THE TREE OF TULE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19009, 3 November 1923, Page 17

THE TREE OF TULE.

The greatest tree in tho Americas, though not the highest, is in the far south of Mexico, at Tule"; the highest and perhaps the oldest is to »be found among tho Californian sequoias. But in girth and grandeur the cypress of Our Lady of Tulo has no rival. The Aztecs called it the Ahuehuetl, but it was a fine old tree at the dawn of their history. It must have been a great tree in the time of the Toltecs, and was before them, too. Perhaps some emperor planted it 2000 years ago, writes Stephen Graham. Who can say ? Cortez and his horsemen, on their way to Honduras, stood under it four centuries ago, and their followers built a chapel beside it, that men might fitly turn from a marvellous creation to a marvellous Creator. It is a pleasant ride from that Oaxaca of which Cortez was by Charles V made marquis, ‘‘tho great Marquis of the Valley.” The Zapotecs found ns horses (with hooded stirrups and corded bridles), and my wife and I rode out to Tide. It was market day in the city, and we threaded our way through innumerable Indians and droves of asses laden with panniers. The astonishment of the Indian women at seeing a lady in riding attire was very amusing. They for their part pick np their long flounced cotton skirts and sit with their bare feet balanced on the ass’s shoulders. Flanked by baskets and sitting on heaps of merchandise on the ass’s haolc, so they ride to market, often suckling a baby the while. But one of their sex astride! ‘"Good Saint Anne!” “Jesus Maria!” “Look Sister!’’ “ Adois !” Their conventions were not our conventions. They carried pigs strung by tho logs to the asses’ side and dangling turkeys and fowls. They nought pots innumerable and baskets of eggs and tomatoes and alligator pears. Some Indians on foot plunged through the dust, and waddling all across the broad highway the asses carao on in droves. M"acn we had ridden out of this turmoil into tho fresher air we were in a land of wild mimosa and that “smell of the wattle” of which Kipling has written memorable words— The smell of the wattle at Lichtenberg Riding in in the rain. But there is no rain in Mexico all the winter long, and all odours that come on the air are warm. Trees with scarlet flowers bend over us. The pomegranate hangs its rosy fruit, the coffee berries ripen on the shrubs, and trees that know no fall, no nakedness of limb, hang everlasting canopies of green. We ride gayly over ploughed corn fields and along the borders of plantations where sugar canes chatter with the wind. Then anon at noon we descry a settlement veiled in verdure, and like a green knoll rising above it the vast upper story of a mighty tree. There is no need to ask. It must be tide and its tree. And we rode by narrow shady lanes between banana palms, date palms, and flowering shrubs criss-cross from the highway to thu tree. - Behold a great cliff of wood, grey like a willow or an ash, with an under bark of nut fibre colour, going upward in a grand sweep to the branches. At the five bays of the tree one might build five fairsized houses. The roots which run out are like great park seats. All is silent, all is beautiful round about it. A beggar only is sitting under the tree. The large, white church behind it reflects a blaze of sunshine. A bouganvilhea, 20ft high, is one mass of crimson bloom all attended by bees and wasps. The solid white wall which runs around, with blockhouse at one corner, is unimpaired. On the white facade of the high broad church are painted tall Moorish decorations in an intense royal blue, tall, slender mosques of gleaming blue and big red empty inches for saints beside them. The tree lifts its voluminous green bulk higher than tho church, but all its branches, all its stems and leaves, ban" as it were in reverence to the high-placed figure of the Virgin. It is plume leaved, and the tree is held sacred by many tribes as the tree of mourning. It has the grand dignity of sorrow for the dead. What a tree! A hundred horses could stand under it. Half-way up, in the midst of the giant growth, starts straight out and" bolt upright a new tree, larger itself than any King Charles Oak, larger even than that tree in Palestine under which the Greek monks tell you Abraham and Sarah entertained their Lord. The German Baron Humboldt, famous traveller in his day, scratched his name in the yqar 1802, the pnly name, the only vandalism, which has been permitted. It is a perfect, tree in full maturity, the same species of cypress as the Tree of the Dreadful Night at Mexico City, but in incomparable better condition and much larger and older. If it could tell its story, the lingering of Cortez and his men in the shade'would be but a page. For it must have attracted the attention of whoever passed that way. The’ old cities like Mitla, 20 miles away, are choked in dust. But with the freshness of spring tho tree lives on. Outside -the walled churchyard which holds the tree is the town plaza swarming with wasps, but without gardens or bandstand, or any of the common ornaments of such places, not even a statue of Juarez. But there is an old portal and one shut shop bearing the curious name of La Vuelta al Mundo (the return to the world). But they have all gone their way, those who sat under the trees in ages past, and none returns to tell us how it was in their day.