# Our Neighbor-Mexico/Book 2/Chapter 3

III.
FROM THE SIDEWALK.
Views from Street Corners.—Chief Street.—Shops, Plaza, Cathedral.—High and Low Religion.—Aztec Calendar Stone.—The Sacrificial Stone.—The President's private House.—Hotel Iturbide.—Private Residences.—Alameda.
The dizzy church top from which we swung round the circle of the town is not half as agreeable as this sturdy and simple pavement at its foot. After all, there is nothing like the solid earth under your feet. Even this not too solid earth is better than all airy spirits and domes and azateas. Not too solid, because you remember Mexico is located on a dry, salt marsh, which was a salt lake when Cortez conquered it, and which is yet a lake a few inches below the surface, and often, in its sewers and odors, upon the surface also.
These odors sometimes surpass those of Cologne, but, unlike those of that fragrant town, are not especially pestilential. The high altitudes preserve it from this peril. Nor is it altogether blamable for this defect. Drainage is hardly possible. The flat plain surrounded by high mountains prevents any sufficient descent for sewerage. When the street is opened for such purposes, you see the moist mud not two feet below the pavement. Efforts are being made, or rather being talked about, for opening channels to the Tulu River, some forty miles to the west, and thereby getting up a movement of this sort from the centre. But it is not likely soon to be.
Turning away our eyes, if we can not turn up our noses, from this offense, which is not very offensive on the chief thoroughfares, let us note the map and the traits of the town.
THE MARKET-PLACE
​city, and bound your vision by the purple mountains, whichever direction you gaze. Take any corner where the streets pass clear through the town, you see, north, south, east, and west, or as near that as the lines run, the all-embracing mountains. They are from three to thirty miles distant, some even sixty miles, and yet they look as if only just down to the farther end of this telescopic tube of a street. They rise from two to ten thousand feet, and so are never diminutive, often very magnificent.
No city I have ever seen has any equal cincture. Athens approaches it. Her chief streets look out on Pentelicus and Hymettus; but she is not level herself, and so can not get up these vistas; nor is she large, and does not, therefore, match her mountains. They overpower her, not she them. Mexico is equal to her grander mountains. Popocatepetl is not ashamed to call her sister, nor is she unworthy of such a companionship. Athens historically overtops all its peaks. Mexico in its present proportions well fits her magnificent frame. One never tires of this resting-place for the eye. It is so exquisite in calm and color, that it seems as if made on purpose for exhibition and exhilaration.
This fact, too, seems to put the city in your grasp at the start. Most towns of this size you find it somewhat difficult to master. They are so tossed up and down, or stretched out, or have no perceptible limits, that one is a long time in getting hold of them. Though a dweller in Chicago for a month, it still bewilders me to arrange the streets of its west and south sides. Its north side I never attempted to subdue. I left that for the fire. Boston, every body says, except its own people, is untamable. Even the fire got tired of running round and round its narrow and crooked thoroughfares, and gave up in despair, especially when it drew near its narrowest and crookedest portion. Philadelphia's perfect rectangularity is equally bewildering, while Washington makes the head swim, no less in its everlasting radiations than its political plannings. As for New York, Brooklyn, London, and such like villages, they are all under the same ban as their superior sisters.
The real reason of this is, they have no perceptible boundaries; ​nothing to which they can be adjusted. Cincinnati, held in a pocket of hills, is much more easily grasped than Chicago, on a walless prairie. Jerusalem is seen at a glance, despite its crooked and narrow alleys, for it is on a hill-top, with higher hills inclosing it. But Mexico is pre-eminent in this respect. You know the town at a glance. There are large portions of it I have not visited, yet I have seemed to see it all at any corner. There it lies, each four of the ways straight to the mountains.
It is not crooked. Every thoroughfare is straight, and the blocks regular. William Penn in 1680 did not surpass Hernando Cortez in 1522. Unlike his ever-stretching, never-girdled town, this city has its natural metres and bounds that put the whole under the eye at once. It is like the observation of a witty judge to a brother lawyer on Hempstead Plains. When urged to stop longer, and see the country more thoroughly, after a brief ride, he stood up in the buggy, turned himself slowly round, and said, "I have seen it. Drive on." So at this corner where the Church of the Profesa stands, you have only to look in four directions, and can say, "I've seen Mexico. Drive on." But if the general appearance is the same, the special and nearer views are varied, novel, and attractive.
Take the spot at the base of our church-tower of the Profesa. It is simply a corner in a city street. The names of the streets are devotional enough to make us pause; for here come together the Street of the Holy Spirit and the Street of St. Joseph, the Royal. You can see north to the Guadalupe range, west to Tacubaya, south to Ajusca (called Ahusca), a tall, dark, purple range, and east to the giant peaks of snow. The mountains are indeed round about Mexico as about no other capital, while the town lies as level at their bases as Chicago by its lake.
The Aztec priest, himself probably a prince and warrior, announced by divination that where they should see an eagle on a cactus, holding a serpent in his beak, there their city should be planted—located rather, for it would be difficult to plant a city on the sea. Such a sight was asserted to be seen at the southern end of Lake Tezcuco. The city was placed there for military ​protection, whatever were the divinations of the priests; for, being on the water, it was not easily assailable. They took the eagle with the serpent and cactus for their national symbol, and the conquerors accepted that national coat of arms from their subjects. Some irreverent Yankees assert that a more appropriate symbol would be a Greaser sitting on a jackass drinking pulqui. But so they could retort that our symbol could better be a whisky-jug and a turkey than our like chosen eagle.
The city thus laid out has since had the water dry up from beneath it sufficiently to give it solid streets. The water of the lake was in it, in canals, and close to it, in its own shallow waves, when Cortez captured it. To-day it is two or three miles from its outer most eastern gate. While the streets are straight, but few are noticeable, and only two or three are really attractive. The chief thoroughfare from the dépôt to the plaza and its two nearest parallel streets are the main avenues of the city.
The San Cosme Avenue starts out from the station very broad, but it narrows as it passes the Alameda, and enters the thick of the town, where it terminates at the eastern end of the Grand Plaza. This is the very street over which Cortez made his famous escape from the infuriated town, rendered doubly mad by the interference of his lieutenant, Alvarado, in his absence, with the bloody rites of human sacrifice. The town woke up before they were well started, roused by a sentinel, chased them along this dike, which is all this then was, crossed with rude and frequent ditches, and inclosed on either side with water. The multitudes dragged them off the narrow causeways, caught them as they tried to clear the chasms, their pontoon train being pressed into the mud of the first broad ditch, so that it could not be taken up. The band of adventurers lost their arms, ammunition, horses, precious metals, and gems, and all but a score of their men were left along the ravine, a prey to the destroyer. They assembled a few miles up, under the cypress tree still standing, and a few days later, with their good swords and strong hearts cut their way through two hundred thousand men, swinging down upon them from the Sierra of Gaudalupe, in the ​plains at Otumba. The avenue is now solid, and Alvarado's famous leap across one of these ditches is an indistinguishable bit of the hard highway. Over the same road marched the American army into town, Scott and Grant and Lee, the known, and the then unknown, being in the little host of later conquerors. If we are seeking a like and larger, bloodless and better, conquest, we can properly pass to our quarters over the same path. It may be ominous of a bloody retreat under the uprisings and assaults of reigning superstition, but it will only thus be prophetic of ultimate and perfect victory.
A parallel street to the central thoroughfare goes out from the western end of the same plaza, and is heavily shaded at the start with covered arcades, like a deep sombrero, behind which shop-men of all sorts ply their trades. It runs straight to the luxurious northern hamlet of Tacubaya. Between these two is the street at whose corner you have been standing. It lies between the green plats of the Plaza and the Alameda, each of which appears at either extremity. This street is the busiest and most fashionable of all in the town. It is half a mile long, forty to fifty feet wide, about three stories high, faced with stone or mortar, but, except three or four buildings, without especial ornament. It bears the names of Calle del Plateros (or Street of the Silversmiths), Calle de Profesa, and Calle de San Francisco. It is, however, one in every respect but its name. They have a way here of giving almost every block a name of its own, which in a long street is as perplexing as the multitude of names given to a royal heir would be if he were called by a different one of them every day.
This street is lively with hackney and private coaches; carts with three mules abreast; burros, or donkeys, with their immense burdens; and men and women with theirs almost equally heavy, the women with rebosas, or blue or brown fine-wove mantles, wrapped about their shoulders, and half hiding the faces; the men with their white blankets with bright-colored borders, or with only their dirty white shirts and trowsers, carrying heavy loads on their trained shoulders.
SAN COSME AQUEDUCT, CITY OF MEXICO.
Fashion also flows up and down the streets, on side-walks, and in carriages. The highest fashion is never to appear on the sidewalk, not even to shop: but the grand lady, sitting in her carriage, has the goods put in her lap, and daintily indulges her feminine passion.
Come up to the plaza, the old centre of the city. It is only a few rods—an eighth of a mile, perhaps. You pass a few dry-goods stores, two or three, in this chiefest resort of the ladies and the trade; many jewelry stores, into which the former silversmiths that gave their name to the street have changed; tobacconists, who have only smoking-tobacco, the chewing variety being here unknown. Their cigarettes are done up in paper of different colors, and so packed as to make the shop look tasteful as its Parisian ​rival. Shoe stores abound, containing very pretty gaiters, and almost the only cheap article in the city.
Two or three of the old silversmith establishments remain, holes in the wall, where a few manufactured articles of silver, very neat and cheap, are hung up on the sides of the wall above the little old counter, and sometimes a tiny forge is plying its fires at the rear.
The plaza is hardly less than a thousand feet square. In its centre is a large garden, planted by Carlotta, and well filled with trees and flowers, in full leaf and bloom. On the west and south sides are deep arcades, filled with all manner of knickknacks of much show and little profit.
The Government Palace extends along the entire eastern side, a stately but not superb edifice. In its ample courts large numbers of the soldiery are stationed, and even a great quantity of ammunition is stored. The hall of ambassadors is the chief room, stretching along nearly all this front, and adorned with portraits of the leading generals and presidents of the republic, among whom place is found for Washington and Bolivar alone, of other nations. We have no such hall in Washington, though the East Room in its height and breadth is of yet greater grandeur.
The north or chief side is occupied with the cathedral. This immense structure is approached by a very broad esplanade of its own, and is of large and even grand proportions, though its towers are not especially effective. It stands on a plateau, raised several feet from the pavement of the plaza, has adjoining it the sagrario, or parish church, profusely carved without and gilded within, the carving cheap and the gilding faded. It is cut up to fit divers crowds. The altar by the chief entrance is usually thronged. The choir behind it is a stately mass of carving. Two beautiful balustrades, of an amalgam of gold, silver, and brass, connect the choir and the high altar. So rich are they that an Englishman offered to replace them with silver, and was refused. Beautiful figures of like precious metal hold candelabra along this walk. The dome is of impressive proportions, and the high altar is set off with polished ​alabaster, and profusion of pink and green images, while the altar behind it is one blaze of gilding, from floor to ceiling, with a multitude of gilded images in niches along its broad and shining face.
THE PALACE OF MEXICO
The area in front of the cathedral is full of people selling their wares—never so full as on Sabbath mornings. Here is the lottery-ticket vender, most numerous and most busy of all. Male and female has this church created them, chiefly old people. All their sales have a percentage of benefit for the priest. The sellers are ​each numbered, and the church keeps steady watch over this important revenue.
Here is a velocipede course, and children enjoy it. The match-boy, pert and pretty; the cigar-boy; the ice-cream vender of a very poor cream, as I knew by a week evening's trial; the print-seller—every trade that can, is disposing of its wares before this sacred portal. How much is a whip of small cords needed here and now for those who make this house a house of merchandise! But merchandise of souls goes on within. Shall not that of lesser wares consistently proceed without?
I saw high mass performed here two weeks ago in the presence of the archbishop, the most elaborate and ornate religious display I ever saw. I hardly think Rome herself equals this grandiloquence of dress and posture. A throne was set on the side of the altar, and the archbishop, in costly gold and silver vestments, was installed under the crimson velvet pall, whose only defect seemed to be a piece of unpainted frame with white wooden pulleys, by which the top of the velvet back was let out over the head a yard or more as a roof. It was evidently made so that this projection could be hauled up to a line with the back, when it was to be carried to the sacristy, or depository, of the sacred garments.
On either side of this king of priests were many pompously arrayed vassals. Before him were three officiating ministers in like gaudy apparel. On the archbishop's head was a tall, ornate, gilded mitre, which he changed for a less gilded pasteboard in the more penitential portions of the ceremony. A dozen boys, in black and white, swung incense and held candles. One of them was the keeper of his grace's handkerchief, which he once called for by touching his nose. It was handed him, a dingy brown and red silk bandana, clean and folded, however. He took, opened, used, refolded, and returned, and the service went on. I am surprised so fine a gentleman does not use a white linen handkerchief, or one with a gold border. Is that en regle? I saw an officiator at the Madelaine in Paris blow his nose upon a like huge and dirty​colored silk. It jarred badly with his golden robes. So did this with these.
Do you wish to know how the archbishop looks? He is from fifty to fifty-two, short, thick-set, full-fleshed, full-faced; has a strong, loud voice, a bland and meaningless smile, a polished and easy manner, and is evidently trained in the art of government. He preaches every Sunday morning to a large audience in the sagrario, who sit or kneel upon the floor. He is not an orator after the impassioned sort, but, like most high officials, is evidently a manager rather than a talker. The interests of his Church will not suffer in his hands, so far as policy and push can favor them. He seems also very devout in the mass, and goes through that ceremony as though he believed it, which most do not.
A small image, set in a golden base, was carried round the church by four blue cotton-robed peons, the image, I believe, of St. Philip, as it was his day; and the choir followed singing, and the clergy, and a crowd of irreverent gazers and worshipers treading almost on the sacred robes and their more sacred wearers. The crowd was very ill-dressed and ill-mannered; and as for religion—well, the stream can not rise higher than the fountain. Poor Philip did differently with the eunuch than these his worshipers when he ran along by his chariot, and preached atonement and salvation by simple faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Ah, if that able and accomplished gentleman who is the head centre of this display could only get out of this pomp into that simplicity of faith, how different would this worship be!
The singing was magnificent, as far as elaborateness goes. After the pomp had finished, they disrobed the archbishop, in the presence of the congregation, of about half a dozen garments, and put on him a scarlet robe. It was all grandly done; but to what intent? Those poor crowds of half-dressed spectators, what did they learn by this display? Ah! Christ, Thou art needed in this temple, to teach Thy professed ministers how to feed Thy famishing flock. Hasten Thy coming! He has come!
Let us get out of this holy smoke, and odor and blaze and glare ​and tinsel, and the nasty, ragged crowd of spectators, and take to the street again. You notice, as you leave the church, a round slab at its northern corner. That is the Calendar Stone of the Aztecs. It was saved from the ruins of the teocallis that stood here. It is a specimen of the learning and art of those people, and shows that but for their religion they might have longer held sway. Their present religion, poor as it is, replaced a poorer. This cathedral, grand as it is, is not too grand to occupy its seat. It is of the Lord.
THE AZTEC CALENDAR STONE.
THE SACRIFICAL STONE
​amorphous figures, and is deep stained as if with blood. Where the cathedral stands, a teocallis stood—five terraces, and two hundred feet high. By a fivefold series of stairs in one corner, and fivefold circuit of the mound, the teocallis was mounted. On its top was this stone. Around the sides of the teocallis and up its steps they led their victims—men and youth by the thousands—made them pause before this stone, stretched their chests over it, so that the heart was strained over its edge, cut the flesh over the heart opening to it, plucked the heart forth, laid it reverently before the god, and hurled the body down the sides of the teocallis to the multitude below, who took it up carefully, cooked it, and ate it as a religious banquet. The cathedral is better than the teocallis, and the genuflexions and millinery of priests and bishops than the sacrifice of bloody hearts and the sacrament of cannibalism.
Turn northward again. We pass up the street of San Francisco, by the modest house of President Lerdo, a two-story city front, with green blinds, without pretense or cost; past the Hotel Iturbide, once that emperor's palace, now the Hotel Diligencias, the costliest edifice on the street; past the chapel of San Francisco and the pile of buildings which made that famous convent. Nearly opposite the chapel and its gardens are the residences of the two wealthiest Mexicans, Barron and Escandron. The brother of the latter once gave his check for seven millions of dollars. He began his fortune by establishing a stage-coach system all over this country. Mines, railroads, and other operations keep it growing. Their residences are plain without, except the latter's new house, which essays pillars and bronze dogs and lions on its roof. Within they are sumptuous. Courts, flowers, long suites of long parlors, every thing the heart craves is there, except that which it craves preeminently—the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Between their houses is an old structure, faced with porcelain, blue-and-white blocks, four inches square, of various figures. Within is a court with carved pillars. It is a very fanciful structure, and originally cost much. Across the way from these dignities, in pleasant apartments, is the residence of the American consul general, Dr. Julius ​A. Skilton, who won large repute for courage and skill in our war, and none the less for his sagacity and courage as a reporter of the New York Herald during the close of the French occupation. Whoever comes to Mexico will be sure of a handsome welcome in this American home.
INTERIOR OF A MODERN MEXICAN HOUSE.
A Mexican house is all beautiful within, if anywhere. It is not so, certainly, without. You enter through a large high door, wide enough to admit your carriage, into a patio, or open paved court. Around this are rooms for servants and horses, on the first floor. Handsome stairs lead to the upper stones, light balconies run around them, and rooms open into them. They are not allowed to open on neighboring estates, so they must open on court or street. The last commands usually only one of the four sides; so most houses have three-fourths of their light from the court.
​These rooms are as cool and airy as those built after our fashion, though they usually have only one inlet for air and light. They are much higher in ceiling than ours, and are tastefully set off in frescoes. The balustrades are often of brass, and the work has a more finished look, even in common houses, than the best in the States exhibit. On the street side are small balconies for sight-seeing. There are more disagreeable dwellings by far than a first-class Mexican house.
A few rods farther north and we reach the city park, called Alameda. It is a pretty shaded inclosure of about forty acres, lying between the two thoroughfares of the San Francisco and the San Cosme. Its trees are large, thick together, and perpetually green. The leaf hardly falls before the young one presses itself to take its aged place, so that even the deciduous sort never get reduced to a Northern nakedness. Their new spring robes, like a snake's, an eagle's, and an Easter belle's, are assumed or ere their old ones are dropped.
These trees are interspersed with open plats, where flowers of every size and sort gladden the nerves of sight and smell. These are again interspersed with fountains, and circular centres lined with stone benches, and open, hard parterres for children and bands to play. The trees and flowers are shut off from approach by high fences; the circles about the fountains and graveled squares are alone accessible.
This park needs only one addition to make it a perpetual delight—safety. One can not walk there in midday without peril. Almost every day robberies occur. A gentleman walking with his wife saw another man being robbed, and declined to interfere, though he had a revolver, on the ground that it might alarm his wife.
We may rest here from our sidewalk studies, if we are tired, and it is not too dark, and talk on what this city needs to make it as safe as it is lovely.