CHAPTER XXV

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CORTES

1. CORTES

Yucatan, the site of the ruins of the Maya civilization, was the first part of Mexico to be discovered, for it was the point of the mainland nearest to the Indies. De Cordova visited it in 1516-1517; Juan de Grijalva called there in 1518 and going further, searched the coast of the Gulf for islets. He was recalled and dishonored, though it is recorded that he was a most honorable man. Honor among pirates is no saving virtue. Cortes followed him, and he had the craft and style to play hero or villain as occasion offered. The Spanish wanted gold; they did not want glory, least of all any one else's glory. Cortes, however, had as great an eye for glory as he had for gold. That he was a great man few who read his history can doubt. He had to fight not only the Indians but the headstrong Spaniards of his own following, the malevolent Velasquez, Governor of Cuba, who had control of his supplies, and even enemies in far-off Spain who hid his glories from the Emperor.

How he resigned his office and got himself elected by his own troops, how he persuaded them to burn their boats so that there could be no return, how he reinforced his army by capturing an army sent against him, how he beguiled Montezuma and fooled him--is a great story, revealing a character which it might have delighted Shakespeare to describe.

But what Cortes was and what he and his followers achieved are two different matters. The brilliance of the exploits of Cortes has blinded many to the sordid material nature of the deeds effected. It is true he cast down a thousand altars of blood and washed away the hideous scarlet stain, putting up white crosses with flowers and Madonnas to whom could be no reproach. But there the ideal side of the adventure ended. The rest was vulgar spoliation, the furtherance of one quest only--the making of a fortune to take back to Spain.

Before Cortes' expedition no one had surmised the wealth of Mexico. The Spanish of the Indies wasted their time, kidnaping natives and selling them to the slavers, not knowing that El Dorado was just a little further out of doors. But Cortes readily grasped that there were rich kingdoms to sack. He founded Vera Cruz with the name "Rich City of the True Cross." He marched to meet the Totonacs at Cempoalla and found a people who wore golden necklaces and bracelets and rings of gold, gems in their noses and ears, headdresses of gold. Spanish eyes stared sultrily at these ornaments on the persons of a tribe who were friends. Some must have wished the Totonacs were enemies.

The fame of Mexico City determined Cortes to march toward it. Health lay in that direction. For a mountain wall had to be scaled, and even a day's march took the army out of the fever flats of Vera Cruz. He climbed up to Jalapa, the city of flowers, and thence to the heights of the plateau where at Xocotlan he found thirteen high temples and pyramids made of tens of thousands of human skulls. The Totonacs accompanied him all the way, for they told of another tribe which might ally itself with Cortes, the Tlascaltecs, who had constantly fought the Aztecs and never been beaten by them. The Tlascaltecs fought Cortes first to see what his troops were made of--and nearly worsted him. But afterwards, having tested him and liked him, they became his best and most lasting friends. Through them more than through his own Spaniards or through the help of God, he won. A month after he left the shore Cortes entered Tlaxcala and was given a marvelous flower festival.

Thence Cortes marched to the pious Cholultecs at the Pyramid of Cholula and massacred them, and then he built a causeway over the collar which holds the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, and marched by Izcalpan and Ayotzinco to the lakes and canals of the Valley of Mexico. From Iztapalapan, now at the end of a tramway, he marched to the great meeting of welcome with Montezuma and his nobles.

2. VERA CRUZ

Mexico City had become haunted for us since Wilfrid Ewart's death, and we were glad when occasion offered to go down to the lower country, to Vera Cruz and the historical country between that city and the capital. Up and down these heights soldiers have constantly streamed in battle. It is Mexico's fighting ground, scene of her victories and of her defeats.

Of the port of Vera Cruz, the old Villa Rica, I will say little except that it has become a place of great commercial and military importance. It is not so great a port as Habana or New Orleans, but it is clearly capable of development to a point of rivalry with these. With all her great seaboard Mexico is nevertheless greatly deficient in natural harbors. The Pacific side is even poorer than the Atlantic side. For that reason Vera Cruz ought to have an enormous trade.

Strategically also an attacking force is somewhat dependent on Vera Cruz. It is the obvious base for an invading army. Cortes started thence in 1520, the Americans in 1846, the French in 1860, and, in the abortive war of 1913-1914, it was occupied by the American marines who had outposts even as far inland as Los Cocos. The Great War showed how easily it could be defended--by mines, but I doubt if the Mexicans have enough intelligence to apply the lessons of the War to the defense of their own country. The Turks learned the use of mines in Asia Minor and cleared Smyrna of foreign ships. But the Mexicans are less intelligent than the Turks, less capable of defending themselves against foes.

During the American occupation of 1913-1914 a great work of sanitation and cleansing was carried out, and the city has never been again the pesthole it was. Some of the scavenging then begun has been carried on. There is a notable decrease in fevers and plague. Yellow fever, for which it had a very evil name, has almost disappeared. It is worth noting that wherever the American army has been sent to keep order or to take possession the general physical health of the community has been benefited.

Vera Cruz now, under a revolutionary administration, is not a pleasant city for visitors. "Make the Foreigner Pay" is applied by all and sundry, to those who have to pass through the port, for business or pleasure. Porters, hotels, shops, are all operated on this plan, and it defeats itself, for no one stays in the city longer than he can help.

The whole State suffers from economic disorganization, personal greed, sloth, and violence. Against this strive many American and British and German companies. If there is anything clean or practical or prepossessing it derives from these countries. It is easy to grasp that if these companies were forced to retreat the Spanish-speaking community would revert to the primitive state.

It is a very Indian State, though Negro blood is mixed in on the coast as it is not in the interior. Negroes in company with Jews and Moors have generally been excluded from Mexico. But at Vera Cruz and Tampico and Puerto Mexico there has naturally been some admixture. The Indian mentality has triumphed but it is a weak one. The favorite buffoonery of the natives when Cortes called on them to surrender and they refused, was to cry out--"We shall eat you with chili to-morrow. We believe you will taste well." To-day modern civilization is in the place of Cortes and still it challenges the Mexicans and they cry out, "We'll have you with chili."

3. THE CITY OF JALAP

Cortes marched up to it from the sea. Montezuma's messengers met him with golden ducks, discs of the sun in gold, large stones of jade, gifts of plumed armor and golden arrows, and they prayed him to go away. Jalapa was the chief city of the Totonac Indians--it was a city of flowers; there were silver houses there. There were blood altars. Cortes said "No," he would not go away till he had delivered in person a message which he bore from the King of Spain. That message he invented--but he had a message nevertheless, obtained out of the book of Fate, and in due time he delivered it. His message dissolved the Aztec Empire and laid low the greatest cultural achievement of the Indians. Anahuac became New Spain.

Four hundred years have just passed since that conquest was achieved, but the Mexicans have not marked it with festivity. Cortes' bones have been driven from cathedral to cathedral and his memory has become unhallowed.

Jalapa, famous for centuries for the export of jalap, is to-day very different from anything it ever was in the past. It is the capital of a Bolshevik State. Nowhere during the ten years revolutionary struggle which followed the fall of Diaz did the proletariat gain more control than in the State of Vera Cruz, and Jalapa is its capital. It should be understood that the United States of Mexico are very much disunited in politics. In five or six of them, such as Tlaxcala, there are actually two legislatures, old and new régime, trying to sit at the same time. But it is safe to say that the majority in all Mexico is Radical and very decidedly anticapitalistic. Where the distribution of the land among the peasants has not been carried out there are continual armed raids. The Mexican landowners and bourgeois are busy organizing a "Fascisti" movement, but that has little chance of success unless the President of the Republic favored them. Obregon, however, is an enigmatical personage. He is anticapitalistic but he is ready with Federal troops to quell riots of the proletariat. His popularity with the masses is waning, but his ability to govern the country shows itself more and more powerfully. The trial of his strength comes between now and the 1924 elections. Mexico depends on him almost as it depended on Diaz. When he goes from power the revolution in its fury may easily break out again.

Jalapa, in which we spent some ten days, is a city of "Red" demonstrations. The "Agrarians" and the Coöperatists parade with their blood-red banners and violent inscriptions. They occupy the Town Hall or the Governor's Palace, and their leaders harangue the crowds from the balconies; the Governor himself lends a hand. Men with red flags climb the steeple of the cathedral and whenever a strong break of oratory is made from the Town Hall balcony below, they ring the cathedral bells with a grand clash.

What is the matter? The workmen of the Maritime Zone have boycotted an Oil Company on which depend for fuel all the railways of the South and most of the factories. Half Mexico is in danger of economic paralysis. It was so all the winter of 1922-23. The company, an English one, was holding out against a proposed seventy-five per cent increase in wages, wages to be paid daily, premiums on dismissal, etc. Wages paid daily is a great feature of the Labor demand, the idea being to make it more easy to go on strike.

There has also been a no-rent campaign, whole populations refusing to pay rent. When in Vera Cruz you decide no longer to pay rent you hang out a red flag from your window. There is also here, as in most of the States, a strained relationship between the Indian peasants and their former masters the landowners.

Against Red rule, the newspapers of Mexico have arrayed themselves, especially _Excelsior_, Mr. Lloyd George's Mexican platform, and _El Dictamen_, both run in favor of capitalism and "common sense." But one of the latest phenomena has been a boycott of these papers in the Maritime Zone largely organized by the Governor of Vera Cruz himself.

It is lucky for the people of Jalapa that the currency of Mexico is federally controlled and is of gold and silver. Otherwise one can imagine the inflation of paper money that would take place in a State run on the lines of that of Vera Cruz. As it is, the disorganization caused by strikes has raised the cost of living to almost double that of the quieter States of Oaxaca and Puebla.

How important this condition of affairs is may be judged from the fact that Vera Cruz is the key of the Republic. Mexico has been three times conquered and its capital taken, by Spain, by the United States, and by France; and all three campaigns started from Vera Cruz. Did not the American soldiers in 1848 play baseball in Jalapa with the President of Mexico's wooden leg? That was the time of one-legged Santa Ana. Now is the time of one-armed Obregon. Despite the great army of Mexico to-day one cannot help feeling that in case of foreign intervention via Vera Cruz and Jalapa there would not be enough moral power to resist invasion.

Still, whatever happens, there is one thing in which Jalapa will not change, never has changed; that is, in the grandeur of her scenery. The city is unfortunately often in the clouds, and warm rolling mists enwrap its stone ways and houses whilst jackdaws innumerable create an unearthly hubbub in the twilight. But when the clouds vanish the landscape appears. The mountains lift themselves in great steps to Himalayan heights. Jalapa is on a ledge five thousand feet above the sea--she is halfway up the Sierra Madre. And above her, above all her clouds, stands Orizaba, twenty thousand feet high, which great snow-crowned mountain has often been called the guardian spirit of Mexico. Orizaba watches the sea, and should she see approaching gods or men she passes word to Popocatepetl, the guardian of the capital. Orizaba must have passed on many messages in her time, though not with much avail.

4. AT TLAXCALA

Tlaxcala surely is the most romantic place in Mexico, the little mountain city whence Cortes gleaned his greatest allies, an Indian Sparta. The Tlascaltecs displayed a devotion to the Spaniards which in its unthinking generosity was very characteristic of the Indians. At a word from Malinche, as they affectionately called him, they even changed their religion and consented to be baptized. They never foresaw how the Spaniards in victory would prove ungrateful. They reinforced Cortes in thousands and went with him to Cholula. The Cholultecs hated them, and, while pretending to receive Cortes amiably, demanded that the Tlascaltecs camp outside and not inside their city bounds. When with his allies Cortes fell upon the Cholultecs it was natural that the insulted Tlascaltecs did great execution, had in fact eventually to be restrained. The Highlanders of Tlaxcala spared neither breath nor spoil. They were almost as avid in victory as the Spaniards themselves. But a nod from Cortes was enough to hold them in check. They gladly followed his horses and men to Montezuma and made no small show of danger to the hated Aztecs. The Aztecs were the imperialists of their days, oppressing all the lower races, but unable to quell the Tlascaltecs. Tlaxcala, therefore, marched against Montezuma. And when Cortes on the "Dreadful Night" was beaten, Tlaxcala still stood by him enabling him to return to the field and win.

You approach Tlaxcala by narrow lanes all fenced with candelabra cactus. This cactus, branching near its root, grows in green pillars as regularly as the stems of a branched candlestick. Sometimes it is called the "organ" cactus from its likeness in shape to organ pipes. These pipes or pillars grow close to one another to a height of six or seven feet when young, often to twenty feet when matured. They make the simplest and most effective of palings, for their barbs forbid any one struggling to get through them. The old stone ways of Tlaxcala, worn by myriads of bare feet of Indians, are now hedged with this cactus and you walk from the old fields up to what were once citadels, temples, palaces, now in shapeless ruin and overheaped with mold and overgrown with flowers. You may sit up there among the mountains and muse on what was Tlaxcala.

Eight thousand feet up, the ancient city was higher than the new one. And it was much larger. Tlaxcala has decayed. It supported the sturdy warriors and their families of pure Tlascaltic origin. Seemingly the half-Spanish breed is idler, lazier, and has not taken kindly to a bleak site of civilization and life. The windy city is cold and poor. Its chief life is in its soldiery who make of it a stamping ground.

The drums and fifes make a great clangor in the stone-walled, echoing city, a hubbub which does not cease all day. The soldiers march well on the cobbles and certainly make a smart turn-out. One's sympathies are with them and with Mexico until a plain-clothes colonel with riding whip comes on the scene and flogs the soldiers as they march. That brutality immediately alienates one's affections. Surprising that the soldiers stand it--after the revolution! But they are bound in the traditions of peonage. Disaffection takes longer to breed in them than it has done in the ex-serfs of Russia.

The most remarkable objects in Tlaxcala are, however, in the churches. There you may see the large stone font in which Xicotencatl, the old general, and all the leading Indians consented to be baptized in 1520, in their nakedness and with the rites of the Catholic Church. The mind can visualize a remarkable scene. The old pulpit whence after they were baptized they were sermonized in Spanish is also there and _in situ_. And you may see the first pictures of the new gods, the first pictures of Christ and the Madonna specially painted by Cortes' men and sent as gifts to the first Christian chapel of the Indians. These are appalling in their ugliness. The ugliness of Death has been added to the ugliness of madness, and together in one face something has been obtained worthy of fear. No loving Savior was presented to the Tlascaltecs, but a worse bogy than their own. Their god of war was ugly, and authorized terrible deeds in his name. But the God of the Christians was more terrible and, as would be proved, would apparently preside over worse human acts--over slaughters, tortures, and human fires innumerable.

It is curiously naïve that the Spanish missionaries to Mexico constantly averred--"Your religion is not unlike ours; only the names of the gods are different."

5. THE PYRAMID OF CHOLULA

Since the discovery of the tomb of King Tut-ankh-a-men there has been in Mexico an amusing feeling of jealousy of Egypt. The era of the mythical Atlantis has been pitted against the era of the biblical Pharaohs. Archeologists in Yucatan are reputed to be digging feverishly for some remains of the Maya civilization which will divert the interest of the world from Luxor.

I have, however, stood in the Kings Chamber in the center of Cheops Pyramid and now I have stood on the apex of the great pyramid of Cholula, and though the remains of Mexico's great past are impressive Egypt is by far the more haunting to a European mind. The thought, however, strikes one--what if in that era of the past when these pyramids were built, the people of these lands so far apart knew one another? Is it possible that the repute of the pyramids of Egypt raised the pyramids of Mexico?

At the time when Cortes came the Aztecs were building pyramids as fast as we build churches; but there were several pyramids in the land which had been there before the Aztecs came to the country ascribed to Toltecs and Chichimecs and other imperial races which had had their day. The Aztecs hewed massive altars of stone and raised them to the heights of the old pyramids, and they made human sacrifice on them and lit votive flames, which glared red in the night as the army of Cortes marched inland from the sea.

Cholula was the holy city of Anahuac, possessing many temples. It was a center of pagan piety, conservative, uncompromising. Cortes did not believe its people could possibly be his friends, and so, with the psychology of a tragedy villain, he suddenly in the midst of friendly seeming accused them of treachery and put them to the sword. The populace took refuge on the hundred and twenty steps of the great pyramid, which had then superstructures of wood, but the Spaniards fired it and all who stood on the pyramid perished, even the priest who came out on the apex invoking Quetzalcoatl, the God of the Air. The priest in a shroud of flame burned to death in the sight of all who were below. The remaining Cholultecs fled to the hills. Cortes put up a cross on the apex of the pyramid and then rode away.

The massacre of Cholula was one of the chief crimes charged against Cortes by his enemies in Spain. That it was a dark and impolitic act was not denied, and had the Emperor Montezuma been a warlike monarch he would have met the Spaniards straightway in arms and have certainly destroyed them. He had hundreds of thousands at his command, but the army of Cortes was only a little over four hundred men. But Montezuma, abounding in manners and piety, was notably deficient in brains and pluck. Cortes built a causeway from Cholula to the saddle of the ridge which separates Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, the great volcanoes, and from the height he and his followers looked down on the rich valley of the capital and upon the scene of a decade of loot and centuries of struggle. When they reached the city the Emperor came out in friendly guise to meet them and Montezuma bade Cortes sit upon his right hand as an equal.

So the destruction of Cholula was proved no error The Spaniards won their way. They obtained vast quantities of gold, later to be lost; they sacked the pagan temples and destroyed not only the false gods but all the records of the people. They put up Christian churches. They carved out the vice-royalty of New Spain. As they had no women of their own they took Indian wives. Every Spaniard in those days was a Solomon. And they bred the Mexican who now appears.

I stood on the top of that old pyramid of Cholula. I climbed by an old stone way, not seldom stepping over stones graven with hieroglyphics of a lost religion. Beside an old cross and in the shadow of a Catholic church I looked on what was Cholula; a squat city with a petrol street car running through it, a dozen old rusty-colored churches built of the stones of shattered Aztec temples, a vast ill kept city square where a large army could be assembled but now tenanted by fifty Indian women selling wares which were spread on the dirt--herbs, fruits, cottons, imitation jewelry--a fountain with stone angels but no water inscribed to Philip III, King of Spain and the Indies; poor people, beshawled women, bare-footed men with ancient, grimy, high-crowned hats of straw.

Change has followed change. By the last revolution in Mexico the Indian has attained equality with the Spaniard; he has in many parts seized the lands of the Spanish; the great _haciendas_ are no more. As workingman the Indian terrorizes capital. And as for the Catholic Church into which his forefathers were forcibly baptized, he comes daily to spurn it more. In no other Catholic country in the world is Catholicism more openly humiliated than in Mexico. Is not the popular craze of the time a climbing of the façades of the cathedrals by acrobats and small boys, a kicking off of the noses of the saints in order to advertise beer! Whilst the Papal Nuncio is told sharply to pack up and quit the country with less notice than would be given a general servant, the petty indignities are manifold and great.

As I go from Cholula in the night and look behind me I see a light burning above the apex of the pyramid--no, not the fires of Quetzalcoatl broken out again, only an electric lamp hung above the cross of the church that you may know that it is there.

6. TENOCHTITLAN

Puebla, the third largest city in modern Mexico, has grown up near Cholula--one of the few cities that has no Indian history behind it. Puebla was built by the Spaniards and exclusively populated by Spaniards. There at least the Indian woman was not a bride. Something purely Spanish was bred there--as a racial bulwark against possible foes. It remains to-day the most Spanish of all the cities of Mexico and therefore the most conservative and the most unalterably Catholic.

Puebla is a beautiful and quiet city, largely adorned by the brightly colored tiles which are a feature of its architecture. Façades of terra cotta and gold, purple and yellow tiled domes, are common features of the churches. Around the great Cathedral are pillars supporting a hundred angels and each angel holds an electric light which is generally burning all day as well as all night. Mimosa and palm trees grow over the cool green lawns of the Plaza and lilies bloom beside many fountains. There is some military parade, as at Tlaxcala, and upon occasion "reactionary" demonstrations. The industrial life is greatly hit by revolutionary economics, and it seems impossible for the city to get back to the prosperity which it used to enjoy.

Like Jalapa, Puebla is an important strategic point. It has been the scene of many battles, and a short walk outside the gates of the city brings you to the old trenches of Frenchmen and Spaniards. In the American War of 1846-1848 the plaza of the town was occupied by a little army and many wounded and sick, and the Americans defended it against all comers, talking and bluffing as well as firing and barricading, for a whole month, when they received reinforcements and were able to withdraw.

This can be said for Puebla and its more purely Spanish population--it is more honest, more dignified, less drunken than Mexico City or Vera Cruz or any of the cities where the Indians are in strength.

The way to Mexico City from Puebla tells something of the debauch of the people. It is over a hundred miles and the country is rich either for pasture or for the cultivation of grain. Rainfall is abundant. Heat and cold are seldom in extremes. But you see no herds grazing there, and few, very few, cornfields. Instead, there are interminable vistas of cultivated cactus, the maguey, raised merely for _pulque_, for the drink that stupefies the nation that takes to it. The freight cars marked "pulque only" block the lines. At the railway stations women in scores come to the trains with pulque bottles. The only rich are the owners of the pulque farms, and you see them on silver-mounted saddles, pricking their fine horses with silver spurs. They are on the one hand and a vast ragged sodden population on the other.

Thus to San Juan and the Pyramids of the Sun and the salt lakes and the canals and the floating gardens, to Texcoco and Chalco and Xochimilco, to Iztapalapa and the metal-shod causeway by which Cortes marched to the city. Iztapalapa is a sad place now, like a sort of Arab village except for the visiting tram car which comes out from the great metropolis, loops a loop at the Plaza, and returns through the dust and dirt to the _Zocalo_, the square of the great pyramid in Mexico City.

Near where Montezuma and Cortes met now stand ugly but powerful and suggestive national monuments--of Indian warrior and squaw, designed for the Zocalo but felt by the Mexicans to be too indelicate for a prominent public place. The Mexicans of to-day are proud of their Indian blood but do not care to be reminded too realistically of what the Indians were. The squat, broad-nosed, large-mouthed, pendulous-cheeked faces, the short legs, the barrel-shaped bodies, the feather ornaments, the war clubs and darts, do not appeal to the mind of the modern Mexican who would rather think of his ancestors as debonnair, Frenchified, with faces and bodies like those of Greek or Roman heroes.

Montezuma regaled the Spaniards very well, not only feeding them and gilding them with presents, but bestowing upon each soldier a bevy of wives. There was not one who had less than ten wives. Cortes could not find his men, they were lost among the young squaws. He was obliged to limit the numbers of female servants--but Montezuma hearing of the trouble arranged special quarters for the harems of the soldiers. Cortes himself was much embarrassed by the number of princesses he was called upon to marry. He had his troubles with the women--did he not push his first wife down a well--and according to the historians made great scruple against taking new ties. However, he took to himself the peerless Marina, who helped him greatly in his conquest of her brother Indians.

The Aztecs, it appears, had no code of morals kin to those current in the Old World. Sensual lust was not a violent passion amongst them. They bought and sold their women, lived polygamously, but women were not centers of voluptuousness. This, it seems, has remained. The Mexican is not hot-blooded over women. He is comparatively cold, and the women are demure and chaste. The contrast, for instance, between Cuban and Mexican is considerable; the mixed blood of Spaniard and Negro is very lustful, the mixed blood of Spaniard and Indian is cold and self-sufficient in the matter of sex.

One reads of the bestowal of beautiful girls upon the Spaniards, but the beauty was doubtless exaggerated. It is difficult to find much feminine beauty among the Aztecs now. There is a moment of unearthly beauty, just a moment, early in the teens, and then the Aztec girl goes heavy and repulsive-looking; her coal-black hair becomes coarse as a horse's mane, her bosom spreads, dirt gets the better of her body. The Mexicans of all classes are remarkably indelicate and dirty. As for their children, a foreigner might be tempted to caress them or play with them, but a glance at the faces causes him to draw away his hands from unwashed skins and sores.

There is no doubt that the Spaniards in allying themselves to the Aztecs joined themselves to a race which was lower than themselves. In the romantic attitude to the Aztecs it is often forgotten that they were cannibals and ate their prisoners of war. A race whose instincts permitted them to do that was obviously in a degraded state. It may safely be said that the Aztecs had no great future, even if Cortes had not come; they were brutal, mentally deficient and depraved, possessed of rites and customs repellent to all who possess a living God.

7. IN THE MARQUISATE OF OAXACA

Cortes was recognized and rewarded and he made a happy end of life. He overcame all the intrigues. His success, like a rising sun, triumphed over all mists and clouds and at its zenith shone over half the world. His Emperor honored him and granted to him and his heirs in perpetuity the lands of the Valley of Oaxaca with all the wealth therein contained, both potential and actual. On the strength of it the Cortes of to-day ought to be Morgans or Rothschilds. Oaxaca is one of the most golden valleys of Mexico, a marvelous place, _El Dorado_ itself in the eyes of the first pioneers who grabbed what they could carry and lost what they could not defend.

Hernando Cortes became the "Marquis of the Valley," known commonly in Spanish annals as "the great Marquis," a title which in British history is, however, associated with a nobler man, the Marquis of Montrose.

Oaxaca, pronounced Wahahca, is some three hundred miles southwest of the capital, reached by rocky, narrow, and often precipitous trails once the secret knowledge of Indians but now followed by a railroad considered a marvel of scientific engineering. No motor road goes through--and it is adventurous going for either horseman or pedestrian. It is one of the ways to the Pacific shore, and once the capital of the marquisate is reached it is not a difficult journey on horseback to Tehuantepec or Salina Cruz, down on the quiet beaches of the Southern Sea.

It should be said that Oaxaca is now a State and that the heirs of Cortes have long since dissipated their fortunes. English and Americans now own the most valuable properties of the Valley which is recognized still as one of the richest mining districts of Mexico. Oaxaca has enriched thousands of individuals. Mexicans without doing work pathetically hope to stumble suddenly on large fortunes. The legends they preserve of hidden gold are many. The Indians especially are supposed to hold secrets which they hand down from generation to generation, of the shrines and treasures of their lost gods. As cupidity is not a vice of the pure-blood Indian this seems always conceivable. You can find out nothing by asking Indians questions. Their innocent mirthfulness under cross-examination has always been one of the most baffling matters to the Spaniard. The days of burning them alive to find their secrets has of course long passed, but the Indians told little under stress of pain. Over the slow fire their innocent mirth changed to a suffering taciturnity and that unearthly fixed gaze which showed a race that had conquered pain.

Out in this valley most of the people now are pure-blood Indians, either Zapotecs or Mixtecs, unambitious, easy-going, fruitful, and true to the soil on which they have always lived. They were never an imperial race like the Aztecs, nor revengeful like the Totonacs. They have no inheritance of ill-will, and all seem as happy as kings. Oaxaca to-day, despite the turmoil of the revolution, presents a picture of what Mexico as a whole might be if her peoples possessed the right temperament. For my part, I count the three weeks I spent in the Marquisate as the happiest in Mexico. One could easily become content to live a long while there. The people retain their national customs and are marvelously good-humored; crime is rare, pistols infrequent, and the cost of living is less than half that of the capital--you can live very well on two dollars a day--and the winter climate is perfect. The happiness of the little city is greatly enhanced by a large city square where a fine brass band plays every evening amid palms and electric lights and lilies and hanging rosy pomegranates.

The cathedral faces the Palacio, and colored stone porticos of shops face porticos of other shops. The broad efflorescent square or _plaza_ is between. The cathedral, alas, looks like a ruin and has been taken and retaken by soldiers in many fights! The Church is too poor to repair it. I saw the "Hombre Mosca," the "Human Fly" climb its pretty façade one morning, stepping on the carved saints and patting the Infant Christ in St. Christopher's arms on his way up, and the Church was quite impotent to stop the insult, even on a Sunday when Mass was observed within. A curious contrast surely, a whole congregation on its knees listening to the sermon of an archbishop within, a hilarious crowd outside cheering the Human Fly and the brass band playing lustily. Something of the destiny of Mexico in that! But in my opinion the human flies hold the future. Sitting on the top of the Cross on the turret of the Cathedral an American acrobat called "Babe White" unfurls a flag on which is printed "Drink Montezuma Beer." Poor old Pope, dead and gone Holy Inquisition, what think you of that?

The Palacio, where I saw the Governor, Garcia Vigil, just before he left for Mexico City where he was badly shot by a hired assassin, is a fine building rendered more impressive by its Indian sentries, some of whom are extremely handsome and fine-looking soldiers. The legislative business of the State is transacted in this palacio and it occupies the whole of one side of the square. Here one may commonly see in the evenings and on Saturday morning long lines of Indians waiting for wages. On Saturday mornings the band enters the interior square of the palacio and plays while waiting for its pay.

The shops which flank the other two sides exhibit various _novedades_ in dress and many marvelous hats ranging in price from ten to a hundred dollars. As Mexicans are more proud of their head wear than of any other part of their attire they are ready to pay fantastic prices for hats. These sombreros which are usually of felt or velour are sometimes two feet high and three feet across from rim to rim. When a little dark man puts on one of these he changes in aspect and looks like some sort of fantastic magician.

In front of the shops and yet under the covered way of the porticos are many tables and booths, and at the tables men wearing these sombreros and long black moustachios play dominoes and drink beer. At the booths quiet-eyed women sell cigarettes and sweets, and all along the curb outside the colored arches of the porticos sit Indian women with their hair hanging to the pavement, breasts exposed and papooses sucking there.

The scene in the plaza at nightfall, when the whole population comes out in parade, is in its way a ballet, unrehearsed and yet faultless. The life of the whole seems to be the band up in the fine stand in the central circle of the square. There stands the perfect little Zapotec conductor facing another Indian who with gourds in his hands waves his rattle with long arms, and on each side of them and around them is resounding brass. A fine discipline has been achieved and a military precision in play. German and Spanish compositions alternate. Marches and Spanish dances seem to have a preference and with joyous clamor and seductive melodies take possession of every man, woman and child in the plaza. Most remarkable are the tatterdemalion crowds of Indians who in cotton slops and bits of old blankets tied together tramp into town and creep out of the dirt and the dust to the inner court of the bandstand. There they crouch and stare, though they get the music in ear-breaking blasts, being far too close. But they love to hear in the midst of it the rattle of the gourd players, the rattle of the rain drops as in their own half-forgotten rituals. Huddled together they stare at the brass, at the gourds, at the Zapotec bandmaster in his perfectly ironed regimentals.

From the inner court of the bandstand go six shady tracks under palms, and scarlet-flowering trees, and orange fruits dripping from boughs, and pomegranate trees; and these tracks reach the broad outer court, round which like mystic shapes the great crowd comes and goes.

Here run the newsboys crying, "Patria, Patria," and the boys with dozens of bottles on their little heads shouting, "Frescos, frescos," and scores of bootblacks with little wooden stools calling to all and sundry "Grasar, grasar." Here walk stately icecream merchants with colored barrels balanced on their heads, and swarthy, sunburned men with sheaves of blankets for sale. Every Indian wears a blanket either slit at the middle for his head to go through or swathed about his body from head to foot as the Arab wears his burnous. Scarlet and orange are the commonest colors of these blankets. They wear their sombreros, the poor ones of straw, the rich ones of felt, Popocatepetls of felt, high-domed, vastly brimmed, embroidered. Here are gray hats all decorated with sailing ships and anchors worked in brown silk. Here are white hats bedizened with silver tinsel sewn on as the Indian women sew beetle-backs and butterfly wings into their embroideries in India. The great hats flock, they shadow the pavement. And all the while _tran-tan-tan_ above it dominates the band.

Little boys carrying sugar canes eight feet long all hung with tiny flags add great color to the scene. The canes are perforated with tiny holes and in each hole is a sugar plum mounted on a long match or wire and each sugar plum has a tiny flag hanging from it. A dozen boys are carrying these resplendent poles; several others are carrying gourds perforated and adorned in the same way.

There are park seats all the way round and there sit the more leisurely of the listeners, and the tired, and watch the world go by. Old dames with trays of pineapple and girls with baskets of pine kernels go from seat to seat selling their wares.

The Zapotec women are straight as pine trees. They wear voluminous cotton skirts but their feet are bare. Above the waist they do not mind how much of their bodies they expose; they wear commonly a slightly embroidered cotton vest cut as low as the rise of their bosoms and leaving their arms bare from just below the shoulders. They have broad, open faces, carved mouths, lined brows, and an enormous flow of raven hair almost to their knees which they allow to hang. They wear earrings of filigree gold and beautiful gold chains round their bare necks. They may be on the point of beggary and yet wear these. The young ones are very beautiful, but quiet-eyed and never lascivious. They hold their heads so far back that if they wore hairpins and dropped one it would always fall clear of their bodies.

Outside the Palacio the sentries march to and fro with bayonets fixed and loaded rifles. The sergeant of the guard has golden bobinets hanging from six golden chevrons. At the changing of the guard bugles sound within the Palace yard in a sort of counterblast to the triumphant choruses of brass coming from the branches of the palm trees and the electric lights of the bandstand. Oaxaca, birthplace of Diaz, birthplace of Juarez, is proud of itself and makes some show under the Mexican sky.

Round and round walks the crowd and there mingle with the Indians American men and women, jaunty men dressed anyhow and women in low-cut evening gowns, simpering to one another and to their male companions. Mexican belles also come out, with highly painted faces and dainty, manicured hands. Girls in their teens join one another and all holding arms walk in strings of sevens and eights. Youths of similar age walk in similar strings. Horsemen with tight trousers and silver spurs dismount and tie up their steeds and join the throng. The Governor himself, the legislature of the State, joins the parade. There is the highest and also the lowest. Bow, bow, bow, come the beggars. You give them centavos or you give them cakes. They wear old dusty sombreros of straw and you put the cakes in the brim. You see beggars with dozens of cakes and _tortillas_ and rolls in the brims of their straw sombreros. The blind beggars walk in tandems; blind mother led by seeing child, sister by sister, grandfather by grandson. There are two pseudo beggars, too proud actually to beg, and they get more alms than all the rest. One is a magnificent fellow with a gigantic straw sombrero. He has lost both legs at the knee, but he must have been very handsome. He has large pads now like the wooden boots put on horses drawing the heavy roller over a lawn, and on these pads he walks like any other man using hip muscles where we use the muscles of the knee. His yellow hat points backward from his head--he carries a bootblack's stool and wherever he goes the crowd makes way for him--a king of the pavement and of all beggars and bootblacks. The other pseudo beggar is a boy with curved spine and twisted body. He walks on all fours and has a basket of matches or sweets hung from his neck. All among the people he jumps like a frog--and whose heart can be so hard as to refuse him when he looks up with angel smile, so sweetly, so appealingly? You pretend to buy, he looks at what you give him, meditatively. He looks up at you smiling, but perhaps a little troubled in expression.

"_Adios?_" he asks as if it were a question.

"_Adios_," you reply.

The trouble clears from his face; he is perfectly happy.

"_Adios, adios_," he exclaims and hops on like a frog amid the bare brown feet of the Indians and the polished boots of Mexicans and Americans.

_Tran-tan-tan_ goes the band all the while, and the Zapotec bandmaster with narrowed waist and rigid little head and shoulders looks like Juarez himself. And the rattle of the gourds is like tambourines struck on the knees of dancing girls.

8. UNDER THE GREAT TREE OF TULE

The greatest tree in the Americas, though not the highest, is in the far south of Mexico at Tule, some ten miles from Oaxaca; the highest and perhaps the oldest is to be found among the Californian sequoias. But in girth and grandeur the cypress of our Lady of Tule has no rival. The Aztecs called it the Ahuehuetl, but it was a fine old tree at the dawn of their history. It must have been a great tree in the time of the Toltecs and was before them too. Perhaps some Emperor planted it two thousand years ago. Who can say?

Cortes and his horsemen, on their way to Honduras, stood under it four centuries ago, and their followers built a chapel there beside it, that men might fitly turn from a marvelous creation to a marvelous Creator.

It is a pleasant ride from the city in the early hours of the morning. The Zapotecs found us horses (with hooded stirrups and corded bridles) and my wife and I rode out to Tule. It was market-day in the city and we threaded our way through innumerable Indians and droves of asses laden with panniers.

The astonishment of the Indian women at seeing a lady in riding attire was very amusing. They for their part pick up their long flounced cotton skirts and sit with their bare feet balanced on the asses' shoulders. Flanked by baskets and sitting on heaps of merchandise on the ass's back, so they ride to market, often suckling a baby the while. But one of their sex astride! "Good Saint Anne!"--"Jesus Maria!"--"Look sister!"--"Adios!" Their conventions were not our conventions. They carried pigs strung by the legs to the asses' sides and dangling turkeys and fowls. They brought pots innumerable and baskets of eggs and tomatoes and alligator pears. Some Indians on foot plunged through the dust, and waddling all across the broad highway the asses came on in droves.

When we had ridden out of this turmoil into the fresher air we were in a land of wild mimosa and that "smell of wattle" of which Kipling has written memorable words--

The smell of the wattle at Lichtenberg Riding in in the rain.

But there is no rain in Mexico all the winter long and all odors that come on the air are warm. Trees with scarlet flowers bend over us. The pomegranate hangs its rosy fruit, the coffee berries ripen on the shrubs, and trees that know no fall, no nakedness of limb, hang everlasting canopies of green. We ride gayly over plowed cornfields and along the borders of plantations where sugar canes chatter with the wind.

Then anon towards noon we descry a settlement veiled in verdure, and like a green knoll rising above it the vast upper story of a mighty tree. There is no need to ask. It must be Tule and its tree. And we ride by narrow shady lanes between banana palms, date palms, and flowering shrubs, crisscross from the highway to the tree.

Behold a great cliff of wood, gray like a willow or an ash, with an underbark of nut-fiber color, going upward in a grand sweep to the branches. At the five bays of the tree one might build five fair-sized houses.

All is silent, all is beautiful round about it. A beggar only is sitting under the tree. The large white church behind it reflects a blaze of sunshine. A bougainvillæa, twenty feet high, is one mass of crimson bloom all attended by bees and wasps. The solid white wall which runs round with blockhouse at one corner is unimpaired. On the white façade of the high broad church are painted tall Moorish decorations in an intense royal blue, tall slender mosques of gleaming blue, and big, red, empty niches for saints beside them.

The tree lifts its voluminous green bulk higher than the church, but all its branches, all its stems and leaves, hang as it were in reverence to the high-placed figure of the Virgin. It is plume-leaved, and the tree is held sacred by many tribes as the tree of mourning. It has the grand dignity of sorrow for the dead.

What a tree! A hundred horses could stand under it. Halfway up, in the midst of the giant growth, starts straight and bolt upright, a new tree, larger itself than any King Charles' Oak, larger even than that tree in Palestine under which the Greek monks tell you Abraham and Sarah entertained their Lord. The German Baron Humboldt, famous traveler in his day, scratched his name on it in the year 1802, the only name, the only vandalism which has been permitted. It is a perfect tree in full maturity, the same species of cypress as the Tree of the Dreadful Night at Mexico City, but in incomparably better condition and much larger and older. If it could tell its story, the lingering of Cortes and his men in its shade would be but a page. For it must ever have attracted the attention of whoever passed that way. The old cities like Mitla, twenty miles away, are choked in dust. But with the freshness of spring the tree lives on.

Outside the walled churchyard which holds the tree is the town plaza swarming with wasps but without gardens or bandstand or any of the common adornments of such places, not even a statue of Juarez. But there is an old _portal_ and one shut shop bearing the curious name of _La Vuelta al Mundo_, the Return to the World. But they have all gone their way, those who sat under the tree in ages past, and none return to tell us how it was in their day.

So--we to our horses once more, leaving, like the others, the Tree behind like old Time itself.

9. FROM THE RUINS OF MITLA

Mitla is the American Luxor, and in the quieter days of Diaz' rule in Mexico many were the travelers who went there, to gaze and wonder. The ruins are those of some great city of a bygone civilization but what civilization, whose civilization, none can tell. History does not work for them as for the ruins of ancient Athens or Thebes--for they are entirely without record and their story, whatever it may be, interweaves in no way with the story of mankind as we know it. How rash the _Outline of History_ seems when we look at the broken outlines of what is called Mitla! And the biblical traditions can hardly be felt to have any reference to Mitla either, unless, as some archeologists have believed, the country was originally settled by one of the lost tribes of Israel.

The greater part of the North American continent is without ruins, unless one thinks of the evidences of primitive man living there for ages. The mounds on the high banks of the Mississippi and the cliff dwellings of New Mexico tell not of a romantic past but of the uncouth savagery of the Stone Age. But away south, in the latitude of what is now British Honduras, are evidences of a way of living not unlike that of Greeks and Romans, or of Egyptians. In fact the dumbfounding truth is that the ruins are of a convincing resemblance to the ruins of the East. Whoever lived there prized gold and gems as did humanity in the Old World, and there is evidence enough that they lived for Empire as did Persians and Babylonians. But they also built as humanity built in ages past, in Egypt, in the East. The ruins of Mitla would not be supremely remarkable in the vicinity of Athens or Tyre or on the Nile. They would be almost in place. It is not merely because of the pyramids. The principal site of pyramids in Mexico is two hundred and more miles to the north, and though of course one is tempted to link the Mexican pyramids with those of Egypt the likeness is less startling than at first appears.

It is common in peoples to imitate in their architecture the natural contours of their surroundings, and I think the Mexican pyramids with their truncated tops are imitations in stone of the altarlike pyramidal mountains, the little _mesas_ so characteristic of the Anahuac plateau. First, victims were offered for sacrifice on sacred mountains, and then as a stage of progress on stone piles shaped like mountains.

But Mitla, and again Palenque in a similar latitude two hundred and fifty miles east, are not imitations of anything in Nature, but rather triumphs over ordinary life in vast untamed wildernesses. Their buildings have tradition and style. Whoever lived at Mitla lived sumptuously there.

I traveled to the little mining town of Tlacolula where the high road hastens downward to Tehuantepec and the Pacific, and then took horses from the Zapotecs. Here all the inhabitants are either Zapotec or Mixtec Indians. And I spent a dusty day at Mitla. Riding up a strange valley betwixt cavernous rock walls marked by splurges of ancient color I thought of an immemorial road and slaves with pots on their heads and princes in chariots drawn by men. I thought of wars, invasions, and the massacre and destruction in what must have been the last days of that Mitla Empire when some barbarous race which cared not for Art swept in upon the people and destroyed them.

There is a Zapotec village now. There were Kings of Zapotec when Cortes came and he made nothing of their kingship, though the greatest ruler that the Mexican people now acknowledge was a Zapotec, the famous and beloved President, Benito Juarez.

Behind the village, scorched and sunbleached, lie the heaps of what was Empire, of what was ancient wreckage in the days when the Spaniards came. Some of it lies in shapeless ruin--perhaps the homes of the poor. Zapotec houses of adobe have added to the heaps. There were Zapotec buildings which the Spaniards sacked; there were tombs of Zapotec Kings or the mummies of Kings, stored with gold and gems in the ancient vaults of stone. Mitla figured for long in the quest for El Dorado. And still to-day it is believed by the Indians that vast sacred treasures are here stored away. They guard the place with superstitious horror still, and a grand work of excavation leading to the discovery of subterranean temples and mausoleums might credibly lead to an uprising.

But I stood there undisturbed and looked at the great monoliths and halls, the stamps of classic pillars, the great walls with their conventional carvings and crosses. I went underground into an atmosphere hot and close as the interior of a pyramid--into mysterious chambers. I crept, candle in hand, into an abyss of darkness, as it were into the hidden past of the dead. And with relief I returned to the tropic blaze of light outside.

There stand long, low, white walls with fretted battlements, and there are hieroglyphics which tell no story, and there in the dust lie the footmarks of barefooted Indians. What does it all mean? Who has the book of the words? There is no answer. I write my name in a register which an Indian workman keeps--"Year 1923, Nationality British." I came and I passed. I have a signature, but Mitla has none. That is not even its name. But fitly might one read--

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

10. AD ASTRA

The story of gold commences in Genesis when of a certain country we are told "The gold of that land is good." It does not say for what or for whom it was good. It was just good. Gold is good: that was in the beginning.

Primitive man held gold in his hand as children do bright pebbles and he was pleased with it, as God the Creator Himself was reputed to be pleased with the world when He had made it. Man in the earliest days kept the gold which he picked up, made a possession of it, fought to keep it, fought also to get other men's gold. Or he stole it and was sued at law for its return.

He burnished his gold, he cut it, he melted it, he cast it as personal adornment, he recast it as idols, he saw that fire had no power to destroy it, he put its power above the power of the Sun, he worshiped it.

No animal prizes gold, not even the ape. Desire for it is a human passion.

After gold the greatest possession was in brides who were bought and sold for a weight of gold somewhat less than their own weight of flesh. And after men's wives their cattle were most precious and sold also for gold. Primitive man worshiped the idea of the perfect bride in a goddess of gold and he worshiped his herds in the golden calf and golden bulls.

Judah's gods were largely gold and sex. Moses gave, however, their vital revelation. His creative spirit distilled the idea of Jehovah, invisible lawgiver and controller set above all visible creation. Still the weakness of the Israelites has remained until this day--a passion for sex and gold.

Gold in itself has nothing of evil in it. It is as innocent as iron or tin. If we call gold fine and lead base it is because we ascribe to them our human ideas about them. Gold at best was prized for its beauty and its scarcity. It could fittingly adorn a bride, it could fittingly be devoted to Jehovah, as in the building of the Temple; but once it had been used to make a golden calf it had been defouled and could not be worn again or devoted to the True God. Moses made the children of Israel _eat_ that disgraced gold--after the calf which they made of their Egyptian spoils had been consumed by fire.

It is, however, possible that much of the gold of the Egyptians is worn and used by men and women to-day. Gold does not easily perish and yet is not easily recognizable. It exists from age to age, cast and recast in ever new forms, gilding ever new superstitions, glories, and ambitions. The gold of Darius was the gold of Alexander, and the gold of Alexander was gold in the triumphs of the Romans. In turn it adorned the rude limbs of Hans and Goths and Franks and Saracens. It glittered in the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It was part of the treasure of the Popes--but why labor the point? Gold has not been allowed to disappear. Tombs are rifled for it. Ocean's bottom is dredged for it. Every man who digs the soil is ready to identify it.

The gold of the New World proved a marvelous accession and drew men to it more than did the Cross of our religion. The Wise Men fixed their eyes on the East, seeking to lay aside their pride and bow to the spiritual new birth. But the young men of our era set their eyes upon the West, saying, "Gold--we will go there for gold." And the older men looked there also, asking for Power, of which gold is the index.

Ah, it has been and is the great _desideratum_, gold, pockets full, coffers full, bank full, heart full--to be finished with the practical problem of life and to have at our disposal all that gold can command.

With their gold the rich gild temples as of old, forgetting the lesson that our God "preferreth above all temples the upright heart and pure." The cynics and the buffoons and the rabble make also their golden calves which in turn some spiritual Moses will cast down.

But where is the poetry of the quest of El Dorado? Surely always in the quest and never in the attainment. If ever in life you find what you are seeking you have gone wrong. Finding, you lose. The whole of life is balanced betwixt the aching heart and the golden dream.

When the quest is transmuted to music, which at its highest strives to express the inexpressible, the ineffable, the unqualified _x_ of life, gold is represented in deep notes and remote superterrestrial harmonies suggesting a golden age, a golden dream, all that we have missed, the pathos of mortality, the forever lost, the infinitely precious past. There were beautiful women, myriads of them, each distinct and lovely, in far-off other times, centuries, ages ago, Queens of Sheba, Helens. They sleep like the daughter of Pharaoh beside a lotus flower, gone to dust, going to dust, to infinite fineness. Your eyes never saw them; they lifted their faces in the morning, at sunrise in the valleys, or on the mountains, far away, in other times. We look back to them from the afternoon, from the evening, from a later time; we cannot see them. They are hidden forever, like the heart of the world.

"Seek and ye shall find" means "Seek forever and ye shall find." "Knock, and it shall be opened" means "Knock forever and it shall be opened." How can we in our mortality find the gold? We cannot. The true El Doradoist, hammer in hand, is knocking and tapping forever, seeking veins of gold, seeking hollow chambers, seeking and opening tombs, climbing westward after a vision which forsakes him every day of his life.

But whither have we led our thoughts, into what starlit unreality? This volume, the like of which was no doubt burned at Alexandria thousands of years ago, is a study of reality, is it not?--the study of the quest of an everlasting substance by those who cannot last. It concerns largely the five last centuries of the second millennium after Christ, and certain peoples called Spanish, Indian, Anglo-Saxon. The Spanish people obtained a great hold on the gold, but it has fallen from their grasp. Americans now are foremost on the track of El Dorado, a super-race who seek gold, it is true, but seek more the Power of which gold is the index. They will take gold by machinery; power giving gold and gold giving power. They have seen in the mirage a golden dream and called it Pan-America.

There, most fittingly, closes this volume of the study of the Quest of El Dorado. A thought, however, comes to me while looking at the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan--When America has consolidated Pan-America from Alaska to Panama she may build a great imperial memorial, a pyramid greater than all other pyramids, a massive work of stone on which Time can play but little havoc. And ultimately that pyramid alone will survive her. In the long night of history it will stand, in the starlit unreality of forgotten Time. Others, somewhere afar, will be seeking still.

THE END

CONDITIONS IN FOREIGN LANDS

A JOURNEY IN IRELAND

By WILFRID EWART, author of "Way of Revelation"

Both sections of Ireland in its stormiest period. Real light on the conditions and public feeling of all shades out of which the present situation grew.

FROM BERLIN to BAGDAD and BABYLON

By Rev. J. A. ZAHM, C.T.C., author of "Following the Conquistadores," etc.

The pathway of civilization and of war between East and West, described by a true scholar of history and men's affairs.

ISLANDERS OF THE PACIFIC

By Lieut.-Col. T. R. ST. JOHNSTON

A graphic account of the strange and fascinating customs and folk-lore of Polynesia.

THE TANGANYIKA TERRITORY

By F. L. JOELSON

A full description of the territory which was formerly German East Africa, and an account of its development.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF JAPAN

By J. W. ROBERTSON SCOTT

The real life of the people throughout the whole country of Japan. Rural, social and industrial conditions intimately described.

SWINGING LANTERNS

By ELIZABETH CRUMP ENDERS

A woman's intimate view of China and Chinese life, in little known districts as well as in more traveled places.

EUROPE--WHITHER BOUND?

By STEPHEN GRAHAM, author of "Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies," "With Poor Immigrants to America," etc.

European conditions in 1921, as they impressed a trained observer who journeyed from capital to capital.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY New York London

PICTURESQUE AND INTERESTING REGIONS

ON THE GORILLA TRAIL

By MARY HASTINGS BRADLEY

Besides its value as a picture of a great gorilla hunt, this book has unusual interest because of the presence of the author's six year old daughter with the expedition.

CAMPS AND TRAILS IN CHINA

By ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS and YVETTE BORUP ANDREWS

Explorations along the frontiers of Tibet and Burma where the Blue Tiger lairs.

ACROSS MONGOLIAN PLAINS

By ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS

A naturalist's experiences in China's great Northwest.

VIVA MEXICO

By CHARLES M. FLANDRAU

The life, the people, and the country of Mexico.

KIPLING'S SUSSEX

By R. THURSTON HOPKINS

The quaint and picturesque Old World county, which forms the setting of some of Kipling's finest tales.

THOMAS HARDY'S DORSET

By R. THURSTON HOPKINS

The countryside and the country folk whose influence is woven into much of Thomas Hardy's work.

TRAMPING WITH A POET in the ROCKIES

By STEPHEN GRAHAM

Graham's hike with Vachel Lindsay through Glacier Park and nearby districts.

MEMORIES OF OLD RICHMOND

By ESTELLA, VICOUNTESS CAVE

Tales of events and people connected with a once famous Royal Palace.

JERSEY: An Isle of Romance

By BLANCHE B. ELLIOTT

Historical and descriptive account of a fascinating island.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY New York London

+-------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's note: | | | |Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+