second-class because there was no fourth.
It may be that the biography which pieced itself unconsciously together as he talked needs a sprinkle of salt here and there, but it all had the earmarks of veracity. He was a Briton, once a surgeon in the British army, with the rank of captain, saw service with Roberts in Egypt, and was with Kitchener at the relief of Khartum. Later he served in India with the Scotch Grays. He looked the part, and had, moreover, the accent and scars to go with it. Glimpses through his conversation into the background beyond suggested he had since been in most parts of the world. He liked Argentina best and the United States least, as a place of residence. Practising as a physician and oculist, he had amassed a moderate fortune, all of which he had lost, together with his wife and child, and possibly a bit of his own wits, in the flood of Monterey. Since that catastrophe he had had no other ambition than to earn enough to drift on through life. With neither money nor instruments left, he took to teaching English to the wealthier class of Mexicans in various parts of the country, now in mission schools, now as private tutor. A Methodist institution in Querétaro had dispensed with his services because he protested against an order to make life unpleasant to those boys who did not respond with their spending money to a daily call for alms at the morning assembly. Six months ago he had drifted into a little town near San Marcos, wearing the title of “professor,” and got together a class of private pupils, chief among them three daughters of a wealthy hacendado. Rebels came one day and in the exuberance that follows a full meal long delayed, with pulque embroidery, one of them fired two shots through the window not far from his venerable British head. The “professor” picked up a two-foot mahogany ruler, marched out into the plaza and, rapping the startled rebel over the skull, took his rifle away from him and turned it over to the delighted jefe político. From then on his future seemed assured, for if the rest of the town was poor, the hacendado’s wealth was only rivaled by his daughters’ longing for English.
But life is a sad proposition at best. On the Monday preceding our meeting the “professor” sat with his pupils in the shade of the broad hacienda veranda when he saw two priests wandering toward the house “like Jews with a pack of clothing to sell.” “It’s all up with the Swede,” he told himself according to his own testimony. The prophecy proved only too true. The padres had come to order that the three daughters be god-mothers to the “Cristo” (in the form of a gaudy doll) that was to be “born” in the town on Christmas eve and paraded to the cathedral of Puebla. As their ticket to heaven depended upon obedience, none of the faithful señoritas dreamed of declining the honor, even though it involved the expenditure of considerable of papá’s good money and required them to spend most of the time until Christmas rehearsing for the ceremony and “praising the glory of God” with the priests in a room of the church, locked against worldly intruders. Naturally this left them no time for English. His mainstay gone, the “professor” threw up the sponge and struck out for pastures new, carrying his trunk-like “telescope” two hot and sandy leagues to catch this morning train.
At Esperanza the Briton went me one better on my own custom of “living on the country.” To the _enchiladas_, large tortillas red with pepper-sauce and generously filled with onions, and the smaller tortillas covered with scraps of meat and boiled egg which we bought of the old women and boys that flocked about the train, he added a liter of pulque. Not far beyond, we reached Boca del Monte, the edge of the great plateau of Mexico. A wealth of scenery opened out. From the window was a truly bird’s-eye view of the scattered town of Maltrata, more than two thousand feet almost directly below in the center of a rich green valley, about the edge of which, often on the very brink of the thick-clothed precipice, the train wound round and round behind the double-headed engine, traveling to every point of the compass in its descent. The town rose up to us at last and for the first time since mounting to San Luís Potosí two months before, I found myself less than a mile above sea-level. Instead of the often bare, wind-swept plateau, immense weeds of the banana family grew up about us, and a beautiful winding vale reeking with damp vegetation stretched before and behind us as we slid onward. High above all else and much farther away than it seemed, stood the majestic, snow-white peak of Orizaba. In mid-afternoon we descended at the city of that name.
It was large, but really a village in every feature of life. Here again were the broad eaves of one-story, tile-roofed houses, stretching well out over the badly cobbled streets, down the center of which ran open sewers. The place was unkempt and unclean, with many evidences of poverty, and the air so heavy and humid that vegetation grew even on the roofs. I wandered about town with the “professor” while he “sized it up” as a possible scene of his future labors, but he did not find it promising. By night Orizaba was still well above the tropics and the single blanket on the hotel cot proved far from sufficient even with its brilliant red hue.
CHAPTER VII
TROPICAL MEXICO
It is merely a long jump with a drop of two thousand feet from Orizaba to Córdoba. But the train takes eighteen miles of winding, squirming, and tunneling to get there. On the way is some of the finest scenery in Mexico. The route circles for miles the yawning edge of a valley dense with vegetation, banana and orange trees without number, with huts of leaves and stalks tucked away among them, myriads of flowers of every shade and color, and here and there coffee bushes festooned with their red berries. The dew falls so heavily in this region that the rank growth was visibly dripping with it.
At somnolent Córdoba I left the line to Vera Cruz for that to the southward. The car was packed with the dirty, foul-tongued wives and the children and bundles of a company of soldiers recently sent against the rebels of Juchitan. Ever since leaving Boca del Monte the day before I had been coming precipitously down out of Mexico. But there were still descents to be found, and the train raced swiftly without effort in and out through ever denser jungle, magnificent in colors, alive with birds, a land in each square yard of which the traveler felt a longing to pause and dwell for a while, to swing languidly under the trees, gazing at the snow peak of Orizaba now growing farther and farther away.
Our conveyance was a species of way-freight, which whiled away most of the day at a speed fittingly respectful to the scenery about us. With every station the population grew perceptibly more lazy. The alert, eager attitude of the plateau gave place to a languorous lethargy evident in both faces and movements. People seemed less sulky than those higher up, more communicative and approachable, but also, strangely enough, less courteous, apparently from laziness, a lack of the energy necessary for living up to the rules of that Mexican virtue. They answered readily enough, but abruptly and indifferently, and fell quickly into their customary somnolence. For a time we skirted the Río Blanco, boiling away toward the sea. Oranges were so plentiful they hung rotting on the trees. The jungle was dense, though by no means so much so as those of the Far East. On either hand were hundreds of native shacks,–mongrel little huts of earth floors, transparent walls of a sort of corn-stalk, and a thick, top-heavy roof of jungle grass or banana leaves, set carelessly in bits of space chopped out of the rampant jungle. Now and then we passed gangs of men fighting back the vegetation that threatened to swallow up the track completely.
Beautiful palm-trees began to abound, perfectly round, slender stems supporting hundreds of immense leaves hanging edgewise in perfect arch shape, perhaps the most symmetrical of all nature’s works. What is there about the palm-tree so romantic and pleasing to the spirits? Its whisper of perpetual summer, of perennial life, perhaps. Great luscious pineapples sold through the windows at two or three cents each. The peons of this region carried a machete in a leather scabbard, but still wore a folded blanket over one shoulder, suggesting chilly nights. The general apathy of the population began to manifest itself now in the paucity of hawkers at the stations. On the plateau the train seldom halted without being surrounded by a jostling crowd, fighting to sell their meager wares; here they either lolled in the shade of their banana groves, waiting for purchasers to come and inspect their displays of fruit, or they did not even trouble to offer anything for sale. Why should man work when his food drops year by year into his lap without even replanting? Moreover, flat noses and kinky hair were growing more and more in evidence.
Not all was jungle. As the mountains died down and faded away in the west there opened out many broad meadows in which were countless sleek cattle tended by somnolent herdsmen on horseback. Much sugar-cane grew, lengths of which were sold to the brawling soldiers’ wives and the carload in general, which was soon reeking with the juice and chewed pulp. By afternoon jungle was a rarity and most of the country was a rich sort of prairie with cattle without number, and here and there an immense tree to break the monotony. These rich bottomlands that seemed capable of producing anything in unlimited quantities were almost entirely uncultivated. At several stations there bulked above the throng white men in appearance like a cross between farmers and missionaries, the older ones heavily bearded. For a time I could not catalogue them. Then, as we pulled out of one town, two of what but for their color and size I should have taken for peons raced for the last car-step, one shouting to the other in the strongest of Hoosier accents:
“Come on, Bud, let’s jemp ‘er!”
Which both did, riding some sixty feet, and dropped off like men who had at last had their one daily excitement. Inquiry proved that they belonged to a colony of Mormons that has settled in several groups in this region, where nature sets their creed a prolific example.
Unbroken prairies, in their tropical form, now stretched as far as the eye could reach, with just the shade of a shadowy range in the far west. The heat had not once grown oppressive during the day.
With dusk it turned almost cold. We wound slowly on into the damp, heavy night, a faint full moon struggling to tear itself a peep-hole through the clouds, and finally at ten, seat-sore with fifteen hours of slat-bench riding, pulled up at Santa Lucrecia.
It was just such a town as dozens of others we had passed that day; a plain station building surrounded unevenly by a score or so of banana-grove huts. Here ends the railroad southward, joining that across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. From the track of the latter a wooden sidewalk that rang drum-hollow under my heels led across a gully of unknown depth in the black night to the Hotel “El Sol Mejicano,” standing-room for which had been gashed out of the jungle. It was a wooden and sheet-iron building on stilts, swarming even at night with dirty children, pigs, chickens, and yellow dogs, and presided over by a glassy-eyed, slatternly woman of French antecedents, the general shape of a wine-skin three-fourths full, and of a ghoulish instinct toward the purses of travelers. In one end were a dozen “rooms,” separated by partitions reaching half way to the sheet-iron roof, and in the other a single combination of grocery and general store, saloon and pool-table, assorted filth and the other attributes of outposts of civilization. The chambers were not for rent, but only the privilege of occupying one of the several beds in each. These fortunately were fairly clean, with good springs and mosquito canopies, but with only a quilt for mattress–unless it was meant for cover–a single sheet, and the usual two little, round, hard mountainous pillows. Otherwise the cabins were wholly unfurnished, even to windows. The train that had brought us in spent the night bucking and jolting back and forth near by; even a barefoot servant walking anywhere in the building or on the veranda set the edifice rocking as in an earthquake; two Mexicans occupying the “room” next to my own–more properly, the one I helped occupy–bawled anecdotes and worse at the top of their voices most of the night; guests were hawking and spitting and coughing incessantly in various parts of the house; at three a servant began beating on the door with something in the nature of a sledge-hammer to know if I wished to take the train Atlantic-bound, and refused to accept a negative answer; my room-mate held the world’s record for snoring; at the first suggestion of dawn every child, chicken, and assorted animal in the building and vicinity set up its greatest possible uproar; and I was half-frozen all night, even under all the clothing I possessed. Except for these few annoyances, I slept splendidly. There was at least the satisfaction of knowing that a traveling millionaire obliged to pass a night in Santa Lucrecia would spend it no better.
Everything was dripping wet when I fled back across the aërial sidewalk to the station. It was not hot, but there was a dense, heavy atmosphere in which one felt he could be as lively and industrious as elsewhere, yet found himself dragging listlessly around as the never-do-anything-you-don’t-have-to inhabitants. Even the boyish train auditor had an irresponsible lackadaisical manner, and permitted all sorts of petty railway misdemeanors. The childishness of tropical peoples was evident on every hand. There was no second-class car on this line, but one third, all but empty when we started, evidently not because most bought first-class tickets but because the auditor was of the tropics. Endless jungle covered all the visible world, with only the line of rails crowding through it. The cocoanut palms and those top-heavy with what looked like enormous bunches of dates soon died out as we left the vicinity of the coast. At Rincon Antonio the car filled up, and among the new-comers were many of the far-famed women of Tehuantepec. Some were of striking beauty, almost all were splendid physical specimens and all had a charming and alluring smile. They dressed very briefly–a gay square of cloth about their limbs, carelessly tucked in at the waist, and a sleeveless upper garment that failed to make connections with the lower, recalling the women of Ceylon. The absence of any other garments was all too evident. Almost all wore in their jet-black hair a few red flowers, all displayed six inches or more of silky brown skin at the waist, and the majority wore necklaces of gold coins, generally American five and ten dollar gold pieces. To see one of them stretched out at full length on a seat, smoking a cigarette and in animated conversation with a man that five minutes before had been a total stranger, might have suggested a certain looseness of character. But this was denied by their facial expression, which bore out the claim of a chance acquaintance long resident among them that they are very frank, “simple,” and friendly, but far more apt to keep within a well-defined limit than the average of tropical women. Tehuantepec, indeed, is the land of “woman’s rights.” The men having been largely killed off during the days of Diaz, the feminine stock is to-day the sturdier, more intelligent, and industrious, and arrogates to itself a far greater freedom than the average Mexican woman. Many of those in the car spoke the local Indian dialect, Zapoteca, but all seemed possessed of fluent Spanish.
Yet how different was all the carload from what we have come to consider “civilized” people. If the aim of humanity is to be happy in the present, then these languid, brown races are on the right track. If that aim is to advance, develop, and accomplish, they must be classed with the lower animals.
For a half hour before reaching Rincon Antonio, we had been winding with a little brawling river through a hilly gorge dense-grown with vegetation. The town was in the lull between two revolts. A bare four days before, a former chief and his followers had been taken by the populace and shot behind the water-tank beside where we paused at the station. A week later new riots were to break out. But today the place was sunk in its customary languor, and only a few bullet-ridden walls and charred ruins hinted its recent history.
I had pictured the Isthmus of Tehuantepec a flat neck of land from ocean to ocean. But the imagination is a deceitful guide. Beyond the town of the water-tank we wormed for miles through mountains higher than the Berkshires, resembling them indeed in form and wealth of vegetation, though with a tropical tinge. The jungle, however, died out, and the train crawled at a snail’s pace, often looping back upon itself, through landscapes in which the organ-cactus was most conspicuous. Even here the great chain known as the Rockies and the Andes, that stretches from Alaska to Patagonia, imposes a considerable barrier between the two seas. There was a cosmopolitan tinge to this region, and the _boinas_ of Basques mingled with the cast-iron faces of Americans and sturdy self-possessed Negroes under broad “Texas” hats. An hour beyond the hills, in a thick-wooded land, I dropped off at the town of Tehuantepec, an intangible place that I had some difficulty in definitely locating in the thickening darkness.
Here was a new kind of Mexico. In many things, besides the naked, brown waists of the women, it carried the mind back to Ceylon. There were the same reed and thatched huts, almost all surrounded by spacious yards fenced by corn-stalk walls through which the inmates could see easily but be seen with difficulty. Here, too, boys went naked until the approach of puberty; the cocoanut palms, the dense banana groves, even the huge earthen water-jars before the houses recalled the charming isle of the Singhalese, and if the people were less kindly to the stranger they were much more joyful and full of laughter than the Mexican of the plateau. In this perhaps they had more in common with the Burmese. The men, often almost white in color, wore few large hats, never one approaching those of the highlands. The hotter the sun, the smaller the hat, seems to be the rule in Mexico. Here it was hot, indeed; a dense, thick, tangible heat, that if it did not sap the strength suggested the husbanding of it.
A fiesta raged on the night of my arrival. The not too musical blare of a band drew me to a wide, inclined street paved in sand, at the blind end of which were seated five rows of women in as many gradations, and everywhere shuttled men and boys, almost all in white trousers, with a shirt of the same color, Chinese-fashion, outside it, commonly barefoot with or without sandals. A few even wore shoes. I hesitated to join the throng. The subconscious expectation of getting a knife or a bullet in the back grows second nature in Mexico. Few foreigners but have contracted the habit of stepping aside to let pass a man who hangs long at their heels. The approach of a staggering, talkative peon was always an occasion for alertness, and one that came holding a hand behind him was an object of undivided curiosity until the concealed member appeared, clutching perhaps nothing more interesting than a cigar or a banana. Mexicans in crowds, mixed with liquor and “religion,” were always worth attention; and here was just such a mixture, for the fiesta was in honor of the Virgin, and the libations that had been poured out in her honor were generous. But the drink of Tehuantepec, whatever it might be–for pulque is unknown in the tropics–appeared to make its devotees merely gay and boisterous. The adults were friendly, even to an American, and the children shouted greetings to me as “Señor Gringo,” which here is merely a term of nationality and no such opprobrious title as it has grown to be on the plateau.
A few rockets had suggested an incipient revolution while I was at supper. Now the scene of the festivities was enlivened by four huge set-pieces of fireworks, each with a bell-shaped base in which a man could ensconce himself to the waist. One in the form of a duck first took to human legs and capered about the square while its network of rockets, pin-wheels, sizzlers, twisters, cannon-like explosions, and jets of colored fire kept the multitude surging back and forth some twenty minutes, to the accompaniment of maudlin laughter and the dancing and screaming of children, while the band, frankly giving up its vain attempts to produce music, gazed with all eyes and blew an unattentive, never-ending rag-time of some two strains. A monster turkey took up the celebration where the charred and disheveled duck left off, capering itself into blazing and uproarious oblivion. The finale consisted of two gigantic figures of a man and a woman, with a marvelous array of all possible lights and noises that lasted a full half-hour, while the two barefoot wearers danced back and forth bowing and careering to each other. The aftermath ran far into the night, and brought to naught my plans to make up for the sleepless night before.
Though most of the inhabitants of Tehuantepec live on earth floors in reed and grass houses, there is scarcely a sign of suffering poverty. Little Spanish is heard among them, although even the children seem quite able to speak it. Their native Indian tongue differs from the Castilian even in cadence, so that it was easy to tell which idiom was being spoken even before the words were heard. It is the chief medium of the swarming market in and about the black shadows of a roof on legs. Here the frank and self-possessed women, in their brief and simple dress, were legion. Footwear is unknown to them, and the loose, two-piece, disconnected dress was augmented, if at all, with a black lace shawl thrown over the shoulders in the, to them, chilly mornings. But the most remarkable part of the costume, of decorative properties only, is the head-dress common to a large per cent, of the women in town. From the back of the otherwise bare head hangs to the waist an intricate contrivance of lace and ruffles, snow-white and starched stiff, the awful complications of which no mere male would be able to describe beyond the comprehensive statement that the ensemble much resembles a Comanche chief in full war regalia. Above this they carry their loads on their heads in a sort of gourd bowl decorated with flowers, and walk with a sturdy self-sufficiency that makes a veranda or bridge quake under their brown-footed tread. They are lovers of color, especially here where the Pacific breezes turn the jungle to the eastward into a gaunt, sandy, brown landscape, and such combinations as soft-red skirts and sea-blue waists, or the reverse, mingle with black shot through with long perpendicular yellow stripes. The striking beauties of many a traveler’s hectic imagination were not in evidence. But then, it is nowhere customary to find a town’s best selling sapotes and fish in the market-place, and at least the attractiveness ranked high compared with a similar scene in any part of the world, while cleanliness was far more popular than in the highlands to the north.
The foreigner in Mexico is often surprised at the almost impossibility of getting the entree into its family life. American residents of high position are often intimate friends for years of Mexican men in their cafés and male gatherings, without ever stepping across their thresholds. Much of the seclusion of the Moor still holds, even half a world distant from the land of its origin. Yet his racial pseudo-courtesy leads the Mexican frequently to extend an invitation which only long experience teaches the stranger is a mere meaningless formality. On the train from Córdoba I spent considerable time in conversation with a well-to-do youth of Tehuantepec, during which I was formally invited at least a dozen times to visit him at his home. He failed to meet me at the rendezvous set, but was effusive when I ran across him in the evening round of the plaza:
“Ah, amigo mío. Muy buenas noches. Como ‘stá uste-e-é? So delighted! I was grieved beyond measure to miss you. I live in the Calle Reforma, number 83. There you have your own house. I am going there now. Do you not wish to accompany me? I have….”
“Yes, I should like to look in on you for a few moments.”
“Ah, I was so sorry to miss you,” he went on, standing stock still. “I must give you my address and you must write me, and I you.”
There followed an exchange of cards with great formality and many protestations of eternal friendship; then an effusive hand-shake and:
“Mil gracias, señor. May you have a most pleasant voyage. Thanks again. So pleased to have met you. Adiós. May you travel well. Hasta luego. Adiós. Que le vaya bien,” and with a flip of the hand and a wriggling of the fingers he was gone.
That evening I returned early to the “Hotel La Perla.” Its entire force was waiting for me. This consisted of Juan, a cheery, slight fellow in a blue undershirt and speckled cotton trousers of uncertain age, who was waiter, chambermaid, porter, bath-boy, sweeper, general swipe, possibly cook, and in all but name proprietor; the nominal one being a spherical native on the down-grade of life who never moved twice in the same day if it could be avoided, leaving the establishment to run itself, and accepting phlegmatically what money it pleased Providence to send him. The force was delighted at the pleasure of having a guest to wait upon, and stood opposite me all through the meal, offering gems of assorted wisdom intermingled with wide-ranging questions. I called for an extra blanket and turned in soon after dark. There reigned a delicious stillness that promised ample reparation for the two nights past. Barely had I drowsed off, however, when there intruded the chattering of several men in the alleyway and yard directly outside my window. “They’ll soon be gone,” I told myself, turning over. But I was over-optimistic. The voices increased, those of women chiming in. Louder and louder grew the uproar. Then a banjo-like instrument struck up, accompanying the most dismally mournful male voice conceivable, wailing a monotonous refrain of two short lines. This increased in volume until it might be heard a mile away. Male and female choruses joined in now and then. In the snatches between, the monotonous voice wailed on, mingled with laughter and frequent disputes. I rose at last to peer out the window. In the yard were perhaps a half-hundred natives, all seated on the ground, some with their backs against the very wall of my room, nearly all smoking, and with many pots of liquor passing from hand to hand. Midnight struck, then one, then two; and with every hour the riot increased. Once or twice I drifted into a short troubled dream, to be aroused with a start by a new burst of pandemonium. Then gradually the sounds subsided almost entirely. My watch showed three o’clock. I turned over again, grateful for the few hours left … and in that instant, without a breath of warning, there burst out the supreme cataclysm of a band of some twenty hoarse and battered pieces in an endless, unfathomable noise that never once paused for breath until daylight stole in at the window.
At “breakfast” I took Juan to task.
“Ah, señor,” he smiled, “it is too bad. But yesterday a man died in the house next door, and his friends have come to celebrate.”
“And keep the whole town awake all night?”
“Ay, senor, it is unfortunate indeed. But what would you? People will die, you know.”
Sleep is plainly not indigenous to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
From the neighboring town of Gamboa there runs southward a railway known as the “Pan-American.” Its fares are high and a freight-train behind an ancient, top-heavy engine drags a single passenger-car divided into two classes with it on its daily journey. The ticket-agent had no change, and did not know whether the end of the line was anywhere near Guatemala, though he was full of stories of the dangers to travelers in that country. A languid, good-natured crowd filled the car. We are so accustomed to think of lack of clothing as an attribute of savages that it was little short of startling to see a young lady opposite, naked to the waist but for a scanty and transparent suggestion of upper garment, read the morning newspaper and write a note with the savoir-faire of a Parisienne in her boudoir. She wore a necklace of American five-dollar gold pieces, with a pendant of twenties, the Goddess of Liberty and the date, 1898, on the visible side, and as earrings two older coins of $2.50. Nearly every woman in the car was thus decorated to some extent, always with the medallion side most in evidence, and one could see at a glance exactly how much each was worth.
In a long day’s travel we covered 112 miles. At Juchitán the passengers thinned. Much of this town had recently been destroyed in the revolution, and close to the track stood a crowded cemetery with hundreds of gorged and somnolent _zopilotes_, the carrion-crow of Mexico, about it. The country was a blazing dry stretch of mesquite and rare patches of forest in a sandy soil, with huts so few that the train halted at each of them, as if to catch its breath and wipe the sweat out of its eyes. Once, toward noon, we caught a glimpse of the Pacific. But all the day there spread on either hand an arid region with bare rocky hills, a fine sand that drifted in the air, and little vegetation except the thorny mesquite. A few herds of cattle were seen, but they were as rare as the small towns of stone huts and frontiers-man aspect. The train passed the afternoon like a walker who knows he can easily reach his night’s destination, and strolled leisurely into Tonolá before sunset.
Beyond the wild-west hotel lay a sweltering sand town of a few streets atrociously cobbled. We had reached the land of hammocks. Not a hut did I peep into that did not have three or four swinging lazily above the uneven earth floor. In the center of the broad, unkempt expanse that served as plaza stood an enormous _pochote_, a species of cottonwood tree, and about it drowsed a Sunday evening gathering half seen in the dim light of lanterns on the stands of hawkers. On a dark corner three men and a boy were playing a _marimba_, a frame with dried bars of wood as keys which, beaten with small wooden mallets, gave off a weird, half-mournful music that floated slowly away into the heavy hot night. The women seemed physically the equal of those of Tehuantepec, but their dress was quite different, a single loose white gown cut very low at the neck and almost without sleeves. One with a white towel on her head and hanging loosely about her shoulders looked startlingly like an Egyptian female figure that had stepped forth from the monuments of the Nile. Their brown skins were lustrous as silk, every line of their lithe bodies of a Venus-like development and they stood erect as palm-trees, or slipped by in the sand-paved night under their four-gallon’ American oilcans of water with a silent, sylph-like tread.
The train, like an experienced tropical traveler, started at the first peep of dawn. Tonolá marked the beginning of a new style of landscape, heralding the woodlands of Guatemala. All was now dense and richly green, not exactly jungle, but with forests of huge trees, draped with climbing vines, interlarded with vistas of fat cattle by the hundreds up to their bellies in heavy green grass, herds of which now and then brought us almost to a standstill by stampeding across the track. In contrast to the day before there were many villages, a kind of cross between the jungle towns of Siam and the sandy hamlets of our “Wild West.” A number had sawmills for the mahogany said to abound in the region. Now and then a pretty lake alive with wild fowl appeared in a frame of green. There were many Negroes, and not a few Americans among the ranchers, sawmill hands and railway employees, while John Chinaman, forbidden entrance to the country to the south, as to that north of the Rio Grande, put in a frequent appearance, as in all Mexico. It was a languorous, easy-going land, where day-before-yesterday’s paper was news. The sulky stare of the Mexican plateau had completely disappeared, and in its place was much laughter and an unobtrusive friendliness, and a complete lack of obsequiousness even on the part of the peons, who elbowed their way in and out among all classes as if there were no question as to the equality of all mankind. The daily arrival of the train seemed to be the chief recreation of the populace, so that there were signs of protest if it made only a brief stop. But there was seldom cause for this complaint, for the swollen-headed old engine was still capable of so much more than the schedule required that it was forced to make a prolonged stay at almost every station to let Father Time catch up with us.
The rumor ran that those who would enter Guatemala must get permission of its consul in Tapachula. But our own representative at that town chanced to board the train at a wayside hamlet and found the papers I carried sufficient. Two fellow countrymen raced away into the place as the train drew in, and returned drenched with sweat in time to continue with our leisurely convoy. Dakin was a boyish man from the Northern States, and Ems a swarthy “Texican” to whom Spanish was more native than English, both wandering southward in quest of jobs, as stationary and locomotive engineers respectively. They rode first-class, though this did not imply wealth, but merely that Pat Cassidy was conductor. He was a burly, whole-hearted American, supporting an enormous, flaring mustache and, by his own admission, all the “busted” white men traveling between Mexico and Guatemala. While I kept the seat to which my ticket entitled me, he passed me with a look of curiosity not unmixed with a hint of scorn. When I stepped into the upholstered class to ask him a question he bellowed, “Si’ down!” The inquiry answered, I rose to leave, only to be brought down again with a shout of, “Keep yer seat!” It is no fault of Cassidy’s if a “gringo” covers the Pan-American on foot or seated with peons, or goes hungry and thirsty or tobaccoless on the journey; and penniless strangers are not conspicuous by their absence along this route. As a Virginia Negro at one of the stations put it succinctly, “If dey ain’t black, dey’se white.”
A jungle bewilderment of vegetation grew up about us, with rich clearings for little clusters of palm-leaf huts, jungles so dense the eye could not penetrate them. Laughing women, often of strikingly attractive features, peopled every station, perfect in form as a Greek statue, and with complexions of burnished bronze. Everywhere was evidence of a constant joy in life and of a placid conviction that Providence or some other philanthropist who had always taken care of them always would. Teeth were not so universally splendid as on the plateau, but the luminous, snapping black eyes more than made up for this less perfect feature.
Nightfall found us still rumbling lazily on and it was nearly an hour later that we reached Mariscal at the end of the line, four or five scattered buildings of which two disguised themselves under the name of hotels. Ems and I slept–or more exactly passed the night–on cots in one of the rooms of transparent partitions, while Dakin, who refused to accept alms for anything so useless, spread a grass mat among the dozen native women stretched out along the veranda.
CHAPTER VIII
HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA
The three of us were off by the time the day had definitely dawned. Ems carried a heavy suitcase, and Dakin an awkward bundle. My own modest belongings rode more easily in a rucksack. A mile walk along an unused railroad, calf-high in jungle grass, brought us to a wooden bridge across the wide but shallow Suchiate, bounding Mexico on the south. Across its plank floor and beyond ran the rails of the “Pan-American,” but the trains halt at Mariscal because Guatemala, or more exactly Estrada Cabrera, does not permit them to enter his great and sovereign republic. Our own passage looked easy, but that was because of our inexperience of Central American ways. Scarcely had we set foot on the bridge when there came racing out of a palm-leaf hut on the opposite shore three male ragamuffins in bare feet, shouting as they ran. One carried an antedeluvian, muzzle-loading musket, another an ancient bayonet red with rust, and the third swung threateningly what I took to be a stiff piece of telegraph wire.
“No se pasa!” screamed the three in chorus, spreading out in skirmish line like an army ready to oppose to the death the invasion of a hostile force. “No one can pass the bridge!”
“But why not?” I asked.
“Because Guatemala does not allow it.”
“Do you mean to say three caballeros with money and passports–and shoes are denied admittance to the great and famous Republic of Guatemala?”
“Not at all, senor, but you must come by boat. The Pope himself cannot cross this bridge.”
It would have been unkind to throw them into the river, so we returned to a cluster of huts on the Mexican bank. Before it drowsed a half-dozen ancient and leaky boats. But here again were grave international formalities to be arranged. A Mexican official led us into one of the huts and set down laboriously in a ledger our names, professions, bachelordoms, and a mass of even more personal information.
“You are Catholic, señor,” he queried with poised pen, eying me suspiciously.
“No, señor.”
“Ah, Protestant,” he observed, starting to set down that conclusion.
“Tampoco.”
There came a hitch in proceedings. Plainly there was no precedent to follow in considering the application of so non-existent a being for permission to leave Mexico. The official smoked a cigarette pensively and idly turned over the leaves of the ledger.
“Será ateo,” said a man behind him, swelling his chest with pride at his extraordinary intelligence.
“That doesn’t fill the bill either,” I replied, “nor any other single word I can think of.”
But the space for this particular item of information was cramped. We finally compromised on “Sin religión,” and I was allowed to leave the country. A boatman tugged and poled some twenty minutes before we could scramble up the steep, jungle-grown bank beyond. At the top of it were scattered a dozen childish looking soldiers in the most unkempt and disheveled array of rags and lack thereof a cartoonist could picture. They formed in a hollow square about us and steered us toward the “comandancia,” a few yards beyond. This was a thatched mud hut with a lame bench and a row of aged muskets in the shade along its wall. Another bundle of rags emerged in his most pompous, authoritative demeanor, and ordered us to open our baggage. Merely by accident I turned my rucksack face down on the bench, so there is no means of knowing whether the kodak and weapon in the front pockets of it would have been confiscated or held for ransom, had they been seen. I should be inclined to answer in the affirmative. In the hut our passports were carefully if unintelligently examined, and we were again fully catalogued. Estrada Cabrera follows with great precision the movements of foreigners within his boundaries.
In the sandy jungle town of Ayutla just beyond, two of us multiplied our wealth many times over without the least exertion. That Dakin did not also was only due to the unavoidable fact that he had no multiplicand to set over the multiplier. I threw down Mexican money to the value of $8.30 and had thrust upon me a massive roll of $150. The only drawback was that the bills had led so long and maltreated a life that their face value had to be accepted chiefly on faith, for a ten differed from a one only as one Guatemalan soldier differs from his fellows, in that each was much more tattered and torn than the other. After all there is a delicate courtesy in a government’s supplying an illiterate population with illegible money; no doubt experience knows other distinguishing marks, such as the particular breeds of microbes that is accustomed to inhabit each denomination; for even inexperience could easily recognize that each was so infested. I mistake in saying this was the only drawback. There was another. The wanderer who drops into a hut for a banana and a bone-dry biscuit, washed down with a small bottle of luke-warm fizzling water, hears with a pang akin to heart-failure a languid murmur of “Four dollars, señor,” in answer to his request for the bill. It is not easy to get accustomed to hearing such sums mentioned in so casual a manner.
A little narrow-gage “railway” crawls off through the jungle beyond Ayutla, but the train ran on it yesterday and to-morrow. To-day there was nothing to do but swing on our loads and strike off southward. The morning air was fresh and the eastern jungle wall threw heavy shade for a time. But that time soon came to an end and I plodded on under a sun that multiplied the load on my back by at least the monetary multiple of Guatemala. Ems and Dakin quickly demonstrated a deep dislike to tropical tramping, though both laid claim to the degree of T. T. T. conferred on “gringo” rovers in Central America. I waited for them several times in vain and finally pushed on to the sweltering, heat-pulsating town of Pahapeeta, where every hut sold bottled firewater and a diminutive box of matches cost a dollar. Grass huts tucked away in dense groves along the route were inhabited by all but naked brown people, kindly disposed, so it required no exertion, toward a passing stranger. Before noon the jungle opened out upon an ankle-deep sea of sand, across which I plowed under a blazing sun that set even the bundle on my back dripping with sweat.
But at least there was a broad river on the farther side of it that looked inviting enough to reward a whole day of tramping. The place was called Vado Ancho–the “Wide Wade”; though that was no longer necessary, for the toy railroad that operated to-morrow and yesterday had brought a bridge with it. I scrambled my way along the dense-grown farther bank, and found a place to descend to a big shady rock just fitted for a siesta after a swim. Barely had I begun to undress, however, when three brown and barefoot grown-up male children, partly concealed in astounding collections of rags, two with ancient muskets and the third with a stiff piece of wire, tore through the bushes and surrounded me with menacing attitudes.
“What are you doing here?” cried the least naked.
“Why the idle curiosity?”
“You are ordered to come to the comandancia.”
I scrambled back up the bank and plodded across another sand patch toward a small collection of jungle huts, the three “soldiers” crowding close about me and wearing the air of brave heroes who had saved their country from a great conspiracy. Lazy natives lay grinning in the shade as I passed. One of the lop-shouldered, thatched huts stood on a hillock above the rest. When we had sweated up to this, a military order rang out in a cracked treble and some twenty brown scarecrows lined up in the shade of the eaves in a Guatemalan idea of order. About half of them held what had once been muskets; the others were armed with what I had hitherto taken for lengths of pilfered telegraph wire, but which now on closer inspection proved to be ramrods. Thus each arm made only two armed men, whereas a bit of ingenuity might have made each serve three or four; by dividing the stocks and barrels, for instance. The tatterdemalion of the treble fiercely demanded my passport, while the “army” quickly degenerated into a ragged rabble loafing in the shade.
I started to lay my rucksack on the bench along the wall, but one of the fellows sprang up with a snarl and flourished his ramrod threateningly. It was evidently a _lèse militarismus_ worthy of capital punishment for a civilian to pass between a pole supporting the eaves and the mud wall of the building. I was forced to stand in the blazing sunshine and claw out my papers. They were in English, but the caricature of an officer concealed his ignorance before his fellows by pretending to read them and at length gave me a surly permission to withdraw. No wonder Central America is a favorite _locale_ for comic opera librettos.
I descended again to the river for a swim, but had not yet stretched out for a siesta when there came pushing through the undergrowth three more “soldiers,” this time all armed with muskets.
“What’s up now?”
“The colonel wants to see you in the comandancia.”
“But I just saw your famous colonel.”
“No, that was only the teniente.”
When I reached the hilltop again, dripping with the heat of noonday, I was permitted to sit on an adobe brick in the sacred shade. The colonel was sleeping. He recovered from that tropical ailment in time, and a rumor came floating out that he was soon to honor us with his distinguished presence. The soldiers made frantic signs to me to rise to my feet. Like Kingslake before the Turkish pasha, I felt that the honor of my race and my own haughty dignity were better served by insisting on social equality even to a colonel, and stuck doggedly to the adobe brick. The rumor proved a false alarm anyway. No doubt the great man had turned over in his sleep.
By and by the lieutenant came to say the commander was in his office, and led the way there. At the second door of the mud-and-straw building he paused to add in an awe-struck whisper:
“Take off your hat and wait until he calls you in.”
Instead I stepped toward the entrance, but the teniente snatched at the slack of my shirt with a gasp of terror:
“Por Diós! Take off your revolver! If the colonel sees it….”
I shook him off and, marching in with martial stride and a haughty carelessness of attitude, sat down in the only chair in the room except that occupied by the commander, with a hearty:
“Buenas tardes, colonel.”
He was a typical guatemalteco in whole trousers and an open shirt, but of some education, for he was writing with moderate rapidity at his homemade desk. He also wore shoes. His manner was far more reasonable than that of his illiterate underlings, and we were soon conversing rationally. He appeared to know enough English to get the gist of my passport, but handed it back with the information that I should have official Guatemalan permission to exist within the confines of his eighteen-for-a-dollar country.
“You carry an apparatus for the making of photographs,” he went on. “Suppose you had taken a picture of our fortress and garrison here?”
“Gar–How’s that, señor?”
“It is the law of all countries, as you know, not to allow the photographing of places of military importance. Even the English would arrest you if you took a picture of Gibraltar.”
It was careless of me not to have noted the striking similarity of this stronghold to that at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Both stand on hills.
“And where do I get this official permission?”
“Impossible.”
“Yet necessary?”
But I still carried Mexican cigarettes, a luxury in Guatemala, so we parted friends, with the manners of a special envoy taking leave of a prime minister. The only requirement was that I should not open my kodak within sight of this hotbed of military importance. I all but made the fatal error of passing between the sacred eave-post and the wall upon my exit, but sidestepped in time to escape unscathed, and left the great fortress behind and above me.
After all I had been far more fortunate than a fellow countryman I met later, who had had a $200 camera smashed by this same ragged “garrison.”
Siesta time was past and I struck on out of town. In the last hut an old woman called out to know why I had gone down to the river, and showed some suspicion at my answer.
“There are so many countries trying to get our war plans,” she explained.
A trail wide enough for single-wheeled vehicles crowded its way between jungle walls. In the breathless, blazing sunshine the sweat passed through my rucksack and into my formal city garments beyond, carrying the color of the sack with it. For some time no one was abroad except a dripping “gringo” and a rare cargador in barely the rags necessary to escape complete nakedness, who greeted me subserviently and gave me most of the road. The Indians of the region were inferior in physique to those of the Mexican plateau, ragged beyond words, and far from handsome in appearance. Their little thatched huts swarmed, however, and almost all displayed something to sell, chiefly strong native liquor in bottles that had seen long and varied service. There was nothing to eat but oranges green in color. The way was often strewn with hundreds of huge orange-colored ones, but they were more sour than lemons and often bitter. A tropical downpour drove me once into the not too effective shelter of the jungle, and with sunset a drizzle set in with a promise of increase. A woodchopper had told me I could not reach my proposed destination that night, but I pressed forward at my best pace up hill and down through an all but continuous vegetation and surprised myself by stumbling soon after dark upon electric-lighted Coatepeque, the first real town of Guatemala, and not a very real one at that.
However, a burly American ran a hotel where the bill for supper and lodging was only $15, and if the partitions of my room were bare they were of mahogany, as were also the springs of the bed. The pilfering of an extra mattress softened this misfortune somewhat, and toward morning it grew cool enough to stop sweating. When I descended in the morning, Ems and Dakin were sitting over their coffee and eggs. They had paid $5 each to ride in a covered bullock cart from Vado Ancho–and be churned to a pulp.
Reunited, we pushed on in the morning shadows. Ems and Dakin divided the weight of the former’s suitcase; but even after the “Texican” had thrown away two heavy books on locomotive driving, both groaned under their loads. The sun of Guatemala does not lighten the burdens of the trail. Ems had boarded the bullock cart the proud possessor of a bar of soap, but this morning he found it a powder and sprinkled it along the way. Soap is out of keeping with Guatemalan local color anyway. Dense forests continued, but here almost all had an undergrowth of coffee bushes. Some of the largest coffee _fincas_ of Guatemala lie along this road, producing annually to hundreds of thousands in gold. Such prosperity was not reflected in the population and toilers. The natives were ragged, but friendly, every man carrying a machete, generally in a leather scabbard, and the women almost without exception enormous loads of fruit. They were weak, unintelligent, pimple-faced mortals, speaking an Indian dialect and using Spanish only with difficulty. Ragged Indian girls were picking coffee here and there, even more tattered carriers lugged it in sacks and baskets to large, cement-floored spaces near the estate houses, where men shoveled the red berries over and over in the sun and old women hulled them in the shade of their huts.
Jungle trees, often immense and polished smooth as if they had been flayed of their bark, gave us dense cool shade, scented by countless wild flowers. But en cambio the soft dirt road climbed and wound and descended all but incessantly, gradually working its way higher, until we could look out now and then over hundreds of square miles of hot country with barely a break in all its expanse of dense, steaming vegetation. Coffee continued, but alternated now with the slender trees of rubber plantations, with their long smooth leaves, and already scarred like young warriors long inured to battle. The road was really only an enlarged trail, not laid out, but following the route of the first Indian who picked his way over these jungled hills. Huts were seldom lacking; poor, ragged, cheerful Indians never. In the afternoon the trail pitched headlong down and around through a rock-spilled barranco with two sheer walls of the densest jungle and forest shutting it in. Where it crossed a stream, Dakin and I found a shaded, sandy hollow scooped out behind a broad flat rock in the form of a huge bathtub of water, clearer than any adjective will describe. Ems, whose swarthy tint and strong features suggested the opposite, was the least able to endure the hardships of the road, and lay lifeless in the shade at every opportunity.
The road panted by a rocky zigzag up out of the ravine again and on over rough and hilly going. Here I fell into conversation with an Indian finca laborer, a slow, patient, ox-like fellow, to whom it had plainly never occurred to ask himself why he should live in misery and his employers in luxury. He spoke a slow and labored, yet considerable, Spanish, of which he was unable to pronounce the f or v; saying “pinca” for finca and “pale” for vale. Those of his class worked from five to five shoveling coffee or carrying it, with two hours off for breakfast and _almuerzo_, were paid one Guatemalan dollar a day, that is, a fraction over five cents in our money, and furnished two arrobas (fifty pounds) of corn and frijoles and a half-pound of salt a month. Yet there are no more trustworthy employees than these underpaid fellows. As pay-day approaches, one of these same ragged Indians is given a grain sack and a check for several thousand dollars gold and sent to the town where the finca owner does his banking, often several days’ distant. The sack half filled with the ragged bills of the Republic and their customary microbes, the Indian shoulders it and tramps back across the country to the estate, stopping at night in some wayside hut and tossing the sack into a corner, perhaps to leave it for hours while he visits his friends in the vicinity. Yet though both the messenger and his hosts know the contents of his bundle, it is very rare that a single illegible _billete_ disappears en route.
We plodded on into the night, but Ems could only drag at a turtle-pace, and it became evident we could not make Retalhuleu without giving him time to recuperate. The first large hut in the scattered village of Acintral gave us hospitality. It was earth-floored, with a few homemade chairs, and a bed with board floor. Though barely four feet wide, this was suggested as the resting-place of all three of us after a supper of jet-black coffee, native bread, and cheese. Dakin and I found it more than crowded, even after Ems had spread a _petate_, or grass-mat, on the ground. The room had no door, and women and girls wandered indifferently in and out of it as we undressed, one mite of barely six smoking a huge black cigar in the most business-like manner. The place was a species of saloon, like almost every hut along the road, and the shouting of the family and their thirsty townsmen seldom ceased even momentarily until after midnight.
Having occasion to be in Guatemala City that day, I rose at two and, swallowing a cup of black coffee and two raw eggs and paying a bill of $12, struck out to cover the two long leagues left to Retalhuleu in time to catch the six-o’clock train. The moon on its waning quarter had just risen, but gave little assistance during an extremely difficult tramp. All was blackest darkness except where it cast a few silvery streaks through the trees, the road a mere wild trail left by the rainy season far rougher than any plowed field, where it would have been only too easy to break a leg or sprain an ankle. Bands of dogs, barking savagely, dashed out upon me from almost every hut. Besides four small rivers with little roofed bridges, there were many narrower streams or mud-holes to wade, and between them the way twisted and stumbled up and down over innumerable hills that seemed mountains in the unfathomable darkness. When I had slipped and sprawled some two hours, a pair of Indians, the first to be found abroad, gave the distance as “dos leguas,” in other words, the same as when I had started. I redoubled my speed, pausing only once to call for water where a light flickered in a hut, and seemed to have won the race when at the edge of the town I came to a river that required me to strip to the waist. As I sprinted up the hill beyond, the sound of a departing train drifted out of the darkness ahead and an Indian informed me that it had been scheduled to leave at five. Fortunately I continued, for it turned out to be a freight, and the daily passenger left at six, so that just as the east began to turn gray I was off on the long ride to the capital.
The train takes twelve hours to make this run of 129 miles by a three-foot-gage railroad, stopping at every cluster of huts along the way. The third-class coach was little more than a box-car with two rough benches along its sides. The passengers 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 assailed by tattered vendors of all manner of fruit, enormous pineapples selling for sixty guatemalteco cents. Amatitlan 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 Amatitlan, 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 dyke and climbed higher and ever higher, with splendid views of the perfect cone-shaped volcanoes Agua and Panteleón 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 slashing 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 space 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 assassination that he jumps about incessantly from one of his one-story residences to another, perhaps, as his people assert, by underground passages, 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 passer-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 multitude fighting for life, the smaller and more agile climbing the sturdier, the weak and unassertive 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 Quiraguá, 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 mass 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 Quiraguá. 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 assert, 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 Jocotán 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 grass by the Indians of Cobán.
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 succumbed 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 Quiraguá, 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 Cordón. 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 pass the night with you?”
“To be sure, señor. 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 señora arose and, covering her breasts with a small apron, 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.
Jocotán, 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. Comotán 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 Chupá, 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 cluster 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 shellful of coffee saved from his rations. Another cluster of huts marked the beginning of a stiff rocky climb, beyond which I passed 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 Copán. 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 pass to visit the ancient ruins of Copán. 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 grass 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 grass 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 grassy 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 adiós 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, grassy 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 relationship 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 superstition 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 multitude 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 succumbed to the combination of sweat and the tearing of jungle grasses; 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 surpassed 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 splashing 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 shirt 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 “Cómo 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 “embarrassed” 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 “Diós se lo pagará”–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 buttresses 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-shift 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 Augustín. 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 Augustín intruded itself in the growing dusk there ran unbidden through my head an ancient refrain:
“Plus je vois l’homme, plus j’aîme 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 amusement 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 naïveté of a child.
Tobacco is grown about San Augustín, 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 coarse 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 Augustín 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 space 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 passed 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 passing peon gave me new life for the corresponding descent. Several of these fellow-roadsters now appeared, courteous fellows, often with black mustaches and imperial à la Napoleon III, who raised their hats and greeted me with a sing-song “Qué 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 partitioning 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 lassitude 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 classes 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 succumbs 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 passed 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 passed 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 passed 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 passed 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 passed 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 shining 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 passed 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.
Over the first hill and river beyond, I fell in with a woman who carried on an unbroken conversation as well as a load on her head, from the time she accepted the first cigar until we had waded the thigh-deep “rio grande” and climbed the rocky bank to her hut and garden. At first she had baldly refused to allow her picture to be taken. But so weak-willed are these people of Honduras that a white man of patience can in time force them to do his bidding by sheer force of will, by merely looking long and fixedly at them. Many the “gringo” who has misused this power in Central America. Before we reached her home she had not only posed but insisted on my stopping to photograph her with her children “dressed up” as befitted so extraordinary an occasion. Her garden was unusually well supplied with fruit and vegetables, and the rice boiled in milk she served was the most savory dish I had tasted in Honduras. She refused payment, but insisted on my waiting until the muleteers she had charged for their less sumptuous dinner were gone, so they should not discover her unpatriotic favoritism.
During the afternoon there was for a time almost level going, grassy and soft, across gently dipping meadows on which I left both mule-trains and pedestrians behind. Houses were rare, and the fall of night threatened to leave me alone among vast whining pine forests where the air was already chill. In the dusk, however, I came upon the hut of Pablo Morales and bespoke posada. He growled a surly permission and addressed hardly a word to me for hours thereafter. The place was the most filthy, quarrelsome, pig and chicken overrun stop on the trip, and when at last I prepared to swing my hammock inside the hut the sulky host informed me that he only permitted travelers the _corredor_. Two other guests–ragged, soil-encrusted arrieros–were already housed within, but there were at least some advantages in swinging my own net outside from the rafters of the eaves. Pigs jolted against me now and then and before I had entirely fallen asleep I was disturbed by a procession of dirty urchins, each carrying a blazing pine stick, who came one by one to look me over. I was just settling down again when Pablo himself appeared, an uncanny figure in the dancing light of his flaming torch. He had heard that I could “put people on paper,” and would I put his wife on paper in return for his kindness in giving me posada? Yes, in the morning. Why couldn’t I do it now? He seemed strangely eager, for a man accustomed to set mañana as his own time of action. His surly indifference had changed to an annoying solicitude, and he forced upon me first a steaming tortilla, then a native beverage, and finally came with a large cloth hammock in which I passed the night more comfortably than in my own open-work net.
In the morning heavy mountain clouds and a swirling mist made photography impossible, but my host was not of the grade of intelligence that made this simple explanation possible. He led the way into the windowless hut, in a corner of which lay a woman of perhaps thirty in a dog-litter of a bed enclosed by curtains hung from the rafters. The walls were black with coagulated smoke. The woman, yellow and emaciated with months of fever, groaned distressingly as the curtains were drawn aside, but her solicitous husband insisted on propping her up in bed and holding her with an arm about the shoulders while I “put them both on paper.” His purpose, it turned out, was to send the picture to the shrine of “la Virgen de los Remedios” that she might cure the groaning wife of her ailment, and he insisted that it must show “bed and all and the color of her face” that the Virgin might know what was required of her. I went through the motions of taking a photograph and explained as well as was possible why it could not be delivered at once, with the added information to soften his coming disappointment that the machine sometimes failed. The fellow merely gathered the notion that I was but a sorry magician at best, who had my diabolical hocuspocus only imperfectly under control, and he did not entirely succeed in keeping his sneers invisible. I offered quinine and such other medicines as were to be found in my traveling case, but he had no faith in worldly remedies.
By nine the day was brilliant. There was an unusual amount of level grassy trail, though steep slopes were not lacking. During the morning I passed several bands of ragged soldiers meandering northward in rout order and some distance behind them their bedraggled women and children, all afoot and carrying their entire possessions on their heads and backs. Frequently a little wooden cross or a heap of stones showed where some traveler had fallen by the wayside, perhaps at the hands of his fellow-man; for the murder rate, thanks largely to drink and vendettas, is high in Honduras. It might be less if assassins faced the death penalty, instead of being merely shut within prisons from which an active man could soon dig his way to freedom with a pocket-knife, if he did not have the patience to wait a few months until a new revolution brought him release or pardon.
The futility of Honduranean life was illustrated here and there. On some vast hillside capable of producing food for a multitude the eye made out a single _milpa_, or tiny corn-field, fenced off with huge slabs of mahogany worth easily ten times all the corn the patch could produce in a lifetime–or rather, worth nothing whatever, for a thing is valuable only where it is in demand. At ten I lost the way, found it again, and began an endless, rock-strewn climb upward through pines, tacking more times than I could count, each leg of the ascent a toilsome journey in itself. Not the least painful of road experiences in Honduras is to reach the summit of such a range after hours of heavy labor, to take perhaps a dozen steps along the top of the ridge, and then find the trail pitching headlong down again into a bottomless gorge, from which comes up the joyous sound of a mountain stream that draws the thirsty traveler on at double speed, only to bring him at last to a rude bridge over a precipitous, rock-sided river impossible to reach before attacking the next slope staring him in the face.
Luckily I foraged an imitation dinner in San Juan, a scattering of mud huts on a broad upland plain, most of the adult inhabitants of which were away at some work or play in the surrounding hills. Cattle without number dotted the patches of unlevel meadows, but not a drop of milk was to be had. Roosters would have made the night a torture, yet three eggs rewarded the canvassing of the entire hamlet. These it is always the Honduranean custom to puncture with a small hole before dropping into hot water, no doubt because there was no other way of getting the universal uncleanliness into them. Nor did I ever succeed in getting them more than half cooked. Once I offered an old woman an extra real if she would boil them a full three minutes without puncturing them. She asserted that without a hole in the end “the water could not get in to cook them,” but at length solemnly promised to follow my orders implicitly. When the eggs reappeared they were as raw as ever, though somewhat warm, and each had its little punctured hole. I took the cook to task and she assured me vociferously that “they broke themselves.” Apparently there was some superstition connected with the matter which none dared violate. At any rate I never succeeded in being served un-holed eggs in all rural Honduras.
Not only have these people of the wilderness next to nothing to eat, but they are too indolent to learn to cook what they have. The thick, doughy tortillas and half-boiled black beans, accompanied by black, unstrained coffee with dirty crude sugar and without milk, were not merely monotonous, but would have been fatal to civilized man of sedentary habits. Only the constant toil and sweat, and the clear water of mountain stream offset somewhat the evil effects under which even a horseman would probably have succumbed. The inhabitants of the Honduranean wilds are distinctly less human in their habits than the wild men of the Malay Peninsula. For the latter at least build floors of split bamboo above the ground. Without exaggeration the people of this region were more uncleanly than their gaunt and yellow curs, for the latter carefully picked a spot to lie in while the human beings threw themselves down anywhere and nonchalantly motioned to a guest to sit down or drop his bundle among fresh offal. They literally never washed, except by accident, and handled food and filth alternately with a child-like blandness.
I was just preparing to leave San Juan when a woman came from a neighboring hut to request my assistance at a child-birth! In this region all “gringoes” have the reputation of being physicians, and the inhabitants will not be undeceived. I forcibly tore myself away and struck for the surrounding wilderness.
From soon after noon until sunset I climbed incessantly among tumbled rocks without seeing a human being. A cold wind howled through a vast pine forest of the highest altitude of my Honduranean journey–more than six thousand feet above sea-level. Night fell in wild solitude, but I could only plod on, for to sleep out at this height would have been dangerous. Luckily a corner of moon lighted up weirdly a moderately wide trail. I had tramped an hour or more into the night when a flickering light ahead among the trees showed what might have been a camp of bandits, but which proved to be only that of a group of muleteers, who had stacked their bales of merchandise around three sides under an ancient roof on poles and rolled up in their blankets close to the blazing wood fire they had built to the leeward of it.
They gave no sign of offering me place and I marched on into the howling night. Perhaps four miles beyond I made out a cluster of habitations pitched on the summit and slope of a hill leaning toward the trail with nothing above it on any side to break the raging wind. An uproar of barking dogs greeted my arrival, and it was some time before an inmate of one of the dark and silent huts summoned up courage to peer out upon me. He emerged armed with a huge stick and led the way to a miserable hovel on the hilltop, where he beat on the door and called out that an “hombrecito” sought posada. This opened at last and I entered a mud room in one end of which a fire of sticks blazed fitfully. A woman of perhaps forty, though appearing much older, as is the case with most women of Honduras, lay on a wooden bed and a girl of ten huddled among rags near the fire. I asked for food and the woman ordered the girl to heat me black coffee and tortillas. The child was naked to the waist, though the bitter cold wind howled with force through the hut, the walls and especially the gables and roof of which were far from whole. The woman complained of great pain in her right leg, and knowing she would otherwise groan and howl the night through in the hope of attracting the Virgin’s attention, I induced her to swallow two sedative pills. The smoke made me weep as I swung my hammock from two soot-blackened rafters, but the fire soon went out and I awoke from the first doze shivering until the hut shook. The temperature was not low compared with our northern winters, but the wind carried a penetrating chill that reached the marrow of the bones. I rose and tried unsuccessfully to relight the fire. The half-naked girl proved more skilful and I sat huddled on a stool over the fire, alternately weeping with the smoke and all but falling into the blaze as I dozed. The pills had little effect on my hostess. I gave her three more, but her Honduranean stomach was evidently zinc-lined and she groaned and moaned incessantly. I returned to my hammock and spent several dream-months at the North Pole before I was awakened at first cockcrow by the old woman kneeling on the earth floor before a lithograph of the Virgin surrounded by withered pine branches, wailing a singsong prayer. She left off at length with the information that her only hope of relief was to make a pilgrimage to the “Virgen de los Remedios,” and ordered the girl to prepare coffee. I paid my bill of two reales and gave the girl one for herself, evidently the largest sum she had ever possessed, if indeed she remained long in possession of it after I took my hobbling and shivering departure.
A cold and wind-swept hour, all stiffly up or down, brought me to Esperanza, near which I saw the first wheeled vehicle of Honduras, a contraption of solid wooden wheels behind gaunt little oxen identical with those of northwest Spain even to the excruciating scream of its greaseless axle. In the outskirts two ragged, hoof-footed soldiers sprang up from behind the bushes of a hillside and came down upon me, waving their muskets and screaming:
“A’onde va? D’onde viene? Have you a pass to go through our department?”
“Yes, from your consul in Guatemala.”
They did not ask to read it, perhaps for a reason, but permitted me to pass; to my relief, for the old woman had announced that smallpox was raging in her town of Yamaranguila and its people were not allowed to enter Esperanza. This proved to be a place of considerable size, of large huts scattered over a broad grassy plain in a sheltered valley, with perhaps five thousand inhabitants but not a touch of civilization. Crowds of boys and dirty ragged soldiers followed me, grinning and throwing salacious comments as I wandered from house to house trying to buy food. At a corner of the plaza the comandante called to me from his hut. I treated him with the haughty air of a superior, with frequent reference to my “orders from the government,” and he quickly subsided from patronizing insolence to humility and sent a soldier to lead me to “where food is prepared for strangers.” Two ancient crones, pottering about a mud stove in an open-work reed kitchen through which the mountain wind swept chillingly, half-cooked an enormous slab of veal, boiled a pot of the ubiquitous black coffee, and scraped together a bit of stale bread, or more exactly cake, for _pan dulce_ was the only species that the town afforded. A dish of tomatoes of the size of small cherries proved far more appetizing, after they had been well washed, but the astonishment with which the aged pair watched me eat them suggested that the tradition that held this fruit poison still reigns in Esperanza.
Back once more in the comandancia I resolved to repay the soldiers scattered about town for their insolence in the one way painful to the Honduranean–by making them exert themselves. Displaying again my “government order,” I demanded a photograph of the garrison of Esperanza with the comandante, its generals, colonels, lieutenants, and all the lesser fry at the head; and an imperative command soon brought the entire force of fifty or more hurrying barefoot and startled, their ancient muskets under their arms, from the four somnolent corners of the city. I kept them maneuvering a half-hour or so, ostensibly for photographic reasons, while all the populace looked on, and the _reos_, or department prisoners in their chains, formed a languid group leaning on their shovels at the edge of the plaza waiting until their guards should be returned to them.
At ten I reshouldered my stuff and marched out in a still cold, cloudy, upland day, the wondering inhabitants of Esperanza staring awe-stricken after me until I disappeared from view. A few miles out I met two pure Indians, carrying oranges in nets on their backs, the supporting strap across their foreheads. To my question they admitted the fruit was for sale, though it is by no means uncommon in Central America for countrymen to refuse to sell on the road produce they are carrying to town for that purpose. I asked for a real’s worth. Luckily they misunderstood, for the price was “two hands for a medio,” and as it was I had to leave lying on the grass several of the ten fine large oranges one of the aborigines had counted on his fingers and accepted a two-and-a-half cent piece for with a “Muchas gracias, amigo.” Farther on I met scores of these short, thick-set Indians, of both sexes and all ages, straining along over mountain trails for forty or fifty miles from their colonies to town each with at most a hundred and fifty oranges they would there scarcely sell for so high a price.
Beyond a fordable, ice-cold stream a fairly good road changed to an atrocious mountain trail in a labyrinth of tumbled pine-clad ridges and gullies, on which I soon lost my way in a drizzling rain. The single telegraph wire came to my rescue, jumping lightly from moss-grown stick to tall slender tree-trunk across vast chasms down into and out of which I had to slip and slide and stumble pantingly upward in pursuit. Before dark I was delighted to fall upon a trail again, though not with its condition, for it was generally perpendicular and always thick with loose stones. A band of arrieros cooking their scanty supper under a shelter tent asserted there were houses some two leagues on, but for hours I hobbled over mountains of pure stone, my maltreated feet wincing at every step, without verifying the assertion. Often the descents were so steep I had to pick each footstep carefully in the darkness, and more than one climb required the assistance of my hands. A swift stream all but swept me off my feet, and in the stony climb beyond I lost both trail and telegraph wire and, after floundering about for some time in a swamp, was forced to halt and swing my hammock between two saplings under enormous sheer cliffs that looked like great medieval castles in the night, their white faces spotted by the trees that found foothold on them. Happily I had dropped well down out of the clouds that hover about Esperanza and the cold mountain wind was now much tempered. The white mountain wall rising sheer from my very hips was also somewhat sheltering, though it was easy to dream of rocks being dropped from aloft upon me.
I had clambered a steep and rocky three hours next morning before I came upon the first evidences of humanity, a hut on a little tableland, with all the customary appurtenances and uncleanliness. Black unstrained coffee and tortillas of yellow hue gradually put strength enough in my legs to enable them to push me on through bottomless rocky barrancas,