Chapter VII: Part 7

There was one sculptor at the Country School. His Christian name was Phidias, not his fault, and no one _could_ have foreseen. He looked white and on the verge of suicide. He said he had been working in Paris ... but that he had done nothing since. He had been back six months. He said there were no sculptors and no art appreciation in Mexico. He certainly could not, even if he would, have worked in the room into which he took me. It would be a perfectly fit room in which to hang oneself. He looked very depressed,--I fear he will starve.

I came back, and went to the reception of the Pani’s. Like last time full of cosmopolitans, diplomats, from South America, such as Uruguay, Guatemala and the like, and also Mr. Malbran and Mr. Summerlin. There were heaps of women and girls, sitting in rows, and men grouped in doorways. That is the only unconventional part of the Pani parties, that the sexes do not engage one another in conversation. Maybe it is the habit of the country.

Today they had for diversion (besides the jazz band, which did bring the sexes together for short intervals) the Indian girl who has won the beauty prize, and 10,000 pesos with it. She was in her pretty Indian dress and certainly looked very attractive, though more Roumanian than Indian. Everyone was making a fuss of her, and she was being photographed by flashlight with Madame Pani, and the highest of the land. This little peasant girl was perfectly smiling and composed, not a bit shy or awkward. Her naked feet reposed on the velvet cushions on the parquet floor, and she seemed to gain a great distinction from her surroundings. Behind her she has generations of noble Indian race. Her dignity and calm had the effect of making the other women appear rather banal. She looked as though a young Cortes should fling his fame and fortune at her feet!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 5, 1921. _Mexico City._

I went to see Pani in his office at what they call “Relationes.” I wanted to say good-bye to him and ask his help in getting over the frontier. His office building inside looked like a converted Palace. I had to go through a large gilt room that contained beautiful tables with a life sized bust on each, presumably of former Presidents (so they do have their busts done sometimes!)

I asked him if the place were a Palace, and he said that it was not, but merely his office. I suppose the busts, the gilt and the good furniture, etc., are the proofs of Pani’s culture. I like Pani, he is not interesting, but is shrewd, and kind, and has a sense of humor. He smiles always, even on official occasions. Other Ministers smile when his name is mentioned. This because he likes old Masters, and Bourgeoisie, and is not a general, and is an opportunist; at least he might be considered so because he was in the Carranza Ministry, and has now attached himself to the Obregon, which is a rare occurrence in this country. Howbeit, Pani fits his post very well, he is a suave diplomat, and can talk a few languages. I confided to him that I am not going off to Los Angeles on Monday, having just been offered a trip to the Tampico oil fields. He agreed it was well worth doing. De la Huerta offered to facilitate my visit to Villa, but I have not time to do both so I have chosen oil.

Pani was charming to me, said that whatever I wanted of Mexico he would have done for me, and he hoped to see me in New York when “things are settled.”

When I got back to the Hotel, a man walked into the patio, with a bunch of flowers. It was a bunch that could hardly get in at the door, and the flowers were of every color and variety. There were exclamations of admiration from the people sitting around, as from me also, and then I was told it was for me, the sender was Don Adolfo de la Huerta. It was so big and so beautiful, I laid it on a table in the middle of my sitting room, and felt that I was at my own funeral, but at least enjoying it. A Mexican bunch is a wonderful thing, a great work of art. The flowers are wired and tied. Some on long sticks according to the design--It produces a wonderful effect, but they cannot be kept alive unless the whole construction is picked to pieces, and then oftentimes it is discovered the stems are too short to put in water. My flowers were roses, dahlias, choisias, magnolia, tuberose and violets, the two latter rescued and put in water. Then I sat down and wrote to de la Huerta, and told him exactly what I thought of him, straight from my heart.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 1921. _Mexico City._

I was lent a car, which called at the Hotel at 6:00 A.M. We did not start till seven, and it was cold, ever so cold, but the road was beautiful. I repeated the expedition to El Desirto and having started early got there before the rains. El Desirto is the ruin of a Carmelite Convent. It is a huge rambling place “in the desert” quite isolated on the mountainside amid the woods. It is very beautiful, but I thought dismal and damp. A Mexican man and boy, armed us with candles, led us down through underground passages and cells that were very extensive and dripping from the vaulted roofs ... Dick loved it, but I was glad to be back in the sunlight. It must be a curious sensation to be a nun or a monk, to live secluded from the world, in peace and calm, and to have no further anxiety (unless it be about one’s soul--) and to be content with the daily round, the menial work. I suppose it requires great belief and no imagination. We came back down the mountain, stopping to pick wild flowers, and at a village we found a house that gave us hot milk, for which we were thankful. Then we pursued our way along a road whence came the endless procession of men, women and boys, carrying their abnormal loads into town for sale. It led us through a valley some miles further in among the hills, and we paused on a hillside in the sun, to eat our combined breakfast and lunch. From our selected spot we viewed about a mile of road, and it made a curious impression upon one (as de la Huerta would have wished). This never ceasing steady stream of human beasts of burden! It suggested the evacuation of a town by refugees, carrying all they could take away.

Dick, gathering bunches of wild penstimon was joined by two little Indian girls. One could not have been more than three years old. She wore a single garment of coarse linen. It reached nearly to her little barefeet, was sleeveless and cut in a big square decolleté. She had the loveliest little face, huge eyes and regular features ... and as she crushed a big bunch of long stemmed penstimon in her arms, as if it might have been a baby, she made a picture that one longed to preserve. But a sadness overwhelmed me at the thought that these little young things on the flowery hillside were surveying their destiny, as it passed along the road below them. They had been born into a world where early in life, they would be bent double, by the burden back and front, of merchandise and baby, and there would seem to be no escape. “Why do they submit?” was the question that kept rising in my heart. Why does man, woman or child submit; and then I imagined myself in their place, and I got the answer: If my father had always done it, and my mother whilst she bore me, and my father’s father and mother, and my mother’s, and my brother already accompanied them, and the neighbors went too, and they talked pantingly as they started off together, or rested at the wayside places, then I who was young enough to be left behind, (and not so young as to be a burden that must be carried with them), I would know that my life would not always be one of watching, or of gathering flowers. When everyone is doing it, and it is in your tradition and in your environment, there is a submission to conditions that no one would dream of breaking.

We went for a walk along a stream, out of view of the saddening road, and our path was a mosaic of flowers, and the shrubs and trees grew in such a way that it might have been a carefully planted and tended English rock garden.

At seven o’clock Mr. Rubio came to see me. Sent by de la Huerta. He was accompanied by a well known writer called Velazquez, who is also a poet. Rubio delivered into my hands a photograph from the Minister; it was inscribed in a way that only the Spanish language lends itself to. Apparently he was pleased by my letter. I had said that I appreciated his personality and his aims, that a few more people of his calibre in the world, and there would be less of suffering for the masses. Rubio says that everything was arranged for General Calles to come and see me last Thursday at seven, but that at five, they telephoned he had been taken suddenly ill, in his office. He has been ill ever since. I had already heard the rumor that he had been poisoned. Rubio asked why I was leaving so quickly. I explained Dick was not well. I did not explain that I had finished my work. To all appearance I have not had any!

A letter has just come from the President’s Secretary, inviting Dick and me to Chapultepec at five on Monday.

MONDAY, AUGUST 8, 1921. _Mexico City._

Our last day in Mexico City, we ended up our riding school lessons (which we have had nearly every day since we’ve been here) by starting out across country at 10 o’clock A.M. I never enjoyed anything so much. We went through Chapultepec Park then out across the fields and galloped. Jumping a ditch Dick came off, but he was not a bit frightened and with good presence of mind clung to the reins and landed on his feet. Had he fallen, he might have been kicked by the horses scrambling up the bank. I was very pleased with him. Most of the rest of the day was spent packing, writing little notes of thanks and farewell and dropping them.

At five o’clock, Dick and I drove to Chapultepec Castle in the face of a blinding rain and thunder storm, which followed after a dust storm. And oh! it was cold.

When we got to the Castle it was very difficult to make anyone understand that I wasn’t a tourist, and that I had an appointment to see the President. One of them argued with me that what was the use, the President couldn’t speak English, and I couldn’t speak Spanish. I wrote my name on a piece of paper and gestured to him to “take it”--which he finally did, without further protest. We were then asked to follow upstairs, and were shown into the reception room that is entered from the roof garden. We waited and waited, and meanwhile Dick, who had heard about the President having lost an arm plied me with questions about war. Was war a thing that we had always with us, and would he go to it when he grew up? I found it extremely difficult to tell.

Finally Obregon came in, very pleasantly and smilingly, but we couldn’t talk, only a few words such as concerned Dick’s age. I said he was five, because I didn’t know what six was in Spanish. I understood he was expecting an interpreter, but no interpreter came, although we wasted three quarters of an hour, during which time he was in and out of the room, restless and expectant. The children came in, Alvaro and Alvarada, aged two and four, and when the President left the room, Dick and the boy, who had eyed each other silently, began to turn summersaults. Alvaro did it first, and then the damask sofa cushions went on to the floor, and when the President returned the children were standing on their heads, and coming down onto the parquet floor with a thud of heels. He laughed heartily. I then went out onto the freezingly cold roof terrace to see if that interpreter was coming--instead, I beheld Pani, smiling as usual. I was glad to see him ... I told him our plight and how difficult it was ... Pani however had come on business, and he and the President were closeted for some time. When he came out, we all went down stairs to the front door, piled into a car, were driven a few paces through the pouring rain across the courtyard, to another door. Here he went down a spiral stair, it was very mysterious and quaint--it led to the living apartments of the Obregons. The rooms were smaller and it certainly was more habitable. Madame Obregon met us at the foot of the stairs. She is one of those simple pretty young Mexican women, grown fat prematurely (though in this case, as an infant is due in October, there is some excuse ...) a woman devoted to her husband and her children and her home. She told me she had three children already, two, three and four years old. She asked about mine, and I told her and we discussed Dick--food and internal ailments. She talks American-English very well. We sat in a small room. It had a table in the middle and chairs all around. In the middle of the table was a silver flute-shaped vase of flowers on a Mexican flag “doyley”.... On the floor, in between the chairs, were large spittoons, quite useful for cigarette ends. Dick dropped his cake into one and roared with laughter. The little two year old girl sat down in her little baby arm chair and was given milk out of a baby’s bottle. I asked Mrs. Obregon if she wanted a boy or a girl. She wanted a girl, but her husband she said wanted another boy. He did not like girls, they had such a hard time in the world he said.

I thought of Mexican girls, and agreed--yet if the girl is born across the border of American citizenship, how different. How near and yet how far is emancipation for the Mexican girl.

I was at the castle an hour and a half altogether. The President had the use of Pani, or of his wife as interpreters if he wished. But he said nothing interesting, and asked nothing. I have an explanation for this in my own mind: In Mexico it is not easy for a woman to be taken seriously. In England, in the States and especially in Russia (where among the Intellectuals woman is on a perfect equality with men) it is natural that clever men should think it worth while to talk to a woman on subjects of mutual interest. But in Mexico woman is on such a different plane. I am told for instance that a “feminist movement” exists, but consists barely of 50 women! For the rest, they are the very carefully guarded mothers of families, and utterly submissive in spirit. I shall never forget the way Madame Pani asked me, the day I lunched there: “Are you here in our country all alone...?” Who in the world did she think I would be with...?

TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 1921.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 1921.

Two days, one night and a half night getting from Mexico to Tampico. We had a “salon” and so were not too uncomfortable. Personally I rather enjoy the incident of travel and in Mexico one usually does not travel without adventure. Usually one derails. On this occasion we just stopped (with a great jerk) for a couple of hours because our engine’s piston-rod broke. It was a bleak and dusty place where maize grew and not much fun. We next stopped because an oil box was on fire, but that did not delay us greatly, finally we stopped two more hours because the train in front had derailed. We walked up the line to see what had happened, the engine was back on the rails, and a good many Indians were at work mending the track. I looked at the lines with an ignorant unprofessional eye, and then I asked questions ...: Should the wooden sleepers be rotten and splitting? Should the screws be entirely missing where two lines were riveted together? Should “pins” stick up half an inch? and then I watched the efforts of four men at the “points” trying to close the lines. They pulled at levers, and finally hammered the line into place! This Railway is owned by American shareholders, and the Mexican Government has not given it back yet, because it cannot pay the damages for the deterioration it has suffered at their hands. Meanwhile it deteriorates more every day, and I suppose each train that passes renders the track more dangerous than the last. During this interval, Dick, who found a pool in a ditch went into bathe. It was a muddy pool where cattle drink. Dick took off all his clothes and swam in it. Afterwards the sun quickly dried him and on our way back to the train we called on an Indian lady who stood at her home door. She was old. Her home was made transparently of irregular bamboo sticks, oddments of dried palmleaf and some sacking. The roof was thatched, the floor was mud. Two planks, raised each on four wooden poles with a piece of matting on the top were the beds for herself and her husband. A primitive cooker, some terra-cotta cooking utensils, and “Our Lady of Guadalupe” in one corner, were the entire contents. Whatever money they earned they spent neither on clothes nor house. Perhaps it went entirely on food. I have seen worse in Ireland. But in a country where the climate is kind (we were some considerable distance from Mexico City) a thatched roof is almost all one needs. Life under those conditions offers little, but demands less. From this place the train went rapidly down hill, winding back and forth round the mountain sides. We were in the rear coach and could see our engine going round hairpin curves, and disappearing into tunnels! The views, which were a mix up of Switzerland and Italy, excelled both. The most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Too beautiful to take in. One felt humbled and awed. At one place, as the train came round the bend of a mountain, we came in sight of a river that cascaded for about half a mile into the valley below. I exclaimed: “Why can’t one live in the beautiful spots of the Earth, instead of seeing them as one passes by?” And I decided that I would not, if I could help it, leave Mexico until I had managed somehow to return to this place to live for a month, however primitively, if it were possible to arrange it.

At all the stations where we stopped there was the ever present crowd of vendors offering excellent cold chicken, hard boiled eggs, hot fried potatoes, cakes and breads of every description, of all kinds of fruits, for almost nothing,--coffee, pulque, lemonade and beer to drink. At some of the mining stations one could buy small polished opals for a peso each (if one bargained) carved and colored walking sticks, Indian made toys and doll’s furniture. Baskets of good shape woven with colors that were a real temptation! Blind beggars played music and sang songs. At one station, a blind boy with a harp was led around by his mother (a grey-haired Indian woman of great dignity of countenance) he played and sang about 500 verses of the Peons ballad to Villa! Towards the end we all knew the chorus well enough to join in, and the train finally unable to wait any longer steamed away, leaving him still monotonously singing the ballad to Villa!

When the train stopped out in the wild country side, the track was alive with myriad butterflies of every size and color, especially brimstone ones. It looked like an allegorical picture of Spring.

We arrived in Tampico about two A.M. on the second night.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 1921. _Tampico._

When I came down to breakfast in the morning, I did not recognize the quiet empty Hotel that I had entered in the small hours of the night. The hall was thronged with white suited, sombrero’d men, gun on hip. They were every type and age. There was not a single woman in the crowd. I thought I had dropped into a film play. Looking out into the sunlit streets small buildings met my gaze, an open fronted restaurant opposite, and barber shops full of men reclining in dental chairs at the mercy seemingly of someone engaged in cutting their throats. Dick asked me nervously, “What are they doing to that poor man...?” and I explained they would do it to him some day. Everything seemed open to the street. It was hot, divinely hot. Sitting still in the shade with no exertion, one had to mop one’s forehead. For the first time in my life I am comfortably warm, and Dick half clad, and protesting against the condition of his body has nevertheless recovered his color, his appetite, and his mischievous eye. In the evening we took a tram (overcrowded with a motley collection of workers) to a place half an hour away, called “Miramar.” Here Dick and Louise bathed in the surf. I felt I had been very superior (instead of lazy) for looking on, when they came out black with the oil which floats on the water. They had to take gasoline shower at the bath house to get clean! The sunset sky was very lovely, but the little wavelets that break on the beach, instead of being ripples of foam, were heavy dark and sluggish.

I have said that everything is open to the street: I include at night a quarter of the town where ladies sit outside their open lit up doorways, displaying a big bedded small room inside. These houses are almost standardised, varying only in the manner of their lights. Some preferring pink, to the cruder unshaded electric globe. From within the dancing saloons came the sound of music. Ladies fanned themselves at the door. Some had black hair and faces powdered ashen white. But the prevalent taste seemed for auburn hair, some color, and a bright pink dress. One or two in night attire were completely and transparently silhouetted in their doorways. The streets in this district being thronged, there is perfect traffic superintendence, and the tramcar has its terminus in this very midst. Everything in this respect being made easy for the tourist.

From the first moment I felt Tampico is a town for men.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 1921. _Tampico._

We started off in the morning in our riding clothes for a two days’ trip across the oil fields. There is no railway, and one might almost say there are no roads to take one over the 80 kilometers to the little “boom oil town” of Zacamixtle where the oil wells are.

Happily it was dry and hot when we started off, passing first of all through the camps and tanks of the Huesteca Oil Company, which is Doheny’s. Wherever the Huasteca has oil stations the roads in that vicinity are good, and the houses of the engineers and employees are well built and nicely situated, lawned and planted, in strong contrast to the surrounding jungle, and the Indian grass huts and their squalor.

Every twenty kilometers along the way, there is a camp, most of these are built by the Foundation Company, a firm that builds railways, that lays pipelines, or restores Cathedrals. There seems to be in fact no building job in the world that the Foundation Company does not take on!

At these camps there are steam heated coils to heat the oil and thin it so that it passes more readily through the pipe line and gigantic pumps to urge it along its course. All of which was a great surprise to me, as I thought the oil flowed by gravity from the wells to the tank ships! Our road displayed at intervals rows of pipes of various sizes, mostly belonging to separate companies, and the spirit of competition was in the atmosphere even of the jungle. Here and there where a pipe had leaked, a black oil pool had oozed through to the surface. In places, such a leakage had rotted the road and made it impassable, so that one had to drive in a detour through the shrub. We went through every kind of scenery, but the woods, of which there were miles and miles, were luxuriantly tropical. I never saw such a variety of flowers, and bush. There were gnarled tall trees on the stems of which scarlet orchids had seeded themselves, and from the branches of which dry grey moss hung down in long festoons. This moss is a particular industry for the peasants, who use it to stuff their mattresses. We lunched at Camp 80, in a wooden mosquito-protected building, where the primitive, hardworking Americans gave of their hospitality. The roads having been indescribable, and the car ill sprung, the day sweltering hot, we were tired and hungry. Dick humiliated me by complaining loudly that the omelette was only “skin” and had no inside. It certainly was not the omelette of a French chef, and I was surprised that Dick knew what an omelette should be like. He is shaping into the proverbial Englishman, who cares what he eats. After lunch I gave him a lecture on manners, and on the art of accepting hospitality, threatening as I did so not to take him with me on my next trip to Russia!

At 4:30 we dined, washed and rested before pushing onto Zacamixtle. This bit of the trip in the dark was the roughest of all. The roads were worse and wet. We got stuck in a village street, the mud being above the axle, and up hill. We had to be pulled out by another car.

For miles one could see the flaring sky and one expected to come upon the wells at the crest of each hill, yet ever there seemed to be another hill between us and the lighted sky. Finally, at a bend in the road, we came upon the full glory of it. Great flares 10 or 12 feet high rising from standards, where they have burned day and night for years. This being the method of disposing of the superfluous gases, which might so easily be put to a useful purpose. But with the wild scramble to make money out of the liquid “black gold” no one has time to think of utility or waste, or even of organization. There is no fraternity in “the fields,” no sense of comradeship, no co-operation, no idea of spending anything on the bit of land that has given so much. There prevails one idea, and that of making as much gold as possible in the shortest space of time, and getting away with it.

These hillsides in the dusk with their silhouettes of drilling towers, of palm trees and grass thatched bamboo huts, added to which the sickly smell of oil, have furnished palaces to men who once had nothing and diamond crowns to women, and given them the power of kings and queens. The mud and chaos, the breathless energy and human striving, have enriched men and women beyond all dream.

But today, the world being saturated in the blood of bankrupting war, the demand for oil has enormously subsided, nor can the price be paid. The golden liquid has sunk temporarily to an eighth of its value of eight months ago. Nevertheless there is no respite in the oil fields. The oil can be stored, the oil producers can afford to wait. So new towers grow up, new holes are bored. Down into the bowels of the earth 1800 feet below sea level the great metal shaft is drilled with the full force of its 4,000 pounds weight until it bores through into the illusive river of oil that flows way down. Albeit in the harbor a few ships only await its flow to carry it to the four corners of the earth, the oil is being caught and caged, forced, heated, pumped and rushed along as before. In fact, more pipe lines and more giant tanks are being hurriedly built, so that the oil can wait in store until the markets of the world have recovered. So they hurry, hurry, bore and build and store, for the “day” of oil will come again as surely as the sun rises over the mountains. Has not Lloyd George said what he will do to the British coal miners now on strike, when he has accumulated and organized oil for fuel as a coal substitute? The world needs oil, will always need oil, will need more and more oil, oil crude and oil refined. So get it, keep it, hold it,--hurry....

But how do the pipes, the boilers, the tanks and the camps, the provisions and the materials get to the fields? What is this super-human effort to achieve the seemingly impossible? Why is there not a pause for breath, a respite from the rush, why is there no co-operation among the companies? There is so much fraternity among workers, why not among employers? A very few months and just a little of this quickly made gold would suffice to achieve a common road for the common welfare, or to build a railway, and obviate this struggle of hired humans to extricate machinery from a bog. Here for instance, is a small stretch of road, called “private.” It can close its gates to a dozen cars that have struggled and bumped and sweated through miles of morass. It is called the Aguila, because that company built it, and when it rains they close the gate to preserve the roads’ condition. What then--? Aguila’s cars can get through, but the Corona, Dutch Shell, Mexican and others can well go back and struggle through a longer hellish way. It was ten o’clock of the night when we made Zacamixtle, and a room was given to us in the staff house. A little clean bare wooden room, with a thin screen partition between us and the noisy card playing party on the other side. Two beds, for Dick, Louise and myself. I left them and went out to see the town. I went in a car, escorted and protected. The town looked like the Chinese towns I have seen in pictures. Some wooden sheds, some open stores, thatched bamboo huts and in one street there was life,--the rest was dark. We looked into saloons whence came the sound of music. In one there was a gambling table and a crowd, we passed on. The other was more full of sound and movement. We went in, took the table that was offered us, and ordered drinks. In breeches and boots I was conspicuous, the other women being half naked half-castes. The men were tall, strong, clear-featured American boys, in big sombrero’s, blue shirts open at the throat, breeches, mud and oil bespattered, and revolver in belt. They danced a perfect fox trot, to music by four men on an instrument that looked like a spinet, but sounded like a xylophone. A man came up to our table and asked me if I was from Minneapolis. I was about to explain that I came from London, and had never seen Minneapolis when my protector intervened sharply with a rebuke that made the Minneapolis man apologize and retreat. I was rather resentful at his being so summarily snubbed, for after all he had, as he said, thought he had met me in Minneapolis. Another man at the next table, drinking his beer out of the bottle, tipped it up for the last dregs, and as he did so turned round to me and when the bottle was drained said “Hullo!” He wasn’t very sober and I disregarded him. Suddenly my protector went up to him threateningly and there were words. As the evening advanced the scene became indescribable. There were Mexicans and there were Chinese in the saloon, and fragments of the conversation are unrepeatable. The two best dressed women in the room became conspicuous. The one in scarlet chiffon, who leaning against the wall had slept, heavily drugged, woke up bad tempered, and took off her white slipper to beat the man on the head who spoke to her. The one in pink chiffon sang noisily as she sat on a man’s knee. There was a white cotton stocking kept up by a mauve garter, and a hiatus of brown skin between the stocking and the chiffon dress. All the women with white shoes were mud covered and trodden on. Our chauffeur sat at our table, and attached to himself a highly painted, cynical faced broad-bosomed dancer. She joined us and her conversation with him was translated to me in an undertone. At one o’clock there being scarce any one sober in the room, and the chiffon gowns having caught their prey and left, we left too.

My impression as I look back, in spite of all the dirt and drunkenness, is of young Americans of fine material, hard working and full of grit and infinitely superior to their conditions of life. These are the men and such are their surroundings, who give their best years for the benefit of the oil shareholders.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 1921. _Zacamixtle._

We were awakened at 6:00 A.M. by the sound of men whistling as they dressed, and finally the gramaphone on the other side of the partition played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and I got up, looked around for water to wash in. Outside on the verandah (where the men have their wash-stand!) I found it in gasoline tins. We had breakfast at the “dining room” to which we motored across an open muddy space. The breakfast, fried eggs, dried bacon, tinned butter, and canned milk was excellent, after which we started homeward, with a feeling of great appreciation for the simple hospitality of these splendid, hardworking men. They had not much to offer, and it is rare indeed that a woman intrudes upon their lives (I believe only about five have done so) but they offer ungrudgingly all they have and make one welcome. I felt badly that two people had been obliged to give up their room to me for the night, and never learnt who they were to thank them.

Passing by daylight the hills with their drilling towers that we had only seen dimly the night before made of the journey a new one.

As we passed through Amatlan we stopped, and got out into the mud to photograph lot 162. This is the hillside with the twelve drilling towers, “derricks” as they are called. 162 is the most prolific lot. It was at this point that the field was threatened by the recent fire, and it is estimated that from 500,000 to a million barrels of oil were lost. I was interested to hear how an oil well on fire can be extinguished, but in order to understand, we first stopped at the Huasteca well, known as Amatlan No. 6, in lot 228, and watched it being drilled. They had reached a depth of 1700 feet and expected to strike oil at about 2,000 feet. A well is drilled by means of a bit. As the hole is bored in, it is filled up by steel casing pounds up and down, worked by a wooden wheel. When a depth of 1800 feet below sea level is reached in a proven territory, the gas is encountered and the drillers know they will soon strike the oil. After drilling through the final strata, the oil dome is reached at about 2,000 feet below sea level. When the well “comes in” the drillers first let her “clean herself out.” This means that the gas is allowed to flow freely out of the well. With the roar and rush of gas come pebbles and stones, in many cases with sufficient force to throw the drilling tools out of the hole, and wreck the derrick. The gas is very inflammable and not even an automobile is allowed to pass within a radius of 300 metres during an in-coming of a well. After the tools are thrown out, a great black spray of oil comes up, and then the well is “in.”

The difficult part is closing in the well. A valve is set on the casing with a stem about 30 feet running at right angles to the casing, and usually the wheel that turns the valve steam is covered by a small hut. A pressure gauge indicates the pressure of the oil, and from this the engineers calculate the estimated daily flow.

When the big fire was raging in Amatlan, the only method of closing the well was to tunnel to the casing, cut the casing and insert a valve so as to shut off the supply of oil that was feeding the flame. This was accomplished by one man, who, by means of an asbestos suit, and tunnel, successfully accomplished the greater part of the work himself. It is claimed that the Oil Companies had about 5,000 men at work, throwing up earthen dykes to prevent a spread.

Craving for information, with the earnest desire of the ignorant person to become knowledgable, I asked if the oil from these wells reached its base through common pipe carriers, as in the United States. But this is not the case here. Each individual company runs its pipe lines at enormous expense, a procedure which is well afforded by the big companies, but which is paralyzingly detrimental to the smaller ones. Only the very rich can afford the luxury of enriching themselves.

From Amatlan we proceeded some miles, to the great crater known as Las Bocas, which took fire and burnt for nine years. In those days the means of extinguishing a burning oil well had not been evolved. The narrow neck had burnt and burnt until it had converted itself into a crater the size of a lake. From the surface of the sluggish waters, gas was still rising and the water bubbling and hissing in eddies. All round the crater the trees stood grey and lifeless, as in some districts of the battlefields in France. This, as in France, being caused by poisonous gas which has killed all vegetation, and left a wood standing like a bare skeleton.

Near this place we met a native, with a gun dragging along a baby coyote. He had wounded it in the hind legs, and the animal unable to walk, was being towed along the ground by means of a willow branch tied round its neck. We asked the man why he did not kill it. He answered that he wanted to bring it “alive to the village, to show to the people.” We argued that it was dying. The native was smiling and unmoved. We offered him a peso to shoot it immediately. He continued to smile. We offered him five pesos, he remained unmoved. “It will be dead in an hour, and you will be without your five pesos.” But he smilingly went on his way, dragging the bulging eyed, panting, dying baby coyote with its limp broken legs. It wasn’t that he was cruel, he was merely a brute with no understanding.

We pushed on to the camp known as Kilometer 40, for lunch, and here, one of the first things they showed me in the Superintendent’s quarters, was a Hearst magazine of July 12th, with a review and long quotation of Clare Sheridan’s Russian diary with photographs of self, with right and lefts of Lenin and Trotzky! I was sure well known by the staff at this point.

During our trip from Kilometer 40 to Kilometer 80, we passed the worst of the road, and I counted six cars bogged! The same fate did not befall us, because we had an extremely brilliant driver, but we had to halt for some time owing to the stoppage congestion. The car in front of us contained a Mexican family moving--on the back of their car, uncaged, sat a little green parrot. It looked so wise and talked so much and laughed heartily. It sat on my shoulder for some time and stroked my cheek with its yellow head, and said things to me in Spanish. And when I answered it in English, it put its head on one side and with the most entrancing Latin accent said “Right-o!” I made up my mind that I must have a parrot, a green one with a yellow head. They grow wild here.

The trip was without further incident until we reached Kilometer 80, where we had a bucket full of lemonade and some thick cheese sandwiches and from there in the dark we made for the Huasteca Terminal, crossed the river in a motor and got back to Tampico about 9:30 P.M.

During these two days, I passed through the oil wells of the following companies, operating in the Southern fields:

Huasteca Petroleum Company (Doheny Company).

Mexican Eagle, /or what is known in Mexico as “Cid Mexicana de
Petroleo, El Aguola” (English interests).

La Corona, or what is known in Mexico as “N. V. Petroleum
Maatschappij La Corona” (Royal Dutch Shell--Dutch Interest).

Mexican Gulf Oil Co. (Mellon Bros., Pittsburgh).

Island Oil Company (Leach & Co.).

International Petroleum Company (John Hays Hammond).

The Texas Company.

Transcontinental Petroleum Company (owned by the Standard Oil
Company--J. D. Rockefeller).

SUNDAY, AUGUST 14, 1921. _Tampico._

Spent ten hours on a small cabin launch going up the Panuco River and the Tamesi with which it junctions. At the ranch on Don Juan del Rio we stopped to bathe. It was very hot and very beautiful. We passed miles and miles of banana plantations and Indians in their frail overloaded “dugouts” who signalled to us to slow up for fear our “wash” would swamp them. Arm chairs and awnings were prepared for us, but with colored glasses to protect my eyes, I preferred sitting up in the ship’s bow all day in full glare of the sun. It beat down upon me, it burnt me, mercilessly, splendidly. I felt as if all the cold and fogs of England’s winters that had seemed so long, all the spring-times of England that had failed, all the summers of England that had been a disappointment, and all the autumns that had eaten damp into the marrow of my bones, were being burnt and branded and cauterized.

MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 1921. _Tampico._

We left Tampico by automobile for the Panuco oil field, and when we reached a point about 20 kilometers east of Panuco we had to abandon our auto in a bog and walk. Our luggage consisted of a gun, two kodaks, three coats and a heavy money bag which we have never dared to leave out of sight. The chauffeur when we abandoned him to his car, had assured us that Panuco was four miles away, “Just over the hill.” We started trustingly and full of energy, two kilometers rough walking over the sunbeaten shadeless plain was a bad start. We were overcome with thirst and Dick had to be carried on our backs in turn. The heat of the sun seemed to increase, the Kodaks became a curse, the coats a mockery. We sweated and limped and panted over the plain, and up the hill in the merciful shade of trees to the crest. No human habitation however was visible; down the hill we went and up the next. Still no sign, yet another hill. Dick became peevish and complaining, everyone too tired to carry him, and the springs in the hollows all dried up. At the foot of the third hill there was a junction of four primitive roads. Our guide left us in a heap, at the crossroads, gun loaded and full cock and with orders not to shoot at sight, but only on provocation, and he went in search of water. I took from my trouser pocket my little jade god, the one that looks like Trotzky and is 2000 years old. He is supposed to be the god who protects one from thirst. I stood him up in the sand and I begged him to send water. “Are you a curse or a blessing?” I asked him. “Never before have I carried you on me, never have I suffered from such thirst--be kind and send us, send us water!”

Half an hour later, when the sun was setting, we heard a distant sound of steps and voices and there our guide came running towards us, and a native boy with a bucket at his side. We all three got up and ran to meet him, ran stumblingly and speechlessly.

“Shut your eyes while you drink it ...” we were told. Womanlike, I looked, it was brown muddy opaque rainwater washed down from the hills ... we drank--and drank, one of us coughed up a small live fish, spat it out and drank again. Never ever had any drink tasted so good! And where was Panuco? Where the Corona Camp? 15 minutes away, said the native boy.

“Come and show us ...”

He would not.

“Five--ten pesos if you will lead us....”

“No I must milk the cows.”

“The cows won’t hurt for thirty minutes....”

“It is getting night....”

“You can find your way in the dark.”

“My father is out....”

We followed the direction he pointed out--we passed the Salvasuchi, Tampuche, Temante and Isleta fields. We passed them, I did not see them, my eyes were glued to the track, picking my way, and my mind concentrated on the effort of “getting along.” A little brandy, and even Dick shouted “no” when asked if we were downhearted. In the face of a lemon and sunset sky we were ferried in a dugout across the Panuco River from the Tamaulipas to the Vera Cruz side. An Indian at this juncture consented to escort us and carried our possessions. He said it was only two kilometers more, but we seemed to walk for two more hours along the river bank, in single silent file, through maize or cotton up to our waists, or banana plantations over our heads. At least we were not thirsty, and the sun was no more. The fire-flies danced around and before us, and the moon rose up in all her glory, making shadows among the banana leaves.

We started walking at 3:30, it was 9:30 when we tottered into the Corona camp and the Superintendent gave us his house for the night. The wife of one of the staff took us to her house to give us supper. I remember vaguely the mental effort of trying to display normal appreciation of her kindness in egg frying. But before the eggs were on the table my head was in my plate and I was fast asleep.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 16, 1921. _Corona Camp._

My bed facing the open window on the river, where the sun was rising, waked me at five. I got up stiffly and dressed at once. Found my host on the verandah and had a little conversation with him. He was a Swiss, and we talked French. Round his neck was a great scar. I learned afterwards that he had been hung by order of Carranza and was cut down just in time before he could die. We breakfasted at six and our host drove us to the railway station, three kilometres away, where we caught the 6:30 train full of workingmen; among whom in appearance we seemed quite in keeping. Dick was rather sleepy and said he felt sick, but otherwise showed no signs of the strain of the night before. He may have been carried at most two kilometers, for the rest of 18 he had walked it gallantly, and (after the sun had gone down) uncomplainingly. His powers of endurance before his sixth birthday made me extremely proud, and very hopeful of him.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 1921.

Got up at 5:30 A. M. Waked Louise and Dick, breakfasted at 6:15 and then proceeded in a car to catch the seven o’clock train. We started a little late and half way the car stopped in a perfectly deserted street. The panic and agitation in which I finally arrived at the station, to catch the only Mexico City express of the day is indescribable. My destination was not Mexico, but Micos, about ten hours away where I had contrived (as I planned) to camp by the falls. All the camp gear had gone on ahead, but waiting for me at the seven o’clock train were my four friends. Each of them director, superintendent, or some occupation of the sort in a Tampico firm. One an Irishman, one a Scotchman, one a Canadian and the other a Mexican. They were arranging for me, and organizing my camp, and joining it for a holiday. They greeted me at the station by the calming assurance that although it was seven o’clock, the train would not leave for an hour. As a matter of fact it did not start for two hours and a half. I had gotten up at five to catch a train that left at 9:30. Meanwhile we were turned out of our compartment while it was hermetically sealed and fumigated--the enforced legislation for every train from a bubonic plague district. Dick walked around in the pouring rain with a friend and bought a baby parrot without a cage. The flies were such as Tampico alone can boast. When we did start, the engine broke down six miles out. It was nightfall when we reached Micos, a primitive little country station, in the middle of a village street. Here we were met by one who had gone ahead to select our camp. He said he had not had time to get things fixed, and that meanwhile he was renting for us a house in the village. Leaving the others to go to the house I walked back along the railway line with the Irishman to view the falls, and select a site. It was not easy, as the bank goes sheer down from the railway to the falls and sheer up from the falls to the mountain top, both sides densely covered with virgin vegetation. In this place there are no roads, peasants load their donkeys and mules and drive them along the single file tracks. There are no churches. The Spaniards never penetrated into this wilderness, the blood of the people is pure undiluted Indian. The railway has brought to them whatever they know of civilization. At the top of a stony track leading down to the valley, two natives, man and wife, bade us “Buenos Noches.” We asked them where they lived. They pointed way down below to a thatched roof and in gallant native fashion “There is _your_ house” they said to us, assuring us that if we pitched our camp there, we could get eggs, fresh milk, a child for Dick to play with, and moreover a boat to ferry the river. We took some cigarettes from them and walked back, reaching our village house after nightfall. It stood on a bank above the railway. It was, of course, unfurnished. Three beds had been put in one room for Dick, Louise and myself. The walls were of dried mud, whitewashed. The floor was of wet mud into which the legs of the bed sank unevenly. Our mosquito nets hung from a transparent ceiling of bamboo through which one could see the thatch. The next room was full of beds for our friends and across a patio, that was like the yard of a pig pen, we walked on duck boards to the kitchen and dining room. I slept with my front door wide open, the moon streaming in, the largest cockroach I have ever seen on the wall, and an upturned cube box next to me with my clock and Margaret’s photograph. The conditions were so novel and interesting that one forgot the discomfort. Every man in the next room (there was an open doorway over which I hung a sheet for privacy) snored like two men each. The village dogs held concert in the night and woke up all the cocks. Two trains came in to the station whistling and the mountains re-echoed. The insects made an unceasing sound, as of machinery, and at five the next morning I got up.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 1921. _Micos._