Part 14 (1/2)
c.o.c.kfighting is such a pa.s.sion here that we thought it as well to see it for once. Santa Ana, now he has retired from politics, spends his time at Carthagena pretty much entirely in this his favourite sport, which forms one of the great items among the pleasures and excitements of a Mexican life. We saw a couple of mains fought, in which the victorious birds were dreadfully mangled, while the vanquished were literally cut to pieces; as much money changed hands as we should have thought sufficient to buy up the whole of the people present, c.o.c.kpit and all. Then, being both agreed that it was a disgusting sight, we went away.
Before we left Mexico we were taken by our man Antonio to a cutler's shop, where the princ.i.p.al trade seemed to be the making of these _cuchillos_ to arm the c.o.c.ks with. We bought a couple of pairs of them, and had them carefully fitted up. The old cutler was quite delighted, and remarked that foreigners must acknowledge that there were some things which were done better in Mexico than anywhere else. I fear we left him under the pleasing impression that we were taking home the blades to introduce as models in our own benighted country.
The Mexican is a great gambler. Bad fortune he bears with the greatest equanimity. You never hear of his committing suicide after being ruined at play; he just goes away, and sets to work to earn enough for a fresh stake. The government have tried to put down gambling in the State of Mexico, but not with much success. For three days in the year, however, at the festival of San Agustin de las Cuevas, public gambling-tables are tolerated, though soldiers and officials are strictly forbidden to play, an injunction which they carefully set at nought. Oddly enough, the government, while doing all it could to keep its own functionaries away from the _monte_ table, did not scruple to send a military escort to convoy the bankers with their bags of gold from Mexico to San Agustin. On one of the three days, Mr. Christy and I went there. There was a great crowd, this time mostly a well-dressed one, and the c.o.c.kpit was on a large scale. But of course the great attraction was the _monte_, which was being played everywhere, the stakes in some places being coppers, in others silver, while more aristocratic establishments would allow no stake under a gold ounce. Dead silence prevailed in these places, and the players seemed to pride themselves upon not showing the slightest change in their countenances, whether they won or lost. The game itself is very simple, and has some points of resemblance to that of lansquenet, known in Europe. The first two cards in the pack, say a four and a king, are laid down, face up, on the table, and the gamblers put down their money against one or the other.
Then the _croupier_ deals the cards out slowly and solemnly one after another, calling out their names as they fall, until he comes--say to a king; when those who have betted on the king have their stakes doubled, and the others lose theirs. The banker has a great advantage to compensate him for his expense and risk. If the first card which is thrown out be one of the two numbers on the table, the banker withholds a quarter of the stake he would otherwise have lost, paying only a stake and three-quarters, instead of two stakes. Now, as there are forty cards in a Spanish pack, two of which have been already thrown out, the chances for a throw favourable to the banker are about one in six, so that he may reckon on an average profit of about two per cent, on all the money staked.
As for the players, they sat round the table, carefully noticing the course of the games, and regulating their play accordingly, as they do at Baden-Baden and Hombourg. I suppose that now and then these scientific calculators must be told that their whole theory of chances is the most baseless delusion, but they certainly do not believe it; and at any rate this curious pseudo-science of winning by skill at games of pure chance will last our time, if not longer.
On some tables there were as much as three or four thousand gold ounces. This struck us the more because we had often tried to get gold coin for our own use, instead of the silver dollars, the general currency of the country, of which twenty pounds' worth to carry home on a hot day was enough to break one's heart. We often tried to get gold, but the answer was always that what little there was in the country was in the hands of the gamblers, whose operations could not be worked on a large scale without it.
The prevalence of mining, as a means of getting wealth, has contributed greatly to make the love of gambling an important part of the national character. Silver-mining in the old times was a most hazardous speculation, and people engaged in it used to make and lose great fortunes a dozen times in their lives. The miners worked not on fixed wages, but for a share of the produce, and so every man became a gambler on his own account. To a great extent the same evils prevail now, but two things have tended to lessen them. Poor ores are now worked profitably which used to be neglected by the miners; and, as these ores occur in almost inexhaustible ma.s.ses, their mining is a much less speculative affair than the old system of mining for rich veins.
Moreover, the men are, in some of the largest mines, paid by the day, so that their life has become more regular. In many places, however, the work is still done on shares by the miners, who pa.s.s their lives in alternations of excessive riches and all kinds of extravagance, succeeded by times of extreme poverty.
An acquaintance of ours was telling us one day about the lives of these men. One week, a party of three miners had come upon a very rich bit of ore, and went away from the _raya_, each man with a handkerchief full of dollars. This was on Sat.u.r.day evening. On Monday morning our informant went out for a ride, and on the road he met three dirty haggard-looking men, dressed in some old rags; one of the three came forward, taking off the sort of apology for a hat which he had on, and said, ”Good morning, Senor Doctor, would you mind doing us the favour of lending us half a dollar to get something to eat?” They were the three successful miners; and when, a few days afterwards, the man who had asked for the money came back to return it, the Doctor inquired what had happened.
It seemed that the three, as soon as they had received their money on Sat.u.r.day, got a lift to the nearest town, and there rigged themselves out with new clothes, silver b.u.t.tons, five-pound serapes, and a horse for each, with magnificent silver mountings to the saddle and spurs.
Here they have dinner, and lots of pulque, and swagger about outside the door, smoking cigarettes. There, quite by chance, an acquaintance meets them, and admires the horses, but would like to see their paces tried a little outside the town. So they pace and gallop along for half a mile or so; when, also quite accidentally, they find two men sitting outside a rancho, playing at cards. The two men--strangely enough--are old acquaintances of the curious friend, and they produce a bowl of cool pulque from within, which our miners find quite refres.h.i.+ng after the ride. Thereupon they sit down to have a little game at _monte_, then more pulque, then more cards; and when they awake the next morning, they find themselves possessed of a suit of old rags, with no money in the pockets. They had dim recollections of losing--first money, then horses, and lastly clothes, the night before; but--as they were informed by the old woman, who was the only occupant of the place besides themselves--their friends had been obliged to go away on urgent business, and could not be so impolite as to disturb them. So they walked back to the mines, ragged and hungry, and borrowed the doctor's half-dollar.
[Ill.u.s.tration: LEATHER SANDALS, WORN BY THE NATIVE INDIANS.]
CHAPTER X.
TEZCUCO. MIRAFLORES. POPOCATEPETL. CHOLULA.
[Ill.u.s.tration: WALKING AND RIDING COSTUMES IN MEXICO. _(After Nebel.)_]
The wet season was fast coming on when we left Mexico for the last time. We had to pa.s.s through Vera Cruz, where the rain and the yellow fever generally set in together; so that to stay longer would have been too great a risk.
Our first stage was to Tezcuco, across the lake in a canoe, just as we had been before. We noticed on our way to the canoes, a church, apparently from one to two centuries old, with the following doggerel inscription in huge letters over the portico, which shows that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is by no means a recent inst.i.tution in Mexico:
_Antes de entrar afirma con tu vida, S. Maria fue sin pecado concebida:_
Which may be translated into verse of equal quality,
_Confess on thy life before coming in, That blessed Saint Mary was conceived without sin._
Nothing particular happened on our journey, except that a well-dressed Mexican turned up at the landing-place, wanting a pa.s.sage, and as we had taken a canoe for ourselves, we offered to let him come with us. He was a well-bred young man, speaking one or two languages besides his own; and he presently informed us that he was going on a visit to a rich old lady at Tezcuco, whose name was Dona Maria Lopez, or something of the kind. When we drove away from the other end of the lake, towards Tezcuco, we took him as far as the road leading to the old lady's house; when he rather astonished us by hinting that he should like to go on with us to the Casa Grande, and could walk back. At the same time, it struck us that the youth, though so well dressed, had no luggage; and we began to understand the queer expression of the coachman's face when he saw him get into the carriage with us. So we stopped at the corner of the road, and the young gentleman had to get out.
At the Casa Grande, our friends laughed at us immensely when we told them of the incident, and offered us twenty to one that he would come to ask for money within twenty-four hours. He came the same evening, and brought a wonderful story about his pa.s.sport not being _en regle_, and that unless we could lend him ten dollars to bribe the police, he should be in a dreadful sc.r.a.pe. We referred him to the master of the house, who said something to him which caused him to depart precipitately, and we never saw him again; but we heard afterwards that he had been to the other foreigners in the neighbourhood with various histories. We made more enquiries about him in the town, and it appeared that his expedition to Tezcuco was improvised when he saw us going down to the boat, and of course the visit to the rich old lady was purely imaginary. Now this youth was not more than eighteen, and looked and spoke like a gentleman. They say that the cla.s.s he belonged to is to be counted rather by thousands than by hundreds in Mexico.
They are the children of white Creoles, or nearly white mestizos; they get a superficial education and the art of dressing, and with this slender capital go out into the world to live by their wits, until they get a government appointment or set up as political adventurers, and so have a chance of helping themselves out of the public purse, which is naturally easier and more profitable than mere sponging upon individuals. One gets to understand the course of Mexican affairs much better by knowing what sort of raw material the politicians are recruited from.
We saw some good things in a small collection of antiquities, on this second visit to Tezcuco. Among them was a nude female figure in alabaster, four or five feet high, and--comparatively speaking--of high artistic merit. Such figures are not common in Mexico, and they are supposed to represent the Aztec Venus, who was called _Tlazolteocihua_, ”G.o.ddess of Pleasure.” A figure, laboriously cut in hard stone, representing a man wearing a jackal's head as a mask, was supposed to be a figurative representation of the celebrated king of Tezcuco, _Nezahualcoyotl_, ”hungry jackal,” of whom Mexican history relates that he walked about the streets of his capital in disguise, after the manner of the Caliph in the Arabian Nights. The explanation is plausible, but I think not correct. The _coyote_ or jackal was a sacred animal among the Aztecs, as the Anubis-jackal was among the Egyptians.
Humboldt found in Mexico the tomb of a coyote, which had been carefully interred with an earthen vase, and a number of the little cast-bronze bells which I noticed in the last chapter. The Mexicans used actually to make a kind of fetish--or charm--of a jackal's skin, prepared in a peculiar way, and called by the same name, _nezahualcoyotl_, and very likely they do so still. From this fetish the king's name was, no doubt, borrowed; and it is not improbable that the whole story of the king's walking in disguise may have grown up out of his name being the same as that of the figure we saw, m.u.f.fled up in a jackal's skin.
It is curious that the jackal, or the human figure in a jackal-mask, should have been an object of superst.i.tious veneration both in Mexico and in Egypt. This, the extraordinary serpent-crown of Xochicalco, and the pyramids, are the three most striking resemblances to be found between the two countries; all probably accidental, but not the less noteworthy on that account.
The collection contained a number of spherical beads in green jade, highly polished, and some as large as pigeon's eggs. They were found in an alabaster box, of such elaborate and beautiful workmans.h.i.+p that the owner deemed it worthy to be presented as a sort of peace-offering to the wife of President Santa Ana.