Adam could well believe that, as they ran slowly past block after block of steel and glass suspended, apparently miraculously, on rows of tall, slender concrete pillars. Facing the campus was the fifteen storey administrative building, to one side of it the thousand foot long Arts Centre and on the other the huge library, its solid walls covered in intricate designs in colourful mosaic, symbolically depicting the rise of Mexican culture from the earliest times. There was a vast stadium, squash and tennis courts, swimming pools, car parks to hold thousands of vehicles, all interspersed with gardens, lakes and wooded areas.
`Your students are lucky,' Adam remarked, `and with their every need catered for like this, they can hardly fail to do well.'
Chela made a grimace. `They could, if they gave all their time to study; but like students everywhere these days they waste a large part of it getting themselves steamed up about politics.'
`I'd have thought that, with a one party government that would not have been allowed. Or are a lot of them anti the bombers?'
`No. The bomb has not yet become a sufficient threat to Mexico for them to concern themselves about that. I was referring to university politics. You see, in 1929 the passion for making everything democratic led to a decree that half the governing body of the University should be elected by the faculty and the other half by the students; and the governors were given power to hire or fire any professor. That meant that all the professors became dependent on the goodwill of their students. If one of them was accused of inefficiency by a pupil he had to defend himself; and if he wanted promotion he had to go canvassing. Naturally, some students favoured one prof. and others another. Every time there is an election books are thrown aside, scores of impassioned speeches are made and the campus often becomes a battlefield.'
While Chela had been talking she was driving north eastward away from the University and soon they entered the district of El Pedregal. It was an area many square miles in extent that,
until quite recently, had been entirely desolate: old lava flow.
Now its uneven waves of stone had disappeared, large quantities of it having been cut into blocks to build several hundred houses. But this was no ordinary housing estate. Each house differed: some were in the old colonial style, others of the large villa type and others again fantastic creations by the most advanced architects of the day. All stood in at least an acre of garden that had been expensively landscaped, had swimming pools, sun parlours, tennis courts or rockeries and were gay with newly planted flowering trees and shrubs. Adam estimated that in England these delightful properties would have cost their owners anything from thirty to sixty thousand pounds.
`Here,' Chela remarked, `you see how some of our rich live. Later, I will take you to see where the poor struggle to survive.'
Her tone was decidedly acid and Adam was both interested and a little surprised to find that the lovely, wealthy playgirl should concern herself with such matters. After a moment, he said
`I had the idea that Mexico was a Welfare State?'
`In a way it is; but only in a way that our clever government has devised to keep itself in power. There are other housing estates unlike this one. They are only row upon row of little four room bungalows, but they have electricity and modern sanitation, so they are palaces compared to the places in which most of the people who have them used to live. Many of them families of six or eight used to be crammed into a two room tenement without even water laid on. The people who get these bungalows pay only a nominal rent, so they are in clover. But they are very carefully selected, and it is no use applying for one unless you are a white collar worker, a trade union official or a schoolmaster. Can you guess why?'
`I think so,' Adam replied. `It is because it is always the underpaid Civil Servants, self educated mechanics and that type of man who create revolutions.'
`You've got it. The really poor and the ignorant masses are helpless without leaders; so the government suborns the class that might give them trouble by pandering to it.'
`That is certainly a cynical attitude, but I don't suppose they could afford to house anything like the number of families that need better homes. And at least it is a start in the right direction. Things will improve as time goes on.'
She shrugged. `I doubt it. Mexico has always been a land of extraordinary contrasts. Vast areas of barren useless land and occasional valleys rich in fertility. The very rich and the very poor. In the cities there has never been such wealth as there is today,
but in purchasing power the peasants earn less than they did a
generation ago. Their state is pitiful; but they will never be better off until they have been organised to bring about a real revolution.'
The car had been heading back westwards towards the University City. Passing through its northern outskirts, Chela drove on into an entirely different district of narrow, cobbled lanes and big old houses behind high stone walls.
`This,' she said, `is San Angel. Many wealthy families of Spanish descent have had their homes here for generations. I'm taking you to an old monastery which is now a restaurant. It is very good and lots of people drive out here for lunch.'
A few minutes later they pulled up and went into the building… The spacious restaurant was crowded with well dressed people: and a big centre table was loaded with cold dishes and delicacies. of every kind. They went through to a courtyard, the walls of which were covered with jasmine, passion vines and bougain, villaea, had drinks there and afterwards ate a meal the cost of which would have fed a poor family for a fortnight. As Adam paid the bill he wondered if Chela ever gave such extravagance a thought. But he was enjoying himself too much to concern himself about that.
Afterwards she drove him back to his hotel, dropped him there and said that she had engagements she had made before they met for that evening, but would call for him at the same time the next day.
That evening he went again to the Anthropological Museum, which was open until ten o'clock, and gazed fascinated at a number of the ancient Toltec exhibits that seemed so familiar to him; then he had a light meal in the hotel and went early to bed.
The following morning Chela drove him northwards through the city to show him one of the government housing estates, then on for twenty odd miles to Teotihuacan, the ceremonial capital of the Toltecs, from which they had been driven late in the tenth century.
It was the largest centre of religion that the world has ever known: eight square miles of courts and pyramids dominated by those of the Moon and the Sun, the latter being in bulk and area even larger than the great pyramid of Egypt.
They parked the car outside the museum with its adjacent wings of shops that sold every variety of Indian antique and souvenir, then spent two hours walking round the ruins. Up to the Pyramid of the Moon there was a broad, mile long open space with rows of ruins on either side, from the steps of which many thousands of spectators must have watched the colourful processions of be feathered priests and nobles.
Grouped about the foot of the big pyramid were several smaller
`ones, connected by little courts and passages. At the entrance to this maze they engaged a guide who explained to Adam that the pyramids consisted of many layers; as their builders had believed that every fifty second year the world entered a new cycle, they had encased the pyramid in a new covering of stone blocks, making its area and height ever greater.
On one side of the pyramid an excavation had been made showing all these layers and, descending a ramp, they passed through a narrow gallery off which there were a number of small, dark rooms deep in the base of the giant structure. The guide said that they had been used for storing treasure, but, as Adam peered into one of them, he was suddenly almost overcome by an attack of nausea. He felt certain they were cells and that in an earlier incarnation he had been imprisoned in one of them. The memory of the fears that had afflicted him during that terrible experience brought him out in a cold sweat. Half choking, he muttered to Chela that he was suffering from claustrophobia; then pushed past her, stumbled up two flights of broken stone stairs and out into the sunlight. It was not until he had been breathing in the fresh air for some moments that he ceased trembling and managed to pull himself together.