CHAPTER VIII.

Puebla.--The Miracle of the Angels.--A City of Priests.--Marianna in Bronze.--The Vega of Puebla.--First View of the Pyramid of Cholula.--Modern Additions to it.--The View from its Top.--Quetzalcoatl.--Cholula and Tlascala.--Cholula without the Poetry.--Indian Relics.

_Pueblo de los Angelos_--the "Village of the Angels"--derives its name from a miracle that occurred during the building of its celebrated Cathedral. While its walls were going up, angels are said to have come down from heaven nightly, and laid on the walls the same amount of stone and mortar that the masons laid the day previous. It is, of course, a sacred city. Its people, particularly the women, are the most devout in all Mexico; and, of course, the most profligate, as we shall show presently. It is a city of priests, and monks, and nuns, and friars, of every order, white and gray, black and greasy. As in all Spanish-American towns, the fronts of the houses are plastered and painted in fresco; but the fresco painting has gone too long without renewing, and the town looks now, as it did two years ago, gray, streaked, and inhospitable. The unwashed houses are filled with unwashed people; and the streets swarm with filthy beggars, and monks asking for alms in the name of the most blessed Virgin. The streets, thanks to the male and female chain-gangs, are kept quite clean. But all else is dirty. If the angels, when they finished their work on the Cathedral, had left a whitewash brush behind them, they would have done the city a real service. The houses, inside and out, and occupants too, and the reputation of its men from olden time, all need whitewashing.

CHARACTER OF THE POBLANAS.

Perhaps I could not present a more deplorable picture of the moral condition of the ladies of Puebla, who are celebrated for being so very devout, "but not very virtuous," than by copying the following from Madame Calderon de la Barca's "Life in Mexico:"

"Yesterday (Sunday), a great day here for visiting after mass is over. We had a concourse of Spaniards, all of whom seemed anxious to know whether or not I intended to wear a Poblana dress at the fancy ball, and seemed wonderfully interested about it. Two young ladies or women of Puebla, introduced by Senor ----, came to proffer their services in giving me all the necessary particulars, and dressed the hair of Josefa, a little Mexican girl, to show me how it should be arranged; mentioned several things still wanting, and told me that every one was much pleased at the idea of my going in a Poblana dress. I was rather surprised that _every one_ should trouble themselves about it. About twelve o'clock the President, in full uniform, attended by his aids-de-camp, paid me a visit, and sat about half an hour, very amiable as usual. Shortly after came more visits, and just as we had supposed they were all concluded, and we were going to dinner, we were told that the Secretary of State, the Ministers of War and of the Interior, and others, were in the drawing-room. And what do you think was the purport of their visit? To adjure me by all that was most alarming, to discard the idea of making my appearance in a Poblana dress! They assured us that Poblanas generally were _femmes de rien_, that they wore no stockings, and that the wife of the Spanish Minister should by no means assume, even for one evening, such a costume. I brought in my dresses, showed their length and their propriety, but in vain; and, in fact, as to their being in the right, there could be no doubt, and nothing but a kind motive could have induced them to take this trouble; so I yielded with a good grace, and thanked the cabinet council for their timely warning, though fearing that, in this land of procrastination, it would be difficult to procure another dress for the fancy ball.

"They had scarcely gone, when Senor ---- brought a message from several of the principal ladies here, whom we do not even know, and who had requested that, as a stranger, I should be informed of the reasons which rendered the Poblana dress objectionable in this country, especially on any public occasion like this ball. I was really thankful for my escape.

"Just as I was dressing for dinner, a note was brought, marked _reservada_ (private), the contents of which appeared to me more odd than pleasant. I have since heard, however, that the writer, Don Jose Arnaiz, is an old man, and a sort of privileged character, who interferes in every thing, whether it concerns him or not. I translate it for your benefit:

"The dress of a Poblana is that of a woman of no character. The lady of the Spanish minister is a _lady_ in every sense of the word. However much she may have compromised herself, she ought neither to go as a Poblana, nor in any other character but her own. So says to the Senor de C----n, Jose Arnaiz, who esteems him as much as possible."

If priests were angels, the town would be rightly named, for it is a city of priests and _religious_ men who have consecrated their lives to begging, and count it a merit with God to live on charity. Convents of male and female _religious_ abound, and, as the books tell us, $40,000,000, in the form of mortgages upon the fairest lands of the Vega of Puebla, is consecrated to their support, under the supervision of the bishop. That smoking mountain, that outlet to infernal fires, is so lose at hand as to suggest the idea that this whole mass of impurity and moral rottenness may have been vomited up from the bottomless pit, or that the fallen angels, in their way thitherward, tarried here to found a sacred city, see its Cathedral finished, and then led the way down the inclined plane to that brimstone convent where friars "most do congregate."

MARIANNA IN BRONZE.

In this city of dirty houses and dirty faces there is, nevertheless, some public spirit. Since I was last here a bronze equestrian statue has been set up in the Grand Plaza. It is a bronze woman, sitting quietly and easily upon a furious bronze horse. The horse is in a terrible state of excitement, but the woman is not alarmed in the least; for she seems to be well aware that it is only make-believe passion, badly executed in bronze. Who could this woman be but Malinche, or Marianna, the Indian mistress of Cortez--a fit patroness of the women of Puebla. She was the first convert that Cortez ever made to Christianity; and her sort of Christianity is not unusual in Mexico. That beautiful cone that rises so majestically out of the plain between Puebla and Tlascala bears the name of Malinche; but as this name was applied to her paramour as well as to herself, an additional testimonial, in the form of a bronze statue, was deemed requisite; for she is considered here as almost a saint, and would be altogether such if she had not been the mother of children, and ended her career by getting married. That act of getting married--not her former life--rendered her unfit for a saint; for how could an honest housewife be a saint? She might have been the best of mothers and the best of wives, and have performed scrupulously the duties that God had assigned to her upon earth; but she was lacking in romance, in those aerial materials from which saints are made. Saints are made in damp, cold prison-cells, where, in the midst of self-inflicted misery, they see visions, dream dreams, and perform cures upon crowds as deluded as themselves.

It was a delightful afternoon when I mounted my horse for a ride to Cholula. The wind of the day before had driven away every vapor from this exceedingly transparent atmosphere, excepting only the cloud that was resting upon Popocatapetl, a little below its snow-covered summit. It was such weather as we have at "harvest home," and it was truly a "harvest home" throughout the whole Vega. Men were working in gangs in the different fields, gathering stalks, or husking corn, or cutting grain, or plowing with a dozen plows in company, or harrowing, or putting in seed. It was harvest-time and seed-time together. The full green blade and the ripened grain stood in adjoining fields in this region of perpetual sunshine. As I rode along between carefully cultivated estates, I did not fail to catch the enthusiasm which groups of cheerful field-laborers always inspire in one whose happiest recollections run back to the labors of the farm. Such are the varieties this country affords: three days ago I was enjoying the most delicate tropical fruits, which I plucked fresh from the trees; yesterday I was traversing a salt desert covered with clouds of drifting sand; and I was now among grain-farms of a cold climate.

PYRAMID OF CHOLULA.

Right before me, as I rode along, was a mass of trees, of ever-green foliage, presenting indistinctly the outline of a pyramid, which ran up to the height of about two hundred feet, and was crowned by an old stone church, and surmounted by a tall steeple. It was the most attractive object in the plain; it had such a look of uncultivated nature in the midst of grain-fields. It would have lost half its attractiveness had it been the stiff and clumsy thing which the pictures represent it to be. I had admired it in pictures from my childhood for what it was not; but I now admired it for what it really was--the finest Indian mound on this continent; where the Indians buried the bravest of their braves, with bows and arrows, and a drinking cup, that they might not be unprovided for when they should arrive at the hunting-grounds of the Great Spirit. A little digging, a few years ago,[11] has furnished the evidence on which I base this assertion. This digging has destroyed the old monkish fiction to reinstate the truly Indian idea of the dead, and of the necessity of mounds for their burial.

By going round to the north side, I obtained a fine view of the modern improvements which have been constructed upon this Indian mound. I rode up a paved carriage-way into the church-yard that now occupies the top, and giving my horse to a squalid Indian imp who came out of the vestry, I went in and took a survey of the tawdry images through which God is now worshiped by the baptized descendants of the builders of this mound. My curiosity was soon gratified, and I returned to my place in the saddle.

I followed the wall around the church-yard, stopping from point to point to look upon the vast map spread around on every side. Orizaba, which I first saw when 150 miles out at sea as a mammoth sugar-loaf sitting upon a cloud, had at Jalapa, and at "the eye of waters," different forms, while here it appeared to be joined with the Perote, forming the limit of the horizon toward the east. On the west were Popocatapetl, Iztaccihuatl, and Malinche; while smaller mountains and hills seemed to complete the line of circumvallation, which gave to the elevated plain of Puebla the aspect of the bed of an exhausted lake, and to the isolated hills, rising here and there upon its surface, the appearance of having been islands when the waters covered the face of the land.

The cloud was still resting upon Popocatapetl; but its crest, far above the clouds, was in that region where, in the tropics, ice and snow lie undisturbed forever. The marks which it bore of having once been the smoke-pipe of one of Nature's furnaces, furnished us with the translation of its name--"The mountain with a smoking mouth." But that lake of fire has long since ceased to burn, and when the mountain had last emitted smoke was unknown to the oldest inhabitant. And that other mountain, Iztaccihuatl, or the "White Woman," lying so quietly and snug, in her covering of perpetual snow, at the side of the volcano, called up in the minds of the Indians the strange conceit of man and wife. There were forests on the mountain sides and trees along the rivers covered with green, but all else looked dry and parched. Seldom, indeed, has the eye of man ever rested on a finer farming country than the great plain of Puebla, and seldom are lands seen better cultivated.

CHOLULA.

Cholula was of old sacred to Quetzalcoatl, the "God of the Air," who, during his abode upon earth, taught mankind the use of metals, the practice of agriculture, and the arts of government. Translating myth into history, we may call him the great Aztec reformer. He is represented as a man of fair complexion with curling hair and flowing beard, very different from the type of the Aztecs. On his way from Mexico to the coast he remained for a while at Cholula, where a mound and temple was raised to his honor.

This tradition made Cholula the Mecca of the Indian world; and with the merchants who came to attend the annual fair held at the base of the mound came also hosts of pilgrims, to offer sacrifice to the memory of that god who introduced flowers into the native worship, and discouraged cruelties and human sacrifices.

At Cholula I was so fortunate as to procure one of the images of Quetzalcoatl, cut in stone, with curled hair and Caucasian features. I afterward verified the same by comparison with the great image found at Mexico, not without strong suspicions that both were counterfeits; for in this country even the most sacred records are open to suspicion. Popular tradition and the most approved authors will have it, that some stray white man had found his way among the Mexicans, and taught them empirically the calculations and divisions of time, and a very few of the arts of civilized life unknown to our Indians, and they venerated him as a god. But the probabilities are that the whole story is a myth, and for once the Inquisition was right in suppressing speculation in relation to him, whether he was Saint Thomas or not.

At the base of this pyramid, three hundred years ago, flourished the rich and opulent city of Cholula, which, according to Cortez,[12] contained 40,000 houses. He says that he counted from this spot 400 mosques,[13] and 400 towers of other mosques--that the "exterior of this city is more beautiful than any in Spain." That is, as he and all other historians of the Conquest agree in representing it, it was at the same time not only the Mecca and the commercial centre, but the centre of learning and refinement of Mexico. Here Indian philosophers met upon a common footing with Indian merchants. Its government, too, was republican; and upon these very plains, three hundred years ago and more, flourished two powerful republics, Tlascala and Cholula. The first was the Lacedaemon, the second the Athens of the Indian world, and when united they had successfully resisted the armies of Montezuma and his Aztecs. But Aztec intrigue was too powerful for the American Athens, and the polished city of Cholula having been subdued by the same arts by which Philip of Macedon had won the sovereignty of Athens--a combination of intrigue and of arms--Tlascala was left alone to resist the whole force of the Aztec empire, now aided by the faithless Cholulans. Yet Tlascala was undismayed by the new combination brought to bear against her, and did not readily listen to the proposed alliance of Cortez. It was only after three terrible battles with Cortez, that Tlascala learned to appreciate the value of his alliance--an alliance which has conferred upon her perpetual freedom and a distinct political organization to the present time.

This is the poetry of the thing. Let us give it a little matter-of-fact examination.

The spot on which I stand, instead of being what it has often been represented to be, is but a shapeless mass of earth 205 feet high, occupying a village square of 1310 feet. It is sufficiently wasted by time to give full scope to the imagination to fill out or restore it to almost any form. One hundred years ago, some rich citizen constructed steps up its side, and protected the sides of his steps from falling earth by walls of adobe, or mud-brick; and on the west side some adobe buttresses have been placed to keep the loose earth out of the village street. This is all of man's labor that is visible, except the work of the Indians in shaving away the hill which constitutes this pyramid. As for the great city of Cholula, it never had an existence; for if there had been, only three hundred years ago, such a city here, composed of 40,000 houses, with 400 towers, besides the 400 mosques, then some vestige or fragment of a fallen wall or a ruined tower would still be visible. But I searched in vain for the slightest evidence of former magnificence, and was driven to the unwelcome conclusion that the whole city was fabricated out of some miserable Indian village, inferior, perhaps, to the present town of one-story, whitewashed mud huts.

My contemplations were broken in upon by a swarm of squalid women and children from the church vestry, importuning me to buy relics in clay, which might answer the double purpose of images of saints or of heathen gods, according to the taste of the purchaser. But when they found me impracticable, they brought out their greatest curiosity--a flint arrow-head, such as used to be plowed up in scores near the place where I was born. Thoroughly disgusted with the sight of this Acropolis, with this ancient Athens of mud, I turned my horse's head toward Puebla; and as I rode on, I met scores of these modern Athenians trotting homeward, bare-headed and bare-footed, carrying "papooses" on their backs, while their faces, forms, and hair, and ragged dress, were the very counterpart of the Indians of North America.

The Indians of Puebla have long enjoyed the distinguished honor of being the governing men, while the white inhabitants were ineligible to a seat in the city councils. This city was formerly an Indian village, bearing the indigestible name of Cuetlaxcapen, or "Snake in the Water;" but, in 1530, the Vice-King Mendoza established here a Spanish colony, but left the original government unchanged; so that, down to the independence, the city administration was conducted by an Indian alcalde, assisted by a council of four Indians. Notwithstanding the anomalous form of its government, Puebla has ever been a great manufacturing town, and at this day consumes a quantity of cotton equal to some of our large manufacturing cities.

[11] The living witnesses of the result of this excavation are still at Cholula, and the fact is mentioned in several American works; my inference from the fact is the only novelty in the matter.

[12] Cortez's "Letters," Folsom's translation, p. 71.

[13] This word mosques Cortez constantly makes use of, apparently to keep before the people of Spain the idea that he Was conducting a holy war.