The mountain range — now like a fortress, now like a cathedral (it was yet another protectively maternal strip of the Sierra Madre) — stayed with us the whole day. But we never climbed it. We moved south along the hot lowland, and the more southerly we penetrated the more primitive and tiny became the Indian villages, the more emblematic the people: naked child, woman with basket, man on horseback, posed in the shattering sunlight before a poor mud hut. As the morning wore on the people withdrew and by eleven o'clock we were watched from the windows of huts which had grown much smaller. Shade was scarce: skinny village dogs slept under the bellies of cows which were themselves transfixed by hanks of coarse grass.
There was water to the south-west — a blue-green haze, a shimmering emptiness, the flat land receding to a sparkle and brown bizarrely suspended boats. This was the Dead Sea, a lozenge of lake on the shore of the Pacific. Nearer the train, horses were tied to the verandah posts of village bars, and men sat at tables near the windows; women and girls hawked prawns and pink-scaled fish which they carried in pails. My eyes were moist from the heat, and through this blur I saw dark pigs and coconut groves and banana trees and, behind them, bouldery mountains.
We crossed into the state of Chiapas. In Chiapas the mountains looked higher, the surrounding land hotter, and these two contrasting landscapes were so inhospitable and unmarked by any human effort, the people seemed like pioneers, hardy new arrivals who had yet to make any dent in the place. That was between stations, but the stations seemed like outposts, too. At the town of Arriaga I asked the conductor when we could expect to arrive in Tapachula. He counted on his fingers, then he laughed because we were more than ten hours late.
'Maybe tonight,' he said. 'Don't worry.'
'I'm not worried.'
Not worried, but rather sick of this hot crowded train. A slow train, which this was, could be a joy, if the seats were not broken and the toilet worked and the dust was mopped off the floor. The passengers, prostrate in the heat, lay collapsed on the seats, their mouths open, as if they had all been gunned down or gassed.
'I'll come back,' said the conductor. 'I'll tell you when we are near Tapachula. Right?'
'Thank you.'
But to arrive in Tapachula was to accomplish very little. Tapachula was nowhere. It was, simply, where this train stopped for good.
I had finished most of my food by the time we reached Pijijiapan; and what remained — some discoloured slices of ham, some sweating cheese that had softened to putty in the heat — I threw out of the window. I had also finished Pudd'nhead Wilson. Pijijiapan was a market town, a mob scene which the arrival of the train only maddened further — the train stayed in the middle of town for half an hour and none of the shoppers or hawkers or battered cars could cross the road. Nor would the conductor allow anyone to pass through the train. So they stood in the hot sun with their baskets, and the fish they carried grew more rancid-smelling as they waited. They carried chickens and turkeys, too, and corn and beans. They were Indians, short, square-featured people who glowered at this intrusion.
If one wonders who precisely they are, one needs only to listen to Jacques Soustelle on the Aztecs. Before treating the artistic and cultural achievements of the nobles, he directs our attention in a kind of whispered prologue, to another group. 'On the fringe of the rich and brilliant cities,' he writes, 'the peasant — Náhuatl, Otomí, Zapotec, etc. - continued to lead his patient and laborious life in obscurity. We know almost nothing about him. . He was of no interest to the native or the Spanish chronicler, with his hut, his maize field, his turkeys, his little monogamous family and his narrow horizon, and they mention him only in passing. . But it is important to speak of him at this point, if only to make his silent presence felt, in the shadows beyond the brilliance of the urban civilization; and the more so, because after the disaster of 1521 [the Spanish conquest] and the collapse of all authority, all concepts, the whole frame of society and all religion, he alone survived, and he alone still lives.'
He — or rather she — sold me some fritters and rice at Pijijiapan; I drank the last of my soda water (I had used the other half of the bottle for brushing my teeth) and we set off again. It was frustrating to be so tired in such a beautiful landscape, like dozing at a concert. The train picked up speed and shot along this savannah, skirting the majestic mountains, but the heat and the dirt and my fatigue, and now the noise of the speeding train, prevented me from being able to concentrate or steady my gaze on the bright rocks or the trees whipping past. It was punishing to feel so battered and incapable, but also a further punishment to know how the best of Chiapas was eluding me. Struggling to stay awake to see it, the effort exhausted me; the bright air and yellow land overwhelmed me, and I slept.
I woke perspiring whenever the train stopped, at little towns, like Mapastepec and Margaritas, where the foreground swam with colour: Jacaranda, bougainvillea, hibiscus — electric contending hues in what was otherwise a desert of frail trees and barren soil, broken by fields of corn and tobacco. We were in the deep hinterland now, and later I was to recognize the remote place, the combination of Indian villages and bad roads and the one railway line producing — but it was not so unusuaclass="underline" they had come with the railway and they had stayed — the Chinese, who advertised themselves on shop signs: Casa Wong or Chen Hermanos. I had thought it had been hot in the morning; the afternoon was almost unbearable and at Soconocusco I felt nauseated by the heat.
Walking the length of the train to find some bottled water to have with my fruit salts I came upon a man I at first took to be an American. I had not met an English speaker since leaving Veracruz, so I greeted him — glad to have someone who might understand my feeling of discomfort. He winced at me. He wore a jacket; the lenses of his glasses were coated with dust; he had a small map; he sat alone in Second Class. He was of course German.