Three gringos in Venezuela and Central America

by Richard Harding Davis

On those frequent occasions when the bull charged the barricade, the entire line of men and boys on its topmost rail would go over backward, and disappear completely until the disappointed bull had charged madly off in another direction. Once he knocked half of a mud-house away in his efforts to follow a man through a doorway, and again a window-sill, over which a toreador had dived head first like a harlequin in a pantomime, caved in under the force of his attack. Fresh bulls followed the first, and the boy musicians maddened them still further by the most hideous noises, which only ceased when the bulls charged the fence upon which the musicians sat, and which they vacated precipitately, each taking up the tune where he had left off when his feet struck the ground. There was a grand ball that night, to which we did not go, but we lay awake listening to the fifteen boy musicians until two in the morning. It was an odd, eyrie sort of music, in which the pipings of the reed instruments predominated. But it was very beautiful, and very much like the music of the Hungarian gypsies in making little thrills chase up and down over one’s nervous system.

The next morning Jeffs had shaken off his fever, and, once more reunited, we trotted on over heavily wooded hills, where we found no water until late in the afternoon, when we came upon a broad stream, and surprised a number of young girls in bathing, who retreated leisurely as we came clattering down to the ford. Bathing in mid-stream is a popular amusement in Honduras, and is conducted without any false sense of modesty; and judging from the number of times we came upon women so engaged, it seems to be the chief occupation of their day.

That night we slept in Comyagua, the second largest city in the republic. It was originally selected as the site for a capital, and situated accordingly at exactly even distances from the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. We found it a dull and desolate place of many one-story houses, with iron-barred windows, and a great, bare, dusty plaza, faced by a huge cathedral. Commerce seemed to have passed it by, and the sixty thousand inhabitants who occupied it in the days of the Spaniards have dwindled down to ten. The place is as completely cut off from civilization as an island in the Pacific Ocean. The plain upon which Comyagua stands stretches for many miles, and the nature of the stones and pebbles on its surface would seem to show that it was once the bottom of a great lake. Now its round pebbles and sandy soil make it a valley of burning heat, into which the sun beats without the intervening shadows of trees or mountains to save the traveller from the fierceness of its rays.

We rode over thirty miles of it, and found that part of the plain which we traversed after our night’s rest at the capital the most trying ten miles of our trip. We rode out into it in the rear of a long funeral procession, in which the men and boys walked bareheaded and barefooted in the burning sand. They were marching to a burial-ground out in the plain, and they were carrying the coffin on their shoulders, and bearing before it a life-sized figure of the Virgin and many flaring candles that burned yellow in the glaring sunlight.

From Comyagua the trail led for many miles through heavy sand, in which nothing seemed to grow but gigantic cacti of a sickly light green that twisted themselves in jointed angles fifteen to twenty feet in the air above us, and century-plants with flowers of a vivid yellow, and tall, leafless bushes bristling with thorns. The mountains lay on either side, and formed the valley through which we rode, two dark-green barriers against a blazing sky, but for miles before and behind us there was nothing to rest the eye from the glare of the sand. The atmosphere was without a particle of moisture, and the trail quivered and swam in the heat; if you placed your hand on the leather pommel of your saddle it burned the flesh like a plate of hot brass, and ten minutes after we had dipped our helmets in water they were baked as dry as when they had first come from the shop. The rays of the sun seemed to beat up at you from below as well as from above, and we gasped and panted as we rode, dodging and ducking our heads as though the sun was something alive and active that struck at us as we passed by. If you dared to look up at the sky its brilliancy blinded you as though some one had flashed a mirror in your eyes.

We lunched at a village of ten huts planted defiantly in the open plain, and as little protected from the sun as a row of bricks in a brick-yard, but by lying between two of them we found a draught of hot air and shade, and so rested for an hour. Our trail after that led over a mile or two of red hematite ore, which suggested a ride in a rolling-mill with the roof taken away, and with the sun beating into the four walls, and the air filled with iron-dust. Two hours later we came to a cañon of white chalk, in which the government had cut stepping-places for the hoofs of the mules. The white glare in this valley was absolutely blinding, and the atmosphere was that of a lime-kiln. We showed several colors after this ride, with layers of sand and clay, and particles of red ore and powdering of white chalk over all; but by five o’clock we reached the mountains once more, and found a cool stream dashing into little water-falls and shaded by great trees, where the air was scented by the odor of pine-needles and the damp, spongy breath of moss and fern.

BRIDGE CONNECTING TEGUCIGALPA WITH ITS SUBURB

We were now within two days of Tegucigalpa, and the sense of nearness to civilization and the knowledge that the greater part of our journey was at an end made us forget the discomforts and hardships which we had endured without the consolation of excitement that comes with danger, or the comforting thought that we were accomplishing anything in the meantime. We had been complaining of this during the day to Jeffs, and saying that had we gone to the coast of East Africa we could not have been more uncomfortable nor run greater risks from fever, but that there we would have met with big game, and we would have visited the most picturesque instead of the least interesting of all countries.

These complaints inspired Jeffs to play a trick upon us, which was meant in a kindly spirit, and by which he intended to furnish us with a moment’s excitement, and to make us believe that we had been in touch with danger. There are occasional brigands in Central America, and their favorite hunting-ground in Honduras is within a few miles of Tegucigalpa, along the trail from the eastern coast over which we were then passing. We had been warned of these men, and it occurred to Jeffs that as we complained of lack of excitement in our trip, it would be a thoughtful kindness to turn brigand and hold us up upon our march. So he left us still bathing at the water-fall, and telling us that he would push on to engage quarters for the night, rode some distance ahead and secreted himself behind a huge rock on one side of a narrow cañon. He first placed his coat on a bush beside him, and his hat on another bush, so as to make it appear that there were several men with him. His idea was that when he challenged us we would see the dim figures in the moonlight and remember the brigands, and that we were in their stalking-ground, and get out of their clutches as quickly as possible, well satisfied that we had at last met with a real adventure.