men of old, is the place where the serapes are made. One gets a glimpse of the oldtime communal life in such villages. None were ever quite sufficient to themselves, evidently, but collectively provided for every need of the countryside. No doubt the men of Teotitlán might have baked pots and woven rope as well as the men of their neighboring towns, but they did not. A self-contained village might not have been nearly so joyous. The markets of to-day are by no means the invention of the Spaniards. They were held by Indians centuries before the white men were ever heard of. The serape makers from this village, and the potters from that, and the cloth weavers from over yonder met to trade and talk. It was this need that created the plazas around which each Indian village centers. Until the coming of Maximilian and Carlota, the plazas were dry, dusty, treeless squares, utilitarian in purpose and appearance. It was Carlota who compelled the planting of trees in most of the Mexican plazas during her brief play at being empress. ON THE ROAD TO TEOTITLAN The road to Teotitlán was dotted with moving figures bound for the Oaxaca City market. A great oxcart creaked toward us, preceded by a Juno of a woman. Stern, high-headed, big-chested, she was, in an Indian way, beautiful, even if she was blackened by sun and dust. The picture she made haunts the memory, as she swung along at the heads of the two great black oxen. The cart was piled high with sacks of coffee, and under a little canopy in front crouched father, a wiz ened, timidly grinning little man with two babies in his arms, while other urchins peeped from niches among the sacks. At Santa María del Tule we saw the Great Tree of Tule. It is one of the natural curiosities of which every one in Mexico knows, though few have seen. Hernán Cortez and his men took shelter under it on their march to Honduras. Baron von Humboldt was so impressed with it in 1803 that he wrote his name and an appropriate inscription on a wooden plate and nailed it to the great trunk. It is now overgrown by the bark, so that only an inch or two of the plate may be seen, and the words are wholly undecipherable. The tree is a cypress, 170 feet high and of so great girth that thirty persons with finger-tips touching can barely encircle it. As old as the Great Tree of Tule was the trumpet song of the Indian who leaned over the battlements of the quaint little church named in honor of the great tree, and under whose shadow are the tombs of friars who came here from Spain to save Indian souls. We were accompanied by a purebred Zapotec Indian, a fine example of his race. "We do not know the meaning of that trumpet call," he said. "We only know that it is very old. It came to us from our ancestors." The trumpeter leaned over the battlements, the silver of his archaic bugle shining in the sun. It may have been-who knows?-carried in that first company of Spanish horse that invaded Oaxaca under Sandoval. In earlier times the men who sounded that call must have used horns of conch or reed. It was quite unlike anything one hears to-day-clear, mournful, barbaric-without a trace of European ancestry. From the houses of the little village, men and women came to listen. When the strains died out they disappeared. MITLA OF CHIEF INTEREST TO Two hours away are the ruins of Mitla.* They are world-famed among archeologists, with their subterranean passages, their immensely thick walls, and their unread inscriptions. But, after all, they lack interest for the uninitiated in archeology. A scientist might be absorbed in them, but any one else is apt to find them tame compared to the living Indians of to-day. I had rather see one such sight as that at an Indian village this same morning-the door of a jail made of barred timbers a foot square. with a dark face in each opening, and crouched upon the doorstep a faithful woman bringing food and drink to her man-than a score of Mitlas. We tramped about through the ruins faithfully, for all that, though more because of our retinue of followers than *See "Hewers of Stone," by Jeremiah Zimmerman, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for December, 1910. SPANISH TREASURE TRAINS ONCE TRAVELED THIS HIGHWAY: CUERNAVACA The weary peon, returning from the Cuernavaca market to his home in the near-by pueblo of Tlaltenango, is apparently unconscious of the gorgeous panoply of color through which he moves-the mass of Bougainvillæa foliage in the center and right a deep-wine or purple, the green cedar spires, the red-tile roofs, enamel domes, and cream-tinted walls. OVERLOOKING THE ZÓCALO, OR PLAZA MAYOR, OF MEXICO CITY, THE STAGE ON WHICH MUCH OF MEXICO'S TROUBLED HISTORY HAS BEEN ENACTED Liberators have been proclaimed here, and Christian churches built on the ruins of pagan temples. The beautiful trees which in former years adorned the plaza were destroyed by gunfire in revolutionary fighting. The view is through the arches of the Municipal Palace, looking toward the cathedral. THE ENTRANCE TO MEXICO'S MAMMOTH CAVE, CACAHUAMILPA Photograph by Sumner W. Matteson The portal is 70 feet high and 150 feet wide, and the rocks are so symmetrically disposed as to make the arch appear to be of artificial construction. The cave, situated 46 miles southwest of Cuernavaca, was discovered nearly 100 years ago. Upon one of the walls up to a few years ago the visitor could decipher two significant inscriptions: "Maria Carlota (Empress Carlota) reached this point," and "Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada (an opponent of monarchists and for a short time a president of Mexico) went beyond!" Photograph by Sumner W. Matteson INDIAN PILGRIMS ASSEMBLING TO ASCEND MEXICO'S SACRED MOUNTAIN ON THEIR KNEES Mountain, which stands at the foot of Popocatepetl, is a cave in which dwelt one of the twelve apostles to the Indians |