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The women, light-hearted hucksters, laugh and sing and chatter continuously. The tortillera, kneeling by her metate, bruises the boiled maize, claps it into thin flakes, flings it on the heated stone, and then cries, "Tortillas! tortillas calientes!"
The rancho of the husbandman is a log cabin, with shingled roof and long projecting eaves, unlike the dwellings either of the great valus or the tierras calientes. I pass the smoking pits of the "carbonero", and I meet the "arriero" with his "atajo" of mules heavily laden with ice of the glaciers. They are passing with their cargoes, to cool the wine-cups in the great cities of the plains.
I am still in the piedmont lands the tierras calientes. The templadas are yet far higher. I am only a thousand yards or so above sea-level. I am in the "foot-hills" of the Northern Andes. How sudden is this change! It is less than an hour since I parted from the plains below, and yet the surface-aspect around me is like that of another land.
Besides the churches, there are the governor's palace, the casa municipal, and the stores and dwelling-houses which surround the Plaza Mayor, the latter having open arcades, or portales, beneath the first story. People come from various parts of Mexico to enjoy the baths of Aguas Calientes, and one sees many strangers about the town.
In the cities and on the Texan border, ice is largely manufactured by chemical process aided by machinery, a means of supply well known in all countries where natural ice is not formed by continued low temperature. San Luis Potosi is situated about one hundred miles to the eastward of Aguas Calientes, on the branch road connecting the main trunk of the Mexican Central with Tampico on the Gulf.
On the Sabbath, as in other Mexican cities, the grand market of the week takes place, when cock-fighting, marketing, praying, and bull-fighting are strangely mixed. About a hundred miles south of Aguas Calientes we reach the important manufacturing city of Leon, State of Guanajuato, a thrifty, enterprising capital, containing over ninety thousand inhabitants.
The hot waters, collected together, form a little rivulet, called the Rio de Aguas Calientes, which, thirty feet lower, has a temperature of only 48 degrees. In seasons of great drought, the time at which we visited the ravine, the whole body of the thermal waters forms a section of only twenty-six square inches.
The mountains connected on the east with the Rincon del Diablo, are much less lofty, and contain, like the promontory of La Cabrera, and the little detached hills in the plain, gneiss and mica-slate, including garnets. In these lower mountains, two or three miles north-east of Mariara, we find the ravine of hot waters called Quebrada de Aguas Calientes.
There are several churches in Aguas Calientes which are well worth visiting, some of which contain fine old paintings, though they are mostly hung in a very poor light. There is an unmistakable atmosphere of antiquity within these walls, "mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old."
The Rio de Aguas Calientes runs towards the north-east, and becomes, near the coast, a considerable river, swarming with great crocodiles, and contributing, by its inundations, to the insalubrity of the shore. We descended towards Porto Cabello, having constantly the river of hot water on our right. The road is extremely picturesque, and the waters roll down on the shelves of rock.
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