But I still carried Mexican cigarettes, a luxury in Guatemala, so we parted friends, with the manners of a special envoy taking leave of a prime minister. The only requirement was that I should not open my kodak within sight of this hotbed of military importance. I all but made the fatal error of passing between the sacred eave-post and the wall upon my exit, but sidestepped in time to escape unscathed, and left the great fortress behind and above me.
After all I had been far more fortunate than a fellow countryman I met later, who had had a $200 camera smashed by this same ragged "garrison."
Siesta time was past and I struck on out of town. In the last hut an old woman called out to know why I had gone down to the river, and showed some suspicion at my answer.
"There are so many countries trying to get our war plans," she explained.
A trail wide enough for single-wheeled vehicles crowded its way between jungle walls. In the breathless, blazing sunshine the sweat passed through my rucksack and into my formal city garments beyond, carrying the color of the sack with it. For some time no one was abroad except a dripping "gringo" and a rare cargador in barely the rags necessary to escape complete nakedness, who greeted me subserviently and gave me most of the road. The Indians of the region were inferior in physique to those of the Mexican plateau, ragged beyond words, and far from handsome in appearance. Their little thatched huts swarmed, however, and almost all displayed something to sell, chiefly strong native liquor in bottles that had seen long and varied service. There was nothing to eat but oranges green in color. The way was often strewn with hundreds of huge orange-colored ones, but they were more sour than lemons and often bitter. A tropical downpour drove me once into the not too effective shelter of the jungle, and with sunset a drizzle set in with a promise of increase. A woodchopper had told me I could not reach my proposed destination that night, but I pressed forward at my best pace up hill and down through an all but continuous vegetation and surprised myself by stumbling soon after dark upon electric-lighted Coatepeque, the first real town of Guatemala, and not a very real one at that.
However, a burly American ran a hotel where the bill for supper and lodging was only $15, and if the partitions of my room were bare they were of mahogany, as were also the springs of the bed. The pilfering of an extra mattress softened this misfortune somewhat, and toward morning it grew cool enough to stop sweating. When I descended in the morning, Ems and Dakin were sitting over their coffee and eggs. They had paid $5 each to ride in a covered bullock cart from Vado Ancho—and be churned to a pulp.
Reunited, we pushed on in the morning shadows. Ems and Dakin divided the weight of the former's suitcase; but even after the "Texican" had thrown away two heavy books on locomotive driving, both groaned under their loads. The sun of Guatemala does not lighten the burdens of the trail. Ems had boarded the bullock cart the proud possessor of a bar of soap, but this morning he found it a powder and sprinkled it along the way. Soap is out of keeping with Guatemalan local color anyway. Dense forests continued, but here almost all had an undergrowth of coffee bushes. Some of the largest coffee fincas of Guatemala lie along this road, producing annually to hundreds of thousands in gold. Such prosperity was not reflected in the population and toilers. The natives were ragged, but friendly, every man carrying a machete, generally in a leather scabbard, and the women almost without exception enormous loads of fruit. They were weak, unintelligent, pimple-faced mortals, speaking an Indian dialect and using Spanish only with difficulty. Ragged Indian girls were picking coffee here and there, even more tattered carriers lugged it in sacks and baskets to large, cement-floored spaces near the estate houses, where men shoveled the red berries over and over in the sun and old women hulled them in the shade of their huts.
Jungle trees, often immense and polished smooth as if they had been flayed of their bark, gave us dense cool shade, scented by countless wild flowers. But en cambio the soft dirt road climbed and wound and descended all but incessantly, gradually working its way higher, until we could look out now and then over hundreds of square miles of hot country with barely a break in all its expanse of dense, steaming vegetation. Coffee continued, but alternated now with the slender trees of rubber plantations, with their long smooth leaves, and already scarred like young warriors long inured to battle. The road was really only an enlarged trail, not laid out, but following the route of the first Indian who picked his way over these jungled hills. Huts were seldom lacking; poor, ragged, cheerful Indians never. In the afternoon the trail pitched headlong down and around through a rock-spilled barranco with two sheer walls of the densest jungle and forest shutting it in. Where it crossed a stream, Dakin and I found a shaded, sandy hollow scooped out behind a broad flat rock in the form of a huge bathtub of water, clearer than any adjective will describe. Ems, whose swarthy tint and strong features suggested the opposite, was the least able to endure the hardships of the road, and lay lifeless in the shade at every opportunity.
The road panted by a rocky zigzag up out of the ravine again and on over rough and hilly going. Here I fell into conversation with an Indian finca laborer, a slow, patient, ox-like fellow, to whom it had plainly never occurred to ask himself why he should live in misery and his employers in luxury. He spoke a slow and labored, yet considerable, Spanish, of which he was unable to pronounce the f or v; saying "pinca" for finca and "pale" for vale. Those of his class worked from five to five shoveling coffee or carrying it, with two hours off for breakfast and almuerzo, were paid one Guatemalan dollar a day, that is, a fraction over five cents in our money, and furnished two arrobas (fifty pounds) of corn and frijoles and a half-pound of salt a month. Yet there are no more trustworthy employees than these underpaid fellows. As pay-day approaches, one of these same ragged Indians is given a grain sack and a check for several thousand dollars gold and sent to the town where the finca owner does his banking, often several days' distant. The sack half filled with the ragged bills of the Republic and their customary microbes, the Indian shoulders it and tramps back across the country to the estate, stopping at night in some wayside hut and tossing the sack into a corner, perhaps to leave it for hours while he visits his friends in the vicinity. Yet though both the messenger and his hosts know the contents of his bundle, it is very rare that a single illegible billete disappears en route.
We plodded on into the night, but Ems could only drag at a turtle-pace, and it became evident we could not make Retalhuleu without giving him time to recuperate. The first large hut in the scattered village of Acintral gave us hospitality. It was earth-floored, with a few homemade chairs, and a bed with board floor. Though barely four feet wide, this was suggested as the resting-place of all three of us after a supper of jet-black coffee, native bread, and cheese. Dakin and I found it more than crowded, even after Ems had spread a petate, or grass-mat, on the ground. The room had no door, and women and girls wandered indifferently in and out of it as we undressed, one mite of barely six smoking a huge black cigar in the most business-like manner. The place was a species of saloon, like almost every hut along the road, and the shouting of the family and their thirsty townsmen seldom ceased even momentarily until after midnight.