Part 6 (2/2)
”Yes, I should like to look in on you for a few moments.”
”Ah, I was so sorry to miss you,” he went on, standing stock still. ”I must give you my address and you must write me, and I you.”
There followed an exchange of cards with great formality and many protestations of eternal friends.h.i.+p; then an effusive hand-shake and:
”Mil gracias, senor. May you have a most pleasant voyage. Thanks again. So pleased to have met you. Adios. May you travel well. Hasta luego. Adios. Que le vaya bien,” and with a flip of the hand and a wriggling of the fingers he was gone.
That evening I returned early to the ”Hotel La Perla.” Its entire force was waiting for me. This consisted of Juan, a cheery, slight fellow in a blue unders.h.i.+rt and speckled cotton trousers of uncertain age, who was waiter, chambermaid, porter, bath-boy, sweeper, general swipe, possibly cook, and in all but name proprietor; the nominal one being a spherical native on the down-grade of life who never moved twice in the same day if it could be avoided, leaving the establishment to run itself, and accepting phlegmatically what money it pleased Providence to send him. The force was delighted at the pleasure of having a guest to wait upon, and stood opposite me all through the meal, offering gems of a.s.sorted wisdom intermingled with wide-ranging questions. I called for an extra blanket and turned in soon after dark. There reigned a delicious stillness that promised ample reparation for the two nights past. Barely had I drowsed off, however, when there intruded the chattering of several men in the alleyway and yard directly outside my window. ”They'll soon be gone,” I told myself, turning over. But I was over-optimistic. The voices increased, those of women chiming in. Louder and louder grew the uproar. Then a banjo-like instrument struck up, accompanying the most dismally mournful male voice conceivable, wailing a monotonous refrain of two short lines. This increased in volume until it might be heard a mile away. Male and female choruses joined in now and then. In the s.n.a.t.c.hes between, the monotonous voice wailed on, mingled with laughter and frequent disputes. I rose at last to peer out the window. In the yard were perhaps a half-hundred natives, all seated on the ground, some with their backs against the very wall of my room, nearly all smoking, and with many pots of liquor pa.s.sing from hand to hand. Midnight struck, then one, then two; and with every hour the riot increased. Once or twice I drifted into a short troubled dream, to be aroused with a start by a new burst of pandemonium. Then gradually the sounds subsided almost entirely. My watch showed three o'clock. I turned over again, grateful for the few hours left ... and in that instant, without a breath of warning, there burst out the supreme cataclysm of a band of some twenty hoa.r.s.e and battered pieces in an endless, unfathomable noise that never once paused for breath until daylight stole in at the window.
At ”breakfast” I took Juan to task.
”Ah, senor,” he smiled, ”it is too bad. But yesterday a man died in the house next door, and his friends have come to celebrate.”
”And keep the whole town awake all night?”
”Ay, senor, it is unfortunate indeed. But what would you? People will die, you know.”
Sleep is plainly not indigenous to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
From the neighboring town of Gamboa there runs southward a railway known as the ”Pan-American.” Its fares are high and a freight-train behind an ancient, top-heavy engine drags a single pa.s.senger-car divided into two cla.s.ses with it on its daily journey. The ticket-agent had no change, and did not know whether the end of the line was anywhere near Guatemala, though he was full of stories of the dangers to travelers in that country. A languid, good-natured crowd filled the car. We are so accustomed to think of lack of clothing as an attribute of savages that it was little short of startling to see a young lady opposite, naked to the waist but for a scanty and transparent suggestion of upper garment, read the morning newspaper and write a note with the savoir-faire of a Parisienne in her boudoir. She wore a necklace of American five-dollar gold pieces, with a pendant of twenties, the G.o.ddess of Liberty and the date, 1898, on the visible side, and as earrings two older coins of $2.50. Nearly every woman in the car was thus decorated to some extent, always with the medallion side most in evidence, and one could see at a glance exactly how much each was worth.
In a long day's travel we covered 112 miles. At Juchitan the pa.s.sengers thinned. Much of this town had recently been destroyed in the revolution, and close to the track stood a crowded cemetery with hundreds of gorged and somnolent _zopilotes_, the carrion-crow of Mexico, about it. The country was a blazing dry stretch of mesquite and rare patches of forest in a sandy soil, with huts so few that the train halted at each of them, as if to catch its breath and wipe the sweat out of its eyes. Once, toward noon, we caught a glimpse of the Pacific. But all the day there spread on either hand an arid region with bare rocky hills, a fine sand that drifted in the air, and little vegetation except the th.o.r.n.y mesquite. A few herds of cattle were seen, but they were as rare as the small towns of stone huts and frontiers-man aspect. The train pa.s.sed the afternoon like a walker who knows he can easily reach his night's destination, and strolled leisurely into Tonola before sunset.
Beyond the wild-west hotel lay a sweltering sand town of a few streets atrociously cobbled. We had reached the land of hammocks. Not a hut did I peep into that did not have three or four swinging lazily above the uneven earth floor. In the center of the broad, unkempt expanse that served as plaza stood an enormous _pochote_, a species of cottonwood tree, and about it drowsed a Sunday evening gathering half seen in the dim light of lanterns on the stands of hawkers. On a dark corner three men and a boy were playing a _marimba_, a frame with dried bars of wood as keys which, beaten with small wooden mallets, gave off a weird, half-mournful music that floated slowly away into the heavy hot night. The women seemed physically the equal of those of Tehuantepec, but their dress was quite different, a single loose white gown cut very low at the neck and almost without sleeves. One with a white towel on her head and hanging loosely about her shoulders looked startlingly like an Egyptian female figure that had stepped forth from the monuments of the Nile. Their brown skins were l.u.s.trous as silk, every line of their lithe bodies of a Venus-like development and they stood erect as palm-trees, or slipped by in the sand-paved night under their four-gallon' American oilcans of water with a silent, sylph-like tread.
The train, like an experienced tropical traveler, started at the first peep of dawn. Tonola marked the beginning of a new style of landscape, heralding the woodlands of Guatemala. All was now dense and richly green, not exactly jungle, but with forests of huge trees, draped with climbing vines, interlarded with vistas of fat cattle by the hundreds up to their bellies in heavy green gra.s.s, herds of which now and then brought us almost to a standstill by stampeding across the track. In contrast to the day before there were many villages, a kind of cross between the jungle towns of Siam and the sandy hamlets of our ”Wild West.” A number had sawmills for the mahogany said to abound in the region. Now and then a pretty lake alive with wild fowl appeared in a frame of green. There were many Negroes, and not a few Americans among the ranchers, sawmill hands and railway employees, while John Chinaman, forbidden entrance to the country to the south, as to that north of the Rio Grande, put in a frequent appearance, as in all Mexico. It was a languorous, easy-going land, where day-before-yesterday's paper was news. The sulky stare of the Mexican plateau had completely disappeared, and in its place was much laughter and an un.o.btrusive friendliness, and a complete lack of obsequiousness even on the part of the peons, who elbowed their way in and out among all cla.s.ses as if there were no question as to the equality of all mankind. The daily arrival of the train seemed to be the chief recreation of the populace, so that there were signs of protest if it made only a brief stop. But there was seldom cause for this complaint, for the swollen-headed old engine was still capable of so much more than the schedule required that it was forced to make a prolonged stay at almost every station to let Father Time catch up with us.
The rumor ran that those who would enter Guatemala must get permission of its consul in Tapachula. But our own representative at that town chanced to board the train at a wayside hamlet and found the papers I carried sufficient. Two fellow countrymen raced away into the place as the train drew in, and returned drenched with sweat in time to continue with our leisurely convoy. Dakin was a boyish man from the Northern States, and Ems a swarthy ”Texican” to whom Spanish was more native than English, both wandering southward in quest of jobs, as stationary and locomotive engineers respectively. They rode first-cla.s.s, though this did not imply wealth, but merely that Pat Ca.s.sidy was conductor. He was a burly, whole-hearted American, supporting an enormous, flaring mustache and, by his own admission, all the ”busted” white men traveling between Mexico and Guatemala. While I kept the seat to which my ticket ent.i.tled me, he pa.s.sed me with a look of curiosity not unmixed with a hint of scorn. When I stepped into the upholstered cla.s.s to ask him a question he bellowed, ”Si' down!” The inquiry answered, I rose to leave, only to be brought down again with a shout of, ”Keep yer seat!” It is no fault of Ca.s.sidy's if a ”gringo” covers the Pan-American on foot or seated with peons, or goes hungry and thirsty or tobaccoless on the journey; and penniless strangers are not conspicuous by their absence along this route. As a Virginia Negro at one of the stations put it succinctly, ”If dey ain't black, dey'se white.”
A jungle bewilderment of vegetation grew up about us, with rich clearings for little cl.u.s.ters of palm-leaf huts, jungles so dense the eye could not penetrate them. Laughing women, often of strikingly attractive features, peopled every station, perfect in form as a Greek statue, and with complexions of burnished bronze. Everywhere was evidence of a constant joy in life and of a placid conviction that Providence or some other philanthropist who had always taken care of them always would. Teeth were not so universally splendid as on the plateau, but the luminous, snapping black eyes more than made up for this less perfect feature.
Nightfall found us still rumbling lazily on and it was nearly an hour later that we reached Mariscal at the end of the line, four or five scattered buildings of which two disguised themselves under the name of hotels. Ems and I slept--or more exactly pa.s.sed the night--on cots in one of the rooms of transparent part.i.tions, while Dakin, who refused to accept alms for anything so useless, spread a gra.s.s mat among the dozen native women stretched out along the veranda.
CHAPTER VIII
HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA
The three of us were off by the time the day had definitely dawned. Ems carried a heavy suitcase, and Dakin an awkward bundle. My own modest belongings rode more easily in a rucksack. A mile walk along an unused railroad, calf-high in jungle gra.s.s, brought us to a wooden bridge across the wide but shallow Suchiate, bounding Mexico on the south. Across its plank floor and beyond ran the rails of the ”Pan-American,” but the trains halt at Mariscal because Guatemala, or more exactly Estrada Cabrera, does not permit them to enter his great and sovereign republic. Our own pa.s.sage looked easy, but that was because of our inexperience of Central American ways. Scarcely had we set foot on the bridge when there came racing out of a palm-leaf hut on the opposite sh.o.r.e three male ragam.u.f.fins in bare feet, shouting as they ran. One carried an antedeluvian, muzzle-loading musket, another an ancient bayonet red with rust, and the third swung threateningly what I took to be a stiff piece of telegraph wire.
”No se pasa!” screamed the three in chorus, spreading out in skirmish line like an army ready to oppose to the death the invasion of a hostile force. ”No one can pa.s.s the bridge!”
”But why not?” I asked.
”Because Guatemala does not allow it.”
”Do you mean to say three caballeros with money and pa.s.sports--and shoes are denied admittance to the great and famous Republic of Guatemala?”
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