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Updated: May 19, 2025
Can't you see the rush of an avenging mob down this steep lane? the havoc and the blows the peasants hacking at the statues and the bronzes loading their ox-carts perhaps with the plunder and finally letting in the lake upon the wreck! Well! somehow like that it must have happened.
They come in ox-carts, mule-carts, buggies, on muleback and horseback, on foot, by railroad: some traveling all night in order to be present.
The road to Tehuantepec at night was one of no adventure. We were impressed with the great number of families travelling in ox-carts over these roads in the cool night air. It was a custom and habit of which we had before no realization. It lacked but ten minutes of one o'clock when finally we rode up to the hotel in Tehuantepec.
Some came, on horseback; the older and feebler in ox-carts, but most of them traveled on foot. At night aged and delicate women slept under trees in the forest, with no covering but the foliage and the cope of heaven. The winter was near at hand, and the nights were already cold and frosty.
Next morning, with real regret, we waved good-by to our dusky attendants, as they stood on the bank, grouped around a little fire, beside the big, empty ox-carts. A dozen miles down-stream a rowboat fitted for a sprit-sail put off from the bank. The owner, a countryman from a small ranch, asked for a tow to Corumba, which we gave.
But all night long the creaking moan of the ox-carts went on, giving the prairie a yet closer resemblance to "an inland sea." The summer passed uneventfully. Day after day we watched for the white-covered mail-waggon, pails dangling underneath it, dogs trotting behind, rousing as they passed countless wild brethren from every quarter of the prairie.
There was a panic in Dhurrumtolla; a "ticca-gharry" the shabby oblong box on wheels, dignified in municipal regulations as a hackney carriage was running away. Coolie mothers dragged naked children up on the pavement with angry screams; drivers of ox-carts dug their lean beasts in the side and turned out of the way almost at a trot; only the tramcar held on its course in conscious invincibility.
Save where some oaken grill supplied an ashen note, its adobe streets burned in smoldering rose, purple and gold the latter always predominant. It glowed in the molten sunlight, shone in the soft satin of a woman's skin; the very dust rose in auriferous clouds from the wooden-wheeled ox-carts.
Where a spring gushed forth and furnished water to the ships, Juan Fuller had his washhouse. Within a stone's throw was the grist mill of Daniel Sill where a mule turned, with the frequent interruptions of his balky temperament, a crude and ponderous treadmill. Grain laden ox-carts stood along the road before it.
But to reach this we had to pass through another square, which we found full of peasants' ox-carts and mule-teams; and there our guide instantly jumped down and entered into a livelier quarrel with those peaceable men and women than I could afterward have believed possible in Spain.
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