Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras — Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond by Harry Alverson Franck
page 78 of 220 (35%)
page 78 of 220 (35%)
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score, joins the forty thousand vendors of forty thousand different
species of uselessness howling in at least as many different voices and tones, each a bit louder than all the others, until even an unoccupied wanderer concludes that sleep is an idle waste of an all too short existence. I brought up a day of random wandering in state's prison. The _Penitenciaria_ of Guadalajara is a huge, wheel-shaped building in the most modern style of that class of architecture. The bullet-headed youth in soldier's uniform and the complexion of a long-undusted carpet, leaning on his musket at the entrance, made no move to halt me, and I stepped forth on a patio forested with orange trees, to find that most of the public had preceded me, including some hundred fruit, tortilla, cigarette, and candy vendors. Here was no sign of prisoners. I approached another stern boy armed like a first-class cruiser in war time and he motioned upward with his gun barrel. The dwelling of the _comandante_ faced the patio on the second-story corridor. His son, aged five, met me with the information: "Papa 'sta dormido." But he was misinformed, for when his mother introduced me into the parlor, father, in shirt-sleeves, was already rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and preparing to light the first after-siesta cigarette. When my impressiveness had penetrated his reawakening intellect, he prepared me a document which, reduced to succinct English, amounted to the statement that the prison and all it contained was mine for the asking. A whiff of this sesame opened like magic the three immense iron doors through anterooms in charge of trusties, in prison garb of the material |
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