III
I stopped at the leading hotel, operated—like most hotels on this coast—by a Chinaman.
It was the usual type of seaport hostelry, less comfortable and more expensive than those of the interior cities, but well stocked with fleas, bugs, liquor, and flirtatious servant maids.
“What does one do in this town for amusement?” I asked a native.
“Amusement?” He seemed a little surprised. “Why, señor, there are plenty of women.”
For occupation, the male population carried the baggage of passing travelers. The female population took in washing. Rather dark, and not distinguished for beauty, the younger ones called at the hotel for the laundry; the older ones did the work. They took the clothes to the waterfront, laid the garments on flat rocks, and pounded the buttons off with a stout club. Then they left them to bleach, spreading them out on scrubby little bushes whose berries stained them with yellow spots, while they themselves—already stripped to the waist for comfort—retired to the shallow water to immerse themselves through the hot mid-day. In the evening they collected the garments, carried them home, and ripped them into shreds with rusty irons. Finally, having wrapped them into a neat bundle with the least-ruined articles on top, the younger girls brought them back with smiling countenances, and the inquiry:
“Is that all, señor?”
As a town, Amapala was not unpicturesque. Its whitewashed houses, beneath red-tiled roofs, were set amid palms and bougainvillea. If at noon it seemed to wither under the dry white heat of a tropic sun, there was usually a breeze in the evening, with a tang of salt from the ocean. Across the Gulf of Fonseca, if one looked beyond the fleet of scows and lighters in the foreground, one could see myriad islands and the cones of several Salvadorean volcanoes. There was a play of red and gold at sunset, then the purple and silver of twilight, and finally a glorious night with stars twinkling above and fireflies below, and the glare of the volcanoes tracing a crimson path through the waters of the bay.
Its only point of interest, however, was the cliff where occurred a bloody incident in a long-past war between Nicaragua and Honduras. Some many years ago Nicaragua, having confiscated a smuggling schooner, had armed it with a cannon, and feeling rather cocky in its possession of a navy, had dispatched it to fight Honduras. It came up to Amapala and fired one shot. The bloody incident occurred when a Honduranean, standing on the cliff, craned his neck to see where the shot landed, and fell into the Gulf of Fonseca.
From the cone of the extinct volcano that rose above Amapala, one could see Honduras, Salvador, and Nicaragua. Each was but a few hours’ distance from the other, yet the traveler might wait indefinitely for a boat. Shields, my companion on the auto trip from Guatemala to Santa Ana, was now in Amapala, also bound for Nicaragua, and had already been waiting over a week.