Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala And Honduras Part 8

The train takes twelve hours to make this run of 129 miles by a three-foot-gage railroad, stopping at every cl.u.s.ter of huts along the way. The third-cla.s.s coach was little more than a box-car with two rough benches along its sides. The pa.s.sengers were unprepossessing; most of them ragged, all of them unclean, generally with extremely bad teeth, much-pimpled faces, emaciated, and of undeveloped physique, their eyes still possessing some of the brightness but lacking the snap and glisten of those of Tehuantepec and the plateau. Many were chrome-yellow with fever. Ragged officers of law and disorder were numerous, often in bare feet, the same listless inefficiency showing in their weak, unproductive, unshaven features. The car grew so crowded I went to sit on the platform rail, as had a half-dozen already, though large signs on the door forbade it.

It was after noon when we reached the first important town, Esquintla. Here the tropics ended and the train began to climb, so slowly we could have stepped off anywhere, the vegetation visibly changing in character with every mile. On the now crowded platform two natives alternately ordered American beer of the train-boy, at $5 a bottle! At Palin we were a.s.sailed by tattered vendors of all manner of fruit, enormous pineapples selling for sixty guatemalteco cents. Amat.i.tlan also swarmed with hawkers, but this time of candy in the form of animals of every known and imaginable species. Thereafter we wound round beautiful Lake Amat.i.tlan, a dark, smooth stretch of water, swarming with fish and bottomless, according to my fellow platformers, flanked by sloping, green, shrub-clad banks that reflected themselves in it. The train crossed the middle of the lake by a stone d.y.k.e and climbed higher and ever higher, with splendid views of the perfect cone-shaped volcanoes Agua and Panteleon that have gradually thrown themselves up to be the highest in Guatemala and visible from almost every part of the republic. It was growing dark when the first houses of Guatemala City appeared among the trees, and gradually and slowly we dragged into the station. A bare-footed policeman on the train took the names and biographies of all on board, as another had already done at Esquintla, and we were free to crowd out into the ragged, one-story city with its languid mule-cars.

In the "Hotel Colon" opposite Guatemala's chief theater and shouldering the president's house, which is tailor-shop and saloon below, the daily rate was $12. The food was more than plentiful, but would have been an insult to the stomach of a harvest-hand, the windowless room was musty and dirty, the walls splashed, spotted, and torn, and the bed was by far the worst I had occupied south of the Rio Grande, having not only a board floor but a mattress that seemed to be stuffed with broken and jagged rocks. Notwithstanding all which I slept the clock round.

If there is any "sight" in Guatemala City besides its slas.h.i.+ng sunlight and its surrounding volcanoes, and perhaps its swarms of Indians trotting to and from the market on Sundays, it is the relief map of the entire Republic inside the race-course. This is of cement, with real water to represent the lakes and oceans and (when it is turned on) the rivers. Every town, railway, and trail of any importance is marked, an aid to the vagabond that should be required by law of every country. On it I picked out easily the route of my further travels. The map covers a s.p.a.ce as large as a moderate-sized house and is seen in all its details from the two platforms above it. Its only apparent fault is that the mountains and volcanoes are out of all proportion in height. But exaggeration is a common Central-American failing.

The city is populous, chiefly with shoeless inhabitants, monotonously flat, few buildings for dread of earthquake being over one story, even the national palace and cathedral sitting low and squat. An elevation of five thousand feet gives it a pleasant June weather, but life moves with a drowsy, self-contented air. Its people are far more obliging than the average of Mexico and have little or none of the latter's sulkiness or half-insolence. Here reigns supreme Estrada Cabrera; exactly where very few know, for so great is his dislike to a.s.sa.s.sination that he jumps about incessantly from one of his one-story residences to another, perhaps, as his people a.s.sert, by underground pa.s.sages, for he is seldom indeed seen in the flesh by his fond subjects. In less material manifestations he is omnipresent and few are the men who have long outlived his serious displeasure. A man of modest ability but of extremely suspicious temperament, he keeps the reins of government almost entirely in his own hands, running the country as if it were his private estate, which for some years past it virtually has been. It is a form of government not entirely unfitted to a people in the bulk utterly indifferent as to who or what rules them so they are left to loaf in their hammocks in peace, and no more capable of ruling themselves than of lifting themselves by their non-existent boot-straps. Outwardly life seems to run as smoothly as elsewhere, and the casual pa.s.ser-by does not to his knowledge make the acquaintance of those reputed bands of adventurers from many climes said to carry out swiftly and efficiently every whispered command of Guatemala's invisible ruler.

On Sunday a bull-fight was perpetrated in the _plaza de toros_ facing the station. It was a dreary caricature of the royal sport of Spain. The plaza was little more than a rounded barnyard, the four gaunt and cowardly animals with blunted horns virtually lifeless, picadors and horses were conspicuous by their absence, and the two matadors were not even skilful butchers. A _cuadrilla_ of women did the "Suerte de Tancredo" on one another's backs--as any one else could have on his head or in a rocking-chair--and the only breath of excitement was when one of the feminine _toreras_ got walked on by a fear-quaking animal vainly seeking an exit. All in all it was an extremely poor newsboys'

entertainment, a means of collecting admissions for the privilege of seeing to-morrow's meat prepared, the butchers skinning and quartering the animals within the enclosure in full sight of the disheveled audience.

The train mounted out of the capital with much winding, as many as three sections of track one above another at times, and, once over the range, fell in with a river on its way to the Atlantic. The country grew dry and Mexican, covered with fine white dust and grown with cactus. At Zacapa, largest town of the line, Dakin was already at work in a machine-shop on wheels in the railroad yards, and Ems was preparing to take charge of one of the locomotives. Descending with the swift stream, we soon plunged into thickening jungle, growing even more dense than that of Tehuantepec, with trees, plants, and all the stationary forms of nature struggling like an immense mult.i.tude fighting for life, the smaller and more agile climbing the st.u.r.dier, the weak and una.s.sertive trampled to death underfoot on the dank, sunless ground. We crossed the now considerable river by a three-span bridge, and entered the banana country. English-speaking Negroes became numerous, and when we pulled in at the station of Quiragua, the collection of bamboo shanties I had expected was displaced by several new and modern bungalows on the brow of a knoll overlooking the railroad. Here was one of the great plantations of the United Fruit Company. From the veranda of the office building broad miles of banana plants stretched away to the southern mountains. Jamaican Negroes were chiefly engaged in the banana culture, and those from our Southern States did the heavier and rougher work. Their wages ran as high as a dollar gold a day, as against a Guatemalan peso for the native peons of the coffee estates in other sections. Much of the work was let out on contract. There were a number of white American employees, college-trained in some cases, and almost all extremely youthful. The heat here was tropical and heavy, the place being a bare three hundred feet above sea-level where even clothing quickly molds and rots. My fellow countrymen had found the most dangerous pastimes in this climate to be drinking liquor and eating bananas, while the ma.s.s of employees more often came to grief in the feuds between the various breeds of Negroes and with the natives.

In the morning a handcar provided with a seat and manned by two muscular Carib Negroes carried me away through the banana jungle by a private railroad. The atmosphere was thick and heavy as soured milk. A half-hour between endless walls of banana plants brought me to a palm-leaf hut, from which I splashed away on foot through a riot of wet jungle to the famous ruins of Quiragua. Archeologists had cleared a considerable square in the wilderness, still within the holdings of the fruit company, felling many enormous trees; but the place was already half choked again with compact undergrowth. There were three immense stone pillars in a row, then two others leaning at precarious angles, while in and out through the adjacent jungle were scattered carved stones in the forms of frogs and other animals, clumsily depicted, a small calendar stone, and an immense carved rock reputed to have been a place of sacrifice. Several artificial mounds were now mere stone hills overgrown with militant vegetation, as were remnants of old stone roadways. Every stone was covered with distinct but crudely carved figures, the most prominent being that of a king with a large Roman nose but very little chin, wearing an intricate crown surmounted by a death's-head, holding a scepter in one hand and in the other what appeared to be a child spitted on a toasting fork. All was of a species of sandstone that has withstood the elements moderately well, especially if, as archeologists a.s.sert, the ruins represent a city founded some three thousand years ago. Some of the faces, however, particularly those toward the east and south from which come most of the storms, were worn almost smooth and were covered with moss and throttling vegetation. Through it all a mist that was virtually a rain fell incessantly, and ground and jungle reeked with a clinging mud and dripping water that soaked through shoes and garments.

CHAPTER IX

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS

The train carried me back up the river to Zacapa, desert dry and stingingly hot with noonday. Report had it that there was a good road to Jocotan by way of Chiquimula, but the difference between a "buen camino" and a mere "road" is so slight in Central America that I concluded to follow the more direct trail. The next essential was to change my wealth into Honduranean silver, chiefly in coins of one _real_, corresponding in value to an American nickel; for financial transactions were apt to be petty in the region ahead of me. In the collection I gathered among the merchants of Zacapa were silver dollars of Mexico, Salvador, Chile, and Peru, all of which stand on terms of perfect equality with the peso of Honduras, worth some forty cents. My load was heavier, as befitted an exit from even quasi-civilization. The rucksack was packed with more than fourteen pounds, not counting kodak and weapon, and for the equivalent of some thirty cents in real money I had acquired in the market of Guatemala City a hammock, more exactly a sleeping-net, made of a species of gra.s.s by the Indians of Coban.

Under all this I was soon panting up through the once cobbled village of Zacapa and across a rising sand-patch beyond, cheered on by the parting information that the last traveler to set out on this route had been killed a few miles from town for the $2 or so he carried. Mine would not have been any particular burden in a level or temperate country, but this was neither. The sun hung so close it felt like some immense red-hot ingot swinging overhead in a foundry. The road--and in Central America that word seldom represents anything better than a rocky, winding trail with rarely a level yard--sweated up and down sharp mountain faces, picking its way as best it could over a continual succession of steep lofty ridges. Even before I lost the railway to view I was dripping wet from cap to shoes, drops fell constantly from the end of my nose, and my eyes stung with salt even though I plunged my face into every stream. My American shoes had succ.u.mbed on the tramp to Retalhuleu and the best I had been able to do in Guatemala City was to squander $45 for a pair of native make and chop them down into Oxfords. These, soaked in the jungle of Quiragua, now dried iron-stiff in the sun and barked my feet in various places.

I had crossed four ranges and was winding along a narrow, dense-grown valley when night began to fall. The rumors of foul play led me to keep a hand hanging loose near my weapon, though the few natives I met seemed friendly enough. Darkness thickened and I was planning to swing my hammock among the trees when I fell upon the hut of Coronado Cordon. It was a sieve-like structure of bamboo, topped by a thick palm-leaf roof, with an outdoor mud fireplace, and crowded with dogs, pigs, and roosted fowls. Coronado himself, attired in the remnants of a pair of cotton trousers, greeted me from his hammock.

"May I pa.s.s the night with you?"

"To be sure, senor. You may sleep on this bench under the roof."

But I produced my hammock and he swung it for me from two bamboo rafters of the low projecting eaves, beside his own and that of a horseman who had also sought hospitality, where a steady breeze swept through. His wife squatted for an hour or more over the fireplace, and at length I sat down--on the ground--to black coffee, frijoles, tortillas, and a kind of Dutch cheese.

Long before morning I was too cold, even under most of the contents of my pack, to sleep soundly. It was December and the days were short for tramping. This one did not begin to break until six and I had been awake and ready since three. Coronado slept on, but his senora arose and, covering her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with a small ap.r.o.n, took to grinding corn for tortillas. These with coffee and two eggs dropped for a moment in hot water, after a pin-hole had been broken in each, made up my breakfast, and brought my bill up to nearly eleven cents.

I was off in the damp dawn. Any enumeration of the rocky, slippery, twisting trails by which I panted up and over perpendicular mountain ridges under a burning sun without the shadow of a cloud, would be wearisome. Sweat threatened to ruin even the clothing in my bundle, it soaked even belt and holster, rusting the weapon within it, and leaving a visible trail behind me. Once, at the careless nod of an Indian, I strained up an all but perpendicular slope, only to have the trail end hundreds of feet above the river in a fading cow-path and leave me to climb down again. Farther on it dodged from under my feet once more and, missing a reputed bridge, forced me to ford a chest-deep river which all but swept me away, possessions and all, at the first attempt.

Jocotan, on the farther bank, was a lazy, sunbaked village the chief industry of which seemed to be swinging in hammocks, though I did manage to run to earth the luxury of a dish of tough meat. Comotan was close beyond, then came two hours straight up to a region of pine-trees with vistas of never-ending mountains everywhere dense-forested, the few adobe or bamboo huts tucked in among them being as identically alike as the inhabitants. These were almost obsequious peons, wearing a sort of white pajamas and moderate-sized straw hats, all strangely clean. Each carried a machete, generally with a curved point, and not a few had guns. Toward evening I struck a bit of level going amid dense vegetation without a breath of air along the bank of a river that must be forded lower down, which fact I took advantage of to perpetrate a general laundering. This proved unwise, for the sun went down before the garments had dried and left me to lug on along the stream those the unexacting customs of the country did not require me to put on wet. Every hundred yards the trail went swiftly down into the stony bed of a tributary, with or without water, and clambered breathlessly out again. A barked heel had festered and made every other step painful.

It was more than an hour after dark that I sweated into the _aldea_ of Chupa, so scattered that as each hut refused me lodging I had to hobble on a considerable distance to the next. The fourth or fifth refusal I declined to accept and swung my hammock under the eaves. A woman was cooking on the earth floor for several peon travelers, but treated me only with a stony silence. One of the Indians, however, who had been a soldier and was more friendly or less suspicious of "gringoes," divided with me his single tortilla and bowl of frijoles. The family slept on dried cowskins spread on the bare earth.

Food was not to be had when I folded my hammock and pushed on at daylight. One of a cl.u.s.ter of huts farther up was given over to a squad of "soldiers," garrisoning the frontier, and an officer who would have ranked as a vagabond in another country sold me three tortillas and a sh.e.l.lful of coffee saved from his rations. Another cl.u.s.ter of huts marked the beginning of a stiff rocky climb, beyond which I pa.s.sed somewhere in a swampy stretch of uninhabited ground the invisible boundary and entered Honduras, the Land of Great Depths.

It was indeed. Soon a vast mountain covered with pine forest rose into the sky ahead and two hours of unbroken climbing brought me only to the rim of another great wooded valley scolloped out of the earth and down into which I went all but headfirst into the town of Copan. Here, as I sat in a fairly easy chair in the shaded corner of a barnyard among pigs, chickens, and turkeys while my tortillas were preparing, I got the first definite information as to the tramp before me. Tegucigalpa, the capital, was said to be fifteen days distant by mule. On foot it might prove a trifle less. But if transportation in the flesh was laborious and slow, the ease of verbal communication partly made up for it. A telegram to the capital cost me the sum total of one real. It should have been a real and a quarter, but the telegraph operator had no change!

Beyond the town I found with some difficulty the gate through which one must pa.s.s to visit the ancient ruins of Copan. Once inside it, a path led through jungle and tobacco fields and came at length to a great artificial mound, originally built of cut-stone, but now covered with deep gra.s.s and a splendid grove of immense trees, until in appearance only a natural hill remained. About the foot of this, throttled by vegetation, lay scattered a score or more of carved stones, only one or two of which were particularly striking. Summer solitude hovered over all the scene.

Back again on the "camino real" I found the going for once ideal. The way lay almost level along a fairly wide strip of lush-green gra.s.s with only a soft-footed, eight-inch path marking the route, and heavy jungle giving unbroken shade. Then came a hard climb, just when I had begun to hear the river and was laying plans for a drink and a swim, and the trail led me far up on the gra.s.sy brow of a mountain, from which spread a vast panorama of pine-clad world. But the trails of Honduras are like spendthrift adventurers, struggling with might and main to gain an advantage, only wantonly to throw it away again a moment later. This one pitched headlong down again, then climbed, then descended over and again, as if setting itself some useless task for the mere pleasure of showing its powers of endurance. It subsided at last in the town of Santa Rita, the comandante of which, otherwise a pleasant enough fellow, took me for a German. It served me right for not having taken the time to shave my upper lip. He had me write my name on a slip of paper and bade me adios with the information that if "my legs were well oiled" I could make the hacienda Jarral by nightfall.

I set a good pace along the flat, shaded, gra.s.sy lane beside the river, promising myself a swim upon sighting my destination. But the tricky trail suddenly and unexpectedly led me far up on a mountain flank and down into Jarral without again catching sight or sound of the stream. There were three or four palm-leaf huts and a large, long hacienda building, unspeakably dirty and dilapidated. The estate produced coffee, heaps of which in berry and kernel stood here and there in the dusk. The owner lived elsewhere; for which no one could blame him. I marched out along the great tile-floored veranda to mention to the stupid _mayordomo_ the relations.h.i.+p of money and food. He referred me to a filth-encrusted woman in the cavern-like kitchen, where three soiled and bedraggled babies slept on a dirtier reed mat on the filthy earth floor, another in a hammock made of a grain sack and two pieces of rope, amid dogs, pigs, and chickens, not to mention other unpleasantnesses, including a damp dungeon atmosphere that ought early to have proved fatal to the infants. When she had sulkily agreed to prepare me tortillas, I returned to ask the way to the river. The mayordomo cried out in horror at the notion of bathing at night, pointing out that there was not even a moon, and prophesying a fatal outcome of such foolhardiness and gringo eccentricity. His appearance suggested that he had also some strong superst.i.tion against bathing by day.

I stumbled nearly a mile along to-morrow's road, stepping now and then into ankle-deep mud puddles, before reaching the stream, but a plunge into a stored-up pool of it was more than ample reward. "Supper" was ready upon my return, and by asking the price of it at once and catching the woman by surprise I was charged only a legitimate amount. When I inquired where I might swing my hammock, the enemy of bathing pointed silently upward at the rafters of the veranda. These were at least ten feet above the tiled floor and I made several ineffectual efforts before I could reach them at all, and then only succeeded in hanging my sleeping-net so that it doubled me up like a jack-knife. Rearranging it near the corner of the veranda, I managed with great effort to climb into it, but to have fallen out would have been to drop either some eight feet to the stone-flagged door or twenty into the cobbled and filthy barnyard below. The chances of this outcome were much increased by the necessity of using a piece of old rope belonging to the hacienda, and a broken arm or leg would have been pleasant indeed here in the squalid wilderness with at least a hundred miles of mule-trail to the nearest doctor.

Luckily I only fell asleep. Several men and dirtier boys, all in what had once been white garments, had curled up on bundles of dirty mats and heaps of bags all over the place, and the night was a pandemonium of their coughing, snoring, and night-maring, mingled with the hubbub of dogs, roosters, turkeys, cattle, and a porcine mult.i.tude that snuggled in among the human sleepers. The place was surrounded by wet, pine-clad mountains, and the damp night air drifting in upon me soon grew cold and penetrating.

Having had time to collect her wits, the female of the dungeon charged me a quadrupled price for a late breakfast of black coffee and pin-holed eggs, and I set off on what turned out to be a not entirely pleasant day's tramp. To begin with I had caught cold in a barked heel, causing the cords of the leg to swell and stiffen. Next I found that the rucksack had worn through where it came in contact with my back; third, the knees of the breeches I wore succ.u.mbed to the combination of sweat and the tearing of jungle gra.s.ses; fourth, the garments I carried against the day I should again enter civilization were already rumpled and stained almost beyond repair; and, fifth, but by no means last, the few American bills I carried in a secret pocket had been almost effaced by humidity and friction. Furthermore, the "road" completely surpa.s.sed all human powers of description. When it was not splitting into a half-dozen faint paths, any one of which was sure to fade from existence as soon as it had succeeded in leading me astray in a panting chase up some perpendicular slope, it was splas.h.i.+ng through mud-holes or small rivers. At the first stream I squandered a half-hour disrobing and dressing again, only to find that some two hundred yards farther on it swung around once more across the trail. Twice it repeated that stale practical joke. At the fourth crossing I forestalled it by marching on, carrying all but s.h.i.+rt and hat,--and got only sunburn and stone-bruises for my foresight, for the thing disappeared entirely. Still farther on I attempted to save time by crossing another small river by a series of stepping-stones, reached the middle of it dry-shod, looked about for the next step, and then carefully lay down at full length, baggage and all, in the stream as the stone turned over under my feet. But by that time I needed another bath.

An old woman of La Libertad, a collection of mud huts wedged into a little plain between jungled mountain-sides, answered my hungry query with a cheery "Como no!" and in due time set before me black beans and blacker coffee and a Honduranean tortilla, which are several times thicker and heavier than those of Mexico and taste not unlike a plank of dough.

Though often good-hearted enough, these children of the wilderness have no more inkling of any line between dirt and cleanliness, nor any more desire to improve their conditions, themselves, or their surroundings, which we of civilized lands think of as humanity's privilege and requirement, than the mangy yellow curs that slink in and out between their legs and among their cooking pots. I had yet to see in Honduras a house, a garment, a single possession, or person that was anything short of filthy.

As I ate, a gaunt and yellow youth arrived with a rag tied about his brow, complaining that a fever had overtaken him on a steep mountain trail and left him helpless for hours. I made use for the first time of the small medicine case I carried. Then the old woman broke in to announce that her daughter also had fever. I found a child of ten tossing on a miserable canvas cot in the mud hut before which I sat, her pulse close to the hundred mark. When I had treated her to the best of my ability, the mother stated that a friend in a neighboring hut had been suffering for more than a week with chills and fever, but that she was "embarra.s.sed" and must not take anything that might bring that condition prematurely to a head. I prescribed not without some layman misgiving. Great astonishment spread throughout the hamlet when I refused payment for my services, and the old woman not only vociferously declined the coin I proffered for the food, but bade me farewell with a vehement "Dios se lo pagara"--whether in Honduranean change or not she did not specify. The majority of the inhabitants of the wilds of Honduras live and die without any other medical attention than those of a rare wandering charlatan or pill-peddler.

Beyond was a rising path through dense steaming jungle, soon crossed by the ubiquitous river. Across it, near a pretty waterfall, the trail climbed up and ever up through jungle and forest, often deep in mud and in places so steep I had to mount on all fours, slipping back at each step like the proverbial frog in the well. A splendid virgin forest surrounded me, thick with undergrowth, the immense trees whispering together far above. A half-hour up, the trail, all but effaced, was cut off by a newly constructed rail fence tied together with vines run through holes that had been pierced in the b.u.t.tresses of giants of the forest. There was no other route in sight, however, and I climbed the obstruction and sweated another half-hour upward. A vista of at least eight heavily wooded ranges opened out behind me, not an inch of which was not covered with dense-green treetops. Far up near the gates of heaven I came upon a sun-flooded sloping clearing planted with tobacco, and found a startled peon in the shade of a make-s.h.i.+ft leaf hut. Instead of climbing the hill by this private trail, I should immediately have crossed the river again more than an hour below and continued on along it!

When he had recovered from the fright caused by so unexpected an apparition, the Indian yielded up his double-bodied gourd and made no protest when I gurgled down about half the water he had carried up the mountain for his day's thirst. That at least was some reward for the useless climb, for there is no greater physical pleasure than drinking one's fill of clear cold water after a toilsome tropical tramp. I crashed and slid down to the river again and picked up once more the muddy path along it between dense walls of damp jungle. It grew worse and worse, falling in with a smaller stream and leaping back and forth across it every few yards, sometimes permitting me to dodge across like a tight-rope walker on wet mossy stones, more often delaying me to remove shoes and leggings. An hour of this and the scene changed. A vast mountain wall rose before me, and a sharp rocky trail at times like steps cut by nature in the rock face led up and up and still forever upward. A score of times I seemed to have reached the summit, only to find that the trail took a new turn and, gathering up its skirts, climbed away again until all hope of its ever ceasing its sweating ascent faded away. After all it was perhaps well that only a small portion of the climb was seen at a time; like life itself, the appalling sight of all the difficulties ahead at once might discourage the climber from ever undertaking the task.

It was near evening when I came out in a slight clearing on what was at last really the summit. Vast forests of whispering pine-trees surrounded me, and before and behind lay an almost endless vista of heavily wooded, tumbled mountains, on a low one of which, near at hand but far below, could be seen the scattered village of San Augustin. There was still a long hour down the opposite face of the mountain, with thinner pine forests and the red soil showing through here and there; not all down either, for the trail had the confirmed habit of falling into bottomless sharp gullies every few yards and struggling out again up the steepest of banks, though the privilege of thrusting my face into the clear mountain stream at the bottom of each made me pardon these monotonous vagaries. After surmounting six or eight such mountain ranges in a day, under a sun like ours of August quadrupled and some twenty pounds of awkward baggage, without what could reasonably be called food, to say nothing of festered heels and similar petty ailments, the traveler comes gradually by nightfall to develop a desire to spend ten minutes under the electric fans of a "Baltimore Lunch."

Yet with all its difficulties the day had been more than enjoyable, wandering through endless virgin forests swarming with strange and beautiful forms of plant and bird life, with rarely a habitation or a fellow-man to break the spell of pure, unadulterated nature. For break it these did. As the first hut of San Augustin intruded itself in the growing dusk there ran unbidden through my head an ancient refrain:

"Plus je vois l'homme, plus j'aime mon chien."

Nearer the center of the collection I paused to ask a man leaning against his mud doorway whether he knew any one who would give me posada. The eagerness with which he offered to do so himself gave me visions of an exorbitant bill in the morning, but it turned out that he was merely anxious for the "honor" of lodging a stranger. This time I slept indoors. My host himself swung my hammock from two of the beams in his large, single-room house made of slats filled in with mud. Though a man of some education, subscriber to a newspaper of Salvador and an American periodical in Spanish, and surrounded by pine forests, it seemed never to have occurred to him to try to better his lot even to the extent of putting in a board floor. His mixture of knowledge and ignorance was curious. He knew most of the biography of Edison by heart, but thought Paris the capital of the United States and the population of that country 700,000.

In the house the only food was tortillas, but across the "street" meat was for sale. It proved to be tough strips a half-inch square of sun-dried beef hanging from the rafters. I made another suggestion, but the woman replied with a smile half of amus.e.m.e.nt half of sorrow that all the chickens had died. A few beans were found, and, as I ate, several men drifted into the hut and gradually and diffidently fell to asking strange and childish questions. It is hard for those of us trained to democracy and accustomed to intercourse only with "civilized" people to realize that a bearded man of forty, with tall and muscular frame, may have only an infantile grade of intelligence, following the conversation while it is kept on the plane of an eight-year-old intellect, but incapable of grasping any real thought, and staring with the open-mouthed navete of a child.

Tobacco is grown about San Augustin, and every woman of the place rolls clumsy cigars and cigarettes as incessantly as those of other parts knit or sew. The wife and daughter of my host were so engaged when I returned, toiling leisurely by the light of pine splinters; for rural Honduras has not yet reached the candle stage of progress. For a half-real I bought thirty cigarettes of the size of a lead-pencil, made of the coa.r.s.e leaves more fitted to cigars. The man and wife, and the child that had been stark naked ever since my arrival, at length rolled up together on a bundle of rags on the dank earth floor, the daughter of eighteen climbed a knotched stick into a cubbyhole under the roof, and when the pine splinter flickered out I was able for the first night in Honduras to get out of my knee-cramping breeches and into more comfortable sleeping garments. The festered heel gave me considerable annoyance. A bread and milk poultice would no doubt have drawn the fever out of it, but even had any such luxury been obtainable I should have applied it internally. During the night I awoke times without number.

Countless curs, that were to real dogs what these people are to civilized races, howled the night hideous, as if warning the village periodically of some imaginary danger, suggested perhaps by the scent of a stranger in their midst. Sometime in the small hours two youths, either drunk or enamored of the bedraggled senorita in the cubbyhole above, struck up a mournful, endless ballad of two unvarying lines, the one barely heard, the other screeching the eternal refrain until the night shuddered with it. All the clothing I possessed was not enough to keep me warm both above and below.

One of the chief difficulties of the road in Honduras is the impossibility of arousing the lazy inhabitants in time to prepare some suggestion of breakfast at a reasonably early hour. For to set off without eating may be to fast all the hot and laborious day. The sun was already warm when I took up the task of picking my way from among the many narrow, red, labyrinthian paths that scattered over the hill on which San Augustin reposes and radiated into the rocky, pine-forested, tumbled mountain world surrounding it. Some one had said the trail to Santa Rosa was easy and comparatively level. But such words have strange meanings in Honduras. Not once during the day did there appear a level s.p.a.ce ten yards in length. Hour after hour a narrow path, one of a score in which to go astray, worn in the whitish rock of a tumbled and irregular series of soft sandstone ridges with thin forests of pine or fir, clambered and sweated up and down incessantly by slopes steeper than any stairway, until I felt like the overworked chambermaid of a tall but elevator-less hotel. My foot was much swollen, and to make things worse the region was arid and waterless. Once I came upon a straggling mud village, but though it was half-hidden by banana and orange groves, not even fruit could be bought. Yet a day or two before some scoundrel had pa.s.sed this way eating oranges constantly and strewing the trail with the tantalizing peelings; a methodical, selfish, bourgeois fellow, who had not had the humane carelessness to drop a single fruit on all his gluttonous journey.

When I came at last, at the bottom of a thigh-straining descent, upon the first stream of the day, it made up for the aridity behind, for the path had eluded me and left me to tear through the jungle and wade a quarter mile before I picked up the trail again. Refreshed, I began a task before which I might have turned back had I seen it all at once.

Four mortal waterless hours I toiled steeply upward, more than twenty times sure I had reached the summit, only to see the trail, like some will-o'-the-wisp, draw on ahead unattainably in a new direction. I had certainly ascended four thousand feet when I threw myself down at last among the pines of the wind-swept summit. A draught from the gourd of a pa.s.sing peon gave me new life for the corresponding descent. Several of these fellow-roadsters now appeared, courteous fellows, often with black mustaches and imperial a la Napoleon III, who raised their hats and greeted me with a sing-song "Que se vaya bien," yet seemed remarkably stupid and perhaps a trifle treacherous. At length, well on in the afternoon, the road broke through a cutting and disclosed the welcome sight of the town of Santa Rosa, its white church bulking above all else built by man; the first suggestion of civilization I had seen in Honduras.

The suggestion withered upon closer examination. The place did not know the meaning of the word hotel, there was neither restaurant, electric light, wheeled vehicles, nor any of the hundred and one things common to civilized towns of like size. After long inquiry for lodging, I was directed to a pharmacy. The connection was not apparent until I found that an American doctor occupied there a tiny room made by part.i.tioning off with a strip of canvas stretched on a frame a part of the public hallway to the patio. He was absent on his rounds; which was fortunate, for his Cuban interpreter not merely gave me possession of the "room"

and cot, but delivered to me the doctor's supper of potatoes, rice, an imitation of bread, and even a piece of meat, when it arrived from a market-place kitchen. Here I spent Sunday, with the extreme la.s.situde following an extended tramp in the hungry wilderness. The doctor turned up in the afternoon, an imposing monument of a man from Texas with a wild tangle of dark-brown beard, and the soft eyes and gentle manners of a girl. He had spent some months in the region, more to the advantage of the inhabitants than his own, for disease was far more wide spread than wealth, and the latter was extremely elusive even where it existed. Hookworm was the second most common ailment, with cancer and miscarriages frequent. The entire region he had found virtually given over to free love. The grasping priests made it all but impossible for the poorer cla.s.ses to marry, and the custom had rather died out even among the well-to-do. All but two families of the town acknowledged illegitimate children, there was not a priest nor a youth of eighteen who had not several, and more than one widow of Honduranean wealth and position whose husband had long since died continued to add yearly to the population. The padre of San Pedro, from whose house he had just come, boasted of being the father of eighty children. All these things were common knowledge, with almost no attempt at concealment, and indeed little notion that there might be anything reprehensible in such customs. Every one did it, why shouldn't any one? Later experience proved these conditions, as well as nearly 90 per cent. of complete illiteracy, common to all Honduras.

The only other industry of Santa Rosa is the raising of tobacco and the making of a tolerably good cigar, famed throughout Honduras and selling here twenty for a real. Every hut and almost every shop is a cigar factory. The town is four thousand feet above sea-level, giving it a delightful, lazy, satisfied-with-life-just-as-it-is air that partly makes up for its ignorance, disease, and unmorality. The population is largely Indian, unwashed since birth, and with huge hoof-like bare feet devoid of sensation. There is also considerable Spanish blood, generally adulterated, its possessors sometimes shod and wearing nearly white cotton suits and square white straw hats. In intelligence the entire place resembles children without a child's power of imitation. Except for the snow-white church, the town is entirely one-story, with tile roofs, a ragged flowery plaza, and straight streets, sometimes cobbled, that run off down hill, for the place is built on a meadowy knoll with a fine vista of hills and surrounded by an immensely rich land that would grow almost anything in abundance with a minimum of cultivation.

The one way of getting an early start in Honduras is to make your purchases the night before and eat them raw in the morning. Christmas day had barely dawned, therefore, when I began losing my way among the undulating white rock paths beyond Santa Rosa. Such a country brings home to man his helplessness and unimportance before untamed nature. I wished to be in Tegucigalpa, two hundred miles away, within five days; yet all the wealth of Croesus could not have brought me there in that time. As it was, I had broken the mule-back record, and many is the animal that succ.u.mbs to the up and down trails of Honduras. This one might, were such triteness permissible, have been most succinctly characterized by a well-known description of war. It was rougher than any stone-quarry pitched at impossible angles, and the attraction of gravity for my burden pa.s.sed belief. To this I had been forced to add not merely a roll of silver reales but my Christmas dinner, built up about the nucleus of a can of what announced itself outwardly as pork and beans. Talgua, at eleven, did not seem the fitting scene for so solemn a ceremony, and I hobbled on, first over a tumble-down stone bridge, then by a hammock-bridge to which one climbed high above the river by a notched stick and of which two thirds of the cross-slats were missing, while the rest cracked or broke under the 185 pounds to which I subjected them.

I promised myself to pitch camp at the very next clear stream. But the hammock-bridge once pa.s.sed there began a heart-breaking climb into bone-dry hills, rolling with broken stones, and palpitating with the heat of an unshaded tropical sun. Several times I had perished of thirst before I came to a small sluggish stream, only to find its water deep blue with some pollution. In the end I was forced to overlook this drawback and, finding a sort of natural bathtub among the blazing rocks, fell upon what after all proved to be a porkless feast. The doctor's treatment had reduced the swelling in foot and ankle, but the wound itself was more painful than ever and called for frequent soaking. In midafternoon I pa.s.sed a second village, as somnolent as the belly-gorged zopilotes that half-jumped, half-flew sluggishly out of the way as I advanced. Here was a bit of fairly flat and shaded going, with another precarious hammock-bridge, then an endless woods with occasional sharp stony descents to some brawling but most welcome stream, with stepping-stones or without. Thus far I had seen barely a human being all the day, but as the shades of evening grew I pa.s.sed several groups of arrieros who blasted my hopes of reaching Gracias that night, but who informed me that just beyond the "rio grande" was a _casita_ where I might spend the night.

It was sunset when I came to the "great river," a broad and noisy though only waist-deep stream with two sheer, yet pine-clad rock cliffs more striking than the Palisades of the Hudson. A crescent moon was peering over them when I pa.s.sed the swinging bridge swaying giddily to and fro high above the stream, but on the steep farther bank it lighted up only a cruel disappointment. For the "casita" was nothing but a roof on wabbly legs, a public rest-house where I might swing my hammock but go famished to bed. I pushed on in quest of a more human habitation. The "road" consisted of a dozen paths s.h.i.+ning white in the moonlight and weaving in and out among each other. No sign of man appeared, and my foot protested vehemently. I concluded to be satisfied with water to drink and let hunger feed upon itself. But now it was needed, not a trickle appeared. Once I fancied I heard a stream babbling below and tore my way through the jungle down a sharp slope, but I had only caught the echo of the distant river. It was well on into the night when the welcome sound again struck my ear. This time it was real, and I fought my way down through clutching undergrowth and stone heaps to a stream, sluggish and blue in color, but welcome for all that, to swing my hammock among stone heaps from two elastic saplings, for it was just my luck to have found the one spot in Honduras where there were no trees large enough to furnish shelter. Luckily nothing worse than a heavy dew fell. Now and then noisy boisterous bands of natives pa.s.sed along the trail from their Christmas festivities in the town ahead. But whereas a Mexican highway at this hour would have been overrun with drunken peons more or less dangerous to "gringoes," drink seemed to have made these chiefly amorous. Still I took good care to arrange myself for the night quietly, if only to be able to sleep undisturbed. Once, somewhere in the darkest hours, a drove of cattle stampeded down the slope near me, but even as I reached for my weapon I found it was not the band of peons from a dream of which I had awakened. The spot was some 1500 feet lower than Santa Rosa, but still so sharp and penetrating is the chill of night in this region in contrast to the blazing, sweating days that I did not sleep a moment soundly after the first hour of evening.

An hour's walk next morning brought me to Gracias, a slovenly, nothing-to-do-but-stare hamlet of a few hundred inhabitants. After I had eaten all the chief hut could supply, I set about looking for the shoemaker my already aged Guatemalan Oxfords needed so badly. I found the huts where several of them lived, but not where any of them worked. The first replied from his hammock that he was sick, the second had gone to Tegucigalpa, the third was "somewhere about town if you have the patience to wait." Which I did for an hour or more, and was rewarded with his turning up to inform me that he was not planning to begin his labors again so soon, for only yesterday had been Christmas.