other, and with his money-belt firmly wrapped around his neck, plunged
into the rapids and started to ford the river. They were exceedingly
swift rapids, and made you feel as though you were swinging round a
sharp corner on a cable-car with no strap by which to take hold. The
only times I could stop at all was when I jammed my feet in between two
stones at the bed of the river, and was so held in a vise, while the
rest of my body swayed about in the current and my boots scooped up
the water. When I wanted to go farther I would stick my toes between
two more rocks, and so gradually worked my way across, but I could
see nothing of Somerset, and decided that he had been drowned, and
went off to avenge him on the alligator. It took me some time to get
my bruised and bleeding toes into the wet boots, during which time I
kept continually looking over my shoulder to see if the alligator were
going to make a land attack, and surprise me instead of my surprising
him. I knew he was very near me, for the island smelled as strongly of
musk as a cigar-shop smells of tobacco; but when I crawled up on him
he was still on his point of sand, and sound asleep. I had a very good
chance at seventy yards, but I was greedy, and wanted to come closer,
and as I was crawling along, gathering thorns and briers by the way,
I startled about fifty birds, and the alligator flopped over again,
and left nothing behind him but a few tracks on the land and a muddy
streak in the water. It was a great deal of trouble for a very little
of alligator; but I was more or less consoled on my return to find that
Somerset was still alive, and seated on the same bank from which we had
both started, though at a point fifty yards farther down-stream. He was
engaged in counting out damp Bank-of-England notes on his bare knee,
and blowing occasional blasts down the barrel of his rifle, which had
dragged him and itself to the bottom of the river before the current
tossed them both back on the shore.
[Illustration: A HALT AT TRINIDAD]
The two days of rest at the ranch of Dr. Pazo had an enervating effect
upon our mules, and they moved along so slowly on the day following
that we had to feel our way through the night for several hours before
we came to the hut where we were to sleep. Griscom and I had lost
ourselves on the mountain-side, and did not overtake the others until
long after they had settled themselves in the compound. They had been
too tired when they reached it to do anything more after falling off
their mules, and we found them stretched on the ground in the light of
a couple of fluttering pine torches, with cameras and saddle-bags and
carbines scattered recklessly about, and the mules walking over them
in the darkness. A fire in the oven shone through the chinks in the
kitchen wall, and showed the woman of the house stirring something
in a caldron with one hand and holding her sleeping child on her hip
with the other, while the daughters moved in and out of the shadow,
carrying jars on their heads and bundles of fodder for the animals. It
looked like a gypsy encampment. We sent Emilio back with a bunch of
pine torches to find the pack-mules, and we could see his lighted torch
blazing far up the trail that we had just descended, and lighting the
rocks and trees on either side of him.
There was only room for one of us to sleep inside the hut that night,
and as Griscom had a cold, that privilege was given to him; but it
availed him little, for when he seated himself on the edge of the
bull-hide cot and began to pull off his boots, five ghostly feminine
figures sat upright in their hammocks and studied his preparations with
the most innocent but embarrassing curiosity. So, after waiting some
little time for them to go to sleep again, he gave up any thought of
making himself more comfortable, and slept in his boots and spurs.
We passed through the pretty village of Trinidad early the next
morning, and arrived at nightfall at the larger town of Santa Barbara,
where the sound of our mules’ hoofs pattering over the paved streets
and the smell of smoking street lamps came to us with as much of a
shock as does the sight of land after a week at sea. Santa Barbara, in
spite of its pavements, was not a great metropolis, and, owing to its
isolation, the advent of five strangers was so much of an event that
the children of the town followed us, cheering and jeering as though
we were a circus procession; they blocked the house in which we took
refuge, on every side, so that the native policemen had to be stationed
at our windows to wave them away. On the following morning we called
to pay our respects on General Louis Bogran, who has been President of
Honduras for eight years and an exile for two. He died a few months
after our visit. He was a very handsome man, with a fine presence, and
with great dignity of manner, and he gave us an audience exactly as
though he were a dethroned monarch and we loyal subjects come to pay
him homage in his loneliness. I asked him what he regarded as the best
work of his administration, and after thinking awhile he answered,
“Peace for eight years,” which was rather happy, when you consider
that in the three years since he had left office there have been four
presidents and two long and serious revolutions, and when we were in
the capital the people seemed to think it was about time to begin on
another.
[Illustration: GENERAL LOUIS BOGRAN]
We left Santa Barbara early the next morning, and rode over a few more
mountains to the town of Seguaca, where the village priest was holding
a festival, and where the natives for many miles around had gathered in
consequence. There did not seem to be much of interest going on when we
arrived, for the people of the town and the visitors within her gates
deserted the booths and followed us in a long procession down the
single street, and invaded the house where we lunched.
Our host on this occasion set a table for us in the centre of his
largest room, and the population moved in through the doors and
windows, and seated themselves cross-legged in rows ten and fifteen
deep on the earth floor at our feet, and regarded us gravely and in
absolute silence. Those who could not find standing-room inside stood
on the window-sills and blocked the doorways, and the women were given
places of honor on tables and beds. It was somewhat embarrassing,
and we felt as though we ought to offer something more unusual than
the mere exercise of eating in order to justify such interest; so
we attempted various parlor tricks, without appearing to notice the
presence of an audience, and pretended to swallow the eggs whole, and
made knives and forks disappear in the air, and drew silver dollars
from the legs of the table, continuing our luncheon in the meantime
in a self-possessed and polite manner, as though such eccentricities
were our hourly habit. We could see the audience, out of the corner of
our eyes, leaning forward with their eyes and mouths wide open, and
were so encouraged that we called up some of the boys and drew watches
and dollars out of their heads, after which they retired into corners
and ransacked their scantily clad persons for more. It was rather an
expensive exhibition, for when we set forth again they all laid
claim to the dollars of which they considered they had been robbed.
[Illustration: OUR PACK-TRAIN AT SANTA BARBARA]
The men of the place, according to their courteous custom, followed
us out of the town for a few miles, and then we all shook hands and
exchanged cigars and cigarettes, and separated with many compliments
and expressions of high esteem.
The trail from Seguaca to our next resting-place led through pine
forests and over layers of pine-needles that had been accumulating for
years. It was a very warm, dry afternoon, and the air was filled with
the odor of the pines, and when we came to one of the many mountain
streams we disobeyed Jeffs and stopped to bathe in it, and let it carry
us down the side of the mountain with the speed of a toboggan. We had
been told that bathing at any time was extremely dangerous in Honduras,
and especially so in the afternoon; but we always bathed in the
afternoon, and looked forward to the half-hour spent in one of these
roaring rapids as the best part of the day. Of all our recollections
of Honduras, they are certainly the pleasantest. The water was almost
icily cold, and fell with a rush and a heavy downpour in little
water-falls, or between great crevices in the solid rocks, leaping and
bubbling and flashing in the sun, or else sweeping in swift eddies in
the compass of deep, shadowy pools. We used to imprison ourselves
between two rocks and let a fall of water strike us from the distance
of several feet on our head and shoulders, or tear past and around us,
so that in five minutes the soreness and stiffness of the day’s ride
were rubbed out of us as completely as though we had been massaged at
a Turkish bath, and the fact that we were always bruised and black and
blue when we came out could not break us of this habit. It was probably
because we were new to the country that we suffered no great harm;
for Jeffs, who was an old inhabitant, and who had joined us in this
particular stream for the first time, came out looking twenty years
older, and in an hour his teeth were chattering with chills or clinched
with fever, and his pulse was jumping at one hundred and three. We were
then exactly six days’ hard riding from any civilized place, and though
we gave him quinine and whiskey and put him into his hammock as soon
as we reached a hut, the evening is not a cheerful one to remember. It
would not have been a cheerful evening under any circumstances, for we
shared the hut with the largest and most varied collection of human
beings, animals, and insects that I have ever seen gathered into so
small a place.
I took an account of stock before I turned in, and found that there
were three dogs, eleven cats, seven children, five men, not including
five of us, three women, and a dozen chickens, all sleeping, or trying
to sleep, in the same room, under the one roof. And when I gave up
attempting to sleep and wandered out into the night, I stepped on the
pigs, and startled three or four calves that had been sleeping under
the porch and that lunged up out of the darkness. We were always asking
Jeffs why we slept in such places, instead of swinging our hammocks
under the trees and camping out decently and in order, and his answer
was that while there were insects enough in-doors, they were virtually
an extinct species when compared to the number one would meet in the
open air.
I have camped in our West, where all you need is a blanket to lie upon
and another to wrap around you, and a saddle for a pillow, and where,
with a smouldering fire at your feet, you can sleep without thought
of insects. But there is nothing green that grows in Honduras that is
not saturated and alive with bugs, and all manner of things that creep
and crawl and sting and bite. It transcends mere discomfort; it is an
absolute curse to the country, and to every one in it, and it would
be as absurd to write of Honduras without dwelling on the insects, as
of the west coast of Africa without speaking of the fever. You cannot
sit on the grass or on a fallen tree, or walk under an upright one or
through the bushes, without hundreds of some sort of animal or other
attaching themselves to your clothing or to your person. And if you
get down from your mule to take a shot at something in the bushes and
walk but twenty feet into them, you have to be beaten with brushes and
rods when you come out again as vigorously as though you were a dusty
carpet. There will be sometimes as many as a hundred insects under one
leaf; and after they have once laid their claws upon you, your life is
a mockery, and you feel at night as though you were sleeping in a bed
with red pepper. The mules have even a harder time of it; for, as if
they did not suffer enough in the day, they are in constant danger at
night from vampires, which fasten themselves to the neck and suck out
the blood, leaving them so weak that often when we came to saddle them
in the morning they would stagger and almost fall. Sometimes the side
of their head and shoulders would be wet with their own blood. I never
heard of a vampire attacking a man in that country, but the fact that
they are in the air does not make one sleep any the sounder.
In the morning after our night with the varied collection of men and
animals we put back again to the direct trail to Tegucigalpa, from
which place we were still distant a seven days’ ride.
II
We swung our hammocks on the sixth night out in the municipal building
of Tabla Ve; but there was little sleep. Towards morning the night
turned bitterly cold, and the dampness rose from the earthen floor of
the hut like a breath from the open door of a refrigerator, and kept us
shivering in spite of sweaters and rubber blankets. Above, the moon and
stars shone brilliantly in a clear sky, but down in the valley in which
the village lay, a mist as thick as the white smoke of a locomotive
rose out of the ground to the level of the house-tops, and hid Tabla
Ve as completely as though it were at the bottom of a lake. The dogs
of the village moved through the mist, howling dismally, and meeting
to fight with a sudden sharp tumult of yells that made us start up in
our hammocks and stare at each other sleepily, while Jeffs rambled on,
muttering and moaning in his fever. It was not a pleasant night, and we
rode up the mountain-side out of the mist the next morning unrefreshed,
but satisfied to be once more in the sunlight. They had told us at
Tabla Ve that there was to be a bull-baiting that same afternoon at
the village of Seguatepec, fifteen miles over the mountain, where a
priest was holding a church festival. So we left Jeffs to push along
with the mozos, and by riding as fast as the mules could go, we reached
Seguatepec by four in the afternoon.
[Illustration: A VILLAGE IN THE INTERIOR]
It was a bright, clean town, sitting pertly on the flat top of a hill
that fell away from it evenly on every side. It had a little church and
a little plaza, and the church was so vastly superior to every other
house in the place--as was the case in every village through which we
passed--as to make one suppose that it had been built by one race of
people and the houses by another. The plaza was shut in on two of its
sides by a barrier seven rails high, held together by ox-hide ropes.
This barrier, with the houses fronting the plaza on its two other
sides, formed the arena in which the bull was to be set at liberty.
All of the windows and a few of the doors of the houses were barred,
and the open places between were filled up by ramparts of logs. There
was no grand-stand, but every one contributed a bench or a table from
his own house, and the women seated themselves on these, while the men
and boys perched on the upper rail of the barricade. The occasion was
a memorable one, and all the houses were hung with strips of colored
linen, and the women wore their brilliant silk shawls, and a band of
fifteen boys, none of whom could have been over sixteen years of age,
played a weird overture to the desperate business of the afternoon.
It was a somewhat primitive and informal bull-fight, and it began with
their lassoing the bull by his horns and hoofs, and dragging him head
first against the barricade. With a dozen men pulling on the lariat
around the horns from the outside of the ring, and two more twisting
his tail on the inside, he was at such an uncomfortable disadvantage
that it was easy for them to harness him in a net-work of lariats,
and for a bold rider to seat himself on his back. The bold rider wore
spurs on his bare feet, and, with his toes stuck in the ropes around
the bull’s body, he grasped the same ropes with one hand, and with the
other hand behind him held on to the bull’s tail as a man holds the
tiller of a boat. When the man felt himself firmly fixed, and the bull
had been poked into a very bad temper with spears and sharp sticks, the
lariat around his horns was cut, and he started up and off on a frantic
gallop, bucking as vigorously as a Texas pony, and trying to gore the
man clinging to his back with backward tosses of his horns.
There was no regular toreador, and any one who desired to sacrifice
himself to make a Saguatepecan holiday was at liberty to do so; and
as a half-dozen men so sought distinction, and as the bull charged
at anything on two legs, the excitement was intense. He moved very
quickly for so huge an animal in spite of his heavy handicap, and, with
the exception of one man with a red flag and a spirit of daring not
entirely due to natural causes, no one cared to go very near him. So
he pawed up and down the ring, tossing and bucking and making himself
as disagreeable to the man on his back as he possibly could. It struck
me that it would be a distinctly sporting act to photograph a bull
while he was charging head on at the photographer, and it occurred to
Somerset and Griscom at about the same time that it would be pleasant
to confront a very mad bull while he was careering about with a man
twisting his tail. So we all dropped into the arena at about the same
moment, from different sides, and as we were gringos, our appearance
was hailed with laughter and yells of encouragement. The gentleman on
the bull seemed to be able to control him more or less by twisting his
tail to one side or the other, and as soon as he heard the shouts that
welcomed us he endeavored to direct the bull’s entire attention to my
two young friends. Griscom and Somerset are six feet high, even without
riding-boots and pith helmets, and with them they were so conspicuous
that the bull was properly incensed, and made them hurl themselves over
the barricade in such haste that they struck the ground on the other
side at about the same instant that he butted the rails, and with about
the same amount of force.
Shrieks and yells of delight rose from the natives at this delightful
spectacle, and it was generally understood that we had been engaged
to perform in our odd costumes for their special amusement, and the
village priest attained genuine popularity for this novel feature. The
bull-baiting continued for some time, and as I kept the camera in my
own hands, there is no documentary evidence to show that any one ran
away but Griscom and Somerset. Friendly doors were opened to us by
those natives whose houses formed part of the arena, and it was amusing
to see the toreadors popping in and out of them, like the little man
and woman on the barometer who come out when it rains and go in when
the sun shines, and _vice versa_.
On those frequent occasions when the bull charged the barricade, the
entire line of men and boys on its topmost rail would go over backward,
and disappear completely until the disappointed bull had charged madly
off in another direction. Once he knocked half of a mud-house away in
his efforts to follow a man through a doorway, and again a window-sill,
over which a toreador had dived head first like a harlequin in a
pantomime, caved in under the force of his attack. Fresh bulls followed
the first, and the boy musicians maddened them still further by the
most hideous noises, which only ceased when the bulls charged the fence
upon which the musicians sat, and which they vacated precipitately,
each taking up the tune where he had left off when his feet struck the
ground. There was a grand ball that night, to which we did not go, but
we lay awake listening to the fifteen boy musicians until two in the
morning. It was an odd, eyrie sort of music, in which the pipings of
the reed instruments predominated. But it was very beautiful, and very
much like the music of the Hungarian gypsies in making little thrills
chase up and down over one’s nervous system.
The next morning Jeffs had shaken off his fever, and, once more
reunited, we trotted on over heavily wooded hills, where we found no
water until late in the afternoon, when we came upon a broad stream,
and surprised a number of young girls in bathing, who retreated
leisurely as we came clattering down to the ford. Bathing in mid-stream
is a popular amusement in Honduras, and is conducted without any false
sense of modesty; and judging from the number of times we came upon
women so engaged, it seems to be the chief occupation of their day.
That night we slept in Comyagua, the second largest city in the
republic. It was originally selected as the site for a capital, and
situated accordingly at exactly even distances from the Pacific Ocean
and the Caribbean Sea. We found it a dull and desolate place of many
one-story houses, with iron-barred windows, and a great, bare, dusty
plaza, faced by a huge cathedral. Commerce seemed to have passed it
by, and the sixty thousand inhabitants who occupied it in the days of
the Spaniards have dwindled down to ten. The place is as completely
cut off from civilization as an island in the Pacific Ocean. The plain
upon which Comyagua stands stretches for many miles, and the nature of
the stones and pebbles on its surface would seem to show that it was
once the bottom of a great lake. Now its round pebbles and sandy soil
make it a valley of burning heat, into which the sun beats without the
intervening shadows of trees or mountains to save the traveller from
the fierceness of its rays.
We rode over thirty miles of it, and found that part of the plain which
we traversed after our night’s rest at the capital the most trying ten
miles of our trip. We rode out into it in the rear of a long funeral
procession, in which the men and boys walked bareheaded and barefooted
in the burning sand. They were marching to a burial-ground out in
the plain, and they were carrying the coffin on their shoulders, and
bearing before it a life-sized figure of the Virgin and many flaring
candles that burned yellow in the glaring sunlight.
From Comyagua the trail led for many miles through heavy sand, in which
nothing seemed to grow but gigantic cacti of a sickly light green that
twisted themselves in jointed angles fifteen to twenty feet in the air
above us, and century-plants with flowers of a vivid yellow, and tall,
leafless bushes bristling with thorns. The mountains lay on either
side, and formed the valley through which we rode, two dark-green
barriers against a blazing sky, but for miles before and behind us
there was nothing to rest the eye from the glare of the sand. The
atmosphere was without a particle of moisture, and the trail quivered
and swam in the heat; if you placed your hand on the leather pommel
of your saddle it burned the flesh like a plate of hot brass, and ten
minutes after we had dipped our helmets in water they were baked as dry
as when they had first come from the shop. The rays of the sun seemed
to beat up at you from below as well as from above, and we gasped and
panted as we rode, dodging and ducking our heads as though the sun was
something alive and active that struck at us as we passed by. If you
dared to look up at the sky its brilliancy blinded you as though some
one had flashed a mirror in your eyes.
We lunched at a village of ten huts planted defiantly in the open
plain, and as little protected from the sun as a row of bricks in a
brick-yard, but by lying between two of them we found a draught of
hot air and shade, and so rested for an hour. Our trail after that
led over a mile or two of red hematite ore, which suggested a ride
in a rolling-mill with the roof taken away, and with the sun beating
into the four walls, and the air filled with iron-dust. Two hours
later we came to a cañon of white chalk, in which the government had
cut stepping-places for the hoofs of the mules. The white glare in
this valley was absolutely blinding, and the atmosphere was that of a
lime-kiln. We showed several colors after this ride, with layers of
sand and clay, and particles of red ore and powdering of white chalk
over all; but by five o’clock we reached the mountains once more, and
found a cool stream dashing into little water-falls and shaded by great
trees, where the air was scented by the odor of pine-needles and the
damp, spongy breath of moss and fern.
[Illustration: BRIDGE CONNECTING TEGUCIGALPA WITH ITS SUBURB]