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Crossing one of the characteristic bridges of the district, with a pretty shingled roof four-sloped like those of the houses over it, and with benches at the sides, where passers can sit and rest, while looking at the dashing, gurgling, foaming, water below, we followed a level road between blackberries, wild roses, and other shrubs, to Uruapan. No town in Mexico is more beautiful.
These spears are used in hunting ducks. Anciently a spear-throwing stick was widely used through Mexico; to-day it lingers in few places, the best known of which is here on Lake Patzcuaro. We easily arranged at Patzcuaro to leave for Uruapan the next morning. Although delayed beyond our proposed hour of starting, we were off at six.
My compatriot strongly opposed my plan of walking to Uruapan at least without an armed guard! The mountains were full of bandits, the Tarascan Indians, living much as they did at the time of the Conquest, did not even speak Spanish, they were unfriendly to whites, and above all dangerously superstitious on the subject of photography.
Patzcuaro is one of the laziest, drowsiest, most delightful pimples on the earth to be found in a long search. It has little in common with Uruapan.
Gourds are ornamented, fruit-forms are colored after nature, bowls made from fruit shells are elaborately decorated, all quite like the Chiapa work. What is characteristic of Uruapan are the placques and table-tops of wood, decorated with floral designs in brilliant colors, upon a background of dark-green, pink, blue, yellow, or black. This art is in the hands of a few persons, some pure indians.
It was brilliant noonday when I descended and walked the mile into town. The birthplace of Jose Morelos and of Yturbide, first emperor of Mexico, sits 6200 feet above the sea and claims 37,000 inhabitants. It is warm and brown with dust. Architecturally it is Mexican, with flat roofs and none of the overhanging eaves of Patzcuaro and Uruapan.
The houses, too, were log structures with shingled four-pitched roofs, and the houses in the town were well built, cement-walled, with low-sloped, far projecting tile roofs supported on trimmed beams. One might as well have been in Patzcuaro, Uruapan, or Chilchota.
Seeing that he was of no earthly use, I took the letter from him, and, turning to the crowd which had gathered, rebuked them for their drunkenness, asserting that it was disgraceful for a whole town government to be intoxicated at the same time; that some one ought always to be sober enough to attend to business; that we had been insulted by being called gringos, and that our order had not been read to them because the secretario was too drunk to do his business; that there were two ways of dealing with such town governments, and that, unless something was done promptly, we would see how they would like to go back with us to Uruapan, whence we had come.
The scene made more comprehensible the preconquest customs of the land, as the antithesis of the drunken and excited Indian to the almost effeminate fear of the same being sober makes more clear that inexplicable piece of romance, the Conquest of Mexico. There is less evidence of "religion" in Uruapan than in Zamora.
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