In the morning heavy mountain clouds and a swirling mist made photography impossible, but my host was not of the grade of intelligence that made this simple explanation possible. He led the way into the windowless hut, in a corner of which lay a woman of perhaps thirty in a dog-litter of a bed enclosed by curtains hung from the rafters. The walls were black with coagulated smoke. The woman, yellow and emaciated with months of fever, groaned distressingly as the curtains were drawn aside, but her solicitous husband insisted on propping her up in bed and holding her with an arm about the shoulders while I "put them both on paper." His purpose, it turned out, was to send the picture to the shrine of "la Virgen de los Remedios" that she might cure the groaning wife of her ailment, and he insisted that it must show "bed and all and the color of her face" that the Virgin might know what was required of her. I went through the motions of taking a photograph and explained as well as was possible why it could not be delivered at once, with the added information to soften his coming disappointment that the machine sometimes failed. The fellow merely gathered the notion that I was but a sorry magician at best, who had my diabolical hocuspocus only imperfectly under control, and he did not entirely succeed in keeping his sneers invisible. I offered quinine and such other medicines as were to be found in my traveling case, but he had no faith in worldly remedies.
By nine the day was brilliant. There was an unusual amount of level grassy trail, though steep slopes were not lacking. During the morning I passed several bands of ragged soldiers meandering northward in rout order and some distance behind them their bedraggled women and children, all afoot and carrying their entire possessions on their heads and backs. Frequently a little wooden cross or a heap of stones showed where some traveler had fallen by the wayside, perhaps at the hands of his fellow-man; for the murder rate, thanks largely to drink and vendettas, is high in Honduras. It might be less if assassins faced the death penalty, instead of being merely shut within prisons from which an active man could soon dig his way to freedom with a pocket-knife, if he did not have the patience to wait a few months until a new revolution brought him release or pardon.
The futility of Honduranean life was illustrated here and there. On some vast hillside capable of producing food for a multitude the eye made out a single milpa, or tiny corn-field, fenced off with huge slabs of mahogany worth easily ten times all the corn the patch could produce in a lifetime—or rather, worth nothing whatever, for a thing is valuable only where it is in demand. At ten I lost the way, found it again, and began an endless, rock-strewn climb upward through pines, tacking more times than I could count, each leg of the ascent a toilsome journey in itself. Not the least painful of road experiences in Honduras is to reach the summit of such a range after hours of heavy labor, to take perhaps a dozen steps along the top of the ridge, and then find the trail pitching headlong down again into a bottomless gorge, from which comes up the joyous sound of a mountain stream that draws the thirsty traveler on at double speed, only to bring him at last to a rude bridge over a precipitous, rock-sided river impossible to reach before attacking the next slope staring him in the face.
Luckily I foraged an imitation dinner in San Juan, a scattering of mud huts on a broad upland plain, most of the adult inhabitants of which were away at some work or play in the surrounding hills. Cattle without number dotted the patches of unlevel meadows, but not a drop of milk was to be had. Roosters would have made the night a torture, yet three eggs rewarded the canvassing of the entire hamlet. These it is always the Honduranean custom to puncture with a small hole before dropping into hot water, no doubt because there was no other way of getting the universal uncleanliness into them. Nor did I ever succeed in getting them more than half cooked. Once I offered an old woman an extra real if she would boil them a full three minutes without puncturing them. She asserted that without a hole in the end "the water could not get in to cook them," but at length solemnly promised to follow my orders implicitly. When the eggs reappeared they were as raw as ever, though somewhat warm, and each had its little punctured hole. I took the cook to task and she assured me vociferously that "they broke themselves." Apparently there was some superstition connected with the matter which none dared violate. At any rate I never succeeded in being served un-holed eggs in all rural Honduras.
Not only have these people of the wilderness next to nothing to eat, but they are too indolent to learn to cook what they have. The thick, doughy tortillas and half-boiled black beans, accompanied by black, unstrained coffee with dirty crude sugar and without milk, were not merely monotonous, but would have been fatal to civilized man of sedentary habits. Only the constant toil and sweat, and the clear water of mountain stream offset somewhat the evil effects under which even a horseman would probably have succumbed. The inhabitants of the Honduranean wilds are distinctly less human in their habits than the wild men of the Malay Peninsula. For the latter at least build floors of split bamboo above the ground. Without exaggeration the people of this region were more uncleanly than their gaunt and yellow curs, for the latter carefully picked a spot to lie in while the human beings threw themselves down anywhere and nonchalantly motioned to a guest to sit down or drop his bundle among fresh offal. They literally never washed, except by accident, and handled food and filth alternately with a child-like blandness.
I was just preparing to leave San Juan when a woman came from a neighboring hut to request my assistance at a child-birth! In this region all "gringoes" have the reputation of being physicians, and the inhabitants will not be undeceived. I forcibly tore myself away and struck for the surrounding wilderness.
From soon after noon until sunset I climbed incessantly among tumbled rocks without seeing a human being. A cold wind howled through a vast pine forest of the highest altitude of my Honduranean journey—more than six thousand feet above sea-level. Night fell in wild solitude, but I could only plod on, for to sleep out at this height would have been dangerous. Luckily a corner of moon lighted up weirdly a moderately wide trail. I had tramped an hour or more into the night when a flickering light ahead among the trees showed what might have been a camp of bandits, but which proved to be only that of a group of muleteers, who had stacked their bales of merchandise around three sides under an ancient roof on poles and rolled up in their blankets close to the blazing wood fire they had built to the leeward of it.
They gave no sign of offering me place and I marched on into the howling night. Perhaps four miles beyond I made out a cluster of habitations pitched on the summit and slope of a hill leaning toward the trail with nothing above it on any side to break the raging wind. An uproar of barking dogs greeted my arrival, and it was some time before an inmate of one of the dark and silent huts summoned up courage to peer out upon me. He emerged armed with a huge stick and led the way to a miserable hovel on the hilltop, where he beat on the door and called out that an "hombrecito" sought posada. This opened at last and I entered a mud room in one end of which a fire of sticks blazed fitfully. A woman of perhaps forty, though appearing much older, as is the case with most women of Honduras, lay on a wooden bed and a girl of ten huddled among rags near the fire. I asked for food and the woman ordered the girl to heat me black coffee and tortillas. The child was naked to the waist, though the bitter cold wind howled with force through the hut, the walls and especially the gables and roof of which were far from whole. The woman complained of great pain in her right leg, and knowing she would otherwise groan and howl the night through in the hope of attracting the Virgin's attention, I induced her to swallow two sedative pills. The smoke made me weep as I swung my hammock from two soot-blackened rafters, but the fire soon went out and I awoke from the first doze shivering until the hut shook. The temperature was not low compared with our northern winters, but the wind carried a penetrating chill that reached the marrow of the bones. I rose and tried unsuccessfully to relight the fire. The half-naked girl proved more skilful and I sat huddled on a stool over the fire, alternately weeping with the smoke and all but falling into the blaze as I dozed. The pills had little effect on my hostess. I gave her three more, but her Honduranean stomach was evidently zinc-lined and she groaned and moaned incessantly. I returned to my hammock and spent several dream-months at the North Pole before I was awakened at first cockcrow by the old woman kneeling on the earth floor before a lithograph of the Virgin surrounded by withered pine branches, wailing a singsong prayer. She left off at length with the information that her only hope of relief was to make a pilgrimage to the "Virgen de los Remedios," and ordered the girl to prepare coffee. I paid my bill of two reales and gave the girl one for herself, evidently the largest sum she had ever possessed, if indeed she remained long in possession of it after I took my hobbling and shivering departure.
A cold and wind-swept hour, all stiffly up or down, brought me to Esperanza, near which I saw the first wheeled vehicle of Honduras, a contraption of solid wooden wheels behind gaunt little oxen identical with those of northwest Spain even to the excruciating scream of its greaseless axle. In the outskirts two ragged, hoof-footed soldiers sprang up from behind the bushes of a hillside and came down upon me, waving their muskets and screaming:
"A'onde va? D'onde viene? Have you a pass to go through our department?"