Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala And Honduras Part 4

The interest of the manager did not extend beyond the cut-and-dried formalities common to all Mexicans. In spite of his honeyed words, it was evident he looked upon me as a necessary evil, purposely come to the hacienda to seek food and lodging, and to be gotten rid of as soon as possible, compatible with the sacred Arabian rules of hospitality. I had not yet learned that a letter of introduction in Latin America, given on the slightest provocation, is of just the grade of importance such custom would warrant. Not that Don Carlos was rude. Indeed, he strove outwardly to be highly _simpatico_. But one read the insincerity underneath by a kind of intuition, and longed for the abrupt but honestly frank Texan.

The two front corners of the estate residence were taken up by the hacienda store and church respectively--a handy arrangement by virtue of which whatever went out the pay window to the peons (and it was not much) came in again at one or the other of the corner doors. Adjoining the building and half surrounding it was an entire village, with a flowery plaza and promenades for its inhabitants. The owners of the estate were less churlishly selfish than their prototypes in our own country, in that they permitted the public, which is to say their own workmen and families, to go freely anywhere in the family residence and its patio, except into the dwelling-rooms proper.

When darkness came on we sat in the piazza garden overlooking the mule-yard. The evening church service over, the estate priest came to join us, putting on his huge black "Texas" hat and lighting a cigarette on the chapel threshold. He wore an innumerable series of long black robes, which still did not conceal the fact that the curve from chest to waist was the opposite of that common to sculptured figures, and his hand-shake was particularly soft and snaky. He quickly took charge of the conversation and led it into anecdotes very few of which could be set down by the writers of modern days, denied the catholic privileges of old Boccaccio and Rabelais.

Toward eight supper was announced. But instead of the conversational feast amid a company of educated Mexican men and women I had pictured to myself during the day's tramp, I was led into a bare stone room with a long, white-clothed table, on a corner of which sat in solitary state two plates and a salt cellar. A peon waiter brought an ample, though by no means epicurean, supper, through all which Don Carlos sat smoking over his empty plate opposite me, alleging that he never ate after noonday for dread of taking on still greater weight, and striving to keep a well-bred false politeness in the voice in which he answered my few questions. He had spent a year in a college of New Jersey, but had not even learned to p.r.o.nounce the name of that State. Having pointed out to me the room I was to occupy, he excused himself for a "moment.i.to," and I have never seen him since.

Evidently horrified at the sight of a white man, even if only a "gringo," traveling on foot, the manager had insisted on lending me a horse and mozo to the railroad station of Moreno, fifteen miles distant, but still within the confines of the hacienda. It may be also that he gave orders to have me out of his sight before he rose. At any rate it was barely three when a knock at the door aroused me and by four I stumbled out into the black starlit night to find saddled for me in the mule-corral what might by a considerable stretch of the word be called a horse. The mozo was well mounted, however, and the family chauffeur, carrying in one hand a basket of eggs he had been sent to fetch the estate owner in Guadalajara, rode a magnificent white animal. Without even the formal leave-taking cup of coffee, we set off on the road to the eastward. For road in Mexico always read--at best a winding stretch of dried mud with narrow paths meandering through the smoother parts of it, the whole tumbled everywhere with stones and rocks and broken by frequent unexpected deep cracks and stony gorges. My "horse" was as striking a caricature of that species of quadruped as could have been found in an all-night search in the region, which indeed there was reason to believe had been produced in just that manner. But at least it had the advantage of being unable to keep up with my companions, leaving me alone behind in far more pleasant company.

We wound through several long peon villages, mere gra.s.s huts on the bare earth floors of which the inhabitants lay rolled up in their blankets. I had not been supplied with spurs, essential to all horsemanship in Mexico, and was compelled at thirty second intervals to p.r.i.c.k up the jade between my legs with the point of a lead pencil, the only weapon at hand, or be left behind entirely. As the stars dimmed and the horizon ahead took on a thin gray streak, peons wrapped in their sarapes pa.s.sed now and then noiselessly in their soft leather _huarachas_ close beside me. In huts along the way frowsy, unwashed women might be heard already crushing in their stone mortars, under stone rolling-pins, maize for the morning atole and tortillas, while thick smoke began to wander lazily out from the low doorways. Swiftly it grew lighter until suddenly an immense red sun leaped full-grown above the ragged horizon ahead, just as we sighted an isolated station building in the wilderness that now surrounded us on all sides.

A two-car train rambled through a light-wooded, half-mountainous country, stopping at every collection of huts to pick up or set down a peon or two, and drew up at length in Zamora. It was a populous, flat-roofed, ill-smelling, typical Mexican city of checkerboard pattern, on the plaza of which faced the "Hotel Morelos," formerly the "Porfirio Diaz," but with that seditious name now carefully painted over. Being barely a mile above sea-level, the town has a suggestion of the tropics and the temperature of midday is distinctly noticeable.

Zamora ranks as the most fanatical spot in Michoacan, which is itself so throttled by the church that it is known as the "estado torpe," the torpid State. Its bishop is rated second in all Mexico only to that of the sacred city of Guadalupe. Here are monasteries, and monks, and nuns in seclusion, priests roam the streets in robes and vestments, form processions, and display publicly the "host" and other paraphernalia of their faith; all of which is forbidden by the laws of Mexico. When I emerged from the hotel, every person in sight, from newsboys to lawyers in frock coats, was kneeling wherever he happened to be, on his veranda, on the sidewalk, or in the middle of the street, his hat laid on the ground before him, facing a high churchman in flowing robes and a "stove-pipe" hat strutting across the plaza toward the cathedral. Traveling priests wear their regalia of office as far as Yurecuaro on the main line, changing there to civilian garb.

Nor is the power of the church here confined to things spiritual. Vast portions of the richest sections of the State are church owned, though ostensibly property of the lawyers that control them. Holding the reins, the ecclesiastics make it impossible for companies to open up enterprises except under their tutelage. The population of the State is some eighty per cent, illiterate, yet even foreigners find it impossible to set up schools for their own employees. The women _of all cla.s.ses_ are almost without exception illiterate. The church refuses to educate them, and sternly forbids any one else to do so. An American Catholic long resident reported even the priests ignorant beyond belief, and a.s.serted that usury and immorality was almost universal among the churchmen of all grades. The peasants are forced to give a tenth of all they produce, be it only a patch of corn, to the church, which holds its stores until prices are high, while the poverty-stricken peon must sell for what he can get. Those married by the church are forbidden to contract the civil ceremony, though the former is unlawful and lack of the latter makes their children legally illegitimate. The local form of worship includes many of the barbaric superst.i.tions of the Indians grafted on the stems of Catholicism, and weird pagan dances before the altar are a part of many a _fiesta_. The town has already churches sufficient to house easily all the population, yet an immense new cathedral is building. The purpose of its erection, according to the bishop, is "for the greater glorification of G.o.d."

I spent two days with the American superintendent of "Plata.n.a.l," the electric plant run by water power a few miles out of town through fields of head-high maize. The night before my arrival bandits had raided the establishment and one of them had been killed. The president of Zamora had profusely thanked the "gringo" in charge when he presented himself in town with the body. On pay-day the manager went and came from the bank with two immense revolvers and a loaded rifle.

The current supplied by the rapids of "Plata.n.a.l" is carried on high-tension wires to several cities far distant, including Guanajuato, a hundred miles away. Let the dynamo here break down and the cage of "Pinguico" mine hangs suspended in its shaft and Stygian darkness falls in the labyrinth below. In the rainy season lightning causes much trouble, and immense flocks of birds migrating south or north, according to the period of year, keep the repair gangs busy by flying against the wires and causing short circuits through their dead bodies. Woodp.e.c.k.e.rs eat away the wooden cross-pieces on the iron towers with disheartening rapidity. The company is philanthropically inclined toward its employees. Even the peons are given two weeks' vacation on full pay, during which many rent a patch of land on the mountainside to plant with corn. A savings bank system is maintained, strict sanitation is insisted upon in the houses furnished by the company, and the methods of the haciendas of the region, of paying the peon the lowest possible wages for his labor and produce and selling to him at the highest possible prices at the estate store, thereby keeping him in constant debt and a species of slavery, are avoided. The result is a permanent force of high Mexican grade. All attempts of the company to introduce schools, however, even on its own property, have been frustrated by the powerful churchmen. A bright young native in the plant was an expert at figures, which he had been surrept.i.tiously taught by his "gringo" superior, but he could not sign his name.

CHAPTER V

ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACaN

My compatriot strongly opposed my plan of walking to Uruapan--at least without an armed guard! The mountains were full of bandits, the Tarascan Indians, living much as they did at the time of the Conquest, did not even speak Spanish, they were unfriendly to whites, and above all dangerously superst.i.tious on the subject of photography. There are persons who would consider it perilous to walk the length of Broadway, and lose sight even of the added attraction of that reputed drawback.

I was off at dawn. Hundreds of Indians from the interior had slept in scattered groups all along the road to town, beside the produce they had come to sell on market day. For it is against the law to be found out of doors in Zamora after ten! My compatriot had twice fallen foul of the vigilant police there and been roundly mulcted--once the bolt of the hired carriage in which he was riding broke, the conveyance turned turtle, mashed his foot, and covered his face with blood, and he was imprisoned and fined for "escandalo." On another occasion he spent some time in jail because his mozo behind him accidentally knocked over the lantern of a policeman set in the middle of the street.

But let us leave so straight-laced a spot behind. The rocky "road"

could not hold to the same opinion for a hundred consecutive yards, but kept changing its mind as often as it caught sight of some new corner of the landscape. The Indians, who crowded the way during the first hour, were not friendly, but neither did they show any dangerous propensities, and never failed in greeting if spoken to first. There were many of them of pure aboriginal blood. The stony road climbed somewhat to gain Tangantzicuaro, then stumbled across a flatter country growing more wooded to Chilota, a large town with a tiny plaza and curious, overhanging eaves, reminiscent of j.a.pan, stretching down its checker-board streets in all directions.

The trail, which had gone a mile or more out of its way to visit the place, no sooner left it than it fell abruptly into the bed of what in other weather would have been a rocky mountain torrent, and set off with it in a totally new direction, as if, having fallen in with congenial company, it had entirely forgotten the errand on which it had first set forth. The land was fertile, with much corn. In time road and river bed parted company, though only after several attempts, like old gossips, and the former took to climbing upward through thin forests of pine in which the wind whispered an imitation of some distant, small waterfall. For some miles there were no houses. Up and down and in and out of valleys thin with pine we wandered, with now and then a rough shelter of rubbish and thatch, halting places of traveling Indians or the guard-houses of their fields, while the sky ahead was always filled half-way up by peaks of many shapes wooded in every inch with brightest evergreens. Michoacan is celebrated for its forests.

The population showed no great difference from the peasants elsewhere. I ran early into their superst.i.tions against photography, however, their belief, common to many uncivilized races, being that once their image is reproduced any fate that befalls it must occur to them in person. When I stepped into a field toward a man behind his wooden plow, he said in a very decided tone of voice, "No, senor, no quiero!"

"Why not?" I asked.

"Porque no quiero, senor," and he swung the sort of small adze he carried to break up the clods of the field rather loosely and with a determined gleam in his eye. I did not want the picture so badly as all that.

There was no such objection in the straggling town made of thatch and rubbish I found along the way early in the afternoon. The hut I entered for food had an unleveled earth floor, many wide cracks in the roof, and every inch within was black with soot of the cooking-stove--three large stones with a steaming earthen pot on them. There was _carne de carnero_, tortillas and water, all for five cents. The weak-kneed table was spread with a white cloth, there were several awkward, _shallow_, home-made chairs, and against the wall a large primitive sideboard with glistening brown earthen pots and carefully polished plates and bowls. When I had photographed the interior, la senora asked if I would take a second picture, and raced away to another hut. She soon returned with a very small and poor amateur print of two peons in Sunday dress. One of them was her son, who had been killed by a falling pine, and the simple creature fancied the magic contrivance I carried could turn this tiny likeness into a life-size portrait.

Beyond, were more rocks and wooded mountains, with vast seas of Indian corn stretching to pine-clad cliffs, around the "sh.o.r.es" of which were dozens of make-shift shacks for the guardians against theft of the grain. Later I pa.s.sed an enormous field of maize, which more than a hundred Indians of both s.e.xes and every age that could stand on its own legs were harvesting. It was a communal corn-field, of which there are many in this region. They picked the ears from the dry stalks still standing and, tossing them into baskets, heaped them up in various parts of the field and at little temporary shanties a bit above the general level on the surrounding "coast." As I pa.s.sed, the gang broke up and peons in all colors, male, female, and in embryo, went away in all directions like a scattering flock of birds.

Thus far there had been no suggestion of the reputed dangers of the road. But trouble is never far off in Mexico, since the failure of its rapidly changing governments to put down bands of marauders has given every rascal in the country the notion of being his own master. The sun was just setting when, among several groups coming and going, I heard ahead five peons, maudlin with mescal, singing and howling at the top of their voices. As they drew near, one of them said something to his companions about "armas." I fancied he was expressing some idle drunken wonder as to whether I was armed or not, and as he held a hand behind him as if it might grasp a rock, I kept a weather eye on him as we approached. Had the weapon I carried in sight been a huge six-shooter, even without cartridges, it would probably have been more effective than the toy automatic well loaded. As the group pa.s.sed, howling drunkenly, a veritable giant of a fellow suddenly jumped toward me with an oath. I drew my putative weapon, and at the same moment the hand I had guessed to be full of rock appeared with an enormous revolver, shining new. With drunken flourishes the peon invited me to a duel. I kept him unostentatiously covered but continued serenely on my way. To have shown fear would have been as dangerous as for a lion-tamer in the cage with his pets. On the other hand, to have killed or seriously wounded one of the group would in all likelihood have meant at least a none-too-well-housed delay of several years in my journey, for the courts of Mexico seldom admit pleas of provocation from a "gringo." The group bawled after me and finally, when I was nearly a hundred yards beyond, the fellow fired four shots in my general direction. But as his bright new weapon, like so many furnished his cla.s.s by our enterprising arms factories, was made to sell rather than to shoot, and his marksmanship was distinctly tempered with mescal fumes, the four bullets harmlessly kicked up the dust at some distance on as many sides of me, with danger chiefly to the several groups of frightened peasants cowering behind all the rocks and rises of ground in the vicinity.

The dangers of the road in Mexico are chiefly from peons mixed with fire-water. When he is sober, the native's att.i.tude verges on the over-cautious. But it is a double danger to the wandering "gringo," for the reason above mentioned, while the native who kills a foreigner not infrequently escapes with impunity, and "gun toting" is limited now among all cla.s.ses of the men only by the disparity between their wealth and the price of a weapon.

As I pa.s.sed on over the rise of ground ahead, huddled groups of men, women, and children fell in after me as if for protection from their own people. At dusk I entered Paracho with a good thirty miles behind me. It was a quaint little town in a lap of valley surrounded by pined hills and with the overhanging j.a.panese eaves peculiar to the region.

The inhabitants were entirely peons and Indians, none in "European"

dress. The vision of being carried into the place with a few stray bits of lead lodged in one's anatomy was not alluring, and the dark dirty little _carcel_ on the plaza looked equally uninteresting.

I turned in at the "Meson de la Providencia." The keeper gave his attention chiefly to his little liquor and corn shop wide-opening on the street. There were several large rooms above, however, facing the great corral where mules and a.s.ses were munching and arrieros had spread their straw and blankets for the night, and in at least one of them was not merely a wooden-floored cot but two sheets to go with it. I bathed in the tin washbasin and turned out redressed for a turn through the town.

It swarmed with liquor-shops. Apparently any one with nothing else to do could set up a little drunkery or street-stand without government interference. There was no pulque, the maguey being unknown to the region, but bottled mescal and aguardiente de cana amply made up for it. It seemed uncanny that one could talk with ease to these unlettered dwellers in the wilderness in the same tongue learned in a peaceful cla.s.s-room of the far North. A towsled woman or child drifted now and then into the meson shop to buy a Mexican cent's worth of firewood. The woman who kept the shanty _fonda_ down the street boasted of having lived nineteen months in California in her halcyon days, but was obliged to borrow enough of me in advance to buy the ingredients of the scanty supper she finally prepared. By eight the corral was snoring with arrieros and I ascended to my substantial couch.

A wintry cold of the highlands hung over Paracho when dawn crawled in to find me shivering under a light blanket. As I left the place behind, the sun began to peer through the crest pines of a curiously formed mountain to the east, and to rend and tear the heavy fog banks hanging over the town and valley. Peons tight-wrapped in their blankets from eyes to knees slipped noiselessly past. There was a penetrating chill in the air, the fields were covered white with what seemed to be h.o.a.r frost, and the gra.s.sy way was wet with dew as after a heavy shower.

Within half an hour the way began to rise and soon entered an immense pine forest without a sign of habitation. Tramping was delightful through what seemed a wild, untamed, and unteutonized Harz, with only the faint road and an occasional stump to show man had pa.s.sed that way before. Huge birds circled majestically over the wooded hills and valleys of which the trail caught frequent brief but wide vistas. The road would have just suited Hazlitt, for it never left off winding, both in and out through the whispering forest and in and out of itself by numberless paths, often spreading over a hundred yards of width, and rolling and pitching like a ship at sea. As in most of Mexico, wheeled traffic would here have been impossible.

By eight I could stuff my coat into my knapsack. The day's journey was short, and twice I lay an hour on a gra.s.sy knoll gazing at the birds and leisurely drifting clouds above and listening to the soft whispering of the pines. Then an unraveled trail led gradually downward, fell in with a broad sandy "road" that descended more sharply to a still swifter cobbled way, and about me grew up a land reminiscent of Ceylon, with many frail wooden houses on either side among banana groves, fruit for sale before them, and frequent streams of clear water babbling past.

But it was only half-tropical, and further down the way was lined with huge trees resembling the elm.

Uruapan was just high enough above the real tropics to be delightful. The att.i.tude of its people, too, was pleasing. If not exactly friendly, they lacked that sour incommunicativeness of the higher plateau. Very few were in modern costume and to judge from the crowd of boys that gathered round me as I wrote my notes in a plaza bench, the arrival of a white man in this largely Indian town was an event not to be slighted. There was a general air of more satisfaction with life in the languid country place where nature rewards all labor quickly and well, and where nearly all have gardens and orchards of their own to make them independent of working for others at a scanty wage.

Its plaza lies a bit higher than the rest of the town, and from it straight streets of one-story houses, all of different slope, flow gently down, to be lost a few blocks away in greenery. The roofs of tile or a long untapered shingle are not flat, as elsewhere, but with a slope for the tropical rains. Patio life is well developed. Within the blank walls of the central portion all the rooms open on sun-flooded, inner gardens and whole orchards within which pa.s.s almost all the family activities, even to veranda dining-rooms in the edge of the shade. Dense groves of banana and coffee trees surround most of the uncrowded, adobe dwellings. In the outskirts the houses are of wood, with sharp-peaked roofs, and little hovels of mud and rubbish loll in the dense-black cool shadows of the productive groves and of the immense trees that are a feature of the place. Flowers bloom everywhere, and all vegetation is of the deepest green. On every side the town dies away into domesticated jungle beyond which lie such pine forests, vast corn fields, and washed-out trails as on the way thither from Zamora.

There is not a "sight" of the slightest importance in Uruapan. But the place itself is a sight worth long travel, with its soft climate like the offspring of the wedded North and South, a balmy, gentle existence where is only occasionally felt the hard reality of life that runs beneath, when man shows himself less kindly than nature. A man offered to sell me for a song a tract bordering the river, with a "house" ready for occupancy, and had the place and all that goes with it been portable we should quickly have come to terms. For Uruapan is especially a beauty spot along the little Cupat.i.tzio, where water clearer than that of Lake Geneva foams down through the dense vegetation and under little bridges quaint and graceful as those of j.a.pan.

The sanitary arrangements, of course, are Mexican. Women in bands wash clothes along the shady banks, both s.e.xes bathe their light-chocolate skins in sunny pools, there were even horses being scrubbed in the transparent stream, and below all this others dipped their drinking water. Here and there the water was led off by many little channels and overhead wooden troughs to irrigate the gardens and to run little mills and cigarette factories.

In the outskirts I pa.s.sed the city slaughter-house. A low atone wall separated from the street a large corral; with a long roof on posts, a stone floor, and a rivulet of water down through it occupying the center of the compound. The cattle, healthy, medium-sized steers worth fifteen dollars a head in this section, were la.s.soed around the horns and dragged under the roof, where another dexterously thrown noose bound their feet together and threw them on the stone floor. They were neither struck nor stunned in any way. When they were so placed that their throats hung over the rivulet, a butcher made one single quick thrust with a long knife near the collarbone and into the heart. Boys caught the blood in earthen bowls as it gushed forth and handed it to various women hanging over the enclosing wall. The animal gave a few agonized bellows, a few kicks, and died. Each was quickly skinned and quartered, the more unsavory portions at once peddled along the wall, and bare-headed Indians carried a bleeding quarter on their black thick hair to the hooks on either side of pack horses which boys drove off to town as they were loaded. There the population bought strips and chunks of the still almost palpitating meat, ran a string through an end of each piece, and carried it home under the glaring sun.

All this is commonplace. But the point of the scene was the quite evident _pleasure_ all concerned seemed to take in the unpleasant business. Most of us eat meat, but we do not commonly find our recreation in slaughter-houses. Here whole crowds of boys, dogs, and noisy youths ran about the stone floor, fingering the still pulsating animal, mimicking its dying groans amid peals of laughter, wallowing in its ebbing blood, while fully as large an a.s.semblage of women, girls, and small children hung over the wall in a species of ecstatic glee at the oft-repeated drama. Death, especially a b.l.o.o.d.y one, appeared to awaken a keen enjoyment, to quicken the sluggard pulse of even this rather peaceful Tarascan tribe. One could easily fancy them watching with the same ebullient joy the dying struggles of helpless human beings butchered in the same way. The killing of the trussed and fallen animal over the rivulet recalled the cutting out of the heart of human victims on the sacrificial stones amid the plaudits of the Aztec mult.i.tude and the division of the still quivering flesh among them, and the vulgar young fellows running around, knife in hand, eager for an opportunity to use them, their once white smocks smeared and spattered with blood, brought back the picture of the savage old priests of the religion of Montezuma. The scene made more comprehensible the preconquest customs of the land, as the ant.i.thesis of the drunken and excited Indian to the almost effeminate fear of the same being sober makes more clear that inexplicable piece of romance, the Conquest of Mexico.

There is less evidence of "religion" in Uruapan than in Zamora. Priests were rarely seen on the streets and the church bells were scarcely troublesome. Peons and a few of even higher rank, however, never pa.s.sed the door of a church even at a distance without raising their hats. Twice during the day I pa.s.sed groups of women of the peon cla.s.s carrying in procession several framed chromo representations of Saint Quien Sabe, bearing in his arms an imaginary Christ child, all of them wailing and chanting a dismal dirge as they splashed along through the dust in their bare feet.

A Tragedy: As I returned in the soft air of sunset from the clear little river boiling over its rocks, I pa.s.sed in a deep-shaded lane between towering banana, coffee, and larger trees about three feet of Mexican in sarape and overgrown hat rooted to a certain spot and shedding copious tears, while on the ground beside him were the remnants of a glazed pot and a broad patch of what had once been native firewater mingled with the thirsty sand. Some distance on I heard a cry as of a hunted human being and turned to see the pot remnants and the patch in the self-same spot, but the hat and the three feet of Mexican under it were speeding away down the lane on wings of terror. But all in vain, for behind stalked at even greater speed a Mexican mother, gaining on him who fled, like inexorable fate, not rapidly but all too surely.

The only train out of Uruapan leaves at an unearthly hour. The sun was just peering over the horizon, as if reconnoitering for a safe entrance, when I fought my way into a chiefly peon crowd packed like a log-jam around a tiny window barely waist high, behind which some unseen but plainly Mexican being sold tickets more slowly than American justice in pursuit of the wealthy. For a couple of miles the way lay across a flat rich land of cornfields, pink with cosmos flowers. Then the train began to creak and grind upward at dog-trot pace, covering four or five times what would have been the distance in a straight line and uncovering broad vistas of plump-formed mountains s.h.a.ggy with trees, and vast, hollowed-out valleys flooded with corn. Soon there were endless pine forests on every hand, with a thick, oak-like undergrowth. A labyrinth of loops one above another brought us to Ajambaran and a bit of level track, with no mountains in the landscape because we stood on the summit of them. Little Lake Zirahuen, surrounded on all sides by sloping hills, half pine, half corn, gleamed with an emerald blue. The train half circled it, at a considerable distance, giving several broad vistas, each lower than the preceding, as we climbed to an animated box-car station higher still. From there we began to descend. Over the divide was a decided change in the landscape; again that dry, brown, thinly vegetated country of most of the Mexican highlands. Miles before we reached the town of the same name, beautiful Lake Patzcuaro burst on our sight through a break in the hills to the left, and continued to gladden the eyes until we drew up at the station.

While the rest of the pa.s.sengers repaired to the mule-tram, I set off afoot for the town, a steady climb of two miles by a cobbled road, up the center of which runs a line of large stones worn flat by generations of bare feet. The man who baedekerized Mexico says it is a "very difficult" trip afoot. Perhaps it would be to him. From the central line of flat stones there ran out, every yard, at right angles, lines of stones a bit smaller, the s.p.a.ce between being filled in with small cobbles, with gra.s.s growing between them. The sun was powerful in this thin atmosphere of more than seven thousand feet elevation. I was barely settled in the hotel when the mule-tram arrived.

Patzcuaro is one of the laziest, drowsiest, most delightful pimples on the earth to be found in a long search. It has little in common with Uruapan. Here is not a suggestion of the tropics, but just a large Indian village of mud and adobe houses and neck-breaking, cobbled streets, a town older than time, sown on and about a hillside backed by pine-treed peaks, with several expanses of plazas, all grown to gra.s.s above their cobbled floors, shaded by enormous ash-like trees with neither flowers, shrubs, nor fountains to detract from their atmosphere of roominess. About them run _portales_, arcades with pillars that seem at least to antedate Noah, and ma.s.sive stone benches green with age and water-logged with constant shade, as are also the ancient stone sidewalks under the trees and the overhanging roofs of one-story houses supported by carved beams. Along these wanders a chiefly peon population, soft-footed and silent, with a mien and manner that seems to murmur: "If I do not do it to-day there is tomorrow, and next week, and the week after." The place is charming; not to its inhabitants perhaps, but to us from a land where everything is distressingly new. To the man who has anything to do or a desire to do anything, Patzcuaro would be infernal; for him who has nothing to do but to do nothing, it is delightful.

Those who wish may visit crooning old churches more aged than the plays of Shakespeare. Or one may climb to "Calvary." The fanatical inhabitants, abetted by the wily priests, have named a road, "very rocky and very hilly," according to the Mexican Baedeker, leading to a knoll somewhat above the town, the "via dolorosa," and have scattered fourteen stations of plastered mud niches along the way. From the aged, half-circular, stone bench on the summit is another of the marvelous views that abound in Mexico. It was siesta-time, and not a human being was in sight to break the spell. The knoll fell away in bushy precipitousness to the plain below. As I reached the top, two trains, bound back the way I had come, left the station two miles away, one behind the other, and for a long time both were plainly visible as they wound in and out away through the foothills, yet noiseless from here as phantoms, and no blot on the landscape, since all colors, even that of a railroad cutting, blended into the soft-brown whole.

The scene was wholly different from that about Uruapan, 1700 feet lower. There was very little green, and nothing at all of jungle; only a sun-faded brown tapestry backed by a jumble of low mountains covered with short bristling pines. Here and there a timid, thin-blue peak peered over a depression in the chain. A panoramic glance, starting from the west, showed range after range, one behind the other, to the dimmest blue distance. Swinging round the horizon, skipping the lake, the eye took in a continuous procession of hills, more properly the upper portions of mountains, losing their trees toward the east and growing more and more bare and reddish-brown, until it fell again on the doddering old town napping in its hollow down the slope. Below the abrupt face of "Calvario," the plain, with a few patches of still green corn alternating with reddish plowed fields, but for the most part humped and b.u.mped, light wooded with scrub pine, was sprinkled with mouse-sized cattle, distinct even to their spots and markings in this marvelous, clear air of the highlands, lazily swinging their tails in summer contentment.

But the center of the picture, the picture, indeed, for which all the rest served as frame, was Lake Patzcuaro. It is not beautiful, but rather inviting, enticing, mysterious for its many sandy promontories, its tongues of mountains cutting off a farther arm of the lake with the old Tarascan capital, and above all for its islands. One of these is flat, running out to sand at either end, and with something of an old town among the trees that cover its slightly humped middle. Then there is Xanicho, pitched high in mound-shape, suggestive of Capri, rocky, bare, reddish-brown, and about its bottom, like a narrow band on a half-sunken Mexican hat, a long thin town of white walls and tiled roofs visible in all detail, a church towering above the rest to form the bow of the ribbon. It is strange how the human plant grows everywhere and anywhere, even on a patch of rock thrust forth out of the sea. A bit to the east and farther away lies a much smaller island of similar shape, apparently uninhabited. Farther still there stands forth from the water a bare precipitous rock topped by a castle-like building suggesting Chillon; and beyond and about are other islands of many shapes, but all flat and gray-green in tint, some so near sh.o.r.e as to blend with the promontories and seem part of the mainland, thereby losing their romance.

Over all the scene was a light-blue, transparent sky, flecked only with a few snow-white whisps of clouds, like bits of the ostrich plume that hung over Uruapan in the far west, and from which a soft wind tore off now and then tiny pieces that floated slowly eastward. The same breeze tempered the sunny stillness of the "Calvario," broken occasionally by the song of a happy shepherd boy in the shrub-clad hills and the mellow-voiced, decrepit, old church bells of Patzcuaro below.

Some miles away from the town, at the far end of Lake Patzcuaro, behind the hills, lies the ancient Indian village of Tzintzuntzan, at the time of the Conquest the residence of the chief of the Tarascans and ruler of the kingdom of Michoacan, which was not subdued until ten years after the fall of Mexico. I planned to visit it next day. As I strolled around the unkempt plaza grande in a darkness only augmented by a few weak electric bulbs of slight candle-power, with scores of peons, male and female, wrapped like half-animated mummies in their blankets, even to their noses, I fell in with a German. He was a garrulous, self-complacent, ungraceful man of fifty, a druggist and "doctor" in a small town far down in Oaxaca State until revolutions began, when he had escaped in the garb of a peon, leaving most of his possessions behind. Now he wandered from town to town, hanging up his shingle a few days in each as an oculist. His hotel room was a museum. None can rival the wandering Teuton in the systematic collecting, at its lowest possible cost, of everything that could by any stretch of the imagination ever be of service to a traveler. This one possessed only a rucksack and a blanket-wrapped bundle, but in them he carried more than the average American would be caught in possession of in his own home. There were worn and greasy notebooks full of detailed information of the road, the cheapest hotels of every known town of Mexico, with the lowest possible price and the idiosyncrasies of their proprietors that might be played upon to obtain it, the exact cafe where the beer gla.s.ses grew tallest, the expenditures that might be avoided by a foresighted manipulation; there were shoes and slippers, sleeping garments for each degree of temperature, a cooking outfit, a bicycle-lamp with a chimney to read by, guns, gun-oil, gun-cleaners, flannel cloth to take the place of socks for tramping, vaseline to rub on the same--it would be madness to attempt a complete inventory, but he would be inventive indeed who could name anything that Teutonic pack did not contain in some abbreviated form, purchased somewhere second hand at a fourth its original cost. The German had learned that the parish priest of Tzintzuntzan wore gla.s.ses, and we parted agreed to make the trip together.

Patzcuaro is summery enough by day, but only the hardy would dress leisurely at dawn. A fog as thick as cheese, more properly a descended cloud, enveloped the place, a daily occurrence which the local authorities would have you think make it unusually healthful. An ancient cobbled road leads up and over the first rise, then degenerates to the usual Mexican _camino_, a trail twisting in and out along a chaos of rocks and broken ground. The fog hung long with us and made impossible pictures of the procession of Tarascan Indians coming in from Tzintzuntzan with every species of red pottery, from cups to immense water-jars, in great nets on the backs of horses, a.s.ses, men, and women. Beyond the railroad the trail picked its way, with several climbs over rocky spur-ends, along the marshy edge of the lake, which was so completely surrounded by mud and reeds that I had to leave unfulfilled my promised swim in it. The trip was made endless by the incessant chatter of the "doctor," who rattled on in English without a break; and when I switched him to German his tongue sped still faster, though fortunately more correctly. No wonder those become fluent linguists who can outdistance and outendure a man in his own tongue long before they have begun to learn it.