expected to follow, but if we were we did not say so--at least, not
before Jeffs. It led almost directly up the face of the mountain, along
little ledges and pathways cut in the solid rock, and at times was so
slightly marked that we could not see it five yards ahead of us.
On that first day, during which the trail was always leading upward,
the mules did not once put down any one of their four little feet
without first testing the spot upon which it was to rest. This made our
progress slow, but it gave one a sense of security, which the angle
and attitude of the body of the man in front did much to dissipate.
I do not know the name of the mountains over which we passed, nor do
I know the name of any mountain in Honduras, except those which we
named ourselves, for the reason that there is not much in Honduras
except mountains, and it would be as difficult to give a name to each
of her many peaks as to christen every town site on a Western prairie.
When the greater part of all the earth of a country stands on edge in
the air, it would be invidious to designate any one particular hill
or chain of hills. A Honduranian deputy once crumpled up a page of
letter-paper in his hand and dropped it on the desk before him. “That,”
he said, “is an outline map of Honduras.”
We rode in single file, with Jeffs in front, followed by Somerset, with
Griscom and myself next, and Charlwood, the best and most faithful of
servants, bringing up the rear. The pack-mules, as I have said, were
two hours farther back, and we could sometimes see them over the edge
of a precipice crawling along a thousand feet below and behind us.
It seemed an unsociable way for friends to travel through a strange
country, and I supposed that in an hour or so we would come to a
broader trail and pull up abreast and exchange tobacco pouches and
grow better acquainted. But we never came to that broad trail until we
had travelled sixteen days, and had left Tegucigalpa behind us, and
in the foreground of all the pictures I have in my mind of Honduras
there is always a row of men’s backs and shoulders and bobbing helmets
disappearing down a slippery path of rock, or rising above the edge of
a mountain and outlined against a blazing blue sky. We were generally
near enough to one another to talk if we spoke in a loud voice or
turned in the saddle, though sometimes we rode silently, and merely
raised an arm to point at a beautiful valley below or at a strange bird
on a tree, and kept it rigid until the man behind said, “Yes, I see,”
when it dropped, like a semaphore signal after the train has passed.
Early in the afternoon of the day of our setting forth we saw for the
last time the thatched roofs of San Pedro Sula, like a bare spot in the
great green plain hundreds of feet below us, and then we passed through
the clouds we had watched from the town itself, and bade the eastern
coast of Honduras a final farewell.
The trail we followed was so rough and uncertain that at first I
conceived a very poor opinion of the Honduranians for not having
improved it, but as we continued scrambling upward I admired them for
moving about at all under such conditions. After all, we who had chosen
to take this road through curiosity had certainly no right to complain
of what was to the natives their only means of communication with the
Atlantic seaboard. It is interesting to think of a country absolutely
and entirely dependent on such thoroughfares for every necessity of
life. For whether it be a postal card or a piano, or a bale of cotton,
or a box of matches, it must be brought to Tegucigalpa on the back
of a mule or on the shoulders of a man, who must slip and slide and
scramble either over this trail or the one on the western coast.
Sometimes this high-road of commerce was cut through the living rock
in steps as even and sharp as those in front of a brownstone house on
Fifth Avenue, and so narrow that we had to draw up our knees to keep
them from being scratched and cut on the rough walls of the passageway,
and again it led through jungle so dense that if one wandered three
yards from the trail he could not have found his way back again; but
this danger was not imminent, as no one could go that far from the
trail without having first hacked and cut his way there.
It was not always so difficult; at times we came out into bare open
spaces, and rode up the dry bed of a mountain stream, and felt the full
force of the sun, or again it led along a ledge of rock two feet wide
at the edge of a precipice, and we were fanned with cool, damp breaths
from the pit a thousand feet below, where the sun had never penetrated,
and where the moss and fern of centuries grew in a thick, dark tangle.
[Illustration: A DRAWER OF WATER]
We stopped for our first meal at a bare place on the top of a mountain,
where there were a half-dozen mud huts. Jeffs went from one to another
of these and collected a few eggs, and hired a woman to cook them
and to make us some coffee. We added tinned things and bread to this
luncheon, which, as there were no benches, we ate seated on the
ground, kicking at the dogs and pigs and chickens, that snatched in a
most familiar manner at the food in our hands. In Honduras there are
so few hotels that travellers are entirely dependent for food and for
a place in which to sleep upon the people who live along the trail,
who are apparently quite hardened to having their homes invaded by
strangers, and their larders levied upon at any hour of the day or
night.
Even in the larger towns and so-called cities we slept in private
houses, and on the solitary occasion when we were directed to a hotel
we found a bare room with a pile of canvas cots heaped in one corner,
to which we were told to help ourselves. There was a real hotel,
and a very bad one, at the capital, where we fared much worse than
we had often done in the interior; but with these two exceptions we
were dependent for shelter during our entire trip across Honduras
upon the people of the country. Sometimes they sent us to sleep in
the town-hall, which was a large hut with a mud floor, and furnished
with a blackboard and a row of-benches, and sometimes with stocks for
prisoners; for it served as a school or prison or hotel, according to
the needs of the occasion.
We were equally dependent upon the natives for our food. We carried
breakfast bacon and condensed milk and sardines and bread with us, and
to these we were generally able to add, at least once a day, coffee
and eggs and beans. The national bread is the tortilla. It is made of
cornmeal, patted into the shape of a buckwheat cake between the palms
of the hands, and then baked. They were generally given to us cold,
in a huge pile, and were burned on both sides, but untouched by heat
in the centre. The coffee was always excellent, as it should have
been, for the Honduranian coffee is as fine as any grown in Central
America, and we never had too much of it; but of eggs and black beans
there was no end. The black-bean habit in Honduras is very general;
they gave them to us three times a day, sometimes cold and sometimes
hot, sometimes with bacon and sometimes alone. They were frequently
served to us in the shape of sandwiches between tortillas, and again
in the form of pudding with chopped-up goat’s meat. At first, and
when they were served hot, I used to think them delicious. That seems
very long ago now. When I was at Johnstown at the time of the flood,
there was a soda cracker, with jam inside, which was served out to
the correspondents in place of bread; and even now, if it became a
question of my having to subsist on those crackers, and the black
beans of Central America, or starve, I am sure I should starve, and by
preference.
We were naturally embarrassed at first when we walked into strange
huts; but the owners seemed to take such invasions with apathy and as
a matter of course, and were neither glad to see us when we came, nor
relieved when we departed. They asked various prices for what they gave
us--about twice as much as they would have asked a native for the same
service; at least, so Jeffs told us; but as our bill never amounted
to more than fifty cents apiece for supper, lodging, and a breakfast
the next morning, they cannot be said to have robbed us. While the
woman at the first place at which we stopped boiled the eggs, her
husband industriously whittled a lot of sharp little sticks, which he
distributed among us, and the use of which we could not imagine, until
we were told we were expected to spike holes in the eggs with them,
and then suck out the meat. We did not make a success of this, and our
prejudice against eating eggs after that fashion was such that we were
particular to ask to have them fried during the rest of our trip. This
was the only occasion when I saw a Honduranian husband help his wife to
work.
After our breakfast on the top of the mountain, we began its descent
on the other side. This was much harder on the mules than the climbing
had been, and they stepped even more slowly, and so gave us many
opportunities to look out over the tops of trees and observe with some
misgivings the efforts of the man in front to balance the mule by lying
flat on its hind-quarters. The temptation at such times to sit upright
and see into what depths you were going next was very great. We struck
a level trail about six in the evening, and the mules were so delighted
at this that they started off of their own accord at a gallop, and
were further encouraged by our calling them by the names of different
Spanish generals. This inspired them to such a degree that we had to
change their names to Bob Ingersoll or Senator Hill, or others to the
same effect, at which they grew discouraged and drooped perceptibly.
We slept that night at a ranch called La Pieta, belonging to Dr. Miguel
Pazo, where we experimented for the first time with our hammocks, and
tried to grow accustomed to going to bed under the eyes of a large
household of Indian maidens, mosos, and cowboys. There are men who will
tell you that they like to sleep in a hammock, just as there are men
who will tell you that they like the sea best when it is rough, and
that they are happiest when the ship is throwing them against the sides
and superstructure, and when they cannot sit still without bracing
their legs against tables and stanchions. I always want to ask such men
if they would prefer land in a state of perpetual earthquake, or in its
normal condition of steadiness, and I have always been delighted to
hear sea-captains declare themselves best pleased with a level keel,
and the chance it gives them to go about their work without having to
hang on to hand-rails. And I had a feeling of equal satisfaction when
I saw as many sailors as could find room sleeping on the hard deck
of a man-of-war at Colon, in preference to suspending themselves in
hammocks, which were swinging empty over their heads. The hammock keeps
a man at an angle of forty-five degrees, with the weight of both his
legs and his body on the base of the spinal column, which gets no rest
in consequence.
The hammock is, however, almost universally used in Honduras, and is
a necessity there on account of the insects and ants and other beasts
that climb up the legs of cots and inhabit the land. But the cots of
bull-hide stretched on ropes are, in spite of the insects, greatly to
be preferred; they are at least flat, and one can lie on them without
having his legs three feet higher than his head. Their manufacture
is very simple. When a steer is killed its hide is pegged out on the
ground, and left where the dogs can eat what flesh still adheres to it;
and when it has been cleaned after this fashion and the sun has dried
it, ropes of rawhide are run through its edges, and it is bound to a
wooden frame with the hairy side up. It makes a cool, hard bed. In the
poorer huts the hides are given to the children at night, and spread
directly on the earth floor. During the day the same hides are used to
hold the coffee, which is piled high upon them and placed in the sun to
dry.
We left La Pieta early the next morning, in the bright sunlight,
but instead of climbing laboriously into the sombre mountains of
the day before, we trotted briskly along a level path between sunny
fields and delicate plants, and trees with a pale-green foliage,
and covered with the most beautiful white-and-purple flowers. There
were hundreds of doves in the air, and in the bushes many birds of
brilliant blue-and-black or orange-and-scarlet plumage, and one of
more sober colors with two long white tail-feathers and a white crest,
like a macaw that had turned Quaker. None of these showed the least
inclination to disturb himself as we approached. An hour after our
setting forth we plunged into a forest of manacca-palms, through which
we rode the rest of the morning. This was the most beautiful and
wonderful experience of our journey. The manacca-palm differs from the
cocoanut or royal palm in that its branches seem to rise directly from
the earth, and not to sprout, as do the others, from the top of a tall
trunk. Each branch has a single stem, and the leaf spreads and falls
from either side of this, cut into even blades, like a giant fern.
[Illustration: NATIVE METHOD OF DRYING COFFEE]
There is a plant that looks like the manacca-palm at home which you
see in flower-pots in the corners of drawing-rooms at weddings, and
consequently when we saw the real manacca-palm the effect was
curious. It did not seem as though they were monster specimens of
these little plants in the States, but as though we had grown smaller.
We felt dwarfed, as though we had come across a rose-bush as large
as a tree. The branches of these palms were sixty feet high, and
occasionally six feet broad, and bent and swayed and interlaced in the
most graceful and exquisite confusion. Every blade trembled in the air,
and for hours we heard no other sound save their perpetual murmur and
rustle. Not even the hoofs of our mules gave a sound, for they trod
on the dead leaves of centuries. The palms made a natural archway for
us, and the leaves hung like a portière across the path, and you would
see the man riding in front raise his arm and push the long blades
to either side, and disappear as they fell again into place behind
him. It was like a scene on the tropical island of a pantomime, where
everything is exaggerated both in size and in beauty. It made you think
of a giant aquarium or conservatory which had been long neglected.
At every hundred yards or so there were giant trees with smooth
gray trunks, as even and regular as marble, and with roots like
flying-buttresses, a foot in thickness, and reaching from ten to
fifteen feet up from the ground. If these flanges had been covered
over, a man on muleback could have taken refuge between them. Some
of the trunks of these trees were covered with intricate lace-work
of a parasite which twisted in and out, and which looked as though
thousands of snakes were crawling over the white surface of the tree;
they were so much like snakes that one passed beneath them with an
uneasy shrug. Hundreds of orchids clung to the branches of the trees,
and from these stouter limbs to the more pliable branches of the palms
below white-faced monkeys sprang and swung from tree to tree, running
along the branches until they bent with the weight like a trout-rod,
and sprang upright again with a sweep and rush as the monkeys leaped
off chattering into the depths of the forest. We rode through this
enchanted wilderness of wavering sunlight and damp, green shadows for
the greater part of the day, and came out finally into a broad, open
plain, cut up by little bubbling streams, flashing brilliantly in the
sun. It was like an awakening from a strange and beautiful nightmare.
[Illustration: IN A CENTRAL-AMERICAN FOREST]
In the early part of the afternoon we arrived at another one of the
farm-houses belonging to young Dr. Pazo, and at which he and his
brother happened to be stopping. We had ridden out of our way there
in the hopes of obtaining a few days’ shooting, and the place seemed
to promise much sport. The Chamelicon River, filled with fish and
alligators, ran within fifty yards of the house; and great forests, in
which there were bear and deer and wild-pig, stretched around it
and beyond it on every side. The house itself was like almost every
other native hut in Honduras. They are all built very much alike, with
no attempt at ornamentation within, or landscape-gardening without,
although nature has furnished the most beautiful of plants and trees
close on every side for just such a purpose. The walls of a Honduranian
hut are made of mud packed round a skeleton of interwoven rods; the
floor is of the naked earth, and the roof is thatched with the branches
of palms. After the house is finished, all of the green stuff growing
around and about it is cleared away for fifty yards or so, leaving
an open place of bare and barren mud. This is not decorative, but it
helps in some measure to keep the insects which cling to every green
thing away from the house. A kitchen of similarly interlaced rods and
twigs, but without the clay, and covered with just such layers of palm
leaves, stands on the bare place near the house, or leans against one
side of it. This is where the tortillas are patted and baked, and the
rice and beans are boiled, and the raw meat of an occasional goat or
pig is hung to dry and smoke over the fire. The oven in the kitchen is
made of baked clay, and you seldom see any cooking utensils or dishes
that have not been manufactured from the trees near the house or the
earth beneath it. The water for drinking and cooking is kept in round
jars of red clay, which stand in rings of twisted twigs to keep them
upright, and the drinking-vessels are the halves of gourds, and the
ladles are whole gourds, with the branch on which they grew still
adhering to them, to serve as a handle.
The furnishing of the house shows the same dependence upon nature; the
beds are either grass hammocks or the rawhide that I have described,
and there are no chairs and few benches, the people preferring
apparently to eat sitting on their haunches to taking the trouble
necessary to make a chair. Everything they eat, of which there is very
little variety, grows just beyond the cleared place around the hut,
and can be had at the cost of the little energy necessary to bring it
in-doors. When a kid or a pig or a steer is killed, the owner goes out
to the nearest peak and blows a blast on a cow’s horn, and those within
hearing who wish fresh meat hurry across the mountain to purchase it.
As there is no ice from one end of Honduras to the other, meat has to
be eaten the day it is killed.
This is not the life of the Honduranians who live in the large towns or
so-called cities, where there are varying approaches to the comfort of
civilized countries, but of the country people with whom we had chiefly
to do. It is as near an approach to the condition of primitive man as
one can find on this continent.
But bare and poor as are the houses, which are bare not because the
people are poor, but because they are indolent, there is almost
invariably some corner of the hut set aside and ornamented as an altar,
or some part of the wall covered with pictures of a religious meaning.
When they have no table, the people use a shelf or the stump of a
tree upon which to place emblematic figures, which are almost always
china dolls, with no original religious significance, but which they
have dressed in little scraps of tinsel and silk, and which they have
surrounded with sardine-tins and empty bottles and pictures from the
lids of cigar-boxes. Everything that has color is cherished, and every
traveller who passes adds unconsciously to their stock of ornaments in
the wrappings of the boxes which he casts away behind him. Sometimes
the pictures they use for ornamentation are not half so odd as the
fact that they ever should have reached such a wilderness. We were
frequently startled by the sight of colored lithographs of theatrical
stars, advertising the fact that they were playing under the direction
of such and such a manager, and patent-medicine advertisements and
wood-cuts from illustrated papers, some of them twenty and thirty years
old, which were pinned to the mud walls and reverenced as gravely as
though they had been pictures of the Holy Family by a Raphael or a
Murillo.
In one hut we found a life-size colored lithograph of a woman whom,
it so happened, we all knew, which was being used to advertise a
sewing-machine. We were so pleased at meeting a familiar face so far
from home that we bowed to it very politely, and took off our hats, at
which the woman of the house, mistaking our deference, placed it over
the altar, fearing that she had been entertaining an angel unawares.
The house of Dr. Pazo, where we were most hospitably entertained, was
similar to those that I have described. It was not his home, but what
we would call a hunting-box or a ranch. While we were at luncheon he
told a boy to see if there were any alligators in sight, in exactly
the same tone with which he might have told a servant to find out if
the lawn-tennis net were in place. The boy returned to say that there
were five within a hundred yards of the house. So, after we had as
usual patiently waited for Griscom to finish his coffee, we went out
on the bank and fired at the unhappy alligators for the remainder of
the afternoon. It did not seem to hurt them very much, and certainly
did us a great deal of good. To kill an alligator it is necessary to
hit it back of the fore-leg, or to break its spine where it joins the
tail; and as it floats with only its eyes and a half-inch of its nose
exposed, it is difficult to reach either of these vital spots. When the
alligator is on a bank, and you attempt to crawl up on it along the
opposite bank, the birds make such a noise, either on its account or on
their own, that it takes alarm, and rolls over into the water with an
abruptness you would hardly expect from so large a body.
On our second day at Dr. Pazo’s ranch we divided into two parties, and
scoured the wilderness for ten miles around after game. One party was
armed with shot-guns, and brought back macaws of wonderful plumage,
wild turkeys, and quail in abundance; the others, scorning anything
but big game, carried rifles, and, as a result, returned as they set
forth, only with fewer cartridges. It was most unfortunate that the
only thing worth shooting came to me. It was a wild-cat with a long
tail, who patiently waited for us in an open place with a calm and
curious expression of countenance. I think I was more surprised than he
was, and even after I had thrown up the ground under his white belly he
stopped and turned again to look at me in a hurt and reproachful manner
before he bounded gracefully out of sight into the underbrush. We also
saw a small bear, but he escaped in the same manner, without waiting
to be fired upon, and as we had no dogs to send after him, we gave up
looking for more, and went back to pot at alligators. There were some
excellent hunting-dogs on the ranch, but the Pazo brothers had killed a
steer the night we arrived, and had given most of it to the dogs, so
that in the morning they were naturally in no mood for hunting.
There was an old grandfather of an alligator whom Somerset and I had
repeatedly disturbed in his slumbers. He liked to take his siestas on
a little island entirely surrounded by rapids, and we used to shoot at
him from the opposite bank of the river. He was about thirteen feet
long, and the agility with which he would flop over into the calm
little bay, which stretched out from the point on which he slept, was
as remarkable as it was disappointing. He was still asleep at his
old stand when we returned from our unsuccessful shooting tour, so
we decided to swim the rapids and crawl up on him across his little
island and attack him from the flank and rear. It reminded me somewhat
of the taking of Lungtenpen on a small scale. On that occasion, if I
remember correctly, the raw recruits were uniformed only in Martinis
and cartridge-belts; but we decided to carry our boots as well, because
the alligator’s island was covered with sharp stones and briers, and
the sand was very hot, and, moreover, we had but vague ideas about the
customs of alligators, and were not sure as to whether he might not
chase us. We thought we would look very silly running around a little
island pursued by a long crocodile and treading on sharp hot stones in
our bare feet.
[Illustration: ON THE TRAIL TO SANTA BARBARA]