more beautiful and more highly cultivated than any they had ever known. They found wealth and splendour such as not even their vivid imaginations had ever constructed. They found everything,"

he finished dramatically, "and they drove the people who had conceived it out, and they took it unto themselves, and it went to ruin. You see now, the modern city, and as you go through its streets, you will find everywhere evidences of all these changes living side by side with the new that the present generation is in the process of building up."

Walker Jamieson had started his little harangue half in fun, but as always when he talked about the old city, he grew serious as he went on.

Now, as he noted the half scowl on Adair MacKenzie's face, the look of interest on Alice's, and the attention of Nan Sherwood and her friends, he paused.

"How am I doing?" he directed the question to the group in general.

Adair MacKenzie grunted.

Alice beamed, her eyes full of pride in him.

And Nan and her crowd nodded their heads for him to go on.

"So, my public adores me," he said in a mocking self-satisfied tone that caused Alice and Nan to laugh aloud.

With this he wrapped his guide's cloak about him again and went on.

"As you go about," he said, "and look up from day to day at the mountains that surround you, you will soon be able to name them all from Chiquihuite, 'the basket', to El Cerro Gordo, 'the fat hill', but there is none that has a more fascinating story than La Sierra Madre over there to the west." He pointed as he spoke. "That's the famous one with the two volcanoes, Ixtaccihuatl, 'the white woman', and Popocatepetl, 'the mountain that smokes'.

"At one time, before the great Cortez conquered the country, these volcanoes were worshipped as deities. There were days set aside for their veneration, feasts in their honor, and elaborate ceremonies."

"Just imagine," Laura interrupted, "having a feast in honor of a mountain."

"Strange, isn't it?" Walker Jamieson agreed. "But wait, I have even stranger things to tell you."

"I have no doubt." The remark was Adair MacKenzie's who, whether he would admit it or not, was really enjoying himself thoroughly.

"Ixtaccihuatl had a wooden idol representing her in the Great Temple and Popocatepetl a representation of dough of amarand and maize seeds. These idols you will see in the great museums of the city. The legend that surrounds them, if you will bear with me, goes something like this.

"Ixtaccihuatl was the beautiful daughter of a proud and powerful Aztec Emperor and his only child. As such, she was heir to his throne and watched and guarded throughout her youth. Her father adored her, but as he grew old and weak and his enemies began to wage war against him, he realized more and more how difficult it would be for a woman to hold together his vast and wealthy empire. So he set out to find a husband worthy of his daughter, worthy of the splendour that would be hers after his death.

"He called to his aid all the proud young warriors of his tribe and offered his daughter in marriage and his throne to the one among them who would conquer his enemies.

"This Popocatepetl that you see yonder went into the fight. He had long been in love with the beautiful princess.

"The war was long. It was cruel. It was b.l.o.o.d.y. But Popocatepetl endured to the end. Ah, but he was proud and triumphant when he saw that it would surely be he who would return to claim the princess whom he loved.

"But alas, his triumph was short-lived. His enemies, having failed in battle, stooped to the lowest form of deceit. They sent back to the Princess the false news that her beloved had been killed. She languished and became ill of a strange malady that not even the smartest witch doctors in the realm could cure her of. She died.

"Popocatepetl's grief was more than he could bear. He wished to die too, so he caused to be constructed a great pyramid upon which he himself laid the beautiful Ixtaccihuatl. Next to it, he built another. There, he stands, holding a funeral torch.

"The snow has enfolded her body and covered that of the man that would have married her, but it has never covered the torch which burns on, a symbol of the love of Popocatepetl for Ixtaccihuatl."

"And the smoke," Nan said quietly when she saw that he had finished, "of the volcano is the smoke of the torch's flame."

"Smart girl," Walker Jamieson slipped into a lighter mood now.

"And they believed that story?" Bess sounded incredulous.

"Yes, O doubtful one," Laura answered the question, "and they had feasts for the couple. Didn't you listen to the beginning?"

"Hm-m, they probably weren't edible," Adair MacKenzie suddenly remembered the meal he had found so distasteful a short time before.

Walker winked at Alice who patted her father on the arm, "Never mind, dad," she said, "there'll be food that you like later on."