Volume 2 — THE SCENERY OF THE MEXICAN LOWLANDS.

FELIX L. OSWALD.

[Mexico is made up of two distinctively different regions; one, the central plateau, temperate in climate, and marked by a great dearth of rainfall; the other, the lowland areas between the plateau and the bordering oceans, tropical in climate and productions, and luxuriant from abundant rains. Dr. Oswald, in the following selection, leads us through the Valley of Oaxaca, a section of this Tierra Caliente, or warm country, and makes us familiar with its interesting vegetable and animal productions and its scenic features.]

We had a glimpse of the sun before we finished our short breakfast, and when we plunged into the maze of the forest the occasional vistas through the leafy vault revealed larger and larger patches of bright blue sky. Our so-called road, however, was worse than anything I had ever seen or heard of Flemish or South Louisiana synonymes of that word,—miry lagoons and spongy mud as black and as sticky as pitch. I followed at the heels of my carrier, who preferred the lagoons and seemed to find the shallow places by a sort of instinct, and the Switzer managed to propel his heavy boots through the toughest quagmire; but his boy, after losing his shoes five or six times, slung them across his shoulder and splashed on barefoot. We kept through a comparatively open forest of cottonwood- and tulip-trees, with a dense jungle on our right-hand side, while on our left the land sloped towards the bottom of the Rio Verde, which is here about five hundred paces wide, and during the rainy season fills its muddy banks to the brink. These lower coast forests abound in gigantic trees, whose fruits are only accessible to the winged and four-handed denizens of the forest, but farther up the river-shores are lined for miles with a dense growth of wild-growing plantains, of which the natives distinguish four varieties under as many different names. The fruit of the largest, the cuernavacas (“cow-horns”), attains a weight of seven pounds, and resembles in shape the crooked pod of the tamarind rather than the cucumber-shaped little bananas which reach our Northern markets. They ripen very slowly, and often rot on the tree before they become eatable, but the Mexicans cure them over a slow fire of embers and green brushwood, after which their taste can hardly be distinguished from that of the finest yellow bananas. Palm-trees mingle here with the massive stems of the cottonwoods, talipot-palms, and the Palma prieta, whose nut might become a profitable article of export, having a close resemblance to a filbert. The plum-clusters of the mango can only be reached by a bold climber, as the trunk rises like a mast, often perfectly free from branches for eighty or ninety feet, and the chief beneficiaries of this region are still the macaws and squirrel-monkeys; but farther up Pomona becomes more condescending, and the ancient Gymnosophists, whose religion restricted true believers to a diet of wild-growing tree-fruits, would have found their fittest home in the terrace-land between the lower twenty miles of the Rio Verde and the foot-hills of the Sierra de San Miguel.

Plum-bearing bushes abound from June to September with red, yellow, and wax-colored fruit; the morus, or wild mulberry-tree, literally covers the ground with its dark, honey-sweet berries; the crown of the pino-palm is loaded with grape-like clusters, which, struck by a cudgel, discharge a shower of rich acorn-shaped nuts; guavas, alligator-pears, mamayos, chirimoyas, and wild oranges display flowers and fruit at the same time, and under the alternate influence of heat and moisture produce their perennial crops with unfailing regularity; the algarobe (Mimosa siliqua), a species of mezquite not larger than an apple-tree, yields half a ton of the edible pods known as carob-beans or St. John’s bread; the figs of the gigantic banyan-tree furnish an aromatic syrup; the trunks of the Robinia viridis exude an edible gum; and from the vine-tangle forming the vault of the forest hang the bunches and clusters of forty or fifty varieties of wild grapes, many of them superior to our scuppernongs and catawbas, while the amber-colored Uva real rivals the flavor of the finest Damascene raisin-grapes. A forced march of ten hours through fens and silent virgin woods brought us at last to the hummock region; the plain swelled into mounds, and the currents of the sluggish bayous became more perceptible. The higher levels showed vestiges of cultivation; we crossed dykes and ditches, a neglected fence here and there, and where the larger trees had been felled grapes and liana figs covered even the bushes and hedges in incredible profusion. A troop of capuchin monkeys leaped from a low mango-tree, and two stumbling youngsters who brought up the rear in the scramble for the high timber would have tempted us to a chase if we had not been anxious to reach less malarious quarters before night. The neighborhood of the great swamps still betrayed itself by that peculiar miasmatic odor which emanates from stagnant pools and decaying vegetable matter, and in the recesses of the forest fluttered the slate-colored swamp-moth, the ominous harbinger of the mosquito. The tipulary pests were getting ready for action; their skirmishers, the sancudos and Moscas negras, had already opened the campaign, and became sensible as well as audible in spite of the rapidity of our march. One of the twilight species, the Mosca delgada, a straw-colored little midge, bites like a fire-ant,—a mischievous and, it seems, unpractical freak of nature, since the superfluous virulence of its sting must certainly interfere with the business facilities of a suctorial insect.

[As evening descended the travellers reached a cotton plantation, and hastened to take refuge from the rising cloud of mosquitoes.]

The cotton-gin loomed at the farther end of the field, and was taken by storm over piles of muck and scattered fence-rails. Seeing no ladder, we clambered through the pivot-hole in the ceiling of a musty-smelling machine-shed, but in the open loft above we found a delicious breeze, and—St. Hubert be praised!—not a single mosquito.

The carrier threw himself upon his pack with a sigh of relief, and we squatted around the hatch to cool off before we opened our mess-bag.

From the hills on our right came the perfume of blooming tamarisks, and from the jungle below a cool lake-air; and at times strange voices of the wilderness,—the hoarse bark of a cayman, answered by the shriek of swamp-geese in the canebrakes of the Rio Verde, and in the distance now and then a queer rustling sound, like the shaking of a tree butted by some heavy animal. Bats were circling above our heads in the moonlight, and our advent seemed to have excited the curiosity of a troop of flying-squirrels, who uttered their chirping squeak now on the roof, now in the branches of a neighboring live-oak-tree.

After removing a layer of seed-cotton that might harbor scorpions or centipedes, I spread my blanket near the hatch and made myself comfortable for the night. My feet still smarted, though I had pulled off my stockings as well as my boots; yet I could not regret the hardships of a march which had brought us to such an encampment. The portador was taking his ease in the centre of the floor, where the night-wind played with his long hair, while the Swiss boy had fallen asleep on the mantle of his countryman, who was sitting in the open louvre, smoking his pipe in measureless content. The air up here was delightfully cool, and, with the buzz of the legions of Beelzebub still ringing in our ears, the sense of security itself was more than a negative comfort.

Baron Savarin, who wrote a treatise on the art of enjoying life, should have added a chapter on the happiness of contrast. A snug little cottage in a stormy November night, a shade-tree on the Llano Estacado, the silence of the Upper Alleghanies after a “revival-meeting” in the valleys, a bath in the dog-days, would rank above all the luxuries of Paris and Stamboul, if unbought enjoyments could ever become fashionable.

The moon set soon after midnight, but we managed to readjust our luggage by the light of greased paper spills, and entered the gates of the foot-hills before the watch-call of the night-hawk had been silenced by the reveille of the iris-crows. A keen land-breeze, tumbling the mists through the fens of the Tierra Caliente, gave promise of a bright day. What wonderful perfumes the morning wind brews from the atmosphere of a moist tropical forest-land!—scents that haunt the memory more persistently than the echo of a weird song. No latter-day nose could analyze these odors and trace them to their several sources; but with or without an attempt at further classification, they might be primarily divided into sweet and pungent aromatic smells, the latter prevailing in the coast jungles, the former in the mountain forests. A few of the first named—the spicy scents—are so peculiar that, once identified, they can be easily recognized: here, for instance, the effluvium of the musk lianas, whose flowers diffuse a sort of odorous diapason which predominates, even through the bouquet-medley of the South Mexican flora.

As the white streaks in the east assumed a yellowish tint, the paroquets in the crests of the pino-palms saluted the morning with sudden screams; the multitudinous voices of a crow-swarm approached from the coast forests; two and two, and in a series of pairs, the macaws came flying across the sky; and in our near neighborhood the startling cry of the chachalaca or jungle-pheasant went up from an hibiscus thicket. Softly first, then louder and louder, the calanda, the mocking-bird of the tropics, intonated its morning hymn, and the fluting curlew rose from the grass like a skylark; but a sweeter sound to our ears was the murmuring of a little brook at the roadside. We had reached the region of rocks and swift-flowing waters.

Of reptiles, as of Red Republicans, it may be said that they are least dreaded in the countries where they most abound. While a New England boarding-school virgin goes into epileptic spasms at the aspect of a blindworm, the young Mexicanas surround themselves with a variety of ophidian pets, and view a freckled tree-snake and a gay butterfly with equal pleasure or equal unconcern. A little barefoot girl that met us on her way to the spring put her toes caressingly on the smooth hide of a green-and-white speckled Vivora mansa that wriggled across the road; and our barelegged portador kicked dozens of good-sized bush-snakes out of our path after noticing that they frightened our young travelling companion. More than ninety per cent of all South American snakes are as harmless as lizards, and the four or five venomous varieties are well known and easily avoided.

I will here add a word on the dreaded venomous insects of the tropics. The ant and mosquito plagues of the coast jungles can hardly be over-estimated, but the virulence of their larger congeners is frequently and grossly exaggerated. The chief insect-ogres of sensation romancers and fireside travellers are three: the scorpion, the tarantula, and the centipede, either of whom can rival the homicidal prestige of Victor Hugo’s octopus. But I may confidently appeal to the verdict of any personal observer who has passed a few years in the African or American tropics when I assert that these supposed express-messengers of Death are not more venomous and are far less aggressive than our common North American hornet. I doubt if the sting of twenty tarantulas could cause the death of a healthy child, and I am quite sure that a poison-ivy blister and the bite of a fire-ant are more painful than the sting of a centipede. An hysterical lady may succumb to the bite of a common gadfly, but I hold that only co-operative insects—termites, wasps, bumble-bees, etc.—could ever make away with a normally constituted human being.

A swarm of vociferous iris-crows appeared in the sky overhead, and before they had passed, the woods were wide awake all around. The humming-birds were on the wing, the wood-pigeons repeated their murmuring call in the taxus-groves, and from the lower depths of the forest came the chattering scream of a squirrel-monkey. The rising sun was hidden by the tree-tops of the eastern valleys when we halted on the summit of a rocky bluff, but the mountain mists had disappeared, and the vistas on our left afforded a dazzling view of the sunlit foot-hills and the valley of the Rio Verde. The river is here crossed by a rope-ferry a little above its junction with a tributary that drains the glorious valley of Morillo and an Alpine group whose wooded heights stand in my memory like a vision of a Ganadesha, the mountain park of Indra’s Paradise.

The air of these woodlands is the antithesis of our Northern workshop atmosphere. There is a feeling of delight—our lost sixth sense, I am tempted to call it—which gratifies the lungs rather than the olfactory organ if you inhale the morning breezes, oxidated, and perhaps ozonized, by the first influence of sunlight on the aromatic vegetation of these hills,—a delight which, like the charm of harmonious sounds, reacts on the soul, and awakens emotions which have lain dormant in the human breast since we exchanged the air of our Summer-land home for the dust of our hyperborean tenement-prisons.

The hum of insects soon mingled with the bird-voices of our forest. To and fro, in fitful flight, flashed the libellas, the glitter-winged dragon-flies, and a few large papilios flopped lazily through the dew-drenched foliage. No gnats up here, but thousands of tiny, honey-seeking wasps and midges, and bright-winged grasshoppers that rose with a fluttering spring when the first sunbeams reached the damp underbrush. Ants hurried about their daily toil, and when we ascended the next ridge we saw various kinds of lizards flitting across the road or basking on the wayside rocks, one of them a sort of dwarf iguana of a moss-green tint, on which protective color it seemed to rely for its safety, as its movements were as sluggish as those of a toad.

As we kept steadily up-hill, the sun seemed to mount very rapidly, and, peak after peak, the summits of the upper Sierra rose into view. Zempantepec, La Sirena, and the Nevada de Colcoyan towered above the rest, the latter at least four thousand feet above the snow-line. Few prospects on earth could efface the impression of that panorama. In the Sierra de San Miguel our continent reproduces the Syrian Lebanon on a grander scale. Septimius Severus, who vacillated between his throne and the Elysian valleys of Daphne, would have renounced the empire of the world for the mountain-gardens of the Val de Morillo, and the giants of the cypress forests on the southeastern slope of the Sierra dwarf all the cedars of Bashan and Hebron. The largest, though not the tallest, of these trees, the cypress of Maria del Tule (twelve miles south of San Miguel), which Humboldt calls the “oldest vegetable monument of our globe,” has a diameter of forty-two feet, a circumference of one hundred and thirty-six feet near the ground and of one hundred and four feet higher up, and measures two hundred and eighty-two feet between the extremities of two opposite branches. Yet this tree has many rivals in the Val de Morillo and near the sources of the Rio Verde, where groups of grayish-green mountain-firs rise like hillocks above the surrounding vegetation.

REGINA ANGELORUM QUEEN OF THE ANGELS From the World-famous Painting by Bouguereau, Paris Exposition, 1900

On our right extended the orange-gardens of Casa Blanca for two miles along the base of the hill to a deep ravine, reappearing on the other side, where their white-blooming tree-tops mingled with the copses of a banana-plantation. Farther up, euphorbias and hibiscus prevailed, and the upper limit of the foot-hills is marked by the paler green of the cork-oak forests that cover the slopes of the sierra proper. In the northeast this sierra becomes linked with the ramifications of the central Cordilleras, and connected with our ridge by one of the densely-wooded spurs that flank the plateau of the Llanos Ventosos. The rocks at our feet belonged, therefore, to a mountain-chain that might be called a lineal continuation of the Gila range in Arizona and Nueva Leon. But what a difference in the climate and scenery! There arid rocks and thorny ravines; here dense mountain forests, deep rivers, a saturated atmosphere, and springs on almost every acre of ground. The very brambles in the rock-clefts were fresh with dew, and the sprouts of the broom-furze looked like wildering asparagus. The ravines flamed with flowers of every size and every hue. An agent of a London or Hamburg curiosity-dealer might make his living here with a common butterfly-net. On any sunny forenoon an active boy could gather a stock of Lepidoptera that would create a bonanza sensation among the collectors of a North European capital. The rhododendron thickets of the upper Rio Verde are frequented by gigantic varieties of nymphalis, vanessa, and parnassius, which would retail in Brussels at from two to ten dollars apiece.

The sun rose higher, but not the thermometer, and when we clambered up through an orchard of scattered cherry-trees I am sure that the maximum temperature in the shade did not exceed sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit. We had reached the Llanos Ventosos, the air-plains of San Miguel, the playground of the four winds of heaven, where sun-strokes are unknown, though the mists of the rainy season never cloud their deep-blue sky. Down in the coast jungles the Rain-fiend was at it again: dark-gray showers swept visibly along the shore, while the foot-hills simmered under the rays of a vertical sun. But up here the air was dry as well as cool; the edge of the plateau is at least six thousand feet above the level of the Pacific, which is in plain view from Punta Piedra to the downs of Tehuantepec.

We entered the village about two p.m., and my companions conducted me to a little frame house, where I was hospitably received by the Indian gardener and the daughters of Pastor Wenck, the minister of the Protestant part of the community, whose brother in Tehuantepec had intrusted me with different letters, with a note of introduction. The pastor had harnessed his mule an hour ago to get a load of Spanish moss from the foot-hills, so I left my carrier in charge of the Indian gardener and sauntered out into the village.

Neubern (New Bern) de San Miguel—or Villa Cresciente, as it was originally called, from its situation on a crescent-shaped bluff—was founded in 1865 under the happiest auspices, the charter of the colony including such inducements as exemption from taxes for the first five years, free roads and schools, gratuitous seed-corn, farming implements, etc., to indigent immigrants, and attracted a considerable number of the very best agriculturists from Tyrol and Southern Switzerland. But after the collapse of the imperial government a waning moon would have been the fitter emblem of the Crescent Village: its privileges were abrogated, and many of the disappointed Bauern returned to their native countries. Still, the appointment of a few half-Indian officials is the only positive grievance of the colonists, and the advantages of their climate and situation might well reconcile them to greater inconveniences.

At a distance of only sixteen degrees from the equator, the average temperatures of the coldest and warmest months differ less than spring and summer in the United States, so that the September weather of Geneva or Innspruck is here as perennial as a sea-fog in Newfoundland. During a residence of seven years, Pastor Wenck has chronicled four thunder-storms, twenty-two common storms, two hoar-frosts (both in November), one sultry day, and two hundred and eight short showers, leaving a balance of two thousand two hundred and ninety-two days of himmelswetter,—heaven weather,—as he called it, alternating with cool nights whose dew indemnifies the fields for the scantiness of the annual rainfall. Yet the denizens of this Himmel-land come in for a first-hand share of all the luxuries which a compensating nature has lavished on the inhabitants of the sweltering Tierra Caliente.

Forty or fifty varieties of tropical fruits come to their tables in a freshness and sun-ripened sweetness quite unknown to our Northern markets; their builders may select their material from groves of mahogany, iron-wood, American ebony, green-heart, euphorbia, and other timber-trees of the coast swamps; cacao, vanilla, gums, and frankincense can be bought at half trade prices, and an excursion of ten miles will take them to a region where the pot-hunter can fill his bag day after day without fear of ever exhausting the meat-supply, where the adventurous sportsman may try his luck and the mettle of his dogs, and where the naturalist can revel in all the wonders of a tropical terra incognita.