OFF TO THE WAR.
The next day Mrs. Rizal and her companion, known as Hilario Agonoy, set out into the country to join Saguanaldo.
After they had proceeded a few miles beyond the city they walked along through the jungle over a trail that was rough, stumpy, stony, and at places almost overgrown and hidden by bamboo growths, trees, ferns, and tropical grasses. Occasionally they came to a grass hut in the midst of a little clearing, and here the friendly peasants, who for the most part, knew Mrs. Rizal, extended their hospitality in the form of invitations to remain with them. In places the women would be at work in the rice fields or cultivating tobacco or sugar cane. They were barefoot and bare armed, wearing only shifts that but partly enveloped them, meagerly concealing their fine physiques. Sometimes a man, barefoot and wearing only two garments, would be seen following the carabao, the native ox, as it dragged the wooden plow that scratched the soil.
There were fields of abace or native hemp, rice and indigo. Sometimes the pilgrims would pass through groves of mahogany or cashu and see men at work with bolos, felling trees for lumber, or with sierras[1] slowly cutting boards from teque or mahogany. Sometimes they saw them grinding cane in the trapiche[2]. Sometimes at night they saw the zanita, the Philippine bee, working by moonlight and storing its honey on the underside of slanting branches; and one day, when the bees were asleep Agonoy climbed a tree while the two laughed at his struggles, and the honey he obtained constituted their supper. They passed haciendas[3] and pueblos[4]. Once they came upon a cemetery where a couple of corpses were hanging, because the friends of the dead could or would not put up enough money to pay for the continuous burial in consecrated ground. Occasionally they were “given a lift,” to use an American expression, on a carata, behind a carabao. They saw at times the timid galina del monte, the wild chickens that ranged the forests, and at other times were regaled with the anona or custard apple.
Now and then there were streams to cross. For the most part these were waded or passed over on logs felled to bridge them, though in a few cases there were rustic bridges made of bamboo curiously woven together.
Everywhere poverty was visible, poverty abject and pitiable.
Now and then they came to villages where there were fine brick churches and conventos; and a few other good buildings, beside many huts that under the operation of the Spanish law poor people were enabled to build. The churches were guarded by American soldiers, and in almost every village the inevitable convento was occupied by officers of the American army. Invariably the friar lands were better cultivated and of a better quality than elsewhere, and resembled the old plantations in the American southern states when they were kept in good condition by slave labor; for the peasants bore the marks of poverty and hard work.