"We'll begin, just as soon as we get back in that car," Jamieson promised further. "When we get to Mexico City, we'll buy some more films and the camera is yours to do with as you will until we return to the States."
So, because of an impulsive wish and an impulsive promise, Nan began almost immediately to develop a hobby that, even before her Mexican adventure was over, was going to have amazing consequences.
From Tamazunchale to Mexico City, the drive was quite another experience. The road now was hewn out of sheer mountain rock. The car climbed and climbed, until the girls' ears felt strange and Bess declared that she could hardly breathe. She forgot this, however, when they, upon Alice's insistence, this time, got out again. All around them, huge mountain peaks rose to great heights making them all, except, perhaps, Adair MacKenzie, feel small and insignificant.
Straight down below them they saw rivers and waterfalls that looked small and white and unimportant, like a thread that some mighty hand had dropped carelessly in the greenness. Then they got in the car, went down the mountainside again, and they came to a lovely white village in a fertile green valley.
"Can't understand this jargon," Adair MacKenzie laid the menu that had been given him down and looked utterly disgusted.
"No sense in their making it like this," he continued as though it was a personal insult that anyone should presume to speak or write any other language than English. "Can't see how they can understand it themselves."
In the end, it was Walker Jamieson who did the ordering. "How about some nice mode de guajolote?" he grinned at Nan and her friends as he put the question. "It's turkey to you," he explained when they laughed, "stuffed turkey to be exact and a choice bit here. With it, we'll have tortillas, the Mexican substitute for bread, and frijoles, the favorite Mexican bean. Sound all right?"
The girls nodded as they tried to find the items on their own menus. And Adair MacKenzie grunted that he would take the same.
The meal wasn't entirely a success. Nan and her friends enjoyed it, but Adair MacKenzie grumbled throughout despite all that Alice could do to mollify him.
"Never mind, daddy," she said at last, "in a couple of more days we'll be at the hacienda--"
