Golden Dreams and Leaden Realities

by George Payson

After an excellent supper, which, besides the dishes included in our bill of fare, contained several that were entirely new to us, we threw ourselves into the hammocks that were slung in the little shop and composed ourselves to sleep. But the fumes of garlic and aguadiente, the glancing of lights before my half-shut eyes,—I have the misfortune to sleep, like the weasel, with one eye half open,—and an interrupted note of preparation buzzing in my ears, kept all my senses on the alert. At two in the morning we were summoned to breakfast, and this time with a reason; for a long march was before us, and our hombres desired to make an early start. The breakfast exceeded in variety and abundance anything that had been set before us for months; and, if our entertainers had understood English, they would have been highly amused by our involuntary exclamations of delight.

The language of inarticulate sounds, however, is pretty much the same the world over; and Dr. Johnson over his leg of mutton, and Sidney Smith's South Sea islander over his slice of broiled missionary, would have had no difficulty in responding to each other's emotions. When our repast was ended, our host, with an enlarged and comprehensive liberality, of which we had hitherto found no specimen among his countrymen, insisted upon our drinking his health in a glass of his own aguadiente; and we parted from him, his wife, and daughter, with expressions of mutual good-will, which lasted on our part as long as the smack of his hospitality still lingered on our palate.

The length of this day's journey was rendered more fatiguing by the various delays that we encountered. Among the other ingenious novelties in the construction of our conveyance, we found that the axle, now worn almost in two, was secured to the body simply by strips of hide. These gradually loosened by the alternations of wet and dry, and the violent strain to which they were subjected, till at length the axle turned completely over, and thus brought so large a portion of the load on to the heads of the oxen as fairly forced their noses into the dirt. But our hombre proved himself equal to the emergency; and, unyoking the oxen, he stationed Ohio at the pole to hold it as high as possible, while he slipt under the cart and went to work in restoring the axle to its proper place with a readiness and dexterity for which we had not given him credit.

This nice and difficult operation was at length completed, but our hombre still showed no inclination to set forward. We questioned,—we bribed,—we expostulated in vain. Ohio bitterly lamented his ignorance of Spanish; which prevented him from cursing the fellow in his own vocabulary, but belaboured him with all the sturdy English oaths he could muster, which fell on his imperturbable stupidity like drops of rain on the hide of a rhinoceros. In the midst of the shower he took from the cart an axe no bigger than a hatchet, with a handle four feet long, and disappeared in the woods, leaving us sitting on a rotten log and hardly knowing whether to laugh or cry.

Si examined his revolver and walked on ahead, under the pleasing illusion that he should find some game; the others soon followed, leaving us in charge of the cart. The wheezing sounds of the hombre's axe were the only sounds that disturbed the immense silence; except, now and then, we heard the far-off halloo of some half frantic driver urging on his weary cattle. These gradually died away in the distance, and we were left entirely alone. But such hours are often the most delightful periods of a journey like ours. We forgot the cities we had past, and the road by which we had come so far; our connection with the world seemed broken, and we felt like a man who had climbed to the moon and then thrown down the ladder by which he had ascended. Robinson Crusoe in his desert island,—a frog at the bottom of his well,—hardly a toad in his lump of granite, could be enclosed in a profounder solitude. I tried to image to myself the great cities, the mighty empires, that had once an existence in my brain; but the feverish pulsation of their hearts, and the hum and stir of their ceaseless bustle, were neither felt in the ground nor visible in the sleeping leaves.

But our hombre now returned, and put to flight my agreeable fancies. Like Robinson Crusoe's man Friday, his appearance on the scene at once dispelled the delightful illusion—there was another man in the world, and if one, why not a thousand? He carried on his shoulder a rough stick some six feet long, which we at once conjectured to be designed for an axle. Our fears were now excited lest he intended to finish it before proceeding any farther, but he speedily put an end to our apprehensions by stowing it in the cart; and, then, reyoking his oxen, we once more found ourselves in motion.

The road, since leaving Realejo, had been remarkably level. We had not met with a single hill worthy of the name, and were not a little surprised, on leaving the forest, to find ourselves on the very edge of a lofty and precipitous elevation and overlooking an immense extent of country. As far as we could see, the surface of the ground was broken into black irregular ridges, as if it had been occupied, for ages, by successive generations of charcoal burners, or had been turned up into huge furrows by the careless ploughing of some clumsy Brobdingnagian boor. The road under our feet was almost as hard as iron, and seemed macadamized with scoria from a blacksmith's forge. At a little distance on the left we discovered what seemed, at first sight, the ruins of an oven or forge. The arch yet remained nearly entire, resting on a pile of fragments; and it required no great effort of the imagination to suppose that I was surveying the ruins of a vast and magnificent city, that, by some fearful convulsion of nature, had been reduced to this state of utter desolation. This fancy was partly true. At some period, apparently not very remote, the volcanoes that stood around the horizon had combined to lay waste the beautiful plain at their feet. In place of the cool green forest, a mass of black, naked lava now presented itself, that seemed hardly to want the touch of the match to burst again into a mighty conflagration. The arch that we had seen, was formed by the lava cooling round the prostrate trunk of a huge tree, that had perished in its embrace like Semele in the arms of Jove.

The road now suddenly descended by a long irregular flight of stairs worn in the crumbling stone. There was no possibility of riding even if we had been willing to lose the strange novelty of the scenery—the wheels fell with the regularity, and almost with the force, of trip-hammers, and with a decided, uncompromising jolt that threatened the immediate dislocation of the axle. Near the bottom, the path had been worn, as if by a winter torrent, into a deep and narrow channel, just wide enough for a single cart;—caves had been hollowed in the sides, and we involuntarily quickened our pace, lest we should be crushed beneath the overhanging banks. Having thus reached the foot of the lofty table land on which we had been travelling, we found ourselves on the edge of a wide valley that held the lakes Leon and Nicaragua in its lap, and stretched one arm, by the San Juan river, away to the Atlantic. Little of the country, however, was now visible, for in addition to the thickening twilight, a thunder cloud was coming rapidly up from the horizon, and soon filled the whole heavens. The first big drops began to fall. Ohio, Texas, and New York hastily scrambled into the cart and, as Si and myself followed, a flash of lightning gave the signal for the contest to commence, and was instantly extinguished in the flood itself had created. The rain, the thunder, and the lightning that now followed hard after us, were such as are met with only in the tropics;—the road soon became a river in earnest, and as the lightning flashed on the swollen and turbid waters, and the cart rocked and pitched with even more than its usual violence, it required but a slight exercise of imagination to feel that we were in a storm at sea. But the cloud having given us this taste of its quality, swept away, and the stars came out, old and young, in their pleasant family circles. There was yet no sign of human habitation. "Quantos ligos a Managua?" we had demanded twenty times, of a few chance travellers, and of our own invaluable hombre. One replied that Managua was four leagues off; and, after travelling steadily for half an hour, we met another who told us it was six.

At length we discovered the lights of a village, and Ohio, in his eagerness, walked on before. But our hombre, instead of stopping, as we expected, held straight on his course, and to our impatient inquiries, "What place is this? Where is Managua?" as curtly answered, "Marteiris,—Managua,—quatro ligos." Another hour we dragged on, and finally crossed the plaza at Managua just as the moon had climbed to the topmost tower of the cathedral.