Dress Her in Indigo Read Online Free PDF

roaring and clattering down the runway and lifted off. You get conditioned to that steep upward slant of the jets. This thing lifted off and seemed to hang there, fighting for every slow foot of altitude. Lots of time to look down into the streets. At seventy-five hundred feet as a starting place, and with a full load, we did a lot of clawing before we finally came up out of the last of the bright morning smutch and made a long slow turn.
    A very plump stewardess in a soiled uniform served us paper cups of coffee and sweet rolls, and she did a lot of bantering with the customers. Then we went between Popo and his sleeping lady, Ixtaccihuatl. The blazing white summits of the dead volcanoes were easily a thousand feet above us, and vivid against the indigo sky. We were close enough to see snow plumes trailing off the cliffs of Ixta in the morning winds.
    Then down along the torn and crumpled country, old stone spilled from the spine of the Sierra Madre. A day so clear you could see tiny villages, see the pale narrow marks of burro paths along the ridges. 'Ibo harsh a land to sustain life, but it does. Spaniards could never have taken it from the Indios without all those cute political tricks, turning them against each other.
    Travel-worn old DC grinding slowly down the side of the rocky world, a tin impertinence making its rackety noise across the stone indifference of the volcanic land. So eat the sweet roll Page 13

    and look down at the world of a thousand years ago. Mexicana Airlines sells tickets on a time machine.
    So we came down into the valley of Oaxacapronounced wuh-HOCK-ah-beginning the descent at the upper end of the valley some twenty miles from the airfield. Green valley encircled by old burned brown rounded hills. It is a plateau valley, five thousand feet high, in the Sierra Madre del Sur, and the Pacific is not far away. Skimmed lower. Saw a broken, abandoned, stone church amid cornfields. Saw a man scratching a groove in brown soil with a wooden plow pulled by slow oxen. Saw village children, bright as spilled flowers. And our pilot set the old crock down with such precise and loving delicacy that there was but one small yelp of rubber, and not the slightest jar:
    A neat little terminal, wine warm air, a confusion of greetings and luggage and taxis and hotel vehi cles. The man from our hotel made himself known by pacing through confusion, calling
    "Veeeek Tory Aaaah! Veeeek lbry Aaaah!"
    So soon we were off in a VW bus, the other passengers two stone-faced ladies with blue hair, large satchels, and guidebooks in German, and one young Mexican couple. The girl was in a smart travel suit of painful newness. The boy looked everywhere except at her. New gold rings gleamed.
    We passed a sign as we approached the city, assorting that there were eighty thousand people therein. We skirted an edge of it, and climbed steep grades, then, in lowest low, ground up the long, r4teep, divided driveway to the parking area at the top, and the portico over the entrance to the Hotel Victoria.
    The modern hotel, five stories tall, stretched along the top of a ridge, looking out across all of the city. Down the slope, in random array, beyond a huge swimming pool, were individual bungalows, each with carport, each landscaped with brilliant flowers and flowering vines. Rough stone steps and walks and stone driveways wound down through the bungalow community, all of it behind a guarded security fence.
    The bungalows had girl-names instead of numbers, and they put us in Alicia. There was one large, tiled, plain room, simply furnished, two double beds, a bath, a dressing room, and a small porch in front overlooking the panorama-a porch with a tin table and poolside chairs. Alicia was two hundred and fifty pesos a day for two. Twenty dollars. I had explained to Meyer the quick easy McGee system for keeping track of the pesos. A fifty-peso bill is a four-dollar bill. A ten-peso bill is an eighty-cent bill.
    Meyer stood on the porch and