Channing Arnold

“ In the streets the picturesque Mexican life is a-doing. The ranchero—so tight of trouser that it looks as if his legs must have been melted and run in hot into those grey pantaloons, like bullets in a mould—silver-spurred, his huge Mother-Shipton-shaped felt hat embroidered and bound with silver laces, his feet hidden in the great leather pockets which serve as stirrups here, canters into the plaza on a white Arab. Round the corner comes the milkman on a mule, his four jars of milk bulking so large round his saddle that you wonder he can get on or off. ”

“ Now we pass through acres of forest banking up each side so high that it is all blackness; while every few miles the mournful tolling of the engine bell heralds us into a wayside village, the lights streaming through the doors of whitewashed huts, and Indians, muffled to their eyes in blankets, standing in silent groups by the railside.
At Rio Blanco we rattle past a great cotton factory, its myriad lights twinkling into such a confusion of illumination that it looks like a swarm of fireflies hovering amid the darkened houses and huts of the town. ”

“ But American capital is rolling in, rolling in like an inexorable tide of Fate. You have only to be in Mexico a day or two to realise how irresistibly the country is sinking into the power of the American investor, and how vain—and the more vicious because of their vanity—are the efforts of Mexicans to avoid looking upon the Gorgon head of Yankee hustle which is destined to turn their somnolent national life, such as it is, into stone. If in Mexico City you say you are an American, you soon find you represent a race which is hated as much as it is dreaded. ”

“ These wretched beings, far away from wife and children, from their soil and sky, in slavery, ignorant of the language of their masters who speak Spanish, and the language of the natives themselves who speak Maya, become homesick and die or run away, forgetting in their longing for freedom the immense distance of thousands of miles that separate Yucatan from Sonora. Homeward they flee, to perish in the lonesome woods from hunger, thirst or fevers, or to be devoured by the wild beasts that swarm in those regions. ”

“ The characteristic of the forest is its deadly stillness. Thanks to the riverless nature of Yucatan there is little animal life. The swamps afford a haunt for the black duck, for wild geese, spoonbills, ibis and flamingo; and now and again you hear the hoarse cry of a parakeet, or a wild pig bustles through the undergrowth. But practically the forest is dead, flowerless, dark; matted, tangled underfoot, matted, tangled overhead; the long snake-like lianas hanging like fairy ropes from the highest, or weaving a network, like the web of some monster spider, between the shorter, trees. ”

“ But here's the plaza, and your first glimpse of Mexican life. It is dusty and frowsy enough—this stone-paved square with its tawdry green and yellow-painted houses, its ill-laid roads broken by crevasses and large holes under the flimsy tram lines where cobble stones have got displaced; but there is just touch enough of the tropics to make it fascinating. At its centre is a two-storeyed kiosk—bandstand above, drinking-booth below. Under the deep shade of giant laurels, evergreen oaks, tulip trees, palms and orange trees, stands an inner ring of chairs and round tables ”

“ Here and there, where the coral promontories lay close together, were quiet bays, the trees growing far out on the little capes making horseshoe-shaped green frames for the sapphire-blue water lying almost pond-like in its stillness.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the beauty of this sunny ocean-path, playing, in its long arbours of woodland, hide-and-seek with the sun and the sea. The long stretches of sand are everywhere rich with perhaps the most beautiful shell in the world, that giant gasteropod technically called Strombus but commonly known as fountain-shell. ”

“ And here, waving pale in the early light, are acres and acres of maguey, the giant cactus rising more than man's height, from which is crushed out pulque, the national drink of Mexico, a milky liquid tasting like sour ginger-beer. And between these miles of cactus and stone are fields yellowing with Indian corn, the picturesque figures of the Indian harvesters, grouped round a mule-waggon or standing idle, sickle in hand, to watch our train, brightening the landscape with their scarlet blankets. ”

“ As the little train jolts through the outskirts of the town, ringing its bell, the dust it raises blending with the resinous smoke from the wood fire of its engine, naked yellow babies look up from their play in the dirt and scamper into shelter, while female faces peer out between the iron bars which do duty for glass windows in the one-storeyed-high flat-roofed houses. Northern Yucatan is as level as an Essex marsh, and the line runs through miles of country at first glance quite English with its dense covering of small trees like nut bushes and silver birches. ”

“ Outside in the yard a hustling crowd of pigs worry round a heap of pumpkin gourds. In the semi-darkness the barelegged Indians with scarlet blankets wrapped round them move to and fro; the boys chasing the pigs and the fowls, and the men foddering the mules and horses in the corral. Thus does every hacienda throughout Yucatan awake to its day's work. While it is still dark the Indian families tumble out of their hammocks, and the housewife builds a little wood fire in the blackened ring of stones on the earth floor which serves for kitchen range. ”

“ The plains, rich with their harvests of cotton and coffee, of fruits, sugar-cane and olives, have given place all round to mountains; and as we wind forward, heights, rising mysterious, magical, wall us in from the rear till we seem as if we were caught in a black devil's-punch-bowl. And then, like the fitting knell to the apprehensive traveller's thoughts, the doleful engine bell clangs sorrowfully backwards and forwards, and the great train rolls into the station of Orizaba. ”

“ By the magic of even that crude draughtsmanship you are transported back through the centuries into the living city. Close at hand you seem to hear the weird chanting of the priests, to smell the resinous incense; from the steaming plain below rise the sounds of hut-life, the grating of the stone rolling-pin (universal sound in every Indian village) on the metate or stone tray as the housewife crushes the maize, the cries of playing children, the barking of the housedogs, the crowing of the cocks. ”

“ To any one who has stood in the roar of London's traffic on Ludgate Hill and looked eastward upon the superb grey severity of St. Paul's, such a building can mean little. But step inside, and it is worse, far worse. What is it which so often makes the interiors of even the larger Catholic churches so vulgar? It must be the gilt and colour, the ostentatious striving after effect, the prostitution of what should be divinely chaste to the lewd sensuality of the eye. Catholicism is a sensuous creed. It has been said a million times, and it is a million times true. ”

“ There was no attempt at or need for foundation, the natural earth forming the flooring, as it does in the huts to-day. Each hut stood in its own garden, in which were cultivated plum-trees, the mamey and the sapota for their fruits, and other trees and shrubs, possibly a little cotton and henequen, and such flowering plants and sweet-scented herbs as wormwood, sweet basil, white and violet irises, and a small white flower, much like the English jasmine and strongly perfumed, which one sees growing everywhere in the woods of Yucatan to-day. ”

“ As darkness falls and the clear azure of the sea turns to a leaden grey, we run past Cancun, this time to seaward, at five or six knots. But it is dawn before we see the coast of Cozumel, which is what sailors call "raw" and is not one to be approached at night time if it can be avoided. So we stand off until the morning; for if one cannot describe the island's shore as one "whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tide," it is true enough that that "foot" is fearsomely shod with coral. ”

“ All the manliness of the race, all the spirit and nobility of a nature which wrung a tribute even from Spanish historians, have been effectually crushed out of them. This is indeed the saddest side of it all. The Yucatecan bullies have done their work so well that if the Indians of all the haciendas could be asked whether they were contented, a large majority, possibly almost all, would apathetically declare themselves content. They are like prisoners who have been so long in the gloom of a dungeon that they would be actually terrified of the sunshine. ”

“ On the shady seats of the plaza loll the ever-tired Mexican workmen, smoking cigarettes. Twelve strikes, and the troop of rurales in grey uniforms, with carbines and heavy revolvers—the mounted police—ride out from their barracks to take their work of patrolling the town. The townspeople gather and look, and then they sleep again; while in their shirt-sleeves, cigar or cigarette between their lips, Mexican clerks balance ledgers in banks and merchants' offices behind lattice blinds, and a postmaster in white-drill trousers and coloured silk vest sells you postage stamps between puffs of smoke. ”

“ And then, in the minutes as we neared, the white became broken into cloudlets, showing up quick in succession like smoke of an engine above the edge of a railway cutting. And quickly the murmuring turned into a booming, like the hum of a great city's traffic heard from afar; and the booming into a low intense thunder. And as we passed into the tumbling waters, the even lines were gone and we saw an endless belt of black coral rock closing our whole horizon. The "Esperanza" was heading for the reef at seven knots. ”

“ The philosopher-mosquito is in danger by reason of its own absorption. Concentrated upon its long drink, it gets killed in a humiliating way, like a man on whom a five-ton chunk of stone falls from a steam crane while he has his nose in a can of beer. The Dervish-mosquito, on the other hand, falls fighting, brandishing its spear, its wild battle-cry on its lips. One cannot help admiring the Dervish-mosquito the most. ”

“ If we had had cups we should have got through the precious draught far too quickly, we reminded ourselves. Pleasure is anticipation; and waiting in the dark, seated on a boulder by the fire we had built in the red road, for your turn at the shallow draught was a real joy. We got outside our precious Cadbury, the black beans, and the eggs, and then we rolled ourselves into our hammocks, making cocoons of ourselves in our Mexican blankets, and, with our soldier servant stretched on a blanket on the ground between the two of us, we were soon fast asleep. ”

“ But even in these unfavourable surroundings tropic Nature beautifies with the greeny-gold leaf of the banana and the heavy-hanging greener crown of the cocoanut palm. Over all rises a strange vista. Merida might well be called the "City of Windmills." On each side of the train you see the horizon literally crowded with air motors for pumping water from the limestone, and you hear it whispered in a tone of pride by a Yucatecan to his neighbour that there are in Yucatan's capital 6,000 of these eyesores. ”

“ The streets of Merida are full of life and bustle, the cleanliest of bustle. Even the blind beggars (blindness is rather common) who crouch against the walls, with their plaintive cry of "Pobre Ciego," are as neat as a new pin. Smartly varnished mule-drawn tramcars tinkle their way to and from the suburbs. Outside the railings of the cathedral sit all day a line of Indian women in front of baskets filled with cakes, flattish, appetising-looking, sometimes as much as two or three feet across. ”

“ There gardens and ranches are rich with oranges and limes, pineapples and sugar-cane, bananas and banana-apples, grape-fruit and the delicious soapy-fleshed guanabana, with groves of cocoanut palms, with figs, with the white starry flowers of tobacco, with the fluffy bursting pods of cotton, and vari-coloured spicebushes. If Cozumel could be cleared in all her fifty miles length and fifteen breadth, what a garden of the gods she would become!
To bargain well one must be a good actor. ”

“ Over the Customs House gate might be written, varying Dante's terrible line, "All hope of cleanliness abandon, ye who enter here": for once inside Progreso town you must do battle with tropical dust at its worst. Through the railway yard, where the sun beats down with a blistering heat on trucks, mules, and men, you make your way to the train through filthy little arcaded streets, your boots disappearing at each footstep in the ill-smelling, garbage-littered compound, your eyes smarting in the clouds of it you kick up. ”

“ Nowhere can one see the inwardness of the harsh struggle for life better than on Vera Cruz quay. Derelicts, wastrels, beachcombers, sinners and sinned against, bloodshot-eyed drunkards and leaden-grey opium smokers and eaters, strong and weak, healthful and sickly, men with faces of vicious angels, men with faces of devils let loose from Hell, they have come from the uttermost corners of the earth, these groaning, sweating, reeking human beings, to fight in blistering sun and pestilential dust for the right to live. ”

“ In Mexico you must play the Levite and "pass by on the other side."
The streets are at all times a human kaleidoscope: the dandy in European dress; the smart Mexican horsemen in tasselled riding gear clattering down the road; the trim cowboy with his grey trousers fitting like an eel's skin, silver-buttoned, a coloured silk scarf round his neck, his head adorned with steeple felt; the wizened Indian beldames in saffron or blue cottons squatting at the church doors stretching out skinny yellow hands for alms ”

“ In buildings of any really striking architectural beauty Mexico City is curiously poor. The Iturbide Hotel—once the palace of the Emperor Iturbide—is a fine example of the best Spanish house-building, with its carved façade, its charmingly cool, balconied patio and its dignified pillared stairways. The National Palace, at the gateways of which stand shuffling, squat, unbusinesslike-looking Mexican soldiers—is a two-storeyed quadrangular mass of yellow stone with no feature of note—about as ornamental as the Privy Council Office in Whitehall. ”