CHAPTER IX.
PUBLIC BUILDINGS.
WHERE once stood the Palace of Montezuma, now stands the national Palace. It occupies the entire eastern side of the Plaza Mayor, with a frontage of 675 feet, and was built in 1692. It is open to the public all day long.
On the ground floor of the plaza front are the barracks. On the second are the President’s chambers and those occupied by the Spanish Viceroys and the Austrian usurper, Maximilian.
At the extreme front is the Ambassadors’ Hall, so long that the President at one end in his chair of state seems but a pigmy, and so narrow that three persons with outstretched hands can touch either wall. The idea of spacious halls seems never to have entered the Mexican’s head. Huge buildings they have, but they are only a succession of rooms whose dimensions depend upon the usual length of building timbers, which is never over twenty feet. It seems easy to connect the joists on supporting pillars and enlarge the room, but, “We have always done this way.” So the Ambassadors’ Hall has a probable length of 300 feet, and an actual width of about twenty.
At the Southern end is a raised dais where the President presides; at the other, under a canopy are two magnificent state chairs. One was the property of Cortez, and has his name on the back in pure gold, and the date 1531. It is in excellent repair, since its construction was entirely of metal covered with brocade, and one might doubt its antiquity were not the ear marks of old Spain everywhere visible in all its workmanship, even in its coat-of-arms. The other is covered entirely with pure gold and is the chair of state of the President, and must be worth $20,000 if appearances comport with the actual value of gold. Just opposite this chair is a painting fifteen by thirty feet, depicting the great battle of Puebla when President Diaz first won his spurs in defeating the French army. An old grizzled veteran who fought in the battle will point out the notables in the picture, not omitting his own which stands to the left of the President.
On the same wall hang the pictures of George Washington and the leaders of Mexican Independence, Iturbide, Hidalgo and Morelos. There is no room closed to the visitor, so we visit the President’s barber shop, reception room, library and the Hydrographic office where maps and charts are being made. All these rooms are furnished differently, and are as elegant and comfortable as even a president could wish. Nearby is the treasurer’s office, and how my feet clogged when I tried to go by! I just want to change money all the time; I know of no better way to get rich than to change money. Hand over one of Uncle Samuel’s ten-dollar bills, and get eighteen dollars and sixty cents back, is just doubling your money as fast as you can stow it away. It beats the lottery business all to pieces. So when I passed by the treasurer’s office I wanted to change money, but I was loaded down at that moment and could not. When you step into a restaurant and give a U.S. dollar for your dinner and get your dinner and another dollar in change, you want to eat some more.
In the courtyard is a curious plant that has a flower exactly in imitation of the human hand with all its fingers. It is the cheirostemon plaxanifolium or hand tree. Only three specimens exist in Mexico. As all the public buildings are under one roof, we soon find ourselves at the Post Office with its seven days wonders. No one goes to the window and inflicts upon the unoffending young lady that much abused old legend, “Is there a letter here for me?” O no, that is not the style. When the mail arrives, the letters are arranged alphabetically and numbered consecutively, then the list is typewritten and posted on the bulletin board, where he who runs may read. Beginning with No. 1 on the first day of the month, the numbers run to the end of the month and start over. The foreign list is published separate from the native. If you find your name on the bulletin you pass to the window and call for date and number only, and a book inside has a duplicate list. The letter is handed you, and you sign your name opposite the number of the letter, giving street, number and hotel. At the same time a policeman stands at your elbow, scrutinizing all persons and their handwriting, and qualifying himself to find you again if necessary in case of forgery. To an American the system may seem cumbersome, but he must remember that he is in a country where letters to the United States cost five cents, and I have seen domestic letters from one state to the other cost ten cents, as much as many people earn, so there is not much letter writing.
Then it has its advantage. Every time a clerk is called to the window, she knows there is a letter needed, and it saves the endless “yes, no, yes, no” all day long, and the sorting of hundreds of letters to look for the name of a person who is not expecting a letter at all, “but just thought I would ask you.” The system is infinitely better than that in Texas towns with a Mexican population. No Mexican signs his name without a flourish which obscures the name entirely sometimes, and besides, the Mexican names have a way of spelling themselves different from the pronunciation.
The Texas post-mistress lumps all Mexican mail in one box, and when a Mexican shows his head at the window she hands him all the Spanish literature on hand, and he takes what he wishes. If he is dishonest, he can purloin any mail he sees fit. The Mexican officials are very kind, and always try to keep a clerk who knows English. Of course she is always out when you need her most, but that does not detract from their good intentions; but the Spanish language is so easy a person can learn a hundred words a day, and if he knows Latin he has nearly half the language to start with.
Next door to the Post Office is the National Museum, the most wonderful repository in America, where ancient Mayan, Aztec and Toltec relics lie side by side with the civilization of today. Here are gods without number and idols by the thousand.
Strangest among these symbols is the ever-present serpent, that subtile being that has left its stamp in the mythology of the old world. Wherever native religions have had their sway, this symbol is certain to appear. It appears in Egypt, Greece, Assyria and among the superstitions of the Celts, Hindoos and Chinese, and here upon these ancient idols he is carved upon porphyry and granite in natural size and heroic dimensions, but always in coil, with the rattlesnake fangs and tail conspicuous.
Here is also the Aztec sacrificial stone of basalt, nine feet in diameter and three feet thick, within whose bloody arms, from Spanish authority, twenty-thousand victims were annually offered up. All of the Spanish under Cortez would have been killed upon that awful retreat of Noche Triste, were it not for the zeal of the Mexicans to capture them alive to offer as sacrifice rather than kill them in battle. The central figure of all this interesting collection is the calendar stone upon whose mysterious records the scholars of Europe and America have labored with only partial success. The stone is circular, is hewn from a solid piece of porphyry, and weighs fifty tons. How it ever reached this island is a mystery, when the people had no beasts of burden; how it was carved is a mystery as the people did not know iron. The greatest wonder is the inscription which accurately records the length of the solar, lunar and siderial year, calculated eclipses, and is a more perfect calendar than any European country possesses.
From this stone we learn that the Aztecs divided the year into 365 days; these were divided into 18 months of 20 days each, and, like the ancient Egyptians, they had 5 complementary days to make out 365. But the year is composed of six hours more than 365 days, and in America we add the six hours every four years and make leap-year. The Aztecs waited 52 years, and then interposed 13 days, or rather 12½, which brought the length of their tropical year to within the smallest fraction of the figures of our most skillful astronomers. Like the Persians and Egyptians, a cycle of 52 years was represented by a serpent, so prominent in mythology.
This interpolation of 25 days in every 104 years showed a nicer adjustment of civil to solar time than that presented by any European calendar, since more than five centuries must elapse before the loss of an entire day. Their astrological year was divided into months of 13 days each, and there were 13 years in their indications which contained each 365 periods of 18 days each. It is also curious that their number of lunar months of 13 days each were contained in a cycle of 52 years with the interpolation of 13 days (12½) should correspond exactly with the Great Sothic period of the Egyptians, viz: 1461. By means of this calendar, the priests kept their own records, regulated the festivals and sacrifices, and made all their astronomical calculations. They had the means of setting the hours with precision; the periods of the solstices and equinoxes and the transit of the sun across the zenith of Mexico. This stone was dug up in the great square in 1790 where it had lain buried since the Conquest in 1520, but its high scientific deductions are out of all proportion to the advance of the Aztec in other branches of learning, since the stone is more exact today than any European calendar in existence, therefore it must have been made by another race. The characters are in the Toltec language, but there are many points of it which the Toltecs copied from the Mayas of Yucatan, and the Mayas seem to have copied from the Egyptians, of which we shall speak in another chapter.
There are other relies more ancient than the Calendar Stone, and others more recent. There is the ideographic picture-writing, through which we learn the history of the race previous to the Conquest. Here is Montezuma’s shield, the armor worn by Cortez in the Conquest, his battle-flag, the statue of the war god Huitzilopochtle, Tula monoliths, the Goddess of Water, Palenque cross, Chacmol, and the finest carriage in the world, built by Maximilian for his Mexican capital. The body is painted red, the wheels are gilded, and the interior is lined with white silk brocade, heavily trimmed with silver and gold thread.
In Ethnology and Zoology the exhibits would require days to see. The museum is open every day but Saturday, and is thronged ever. The Indians never tire gazing on the scenes which recall the times when they were masters. In the midst of the quadrangle is a beautiful garden of rare plants and tall palms.
Soldiers guard the entrance and police welcome you and ask for your camera and umbrellas, and as your party starts, a uniformed lad will fall in at your heel, attach himself to your shadow and never leave you till you descend the steps to the exit. He does not seek your companionship necessarily for publication, “but as an evidence of good faith.” He is not intrusive nor garrulous; his duty is simply to be ever present. With tens of thousands of valuable relics in easy reach, probably they are acting wisely upon past experience.
The next door leads to San Carlos, the National Art Gallery. Here are the famous paintings of “Padre Los Casas,” “The Deluge,” and Murillo’s “San Juan de Dios” and “The Lost Sheep.” In the fourth and fifth salons are the works of native Mexicans, and their love to old Spain is shown by their paintings; whole sides of the salons are given to the cruel tale of the Conquest and the Inquisition: Spanish Cavaliers, holding up the cross in one hand and the drawn sword in the other, and cutting down the ignorant natives who would not confess the Virgin; the death of Montezuma, surrounded by heaps of gold so gluttonously hoarded by the Spaniards; the fate of his brother, Guatemotzin, the last of the Aztec chieftains, whose feet are held in the fire by his Christian torturers, to disclose his hidden treasures, and the haughty chieftain still kept his heroic mien without a murmur.
One of his generals who was similarly tortured appealed to him. Turning a look of scorn upon him Guatemotzin replied: “And say, am I on a bed of roses?” There is a weird fascination about the paintings that makes you feel that the paintings have just stepped from the pages of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. It is the Chamber of Horrors where the Spanish Inquisition is depicted by men who knew. Overhead are scores of medallions of famous men of Mexican birth, and beneath each a famous picture. Leaving this salon we come to a well lighted hall with several hundred easels and folding stools. This is the instruction room, and is filled with students and models and casts and charts, where lessons are given to all who apply without regard to creed or race or color. The Color Line has no place in Mexico. Beneath the salon are halls filled with statuary, where clay modeling and sculpture is taught, and as you leave with weary limb you are convinced that it is in truth a National Academy.
Then there is the Mineria, the School of Engineering and Mines, on San Andres and Betlemita streets. It cost a million and a half of dollars, and was the work of the sculptor and architect, Tolsa. It contains rich collections of geological and minerological specimens, and a meteorological observatory, also a fossil of the Pleiocene horse of three toes. The mint on Apartado Street struck its first coin in 1535, and since then the coins of republics, empires and dictatorships have run from it in a constant stream of gold and silver to the enormous sum of $2,200,000,000.
Then there is the National Library and the Preparatory School on San Ildefonso Street, with a thousand students and fine equipment and botanical garden. Public instruction is free and gratuitous in every respect, without regard to race or religion.
Just beyond the Cathedral is a National Pawnshop, Monte de Piedad, “Mountain of Mercy.” It was founded more than a hundred years ago by Count Regla, the owner of the famous silver-mine of Real de Monte, who gave three hundred thousand dollars for the purpose, so that the poor and needy could get money on their belongings at reasonable interest. Any article deposited is valued by two disinterested parties, and three-fourths of its value is promptly advanced. If the party ceases to pay interest on the loan, the article is kept six months longer, and then exposed for sale. If not sold in the next six months, it is sold at public auction, and all that is realized from the sale above the original pawn, is placed to the borrower’s credit. If this money is not called for in a specified time, it reverts to the bank of the institution. This is a government institution, and has entirely broken up the small pawn-shops that charge unreasonable interest. The rate of interest is never raised, and it lends a million dollars a year, and has fifty thousand customers. One dollar is the smallest sum loaned, and ten thousand the largest, and the loans are about three hundred daily. About one-third of the articles pawned are never redeemed, and tourists can find some wonderful bargains here. The Diamond snuff-box presented Santa Anna when he was Dictator is here. $25,000 will buy the little trifle.
In all the wars and revolutions this old city has seen, all parties have respected this grand institution, with one exception: When Gonzales was president in 1884, he ran so short of money, that to keep the National credit, he levied upon its treasury. An English syndicate with a capital of $25,000,000 has recently bought the institution for one million, and will still carry on the banking business.
Chapultepec, “The hill of the Grass-hopper,” is the president’s White House and the West Point of Mexico. It is three miles from the city, and is situated upon a perpendicular rock, two hundred feet high, and was a veritable Gibraltar in war times when cannon were unknown. This castle was the pride and ambition of Carlotta, the wife of Maximilian, and she spent half a million dollars on the interior furnishings. The interior is remodeled on the Pompeiian style. The castle is reached by a winding road around the hill, and also by a secret cavern through the hill. On the rock in front are the engraved pictures of Montezuma I. and his successor. In the rear is the immense park of ahuehuete or cypress trees, next in size to the redwoods of California. One of these venerable monarchs is fifty feet in circumference and one hundred and seventy feet high, under which was Montezuma’s favorite seat. This park measures two miles in length, and reaches to Molino del Rey, “The King’s Mill,” which figured in the war with the United States. It is now the National Arsenal.
The Military Academy is at Chapultepec, and the whole hill is a military camp. From the citadel a view can be had of the whole valley of Mexico, forty miles long and thirty wide. To the left of the road leading up to the castle is a cave, closed with an iron gate. This is said to have been the treasure house of both Montezuma and Cortez. A stairway leads up through the hill to the castle. A large collection of animals are in the park and a beautiful flower garden. From here leads an aqueduct that supplies the city with water, just as it did before the Conquest. Here was made the last stand against the American army under General Pillow, and U. S. Grant was one of the first to mount the hill, and the flower of the cadet army was slain here, and they were only boys. The occasion has been remembered by the government, and at the foot of the hill stands a large monument with the names of all the boys who fell. On one side is this inscription:
“DEDICATED TO THE STUDENTS
WHO FELL
IN DEFENDING THEIR COUNTRY AGAINST
THE AMERICAN INVASION.”
