Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/282

 272 I climbed the hill where the white face of the Toltec Malinche had been marked out to me. I could not find it. A ghost of the ages it represents, like all other ghosts, it flies on near approach. The sun went down, the moon came up, each brilliant in its work and way. But Malinche hid her white face before the white face of the moon among the tall cacti of the hills, and I came back disappointed to my hotel. Several huge gray shafts in its patio carved over (specimens of the pinea I found not) solaced me for my loss.

At two o'clock in the morning I was awakened by the mozo, as the house or body servant is called, of the Casa de Diligencias. The moon was up, and the sky, like the earth under it, was full of silver. A cup of excellent coffee and a fresh sweet roll, and I am safely stowed away in the coach. Fortunately, the whole back seat is mine, so that I can take my ease, if any ease can be taken in this peripatetic inn. The mules leap out of the court-yard and whirl away, crazy as the Pegasus of a new-fledged poet.

The cold is sharp, and the road rough, rougher, roughest. But sleep is too much for any road, and, lying on a pillow of coats, with a shawl for a blanket, I am tossed unconsciously for three solid hours; unconscious save for the cold that bites the toes, and which a redistribution of the shawl causes to retreat. The sun is up, and a hill-top station (also up), for changing the mules, gets me up. I get out, stretch legs, and renew coffee. It is called Juelites (pronounced Wheyletes), the name of an herb the Indians eat, which is worse of smell than garlic. These half-dozen "huts of stone" are such as Dr. Holmes would not be content with, I fear, despite his declaration to the contrary. There is existence here, and that only. Yet a school is held here, and some day the newspaper and the true Church will follow, and the hut of barbarism give way to the cottage of civilization, which has not been the case these three hundred and fifty years, in which a spurious Christianity has subdued, not elevated, this people.

The land slopes softly and prettily. The fields are frosty, the first I have seen, with one exception, all this winter; each was a light September frost. They are good for grazing, and their