What the Traveller Saw (13 page)

T
HE NAME YUCATAN
only came into use after 1528 when the Castilian conquistador Don Francesco de Montejo took possession of the more accessible parts of the hinterland in the name of the King of Spain. He and his successors got little out of the country. There was no metal of any kind, let alone gold and silver, and nothing like enough local inhabitants to make it economically exploitable by Spanish slave-driving standards.

‘Ouyouckatan!’ (‘Just listen to them’) the Mayans are reputed to have exclaimed on first hearing the Castilian dialect, and this is why it is called Yucatan, although savants with their usual dreary pedantry have insisted that it means Land of the Yuca, a cassava that was used to make a sort of bread, and tapioca. Both versions are probably wrong. In what was the land of the Mayans anything was possible.

Most visitors to Yucatan flew from Mexico City to Merida, the capital, in about 1½ hours. Or you could cover the 945 miles from Mexico City by bus in about 22 hours, or by train in 36 hours (Pullman and dining car service). To further the illusion that this really was a voyage of discovery we chose to arrive by sea, at Progreso, the principal port.

On either side of a 2000-metre-long jetty white beaches with palms behind stretched away seemingly for ever. The
nortes
, otherwise the
temporales
, were blowing and the sea was steaming up on them and spraying the windows of the bijou and not-so-bijou but uniformly hideous villas of the well-to-do Meridans who fled here from the capital in July and August – months in which Merida was to be avoided like the
Black Death, as this was the rainy season and every afternoon its streets were turned into canals on which no one had thought of running a boat service. The best time to go to Yucatan is from October to March when the day temperature is around 70°F to 80°F and the nights are cool, around 60°F.

Offshore at Progreso the sea is infested with man-eating sharks, at least it was in 1911 when my copy of Terry’s
Guide to Mexico
, signed by the author, was published, and what Terry said was good enough for me. Swimming was safe from the beaches.

Progreso was a straggling place only a few streets deep from front to back, so you had to be careful not to penetrate too far or you ended up in a swamp. There were some semi-open-air fish restaurants and some atmospheric drinking places with swing doors with barrels painted on them in case you couldn’t read, and there was a lot of sand about, most of it airborne.

From Progreso the principal crop of the country,
henequén
, otherwise sisal, was exported, but the business was in a pretty terrible way because of the use of synthetics, and so was the trade in
chicle
, I was glad to hear, the other principal export – the loathsome base of chewing gum which makes sitting down anywhere such a hazardous business, some maniac having recently discovered a substitute for that, too.

There are two sorts of Yucatezos: pure-blooded Mayans, a minority, whose menfolk in particular often bear a striking resemblance to the sculptures of their ancestors in their ruined cities; and the Mestizos (the women are Mestizas), who are a mixture of Mayan and Spanish. The Yucatezos are among the most handsome of the Mexican peoples. They have beautiful manners and are very hospitable, and profess a fervent Catholicism on to which they have grafted more ancient beliefs.

The women have jet-black eyes, and equally black hair caught up at the back in a bun and finished off with a bow. They wear the
huipil
, here called the
ipil
, a long white cotton
shift with a square neck, neck and hem being embroidered with brilliant flowers. Below the hem of some of the shorter ones a lace-trimmed underskirt could sometimes be glimpsed.

It was only 24 miles from Progreso to Merida and the road was dead straight. At first it ran on a causeway across an enormous, eerie lagoon full of mangrove trees, many of them dead and bleached white. Beyond these swamps was The Interior – flat as a pancake, composed of limestone, which formed the foundation of the entire peninsula, with a minimum of earth on top. In it grew endless plantations of greeny grey
henequén
plants. From the white-fibred sort the Mayans made the ropes used to haul the blocks of stone up the steep sides of their enormous pyramids.

Occasionally we passed a grove of palm and casuarina trees which meant that almost certainly there was a
cenote
nearby. A
cenote
is a water-filled cave, sometimes one in which the roof has collapsed, leaving a large hole open to the sky. They can be of truly arcadian beauty.

There are no surface rivers in Yucatan. They all run underground. The
cenotes
supply the water and in the country are often used as bathing places. The Mayans used them for ritual purposes, sometimes of a bloodthirsty nature. The giant
cenote
at Chichén Itzá is said to have been used as a propitiatory dumping place for auspiciously cross-eyed virgins who were drowned in it. After a short time in Yucatan one begins to suspect that Cecil B. de Mille must have been a Mayan.

Finally we arrived in Merida, where whole streets of Spanish colonial houses were being torn down to make room for office blocks. In spite of this there were still sufficient to give the place a remarkable quality. In Merida the streets formed a grid at right angles to one another, and originally each
calle
was identifiable by an ideograph, the
calle
of the elephant by an elephant, that of the flamingo by an oversize flamingo, and so on.

Now they were numbered, odd numbers from east to west,
even from north to south. This, with the superimposition of a one-way street system, was enough to make visitors throw away their motor cars, which was probably what was intended. By far the best thing was to clip-clop down to the markets in one of the old, horse-drawn
calesas
in search of a straw hat, some of which were so fine that they could be drawn through a ring.

The old Spanish houses had a distinctly Moorish look. They had thick walls washed in delicate pastel greens, blues and pinks. Very often they had roof gardens and always a white tank for catching rain water for drinking, and a windmill, of which there were estimated to be between 15,000 and 20,000 in the city, for drawing up washing water from the depths below. The tall, narrow windows were covered with delicate iron grilles. Inside the heavy doors which opened on to the street there was an arcaded patio with flowers, climbing plants and palms growing, and often there was a fountain. Big hammocks swung from wooden knobs set in the walls of the arcades. Everyone in Yucatan slept in a hammock. Even in Merida the use of a bed, except by foreigners and in hotels, was almost unknown.

The best
hamacas
were made from the white sisal fibre and were incredibly fine, like lace. They lasted forever and were correspondingly expensive.
Hamacas matrimoniales
held entire families. Yucatezos are conceived, born and die in
hamacas.
Among the best in Merida were those made by the female inmates of the penitentiary. They welcomed visitors, but their
hamacas
were no cheaper.

‘How do you make love in a
hamaca
?’ I asked a gentleman in the city. He laughed, gave his moustaches a twirl, and said, ‘It is necessary to keep one foot on the ground.’

And now, having found out what to do in order not to loop the loop while making love in a
hamaca
, we set off for the ruins, which is what the majority of visitors come to see. Having visited them I despaired of writing about them. How
could one write about what one had only dimly apprehended; about Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and the enormous and to me (apart from a beautiful
cenote
in which we swam) uninspiring Dzichibaltun, which covers about 30 acres and has 8000 unexcavated structures in it? We knew what they must have looked like when new, from drawings and models and what the Spaniards wrote about them when they had scarcely had time to decay. The squares were perfectly paved; the dazzlingly polished buildings, the number of columns, the staircases and even the number of times some sculptural feature was reiterated, all expressed their involvement with the measurement and the passing of time. These, and the pyramids and the observatories that enabled them to measure to 0.00069 of a day, the length of a solar year, could be seen for miles towering above the jungle trees, all built by people who had no knowledge of the keystone arch and without the aid of the wheel or metal instruments of any kind.

But in spite of their brilliance and erudition I could not rid myself of the feeling that the Mayans and the Toltecs who encroached on their territories had something slightly Hollywoodish about them. I knew they worshipped gods of the earth, moon and stars and the hideous, snouted Chac, god of water, and we had seen the reclining Chac-Mools, great reclining stone monoliths into whose laps the hearts of the sacrificial victims were thrown after they had been scooped from their bodies with obsidian knives.

Both the Mayans and the Toltecs seem to have been a cold, organization-man lot. The Mayans played a game called
pok-ta-pok
in enormous open courts using a ball made from the ubiquitous
chicle
, a game that sometimes involved the slaughter of numbers of the losing side. I always hated team games, anyway.

It was the pleasure of ruins in the sense that Rose Macaulay wrote about them that would have led us to return if we had the chance. We preferred by far the more ruined places to
those that had been made almost as good as new and were tended by devoted custodians who mowed the lawns and pulled up the shoots sent out by the trees and creepers in the surrounding jungle, which, given the opportunity, would engulf them yet again.

U
NTIL I WENT THERE
, I thought – if I had ever thought about it – that Fiji was a single island such as Corsica, St Helena or the Isle of Wight. Now I know that it is an archipelago of more than 800 islands which altogether are about the size of Wales scattered over about a hundred thousand square miles of the South Pacific, and that they are so close to the 180th Meridian, which is also the International Date Line, that it actually passes through one of them, the island of Taveuni, on which a monument records this strange, nineteenth-century invention whereby you lose or gain a day of earthly pleasures when going round the world from West to East or vice-versa.

Why did we choose to go to Fiji when there were so many other islands and archipelagos of islands in the Pacific on which you could smell such characteristic smells as those of copra, the scent of unidentifiable exotic flowers, the incenses of religions that were not always Christian; witness fantastic sunsets and dawns which were like the creation of the world all over again, and on which you could listen to the trade wind humming in the high tops of the coconut palms, the sound of the surf booming on the reefs out beyond the turquoise lagoons and on the dazzling beaches; and also hear the buzzing of flies, the demented howl of the non-malarial mosquito and the strange nocturnal cries of birds in the dark forests behind the coast, which suggested a mysterious and probably untouristy interior?

Because it was the only way, unless they happened to be fighting world wars, or playing rugby, about which they were
crazy, in Sydney, Auckland, Swansea or Twickenham, of seeing the Fijians themselves.

Fijians were charming and good-humoured – when they laughed, which was pretty incessantly, the noise sounded as if it emanated from where their boots would have been had they worn any. They were handsome rather than beautiful (the men looked like great standing stones, the girls were comely and come-hither). The red light section of Suva, the capital on Viti Levu, was a farce. Nobody used it.

They were also generous to a degree which might be regarded as excessive: an ancient custom known as
kerekere
obliged a Fijian to hand over any possession fancied by another Fijian, who simply had to ask for it. This made it impossible for them to engage in shopkeeping with any hope of success, since the stock was simply removed from the shelves by relatives and friends as soon as it came in. This, without any suggestion of payment on their part or, indeed, any being demanded.

The Fijians had been described to me as lazy. In fact they were an extremely skilful people and indisputably the best boat and house builders in the entire Pacific. They were, and probably still are, however, convinced of the stupidity of any kind of repetitive labour beyond that which satisfied their immediate needs.

Consequently, they were the despair of the British colonial administrators who were in charge of them until 1970 and who undoubtedly loved them. It was then that Fiji became an independent state and a member of the Commonwealth, with a Governor-General appointed by the Queen.

Those who didn’t love them were the businessmen who imported cheap, indentured Hindu labour into the country to harvest sugar cane. The result was that by 1971 there were more Indians than Fijians in Fiji, none of whom had any intention of returning to the land of their forefathers, most of
whom had never seen it, anyway, and by that time had long since ceased to be serfs and were now well-off farmers, shopkeepers and, worst of all, moneylenders to the Fijians. All this constituted a terrible problem for the Fijians, now in nominal control of their country, which they had no idea how to solve.

Subjected to their disingenuous charm, I found it difficult to believe that the solution to their problems might be of a sanguinary nature. Yet not much more than one hundred years previously, the Fijians were world-famous for their bloodthirstiness, treacherous natures and anthropophagous habits. Suspicious even of their nextdoor neighbours, they lived in villages perched on inaccessible ridges. They were noted for pelting one another with specially selected stones the size of cricket balls (not surprising that, after rugby, cricket is their favourite game), strangling their nearest relatives as a mark of respect on the death of a person of greater importance, burying people under the corner posts of newly constructed houses, and, above all, eating one another in truly enormous quantities. These islands were not called the Cannibal Isles for nothing.

One chief without any help from his friends consumed 999 people (presumably keeping the thousandth as a form of iron ration) and every time he ate one he erected a stone pillar as a sort of aide-mémoire. Fijians ate anyone who came to hand not because they believed, as the members of some primitive societies do, that the consumer gained some of the innate qualities of the consumed, but simply because they enjoyed eating what they called ‘long pig’.

For this purpose they used multipronged wooden forks, instruments that were still on offer second-hand but which I had no interest in acquiring.

In these circumstances, in these islands, on what was virtually a
route des gastronomes
, no one was safe, shipwrecked sailors meeting the same fate as the men and women of alien
tribes who had strayed a little too far from home. Such was the turnover that an island on which we stopped, which was regarded as the Fijian Pantheon, had been raised several feet above its original level by human bones. On them we passed the night of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

The miraculous change of heart which had turned the Fijians into one of the friendliest races in the Pacific (travelling anywhere it was obligatory to wave to every single man, woman and child met with
en route
) must, reluctantly, be attributed to the efforts of the missionaries – Wesleyans, Seventh Day Adventists, Roman Catholics (known rather charmingly as
Popi
), Church of England and other sects in descending order of successful conversion rates – and also of their proselytes, some of whom were extremely courageous.

It is strange that with one exception missionaries were the only people who were never eaten, although they used to complain constantly to the chiefs in whose territories they resided about the smoke from the open-cast ovens which were often situated embarrassingly close to their places of worship.

The exception was a Wesleyan, the Reverend Thomas Baker, who was cooked and eaten, boots and all, together with a number of converts who acted as side dishes, near the headwaters of the Singatoka River, in July 1867.

At the time of our visit, in the 1970s, a Fijian village had anything between twenty and five hundred inhabitants, and the houses, which often stood beneath ancient trees, were grouped around a large, grassy open space, called the
rara
, which was used for ceremonies. It resembled an old-fashioned English village green plonked down in the tropics. This was where the house of the chief would be, the
vale levu
, and although all the houses were raised above the ground on platforms of earth or stones, his would be the most elevated. Bigger villages had a cricket and football pitch as well.

When invited to enter one of these houses, as they surely would be if they showed signs of wishing to do so, visitors removed their shoes at the entrance.

If it was an old house it would have a thatched roof and it would be built of wood and reeds and decorated with sinnet, a sort of flat, plaited cordwork. Otherwise it might have a corrugated-iron roof because house building, as was every other domestic activity of the Fijians, was communal, and now that more people went away to work in towns it was more difficult to find enough of them to do the thatching.

Then they washed their feet in a wooden bowl and squatted down on the floor which was upholstered with grass and covered with beautiful mats made from a sort of pine leaf, or else from sedges.

Everything was very simple. On one side there was a raised sleeping platform; on another an open fireplace, but no chimney. There might also be one or two pieces of furniture.

The owner of the house then offered the visitors half a coconut shell which contained
yanggona.
If the shell was an old one, it had a sort of bluish bloom on it as if it had been enamelled.

Yanggona
, the
kava
of some other South Sea islands, is made by dissolving the green root of a shrub,
Piper methysticum
, which has been pulped on a rough volcanic stone, in cold water.

The best roots are about five years old. Alternatively, it is prepared with the dried root which is powdered in a mortar. The root is a more or less obligatory gift and all visitors to Fijian houses provided themselves with a good stock of it, either in powder or vegetable form. It is the idea of the gift that is important to Fijians.

It was also a good idea to bring a couple of bottles of rum for the moment when the
yanggona
ran out.

In the past, young bachelors and nubile girls used to prepare the
yanggona
by chewing the green root, a practice that by the
time we got here had fallen into disuse. It was much more potent made in this way.

Before we took the proffered drink we clapped our hands slowly and intoned the words ‘
Ni Mbula
’ (‘Good health’), and when we had drunk it the other people present clapped their hands and exclaimed, ‘
A Matha
’ (‘It is dry’).

The taste of
yanggona
has been compared to soapy water with a dash of peppermint added, some say pepper, others rhubarb that has been mixed with magnesia and flavoured with sal volatile, not a mixture in which most of us have indulged very frequently. The effect on the palate is rather like having one’s mouth lined with tissue paper, or the effect of a pain-killing injection.

Personally, I thought it looked like dirty washing-up water and tasted of
yanggona
, but after the tissue paper/Novocaine effect had worn off I felt cool, refreshed and in the mood for more.

Apparently, you don’t get drunk on
yanggona
, it only makes you want to smoke and pee. The paralysis of the lower limbs which is alleged to supervene after overindulgence, proceeds solely from the excruciatingly uncomfortable position you are required to assume in order to drink it. So much for
yanggona.