Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras | Page 7

no cure for
man's ills. The chief center was the swarming market. Picture a dense
mob of several thousand men and boys, gaunt, weather-beaten, their
tight trousers collections of rents and patchwork in many colors,
sandals of a soft piece of leather showing a foot cracked, blackened,
tough as a hoof, as incrusted with filth as a dead foot picked up on a
garbage heap, the toes always squirting with mud, the feet not merely
never washed but the sandal never removed until it wears off and drops
of its self. Above this a collarless shirt, blouse or short jacket, ragged,
patched, of many faded colors, yet still showing half the body. Then a
dull, uncomplaining, take-things-as-they-come face, unwashed, never
shaved--the pure Indian grows a sort of dark down on his cheeks and
the point of the chin, the half-breeds a slight beard--all topped by the
enormous hat, never missing, though often full of holes, black with dirt,
weather-beaten beyond expression.
Then there were fully as many women and girls, even less fortunate, for
they had not even sandals, but splashed along barefoot among the small
cold cobblestones. Their dress seemed gleaned from a rag-heap and
their heads were bare, their black hair combed or plastered flat.
Children of both sexes were exact miniatures of their elders. All these
wretches were here to sell. Yet what was for sale could easily have
been tended by twenty persons. Instead, every man, woman, and child
had his own stand, or bit of cloth or cobblestone on which to spread a
few scanty, bedraggled wares. Such a mass of silly, useless, pathetic
articles, toy jars, old bottles, anything that could be found in all the
dump-heaps of Christendom. The covered market housed only a very

small percentage of the whole. There was a constant, multicolored
going and coming, with many laden asses and miserable, gaunt
creatures bent nearly double under enormous loads on head or
shoulders. Every radiating narrow mud-dripping street for a
quarter-mile was covered in all but the slight passageway in the center
with these displays. Bedraggled women sat on the cobbles with aprons
spread out and on them little piles of six nuts each, sold at a centavo.
There were peanuts, narrow strips of cocoanut, plantains, bananas short
and fat, sickly little apples, dwarf peaches, small wild grapes, oranges
green in color, potatoes often no larger than marbles, as if the possessor
could not wait until they grew up before digging them; cactus leaves,
the spines shaved off, cut up into tiny squares to serve as food; bundles
of larger cactus spines brought in by hobbling old women or on dismal
asses and sold as fuel, aguacates, known to us as "alligator pears" and
tasting to the uninitiated like axle-grease; pomegranates, pecans,
cheeses flat and white, every species of basket and earthen jar from
two-inch size up, turnips, some cut in two for those who could not
afford a whole one; onions, flat slabs of brown, muddy-looking soap,
rice, every species of frijole, or bean, shelled corn for tortillas,
tomatoes--tomate coloradito, though many were tiny and green as if
also prematurely gathered--peppers red and green, green-corn with
most of the kernels blue, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, carrots, cabbages,
melons of every size except large, string-beans, six-inch cones of the
muddiest of sugar, the first rough product of the crushers wound in
swamp grass and which prospective purchasers handled over and over,
testing them now and then by biting off a small corner, though there
was no apparent difference; sausages with links of marble size,
everything in the way of meat, tossed about in the dirt, swarming with
flies, handled, smelled, cut into tiny bits for purchasers; even strips of
intestines, the jaw-bone of a sheep with barely the smell of meat on it;
all had value to this gaunt community, nothing was too green, or old, or
rotten to be offered for sale. Chickens with legs tied lay on the ground
or were carried about from day to day until purchasers of such
expensive luxuries appeared. There were many men with a little glass
box full of squares of sweets like "fudge," selling at a half-cent each;
every possible odd and end of the shops was there; old women humped
over their meager wares, smoking cigarettes, offered for sale the scraps

of calico left over from the cutting of a gown, six-inch triangles of no
fathomable use to purchasers. There were entire blocks selling only
long strips of leather for the making of sandals. Many a vendor had all
the earmarks of leprosy. There were easily five thousand of them,
besides another market on the other side of the town, for this
poverty-stricken city of some fifty thousand inhabitants. The swarming
stretched a half mile away in many a radiating street, and scores