We slept on native mats set on frames three feet above the adoby floor in the open _patio_. Pigs, cats, chickens, dogs and children scrambled beneath.
We were just rolling up in our blankets, when _Doña_ Faustina excitedly addressed my companions, Tio and El Padre, and I gathered from her speech that _chinchas_, as long as your hand, had a habit of crawling along the rafters and dropping upon the unsuspecting sleeper, while, unless your shoes were hung above the floor, _tiernanes_ (scorpions) were likely to camp in them until dislodged. I hung my slippers above the _tiernanes_ stinging reach and lay awake apprehending the _chinchas’_ descent, but the fatigue and heat of the day, the soporific influences of _chilis_ and cheese, soon wrapped me in a slumber from which only the braying of our white pack mule at last aroused me, as Izus cinched upon him the burden for another day. The night was warm and close, the first dull, heavy air I have known in Mexico. We were now actually in the _Tierra Caliente_--where, the saying is, “the inhabitants of Churmuco need never go to hell since they already live there.”
It was not yet three o’clock in the morning and still dark. _Ros_ and _poios_ and coffee were already prepared for us. “_Adios, Doña Faustina!_” “_Adios, Señorita!_” “_Adios, Señores!_” “_Adios, adios!_” and we trotted out of the _corral_ and, turning northward, moved up a deeply-cut _baranca_ over a more generally traveled trail than that by which we had come. The coldness of night no longer chilled us, the air was almost warm, while no sign of day made mark upon the heavens above us; the black spaces of the night were yet ablaze with great white stars. The constellations to the northward I well knew, but to the south there were many wholly new and, supremest of them all, just clinging along the gigantic mountain summits, shone the splendid constellation of the Southern Cross, my first glimpse of it. We reined in our horses, turned and watched the big lustrous stars descend and disappear behind the impenetrable curtain of the Cordillera’s towering chain.
[Illustration: THE LANDING, RIO DE LAS BALSAS]
The Balsas River was now behind us. The _baranca_ we ascended widened out. We were upon the well-beaten track of travel from Guerrero, and even Acapulco, to the north. Ere the sun came blazing up, we were many miles on our way. And well for us it was so, for the day’s heat has been the most terrible I have yet endured. The animals did not sweat, nor did we, the air was too dry for that, but my blood boiled, my bones baked, and my skin parched from the fierce hotness of the sun. Even the cowboys we here and there encountered sat silent in their saddles beneath the mimosa’s and mesquit’s thickest shade.