Having occasion to be in Guatemala City that day, I rose at two and, swallowing a cup of black coffee and two raw eggs and paying a bill of $12, struck out to cover the two long leagues left to Retalhuleu in time to catch the six-o'clock train. The moon on its waning quarter had just risen, but gave little assistance during an extremely difficult tramp. All was blackest darkness except where it cast a few silvery streaks through the trees, the road a mere wild trail left by the rainy season far rougher than any plowed field, where it would have been only too easy to break a leg or sprain an ankle. Bands of dogs, barking savagely, dashed out upon me from almost every hut. Besides four small rivers with little roofed bridges, there were many narrower streams or mud-holes to wade, and between them the way twisted and stumbled up and down over innumerable hills that seemed mountains in the unfathomable darkness. When I had slipped and sprawled some two hours, a pair of Indians, the first to be found abroad, gave the distance as "dos leguas," in other words, the same as when I had started. I redoubled my speed, pausing only once to call for water where a light flickered in a hut, and seemed to have won the race when at the edge of the town I came to a river that required me to strip to the waist. As I sprinted up the hill beyond, the sound of a departing train drifted out of the darkness ahead and an Indian informed me that it had been scheduled to leave at five. Fortunately I continued, for it turned out to be a freight, and the daily passenger left at six, so that just as the east began to turn gray I was off on the long ride to the capital.
The train takes twelve hours to make this run of 129 miles by a three-foot-gage railroad, stopping at every cluster of huts along the way. The third-class coach was little more than a box-car with two rough benches along its sides. The passengers were unprepossessing; most of them ragged, all of them unclean, generally with extremely bad teeth, much-pimpled faces, emaciated, and of undeveloped physique, their eyes still possessing some of the brightness but lacking the snap and glisten of those of Tehuantepec and the plateau. Many were chrome-yellow with fever. Ragged officers of law and disorder were numerous, often in bare feet, the same listless inefficiency showing in their weak, unproductive, unshaven features. The car grew so crowded I went to sit on the platform rail, as had a half-dozen already, though large signs on the door forbade it.
It was after noon when we reached the first important town, Esquintla. Here the tropics ended and the train began to climb, so slowly we could have stepped off anywhere, the vegetation visibly changing in character with every mile. On the now crowded platform two natives alternately ordered American beer of the train-boy, at $5 a bottle! At Palin we were assailed by tattered vendors of all manner of fruit, enormous pineapples selling for sixty guatemalteco cents. Amatitlan also swarmed with hawkers, but this time of candy in the form of animals of every known and imaginable species. Thereafter we wound round beautiful Lake Amatitlan, a dark, smooth stretch of water, swarming with fish and bottomless, according to my fellow platformers, flanked by sloping, green, shrub-clad banks that reflected themselves in it. The train crossed the middle of the lake by a stone dyke and climbed higher and ever higher, with splendid views of the perfect cone-shaped volcanoes Agua and Panteleón that have gradually thrown themselves up to be the highest in Guatemala and visible from almost every part of the republic. It was growing dark when the first houses of Guatemala City appeared among the trees, and gradually and slowly we dragged into the station. A bare-footed policeman on the train took the names and biographies of all on board, as another had already done at Esquintla, and we were free to crowd out into the ragged, one-story city with its languid mule-cars.
In the "Hotel Colon" opposite Guatemala's chief theater and shouldering the president's house, which is tailor-shop and saloon below, the daily rate was $12. The food was more than plentiful, but would have been an insult to the stomach of a harvest-hand, the windowless room was musty and dirty, the walls splashed, spotted, and torn, and the bed was by far the worst I had occupied south of the Rio Grande, having not only a board floor but a mattress that seemed to be stuffed with broken and jagged rocks. Notwithstanding all which I slept the clock round.
If there is any "sight" in Guatemala City besides its slashing sunlight and its surrounding volcanoes, and perhaps its swarms of Indians trotting to and from the market on Sundays, it is the relief map of the entire Republic inside the race-course. This is of cement, with real water to represent the lakes and oceans and (when it is turned on) the rivers. Every town, railway, and trail of any importance is marked, an aid to the vagabond that should be required by law of every country. On it I picked out easily the route of my further travels. The map covers a space as large as a moderate-sized house and is seen in all its details from the two platforms above it. Its only apparent fault is that the mountains and volcanoes are out of all proportion in height. But exaggeration is a common Central-American failing.
The city is populous, chiefly with shoeless inhabitants, monotonously flat, few buildings for dread of earthquake being over one story, even the national palace and cathedral sitting low and squat. An elevation of five thousand feet gives it a pleasant June weather, but life moves with a drowsy, self-contented air. Its people are far more obliging than the average of Mexico and have little or none of the latter's sulkiness or half-insolence. Here reigns supreme Estrada Cabrera; exactly where very few know, for so great is his dislike to assassination that he jumps about incessantly from one of his one-story residences to another, perhaps, as his people assert, by underground passages, for he is seldom indeed seen in the flesh by his fond subjects. In less material manifestations he is omnipresent and few are the men who have long outlived his serious displeasure. A man of modest ability but of extremely suspicious temperament, he keeps the reins of government almost entirely in his own hands, running the country as if it were his private estate, which for some years past it virtually has been. It is a form of government not entirely unfitted to a people in the bulk utterly indifferent as to who or what rules them so they are left to loaf in their hammocks in peace, and no more capable of ruling themselves than of lifting themselves by their non-existent boot-straps. Outwardly life seems to run as smoothly as elsewhere, and the casual passer-by does not to his knowledge make the acquaintance of those reputed bands of adventurers from many climes said to carry out swiftly and efficiently every whispered command of Guatemala's invisible ruler.
On Sunday a bull-fight was perpetrated in the plaza de toros facing the station. It was a dreary caricature of the royal sport of Spain. The plaza was little more than a rounded barnyard, the four gaunt and cowardly animals with blunted horns virtually lifeless, picadors and horses were conspicuous by their absence, and the two matadors were not even skilful butchers. A cuadrilla of women did the "Suerte de Tancredo" on one another's backs—as any one else could have on his head or in a rocking-chair—and the only breath of excitement was when one of the feminine toreras got walked on by a fear-quaking animal vainly seeking an exit. All in all it was an extremely poor newsboys' entertainment, a means of collecting admissions for the privilege of seeing to-morrow's meat prepared, the butchers skinning and quartering the animals within the enclosure in full sight of the disheveled audience.
The train mounted out of the capital with much winding, as many as three sections of track one above another at times, and, once over the range, fell in with a river on its way to the Atlantic. The country grew dry and Mexican, covered with fine white dust and grown with cactus. At Zacapa, largest town of the line, Dakin was already at work in a machine-shop on wheels in the railroad yards, and Ems was preparing to take charge of one of the locomotives. Descending with the swift stream, we soon plunged into thickening jungle, growing even more dense than that of Tehuantepec, with trees, plants, and all the stationary forms of nature struggling like an immense multitude fighting for life, the smaller and more agile climbing the sturdier, the weak and unassertive trampled to death underfoot on the dank, sunless ground. We crossed the now considerable river by a three-span bridge, and entered the banana country. English-speaking Negroes became numerous, and when we pulled in at the station of Quiraguá, the collection of bamboo shanties I had expected was displaced by several new and modern bungalows on the brow of a knoll overlooking the railroad. Here was one of the great plantations of the United Fruit Company. From the veranda of the office building broad miles of banana plants stretched away to the southern mountains. Jamaican Negroes were chiefly engaged in the banana culture, and those from our Southern States did the heavier and rougher work. Their wages ran as high as a dollar gold a day, as against a Guatemalan peso for the native peons of the coffee estates in other sections. Much of the work was let out on contract. There were a number of white American employees, college-trained in some cases, and almost all extremely youthful. The heat here was tropical and heavy, the place being a bare three hundred feet above sea-level where even clothing quickly molds and rots. My fellow countrymen had found the most dangerous pastimes in this climate to be drinking liquor and eating bananas, while the mass of employees more often came to grief in the feuds between the various breeds of Negroes and with the natives.
In the morning a handcar provided with a seat and manned by two muscular Carib Negroes carried me away through the banana jungle by a private railroad. The atmosphere was thick and heavy as soured milk. A half-hour between endless walls of banana plants brought me to a palm-leaf hut, from which I splashed away on foot through a riot of wet jungle to the famous ruins of Quiraguá. Archeologists had cleared a considerable square in the wilderness, still within the holdings of the fruit company, felling many enormous trees; but the place was already half choked again with compact undergrowth. There were three immense stone pillars in a row, then two others leaning at precarious angles, while in and out through the adjacent jungle were scattered carved stones in the forms of frogs and other animals, clumsily depicted, a small calendar stone, and an immense carved rock reputed to have been a place of sacrifice. Several artificial mounds were now mere stone hills overgrown with militant vegetation, as were remnants of old stone roadways. Every stone was covered with distinct but crudely carved figures, the most prominent being that of a king with a large Roman nose but very little chin, wearing an intricate crown surmounted by a death's-head, holding a scepter in one hand and in the other what appeared to be a child spitted on a toasting fork. All was of a species of sandstone that has withstood the elements moderately well, especially if, as archeologists assert, the ruins represent a city founded some three thousand years ago. Some of the faces, however, particularly those toward the east and south from which come most of the storms, were worn almost smooth and were covered with moss and throttling vegetation. Through it all a mist that was virtually a rain fell incessantly, and ground and jungle reeked with a clinging mud and dripping water that soaked through shoes and garments.