C. Reginald Enock

“ Away on the slopes and tablelands of the grim Cordillera the ancient palaces and temples of the bygone Incas look down, unknown, unvisited, save by those whom interest or chance may take that way. Once washed by the waves of Lake Titicaca—that most remarkable of lakes, 12,500 feet above the sea, yet whereon we may journey out of sight of land—lie the ruins of that strange temple of Tiahuanako, of unknown age, the most ancient handiwork of man in the New World. ”

“ The Mexico of to-day is not less interesting, for its vast territory holds a wealth of historic lore and a profusion of natural riches. Beneath the Mexican sky, blue and serene, stretch great tablelands, tropic forests, scorching deserts, and fruitful valleys, crowned by the mineral-girt mountain ranges of the Sierra Madres; and among them lie the strange pyramids of the bygone Aztecs, and the rich silver mines where men of all races have enriched themselves. Mexico is part of that great Land of Opportunity which the Spanish-American world has retained for this century. ”

“ From time to time the suggestions of the North are strangely compelling. Thus, when the heavy flower-cones of the horse-chestnut stand out boldly next to the snow-white circles of the elder-tree, with a grove of oaks as a background, it is with something akin to a shock that the succeeding clumps of paraiso and eucalyptus-trees, and the fleshly leaves of the aloe and prickly-pear bring the traveller back to reality and the land of warm sunshine. ”

“ To the foreign traveller, Central America might afford an extremely pleasing field of travel. There is a charm in the remains of the prehistoric American cultures, the carved walls of the old temples, the buried idols, the ancient industries. Restful and quaint are these little towns with the stamp of the Spanish Colonial architecture. Here man and Nature soon forget the bloodshed and the enmity of the torn and stained pages of history. The simple folk of the countryside are full of courtesy, the needs of life are cheap and plentiful, for the earth is bountiful. ”

“ The day is done, the night has come, "in which no man can work."
At daylight the uncultivated desert gives place to human habitations; and we approach the hacienda of a large landowner, with its irrigated plantations, and adobe buildings which form the abodes of the workers. All around are vast fields of maguey, or plantations of cotton, stretching as far as can be seen. Great herds of cattle, rounded up by picturesque vaqueros with silver-garnished saddles and strange hats and whirling lassoes, paw the dusty ground, shortly to writhe beneath the hot imprint of the branding-iron. ”

“ The sombre green of forest or prairie everywhere hides the rocks; the soil stripped bare by the roads, is of a dull, uniform red; even the dust is red. Bright colours and broken lines are equally rare. One travels continually among rounded hillocks of green; the humid climate hides or softens the contour of hill and valley alike. The memories of one's journey's blend and grow confused; reminiscences of forests, skirted or traversed; clumps of banana-palms near fordable streams; windings of the twisted trail in the midst of undulating prairies. ”

“ Upon the seashore there is a band of mail-clad Spaniards, at their head a tall bearded man, spare of frame, but full of spirit, that spirit which dares the unknown and dares again, in spite of famine and privation. It is Pizarro, the famous conquistador, and in his hand is a drawn sword. There has been disaffection in the band, wrought of sufferings and disappointment in that desolate region. "Where is the gold we have been promised?" the malcontents exclaim. "What profit is there in fighting famine and miserable savages? Let us go back to Panama before we all perish!" ”

“ Singular shops, where fruits and meats and clothing are displayed in windowless array, line the streets, and quaint dwelling-houses, with iron grilles covering their windows, giving them the mediæval Hispanic aspect familiar to the Spanish-American traveller. Into these we gaze down from the height of the saddle in passing, and perchance some dark-haired Mexican damsel, who has been snatching a moment from her household duties to gaze at the outside world, retires suddenly from the balcony with well-simulated haste and modesty before the rude gaze of the approaching stranger. ”

“ The name of the Andes, to the traveller who has crossed the giddy passes and scaled the high peaks of this stupendous mountain chain, brings back sensations which are a blend of the pleasurable and the painful. In his retrospect the Cordillera—for such is its familiar name to the inhabitants of the land it traverses—bulks as a thing of varied and almost indescribable moods. It possesses that individuality—menacing, beautiful by turns—which no doubt is an attribute of all mountains, in the recollection of those who best know them. ”

“ Others, undulating in the wind, waving their palmated crests, seem like the parks of some destroyed Eden; they are often so burdened with flowers that when the wind blows it is as though the snow were falling. Some of these forests are incessantly alive with myriads of splendidly coloured birds and monkeys of every species; others, on the contrary, are so full of silence and shadow and mysterious solitude that the traveller might believe himself in a virgin world. ”

“ As to the Teocallis, perhaps their form was suggested by the natural pyramidal hills of the mountain landscape, whereon men must have stood to watch the sunset and feel nearer heaven, even in those savage lands. Even to-day this hill-ascending influence is not banished among the primitive class of the Mexican people. Every hill in the neighbourhood of a hamlet is surmounted by a cross, up to which culminating point processions constantly ascend. Indeed, at times the devout—or fanatic—Indian and peon ascends these rocky steeps upon his knees, leaving blood-spots to mark his way! ”

“ Who has not felt at some time the lure of Spanish America, the attraction of those half-mysterious lands—Peru or Panama, Mexico or Brazil, and all that galaxy of far-off States, with the remains of their ancient civilization and their picturesque modern setting—beneath the equatorial sun, beyond the Western sea? They drew us in our youth, were it but in the pages of Prescott, when with Cortes and Pizarro the Aztec and Inca Empires lay before us; they draw us even in maturer years. ”

“ No pen can describe the beauty of the broad smiling valley, as seen from favourable points on either range, with its broad green pastures, yellow fields of sugar-cane, dark woodlands, its towns nestling at the foothills, the Cauca River in the midst, silvered by the reflected sun, and looking across the lomas of the rapidly ascending foothills, with cameo-cut country houses, topped by the dense forests of the upper reaches of the mountains, rising to majestic heights. ”

“ The environs of the capital form a good setting to its beauty. Taking our stand on the range of hills which bound the Valley of Mexico, our eyes rest upon the cultivated fields and gardens of the smaller towns which dot the plain and lead up to the central mass. Green meadows, running streams, great plantation of maguey, giving their characteristic semi-tropical aspect to the landscape, surround haciendas and villages embowered in luxuriant foliage, all lying beneath the azure vault of the Mexican sky. The gleam of domes and towers, softened in the glamour of the distance, catches our eyes ”

“ A sensitive and developing people, the Spanish American folk would resent any aspersion of their civilization. They have all the machinery of culture to their hand. Here the Parisian toilette rubs shoulders in their streets and plazas with the blanketed and sandalled Indian; the man of fashion and the man of the Stone Age walk the same pavement. Here in these pleasing towns—some of them marvels of beauty, some of them in an atmosphere of perpetual spring, some miles above the sea—are palaces of justice, art and science. ”

“ We reach Mendoza, beautifully situated, and watered by streams which flow from the Andes, giving life to many a fruitful sugar-cane plantation and vineyard, where under irrigation scientifically practised, from dams and conduits, the fertile soil yields up wealth in its most delightful forms, wealth of sugar, of wine, of deep pastures of alfalfa. Here, indeed, is the California of Argentina, on the slopes of the Andes, with Mendoza as its pleasing metropolis. ”

“ Impenetrable gloom lurks beneath the faces of the cliffs, the mournful howl of the coyotes comes across the plain, and their slinking forms emerge from the shadow of the rocks. There is a shapeless heap, the carcass of some dead mule or ox, some jetsam of the desert, lying near at hand, at which my horse was uneasy as I drew rein in contemplation, and which explains the nearness of the beasts of prey, and the long line of zopilotes, or buzzards, which I had observed to cross the fading gleam of the firmament. All is solitary, deserted, peaceful. ”

“ If you cannot withstand the petty discomforts of the trail for the sake of the ever-shifting panorama of snow-peaks, rugged mountains, cosy valleys, smiling woodlands, trim little valleys, then you are not worthy to be exhilarated by the sun-kissed winds of the Andes, or soothed by the languorous tropical moonlight of the lower lands, or to partake of the open-handed hospitality which will greet you. ”

“ To say that Mexico is the Egypt of the New World, whilst it is not untrue, is to deepen the atmosphere. The sandalled Indian creeps across his desert sands and irrigates them with his native torrents as he did in centuries past, lives in his wattle or adobe hut, and, if he no longer worships the sun, at least he stands before its morning rays to embrace its warmth—el capa de los pobres ("the poor man's cloak") —for poverty denies him other comfort. ”

“ There they arise, great palace walls where sculptured tigers and serpents, and strange designs, run in barbaric riot around their ruined façades, above grim vaults, subterranean passages, and chambers of inexplicable purpose. There they stand, chapters in stone of the history of a people whose destiny it seems to have been to have formed no link in the purpose and evolution of man; a people who seem to have been upon the threshold of a true civilisation.
The form of government of the principal peoples of Anahuac, the Aztecs and Texcocans, was an uncommon one—that of an elected monarchy. ”

“ Day by day a huge coffin-shaped mountain had overhung the horizon—the Cofre de Perote, an extinct volcano, in whose vicinity the desolating action of old lava-flows startles the traveller's eye. As they reached the summit of the range—the crests of the Eastern Sierra Madre—the rain and snow and bitter winds, the functions of Nature which she ever lets loose upon the head of the traveller who defies her in such inclement regions, assailed the Spaniards, and some of the unfortunate Indians, natives of the tropic lands of the coast, succumbed to the cold. ”

“ Approaching the capital, Belize, from the sea, we pass the green islands that fringe the coast, and extending along the banks of the river we see the high roofs and wide verandas of the houses and remark the coco-palm's grateful shade. Often an invigorating breeze blows from the sea, the same gales that crisp the surf at Colon, which the traveller will inevitably note, and this and the high tides wash the fever-bearing mangrove swamps and marshes, rendering them less unhealthy than otherwise would be the case. ”

“ The sandy wastes give place to tropical forests and fertile valleys, with their bright accompaniment of profuse flower- and bird-life. These, in turn, disappear from the changing panorama, and the traveller reaches the appalling escarpments of the Mexican Andes, looking down from time to time from dizzy ridges, where the ascending steel lines of the railroad spiral has brought him, to where distant fertile vales lie in the glimmering haze, thousands of feet below. ”

“ Spanish America, in fact, is enshrouded in an atmosphere of romance and interest which time does not easily dispel, and remains a land of adventure and enterprise. Its sunny shores, its picturesque folk with their still semi-mediaeval life, despite their advancing civilization—the great untravelled spaces, the forests, the mountains, the rivers, the plains, and all they contain, the lure and profit of commerce and of trafficking—all these are matters we cannot separate from the New World as peopled by Spain and Portugal. ”

“ Impressive and melancholy is the nightfall upon the Great Plateau. The opalescent tints of the dying day, and the scarlet curtains flung across the Occident at the sun's exit give place to that indescribable depth of purple of the high upland's sky. The faint ranges of hills which bound the distant horizon take on those diminishing shades which their respective distances assign them, and stand delicately, ethereally, against the waning colours of the sunset, whilst the foreground rocks are silhouetted violet-black against the desert floor. ”