The road out of Mexico City takes us into the mountains and then pours into Puebla, a city gathered tight on itself, as reclusive as a bitter man. On to Cholulu, blistered with churches, and through scraped hills to Tehuacan, a spa of shaded streets and family hotels whose dining room shelves hold arrays of vitamin pills and digestive aids. Shortly out of Tehuacan the road becomes rough rock and dusty pits; the vistas of dry scrub flow into the dark maw of the encircling mountains; the bump and sway of the of the car, the taut hunched back of the driver imposes silence on the party of six. Everyone seems to be along with his anticipation -- curiosity, fear, hope -- of the effect of the hallucinogenic mushrooms.

The dry, scratched plain dips behind us as the road narrows and coils upward into hill on hill, threading its loops and curves through the heaps of green velvet mountain. For four of five mesmerized hours we climb and turn on the narrow dirt road, without guardrails or even a warning rock. Twice we meet trucks and have to back to a curve in the sheltering rock from where we watch them swing along the outer, loose edged curve of the road, their wheels scooping stones and earth into the gorge three thousand feet below. Once or twice we skid on a patch of mud which is, h happily, the cover of a large hole and holds the car; a smooth path might have made a ski jump into the clear, murderous air. (Obviously, the road would be unusable through most of the summer rainy season except for the valiant drivers of heavy trucks. Certain exotic supplies, like mushroom fanciers and anthropologists, are then flown in by chartered planes.) The mountains are endless, melting into each other in a hypnotic succession, and except for a fleeting glimpse of a shepherd with a small flock of skinny goats and the minute white dot of an Indian working a distant, perpendicular scrap of cornfield, are as empty as the end of the world.

It is night when we reach the village, shapeless and anonymous in the dark, lit by just enough street lights to indicate the unpaved main street which leads to the hotel. The hotel is in the on stubborn mold of most Mexican rural hotels, large, bare, whitewashed rooms, two or three hooks forced into the wall to hold clothing, one bare uncovered light bulb, weak and half blind, hanging from the center of the ceiling, two or three or five tired beds, and one thick tumbler on the window sill. The toliet and shower are in a separate little shack, reached by flat rocks placed in a moist path. The dining room, directly open to the clatter, the sizzling, the odors, and emotions of the kitchen, is painted red and contains three or four crammed full of gardenias and camellias. After a supper which starts with good soup and trails from indifferent rice to scarcely edible meat, we go to our rustling beds.
After breakfast the next morning, we explore the village. It is fairly large, and though the evidence may no be apparent to U.S. eyes, it is quite prosperous, the center of coffee growing in the surrounding hills. The shopkeepers -- some of them bake, show horses, and mend shoes under one low pitched roof -- and the growers are mextizos, while much of the labor is Mazateco. The latter are small, neatly designed people, golden skinned and for mountain Indians, extraordinarily affable. Their speech is quite unlike the Aztec tongue spoken in most of the area; it sounds rather like Chinese, running a scale of nasal sounds and glottal stops. Like a number of Indian groups they are polygamous in a casual system of picking up, dropping, and changing women. The men wear blue jeans or chino pants and cotton shirts, like worker elsewhere, but the women are beautifully showy. They spending much of their time embroidering bright designs of birds, flowers and vines on rectangles of coarse, white cotton. These pieces are then sewn together into a loose, knee-length blouse, and the sections marked off with ribbons of red or magenta or turquoise blue. A broad frill of ribbon of the same color at the elbow is the final flourish. Under the blouse they wear dark homespun woolen skirts, tightly wrapped and falling to the ankle.
The village is voluble and hospitable, very different from the usual closed, guarded, mountain village. (It was suggested by one of the party this this extraordinary mood was the result of a light, constant diet of 'happy' mushrooms. A less exotic razon may be that coffee is a good crop and the village eats fairly well, not depending on sparse stands of mountain corn.) It is a lovely place. The wooden, steep-roofed houses and the winding green lined paths lurch and roll into each other in appealing illogic; gardenias and hibiscus well over the earthen steam-bath cribs which stand at the sides of the road; bird of paradise

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