Popo's Toll

When the setting sun tints the snowy slope of Popocatepetl, the 17,887-ft. volcano seems to float majestically beside its twin peak Ixtacihuatl, in the thin air over Mexico City. To tourists looking out from their hotel windows, the rosy mountain is enchanting. But to the primitive Indians living in the village of Amecameca at the volcano's base, it is frightening. Centuries ago their ancestors cast human sacrifices into the crater's fiery maw. Today Popocatepetl sleeps, but the Indians of Amecameca are sure that it is still hungry and jealous of its rights.

An Irresistible Challenge. Popo, as even the Indians call the tongue-twisting peak, exacts its toll nowadays from the young and the strong who, year after year, feel the irresistible challenge to climb the mountain. After eleven climbers had lost their lives in 1953, government authorities stepped in to regulate the traffic of alpinists. They prohibited ascents when the weather was threatening, and required each climber to have a safe minimum of alpine gear for the venture. The precautions seemed to work; ten months passed without a casualty on Popo.

But in the village of Amecameca the Indians waited, unconvinced. One evening last week, an exhausted young man staggered into a climbers' base camp with word that an avalanche had overtaken a party of five men and three women under the crater's rim. He had heard the thunder of the slide, then screams in the cloud haze that enveloped the peak. Groping through the darkness and swirling snow, he found a youth and a girl, half buried and moaning with pain. Their companions were lost somewhere in the snow and ice.

An Icy Death. A search party clawed and hacked its way up the steepest side of Popo, found the injured youth and girl in the lean-to where the young climber had left them; they were carried back to safety. Following the course of the avalanche, the party came to a deep crevasse and spotted in it with searchlights a climber's torn coat. Near by, the rescuers found the first body, that of a college football star, Humberto Areizaga. As they dug deeper they were horrified to hear muffled voices beneath them. Leonor Colin, a 21-year-old student, and Francisco Meneses, a husky blacksmith, were buried under huge blocks of ice. Rescuers chopped futilely with their alpine ice axes. "Where is my mother? I want to see her again," the girl sobbed just before she died. Soon afterwards, the blacksmith died and the dark mountain was quiet--except for the chip-chip of the ice axes.

In the village of Amecameca, the Indians drew their coarse woollen ponchos tight against the night air and counted the bodies as they were brought down the mountain--four men and two girls, the highest toll for a single mountain-climbing accident in Mexican history.

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