Land without chimneys; or, the byways of Mexico

THE SAN JUAN VALLEY.

Did it ever occur to the American reader that there lives a people numbering twelve millions, who know not the comforts of the fire-place, nor the discomforts of soot and chimney-swallows? And yet there lives just such a people at our very doors; just across the Rio Grande, in that strange land of romance and fiction, where the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries go hand-in-hand and never unite; where the variation in temperature is less than at any other place on the globe; where an ancient race live among the ruined temples and pyramids of a race they know not of; where the traveler finds mouldering ruins of hewn stone engraved with figures and animals that have no likeness anywhere else, except amid the ruins of Egypt; it is here you find the Land Without Chimneys. The land of Montezuma; the spoil of Cortez; the treasure-house of Spain; the modern Mexico, where fact and fancy so mingle with romance and fable, that we hardly know when we have reached historical data.

When the Spaniards reached Mexico in 1518, they found that the Toltec history, done in picture-writing, was the most reliable source of information obtainable in this strange fairy-land.

From these idiographic paintings we learn that the Aztecs, or Mexicans, entered the valley from the north about 1200 A. D. Before the Aztecs came, the valley was occupied by the Chicimecs, and before they had pitched their tents around their capital hill, Chapultepec, the Toltecs had ruled supreme.

The Toltecs, being exiled from Tollan, their ancient capital near lake Tulare, wandered a hundred and twenty years, until, in 667, A. D., they came to the bank of a river, where they founded another city which they called Tollan, or Tula, in honor of their ancient capital. The ruins of this ancient city lie twenty-five miles from the city of Mexico. During the reign of their eighth king, a famine drove the Toltecs south, whither many emigrated to Yucatan and Guatemala, where the Toltec language is still spoken. But before the Toltecs, there lived in Yucatan the Maya race, the most ancient in Mexico, whose tradition dates to the year 793 B.C., when they arrived in Yucan by water from Tulapam. Here tradition is lost until we examine the ancient ruins and pyramids of Uxmal and Copan, whose walls are nine feet thick and covered with the finest facades found in America; and then language fails us as we gaze upon the massive walls of the pyramid of Copan, containing twenty-six million cubic feet of stone brought from a distant quarry, whose base is six hundred twenty-four feet by eight hundred nine feet, and a tower one hundred eighty-four feet, built of massive blocks of stone, and surmounted by two huge trees rooted in its mold.

Within the inside are statues and hieroglyphics and inscriptions which tell to the world their history, but they speak in an unknown tongue, which may tell us of their Tulapam on the lost Atlantis. In despair, we give up the riddle of the first people of Mexico, and take a nearer view of the present inhabitants. The country is divided into three parts--the coast region called tierra calienta, where the tropical sun makes life a burden, and engenders that scourge of Mexico, el vomito, or yellow fever.

Midway between the coast and the mountain is the tierra templada, where the mean temperature is 68° F. The tierra fria, or cold country, is the plateau which caps the crest of the Cordilleras, so different from the mountains of the rest of the world that a carriage road was built for eight hundred miles along the crest of the mountains, without the service of an engineer.

Here the mean temperature is 63° F., and on account of the altitude rain seldom falls, and, where it does fall, the porous amygdaloid rocks absorb it so quickly that the plateau is a veritable desert, where the cactus and other thorny plants have taken possession of soil and rock alike. What adds more than anything else to its barrenness, is the utter lack of forest tree or green grass. Everywhere, for miles and miles of landscape, the eye meets only the bare rock and brown earth, with here and there the ever-present cactus and its kind.

What wonder is it that nearly all these plateau people are beggars, when the water for their very existence must be drawn from the locomotive tanks each day as the train passes? Far across the treeless plain they see the smoke of the locomotive, and from every adobe hut and straw-thatched jackal swarm the eager-eyed women, carrying the empty five-gallon cans of the Standard Oil Company, or their smaller ollas of burnt earthenware.

To supply that horde would be to disable the train, so the fireman fills a number and again mounts his engine amid the silent looks of anguish from the disappointed faces that plead more eloquently than words. Yet there are whole townships of this desert, fenced in with stone walls, and upon these haciendas the rancheros grow rich off their herds at the expense of the poor peons, and the source of their wealth is the prickly pear.

The thick, fleshy leaf is both food and water to the starving cattle. Where herds are small, the herder, with a huge knife or machete, cuts the cruel thorns from the leaves or singes them in a great bonfire; but on the vast estates the cattle must, from necessity, get their food without help. It may be curious to know how these leaves can furnish water in a country where it rarely rains. The reason is, the skin is so tough it does not lose any water by evaporation, and it is thus able to carry water a year or more without additional rain. This cactus grows to the height of fifteen feet, with innumerable branches armed with needles nearly as long as your finger, and it bears bunches of fruit about the size and shape of lemons, called tunas. This is the staff of life for the poor people on the plains, and without it, existence on the plateau, for man or beast would be impossible.

But this country was not always a desert. Before the coming of the Spaniards it was clothed in verdure, but “it was not like the plains of Old Castile,” and so the reckless gold hunter turned the beautiful plateau into a Sahara, in which the silver mines now pay from eleven to sixteen dollars a cord for wood, brought on the backs of diminutive burros, and five dollars and seventy-five cents for a hundred and fifty pounds of corn.

It is purely a lack of thrift that no effort is now made to restore the land to its original inheritance. The eucalyptus tree of California has been tried in many places and thrives well, and with proper protection would soon grow a forest. The present wood supply is the mesquite, which never grows taller than a peach tree, and the average size stick of wood it furnishes is but little larger than a beer bottle. Yet, with all its scarcity, the locomotives use it, because coal from the United States costs twenty-one dollars a ton. This wood is packed on the backs of dozens of little burros, and is carried as far as a dozen miles for delivery.

This is a land without chimneys, for two reasons: The climate is not cold enough to require fires, and if it was, the poor people would never be able to purchase wood. The little cooking that is done, is accomplished by little charcoal fires in braziers.

If all this country was a plateau, then my tale would not be told, but there can be no mountains without valleys, and it is these valleys that make Mexico one of the most delightful spots in this country. In the lovely valley of the noisy little San Juan River, rests the beautiful city of Monterey--“King Mountain.”

Situated at the foot of the Sierra Madres, surrounded by cloud-covered peaks, there seems to be not enough room for its seventy-five thousand inhabitants, as it first bursts upon the vision through the towering masts of Yucca palms. It is wedged between “La Silla,” Saddle Mountain, and “Las Mitras,” the Bishop’s Mitre; but this is only the first trick which this clear and illusive atmosphere plays upon the traveler from the lowlands.

The perspective seems unduly fore-shortened, and mountain peaks which are really twenty-five miles away, appear to be within an hour’s walk. After your law of optics has been restored, you discover that no prettier spot could have been chosen for a city than that for Monterey.

Founded three hundred and thirty-five years ago, upon an elevation 1700 feet above the sea, the seasons are so nearly alike that December is as pleasant as May.

In the western part of the city are the homes of the wealthy; beautiful houses in shaded gardens where tropical birds and flowers have their home, and where spraying fountains and living streams of water remind one of the tales of fairy-land. Just beyond these homes is the Bishop’s Palace, the last fortification to succumb to the American army of invasion when the city was taken. Around the palace are many cannon, some half-buried beneath the soil, and one with the unbelched shot still imbedded in its throat where, for fifty years it has lain in mute testimony of that unequal struggle which General Grant called “The most unholy war in all history.”

Across the valley, three miles as the crow flies, are the famous hot springs of Topo Chico, at the base of a mountain of black marble, which, in building material, shows a beautiful stripe of alabastine whiteness.

It was here the daughter of Montezuma and the élite of the Valley of Mexico came to bathe and chase dull care away, after the whirl of the court in the capital city of Tenochtitlan, long before the coming of the white man.

At a temperature of 106° F. the water bursts forth in a heroic stream that bears testimony of the intense fires that hurl it forth.

This reminds us that there is hardly a city in Mexico that has not its hot water baths, and it need not excite surprise, when three of the loftiest volcanoes in the world stand guard over the valley; Orizaba in the east and Popocatapetl and Ixtacihuatl in the south, the highest standing 17,782 feet above the sea.

The water of Topo Chico, after serving the baths, is carried through the valley in irrigating ditches. Leaving the horse-cars which brought us from the city, we are enticed across the beautiful meadows to a grove of palms and tropical flowers, and find ourselves at the lofty walls of an enclosure which at first gives the impression of a penitentiary, but which you afterwards learn is a “Campo Santo,” or cemetery.

We walk around the forbidding walls until we come to a massive iron gate, and through its opening we see a forest of wooden crosses which tell their own tale, but the sexton will tell another.

“A relic of by-gone days was he, And his hair was white as the foaming sea.”

He had dug a row of twenty-four graves, twenty-three of which were open, but the other was filled to the brim with bones and scraps of clothing taken from the others. A peep into these revealed cross-sections of leg-bones here, two ribs and a hand there, with a jawbone or a vertebra lying in the bottom. The sexton explained that a person may rest in peace for the period of five years, and if, after that time his relatives do not pay a tax on his grave, his resurrection day will come to make room for newer tenants and better renters.