two or three weeks back had not yet been removed, but an opening at one side allowed men and horses to get past. Carriages had to go round, an easy matter in a city built as this is in squares like a chess-board. The barricades mount two guns each, and as the streets are quite straight they can sweep them in both directions, to the whole length of their range. As in Turin, you can look backward and forward along the straight streets from every part of the city, and see mountains at each end. The suburbs of the city are quite as repulsive as our first glimpse of them led us to expect; and, as far as one could judge by the appearance of the half-caste inhabitants, it is not good to go there alone after dark. Here is the end of the aqueduct of Chapultepec, the Salto del Agua; and–crowded round it–a thoroughly characteristic group of women and water-carriers, filling their great earthen jars with water, which they carry about from house to house. The women are simply and cheaply dressed, and though not generally pretty, are very graceful in their movements. Their dress consists of a white cotton under-dress, a coloured cotton skirt, generally blue, brown, or grey, with some small pattern upon it, but never brilliant in colour, and a rebozo, which is a small sober-coloured cotton shawl, long and narrow. This rebozo passes over the back of the head, where it is somehow fixed to a back hair-comb, and the two ends hang down over the shoulders in front; or, more often, one end is thrown over the opposite shoulder, so that the young lady’s face is set in it, like a picture in a frame. Add to this a springy step, the peculiarly unconstrained movement in walking which comes of living in the open air and wearing a loose dress, a pleasant pale face, small features, bright eyes, small hands and feet, little slippers and no stockings, and you have as good a picture of a Mexican half-caste girl as I can give. A book of Mexican engravings, however, will give a much better idea of her. Then we went past the great prison, the Acordada, and out at the gate (we had purposely gone out of our way to see more of the city), and so into the great promenade, the Pased or Alameda. The latter is the Spanish name for this necessary appendage to every town. It comes from _alamo_, which means a poplar. Imagine a long wide level road, a mile or so long, generally so chosen as to have a fine view, with footpaths on each side, lines of poplar trees, a fountain at each end and a statue in the middle, and this description will stand pretty nearly for almost every promenade of the kind I have seen in Spain or Spanish America.
[Illustration: WATER-CARRIER AND A MEXICAN WOMAN, AT THE FOUNTAIN.]
Tacubaya is a pleasant place on the ride of the first hills that begin to rise towards the mountain-wall of the valley. Here rich Mexicans have country-houses in large gardens, which are interesting from the immense variety of plants which grow there, though badly kept up, and systematically stripped by the gardeners of the fruit as it gets ripe–for their own benefit, of course. From Tacubaya we go to Chapultepec (Grasshopper Mountain), which is a volcanic hill of porphyry rising from the plain. On the top is the palace on which the viceroy Galvez expended great sums of money some seventy years ago, making it into a building which would serve either as a palace or as a fortress in cases of emergency. Though the Americans charged up the hill and carried it easily in ’47, it would be a very strong place in proper hands. It is a military school now. On the hill is the famous grove of cypresses–ahuehuetes[5]–as they are called, grand trees with their branches hung with fringes of the long grey Spanish moss–barba Espanola–Spanish beard. I do not know what painters think of the effect of this moss, trailing in long festoons from the branches of the trees, but to me it is beautiful; and I shall never forget where I first saw it, on a bayou of the Mississippi, winding through the depths of a great forest in the swamps of Louisiana.[6] In this grove of Chapultepec, there were sculptured on the side of the hill, in the solid porphyry, likenesses of the two Montezumas, colossal in size. For some reason or other, I forget now what, one of the last Spanish viceroys thought it desirable to destroy them, and tried to blow them up with gunpowder. He only partially succeeded, for the two great bas-reliefs were still very distinguishable as we rode past, though noseless and considerably knocked about.
We went home to breakfast with our friends, and looked at the title-deeds of their house in crabbed Spanish of the sixteenth century, and the great Chinese treasure-chest, still used as the strong-box of the firm, with an immense lock, and a key like the key of Dover castle. Fine old Chinese jars, and other curiosities, are often to be found in Mexico; and they date from the time when the great galleon from Manila, which was called “el nao”–the ship–to distinguish it from all other ships, came once a year to Acapulco.
After breakfast, business hours begin; so we took ourselves off to visit the canal of Chalco, and the famous floating gardens–as they are called. On our way we had a chance of studying the conveyances our ancestors used to ride in, and availed ourselves of it. In books on Spanish America, written at the beginning of this century, there are wonderful descriptions of the gilt coaches, with six or eight mules, in which the great folks used to drive in state on the promenades. They are exactly the carriages that it was the height of a lady’s ambition to ride in, in the days of Sir Charles Grandison, and Mr. Tom Jones. Here, in Mexico, they were still to be found, after they had disappeared from the rest of the habitable globe; and even now, though the private carriages are all of a more modern type, there are still left a few of these amazing vehicles, now degraded to the cab-stand; and we got into one that was embellished with sculptured Cupids–their faces as much mutilated as the two Montezumas–and with the remains of the painting and gilding, which once covered the whole affair, just visible in corners, like the colouring of the ceilings of the Alhambra. We had to climb up three high steps, and haul ourselves into the body of the coach, which hung on strong leather straps; springs belong to a later period. By the time we had got to the Paseo de las Vigas we were glad enough to get out, wondering at the sacrifice of comfort to dignity those highly respectable grandees must have made, and not surprised at the fate of some inquisitive travellers who have done as we did, and have been obliged to stop by the qualms of sea-sickness. At the bridge we chartered a canoe to Santa Anita. This Santa Anita is a little Indian village on the canal of Chalco, and to-day there is to be a festival there. For this, however, we shall be too early, as we have to be back in time to see Mexico turn out for a promenade on the Paseo de las Vigas, and then to go out to dinner. So we must just take the opportunity of looking at the Indian population as they go up and down the canal in canoes, and see their gardens and their houses. However, as the Indian notion of a festival consists in going to mass in the morning, and getting drunk and fighting in the afternoon, we are perhaps as well out of it. We took our passage to Santa Anita and back in a canoe–a mere flat-bottomed box with sloping sides, made of boards put together with wooden pegs. There was a mat at the stern for us to squat upon, and an awning over our heads. An old Indian and his son were the crew; and they had long poles, which they set against the banks or the bottom of the shallow canal, and so pushed us along. Besides these two, an old woman with two little girls got in, as we were starting–without asking our leave, by the way–and sat down at the other end of the canoe. Of course, the old woman began to busy herself with the two little girls, in the usual occupation of old women here, during their idle moments; and though she left off at our earnest request, she evidently thought us very crotchety people for objecting.
The scene on the canal was a curious one. There were numbers of boats going up and down; and the Indians, as soon as they caught sight of an acquaintance, began to shout out a long string of complimentary phrases, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in Mexican: “How is your worship this morning?” “I trust that I have the happiness of seeing your worship in good health.” “If there is anything I can have the honour of doing for your worship, pray dispose of me,” and so forth; till they are out of hearing. All this is accompanied by a taking-off of hats, and a series of low bows and complimentary grimaces. As far as we could ascertain, it is all mere matter of ceremony. It may be an exaggeration of the formal, complimentary talk of the Spaniards, but its origin probably dates further back.
The Indians here no longer appeared the same dull, melancholy men whom we had seen in the richer quarter of the town. There they were under a strong feeling of constraint, for their language is not understood by the whites and mestizos; and they, for their part, know but little Spanish; and besides, there is very little sympathy between the two classes. One thing will shew this clearly enough. By a distinct line of demarcation, the Indians are separated from the rest of the population, who are at least partly white. These latter call themselves “gente de razon”–people of reason,–to distinguish themselves from the Indians, who are people without reason. In common parlance the distinction is made thus: the whites and mixed breed are “gente”–_people_,–the brown men being merely “Indios”–Indians–and not people at all.
Here, in their own quarter, and among their own people, they seem talkative enough. We can only tell what they are chattering about when they happen to speak Spanish, either for our benefit, or to show off their proficiency in that tongue. People who can speak the Aztec language say that their way of forming compound words gives constant occasion for puns and quibbles, and that the talk of the Indians is full of such small jokes. In this respect they differ exceedingly from the Spaniards, whose jests are generally about _things_, and seldom about their _names_, as one sees by their almost always bearing translation into other languages.
Most of the canoes were tastefully decorated with flowers, for the Aztecs have not lost their old taste for ornamenting themselves, and everything about them, with garlands and nosegays. The fruits and vegetables they were carrying to market were very English in their appearance. Mexico is supplied with all kinds of tropical fruits, which come from a distance; but the district we are now in only produces plants which might grow in our own country–barley, potatoes, cabbages, parsnips, apples, pears, plums, peaches, and so forth, but scarcely anything tropical in its character. One thing surprises us, that the Indians, in a climate where the mornings and evenings are often very chilly, should dress so scantily. The men have a general appearance of having outgrown their clothes; for the sleeves of the kind of cotton-shirt they wear only reach to their elbows, and their trousers, of the same material, only fall to their knees. To these two garments add a sort of blanket, thrown over the shoulders, a pair of sandals, and a palm-leaf hat, and the man is dressed. His skin is brown, his limbs muscular–especially his legs–his lips thick, his nose Jewish, his hair coarse, black, and hanging straight down. The woman’s dress is as simple as the man’s. She has on a kind of cotton sack, very short in the sleeves, and very open at the shoulders, and some sort of a skirt or petticoat besides. Sometimes she has a folded cotton cloth on her head, like a Roman contadina; but, generally, nothing covers her thick black hair, which hangs down behind in long twisted tails.
In old times, when Mexico was in the middle of a great lake, and the inhabitants were not strong enough to hold land on the shores, they were driven to strange shifts to get food. Among other expedients, they took to making little floating islands, which consisted of rafts of reeds and brushwood, on which they heaped mud from the shores of the lakes. On the banks of the lake of Tezcuco the mud was, at first, too full of salt and soda to be good for cultivation; but by pouring the water of the lake upon it, and letting it soak through, they dissolved out most of the salts, and the island was fit for cultivation, and bore splendid crops of vegetables.[7] These islands were called _chinampas_, and they were often large enough for the proprietor to build a hut in the middle, and live in it with his family. In later times, when the Mexicans came to be no longer afraid of their neighbours, the chinampas were not of much use; and when the water was drained off, and the city stood on dry land, one would have supposed that such a troublesome and costly arrangement would have been abandoned. The Mexican, however, is hard to move from the customs of his ancestors; and we have Humboldt’s word for it, that in his time there were some of these artificial islands still in the lake of Chalco, which the owners towed about with a rope, or pushed with a long pole. They are all gone now, at any rate, though the name of _chinampa_ is still applied to the gardens along the canal. These gardens very much resemble the floating islands in their construction of mud, heaped on a foundation of reeds and branches; and though they are not the real thing, and do not float, they are interesting, as the present representatives of the famous Mexican floating gardens. They are narrow strips of land, with a frontage of four or five yards to the canal, and a depth of one hundred, or a hundred and fifty yards. Between the strips are open ditches; and one principal occupation of the proprietor seems to be bringing up mud from the bottom of the ditch with a wooden shovel, and throwing it on the garden, in places where it has sunk. The reason of the narrowness of the strips is that he may be able to throw mud all over them from the ditches on either side.
While we are busy observing all these matters, and questioning our boatmen about them, we reach Santa Anita. Here there are swampy lanes and more swampy gardens, a little village of Indian houses, three or four pulque-shops, and a church. Outside the pulque-shops are fresco-paintings, representing Aztec warriors carousing, and draining great bowls of pulque. These were no specimens of Aztec art, however, but seemed to be copied (by some white or half-caste sign-painter, probably) from the French coloured engravings which represent the events of the Conquest. These extraordinary works of art are to be seen everywhere in this country, where, of all places in the world, one would have thought that people would have noticed that the artist had not the faintest idea of what an Aztec was like, but supposed that his limbs and face and hair were like an European’s. Here, with the real Aztec standing underneath, the difference was striking enough. One ought not to be too critical about these things, however, when one remembers the pictures of shepherds and shepherdesses that adorn our English farmhouses. We drank pulque at the sign of _The Cacique_, and liked it, for we had now quite got over our aversion to its putrid taste and smell. I wonder that our new faculty of pulque-drinking did not make us able to relish the suspicious eggs that abound in Mexican inns, but it had no such effect, unfortunately.
Our canoe took us back to the Promenade of Las Vigas, which is a long drive, planted with rows of trees, and extends along the last mile or two of the canal. Indeed, its name comes from the beam (Viga) which swings across the canal at the place where the canoes pay toll. This was the great promenade, once upon a time; but the new Alameda has taken away all the promenaders to a more fashionable quarter, except on certain festival days, three or four times in the year, when it is the correct thing for society to make a display of itself–on horseback or in carriages–in this neglected Indian quarter. We had happened upon one of these festival days; so, as we crawled along the side-path, tired and dusty, we had a good opportunity of seeing the Mexican beau monde. The display of really good carriages was extraordinary; but it must be recollected that many families here are content to live miserably enough at home, if they can manage to appear in good style at the theatre and on the promenade. This is one reason why so many of the Mexicans who are so friendly with you out of doors, and in the cafes, are so very shy of letting you see the inside of their houses. They say, and very likely it is true, that among the richer classes, it is customary to put a stipulation in the marriage-contracts, that the husband shall keep a carriage and pair, and a box at the theatre, for his wife’s benefit. The horsemen turned out in great style, and the foreigners were fully represented among them. It was noticeable that while these latter generally adopted the high-peaked saddle, and the jacket, and broad-brimmed felt hat of the country, and looked as though the new arrangements quite suited them, the native dandies, on the other hand, were prone to dressing in European fashion, and sitting upon English saddles–in which they looked neither secure nor comfortable.
We walked home past the old Bull-ring, now replaced by a new one near the new promenade, and found, to our surprise, that in this quarter of the town many of the streets were under water. We knew that the level of the lake of Tezcuco had been raised by a series of three very wet seasons, but had no idea that things had got so far as this. Of course the ground-floors had to be abandoned, and the people had made a raised pathway of planks along tho street, and adopted various contrivances for getting dryshod up to their first floors; and in some places canoes were floating in the street. The city looked like this some two hundred years ago, when Martinez the engineer tried an unfortunate experiment with his draining tunnel at Huehuetoca, and flooded the whole city for five years. It was by the interference, they tell us, of the patroness of the Indians, our Lady of Guadalupe, who was brought from her own temple on purpose, that the city was delivered from the impending destruction. A number of earthquakes took place, which caused the ground to split in large fissures, down which the superfluous water disappeared. For none of her many miracles has the Virgin of Guadalupe got so much credit as for this. To be sure, it is not generally mentioned in orthodox histories of the affair, that she was brought to the capital a year or two before the earthquakes happened.
Talking of earthquakes, it is to be remembered that we are in a district where they are of continual occurrence. If one looks carefully at a line of houses in a street, it is curious to see how some walls slope inwards, and some outwards, and some are cracked from top to bottom. There is hardly a church-tower in Mexico that is not visibly out of the perpendicular. Any one who has noticed how the walls of the Cathedral of Pisa have been thrown out of the perpendicular by the settling down of the foundations, will have an idea of the general appearance of the larger buildings of Mexico. On different occasions the destruction caused by earthquakes has been very great. By the way, the liability of Mexico to these shocks, explains the peculiarity of the building of the houses. A modern English town with two-or-three-storied houses, with their thin brick walls, would be laid in ruins by a shock which would hardly affect Mexico. Here, the houses of several storeys have stone walls of such thickness that they resist by sheer strength; and the one-storey mud houses, in the suburbs, are too low to suffer much by being shaken about. A few days before we arrived here, our friends Pepe and Pancho were playing at billiards in the Lonja,[8] the Merchants’ Exchange; and Pepe described to us the feeling of utter astonishment with which he saw his ball, after striking the other, go suddenly off at an absurd angle into a pocket. The shock of an earthquake had tilted the table up on one side. While we were in Mexico there was a slight shock, which set the chandeliers swinging, but we did not even notice it. In April, a solemn procession goes from the Cathedral, on a day marked in the Calendar as the “Patrocinio de Senor San Jose”, to implore the “Santissimo Patriarca” to protect the city from earthquakes (temblores). In connection with this subject there is an opinion, so generally received in Mexico that it is worth notice. Everybody there, even the most educated people, will tell you that there is an earthquake-season, which occurs in January or February; and that the shocks are far more frequent than at any other time of the year. My impression is that this is all nonsense; but I should like to test it with a list of the shocks that have been felt, if such a thing were to be had. It does not follow that, because the Mexicans have such frequent opportunities of trying the question, they should therefore have done so. In fact, experience as to popular beliefs in similar matters rather points the other way. I recollect that in the earthquake districts of southern Italy, when shocks were of almost daily occurrence, people believed that they were more frequent in the middle four hours of the night, from ten to two, than at other times. Of course, this proved on examination to be quite without foundation. To take one more case in point. How many of our almanack-books, even the better class of them, contain prophecies of wet and fine weather, deduced from the moon’s quarters! How long will it be before we get rid of this queer old astrological superstition?
We made a few rough observations of the thermometer and barometer during our stay in Mexico. The barometer stands at about 22-1/2 inches, and our thermometer gave the boiling point of water at 199 degrees. We could never get eggs well boiled in the high lands, and attributed this, whether rightly or not I cannot say, to the low temperature of boiling water.
[Illustration: GROUP OF ECCLESIASTICS, MEXICO.]
CHAPTER IV.
TACUBAYA. PACHUCA. REAL DEL MONTE.
We went one morning to the house of our friend Don Pepe, and were informed by the servant as we entered the courtyard that the nino, the child, was up stairs waiting for us. “The Child” seemed an odd term to apply to a young man of five and twenty. The young ladies, in the same way are called the ni-as, and keep the appellation until they marry.
We went off with the nino to his uncle’s house at Tacubaya, on the rising ground above Mexico. In the garden there we found a vegetation such as one would find in southern Europe–figs, olives, peaches, roses, and many other European trees and flowers–growing luxuriantly, but among them the passion-flower, which produces one of the most delicious of fruits, the granadita, and other semi-tropical plants. The live creatures in the garden, however, were anything but European in their character. There were numbers of immense butterflies of the most brilliant colours; and the garden was full of hummingbirds, darting backwards and forwards with wonderful swiftness, and dipping their long beaks into the flowers. They call them chupa-mirtos–myrtle-suckers, and the Indians take them by blowing water upon them from a cane, and catching them before they have recovered from the shock. One day we bought a cage full of them, and tried to keep them alive in our room by feeding them with sugar and water, but the poor little things pined away. In old times the Mexicans were famous for their ornaments of humming-bird’s feathers. The taste with which they arranged feathers of many shades of colour, excited the admiration of the conquerors; and the specimens we may still see in museums are beautiful things, and their great age has hardly impaired the brilliancy of their tints. This curious art was practised by the highest nobility, and held in great esteem, just as working tapestry used to be in Europe, only that the feather-work was mostly done by men. It is a lost art, for one cannot take much account of such poor things as are done now, in which, moreover, the designs are European. In this garden at Tacubaya we saw for the first time the praying Mantis, and caught him as he sat in his usual devotional attitude. His Spanish name is “el predicador,” the preacher.
We got back to Mexico in time for the Corrida de Toros. The bull-ring was a large one, and there were many thousands of people there; but as to the spectacle itself, whether one took it upon its merits, or merely compared it with the bull-fights of Old Spain, it was disgusting. The bulls were cautious and cowardly, and could hardly be got to fight; and the matadors almost always failed in killing them; partly through want of skill, partly because it is really harder to kill a quiet bull than a fierce one who runs straight at his assailant. To fill up the measure of the whole iniquitous proceeding, they brought in a wretch in a white jacket with a dagger, to finish the unfortunate beasts which the matador could not kill in the legitimate way. It was evidently quite the regular thing, for the spectators expressed no surprise at it.
After the bull-fight proper was finished, there came two or three supplementary performances, which were genuinely Mexican, and very well worth seeing. A very wild bull was turned into the ring, where two lazadores, on beautiful little horses, were waiting for him. The bull set off at full speed after one of the riders, who cantered easily ahead of him; and the other, leisurely untying his lazo, hung it over his left arm, and then, taking the end in his light hand, let the cord fall through the loop into a running noose, which he whirled two or three times round his head, and threw it so neatly that it settled gently down over the bull’s neck. In a moment the other end of the cord was wound several times round the pummel of the saddle, and the little horse set off at full speed to get ahead of the bull. But the first rider had wheeled round, thrown his lazo upon the ground, and just as the bull stepped within the noose, whipped it up round his hind leg, and galloped off in a contrary direction. Just as the first lazo tightened round his neck, the second jerked him by the leg, and the beast rolled helplessly over in the sand. Then they got the lazos off, no easy matter when one isn’t accustomed to it, and set him off again, catching him by hind legs or fore legs just as they pleased, and inevitably bringing him down, till the bull was tired out and no longer resisted. Then they both lazo’d him over the horns, and galloped him out, amid the cheers of the spectators. The amusements finished with the “colear.” This is quite peculiar to Mexico, and is done on this wise. The coleador rides after the bull, who has an idea that something is going to happen, and gallops off as fast as he can go, throwing out his hind legs in his awkward bullish fashion. Now, suppose you are the coleador, sitting in your peaked Mexican saddle, that rises behind and before, and keeps you in your seat without an effort on your part. You gallop after the bull, and when you come up with him, you pull as hard as you can to keep your horse back; for, if he is used to the sport, as almost all Mexican horses are, he is wild to get past, not noticing that his rider has got no hold of the toro. Well, you are just behind the bull, a little to the left of him, and out of the way of his hind legs, which will trip your horse up if you don’t take care; you take your right foot out of the stirrup, catch hold of the end of the bull’s tail (which is very long), throw your leg over it, and so twist the end of the tail round your leg below the knee. You have either got the bridle between your teeth or have let it go altogether, and with your left hand you give your horse a crack with the whip; he goes forward with a bound, and the bull, losing his balance by the sudden jerk behind, rolls over on the ground, and gets up, looking very uncomfortable. The faster the bull gallops, the easier it is to throw him over; and two boys of twelve or fourteen years of age coleared a couple of young bulls in the arena, in great style, pitching them over in all directions. The farmers and landed proprietors are immensely fond of both these sports, which the bulls–by the way–seem to dislike most thoroughly; but this exhibition in the bull-ring was better than what one generally sees, and the leperos were loud in their expressions of delight.
When we had been a week or two in the city of Mexico, we decided upon making an excursion to the great silver mining district of the Real del Monte. Some of our English friends were leaving for England, and had engaged the whole of the Diligence to Pachuca, going from thence up to the Real, and thence to Tampico, with all the pomp and circumstance of a train of carriages and an armed escort. We were invited to go with them as far as Pachuca; and accordingly we rose very early on the 28th of March, got some chocolate under difficulties, and started in the Diligence, seven grown-up people, and a baby, who was very good, and was spoken of and to as “leoncito.” On the high plateaus of Mexico, the children of European parents grow up as healthy and strong as at home; it is only in the districts at a lower elevation above the sea, on the coasts for instance, that they do not thrive. Mr. G., who was leaving Mexico, was the head of a great merchant-house, and it was as a compliment to him and Mrs. G. that we were accompanied by a party of English horsemen for the first two or three leagues. Englishmen take much more easily to Mexican ways about horses than the Mexicans do to ours, and a finer turn-out of horses and riders than our amateur escort could hardly have been found in Mexico. There was our friend Don Guillermo, who rode a beautiful horse that had once belonged to the captain of a band of robbers, and had not its equal in the city for swiftness; and Don Juan on his splendid little brown horse Pancho, lazoing stray mules as he went, and every now and then galloping into a meadow by the roadside after a bull, who was off like a shot the moment he heard the sound of hoofs. I wonder whether I shall ever see them again, those jovial open-hearted countrymen of ours. At last our companions said good-bye, and loaded pistols were carefully arranged on the centre cushion in case of an attack, much to the edification of my companion and myself, as it rather implied that, if fighting were to be done, we two should have to sit inside to be shot at without a chance of hitting anybody in return.
The hedges of the Organ Cactus are a feature in the landscape of the plains, and we first saw them to perfection on the road between Mexico and Pachuca. This plant, the Cereus hexagonus, grows in Italy in the open air, but seems not to be turned to account anywhere except in Mexico for the purpose to which it is particularly suited. In its wild state it grows like a candelabrum, with a thick trunk a few feet high, from the top of which it sends out shoots, which, as soon as they have room, rise straight upwards in fluted pillars fifteen or twenty feet in height. Such a plant, with pillars rising side by side and almost touching one another, has a curious resemblance to an organ with its pipes, and thence its name “organo.”
To make a fence, they break off the straight lateral shoots, of the height required, and plant them closely side by side, in a trench, sufficiently deep to ensure their standing firmly; and it is a curious sight to see a labourer bearing on his shoulder one of these vegetable pillars, as high as himself, and carefully guarding himself against its spines. A hedge perfectly impassable is obtained at once; the cactus rooting so readily, that it is rare to see a gap where one has died. The villagers surround their gardens with these fences of cactus, which often line the road for miles together. Foreigners used to point out such villages to us, and remark that they seemed “well organized,” a small joke which unfortunately bears translation into all ordinary European languages, and was inflicted without mercy upon us as new comers.
We reached Pachuca early in the afternoon, and took up our quarters in the inn there, and our friends went on to Real del Monte.
This little town of Pachuca has long been a place of some importance in the world, as regards mining-operations. The Aztecs worked silver-mines here, as well as at Tasco, long before the Spaniards came, and they knew how to smelt the ore. It is true that, if no better process than smelting were known now, most of the mines would scarcely be worth working; but still, to know how to extract silver at all was a great step; and indeed at that time, and for long after the Conquest, there was no better method known in Europe. It was in this very place that a Spaniard, Medina by name, discovered the process of amalgamation with mercury, in the year 1557, some forty years after the invasion. We went to see the place where he first worked his new process, and found it still used as a “hacienda de beneficio” (establishment for extracting silver from the ore.) So few discoveries in the arts have come out of Mexico, or indeed out of any Spanish colony, that we must make the most of this really very important method, which is more extensively used than any other, both in North and South America. As for the rest of the world, it produces, comparatively, so little silver, that it is scarcely worth taking into account.
We had forgotten, when we went to bed, that we were nearly seven hundred feet higher than Mexico; but had the fact brought to our remembrance by waking in the middle of the night, feeling very cold, and finding our thermometer marking 40 degrees Fahr.; whereupon we covered ourselves with cloaks, and the cloaks with the strips of carpet at our bedsides, and went to sleep again.
We had hired, of the French landlord, two horses and a mozo to guide us, and sorry hacks they were when we saw them in the morning. It was delightful to get a little circulation into our veins by going at the best gallop our horses would agree to; for we were fresh from hot countries, and not at all prepared for having our hands and feet numbed with cold, and being as hoarse as ravens–for the sore throat which is the nuisance of the district, and is very severe upon new comers, had not spared us. Evaporation is so rapid at this high altitude that if you wet the back of your hand it dries almost instantly, leaving a smart sensation of cold. One may easily suppose, that when people have been accustomed to live under the ordinary pressure of the air, their throats and lungs do not like being dried up at this rate; besides their having, on account of the rarity of the air, to work harder in breathing, in order to get in the necessary quantity of oxygen.
Coughs seem very common here, especially among the children, though people look strong and healthy, but in the absence of proper statistics one cannot undertake to say whether the district is a healthy one or not.
For a wonder we have a good road, and this simply because the Real del Monte Company wanted one, and made it for themselves. How unfortunate all Spanish countries are in roads, one of the most important first steps towards civilization! When one has travelled in Old Spain, one can imagine that the colonists did not bring over very enlightened ideas on the subject; and as the Mexicans were not allowed to hold intercourse with any other country, it is easy to explain why Mexico is all but impassable for carriages. But if the money–or half of it–that has been spent in building and endowing churches and convents had been devoted to road-making, this might have been a great and prosperous country.
For some three hours we rode along among porphyritic mountains, getting higher at every turn, and enjoying the clear bright air. Now and then we met or passed a long recua (train) of loaded mules, taking care to keep the safe side of the road till we were rid of them. It is not pleasant to meet a great drove of horned cattle in an Alpine pass, but I really think a recua of loaded mules among the Andes is worse. A knowing old beast goes first, and the rest come tumbling after him anyhow, with their loads often projecting a foot or two on either side, and banging against anybody or anything. Then, wherever the road is particularly narrow, and there is a precipice of two or three hundred feet to fall over, one or two of them will fall down, or get their packs loose, and so block up the road, and there is a general scrimmage of kicking and shoving behind, till the arrieros can get things straight again. At last we reach the top of a ridge, and see the little settlement of Real del Monte below us. It is more like a Cornish mining village than anything else; but of course the engine-houses, chimneys, and mine-sheds, built by Cornishmen in true Cornish fashion, go a long way towards making up the resemblance. The village is built on the awkwardest bit of ground possible, up and down on the side of a steep ravine, one house apparently standing on the roof of another; and it takes half a mile of real hard climbing to get from the bottom of the town to the top.
We put up our horses at a neat little inn kept by an old Englishwoman, and walked or climbed up to the Company’s house. We made several new acquaintances at the Real, though we left within a few hours, intending to see the place thoroughly on our return.
One peculiarity of the Casa Grande–the great house of the Company–was the warlike appearance of everybody in it. The clerks were posting up the ledgers with loaded revolvers on the desk before them; the manager’s room was a small arsenal, and the gentlemen rode out for exercise, morning and evening, armed to the teeth. Not that there is anything to be apprehended from robbers–indeed I should like to see any of the Mexican ladrones interfering with the Cornish miners, who would soon teach them better manners. I am inclined to think there is a positive pleasure in possessing and handling guns and pistols, whether they are likely to be of any use or not. Indeed, while travelling through the western and southern States of America, where such things are very generally carried, I was the possessor of a five-barrelled revolver, and admit that I derived an amount of mild satisfaction from carrying it about, and shooting at a mark with it, that amply compensated for the loss of two dollars I incurred by selling it to a Jew at New Orleans.
We rode on to Regla, soon finding that our guide had never been there before; so, next morning, we kept the two horses and dismissed him with ignominy. A fine road leads from the Real to Regla, for all the silver-ore from the mines is conveyed there to have the silver separated from it. My notes of our ride mention a great water-wheel: sections of porphyritic rocks, with enormous masses of alluvial soil lying upon them: steep ravines: arroyos, cut by mountain-streams, and forests of pine-trees–a thoroughly Alpine district altogether. At Regla it became evident that our letter of introduction was not a mere complimentary affair. There is not even a village there; it is only a great hacienda, belonging to the Company, with the huts of the workmen built near it. The Company, represented by Mr. Bell, received us with the greatest hospitality. Almost before the letter was opened our horses and mozo were off to the stables, our room was ready, and our dinner being prepared as fast as might be. What a pleasant evening we had, after our long day’s work! We had a great wood-fire, and sat by it, talking and looking at Mr. Bell’s photographs and minerals, which serve as an amusement in his leisure-hours. The Company’s Administrador leads rather a peculiar life here. There is no want of work or responsibility; he has two or three hundred Indians to manage, almost all of whom will steal and cheat without the slightest scruple, if they can but get a chance; he has to assay the ores, superintend a variety of processes which require the greatest skill and judgment, and he is in charge of property to the value of several hundred thousand pounds. Then a man must have a constitution of iron to live in a place where the air is so rarefied, and where the temperature varies thirty and forty degrees between morning and noon. As for society, he must find it in his own family; for even the better class of Mexicans are on so different a level, intellectually, from an educated Englishman, that their society bores him utterly, and he had rather be left in solitude than have to talk to them. Well, it is a great advantage to travellers that circumstances fix pleasant people in such out-of-the-way places.
One necessary part of a hacienda is a church. The proprietors are compelled by law to build one, and pay the priest’s fees for mass on Sundays and feast-days. Now, almost all the English one meets with engaged in business, or managing mines and plantations, are Scotch, and one may well suppose that there is not much love lost between them and the priests. The father confessor plays an important part in the great system of dishonesty that prevails to so monstrous an extent throughout the country. He hears the particulars of the thefts and cheatings that have been practised on the proprietor who builds his church and pays for his services, and he complacently absolves his penitents in consideration of a small penance. Not a word about restitution; and just a formal injunction to go and sin no more, which neither priest nor penitent is very sincere about. The various evils of the Roman Catholic system have been reiterated till the subject has become tiresome, but this particular practice is so contrary to the simplest notions of morality, and has produced such fearful effects on the character of this nation, that one cannot pass it by without notice. If the Superintendent should roast the parish priest in front of the oxidising furnace, till he confessed all he knew about the thefts of his parishioners from the Company, he would tell strange stories,–how Juan Fernandez carried off sixpennyworth of silver in each car every day for a month; and how Pedro Alvarado (the Indian names have almost disappeared except in a few families, and Spanish names have been substituted) had a hammer with a hollow handle, like the stick that Sancho Panza delivered his famous judgment about, and carried away silver in it every day when he left work; and how Vasco Nunez stole the iron key from the gate (which cost two dollars to replace), walking twenty miles and losing a day’s work in order to sell it, and eventually getting but twopence for it; and plenty more stories of the same kind. The Padre at Regla, we heard, was not given to preaching sermons, but had lately favoured his congregation with a very striking one, to the effect that the Company paid him only three dollars a time for saying mass, and that he ought to have four.
Almost every traveller who visits Mexico enlarges on the dishonesty which is rooted in the character of the people. That they are worse now in this respect than they were before the Conquest is highly probable. Their position as a conquered and enslaved people, tended, as it always does, to foster the slavish vices of dissimulation and dishonesty. The religion brought into the country by the Spanish missionaries concerned itself with their belief, and left their morals to shift for themselves, as it does still.
In the mining-districts stealing is universal. Public feeling among the Indians does not condemn it in the least, quite the contrary. To steal successfully is considered a triumph, and to be found out is no disgrace. Theft is not even punishable. In old times a thief might be put in the stocks; but Burkart, who was a mining-inspector for many years, says that in his time, some twenty years ago, tins was abolished, and I believe the law has not been altered since. It is a miserable sight to see the Indian labourers searched as they come out of the mines. They are almost naked, but rich ore packs in such a small compass, and they are so ingenious in stowing it away, that the doorkeepers examine their mouths and ears, and their hair, and constantly find pieces that have been secreted, while a far greater quantity escapes. It is this system of thieving that accounts for the existence of certain little smelting-sheds, close to the works of the Company, who look at them with such feelings as may be imagined. These places profess to smelt ore from one or two little mines in the neighbourhood, but their real object is no secret. They buy the stolen bits of rich ore from the Indian labourers, giving exactly half the value for it.
Of course, we must not judge these Mexican labourers as though we had a very high standard of honesty at home. That we should see workmen searched habitually in England, at the doors of our national dock-yards, is a much greater disgrace to us. And not merely a disgrace, but a serious moral evil, for to expose an honest man to such a degradation is to make him half a thief already.
People who know the Indian population best assure us that their lives are a perpetual course of intrigue and dissimulation. Always trying to practise some small fraud upon their masters, and even upon their own people, they are in constant fear that every one is trying to overreach them. They are afraid to answer the simplest question, lest it should be a trap laid to catch them. They ponder over every word and action of their European employers, to find out what hidden intrigue lies beneath, and to devise some counter-plot. Sartorius says that when he has met an Indian and asked his name, the brown man always gave a false one, lest the enquirer should want to do him some harm.
Never did any people show more clearly the effects of ages of servitude and oppression; but, hopeless as the moral condition of this mining population seems, there is one favourable circumstance to be put on record. The Cornish miners, who have been living among them for years, have worked quite perceptibly upon the Indian character by the example of their persevering industry, their love of saving, and their utter contempt for thieves and liars. Instead of squandering their wages, or burying them in the ground, many of the Indian miners take their savings to the Banks; and the opinions of the foreigners are gradually–though very slowly–altering the popular standard of honesty, the first step towards the moral improvement of the Mexican population.
In the morning we went off for an excursion, having got a lively young fellow from the hacienda in exchange for our stupid mozo. There was hoar frost on the ground, and the feeling of cold was intense at first; but the sun began to warm the ground about eight o’clock, and we were soon glad to fasten our great coats and shawls to our saddles. Three leagues took us to the town of Atotonilco[9] el Grande, which gives its name to the plateau we were crossing. Here we are no longer in the valley of Mexico, which is separated from this plain by the mountains of the Real del Monte. We rode on two leagues more to the village of Soquital[10] where, it being Sunday, we found the inhabitants–mostly Indians–amusing themselves by standing in the sun, doing nothing. I can hardly say “doing nothing,” though, for we went into the tienda, or shop, and found a brisk trade going on in raw spirits. _Tienda_, in Spanish, means a tent or booth. The first shops were tents or booths at fairs or in market-places; and thence “tienda” came to mean a shop in general; a derivation which corresponds with that of the word “shop” itself. Such of the population as had money seemed to drop in at regular intervals for a dram, which consisted of a small wine-glassful of white-corn-brandy, called _chinguerito_. We tasted some, while the people at the shop were frying eggs and boiling beans for our breakfast; and found it so strong that a small sip brought tears into our eyes, to the amusement of the bystanders. It seemed that everybody was drinking who could afford it; from the old men and women to the babies in their mothers’ arms; everybody had a share, except those who were hard up, and they stood about the door looking stolidly at the drinkers. There was nothing like gaiety in the whole affair; only a sort of satisfaction appeared in the face of each as he took his dose. It is the drinkers of pulque who get furiously drunk, and fight; here it is different. These drinkers of spirits are not much given to that enormous excess that kills off the Red Indians; indeed, they are seldom drunk enough to lose their wits, and they never have delirium tremens, which would come upon a European, with much less provocation. They get into a habit of daily–almost hourly–dram-drinking, and go on, year after year, in this way; seeming, as far as we could judge, to live a long while, such a life as it is. As we mounted our horses and rode on, we agreed that we had seldom seen a more melancholy and depressing sight.
We met some arrieros, who had brought up salt from the coast; and they, seeing that we were English, judged we had something to do with mines, and proposed to sell us their goods. The price of salt here is actually three-pence per lb., in a district where its consumption is immense, as it is used in refining the silver ore. It must be said, however, that this is an unusual price; for the muleteers have been so victimised by their mules being seized, either by the government or the rebels (one seems about as bad as the other in this respect), that they must have a high price to pay them for the risk. Generally seven reals, or 3s. 6d. per arroba of 25 lbs. is the price. This salt is evaporated in the salinas of Campeche, taken by water to Tuzpan, and then brought up the country on mules’ backs–each beast carrying 300 lbs. Of course, this salt is very coarse and very watery; all salt made in this way is. It suits the New Orleans people better to import salt from England, than to make it in this way in the Gulf of Mexico, though the water there is very salt, and the sun very hot. The fact, that it pays to carry salt on mules’ backs, tells volumes about the state of the country. At the lowest computation, the mules would do four or five times as much work if they were set to draw any kind of cart–however rough–on a carriageable road. It is true that there is some sort of road from here to Tampico, but an English waggoner would not acknowledge it by that name at all; and the muleteers are still in possession of most of the traffic in this district, as indeed they are over almost all the country.
It was mid-day by this time; and, as we could not get to the Rio Grande without taking our chance for the night in some Indian rancho, we turned back. The heat had become so oppressive that we took off our coats; and Mr. Christy, riding in his shirt-sleeves and holding a white umbrella over his head, which he had further protected with a turban, declared that even in the East he had not had so fatiguing a ride. We passed through Soquital, and there the natives were idling and drinking spirits as before, and seemed hardly to have moved since we left. This plateau of Atotonilco el Grande, called for shortness Grande, is, like most of the high plains of Mexico, composed mostly of porphyry and obsidian, a valley filled up with debris from the surrounding mountains, which are all volcanic, embedded in reddish earth. The mountain-torrents–in which the water, so to speak, comes down all at once, not flowing in a steady stream all the year round as in England–have left evidences of their immense power in the ravines with which the sides of the hills, from their very tops downward, are fluted.
These fluted mountain-ridges resemble the “Kamms” (combs) of the Swiss Alps, called so from their toothed appearance.
We had met numbers of Indians, bringing their wares to the Sunday market in the great square of Atotonilco el Grande; and when we reached the town on our way home, business was still going on briskly; so we put up our horses, and spent an hour or two in studying the people and the commodities they dealt in. It was a real old-fashioned Indian market, very much such as the Spaniards found when they first penetrated into the country. A large proportion of the people could speak no Spanish, or only a few words. The unglazed pottery, palm-leaf mats, ropes and bags of aloe-fibre, dressed skins, &c., were just the same wares that were made three centuries ago; and there is no improvement in their manufacture. This people, who rose in three centuries from the condition of wandering savages to a height of civilization that has no equal in history–considering the shortness of the time in which it grew up–have remained, since the Conquest, without making one step in advance. They hardly understand any reason for what they do, except that their ancestors did things so–they therefore must be right. They make their unglazed pottery, and carry it five and twenty miles to market on their heads, just as they used to do when there were no beasts of burden in the country. The same with their fruits and vegetables, which they have brought great distances, up the most difficult mountain-paths, at a ruinous sacrifice of time and trouble, considering what a miserable sum they will get for them after all, and how much even of this will be spent in brandy. By working on a hacienda they would get double what their labour produces in this way, but they do not understand this kind of reasoning. They cultivate their little patches of maize, by putting a sharp stick into the ground, and dropping the seed into the hole. They carry pots of water to irrigate their ground with, instead of digging trenches. This is the more curious, as at the time of the Conquest irrigation was much practised by the Aztecs in the plains, and remains of water-canals still exist, showing that they had carried the art to great perfection. They bring logs of wood over the mountains by harnessing horses or mules to them, and dragging them with immense labour over the rough ground. The idea of wheels or rollers has either not occurred to them, or is considered as a pernicious novelty.
It is very striking to see how, while Europeans are bringing the newest machinery and the most advanced arts into the country, there is scarcely any symptom of improvement among the people, who still hold firmly to the wisdom of their ancestors. An American author, Mayer, quotes a story of a certain people in Italy, as an illustration of the feeling of the Indians in Mexico respecting improvements. In this district, he says that the peasants loaded their panniers with vegetables on one side, and balanced the opposite pannier by filling it with stones; and when a traveller pointed out the advantage to be gained by loading both panniers with vegetables, he was answered that their forefathers from time immemorial had so carried their produce to market, that they were wise and good men, and that a stranger showed very little understanding or decency who interfered in the established customs of a country. I need hardly say that the Indians are utterly ignorant; and this of course accounts to a great extent for their obstinate conservatism.
There were several shops round the market-place at Grande, and the brandy-drinking was going on much as at Soquital. The shops in these small towns are general stores, like “the shop” in coal- and iron-districts in England. It is only in large towns that the different retail-trades are separated. One thing is very noticeable in these country stores, the certainty of finding a great stock of sardines in bright tin boxes. The idea of finding _Sardines a l’huile_ in Indian villages seemed odd enough; but the fact is, that the difficulty of getting fish up from the coast is so great that these sardines are not much dearer than anything else, and they go a long way. Montezuma’s method of supplying his table with fresh fish from the gulf, by having relays of Indian porters to run up with it, is too expensive for general use, and there is no efficient substitute. It is in consequence of this scarcity of fish, that Church-fasts have never been very strictly kept in Mexico.
[Illustration: HIEROGLYPHICS.]
The method of keeping accounts in the shops–which, it is to be remembered, are almost always kept by white or half-white people, hardly ever by Indians–is primitive enough. Here is a score which I copied, the hieroglyphics standing for dollars, half-dollars, medios or half-reals, cuartillos or quarter-reals, and tlacos–or clacos–which are eighths of a real, or about 3/4d. While account-keeping among the comparatively educated trades-people is in this condition, one can easily understand how very limited the Indian notions of calculation are. They cannot realize any number much over ten; and twenty–cempoalli–is with them the symbol of a great number, as a hundred was with the Greeks. There is in Mexico a mountain called in this indefinite way “Cempoatepetl”–the twenty-mountain. Sartorius mentions the Indian name of the many-petaled marigold–“cempoaxochitl”–the twenty-flower. We traded for some trifles of aloe-fibre, but soon had to count up the reckoning with beans.
I have delayed long enough for the present over the Indians and their market; so, though there is much more to be said about them, I will only add a few words respecting the commodities for sale, and then leave them for awhile.
There seemed to be a large business doing in costales (bags) made of aloe-fibre, for carrying ore about in the mines. True to the traditions of his ancestors, the Indian much prefers putting his load in a bag on his back, to the far easier method of wheeling it about. Lazos sold at one to four reals, (6d. to 2s.) according to quality. There are two kinds of aloe-fibre; one coarse, _ichtli_, the other much finer, _pito_; the first made from the great aloe that produces pulque, the other from a much smaller species of the same genus. The stones with which the boiled maize is ground into the paste of which the universal tortillas are made were to be had here; indeed, they are made in the neighbourhood, of the basalt and lava which abound in the district. The metate is a sort of little table, hewn out of the basalt, with four little feet, and its surface is curved from the ends to the middle. The metalpile is of the same material, and like a rolling-pin. The old-fashioned Mexican pottery I have mentioned already. It is beautifully made, and very cheap. They only asked us nine-pence for a great olla, or boiling-pot, that held four or five gallons, and no doubt this was double the market-price. I never so thoroughly realized before how climate is altered by altitude above the sea as in noticing the fruits and vegetables that were being sold at this little market, within fifteen or twenty miles of which they were all grown. There were wheat and barley, and the pinones (the fruit of the stone-pine, which grows in Italy, and is largely used instead of almonds); and from these representatives of temperate climates the list extended to bananas and zapotes, grown at the bottom of the great barrancas, 3,000 or 4,000 feet lower in level than the plateau, though in distance but a few miles off. Three or four thousand miles of latitude would not give a greater difference.
It would never do to be late, and break our necks in one of the awkward water-courses that cut the plateau about in all directions; so we started homewards, soon having to unfasten great-coats and shawls from our saddles, to keep out the cold of the approaching sunset; and so we got back to the hospitable hacienda, and were glad to warm ourselves at the fire.
Next morning, we went off to get a view of the great barranca of Regla. A ride over the hills brought us to a wood of oaks, with their branches fringed with the long grey Spanish moss, and a profusion of epiphytes clinging to their bark, some splendidly in flower, showing the fantastic shapes and brilliant colours one sees in English orchid-houses. Cactuses of many species complete the picture of the vegetation in this beautiful spot. This is at the top of the barranca. Then imagine a valley a mile or two in width, with sides almost perpendicular and capped with basaltic pillars, and at the bottom a strip of land where the vegetation is of the deepest green of the tropics, with a river winding along among palm-trees and bananas. This great barranca is between two and three thousand feet deep, and the view is wonderful. We went down a considerable way by a zig-zag road, my companion collecting armfuls of plants by the way, but unfortunately losing his thermometer, which could not be found, though a long hunt for it produced a great many more plants, and so the trouble was not wasted. The prickly pear was covered with ripe purple fruit a little way down, and we refreshed ourselves with them, I managing–in my clumsiness–to get into my fingers two or three of the little sheaves of needles which are planted on the outside of the fruit, and thus providing myself with occupation for leisure moments for three or four days after in taking them out.
Many species of cactus, and the nopal, or prickly pear, especially, are full of watery sap, which trickles out in a stream when they are pierced. In these thirsty regions, when springs and brooks are dry, the cattle bite them to get at the moisture, regardless of the thorns. On the north coast of Africa the camels delight in crunching the juicy leaves of the same plant. I have often been amused in watching the camel-drivers’ efforts to get their trains of laden beasts along the narrow sandy lanes of Tangier, between hedges of prickly pears, where the camels with their long necks could reach the tempting lobes on both sides of the way.
In this thirsty season, while the cattle in the Mexican plains derive moisture from the cactus, the aloe provides for man a substitute for water. It frequently happened to us to go from rancho to rancho asking for water in vain, though pulque was to be had in abundance.
To attempt any description of the varied forms of cactus in Mexico would be out of the question. In the northern provinces alone, botanists have described above eight hundred species. The most striking we met with were the prickly pear (cactus opuntia), the organo, the night-blowing cereus, the various mamillarias–dome-shaped mounds covered with thorns, varying in diameter from an inch to six or eight feet–and the greybeard, _el viejo,_ “the old man,” as our guide called them, upright pillars like street-posts, and covered with grey wool-like filaments.
Getting to the top of the ravine again, we found an old Indian milking an aloe, which flourishes here, though a little further down the climate is too hot for it to produce pulque. This old gentleman had a long gourd, of the shape and size of a great club, but hollow inside, and very light. The small end of this gourd was pushed in among the aloe-leaves into the hollow made by scooping out the inside of the plant, and in which the sweet juice, the aguamiel, collects. By having a little hole at each end of the gourd, and sucking at the large end, the hollow of the plant emptied itself into the Acocote, (in proper Mexican, _Acocotl_, Water-throat), as this queer implement is called. Then the Indian stopped the hole at the end he had been sucking at, with his finger, and dexterously emptied the contents of the gourd into a pig-skin which he carried at his back. We went up with the old man to his rancho, and tested his pulque, which was very good, though we could not say the same of his domestic arrangements. It puzzled us not a little to see people living up at this height in houses built of sticks, such as are used in the hot lands, and hardly affording any protection from the weather, severe as it is here. The pulque is taken to market in pig-skins, which, though the pig himself is taken out of them, still retain his shape very accurately; and when nearly full of liquor, they roll about on their backs, and kick up the little dumpy legs that are left them, in the most comical and life-like way. When we went away we bought the old man’s acocote, and carried it home in triumph, and is it not in the Museum at Kew Gardens to this day? _(See the illustration at page 36.)_
At the hacienda of Regla are to be seen on a large scale most of the processes which are employed in the extraction of silver from the ore–the _beneficio_, or making good, as it is called.
In the great yard, numbers of men and horses were walking round and round upon the “tortas,” tarts or pies, as they are called, consisting of powdered ore mixed with water, so as to form a circular bed of mud a foot deep. To this mud, sulphate of copper, salt, and quicksilver are added, and the men and mules walk round and round in it, mixing it thoroughly together, a process which is kept up, with occasional intervals of rest, for nearly two months. By that time the whole of the silver has formed an amalgam with the mercury, and this amalgam is afterwards separated from the earth by being trampled under water in troughs. We were surprised to find that men and horses could pass their lives in wading through mud containing mercury in a state of fine division without absorbing it into their bodies, but neither men nor horses suffer from it.
We happened to visit the melting-house one evening, while silver and lead were being separated by oxidizing the lead in a reverberatory furnace. Here we noticed a curious effect. The melted litharge ran from the mouth of the furnace upon a floor of damp sand, and spread over it in a sheet. Presently, as the heat of the mass vaporized the water in the sand below, the sheet of litharge, still slightly fluid, began to heave and swell, and a number of small cones rose from its surface. Some of these cones reached the height of four inches, and then burst at the top, sending out a shower of red-hot fragments. I removed one of these cones when the litharge was cool. It had a regidar funnel-shaped crater, like that which Vesuvius had until three or four years ago.
The analogy is complete between these little cones and those on the lava-field at the foot of the volcano of Jorullo, the celebrated “hornitos;” the concentric structure of which, as described by Burkart, proves that they were formed in precisely the same manner. Until lately, the formation of the great cone of Jorullo was attributed to the same kind of action as the hornitos, but later travellers have established the fact that this is incorrect. One of the De Saussure family, who was in Mexico a few years back, describes Jorullo as consisting of three terraces of basaltic lava, which have flowed one above another from a central orifice, the whole being surmounted by a cone of lapilli thrown up from the same opening, from which also later streams of lava have issued.
The celebrated cascade of Regla is just behind the hacienda. There is a sort of basin, enclosed on three sides by a perpendicular wall of basaltic columns, some eighty feet high. On the side opposite the opening, a mountain stream has cut a deep notch in this wall, and pours down in a cascade. The basaltic pillars rest upon an undisturbed layer of basaltic conglomerate five feet thick, and that upon a bed of clay. The place is very picturesque; and two great Yuccas which project over the waterfall, crowned with their star-like tufts of pointed leaves, have a strange effect. These basalt-columns are very regular, with from five to eight sides; and are almost black in colour. They have a curiously well-defined circular core in the middle, five or six inches in diameter. This core is light grey, almost white. The Indians bring down numbers of short lengths or joints of the columns, and they are used at the hacienda in making a primitive kind of ore-crushing mill, in which they are dragged round and round by mule-power, on a floor also of basalt.
When we had visited the falls we took leave of our hospitable friend, and set off to return to the Real. We stopped at San Miguel, another of the haciendas of the Company, where the German barrel-process is worked. Just behind the hacienda is the Ojo de Agua–the Eye of Water–a beautiful basin, surrounded by a green sward and a wood of oaks and fir-trees. A little stream takes its rise from the spring which bubbles up into this basin, and the name “Ojo de Agua,” is a general term applied to such fountain-heads. When one looks down from a high hill upon one of these Eyes of Water, one sees how the name came to be given, and indeed, the idiom is thousands of years older than the Spanish tongue, and belongs as well to the Hebrew and Arabic. A Mexican calls a lake _atezcatl_, Water-Mirror, an expressive word, which reminds one of the German _Wasserspiegel_.
Soon after nightfall we got back to the English inn, and went to bed without any further event happening, except the burning of some outhouses, which we went out to see. The custom of roofing houses with pine-shingles (“tacumeniles”), and the general use of wood for building all the best houses, make fires very common here. During the few days we spent in the Real district, I find in my notebook mention of three fires which we saw. We spent the next day in resting, and in visiting the mine-works near at hand. The day after, an Englishman who had lived many years at the Real offered to take us out for a day’s ride; and the Company’s Administrador lent us two of his own horses, for the poor beasts from Pachuca could hardly have gone so far. The first place we visited was Penas Cargadas, the “loaded rocks.” Riding through a thick wood of oaks and pines, we came suddenly in view of several sugar-loaf peaks, some three hundred feet high, tapering almost to a point at the top, and each one crowned with a mass of rocks which seem to have been balanced in unstable equilibrium on its point,–looking as though the first puff of wind would bring them down. The pillars were of porphyritic conglomerate, which had been disintegrated and worn away by wind and rain; while the great masses resting on them, probably of solid porphyry, had been less affected by these influences. It was the most curious example of the weathering of rocks that we had ever seen. From Penas Cargadas we rode on to the farm of Guajalote, where the Company has forests, and cuts wood and burns charcoal for the mines and the refining works. Don Alejandro, the tenant of the farm, was a Scotchman, and a good fellow. He could not go on with us, for he had invited a party of neighbours to eat up a kid that had been cooked in a hole in the ground, with embers upon it, after Sandwich Island fashion. This is called a _barbacoa_–a barbecue. We should have liked to be at the feast, but time was short, so we rode on to the top of Mount Jacal, 12,000 feet above the sea, where there was a view of mountains and valleys, and heat that was positively melting. Thence down to the Cerro de Navajas, the “hill of knives.” It is on the sides of this hill that obsidian is found in enormous quantities. Before the conquerors introduced the use of iron, these deposits were regularly mined, and this place was the Sheffield of Mexico.
We were curious to see all that was to be seen; for Mr. Christy’s Mexican collection, already large before our visit, and destined to become much larger, contained numbers of implements and weapons of this very peculiar material. Any one who does not know obsidian may imagine great masses of bottle-glass, such as our orthodox ugly wine-bottles are made of, very hard, very brittle, and–if one breaks it with any ordinary implement–going, as glass does, in every direction but the right one. We saw its resemblance to this portwine-bottle-glass in an odd way at the Ojo de Agua, where the wall of the hacienda was armed at the top, after our English fashion, apparently with bits of old bottles, but which turned out to be chips of obsidian. Out of this rather unpromising stuff the Mexicans made knives, razors, arrow- and spear-heads, and other things, some of great beauty. I say nothing of the polished obsidian mirrors and ornaments, nor even of the curious masks of the human face that are to be seen in collections, for these were only laboriously cut and polished with jewellers’ sand, to us a common-place process.
[Illustration: STONE SPEAR-HEADS AND OBSIDIAN KNIVES AND ARROW-HEADS, FROM MEXICO. 1. Flame shaped Arrow-head; obsidian: Teleohuacan. 2. Arrow-head; opake obsidian: Teleohuacan. 3. Knife or Razor of Obsidian; shown in two aspects; Mexico. 4. Leaf-shaped Knife or Javelin-head; obsidian: from Real Del Monte. 5. Spear-head of Chalcedony; one of a pair supposed to be spears of State: found in excavating for the Casa Grande, Tezcuco. (This peculiar opalescent chalcedony occurs as concretions, sometimes of large size, in the trachytic lavas of Mexico.)]
Cortes found the barbers at the great market of Tlatelolco busy shaving the natives with such razors, and he and his men had experience of other uses of the same material in the flights of obsidian-headed arrows which “darkened the sky,” as they said, and the more deadly wooden maces stuck all over with obsidian points, and of the priests’ sacrificial knives too, not long after. These things were not cut and polished, but made by chipping or cracking off pieces from a lump. This one can see by the traces of conchoidal fracture which they all show.
The art is not wholly understood, for it perished soon after the Conquest, when iron came in; but, as far as the theory is concerned, I think I can give a tolerably satisfactory account of the process of manufacture. In the first place, the workman who makes gun-flints could probably make some of the simpler obsidian implements, which were no doubt chipped off in the same way. The section of a gun-flint, with its one side flat for sharpness and the other side ribbed for strength, is one of the characteristics of obsidian knives. That the flint knives of Scandinavia were made by chipping off strips from a mass is proved by the many-sided prisms occasionally found there, and particularly by that one which was discovered just where it had been worked, with the knives chipped off it lying close by, and fitting accurately into their places upon it.
Now to make the case complete, we ought to find such prisms in Mexico; and, accordingly, some months ago, when I examined the splendid Mexican collection of Mr. Uhde at Heidelberg, I found one or two. No one seemed to have suspected their real nature, and they had been classed as maces, or the handles of some kind of weapon.
[Illustration: FLUTED PRISM OF OBSIDIAN: THE CORE FROM WHICH FLAKES HAVE BEEN STRUCK OFF.]
I should say from memory that they were seven or eight inches long, and as large as one could conveniently grasp; and one or both of them, as if to remove all doubt as to what they were, had the stripping off of ribbons not carried quite round them, but leaving an intermediate strip rough. There is another point about the obsidian knives which requires confirmation. One can often see, on the ends of the Scandinavian flint knives, the bruise made by the blow of the hard stone with which they were knocked off. I did not think of looking to this point when at Mr. Uhde’s museum, but the only obsidian knife I have seen since seems to be thus bruised at the end.
[Illustration: AZTEC KNIVES OR RAZORS. LONG NARROW FLAKES OF OBSIDIAN, HAVING A SINGLE FACE ON THE ONE SIDE AND THREE FACETS ON THE OTHER.]
Once able to break his obsidian straight, the workman has got on a long way in his trade, for a large proportion of the articles he has to make are formed by planes intersecting one another in various directions. But the Mexican knives are generally not pointed, but turned up at the end, as one may bend up a druggist’s spatula. This peculiar shape is not given to answer a purpose, but results from the natural fracture of the stone.
Even then, the way of making several implements or weapons is not entirely clear. We got several obsidian maces or lance-heads–one about ten inches long–which were taper from base to point, and covered with taper flutings; and there are other things which present great difficulties. I have heard on good authority, that somewhere in Peru, the Indians still have a way of working obsidian by laying a bone wedge on the surface of a piece, and tapping it till the stone cracks. Such a process may have been used in Mexico.
We may see in museums beautiful little articles made in this intractable material, such as the mirrors and masks I have mentioned, and even rings and cups. But, as I have said, these are mere lapidaries’ work.
The situation of the mines was picturesque; grand hills of porphyritic rock, and pine-forest everywhere. Not far off is the broad track of a hurricane, which had walked through it for miles, knocking the great trees down like ninepins, and leaving them to rot there. The vegetation gave evident proof of a severe climate; and yet the heat and glare of the sun were more intolerable than we had ever felt it in the region of sugar-canes and bananas. About here, some of the trachytic porphyry which forms the substance of the hills had happened to have cooled, under suitable conditions, from the molten state into a sort of slag or volcanic glass, which is the obsidian in question; and, in places, this vitreous lava–from one layer having flowed over another which was already cool–was regularly stratified.
The mines were mere wells, not very deep; with horizontal workings into the obsidian where it was very good and in thick layers. Round about were heaps of fragments, hundreds of tons of them; and it was clear, from the shape of these, that some of the manufacturing was done on the spot. There had been great numbers of pits worked; and it was from these “minillas,” little mines, as they are called, that we first got an idea how important an element this obsidian was in the old Aztec civilization. In excursions made since, we travelled over whole districts in the plains, where fragments of these arrows and knives were to be found, literally at every step, mixed with morsels of pottery, and here and there a little clay idol. Among the heaps of fragments were many that had become weathered on the upper side, and had a remarkable lustre, like silver. Obsidian is called _bizcli_ by the Indians, and the silvery sort is known as _bizcli platera_.[11] They often find bits of it in the fields; and go with great secrecy and mystery to Mr. Bell, or some other authority in mining matters, and confide to him their discovery of a silver-mine. They go away angry and unconvinced when told what their silver really is; and generally come to the conclusion that he is deceiving them, with a view of throwing them off the scent, that he may find the place for himself, and cheat them of their share of the profits–just what their own miserable morbid cunning would lead them to do under such circumstances.
[Illustration: MEXICAN ARROW-HEADS OF OBSIDIAN.]
The family-likeness that exists among the stone tools and weapons found in so many parts of the world is very remarkable. The flint-arrows of North America, such as Mr. Longfellow’s arrow-maker used to work at in the land of the Dacotahs, and which, in the wild northern states of Mexico, the Apaches and Comanches use to this day, might be easily mistaken for the weapons of our British ancestors, dug up on the banks of the Thames. It is true that the finish of the Mexican obsidian implements far exceeds that of the chipped flint and agate weapons of Scandinavia, and still more those of England, Switzerland, and Italy, where they are dug up in such quantities, in deposits of alluvial soil, and in bone-caves in the limestone rocks. But this higher finish we may attribute partly to the superiority of the material; for the Mexicans also used flint to some extent, and their flint weapons are as hard to distinguish by inspection as those from other parts of the world. We may reasonably suppose, moreover, that the skill of the Mexican artificer increased when he found a better material than flint to work upon. Be this as it may, an inspection of any good collection of such articles shows the much higher finish of the obsidian implements than of those of flint, agate, and rock-crystal. They say there is an ingenious artist who makes flint arrow-heads and stone axes for the benefit of English antiquarians, and earns good profits by it: I should like to give him an order for ribbed obsidian razors and spear-heads; I don’t think he would make much of them.
[Illustration: AZTEC KNIFE OF CHALCEDONY, MOUNTED ON A WOODEN HANDLE, WHICH IS SHAPED LIKE A HUMAN FIGURE WITH ITS FACE APPEARING THROUGH AN EAGLE-HEAD MASK, AND HAS BEEN INLAID WITH MOSAIC WORK OF MALACHITE, SHELL, AND TURQUOISE. LENGTH 12-1/2 INCHES.]
The wonderful similarity of character among the stone weapons found in different parts of the world has often been used by ethnologists as a means of supporting the theory that this and other arts were carried over the world by tribes migrating from one common centre of creation of the human species. The argument has not much weight, and a larger view of the subject quite supersedes it.
We may put the question in this way. In Asia and in Europe the use of stone tools and weapons has always characterized a very low state of civilization; and such implements are only found among savage tribes living by the chase, or just beginning to cultivate the ground and to emerge from the condition of mere barbarians. Now, if the Mexicans got their civilization from Europe, it must have been from some people unacquainted with the use of iron, if not of bronze. Iron abounds in Mexico, not only in the state of ore, but occurring nearly pure in aerolites of great size, as at Cholula, and at Zacatecas, not far from the great ruins there; so that the only reason for their not using it must have been ignorance of its qualities.
The Arabian Nights’ story of the mountain which consisted of a single loadstone finds its literal fulfilment in Mexico. Not far from Huetamo, on the road towards the Pacific, there is a conical hill composed entirely of magnetic iron-ore. The blacksmiths in the neighbourhood, with no other apparatus than their common forges, make it directly into wrought iron, which they use for all ordinary purposes.
Now, in supposing civilization to be transmitted from one country to another, we must measure it by the height of its lowest point, as we measure the strength of a chain by the strength of the weakest link. The only civilization that the Mexicans can have received from the Old World must have been from some people whose cutting implements were of sharp stone, consequently, as we must conclude by analogy, some very barbarous and ignorant tribe.
From this point we must admit that the inhabitants of Mexico raised themselves, independently, to the extraordinary degree of culture which distinguished them when Europeans first became aware of their existence. The curious distribution of their knowledge shows plainly that they found it for themselves, and did not receive it by transmission. We find a wonderful acquaintance with astronomy, even to such details as the real cause of eclipses,–and the length of the year given by intercalations of surprising accuracy; and, at the same time, no knowledge whatever of the art of writing alphabetically, for their hieroglyphics are nothing but suggestive pictures. They had earned the art of gardening to a high degree of perfection; but, though there were two kinds of ox, and the buffalo at no great distance from them, in the countries they had already passed through in their migration from the north, they had no idea of the employment of beasts of burden, nor of the use of milk. They were a great trading people, and had money of several kinds in general use, but the art of weighing was utterly unknown to them; while, on the other hand, the Peruvians habitually used scales and weights, but had no idea of the use of money.
To return to the stone knives; the Mexicans may very well have invented the art themselves, as they did so many others; or they may have received it from the Old World. The things themselves prove nothing either way.
The real proof of their having, at some early period, communicated with inhabitants of Europe or Asia rests upon the traditions current among them, which are recorded by the early historians, and confirmed by the Aztec picture-writings; and upon several extraordinary coincidences in the signs used by them in reckoning astronomical cycles. Further on I shall allude to these traditions.
On the whole, the most probable view of the origin of the Mexican tribes seems to be the one ordinarily held, that they really came from the Old World, bringing with them several legends, evidently the same as the histories recorded in the book of Genesis. This must have been, however, at a time, when they were quite a barbarous, nomadic tribe; and we must regard their civilization as of independent and far later growth.
We rode back through the woods to Guajalote, where the Mexican cook had made us a feast after the manner of the country, and from her experience of foreigners had learnt to temper the chile to our susceptible throats. Decidedly the Mexicans are not without ideas in the matter of cookery. We stayed talking with the hospitable Don Alejandro and his sister till it was all but dark, and then rode back to the Real, admiring the fire-flies that were darting about by thousands, and listening to our companion’s stories, which turned on robberies and murders—as stories are apt to do in wild places after dark. But, save an escape from being robbed some twenty years back, and the history of an Indian who was murdered just here by some of his own people, for a few shillings he was taking home, our friend had not much reason to give for the two huge horse-pistols ho carried, ready for action. His story of the death of a German engineer in these parts is worth recording here. He was riding home one dark night, with a companion; and, trusting to his knowledge of the country, tried a short cut through the woods, among the old open mines near the Regla road. They had quite passed all the dangerous places, he thought, so he gave his horse the spur, and plunged sheer down a shaft, hundreds of feet deep. His friend pulled up in time, and got home safely.
We had one more day among the mines, and then went back to Pachuca, and next day to Mexico in the Diligence. Everywhere the same hospitality and good-natured interest in us and our doings, often shown by people with whom we had hardly the slightest acquaintance. Travelling here is very different from what it is in a country on which the shadow of Murray’s Handbook has fallen.
Almost all the interest Europe takes in Mexico, politically and commercially, turns upon the exportation of silver. The gold, cochineal, and vanilla are of small account. It is the silver dollars that pay for the Manchester goods, woollens, hardware, and many other things–those ubiquitous boxes of sardines a l’huile, for instance. The Mexicans send to Europe some five millions sterling in silver every year, that is, about twelve shillings apiece for all the population. It is just about what their government spends annually in promoting the maladministration of the country (and, looking at the matter in that point of view, they don’t do their work badly for the money). The income of the Mexican church is not quite so much, but not far off.
Baron Humboldt has expressed a hope that, at some future day, the Mexicans will turn their attention to producing articles of real intrinsic value, and not those which are merely a sign to represent it. He tells us, quite feelingly, how the Peace of Amiens stopped the working of the iron-mines that had been opened when they could get no iron from abroad; for, when trade was reopened, people preferred buying in Europe probably a better article at one-third the price. He even hopes an enlightened government will encourage (that is, protect) more useful industries. This was written fifty years ago, though. If an enlightened government will give people some security for life and property, and make reasonable laws, and execute them,–leaving men of business to find out for themselves how it suits them to employ their capital, it seems probable that the balance between articles of real value and articles of imaginary value will adjust itself, perhaps better than an enlightened government could do it. The Mexican government has, unfortunately, followed Humboldt’s advice in some respects. Cotton goods, woollens, and hardware are thus protected. We may sum up the statistics of the Mexican cotton-manufacture in a rough way thus,–taking merely into question the coarse cotton cloth called _manta_, and used principally by the Indians. We may reckon roughly that for this article alone the Mexicans have to pay a million sterling annually more than they could get it for if there were no protection-duty. The only advantage anybody gets by this is that a certain part of the population is employed in a manufacture unsuited to the country, and is thus taken away from work that may be done profitably. The actual amount of money paid in wages to the class of operatives thus forced into existence is much _less_ than the amount which the country forfeits for the sake of making its manta at home. Thus a sum actually amounting to a third of the annual taxation of the country is thrown away upon this one article; and more goes the same way, to encourage similar unprofitable manufactures.
With respect to the silver-mines, it is stated, on competent authority, that the northern States of Mexico are very rich in silver; but there is scarcely any population, and that consisting mostly of Red Indians who will not work. When this district becomes a territory of the United States–as seems almost certain, this silver will, no doubt, be worked. We may make three periods in the history of Mexican silver-mining. Before the Conquest, the Aztecs worked the silver-ore at Tasco and other places; and were very familiar with silver, though they did not value it much. Under the Spaniards, the working of silver became the prominent industry of the country; and, until the Mexican Independence, the production steadily increased. The Spaniards invented amalgamation by the _patio_-process, a most, important improvement. Then came above twenty years of confusion, when little was done. But when the Republic had fairly got under way, and the country was in some measure open to foreigners, Europe, especially England, in hot haste to take advantage of the opportunity, sent over engineers and machinery, and great sums of money, much of which was quite wasted, to the hopeless ruin of a great part of the adventurers.
The improvements and the machinery remained, however; and the mines passed into other hands. Of late years the companies have been doing very well, and now export nearly as much silver as during the latter years of the Spanish government–nearly, but not quite. The financial history of the Real del Monte Company is worth putting down. The original English company spent nearly one million sterling on it, without getting any dividend. They sold it to two or three Mexicans for about twenty-seven thousand pounds, and the Mexicans spent eighty thousand more on it, and then began to make profits. The annual profit is now some L200,000.
I have said that the modern Mexican Indian has but little idea of arithmetic. This was not the case with his ancestors, who had a curious notation, serving for the highest numbers. The Indians of the present day use the old Aztec numerals, and from these there is something to be learnt.
Baron Humboldt, speaking of the Muysca Indians of South America, says that their word for eleven is _quihicha ata_, that is, “foot one;” meaning that they have counted all their fingers, and are beginning their toes. He proceeds to compare the Persian words, _pentcha_, hand, and _pendj_, five, as being connected with one another, and gives various other curious instances of finger-numeration. We may carry the theory further. The Zulu language reckons from one up to five, and then goes on with _tatisitupe_ (“take the thumb”), meaning _six_; _tatukomba_ (“take the pointer,” or forefinger), meaning _seven_, and so on. The Vei language counts from one up to nineteen, and for twenty says _mo bande_–“a person is finished”–that is, both fingers and toes. I venture to add another suggestion. Eichhoff gives a Sanskrit word for finger, “daicini” (taken apparently from _pra-decini_, forefinger), and which corresponds curiously with “dacan,” ten; and we have the same resemblance running through many of the Indo-European languages, as [Greek: deka] and [Greek: daktylos], _decem_ and _digitus_; German, _Zehn_ and _Zehe_, and so on.
Here the Mexican numerals will afford us a new illustration. Of the meaning of the first four of them–_ce, ome, yei, nahui_–I can give no idea, any more than I can of the meaning of the words one, two, three, four, which correspond to them; but the Mexican for _five_ is _macuilli_, “hand-depicting.” Then we go on in the dark as far as _ten_, which is _matlactli_, “hand-half,” as I think it means, (from _tlactli_, half); and this would mean, not the halving of a hand, but the half of the whole person, which you get by counting his hands only. The syllable _ma_, which means “hand,” makes its appearance in the words five and ten, and no where else; just as it should do. When we come to twenty, we have _cempoalli_, “one counting;” that is, one whole man, fingers and toes–corresponding to the Vei word for twenty, “a person is finished.”
I think we need no more examples to show that people–in almost all countries–reckon by fives, tens, or twenties, merely because they began to count upon their fingers and toes. If the strong man who had six fingers on each hand, and six toes on each foot, had invented a system of numeration, it would have gone in twelves, nearly like the duodecimals which our carpenters use; unless, indeed, he had been stupid after the manner of very strong men, and not gone beyond sixes. We see how the Romans, though they inherited from their Eastern ancestors a numeration by tens up to _decem_, and then beginning again _undecim_, &c., yet when they began to write a notation could get no farther than five–I., II., III., IV., V.; and then on again, VI., VII., up to ten, from ten to fifteen, and so on.
There is a very curious vulgar error which prevails, even among people who have a good practical acquaintance with arithmetic. It is that the number _ten_ has some special virtue which fits it for counting up to. The fact is that ten is not the best number for the purpose; you can halve it, it is true, but that is about all you can do with it, for its being divisible by five is of hardly any use for practical purposes. _Eight_ would be a much better number, for you can halve it three times in succession; and _twelve_ is perhaps the most convenient number possible, as it will divide by two, three, and four. It is this convenient property that leads tradesmen to sell by dozens, and grosses, rather than by tens and hundreds. If we used eights or twelves instead of tens for numeration, we might of course preserve all the advantages of the Indian or Arabic numerals; in the first case, we should discard the ciphers 8 and 9, and reckon 5, 6, 7, 10; and in the second case, we should want two new ciphers for ten and eleven; and 10 would stand for twelve, and 11 for thirteen. Our happening to have ten fingers has really led us into a rather inconvenient numerical system.
[Illustration: AZTEC HEAD, IN TERRA COTTA. (PROBABLY EITHER A HOUSEHOLD-GOD OR A VOTIVE OFFERING).]
* * * * *
NOTE.
The unique Knife figured at page 101 and two masks incrusted with a similar mosaic work (of turquoise and obsidian) are in Mr. Christy’s collection; and a mask and head of similar workmanship are in the collection at Copenhagen. These are the only known examples of this advanced style of Aztec art.
The whole once belonged probably to one set, brought to Europe soon after the Conquest of Mexico. The two at Copenhagen were obtained at a convent in Rome; and, of the other three, two were for a long period in a collection at Florence, and the other was obtained at Bruges, where it was most probably brought by the Spaniards during their rule in the Low Countries.
CHAPTER V.
MEXICO. GUADALUPE.
[Illustration: THE ROBES WORN BY THE WOMEN OF MEXICO; AND THE SERAPE WORN BY THE MEN.]
While we were away at the Real del Monte, the news had reached Mexico that Puebla had capitulated, and that the rebel leader had fled. The victory was celebrated in the capital with the most triumphal entries, harangues, bull-fights, and illuminations done to order. If you had a house in one of the principal streets, the police would make you illuminate it, whether you liked or not. The newspapers loudly proclaimed the triumph of the constitutional principle, and the inauguration of a reign of law and order that was never to cease.
As for the newspapers, indeed, one looked in vain in them for any free expression of public opinion. They were all either suppressed, or converted into the merest mouthpieces of the government. The telegraph was under the strictest surveillance, and no messages were allowed to be sent which the government did not consider favourable to their interests; a precaution which rather defeated itself, as the people soon ceased to believe any public news at all. In all these mean little shifts, which we in England consider as the special property of despotic governments, the authorities of the Mexican Republic showed themselves great proficients.
We were left, therefore, to form what idea we could of the real state of Mexican affairs, from the private information received by our friends. Just for once it may be worth while to give a few details, not because the people engaged were specially interesting, but because the affair may serve to give an idea of the condition of the country.
President Comonfort, not a bad sort of man, as it seemed, but not “strong enough for the place,” and with an empty treasury, tried to make a stand against the clergy and the army, who stood firm against any attempt at reform–knowing, with a certain instinct, that, if any real reform once began, their own unreasonable privileges would soon be attacked. So the clergy and part of the army set up an anti-president, one Haro; and he installed himself at Puebla, which is the second city of the Republic, and there Comonfort besieged him. So far I have already described the doings of the “reaccionarios.”
The newspapers gave wonderful accounts of attacks and repulses, and reckoned the killed on both sides at 2,500. There were 10,000 regular troops, and 10,000 irregulars (very irregular troops indeed); and these were commanded by a complete regiment of officers, and _forty_ generals. This is reckoning both sides; but as, on pretty good authority (Tejada’s statistical table), the troops in the Republic are only reckoned at 12,000, no doubt the above numbers are much exaggerated. As for the 2,500 killed, the fact is that the siege was a mere farce; and, judging by what we heard at the time in Mexico, and soon afterwards in Puebla itself, 25 was a much more correct estimate: and some facetious people reduced it, by one more division, to two and a half. The President had managed, by desperate efforts, to borrow some money in Mexico, on the credit of the State, at sixty per cent.; and it seems certain that it was this money, judiciously administered to some of Haro’s generals, that brought about the flight of the anti-president, and the capitulation of Puebla. The termination of the affair, according to the newspapers, was, that the rebel army were incorporated with the constitutional troops; that their officers–500 in number–were reduced to the ranks for a term of years; that a hot pursuit was made after the fugitive Haro; and that, as it was notorious that the clergy had found the money for the rebellion, it was considered suitable that they should pay the expenses of the other side too; and an order was made on the church-estates of the district to that effect. Of course, it was an understood thing that the officers thus degraded would desert at the first opportunity, and thus the Government would be rid of them. As for Haro, it is not probable that they ever intended to catch him; and they were very glad when he disguised himself in sailor’s clothes, and shipped himself off somewhere. When the Mexicans first took to civil wars, the victorious leader used to finish the contest by having his adversary shot. At the time of our visit, this fashion had gone out; and the victor treated the vanquished with great leniency, not unmindful of the time when he might be in a like situation himself.
Whether the President ever got much of the forced contribution from the clergy, I cannot say. At any rate, they have turned him out since; and for a very poor government have substituted mere chaotic anarchy, as Mr. Carlyle would call it. While the siege was going on, all the commerce between Vera Cruz and the capital was interrupted, and, of course, trade and manufacturing felt the effects severely. Nothing shews the capabilities of the country more clearly than the fact that, in spite of its distracted state and continual wars, its industrial interests seem to be gaining ground steadily, though very slowly. The evil of these ceaseless wars and revolutions is not that great battles are here fought, cities destroyed, and men sacrificed by thousands. Perhaps in no country in the world are “decisive victories,” “sanguinary engagements,” “brilliant attacks,” and the like, got over with less loss of life. Incredible as it may seem to any one who knows how many civil wars and revolutions occur in the history of the country for the last four or five years, I should not wonder if the number of persons killed during that time in actual battle was less than the number of those deliberately assassinated, or killed in private quarrels.
Cheap as Mexican revolutions are in actual bloodshed, we must recollect what they bring with them. Thousands of deserters prowling about the country, robbing and murdering, and spreading everywhere the precious lessons they have learnt in barracks. We know something in England of the good moral influence that garrisons and recruiting sergeants carry about with them; and can judge a little what must be the result of the spreading of numbers of these fellows over a country where there is nothing to restrain their excesses! As for the soldiers themselves, one does not wonder at their deserting, for they are in great part pressed men, earned off from their homes, and shut up in barracks till they have been drilled, and are considered to be tamed; and moreover their pay, as one may judge from the general state of the military finances, is anything but regular. People who understand such matters, say that the Mexicans make very good soldiers, and fight well and steadily when well trained and well officered. They are able to march surprising distances, day after day, to live cheerfully on the very minimum of food, and to sleep anyhow. This we could judge for ourselves. One thing there is, however, that they strongly object to, and that is to be moved much beyond the range of their own climate. The men of the plains are as susceptible as Europeans to the ill effects of the climate of the tierra caliente; and the men of the hot lands cannot bear the cold of the high plateaus.
Travellers in the United States make great fun of the profusion of colonels and generals, and tell ludicrous stories on the subject. There is also talk of the absurd number of officers in the Spanish-American armies, but we should not, by any means, confound the two things. In the United States it is merely a harmless exhibition of vanity, and an amusing comment on their own high-minded abnegation of mere titles. In Spanish America it indicates a very real and serious evil indeed.
Don Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, in his statistical chart for 1856, quoted above, estimates the soldiers in the Republic at 12,000, and the officers at 2,000, not counting those on half-pay. One officer to every six men; and among them sixty-nine generals. These are not mere militia heroes, walking about in fine uniforms, but have actual commissions from some one of the many governments that have come and gone, and are entitled to their pay, which they get or do not get, as may happen. Only a fraction of them know anything whatever about the art of war. They were political adventurers, friends or relatives of some one in power, or simply speculators who bought their commissions as a sort of illegitimate Government Annuities. The continual rebellions or pronunciamientos have increased the number of officers still further. Comonfort’s notion of degrading all the officers of the rebel army was a new and bold experiment. A very common course had been, when a pronunciamiento had been made anywhere against the then existing government, and a revolutionary army had been raised, for an amalgamation to take place between the two forces; intrigue and bribery and mutual disinclination to fight bringing matters to this peaceful kind of settlement. In this case, it was usual for the rebel officers to retain their self-conferred dignities.
I think this body of soldierless officers is one of the most troublesome political elements at work in the Republic. The political agitators are mostly among them; and it is they, more than any other class, who are continually stirring up factions and making pronunciamientos (what a pleasant thing it is that we have never had to make an English word for “pronunciamiento”). Several times, efforts have been made to reduce the Army List to decent proportions, but a fresh crop always springs up.
In the “lowest depth” of mismanagement to which Mexican military affairs have sunk, the newspapers still triumphantly refer to countries which surpass them in this respect, and, at the time of our arrival, were citing the statistics of the Peruvian Republic, where there are a general and twenty officers to every sixty soldiers, and as many naval officers as seamen.
These officers are not subject to the civil administration at all, whatever they may do. They have their _fuero_, their private charter, and are only amenable to their own tribunals, just as the clergy are to theirs. To the ill effects of the presence of such armies and such officers in the country, we must add the continual interruptions to commerce arising from the distracted state of the republic, and the uncertain tenure by which every one holds his property, not to say his life; and this, in its effect on the morale of the whole country, is worse than the positive suffering they inflict. So much for soldiering, for the present. We leave the President trying, with the aid of his Congress, to organize the government, and set things straight generally. This August assembly is selected from the people by universal suffrage, in the most approved manner, and ought to be a very important and useful body, but unfortunately can do nothing but talk and issue decrees, which no one else cares about.
In consequence of the alarming increase of highway-robbery, steps are taken to diminish the evil. It is made lawful to punish such offenders on the spot, by Lynch law. This is all. You may do justice on him when caught, but really you must catch him yourself. Sober citizens are even regretting the days of Santa Ana (recollect, I speak now of 1856, and they might regret him still more in 1860.) He was a great scoundrel, it is true; but he sent down detachments of soldiery to where the robbers practised their profession, and garotted them in pairs, till the roads were as safe as ours are in England. A President who sells states and pockets the money may have even that forgiven him in consideration of roads kept free from robbers, and some attempt at an effectual police. There is a lesson in this for Mexican rulers.
The Congress professed to be hard at work cleaning out the Augean stable of laws, rescripts, and proclamations, and making a working constitution. We went to see them one day, and heard talking going on, but it all came to nothing. Of one thing we may be quite sure, that if this unlucky country ever does get set straight, it will not be done by a Mexican Congress sitting and cackling over it.
On our return from the Real, we spent two days at the house of an English friend at Tisapan, at the edge of the great Pedrigal, or lava-field, which lies south of the capital. It was across this lava-field that a part of the American army marched in ’47, and defeated a division of the Mexican forces encamped at Contrevas. On the same day the American army attacked the Mexicans who held a strongly fortified position at Churubusco, some four miles nearer Mexico, and routed the main army there. They beat them again at Molino del Rey, carried the hill of Chapultepec by storm, and then entered the city without meeting with further resistance; though the Mexicans, after they had formally yielded possession of the city, disgraced themselves by assassinating stray Americans, stabbing them in the streets, and lazoing them from the tops of the low mud houses in the suburbs.
An acquaintance of ours in Mexico met some American soldiers, with a corporal, in the street close to his house, and asked them in. Presently the corporal sent one of the men off into the next street to execute some commission; but half an hour elapsed, and the man not returning, the corporal went out to see what was the matter. He came back presently, and remarked that some of those cursed Mexicans had stabbed the man as he was turning the corner of the street, and left him lying there. “So,” said the corporal, “I may as well finish his brandy and water for him;” he did so accordingly, and the men went home to their quarters.
The American soldiers were, as one may imagine, a rough lot. Only the smaller part of them were born Americans, the rest were emigrants from Europe; to judge by what we heard of them–both in the States and in Mexico–the very refuse of all the scoundrels in the Republic; but they were well officered, and rigid discipline was maintained. So effectually were they kept in order, that the Mexicans confessed that it was a smaller evil to have the enemy’s forces marching through the country, than their own army.
An elaborate account of the American invasion is given in Mayer’s ‘Mexico.’ To those who do not care for details of military operations, there are still points of interest in the history. That ten thousand Americans should have been able to get through the mountain-passes, and to reach the capital at all, is an astonishing thing; and after that, their successes in the valley of Mexico follow as a matter of course. They could never have crossed the mountains but for a combination of circumstances.
The inhabitants generally displayed the most entire indifference; possibly preferring to sell their provisions to the Americans, instead of being robbed of them by their own countrymen. Add to this, that the Mexican officers showed themselves grossly ignorant of the art of war; and that the soldiers, though they do not seem to have been deficient in courage, were badly drilled and insubordinate. One would not have wondered at the army being in such a condition—in a country that had long been in a state of profound peace; but in Mexico a standing army had been maintained for years, at a great expense, and continual civil wars ought to have given people some ideas about soldiering. We may judge, from the events of this war, that Mexico might be kept in good order by a small number of American troops. The mere holding of the country is not the greatest difficulty in the question of American annexation.
One thing that struck our friends at Tisapan, among their experiences of the war, was the number of dead bodies of women and children that were found on the battle-fields. A crowd of women follow close in the rear of a Mexican army; almost every soldier having some woman who belongs to him, and who carries a heavy load of Indian corn and babies, and cooks tortillas for her lord and master. The number of these poor creatures who perished in the war was very great.
We spent much of our time at Tisapan in collecting plants, and exploring the lava-field, and the canada, or ravine, that leads up into the mountains that skirt the valley of Mexico. I recollect one interesting spot we came to in riding through the pine-forest on the northern slope of the mountains, where the course of a torrent, now dry, ran along a mere narrow trench in the hard porphyritic rock, some ten or fifteen feet wide, until it had suddenly entered a bed of gravel, where it had hollowed out a vast ravine, four hundred feet wide and two hundred deep, the inlet of the water being, in proportion, as small as the pipe that serves to fill a cistern.
Such places are common enough in the south of Europe, but seldom on so grand a scale as one finds them in this country, where the floods come down from the hills with astounding suddenness and violence. Mr. L. had experience of this one day, when he had got inside his waterwheel, to inspect its condition, the water being securely shut off, as he thought. However, an aversada–one of these sudden freshets–came down, quite without notice; and enough water got into the channel to set the wheel going, so as to afford its proprietor a very curious and exciting ride, after the manner of a squirrel in a revolving cage, until the people succeeded in drawing off the water.
It was after our return from Tisapan that we paid a visit to Our Lady of Guadalupe, rather an important personage in the history of Mexican church-matters. The way lies past Santo Domingo, the church of the Holy Office, and down a long street where live the purveyors of all things for the muleteers. Here one may buy mats, ropes, pack-saddles–which the arrieros delight to have ornamented with fanciful designs and inscriptions, lazos, and many other things of the same kind. Passing out through the city-gate, we ride along a straight causeway, which extends to Guadalupe. A dull road enough in itself, but the interminable strings of mules and donkeys, bringing in pig-skins full of pulque, are worth seeing for once; and the Indians, trudging out and in with their various commodities, are highly picturesque.
On a building at the side of the causeway we notice “Estacion de Mejico” (Mexico Station) painted in large letters. As far as we could observe, this very suggestive sign-board is the whole plant of the Railway Company at this end of the line. A range of hills ends abruptly in the plain, at a place which the Indians called Tepeyacac, “end of the hill” (literally “at the hill’s nose”). Our causeway leads to this spot; and there, at the foot and up the slope of the hill, are built the great cathedral and other churches and chapels, altogether a vast and imposing collection of buildings; and round these a considerable town has grown up, for this is the great place of pilgrimage in the country.
The Spaniards had brought a miraculous picture with them, Nuestra Senora de Remedios, which is still in the country, and many pilgrims visit it; but Our Lady of Guadalupe is a native Mexican, and decidedly holds the first rank in the veneration of the people.
In the great church there is a picture mounted in a gold frame of great value. Its distance from the altar-rails, and the pane of glass which covers it, prevent one’s seeing it very well. This was the more unfortunate, as, according to my history, the picture is in itself evidently of miraculous origin, for the best artists are agreed that no human hand could imitate the drawing or the colour! It appears that the Aztecs, long before the arrival of the Spaniards, had been in the habit of worshipping–in this very place–a goddess, who was known as _Teotenantzin_, “mother-god,” or _Tonantzin_, “our mother.” Ten years after the Conquest, a certain converted Indian, Juan Diego (John James) by name, was passing that way, and to him appeared the Virgin Mary. She told him to go to the bishop, and tell him to build her a temple on the place where she stood, giving him a lapful of flowers as a token. When the flowers were poured out of the garment, in presence of the bishop, the miraculous picture appeared underneath, painted on the apron itself. The bishop accepted the miracle with great unction; the temple was built, and the miraculous image duly installed in it. Its name of “Santa Maria de Guadalupe,” was not, as one might imagine, taken from the Madonna of that name in Spain (of course not!), but was communicated by Our Lady herself to another converted Indian. She told him that her title was to be _Santa Maria de Tequatlanopeuh_, “Saint Mary of the rocky hill,” of which hard word the Spaniards made “Guadalupe,”–just as they had turned Quauhnahuac into Cuernavaca, and Quauhaxallan into Guadalajara, substituting the nearest word of Spanish form for the unpronounceable Mexican names. This at least is the ingenious explanation given by my author, the Bachelor Tanco, Professor of the Aztec language, and of Astrology, in the University of Mexico, in the year 1666. The bishop who authenticated the miracle was no less a person than Fray Juan de Zumarraga, whose name is well known in Mexican history, for it was he who collected together all the Aztec picture-writings that he could find, “quite a mountain of them,” say the chroniclers, and made a solemn bonfire of them in the great square of Tlatelolco. The miracles worked by the Virgin of Guadalupe, and by copies of it, are innumerable; and the faith which the lower orders of Mexicans and the Indians have in it is boundless.
On the 12th of December, the Anniversary of the Apparition is kept, and an amazing concourse of the faithful repair to the sanctuary. Heller, a German traveller who was in Mexico in 1846, saw an Indian taken to the church; he had broken his leg, which had not even been set, and he simply expected Our Lady to cure him without any human intervention at all. Unluckily, the author had no opportunity of seeing what became of him. The great miracle of all was the deliverance of Mexico from the great inundation of 1626, and the fact is established thus. The city was under water, the inhabitants in despair. The picture was brought to the Cathedral in a canoe, through the streets of Mexico; and between one and two years afterwards the inundation subsided. _Ergo_, it was the picture that saved the city!
For centuries a fierce rivalry existed between the Spanish Virgin, called “de Remedios,” and Our Lady of Guadalupe; the Spaniards supporting the first, and the native Mexicans the second. A note of Humboldt’s illustrates this feeling perfectly. He relates that whenever the country was suffering from drought, the Virjen do Remedios was carried into Mexico in procession, to bring rain, till it came to be said, quite as a proverb, _Hasta el agua nos debe venir de la Gachupina_–“We must get even our water from that Spanish creature.” If it happened that the Spanish Madonna produced no effect after a long trial, the native Madonna was allowed to be brought solemnly in by the Indians, and never failed in bringing the wished-for rain, which always came sooner or later. It is remarkable that the Spanish party, who were then all-powerful, should have allowed their own Madonna to be placed at such a disadvantage, in not having the last innings. I need hardly say that the shrine of Guadalupe is monstrously rich. The Chapter has been known to lend such a thing as a million or two of dollars at a time, though most of their property is invested on landed security. They are allowed to have lotteries, and make something handsome out of them; and they even sell medals and prints of their patroness, which have great powers. You may have plenary indulgence in the hour of death for sixpence or less. We drank of the water of the chalybeate spring, bought sacred lottery-tickets, which turned out blanks, and tickets for indulgences, which, I greatly fear, will not prove more valuable; and so rode home along the dusty causeway to breakfast.
As means of learning what sort of books the poorer classes in Mexico preferred, we overhauled with great diligence the book-stalls, of which there are a few, especially under the arcades (Portales) near the great square. The Mexican public have not much cheap literature to read; and the scanty list of such popular works is half filled with Our Lady of Guadalupe, and other miracle-books of the same kind. Father Ripalda’s Catechism has a large circulation, and is apparently the one in general use in the country. Zavala speaks of this catechism as containing the maxims of blind obedience to king and pope; but my more modern edition has scarcely anything to say about the Pope, and nothing at all about the government. Of late years, indeed, the Pope has not counted for much, politically, in Mexico; and on one occasion his Holiness found, when he tried to interfere about church-benefices, that his authority was rather nominal than real. On the whole, nothing in the Catechism struck me so much as the multiplication-table, which, to my unspeakable astonishment, turned up in the middle of the book; a table of fractions followed; and then it began again with the Holy Trinity.
To continue our catalogue; there are the almanacks, which contain rules for foretelling the weather by the moon’s quarters, but none of the other fooleries which we find in those that circulate in England among the less educated classes. It is curious to notice how the taste for putting sonnets and other dreary poems at the beginnings and ends of books has survived in these Spanish countries. What used to be known in England as “a copy of verses” is still appreciated here, and almanacks, newspapers, religious books, even programmes of plays and bull-fights, are full of such dismal compositions. We ought to be thankful that the fashion has long since gone out with us (except in the religions tract, where it still survives). It is not merely apropos of sonnets, but of thousands of other things, that in these countries one is brought, in a manner, face to face with England as it used to be; and very trifling