Anahuac written by Edward Burnett Tylor

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On the 12th of December, the Anniversary of the Apparition is kept, and
an amazing concourse of the faithful repair to the sanctuary. Heller, a
German traveller who was in Mexico in 1846, saw an Indian taken to the
church; he had broken his leg, which had not even been set, and he
simply expected Our Lady to cure him without any human intervention at
all. Unluckily, the author had no opportunity of seeing what became of
him. The great miracle of all was the deliverance of Mexico from the
great inundation of 1626, and the fact is established thus. The city
was under water, the inhabitants in despair. The picture was brought to
the Cathedral in a canoe, through the streets of Mexico; and between
one and two years afterwards the inundation subsided. _Ergo_, it was
the picture that saved the city!

For centuries a fierce rivalry existed between the Spanish Virgin,
called "de Remedios," and Our Lady of Guadalupe; the Spaniards
supporting the first, and the native Mexicans the second. A note of
Humboldt's illustrates this feeling perfectly. He relates that whenever
the country was suffering from drought, the Virjen do Remedios was
carried into Mexico in procession, to bring rain, till it came to be
said, quite as a proverb, _Hasta el agua nos debe venir de la
Gachupina_--"We must get even our water from that Spanish creature." If
it happened that the Spanish Madonna produced no effect after a long
trial, the native Madonna was allowed to be brought solemnly in by the
Indians, and never failed in bringing the wished-for rain, which always
came sooner or later. It is remarkable that the Spanish party, who were
then all-powerful, should have allowed their own Madonna to be placed
at such a disadvantage, in not having the last innings. I need hardly
say that the shrine of Guadalupe is monstrously rich. The Chapter has
been known to lend such a thing as a million or two of dollars at a
time, though most of their property is invested on landed security.
They are allowed to have lotteries, and make something handsome out of
them; and they even sell medals and prints of their patroness, which
have great powers. You may have plenary indulgence in the hour of death
for sixpence or less. We drank of the water of the chalybeate spring,
bought sacred lottery-tickets, which turned out blanks, and tickets for
indulgences, which, I greatly fear, will not prove more valuable; and
so rode home along the dusty causeway to breakfast.

As means of learning what sort of books the poorer classes in Mexico
preferred, we overhauled with great diligence the book-stalls, of which
there are a few, especially under the arcades (Portales) near the great
square. The Mexican public have not much cheap literature to read; and
the scanty list of such popular works is half filled with Our Lady of
Guadalupe, and other miracle-books of the same kind. Father Ripalda's
Catechism has a large circulation, and is apparently the one in general
use in the country. Zavala speaks of this catechism as containing the
maxims of blind obedience to king and pope; but my more modern edition
has scarcely anything to say about the Pope, and nothing at all about
the government. Of late years, indeed, the Pope has not counted for
much, politically, in Mexico; and on one occasion his Holiness found,
when he tried to interfere about church-benefices, that his authority
was rather nominal than real. On the whole, nothing in the Catechism
struck me so much as the multiplication-table, which, to my unspeakable
astonishment, turned up in the middle of the book; a table of fractions
followed; and then it began again with the Holy Trinity.

To continue our catalogue; there are the almanacks, which contain rules
for foretelling the weather by the moon's quarters, but none of the
other fooleries which we find in those that circulate in England among
the less educated classes. It is curious to notice how the taste for
putting sonnets and other dreary poems at the beginnings and ends of
books has survived in these Spanish countries. What used to be known in
England as "a copy of verses" is still appreciated here, and almanacks,
newspapers, religious books, even programmes of plays and bull-fights,
are full of such dismal compositions. We ought to be thankful that the
fashion has long since gone out with us (except in the religions tract,
where it still survives). It is not merely apropos of sonnets, but of
thousands of other things, that in these countries one is brought, in a
manner, face to face with England as it used to be; and very trifling
matters become interesting when viewed in this light. The last item in
the list comprises translations, principally of French novels, those
being preferred in which the agony is "piled up" to the highest point.
German literature is represented by the "Sorrows of Werter." Of course,
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" is widely circulated here, as it is everywhere in
countries not given to the "particular vanity" attacked in it.

One need hardly say that both literature and education are at a very
low ebb in Mexico. Referring to Tejada again, I find that he reckons
that in the capital, out of a population of 185,000, there are 12,000
scholars at primary schools; but of course, as in other countries, a
large proportion of these children attend so irregularly that they can
hardly learn anything. For the country generally, he estimates one
child receiving instruction out of thirty-seven inhabitants, a very
significant piece of statistics. Efforts are being made, especially in
the capital, to raise the population out of this state. Mr. Christy
took much trouble in investigating the subject, with the assistance of
our friend Don Jose Miguel Cervantes, the head of the Ayuntamiento, or
Municipal Council. This gentleman, with a few others, has been doing
much up-hill work of this kind for years past, establishing schools,
and trying to make head against the opposition of the priests and the
indifference of the people, as yet with but small success.

It seems hard to be always attacking the Roman Catholic clergy, but of
one thing we cannot remain in doubt,--that their influence has had more
to do than anything else with the doleful ignorance which reigns
supreme in Mexico. For centuries they had the education of the country
in their hands, and even at this day they retain the greater share of
it. The training which the priests themselves receive will therefore
give one some idea of what they teach their scholars. Unluckily, their
course of instruction was stereotyped ages ago, when learned men
devoted themselves to writing huge books on divinity, casuistry, logic,
and metaphysics; concealing their ignorance of facts under an
affectation of wisdom and clouds of long words; demonstrating how many
millions of angels could dance on a needle's point; writing treatises
"_de omni re scibili_," and on a good many things unknowable also; and
teaching their admiring scholars the art of building up sham arguments
on any subject, whether they know anything about it or not. This is a
very vicious system of training for a man's mind, the more especially
when it is supposed to set him up with a stock of superior knowledge;
and this is what the Roman Catholic clergy have been learning,
generation after generation, in Mexico and elsewhere. Of course, there
are plenty of exceptions, particularly among the higher clergy; but, so
far as I have been able to ascertain, education in clerical schools has
generally been of this kind. It is instinctive to talk a little, as one
occasionally finds an opportunity of doing, to some youth just out of
these colleges. I recollect speaking to a young man who had just left
the Seminario of Mexico, where he had been through a long course of
theology and philosophy. He was astonished to hear that bull-fighting
and colearing were not universally practised in Europe; and, when his
father began to question me about the Crimean war, the young
gentleman's remarks showed that he had not the faintest idea where
England and France were, nor how far they were from one another.

I happened, not long ago, to visit a celebrated monastic college in
South Italy, where they educated, not ordinary mortals, but only young
men of noble birth; and here I took particular care in inspecting the
library, judging that, though the scholars need not learn all that was
there, yet that no department of knowledge would be taught there that
was not represented on the library-shelves. What I saw fully confirmed
all that I had previously seen and heard about the monastic learning of
the present day. There were to be seen many fine manuscripts, and
black-letter books, and curious old editions of great value, good store
of classics (mostly Latin, however), works of the Fathers by the
hundred-weight, and quartos and folios of canon-law, theology,
metaphysics, and such like, by the ton. But it seemed that, in the
estimation of the librarians, the world had stood still since the time
of Duns Scotus; for, of what we call positive knowledge, except a
little arithmetic and geometry, and a few very poor histories, I saw
nothing. It is easy to see how one result of the clerical monopoly of
education has therefore come about--that the intellectual standard is
very low in Mexico. The Holy Office, too, has had its word to say in
the matter. This institution had not much work to do in burning
Indians, who were anything but sceptical in their turn of mind, and,
indeed, were too much like Theodore Hook, and would believe "forty, if
you pleased." They even went further, and were apt to believe not only
what the missionaries taught them, but to cherish the memory of their
old gods into the bargain. It was three centuries after the Conquest,
that Mr. Bullock got the goddess Teoyaomiqui dug up in Mexico; and the
old Indian remarked to him that it was true the Spaniards had given
them three very good new gods, but it was rather hard to take away all
their old ones. At any rate, the functions of the Inquisition were
mostly confined to working the _Index Expurgatorius_, and suppressing
knowledge generally, which they did with great industry until not long
ago.

Here, then, are two causes of Mexican ignorance, and a third may be
this; that Mexico was a colony to which the Spaniards generally came to
make their fortunes, with a view of returning to their own land; and
this state of things was unfavourable to the country as regards the
progress of knowledge, as well as in other things.

CHAPTER VI.

TEZCUCO.

Across the lake of Tezcuco is Tezcuco itself, a great city and the
capital of a kingdom at the time of the Conquest, and famous for its
palaces and its learned men. Now it is an insignificant Spanish town,
built, indeed, to a great extent, of the stones of the old buildings.
Mr. Bowring, who has evaporating-works at the edge of the lake, and
lives in the "Casa Grande"--the Great House, just outside Tezcuco, has
invited us to pay him a visit; so we get up early one April morning,
and drive down to the street of the Solitude of Holy Cross (Calle de la
Soledad de Santa Cruz). There we find Mr. Millard, a Frenchman, who is
an _employe_ of Mr. Bowling's, and is going back to Tezcuco with us;
and we walk down to the canal with him, half a dozen Indian porters
with baskets following us, and trotting along in the queer shuffling
way that is habitual to them. At the landing-place we find a number of
canoes, and a crowd of Indians, men and women, in scanty cotton
garments which show the dirt in an unpleasant manner. A canoe is going
to Tezcuco, a sort of regular packet-boat, in fact; and of this canoe
Mr. Millard has retained for us three the stern half, over which is
stretched an awning of aloe-fibre cloth. The canoe itself is merely a
large shallow box, made of rough planks, with sloping prow and stern,
more like a bread-tray in shape than anything else I can think of.
There is no attempt at making the bows taper, and indeed the Indians
stoutly resist this or any other innovation. In the fore part of the
canoe there is already a heap of other passengers, lying like bait in a
box, and when we arrive the voyage begins.

The crew are ten in number; the captain, eight men, and an old woman in
charge of the tortillas and the pulque-jar. All these are brown people;
in fact, the navigation of the lakes is entirely in the hands of the
Indians, and "reasonable people" have nothing to do with it. Reasonable
people--"gente de razon"--being, as I have said before, those who have
any white blood in them; and republican institutions have not in the
least effaced the distinction.

So it comes to pass that the canoe-traffic is carried on in much the
same way as it was in Montezuma's time. There is one curious
difference, however. These canoes are all poled about the lakes and
canals; and I do not think we saw an Indian oar or paddle in the whole
valley of Mexico. In the ancient picture-writings, however, the Indians
are paddling their canoes with a kind of oar, shaped at the end like
one of our fire-shovels. But, as we have seen, the distribution of land
and water has altered since those days; and the lakes, far greater in
extent, were of course several feet deeper all over the present beds;
and even at a short distance from the city poling would have been
impossible. I suspect that the Aztecs originally used both poles and
paddles, and that the latter went out of use when the water became
shallow enough for the pole to serve all purposes. Otherwise, we must
suppose that the Mexicans, since the Spanish Conquest, introduced a new
invention; which is not easy to believe.

We had first to get out of the canal, and fairly out into the lake.
This was the more desirable, as the canal is one of the drains of the
city, an office that it fills badly enough, seeing that there is
scarcely any fall of water from the lower quarters of the city to the
lake. I never saw water-snakes in numbers to compare with those in the
canal, and by the side of it. They were swimming in the water,
wriggling in and out; and on the banks they were writhing in heaps,
like our passengers forward. Two of our crew tow us along, and we are
soon clear of the canal, and of the salt-swamp that extends on both
sides of it, where the bottom of the lake was in old times. Once fairly
out, we look round us. We see Mexico from a new point of view, and
begin to understand why the Spaniards called it the Venice of the New
World. Even now, though the lake is so much smaller than it was then,
the city, with its domes and battlemented roofs, seems to rise from the
water itself, for the intervening flat is soon foreshortened into
nothing. At the present moment it is evident that the level of the lake
is much higher than usual. A little way off, on our right, is the Penon
de los Banos--"the rock of baths"--a porphyritic hill forced up by
volcanic agency, where there are hot springs. It is generally possible
to reach this hill by land, but the water is now so high that the rock
has become an island as it used to be.

When the first two brigantines were launched on the Lake of Tezcuco by
the Spaniards, Cortes took Montezuma with him to sail upon the lake,
soon leaving the Aztec canoes far behind. They went to a Penon or rocky
hill where Montezuma preserved game for his own hunting, and not even
the highest nobility were allowed to hunt there on pain of death. The
Spaniards had a regular battue there; killing deer, hares, and rabbits
till they were tired. This Penon may have been the Penon de los Banos
which we are just passing, but was more probably a similar hill a
little further off, of larger extent, now fortified and known as El
Penon, the Hill. Both were in those days complete islands at some
distance from the shore.

Now that we are out of the canal, our Indians begin to pole us along,
thrusting their long poles to the bottom of the shallow lake, and
walking on two narrow planks which extend along the sides of the canoe
from the prow to the middle point. Four walk on each plank, each man
throwing up his pole as he gets to the end, and running back up the
middle to begin again at the prow. The dexterity with which they swing
the poles about, and keep them out of each other's way, is wonderful;
and, as seen from our end of the canoe, looks like a kind of
exaggerated quarter-staff playing, only nobody is ever hit.

The great peculiarity of the lake of Tezcuco is that it is a salt lake,
containing much salt and carbonate of soda. The water is quite brackish
and undrinkable. How it has come to be so is plain enough. The streams
from the surrounding mountains bring down salt and soda in solution,
derived from the decomposed porphyry; and as the water of the lake is
not drained off into the sea, but evaporates, the solid constituents
are left to accumulate in the lake.

In England, I think, we have no example of this; but the Dead Sea, the
Caspian, the Great Salt Lake of Utah, and even the Mediterranean, have
various salts accumulated in solution in the same way. It seems to me,
that, by taking into account the proportion of soluble material
contained in the water that flows down from the mountains, the probable
quantity of water that flows down in the year, and the proportion of
salt in the lake itself, some vague guess might be made as to the time
this state of things has been lasting. I have no data, unfortunately,
even for such a rough calculation as this, or I should like to try it.

In spite of the splendid climate, a great portion of the Valley of
Mexico is anything but fertile; for the soil is impregnated with salt
and soda, which in many places are so abundant as to form, when the
water evaporates, a white efflorescence on the ground, which is called
_tequesquite_, and regularly collected by the Indians. Some of it is
stopped on its way down from the higher ground, by the evaporation of
the water that was carrying it; and some is left by the lake itself, in
its frequent floodings of the ground in its neighbourhood. So small is
the difference of level between the lake and the plain that surrounds
it, that the slightest rise in the height of the water makes an immense
difference in the size of the lake; and even a strong wind will drive
the water over great tracts of ground, from which it retires when the
gale ceases. It must have been this, or something similar, that set
Cortes upon writing home to Spain that the lakes were like inland seas,
and even had tides like the ocean. Of course, this impregnation with
salts is ruinous to the soil, which will produce nothing in such places
but tufts of coarse grass; and the shores of the lake are the most
dismal districts one can imagine. All the lakes, however, are not so
salt as Tezcuco; Chalco, for instance, is a fresh-water lake, and there
the fertility of the shores is very great, as I have already had
occasion to notice.

As soon as the novelty of this kind of travelling had worn off, we
began to find it dull, and retired under our awning to breakfast and
bitter beer; which latter luxury, thanks to a suitable climate and an
English brewer, is very well understood in Mexico, and is even accepted
as a great institution by the Mexicans themselves.

We were just getting into a drowsy state, when an unusual bustle among
the crew brought us out of our den, and we found that three hours of
assiduous poling had taken us half-way across the lake, just six
miles--a good test of the value of the Aztec system of navigation. Here
was a wooden cross set up in the water; and here, from time out of
mind, the boatmen have been used to sing a little hymn to the Madonna,
by whose favour we had got so far, and hoped to get safe to the end of
our voyage. Very well they sang it too, and the scene was as striking
as it was unexpected to us. It seemed to us, however, to be making a
great matter of crossing a piece of water only a few feet deep; but Mr.
Millard assured us, that when a sudden gale came on, it was a
particularly unpleasant place to be afloat in a Mexican canoe, which,
being flat-bottomed, has no hold at all on the water, and from its
shape is quite unmanageable in a wind. He himself was once caught in
this way, and kept out all night, with a "heavy sea" on the lake, the
boat drifting helplessly, and threatening to overturn every moment, and
that in places where the water was quite deep enough to drown them all.
The Indians lost their heads entirely, and throwing down their poles
fell on their knees, and joined in the chorus with the women and
children and the rest of the helpless brown people, beating their
breasts, and presenting medals and prints of our Lady of Guadalupe to
each wave as it dashed into them. The wind dropped, however, and Mr.
Millard got safe to Tezcuco next morning; but, instead of receiving
sympathy for his misfortunes when he got there, found that the idea of
a tempest on the lake was reckoned a mere joke, and that the
drawing-room of the Casa Grande had been decorated with a fancy
portrait of himself, hanging to the half-way cross, with his legs in
the water, and underneath, a poetical description of his sufferings to
the tune of "_Malbrouke s'en va-t-en guerre, ne sais quand reviendra_."

More poling across the lake, and then another little canal, also
constructed since the diminishing of the water of the lake (which once
came close to the city), and along which our Indians towed us. Then
came a short ride, which brought us to the Casa Grande, where Mrs.
Bowring received us with overflowing hospitality. We went off presently
into the town, to see the glassworks. In a country where all things
imported have to be carried in rough waggons, or on mules' backs, and
over bad roads, it would be hard if it did not pay to make glass; and,
accordingly, we found the works in full operation. The soda is produced
at Mr. Bowling's works close by, the fuel is charcoal from the
mountains, and for sand they have a substitute, which I never heard of
or saw anywhere else. It seems that a short distance from Tezcuco there
is a deposit of hydrated silica, which is brought down in great blocks
by the Indians; and this, when calcined, answers the purpose perfectly,
as there is scarcely any iron in it. In its natural state it resembles
beeswax in colour.

It is worth while to describe the Casa Grande, which is strikingly
different from our European notions of the "great house" of the
village. As we enter by the gate, we find ourselves in a patio--an open
quadrangle surrounded by a covered walk--a cloister in fact, into which
open the rooms inhabited by the family. The second quadrangle, which
opens into the first, is devoted to stables, kitchen, &c. The outer
wall which surrounds the whole is very thick, and the entire building
is built of mud bricks baked in the sun, and has no upper storey at
all. It is a Pompeian house on a large scale, and suits the climate
perfectly. The Aztec palaces we read so much of were built in just the
same way. The roofs slope inwards from the sides of the quadrangle, and
drain into the open space in the middle. One afternoon, a tremendous
tropical rain-storm showed us how necessary it was to have the covered
walk round the quadrangle raised considerably above this open square in
the middle, which a few minutes of such rain converted into a pond.

As for ourselves, we spent many very pleasant days at the Casa Grande,
and thoroughly approved of the arrangement of the house, except that
the four corners of the patio were provokingly alike, and the doors of
the rooms also, so that we were as much bothered as the captain of the
forty thieves to find our own doors, or any door except Mr. Millard's,
whose name was indicated--with more regard to pronunciation than
spelling--with a 1 and nine 0's chalked on it.

In spite of a late evening spent in very pleasant society, we were up
early next morning, ready for an excursion to the Pyramids of
Teotihuacan, some sixteen miles off, or so, under the guidance of one
of Mr. Bowring's men. The road lies through the plain, between great
plantations of magueys, for this is the most renowned district in the
Republic for the size of its aloes, and the quality of the pulque that
is made from them. We stopped sometimes to examine a particularly large
specimen, which might measure 30 feet round, and to see the juice,
which had collected in the night, drawn out of the great hollow that
had been cut to receive it, in the heart of the plant. The Indians have
a great fancy for making crosses, and the aloe lends itself
particularly to this kind of decoration. They have only to cut off six
or eight inches of one leaf, and impale the piece on the sharp point of
another, and the cross is made. Every good-sized aloe has two or three
of these primitive religious emblems upon it.

Several little torrent-beds crossed the road, and over them were thrown
old-fashioned Spanish stone bridges, as steep as the Rialto, or the
bridge on the willow-patterned plates.

Before going to see the pyramids, we visited the caves in the hill-side
not far from them, whence the stone was brought to build them. It is
_tetzontli_, the porous amygdaloid which abounds among the porphyritic
hills, a beautiful building-stone, easily worked, and durable. There
was a large space that seemed to have been quarried out bodily, and
into this opened numerous caves. We left our horses at the entrance,
and spent an hour or two in hunting the place over. The ground was
covered with pieces of obsidian knives and arrow-heads, and fragments
of what seemed to have been larger tools or weapons; and we found
numbers of hammer-heads, large and small, mostly made of greenstone,
some whole, but most broken.

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