The American Egypt Part 6

We found Citas the same dirty little place we had left it a week past and the people as stupid as ever. But after some difficulties with our baggage, we did eventually reach Valladolid towards midday. To the Jefe Politico there we had a letter from the Governor of Yucatan, bidding him treat us "in a very special manner." The Jefe was a feeble, melancholy, epicene little man, who wore spring-side boots, carried a lady's silver-topped umbrella and a fan, and perpetually smoked straw cigarettes. His hair was dyed and his manner was wistfully bored. He was fetched from his hammock to receive us, and extended a damp bird-like claw of a hand. He offered us no hospitality but led the way down the street to a filthy shop, in the rear of which was a barn, furnished with two hammocks and an enamelled bowl perched on an empty soap-box, serving as dressing-table and washstand. For food he directed us to a reeking little drinking-den. Having thus exhausted his energies in this "very special manner," he retired, promising to return in the evening to a.s.sist us in the purchase of stores for our journey through the forest.

There was very little to see in Valladolid. The Spanish vandals had taken care of that. All traces of the old Indian domination had been effectually wiped out. At the Jefetura, the Court House or Town Hall in the plaza, signs were not lacking of the troubled state of the country.

Bands of soldiers were loitering under the verandahs cleaning rifles and smoking cigarettes. We call them soldiers, because that is what they call themselves; but they were certainly the sloppiest, most ill-disciplined body of men who ever disgraced that name. They were dressed in loose flying cotton shifts and cotton trousers, rolled up to the knee. Their feet were sandalled, and on their heads were queer pudding-basin-shaped straw hats with red ribbon lettered in black 5 Bat.

G.N., which means 5th Battalion, National Guard. Ever since the war of extermination, some of the iniquities of which we shall presently relate, was started, Valladolid never knows quite where she is.

Raiding-parties of Indians loiter in the woods to the eastward, and make periodic descents upon outlying houses and Government convoys. We attached to us a Yucatecan lad, sadly enough far advanced in consumption, who, unlike his fellow-citizens, was frank and pleasant-mannered and anxious to please. With him as our guide we visited a neighbouring cenote, the water supply of the ancient Indian city. This was very unlike those at Chichen, for it was not very deep down and was of open approach. In a basin some hundred feet wide lay the water, gra.s.s-green with water-weed, and far over it jutted a natural roof of rock, from which hung stalact.i.tes, a row of grey stone icicles some thirty feet long, like a fairy fringe over the pool. We made our way down the steep rocky side to a narrow ledge of rock which ran half way round the cenote, some twenty feet above water-level. Here there were caves where we were told jaguars sometimes sheltered.

The Jefe Politico was due to join us at eight o'clock, and on our return to the town we waited with what patience we could for him. But he never appeared. So we made the best of a bad bargain and a tour of the shops, succeeding in being swindled over each item of our commissariat. On the morrow, anxious to be starting, we walked over to the Jefetura to wake the Mayor up. There under the verandah in a ring sat the "rude forefathers" of this Yucatecan hamlet, the ancient Jefe in the middle.

There is a local proverb, "_Hay mucho vago en Valladolid_" ("There are many loiterers in Valladolid"), and no better realisation of its truth could there have been than this band of venerable officials, drowsing their morning away. We were invited within the "magic circle," but even our execrable Spanish failed to rouse them. They had nothing to do, so they sat in the shade and did it; and the street crowd had nothing to do, so they hung on the verandah railings and stared at the first Englishmen reckless enough to visit the City of Dolittles. But smoking cigarettes and endeavouring to remember the past and future tenses of irregular Spanish verbs pall as occupations, and, losing all patience, we informed the somnolent Mayor that unless our wants in the matter of horses and a servant were promptly satisfied we would make a complaint to the Governor of the State. This threat galvanised the band of Vallado-littles into a frenzy of energy. Soldiers were summoned and came forward at the salute with fixed bayonets. Two were dispatched to get us hammocks; a third went off to seek a horse-dealer; while a fourth, actually the sentry on duty, under the directions of the Jefe, solemnly laid aside his rifle and set to work to peel a plate of oranges which had been produced to a.s.sist in our pacification.

The hammock-seeking warriors returned with a string of Indian women, each nursing "a special line" of hammocks. Of course prices had rushed up at the mere rumour of us, and having been a.s.sured in Merida that hammocks, a staple product of the town, were cheap in Valladolid, we were naturally disappointed to find that the commonest of those brought to be shown us were about three times their normal value. But hammocks we had to have, so we bought a couple of strong cloth ones at an exorbitant price, and a portion of the National Guard were told off to string them.

Then came the horse-dealers with all the maimed, the halt, and the blind of equine Valladolid. The prices asked for these chargers were truly tropical, and had grown to a great height. But no Englishman had ever visited the town before, and it was far too good a chance to be lost. We do not want to libel the somnolescent Jefe, but it was probably as much as his place was worth to refuse to "c.o.c.k the blind 'un" on the frauds which his fellow-citizens were attempting to play on us. He was no man for half-measures in such a delicate matter, so he retired into the Mayor's Parlour to take a nap while we argued. None of the mounts were in the first flush of their giddy youth, and some looked Methuselahs.

There was a horse with a sore on its back as big as a cheese plate, which the owner resolutely declined to part with for less than a hundred dollars; while another steed, badly spavined, was so precious to its lucky proprietor that with tears in his avaricious eyes he a.s.sured us it would break his heart to accept for this peerless mount less than double that sum. Fortunately we knew something about horses and were able slowly but surely to weed out the "crocks," though the rapacious crowd did all in their power to fool us. It ended in our giving a hundred dollars too much for the three horses we selected; but they were at least sound in "wind and limb," though the strongest, a stallion, was blind in the right eye. The Mayor, having been waked up by a soldier, then regretfully took an active part in the proceedings. To prevent horse-stealing, the purchase of a horse in Yucatan is attended by the utmost official ceremony. If the occasion had been an auction of blood-stock at Tattersall's these fatuous Yucatecan officials could not have made more fuss. Armed with note-books they waltzed round our sorry purchases, marking down their peculiarities. We did not see the books, but it is quite likely that they were entered as having "four legs and a tail." At any rate it took the united efforts of the Town Council to make out the official receipts, which bore so many stamps as must have crippled the resources of the local G.P.O. for some weeks.

But it is one thing to buy a Yucatecan horse, and it is quite another to load him with portmanteaux sewn into sacks. The stallion, which, as the strongest of the trio, we had selected to carry the heaviest of the baggage, had not "signed on" for any such nonsense; and fixing us with his one eye, which rolled as viciously as it could in its deserted state, he signified intense dissatisfaction with all loads and portmanteaux in particular by letting out his heels at the Mayor, and then rearing up and pawing the air, Pegasus-fashion, over a knot of sloppy becottoned troops who broke and ran in all directions. He was really quite a nice horse. We afterwards nicknamed him Cyclops, in affectionate allusion to his ocular defects, and grew to be quite fond of him. But he was not at all nice on first acquaintance, and a crowd of jeering Vallado-littles--far too scared to come within the lash of his hoofs--collected at a respectful distance to watch the fun. The Mayor had half an hour before presented us with a soldier servant who owned the name Contrario, and rejoiced on all occasions in deserving it by his obstinacy. We had come into the country expecting to find every man a Buffalo Bill; but these troops were very disappointing; they were so obtrusively foot-soldiers. They evidently agreed with the Psalmist that "a horse is a vain thing for safety," and Contrario, told to hold Cyclops, absolutely refused. But the crowd was growing with our anger, and it was no time for mutiny, so by sheer physical force we made the poor shivering wretch carry out our orders. Again and again we tried to get the baggage on. No sooner did Cyclops feel the first pressure of the load, which we adroitly brought up on his blind side, than he plunged and bucked like the veriest broncho, throwing the baggage into the dust.

Disappointed in their malicious hope that we should have to give it up, one or two of the crowd began to take a friendly interest in our efforts, and one man, a big fellow for a Yucatecan but obviously as timid of horses as our soldier servant, volunteered to help. This time we got the twin sacks well over the stallion's back before he plunged, and a rope, adroitly thrown round, kept them in position till he quieted down and made up his mind to the inevitable. It was all over except the jeering, and, fearful as we were of mounting our saddle horses and leaving the recalcitrant Cyclops with his hated load to the feeble management of Contrario, we ignominiously led the horses out of the horrid little town amid an accompaniment of this from the citizens. But it was such an infinite relief to turn our backs upon the city of do-littles and brigands that we could have calmly borne twice the mockery hurled at us by that yellow-faced shambling crowd.

Our way lay for the next few days through forty-odd miles of a country densely wooded but traversed by a fair road. This latter had earned a bad reputation of late as being infested by bandits, Mexican criminals shipped from Vera Cruz to serve against the Indians, who had deserted and betaken themselves to the woods with their rifles. Only a few days before our arrival a gang of them had murdered three Indians who were in charge of a drove of pigs. It had been such collar-work inducing the Do-littleians to do even the little they did that it was wearing well on to four o'clock before we found ourselves out into the open. Once past the outlying huts of Valladolid, the dust of the rock-strewn road changed into a brick-red loam. In many parts of Yucatan for scores of miles at a time the tracks through the forest are red like this, suggestive of nothing so much as a rough cart road to an English brick-field. Once you have seen one such road you have seen them all, for they are as like as two pins. The dense woods hemmed us in on each side, and the monotony was only broken now and again by meeting straggling parties of Indians, naked but for breech-cloth, with rough plaited straw hats, their long guns slung on their brown backs, a linen hunting bag at their waist, on their way to shoot in the woods.

Throughout Eastern Yucatan every Indian is out at dawn and sundown to pick up something for the pot. Their guns are for the most part antiquated muzzle-loaders, single-barrelled, sometimes of obviously home manufacture. They are poor sportsmen from the English point of view, for they are out to kill, and they think nothing of following a bird up for a mile or two till they can shoot it sitting. They were a very different breed of men from those Indians we had seen nearer Merida, and some of them even looked truculent. But they gave us a very civil "_Buenas tardes!_" ("Good afternoon!") as they stopped to rest on their guns and gaze with wonder at such an unusual spectacle as two khaki-clad Englishmen and the three laden horses.

We were not able to make much progress before the sun was near setting, and we kept our eyes open for a likely spot to make our camp. Shortly before six we halted on the Tizimin side of the small Indian village of Cursuc. We cut our way some fifty yards into the wood and with axes made a clearing of some twenty feet square, slinging our hammocks between the trees. Tethering the horses to stout saplings, we sent Contrario to the village for water; but before we had got our saucepans boiling, darkness was on us, and we had to make the best of a meal eaten in a gloom which made it impossible to tell a spoonful of black beans from a spoonful of egg till you tasted them. In this Cimmerian darkness we managed to make the deplorable discovery that we had forgotten to provide cups, and we found ourselves in the ludicrously Tantalus-like position of having a saucepan, too hot to drink from, of boiling Cadbury's cocoa, and nothing to put the precious liquid in. Then one of us had the happy inspiration of utilising the saucepan lid. A great deal of real fun can be got out of drinking boiling hot cocoa from a saucepan lid. It is so aggravatingly shallow, so infernally hot to hold, and so top-heavy. But we were far too tired with the dusty tramp, after our long day's battle with the detestable inhabitants of Valladolid, to make mountains out of molehills. If we had had cups we should have got through the precious draught far too quickly, we reminded ourselves. Pleasure is antic.i.p.ation; and waiting in the dark, seated on a boulder by the fire we had built in the red road, for your turn at the shallow draught was a real joy. We got outside our precious Cadbury, the black beans, and the eggs, and then we rolled ourselves into our hammocks, making coc.o.o.ns of ourselves in our Mexican blankets, and, with our soldier servant stretched on a blanket on the ground between the two of us, we were soon fast asleep.

Each day of our march through this forest country was much the same as the last. We waked in the bitter cold of the early dawn, huge drops of dew falling from the trees overhead upon the rubber sheeting which we had had the foresight to take with us to act as counterpane. Each night we camped afresh in the forests, making a clearing some little way from the road; and despite the alarmist rumours which had reached us in Merida and elsewhere of the dangers attending such forest campings, we had but one serious alarm. We had been asleep some hours, dead-tired with our day's march, when we waked to find the fire, which we had left on the roadside mere embers, flaming three feet high. We did not know why we waked and we do not know now, for there was no noise to disturb us, and it was quite an unusual thing: as a rule we slept like logs. All we know is that we did wake and to our astonishment saw the fire, which we had carefully stamped out on turning in, blazing high. We were wondering what this could mean, when in the rear of us we heard stealthy footsteps, the brushwood crackling as if some two or three people were creeping in upon us. It was a very dark moonless night, and altogether the position was decidedly uncanny. We reached for our revolvers, which always hung by their belts at the hammock head, and sat up waiting.

Whoever it was had seen us move, for all was still at first, and then, after a few minutes of dead silence, we distinctly heard the footsteps retreating. Possibly, as our horses were tethered on the side nearest the road, the robbers did not care to venture in that way, but made up our fire that the glare might guide them in a wide detour through the wood in rear of us. They had no doubt hoped to find us asleep, to have dashed in upon us and given us a slash over the head with their long knives, and then ransacked our baggage at their leisure. Finding that we were awake, however, and that they would have to fight for this privilege, they decamped.

But brigand alarms, though the most dignified, were not our only troubles in the forests. All Yucatan, wherever there are cattle, is cursed with an insect pest--a cattle louse known as the _garrapatas_. In these first days we suffered much from them. To look at they are like a cross between the ordinary bed-bug and a sheep-tick, but they often have markings on their backs like those on a garden spider. They get on to coat-sleeve or riding-breeches, often tiny as money-spiders, in scores at a time. They hang in brown patches upon the leaves and branches of shrubs and bushes, and if you just brush against these, before you have time to notice almost, the insects have climbed all over you, in a few minutes fixing themselves in the flesh and digging their way in till nothing but the rounded tops of their backs are visible. Their bites are not at first painful, but become intensely irritable after a day or two and cause troublesome swellings, if in any great numbers. It is nothing uncommon to find fifty or a hundred of these tiny plagues on one after a day's riding through the bush. Cleanliness is no prophylactic against them. The only thing we found any good was to make a strong solution of tobacco and smear this well over legs, thighs, and arms when dressing.

This keeps some of the less hardier ones at bay; but the really big ones (we found one as big as a threepenny piece fastened on to the hinge of the lid of a box-tortoise in the woods at Chichen) stop at nothing, and no pulling will get them out. The only thing to do is to let them work their wicked will of you, when, after a day or two, they fill up with blood and turn a deep purple colour like a black Hamburg grape. In this aldermanic condition of repletion they are very easily detached, ... and alas! squashed.

The Yucatecans are a cleanly people and bathe a great deal, the poor as well as rich; but nothing astonished Contrario more than our rubber bath. This, which we had bought in London, folded into so small a s.p.a.ce that it was a treat to watch his face when we first unfolded it and he saw an admirable bath four feet in diameter, spread out as if by a conjuring trick. If we stopped early enough and the sun was still up, we would send him down to the nearest well and have a glorious time splashing about and sponging cool streams of water over ourselves, while gorgeous b.u.t.terflies of blue, scarlet, and amber fluttered round us in the thicket, and green parakeets and the bushy-tailed grey squirrels perched on the trees to watch us. Though probably as immoral as any race in the world, the Yucatecans are singularly modest, and, though he saw us minus everything but a smile revelling in the cool limestone water and he would sit mournfully by trying to pick the garrapatas out of his legs and thighs, nothing would induce him to take advantage of our rubber bath, presumably because he feared we might look while he was in the "altogether."

The villages we pa.s.sed were monotonously alike: squares of palm-leaf-thatched huts round a plot of wiry gra.s.s centred by the village well with gibbet-like uprights and cross-piece of wood over which hung the bucket. At all hours of the day there cl.u.s.tered here knots of Indian women and girls, the _cantaros_ (earthenware water-jars) balanced on their left hips as they pattered to and fro to their whitewashed huts with the precious liquid. We generally called our midday halt between these settlements, as we found that our arrival was hailed with the same popular excitement as that which welcomes a circus in an English village; and it is a trifle disconcerting, even if your menu is not very varied, to eat one's lunch in the centre of a serried circle of bright-eyed children and women, and grinning, wondering men. But the fourth day at the little village of Pokboc we were so much tempted by the wonderful shade of a large ceibo-tree which stood by the huge ruined church, inside the gaunt staring walls of which a whitewashed Indian hut now did duty for such infrequent services as were held, that we broke our rule. Though we were now deep in Yucatan's cool season, the heat had been blistering all the morning, and, steering as we had been due north on a fairly straight road, the sun on our backs had made us feel quite sick. Thus the deep shade offered by the giant tree, the leafiest of all trees found in the country, was an irresistible temptation. The horses, too, had suffered, and stood as meek as lambs to be unsaddled. But before we had got far in our preparations for a meal half the village was round us, to make way in a second for two men, one about sixty, with a long tufted beard of grey, growing from the extreme limit of his chin, the other some twenty years younger. They cordially introduced themselves as the village Jefe and his son; the latter insisting upon calling himself "el secretario." They kept the store and public-house of the village, and, in the absence of customers, had filled up their time by serving themselves so liberally that they were quite merry. They insisted that we should come to their shop and take some of their "_agua ardiente_" (fire-water: and it lives up to its name too); but we explained that we were teetotalers.

At this moment there came racing across the plaza a perfectly lovely little laddie, bare-legged and bare-headed, with the scantiest of cotton vests and black-cotton knickerbockers on. El Secretario introduced the little fellow as his son, "_Cipriano, su servidor_" ("Cipriano, at your service"), and told us he was ten. We had a bottle of acid drops with us, and diving in our saddle-bags we in a moment won Cipriano's heart and cemented our budding friendship with the family by filling his pretty little hand full of the sweets. By this time a baby sister had arrived, and we found it impossible longer to resist the pressing hospitalities of the Jefe. We were anxious, too, to taste the national drink, which has the alias of "_anise_" and is made from crushed sugar-cane and aniseed. So we temporarily threw our teetotal principles to the four winds (or at least to where those most desirable elements successfully hid themselves, for there was not a breath of air) and walked over to the store. Once there, large gla.s.ses of the clear white liquid were poured out, and our hosts, enchanted at the excuse for more tippling, began drinking our healths in such lavish style as was ominous of the great difficulty we should have in getting away from their bibulous friendliness without the risk of a quarrel. We had just sipped at our gla.s.ses, which was all we ever intended to do, when fortune came to our aid. Looking across the plaza, we saw a stray village horse biting our stallion's neck. With a hurried word of excuse, we rushed out of the shop, our hosts shouting to us to return after we had righted things. But we never did; and the somnolent effects of the last "b.u.mpers" of anise they had drunk were so complete that we were left to eat our lunch in peace. By the time we had finished it was the siesta hour and the village had crept into its hammocks. As we rode past the store, we caught a glimpse of our friend the Jefe stretched full length, fast asleep, on his own counter.

From Pokboc it was some three leagues (all distances in Yucatan are measured by the league, which is not the well-conducted league of Europe, but, like the French verbs, irregular to the verge of impropriety) to Calotmul on a road which seemed redder and hotter than ever. Calotmul is a town run to seed, a ruinous unwieldy place with a plaza of mangy gra.s.s as big as Trafalgar Square, a long stuccoed, arcaded building in one corner of which served as the Jefetura where loitered some of Contrario's brothers-in-arms. Big as these decayed Spanish-Indian villages are, there is never any attempt at an inn, the very rare travellers by the roads being local Yucatecans who are sure of having one or more kinsmen in each village. So knowing no one and having been sated with Yucatecan interiors at vile Valladolid, we pushed on through the town, preferring the freedom of our woodland hotel. Our obstinacy much alarmed Contrario. He knew that Tizimin, the town to which we were steering and which was to serve as the base for serious exploration, was fourteen miles further on, and he thought we intended to try and reach it that night. But he became easier in his mind when we unhooked from the saddle our tripod boiler, which had throughout the journey served as a pail for fetching drinking-water, and sent him back to the well. By the time he had overtaken us we had selected a camping-ground about half a mile from the village, the horses were feeding quietly by the roadside, the baggage had been carried into the woods and our hammocks slung.

We always made a practice of one of us seeing the horses properly watered, while the other stayed in camp. As soon as Contrario rejoined us it was time for "watering order"; and one of us started out on Cyclops, while Contrario led the other horses, tied together. We had given him the kettle and one of the water-bottles to carry. The well was reached safely, the horses watered, and some corn bought at the local store; but on return to camp Contrario was only carrying the kettle. He had already annoyed us by the slow pace at which he had kept the horses going and by loitering to talk with some of the National Guard. We were tired and not in the best of tempers, and somewhat testily demanded to know where the water-bottle was. He gabbled away in Spanish some sentences we did not understand, but did not attempt to produce it. We thought he had left it at the well and tried to say so, ordering him to return for it. He entirely misunderstood, and believed we were accusing him of stealing it. The fellow was a fool but he was genuinely honest, and the most we were accusing him of was carelessness. But he would not be pacified, and wringing his hands and in a snivelling whine repeating again and again "_Yo soy no robo!_" ("I am no robber!"), he gathered up his traps, and, regardless of pay, was about to leave when suddenly by the firelight one of us detected the water-bottle, lying hidden in the shadow of a boulder where he had set it down and forgotten it before going down to the well. We were really sorry to have hurt his feelings, and he saw it, and with almost childish pleasure accepted our apologies.

It was like a thunderstorm, it cleared the air; and as, after our frugal meal of black beans, boiled eggs, tortillas, and Cadbury's cocoa, we sat round the fire smoking, we became quite "chummy" with the soldier-lad, who, delighted at the rehabilitation of his character, talked nineteen to the dozen till hammock-time, when we cemented our new-found friendship by giving him one of our blankets to aid his own flimsy Mexican wrap in keeping him warm during the cold night.

The next day, in sunlight which was positively grilling, we completed our journey to Tizimin. It was siesta time when we rode into the plaza under the shadow of the gaunt walls of the hideous ruined monastery. The town was quiet, almost like a city of the dead. The shops were closed; and at the long grated window-s.p.a.ces sunblinds were drawn. The gra.s.s had invaded the streets; the whole place looked like a Rip Van Winkle city which had got badly "left" in the race of civic life. Stretched in the thick dust a mangy dog or two lay panting; here and there under the shadow of a wall dozed an Indian, crouched on his haunches. We rode up to the Jefetura, and there from a yawning soldier we learnt that the Jefe was taking his morning tub, so we had some minutes to wait before we could expect an official welcome. Meanwhile we had time to glance round us. The plaza was of much the same size as Valladolid. In front of the Palacio Munic.i.p.al, where the becottoned National Guard were drowsing in the verandah-shade, was an avenue of orange trees loaded with fruit.

On the other side of the square stood another of those huge stuccoed churches we had become so accustomed to seeing. The seventeenth-century Spaniards in Yucatan certainly had no taste in building. Nothing could be more distressing than these great piles of stucco, flat-faced as any Hottentot. Their bigot builders certainly preferred quant.i.ty to quality.

Even when new, these ecclesiastical eyesores must have always been such.

But now, ... with plaster peeling off, with tufts of rank weeds growing from gaps in the walls, surrounded by a courtyard half cobble, half leprous gra.s.s, the enclosing walls tumbling in ruin, the church gate sagging on its broken rusty hinges or perchance replaced by a hurdle, they admirably typify the bedraggled down-at-heel ceremonial which masquerades throughout Yucatan as religion.

By this time our arrival had attracted representatives of the Tiziminians in the shape of three of the fattest boys we had ever seen outside a show. They were pretty fellows, too, about thirteen years old; but they would have been a good deal prettier if they had possessed less adipose tissue. Their tight holland knickers seemed on the point of giving up the task of enclosing the luxuriant opulence of what one might politely call their southern facades; while their bare brown legs were so ludicrously plump and rounded that they looked as if they had been blown up with a bicycle pump. The boys gazed at us and we gazed at the boys; it was hard to say which of the two sets of gazers was most astonished. But by this time a shuffling among the troops heralded the approach of the Jefe, coming like a giant refreshed from his bath. He was a great contrast to the epicene bird-like creature who had lorded it over the civic fortunes of Valladolid. A grand old man of good height, swarthy skinned, with a snow-white full patriarchal beard reaching nearly to his waist, he greeted us with true Spanish courtesy, with a hospitable wave of his hand inviting us within the cool stone room, where above the row of rocking-chairs hung a life-sized coloured print of the great Diaz. It was a most humiliating moment. Dusty, dirty, sweaty, covered with garrapatas, with many days' growth of beard, we were grieved indeed that this should be the snowy-haired Don's first sight of England. We indicated as best we could that this was not the normal condition of Englishmen, and that we should be more than grateful if he would allow us to wash first and talk afterwards. But he insisted upon hearing our plans, and when we told him of our intention of going through the country to the eastward his face bore a look of alarm. He declared the country "_muy peligroso_" (very dangerous); that the Indians were hostile to the whites; that even for the contents of a water-bottle travellers were killed, as in fact had actually happened to two Yucatecans but a few weeks before. We were too much in need of a wash to be much depressed by his pessimism, and were glad when he made a move to find us lodgings. These we found without much difficulty, a young Yucatecan being fetched and offering us a house for four dollars the week. It was only a few yards away, nothing really but two or three lofty whitewashed barns _en suite_, stone-floored, the walls decorated with hammock-pegs. But the great advantage was that it possessed a small paddock, rankly overgrown with shrubs and gra.s.s, which would serve as an excellent corral for our horses. A well too, there was, and before the genial Jefe had bade us "_Adios!_" we had our rubber bath out and were preparing for a glorious wash.

We were now in what is known as the Kantunil district, and in touch with the north-eastern branch of the independent Mayans. For Tizimin is the last outpost of Yucatecan authority. Even the Indians living within the town are a very different breed from the haciendado-ridden ones of the Yucatan which lay behind us. And this is perhaps the best place to give some idea of the physical appearance of the Mayan Indians generally. The whole race throughout the Peninsula is still singularly h.o.m.ogeneous, though it is in the Kantunil and eastern coast district, where crossings with the whites or even inter-tribally are unknown, that the purest types are found.

The Mayan is stoutly built and muscular, but seldom tall. His colour is a rich dark reddish brown--a beautiful tint remarkably distinct from that of the American Indian race in general. His hair is invariably raven black, lank and coa.r.s.e. His eyes are black or black-brown, usually small and somewhat cunning-looking; straight set as a rule, but occasionally with a suspicion of obliquity. The nose is well formed, straight or slightly aquiline, and at times somewhat Semitically heavy at the tip; but scarcely ever pyramidal in the pure Mayans. The noses of the women one would almost declare their best feature. The hair of the women, worn gathered in a knot at the back of the head, is often luxuriantly long; but men are fairly closely cropped. Of baldness we never saw a trace, though grey Indians of both s.e.xes are fairly common.

Both s.e.xes have a Mongolian lack of body hair; legs, arms and chests being rarely hirsute. The teeth are always good, and add to the charm of the sweet smile which at the least provocation comes to rob the faces of both s.e.xes of the rather sullen expression characteristic of them. Many of the children are extraordinarily pretty, and young girls of twelve (at which age they usually marry) are often fascinating pictures of youthful bloom, quite statuesque in their grace, their exquisitely developed figures showing through the clinging folds of their one chemise-like linen garment.

Mayan women age rapidly; but between p.u.b.erty (about ten) and their twenty-fifth year they are remarkable for matronly health and strength and their graceful carriage. They incline to flesh, and before forty are often unwieldy to a degree which is really ludicrous; such "too, too solid flesh" scarcely harmonising with the severely scanty lines of the _huipil_. This--the universal dress of all Indian women throughout Yucatan--is really nothing but a sheet, folded double and sewn down the sides and a half-moon cut out of the middle of the fold. Through this the head goes, and round this yoke runs back and front a flowered border, stamped coloured cotton among the poorer, elaborately hand-embroidered among the richer, women. The hem of the garment, which reaches rather more than half-way down the calf, is also often ornamented with embroidery. This shift or chemise--for it is little else--is sleeveless; and the only attempt at underclothes is a plain cotton petticoat; but many women and most young girls do not wear this.

In some of the wilder districts we visited the girls are stark naked till p.u.b.erty, while the old women and many of the young matrons wear nothing but a short cotton kilt from waist to knee. Round her neck the Indian woman wears a chain (though this habit is less common among the independent Mayans than among the Indians of Merida and the north-west district), oftenest of gilt or gla.s.s beads, with some small gold coin, gewgaw, charm or crucifix attached. Large gold earrings, too, are much worn. Round her shoulders she throws, when out of doors, a wrap of cotton or silk, brought up over the head and then allowed to hang down over the other shoulder. These wraps, which serve a practical purpose in protecting from the sun, are most picturesque. In Merida, as we have said, you see all colours; but a dark indigo or rich copper brown are the most common in the country districts. Almost without exception the women go barefoot, and their feet, though small, have from long shoelessness become broad.

The Mayan man dresses in loose white-cotton trousers, which he usually wears turned up to the knees, and a loose-fitting shirt of white cotton tucked in at the belt. As often as not the shirt is discarded while at work or in the bush, and the trousers give place to the _maxtli_, a broad loin-cloth. A pudding-basin-shaped straw hat, home-plaited, and sandals made of a single thickness of tanned hide cut to the shape of the foot, with a piece of cord coming up between the first and second toe, pa.s.sing over the instep and through a string loop on either side of the heel and then twisted round the ankle, complete his outfit. Every Indian wears belted round him in a leather sheath the _machete_, the native weapon universal throughout Central America. It is a sword-like knife, the blade about thirty inches long and two broad, with a plain hand-grip of bone or wood about four inches long. These are fearsome-looking weapons even when, as is usually the case, the blade is straight; but they are positively blood-curdling when they are, as one sees them sometimes, scimitar-shaped or ending with an ugly hook, like the finish of an English billhook.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NUNNERY (CASA DE LAS MONJAS), CHICHEN ITZA.]

The Mayans are a singularly healthy people, and free of skin complaints and those other blood diseases which so often affect native races in a low state of civilisation. But they are not const.i.tutionally strong, and die off like flies when exposed to an epidemic. Though so thoroughly a tropical people, they are cold-blooded with sluggish circulations, if one is to judge by the coldness of their hands, which, even in the children, are froggy in their chilliness. They are a clean race, and the Mayan labourer on coming in from his work would not dream of squatting before his frugal evening meal of tortillas and beans till he has had a hot bath. This he takes in a large shallow wooden trough, exactly like a butcher's tray magnified four times. In this, one end resting on the ground, the other raised on a low log of wood, the Mayan squats and sponges the water over himself with a bunch of henequen or other fibre.

In this tray, too, the babies are bathed and the family washing is done.

It is always washing-day with the Mayan women, and the hut gardens are always a-flutter with billowy white huipils. The Mayans are a singularly modest people, and, sharing their huts, we were again and again astonished at the decency which triumphed over the fact that a large family of all ages shared the same sleeping-room and slung their hammocks from the same beams.

With Tizimin as our base we explored the Kantunil district. The roads marked even on the official maps in Mexico City no longer exist, probably never existed. Overgrown and rendered impa.s.sable by luxuriant vegetation, such as there are have become mere trails which even the Indians can only use in single file. Thirty miles to the eastward of Tizimin begins the region of unbroken primeval forest. The road, which starts a good width, dwindles down into a mere path by which the Indians from Chansenote and Kantunil come into Tizimin to buy powder or shot or a new gun. Growing their own maize, raising cattle, pigs and poultry, spinning and weaving their clothing, braiding their hats and netting their hammocks, arms, salt, and luxuries such as women's finery or spirits are all they need to buy. They come into Tizimin not in crowds but one or two at a time, so as not to create suspicion, and meet their friends outside with their purchases. Of these Indians some five thousand are said to still exist in this north-eastern corner of the Peninsula; but the Mexican authorities, after butchery as ruthless as it has been fruitless, have been forced to retreat, and there is thus no way of obtaining accurate statistics. The Jefe Politico of Merida himself told us (we quote it as a proof that the Indians have triumphed thereabouts) that his family property near Kantunil had not been of any profit for years and was never likely to be again, as the Mayans denied his agents access to it.

It was at Tizimin that we first realised the positively amazing ignorance of the Yucatecan as to his own country or even his own district. No definite information as to the road we should take, or whether indeed we could reach the coast at all, was available. As it proved, this was impossible. Between Kantunil and the sea stretch miles of uninhabitable swamp which is impa.s.sable for horse, mule or man except possibly in places at the end of the driest of dry seasons. When we were there an average of three feet of water covered the coast lands. A change of plan was thus essential, and we had to go first more directly north and then take an eastward course. Meanwhile we employed some days in exploring the north-easterly district. The road to Chansenote shows signs of the struggle which has ended, at any rate for the present, in the triumph of the Indians. Here and there the gaunt walls of ruined haciendas, half hidden by luxuriant tropic weed, stand as silent witnesses to the cowardly retreat of the Yucatecan landlords. A cruel war of extermination has laid its desolating hand on all around, and the hungry forest has swallowed up again _milpas_ (cornfields) and fruit gardens.

The Indians themselves we found friendly enough if treated fairly and kindly. The children would watch us solemnly from the hut-doors, and the boys and men followed us at a respectful distance in our wanderings through the woodlands in search of buried cities. We found little save littered stones, but our excursions satisfied us that no Chichens exist in this part of Yucatan. Chansenote itself, once a flourishing Indian town, is now a group of mud-plastered huts with possibly three dozen inhabitants. Kantunil is a larger settlement, strictly Indian now as it always has been; the government vested in an Indian chief. Here the Mayans live pretty much as did their ancestors four centuries back, cultivating their milpas, rearing their farm stock, nominally Catholics but really without religion, save a jumbled ma.s.s of superst.i.tion in which Christian Saints and pagan G.o.ds are, after the long lapse of years, inextricably mixed.

Due north of Tizimin the country is still for the most part in the hands of the Yucatecans; but the cultivation of it is handicapped by a dearth of labour, for here the Indians do not submit to the conditions of serfdom existing in so-called civilised Yucatan, but will only work for fair wage, and often not long for that. Kikil, some miles from Tizimin on the north, is a straggling settlement of such working Indians, once the site of a large Indian town before the Spaniards built Tizimin. Here there were said to be extensive ruins, but we were disappointed as usual. Nothing is more disheartening than the glib way the idiotic Yucatecans send one on wild-goose chases after ruins which prove to be hideous Catholic churches of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. The Indians, too, are untrustworthy guides in such matters, for they have a perfect indifference to the architectural skill of their ancestors, and speak of their productions as "_xlap-pak_" (old walls).

Christmas week is a grand time for Tizimin, for it heralds in the great local _fiesta_ of the year, a feast which lasts from Christmas day till the New Year. Though synchronous with our Yuletide, it is not in celebration of that, but in honour of the local patron saint. The great feature of this gala are the bullfights. It is really doing them too much honour, though, to give them this dignified name; for they are really nothing less than a series of cowardly baitings of young bullocks. Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory of the bull-ring hath departed from Yucatan. We shall have more to say of this decadent torturing of domesticated animals in a later chapter. But the people "see blood," and in this respect the Indians are as bad as the mongrel usurpers of their country, and crowds flock in from the settlements for miles round. They bring with them their wives, their children, and packs of dogs; the babies astride their mother's hips, the bigger children clinging to her huipil; while the men bend under huge loads of basket-baggage slung on their backs, but the whole dead weight of which is on the man's forehead, the broad plaited string of the basket pa.s.sing just above his eyes. This is the queer way that all the Mayan Indians carry loads; and as you pa.s.s them they look up at you from under the strings, their uneasy att.i.tude giving their eyes a quite unfair appearance of sneaky shiftiness.

This fiesta week, then, we had the local life of Tizimin at its brightest. The plaza turns itself into a fair, with rows of tiny wooden booths whereat cheap gewgaws and tasteless finery in cottons and tinsels, necklaces of beads and the inevitable rosaries hung with cheap gilt crosses, bankrupt the Indian wife; while her lord fuddles himself with liquid poisons at the drinking-shops. Foodstuffs leap up to famine prices. The skinny fowl which would have cost you a dollar (two shillings) "booms" to three; eager crowds surround the butchers' stalls where from dawn are trays, none too clean, piled up with blood-boltered lumps of meat (they never cut their beef in joints in Yucatan) calculated to rob an average tom-cat of his appet.i.te. Trays of unspeakably sticky sweets reek in the sun, surrounded by eager-faced children. Strung like onions, hundreds of tortillas hang festooned on strings round the shops, as if some huge type of yellow mushroom had been utilised for decoration. Hour after hour gallop into the dusty plaza _caballeros_ from the local plantations--fine young dandies these!

who fancy themselves, intent on conquests among some of those black-eyed girls who stare from the shaded doorways as they clatter past. The three-muled waggon, too, huge-wheeled, shaded with green canvas, rolls its lumbering way into the town, bringing some family from Espita or Valladolid; and the tired mules, released from their rope and leather trappings, look about for the dustiest spot in the plaza and roll and roll and roll, backwards and forwards, in an ecstasy of freedom, to presently regain their feet, shake themselves like a dog from the water, and look about for the much desired drink.

The people come in to enjoy themselves, and perhaps they do. But there seems little or no real gaiety in the crowd. The drunken Indian is at best a maudlin creature, often quarrelsome and never merry and boisterous, and his women and children are the most silent of beings; while over the whole scene hangs the mephitic atmosphere engendered by that mischievous superst.i.tion, mainstay of a sickeningly hypocritical ecclesiasticism--that web of priest-cunning which Catholicism has woven, spider-like, round the race she has enmeshed and degraded. And so you see the poor bewildered, stumbling Indian drunkard wasting his last few centavos on a dirty melting tallow dip which, with many genuflexions, he places before a plaster St. Andrew or St. Peter. Yes! the Church is there, and makes high holiday. It is the padre's great harvesting (later we will describe an amusing "corner" made in candles by the Tizimin "curer of souls"), and hour after hour the Yucatecan sacristan climbs to the belfry to summon the faithful. But the Indian faithful are made, the wise padres know, the more faithful by a little liquor; and so outside the church doors are little drinking-shops, and the devils of superst.i.tion and drink, hand in hand, work their evil will on the weltering crowd. All the burning day the people sit huddled in the dust of the plaza, and when the chill black night settles down, the light streams from the gaping doorways of the church, where the whining sing-song of the priest and the treble voices of the boy choristers make one long inharmonious chant, punctuated with the metallic ring of cymbals, while beneath the ink-black shade of the church walls the Indian families squat, shivering in their blankets, around small fires.

Our final preparations for the journey to the coast took some days, and the fiesta was in full swing before we were ready to leave. Owing to the swamps, we thought it well to cut our baggage down to vanishing point.

Having thus almost attained "that consummation devoutly to be wished" by all good travellers,--the toothbrush and blanket state,--we rode out from Tizimin late in December. Contrario had gone back to Valladolid, and we had hired an Indian boy. Our route lay for nine miles over a fair road to Sucopo. Thence a narrower path led to Zonotake, whence after eighteen miles through the jungle we reached the old Indian settlement of Occeh. Here we made a day or two's stay at the hacienda, and discovered a series of sepulchral mounds, each crowned with the ruins of a building. Below one mound we found, hidden by the tangled thorn-bushes, what appeared to be the mouth of a cave. It was little more than two feet wide, and looked uninviting. But hoping it would prove a pa.s.sage to the centre of the mound, and first taking the precautionary measure of throwing in a stone to disturb any snake which might be sheltering, we wriggled in. It was only a cave of fair size; at the back a ma.s.s of limestone had lately fallen, blocking up any pa.s.sage-way, if indeed any existed. In Mayan burial mounds the corpse was nearly always deposited in a well sunk from the top, and often extraordinarily deep.

Between Occeh and the sea lay forty miles of forest. As we approached the coast the land became low and boggy till the whole country seemed a swampy wood. The animals were often floundering up to their bellies in water and black mud. In places a stretch of water looking like a river formed the path ahead of us. When night came and the moon rose, the forests seemed a piece of water fairyland. The mule-track we followed lay between woodland so thick that it seemed like an ebon wall on either side save where the moon, glinting through the overgrowth, speckled the path with silver light. A great silence reigned, broken only by the cry of some night bird or the whispering rustle of the palm-leaves. Here and there the trees parted a little, as we reached some clearing where the moon was reflected in the pools and struck upon the sapota trees, making them, with their smooth grey barks, look like granite pillars.

Now and again the animals waded through shallow swamps around which a thousand fireflies flitted, and from the edges of which white ibises splashed and fluttered up, a ghostly flock, at our approach. On reaching the coast a kindly welcome was accorded us at El Cuyo, a tiny port, by the Cuban superintendent of a wood-cutting company which has its headquarters there.

CHAPTER VIII

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CORTES

On the coast from El Cuyo to Cape Catoche and round as far east as Contoy Island are mounds, sometimes many miles apart, averaging about 50 or 60 feet in height. We examined some of these. They are obviously artificial, quite roughly built of earth and unhewn stones, and, there can be little doubt, were erected during the later years of the fifteenth and the early years of the sixteenth centuries as "look-outs"

to warn the tribes of the interior of the approach of the Spaniards.

Around them are no traces of buildings. From them smoke-signals by day and fire by night doubtless served as a perfect means of collecting the tribes at any threatened point.

From El Cuyo, recrossing the salt lakes which for twenty-four miles fringe the swampy forest coast lands at this part, we took a directly east course for sixty miles. Profitless as this part of our tour proved archaeologically, it was geographically of interest. We have been enabled to prepare a map of this north-eastern corner of Yucatan, which attains an accuracy no map heretofore published has attained. This district is a dead level of primeval forest, untrodden, unknown, stretching for forty miles inland and fringed by swamps which are anything from five to ten miles wide. Here and there we discovered traces of Indian towns, in no case suggesting much size, the settlements of those sub-tribes which ranged this woodland and probably looked Chichen-wards for their supreme chief. This belt of forest land forms the gigantic concession of a Yucatecan trading concern, "La Compania Agricola," founded in 1902; but a really infinitesimal part comparatively has been brought by them under cultivation, working with imported labour, chiefly from Cuba and Mexico.

From the officials--all Cubans--we received the most perfect courtesy and the most generous a.s.sistance in forwarding our progress along the coast, and we shall directly describe a pleasant stay we made on their chief sugar plantation.

The days in the forest were monotonous enough. We followed a mule-track used by the woodcutters. Mile after mile the scenery was the same. There is nothing majestic in the Yucatecan forests. You see no giant trees, no mighty fathers of the woodland towering up. The highest is the sapota, from which the gummy sap _chicle_--basis of all American chewing-gums--is obtained. The characteristic of the forest is its deadly stillness. Thanks to the riverless nature of Yucatan there is little animal life. The swamps afford a haunt for the black duck, for wild geese, spoonbills, ibis and flamingo; and now and again you hear the hoa.r.s.e cry of a parakeet, or a wild pig bustles through the undergrowth. But practically the forest is dead, flowerless, dark; matted, tangled underfoot, matted, tangled overhead; the long snake-like lianas hanging like fairy ropes from the highest, or weaving a network, like the web of some monster spider, between the shorter, trees.