CHAPTER V.
IN THE VALLEY OF THE LAJA.
BEYOND San Luis we come to Villa Reyes with the immense Hacienda of Jaral, which at one time controlled 20,000 peon laborers, and during the Revolution of 1810, furnished a full regiment of cavalry to the Viceroy to fight the patriots. Beyond is the town of Dolores Hidalgo, “The Sorrowful Hidalgo,” where was born Hidalgo, the George Washington of Mexican Independence. Sept. 15, 1810, he set the watchfires burning which dimmed not till Spanish misrule was ended in 1820. Still nearby, is the city of San Miguel De Allende, also named for Allende, another patriot priest who, like Hidalgo, suffered martyrdom for Mexican liberty.
Here are the famous baths, with the water gushing from the mountain side, through the baths to the evergreen gardens and fruits and flowers in the valley. This city is situated on the enchanted Cerro de Moctezuma, and overlooks the beautiful valley of the Laja (Lah-hah.) The Hotel Allende was once the palatial home of a wealthy and pious man, Señor Don Manuel Tomas de la Canal and his wife who donated the chapel of the Casa de Loreto. Here is a beautiful Gothic church, the only one in Mexico, and was the work of a native architect who drew his plans with a stick in the sand, and this was the only guide his workmen had. A dozen miles from San Miguel is the town of Atontonilto, famous as the place where Allende and Hidalgo started with the Banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and marched with it to San Miguel and opened the Revolution. Here we leave the plain and enter the Vale of Laja, 250 miles north of the city of Mexico. Before us is a frowning gateway of solid rock, but following the shimmering little river, the beautiful valley breaks upon the view like a panorama. Everywhere is the pepper tree, loaded to the tips with the beautiful berries that look so much like our cherries. Dame Nature here is at her best. Bananas, oranges, lemons and pomegranates everywhere shade the peaceful homes whose acres in the rear are covered with maize and pepper and fruits and flowers.
The people of Mexico do not live in the country, but in cities, towns and hamlets, and prefer to thus live and travel long distances to their work. In the Vale of Laja, it is one continual series of hamlets, where the canon has widened into a beautiful valley whose season is perpetual summer. Whatever grows elsewhere, grows here. Up the rocky slopes where cultivation is impossible, the rich lava soil still supports countless thousands of maguey and cactus plants that produce food and fuel, drink and clothing. The bushels of succulent tunas that a single cactus bears, will feed a family for weeks, and the only labor required is the picking. A stalk of maguey will furnish in its undeveloped bud an excellent substitute for cabbage. The unfermented sap is the agua miel, or honey water of commerce. When fermented, a single stalk will furnish for months a gallon a day of pulque.
Its broad leaves, which are eight feet long, furnish a thatch for the house, and when dried, an excellent fuel. It is here the natives laze their time away from sheer ennui. It is in this valley the railroad contractors never go to hunt laborers. A Mexican works when he is hungry, and why should he be hungry in this valley where his rations may be had for the picking? And what would he do with money? The saloon has no charms where every man is his own distiller, and the law gives no occasion for “moonshine” and “blind tiger.” So it is the poor plains’ people who grade the road and drive the spikes, and even here the railroad people experience difficulties. The native has an inseparable attachment for his humble home, and will not under any circumstance follow a construction gang far. When the construction train has passed his home two or three miles, he finds it too far to return home at night, and the next day he bolts for home, and the company has to hire new laborers in the neighborhood; but when the work gets too far to walk home, they throw up their jobs also. If a few are influenced to remain, the whole family joins the procession, and move their temporary residence each day. The same is true of the army. When on the march it rarely has to supply a commissary, as each soldier’s wife follows the march and cooks for him. In the midst of each hamlet in this valley is to be seen the ever-present bell tower, and, clustered among the orange trees, the little chapel. The native may have no other resting place but mother earth, but his last penny will go to build his church.
While drinking in the beauties of the valley, we suddenly turn into the equally beautiful city of Celaya, in the state of Guanajuata.
In 1570, sixteen married men and seventeen bachelors founded the town, and it increased so in population, that in 1655, by a decree of Philip IV, of Spain, it was made a city, but it was three years afterwards that the inhabitants found it out. For beauty and importance of location, Celaya has no peer. Here is a junction of the two most important railroads, the Central and National, which offer transportation in every direction for the product of its woolen mills and the extensive haciendas throughout the valley.
This is a great market for opals. As a precious stone, the opal ranks high, but on account of its reputed bad luck, there are people who would not wear one as a gift. Those of Hungary and Australia are harder than these, but the fiery, prismatic glint of the opals of Celaya surpasses any in the old country. I have heard of a fourteen carat opal in Hungary that could not be bought for five thousand dollars. In Celaya they are of all grades and all prices, but the most remarkable thing about them is, in Celaya everybody offers them for sale. It does not matter when the train arrives, in the grey of morning or the dead of night, the ragged vendors are always on hand. As the train pulls into the station, a hundred hands will be thrust through the fence pickets, and in each hand, on a piece of black cloth, lie the beautiful gems, sparkling in the artificial light.
“All Americanos are rich,” is a saying of these people, as honestly believed as the catechism, and all prices are made on that basis. If your early education has been neglected in the line of precious stones, you will do well to let these pirates pass, for they are Shylocks all, these black-eyed natives.
One will look you in the eye, cross himself and swear by all the saints that fifty dollars or nothing will move his opal.
If you know your business and the price of opals, you have the money in your hand, and as the train starts, hold the silver temptingly before his eyes, and rare is the case when this will not “fetch” him.
An opal may be precious, but to a hungry man, silver is more precious. And that little trick is good for other trades as well as opals.
Anxiety or interest on your part is as fatal as greenness in trading with these sharpers. Utter contempt and unconcern on your part, throws the burden of concern upon him, and he soon begins to make concessions by asking how much will you give. However much you may want a thing, you must impress him that it is purely a matter of sympathy for his poverty that you buy. You may slyly hear him set the price to one of his countrymen, and when you come up and ask the price, without turning a hair, he will multiply it by two.
The city of Celaya has much of interest in the church line; which is the base of all greatness in this priest-ridden land. These are said to be the prettiest churches in Mexico. The one of Our Lady of Carmen contains the chapel of the Last Judgment and the most beautiful paintings and frescoes. San Francisco, San Augustin, Tercer Orden are all hung with paintings of the Michael Angelo of Mexico, Eduardo Tresguerres, painter, architect and sculptor, a native of Celaya.
The public buildings are worth seeing and the baths are delightful. I have never heard this town spoken of in connection with beautiful women, but the most beautiful madonna face I have seen outside a picture frame, I saw here at the railroad station, and the artist who would paint a picture of beauty should seek this Celayan Helen, and yet from her apparel, she was of humble family, but so was Cinderella.
This city is especially noted for its dulcies, or sweetmeats, and here are made the best in Mexico. To be in good form of course you must eat some Celayan dulcies; and having satisfied your conscience, we pass into the Vale of Solis.
No serpent ever made a more tortuous track than did our train, trying to leave that valley through the canon cut by the fretful little river in ages past. Up the perpendicular cliffs which would shame Niagara, we find a trail blasted from the granite sides just wide enough to admit the track. Under a beetling cliff we pass El Salto de Medina, or Medina’s Leap. So goes the story: Juan Medina was a famous bandit when those gentlemen of the road carried the riches and cares of the country upon their shoulders, and most generously relieved the good people of all trouble in looking after their wealth. Spanish history does not mention that they ever received a vote of thanks for the self imposed duties, but such is the nature of this sordid world. But one day a committee did call upon the bandit on some very pressing business when he was not receiving guests. Perhaps the committee had forgotten his “day at home.” The intrusion so disturbed the bandit that he started away on the pony express, and the committee actually began shooting at him, and, seeing no other escape from his friends, he spurred his horse over the chasm and was dashed to atoms. I did not see the atoms, but I saw the cliff three or four hundred feet high, and if you believe the first part of the story, the atomic theory was easy.
Not a shrub is visible to mar the vision of this huge pile of granite reaching a thousand feet in the air. Creeping along its side we enter the Lopilote Canon, almost as dark as a tunnel. There must be something in a name. Lopilote means buzzard, and I suppose it is called Lopilote canon because the buzzards have no where else to roost but on the edge of the canon, as there is not a bush visible. It reminds me of the man who had a horse that was named Napoleon, all on account of the bony part. On the rear platform is the place to stand. This is a narrow-gauge road, and only has room for the cars with no margin for landscape. Standing on the steps you can easily touch the rock wall on one side with your hand, while on the other you may hear the splash of the imprisoned waters over a sheer fall of many hundreds of feet, but nothing can be seen. The engineer can see only one coach behind his engine as he makes his famous curve of 35 degrees, the shortest on any road in America. Up and straight ahead, where the eye can see only granite walls with peaks bathed in clouds, and no visible means of passage, but at last light breaks through the top, and the devil’s hole is passed.
What a sigh of relief it is to be over with the nervous strain. What if a wheel had slipped or an axle broken, or a stray rock had fallen upon that ten foot trail? There was hardly a chance in a million for a life to have been saved. It recalled the dilemma of a negro who was asked his preference of travel, by rail or steamboat. He unhesitatingly chose the railroad with this argument: “Ef the train runs off the track, dar yo is. Ef the steamboat sinks, whar is you?” He had never traveled the Lopilote Canon when he made the remark, or he would have chosen to walk.
Once out of the Sierra Madre Mountains, we are again in the beautiful Vale of Lerma. The river Lerma is the longest in Mexico, seven hundred miles, and changes its name to Rio Grande de Santiago before it empties into the Pacific. We cross the river at the beautiful city of Acambaro, in the state of Guanajuata, where a branch road leads to Morelos and Patzcuaro, the beautiful lake region. Here is a quaint old arched bridge, built in 1513. Here were headquarters for the Army of Independence, under Hidalgo in 1810, and Gen. Scott’s army crossed this bridge on the march to the city of Mexico. This is called the most self-satisfying city in Mexico, and lies hidden among the trees a half mile from the station. The lover of the quaint and curious should by all means see this old town of ten thousand inhabitants, whose only diversion is to go down and see the train come in. Its quietness is oppressive, and the town seems to be under a spell like the enchanted city in the Arabian Nights.
The fine music by the female orchestra is one of the attractions. In the foreground is the river Lerma, in the background the trees ever green and the mountains ever blue, and peeping up here and there the towers of old churches, which altogether make an enchanted scene worth your journey to see.
It was many centuries ago that the Tarascan and Otomite Indians built this town, and in 1526 Don Nicholas Montanes marched his Spanish troops through the quiet town and laid the foundation of the Catholic church we see in all its glory today. The hand of the vandal has not yet laid hold of Acambaro with its modern innovations and church repairs according to fin du siecle notions of architecture, so the town really looks the age it claims, and the descendants of these same Indians live in the identical houses their ancestors built.
In the Calle de Amargura are fourteen little chapels commemorating the stations of the cross, ending in the Soledad on the hill. The church of San Francisco and the deserted convent have their especial charms. Acambaro is in the state of Guanajuata (wan-a-water), but in the See of Michoacan. While sitting in the beautiful plaza whose immense trees reach to the caves of the old convent towers, you see a carriage approaching drawn by two white mules. As it draws near the crowd, a tall, fine-looking man in long black robe appears and holds his hands above his head. Instanter, every person in sight of that carriage falls to his knees or upon his face, and remains until the hands of the mysterious stranger are lowered. It is the Bishop of Michoacan on the way to his palace in Morelia, and he stopped to bless the people. Slowly and reverently the worshipers rise from their groveling in the dust, with a radiance upon their dusky faces as though the Son of God had just passed by. This is the class of people that keep Mexico living back in the seventeenth century.
Still down the Lerma from Acambaro is the Hacienda de Robles extending thirty-three kilometers on each side of the river, and which furnishes hundreds of peons, and still further is the city of Irapuata, the perpetual home of the strawberry. For three hundred and sixty-five days in the year no train has ever passed Irapuata without strawberries being offered for sale, for in this rich valley it is perpetual seedtime and harvest. The whole year is springtime, and the energies of all the people are devoted to strawberries. It was Sydney Smith who said: “Doubtless God Almighty could have made a better berry than the strawberry, but God Almighty has never done so.” The fresas are all offered in a basket holding from one pint to three quarts, and are arranged with great care, so that the large ones shall all be on top. If you know your business you do not buy till the train is pulling out, and then a silver dime gets fresas, basket and all. When you consider that a Mexican dime is worth five and a half cents in Uncle Sam’s money, you can figure out the cost at leisure. The basket would sell at fifteen cents in the States, and the bottom does not punch up to the middle either. When I look at my pile of empty baskets, I wonder if I cheated the little pirates, but I get my balm in knowing that hundreds of people pay them the thirty or forty cents they first ask for them, which will enable them to strike a balance sheet. I know strawberries are perishable, and a twenty-five cent basket today will not be worth a dime by the next train time, which is next day, so I offer him the price a day in advance, which he would have to take tomorrow. He knows that I am “onto his curves,” as the baseball boys say, so we get along finely and always trade as the train begins to move and he realizes that it is now or never.
From the river and from wells dug in the valley irrigation makes this unusual fertility possible, and the old-time well-sweep is everywhere, with its long see-saw pole with a weight at one end and a bucket tied to the other. A ride of a mile on the horse-car is worth while. You will see what you see in almost every Mexican town, not a shade tree on the streets, and the brown, flat-roofed adobe houses without windows are anything but inviting. Of course there are fine churches, what town has not its Carmen and Merced and San Francisco? And of course its plaza and band-stand, and Sundays and every alternate evening in the week the government furnishes its citizens with music.
Irapuato is an important junction for trains going to the Pacific Coast, and is in the midst of a fertile valley that needs no Nile to enrich it, no augurs to propitiate the God of the harvest, no winter, no summer, this is Utopia.
Leaving Irapuato and Acambaro behind, we still follow the Lerma towards its source. We pass thousands and thousands of peons with their oxen plowing with a sharp stick, or treading out the grain on the harvest floor just as they did in Egypt three thousand years ago. Fat cattle and water-fowl and farms and landscape and shifting panorama give us an uncanny feeling that the thing is not real, that such a beautiful country is seen only in pictures, that some hallucination has taken hold upon us, so swiftly and charmingly do they change in their beauty. Were all of Mexico like the Vale of Lerma, it would be the fairest spot on earth. And then comes the sickening thought that the whole seven hundred miles of this paradise is in the possession of two or three dozen land owners that nothing on earth could prevail upon to sell to the small farmer. These land owners live either in Paris or Madrid, and support palaces in the old world from blood money of these debtridden Mexicans. More than that, they have had laws enacted to restrain their descendants from parting with the land, the rightful inheritance of the Indians who till it on sufferance, and are thus made aliens in the land of their birth.
In the distance is the fountain head of Rio Lerma, and now we see the snow cap of the Volcan de Toluca, and at its base the beautiful city of Toluca, the capital of the state of Mexico. Here within three hours of the city of Mexico, are two of the grandest natural wonders on earth, the precipice of Ocoyocac and El Volcan de Toluca. This city of twenty thousand inhabitants was built in 1533, and is upon the dividing line of the tropical country of tierra caliente and the mountainous tierra templada, so absolutely everything you have ever seen growing, will grow here. Its altitude is sufficient for wheat which grows in British America, and the warm winds from the Pacific make an eternal tropical summer for everything else. The buildings in the city are superior to most you have seen. The market-house with its pillars painted in Pompeiian colors is the finest in Mexico, and was once an exposition building. At the station vendors will offer you fruits and basket at such a price you wonder if they were stolen. Here too is a great market for baskets and bird cages, and the baskets are so closely woven they will hold water.
Here is the Instituto Liberario, the Harvard College of Mexico. Here grows the coral tree, whose graceful stem is six or seven feet high with pendant palm-shaped foliage, and crowned with vegetable coral of the deepest red, an exact counterpart of the Mediterranean article. Horse cars lead to the city along Calle Independencia, where stands a statue to Hidalgo et Libertador, and here the wealth of the Republic is displayed in its public buildings. Around the plaza is that universal arrangement of huge arches called portales or arcades, which enclose the sidewalk and support the second story. The average height is twelve or fifteen feet, and besides being a sidewalk, it is also used for vendors’ booths. Here are sold lace work and drawn work and feather work and carved work and onyx and souvenirs of all kinds.
Here is shown the fine residence of a rich haciendado who was once a great patron of the bull-ring and furnished many a toro bravo for the ring, and when the noble animals entered the arena with his colors dangling from their necks, the very walls shook with the loud huzzas. Once upon a time a famous bull fought his way back to life. The lances of the picadores broke and he killed all the horses. The banderilleros could not place the darts so he could not shake them from his shaggy neck, and the matadores lost their reputation and were hissed from the ring, because they could not place the sword. Here the old haciendado begged the president to not permit him to be lassoed and assassinated, but to give him his freedom. This was granted, and many years afterward when he died his skin was stuffed to adorn his master’s banquet hall.
Behind the city is the volcano, which can be explored in two days. The height is 16,156 feet and the top is no more than ten feet wide, and the crater contains a fathomless lake with a whirl-pool in the center. Standing here amid the eternal snows the earth is spread before you as is denied in any other part of the world. Three miles up in the air you stand and in the west you see the Pacific Ocean; across the Sierra Madres appear the snow-white top of Volcan Popocatapetl (smoking mountain) 17,685 feet high; Volcan Ixtaccihuatl (white woman) 15,714 high; Citlatepetl (mount of the star) 17,664 feet high; Nauchampatapetl (square rock) and Pirote’s Chest, peak answering peak, and still through the azure vista beyond lie the blue waters of the Mexican Gulf. Toluca is the fourth highest mountain in Mexico, being overtopped by Orizaba and the two named above. It is from these eternal reservoirs that the cities get their supplies of ice, and any day the Indians laden with their chilly burden descend among the human mozaics to furnish the American barrooms with their sine qua non at ten cents a pound.
Of course the usual churches and fine paintings must be seen, so we visit Tercer Orden, Carmen and Tecajec. And now we prepare to see a sight that has not a peer on the globe. Two engines are hitched to the train and we begin to climb the Sierra Madres. We stop at the little town of Ocoyocac, and in a half hour the train returns on the horse shoe curve one thousand perpendicular feet above the town. Not a bush nor a blade of grass interrupts the vision as we nervously look down one-fifth of a mile upon the toy-looking houses we could drop a stone upon. You instinctively hold your breath as we creep around this narrow trail blasted from the solid granite and marvel at the engineering that could ever dream of such possibilities. Far beyond over the plain of Toluca is a panorama that will abide with you forever, but which you can never describe. We soon come to the mills of JaJalpa and pass under the stone aqueduct more than a hundred feet high which curries the pure mountain water to the thirsty city below.
Every city near a mountain gets its water through these massive stone aqueducts that are built to last a thousand years. Up, up we slowly climb with our two locomotives until we reach Salazar and take a few minutes to raise steam for the final climb. At last we stop on the back-bone of the Sierras, at La Cima, (the summit) twenty-four miles from the capital, and 11,000 feet above the sea. Herein the Torrid Zone among the clouds the frost is white upon the rails, and the damp fog chills you to the marrow. There behind us is a rushing mountain torrent, the source of the river Lerma, just starting on its seven hundred mile journey to the Pacific. Here just in front of the locomotive is a fretful little brook that breaks into a thousand cascades in its journey to the Mexican Gulf. Forty miles to the south is a scene that defies description. A hundred miles to the south stand those mighty sentinels of the beautiful Nahuatl Valley, Popocatapetl and Ixtaccihuatl, in that clear atmosphere, almost in speaking distance. In the midst of the valley lie the silver lakes of Texcoco and Xochimilco, large enough to mirror those lofty sentinels and reflect their perpetual robes of white to the nymphs and naiads in the azure depths below.
Could these everlasting hills speak, what a tale they could unfold of the awful tragedies they have witnessed in this valley; of crimes and bloodshed and migrations and banishments; of nations who wrought while Phœnician commerce was young; of cities built and crumbled to dust; of opulence and power and intrigue! They might tell us who carved the Calendar Stone, and who evolved its astronomical knowledge, and who wrote the hieroglyphics of Tula, and in what language are the facade and tablet inscriptions of Palenque and Uxmal, and, before the Aztecs, whence came the Toltecs, and Tlascalans, and their forerunners the Tezcucans, who in turn were driven out by the Acolhuas in the inverse order by Tepanecs, and Chalcos, and Xochimilcos, and who built the seven mysterious cities of Cibola, and the pyramid of Bholula, and the mounds and the pyramids of Tampico, and Panuco and the pyramids to the sun and moon at Teotihuacan, and why was the stately avenue of pillars left at ancient Mitla, and why, O Sphinx of the Valley! dost thou not reveal the secrets of the dead past whose unmultiplied aeons are to thee as but an open book? But the sphinx answered never a word. My tears and eloquence turned to thin air in the morning frost, and after waiting a reasonable time for an answer, I thought of that old tale about Mahomet and the mountain, and that decided my course. I determined to go find out for myself, and as the engineer had dropped one engine behind he said if I was going with him I had better get a move on myself, so I set forth to solve the mysteries that have baffled the world in the Valley of Mexico.
