Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala And Honduras Part 9

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, gra.s.sy 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 manana 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.sy trail, though steep slopes were not lacking. During the morning I pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 ill.u.s.trated here and there. On some vast hillside capable of producing food for a mult.i.tude 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 canva.s.sing 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 a.s.serted 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 a.s.sured me vociferously that "they broke themselves."

Apparently there was some superst.i.tion 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 succ.u.mbed. 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 a.s.sistance 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 alt.i.tude 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 c.o.c.kcrow 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s; 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 gra.s.sy 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 gra.s.s 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 s.e.xes 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 a.s.serted 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 a.s.sertion. Often the descents were so steep I had to pick each footstep carefully in the darkness, and more than one climb required the a.s.sistance 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, and at length, beyond the hamlet of Santa Maria, up one of the highest climbs of the trip to the long crest of a ridge thick with whispering pines and with splendid views of the "Great Depths," dense in woodland, on either side as far as the eye could reach. Muleteers pa.s.sed frequently, often carrying on their own backs a bundle of the Santa Rosa cigars with which their animals were laden. Except for her soldiers, accustomed to "show off" before their fellows, every person I had met in Honduras had been kindly and courteous--if dirty--and never with a hint of coveting my meager h.o.a.rd. Beggars seemed as unknown as robbers--perhaps from lack of initiative and energy. From Esperanza on, the Indian boys I met driving mules or carrying nets of oranges all folded their hands before them like a Buddhist at prayer when they approached me, but instead of mumbling some request for alms, as I expected, they greeted me with an almost obsequious "Adios" and a faint smile. How the "little red schoolhouse" is lacking in this wooded mountainland! Not merely was the immense majority entirely illiterate, but very few of them had even reached the stage of desiring to learn. A paucity of intelligence and initiative made all intercourse monotonously the same. The greeting was never a hearty, individual phrase of the speaker's own choosing, but always the invariable "Adios, Buenos dias, tardes or noche," even though I had already addressed some inquiry to them. Replies to questions of distance were as stereotyped, with the diminutive _ito_ beloved of the Central Americans tacked on wherever possible:

"Larguita 'sta! A la vuelt.i.ta no mas! Esta cerquita! De dia no llega! A la tardecita llega. Ay no masito! A la oracioncita llega--"

Nothing could bring them down from these glittering generalities to a definite statement of distance, in leagues or hours, and to reach a place reported "Just around the little corner" was as apt to mean a half day's tramp as that it was over the next knoll.

In the _aldea_ of Tutule I fell in with Alberto Suaza, a pleasant appearing, all but white Honduranean, who had once been in the army and was now returning on horseback from some government errand. The hamlet slumbered on a slope of a little leaning valley backed by a wooded mountain ridge, all but a few of the inhabitants being engaged in coffee culture in the communal tract up over the hill when we arrived. Suaza picketed his diminutive animal before the hut of a friend, in which we shared two eggs and coffee and turned in together. Unfortunately I let my companion persuade me against my better judgment to lay aside my hammock and sleep on his "bed," a sun-dried ox-hide thrown on the earth floor, on my side of which, "because he was more used to hard beds than those senores gringoes," he spread most of the _colchon_ (mattress)--which consisted of two empty grainsacks. Either these or the painfully thin blanket over us housed a nimble breed I had miraculously escaped thus far on the journey, robbing me of the much-needed sleep the incessant barking of a myriad of dogs, the itching of mosquito bites, the rhinoceros-like throat-noises of the family, and the rock hardness of the floor would probably otherwise have pilfered. The man of the house had stripped stark naked and, wrapping a red blanket about him, lay down on a bare wooden bed to pa.s.s the night apparently in perfect comfort. Soft mortals indeed are we of civilized and upholstered lands.

Suaza made no protest when I paid the bill for both, and by seven we were off, he riding his tiny horse until we were out of sight of the town, then dismounting to lead it the rest of the day. He had announced himself the possessor of an immensely rich aunt on whose hacienda we should stop for "breakfast," and promised we should spend the night either in the gold mine of which she was a chief stockholder or at her home in La Paz, which I gathered to be a great mansion filled with all the gleanings of that lady's many trips to Europe and the States. I had long since learned the Latin American's love of personal exaggeration. But Suaza was above the Honduranean average; he not only read with comparative ease but cleaned his finger nails, and I looked forward with some eagerness to a coming oasis of civilization in the hitherto unsoftened wilderness.

It was an ideal day for tramping, cloudy yet bright, with a strong fresh wind almost too cold for sitting still and across a country green and fragrant with endless forest, and after the climb back of Tutule little more than rolling. It was noon before we came upon the new mud-and-tiled house of the cattle-tender of "dear aunty's" hacienda, and though the meal we enjoyed there was savory by Honduranean standards, it was not so completely Parisian as I had permitted myself to antic.i.p.ate. That I was allowed to pay for it proved nothing, for the employees of the wealthy frequently show no aversion to accepting personal favors.

Not far beyond we came out on the edge of a tableland with a splendid view of the valley of Comayagua, far below, almost dead level, some ten miles wide and thirty long, deep green everywhere, with cloud shadows giving beautiful color effects across it in the jumble of green mountains with the purple tinge of distance beyond which lay Tegucigalpa. At the same time there began the most laborious descent of the journey, an utterly dry mountain face pitched at an acute angle and made up completely of loose rock, down which we must pick every step and often use our hands to keep from landing with broken bones at the bottom. The new buildings of the mine were in plain sight almost directly below us from the beginning, yet we were a full two hours in zigzagging by short legs straight down the loose-stone slope to them. The American manager was absent, but in the general store of the company I had not only the pleasure of spending an hour in the first thoroughly clean building I had seen in Honduras, but of speaking English, for the two Negro youths in charge of the place were natives of Belize, or British Honduras, and were equally fluent in my own tongue or Spanish, while their superiority in personal condition over the natives was a sad commentary on the boasted advantage of the republican form of government.

The thirsty, rock-sown descent continued, bringing us at last with aching thighs to the level of the vast valley, more than four thousand feet below the lodging-places of the few days past. Suaza mounted his horse and prepared to enter his native La Paz in style. So often had kingly quarters promised me by the self-styled sons of wealth in Latin America gradually degenerated to the monotonous tortilla level of general conditions that I had not been able entirely to disabuse myself of an expectation of disappointment. Sure enough, where the trail broke up into a score of paths among mud huts and pig wallows, my companion paused in the dark to say:

"Perhaps after all it will be better to take you right to my house for to-night. One always feels freer in one's father's house. My aunt might be holding some social affair, or be sick or--But we will surely call at her mansion to-morrow, and--"

"Como usted quiera?" I answered, swallowing my disappointment. At least his father's house should be something above the ordinary.

But to my astonishment we stopped a bit farther on in the suburbs before one of the most miserable mud hovels it had been my misfortune to run across in Honduras, swarming with pigs, yellow curs, and all the mult.i.tudinous filth and disarray indigenous to the country. The coldest of welcomes greeted us, the frowsy, white-bearded father in the noisome doorway replying to the son's query of why there was no light with a crabbed:

"If you want light why don't you come in the daytime?"

My companion told a boy of the family to go buy a candle, and his scrawny, unkempt mother bounded out of the hut with the snarl of a miser:

"What do you want a candle for?"

The boy refused to go and Suaza tied his horse to a bush and went in quest of one himself. I mentioned supper, hinting at my willingness to pay for anything that could be furnished, but to each article I suggested came the monotonous, indifferent Honduranean answer, "No hay."

After much growling and an extended quarrel with her son, the woman set on a corner of a wabbly-legged table, littered with all manner of unsavory junk, two raw eggs, punctured and warmed, a bowl of hot water and a stale slab of _pan dulce_, a cross between poor bread and worse cake. I wandered on into the town in the hope of finding some imitation of a hotel. But though the place had a population of several thousand, it was made up exclusively of mud huts only two or three of which were faintly lighted by pine-splinters. The central plaza was a barren, unlighted pasture, a hut on the corner of which was reputed to be a shop, but when I had beaten my way into it I found nothing for sale except bottles of an imitation wine at monopoly prices. In my disgust I pounded my way into every hovel that was said to be a tienda. Not an edible thing was to be found. One woman claimed to have fruit for sale, and after collecting a high price for them she went out into the patio and picked a half-dozen perfectly green oranges.

"But what do people eat and drink in La Paz? Gra.s.s and water?" I demanded.

But the bedraggled population was not even amenable to crude sarcasm, and the only reply I got was a lazy, child-like:

"Oh, each one keeps what he needs to eat in his own house."

Here was a town of a size to have been a place of importance in other lands, yet even the mayor lived with his pigs on an earth floor. Statistics of population have little meaning in Honduras. The place recalled a cynical "gringo's" description of a similar town, "It has a hundred men, two hundred women, and 100,000 chuchos "--the generic term in Central America for yellow curs of all colors. Why every family houses such a swarm of these miserable beasts is hard to guess. Mere apathy, no doubt, for they are never fed; nor, indeed, are the pigs that also overrun every household and live, like the dogs, on the offal of the patio or backyard that serves as place of convenience. They have at least the doubtful virtue of partly solving the sewer problem, which is not a problem to Honduraneans. A tortilla or other food held carelessly is sure to be s.n.a.t.c.hed by some cat, pig, or dog; a bundle left unwatched for a moment is certain to be rooted about the floor or deposited with filth. These people utterly lack any notion of improvement. A child or an animal, for instance, climbs upon the table or into a dish of food.

When the point is reached at which it is unavoidable, the person nearest shouts, throws whatever is handy, or kicks at the offender; but though the same identical performance is repeated a score of times during a single meal, there is never any attempt to correct the culprit, to drive it completely off, or remove the threatened dish from the danger zone. A people inhabiting a land that might be a garden spot of the earth drift through their miserable lives in identically the same fashion as their gaunt and mangy curs.

There was a great gathering of the neighboring clans in the Suaza hut next morning, while my companion of the day before enlarged upon what he fancied he knew about his distinguished guest. Among those who crowded the place were several men of education, in the Honduranean sense,--about equal to that of a poorly trained American child in the fourth grade. But there was not one of them that did not show a monkey curiosity and irresponsibility in handling every article in my pack; my sweater--"Ay que lindo!" my papers--"How beautiful!" an extremely ordinary shirt--"How soft and fine! How costly!" and "How much did this cost?--and that?" Suaza displayed my medicine-case to the open-mouthed throng--and would I give mother some pills for her colic, and would I please photograph each one of the family--and so on to the end of patience. There was no mention made of the wealthy aunt and her mansion after the day dawned. The invitation to spend a few days, "as many as you like," amid the luxuries of Paris and the Seven Seas had tapered down to the warmed eggs and black coffee, the only real food I ate being that I had bought in a house-to-house canva.s.s in the morning. I had distributed pills to most of the family and several neighbors and photographed them, at the request of the man of many promises, had paid his bills on the road since our meeting; while I prepared my pack, he requested me to send him six prints each of the pictures, some postals of New York, a pair of pajamas such as I carried, "and any other little things I might think he would like," including long weekly letters, and as I rose to take my leave and asked what I owed him, he replied with a bland and magnanimous smile:

"You owe me nothing whatever, senor,--only to mama," and dear mama collected about what a first-cla.s.s hotel would have for the same length of time.

CHAPTER X

THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS

A monotonous wide path full of loose stones led through dry, breathless jungle across the valley floor to Comayagua. The former capital of the republic had long held a place in my imagination, and the distant view of it the day before from the lofty rim of the valley backed by long blue ranges of mountains had enhanced my desire to visit the place, even though it lay somewhat off the direct route. But romance did not long survive my entrance. For the most part it was merely a larger collection of huts along badly cobbled or gra.s.s-grown streets common to all "cities" of Honduras. A stub-towered, white-washed cathedral, built by the Spaniards and still the main religious edifice of Honduras, faced the drowsy plaza; near it were a few "houses of commerce," one-story plaster buildings before which hung a sign with the owner's name and possibly some hint of his business, generally that of hawking a few bolts of cloth, straw hats, or ancient and fly-specked cheap products from foreign parts. The town boasted a place that openly receives travelers, but its two canvas cots and its rafters were already occupied by several sn.o.bbish and gawkily dressed young natives bound from the north coast to the capital.

The chief of telegraphs finally led me to the new billiard-hall, where a lawyer in a frock coat and the manners of a prime minister admitted he had an empty shop in which I could swing my hammock. When he had finished his game, he got a ma.s.sive key and a candle and led the way in person to a small hut in a side street, the rafters uncomfortably high above the tile floor, on which I was fortunate to have a newspaper to spread before depositing my bundle. The lawyer took leave of me with the customary "At your orders; here you are in your own house," and marched ministerially away with the several pompous friends who had accompanied him. But a few moments later, having shaken them off, he returned to collect ten cents--one real for rent and another for the candle. It was the first lodging I had paid since leaving Guatemala City. As I doubled up in my ill-hung hammock, the dull thump of a distant guitar and the explosion of a rare firecracker broke the stillness of New Year's eve, while now and then there drifted to my ears the sound of a band in the main plaza that tortured the night at intervals into the small hours.

Comayagua by day was a lazy, silent place, chiefly barefoot, the few possessors of shoes being gaudily dressed young men whose homes were earth-floored huts. The place had the familiar Central American air of trying to live with the least possible exertion; its people were a mongrel breed running all the gamut from black to near-white. There were none of the fine physical specimens common to the highlands of Mexico, and the teeth were notably bad. A few of the soldiers, in blue-jean uniforms with what had once been white stripes, faded straw hats, and bare feet, were mountain Indians with well-developed chests; for military service--of the catch-them-with-a-rope variety--is compulsory in Honduras. But the population in general was anemic and stunted. Two prisoners were at work in the streets; more properly they sat smoking cigarettes and putting a finger cautiously to their lips when I pa.s.sed in silent request not to wake up their guard, who was sound asleep on his back in the shade, his musket lying across his chest. The town had one policeman, a kinky-haired youth in a white cap and a pale light gray cotton uniform, who carried a black club and wore shoes! The _cartero_, or mailman, was a barefoot boy in faded khaki and an ancient straw hat, who wandered lazily and apparently aimlessly about town with the week's correspondence in hand, reading the postals and feeling the contents of each letter with a proprietary air. The sun was brilliant and hot here in the valley, and there was an aridity that had not been suggested in the view of it from the heights above.

It was no place to spend New Year's, however, stiff and sore though I was from the hardships of the road, and toward lazy, silent noonday I wandered on along the trail to the modern capital, hoping that it, at least, might have real beds and a hotel, and perhaps even white inhabitants. The battered old church bells were thumping as I topped the slight rise that hid the town from view, and it was four hours later that I saw or heard the next human being, or any other evidence of his existence except a stretch of barb-wire and one lone telegraph wire sagging from one crooked stick to another. The four stony dry but flat leagues along the valley floor had brought me to San Antonio, all the population of which was loafing and mildly celebrating New Year's, as they would celebrate any other possible excuse not to work. Here I obtained water, and new directions that led me off more toward the east and the heaped-up mountains that lay between me and Tegucigalpa. On all sides spread a dry, bushy land, aching for cultivation. I had the good fortune to fall in with a river so large I was able to swim three strokes in one of its pools, and strolled with dusk into the town of Flores on the edge of the first foothills of the ranges still to be surmounted.

Though still a lazy naked village, this one showed some hint of the far-off approach of civilization. Animals were forbidden the house in which I pa.s.sed the night, and its tile-floor was almost clean. This latter virtue was doubly pleasing, for the rafters above were so high that even when I had tied my hammock by the very ends of the ropes I could only climb in by mounting a chair and swinging myself up as into a trapeze; and if I must break a leg it would be some slight compensation to do so on a clean floor. How much uncleanliness this simple little 30-cent net had kept me up out of since the day I bought it in Guatemala City!

Like many of the tasks of life, this one grew easier toward its termination. A moderate day's walk, not without rocky climbs and _bajadas_, but with considerable stretches of almost level going across solitary wind-cooled plains, brought me to Tamara. A pa.s.sing company of soldiers had all but gutted the village larder, but at dusk in the last hut I got not only food but meat, and permission to swing my hammock from the blackened rafters of the reed kitchen, over the open pots and pans. Incidentally, for the first time in Honduras prices were quadrupled in honor of my being a foreigner. Civilization indeed was approaching.

Half way up the wooded ridge beyond I met the sun mounting from the other side, fell in soon after with a real highway, and at eleven caught the first sight of Tegucigalpa, the "City of the Silver Hills," capital of the Sovereign and Independent Republic of Honduras. It was no very astounding sight; merely what in other lands would have been considered a large village, a chiefly one-story place with a whitewashed church, filling only a small proportion of a somewhat barren valley surrounded by high rocky and partly wooded hills. I marched down through Comayaguela in all the disreputableness of fifteen days on the trail, across the little bridge of a few arches over a shallow river which to Honduraneans far and wide is one of the greatest works of man, and into the park-like little central plaza, with its huge arbor of purple bourgainvillea.

The "Hotel Jockey Club" was not all that the imagination might have pictured, but at least there Was the satisfaction of knowing that any stranger in town, be he "gringo" or president-elect, famous or infamous, rich or honest, could stop nowhere else. Among its luxuries was a "bath," which turned out to be a ma.s.sive stone vessel in the bas.e.m.e.nt with a drizzle of cold water from a faucet above that was sure to run dry about the time the victim was well soaped; its frontiersman rooms were furnished with little more than weak-kneed canvas cots, and the barefoot service of the dining-room was a.s.sisted by all the dogs, fowls, and flies of the region. But there lay two hungry weeks of Central American trail behind me and for days to come I ate unquestioningly anything that came within reach of my fingers, of whatever race, color, or previous condition of servitude.