PRELIMINARY.
Reader, take down your map, and, starting at the now well-known Isthmus of Panama, run your finger northward along the coast of the Pacific, until, in latitude 13° north, it shall rest on a fine body of water, or rather the "counterfeit presentment" thereof, which projects far into the land, and is designated as the Bay of Fonseca. If your map be of sufficient scale and moderately exact, you will find represented there two gigantic volcanoes, standing like warders at the entrance of this magnificent bay. That on the south is called Coseguina, memorable for its fearful eruption in 1835; that on the north is named Conchagua or Amapala, taller than Coseguina, but long extinct, and covered to its top with verdure. It is remarkable for its regularity of outline and the narrowness of its apex. On this apex, a mere sugar-loaf crown, are a vigía or look-out station, and a signal-staff, whence the approach of vessels is telegraphed to the port of La Union, at the base of the volcano. A rude hut, half-buried in the earth, and loaded down with heavy stones, to prevent it from being blown clean away, or sent rattling down the slopes of the mountain, is occupied by the look-out man,—an old Indian muffled up to his nose; for it is often bitter cold at this elevation, and there is no wood wherewith to make a fire. Were it not for that jar or tinaja of aguardiente which the old man keeps so snugly in the corner of his burrow, he would have withered up long ago, like the mummies of the Great Saint Bernard.
But I am not going to work up the old man of the vigía; for he was of little consequence on the 10th day of April, 1853, except as a wondering spectator on the top of Conchagua, in a group consisting of an ex-minister of the United States, an officer of the American navy, and an artist from the good city of New York, to whose ready pencil a grateful country owes many of the illustrations of tropical scenery which have of late years lent their interest to popular periodicals and books of adventure. I might have added to this enumeration the tall, dark figure of Dolores, servant and guide; but Dolores, with a good sense which never deserted him, had no sooner disencumbered his shoulders of his load of provisions, than he bestowed himself in the burrow, out of the wind, and possibly not far from the aguardiente.
The utilitarian reader will ask, at once, the motive of this gathering on the top of the volcano of Conchagua, five thousand feet above the sea, wearily attained at no small expenditure of effort and perspiration. Was it love of adventure merely? ambition to do something whereof to brag about to admiring aunts or country cousins? Hardly. The beauty of the wonderful panorama which spreads before the group of strangers is too much neglected, their instruments are too carefully adjusted and noted, and their consultations are far too earnest and protracted, to admit of either supposition. The old man of the vigía, as I have said, was a wondering spectator. He wondered why the eyes of the strangers, glasses as well as eyes, and theodolites as well as glasses, should all be directed across the bay, across the level grounds beyond it, far away to the blue line of the Cordilleras, cutting the clear sky with their serrated outline. He does not observe that deep notch in the great backbone of the continent, as regular as the cleft which the pioneer makes in felling a forest-tree; nor does he observe that the breeze which ripples the waters at the foot of the volcano is the north wind sweeping all the way from the Bay of Honduras through that break in the mountain range, which everywhere else, as far as the eye can reach, presents a high, unbroken barrier to its passage to the Pacific. Yet it is simply to determine the bearings of that notch in the Cordilleras, to fix the positions of the leading features of the intervening country, and to verify the latitude and longitude of the old man's flag-staff itself, as a point of departure for future explorations, that the group of strangers is gathered on the top of Conchagua.
And now, O reader, run your finger due north from the Bay of Fonseca, straight to the Bay of Honduras, and it will pass, in a figurative way, through the notch I have described, and through the pass of which we were in search. You will see, if your map be accurate, that in or near that pass two large rivers have their rise; one, the Humuya, flows almost due north into the Atlantic, and the other, the Goascoran, nearly due south into the Pacific,—together constituting, with the plain of Comayagua, a great transverse valley extending across the continent from sea to sea. Through this valley, commencing at Port Cortés, on the north, and terminating on the Bay of Fonseca on the south, American enterprise and English capital have combined to construct a railway, designed to afford a new, if not a shorter and better route of transit across the continent, between New York and San Francisco, and between Great Britain and Australia.
But when we stood on the top of Conchagua, on the 10th day of April, 1853, the existence of a pass through the mountains, as well as of that great transverse valley of which I have spoken, was only inferentially known. In fact, the whole interior of Honduras was unexplored; its geography was not understood; its scenery had never been described; its towns and cities were scarcely known even by name; and its people lived in almost as profound a seclusion from the world at large as the dwellers on the banks of the Niger and the Zambezi. It is not, however, to bore you, O reader, with all the details of our surveys, nor to bother you with statistics, that I write; for, verily, are not these all set down in a book? But it is rather to amuse you with the incidents of our explorations, our quaint encounters with a quaint people of still quainter manners and habits and with ideas quainter than all, and to present you with a picture of a country and a society interesting equally in themselves and from their strong contrasts with our own,—I say, it is rather with these objects that I invite you, O reader, to join our little party, and participate in the manifold adventures of "HUNTING A PASS."