In The Heart Of Old Honduras

( Originally Published 1905 )

These are the tales those merry guests

Told to each other, well or ill;

Like summer birds that lift their crests

And twitter and again are still.

—Longfellow.

WHILE I resided in Guatemala City I was a daily visitor to the library of the university, where are shelved many of the books carried away from the monasteries when the property of the church was secularized in Guatemala. One afternoon I found what was to me a treasure. The date of the publication of the brochure or bound pamphlet was 1576, and the title, " Report to His Catholic Majesty the King of Aragon and Castile by the Licentiate Don Diego Garcia de Palacio." Now who was Diego Palacio ? Well, for our purpose it is enough for us to know that he was sent out to Central America by Philip II of Spain to report on the condition of the country. He was the first white man to explore the remains of the mystic city of Copan, and his description of the " ruins of these superb buildings constructed of hewn stone" is the most complete and satisfactory in existence. I will have occasion to cite him as authority—an authority supported by the testimonies of subsequent visitors —to corroborate me in statements that stagger acceptance. To-day I confine myself to incidents of the route and the great forest "through which," writes Palacio, "we cut our way to the silent city." We breakfasted on frijoles or black beans, tortillas and chocolate, shook hands with our Indian family, and before sunrise were in the saddles.

Before renewing our journey each morning I was particularly careful to see that the hair riata and hammocks were strung to the pommel of the Mexican saddle. The rains of the previous week had soaked the alluvial lands through which we were now travelling, and for hours our horses never broke their walk. In the afternoon we crossed the Morita ridges, and descending we entered the desert lands of Guetenango. After a few hours' ride we came upon a muleteers' encampment, and with them I desired to pass the night. Riding into the camp I asked to see " El senor capitan de los arrieros," and was at once confronted with a Hondurian Indian, a fairly tall, swarthy complexioned man with long, coarse hair and restless, piercing eyes. His name was Lopez, and after I told him who I was, my mission, and where I came from, I was at once made welcome.

Neither he nor any of his band had ever heard of Canada, and when I told of our inland seas, our rivers which were never dry, of our ice and snow fields, our beautiful summers, they expressed great astonishment. Darkness rapidly succeeds daylight in tropical latitudes, but before night shrouded us I noticed two of the muleteers on hands and knees examining the ground. Then they unwound my riata, tied it to one of three others, and formed a ground circle of twenty feet in diameter. These deserts are infested with centipedes, scorpions, snakes and creeping things, full of venom and inimical to human life. The rough, fibrous surface of the horsehair rope, called a riata, keeps out all dangerous reptiles. Notwithstanding tales of travellers, tarantulas, scorpions, and even snakes never attack a sleeping man if he is quiet in his sleep. But the slightest movement is a suspicion of danger to the hideous creatures, and woe to the sleeping man who moves. We hear much of and fear more the tarantula that is sometimes found in the banana bunches sent to us from Florida, but the tarantula of Florida, New Mexico, Texas and Arizona is a gigantic bush spider, and not a tarantula. The bite of the bush spider, like that of our own black spider, means painful irritation and passing fever, but unless our blood be in a bad state, nothing more.

Here the tarantula, centipede and scorpion inject a lethal poison, and if the wound is not attended to at once death or very serious results follow. At Pinos I met an Indian whose whole hand and forearm were withered, dried up and wasted shockingly. While resting in the afternoon, a centipede crawled across his hand. He foolishly brushed it off, but was too late, and will carry through life a wasted arm and hand. If he had grimly set his teeth, watched and let him crawl, the ugly thing would have (lone him no harm. In these desert wastes, among sage brush, cacti and mesquite the rattlesnake is king, but he is never the first to attack. If you approach too near he rattles a warning, and if you are for peace, turn aside and pass on. But if, after he speaks, you yet approach, woe to you; he strikes, and then for you it's the knife, whiskey or the grave. Much, however, depends on the condition of your blood, the age of the snake, the reserve of poison in his glands, and your physical state when struck. The horned rattlesnake strikes to kill, and death it is.

But the most awful thing in these Hondurian deserts is the El Muerte—the death. He is the PichuCoatle viper, about ten inches long, of a gray coppery hue, and for its size is the most deadly thing alive. For malignity, cunning and malevolence the El Muerte is in a class by itself. Its head is small, triangular or lance-shaped, its eyes are like the point of a needle heated, while back of each eye is a puffed gland, a diminutive reservoir of the most deadly poison. Its fangs are as delicate as the finest cambric needle, but once they pierce a victim where the flesh cannot in an instant be scooped out—not alone cut out—writhing death follows. Such is the Pichu-Coatle, a repulsive, loathsome microscopic monster. I once, in the town of Guzman, was brought by a friend to the chozas, or huts of two Indians, who survived the bite of the El Muerte. The first to whom I spoke was a manque-beti, a " snake man," who, like the Moki witch doctors, "had power over snakes." He was bitten by the viper in the back of the hand. At once, and as if by instinct, he leaped to his feet, with bloodless face and quivering frame he snatched his machete and cut off his hand, allowed the stump to bleed for a while, and then stopped the flow of blood with a tourniquet made of the pita fibre. His nerve left him, and with it went his hypnotic power over snakes. The other was an Indian cargidor or carrier, who with his companions stretched himself out for his mid-day rest. He must have stirred in his sleep, for he sprang to his feet with a moan of agony, and cried "El ill His face was the face of a dead man, his frame quivered with uncontrollable emotion, and when about to sink to the earth, one of his companions braced him up, and Emanuel, the other, seizing his hand, held his thumb erect, levelled his revolver, and fired. His life was saved, but when I greeted him I shook a thumbless hand. Fortunately, the Pichu-Coatle is found only in the most lonely and forbidding places, where man has no business and ought not to go. I do not know if the venom has ever been chemically examined, but one recoils with horror from the thought that any created thing conceals, even in the minutest quantity, a fluid that when it once touches man's blood bears with it death and loathsome putrefaction.

With Lopez and his mule-drivers I passed a pleasant and romantic evening. The arrieros are great smokers and gamblers and usually spend the early night playing trienta-uno, but the visit of a guest, a traveller from the frozen north, was an extraordinary event and the night was passed in song and story. Transito Nunez sang in a rich baritone " 0 pescator del 'onda," his companions joining in the chorus, and in this wild desert land, under a moon swinging three-quarters full in a starlight sky there was a fascination even in the timbre of their voices. I entertained them with the history of our tribes; their life on the plains and on the reservations, their almost unconquerable thirst for aguardientecalled whiskey, and the fine of fifty dollars imposed by our government on any white man for selling one glass of the chica to an Indian. " Valgame Dios"—good heavens,—exclaimed Rafael Carera, "fifty pesos, for to sell only one little drinklet of chica to a poor man." Then Lopez told the story of Filipo and Jose Manta, brothers who sold their fifteen sheep in the market at Icaiche and bought ten gallons of whiskey to retail at the fiesta to be held in a few days at Santa Rita. With the keg stowed in a huecala, or basket, suspended from a pole. they started over the mountain roads for Santa Rita. Knowing their besetting weakness, each took a solemn oath that neither would give the other a drop till Santa Rita was reached. Between them they had a medio—a three cent piece—and Filipo was the owner. It was a hot day and an uphill road. " Caramba," groaned Filipo after they had travelled a few miles, "it is very long without one little drink; for the love of the saints, my brother, give me to swallow."

"But how that thou thinkest not the promise," said the teetotaler Jose. Filipo groaned, set his teeth and trotted on. Then he stopped.

"It is so, fratello mio, that we swore not to give one little drink, but of the to sell was nothing said. Mira! look! I have one medio, sell to me one drink-let, my brother."

" Sta buena," said Jose, taking the medio and pouring out a small dose, "the good San Diego will witness I kept my oath, for of the to sell was nothing said." They shouldered their load and started again, but after going a few miles Jose came to a dead stop.

" Caramba, how buy not I too, a leetle drink. I am dry, Filipo. I am dry." Back to Filipo went the medio.

"But wait me a little," said Filipo," and I from you buy me one drink that we together may drink joined."

"A la vuestra salua!—good health my brother," spoke Filipo. "Drink hearty, brother of mine," said Jose.

Back went the medio to Filipo again. Then Filipo did some thinking, looked at his companion, and said : " Ay como estoy deshonorado, thou hast had two swallows and I but one; go sell to me another that we are equal."

They sat down under a tree to rest. Back and forth went the nimble medio. Now Filipo, now Jose, and now both together. On the third day, the day of the fiesta, a muleteer passed that way.

Two gray haired men lay under the tree. " San Mateo," cried the muleteer, " they are dead." The voice woke Jose.

" Que hora es ? "—what time is it—he asked. "Three of the afternoon," and the mule driver pocketed the medio which he took from the hand of Filipo and passed on.

"Awake, my brother," said Jose, "and let us to the fiesta." " Mala suelta, it is so," and the brothers went on their way.

That night in Santa Rita friends asked, "And how to you went the travel ?" "Caramba! we sold our sheep but ladrones robbed us and took all our money."

As usual, we rose with the earliest sign of dawn, and long before the sun had risen over the distant hills we were at San Pedro, on the fringe of the great Hondurian forest, eight miles from Copan. Here we breakfasted, left our horses with the jefe politico, or head man of the town, and entered the wilderness. We carried with us a skin of wine, tortillas, or cakes of the maize meal, a mosquito net, hammocks, a machete, and a bottle of the oil of the pimento plant, which, rubbed hourly on the hands, neck and face, saves you from mosquito bites.

The change from the bright light of the treeless plain to the gloom of the forest was startling. Not less so was the transition from the fresh, clean, solar air to an atmosphere of mephitic humidity and unfamiliar odours of vegetable decomposition.

There was light, but it was a phosphorescent, nebulous light, an indescribable luminosity, which inspired you with mysterious awe. And there was heat, an excess of it, but it was not the heat of the mid-day sun, nor that of a hot night, but a strange warmth, the warmth of the escaping elements of decomposing matter, of fermenting mould, of impalpable gases, of insect myriads dissolving into air. Death seems so omnipresent and luminous here—insect and vegetable death—that you think of it as a mystic something rising from the soft earth, and, with gauze-like tenderness, settling on the life around you. Here only, and for the first time, you understand what vegetable antiquity means. It is idle to look for the primitive soil here. It lies buried under the humus of perished forests that have succeeded each the other since the creation; under a sort of vegetable debris accumulating here for unnumbered ages.