From Amatlan we proceeded some miles, to the great crater known as Las Bocas, which took fire and burnt for nine years. In those days the means of extinguishing a burning oil well had not been evolved. The narrow neck had burnt and burnt until it had converted itself into a crater the size of a lake. From the surface of the sluggish waters, gas was still rising and the water bubbling and hissing in eddies. All round the crater the trees stood grey and lifeless, as in some districts of the battlefields in France. This, as in France, being caused by poisonous gas which has killed all vegetation, and left a wood standing like a bare skeleton. Near this place we met a native, with a gun dragging along a baby coyote. He had wounded it in the hind legs, and the animal unable to walk, was being towed along the ground by means of a willow branch tied round its neck. We asked the man why he did not kill it. He answered that he wanted to bring it “alive to the village, to show to the people.” We argued that it was dying. The native was smiling and unmoved. We offered him a peso to shoot it immediately. He continued to smile. We offered him five pesos, he remained unmoved. “It will be dead in an hour, and you will be without your five pesos.” But he smilingly went on his way, dragging the bulging eyed, panting, dying baby coyote with its limp broken legs. It wasn’t that he was cruel, he was merely a brute with no understanding. We pushed on to the camp known as Kilometer 40, for lunch, and here, one of the first things they showed me in the Superintendent’s quarters, was a Hearst magazine of July 12th, with a review and long quotation of Clare Sheridan’s Russian diary with photographs of self, with right and lefts of Lenin and Trotzky! I was sure well known by the staff at this point. During our trip from Kilometer 40 to Kilometer 80, we passed the worst of the road, and I counted six cars bogged! The same fate did not befall us, because we had an extremely brilliant driver, but we had to halt for some time owing to the stoppage congestion. The car in front of us contained a Mexican family moving--on the back of their car, uncaged, sat a little green parrot. It looked so wise and talked so much and laughed heartily. It sat on my shoulder for some time and stroked my cheek with its yellow head, and said things to me in Spanish. And when I answered it in English, it put its head on one side and with the most entrancing Latin accent said “Right-o!” I made up my mind that I must have a parrot, a green one with a yellow head. They grow wild here. The trip was without further incident until we reached Kilometer 80, where we had a bucket full of lemonade and some thick cheese sandwiches and from there in the dark we made for the Huasteca Terminal, crossed the river in a motor and got back to Tampico about 9:30 P.M. During these two days, I passed through the oil wells of the following companies, operating in the Southern fields: