Pedro contemplated this new landscape with a disturbance he did not know how to define. Some inner rigidity whose tension was sustained by the mountain yielded here. He was walking in the same rhythm as the others and was prompt to obey the commands of the capataz. But during the march and amidst his obedience, a greedy eye was gathering in the color of a fleeting bird, sensitive pores were assessing the fertile earth underfoot, the rough tree trunk with a slash through it that served as a signal.

At night, instead of giving in to exhaustion as the others did, Pedro stayed awake. Never had the sky been so close, the clusters of stars within such easy reach of the hand. The constellations slipped by, silent as a great river. It was the smaller beings that signalled their presence with noises: the crackling of the dry leaves on the ground, the bleating of an abandoned suckling lamb, the jabbering of the monkeys, the seething voice of the jaguar.

After so many days of travel, Tapachula could seem to those who arrived on foot (and even more to these Chamulas, accustomed to the misery of their villages or the shameful poverty of Ciudad Real) like a splendid place. Nature had not stinted on any of her luxuries here: beneficent plants, abundant fruit, ornamental parasites. The buildings, which would have been modest somewhere else, seemed trivial here. From what severity of climate did their inhabitants need to protect themselves, from what fierce elements did they need to take shelter? A bit of shade was all that was necessary, and to achieve that, a few gigantic leaves supported with a thin framework of flimsy vines and twisted, unpolished logs were all that was needed.

But in the center of the city the view changed; cement and mortar replaced wood and palm leaves, and walls surrounded an interior that the archways without doors insisted on revealing: courtyards from which vegetation was banished because it was uncontrollable, hot concrete, cracked everywhere by invisible seeds on the verge of germinating, sprouting, growing.

In the galleries, large hammocks were slung: pale women with shadowy eyes sleeping the sleep of pregnancy or distractedly abandoning a flaccid and already sterile breast to a suckling child. Barefoot children, large-bellied and colorless; domestic animals, sleepy and panting; an ancient woman fanning herself with a mechanical motion that she no longer put any hope or conviction into.

The Indians were sweating. They had torn off their woolen serapes, which were intolerable in this climate, and they would have liked to relinquish the solid mass of their bodies, as well, where the heat ensconces itself and torments.

“It will be difficult to work here,” Pedro thought “We are not accustomed to these ways.”