[Illustration: A WILD FIG TREE--LA PLAYA]
We were now on a level of palm orchards, whence the dried palm leaves are shipped to the highlands in great bales. Then we came to another _hacienda_, a farm of a hundred thousand acres, La Playa, where the Jefe and his company with their doomed prisoner took the diverging road to La Huacana. Finally, we came to a broad valley, the valley of El Rio de la Playa, black with volcanic sand, called the _mal pais_ (bad land), this being the immediate region once devastated by the terrible eruption of volcano Jorullo. Here were extensive banana groves, strange tropical trees quite new to me, orchids and palms and a stretch of several miles of indigo and watermelon cultivation. We then crossed another divide and came down again just as the big hot sun dove behind the mountains and precipitated the night. It was pitch dark when we entered the _hacienda_ La Cuyaco and dismounted, four thousand eight hundred feet below Ario, six thousand feet below Santa Clara and yet some one thousand two hundred feet above the sea.
This night we slept on rawhide springs, a piece of matting for a mattress. We were in the tropics. I was forbid to touch water, even to wash. Our supper was chocolate, (delicious), _tortillas_ and eggs. Parrots and two large gray doves and a gold finch hung in cages in the _patio_ where we ate. All were new to me. A baby swung in a cradle suspended from the ceiling and the father, Izus, the keeper of the courtyard, held another. He had thirteen children.
We took off our thick clothes--(it had been difficult to endure them all the afternoon)--I put on a gauze underwear and linen, and slept without the burden of a blanket. In the morning we set out early, but the sun was fiercely hot by nine o’clock. For some fifteen miles we now traversed a wide valley. We were away from the neighborhood of Jorullo and its scattered volcanic sands, and had entered the mineral belt. A ledge bearing copper and silver ran through the courtyard of the _hacienda_. I tripped against it when going to supper.
And thereby hangs a tale: Not long ago, it seems, an itinerant American--one of those casual countrymen of mine who now and then retreat to Mexico, when the law at home gives too hot chase--dropped in at the _hacienda_ toward the close of a hot day and asked for lodging. He was hospitably received, as is the custom, and when the great bell clanged for supper, he left his sleeping room and made his way across the courtyard.