Would they try to follow the car all the way to Mexico City if we drove slow enough?"
"Yes," I said, for I knew.
We came into the dizzying heights of the Sierra Madre Oriental.
The banana trees gleamed golden in the haze.
Great fogs yawned beyond stone walls along the precipice.
Below, the Moctezuma was a thin golden thread in a green jungle mat.
Strange crossroad towns on top of the world rolled by, with shawled Indians watching us from under hatbrims and rebozos.
Life was dense, dark, ancient.
They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks.
All had their hands outstretched.
They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it.
They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.
Our broken Ford, old thirties upgoing America Ford, rattled through them and vanished in dust.
We had reached the approaches of the last plateau.
Now the sun was golden, the air keen blue, and the desert with its occasional rivers a riot of sandy, hot space and sudden Biblical tree shade.
Now Dean was sleeping and Stan driving.
The shepherds appeared, dressed as in first times, in long flowing robes, the women carrying golden bundles of flax, the men staves.
Under great trees on the shimmering desert the shepherds sat and convened, and the sheep moiled in the sun and raised dust beyond.
"Man, man," I yelled to Dean, "wake up and see the shepherds, wake up and see the golden world that Jesus came from, with your own eyes you can tell!"
He shot his head up from the seat, saw one glimpse of it all in the fading red sun, and dropped back to sleep.
When he woke up he described it to me in detail and said,
"Yes, man, I'm glad you told me to look.
Oh, Lord, what shall I do?
Where will I go?"
He rubbed his belly, he looked to heaven with red eyes, he almost wept.
The end of our journey impended.
Great fields stretched on both sides of us; a noble wind blew across the occasional immense tree groves and over old missions turning salmon pink in the late sun.
The clouds were close and huge and rose.
"Mexico City by dusk!"
We'd made it, a total of nineteen hundred miles from the afternoon yards of Denver to these vast and Biblical areas of the world, and now we were about to reach the end of the road.
"Shall we change our insect T-shirts?"
"Naw, let's wear them into town, hell's bells."
And we drove into Mexico City.
A brief mountain pass took us suddenly to a height from which we saw all of Mexico City stretched out in its volcanic crater below and spewing city smokes and early dusklights.
Down to it we zoomed, down Insurgentes Boulevard, straight toward the heart of town at Reforma.
Kids played soccer in enormous sad fields and threw up dust.
Taxi-drivers overtook us and wanted to know if we wanted girls.
No, we didn't want girls now.
Long, ragged adobe slums stretched out on the plain; we saw lonely figures in the dimming alleys.
Soon night would come.
Then the city roared in and suddenly we were passing crowded cafes and theaters and many lights.
Newsboys yelled at us.
Mechanics slouched by, barefoot, with wrenches and rags.
Mad barefoot Indian drivers cut across us and surrounded us and tooted and made frantic traffic.
The noise was incredible.
No mufflers are used on Mexican cars.
Horns are batted with glee continual.
"Whee!" yelled Dean,
"Look out!"
He staggered the car through the traffic and played with everybody.