Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala And Honduras Part 3

My rucksack on the back of a peon--and it is astonishing how much more easily one's possessions carry in that fashion; as if it were indeed that automatic baggage on legs I have long contemplated inventing--I set off to the neighboring mine of "Peregrina." As the peon was accustomed to carry anything short of a grand piano, he did not complain at this half-day excursion under some twenty pounds. Being drawn out, he grew quite cheery on this new fashion of carrying--"when the load is not much." In the cool morning air, with a wind full of ozone sweeping across the high country, the trail lay across tumbled stretches of rocky ground, range behind range of mountains beyond and a ruined stone hut or corral here and there carrying the memory back to Palestine. For a half hour we had Guanajuato in full sight in its narrow gully far below. Many donkeys pattered by under their loads of encinal f.a.gots, the ragged, expressionless drivers plodding silently at their heels.

Ahead grew the roar of "Peregrina's" stamp-mill, and I was soon winding through the gorge-hung village. According to the manager, I had chosen well the time of my coming, for there was "something doing." We strolled about town until he had picked up the jefe politico, a handsome Mexican, built as ma.s.sive as an Aztec stone idol, under a veritable haystack of hat, who ostensibly at least was a sworn friend of the mining company. With him we returned to the deafening stamp-mill and brought up in the "zinc room," where the metal is cast into bricks. Here the stealing of ore by workmen is particularly prevalent, and even the searching by the trusty at the gate not entirely effective, for even the skimming off of the sc.u.m leaves the floor scattered with chips of silver with a high percentage of gold which even the American in charge cannot always keep the men from concealing. Hence there occurs periodically the scene we were about to witness.

When the native workmen of the "zinc room" enter for the day, they are obliged to strip in one chamber and pa.s.s on to the next to put on their working clothes, reversing the process when they leave. To-day all five of them were herded together in one dressing-room, of which, the three of us being admitted, the door was locked. The jefe politico, as the government authority of the region, set about searching them, and as his position depended on the good-will of the powerful mining company, it was no perfunctory "frisking." The ragged fellows were called up one by one and ordered to strip of blouses, shirts, and trousers, and even _huarachas_, their flat leather sandals, the jefe examining carefully even the seams of their garments. Indeed, he even searched the hairs of their bodies for filings of "high-grade."

The men obeyed with dog-like alacrity, though three of them showed some inner emotion, whether of guilt, fear, or shame, it was hard to guess. Two had been carefully gone over without the discovery of anything incriminating, when the jefe suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed up the hat of the first and found in it a knotted handkerchief containing a sc.r.a.p of pure metal some two inches long. From then on his luck increased. The fourth man had been fidgeting about, half disrobing before the order came, when all at once the local authority turned and picked up a piece of ore as large as a silver dollar, wrapped in paper, which the fellow had surrept.i.tiously tossed away among a bunch of mats against the wall. The jefe cuffed him soundly and ordered him to take off his shoes--he was the only one of the five sporting that luxury--and discovered in the toe of one of them a still larger booty. The last of the group was a cheery little fellow barely four feet high, likable in spite of his ingrained lifetime lack of soap. He showed no funk, and when ordered to undress turned to the "gringo" manager with: "Me too, jefe?" Then he quickly stripped, proving himself not only honest but the biggest little giant imaginable. He had a chest like a wine-barrel and legs that resembled steel poles, weighed fifty-two kilos, yet according to the manager, of whom he was one of the trusties, frequently carried four-hundred-pound burdens up the long hill below the mine. The jefe found something tied up in his old red cloth belt, but little Barrel-chest never lost his smile, and the suspicious lump proved to be a much-folded old chromo print of some saint.

"What's he got that for?" asked the manager.

"To save him from the devil," sneered the jefe, wadding it up and tossing it back at him.

When he was dressed again the little giant was sent to town for policemen, a sign of confidence which seemed greatly to please him. For a half hour we smoked and joked and discussed, like so many cattle in the shambles, the three prisoners, two found guilty and the third suspected, who stood silent and motionless against the wall. Three policemen in shoddy uniforms, armed with clubs and enormous revolvers sticking out through their short coat-tails, at length appeared, of the same cla.s.s and seeming little less frightened than the prisoners. They were ordered to tie ropes about the waists of the criminals and stood clutching these and the tails of the red sarapes, when the jefe interrupted some anecdote to shout the Spanish version of:

"What in ---- are you waiting for?"

They dodged as if he had thrown a brick, and hurried their prisoners away to the cold, flea-ridden, stone calaboose of the town, where in all probability they lay several months before their case was even called up; while the manager and I ascended to his veranda and flower-grown residence and sat down to a several course dinner served by a squad of solemn servants. As in many another land, it pays to be a white man in Mexico.

Stealing is rarely a virtue. But it was not hard to put oneself in the place of these wretches and catch their point of view that made such thievery justifiable. As they saw it, these foreigners had made them go down into their own earth and dig out its treasures, paid them little for their labors, and searched them whenever they left that they should not keep even a little bit of it for themselves. Now they had made their own people shut them up because they had picked up a few dollars'

worth of sc.r.a.ps left over from the great burro-loads of which, to their notion, the hated "gringoes" were robbing them. Like the workingmen of England, they were only "getting some of their own back." They were no doubt more "aficionados al pulque" and gambling than to their families, but so to some extent were the "gringoes" also, and they were by no means the only human beings who would succ.u.mb to the same temptation under the same circ.u.mstances.

The ancient "Peregrina" mine was different from "Pinguico." Here we entered by a level opening and walked down most of the two thousand feet, much of it by narrow, slimy, slippery, stone steps, in some places entirely worn away by the bare feet of the many generations of peons that as slaves to the Spaniards of colonial days used to carry the ore up on their backs from the very bottom of the mine. "Peregrina"

mountain was almost another Mammoth Cave, so enormous are the caverns that have been "stoped out" of it in the past four centuries. In many a place we could see even with several candles only the ground underfoot and perhaps a bit of the nearest sidewall; the rest was a dank, noiseless, blank s.p.a.ce, seeming square miles in extent. For three hours we wandered up and down and in and out of huge unseen caves, now and then crawling up or down three or four hundred foot "stopes" on hands and knees, by ladders, stone steps, or toe-holes in the rock. Through it all it was raining much of the time in torrents--in the mine, that is, for outside the sun was shining brightly--with mud underfoot and streams of water running along much of the way; and, unlike the sweltering interior of "Pinguico," there was a dank dungeon chill that reached the marrow of the bones. Even in the shafts which we descended in buckets, cold water poured down upon us, and, far from being naked, the miners wore all the clothing they possessed. Here the terror of the peons was an old American mine-boss rated "loco" among them, who went constantly armed with an immense and ancient revolver, always loaded and reputed of "hair trigger," which he drew and whistled in the barrel whenever he wished to call a workman. A blaze crackling in the fireplace was pleasant during the evening in the manager's house, for "Peregrina" lies even higher above the sea than "Pinguico"; but even here by night or day the peons, and especially the women, went barefoot and in thinnest garb.

A native horse, none of which seem noted for their speed, carried me out to the famous old mining town of La Luz, where the Spaniards first began digging in this region. The animal made little headway forward, but fully replaced this by the distance covered up and down. To it a trot was evidently an endeavor to see how many times and how high it could jump into the air from the same spot. The ancient Aztecs, seeing us advancing upon them, would never have made the mistake of fancying man and horse parts of the same animal. Moreover, the pesky beast had an incurable predilection for treading, like a small boy "showing off," the extreme edge of pathways at times not six inches from a sheer fall of from five hundred to a thousand feet down rock-faced precipices.

Still it was a pleasant three-hour ride in the brilliant sunshine, winding round and over the hills along pitching and tossing trails. Peons obsequiously lifted their hats when I pa.s.sed, which they do not to a man afoot; a solemn stillness of rough-and-tumble mountains and valleys, with deep-shadowed little gorges scolloped out of the otherwise sun-flooded landscape, broad hedges of cactus and pitching paths, down which the animal picked its way with ease and a.s.surance, alternated with mighty climbs over a dozen rises, each of which I fancied the last.

La Luz is a typical town of mountainous Mexico. A long, broken adobe village lies scattered along a precipitous valley, scores of "roads" and trails hedged with cactus wind and swoop and climb again away over steep hills and through deep _barrancos_, troops of peons and donkeys enlivening them; flowers give a joyful touch, and patches of green and the climate help to make the place reminiscent of the more thickly settled portions of Palestine. From the town we could see plainly the city of Leon, fourth in Mexico, and a view of the plain, less striking than that from "Pinguico," because of the range rising to cut it off in the middle distance. The mountains of all this region are dotted with round, white, cement monuments, the boundary marks of different mining properties. By Mexican law each must be visible from the adjoining two, and in this pitched and tumbled country this requires many.

Beyond the village we found, about the old Spanish workings, ancient, roofless, stone buildings with loop-holed turrets for bandits and niches for saints. These structures, as well as the waste dumped by the Spaniards, were being "repicked for values," and broken up and sent through the stamp-mill, the never-ending rumble of which sounded incessantly, like some distant water-fall; for with modern methods it pays to crush rock with even a few dollars a ton value in it, and the Americans of to-day mine much that the Spaniards with their crude methods cast aside or did not attempt to work. At a mine in the vicinity the ancient stone mansion serving as residence of the superintendent was torn down and sent through the stamping-mill, and a new one of less valuable rock erected. We descended 1600 feet into the mine of La Luz down a perfectly round, stone-lined shaft in a small iron bucket held by a one-inch wire cable and entirely in charge of peons--who fortunately either had nothing against us or did not dare to vent it.

CHAPTER IV

BOUND ABOUT LAKE CHAPALA

With the coming of November I left Guanajuato behind. The branch line down to Silao was soon among broad plains of corn, without rocks even along the flat, ragged, country roads, bringing to mind that it was long since I had walked on level and un.o.bstructed ground. The crowding of the second-cla.s.s car forced me to share a bench with a chorus girl of the company that had been castilianizing venerable Broadway favorites in Guanajuato's chief theater. She was about forty, looked it with compound interest, was graced with the form of a Panteon mummy, and a face--but some things are too horrible even to be mentioned in print. Most of the way she wept copiously, apparently at some secret a pocket mirror insisted on repeating to her as often as she drew it out, and regained her spirits only momentarily during the smoking of each of several cigarettes. Finally she took to saying her beads in a sepulchral, moaning voice, her eyes closed, and wagging her head from side to side in the rhythm of her professional calling, until we pulled into the one-story, adobe, checkerboard town. All the troupe except the two "stars" rode second-cla.s.s, dressed much like peons, and carried their possessions in misshapen bundles under their arms. If the one performance I had seen was typical, this was far better treatment than they deserved.

The express from El Paso and the North set me down in the early night at Irapuato, out of the darkness of which bobbed up a dozen old women, men, and boys with wailing cries of "Fresas!" For this is the town of perennial strawberries. The basket of that fruit heaped high and fully a foot in diameter which sat before me next morning as we rambled away westward toward Guadalajara cost _cuatro reales_--a quarter, and if the berries grew symmetrically smaller toward the bottom, an all-day appet.i.te by no means brought to light the tiniest. The way lay across a level land bathed in sunshine, of extreme fertility, and watered by harnessed streams flowing down from the distant hills. All the day one had a sense of the richness of nature, not the prodigality of the tropics to make man indolent, but just sufficient to give full reward for reasonable exertion. The rich, black, fenceless plains were burnished here and there with little shallow lakes of the rainy season, and musical with wild birds of many species. Primitive well-sweeps punctuated the landscape, and now and then the church towers of some adobe village peered through the mesquite trees. In the afternoon grazing grew more frequent and herds of cattle and flocks of goats populated all the scene. Within the car and without, the hats of the peons, with all their sameness, were never exactly alike. Each bore some individuality, be it in shape, shade, material, or manner of wearing, as distinct as among the fair s.e.x in other lands; and that without resorting to decorating them with flowers, vegetables, or dead birds. Some wore around them ribbons with huge letters proposing, "Viva ----" this or that latest aspirant to the favor of the primitive-minded "pela'o," but these were always arranged in a manner to add to rather than detract from the artistic ensemble. Many a young woman of the same cla.s.s was quite attractive in appearance, though thick bulky noses robbed all of the right to be called beautiful. They did not lose their charms, such as they were, prematurely, as do so many races of the South, and the simplicity of dress and hair arrangement added much to the pleasing general effect.

As night descended we began to pant upward through low hills, wooded, but free from the rocks and boulders of a mining region, and in the first darkness drew up at Guadalajara, second city of Mexico. It is a place that adorns the earth. Jalisco State, of which this is the capital, has been called the Andalusia of Mexico, and the city is indeed a Seville of the West, though lacking in her spontaneity of life, for this cruder people is much more tempered with a constant fear of betraying their crudeness and in consequence much weighed down by "propriety." But its bright, central plaza has no equal to the north. Here as the band plays amid the orange trees heavy with ripening fruit, the more haughty of the population promenade the inner square, outside which stroll the peons and "lower cla.s.ses"; though only custom seems responsible for the division. One misses in Mexico the genuine democracy of Spain. The idea of a conquered race still holds, and whoever has a strain of white in his veins--or even in the hue of his collar--considers it fitting to treat the Indian ma.s.s with a cold, indifferent tone of superiority. Yet in the outer circle the unprejudiced observer found more pleasing than within. One was reminded of Mark Twain's suggestion that complexions of some color wear best in tropical lands. In this, above all, the women of the rebozo were vastly superior to those who stepped from their carriages at about the beginning of the third number and took to parading, the two s.e.xes in pairs marching in opposite directions at a snail's pace. The "women of the people" had more sense of the fitness of things than to ape the wealthy in dress, like the corresponding cla.s.s in our own land, and their simplicity of attire stood out in attractive contrast to the pasty features and unexercised figures in "Parisian" garb of the inner circle.

Guadalajara has the requisites of a real city. Its streets are well paved with macadam, and it even possesses garbage wagons. Indeed, in some respects it has carried "progress" too far, as in the case of the winking electric sign of Broadway proportions advertising a _camiseria_--a local "shirtery," before which fascinated peons from the distant villages stand gazing as at one of the seven wonders of the universe. Beggars are few and there is none of the oppressive poverty of other Mexican cities. This, it is agreed, is due not merely to the extreme fertility of Jalisco, but to the kindness of nature in refusing to produce the maguey in the vicinity, so that drunkenness is at its lowest Mexican ebb and the sour stink of pulque shops nowhere a.s.sails the nostrils. For this curse of the peon will not endure long transportation. An abundance of cheap labor makes possible many little conveniences unknown in more industrial lands, and the city has a peaceful, soothing air and temperature, due perhaps to its ideal alt.i.tude of six thousand feet, that makes life drift along like a pleasant dream.

But its nights are hideous. The Mexican seems to relish constant uproar, and if Guadalajara is ever to be the open-air health resort for frayed nerves and weakened lungs it aspires to, there must come a diligent suppression of unnecessary noises. As the evening gathering evaporates, leaving the plaza sprinkled with a few dreamy mortals and scattered policemen eating the lunch their wives bring and share with them, pandemonium seems to be released from its confinement. First these same preservers of law and order take to blowing their hair-raising whistles at least every ten minutes from one to another back and forth through every street, as if mutually to keep up their courage. Scores of the gilded youth on the way home from "playing the bear" before their favorite _rejas_ join together in bands to howl into the small hours their glee at the kindness of life, the entire stock of street-cars seems to be sent out nightly on some extended excursion with orders never to let their gongs fall silent, and long before dawn even the few who have succeeded in falling into a doze are s.n.a.t.c.hed awake by an atrocious din of church-bells sufficient in number to supply heaven, nirvana, the realm of houris, and the Irish section of purgatory, with enough left over to furnish boiling pots for the more crowded section of the Hereafter. Then with a dim suggestion of dawn every living dog and fighting-c.o.c.k, of which each inhabitant appears to possess at least a score, joins the forty thousand vendors of forty thousand different species of uselessness howling in at least as many different voices and tones, each a bit louder than all the others, until even an unoccupied wanderer concludes that sleep is an idle waste of an all too short existence.

I brought up a day of random wandering in state's prison. The _Penitenciaria_ of Guadalajara is a huge, wheel-shaped building in the most modern style of that cla.s.s of architecture. The bullet-headed youth in soldier's uniform and the complexion of a long-undusted carpet, leaning on his musket at the entrance, made no move to halt me, and I stepped forth on a patio forested with orange trees, to find that most of the public had preceded me, including some hundred fruit, tortilla, cigarette, and candy vendors. Here was no sign of prisoners. I approached another stern boy armed like a first-cla.s.s cruiser in war time and he motioned upward with his gun barrel. The dwelling of the _comandante_ faced the patio on the second-story corridor. His son, aged five, met me with the information:

"Papa 'sta dormido."

But he was misinformed, for when his mother introduced me into the parlor, father, in shirt-sleeves, was already rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and preparing to light the first after-siesta cigarette. When my impressiveness had penetrated his reawakening intellect, he prepared me a doc.u.ment which, reduced to succinct English, amounted to the statement that the prison and all it contained was mine for the asking.

A whiff of this sesame opened like magic the three immense iron doors through anterooms in charge of trusties, in prison garb of the material of blue overalls and caps shaped like a low fez. Inside, a "preso de confianza" serving as turnkey led the way along a great stone corridor to a little central patio with flowers and a central fountain babbling merrily. From this radiated fifteen other long-vaulted pa.s.sages, seeming each fully a half mile in length; for with Latin love of the theatrical the farther ends had been painted to resemble an endless array of cells, even the numbers being continued above the false doors to minute infinity. Besides these imaginary ones there were some forty real places of confinement on each side of each corridor, three-cornered, stone rooms with a comfortable cot and noticeable cleanliness. The hundred or more convicts, wandering about or sitting in the sun of the patio, were only locked in them by night. Whenever we entered a corridor or a room, two strokes were sounded on a bell and all arose and stood at attention until we had pa.s.sed. Yet the discipline was not oppressive, petty matters being disregarded. The corridor of those condemned to be shot was closed with an iron-barred gate, but the inmates obeyed with alacrity when my guide ordered them to step forth to be photographed.

One of the pa.s.sageways led to the _talleres_ or workshops, also long and vaulted and well-lighted by windows high up in the curve of the arched roof.

These showed the stone walls to be at least four feet thick, yet the floor was of earth. On it along the walls sat men weaving straw ribbons to be sewn into hats on the American sewing-machines beyond. In side rooms were blacksmith, carpenter, and tinsmith shops in which all work was done by hand, the absence of machinery suggesting to the trusty in charge that Mexico is "muy pobre" as compared with other lands. Convicts were obliged to work seven hours a day. Scattered through the building were several small patios with patches of sun, in which many prisoners were engaged in making ingenious little knickknacks which they were permitted to sell for their own benefit. The speciality of one old fellow under life sentence was a coin purse with the slightly incongruous device, "Viva la Independencia!"

There was a complete absence of vicious faces, at least faces more so than those of the great ma.s.s of peons outside. I recalled the a.s.sertions of cynical American residents that all Mexicans are criminals and that those in jail were only the ones who have had the misfortune to get caught. Certainly there was nothing in their outward appearance to distinguish the inmates from any gathering of the same cla.s.s beyond prison walls. Off one corridor opened the bath patio, large, and gay with sunshine and flowers, with a large swimming pool and several smaller baths. The prisoners are required to bathe at least every Sunday. Within the penitentiary was a garden of several acres, on the walls above which guards patroled with loaded muskets and in which prisoners raised every species of fruit and vegetable known in the region. The inst.i.tution indeed was fully self-supporting. The kitchen was lined with huge vats into which bushels of beans, corn, and the like were shoveled, and like the prison tailor, shoe, and barber shops, was kept in excellent order. Several short-time prisoners, among them many boys, volunteered to stand in appropriate att.i.tudes before the heavy wall at the end of a three-cornered court where condemned men are shot at three paces in the dawn of many an early summer day. In one corridor the prison band, entirely made up of prisoners, was practising, and when I had been seated in state on a wooden bench they struck up several American favorites, ending with our national hymn, all played with the musical skill common to the Mexican Indian, even among those unable to read a note. On the whole the prison was as cheery and pleasant as fitted such an inst.i.tution, except the women's ward, into which a vicious-looking girl admitted me sulkily at sight of the comandante's order. A silent, nondescript woman of forty took me in charge with all too evident ill-will and marched me around the patio on which opened the rooms of female inmates, while the fifty or more of them left off their cooking and washing for the male prisoners and stood at disgruntled attention in sullen silence. Their quarters were noticeably dirtier than those of the men. My guide took leave of me at the first of the three iron doors, having still to postpone his exit a year or more, and these again, fortunately, swung on their hinges as if by magic to let pa.s.s only one of the thousand of us within.

On the mule-car that dragged and jolted us out to the "Niagara of Mexico" were three resident Germans who strove to be "simpatico" to the natives by a clumsy species of "horse play." Their asininity is worth mention only because among those laughing at their antics was a peon who had been gashed across the hand, half-severing his wrist, yet who sat on the back platform without even a rag around the wound, though with a rope tourniquet above. Two gray and decrepit policemen rode with him and half way out stopped at a stone hut to arrest the perpetrator of the deed and bring him along, wrapped in the customary red sarape and indifference.

The waterfall over a broad face of rock was pleasing but not extraordinary, and swinging on my rucksack I struck off afoot. The lightly rolling land was very fertile, with much corn, great droves of cattle, and many shallow lakes, its climate a pleasant cross between late spring and early fall. From El Castillo the path lay along the shimmering railroad, on which I outdid the train to Atequisa station.

The orange vendors lolling here under the shade of their hats gave the distance to Chapala as fifteen miles, and advised me to hire a horse or take pa.s.sage in the stage. This primitive bone-shaker, dark-red in color, the body sitting on huge leather springs, was drawn by four teams of mules in tandem, and before revolution spread over the land was customarily packed to the roof and high above it with excursionists to Mexico's chief inland watering-place. Now it dashed back and forth almost empty.

I preferred my own legs. A soft road led between orange-groves--at the station were offered for sale seedless oranges compared to which those of California are pigmies--to the drowsing town of Atequisa. Through one of its crumbling stone gates the way spread at large over its sandy, sun-bathed plaza, then contracted again to a winding wide trail, rising leisurely into the foothills beyond. A farmer of sixty, homeward bound to his village of Santa Cruz on a loose-eared a.s.s, fell in with me. He lacked entirely that incommunicative manner and half-resentful air I had so often encountered in the Mexican, and his country dialect whiled away the time as we followed the unfenced "road" around and slowly upward into hills less rugged than those about Guanajuato and thinly covered with coa.r.s.e gra.s.s and small brush. Twenty-one years ago he had worked here as _mozo_ for "gringoes," my compatriots. They had offered him a whole peso a day if he would not get married. But "he and she both wanted," so "que quiera uste'"? They had started farming on a little piece of rocky ridge. He would point it out to me when we came nearer. By and by he had bought another piece of land for fifty pesos and then _poco a poco_ for forty pesos some more. Then for twenty-four pesos and fifty centavos he had bought a cow, and the _vaca_ before long gave them a fine calf and twelve _cuartillos_ of milk a day. So that he was able to buy another heifer and then an ox and finally another ox and--

Whack! It took many a thump and prod and "Bur-r-r-r-r-r-o!" to make the pretty little mouse-colored donkey he was riding keep up with me--and what did I think he paid for him? Eighteen pesos! Si, senor, ni mas ni menos. A bargain, eh? And for the other one at home, which is larger, only twenty-two pesos, and for the one _they_ stole from him, fifteen pesos and a bag of corn. And once _they_ stole all three of the _burritos_ and he ran half way to Colima and had them arrested and got the _animalitos_ back. So that now he had two oxen--pray G.o.d they were still safe--and two burros and three pieces of land and a good wife--only yesterday she fell down and broke her arm and he had had to cut sticks to tie it up and she would have to work without using it for a long time--

Whack! "Anda bur-r-r-r-r-ro!" and once he owned it he never could get himself to sell an animalito. They were sometimes useful to plow and plant anyway, and this life of _sembrar_ and _cosechar_ was just the one for him. The cities, bah!--though he had been twice to Guadalajara and only too glad to get away again--and wasn't I tired enough to try the burrito a while, I should find her pace smooth as sitting on the ground. No? Well, at least if I got tired I could come and spend the night in his _casita_, a very poor little house, to be sure, which he had built himself long ago, soon after they were married, but there I would be in my own house, and his wife--or perhaps now he himself--would _ordenar la vaca_ and there would be fresh milk and--

So on for some seven or eight miles. Here and there the road pa.s.sed through an open gate as into a farmyard, though there were no adjoining fences to mark these boundaries of some new hacienda or estate. From the highest point there was a pretty retrospect back on Atequisa and the railroad and the broad valley almost to far-off Guadalajara, and ahead, also still far away, Lake Chapala shimmering in the early sunset. Between lay broad, rolling land, rich with flowers and shrubbery, and with much cultivation also, one vast field of ripening Indian corn surely four miles long and half as wide stretching like a sea to its surrounding hills, about its edge the leaf and branch shacks of its guardians. Maize, too, covered all the slope down to the mountain-girdled lake, and far, far away on a point of land, like Tyre out in the Mediterranean, the twin towers of the church of Chapala stood out against the dimming lake and the blue-gray range beyond.

Two leagues off it the peasant pointed out the ridge that hid his casita and his animalitos and his good wife--with her broken arm now--and regretting that I would not accept his poor hospitality, for I must be tired, he rode away down a little barranca walled by tall bushes with brilliant ma.s.ses of purple, red, and pink flowers and so on up to the little patch of corn which--yes, surely, I could see a corner of it from here, and from it, if only I would come, I should see the broad blue view of Chapala lake, and--My road descended and went down into the night, plentifully scattered with loose stones. Before it had grown really dark I found myself casting a shadow ahead, and turned to find an enormous red moon gazing dreamily at me from the summit of the road behind. Then came the suburbs and enormous ox-carts loaded with everything, and donkeys without number pa.s.sing silent-footed in the sand, and peons, lacking entirely the half-insolence and pulque-sodden faces of Guanajuato region, greeted me unfailingly with "Adios" or "Buenas noches."

But once in the cobble-paved village I must pay high in the "Hotel Victor"--the larger ones being closed since anarchy had confined the wealthy to their cities--for a billowy bed and a chicken centuries old served by waiters in evening dress and trained-monkey manners. The free and easy old _casa de asistencia_ of Guadalajara was far more to my liking. But at least the landlord loaned me a pair of trunks for a moonlight swim in Lake Chapala, whispering some secret to its sandy beaches in the silence of the silver-flooded night.

It is the largest lake in Mexico, second indeed only to t.i.ticaca among the lofty sheets of water of the Western world. More than five thousand feet above the sea, it is shallow and stormy as Lake Erie. Waves were dashing high at the foot of the town in the morning. Its fishermen are ever fearful of its fury and go to pray for a safe return from every trip before their patron St. Peter in the twin-spired village church up toward which the lake was surging this morning as if in anger that this place of refuge should be granted its legitimate victims.

Its rage made the journey by water I had planned to Ribera Castellanos inadvisable, even had an owner of one of the little open boats of the fishermen been willing to trust himself on its treacherous bosom, and by blazing eleven I was plodding back over the road of yesterday. The orange vendors of Atequisa gathered around me at the station, marveling at the strength of my legs. In the train I shared a bench with a dignified old Mexican of the country regions, who at length lost his reserve sufficiently to tell me of the "muy amigo gringo" whose picture he still had on the wall of his house since the day twenty-seven years ago when my compatriot had stopped with him on a tour of his native State, carrying a small pack of merchandise which gave him the entree into all houses, but which he purposely held at so high a price that none would buy.

From Ocotlan station a broad level highway, from which a glimpse is had of the sharp, double peak of Colima volcano, runs out to Ribera Castellanos. Sam Rogers was building a tourist hotel there. Its broad lawn sloped down to the edge of Lake Chapala, lapping at the sh.o.r.es like some smaller ocean; from its verandas spread a view of sixty miles across the Mexican t.i.ticaca, with all vacation sports, a perennial summer without undue heat, and such sunsets as none can describe. The hacienda San Andres, also American owned, embraced thousands of acres of rich bottom land on which already many varieties of fruit were producing marvelously, as well as several mountain peaks and a long stretch of lake front. The estate headquarters was like some modern railway office, with its staff of employees. In the nearby stables horses were saddled for us and we set off for a day's trip all within the confines of the farm, under guidance of the bulky Mexican head overseer in all his wealth of national garb and armament.

For miles away in several directions immense fields were being plowed by dozens of ox-teams, the white garments of the drivers standing out sharply against the brown landscape. Two hours' riding around the lagoon furnishing water for irrigation brought us to a village of some size, belonging to the estate. The wife of one of the bee-tenders emerged from her hut with bowls of clear rich honey and tortillas, and the manner of a serf of medieval times before her feudal lord. The bees lived in hollow logs with little thatched roofs. For several miles more the rich bottom lands continued. Then we began to ascend through bushy foothills, and cultivation dropped behind us, as did the ma.s.sive head overseer, whose weight threatened to break his horse's back. Well up we came upon the "chaparral," the hacienda herdsman, tawny with sunburn even to his leather garments. He knew by name every animal under his charge, though the owners did not even know the number they possessed. A still steeper climb, during the last of which even the horses had to be abandoned, brought us to a hilltop overlooking the entire lake, with the villages on its edge, and range after range of the mountains of Jalisco and Michoacan. Our animals were more than an hour picking their way down the stony trails between all but perpendicular cornfields, the leaves of which had been stripped off to permit the huge ear at the top the more fully to ripen. A boulder set in motion at the top of a field would have been sure death to the man or horse it struck at the bottom.

The hotel launch set me across the lake next morning. From the rock-tumbled fisher-town of La Palma an arriero pointed out to me far away across the plains of Michoacan a mountain of striking resemblance to Mt. Tabor in Palestine, as the landmark on the slopes of which to seek that night's lodging. The treeless land of rich black loam was flat as a table, yet the trail took many a turn, now to avoid the d.y.k.e of a former governor and Porfirio Diaz, who planned to pump dry this end of the lake, now for some reason only those with Mexican blood in their veins could fathom. Peons were fishing in the irrigating ditches with machetes, laying their huge, sluggish victims all but cut in two on the gra.s.s behind them.

Noon brought Sahuayo, a large village in an agricultural district, in one of the huts of which ten cents produced soup, pork, frijoles, tortillas, and coffee, to say nothing of the tablecloth in honor of so unexpected a guest and a dozen oranges for the thirst beyond. The new trail struck off across the fields almost at right angles to the one that had brought me. I was already on the hacienda Guaracha, largest of the State of Michoacan, including within its holdings a dozen such villages as this, but the owner to whom I bore a letter lived still leagues distant. Dwellers on the estate must labor on it when required or seek residence elsewhere, which means far distant. All with whom I spoke on the subject, native or foreigners, seemed agreed that the peon prefers this plan to being thrown on his own responsibility.

The traveler could easily fancy himself in danger in this vast fenceless and defenseless s.p.a.ce. Enormous herds were visible for miles in every direction, bulls roamed here and there, bellowing moodily, cattle and horses by hundreds waded and grazed in the shallow swamps across which the d.y.k.ed path led. All the brilliant day "Mt. Tabor" stood forth in all its beauty across the plain in this clear air, and the sun brought sweat even at more than a mile above the sea.

I was in the very heart of Birdland. These broad, table-flat stretches of rich plateau, now half inundated, seemed some enormous outdoor aviary. Every species of winged creature one had hoped ever to see even in Zoo cages or the cases of museums seemed here to live and fly and have its songful being. Great sluggish _zopilotes_ of the horrid vulture family strolled or circled lazily about, seeking the scent of carrion. Long-legged, snow-white herons stood in the marshes. Great flocks of small black birds that could not possibly have numbered less than a hundred thousand each rose and fell and undulated in waves and curtains against the background of mountains beyond, screening it as by some great black veil. There were blood-red birds, birds blue as turquoise, some of almost lilac hue, every gra.s.sy pond was overspread with wild ducks so tame they seemed waiting to be picked up and caressed, eagles showed off their spiral curves in the sky above like daring aviators over some admiring field of spectators; everywhere the stilly hum of semi-tropical life was broken only by the countless and inimitable bird calls.

As my shadow grew ungainly, the d.y.k.ed path struck across a long wet field against the black soil of which the dozens of white-clad peons with their mattocks gleamed like grains of rice on an ebony surface.

Beyond, it entered foothills, flanked a peak, and joined a wide road leading directly to an immense cl.u.s.ter of buildings among trees. The sun was firing the western horizon. From every direction groups of white-garbed peons were drawing like homing pigeons toward this center of the visible landscape. I reached it with them and, pa.s.sing through several ma.s.sive gates, mounted through a corral or cobbled stable yard with many bulky, two-wheeled carts and fully two hundred mules, then up an inclined, cobbled way through a garden of flowers to the immense pillared veranda with cement floor of the owner's hacienda residence.

The building was in the form of a hollow square, enclosing a flowery patio as large as many a town plaza. Don Diego was not at home, nor indeed were any of his immediate family, who preferred the urban pleasures of Guadalajara. The Indian door-tender brought me to "Don Carlos," a fat, cheerful man of forty in a white jacket, close-fitting trousers, and an immense revolver attached to the left side of his broad and heavily weighted cartridge-belt. I presented my letter of introduction from an American friend of the owner and was soon entangled in the coils of Mexican pseudo-politeness. Don Carlos tore himself away from his priceless labors as manager of the hacienda and took me up on the flat roof of the two-story house, from which a fine view was had for miles in all directions; indeed, nearly a half of the estate could be seen, with its peon villages, its broad stretches of new-plowed fields, and the now smokeless chimney of the sugar mill among the trees.