miles: while between Chihuahua and Zacatecas there is an immense desert tract, over which the "Mexican Central Railway" has to transport in supply-tanks the water necessary for its locomotives. It is true that in both of these instances the natural difficulties have now in a great measure been remedied by railroad constructions; but when it is remembered that, outside of the leading cities and towns of Mexico, there are hardly any wheeled vehicles, save some huge, cumbersome carts with thick, solid, wooden wheels (a specimen of which, exhibited as a curiosity, may be seen in the National Museum at Washington); that the transportation of commodities is mainly effected on the backs of donkeys or of men; that the roads in Mexico, as a general thing, are hardly deserving of the name;[1] and that, even with good, ordinary roads and good teams and vehicles at command, a ton of corn worth twenty-five dollars at a market is worth nothing at a distance of a hundred and
- ↑ One of the most noted routes in Mexico is from the capital to Acapulco, the best Mexican port on the Pacific; a route that was traveled and constituted a part of the transit for convoys of treasure and rich tropical products between the Indies and Old Spain, a hundred years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. And yet a journey over this route, a distance of three hundred miles, consumes ten days on horseback under the most favorable auspices; and the path or trail followed has in great part so few of the essentials of a road that, in popular parlance, it is spoken of as "buen camino de pajaros" (a good road for birds).
