Lucky Adam Gordon. He had survived when the rest of his family had perished. Lucky Gordon, although the son of a poor Scottish net maker, he had been sent to one of England 's finest public schools. Lucky Gordon, against all reasonable possibility at the time, he had been through a good university. Lucky Gordon, with his first book he had made a name for himself. Lucky Gordon, Fate had relieved him of a wife whom he had come to hate. Lucky Gordon, with his fourth book he had hit the high spots and as an author was now the envy of the literary world. Lucky Gordon, that winter he was able to travel deluxe to Mexico, the warm, exotic, wonderful land of which he had for so long had dreams and longed to see.
But parts of his road to riches had been far harder than people knew, and several times it had seemed that his luck had deserted him for good. As he finished his daiquiri and his eyes again roved over the well dressed men and lovely women dining in the roof restaurant of the Del Paseo, he wondered a shade uneasily for how long his present luck was going to last.
CHAPTER 2
An Author in Search of a Plot
ADAM had flown out from England on New Year's Day by the Qantas direct flight, touching down only at Bermuda and the Bahamas. Soon after one o'clock in the morning the aircraft had come in over Mexico City. Nearly six million people lived down there in the broad valley so, on any cloudless night, countless twinkling lights could be seen; but, as the Christmas decorations were still up, the great arena blazed like a velvet carpet heaped with strings, loops and plaques of precious jewels, making a never to be forgotten sight.
Next morning he had slept late; then, after a breakfast lunch up in his eighth floor bedroom, he got out a map and, through the plate glass that formed the wall of one side of the room, he endeavoured to imagine the city as it had been in the days of the Aztec Empire.
That proved impossible. Then it had consisted of a large island in the middle of a great lake, to the shores of which it was connected by three long causeways. A copy of a drawing of it, attributed to Albrecht Durer, that Adam had seen, showed the island to have been entirely built over with many fine plazas, palaces and pyramids. That was how Cortes and his men had seen it on their arrival and reception by the Emperor Montezuma. They had marvelled at the beautifully carved stonework of the buildings, the scrupulously clean markets and the balconies of the houses gay with flowers.
Montezuma’s intelligence service had been good. For years past he had been receiving reports of the Spaniards' activities in the Caribbean: of their ships as big as houses, their cannon and muskets that could deal death from a distance by fire. He had endeavoured to persuade his formidable visitors to go away by making them presents of many beautiful gifts and much gold. The Spaniards were few in numbers and after eight months, disgusted by his cowardice in submitting to their blackmail, his people had revolted, stoned him to death and driven the Spaniards out. In la noche triste, as that terrible night was called, many of them had been so loaded down with gold that while trying to escape they ad fallen from the causeways into the lake and had drowned.
But Cortes, with the survivors and a host of Indian allies hostile to the Aztecs, had returned. Their last Emperor, Cuauhtémoc, had led a, most courageous resistance, but in vain. Then, in revenge for the Aztecs' treachery, Cortes had razed the beautiful city of Tenochtitlan, as the capital was then named, to the ground. All that remained of it were many stones that the Spaniards had used when building a new and entirely different city.
An even greater change had been caused by the complete disappearance of the island. Late in the nineteenth century the great shallow lake had been drained, with the object of growing crops there. That had not proved possible because the marshland was strongly impregnated with salt; but ever spreading suburbs had since been built on it, so that no trace remained of what had once been a tropical Venice set in the great fertile Anahuac valley.
Yet, further afield, the scene was unchanged. On either side of the valley ranges of mountains, some with the sun shining on their snow caps, dropped away into the misty distance. They were dominated by Popocatepetl, rising ten thousand feet above the city to seventeen thousand seven hundred feet.
Aeons ago Mexico had been split by a great rift running from Vera Cruz on the Atlantic to Cape Corrientes on the Pacific. The central plateau, on which Mexico City lay, had been heaved up and on both sides of it a belt erected eight hundred miles long by one hundred wide, dotted with innumerable volcanoes, many of which were still active. Once their lower slopes had been covered with dense forests of cedar; but, for building and fuel, the Spaniards had cut them down. The great ranges had since become a region of unbelievable harshness and desolation.
To the north of the rift lay many equally inhospitable areas of desert, and to the south of it, stretching away to Yucatan and Guatemala, vast tracks of low lying land covered with jungle. Both could become unbearably hot and lack of roads rendered some parts so inaccessible that the Indians still lived in their villages in primitive conditions. So remote were they from law and order that if an aircraft had to make a forced landing in their neighborhood they were still capable of murdering the passengers.
But during the past forty years enormous changes had taken place in Mexico. The land was incredibly poor and its agricultural value had been greatly reduced during the centuries by deforestation, which lessened the rainfall. Industrial development had attracted large numbers of the poverty stricken peasants to the cities, many of which had quadrupled in size so that they now formed an extraordinary contrast to the barren lands scattered with miserable villages that surrounded them.
Mexico City itself was the exemple par excellence of this new age and when Adam went out that afternoon he was amazed by the grandeur of this modern metropolis.
Past his hotel ran the Paseo de la Reforma: a mile long, six lane highway that had been driven right through the centre of the city, with great skyscrapers of steel and glass rearing up on either side. Along it surged a flood of vehicles, the fast cars on the inner lanes speeding along at sixty miles an hour. In the side streets behind his hotel, where lay the best shopping district, there were jewellers, modistes, antiquiers and men's shops that were evidence of the riches of the Mexican upper classes. In the evening he went out again to see the illuminations. The Reforma, and all the other principal highways, had chains of coloured lights across them at frequent intervals and, every few hundred yards, big set pieces of Father Christmas in his sleigh, the Seven Dwarfs, groups of angels and big baskets of flowers. Skyscrapers, with every window lit, reared up towards the stars and downtown, in the old part of the city, the Plaza de la Constitution was a sight never to be forgotten. In it stood the oldest Cathedral in the New World, the National Palace and the two city Halls. Every facet of these huge buildings was lit with concealed lighting, making the square as bright as day and very Beautiful. Nothing that Paris or London had ever shown could approach the magnificence of these illuminations and nothing could have more greatly impressed Adam with the wealth of modern Mexico.
As he ate his late dinner in the roof restaurant of the Del Pasco e thumbed through a guide book to make plans for the following day, and decided that Chapultepec Park had places in it that were the most likely to provide him with ideas for the basis of a new book.