Part 4

The grades are in some places very steep, and as the engine was not as young as it had been, two negro boys and a box of sand were placed on the cow-catcher, and whenever the necessity of stopping the train was immediate, or when it was going downhill too quickly, they would lean forward and pour this sand on the rails. As soon as Griscom and Somerset discovered these assistant engineers they bribed them to give up their places to them, and after the first station we all sat for the remainder of the journey on the cow-catcher. It was a beautiful and exhilarating ride, and suggested tobogganing, or those thrilling little railroads on trestles at Coney Island and at the fêtes around Paris. It was even more interesting, because we could see each rusty rail rise as the wheel touched its nearer end as though it meant to fly up in our faces, and when the wheel was too quick for it and forced it down again, it contented itself by spreading out half a foot or so to one side, which was most alarming. And the interest rose even higher at times when a stray steer would appear on the rails at the end of the tunnel of palms, as at the end of a telescope, and we saw it growing rapidly larger and larger as the train swept down upon it. It always lurched off to one side before any one was killed, but not until there had been much ringing of bells and blowing of whistles, and, on our part, some inward debate as to whether we had better jump and abandon the train to its fate, or die at our post with our hands full of sand.

We lay idly at San Pedro Sula for four days, while Jeffs hurried about collecting mules and provisions. When we arrived we insisted on setting forth that same evening, but the place put its spell upon us gently but firmly, and when we awoke on the third day and found we were no nearer to starting than at the moment of our arrival, Jeffs’s perplexities began to be something of a bore, and we told him to put things off to the morrow, as did every one else.

San Pedro Sula lay in peaceful isolation in a sunny valley at the base of great mountains, and from the upper porch of our hotel, that had been built when the railroad was expected to continue on across the continent, we could see above the palms in the garden the clouds moving from one mountain-top to another, or lying packed like drifts of snow in the hollows between. We used to sit for hours on this porch in absolute idleness, watching Jeffs hurrying in and out below with infinite pity, while we listened to the palms rustling and whispering as they bent and courtesied before us, and saw the sunshine turn the mountains a light green, like dry moss, or leave half of them dark and sombre when a cloud passed in between. It was a clean, lazy little place of many clay huts, with gardens back of them filled with banana-palms and wide-reaching trees, which were one mass of brilliant crimson flowers. In the centre of the town was a grass-grown plaza where the barefooted and ragged boy-soldiers went through leisurely evolutions, and the mules and cows gazed at them from the other end.

Our hotel was leased by an American woman, who was making an unappreciated fight against dirt and insects, and the height of whose ambition was to get back to Brooklyn and take in light sewing and educate her two very young daughters. Her husband had died in the interior, and his portrait hung in the dining-room of the hotel. She used to talk about him while she was waiting at dinner, and of what a well-read and able man he had been. She would grow so interested in her stories that the dinner would turn cold while she stood gazing at the picture and shaking her head at it. We became very much interested in the husband, and used to look up over our shoulders at his portrait with respectful attention, as though he were present. His widow did not like Honduranians; and though she might have made enough money to take her home, had she consented to accept them as boarders, she would only receive gringos at her hotel, which she herself swept and scrubbed when she was not cooking the dinner and making the beds. She had saved eight dollars of the sum necessary to convey her and her children home, and to educate them when they got there; and as American travellers in Honduras are few, and as most of them ask you for money to help them to God’s country, I am afraid her chance of seeing the Brooklyn Bridge is very doubtful.

We contributed to her fund, and bought her a bundle of lottery tickets, which we told her were the means of making money easily; and I should like to add that she won the grand prize, and lived happily on Brooklyn Heights ever after; but when we saw the list at Panama, her numbers were not on it, and so, I fear, she is still keeping the only clean hotel in Honduras, which is something more difficult to accomplish and a much more public-spirited thing to do than to win a grand prize in a lottery.

We left San Pedro Sula on a Sunday morning, with a train of eleven mules; five to carry our luggage and the other six for ourselves, Jeffs, Charlwood, Somerset’s servant, and Emilio, our chief moso, or muleteer. There were two other mosos, who walked the entire distance, and in bull-hide sandals at that, guarding and driving the pack-mules, and who were generally able to catch up with us an hour or so after we had halted for the night. I do not know which was the worst of the mosos, although Emilio seems to have been first choice with all of us. We agreed, after it was all over, that we did not so much regret not having killed them as that they could not know how frequently they had been near to sudden and awful death.

The people of Honduras, where all the travelling is done on mule or horseback, have a pretty custom of riding out to meet a friend when he is known to be coming to town, and of accompanying him when he departs. This latter ceremony always made me feel as though I were an undesirable citizen who was being conveyed outside of the city limits by a Vigilance Committee; but it is very well meant, and a man in Honduras measures his popularity by the number of friends who come forth to greet him on his arrival, or who speed him on his way when he sets forth again. We were accompanied out of San Pedro Sula by the consular agent, the able American manager of the thirty-seven miles of railroad, and his youthful baggage-master, a young gentleman whom I had formerly known in the States.

Our escort left us at the end of a few miles, at the foot of the mountains, and we began the ascent alone. From that time on until we reached the Pacific Ocean we moved at the rate of three miles an hour, or some nine leagues a day, as distances are measured in Honduras, ten hours being a day’s journey. Our mules were not at all the animals that we know as mules in the States, but rather overgrown donkeys or burros, and not much stouter than those in the streets of Cairo, whether it be the Street in Cairo of Chicago, or the one that runs in front of Shepheard’s Hotel. They were patient, plucky, and wonderfully sure-footed little creatures, and so careful of their own legs and necks that, after the first few hours, we ceased to feel any anxiety about our own, and left the entire charge of the matter to them.

I think we were all a little startled at sight of the trail we were 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.

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.

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.