Golden Dreams and Leaden Realities

by George Payson

Managua is a pleasant city of ten or fifteen thousand inhabitants. The great cathedral is situated, like that at Leon, on one side of the plaza, but is far inferior in extent and magnificence. Our hotel also stood on the plaza; but lest the reader should form from this a too exalted notion of its appearance, I would add that it contained but two apartments, of moderate dimensions, one of which was occupied by the family, while the other served as a store-room and poultry house. There was, however, in the rear, a broad and spacious verandah where we ate our supper—after which we spread our blankets in a corner of the poultry house with a hen and brood of chickens in my right ear, and a duck quacking softly in my left.

At this place a part of our fellow-passengers becoming impatient of the slow rate at which we travelled, and fearful lest they should not reach San Juan in season, hired horses for the remainder of the journey—New York and Texas were among the number; but we were encumbered with too much baggage to follow their example, and Ohio had bought a whole regiment of parrots and paroquets that required his constant supervision, besides costing him a fortune in cages and bananas, which they ate with apparently equal relish.

Our hombre was occupied several hours the next morning in making a new axle. For want of an auger, the use of which simple instrument seemed unknown to him, he was obliged to cut the holes for the linchpins with a chisel; and this, in his hands, was a long and tedious operation. It was some satisfaction, however, to reflect that the work would not require to be done over again until he reached Granada, and might even last through the whole of his homeward journey.

Our road led to-day for several miles along the shore of Lake Leon. This is a large body of water resembling an inland sea; and some of our party, deceived by its extent, supposed it, at first, to be an arm of the ocean. A general halt was here ordered, and our hombres and muchachos, throwing off their light garments, were soon disporting themselves in the shallow water. They enjoyed this exercise so keenly, that it was with great difficulty we persuaded them to resume their march.

We stopped this night at Marsawa, a city of about the same size as Managua; and the next afternoon made our entry into Granada. It was Sunday, and the inhabitants, dressed in their best, were sitting in the open doors of their houses, exhibiting marks of greater opulence and refinement than we had yet witnessed. The grace and beauty of the women especially attracted our attention,—we seemed suddenly brought near to home, and to have been, all at once, set down in the midst of the nineteenth century, after so long travelling in mediæval darkness.

Granada, as already stated, is situated on Lake Nicaragua, and connected by the San Juan river with the Atlantic. It has thus become the great inland market for that part of Central America. The various goods imported into the country are brought up the river and across the lake in huge canoes, or in boats of the heaviest and most awkward construction. There were also three small schooners on the lake about the size of a common pleasure-boat, and capable of carrying thirty men apiece; but not one of these was at that time at Granada, though they had been sent for at the first intimation of our approach, and were expected to arrive in one or two days.

In the mean time a number of our companions, impatient of the delay, and deceived by the statements of interested parties, who assured them that that mode of conveyance was much to be preferred, embarked in one of the canoes for a voyage of ninety miles across a body of water famed for its sudden and capricious temper. We were strongly tempted to follow their example, but finally concluded to remain at Granada until the arrival of the schooners, which were now expected to arrive every hour. The hotel where we had taken lodgings was very spacious and commodious. It would not indeed equal the St. Nicholas in either of these particulars, but may well deserve that distinction when compared with the others we had visited during our route. There was not only a dining-room capable of accommodating one hundred guests, but there were several sleeping apartments of like generous proportions, and furnished with cot bedsteads, a luxury to which we had been lately wholly unaccustomed. Except at the little village of Nigarote, we had slept on nothing softer than the floor for weeks, and we at first felt some alarm at the thought of such an unnatural elevation. All these apartments were on the ground floor, and, with the kitchen and outhouses, entirely surrounded an open court about a hundred feet square.

The price of board at this hotel was one dollar a day, and for this we had an abundance of tough beef cooked with garlic, beans, French rolls, coffee and milk. We had also, by way of variety, a few eggs and chickens, and a very limited supply of butter.

Granada presents little attraction to the stranger—on one side was the deep forest through which we had travelled—on the other a burning plain, with a few scattered houses, stretching two miles away to the lake. Owing to the intense heat, we remained most of the time at our hotel, lounging in the hammocks slung under the veranda, or watching from the steps of the dining-room the lazy groups of the natives, or our own more fiery Saxons, as they hurried hither and thither on some important trifle.

No exhibition of passion is perhaps more amusing than that of a dispute between two Spaniards. Such volubility of utterance, such nervous flexibility of feature, such jerking spitefulness of emphasis, can nowhere find a parallel, except in the nocturnal colloquy of half a dozen enamoured grimalkins. A quarrel, the merits of which we could not determine, arose one day between our landlord and another of the same gunpowder fraternity. One of Hoe's eight-cylinder printing presses could hardly have kept pace with the impetuous torrent of words that streamed quivering from their lips—our sluggish consonants, compared with their nimble vowels, are like the mailed crusader opposed to the lithe and supple Saracen, when the greatest danger arises from the rapidity of the onset. After keeping up a continuous fire of words, like a rolling discharge of musketry or a redhot poker sizzling in a pail of water, for some ten minutes, our landlord suddenly seized a gun that stood in one corner of the bar, and levelled it with an expression of most determined ferocity at his vapouring antagonist. The admiring Californians, instantly opening to right and left, displayed a narrow lane, at the end of which was discovered the cunning Spaniard prostrate on all fours, and warily exposing to the fire of the enemy that part of his person which instinct, or perhaps experience, had taught him was best calculated to meet the assault. The next moment, by a skilful side movement, he precipitated himself down the steps into the street.—Our landlord, with a grim smile of satisfaction, restored the gun to its place, and the storm cleared away as rapidly as it commenced.