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Updated: June 5, 2025
There were quite a number of young officers at the post during the winter, and as our relations with the Mexican commandant at Piedras Negras were most amicable, we were often invited to dances at his house.
This was the route followed by the author, the Rio Grande being crossed at the international bridge, and Mexican territory entered at the town of Piedras Negras in the State of Coahuila, a thriving place of some four thousand inhabitants.
There were quite a number of young officers at the post during the winter, and as our relations with the Mexican commandant at Piedras Negras were most amicable, we were often invited to dances at his house.
One of the geological surveys calls it Cactus Plain. It is one hundred miles long. There is water in a fissure of a mountain-spur on one side called the Cisternas Negras, or Black Tanks, but for the rest of the distance there was formerly no water except in depressions after a rainfall, a supply that quickly evaporated under a hot sun and in a dry atmosphere.
But it is not to be denied that his practice of making this journey to and fro afoot was not without its prejudicial result. The people of quality of either side of the river rarely ever set foot on the bridge, or on those malodorous streets of Piedras Negras which lay near the river.
It is probably dangerous to sleep on the laxas negras, only because these rocks retain a very elevated temperature during the night. I have found their temperature in the day at 48 degrees, the air in the shade being at 29.7 degrees; during the night the thermometer on the rock indicated 36 degrees, the air being at 26 degrees.
And you seemed pretty high. There was the dull silver of the river, and the line of lights along the bridge, and beyond the huddled, dark structures of Piedras Negras. You might have imagined yourself on the deck of a Mediterranean steamer, looking at a town in Algeria or Tunis.
And then there was a list of the names of the guests. Possibly Piedras Negras hadn't been included and possibly he was still regarded as belonging to the railroad offices, and the people across the river. But no, there were the names: heads of departments and the usual presentable clerks young Englishmen with an air.
He even became oblivious to the discussion on the other side of the partition, where Sylvia and madame presently entered upon the preliminaries of the business in hand. The street was quite familiar to him. There had been a year or so, long ago, when he had "made" Piedras Negras, as railroaders say, twice a week. He hadn't liked the town very well. He saw its vice rather than its romance.
I prefer me liquid refrishment with a little less mate, not to minshin its bein' less frisky." We had come to the Cisternas Negras with towels, intending to wash off the dust of travel. We now used one of them to strain the water, and were astonished to see that each gallon left behind it a plump spoonful of animalcula.
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