Part 6

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.

We were now within two days of Tegucigalpa, and the sense of nearness to civilization and the knowledge that the greater part of our journey was at an end made us forget the discomforts and hardships which we had endured without the consolation of excitement that comes with danger, or the comforting thought that we were accomplishing anything in the meantime. We had been complaining of this during the day to Jeffs, and saying that had we gone to the coast of East Africa we could not have been more uncomfortable nor run greater risks from fever, but that there we would have met with big game, and we would have visited the most picturesque instead of the least interesting of all countries.

These complaints inspired Jeffs to play a trick upon us, which was meant in a kindly spirit, and by which he intended to furnish us with a moment’s excitement, and to make us believe that we had been in touch with danger. There are occasional brigands in Central America, and their favorite hunting-ground in Honduras is within a few miles of Tegucigalpa, along the trail from the eastern coast over which we were then passing. We had been warned of these men, and it occurred to Jeffs that as we complained of lack of excitement in our trip, it would be a thoughtful kindness to turn brigand and hold us up upon our march. So he left us still bathing at the water-fall, and telling us that he would push on to engage quarters for the night, rode some distance ahead and secreted himself behind a huge rock on one side of a narrow cañon. He first placed his coat on a bush beside him, and his hat on another bush, so as to make it appear that there were several men with him. His idea was that when he challenged us we would see the dim figures in the moonlight and remember the brigands, and that we were in their stalking-ground, and get out of their clutches as quickly as possible, well satisfied that we had at last met with a real adventure.

We reached his ambuscade about seven. Somerset was riding in advance, reciting “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” while we were correcting him when he went wrong, and gazing unconcernedly and happily at the cool moonlight as it came through the trees, when we were suddenly startled by a yell and an order to halt, in Spanish, and a rapid fusillade of pistol-shots. We could distinguish nothing but what was apparently the figures of three men crouching on the hill-side and the flashes of their revolvers, so we all fell off our mules and began banging away at them with our rifles, while the mules scampered off down the mountain. This was not as Jeffs had planned it, and he had to rearrange matters very rapidly. Bullets were cutting away twigs all over the hill-side and splashing on the rock behind which he was now lying, and though he might have known we could not hit him, he was afraid of a stray bullet. So he yelled at us in English, and called us by name, until we finally discovered we had been grossly deceived and imposed upon, and that our adventure was a very unsatisfactory practical joke for all concerned. It took us a long time to round up the mules, and we reached our sleeping-place in grim silence, and with our desire for danger still unsatisfied.

The last leagues that separated us the next morning from Tegucigalpa seemed, of course, the longest in the entire journey. And so great was our desire to reach the capital before nightfall that we left the broader trail and scrambled down the side of the last mountain, dragging our mules after us, and slipping and sliding in dust and rolling stones to the tops of our boots. The city did not look inviting as we viewed it from above. It lay in a bare, dreary plain, surrounded by five hills that rose straight into the air, and that seemed to have been placed there for the special purpose of revolutionists, in order that they might the more exactly drop shot into the town at their feet. The hills were bare of verdure, and the landscape about the capital made each of us think of the country about Jerusalem. As none of us had ever seen Jerusalem, we foregathered and argued why this should be so, and decided that it was on account of the round rocks lying apart from one another, and low, bushy trees, and the red soil, and the flat roofs of the houses.

The telegraph wire which extends across Honduras, swinging from trees and piercing long stretches of palm and jungle, had warned the foreign residents of the coming of Jeffs, and some of them rode out to make us welcome. Their greeting, and the sight of paved streets, and the passing of a band of music and a guard of soldiers in shoes and real uniform, seemed to promise much entertainment and possible comfort. But the hotel was a rude shock. We had sent word that we were coming, and we had looked forward eagerly to our first night in a level bed under clean linen; but when we arrived we were offered the choice of a room just vacated by a very ill man, who had left all of his medicines behind him, so that the place was unpleasantly suggestive of a hospital, or a very small room, in which there were three cots, and a layer of dirt over all so thick that I wrote my name with the finger of my riding-glove on the centre-table. The son of the proprietor saw this, and, being a kindly person and well disposed, dipped his arm in water and proceeded to rub it over the top of the table, using his sleeve as a wash-rag. So after that we gave up expecting anything pleasant, and were in consequence delightfully surprised when we came upon anything that savored of civilization.

Tegucigalpa has an annex which lies on the opposite side of the river, and which is to the capital what Brooklyn is to New York. The river is not very wide nor very deep, and its course is impeded by broad, flat rocks. The washer-women of the two towns stand beside these all day knee-deep in the eddies and beat the stones with their twisted clubs of linen, so that their echo sounds above the roar of the river like the banging of shutters in the wind or the reports of pistols. This is the only suggestion of energy that the town furnishes. The other inhabitants seem surfeited with leisure and irritable with boredom. There are long, dark, cool shops of general merchandise, and a great cathedral and a pretty plaza, where the band plays at night and people circle in two rings, one going to the right and one going to the left, and there is the government palace and a big penitentiary, a university and a cemetery. But there is no color nor ornamentation nor light nor life nor bustle nor laughter. You do not hear people talking and calling to one another across the narrow streets of the place by day or serenading by night. Every one seems to go to bed at nine o’clock, and after that hour the city is as silent as its great graveyard, except when the boy policemen mark the hour with their whistles or the street dogs meet to fight.

The most interesting thing about the capital is the fact to which I have already alluded, that everything in it and pertaining to it that was not dug from the ground or fashioned from trees was carried to it on the backs of mules. The letter-boxes on the street corners had once been United States letter-boxes, and had later swung across the backs of donkeys. The gas-lamps and the iron railings of the parks, the few statues and busts in the public places, reached Tegucigalpa by the same means, and the great equestrian statue of Morazan the Liberator, in the plaza, was cast in Italy, and had been brought to Tegucigalpa in pieces before it was put together like a puzzle and placed in its present position to mark a glorious and victorious immortality. These things were not interesting in themselves, but it was interesting that they were there at all.

On the second day after our arrival the vice-president, Luis Bonilla, who bears the same last name but is no near relation to President Bonilla, took the oath of office, and we saw the ceremony with the barefooted public in the reception-room of the palace. The hall was hung with lace curtains and papered with imitation marble, and the walls were decorated with crayon portraits of Honduranian presidents. Bogran was not among them, nor was Morazan. The former was missing because it was due to him that young Bonilla had been counted out when he first ran for the presidency three years ago, when he was thirty-three years old, and the portrait of the Liberator was being reframed, because Bonilla’s followers six months before had unintentionally shot holes through it when they were besieging the capital. The ceremony of swearing in the vice-president did not last long, and what impressed us most about it was the youth of the members of the cabinet and of the Supreme Court who delivered the oath of office. They belonged distinctly to the politician class as one sees it at home, and were young men of eloquent speech and elegant manners, in frock-coats and white ties. We came to know most of the president’s followers later, and found them hospitable to a degree, although they seemed hardly old enough or serious enough to hold place in the government of a republic, even so small a one as Honduras. What was most admirable about each of them was that he had fought and bled to obtain the office he held. That is hardly a better reason for giving out clerkships and cabinet portfolios than the reasons which obtain with us for distributing the spoils of office, but you cannot help feeling more respect for the man who has marched by the side of his leader through swamps and through jungle, who has starved on rice, who has slept in the bushes, and fought with a musket in his hand in open places, than for the fat and sleek gentlemen who keep open bar at the headquarters of their party organization, who organize marching clubs, and who by promises or by cash secure a certain amount of influence and a certain number of votes.

They risk nothing but their money, and if their man fails to get in, their money is all they lose; but the Central-American politician has to show the faith that is in him by going out on the mountain-side and hacking his way to office with a naked machete in his hand, and if _his_ leader fails, he loses his life, with his back to a church wall, and looking into the eyes of a firing squad, or he digs his own grave by the side of the road, and stands at one end of it, covered with clay and sweat, and with the fear of death upon him, and takes his last look at the hot sun and the palms and the blue mountains, with the buzzards wheeling about him, and then shuts his eyes, and is toppled over into the grave, with a half-dozen bullets in his chest and stomach. That is what I should like to see happen to about half of our professional politicians at home. Then the other half might understand that holding a public office is a very serious business, and is not merely meant to furnish them with a livelihood and with places for their wives’ relations.

I saw several churches and cathedrals in Honduras with a row of bullet-holes in the front wall, about as high from the ground as a man’s chest, and an open grave by the road-side, which had been dug by the man who was to have occupied it. The sight gave us a vivid impression of the uncertainties of government in Central America. The man who dug this particular grave had been captured, with two companions, while they were hastening to rejoin their friends of the government party. His companions in misery were faint-hearted creatures, and thought it mattered but little, so long as they had to die, in what fashion they were buried. So they scooped out a few feet of earth with the tools their captors gave them, and stood up in the hollows they had made, and were shot back into them, dead; but the third man declared that he was not going to let his body lie so near the surface of the earth that the mules could kick his bones and the next heavy freshet wash them away. He accordingly dug leisurely and carefully to the depth of six feet, smoothing the sides and sharpening the corners, and while he was thus engaged at the bottom of the hole he heard yells and shots above him, and when he poked his head up over the edge of the grave he saw his own troops running down the mountain-side, and his enemies disappearing before them. He is still alive, and frequently rides by the hole in the road-side on his way to the capital. The story illustrates the advisability of doing what every one has to do in this world, even up to the very last minute, in a thorough and painstaking manner.