Off for Tehuantepec—A journey through the jungles—The blazing tropics—Through Chivela Pass in the lemon-colored dawn—Ravages of the revolution—A race of queens

January 1, 1912.

My first thought flies to you this morning. I have sorrowed, smiled, in other years, perhaps learned to pray, so mayhap my heart is ready for 1912.

N. has gone to the Palace, where the President receives the gentlemen of the Diplomatic Corps; this afternoon Madame Madero receives both messieurs et dames. Last night a pleasant dinner at the Embassy, at which I presided. Americans only, the ambassador's special friends, and home in reasonable time. I was "hung solitary in the universe" when twelve o'clock struck and kindly healths were drunk. I thought of the light already beginning to break over the wintry ZÜrich hills, and of you, and Elliott and his Calvary, and that other dear one of our blood, lost to men but not to God. Was he sleeping quietly?

January 2d.

N. came in a while ago with arrangements complete for the trip to Tehuantepec. A telegram from Aunt Laura last night says: "All quiet here again; so glad you are at last coming."

It seems like a fairy-tale that I am off to San GerÓnimo, that exotic memory of my childhood. I remember we called it San GeronÍmo instead of pronouncing it San HerÓnimo. How the letters used to come dropping in—and the presents! The red-leather-covered sandalwood box, with its brass nails; the strange, square, old Spanish silver coins, just chopped off, as one would a bit of dough, and stamped hot; the painted gourds, the idols and the bright bits of embroidery.

N. has just been delegated to go to get an American out of jail, the third one this week. They are taken up for nothing; we are not popular here just now.

Madame Madero's New-Year's reception for the Corps Diplomatique was poorly attended and there was no enlivening touch in the way of refreshments and nothing in which to drink healths. The wife of the — minister asked the President for a verre d'eau toward the end. He was very apologetic, pleasant, and modest, and said: "Oh, we don't know how to do these things." He seemed full of good intentions and hope for 1912—but alack! alack! never has it been seen that nobility alone is able to maintain its possessor!

Elim is begging me to bring him a monkey when I come back. I hate to disappoint him—but do you see me traveling with anything belonging to that species? The trip is said to be magnificent—two nights and one day. I wish it were two days and one night.

Aunt L. is thinking of me and preparing for me; I know what it means for some one of her own to penetrate to her fastness, or rather her jungle. Mr. Cummings has put the telegraph at N.'s and my disposal while I am away. I have not been outside the Federal district since I arrived, so content with the treasures of this matchless valley; but of course one easily gets the Reisefieber.

I will write en route to the "blazing tropics." Now, farewell.

January 4th, CÓrdoba, 10 a.m.

We have just descended into a dew-drenched world. It is supposed to be the "dry season," estaciÓn de secas. A warm, wet, glistening air comes in at the window, and my furs are in the rack.

I have been watching endless coffee-plantations with red berries shining among the foliage, and great tobacco-fields of broad, shiny leaves. Banana-trees grow close to the tracks, and everywhere are the most perishable of homes, built of what looks like nothing more solid than corn-stalks and dried leaves.

Cordoba was founded early in the seventeenth century by a viceroy, who modestly called it after himself.

Later.

A series of the most gorgeous mountain vistas, tunnel after tunnel, and in between each darkness a world of beauty. Lovely palms abound, delicate yet definite in their flowery symmetry. The Pico de Orizaba has made various farewell appearances, one more enchanting and regretful than the other. Now a great plain is rolling away, of seemingly incredible fertility, with shadows of clouds on its shining stretches.

The faithful banana, which was first brought to this continent by a Dominican monk, via Haiti, about the time of the Conquest certainly came into its own in this hot, moist land. One of the early ecclesiastical writers in Mexico was so impressed that he hazards the statement that it was the forbidden fruit that tempted Eve. It certainly continues to tempt both sexes and all ages to idleness.

Later.
Presidio, in the caÑon of the Rio Blanco.

I have been absorbed in watching the tropical jungles, where form is eliminated. Every tree is choked or cloaked by some sort of enveloping convolvuli; every wall has its formless abundant covering. No silhouettes anywhere, no "cut" to anything—which is why all this richness could, I imagine, get monotonous.

Tierra Blanca, 3.30.

In the "blazing tropics"! A heavy, hot atmosphere comes in at the window. All along there has been much sitting of a dark race under banana-trees, where not even a change of position seems necessary in order to be fed.

We have had a long wait here at Tierra Blanca, which is the junction of a branch line to Vera Cruz, and I have been watching station life. It's very highly colored. Here and there appears an unmistakably American face—the "exploiters" some would call them; but it seems to me they gather up all this vague splendor, this endless abundance, into something definite, with benefits to the greater number, though some get "left," of course.

There is a decided note of carpe diem transposed into orange, scarlet, and black, which all the coming and going of men, women, and children with baskets of coffee-beans doesn't do away with. In the tropics the white man is king, be he Yankee, Spaniard, or Northman, and it is part of the lure. The abundances of Mother Earth are for his harvesting; a strange, native race seems there to do him honor, render him service, asking only in return enough of the abundance to keep soul in body for the allotted span.

We have just passed the broad Rio Mariposa (Butterfly River), and are at a place called "Obispo." Indian women are holding up baskets of the most gorgeous fruits, babes on their backs, cigarettes in their mouths. We are near the celebrated Valle Nacional. I remember some terrible articles in one of the magazines about the human miseries in the working of the tobacco-factories, herds of men, women, and children locked together into great sheds at night during tropical storms, enslavements, separations. It's easy to hope it is not so, but I dare say it is.

We are zigzagging through dense jungle with the gaudiest splashes of color. Flashy birds are flying about. Sometimes one wonders if it is bird or flower. All the green is studded with bright spots. There are great, flat, meadow-like spaces, the soil looking rich enough to bear food for all the hungry millions of the earth, and numberless cattle are grazing over it. But oh! the inexpressible slipshodness of the human abodes! Anything perishable, nearest at hand, sugar-cane stalks, palm leaves, continue to compose the dwellings; and oh! the crowds of children, of human beings, just as slipshod, just as perishable!

The sun is setting. Great pink brushes of cirrus are covering the sky, against a blue that hates to give way, but in a moment I know it will be dark.

Later.

A wonderful day, but somehow I am glad I was born in the temperate zone. I suppose it's the New England blood protesting against all this, as something wasteful and unrelated. Since we passed the heavy-flowing Rio Mariposa I have been having more than a touch of "world-pain." The light is so poor in my state-room that I can't read, but I arrive at San GerÓnimo at 5.30, which means a 4.30 rising, so good night.

January 5th, 5.30 a.m.

Chivela Pass in the lemon-colored dawn! I don't know what I went through in the night, but now I am descending to the Pacific. Sharp outlines of treeless, pinkish hills are everywhere showing themselves, with here and there patches of the classic and beautiful organos cactus. It is almost chilly. My heart and I are ready for the meeting. The porter tells me there are only two more stations.

San GerÓnimo, January 6th, evening.

As the train got in to San G. I saw a very pale, very blue-eyed, slim, white-clad figure. New England, though a thousand cycles had been passed in the tropics. We met in silence, two full hearts, and in silence we went over to the house....

January 8th, evening.

We have been walking up and down the garden under the big fig-tree, where a huge and very beautiful huacamaia, a sort of parrot, with a yellow-and-red head and a long blue tail makes his home. We have been thinking and talking in a way so foreign to the thick tropical darkness enveloping us.

The sun went down on a world of ashes of roses and then this soft, very black night fell. At sunset we took a turn about the sandy, desolate-looking town.

Women, scriptural women, were washing and bathing in the broad, high-banked stream. It reminded me of Tissot's pictures of the Holy Land—the barren banks of the pebbly river, the fig-trees, the little groups. The women wear most lovely garments as to outline. A wide skirt with a deep flounce is tucked up in front, for more ease in moving, and the falling flounce gives quite a Tanagra line.

Little girls are always dressed, from their tenderest age, in skirts too long; but little boys go naked till they are eleven or twelve, and the clad and the unclad play about together.

When Don Porfirio took things in hand the boys were made to dress to go to school, and as a last touch of fashion made to tuck their shirts inside their trousers. It appears, however, they only tuck them in as they enter the school door, pulling them out when they are released.

... But Aunt L. says she is tired of it all—the naked children, the barren stretches, the carpe diem, the ultimate unrelatedness of her life to its frame, though I kept thinking of Henley's line, "and in her heart some late lark singing." ...

... Each life, it seems to me, short or long, is wonderful when it becomes a perfected story, if we could only get it in perspective, against its own destined background; not blurred and mixed with other unrelated lives, but by itself, in relief, as the great artists show their masterpieces. I can't feel the ordinariness of any human life. Some are dreadful, some beautiful, some undeveloped; but each in its way could be an infinitely perfect story were the artist there to record it.

January 10th, evening.

To-day we drove over to Juchitan, the "county-seat"—Aunt L. to get some papers witnessed and signed at the jefatura, and to show me the ravages of the revolution of November.

The country, as we drove along, was scorching, dry, light-colored, with only an occasional tree and the irrepressible mesquite growing everywhere out of the sandy soil. We passed dreadful, screaming, wooden carts, with their solid wooden wheels, drawn by thin oxen, trying to nibble the withered grass; and there were herds of skeleton-like cattle dotted over the thorny cactus-covered fields.

There is a great hill, Istlaltepec, which separates San GerÓnimo (fortunately, I should say) from lively Juchitan; and on the side of it away from San GerÓnimo are prehistoric tracings and remains, studied, at various times, by various savants. It's a country with sandy, flat stretches and blue hills bounding them, and the river of Juchitan flowing to the near Pacific. The village of Istlaltepec was a blaze of color, white-washed or pink- or blue-washed dwellings, fig- and palm-trees, and over all the brilliant, blinding light.

At Juchitan we stopped a moment at a hotel, but it was so dilapidated and shot with bullet marks, and so desolate and mournful-looking inside, that we went to a small, native place of refreshment, kept by a one-time servant of Aunt L.'s. She was old, but welcoming. Her daughter, a fine, tall woman of thirty or thereabouts, was coming down the street, with one of the great, painted gourds on her head filled with a variety of highly colored things, and with the walk of a queen, a majestic, gentle, swaying movement.

They spread a spotless cloth, in a dim, sandy, red-tiled room with a glimpse of a palm in the old patio behind, that would have been a back yard, and a hideous one, if it had been "at home." The old woman told her ailments, and the daughter, aided by the granddaughter, served us a sopa de frijoles (bean soup), a perfect omelet, with a hard-crusted, pleasant-tasting bread, but no butter, and black coffee.

Goat's milk was offered; the goat was in the patio—but "goat me no goats."

The inhabitants of the street gathered around as we got into the carriage, among them an Indian woman with a coal-black baby—a salto atras, a "jump back," as they are cheerfully called, when the baby is blacker than the mother. We proceeded to hunt the jefe again, but when we got to the jefatura we were informed that he was still taking his siesta, so in spite of the sun we decided to look about the apparently deserted town.

We stopped at another inn, where there were more signs of recent "regeneration"—blood-stained walls, mirrors broken, a billiard-table partly chopped up, and a piano of the "cottage" variety with its strings pulled out. The propietario showed us around sadly, but with a note of pride. His house was, for the moment, the "show-place" of the town. He pointed out a large, carefully preserved blood-spot on the floor, and kept repeating muy triste—but all the same there was a light in his eye.

The barracks, with a large detachment of Federal troops, and the near-by church have great pieces chipped off by guns, and are embroidered by pepperings of rifle-fire.

Don Porfirio nearly lost his life on his way to Don Alejandro de GyvÈs' (Aunt L.'s French friend, when she first came down here; he was consul, you remember, and they were the civilisÉs of the place). The Juchitecos tried to kill Diaz and his priest-friend, Fray Mauricio, near his house, and it was the village leader of that epoch who put his brother Felix to death. They seem to be consistent and persistent fighters, these Juchitecos, given over to libations, always fighting with somebody, but best enjoying it in their own bailiwick.

The damages caused by the ambitions of the late Che GÓmez were amply testified to. A French merchant, SeÑor Rome, whom Aunt L. saw about some business, had had his home in the environs sacked, and his bride had escaped with difficulty into the hills, her beloved trousseau and household linen, brought from Paris, of course, being destroyed or stolen.

January 12th, 9 a.m.

We were up with the dawn, expecting to start for Tehuantepec and Salina Cruz at six o'clock, taking the train that I had arrived on at 5.30. But this is one of the mornings when it won't get here till after nine o'clock.

A hot, fierce, sandy gale is blowing, and every door and window in the house is rattling. We are just going to have a second breakfast, before starting out. The Chinese cook does very well, but when he was talking with his assistant this morning under my window, it sounded like the chopping of hash, literally, a conversation of short sounds and shorter stops.

Some fresh cocoanuts were brought in, and we have each had a glassful of the milky beverage. I can imagine how delicious it would be, come upon suddenly in the desert; but sitting at a table with a servant to pour it out, I was a little disappointed. I innocently came down in a hat for the journey, but it was impossible to keep it on, even sitting on the veranda. These winds, it appears, blow whenever they feel like it, from October till May.

Now we are waiting, Aunt L. in white, with a long blue chiffon veil, and I in blue, with a white veil. I fancy we would present a picturesque sight to the proper eyes.

January 13th, 7.30 a.m.

At last, yesterday, the train came, and, clutching at our veils, we were blown into it, and after another unexplained delay started off in an American-built car like our ordinary ones. Its name was "Quincy"! In the old days, Aunt L. went everywhere on horseback. We passed various little wind-swept villages. Jordan was the name of one of them, seeming, in the sandy, New-Testament-looking spot, just the right name. Two beautiful Tehuantepec women got into the train there, kindly sitting near us. I was fascinated by their clothes, and much more interested in them than they were in us.

The unfamiliar cadence of the Zapoteca gave them a complete touch of foreignness. One of them wore a beautiful, strange, complicated head-dress of stiff pleated and ruffled lace, which, I later discovered, does not at all interfere with the carrying on their heads of the large, shallow, brightly painted gourds. Her skirts were long and deeply flounced, but looped up at the waist, just a tucking in of the lower hem of the flounce, with the rest of the stuff flowing away in a most lovely line. The other woman had on a beautiful necklace of irregular-shaped gold coins, and with her flashing teeth and dark eyes, and a brilliant, low-cut, full jacket, with a yellow handkerchief twisted turbanwise around her head, made a picture I could not take my eyes from. I felt as colorless as a shadow, and I told Aunt L. she looked like a blue-and-gray Copenhagen vase strayed into a Moorish room.

Just before getting into Tehuantepec we came upon a beautiful grove of cocoanut-palms, high and graceful, above the rest of the vegetation, and the little nestling huts and houses. All about are jungles containing strange creeping things, and strange fevers and kindred creeping ills.

As the train passed slowly down the principal street, it seemed to me I looked out on a race of queens, tall, stately, with their lovely costumes. The men seemed undersized and sort of "incidental" in the landscape, but those beautiful women walking up and down their sandy streets were a revelation. Aunt L. says they possess not only the beauty, but the brains of the race. Former generations of Tehuantepec men, fitter mates for these queens than the specimens I saw, were mostly killed off in the various wars of "independence," and I understand the population is kept up by fortuitous but willing males from other places.

Everything was color; gorgeous splashes of yellow and black, and red and orange and blue against the shifting, sandy streets. A picturesque, creamy Palacio Municipal faces the plaza, and there were many churches—mostly showing earthquake vicissitudes. An old fortress, once the headquarters of Diaz, gives a last suggestive note to the whole.

Glorious memories of Don Porfirio hang all over this part of the world, where he is adored and mourned. I must say Madero's face looked positively childish in the jefatura at Juchitan, as it confronted the stern, clever visage of the great Indian. Even the cheap, highly colored lithograph could not do away with his look of distinction and power. He was, in his young days, military governor of Tehuantepec, and at one time jefe polÍtico. A French savant and traveler, l'AbbÉ Brasseur de Bourbourg, remembering him then, said he was the most perfect type he had ever seen, and what he imagined the kingly hero Cuauhtemoc to have been.

When we got out of the train at Salina Cruz, a whirl-wind caught us and blew us down the platform. I saw very little of the town on the way to the British Consulate, where we were to lunch, as I was bent double by the wind and blinded by the sand.

Mr. Buchanan and his wife were waiting to receive us. Mr. B.'s kind but shrewd blue eyes, altruistic brow, and welcoming hand-clasp show him at first sight to be what Aunt L. says he is, "pure gold." She has found him through years the best of friends and wisest of advisers. The consulate is on one of the sandy ridges that the town seems largely composed of, and Mrs. Buchanan has arranged it with taste and comfort after our ideas, with books and flowers and easy-chairs. But one look from the high bow window and you know at once where you are, with irrepressible cacti and palm-trees peeking in at you.

I tried sitting on the sheltered side of the veranda for a few minutes while waiting for lunch, that my eyes might "receive" the Pacific, but I was glad to go in-doors again. Mr. B. says the wind blows that way six or seven months in the year. Yesterday was one of its "best."

Our consul, Mr. Haskell, and his wife came in later to tea. Their house is on another sand-ridge. After a last pleasant chat about our affairs, their affairs, and Mexican affairs we departed for our train in a great darkness that the stars made no impression on, the wind still tearing down the sandy streets. I was sorry not to visit the breakwaters—rompeolas, they call them—but would probably have been blown overboard.

From the veranda I could see ships that had come from Morning Lands, riding at anchor, and later the sun went down in quiet majesty over the great, flat waters of the Pacific. I was so near the Atlantic that I thought of Humboldt's expression of "tearing the Isthmus apart, as the pillars of Hercules had been torn in some great act of nature," and Revillagigedo's[29] dream of a canal joining the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Mr. Buchanan said the first authentic mention of the Isthmus was in a conversation between Montezuma and CortÉs, as to the source of the quantities of gold the Spaniards saw. CortÉs, who was of an inquiring turn of mind at any mention of the shining stuff, sent Pizarro, and then Diego de Ordaz (he who tried to ascend Popocatepetl, and got a volcano added to his crest), to investigate, coming here himself after the rebuilding of Mexico City, en route to Honduras. He received a grant of the whole territory round about—"Las Marquesadas," as they are still called, after his title, MarquÉs del Valle de Oaxaca (Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca).

This morning there is still a great rattling of the windows and the doors, but not a sign of gnat or mosquito. I must arise and further investigate isthmian life. The huacamaia in the fig-tree has been making himself heard since dawn. I knew that if I did not tell you of Tehuantepec and Salina Cruz now, you would never hear, and I think what those names have meant to you during the years. It's all a memory of drifting sands, women as straight as their own palm-trees, slim, naked boys, fierce wind, and, in the harbor, the great port works, built by foreign energy and capital.

January 14th.

Going up, up, with a ringing in my ears out of the "blazing tropics" into the Tierra Templada. I am traveling with a parrot in a cage, and a nondescript little animal called, I think, a tajon, in a box with slats! After a very cursory survey last night, it seemed to belong to the 'coon family. I (who wish all animals well, but not too near) dimly apprehend the MÉrida family on the "Ward Line" traveling with their parrot, when I consider that I was put onto the Pullman last night in a thick, inky, tropical darkness, with a parrot in a cage, and a tajon in a box with slats. The amiable colored porter is looking after them in the baggage-car, and the back veranda with the oleanders, beyond the dining-room, is their ultimate destination. I say nothing of the parting; Aunt L. has promised to come soon.

The glorious Pico de Orizaba has just shown its lovely white head between two dissolving blue ridges. Last night I reread Le Journal d'Amiel, which, with Monsieur Le Coq, I picked up as I was leaving the house. As up-to-date in the jungle as anything would be.