We stopped the fourth night at a town called San Pablo, containing
many substantial buildings and several thousand inhabitants. We
were obliged, however, to throw ourselves, as before, upon the
hospitality of private families. Our search for some time proved
unsuccessful,--the citizens were wealthier and more aristocratic,
and were not always disposed to receive such a set of ragamuffins
into their houses. But, at length, one of the principal storekeepers
consented to provide us with supper and lodging, and then the
following conversation took place:
"Have you any eggs--huevos?"
"Si, Señor! huevos."--"Gallina?" "Si, Señor! gallina."--"Pan?"
"Si, pan."--"Milk?" (here our Spanish was at fault.) "Si,
mañaña."--"Frijoles?" "Si, Señor! frijoles." "Bueno! quantos reales?"
"Quantos reales?"--and at this important question he hesitated, while
he consulted with his wife by signs--"Cinquo reales."--"Cinquo reales
por uno?" "Si, Señor! bueno?" "Si! bueno! quantos horas?"
This question completely staggered him, as well it might; but we at
length succeeded in making him comprehend that we wished to know
at what hour we could have supper; and, this being satisfactorily
arranged, he again ran over our bill of fare:--"Huevos, gallina, pan,
frijoles, cinquo reales, esta bueno?"
"Si, Señor," we replied, "esta bueno," and set out on a stroll
through the town in search of a Panama hat Ohio was anxious to obtain.
We failed to find any sufficiently large, but going into what seemed
a shop, we found a fat padre swinging in his hammock, with one foot
lazily patting the floor, and an expression of entire complacency in
his little twinkling eyes and broad, good-humoured countenance. His
library was arranged on one or two small shelves, and consisted mostly
of ancient Latin folios written, probably, some hundreds of years ago.
The padre received us with the utmost courtesy; and, in spite of his
sluggish temper, really looked as if he would have liked to converse
with us if he could. But signs and single words, though they sometimes
answered a very good purpose in enabling us to make a bargain for
supper, or something equally simple, were of little service in
carrying on an abstract conversation; we therefore soon made our
adios, the padre returned to his hammock to meditate over his dinner,
and we continued our walk.
* * * * *
After an excellent supper, which, besides the dishes included in our
bill of fare, contained several that were entirely new to us, we threw
ourselves into the hammocks that were slung in the little shop and
composed ourselves to sleep. But the fumes of garlic and aguadiente,
the glancing of lights before my half-shut eyes,--I have the
misfortune to sleep, like the weasel, with one eye half open,--and an
interrupted note of preparation buzzing in my ears, kept all my senses
on the alert. At two in the morning we were summoned to breakfast,
and this time with a reason; for a long march was before us, and our
hombres desired to make an early start. The breakfast exceeded in
variety and abundance anything that had been set before us for months;
and, if our entertainers had understood English, they would have been
highly amused by our involuntary exclamations of delight.
The language of inarticulate sounds, however, is pretty much the same
the world over; and Dr. Johnson over his leg of mutton, and Sidney
Smith's South Sea islander over his slice of broiled missionary, would
have had no difficulty in responding to each other's emotions. When
our repast was ended, our host, with an enlarged and comprehensive
liberality, of which we had hitherto found no specimen among his
countrymen, insisted upon our drinking his health in a glass of his
own aguadiente; and we parted from him, his wife, and daughter, with
expressions of mutual good-will, which lasted on our part as long as
the smack of his hospitality still lingered on our palate.
The length of this day's journey was rendered more fatiguing by
the various delays that we encountered. Among the other ingenious
novelties in the construction of our conveyance, we found that the
axle, now worn almost in two, was secured to the body simply by strips
of hide. These gradually loosened by the alternations of wet and dry,
and the violent strain to which they were subjected, till at length
the axle turned completely over, and thus brought so large a portion
of the load on to the heads of the oxen as fairly forced their noses
into the dirt. But our hombre proved himself equal to the emergency;
and, unyoking the oxen, he stationed Ohio at the pole to hold it as
high as possible, while he slipt under the cart and went to work in
restoring the axle to its proper place with a readiness and dexterity
for which we had not given him credit.
This nice and difficult operation was at length completed, but our
hombre still showed no inclination to set forward. We questioned,--we
bribed,--we expostulated in vain. Ohio bitterly lamented his ignorance
of Spanish; which prevented him from cursing the fellow in his own
vocabulary, but belaboured him with all the sturdy English oaths he
could muster, which fell on his imperturbable stupidity like drops of
rain on the hide of a rhinoceros. In the midst of the shower he took
from the cart an axe no bigger than a hatchet, with a handle four feet
long, and disappeared in the woods, leaving us sitting on a rotten
log and hardly knowing whether to laugh or cry.
Si examined his revolver and walked on ahead, under the pleasing
illusion that he should find some game; the others soon followed,
leaving us in charge of the cart. The wheezing sounds of the hombre's
axe were the only sounds that disturbed the immense silence; except,
now and then, we heard the far-off halloo of some half frantic driver
urging on his weary cattle. These gradually died away in the distance,
and we were left entirely alone. But such hours are often the most
delightful periods of a journey like ours. We forgot the cities we
had past, and the road by which we had come so far; our connection
with the world seemed broken, and we felt like a man who had climbed
to the moon and then thrown down the ladder by which he had ascended.
Robinson Crusoe in his desert island,--a frog at the bottom of his
well,--hardly a toad in his lump of granite, could be enclosed in a
profounder solitude. I tried to image to myself the great cities,
the mighty empires, that had once an existence in my brain; but the
feverish pulsation of their hearts, and the hum and stir of their
ceaseless bustle, were neither felt in the ground nor visible in the
sleeping leaves.
But our hombre now returned, and put to flight my agreeable fancies.
Like Robinson Crusoe's man Friday, his appearance on the scene at once
dispelled the delightful illusion--there was another man in the world,
and if one, why not a thousand? He carried on his shoulder a rough
stick some six feet long, which we at once conjectured to be designed
for an axle. Our fears were now excited lest he intended to finish
it before proceeding any farther, but he speedily put an end to our
apprehensions by stowing it in the cart; and, then, reyoking his oxen,
we once more found ourselves in motion.
The road, since leaving Realejo, had been remarkably level. We had
not met with a single hill worthy of the name, and were not a little
surprised, on leaving the forest, to find ourselves on the very edge
of a lofty and precipitous elevation and overlooking an immense
extent of country. As far as we could see, the surface of the ground
was broken into black irregular ridges, as if it had been occupied,
for ages, by successive generations of charcoal burners, or had been
turned up into huge furrows by the careless ploughing of some clumsy
Brobdingnagian boor. The road under our feet was almost as hard as
iron, and seemed macadamized with scoria from a blacksmith's forge.
At a little distance on the left we discovered what seemed, at first
sight, the ruins of an oven or forge. The arch yet remained nearly
entire, resting on a pile of fragments; and it required no great
effort of the imagination to suppose that I was surveying the ruins
of a vast and magnificent city, that, by some fearful convulsion of
nature, had been reduced to this state of utter desolation. This
fancy was partly true. At some period, apparently not very remote,
the volcanoes that stood around the horizon had combined to lay
waste the beautiful plain at their feet. In place of the cool green
forest, a mass of black, naked lava now presented itself, that seemed
hardly to want the touch of the match to burst again into a mighty
conflagration. The arch that we had seen, was formed by the lava
cooling round the prostrate trunk of a huge tree, that had perished in
its embrace like Semele in the arms of Jove.
The road now suddenly descended by a long irregular flight of stairs
worn in the crumbling stone. There was no possibility of riding even
if we had been willing to lose the strange novelty of the scenery--the
wheels fell with the regularity, and almost with the force, of
trip-hammers, and with a decided, uncompromising jolt that threatened
the immediate dislocation of the axle. Near the bottom, the path had
been worn, as if by a winter torrent, into a deep and narrow channel,
just wide enough for a single cart;--caves had been hollowed in the
sides, and we involuntarily quickened our pace, lest we should be
crushed beneath the overhanging banks. Having thus reached the foot
of the lofty table land on which we had been travelling, we found
ourselves on the edge of a wide valley that held the lakes Leon
and Nicaragua in its lap, and stretched one arm, by the San Juan
river, away to the Atlantic. Little of the country, however, was now
visible, for in addition to the thickening twilight, a thunder cloud
was coming rapidly up from the horizon, and soon filled the whole
heavens. The first big drops began to fall. Ohio, Texas, and New
York hastily scrambled into the cart and, as Si and myself followed,
a flash of lightning gave the signal for the contest to commence,
and was instantly extinguished in the flood itself had created. The
rain, the thunder, and the lightning that now followed hard after us,
were such as are met with only in the tropics;--the road soon became
a river in earnest, and as the lightning flashed on the swollen and
turbid waters, and the cart rocked and pitched with even more than
its usual violence, it required but a slight exercise of imagination
to feel that we were in a storm at sea. But the cloud having given us
this taste of its quality, swept away, and the stars came out, old
and young, in their pleasant family circles. There was yet no sign of
human habitation. "Quantos ligos a Managua?" we had demanded twenty
times, of a few chance travellers, and of our own invaluable hombre.
One replied that Managua was four leagues off; and, after travelling
steadily for half an hour, we met another who told us it was six.
At length we discovered the lights of a village, and Ohio, in his
eagerness, walked on before. But our hombre, instead of stopping,
as we expected, held straight on his course, and to our impatient
inquiries, "What place is this? Where is Managua?" as curtly answered,
"Marteiris,--Managua,--quatro ligos." Another hour we dragged on, and
finally crossed the plaza at Managua just as the moon had climbed to
the topmost tower of the cathedral.
Managua is a pleasant city of ten or fifteen thousand inhabitants. The
great cathedral is situated, like that at Leon, on one side of the
plaza, but is far inferior in extent and magnificence. Our hotel also
stood on the plaza; but lest the reader should form from this a too
exalted notion of its appearance, I would add that it contained but
two apartments, of moderate dimensions, one of which was occupied by
the family, while the other served as a store-room and poultry house.
There was, however, in the rear, a broad and spacious verandah where
we ate our supper--after which we spread our blankets in a corner of
the poultry house with a hen and brood of chickens in my right ear,
and a duck quacking softly in my left.
At this place a part of our fellow-passengers becoming impatient of
the slow rate at which we travelled, and fearful lest they should
not reach San Juan in season, hired horses for the remainder of
the journey--New York and Texas were among the number; but we were
encumbered with too much baggage to follow their example, and Ohio
had bought a whole regiment of parrots and paroquets that required
his constant supervision, besides costing him a fortune in cages and
bananas, which they ate with apparently equal relish.
Our hombre was occupied several hours the next morning in making a new
axle. For want of an auger, the use of which simple instrument seemed
unknown to him, he was obliged to cut the holes for the linchpins with
a chisel; and this, in his hands, was a long and tedious operation.
It was some satisfaction, however, to reflect that the work would not
require to be done over again until he reached Granada, and might even
last through the whole of his homeward journey.
Our road led to-day for several miles along the shore of Lake Leon.
This is a large body of water resembling an inland sea; and some of
our party, deceived by its extent, supposed it, at first, to be an arm
of the ocean. A general halt was here ordered, and our hombres and
muchachos, throwing off their light garments, were soon disporting
themselves in the shallow water. They enjoyed this exercise so keenly,
that it was with great difficulty we persuaded them to resume their
march.
We stopped this night at Marsawa, a city of about the same size as
Managua; and the next afternoon made our entry into Granada. It was
Sunday, and the inhabitants, dressed in their best, were sitting in
the open doors of their houses, exhibiting marks of greater opulence
and refinement than we had yet witnessed. The grace and beauty of the
women especially attracted our attention,--we seemed suddenly brought
near to home, and to have been, all at once, set down in the midst of
the nineteenth century, after so long travelling in mediæval darkness.
Granada, as already stated, is situated on Lake Nicaragua, and
connected by the San Juan river with the Atlantic. It has thus become
the great inland market for that part of Central America. The various
goods imported into the country are brought up the river and across
the lake in huge canoes, or in boats of the heaviest and most awkward
construction. There were also three small schooners on the lake about
the size of a common pleasure-boat, and capable of carrying thirty men
apiece; but not one of these was at that time at Granada, though they
had been sent for at the first intimation of our approach, and were
expected to arrive in one or two days.
In the mean time a number of our companions, impatient of the delay,
and deceived by the statements of interested parties, who assured
them that that mode of conveyance was much to be preferred, embarked
in one of the canoes for a voyage of ninety miles across a body of
water famed for its sudden and capricious temper. We were strongly
tempted to follow their example, but finally concluded to remain at
Granada until the arrival of the schooners, which were now expected
to arrive every hour. The hotel where we had taken lodgings was very
spacious and commodious. It would not indeed equal the St. Nicholas
in either of these particulars, but may well deserve that distinction
when compared with the others we had visited during our route. There
was not only a dining-room capable of accommodating one hundred
guests, but there were several sleeping apartments of like generous
proportions, and furnished with cot bedsteads, a luxury to which we
had been lately wholly unaccustomed. Except at the little village of
Nigarote, we had slept on nothing softer than the floor for weeks,
and we at first felt some alarm at the thought of such an unnatural
elevation. All these apartments were on the ground floor, and, with
the kitchen and outhouses, entirely surrounded an open court about a
hundred feet square.
The price of board at this hotel was one dollar a day, and for this
we had an abundance of tough beef cooked with garlic, beans, French
rolls, coffee and milk. We had also, by way of variety, a few eggs and
chickens, and a very limited supply of butter.
Granada presents little attraction to the stranger--on one side was
the deep forest through which we had travelled--on the other a burning
plain, with a few scattered houses, stretching two miles away to the
lake. Owing to the intense heat, we remained most of the time at our
hotel, lounging in the hammocks slung under the veranda, or watching
from the steps of the dining-room the lazy groups of the natives, or
our own more fiery Saxons, as they hurried hither and thither on some
important trifle.
No exhibition of passion is perhaps more amusing than that of a
dispute between two Spaniards. Such volubility of utterance, such
nervous flexibility of feature, such jerking spitefulness of emphasis,
can nowhere find a parallel, except in the nocturnal colloquy of
half a dozen enamoured grimalkins. A quarrel, the merits of which we
could not determine, arose one day between our landlord and another
of the same gunpowder fraternity. One of Hoe's eight-cylinder
printing presses could hardly have kept pace with the impetuous
torrent of words that streamed quivering from their lips--our sluggish
consonants, compared with their nimble vowels, are like the mailed
crusader opposed to the lithe and supple Saracen, when the greatest
danger arises from the rapidity of the onset. After keeping up a
continuous fire of words, like a rolling discharge of musketry or a
redhot poker sizzling in a pail of water, for some ten minutes, our
landlord suddenly seized a gun that stood in one corner of the bar,
and levelled it with an expression of most determined ferocity at his
vapouring antagonist. The admiring Californians, instantly opening
to right and left, displayed a narrow lane, at the end of which was
discovered the cunning Spaniard prostrate on all fours, and warily
exposing to the fire of the enemy that part of his person which
instinct, or perhaps experience, had taught him was best calculated
to meet the assault. The next moment, by a skilful side movement, he
precipitated himself down the steps into the street.--Our landlord,
with a grim smile of satisfaction, restored the gun to its place, and
the storm cleared away as rapidly as it commenced.