Amapala was the hottest place I ever visited. It did not grow warm as the day wore on, but began briskly at sunrise by nailing the mercury at fever-heat, and continued boiling and broiling until ten at night. By one the next morning the roof over your head and the bed-linen beneath you had sufficiently cooled for you to sleep, and from that on until five there was a fair imitation of night.
There was but one cool spot in Amapala; it was a point of land that the inhabitants had rather tactlessly selected as a dumping-ground for the refuse of the town, and which was only visited by pigs and buzzards. This point of land ran out into the bay, and there had once been an attempt made to turn it into a public park, of which nothing now remains but a statue to Morazan, the Liberator of Honduras. The statue stood on a pedestal of four broad steps, surrounded by an iron railing, the gates of which had fallen from their hinges, and lay scattered over the piles of dust and débris under which the park is buried. At each corner of the railing there were beautiful macaws which had once been painted in brilliant reds and greens and yellows, and which we tried to carry off one night, until we found that they also were made of iron. We would have preferred the statue of Morazan as a souvenir, but that we doubted its identity. Morazan was a smooth-faced man with a bushy head of hair, and this statue showed him with long side-whiskers and a bald head, and in the uniform of an English admiral. It was probably the rejected work of some English sculptor, and had been obtained, no doubt, at a moderate price, and as very few remember Morazan to-day it answers its purpose excellently well. We became very much attached to it, and used to burn incense to it in the form of many Honduranian cigars, which sell at two cents apiece.
When night came on, and the billiard-room had grown so hot that the cues slipped in our hands, and the tantalizing sight of an American ice-cooler, which had never held ice since it left San Francisco, had driven us out into the night, we would group ourselves at the base of this statue to Morazan, and throw rocks at the buzzards and pigs, and let the only breeze that dares to pass over Amapala bring our temperature down to normal. We should have plotted a revolution by rights, for the scene was set for such a purpose, and no one in the town accounted in any other way for our climbing the broken iron railing nightly, and remaining on the steps of the pedestal until two the next morning.
Amapala, I suppose, was used to heat, and could sleep with the thermometer at ninety, and did not mind the pigs or the buzzards, and if we did plot to convert Honduras into a monarchy and make Somerset king, no one heard us but the English edition of Morazan smiling blandly down upon us like a floor-walker at the Army and Navy Stores, with his hand on his heart and an occasional buzzard soaring like Poe’s raven above his marble forehead. The moonlight turned him into a figure of snow, and the great palms above bent and waved and shivered unceasingly, and the sea beat on the rocks at our feet.
It was an interesting place of rendezvous, but we tired of a town that grew cool only after midnight, and in which the fever stalked abroad by day. So we chartered a small boat, and provisioned it, and enlisted a crew of pirates, and set sail one morning for Corinto, seventy-five miles farther south. There was no steamer expected at Corinto at any earlier date than at Amapala, but in the nature of things one had to touch there some time, and there was a legend to which we had listened with doubt and longing to the effect that at Corinto there was an ice-machine, and though we found later that the ice-machines always broke on the day we arrived in port, we preferred the chance of finding Fonseca Bay in a peaceful state to yellow-fever at Amapala. It was an exciting voyage. I would now, being more wise, choose the yellow-fever, but we did not know any better then. There was no deck to the boat, and it was not wide enough for one to lie lengthwise from side to side, and too crowded to permit of our stretching our bodies fore and aft. So we rolled about on top of one another, and were far too miserable to either apologize or swear when we bumped into a man’s ribs or sat on his head.
We started with a very fine breeze dead astern, and the boat leaped and plunged and rolled all night, and we were hurled against the sides and thumped by rolling trunks, and travelling-bags, and gun-cases, and boxes of broken apollinaris bottles. The stone-breaker in a quarry would have soothed us in comparison. And when the sun rose fully equipped at four in the morning the wind died away absolutely, and we rose and sank all day on the great swell of the Pacific Ocean. The boat was painted a bright red inside and out, and the sun turned this open red bowl into an oven of heat. It made even our white flannels burn when they touched the skin like a shirt of horse-hair. As far as we could look on every side the ocean lay like a sea of quicksilver, and the dome of the sky glittered with heat. The red paint on the sides bubbled and cracked, and even the native boatmen cowered under the cross-seats with their elbows folded on their knees and their faces buried in their arms; and we had not the heart to tell them to use the oars, even if we had known how. At noon the chief pirate crawled over the other bodies and rigged up the sail so that it threw a shadow over mine, and I lay under this awning and read Barrie’s Lady Nicotine, while the type danced up and down in waving lines like the letters in a typewriter. I am sure it was only the necessity which that book impressed upon me of holding on to life until I could smoke the Arcadia mixture that kept me from dropping overboard and being cremated in the ocean below.
We sighted the light-house of Corinto at last, and hailed the white custom-house and the palms and the blue cottages of the port with a feeble cheer.
The people came down to the shore and crowded around her bow as we beached her in front of the custom-house, and a man asked us anxiously in English, “What ship has been wrecked?” And we explained that we were not survivors of a shipwreck, but of a possible conflagration, and wanted ice.
And then, when we fell over the side bruised and sleepy, and burning with thirst, and with everything still dancing before our eyes, they refused to give us ice until we grew cooler, and sent out in the meanwhile to the comandancia in search of some one who could identify us as escaped revolutionists. They took our guns away from us as a precaution, but they could have had half our kingdom for all we cared, for the wonderful legend proved true, and at last we got the ice in large, thick glasses, with ginger ale and lemon juice and apollinaris water trickling through it, and there was frost on the sides of the glasses, and a glimpse of still more ice wrapped up in smoking blankets in the refrigerator—ice that we had not tasted for many days of riding in the hot sun and through steaming swamp-lands, and which we had last seen treated with contempt and contumely, knocked about at the bow of a tug-boat in the North River, and tramped upon by many muddy feet on Fifth Avenue. None of us will ever touch ice hereafter without handling it with the same respect and consideration that we would show to a precious stone.
The busybodies of Corinto who had decided from the manner of our arrival that we had been forced to leave Honduras for the country’s good, finally found a native who identified me as a filibuster he had met during the last revolution at Leon. As that was bringing it rather near home, Griscom went after Mr. Palaccio, the Italian who serves both England and the United States as consular agent. We showed him a rare collection of autographs of secretaries, ambassadors, and prime-ministers, and informed him that we intended taking four state-rooms on the steamer of the line he represented at that port. This convinced him of the necessity of keeping us out of jail until the boat arrived, and he satisfied the local authorities as to our respectability, and that we had better clothes in our trunks.