A DRAWER OF WATER
We stopped for our first meal at a bare place on the top of a mountain, where there were a half-dozen mud huts. Jeffs went from one to another of these and collected a few eggs, and hired a woman to cook them and to make us some coffee. We added tinned things and bread to this luncheon, which, as there were no benches, we ate seated on the ground, kicking at the dogs and pigs and chickens, that snatched in a most familiar manner at the food in our hands. In Honduras there are so few hotels that travellers are entirely dependent for food and for a place in which to sleep upon the people who live along the trail, who are apparently quite hardened to having their homes invaded by strangers, and their larders levied upon at any hour of the day or night.
Even in the larger towns and so-called cities we slept in private houses, and on the solitary occasion when we were directed to a hotel we found a bare room with a pile of canvas cots heaped in one corner, to which we were told to help ourselves. There was a real hotel, and a very bad one, at the capital, where we fared much worse than we had often done in the interior; but with these two exceptions we were dependent for shelter during our entire trip across Honduras upon the people of the country. Sometimes they sent us to sleep in the town-hall, which was a large hut with a mud floor, and furnished with a blackboard and a row of-benches, and sometimes with stocks for prisoners; for it served as a school or prison or hotel, according to the needs of the occasion.
We were equally dependent upon the natives for our food. We carried breakfast bacon and condensed milk and sardines and bread with us, and to these we were generally able to add, at least once a day, coffee and eggs and beans. The national bread is the tortilla. It is made of cornmeal, patted into the shape of a buckwheat cake between the palms of the hands, and then baked. They were generally given to us cold, in a huge pile, and were burned on both sides, but untouched by heat in the centre. The coffee was always excellent, as it should have been, for the Honduranian coffee is as fine as any grown in Central America, and we never had too much of it; but of eggs and black beans there was no end. The black-bean habit in Honduras is very general; they gave them to us three times a day, sometimes cold and sometimes hot, sometimes with bacon and sometimes alone. They were frequently served to us in the shape of sandwiches between tortillas, and again in the form of pudding with chopped-up goat’s meat. At first, and when they were served hot, I used to think them delicious. That seems very long ago now. When I was at Johnstown at the time of the flood, there was a soda cracker, with jam inside, which was served out to the correspondents in place of bread; and even now, if it became a question of my having to subsist on those crackers, and the black beans of Central America, or starve, I am sure I should starve, and by preference.
We were naturally embarrassed at first when we walked into strange huts; but the owners seemed to take such invasions with apathy and as a matter of course, and were neither glad to see us when we came, nor relieved when we departed. They asked various prices for what they gave us—about twice as much as they would have asked a native for the same service; at least, so Jeffs told us; but as our bill never amounted to more than fifty cents apiece for supper, lodging, and a breakfast the next morning, they cannot be said to have robbed us. While the woman at the first place at which we stopped boiled the eggs, her husband industriously whittled a lot of sharp little sticks, which he distributed among us, and the use of which we could not imagine, until we were told we were expected to spike holes in the eggs with them, and then suck out the meat. We did not make a success of this, and our prejudice against eating eggs after that fashion was such that we were particular to ask to have them fried during the rest of our trip. This was the only occasion when I saw a Honduranian husband help his wife to work.
After our breakfast on the top of the mountain, we began its descent on the other side. This was much harder on the mules than the climbing had been, and they stepped even more slowly, and so gave us many opportunities to look out over the tops of trees and observe with some misgivings the efforts of the man in front to balance the mule by lying flat on its hind-quarters. The temptation at such times to sit upright and see into what depths you were going next was very great. We struck a level trail about six in the evening, and the mules were so delighted at this that they started off of their own accord at a gallop, and were further encouraged by our calling them by the names of different Spanish generals. This inspired them to such a degree that we had to change their names to Bob Ingersoll or Senator Hill, or others to the same effect, at which they grew discouraged and drooped perceptibly.
We slept that night at a ranch called La Pieta, belonging to Dr. Miguel Pazo, where we experimented for the first time with our hammocks, and tried to grow accustomed to going to bed under the eyes of a large household of Indian maidens, mosos, and cowboys. There are men who will tell you that they like to sleep in a hammock, just as there are men who will tell you that they like the sea best when it is rough, and that they are happiest when the ship is throwing them against the sides and superstructure, and when they cannot sit still without bracing their legs against tables and stanchions. I always want to ask such men if they would prefer land in a state of perpetual earthquake, or in its normal condition of steadiness, and I have always been delighted to hear sea-captains declare themselves best pleased with a level keel, and the chance it gives them to go about their work without having to hang on to hand-rails. And I had a feeling of equal satisfaction when I saw as many sailors as could find room sleeping on the hard deck of a man-of-war at Colon, in preference to suspending themselves in hammocks, which were swinging empty over their heads. The hammock keeps a man at an angle of forty-five degrees, with the weight of both his legs and his body on the base of the spinal column, which gets no rest in consequence.
The hammock is, however, almost universally used in Honduras, and is a necessity there on account of the insects and ants and other beasts that climb up the legs of cots and inhabit the land. But the cots of bull-hide stretched on ropes are, in spite of the insects, greatly to be preferred; they are at least flat, and one can lie on them without having his legs three feet higher than his head. Their manufacture is very simple. When a steer is killed its hide is pegged out on the ground, and left where the dogs can eat what flesh still adheres to it; and when it has been cleaned after this fashion and the sun has dried it, ropes of rawhide are run through its edges, and it is bound to a wooden frame with the hairy side up. It makes a cool, hard bed. In the poorer huts the hides are given to the children at night, and spread directly on the earth floor. During the day the same hides are used to hold the coffee, which is piled high upon them and placed in the sun to dry.
We left La Pieta early the next morning, in the bright sunlight, but instead of climbing laboriously into the sombre mountains of the day before, we trotted briskly along a level path between sunny fields and delicate plants, and trees with a pale-green foliage, and covered with the most beautiful white-and-purple flowers. There were hundreds of doves in the air, and in the bushes many birds of brilliant blue-and-black or orange-and-scarlet plumage, and one of more sober colors with two long white tail-feathers and a white crest, like a macaw that had turned Quaker. None of these showed the least inclination to disturb himself as we approached. An hour after our setting forth we plunged into a forest of manacca-palms, through which we rode the rest of the morning. This was the most beautiful and wonderful experience of our journey. The manacca-palm differs from the cocoanut or royal palm in that its branches seem to rise directly from the earth, and not to sprout, as do the others, from the top of a tall trunk. Each branch has a single stem, and the leaf spreads and falls from either side of this, cut into even blades, like a giant fern.
