Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/662

654 hips, and guide him without a bridle, or even a stick. Let their pictures speak for them. Across the burro's back is thrown a hide-sack of leather, a pouch of which on either side is filled with water, which is dispensed to customers through an aperture in the bottom, stopped up by a cow's horn, which fills it tightly, owing to the pressure from above.

Notwithstanding the intense heat, and the fever season in prospective, the authorities of Guaymas permitted filth and garbage to stare one in the face at every turn. As might have been expected, the vomito came upon the town in August, and raged so fiercely that few of the living remained to care for the sick and dead. It was the first visitation in many years so fatal in its consequences; and if the local officers accept the lesson, and use their endeavors to cleanse the place, there need not be such a recurrence of the evil.

Charles Kingsley once called the port of St. Thomas a Dutch-oven of a place, and it is not far different in its surroundings from Guaymas, both being half surrounded by blistering hills; but the former has an advantage in the free circulation of air. One hundred degrees is a temperature often reached in Guaymas, while ninety-five is considered remarkably cool. During the two nights I dwelt there I nearly perspired myself away, though all the doors of the hotel were open from sunset to sunrise. Music and moonlight contributed to the enjoyment of evenings passed in the plaza, and after the musicos had departed it was interesting to watch the people pouring out of their adobe hives, and stretching their cots in the streets and on the sidewalks. Not alone men and boys, but girls and women, were taking up their beds and planting them outside the walls, where only they could get a breath of air not heated to the temperature of a sirocco blast.

Guaymas, just previous to my arrival, had passed through a gold fever without a precedent in several years. Reports had come across the Gulf of the finding of placer gold, in the remote district of Mulegé, in the great abundance that in Upper California astonished the world a century ago. People poured down from the mining regions of Arizona, drawn to this region