The Lopez family has long been connected with Cajabon, and although my companions Gorgonio and Carlos Lopez and other brothers had wandered away and settled in Coban and Salamá, the eldest, Cornelio, still remained in his old home and held the office of “secretario” to the municipality, the officer who is appointed by the Government to counsel and guide the Indian officials, for, with the exception of the Lopezes and one other half-caste family, the community is purely Indian. As we neared the town Gorgonio told me that he did not think I should be comfortable at his brother’s house, as the house was small and his brother’s family numerous, and suggested my seeking a lodging at the “Convento,” where the Padre was known to be hospitable and a good fellow. So we rode on through the straggling Indian town, winding our way round the bases of many small hills on which the Indian houses are perched; and then up the side of the large central hill which is crowned by the church and the remains of an old convent of the Dominican monks. Passing through the gate into the great walled square, where stands a weather-beaten stone cross, I dismounted from my horse at the foot of the steps leading to the Convento, and was greeted with “Come in, come in! I very glad to see you. I do speek de Engleesh very well.” Looking up I saw a small, sandy-haired, grey-eyed man dressed in blue-and-white-striped cotton trousers, a spotted cotton shirt, and a pair of rough brown native shoes; he ran down the steps, grasped my hand, patted me on the back, roared with laughter, and kept up a stream of greetings in the most delicious broken English. I had looked for the usual sallow-faced, half-baked ladino padre, and here, in this out-of-the-way Indian village, I chanced on, of all people in the world—a Dutchman!
“Yes, I speek de Engleesh very well. I go to school at Mill Hill: you know Mill Hill? Very good place. Cardinal Manning he my friend. Queen Victoria she one very good woman.” And so he rattled on, cracked small jokes, dug me in the ribs, and laughed continuously. How often during the next week I wished that some one had been with me to enjoy him. He was perfectly delicious—always laughing; he let off innumerable little jokes and told interminable stories, and told them again and again with the same delightfully quaint phrases. His favourite reminiscence was of the day when the Prince of Wales went to Saint Paul’s to return thanks after recovery from illness. Apparently the pupils of the Roman Catholic College of Mill Hill were allowed a holiday, taken to the City to see the show and given a good dinner afterwards. But this was not quite the Padre’s view of it; he never seemed to tire of telling this story, and always told it to me with much detail, as though I could not possibly be expected to know anything about the matter, and always prefaced it with “Queen Victoria she one very good woman.” “Well, I will tell you her primogenito what they call him, Prince o’ Wales, he very sick; the Queen tink he go die, everyone say he go die; but Queen Victoria, she one very good woman, she give plenty of money, and she say everybody must pray very hard; and dey all pray very hard, everybody; and Prince o’ Wales he get well again: it one miracle sabe Usted? because dey all pray so hard. Queen Victoria, she one very good woman, she say now we make one gran fiesta; and Queen Victoria and Prince o’ Wales and all de people, oh plenty people! dey all go to San Pablo, de gran Catedrál in London, and say prayers. And de Queen she say everybody have pray very hard, very hard: now everybody have good dinner, everybody, Catholic, Jew, Turk, everybody; and oh! what good dinner we had.” He was always kindly, and I learnt that he was constant at his duties and at everyone’s service; and the Indians had a great liking and respect for him, although they looked on him as a being altogether beyond their comprehension. When he laughed and cracked his jokes and dug them in the ribs they stood round in solemn and open-mouthed wonder. “Ah!” he turned to me one day from a group who had come to him on some business, “Indian very good people, and it one very good ting to be parish priest. Every Indian man he marry, oh very young!—dat two dollars; den every Indian woman she get baby, want him baptize—dat one dollar. Oh it very good ting to be parish priest! Den I make Coffee Finca; Indian very good, he all come and help. Den I keep plenty cattle: when cow break into Indian plantation, Indian he make much cry out, he beat cow very hard, he say you pay money for milpa; but when Padre’s cow eat milpa, Indian he say, dis Padre’s cow, he lead him out very quiet. Oh it one very good ting to be parish priest!” And then he roared with laughter at his own worldly wisdom.
I asked the Padre about his past career, and learnt that he had left Holland as a young man to take a position as teacher in a college—I think in San Salvador. Soon after his arrival a revolution broke out, and during the anarchy which followed there was no money forthcoming to pay teachers, the college ceased to exist, and he found himself penniless and destitute. Then someone suggested his taking orders, which was done without loss of time and apparently without much difficulty; since then he had found it “One very good ting to be parish priest.” He owned that he had not written home for years; and I fear my efforts to persuade him to write and regain touch with his friends were of no avail, for when I asked after him two years later, it was only to learn that he was dead and that the Consul who had his affairs in hand could find no trace of his family in Europe.
The Convento was a thick-walled, large-roomed building, in rather a tumble-down condition, and contained little in the way of furniture. Two or three women servants lived in an outbuilding at the back, and cooked the Padre’s food for him, brought in the water, and occasionally swept out the big room, which was all the service he needed. Having heard something of the ways of native padres, I ventured to ask one of my men if my host had any “compañera” attached to him: he said, “No, not one”; and added, with delightful simplicity, “And, you see, that is so strange, as a padre often has three or four”!
Cornelio and the Padre, as the only “gente de razon” in the place, generally spent their evenings together. I asked the Padre if they had any books to read, and he said that he had none, but added, with some pride, that Cornelio possessed a ‘History of the World,’ in two volumes, and that they had often read that. My offer to see if I could spare him any books did not seem to arouse much interest; apparently he had never read a novel, and hardly seemed to know what it meant. However, I looked through my boxes and found a copy of ‘El Niño de la bola’ and ‘Pepita Jimenes,’ and these I handed to him; he thanked me listlessly and put them aside. That evening I said good night to my host early, as I had some writing to do, and later on spent an hour or two shooting stars with a sextant and working out our position. It was past one o’clock when I was ready to turn in, and to my surprise I saw a light under the Padre’s door and heard the sound of a voice. I called out, and hearing no reply, pushed at the big wooden door, which swung open. The feeble rays of light from one small oil-lamp were lost in the gloom of the far corners of the great bare room; but I could just make out Cornelio seated on the bench against the wall with his elbows pushed over the heavy well-worn table, his head resting on his hands, in rapt attention, whilst the Padre—a candle in one hand and a book in the other—was pacing up and down in front of the table, reading aloud from the pages of ‘Pepita Jimenes.’ “Hush!” he cried, holding up the book at me and not stopping in his walk, “he is just going to do it”; and I sat quietly on the bench whilst he read page after page of that delightfully told story. Then I crept quietly off to bed—my departure unobserved by them, so absorbed were they both in the story,—and fell asleep to the distant murmur of the Padre’s voice. He had taken up the book casually late in the evening and, once started, read it out loud from beginning to end.
CAJABON.
By the 18th of February the work of plotting the traverse from Lanquin to Cajabon was finished, and, after almost endless bother, the cargadores for the forest journey had been engaged and their loads arranged; so, bidding farewell to the Padre and Cornelio, with many handshakes and mutual expressions of goodwill, we set out on our way. My party consisted of Gorgonio, Carlos, José Domingo Lopez, and about twenty Indian cargadores. We had arranged to take with us one horse and three mules, although many years had passed since anyone had attempted to take animals over the track we proposed to follow, but we knew how necessary they would be to us when the dense forest was passed and we should emerge on the savannah lands of Peten. Until we were clear of the forest neither corn nor pasture would be met with, and unluckily neither the horse nor the mules were accustomed to feed on the leaves of the Ramon tree, which is the food usually given to animals employed in forest journeys. Ramon is not a fodder which either horses or mules take to readily, and it is in some cases only after days of starvation that they will eat it at all; but having once fed on Ramon they seem to like it as well as any other food, and it keeps them in excellent condition. These trees are seldom very numerous, and when there is much traffic along a forest-path they are so systematically stripped of their branches by the muleteers that it is often difficult to find an untouched tree within a mile of the track.
The first few days of our journey are pleasanter to think over than they were to go through. Twenty unwilling overladen Indian carriers in a damp and mosquito-haunted forest would try the temper of an angel. They dawdled along and made every sort of excuse to stop and readjust their packs, and we had to keep a sharp look-out to see that none of them wandered off to their milpas and gave us the slip altogether. The loads I had given them to carry were not too heavy, and included food enough to last a fortnight; moreover, arrangements had been made for further supplies to overtake us on the road. However, the men had not been satisfied, and each one had thought it necessary to bring with him an extra thirty or forty pounds’ weight of food on his own account. As a rule, it is no doubt the better plan to let Indians cater for themselves, but then there is always the danger that at the end of a few days they will tell you that all their food is finished, and propose a halt whilst they send to their homes or hunt round for supplies; and as time is of no importance to them, the delays may be endless. On the other hand, if you undertake to cater for them they never quite believe that you mean to go on doing so, and look on your supply of food as something to be feasted on at once, and the capacity of an Indian’s stomach for holding totoposte (parched corn cake) is a marvel to any white man.
Some years ago, when starting on a ten days’ journey through the forest from Coban to the Lake of Peten, I took a large quantity of totoposte with me, not to be eaten on the way, as each man carried his own food for the journey, but to enable me, when I reached the lake, to push on at once to the ruins of Tikál. The loads were most carefully arranged, and I set out feeling confident that no one was overburdened; but never in all my experience was there more growling and groaning. I began to think that in some unaccountable way we must have made a mistake in the weights, and I felt obliged to pick up some more carriers on the way to ease my men of part of their burdens; nevertheless the groaning and the grumbling did not cease. After a long and wearisome march we arrived at the village of Sacluc, and set about re-arranging our cargoes for the journey to Tikál. Then only did I find out that the totoposte had been secretly taken out of the packs and eaten during our march, and that the bulky burdens under which the mozos had been groaning were half made up of sticks and dead leaves. So skilfully had the change been made that even Gorgonio had been deceived, and there was no avoiding a delay of three or four days whilst a fresh and far more expensive supply of totoposte was being baked.