The West Indies and the Spanish Main

by Anthony Trollope

For it is not very easy to sit upon a mule under such circumstances. The bushes were so close upon me that one hand was required to guard my face from the thorns; my knees were constantly in contact with the stumps of trees, and when my knees were free from such difficulties, my shins were sure to be in the wars. Then the poor animal rolled so from side to side in his incredible struggles with the mud that it was frequently necessary to hold myself on by the pommel of the saddle. Added to this, it was essentially necessary to keep some sort of guide upon the creature's steps, or one's legs would be absolutely broken. For the mule cares for himself only, and not for his rider. It is nothing to him if a man's knees be put out of joint against the stump of a tree.

Splash, splash, slosh, slosh! on we went in this way for hours, almost without speaking. On such occasions one is apt to become mentally cross, to feel that the world is too hard for one, that one's own especial troubles are much worse than those of one's neighbours, and that those neighbours are unfairly favoured. I could not help thinking it very unjust that I should be fifteen stone, while Fitzm—— was only eight. And as for that distressed Britisher, he weighed nothing at all.

Splash, splash, slosh, slosh! we were at it all day. At Careblanco—the place of the white-faced pigs I understood it to mean;—they say that there is a race of wild hogs with white faces which inhabit the woods hereabouts—we overtook the post, and kept close to them afterwards. This was a pasture farm in the very middle of the forest, a bit of cleared land on which some adventurer had settled himself and dared to live. The adventurer himself was not there, but he had a very pretty wife, with whom my friend the lieutenant seemed to have contracted an intimate acquaintance on his previous journey up to San José.

But at Careblanco we only stopped two minutes, during which, however, it became necessary that the lieutenant should go into the rancho on the matter of some article of clothes which had been left behind on his previous journey; and then, again, on we went, slosh, slosh, splash, splash! My shins by this time were black and blue, and I held myself on to my mule chiefly by my spurs. Our way was still through dense forest, and was always either up or down hill. And here we came across the grandest scenery that I met with in the western world; scenery which would admit of raving, if it were given to me to rave on such a subject.

We were travelling for the most part along the side of a volcanic mountain, and every now and then the declivity would become so steep as to give us a full view down into the ravine below, with the prospect of the grand, steep, wooded hill on the other side, one huge forest stretching up the mountain for miles. At the bottom of the ravine one's eye would just catch a river, looking like a moving thread of silver wire. And yet, though the descent was so great, there would be no interruption to it. Looking down over the thick forest trees which grew almost from the side of a precipice, the eye would reach the river some thousand feet below, and then ascend on the other side over a like unbroken expanse of foliage.

Of course we both declared that we had never seen anything to equal it. In moments of ecstasy one always does so declare. But there was a monotony about it, and a want of grouping which forbids me to place it on an equality with scenery really of the highest kind, with the mountains, for instance, round Colico, with the head of the Lake of the Four Cantons, or even with the views of the upper waters of Killarney.

And then, to speak the truth, we were too much engulfed in mud, too thoughtful as to the troubles of the road, to enjoy it thoroughly. "Wonderful that; isn't it?" "Yes, very wonderful; fine break; for heaven's sake do get on." That is the tone which men are apt to adopt under such circumstances. Five or six pounds of thick mud clinging round one's boots and inside one's trousers do not add to one's enjoyment of scenery.

Mud, mud; mud, mud! At about five o'clock we splashed into another pasture farm in the middle of the forest, a place called San Miguel, and there we rested for that night. Here we found that our beef also must be thrown away, and that our bread was all gone. We had picked up some more hard-boiled eggs at ranchos on the road, but hard-boiled eggs to my companion were no more than grains of gravel to a barn-door fowl; they merely enabled him to enjoy his regular diet. At this place, however, we were able to purchase fowls—skinny old hens which were shot for us at a moment's warning. The price being, here and elsewhere along the road, a dollar a head. Tea and candles a ministering angel had given to me at the moment of my departure from San José. But for them we should have indeed been comfortless, thirsty, and in utter darkness. Towards evening a man gets tired of brandy and water, when he has been drinking it since six in the morning.

Our washing was done under great difficulties, as in these districts neither nature nor art seems to have provided for such emergencies. In this place I got my head into a tin pot, and could hardly extricate it. But even inside the houses and ranchos everything seemed to turn into mud. The floor beneath one's feet became mud with the splashing of the water. The boards were begrimed with mud. We were offered coffee that was mud to the taste and touch. I felt that the blood in my veins was becoming muddy.

And then we had another day exactly like the former, except that the ground was less steep, and the vistas of scenery less grand. The weather also was warmer, seeing that we were now on lower ground. Monkeys chattered on the trees around us, and the little congo ape roared like a lion. Macaws flew about, generally in pairs; and we saw white turkeys on the trees. Up on the higher forests we had seen none of these animals.