Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/553

Rh may have served as axes, yet the tenuity of the smaller ones forbids any supposition that they were so used. They most probably served as currency, and as articles of tribute.

After our return to the city of Oaxaca, our chief projected a series of expeditions to the hill towns and mountain districts of the great State, which involved three long and fatiguing journeys among the Indians of the sierras, where gentes de razon, or "reasonable men," were scarcer than the gold which was the object of these expeditions. We rode, in all, over nine hundred miles, horseback and muleback, and our adventures were of such a romantic character as to be almost out of place in a sober book of travel. At all events, the space at my disposal will not permit me to include them, and I hasten on to the conclusion of my explorations in Southern Mexico; though with extreme regret, for notes made from the saddle are always more interesting than those from a car window, and fresh fields far more fascinating than a region traversed by beaten paths.

Our friend and companion on these excursions was a noted horseman of Southern Mexico, Don Santos Gomez, who provided the best of horses and the safest of mules, conducting us to our destinations with the tender solicitude of a mother. Each caballero of the party was fully equipped after the Mexican fashion, which is the best in the world for travel on horseback. On his head he wore a broad sombrero, or felt hat, of native manufacture, and from his shoulders, in the cool of morning or evening, depended the sarape, or blanket shawl, also the product of native skill. Having a slit in the centre, through which the head was thrust, it fell around him in graceful folds, hiding the broad belt about his waist, which contained a cuchillo, or broad-bladed knife, and his revolver, and covered likewise the saddle, as well as a goodly portion of the beast he rode. For the rain he had his manga de agua, or rain-cloak, a rubber sarape, like the poncho of South America, so broad and ample that it not only protected the rider from rain, but could be spread out over the animal beneath him from head to tail.

The sarape, I am inclined to believe, is an aboriginal garment, worn by the Indians of Mexico in pre-Columbian times. It is