to our unwieldy machine; the helpers let go, and off they went, kicking, plunging, rearing, biting, and screaming, into ruts and watercourses that were like the trenches they make for gas-pipes in London streets, with our wheels on one side on a stone wall, and in a pit on the other, and Black Sam leaning back with his feet on the board, waiting with perfect tranquillity until the animals had got rid of their superfluous energy and he could hold them in. We were always just going to have some frightful accident, and always just missed it. The last stage before we reached Otumba, a small dusky urchin ran across the road just before us. How Black Sam contrived to pull up I cannot tell, though, indeed, his arms were about the size of an ordinary man’s thighs; but he did, and they got the child out from the horses’ feet quite unhurt.
It was at the inn where we stopped to breakfast that we made our first acquaintance with the great Mexican institutions—tortillas and pulque.
The pulque was being brewed on a large scale in an adjoining building. The vats were made of cow-skins (with the hair inside), supported by a frame of sticks; and in them was pulque in every stage, beginning with the sweet aguamiel—honeywater—the fresh juice of the aloe, and then the same in different degrees of fermentation till we come to the madre pulque, the mother pulque, a little of which is used like yeast, to start the fermentation, and which has a combined odour of gas-works and drains.
Pulque, as you drink it, looks like milk and water, and has a mild smell and taste of rotten eggs.
Tortillas are like oat-cakes, but made of Indian corn meal, not crisp, but soft and leathery.
We thought both dreadfully nasty for a day or two; then we could just endure them; then we came to like them; and before we left the country we wondered how we should do without them.