I retired to the lighter, and discovering a sheltered nook among the sacks of beans, rolled up in my blanket. There was a splendid moon overhead. The black jungle, illumined now and then with patches of misty gray, slid past in mysterious procession. At times I would awaken as the motor stopped and the native boatmen climbed over me to guide us with long poles through rippling shallows. Sometimes the claw-like branches of a half-submerged tree came racing at us, as though shooting upstream to seize us; there would be much frantic shouting, and furious work with the guiding-poles as we dodged it; then I would settle back to another nap, lulled by the music of swift waters, and pitying the other passengers huddled in cramped discomfort aboard the launch.
FOR THREE DAYS THE BOATMEN POLED THE LAUNCH THROUGH SHALLOWS FRAMED IN RANK GREEN JUNGLE
But the pity was premature. Without warning the heavens opened up, and poured down a perfect deluge of chilling rain, and I found myself the only passenger not under a roof and with no space left under the awning. I had not known that every season was rainy season on the San Juan. And the deluge fell intermittently throughout the night. Drawing the blanket over my head, I burrowed down between two bean-sacks, where presently a boatman rushing across the scow with his pole gave a leap and planted both bare feet in my face.
“Pardon, señor, but you looked like part of the cargo!”
In the morning we docked at Puerto Castillo, a string of aged wooden shanties bordering the river, shrouded in an unceasing drizzle of mist. There were some especially dangerous rapids here, and the women were landed while the rest of us charged downstream through boiling foam. Our launch bumped and grated over the rocks as we plunged through the shallow falls, but the current swept us on, and we came finally into deeper pools below, where the women, straggling along the shore-trail, rejoined us, and crawled over one another as each sought to find her own baggage among the mixture of sacks, bundles, baskets and boxes, and to extract therefrom the ingredients for breakfast.
Each passenger foraged for himself. For three days we chugged downstream through rank green jungle with bits of fog clinging to its edges, through shallows and rapids, through drizzling showers. Every one had taken the precaution to bring food, which we ate without cooking. Now and then, if we stopped at a thatched hut, a native woman could be persuaded to boil coffee, but it was seldom that we stopped long enough. With both sexes packed tightly into an open launch for many hours at a time, there was necessary a complete abandonment of the modesties which civilized society regards as imperative. When passengers complained, the captain agreed with them sympathetically, in the fatalistic fashion of these people, as though he felt that the discomfort were something to be deplored, but not to be remedied.
The captain was in reality a “Colonel” by title. Several of the men passengers were “Generals.” Most Nicaraguans of any social standing have a military title of some sort, earned in a long-past revolution. Two or three of the women were the wives of government officials stationed in Bluefields or other isolated east coast towns, and were ladies of refinement. But contiguity was productive of democracy, and both ladies and Generals joined the peons in lamentation of common misery.
The life of the party was a stout woman with a machete in the bosom of her voluminous soiled shirtwaist. Her seven children were constantly tumbling about over the other passengers to the annoyance of every one, and her admonitions that she would cut their throats if they did not sit still, illustrated by a waving of the machete, had little effect upon them. On the lake steamer, she had led the mournful chorus of “Ay! Ay! Ay!” but she was now in good spirits and prepared at all times to conduct the conversation.
Her favorite theme was her romances.