Anahuac written by Edward Burnett Tylor

E >> Edward Burnett Tylor >> Anahuac

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26

We left the natives to their amusement, and started on our twenty miles
ride. By the time the evening had fairly begun to close in upon us, we
crossed the crest of a hill and had a dim view of a valley below us,
but there were no signs of Chalma or its convent. We let our horses
find their way as well as they could along the rocky path, and got down
into the valley. A light behind us made us turn round, and we saw a
grand sight. The coarse grass on a large hill further down the valley
had been set fire to, and a broad band of flame stretched right across
the base of the hill, and was slowly moving upwards towards its top,
throwing a lurid glare over the surrounding country, and upon the
clouds of smoke that were rising from the flames. Every now and then we
turned to watch the line of fire as it rose higher and higher, till at
last it closed in together at the summit with one final blaze, and left
us in the darkness. We dismounted and stumbled along, leading our
horses down the precipitous sides of the deep ravines that run into the
valley, mounting again to cross the streams at the bottom, and
clambering up on the other side to the level of the road. At last a
turn in the valley showed lights just before us, and we entered the
village of Chalma, which was illuminated with flaring oil-lamps in the
streets, where men were hard at work setting up stalls and booths of
planks. It seemed there was to be a fair next day.

They showed us the way to the _meson_[16] and there we left Antonio
with the horses, while the proprietor sent an idiot boy to show us the
way to the convent, for our inspection of the meson decided us at once
on seeking the hospitality of the monks for the night. We climbed up
the hill, went in at the convent-gate, across a courtyard, along a dim
cloister, and through another door where our guide made his way out by
a different opening, leaving us standing in total darkness. After a
time another door opened, and a good-natured-looking friar came in with
a lamp in his hand, and conducted us upstairs to his cell. I think our
friend was the sub-prior of the convent. His cell was a very comfortable
bachelor's apartment, in a plain way, vaulted and whitewashed, with good
chairs and a table and a very comfortable-looking bed.

We sat talking with him for a long while, and heard that the fair next
day would be attended by numbers of Indians from remote places among
the mountains, and that at noon there would be an Indian dance in the
church. It is not the great festival, however, he said. That is once a
year; and then the Indians come from fifty miles round, and stay here
several days, living in the caves in the rock just by the town, buying
and selling in the fair, attending mass, and having solemn dances in
the church. We asked him about the ill feeling between the Indians and
the whites. He said that among the planters it might be as we said, but
that in the neighbourhood of his convent the respect and affection of
the Indians for the clergy, whether white or Indian, was as great as
ever. Then we gossipped about horses, of which our friend was evidently
an amateur, and when the conversation flagged, he turned to the table
in the middle of the room and handed us little bowls made of
calabashes, prettily decorated and carved, and full of sweetmeats.
There were ten or twelve of these little bowls on the table, each with
a different kind of "tuck" in it. We inquired where all those good
things came from, and learnt that making them was one of the favourite
occupations of the Mexican nuns, who keep their brethren in the
monasteries well supplied. At last the good monk went away to his
duties and left us, when I could not resist the temptation of having a
look at the little books in blue and green paper covers which were
lying on the table with the sweetmeat-bowls and the venerable old
missal. They proved to be all French novels done into Spanish, and
"Notre-Dame de Paris" was lying open (under a sheet of paper); so I
conclude that our visit had interrupted the sub-prior while deep in
that improving work.

Presently a monk came to conduct us down into the refectory, and there
they gave us an uncommonly good supper of wonderful Mexican stews,
red-hot as usual, and plenty of good Spanish wine withal. The great
dignitaries of the cloister did not appear, but some fifteen or twenty
monks were at table with us, and never tired of questioning us--exactly
in the same fashion that the ladies of the harem questioned Dona Juana.
We delighted them with stories of the miraculous Easter fire at
Jerusalem, and the illumination of St. Peter's, of the Sistine chapel
and the Pope, and we parted for the night in high good humour.

Next morning a monk attached himself to us as our cicerone, a fine
young fellow with a handsome face, and no end of fun in him.

Now that we saw the convent by daylight, we were delighted with the
beauty of its situation. The broad fertile valley grows narrower and
narrower until it becomes a gorge in the mountains; and here the
convent is built, with the mountain-stream running through its
beautiful gardens, and turning the wheel of the convent-mill before it
flows on into the plain to fertilize the broad lands of the reverend
fathers.

When we had visited the gardens and the stables, our young monk brought
us back to the great church of the convent, where we took our places
near the monks, who had mustered in full force to be present at the
dancing. Presently the music arrived, an old man with a harp, and a
woman with a violin; and then came the dancers, eight Indian boys with
short tunics and head-dresses of feathers, and as many girls with white
dresses, and garlands of flowers on their heads. The costumes were
evidently intended to represent the Indian dresses of the days of
Montezuma, but they were rather modernized by the necessity of wearing
various articles of dress which would have been superfluous in old
times. They stationed themselves in the middle of the church, opposite
the high altar, and, to our unspeakable astonishment, began to dance
the polka. Then came a waltz, then a schottisch, then another waltz,
and finally a quadrille, set to unmitigated English tunes. They danced
exceedingly well, and behaved as though they had been used to European
ball-rooms all their lives. The spectators looked on as though it were
all a matter of course for these brown-skinned boys and girls to have
acquired so singular an accomplishment in their out-of-the-way village
among the mountains. As for us we looked on in open-mouthed
astonishment; and when, in the middle of the quadrille, the harp and
violin struck up no less a tune than "The King of the Cannibal
Islands," we could hardly help bursting out into fits of laughter. We
restrained ourselves, however, and kept as grave a countenance as the
rest of the lookers-on, who had not the faintest idea that anything odd
was happening. The quadrille finished in perfect order; each dancer
took his partner by the hand and led her forward; and so, forming a
line in front of the high altar, they all knelt down, and the rest of
the congregation followed their example; there was a dead silence in
the church for about the space of an Ave Maria, then everyone rose, and
the ceremony was over.[17]

Our young monk asked permission of his superior to take us out for a
walk, and we went down together to the convent-mill. There we saw the
mill, which was primitive, and the miller, who was burly; and also
something much more worth seeing, at least to our young acquaintance,
who tucked up his skirts and ran briskly up a ladder into the upper
regions, calling to us to follow him. A door led from the granary into
the miller's house, and the miller's daughter happened, of course
entirely by chance, to be coming through that way. A very pretty girl
she was too, and I never in my life saw anything more intensely comic
than the looks of intelligence that passed between her and the young
friar when he presented us. It was decidedly contrary to good monastic
discipline it is true, and we ought to have been shocked, but it was so
intolerably laughable that my companion bolted into the granary to
examine the wheat, and I took refuge in a violent fit of coughing. Our
nerves had been already rudely shaken by the King of the Cannibal
Islands, and this little scene of convent-life fairly finished us.

We asked our young friend what his day's work consisted of, and how he
liked convent-life. He yawned, and intimated that it was very slow. We
enquired whether the monks had not some parochial duties to perform,
such as visiting the sick and the poor in their neighbourhood. He
evidently wondered whether we were really ignorant, or whether we were
"chaffing" him, and observed that that was no business of their's, the
curas of the villages did all that sort of thing. "Then, what have you
to do?" we said. "Well," he said, "there are so many services every
day, and high mass on Sundays and holidays; and besides that,
there's--well, there isn't anything particular. It's rather a dull
life. I myself should like uncommonly to go and travel and see the
world, or go and fight somewhere." We were quite sorry for the young
fellow when we shook hands with him at parting, and he left us to go
back to his convent.

We had been clambering about the hill, seeing the caves with which it
is honeycombed, but at present they were uninhabited. At the time of
the great festival, when they are full of Indian families, the scene
must be a curious one.

The monks had hospitably pressed us to stay till their mid-day meal,
but we preferred having it at the shop down in the village, so as to
start directly afterwards. Here the people gave us a regular reception,
entertained us with their best, and could not be prevailed upon to
accept any payment whatever. The proprietor of the meson sat down
before the barley-bin which served him for a desk, and indited a long
and eloquent letter of introduction for us to a friend of his in
Oculan, who was to find a night's lodging for us. Before he sealed up
the despatch he read it to us in a loud voice, sentence by sentence. It
might have been an autograph letter from King Philip to some foreign
potentate. Armed with this important missive, we mounted our horses,
shook hands with no end of well-wishers, and rode off up the valley.

For a little while our path lay through a sort of suburb of Chalma,
houses lying near one another, each surrounded by a pleasant garden,
and both houses and people looking prosperous and cheerful. Our
directions for finding the way were simple enough. We were to go up the
valley past the Cerra de los Atambores, "the hill of drums," and the
great _ahuehuete_. What the Cerra de los Atambores might be, we could
not tell, but when we had followed the valley for an hour or so, it
came into view. On the other side of the stream rose a precipitous
cliff, several hundred feet high, and near the top a perpendicular wall
of rock was carved with rude designs. People have supposed, it seems,
that these carvings represented drums, and hence the name.

Had we known of the place before, we should have made an effort to
explore it, and copy the sculptured designs; but now it was too late,
and from the other side of the valley we could not make out more than
that there seemed to be a figure of the sun among them.

A little further on we came to the "Ahuehuete." The name means a
deciduous cypress, a common tree in Mexico, and of which we had already
seen such splendid specimens in the grove near Tezcuco, and in the wood
of Chapoltepec. This was a remarkable tree as to size, some sixty feet
round at the lower part where the roots began to spread out. A copious
spring of water rose within the hollow trunk itself, and ran down
between the roots into the little river. All over its spreading
branches were fastened votive offerings of the Indians, hundreds of
locks of coarse black hair, teeth, bits of coloured cloth, rags, and
morsels of ribbon. The tree was many centuries old, and had probably
had some mysterious influence ascribed to it, and been decorated with
such simple offerings long before the discovery of America. In Brittany
the peasants still keep up the custom of hanging up locks of their hair
in certain chapels, to charm away diseases; and there it is certain
that the Christians only appropriated to their own worship places
already held sacred in the estimation of the people.

Oculan is a dismal little place. We found the great man of the village
standing at his door, but our letter to him was dishonoured in the most
decided manner. He read the epistle, carefully folded it up and
pocketed it, then pointed in the direction of two or three houses on
the other side of the way, and saying he supposed we might get a
lodging over there, he wished us good-day and retired into his own
premises. The landlord of "over there" was very civil. He had a shed
for the horses, and could give us palm-mats to sleep upon on the floor,
or on the shop-counter, which was very narrow, but long enough for us
both; and this latter alternative we chose.

We walked up to the top of a hill close by the village, and were
surveying the country from thence, keeping a sharp look-out all the
while for Mexican remains in the furrows. For a wonder, we found
nothing but some broken spindle-heads; but, while we were thus
occupied, two Indians suddenly made their appearance, each with his
_machete_ in his hands, and wanted to know what we were doing on their
land. We pacified them by politeness and a cigar apiece, but we were
still evidently objects of suspicion, and they were quite relieved to
see us return to the village. There, an old woman cooked us hard-boiled
eggs and tortillas, and then we went tranquilly to bed on our counter,
with our saddles for pillows, and our serapes for bed-clothes.

All the way from Cocoyotla our height above the sea had been gradually
increasing; and soon after we started from Oculan next morning, we came
to the foot of one of the grand passes that lead up into the high
lands, where the road mounts by zig-zag turns through a splendid forest
of pines and oaks, and at the top of the ascent we were in a broad
fertile plain as high or higher than the valley of Mexico. It was like
England to ride between large fields of wheat and barley, and to pick
blackberries in the hedges. It was only April, and yet the grain was
almost ready for the sickle, and the blackberries were fully ripe.
Fresh green grass was growing in the woods under the oak-trees, and the
banks were covered with Alpine strawberries.

We are in the great grain-district of the Republic. Wheat is grown for
the supply of the large towns, and barley for the horses. Green barley
is the favourite fodder for the horses in the Mexican highlands, and in
the hotter districts the leaves of young Indian corn. Oats are to be
seen growing by chance among other grain, but they are never
cultivated. Though wheat is so much grown upon the plains, it is not
because the soil and climate are more favourable than elsewhere for
such culture. In the plains of Toluca and Tenancingo the yield of wheat
is less than the average of the Republic, which is from 25- to 30-fold,
and in the cloudy valleys we passed through near Orizaba it is much
greater. Labour is tolerably cheap and plentiful here, however; and
then each large town must draw its supplies of grain from the
neighbouring districts, for, in a country where it pays to carry goods
on mules' backs, it is clear that grain cannot be carried far to
market.

In the question of the population of Mexico, one begins to speculate
why--in a country with a splendid climate, a fertile soil, and almost
unlimited space to spread in, the inhabitants do not increase one-half
so fast as in England, and about one-sixth as fast as their neighbours
of the United States. One of the most important causes which tend to
bring about this state of things is the impossibility of conveying
grain to any distance, except by doubling and trebling its price. The
disastrous effects of a failure of the crop in one district cannot be
remedied by a plentiful harvest fifty miles off; for the peasants,
already ruined by the loss of their own harvest, can find neither money
nor credit to buy food brought from a distance at so great an expense.
Next year may be fruitful again, but numbers die in the interval, and
the constitutions of a great proportion of the children never recover
the effects of that one year's famine.

We left the regular road and struck up still higher into the hills,
riding amongst winding roads with forest above and below us, and great
orchids of the most brilliant colours, blue, white, and crimson,
shining among the branches of the oak-trees. The boughs were often
breaking down with the bulbs of such epiphytes; but as yet it was early
in the season, and only here and there one was in flower. At the top of
the hill, still in the midst of the woods, is the Desierto, "the
desert," the place we had selected for our noon-day halt. There are
many of these Desiertos in Mexico, founded by rich people in old times.
They are a kind of convent, with some few resident ecclesiastics, and
numbers of cells for laymen who retire for a time into this secluded
place and are received gratuitously. They spend a week or two in prayer
and fasting, then confess themselves, receive the sacrament, and return
into the world. The situation of this quiet place was well chosen in
the midst of the forest, and once upon a time the cells used to be full
of penitents; but now we saw no one but the old porter, as we walked
about the gardens and explored the quadrangle and the rows of cells,
each with a hideous little wood-cut of a martyr being tortured, upon
the door.

Thence we rode down into the plain, looking down, as we descended, upon
a hill which seemed to be an old crater, rising from the level ground;
and then our path lay among broad fields where oxen were ploughing, and
across marshes covered with coarse grass, until we came to the quaint
little town of Tenancingo. There we found the _meson_; and the landlord
handed us the key of our room, which was square, whitewashed, and with
a tiled floor. There was no window, so we had to keep the door open for
light. The furniture consisted of three articles,--two low tables on
four legs, made of rough planks, and a bracket to stick a candle in.
The tables were beds after the manner of the country; but, as a special
attention to us, the patron produced two old mattresses; the first
sight of them was enough for us, and we expelled them with shouts of
execration. We had to go to a shop in the square to get some supper;
and on our return, about nine o'clock, our man Antonio remarked that he
was going to sleep, which he did at once in the following manner. He
took off his broad-brimmed hat and hung it on a nail, tied a red cotton
handkerchief round his head, rolled himself up in his serape, lay down
on the flags in the courtyard outside our door, and was asleep in an
instant. We retired to our planks inside and followed his example.

The next afternoon we reached Toluca, a large and prosperous town, but
with little noticeable in it except the arcades (portales) along the
streets, and the hams which are cured with sugar, and are famous all
over the Republic. Our road passed near the Nevado de Toluca, an
extinct snow-covered volcano, nearly 15,000 feet above the sea. It
consists entirely of grey and red porphyry, and in the interior of its
crater are two small lakes. We were not sorry to take up our quarters
in a comfortable European-looking hotel again, for roughing it is much
less pleasant in these high altitudes--where the nights and mornings
are bitterly cold--than in the hotter climate of the lower levels.

Our next day's ride brought us back to Mexico, crossing the corn-land
of the plain of Lerma, where the soil consists of disintegrated
porphyry from the mountains around, and is very fertile. Lerma itself
is the worst den of robbers in all Mexico; and, as we rode through the
street of dingy adobe houses, and saw the rascally-looking fellows who
were standing at the doors in knots, with their horses ready saddled
and bridled close by, we got a very strong impression that the
reputation of the place was no worse than it deserved. After Lerma,
there still remained the pass over the mountains which border the
valley of Mexico; and here in the midst of a dense pine-forest is Las
Cruzes, "the crosses," a place with an ugly name, where several
robberies are done every week. We waited for the Diligence at some
little glass-works at the entrance of the pass, and then let it go on
first, as a sop to those gentlemen if they should be out that day. I
suppose they knew pretty accurately that no one had much to lose, for
they never made their appearance.

[Illustration: SPANISH-MEXICAN SPURS. _From 5 to 6 inches long, with
rowels from 2-1/2 to 3 inches in diameter. The broad instep-strap of
embossed leather is also shewn. (From Mr. Christy's Collection)_]

CHAPTER IX.

ANTIQUITIES. PRISON. SPORTS.

[Illustration: STATUE OF THE MEXICAN GODDESS OF WAR (OR OF DEATH),
TEOYAOMIQUI. _(After Nebel). Height of the original, about Nine Feet_.]

It was like getting home again to reach Mexico, we had so many friends
there, though our stay had been so short. We were fully occupied, for
weeks of hard sight-seeing are hardly enough to investigate the objects
of interest to be found in the city. We saw these things under the best
auspices, for Mr. Christy had letters to the Minister of Public
Instruction and other people in authority, who were exceedingly civil,
and did all they could to put us in the way of seeing everything we
wished. Among the places we visited, the Museum must have some notice.
It is in part of the building of the University; but we were rather
surprised, when we reached the gate leading into the court-yard, to be
stopped by a sentry who demanded what we wanted. The lower storey had
been turned into a barrack by the Government, there being a want of
quarters for the soldiers. As the ground-floor under the cloisters is
used for the heavier pieces of sculpture, the scene was somewhat
curious. The soldiers had laid several of the smaller idols down on
their faces, and were sitting on the comfortable seat on the small of
their backs, busy playing at cards. An enterprising soldier had built
up a hutch with idols and sculptured stones against the statue of the
great war-goddess Teoyaomiqui herself, and kept rabbits there. The
state which the whole place was in when thus left to the tender mercies
of a Mexican regiment may be imagined by any one who knows what a dirty
and destructive animal a Mexican soldier is.

The guardians of the Museum have treated it even worse. People who know
how often the curators of the Museums of southern Europe are ready to
sell anything not very likely to be missed will not be astonished to
hear of the same thing being done to a great extent some six or eight
years before our visit.

The stone known as the statue of the war-goddess is a huge block of
basalt covered with sculptures. The antiquaries think that the figures
on it stand for different personages, and that it is three
gods,--Huitzilopochtli the god of war, Teoyaomiqui his wife, and
Mictlanteuctli the god of hell. It has necklaces of alternate hearts
and dead man's hands, with death's heads for a central ornament. At the
bottom of the block is a strange sprawling figure, which one cannot see
now, for it is the base which rests on the ground; but there are two
shoulders projecting from the idol, which show plainly that it did not
stand on the ground, but was supported aloft on the tops of two
pillars. The figure carved upon the bottom represents a monster holding
a skull in each hand, while others hang from his knees and elbows. His
mouth is a mere oval ring, a common feature of Mexican idols, and four
tusks project just above it. The new moon laid down like a bridge forms
his forehead, and a star is placed on each side of it. This is thought
to have been the conventional representation of Mictlanteuctli (Lord of
the Land of the Dead), the god of hell, which was a place of utter and
eternal darkness. Probably each victim as he was led to the altar could
look up between the two pillars and see the hideous god of hell staring
down upon him from above.

There is little doubt that this is the famous war-idol which stood on
the great teocalli of Mexico, and before which so many thousands of
human victims were sacrificed. It lay undisturbed underground in the
great square, close to the very site of the teocalli, until sixty years
ago. For many years after that it was kept buried, lest the sight of
one of their old deities might be too exciting for the Indians, who, as
I have mentioned before, had certainly not forgotten it, and secretly
ornamented it with garlands of flowers while it remained above ground.

The "sacrificial stone," so called, which also stands in the court-yard
of the Museum, was not one of the ordinary altars on which victims were
sacrificed. These altars seem to have been raised slabs of hard stone
with a protuberant part near one end, so that the breast of the victim
was raised into an arch, which made it more easy for the priest to cut
across it with his obsidian knife. The Breton altars, where the slab
was hollowed into the outline of a human figure, have some analogy to
this; but, though there were very many of these altars in different
cities of Mexico, none are now known to exist. The stone we are now
observing is quite a different thing, a cylindrical block of basalt
nine feet across and three feet high: and Humboldt considers it to be
the stone described by early Spanish writers, and called _temalacatl_
(spindle-stone) from its circular shape, something like a distaff-head.
Upon this the captive chiefs stood in the gladiatorial fights which
took place within the space surrounding the great teocalli. Slightly
armed, they stood upon this raised platform in the midst of the crowd
of spectators; and six champions in succession, armed with better
weapons, came up to fight with them. If the captive worsted his
assailants in this unequal contest, he was set free with presents; but
this success was the lot of but few, and the fate of most was to be
overpowered and dragged off ignominiously to be sacrificed like
ordinary prisoners. On the top of the stone is sculptured an outline of
the sun with its eight rays, and a hollow in the centre, whence a
groove runs to the edge of the stone, probably to let the blood run
down. All round it is an appropriate bas-relief repeated several times.
A vanquished warrior is giving up his stone-sword and his spears to his
conqueror, who is tearing the plumed crest from his head.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26