As we near the capital (the distance is but twenty-five miles) the carriages fill up, and you squeeze closer into your caned seat for two to make room for some fat Yucatecan or his ill-shaped, chalk-faced powdered dame. In the suburbs of Merida (there are miles of them) the rail runs between rows of native huts, palm-leaf thatched frameworks of wood upon which red earth is plastered and then stuccoed or whitewashed. Each has its garden, evidently the despair of its owner, for dogs, pigs, and fowls dispute possession of it with tin cans and refuse. But even in these unfavourable surroundings tropic Nature beautifies with the greeny-gold leaf of the banana and the heavy-hanging greener crown of the cocoanut palm. Over all rises a strange vista. Merida might well be called the "City of Windmills." On each side of the train you see the horizon literally crowded with air motors for pumping water from the limestone, and you hear it whispered in a tone of pride by a Yucatecan to his neighbour that there are in Yucatan's capital 6,000 of these eyesores. Merida could claim another alias. "The City of Windmills" might as appropriately be called "The City of Cabs." And they are curious cabs too: cabs without sides or backs or fronts; mere frameworks of light wood with leather tops and cloth curtains all round, which roll up and button, or roll down and shade the "fare"; spectral four-wheelers, as if in prehistoric times a London "growler" had emigrated here and propagated a species of tropical growler, all skin and bones. Dozens of these hackney phantoms await us in the station yard; the drivers in spotless loose-flying linen shifts and linen trousers bell-bottomed over their bare brown feet shod with sandals, their headgear wideawakes of black or brown felt. The boxes are elaborately ornamented with brass nails burnished to a dazzling brightness. The back seat (you must not sit too far back or you will fall out) has room for two, and in front a shelf like that in a victoria lets down for a third passenger. There are hundreds of these cabs in Merida, and everybody uses them all the time. They are not the luxury they are in most capitals, and are quite a feature of the place. We had understood there is only one hotel in Merida (it is a libel, for there are three), and, seated in the phantom car we select, we bowl noiselessly over asphalted roads towards it.