QUIRIGUA. STELA D NORTH FACE.
On reaching the summit of the hills we had been ascending, a still more striking landscape lay spread out before us, for the great forest-covered plain stretched to the N.E., through which the Motagua winds its way to the sea. The misty outlines of the hills on the far side of the river closed the picture on the right, whilst on the left the bold outlines of the Sierra de las Minas, ending in name only at the hardly distinguishable gap through which the road passes to Yzabal, run on under the name of the Sierra del Mico, until their beautiful overlapping slopes are lost to sight where they sink in mist towards the sea. A short ride brought us to Quirigua, which a few years ago was the site of a village of twenty or thirty houses, but now contains only the comfortable homestead of the cattle rancho belonging to Don Carlos Herrera. The ruins of Quirigua, about six miles distant, are included within the limits of the estate, which since the time of our visit has passed into the hands of President Barrios, and it is to be sincerely hoped that he will take measures to guard the monuments against depredations likely to occur by occasion of their proximity to the new railway.
Next morning we set out for the ruins. Riding first through a grove of pine-trees, and then gradually descending to the plain, we followed a narrow track into an almost impenetrable forest of coroza palms, mahogany and cedar trees, and all that marvellous tangle of creepers and climbing plants which go to make up that great wonder of nature—a tropical forest. After about an hour’s ride through the forest, we crossed the line of the new railway, which was as yet innocent of rails, and half an hour later we emerged on the bank of the Motagua, about a mile distant from the ruins, and were welcomed to our new camping-ground by Mr. Hugh Price, my husband’s companion and assistant in an expedition to Palenque in 1891.
The great river had shrunk to its summer limits, and had left bare long stretches of sand strewn with the leavings of former floods, reminding one of the dumping ground of some great city, and no more picturesque than such a receptacle of rubbish. A little settlement of half a dozen houses had lately been formed on the river-bank, and a hundred yards beyond it Mr. Price, who had arrived a fortnight earlier, had built a rancho for us at the cost of about £2 sterling. With our tent pitched beside it for use as a bedroom we were well accommodated; but the situation was not a pleasant one. The herds of cattle roaming through the forest would draw down of an evening towards the river-bank, when rival bulls made night hideous with their bellowings, and we were forced to get up again and again to ward off attacks on the rather frail fence which protected our homestead, and to drive off those animals who came stumbling among the tent ropes and threatened to bring the canvas down on our heads. The poor beasts meant no harm to us, but they were searching wildly for something salt, and they would return again and again to lick and scrape the earth on the spot where we had thrown the small ration of salt which we daily gave to our mules. Woe to the man who left his garments overnight hanging on the fence to dry; nothing would be left of them in the morning but a chewed unrecognizable mass.
Unattractive as were our surroundings, it was no doubt preferable living near the river-bank, where the breeze could reach us and the water-supply was ample, to camping at the ruins, where the water was not fit to drink, the heat was stifling, and myriads of mosquitoes, flies, and minute bees were irritating beyond measure; but as I never would go through the forest alone, the mile of rough track between the rancho where I had the housekeeping and cooking to attend to, and the ruins where my husband was at work, caused me to spend most of my days in solitude.
QUIRIGUA. STELA F.
The climate at Quirigua in April is, I am told, usually clear and dry, but we had chanced on one of those exceptional seasons which it seems to be the usual fate of travellers to meet in all parts of the world, and the inevitable heat was made the more disagreeable by sudden deluges of rain, which, falling on the sun-baked sands, turned the air into a great vapour-bath. Two or three times, however, during our stay, a strong breeze of an evening was followed by a bright and lovely day; then I hurried through my housekeeping with all possible speed, and rode off to spend the day at the ruins. On such a day the forest was beautiful and interesting beyond description, and seemed to be laid under a spell of enchantment. Nothing could exceed the wondrous beauty of the sinuous motion of coroza palms as the breeze gently stirred their splendid leaves and waved them lazily together in a lingering embrace. The forest resounded with the calls of birds, the gurgling note of the oropendula, the cries of parrots, and the screams of brilliant macaws, to which the hoarse roar of the monos, hidden in the highest tree-tops, formed a monotonous accompaniment. The perfumed breeze shook down flowers from invisible tree-tops and showered them in the path, and the sun’s rays, forcing their way through every break in the almost impenetrable canopy of vegetation, danced merrily through the forest. What a marvellous place it was! What a fearful restless struggle for existence was going on in the vegetable world before one’s very eyes! Everything was fighting its way upward towards the air and sunlight; straight, slim, branchless stems shot up to an incredible height and buried their heads in the canopy above, giving one no chance of distinguishing the shape of the leaves they bore. Numberless creepers and climbers used these shafts as supports on their way upward, their flexible stems being turned around them and hanging in great cable-like loops from the distant branches. One after another the great trees, even the forest giants with monster boles and huge buttress-shaped roots, seem to fall a prey to the insidious attacks of parasites, and what at first sight appeared to be the shaft of a mighty forest-tree, would sometimes prove to be only the interlacing stems of the Matapalo, a parasitic fig, which still held the dead and rotting trunk of some monarch of the grove within its embrace. The parasite had conquered in the struggle, but its triumph would not last long; the gale which would have failed to bend its victim’s stem will send the hollow impostor crashing to the ground, and a hundred rivals will fight for its share of the sunlight.
