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Updated: May 25, 2025
Notwithstanding their formidable and forbidding appearance they are nevertheless attractive and possess some value either medicinal, commercial or ornamental. The maguey, or American aloe, is the most abundant and widely distributed of the native plants. It is commonly known as mescal, but is also called the century plant from a mistaken notion that it blossoms only once in a hundred years.
Where the ravines had been filled with solid masonry, the mountain torrents have eaten a way beneath it, leaving the superincumbent mass still spanning the valley like an arch. The suspension-bridges instead of which wretchedly inferior ones of wood are now used were composed of the tough fibres of the maguey; a species of osier, possessing an extraordinary degree of tenacity and strength.
My hands trembled as I cut the delicate stitching of maguey fibre, and then drew forth a mass of several thicknesses of coarse gray-brown paper, also made of the maguey, such as the ancient Aztecs used. Being unfolded, I had before me a sheet nearly two feet square, on which was painted in dull colors a curious winding procession of figures and symbols.
On this plateau, too, grows the Maguey agave, Mexicana, a wonderful plant, which is as useful to the Mexicans as the cocoa-nut tree is to the inhabitants of the lands to which it is indigenous." L'Encuerado had stooped down under a pepper-tree, and his glance wandered over the scene.
He had not the remotest notion of the direction in which the camp lay, for during many hours of his journey he had been asleep, and the Indians were not only continually changing the direction of their travel, but were apparently taking a constant succession of short cuts across country, now winding their way for a mile or two along the face of some dizzy precipice by means of a ledge only a foot or two in width, anon clambering some hundreds of feet up or down an almost vertical rock face, where a slip or a false step meant instant death; now crossing some ghastly chasm by means of a frail and dilapidated suspension bridge constructed of cables of maguey fibres and floored with rotten planking, which swung to the tread until the oscillation threatened to precipitate the entire party into the terrible abyss that yawned beneath them, and perhaps half an hour later forcing their way, slowly and with infinite labour and difficulty, up the boulder-strewn bed of some half-dry mountain stream that was liable at any moment if there happened to be rain higher up among the hills to become swollen into a raging, foaming, irresistible torrent, against the impetuous fury of which no man could stand for an instant.
We could see the mezcal, or wild maguey plant, growing against the cliff its scarlet leaves contrasting finely with the dark foliage of the cedars and cacti. Some of these plants stood out on the very brow of the overhanging precipice, and their long curving blades gave a singular character to the landscape. Along the face of the dark cliffs all was rough, and gloomy, and picturesque.
Then she said, "There's a big black cloud, and the sun is lost in it, and it's going to rain, and we aren't anywhere at all yet!" They had got down to level ground by this time and were walking through a great field of maguey plants. The maguey is a strange great century-plant that grows higher than a man's head.
It was a chilly gray day when the little narrow-gage train bore us close by the miraculous temple of Guadalupe, with its hilltop cemetery and stone sails, and into the vast fields of maguey beyond. Peons and donkeys without number, the former close wrapped in their colored blankets, the latter looking as if they would like to be, enlivened the roads and trails.
To prevent scurvy we used the juice of the maguey plant, called pulque, and to obtain a supply of this anti-scorbutic I was often detailed to march the company out about forty miles, cut the plant, load up two or three wagons with the stalks, and carry them to camp.
As soon as the maguey juice in the hog-skin has fermented, it is pulque; and is readily sold for eight, and sometimes as high as twenty-five cents a quart, producing a very large revenue upon the cost of the plant. It is not ordinarily sold at wholesale; but each maguey estate has its retail shops in town, from which the whole product of the estate is retailed out.
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