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THE GLORY THAT WAS SPAIN

THE LAND BEYOND
MEXICO BY
RHYS CARPENTER

BOSTON
RICHARD G. BADGER
THE GORHAM PRESS

Copyright, 1920, by Richard G. Badger

All Rights Reserved

Made in the United States of America

The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.

201 nOATKEPAEZ OPET BIBAION MNHMEIA ANEGHKA
nOINAS HN EHAGON TINTMENOS SE EHESIN

This book, thou crafty mule, to thee
I dedicate in memory,
For penalty of every wrong
Avenging me on thee with song.

FOREWORD
This book is the record of a mule-back
journey of nearly a thousand miles undertaken by
an American archaeologist who wished to
familiarize himself with some of the old Maya
ruins of Central America.
It aims at giving a picture of the land and
people of Guatemala, San Salvador, and the
northern border of Honduras, as they are known
only to those who are content to sleep in the
Indian villages and ride the lonely upland trails
of one of the loveliest and least known countries
of the New World.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. In THE Highlands  13
II. Mirage or Quiche  47
III. Antigua  72
IV. Riding to Salvador  97
V. Don Quixote's Ranch .... 124
VI. The Lowlands  153

ILLUSTRATIONS
The Glory that was Spain Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

Survivors of Earthquake .... 34
High Street. Antigua  50
Road and Ruin. Antigua .... 60
Feast of the Virgin. Guatemala City 90
"Idols" of Copan. Honduras . . . 114
The Thicket. Quirigua  126

THE LAND BEYOND MEXICO

THE LAND BEYOND MEXICO
CHAPTER I
IN THE HIGHLANDS
To what lengths do we go for our amusement,
we, the spoiled children of our age ! I have found
me a table and made me a bench, and I am seated
out-of-doors under a sloping roof. All that I
can see is a courtyard, full of diickens and ducks
and rain. The hens, devoid of maritime inclina
tions, are pecking about forlornly under what
shelter they can find, while their sea-going cousins,
indifferent to the flood, drift about happily on the
lake that was a courtyard. Beyond is a wall
whose dirty stucco, scaling away, has made patent
to every passer-by that adobe is mud in spite of all
pretences. Above it, the more distant ridge of a
thatched roof vanishes into the grey of the driv
ing rain. That is all that meets my eye, except
an Indian boy or two, moving about the house.
Most of the Indians are asleep, curled on rugs
and blankets, though it is not yet three in the
13

14 The Land Beyond Mexico
afternoon. Two others, manifestly against their
will, subject to the force majeure of the woman
of the house, have gone to find fodder for my
mule. Feeding Colorada, I can already see, will
be the cross and trial of the days to come. But
what isi bad for my temper is good for my
Spanish : meanwhile it rains.
I am inclined to think that these haunts are to
be found in nearly every atlas. The poorest bit
of cartography will show you that the first country
south of Mexico is Guatemala, that it stretches
from ocean to ocean without managing to attain
any considerable area, and that it has a range of
mountains running through it, out of Mexico and
into Salvador, a sacral vertebra in the great
North American spine. In the undulating table
land in the center of those volcanic hills, a
hundred miles below Mexico, a hundred miles
above Salvador, there is a little sloping town
called Patzizia. In one of the topmost streets
is a house a little larger than its neighbours, vsdth
a courtyard and a stall. In the stall is a munching
mule recently renamed Colorada, and in the court
yard under a sloping roof Is an American traveller
who is writing and watching the rain.
A glance indoors at the mattress has just con
vinced him that he will not be undressing for bed
to-night. Meanwhile it rains, and it vsall still be

In the Highlands 15
indulging in that heavenly and beneficent occupa
tion for the five hours of daylight that yet re
main. There is neither event nor change. The
inn-keeper's daughter is rather good-looking, but
her legs are too thick and her nose is a trifle
short; out in the dreary deluge, unfed and un-
pitied, there is tied a decrepit old horse with a sore
on either shoulder; the household wash is flying
in the wind in a preposterous attempt to dry itself,
though Deukalion and Gilgamesh never beheld
anything more torrential; an attractive, but sod
den, little pig has just taken refuge in my bed
room, and I am debating whether it is Christian
to turn him out into the wet. . . . Oh, we
spoiled children of our age 1 I have come three
thousand miles for this; and I half believe that I
enjoy it.
The head of the household is an old, old woman
(aetate sua XLV) who does all her arithmetic
with kernels of dried corn. There Is, it seems,
something unprognosticable in the addition of six
and five which only empiric observation can de
termine. But it is folly to deride her methods,
for I suspect her to be the richest woman in the
village and, to judge by the wrinkled cunning of
her eyes, the shrewdest. There are three genera
tions under her roof, and unless her strong-ankled
grand-daughter is as haughty as she is pretty,

1 6 The Land Beyond Mexico
future travellers will find four. She was atten
tive to my wants and comfort, at which I should
have been surprised had I known the country bet
ter. I was soon to learn that Guatemala is ob
livious to the stranger within her gates, that she
greets him with indifference, tends him with in
dolence, and speeds him in indigence. I do not
mean that he is robbed or cheated on his de
parture. On the contrary, he cannot get rid of
his money, since It buys him nothing. The people
are not hostile, but inactive ; incurious, rather than
unfriendly; and negligent because they are unim
aginative and because they work only when they
must. Travelling is cheap and uncomfortable.
Distances are long and food Is meagre. But I
was well-fed that afternoon In Patzizia and went
to bed at an early hour. The pig had upheld his
right of entry; but soon my sleepy senses heard
neither him nor the rain, and when I woke at
dawn, both had vanished.
******* I set out early on my northward road, where
among pines and corn-fields and green slopes of
grass I almost found again our own Atlantic
states. Some glimpse, some turn, some folding of
the hills had an easy and pleasant familiarity, only
to lose its homely appeal a hundred yards further
up the road, where agave and a burst of un-

In the Highlands 17
northern flowers marked the Invasion of the low
land flora from the hot and luxuriant coast be
yond the mountain-wall.
The road from Patzizia leads between green
hedges through a garden-land where the corn
grows high and weeds are unbelievably fertile.
Less than fifteen degrees north of the Equator
and more than six thousand feet above the sea,
this upland of volcanic soil is a compromise be
tween a tropic latitude and a temperate altitude.
There is a northern character to the scenery, yet
the greens are harder and cruder, and the light
has none of the richness and shadow-play of
Berkshire lawns or New Hampshire woods. In
some strange way it Is the Tropics still.
Behind me as I rode were the hills, high wood
ed slopes with a towering red peak of rock above
them, the head of Fire, the great volcano. Before
me across the growing plain were other hills less
high, but running up Into blue forest-ridges that
made me impatient of my level road between the
hedges. The Indians passed me in an endless proces
sion of servitude. They were carrying earthen
jugs and pots, and managed to string twenty ves
sels upon a single frame. Bowed under the load
which was piled high above their heads, they
trotted along, barefooted or sandalled, with the

1 8 The Land Beyond Mexico
strange half-running gait which is their character
istic mode of journey. They are no better than
beasts of burden. Cheaper than mules, they take
the four-foot's place and carry these wares to
markets that are two and three days distant.
Short of stature, they are tremendously develop
ed In the muscles of their legs and backs, but
feeble In their arms, and permanently bent from
their unenviable occupation.
The pottery itself is crudely made. Shaped on
a wheel, it Is symmetrical enough, but without any
grace or character. The flame-marks show on
every piece, patches of black where the clay has
been unevenly baked. Strung on wooden frames,
these pots came down the road with a pair of
bare brown legs beneath them, a strange sight for
the unaccustomed. But I rode Into a spectacle
much worse ; for as I descended to a little stream
I had the horrid experience of meeting a rigid
human-being, wrapped like a mummy In pink cloth
and carried in a wooden frame on an Indian's
back. Not until I saw that the protruding naked
feet were of wax did I realize that I had stumbled
neither on crime nor on funeral ceremony, but that
some church was to be enriched with the embodi
ment of a saint.
We breakfasted at ten in the village of Patzum,

In the Highlands 19
Colorada on a couple of pounds of dried corn,
myself on fried eggs and frijoles, tortillas, and
coffee. Tortillas and frijoles will be common
words of mine throughout this book. Both are
well enough in moderation, but to these two in
Guatemala there is no end. Frijoles are black
beans, always boiled and sometimes mashed and
re-warmed; tortillas are both a food and a cere
mony. Dried Indian corn is rubbed on stone to
a whitish flour, mixed with water to a dough,
moulded and patted to a pancake, baked on an
open griddle to an uneven brown, and fed to
friend and foe. Fresh and hot they are very
good; and when cold they can be restored to the
category of food by toasting. In the Maya
world frijoles are meat and tortillas are bread.
Besides these there is water in the country; but
the favourite drink Is the colourless brandy which
is distilled from crude cane-sugar. If it were
deodorized it might sell for pure alcohol. Of
this powerful intoxicant there Is an unlimited
supply and an unmoderated consumption. Hav
ing no prejudice against Bacchus, I cannot be con
sidered partisan If I call this the scourge of the
Indian race in whose degeneration and gradual
extinction it is one of three prime factors. The
other two are the changed habits of life and the

20 The Land Beyond Mexico
diseases brought by the white man. "We died
of the blessings of civilisation," will be written
on the gravestone of the race.
But I had no such thoughts as I rode away
from Patzum. A level road, a green landscape,
a sunny blue sky after a day of rain, a willing
mule, and an Indolent rider, — for once it was the
time and the place and the loved things all to
gether. The Indians trotted by without a look
or a word of greeting, although when I insisted
on the amenities usual to fellow-beings, they seem
ed much pleased at the distinction between Mayas
and mules which my "Good-afternoon" implied.
An hour passed without incident. Twice the
path skirted curious earth ravines whose edges
dropped away sheer for a good two hundred feet.
The flat fertile table-land stretched to the very
brink without a warning wrinkle or shudder; be
yond the chasm, it resumed its level expanse. I
tied Colorada to a bush and peered over an un
safe edge. Far below were the tops of trees
and the crowded green of well-watered and well-
shadowed growth; but there was neither stream
nor outlet to be seen. The ravine yawned like
a crevasse in a field of ice without further geo
logic excuse.
I rode on and was beginning to think Guate
malan journeying dull and disappointing, when

In the Highlands 21
the path suddenly fell into one of these abysses.
In the course of a thousand feet of steep descent
on washed-out rocky zig-zags, table-land and
corn-field disappeared, orchid-covered moss-hung
oaks massed to a forest, and cliffs and wooded
ridges shut out half the sky. The only apparent
master and maker of all this scenery was a diminu
tive stream that twinkled merrily along on the
floor of the ravine. It was like a kitten playing
among the overturned tables and broken china of
a feast, and it seemed absurd to blame all that
havoc upon so small a thing.
Once down at the bottom, the path splashed
about In the little stream till it came to a green
and lonely farm and there it passed abruptly
through a door of rock whose traces of ancient
barricading hinted of less peaceful times.
Through wrinkled woods higher and higher above
the stream the trail bent in and out as It fol
lowed the creases of the valley-side; but just as
one hoped to reach the rim of the table-land
above, It dropped again deeper than ever to a
foaming ford. Guatemalan trails are fond of
such tricks. They lure the traveller within sight
of his goal only to drop him Into interminable
clefts and sink him into hidden woods to "wail
by Impassable streams." Yet the solitude and the
endless trees, the glimpses of water and distant

22 The Land Beyond Mexico
heights, the unknown path and the unexpected
scenes, make up for these uneven pilgrimages.
The Pass of the Langadha, the finest similar
thing In Greece, is beggared by the densely over
grown gorges through which I rode that day.
There Is no Sparta at the end to make the
passage famous ; yet I came upon something whose
beauty can rival the fragrant orange-blossomed
plain of the Eurotas below snow-capped Tay-
getos. At five in the afternoon, after riding for
an hour high up in mountain fog and shower, I
came dovpn through a village and out upon the
steepest descent of the day. Crawling down step
by step on ragged zig-zags In the midst of a down
pour of rain that made a river under Colorada's
hoofs and a grey curtain of the air, I had ceased
to expect or hope, thinking it was enough to be
still on Colorada's back, when in the midst of my
wretchedness the rain stopped with characteris
tic abruptness, the wind blew holes in the mist,
and I saw sheer under me, seemingly thousands
of feet, a lowland lake with further shores of
cliff. It was fog-magic; for I felt as though I
were hung In the clouds, and the plain was so
bright and so fresh and so clear and the lake
was of such a summer-blue that It seemed a vision
out of another world and the most beautiful sight
that I had ever seen.

In the Highlands 23
Actually it was only a few more hundred feet
down to the plain. With the last step, upland
changed to lowland and the path slipped into a
riot of bamboo, sugar-cane, oranges, limes, and
plants whose names are only native words to
me. But Jordan had broken into Eden: for the
path led demurely into a river whose rain-
swollen rapid I could not cross, even though I
knew that dinner and bed dwelt beyond the other
bank. The downpour began again. With four
teen hundred feet of rock behind me and an un-
fordable river ahead, a sodden soil beneath me
and a falling sky above, I was well encompassed.
But an Indian appearing after a little told me
of an easier ford and showed me a little jungle-
track which I had mistaken for an irrigation-
ditch in action. Arrived at the passage, Colo
rada chose wisely between the two evils of a spur
ring master and a foaming stream and we were
soon in Panajachel In one of the few Guatemalan
inns where strangers seem to be really welcome.
******* After dinner I sat out in the grass-grown court
of the inn. The rain had passed, and the day's
strangeness was already a memory. In the twi
light a tree-toad was piping his high-pitched eve
ning song; the fire-flies were lighting their
lamps; on the horizon a thunderstorm was ris-

24 The Land Beyond Mexico
ing, and the distant lightning flared without sound.
The air was warm and almost still. It was a
northern evening of mid-summer, and I felt that
I was back in the New England hills. Yet I knew
that on the other side of the wall the Indians
were encamped in a Guatemalan village-square,
crouching over tiny bonfires at which they were
toasting tortillas and brewing coffee, or seated In
the shelter of the raised wooden arcade in silent
contemplation of their fellows. And beyond the
square were the slow-falling ruins of a church
built by the vanished Spaniards, and beyond in
a crumbled belfry hung bells that were cast long
ago in Spain. For all the illusion I was in an
Indian village, hemmed In by a language that was
not my own; and when the clouds blew from the
sky it was not the New England constellations
that shone out.
To everyone who has emerged from the sub-
savage condition of treating the stars as sprin
klings from some vast salt-shaker, unordered
and unarrangeable as the sugar-grains we strew
on cakes, a voyage Into the Tropics holds a new
experience. Some of us read the Odyssey and,
regarding the simple allusions to the stars as lit
erary exotics, miss the true savour of that homely
narrative. Others, however, have raised them
selves sufficiently near to the status of the early

In the Highlands 25
races to find something of comradeship in the
map of heaven. In Europe and in the Far East
they look for the old time-endeared constella
tions and, seeing them, find something familiar
and something of home. But when they travel
south across the line of the tropics, there come,
night after night, unknown stars higher and
higher above the horizon into which they steer.
The eternity of space with Its everlasting stretches
we explain to children for their wonder, without
feeling what we speak. To us these are unpalat
able common-places. But when the familiar con
stellations make room for others unknown, there
blows over us of a sudden a breath from that
other half of the unbounded into which we have
never gazed.
In much the same way those who have known
the Atlantic all their lives stare like Cortes
strangely and with an unexplained exaltation on
the Pacific surf when first it breaks before them.
But the southern skies are an ocean incompara
bly vaster and richer. I fear that I have little
of ready-made religion; but no pilgrim ever sa
luted a relic of Golgotha with truer emotion than
I the Southern Cross and the shining stars whom
I had never seen.
******* Next morning I went swimming in the lake, to

26 The Land Beyond Mexico
the amazement and idolatrous admiration of the
native boys who had never seen the simple strokes
which I executed so ineffectively. These Indians
of Guatemala are poor swimmers, poor horsemen,
poor judges of distance and direction, poor cooks,
and poor hunters. They are excellent beasts of
burden and splendid fanatics; but the marvellous
woodcraft and primitive proficiency with which
savage races are so popularly endowed should be
sought elsewhere than in Guatemala.
As I came ashore I discovered that the "drift
wood" of the sandy beach was a line of pumice
and I forthwith Indulged a small-boy's idea of
pleasure by throwing into the water the largest
stones that I could find. They recovered smil
ingly from the splash, to bob about as serenely
as though there were nothing unusual In their be
haviour. I was not surprised to learn that the lake of
Atitlan had no bottom, for the burden of proof
can be put on the unbeliever; but I was not pre
pared to hear that it had no outlet. For that is
a matter which any pair of eyes might settle to
the contrary. And this I determined to do.
A white-haired, round-faced German sea-cap
tain navigates a launch with wheel and compass
across the ten-mile deep. Perhaps there are foggy

In the Highlands 27
days to justify this wilful reminiscence of a sea
going life, or It may be that the ritual instils ad
ditional respect into the humble native mind.
At the long-drawn blast of a cheap brass horn
the waiting Indians solemnly gathered their packs
and trooped aboard with a couple of ragged and
dirty bills for the waiting captain, whose aged
face while he gathered the five-cent fares glowed
with a benevolence hitherto confined to the an
gelic host.
The water was windless, in colour more green
than blue. Cliffs and mountain-slopes shut it In,
making their ring more marked by their clear re
flections. On the furthest shore stood two vol
canoes with their heads in cloud. The world
seemed silent and sun-flooded. Nature has her
own calendar and this was her Sabbath of rest.
It is a day which the human calendar in Central
America intercalates with an almost diurnal as
siduity, but which is only impressive when wind
and water proclaim it.
The Indians crouched on the deck, without
comment or question among themselves, while the
launch puffed over the quiet surface and the cliffs
rose higher behind us as the distance Increased.
Only an Axenstrasse could girdle Atitlan. Even
the shaggiest paths have to turn inland, so that

28 The Land Beyond Mexico
It becomes a long and diflicult day's ride to reach
the villages to which the launch crosses in a couple
of hours.
There was in truth no outlet to the lake.
Where it might have been, the volcanoes have
pushed up their barriers. Between the cones of
Tollman and San Pedro the water has run In,
but a lava wall shuts off further progress. Thus
a deep bay is formed, on whose steep shore stands
Atitlan, the village from which the lake has its
name. It is one of the oldest Guatemalan towns
and is mentioned in the Spanish chronicles as the
home of the Tzutohlles, a tribe whose name has
nowadays more flavour than significance.
Going ashore, I found myself back in my boy
hood Africa of du ChalUu. ThCie was nothing
to suggest Spain or Spaniard. People and life
were savage. The houses were built with walls
of split bamboo, pervious to smoke from within
and eyesight from without. The pointed roofs
of palm-leaf ended in a central earthen pot that
covered the radiating thatch. I was looking on
the prototype of the Greek round temple and I
had before me the origin of the elaborate central
poppy-flower which crowned the marble Olym
pian tholos of Philip of Macedon. My thoughts,
in fact, were rather far afield; for an "African"
village is amazingly dull. But my speculations

In the Highlands 29
came out of the Hellenic past and leaped from
the chill of architecture to the human warmth of
sculpture when the bare-legged Indian girls came
down the rocky street to fill their water-pitchers.
With one hand raised to the empty vessel on their
head they descended with a pack-mule's sure-
footedness and more than a pack-mule's grace.
It was after they had waded Into the lake, filled
the jug, replaced it on their heads, and begun
to reascend with both arms raised to steady the
heavy burden, that I realized that eurhythmies
were folly and that our daughters should be
taught to carry water-jugs. And as they wore so
little clothing with such obvious propriety, — ^but
that ruins my scheme for our northern daughters.
There are other villages on the shores of Atit
lan, slightly differing In size and appearance, but
alike in their monotony. It Is not the little towns
which are interesting in Guatemala, but the open
country. And among all the scenery through
which I was to ride there was to be nothing more
beautiful than this.
In clear weather Atitlan is a blue mountain-
lake shut In by green heights and dark walls where
waterfalls hang like white ribbons. The fine clear
forms of the great volcanoes break the line of
girdling hills and add their smooth green slopes
to the scene's tranquillity. There are no vine-

30 The Land Beyond Mexico
yards nor gardens to suggest North Italy, but an
Incomparable fertility and a far-away inland
charm of sunlit isolation.
In time of storm all this Is changed. When
the lightning pours over It and the rain-gusts
sweep across it Atitlan has a sudden grim and
terrifying appearance. The circle of rock dark
ens and closes in, the clouds come down like a
cover to a kettle, and In the vast crater, lifted
a mile in air above the Pacific level, the storm
stirs wind and wave to a black witches'-brew in
an uproar of water and air and fire. After it
all, when the rain has passed and the wind has
dropped, the green slopes suddenly reappear
fresher and brighter and above the wild dark
walls with their curled cornice of clouds shines
the childishly Innocent blue of Fra Angelico's
paradise. It is a region of moods and changing moments
whose variety seems inexhaustible. Outstaying
my intentions, exploring Its woods and valleys
and towns and climbing some of its heights, I
found it ever more beautiful. When at last I
came to leave it I was already convinced that
I should find nothing finer in Central America.
Though I knew that it could not be true, I had
come to sympathize with the kindly old man of the
inn who had said so simply and so quietly,

In the Highlands 31
"Atitlan, you know, is the most beautiful spot in
the world."
******* I left Panajachel early in the morning. In a
season where daily rain ruins the afternoon my
habits were growing more and more matutinal.
In the end I was to reach the native stage of
ultimate attainment and saddle Colorada by can
dle-light ten minutes before the first dawn. But
Panajachel came early in my travels, before a
receding breakfast had reached those sunless
hours, and it was seven o'clock before I was well
upon my road.
The path climbed the steep mountain-side, lead
ing at times along rocky shelves, at times by hewn
steps of stone and once through the spray of a
waterfall, while the lake sank slowly below me,
grovring bluer and brighter as it receded. New
heights rose behind the familiar hills and far on
the south-eastern horizon I saw a peaked hat of
rock which I recognized to be Fire, the towering
friend of my previous ride. At the top of the
wall the path turned inland and I soon reached
the large and uninteresting village of Solola.
It Is not my intention to make a diary of such
uneventful progress. Just as it is art's privilege
not to paint everything In a landscape, so I in
tend to change the perspective which the ticking

32 The Land Beyond Mexico
clock of the present imposed upon me as I rode
hour after hour and day after day, and to set
the past in a temporal setting where many an
hour In the saddle may drop from sight and in
tervening distances (if they were but dull
stretches) may cease to divide.
On this day, therefore, I find myself passing
through pine woods full of noisy flocks of the
bluest of jays and straightway thereafter begging
black-beans and tortillas In a thatched and smoky
Indian hut, as though one had but to emerge
from that bird-haunted thicket to encounter the
dirty little village which so grudgingly prepared
me sa poor a midday meal. And hardly is the
meal over when I am on a great hill-side, mount
ing amid orchid-covered oaks through cool, deep
shadows, only to be caught in a torrential thunder
storm from which even those great trees cannot
shelter me. The path turns Into a flight of care
fully paved steps, and the steps into a brown
torrent where Colorada and I stumble up, with
occasional backward glimpses at the uplands
which we have left so far below us, till we emerge
on a sodden Alpine meadow ten thousand feet
above the sea. And here the sun comes out, the
lush green shines, and song-sparrows try again
their northern song. There are flowers, shep
herds with their sheep, and over us all a bright

In the Highlands 33
sky and a cool wind. It is that rare thing, — ^an
idyll that is not just between the covers of a
book but out in the world of real things where
there is none of the falseness of fine writing.
Being of that unenduring kingdom, it soon is
over. In its place come muddy paths, hard to
find and slippery to follow, marshalling a seem
ingly unlimited array of yet-remaining miles. But
If one is fairly Inured to the saddle and fond
of the uplands, no more beautiful ride could be
imagined. I must have loitered on my way, for It was
nearly dusk before I came to the edge of the up
lands. The twinkling lights were beginning to
come out in the little checker-board of a town
below me and before Colorada had swung her
leisurely nose around the last zig-zag of the de
scent It was dark. Luckily there were hedges
and soon there were houses to shut us in upon
our stumbling path, and though once I thought
I had found a sheer descent to Cocytus we came
to the lights at last. They were electric and
Illumined street-corners whose signs announced
numbered avenues and streets. Colorada as
sumed a metropolitan air of indifferent gentility
whose leisure I ended rudely with my spurs. We
clattered down the streets into the deserted
market-place, gathered information from the sen-

34 The Land Beyond Mexico
try of the garrison, and ended our long day's ride
In the Central Hotel, Totonicapan, Los Altos,
Guatemala (C. A.). Colorada's stall was oppo
site mine, though an intervening couple of long-
horned sheep, a sore-backed mare with her ragged
rumply-coated filly, and an Indian stable-boy
made communication difficult.
I dined poorly and slept well. When I woke
it was early morning, grey with rain. My itin
erary for the day was thus already settled, — to
Colorada's complete satisfaction. At ten o'clock
it cleared suddenly and I went a-foot to see the
town, though I knew beforehand what I should
find: — a cabildo, a garrison, and a line of gen
eral shops around an open paved square; a
church, with dark, empty floor of red tile, wax
Images dressed in gaudy calicoes, altarpieces over
loaded with gilding, and Indian women reciting
endless petitions In their own weird tongue; be
yond that, only an occasional open shop-front and
the blank one-storied line of homes. To pass
a sunny hour In the streets of Totonicapan one
has need of the Old Dutch Masters' eyes, ap
preciative of homely squalor and the picturesque-
ness of petty things ; but to pass a rainy afternoon
in the same town one needs the devil's own in
dulgence for eternity. I returned to my quar
ters, lunched, and soon afterwards began my

SURVIVORS OF EARTHQUAKE

In the Highlands 35
inevitable traveler's refrain of "Quid nunc?"
After I had made a veterinary round of Insincere
affection which included two starved dogs (who
were interested in everything) , the mare and her
filly (who were interested only in each other), the
sheep (who were chiefly interested in salt), and
three alien mules (who were interested in noth
ing at all) , — after all this I looked at my watch
and saw that it was half past two. I studied
my map for an hour or more — and found that it
was twenty minutes to three. Then I sat around
for a long time and finally crossed the street
to play on the billiard-table (for every Guate
malan town must have billiard-tables, sky-rockets,
sewing machines, and a Temple of Minerva:
nothing else matters). But the famous Mikado
had been there before me and attained his in
famous Object All-sublime. And now it was
nearly three o'clock. A tame deer entered the
room and had late luncheon on the floor and a
large parrot, seeing me bored, obliged with an
impersonation of a derelict Indian baby in acute
whooping-cough. I flatter myself that I suc
ceeded in openly wounding his histrionic pride by
leaving the room at once.
It was now still nearly three o'clock. I found
a bleary German who was taking "The Baths."
He took them very early in the morning as he

36 The Land Beyond Mexico
preferred to precede native patronage. He ob
jected to the Indian women more than to the
men and had an almost profane aversion to the
ultra-modern practise of what I might scientifi
cally describe as syncolymbesis of the sexes. But
my new friend soon left me to attend to some
sausages {sic/) In a critical stage of manufac
ture, and after a little the clock at last managed
to strike three. It was raining hard — and din
ner was at six. In the distance, the parrot had
taken to such fits of idiotic laughter that I de
termined to have him shot at sun-rise. Such are
the diversions and excitements of a Central Amer
ican village.
We are snobs with our affectations of culture,
our sets and our fads and our civilized banali
ties. Instead of taking delight in our music and
our art for what they are, we ruin our enjoy
ment with sophisticated prejudices and discrimi
nations. How differently we should feel If only
we could be brought to realize that cultural civili
sation is the inestimable sun that lights the hor
rible darkness of sentient life! I myself shall
relapse into snobbery and discriminations. But
for a little while, in Totonicapan, eight thousand
feet in the hills, with never a book or a friend
or a game or a theatre or a concert or a beauti
ful object, In rain and utter loneliness, I almost

In the Highlands 37
understood the worth of our European heirloom
of 4000 years.
What a difference rain can make ! The dis
similarities of a Yorkshireman and a Neapolitan
are largely a matter of rain. The Arab is an Arab
because of the desert and the desert Is a desert
because of the rain. My Guatemalan life was a
quilt-work of contrasting emotions, all traceable
to that single cause. The Eternal within us is In
league with the Temporal and the spirit's glass
is only too often indistinguishable from the ba
rometer. My mental weather-chart , for almost
any of those days of mule-back journeying might
have run as follows :
As I rode up out of the valley in the morning
and the bugles blew in the little town at Colo
rada's feet, the discomforts of the night were
forgotten. The bugles were out of tune, but the
sense of their discordance penetrated no further
than the brain. The mist rose from the plain
and the sunlight was clear and sharp on the hills.
Day-light and morning air and an unknown path,
they were like the singing of birds In one's heart
and the blowing of fresh winds across the spirit.
Ten hours later it was a different world. The
rain poured down and the mountain-fog shut
out every view. The steep paths were water-
torrents, — endless brown fordlngs amid the

38 The Land Beyond Mexico
stones, slippery mud-slides elsewhere. There
was no shelter, since the day's appointed goal
must be made before dusk. The steady rain, the
plodding pace became part of the mind. The
spirit's eye grew as cloudy as the rain-hung corn
fields, motionless and impenetrable as the great
dripping woods. But it all ended, with food and
warmth and a bed at last. And the next morn
ing under a blue sky I was off through the early
light again and as I rode up out of the valley
the bugles blew in some other little tovm at Colo
rada's feet.
Here more than elsewhere, life was a contrast
of wet and dry. But I suspect that elsewhere,
too, though it be less obvious than in Totoni
capan, the weather is In the end responsible for
most of our human behaviour.
And these intolerable reflections, likewise, were
after all due only to the rain ; and when it ceased
within an hour I forgot my gloominess and went
for another walk.
9): ***** *
Guatemala is a land where the small boy's
prerogative of jeering and reviling the stranger
for his strangeness' sake is under abeyance or un
known. Everywhere my costume aroused indig
nation in the dogs ; but the Indians refrained even
from that wordless comment which a stare con-

In the Highlands 39
veys. That afternoon beyond Totonicapan,
walking, though I obviously belonged on mule-
back, only the four-foot mongrel remarked upon
my condition; until, while trying to propitiate one
of my yelping critics, I fell victim to suspicion.
Never have I seen such pitiful dogs as in Cen
tral America. Canine anatomy may here be
studied without dissection. Graveyard carcasses
slink on forlorn foragings. Even the frijoles and
tortillas seem denied to them. The affection of
their masters neither includes food nor excludes
missiles. The poor animals are little better than
starveling outcasts sneaking lifelong to the grave.
And even the grave is precarious, or rather Its
absence only too assured. The cowled directors
of their funerals, the buzzards, stare down at
them from the thatched ridge of their own mas
ter's roof as though they begrudged them even
those few days of living wretchedness.
So I was surprised at the suspicion Into which
I fell through being discovered in my overtures
to a nasty little dog; for the beast had been born
with his tail between his legs and a yelp in his
throat. Further on I assisted a young fowl who seemed
unreasonably upset at the very natural discovery
that she could not ascend a perfectly sheer em
bankment. During our efforts there appeared an

40 The Land Beyond Mexico
Indian boy. Only my distmguished leggings saved
my reputation.
The indulgent reader will see that I am not
wasting his patience upon anecdotes of the poul
try-yard, but laying bare a deep racial difference.
For example, I hold It self-evident that every
one should be interested in young pigs, — little
trotters and friskers I mean, delightful snouty
little fellows with bright eyes. But I found
that when I met them twinkling to market my elo
quent interest was always viewed by the Indians
with the uneasiness with which we regard the in
comprehensible and fantastic. Yet a team of
seven in harness trotting up a steep mountain-
path is as much a sight as is a coach-and-four,
especially If one considers that the slightest ac
cident may convert the driver into a badly wound
May-pole. Everywhere my advances to animals were con
sistently misunderstood, even by the victims of
my affection. Colorada alone came to compre
hend that a raised hand can fall lightly.
^ S(C ^ #ff 5p 3p -P
That evening when I entered for dinner I found
three men already at table, — an abiding and In
separable trinity whose outward number I in
creased to four without In any way disturbing
those properties peculiar to the triangle.

In the Highlands 41
Of that mutually devoted crew the third never
left any impression on me. From meal to meal
I forgot him. He was one of those, no doubt,
who keep the world's work done, reliable and
unobtrusive, dull as the cog-wheel whose func
tion in society he performed. I am ready to al
low that he may have been the best man of the
three; but as he made no impression I am obliged
to leave him out. Of the other two there Is more
to say.
One was the German sausage-maker, my ac
quaintance of the early afternoon. Profanity was
to his conversation what spices must have been to
his sausages: a plentiful inspersion suited the cli
mate. His past was a veritable sausage-meat of
strange happenings. He was a man stuffed and
seasoned with experience. But this I learned
later, for at the time I had eyes only for the
remaining spirit of that trinity.
He was an Indian and a barber. Small-headed,
with dirty black curls standing out in nodding
animation, he had the tiny alert eyes of a prowl
ing night-animal. He used his forefinger in con
versation and would cock his head and regard it
with the bright excitement of a crafty child. He
was forever saying witty things which to me as
Invariably seemed without point. By a display
of interest and some faded photographs he tried

42 The Land Beyond Mexico
to lure me Into submission to his black craft;
but I wanted none of his barbarous rites, and
I fear that a slight coldness sprang up between
us. While the sausage-maker and I talked
rheumatism and German submarines, he would
watch us in moody silence like an Olympian
estranged, an unsuspected shepherd of Admetus.
Then suddenly he would blow off all his Ill-hu
mour in a sparkling geyser-jet of discourse, be-
showering the little Indian waiter who at the end
of an attentive listening would emit an "Ah, si !"
which showed only too clearly that he had made
nothing of Figaro or of Spanish.
The sausage-maker was a different character.
His shirt seemed always on the verge of dis
missal to the tub, yet never so soiled itself as
to bring about that painful separation. His sus
penders dispensed with buttons by a seamanlike
use of marlin at crucial junctions. Coat and hat
were to him unessential, though Totonicapan is
anything but tropical. His sharp face was wrin
kled, worn more by that capricious weather which
we call adversity than by the far less trying me
teorological changes of wind and rain and sun.
He had no respect for god or devil, much less for
human-kind. But as this attitude arose from
knowledge and not from braggardism, he was
endurable enough (considering the latitude). In

In the Highlands 43
fact he was socialist rather than anarchist, and
seasoned enough to have discovered that the mil
lennium would not occur during his life-time.
A fortnight later when I was again in Totoni
capan he told me his story. And as I have no
table-talk from that first dinner with the trinity,
I may be allowed to enliven its rice and black-
beans, faded meat, tortillas, stewed papaya, and
coffee, by relating here as I later heard it
The Sausage-maker^ s Romance
He began mortal miseries as a Hanoverian
peasant-baby and gained a German strength of
foot and tongue on a tiny farm. But of those
bucolic years he had little to say and my first
good glimpse of him was In the heart of Africa
with the great Stanley. For more than a year
he was member of the party: quorum si pars
magna fuit one may perhaps determine by read
ing the memoirs of that strong-handed adven
turer. When a Belgian caravan at length en
countered them the smell of the coast was strong
in the Hanoverian's nostrils. Without overmuch
ceremony he said his farewells to Stanley and
went with the Belgians down to the ships. From
Stanley, he declared, he had learned his English,
— ^the humour of which remark the great explorer
would have been the first to admit. Perhaps

44 The Land Beyond Mexico
some of the fabric was laid in the jungle, but the
embroidery seems to have been added later when
he cruised the seven seas with the baccalaureate
distinction of the fo'c'sle.
His exodus from the jungle could not have
been entirely surreptitious. For later. In Aus
tralia, he encountered Stanley again, and Stanley,
the great Stanley, clapped him on the back before
all the crowd and acknowledged him for com
rade. The exact words of that unforgettable
greeting were sensible and sufficient: "By God,
here's Weissmann!" said Stanley; and the tears
came to the German's eyes as he told the inci
dent. Whaling and carrying cargo In sailing vessels
the future stuffer-of-sausages had been blown like
a thistledown about the habitable and less than
habitable earth, nowhere striking root. But at
last, somehow, he stuck In Central America, where
he put some money into mines and gradually grew
rich. That was life's hey-day. Marrying a
Guatemalan girl he had children and content
ment and an easy affluence.
And now mark the peripatesis and the good
Greek descent Into misery. Suddenly, In Costa
Rica, wife and children died of fever and a fail
ing Investment shore away his wealth. Broken
in heart and pocket, he returned to Guatemala

In the Highlands 45
and there In the good German-American tradi
tion took to an old and casual employment. The
sausages which he made were bought by the Ger
man coffee-planters. As these are numerous,
business went well enough, in a grey and dreary
fashion. The lonely old wanderer stuffed his
sausages and smoked his hams and shrugged his
shoulders at the world, until age and the humors
of his trade brought rheumatism. Then fell the
final blow.
In need of a cure, he entrusted the business to
his Mexican assistant and went away to the hot
baths. He returned to empty rooms, to walls
without pictures, floors without tables or beds or
chairs or carpets, worst of all to a shop without
showcase or stock and a shed without machinery.
A sudden access of nostalgia had swept the Mex
ican across the border Into a land where there is
no finding of fugitives and no redress.
With nothing but the clothes on his back the
old man had wandered to Totonicapan in the
hills; and there the baths had cured him. He
made sausages for the Inn-keeper in lieu of coin
of the realm. Three times a week he made them ;
the rest of the time, standing or sitting or re
clining, he cursed the English and his rheuma
tism and lived forlornly between bed and board.
In that dirty and uneventful town a long life of

4-6 The Land Beyond Mexico
adventure and marvel was shut up in a forlorn
old body, fading slowly away into dreary forget-
fulness. I asked him whether it would do any good to
make more sausages. "If I make more," he
answered, "and give them to the Indians to ped
dle, they get drunk on the money and the sausages
go to Hell. In this country," said he with con
cluding emphasis, "It's no damned use to
work. . . ."
Such is the Sausage-maker's Romance; and if
the story reads a little differently in the Angel
Michael's golden book, the fault does not lie
with me.

CHAPTER II
MIRAGE OF QUICHE
Quezaltenango is the second city of Guate
mala. It Is not wholly uninteresting, as it offers
the remnants of an old church, the ready spec
tacle of Indian market, and the associations of
a history of at least four hundred years. It was
on the nearby plain toward Totonicapan that Al-
varado fought the tumultuous battle in which
he broke the power of the Indians of Quiche.
There Is a peculiar flavour to these early inci
dents from the days of the conquistadores which,
like tropic fruit, should be tasted at least once for
the experience; and I can do no better than to
serve this meal from the pages of Stephens'
book:^ "We were again on classic soil. The reader
perhaps requires to be reminded that the city
stands on the site of the ancient Xelahuh, next to
Utatlan, the largest city In Quiche, the word
Xelahuh meaning "under the government of
*J. L. Stephens. Incidents of Travel in Central America,
Chiapas, and Yucatan. 2 vols. 1841. Harper & Bros. Long
out of print, but not impossible to secure.
47

48 The Land Beyond Mexico
ten"; that is, It was governed by ten principal
captains, each captain presiding over eight thou
sand dwellings, in all eighty thousand, and con
taining, according to Fuentes, more than three
hundred thousand inhabitants; that on the defeat
of Tecum Umam by Alvarado, the Inhabitants
abandoned the city, and fled to their ancient for
tresses, Excansel the volcano, and Cekxak, an
other mountain adjoining; that the Spaniards en
tered the deserted city, and, according to a manu
script found In the village of San Andres Xecul,
their videttes captured the four celebrated
caciques, whose names, the reader doubtless re
members, were Calel Kalek, Ahpopgueham, Cal-
alahan, and Calelaboy; the Spanish records say
that they fell on their knees before Pedro Al
varado, while a priest explained to them the na
ture of the Christian faith, and they declared
themselves ready to embrace it. Two of them
were retained as hostages, and the others sent
back to the fortresses, who returned with such
multitudes of Indians ready to be baptized, that
the priests, from sheer fatigue, could no longer
lift their arms to perform the ceremony."
I may be fortunate enough to introduce the
reader to the book from which this passage
comes. The cumbrous title hides the garrulous
and adventurous journeys of an American am-

Mirage of Quiche 49
bassador in search of a government in the days
when Central America was a flame of civil wars
and Guatemala was dominated by a remarkable
Indian peasant, unable to sign his name but able
to enforce his will. I came to a Quezaltenango
void of incidents or life. Stephens reached It
on the morrow of a revolution needlessly drowned
in blood. So idle are these days and so stirring
were those and so striking is the picture of the
Indian Carrera, that it is Stephens who is here
in place. . . .
"Early the next morning Carrera marched into
Quezaltenango, with the cura and Don Juan as
prisoners. The municipality waited upon him In
the plaza; but, unhappily, the Indian intrusted
with the letter to Morazan had loitered in the
town, and at this unfortunate moment presented
It to Carrera. Before his secretary had finished
reading it, Carrera, in a transport of fury, drew
his sword to kill them on the spot with his own
hand, wounded Molina, the alcalde-mayor, and
two other members of the municipality, but
checked himself and ordered the soldiers to seize
them. He then rode to the corregidor, where
he again broke out Into fury, and drew his sword
upon him. A woman in the room threw herself
before the corregidor, and Carrera struck around
her several times, but finally checked himself

50 The Land Beyond Mexico
again, and ordered the corregidor to be shot un
less he raised five thousand dollars by contri
butions upon the town. Don Juan and the cura
he had locked up In a room with the threat to
shoot them at five o'clock that afternoon unless
they paid him one thousand dollars each, and
the former two hundred, and the latter one hun
dred to his secretary. Don Juan was the prin
cipal merchant in the town, but even for him It
was difficult to raise that sum. The poor cura
told Carrera that he was not worth a cent in
the world except his furniture and books. No
one was allowed to visit him except the old house
keeper who first told us the story. Many of his
friends had fled or hidden themselves away, and
the old housekeeper ran from place to place with
notes written by him, begging five dollars, ten
dollars, anything she could get. One old lady
sent him a hundred dollars. At four o'clock,
with all his efforts, he had raised but seven hun
dred dollars ; but, after undergoing all the mental
agonies of death, when the cura had given up
all hope, Don Juan, who had been two hours at
liberty, made up the deficiency, and he was re
leased. The next morning, Carrera sent to Don Juan
to borrow his shaving apparatus, and Don Juan
took them over himself. He had always been

high street, ANTIGUA

Mirage of Quiche 51
on good terms with Carrera, and the latter asked
him if he had got over his fright, talking with
him as familiarly as if nothing had happened.
Shortly afterward he was seen at the window
playing on a guitar; and in an hour thereafter,
eighteen members of the municipality, without
the slightest form of trial, not even a drum-head
court-martial, were taken out into the plaza and
shot. They were all the very first men in
Quezaltenango; and Molina, the alcalde-mayor,
in family, position, and character was second to
no other in the republic. His wife was clinging
to Carrera's knees, and begging for his life when
he passed with a file of soldiers. She screamed
"Robertito" ; he looked at her, but did not speak.
She shrieked and fainted, and before she recov
ered her husband was dead. He was taken
around the corner of the house, seated on a stone,
and despatched at once. The others were seated
in the same place, one at a time; the stone and
the wall of the house were still red with their
blood. I was told that Carrera shed tears for
the death of the first two, but for the rest he
said he did not care."
The description which Stephens elsewhere gives
agrees well enough with the Quezaltenango of
to-day. Yet it was a different town into which
he rode. For in 1902, to the perplexity of all

52 The Land Beyond Mexico
observers, every living thing which could con
veniently run or fly abandoned the nearby slopes
of Santa Maria, the extinct volcano; and sud
denly, a few days later, the cathedral of Quezal
tenango was standing alone above the ruins of
the town. Santa Maria, though baptized into
the church with every ritual, had departed from
the decorum of the saints. In a terrific explo
sion she had blown off one entire slope of her
peak, and amid eruption and earthquake Quezal
tenango had been destroyed.
Not long before this murderous disaster a sci
entist of distinction had pronounced Santa Maria
dead. But he might better have said, "Apar-
taos, que la joven no es muerta; sino que duerme."
For among volcanoes there is no death, but only
quiescence. In them the race of giants is not
extinct. They are the true owners of Guate
mala and men are only the ephemeral tenants
of their treacherous domain. More and more I
grew convinced that all there was of strange
and fascinating and distinctive in that country was
ultimately traceable either to the Indians or to
the volcanoes. On these two hangs all that is
picturesque and imaginative. Artistically they
are fundamentals, the one giving outline and the
other adding color.
In one sense it is only too truthful a jest to

Mirage of Quiche 53
say that the Indians add color to Guatemala.
But I intended no gametal cynicism. Their bright
dress, their bare legs and arms, their packs and
wares more than offset the second-hand Ameri
canism which is creeping over the country. Ig
norant and superstitious and lazy, at least they
are still themselves, with a bird's brightness of
plumage to hide their primeval sadness.
If they are the hues of the landscape, the vol
canoes are the form.
The race of volcanoes are the Greeks of the
mountain-world, even as the Swiss Alps are Its
romanticists. Definite and logical, instinct with
form, full of concealed energy, dark-souled withal
and drawn to imaginative and terrible catastro
phes, they combine an ordered calm of appear
ance with the restlessness of an unsuppresslble
interior ferment. Because they are not, like
merely pretty things, negligible in the sphere of
our action, they can attain to true beauty. Tran
scending the passivity of mere outward perfec
tion, they are more than the insipid beings of the
classic revivals: they are true Greeks. And like
the Greeks, though they have been seemingly
dead two thousand years or more we yet dare not
ignore them to-day.
And so it is that a volcano does not merely add
its peak to a landscape, any more than a new

54 The Land Beyond Mexico
outline merely adds its contour to a drawing.
For the entire picture is so affected by the in
trusion that the whole complex of emotions is
changed. Volcanoes, I am convinced, are wonderful
things and more than the mere vent-holes of a
crass subcutaneous condition in the terrestrial
monster upon whom we lead our parasitic lives.
Among their distinctions they include a prop
erty which I had imagined to be peculiar to Look
ing-glass Land: one can see them only by riding
away from them. If one rides toward them,
little by little, they disappear; and If one still
persists so far as to try to ascend them, they
vanish altogether and leave the rider amid huge
forests on steep and interminable trails.
Quezaltenango Is far enough distant from
Santa Maria to make Its sharp cone visible; but
one must ride some fifteen miles further away
into the hills around the town of St. Francis the
High before its perfect and beautiful propor
tions rise completely into view. Best of all. It
should be seen from ship-board on the Pacific.
Then the broad level of the lowlands gives a
ground-line from which the volcanoes rise, in color
a pale greyish blue like smoke, a ragged and
mighty line facing the sea. Tajumulco, Santa
Maria, Atitlan, Fire, Water, — elsewhere in the

Mirage of Quiche 55
world there may be such a company, but I do not
know where to look for it. Their height is no
arbitrary mental calculation from an Invisible
level. Twelve and thirteen thousand feet they
rise before the eye. Toward noon the clouds
cover them and they drift off into the thickening
sky, till it seems impossible that those sharp cones
and perfect lines were ever there. But the next
morning, pale and exquisitely clear, they float
against the sunrise far astern.
But I was writing of Quezaltenango before the
typical dullness of that prosperous little place in
duced me to turn to Santa Maria and her choleric
tribe. North of the town there is much dull country,
high water-worn table-land covered with corn and
wheat and broken by bare tracts where the grass
grows In tall Isolated clumps. There one rides
for hours with goal In sight and tires of every
journey before it Is ended.
Ordinarily the roads hereabouts are without
life or Interest; but on market-days they are trans
formed. St. Francis stands on a high bare ridge
with the whitewashed cupola of its church visible
across the countryside. Friday Is full market.
Up the steep winding pathways to the town the
Indians toll in the sun, driving pigs and lambs,

56 The Land Beyond Mexico
the women with live turkey and other fowl slung
on their back or with baskets on their heads, the
men bent beneath their canisters. Even the small
children come and do their share of transporta
tion. Every yard of the square in front of the
white church is covered. It is a tattered spec
tacle of many colors, and from a distance resem
bles a brilliant rag-quilt. And that. Indeed, it is.
The great tailor-made Republic north of Mexico
little knows how much of the spirit of the Levant
lurks on its own progressive and western conti
nent. The line where the scavenger-buzzards be
gin marks a world unknown or Ignored.
It Is more interesting country to the West
toward the Mexican frontier. Two hours out
from Quezaltenango the hills are white with vol
canic sand through which breaks the green of
the maize. Further on, russet is added to the
green and the white, and these three tones every
where prevail. There is similar country in the
Pyrenees where, too, in spite of the arid soil and
the monotonous landscape the bare clear hills lit
tle by little press their inexplicable fascination till
they grow to be part of one's memory and expec
tation. These are fine hills for idle goers. On one side
of the ridge the view drops back to the plain
capped by the perfect cone of Santa Maria. Los-

Mirage of Quiche 57
ing this prospect one rides through the great
woodlands of the mountain-crest and comes out
on the other side upon another world, where be
yond upland meadows rolls a lower land, wave
after wave, to the smoky-blue hills of the Mexican
border. As one keeps the crest these two views
alternate. It is a solitary ride, quite off the trav
elled track; and if one does not wish to sleep
by a tethered mule under a raining sky it Is well
to be off the ridge long before sundown. Riding
lazily along, with my eyes out over forty miles
of shower-streaked summer land, I came to a kind
of moor, treeless and wild, with high clumps of
grass on every side. Ten thousand feet above
the sea can almost bring Scotch heather under
the fifteenth circle. And here I met three way
farers who had come up from the plains with
their packs. They were a rascally looking crew
(as the pirate-books say) and when they saw me
riding alone on the blasted heath the three took
a position on either side of the path and waited
for me to come up. Withered and wild as was
their attire they turned out to be good-natured,
simple-hearted hill-people who owned a couple
of farms on the slope of the moor. They had
been to town fifteen miles away, had left at day
break and were only just returning; and what
was I doing? merely looking? not selling sewing-

58 The Land Beyond Mexico
machines? with no commission at all? So we
talked for a little about this and that, and said
good-by. And such In general are the people of
the country, simple and poor and kind. The soli
tary traveller is safer in this "lawless" land than
in our own civilised communities of the North.
******* Farther to the West, beyond the ridge which I
have been describing, lies the department of San
Marcos, more orderly and prosperous than Is the
Guatemalan wont. At a trifurcation of the road
stand three signs which amaze one not a little :
"Short-cut to San Marcos," pipes the little cen
tral trail; "Wagon-road to San Marcos," an
nounces his broader neighbor to the right; "For
Automobiles," booms the aristocrat to the left.
All honour to the far-sighted Department which
can look forward to that fusion of motor-car and
aeroplane which alone will ever pass that way!
Occasional bridges are omitted and the cross-cut
sawings of the mountain torrents are ignored with
dignity; but what does It matter? The road
and the sign are there: that is the main thing.
And no automobile has come to grief, — there are
none in that part of the country.
The approach to the town lies through a
straight dark avenue of firs at the end of which
a gentleman-warrior (to me unknown) leans peril-

Mirage of Quiche 59
ously out from his pedestal. Four cabalistic
carven dates serve to endear him to his country's
memory. The town itself lies in pleasant fields
surrounded by hills. On a high bastion In the
centre a paved platform looks out over the house
tops. At its back stands an armoury, a real
armoury, with look-out towers and swallow-tail
battlements. This gives a military tone to the
town. One feels that it is indeed only twenty-
five miles to the frontier, that the bayonet and
rifle rule on the Guatemalan border, that beyond
those hills lies the lawless land. Besides, San
Marcos thinks and speaks freely, — as the gov
ernment would say, seditiously; and the sight of
soldiery Is always a good deterrent on a too-
progressive department of a Central American
republic. The townspeople seem active and ef
ficient. Was It imagination, or were they also
correspondingly less open and less courteous?
After all, is it only the good-for-nothings in this
world that are thoroughly lovable, only the shift
less who are good-natured, the incapable who
have a soul and the brainless who have a heart?
I hope not. Yet there are times in the tropics
when the shadow of doubt runs over all that en
ergetic Northern civilisation, of whose claims to
supremacy not all of us are always so eloquent
or so convinced.

6o The Land Beyond Mexico
At the hotel I came upon a courtyard full of
gayety. The inn-keeper's little daughter was
holding a birthday party and the space was
crowded with children. Music was freely dis
pensed by a marimba, native glorification of the
xylophone. The physics of this Instrument are
not uninteresting. Under each key of the wooden
keyboard hangs a hollow tube of appropriate
length, whose column of air vibrates to the note.
This gives a resonant background and adds
greatly to the timbre. A mere xylophone has
something of the dryness of footsteps on a frosty
morning or the shallow brilliance of an Oxford
exhibitioner; and this defect the marimba over
comes. But as It also assumes the quality of a
piano played with damper raised. It Is confusing
rather than clear and carries with it some of the
excitement of shouting or of moving crowds.
Consequently it is at its best while playing mar
tial or stirring tunes In the open air, when, if
cunningly belabored, it becomes really rousing.
The children danced In and out under the dry
ing garments of the week's wash. Yet it seemed
as If even the frankness of these surroundings
did not put them at ease. They were stiff and
formal toward each other, in that delightful and
unnecessary way which children adopt at their
own parties until the rough-and-tumble of some

ROAD AND RUIN, ANTIGUA

Mirage of Quiche 61
game makes them forget the starch and creases.
But there were no games on that occasion. The
little boys struggled with the dance-steps and
their best shoes, while the little girls displayed
their conviction of an Innate grace. Yet conscious
aptitude and awkwardness ended at last. In the
sight of all, a bright-coloured plaster bomb was
knocked down from Its swinging perch below the
rafters, combining in its subsequent behaviour the
good tradition of Humpty-Dumpty with the less
pleasant one of shrapnel. There was a rush for
the burst of little presents, and homo natur,ailis
resumed his rule.
I judged that the marlmberos were hired by
the day; for the departure of the children af
fected them not at all. Their repertoire com
bined the American musical comedy with South
American tunes. Of native melodies there were
none; but I could not discover whether the omis
sion implied a non-existence or merely well-bred
suppression. There is said to be much native
Mexican music, and the enthusiasm for the ma-
rimba seems to Imply an indigenous interest. But
it was with "O la bella lund' and with the Dollar-
Princess that I had to satisfy my taste for the
exotic. ******* I went no further toward Mexico, but turned

62 The Land Beyond Mexico
northward from San Marcos, and at length east
ward, until I was riding back on a parallel course,
with incidental amusement and discomfort
enough, but little to chronicle until I came to
Santa Cruz Quiche and the broad green valley
wherefrom the two great rivers of Guatemala
rise. It Is an amusing plain through which to ride;
for though It seems perfectly level, it cannot be
traversed In a straight line from any direction.
The roads and paths twist about sudden ravines
and vast earth-crevasses, crossing on narrow
tongues between five-hundred foot abysses, or
plunge deep down Into shadowy hollows wherein
grow great trees whose peaks never reach the
level plain. These barrancas are, next to the vol
canoes, the most distinctive element of Guate
malan scenery. Occasionally they afford spectacu
lar views, as when the road suddenly emerges on
the brink of some great valley with steep un-
cloven sides in whose deep bed winds a stream.
Ride half a mile further and you will look back
over a level plain, unable to believe in the ex
istence of what your own eyes saw so recently.
Below Santo Tomas, for example, there Is such
a view. I came upon it unexpectedly at sunset
after rain, and though I cannot describe it, neither
can I forget it.

Mirage of Quiche 63
But my chronicle begins a few miles further
West, at Santa Cruz Quiche, to which I woke on
a sunny Sunday morning. It was fiesta and
rockets were wasting themselves in the full glare
of day, while a turkey in the courtyard was greet
ing every explosion with a gobble of enthusiasm
so accurately timed that It must have been that
pitiless recurrence of "zzzz . . . bang . . . gob
ble" which awakened me. I looked out over the
littered court below. At one loud explosion a
flock of birds wheeled by in terror and I thought
of the piazza of St. Mark's in Venice and the
pigeons flying up at the sound of the sunset can
non. A sudden ennui came over me, a disgust of
the dirty unlettered towns and of the whole fer
tile and futile, beautiful and barbarian land to
which I had exiled myself for a summer's caprice.
One has such feelings on waking In an unknown
Indian village with the memory of a long day's
ride still in one's arms and legs. The emotion
wears away almost as quickly as the physical fa
tigue ; but it is well to recall its poignancy in after-
days when one looks back with self-deceiving
regret to the joys of solitary muleback in New
Spain. I was intent on seeing the ruins. Near Santa
Cruz once stood the capital of the Indians in the
days of the Spanish conquistadores and some of

64 The Land Beyond Mexico
the walls of their ancient town still stand with
broken towers visible afar. With a small boy
of ten years for my guide, I started out on foot
and came in twenty minutes to rubble walls, drear
but real remnants of Indian work.
Thanks to those curious earth-crevasses of
which I have spoken, the town had been defended
by natural moats hundreds of feet deep, upon
whose Inner lip rose the fortification walls. The
general workmanship was rather poor. Though
some of the stones had been hewn, the technique
was after all only a mud-concrete, quite unlike the
marvellously jointed Inca masonry of Peru. At
one point were traces of a gateway and remnants
of a tower, still some twenty-five feet in height,
roughly square, with a slight batter. Half-way
up. It had a guard-room, as though hollowed out,
with traces of the Incline of the stairway which
led up to it.
The site Is strewn with fragments of coarsely
glazed red earthen-ware of rather uniform clay,
showing traces of the potter's wheel. I picked up
quantities of obsidian splinters, black volcanic
glass, the tools of this early folk. I found also
a little head of terracotta, slightly rough, but full
of traces of a finer touch than one would have
expected. In the side of the steep slope of one of the

Mirage of Quiche 6$
guarding ravines there is a gallery hewn in the
soft rock, — a passage some twelve feet high and
some hundred yards long with small chambers
opening off on either side. One of these rooms
ends in a sudden pit, a black vertical shaft lead
ing (the natives told me) to a lower floor with
many rooms. All are empty; and the walls are
without trace of ornament. They seem to have
served as store-rooms rather than burial vaults.
Poking and peering about by candle-light deep
in the hillside, I felt some of that sense of slip
ping out of place in the centuries which I take
to be the emotional element of a first visit to the
Palaeolithic caverns of Spain and the Dordogne.
But here there was drawn neither bison nor elk.
There was only the bare testimony of the dark
and empty passages.
Gazing from these feeble remnants of power
out over the most beautiful plain in the coun
try, I could not realize that this was the Utatlan
of which I had read, that here had been human
sacrifice to Indian gods, that here had come Al
varado with his Spaniards and broken the last
resistance of a mighty people. Guarded by the
great ravines here had been palaces of the kings
of Quiche with courts and towers and decorated
walls, altars and idols, chieftains and warriors.
Only a hundred years ago (if we are to trust

66 The Land Beyond Mexico
Stephens' Informants) the palace with its garden
was still to be seen. Thirty years later Stephens
himself saw the ruins of the altar of sacrifice but
otherwise little more than I. In that short in
terval had come the suspicion of hidden treasure
and the destruction of the buildings that Alvarado
had spared. Ichabod, Indeed! It all exists only
In printed books and old handwritings (although
it may be that it never existed elsewhere In quite
the sumptuous glory of the chroniclers). Cer
tainly it lives no longer on the green plain of
Santa Cruz, though the com still springs, no
doubt, from the moulderlngs of Indians and Span
iards slain In battle.
"Well," said the friendly Inn-keeper on my re
turn to the modem town a mile away, "and how
were the ruins? For my own part, I have never
troubled to go to look at them." Yet he had
lived there all his life.
I found Santa Cruz a little less unendurable
than I had expected. Its town-square has un
usual distinction. At dusk, especially, it has the
charm which often comes with the not too clearly
seen. Then there stand against the sky three
tall forms whose mutual contrast is like the con
trast of different races. There is the tower of the
garrison, in three receding stories, well-poised and
graceful, a memory of Spain. Then there is the

Mirage of Quiche 67
fagade of the church, stifliy vertical, a mask and
a sham, like the false front of an early Tuscan
church. Between the two is the blown bubble of
the cupola above the transept, a thing of curving
outline and balanced thrusts and strains, crying
attention to a mechanical function well performed.
These are the three against the sky. But Santa
Cruz has no idea what they all mean.
******* I rode in the late afternoon to Santo Tomas, —
whose simple and pious name appeals to the na
tives less than their own long-drawn and sibilant
Chichicastenango. It stands on a hill rather
prettily; but further than that I know little about
it. For I left at dawn and rode through wild
country, up and down by ridge and gorge, grad
ually mounting through ragged hillsides to high
unwooded slopes with ever-widening views of the
plain of Quiche, the valley of the River Mo-
tagua, and the blue barrier mountains which
guard the low, wet, and wild jungles of Peten.
I met no one and passed no houses for many
miles. But the world grew broader and broader
till it came to be a vast spectacle of trembling
light whose distances were as blue as the back
ground hills of the Venetian painters. The path
was hot and stony, up and up without pity. Near
the ridge came a last open view as wonderful

68 The Land Beyond Mexico
In width and power as anything in all the coun
try; and then the road took to the great, cool
forest, and the light of the far blue hills and
lowlands was suddenly shut out, to reappear no
more. At the damp watershed I crossed a waving
meadow of thistles and forget-me-nots, — fit sym
bol of the mixed feelings of the traveller who
has climbed those arid hills for hours without
food or friend, yet has been rewarded by the
ever-memorable blue of those clear fifty-mile ex
panses. A long winding descent on the other side led
down Into the high cornland from which my jour
ney had commenced nearly a month ago. I had
been to Mexico and back, with interest but with
out adventure, keeping always to the ridge of the
continent and the cool open uplands. And now
I was riding in the last of Los Altos, heading
eastward for Guatemala City and the slow de
scent to warmer lands.
Having ridden all day without food, I was
both tired and hungry when I reached Tecpan.
But I postponed dinner and sleep to watch the
natives with lighted candles escort Christ to the
village church. Dressed in a cheap Imitation of
purple brocade, his face tear-stained and pitiable,
he had stumbled to his knees beneath his cross.
He was borne on a platform upon the shoulders

Mirage of Quiche 69
of four men while a few brass horns improvised
a sort of Ases Tod. Before him two tall battered
candlesticks from the altar had joined the proces
sion. Behind came the Indians and the lighted
candles, — large candles, small candles, fat ones
and lean ones, twisted ones, colored ones, all with
their gob of fire\ The little girls were enjoying
the excitement of keeping the thin flames alight,
and whispered and pushed and giggled. The
women were clearly devotional, the men ceremoni
ous. The sun was down, and this barbarian cor
tege moving through the gathering nightfall
seemed like the funeral of some Cachiquel hero.
Indeed, I asked a man with a wart on his face
what festival this was and whether some one was
dead. "It is Christ," said he, "coming from the
house where he lives." That is all I learned.
Candles and music passed down the street and
I went in to dinner.
Below Tecpan there Is a rocky hole low down
In the green bank and through it the traveller
sees trees growing and the light shining, as though
within that hill were a garden of the good people.
It Is a queer and unexplained glimpse and I was
careful to leave It so, lest that fragile faith In
the folk of the hollow hills should be crushed
once more when the miracle was understood.

70 The Land Beyond Mexico
My experience at Santa Cruz made me unam
bitious to search out the stones of the old Indian
stronghold of Tecpan-Quautamala. I cared
more for the clear stream and green grass and
English shadows below the town, things neither
primitive nor intangible. Any one with half a
soul In his body will do the same in Guatemala
or in Turkey or any ancient land, and turn from
the five graceless stones of an ancient town,
thankful that the sky does not crumble nor the
landscape pass away.
This is the cornfield of the gods, comparable
to the Lombardy plain whose vast stalks of maize,
rioting in the heat, so strongly affect the traveller
come down from the cold and rainy Tyrol. But
here the aloes line the lanes and down in the
barrancas unfamiliar shadow falls close from the
tropical trees. It is a world of Its own, good to
ride In, growing gradually beloved as its first
strangeness and hostile formlessness wear away.
The villages are hidden in the fields. Five min
utes' riding leaves them behind, with only the
white dome of the church looking out across the
level corn.
The volcanoes re-appeared, first Fire and then
Water. Three miles to the south of me was
Patzizia, the rainy village from which I began
my book. At Zaragoza I was in the highroad to

Mirage of Quiche 71
the capital, among mules and horses and ox-carts.
At Chimaltenango my senses, trained to loneli
ness, resented the advanced civilisation which a
month ago I could not even discern. Guatemala
City would only depress me with Its reckless mo
dernity. So I turned aside and rode down Into the
basin between the volcanoes, down into the black-
green of coffee-farms where the hillsides were
like thunder-clouds of outward-bellying trees and
the road was dark with bamboo and fern and
palm. And so through delightful shadow of
greenery I came to the one town of real interest
in the land, the oldest in Central America, An
tigua, City of St. James of Gentlemen.

CHAPTER III
ANTIGUA
Picture a round green valley, a bowl whose
ragged edge Is an encircling line of wooded ridges
and sharp volcanic peaks. Below a sky bluer
than that of Sicily the woods begin, compact and
billowy as summer thunder-caps. Below these are
dark stretches of coffee-plants, and down In the
bottom of the bowl is a checker of red roofs and
white domes. That is Antigua.
Suspicion might well attach to any vista which
claims to be more lovely than a glimpse into this
cup of green. Its nearest rival, Florence from
Flesole, cannot match it for mere beauty. The
elements, indeed, are much the same: red-tiled
roofs of a town below, a valley-basin, and enclos
ing hills. But Italy can never wholly conceal nor
reconcile Its soil's decrepitude. Its landscapes
have an arid hint of three thousand years of
peasant farming. That Is part of its charm, no
doubt; but the charm of the New-World's fresh
fertility is truer to our instinctive preference of
live things to dead. 72

Antigua 73
Yet Florence is unrivalled, because we see It
with our minds and memories. Just so, few peo
ple of intellectual integrity would exchange the
Alban hills for my great volcanoes or an acre
of the Campagna for all the coffee-plantations of
Guatemala. But Antigua, alone In Central Amer
ica, has this same mirage of the past upon it
to make enchantment out of dirty streets and
crumbling stones. For Bmnelleschi's dome there
are only the white cupolas of the Spanish churches,
yet these are leaven of art enough to make the
bread of life.
I have ventured the comparison with Florence.
Yet what have I to offer to match an hour's walk
on the Lung' Arno past the bridges and back by
the Palazzo Vecohio and the Mercato with Or
San Michele? Not much, I fear. In Antigua
one loves little things. It is enough to stare at
a house-corner with a queer window-seat, or to
mark a cactus' ear springing from the joint of a
roof, most fantastic of finlals. And after all, is
not this the spirit of those who really love Flor
ence — to look for the casual, which Is the tme
artistic? And would not a rambling painter bless
the fertility which turns roof-tiles into the green
of moss and the golden-yellow and yellow-green
of mouldy growths, in a wealth and play of colour
that even Italy cannot show? Yet in spite of

74 The Land Beyond Mexico
the warning, my hour's walk may seem so very
trivial! . . .
Here Is an open shop. A Spanish girl has
brought her poodle to be sheared. She has
stretched the little animal out on the counter;
the scissors are already at work on his woolly
overcoat. From the main square a drum snares
and two ambitious buglers plunge through an ill-
advised call. It is the stroke of the hour. A
school Is reciting in unison at the top of unmellow
childish voices some lesson of the day.
Occasional dark shadows cross the white and
dusty street. Look up and you will see dark birds
on the bright blue sky, graded from the sharp
large wings of the lower levels to small blotches
a mile in air. These are the scavengers, the
pest-averters, cleaners of street and court. These
are the buzzards. They sit on the roofs, their
ugly grey-cowled faces thrust forward, their necks
bent. They stalk in the streets, sombre and
evil. In the clean sky they bring the pollution
of their carrion-fed bodies. A malign benevo
lence, they ward over the tropic lands. One sees
their circling company high in air, while the foot
hills still hide the villages from view. A map
of the sky above Central America with only the
buzzards indicated would perform every service
of a gazetteer.

Antigua 75
Above the one-story houses the old churches
seem like giants of ancient days; for ruin and
desolation add to their apparent size. Here, too,
the buzzards perch on the broken walls. Inside,
the floors are lost in vegetation. You may see
the rents which the earthquakes made through
masonry so many feet thick that it leaves only the
more apparent the vanity of the builders. The
facades have still their saints In the niches. In
the side walls great octagonal ports with double
splay still mark the windows. Here and there,
the springlngs of the vaults, the arches of the
doors are standing.
A blind beggar with his dog is going his well-
planned round. . . . Over the portal of the
courtyard of the church of San Buenaventura
stands the little saint in person, dressed in pretty
blue, with a broad-brimmed black hat and a staff.
His tilted face has a melancholy and pathetic
air, in contrast to his spruce and bright attire.
. . . An Indian girl passes, carrying vases of bril
liant flowers for the church.
Everywhere along the street there are glimpses
through open doorways into gardens and court
yards. How fine to have a sixty-foot tree in one's
house! . . . On a roof there is growing a
prickly-pear, like the hairy green ears of some

76 The Land Beyond Mexico
strange elephantine animal who lives in the house
beneath. Inside the cathedral the shrines are loaded
with dolls in brilliant frocks. These wax-figures
in muslin clothes with sweeping wings of tin are
the queen of heaven and the angelic company
for whom the candles are lighted and the rockets
make their noise, for whom the bells clatter and
a shrewd church holds its ceremony of tinsel and
vestments and incense.
Then there are the Indian women washing In
line along the street, each before a stone basin
which she fills with water from a central pool.
Last of all, there is the ruined church which
serves for Indian market. That is a charmed
haunt, always with much to sell and much to see.
May the God of the North help the temperate
stomach which ever encounters the food that one
here sees mashed and stirred and brewed! The
mere look of some of it can make one 111. But
the rest is all brilliant colour of clothes against
the dark skins of the women, of baskets of fruit
against the mouldy walls, and of an open blue
sky over all.
And that, briefly, is an hour's walk in Antigua.
******* In these lands the houses are built with large
bricks of sun-dried mud. These, If they stood

Antigua Tj
alone and exposed to the weather, the rains would
soon disintegrate; but thickly plastered with
stucco, they seem to wear as well in that chmate
as our more costly structures in colder lands.
It would be easy to paint a picture of an An-
tiguan street. A child's box of colours has every
thing needful. The first house is to be light ver
milion, the next blue, the next yellow, the next
lilac, all in clear bright colours set side by side
without transition. The effect Is naive and sim-
ple-souled. It brings with it a child's gayety. It
has the spirit of a Noah's-Ark, a toy-town shin
ing in the sun.
The houses are all of a single story with over
hanging eaves set at slightly different levels.
Looking down the vista of houses, one has the
Illusion that one could ride along the sidewalk
and touch the eaves with uplifted hand. In real
ity the windows and ceilings are very high, mak
ing the rooms airy and cool. The house-fronts
are necessarily long; for the people live in ex-
tenso, since they may not live in alto. Though
the volcanoes are almost wholly extinct, earth
quakes are perennial, as the story of the town
will witness; and for that reason the two safe
dimensions in domestic architecture have to make
up for the perilous third. The fronts are plain,
a flat expanse of uniform colour broken only by

78 The Land Beyond Mexico
large window-grills that project out into the side
walk. An Antlguan window is not, as with us,
a mere glazed hole In the wall; for between the
Iron bars of the outer grill and the glass of the
casement there is a little territory, in the street
but not of it, a little balcony where one may lean
one's arms and gaze up-village and down. Here
the women put the little children and close the
window behind them. Out-of-door prisoners, they
watch securely the grown-up world through the
gratings of their little cell. These self-same
windows have also another common use, though
I should suppose a certain tantalization to be at
tendant upon the ceremony. As the Spanish catch
goes.
And perilous spots are the window-plOces
For mothers whose daughters have pretty faces/
The streets are all alike, save where around
the central square the blank walls give way to
open shops. Such Is Antigua from without. But
nearly every one of all those unattractive fronts
hides a courtyard full of flowers and shrubs and
running water, and no passer-by can tell how much
or how little luxury and comfort the tinted plaster
conceals. It is a tropical instinct to Ignore street-fronts

Antigua 79
and to live about an internal court. Where our
northern windowed houses gape like sponges or
honey-combs upon the street, the ancient Greek
and Roman and the modern Levantine and Span
ish dwellings turn blank faces to the passer-by and
live secluded about their hidden yard, whose tem
pered sunlight and flowers and caged birds are a
refuge from the barren and dusty world without.
I think that the honest visitor to Pompeii
might well allow that the sight of the ancient
houses, even where the peristyles have been re
built and replanted, has never brought that feel
ing of comfort which emanates from the really
liveable and homelike. In the grey desolation
of that terrible skeleton of an ancient town, the
classic mirage makes life distant and chilly and
Latin. But In Antigua the Pompeian house lives
again, to take us back to the year 70 without the
qualms of erudition and to make a real and pres
ent pleasure out of the dreary ruined matter of
our Italian memories. The delight of houses lies
always In the discovery of their fitness to be lived
in; and here in Antigua life is unusually lovely
with Its dreamy fusion of out-of-doors and in.
The open court Is a garden of colour and per
fume. Plants hang In swinging pots and birds
sing in wooden cages. Sitting beneath the red
slope of the roof that runs around this inner para-

8o The Land Beyond Mexico
disc, one sees the familiar cone of Agua standing
over the town as Vesuvius stands above Pompeii.
The comparison is only too fitting. Fertile and
undreaded, both have destroyed those who trusted
to their deceptive protection and lived so serenely
at their feet.
The Antlguan churches are built of brick laid
in thick mortar to form a concrete mass. Walls,
arches, vaults, and domes are all so constructed,
and all are remarkable for their solidity. This
gigantic Roman technique is enlivened in true an
cient Roman manner by a facing of decorated
stucco, behind which the true structure vanishes,
while a more or less plausible system of "Greek"
columns and entablatures makes feeble pretence
of responsibility.
Where the buildings lie in ruins, one can but
admire the tenacity of this concrete. Fallen
vaults lie in gigantic masses. Instead of crumbled
mortar and scattered brick, huge striped boulders
block the way. The Spaniards built against
earthquake; and though they failed, they proved
themselves great builders, followers in the struc
tural traditions of Imperial Rome.
Their ornamentation was of another sort.
Heirs to the undlscrimlnating decadence of the
last of the Renaissance, they played the usual

Antigua 8 1
havoc with their Inheritance. They wound stucco
spirals around the simple uprightness of the
classic column. They finished the fagades with
ungainly volutes. They broke the wall-spaces with
unnecessary niches in which they put bishops and
angels and saints. And finally they attacked span
drels and lunettes with moulded and painted ara
besques. One can hardly imagine to what height
of revelry this mania for stucco twinery could
lead, until he has seen these ruins. On one f agade
which I well remember, column-bases, shafts, and
capitals were overlaced with leaf-patterns; the
entablature was a succession of braid and vine and
scroll; the wall-niches were covered and crowned
with intricate designs ; and not an inch of wall-
space was left without ornament. The Gothic
outline that topped the doorway made spandrel-
room for bewigged and wild-eyed angels amid
a truly tropical luxuriance of auxiliary fillings.
The result is marvellous in Its richness and gor
geous at a distance, but disappointing on closer
scrutiny. In any case. It is a masterpiece because
it is the consummation of its kind. It deserves
the most careful preservation in detail photo
graphs and coloured drawings. There could
hardly be a better memorial of Spanish influence
in America than an exhaustive and adequate pub-
¦ llcation of the Antlguan ruins.

82 The Land Beyond Mexico
In the old cathedral Is yet another remarkable
example of moulded stucco. The sunlight pours
through the fallen dome and thus illumines the
pendentives and the crowning circular frieze In
all their richness of intertwining ornament. In
each pendentlve stands an angel dressed in broad
flounced skirt and ribboned knee-boots which give
a strange air of earthly cavalier to these Inhab
itants of heaven. They swing censers against an
amazing background of writhing and Interlacing
cords, above which there circles a frieze as Intri
cate as filigree. Above the aisles stretch wall-
spaces between the pendentives, and these are
pierced by a splayed window whose receding
mouldings have the richest and least analysable
ornament of all.
But it must not be supposed that all the churches
have this abundant grace of surface. On the con
trary, some of the fagades are ugly in their plain
ness. The solidity of their walls is echoed in
heavy windows, squat columns, and deep niches.
A favorite feature Is a great octagonal window,
heavily splayed, which looks like a gigantic port
hole between the heavy buttresses. Even the
niches not uncommonly assume this form, and the
unfortunate fagades become unwieldy and grace
less. For the rest, these old churches are a matter

Antigua 83
for the wandering idler or the architectural his
torian. For the one they are Inexhaustible in
their ruined charm and the spell of their associa
tions; for the other they have a variety that only
the trained eye can truly see.
Antigua Is viewed in half a day, yet known and
understood not even by those who have visited It
a score of times, much less (of course) by those
who live there all their lives.
The church of Santa Clara Is unmolested by
antiquarian veneration. Muck of a cow-stable
covers the narrow space in front of its fagade.
The portico is an Indian's home. A tiny fire
smokes on the once holy floor, and gourds and
dirty cooking-things lie littered about. When I
visited It no one was at home. In the roofless
nave I found a patch of com with banana-plants
down the middle and an Indian girl curled up
asleep on a bundle of dirty rags. In the cloister
the heavy vegetation hid the ruins of the two-
storied ambulatory. In the centre, within a
thicket, stood the old fountain with water still
running into its many-sided basin. I could not
help feeling that not one mere Indian girl, but
all the old grandeur of Spain was sleeping there,
ruined and overgrown. No one thinks of It or
cares for it now. Rain and sunlight stream Into

84 The Land Beyond Mexico
the house of incense and candle-light, that a dirty
Indian may live on bananas and corn where his
ancestors knelt at prayer.
Nearby are greater ruins and mightier desola
tion. No doubt it is a great exaggeration to com
pare the church of St. Francis with the Baths of
Caracalla. Yet some kindred emotion haunts
this greatest of Antlguan relics, which, like the
Roman, has Its own secret of largeness and vast
ness. The piers and many of the arches still
stand; but the roof has fallen in, bringing, as in
Santa Clara, sun and rain through its shattered
vaulting to foster a riot of green In every place
where seeds may fall or blow. There is still some
of the old carving on the spandrels of the de
pressed arches which carry the schola cantorum —
rosettes and twining ribbons. Here and there in
other parts painted arabesques shine with a clear
and unexpected freshness of blue or green or
brown. But it is the rank desolation and the
emptiness that bring a sense of greatness for
which the actual measurements give no warrant.
Adjoining are ample ruins of refectory and
dormitory which serve to Increase the Impression
of one-time ecclesiastical magnificence.
One of the old bells, a fine piece of figured
casting, hangs in the belfry of the church. From
Its crumbling eyrie one looks across Antigua.

Antigua 85
Santa Clara is In the foreground. Beyond stand
the cathedral and the mayoralty and the barracks
which frame the Plaza. Beyond these are red
roofs, and beyond these the hills.
On the whole, though there was much build
ing, it was not a period of great architects. The
structures were simple and massive ; the plans are
straightforward and obvious, as good plans
should be. But as the ornamentation is accessory
rather than Integral, with all the illogical and
unnecessary evils of the baroque, I Imagine that
they make finer ruins than they ever made archi
tecture. Their number and nearness to each
other are barely explicable. The townsmen claim
the ruins of more than forty churches. I failed
to count more than half that number, but a greater
patience might well have been rewarded. There
must have been a vast clan of priests; and though
in Spanish days the capital may have been a
larger town than the present Antigua, yet the
most generous calculations leave a host of idle
churches and Idle churchmen. Old accounts add
that the furnishings were very costly, and that
gold and precious stones were plentiful. Legend,
perhaps; yet It must have been a strange period
of priestly splendour dominating a simple and
pious savage race. From all of that, enough re
mains to make Antigua a charmed spot such as

86 The Land Beyond Mexico
we find so often in the Old World and look for so
vainly in the New. Antigua has character and
atmosphere. It is not a commercial ant-hill, but
a ruined soul. That is one reason why it is dirty
and uncomfortable and lazy and good-for-noth
ing; for these are often part of that unworldly
gift which we call temperament.
******* In the ruins of one of the largest churches the
Indians hold their market. Fore-court, nave, and
cloister, all three are fiUed with colour. There
Is no hubbub and stir, no crying of wares nor
Italian penny-drama. The women squat on the
ground with their little store spread out before
them. They have carried every ounce of it to
town upon their heads; so that each has a mere
basketful to offer, and their day's profits are de
cidedly par menor. At least half of them bring
their babies. I never tired of the little round
dark faces with shining black shoe-button eyes
that looked out so contentedly from the fold of
dirty cloth in which they had been slung upon
their mother's back. Savage babies, having no
conviction of self-importance, neither play nor
howl. They are jogged Into market (for the
Indian always trots while on errand) and spend
the day en papoose, silent and unremonstrative.
On four sides stand the shattered walls, their

Antigua 87
core of red brick laid bare through the broken
plaster. Where the surface is still good on soffit
of arch, on Impost, or on springing of some fallen
vault, the arabesques keep their colour and their
line, reminiscent of Spaniard and of Moor. Over
head is the open sunny sky. From here and there
one catches a glimpse of the peaked hats of the
volcanoes. What a setting for the blotched and
huddled colours of the Mayas' petty merchandry !
Little by little one learns the names and natures
of all the strange wares ; but the first effect is still
the best, before knowledge has intervened between
the senses and the imagination, or familiarity has
dulled the eyes to the medley of shapes and hues.
On the walls is a stencilled list of the probable
articles for sale, with the amount of the octroi on
each — a tax so minute that there Is no currency
to pay it. Every Indian bringing goods to market
surrenders a coupon to the official at the doorway
In payment for his right to sell. "From him that
hath not. . . ." No doubt It is justifiable
revenue; yet the American visitor emerges from
such a scene with a feeling of awe for his own
affluence. The Indians are a fascinating people. I have
always been suspicious and a little impatient of
the present-day cult of our own vanished red
skins. Through the cloud of sentimentality one

88 The Land Beyond Mexico
seems to discern a race unbelievably cruel, savage,
and shiftless. The present-day Guatemalan na
tive has only the last of these characteristics. He
is not manifestly related by race to the Indians
of North America, whose high cheek-bones and
peculiar profile he lacks. Instead the untrained
observer is sometimes reminded of Japanese peas
ant types ; and this resemblance is accentuated by
the rough short skirt, the sleeved blouse, and the
broad-brimmed hat in which the men are so often
dressed. At other times the Mayas of the carved
walls of Palenque and the idols of Copan seem
to have come to life.
The Indians still speak their native tongues,
in which I was tempted to seek Instruction until
I discovered that In Guatemala alone there are
some twenty dialects. The sound for the most
part is harsh and guttural, full of tsh and Scottish
och. At times I thought that its effect could be
best suggested by saying that It was like Welsh,
only more so; at other times it seemed a flood of
whispered gutturals. To hear Indian children
talking Spanish is to listen to the twittering and
squeaking of bats. Many of the men know no
Spanish. To all one's remarks and inquiries these
invariably shout "No! no!" in a loud and seem
ingly terrified tone.
Western Guatemala, in fact, is not a Spanish,

Antigua 89
but an Indian land. Ninety-five per cent of the
population is Indian (and to my thinking, if a
strain of Indian blood is determinative, the other
five per cent is rather Indian, too). They are a
silent and Incurious folk, dumb beasts of burden
without greeting for each other as they pass.
They have few jests among themselves and laugh
but little. Of course, there are exceptions like the
whistling landlord of San Carlos Sija (whose ex
tensive repertory of cheerful sounds includes no
recognizable tune) ; but sober hilarity and banter
are strange to them. They are addicted to the
terribly strong brandy which Is manufactured
from sugar-cane. On Sunday evening the ap
proaches to the villages are thick with reeling or
fallen figures. One sees with repulsion dmnken
women with children slung on their backs, lurch
ing across the road. They will roll about on the
steep dirty pavings In drunken stupor, or lie all
night by the roadside in the rain: and the child
must suffer.
Such drunkenness, however, is a Dominical ex
ception. On their sober week-days they are a
much more attractive race. The men frequently
are handsome and the women beautiful. One
morning I saw an Indian standing in the doorway.
His brown legs were bare to the loins ; his ragged
clothes were slung, rather than worn, about his

90 The Land Beyond Mexico
shoulders, and there was a barbaric touch of
colour in the faded brilliance of red and the soiled
white with which he was festooned. He carried a
net on his back, and the weight of its pack made
him stoop. He was holding out some dirty bills
and making a helpless and wordless appeal to
someone beyond my sight. Behind his clear hawk
like profile there played the strong sunshine of
early morning; and the doorway, framing him in,
made still more striking and picturesque that new-
world silhouette.
The young girls have fine erect bodies which
they are not taught to hide nor need to display.
From carrying all their burdens on their heads,
they develop a carriage and a poise which puts
our northern ways to shame. The men, on the
other hand, by putting everything on their backs,
soon develop a slouching and slovenly gait, which
the women are quick to acquire as soon as they
have children to carry about.
******* I was eager to ascend Agua, though I knew that
the season was anything but propitious. Every
day by noon the cone was under cloud, while the
afternoon rains made camping difficult. Accord
ingly I determined to make the trip in a single
day, and drove off in the complete darkness of
four o'clock. In the course of two hours I learned

FEAST OF THE VIRGIN, GUATEMALA CITY

Antigua 51 1
much of the patience, goodness, and long-suffer
ing of that Intangible destiny which we name the
Center of Gravity. The road was washed-out
and probably dangerous; but as the driver did
not seem to mind. It seemed unreasonable for me
to object. At sunrise we were two thousand feet
above Antigua on the skirts of the volcano. Here
stood a wretched hamlet, Santa Maria, and here
the local despot furnished horse and guide and
breakfast and cordiality.
There Is a trail to the summit. In spite of
occasional obstacles It is excellent going. Half
way up I declined to have the blood of even so
small a thing as, a lank and ribbed nag upon my
soul, and proceeded more rapidly on foot. After
a few thousand feet of deep tangled woodland,
the heavier vegetation became discouraged and
little by little gave way to pine and grass. At
the top there was only arid and stunted growth.
The crater was a wild sparse bowl, ringed with
black and brown cliffs a couple of hundred feet
high. The volcano had obviously been long ex
tinct. The view was the thing.
The Pacific coastland lay twelve thousand feet
directly below, a greenish blue sea of vegetation
merging Into a palish blue ocean of water. On
the other sides were the hills and the volcanoes, —
Fire, just across the way; Pacaya and the Kettle

92 The Land Beyond Mexico
to the East, with the ravishing glint of the sky-
blue lake of Amatitlan directly underfoot. It was
an ^schylean Prometheus view, — nothing else
can give the spirit of blown air and sheer height
and outspread earth and sea.
Within half an hour the clouds shut me in with
cold fog and whistling winds, and I was glad to
descend. I reached Santa Maria in the early
afternoon and Antigua in time for dinner. It was
fortunate that I returned so early, as It chanced
to be the festival of St. James and the town was
en fete.
After dinner I followed the crowds to the
square (which Is the only really picturesque thing
In Guatemala) and there I watched a man in a
frame of sputtering fuses and exploding fireworks.
He trotted up and down, followed by the boys
of the town, who charged the shower of harmless
sparks and taunted him until some sudden volley
of squibs and bursting fire-balls put them to flight.
No doubt you have guessed the tradition: it is
all that is left of toro and toreadores.
Central America ¦ has such a passion for fire
works that even the broad daylight is filled with
the unsexed and feeble fury of noonday rockets.
On Sundays the mass-goers are greeted with them
at the church-doors ; the dead are burled to their
popping; the returning pilgrim has a couple on his

Antigua 93
back, to set off when he reaches home. Noise is a
ritual to primitive minds; and perhaps a rocket-
flight Imparts the same emotion as a church-spire.
Indians who are too poor to buy bread still have
their "cohetes." As I write, and as you read,
there are rockets blowing their heads off in a
thousand Indian villages between Mexico and
Panama. And the black buzzards on the house
tops are paying not the slightest attention to their
explosion. Often I looked up longingly to the peak of
Fire ; but I had no tent and in the rainy season I
could not go without one. So I stayed below and
contented myself with gazing. I cannot tell you
what a spectacle he is. After a drenching June
rain a cloud-belt of unimaginably brilliant white
will hide all the lower reaches and leave only the
sunny peak of red against a quilted sky's patch
work of white and blue. In the foreground are
the coffee plantations and eucalyptus alleys with
the light catching the wet leaves. You may ride
on through the cool and shadowy plantations
hardly touched by the sun. Then there will come
a sudden gap, and you will look out from the
half-darkness, and there In the sky will be the
great head of the volcano again.
*******

94 The Land Beyond Mexico
One morning, remembering how beautiful had
been the lake which I had seen from the top of
Agua, I disturbed Colorada's fattening medita
tions and rode up over the shoulder of the vol
cano and down on the other side to Amatitlan,
the town on the edge of the lake.
I found an inn. No one was interested to know
who I was or what I did or whence I came. They
tolerated my presence — ^barely that. I did not
mind. Nor did it annoy me that they promised
fodder for Colorada and brought none. An hour
later as I crossed the town-square, laden with
corn of my own provisioning, I was watched with
out surprise, shame, or resentment. It was only
a symbol of what they were and how they did.
The courtyard was a wilderness of flowers, like
Eden after Eve had been forced to give up
gardening. Throughout the inn everything that
might have made for comfort and orderliness was
turned to squalor and untidiness. Every room
was like a grandfather's clock run down a genera
tion ago. There is always that air about Spanish
things: they have had a past.
Weary of the household with its hostile in-
curiousness, its bad food, its unkempt condition,
I went out. The town was no better. Dirty pink
and blue house-fronts, drink-shops, slovenly little
stores full of low-grade odds and ends, dirt and

Antigua 95
decay and indifference — it was all of a piece.
Spanish decadence has not even vice to redeem it.
It is as inactive as a rusted spring or a roof that
has fallen In. Woe to the traveller in Spanish
lands, if his artist-eye loses Its sharpness I When
mere decay has foregone Its glamour, when the
back aches from weeks in the saddle, and the
stomach is vicious in its complaint of evil food,
when the air Is hot and heavy with rain, a Guate
malan town burns on his spirit like a fly in the
sore of a horse's back.
I felt that I had endured enough of the
wretched country. Cursing the streets through
which I walked, I came out at the town's edge
upon the grey-blue lake where the steep green
volcanic slopes ended in a fairyland of trees with
branches bent over to the mirror of windless
water; and all my ill-humour went like a dream.
There Is only one true magician in this world,
one veritable wand of enchantment. There is no
formula for the beauty with which she works.
One can account for formal beauty in a measure,
the mind can analyse its symmetries and relations;
but the beauty of trees and winds and high hills
and broad sunlight and running streams is sheer
magic, working without reason by its mere po
tency. And because it is untamable to logic and
explication, it is incommunicable to him who does

96 The Land Beyond Mexico
not feel It. A Spanish gentleman to whom I con
fided my love of riding the Guatemalan hills
shrugged his shoulders. "Trees!" said he.
A path brought me up to a grassy shoulder
high above the lake. Beyond, Agua was wreath
ing and unwreathing her head with cloud. The
eastern volcanoes were driven deep with thunder
storm. Below was the Intricate wonderland of
trees in steep descent to the water. After all,
thought I, it was not for the towns that I came
to Guatemala.
And when I returned to the village I found that
I could be as tolerant of its monstrous unworthi-
ness as the Spanish law is tolerant of beggars and
the Spanish houses of dirt.
Next day I rode up to Guatemala City. It was
as I had feared : the civilisation was too advanced.
Within a week I was off on my travels again,
headed this time for Salvador. But that shall
make my next chapter.

CHAPTER IV
RIDING TO SALVADOR
The scene is laid once more in mud and water.
The only stage-mechanism is rain and thunder.
The ox-carts go by, their great wheels sunken
to the hubs, the oxen plunging and wallowing,
the drivers nearly naked, knee-deep in the morass
which was a road, prodding the oxen with pointed
sticks, and shouting to each other, to the oxen,
to God in heaven. The rain is nearly blinding.
When the gust pauses, there are only earth banks
on either side, crowned with the jaundiced leaf
of the tree called Evil Herb. There Is no glimpse
of the country-side without; only the stretch of
mud which the oxen have churned and the rain-
curtained hedge like a line of vegetable soldiery
to keep the traveller from taking in despair to
the empty hills.
The anguish of riding Is not easily described.
There are mud-holes, unavoidable, and stretches
which seem impassable. At times, with Colorada
shoulder-deep and very frightened, we plunged
and strained, only going on because it could not
97

98 The Land Beyond Mexico
be worse than returning. In other places travel
lapsed to the rainy monotony of Kipling's ele
phants "In the sludgy squdgy creek." Then came
renewed thunder and lightning in the hills accom
panied by an unbelievable downpour. At any
rate, one came to know how Augustus felt on that
wild night of storm in the Pyrenees when the
lightning struck close to his litter and his bearers
floundered to their waists in mud. The anecdote
is imperial, but the experience has little of regal
dignity. The purpled emperor, if he fared like
Colorada and me, must have been a pretty sight
next morning. I felt like Max and Moritz just
emerged from the baker's trough of dough, and
Colorada must have felt still worse; for she had
torn off half of a shoe and was rapidly going
lame. "But for to tellen you of his array,
His hors were goode, but he was nat gay."
It was a day of blank despond without human
Incident or cheer.
We find strange solace at such times. What
Colorada may have found lies beyond mere
human intuition. For myself, I have long ago
forgotten the watery misery of body, yet I re
member still the buzzards on the house-tops as I
left Guatemala City in the early morning and
the singing and flitting of brown and grey-green

Riding to Salvador 99
birds among the lush woodland in the later after
noon. Like the long-winged sun-disks over an
cient Egyptian doorways, the buzzards were hold
ing out their pointed wings for the rising sun to
dry. They were like the cranes In Hauff's mar
vellous fairy-tale. It was the same spirit of bird-
solemnity touched for the spectator with gro-
tesqueness and pathos and set by some eery
fashion In a frame of ritual and magic. Great
and ugly, they stood on the red gables, motionless,
tip of beautiful wing almost touching tip of wing,
like priests in mummery, facing the sunrise. As
I rode on, the misty sun was annihilated in the
sweep of clouds. But when I had passed the hill-
ridges and slithered down roads which reversed
all normal conventions of surface drainage, the
sun once more illumined my grey and porcine
career, and as I rode through the wet woods
the birds came out, sleek and trim and jubilant,
like the return of happiness after long misfortune.
And of all that afternoon's countryside I remem
ber only that there were occasional great oaks and
pebbled crossings of shining brooks and, every
where about me, bird-song.
At dusk I made a dirty down-at-the-heels
pueblo in which a line of African huts gave way
to a street of adobe shops and a couple of inns.
That evening in the narrow public room five men

loo The Land Beyond Mexico
pounded a pair of marimbas into an unmannerly
reverberation of a North-American tune. The
closed doors were their sounding boards, and I
their victim, too tired to escape. But it is sweet
to share misery. Looking up I saw that half a
dozen little green parrots were perched near the
celling, blinking their eyes, martyred. Anyone
could see that they were very, very wise, and (like
most really wise folk) extremely unhappy. And
that, said I, is like the scorn of omniscient eternity
for the evil transiency of human art. But as I
said it in English, the drunken deserter from
Salvador went on shouting to me that when it
came to a point of honour a subaltern should not
hesitate to shoot his superior, and the marimberos
continued to pound their devil's-anvil, and the
plagued and sleepy birds on the rafter tried miser
ably to doze.
Through all my journey I was haunted by this
implied comment of the bird-folk. In filthy court
yards walked the teal-like duck which they call
the pijiji, and always he kept himself so trim and
tidy amid the immundicity that the contrast ought
to have penetrated even to those shameless races.
Down In a Pacific port of the country, on another
occasion, I watched the pelicans coming home
along the lagoon. I had left the village In dis
gust of its two-storied balconied houses set crazily

Riding to Salvador loi
upon piles on the narrow beach of dark volcanic
sand. Inland, a row of tumble-down shanties on
either side of a railroad track had brought the
sense of a Hfetime acquaintance during the heat of
a single afternoon. A fairly white man in fairly
white linen had crossed the track a couple of times
before I discovered that he had only two steady
points of call, both alcoholic, and that he was cross
ing from one to the other without other pause
than the consumption of brandy exacted. Each
trip became more hazardous than the preceding
one for this human ferry for whom the straight
line of steel rail must long since have abandoned
Its easy equation of the first degree, to revel in
asymptotic curves and those more delirious forms
familiar only to the mathematician and the drunk
ard. The end came at last. His foot, striving
to overstep the elusive metal, found the barrier In
surmountable. Soon he was lying on the open
track In a stupor, his head bare to the blazing sun.
The Indians passed and saw him with indifference.
No one helped him, until a white woman found
him and brought men to the scene. I left in dis
gust and sought the uninhabited shore.
The pelicans were coming home. Their large
ungainly heads showed clear and sharp against
the sky-line. They were soaring on their wide
wings, splendid beautiful fliers, a delight for the

I02 The Land Beyond Mexico
body-prisoned eye. Low over the surf came one,
sailing without beat of wing under the smooth
curl of the glassy wave and without effort just
avoiding the white crash of falling water as the
great wave broke. And I thought how I had
but now seen a biped who could not so much as
cross a railroad-track. Clearly the pelicans were
the best blood in the place.
With the last of the birds the sun set Behind
the sea-line. Near by, the great surf under the
rusted iron pier gradually took on phosphorescent
lines in Its broken depths, the lights shone in the
cabin of the little freighter at anchor, and the
stars came out. I walked back to the village.
It was Saturday night and everyone was drunk.
I thought of all this through the din of the
marimbas In Barberena, and the memory of that
Pacific evening drove me out-of-doors In the hope
of that silence which is so much more musical than
sound. Colorada was still at supper. The light
of a full Guatemalan moon flooded the littered
yard. It was a time for nightingales. But it
was well that there were none. The birds al
ready had more than proved their superiority;
and never had I felt it more keenly than that
afternoon when the mule and I limped on our be
draggled way, mud-caked and heathen, while
above us in the branches sang the glad clean

Riding to Salvador 103
feathered folk. But I dared not communicate
my impressions to any one; and as Colorada
proved indifferent to anything except food, I de
barred her from my recently-formed category of
animals superior to man, and went to bed.
******* It was in this part of the land that I encounter
ed a coffee-planter whose Spanish proclaimed him
a fellow-countryman of mine. Acquaintance
turned to mutual liking, liking to hospitality, and
hospitality to a three days' visit. We turned off
from the Salvador highway and soon were riding
through the dark solitude of evenly planted coffee-
bushes. This plantation, said my new friend, be
longed to a Belgian; and we would drop In on him,
as our path led past his door.
There soon appeared a wooden house with
broad verandahs and a general look of unkempt
habltablllty. At the uproar of the dogs, the
planter emerged, uncoated, voluble. We should
stop, we should open a bottle of wine, we should
have music. Red-faced and well-stomached, he
poured forth his un-Parisian French like the gush
of an oil-well newly liberated. He dragged us
off our animals, and laughed at all we said.
Schumann's Merry Farmer played with bouncing
gusto would have been his musical embodiment.
An hour later I knew that his wine was excru-

I04 The Land Beyond Mexico
ciatingly sour, that his phonograph records were
scratched and out of tune, that his house was in
confusion, that his table-cloth was as coffee-
stained as his shirt-front, that his house needed
paint and his verandah repair, that his anecdotes
were stupid and his gesticulations silly; but when
I knew all that, I had been riding for half an
hour, Belgian and finca had been left behind, and
the whirl of chuckling riotous farewell had soften
ed Into the solitude of the dark bushes of berry-
laden coffee. Dionysos never wrought more il
lusion out of pine-stick and ivy-spray and goat
skin sack than that Belgian whirlwind blowing
amid his bottles of acid wine and disks of sour
music. "He's always like that," said my new friend.
"My stomach is nearly ruined from having to pass
this way."
Colorada was freed, to rest her strained and
shoeless leg. In perfect happiness she roamed an
unscythed field; and seeing her, I could not help
thinking of the great elder-tree with its flowers
in Swinburne's poem, and of
"The ripe tall grass, and one that walked
therein,
Naked, with hair shed over to the knee."
In the morning my friend loaned me a horse and

Riding to Salvador 105
we started out to make an overseer's round. I
called to Colorada as we rode by. Her long
ears forward, she whinnied. Then, as intent as
a mistress who sees her lover with another
woman, she regarded me and my new mount in
puzzled silence, until at last the fragrant grass at
her feet recalled her to less speculative activities.
I resent the sentimental ascription of human emo
tions to animals and I have no conviction that
Colorada experienced any feelings during that
tragic encounter: I confine my chronicle to her
indubitable stare.
My friend complained much of the shiftless
natives and their lazy unambitious ways. Still,
after twenty years of It, the country jangled his
nerves. We sought out a half-breed's cabin
where a woman came to the door at our call.
Her man, she said, had gone to Guatemala City
to be cured.
"Yesterday," said my friend, the overseer,
"you said he was too sick to leave his bed. How
then could he walk forty miles to-day?"
To this there was no repartee; but "indeed, he
had gone!"
"You tell him," said my friend, "that I am
tired of his nonsense, and that as soon as he gets
that matter of the boat fixed up he is to get to
work again."

io6 The Land Beyond Mexico
"Yes, sir," said the woman, at once admitting
the point, "he Is down attending to it now. I
will tell him when he gets back."
We in the North lie stubbornly and resent de
tection. In the tropics they desert their lies as
readily as they abandon their mistresses. "After
all," they think, "what does it matter?"
So off we rode on our round of the plantation
where the natives were hoeing out the weeds and
banking the irrigation-ridges beneath the heavy
shadow of the coffee-bushes. So rapid is the
growth of weed that a fortnight turns the brown
soil Into a little jungle of undergrowth, and the
hoe Is never still.
We rode for a couple of hours with occasional
plunges into great copses and water-cut chasms of
rioting green. Here and there came a glimpse
toward the great volcanoes on whom I had turn
ed my back, — Fire and Water, and the Kettle, on
whose slopes my friend had once seen the lava-
streams blazing at night.
After a time we came to dirt mounds amid the
coffee, a cluster of earthen barrows littered with
numberless fragments of coarse pottery and with
shards and splinters of obsidian knives. Here
stood a stone some three feet square, carved to the
likeness of a huge toad, with weatherworn face
and limbs. Near by lay the broken head of an

Riding to Salvador 107
idol with good Indian features of the Maya race.
A line of beard ran from lower-lip to chin; an
ornamental scroll variegated his ear. Authority
and determination were still upon him, though his
descendants of to-day have neither.
From the soil round about I picked up some
small terra cottas, a grotesque demon-head mask
with bird-beak nose, and a head most clearly and
humorously pithecan.
When we returned to the plantation-house my
friend produced an ancient jug of good black clay
shaped in the guise of a well-fed townsman of
that old Maya community, caressing with folded
hands a portliness such as even Falstaff might
have envied.
Indian sites are frequent in Guatemala, and
much minor art is still to find. But the traveller
needs a measuring-worm's methodical persistence ;
for even when the sites are close at hand he will
hear of them not at all or by mere accident. Di
rect enquiry for them will be In vain, as the natives
have never noticed them or are too Indifferent to
be bothered with showing the way. Money, It
must be remembered, is not an effective Instrument
in the Spanish tropics.
******* Regretfully I left the pleasant idleness of
plantation life. I was given an Indian servant to

io8 The Land Beyond Mexico
accompany me through the coffee-land back to the
Salvador road. In the nearest town I presented
Colorada with a shining set of new shoes and
waited while she had them put on. It was after
noon before I got upon my way, and a dreary
rain soon overtook me.
As I passed through the Indian villages, the
sloping thatch dripped monotonously at the eaves,
the brown mud splashed underhoof, and the fog
hung In rainy festoons among the great trees over
head. There was no sound but the yapping of
unfed dogs and the slapping of tortillas, varied by
the fragmentary insanities of tame parrots. I
saw no one. The rainy road led on, and the vil
lage was forgotten.
By supper-time I reached a town whose length
of name ill agreed with the shortness of Its
streets. Entirely destroyed by earthquake a few
years ago, Cuajiniquilapa lost its metropolitan
headship of the department, Its profusion of
adobe houses, and a church which I should gladly
have examined. Its dome had dinner-plates bed
ded in the mortar (like some of the churches on
iEgean Islands, I presume, or the monastery of
St. Nicholas on the Island of Salamis). But the
piece that crowned and closed the domical vault
was not taken from table-ware, but borrowed
from that equally useful nocturnal service which

Riding to Salvador 109
it Is not decent to name nor well-bred to Insinuate.
It is going too far to assume that even Nature
was shocked and to explain the earthquake on
grounds of her outraged delicacy, — even though
it is characteristic of man in all ages to elevate the
paltry misdeeds of his hand or tongue to causes
for cosmic convulsions, so colossal is the conceit
of his own accusing conscience! Yet if that is
indeed the explanation, I can only regret that
Nature passed judgment so hastily. Does not
Browning's Pippa enjoin us that
"AH service ranks the same with God?"
Among the new houses was one where strangers
could be lodged, and there I revelled in fresh pine
apple, whose taste alone repays a journey to the
tropics. I have spoken little of Guatemalan
fruits. Eating them Is apt to be an acquired
ability. The flavour of many is as indescribable
as would be a new colour which had no kinsman
in our spectrum. After all, mangoes taste so
much like mangoes and so little like anything else
in the world, that one can only say that they taste
like mangoes. And If I add that papayas are
very good if you happen to like them, I am only
wasting a slice of printer's pie. But of pine
apples all may judge by imagining the substitution
of a warmly ripe and dripplngly luscious fruit for
that faintly flavoured pulp which we buy in our

no The Land Beyond Mexico
northern markets, deluded by its barbaric ex
terior into the expectation of a pleasant dessert.
The house ran with dogs, miscellaneous in their
pedigree. I even suspected an ornithic strain
when I saw them begin to roost for the night.
At dusk one took to a high bench; another slept
on the dining-room table, to which he correctly
ascended by way of a chair; while a third climbed
with the utmost nonchalance and a considerable
display of skill into the low-swung hammock.
When, on retiring, I left the door ajar the cat
came to share my rest and a fourth dog occupied
the bed against the other wall. 'No doubt,'
thought I, 'attentive observation of the "smale
fowles" saves them from rheumatism !'
I woke in the middle of the night to find that
the rain had invaded the room and that the floor
was well under water. Outside, the moon was
struggling through the clouds. It was a scene
whose rippling beauty was marred only by the
unesthetic reminiscence that I had left my shoes
in the path of inundation. The next morning the
dog was still snoozing drily in his hammock and
the water had disappeared. But the shoes bore
witness that my vision was not the mere disorder
of my dreams.
Colorada seemed ready for a day's work. So
I saddled her in the sunrise and rode dovra a

Riding to Salvador ill
long descent to the River of the Slaves, whose
boulder-strewn flood of roaring dirty water is
crossed by what may well be the oldest bridge in
our western world. For it was built In 1589, and
there are few things on our side of the Atlantic
which can number a third of a thousand years.
Some of the stones are new; but others may well
be as old as the tablet on the crown of the span
insists. For a time the path led up the sandy river-
valley, splashing among clear puddles and crossing
little woodland streams, until the scenery lost its
good-natured tranquillity and swung Into the
savage reaches of deserted hills. With the path
winding up and up in the burning sun, it was long
before the last of the valley was left behind.
Looking back over the ragged tree-land, forty
miles away I saw the familiar sugar-loaf hats of
the great volcanoes and waved good-bye to them.
As I crossed into the new watershed they vanish
ed, and I came to the village of Azacualpa.
This was by origin a Spanish penal colony, and
had an appropriately evil repute through all the
country-side. In Azacualpa they would steal the
tail off the mule while you were riding through.
From every hand I had been warned to waste no
time in that robber's nest. So I was dutifully
shuddering and riding on, when such a burst of

112 The Land Beyond Mexico
thunderstorm overtook me that, to escape it, I
would cheerfully have turned aside to play Faro
with Captain Flint. Naturally, I found the
people simple and kind and pleasant. The
soldiers were willing to talk; the women Insisted
on feeding me eggs and bread and coffee. Even
the dogs were friendly. Colorada, too, thought
highly of the community, and I would have spent
the night there ; but hearing of a larger town some
ten miles further on, I set out again In a heavy fog
which failed to lift. I must have made poor
progress ; for when I slipped below the cloud-line
into an open valley-basin it was sunset. Dusk
came on in the uninhabited fields. Then came
darkness and rain and I abandoned the helm to
the four feet of a surer navigator than myself.
For having left the high road in the hope that a
short-cut would bring me to Quesada in time, my
only reward was now the dim form of an un
meaning hedge close at hand and the provoking
distant twinkle of an unknown light. It was the
first and last time that darkness was to catch me
on the road.
Left to her own mulish devices Colorada
gratefully lapsed into that speed whose Ideal she
shared with tortoises and snails. Lights appear
ed, sudden as cloud-uncovered stars, and they
were close at hand. Then came a turn, a sharp

Riding to Salvador 113
descent, and the black rush of a bridgeless river;
and all the lights had vanished. Poor Colorada
was unanimously In favour of remaining on the
hither shore, until my spurs overruled her last ob
jections and she waded out into the invisible swirl
ing current. By good luck the stream was
swifter than it was deep and we struck the notch
in the opposite bank where the road continued.
In five minutes more we were in the town; and
soon Colorada was eating a lampless dinner of
corn-stalks in the Municipal Stables, while I,
supperless and a trifle wet from the river, slept
in my clothes on the bench of the Court of
Justice. I awoke in the black hours of the night to dis
cover that somebody was trying to saddle a mule
in the middle of the floor. When he had finished,
he roused the roomful of Indian constabulary for
fear that they had failed to become aware of his
departure, shook hands with each and every one
of them, then climbed on his mule and rode
through the doorway into the pelting rain.
Torches were extinguished, candles blown out,
and sleep resumed, when the night-watch entered,
announced that it was raining too hard for mili
tary service, and began an endless conversation
in the course of which I fell asleep once more and
missed all but the last part of their narrative.

114 The Land Beyond Mexico
This I woke to hear at a time when a grey light
was breaking through the chinks of the wall,
gradually transforming the shapeless bundles on
the floor to brown bare legs and snoring bodies
of half-breed Indians.
In the unexaggerating light of a breakfastless
dawn the Municipal Stables looked astonishingly
like an ordinary dirty back-yard and the Courts of
Justice like a small unfurnished room with brick-
tile floors and drab walls. However, as my
hotel-bill was four cents American, it would be
worse than ungrateful for me to spoil the illusion
of those stately names.
Would no one give me coffee? Perhaps the
Chinaman who kept the store around the comer,
or even the Frenchman across the square. The
square had some of the geometric properties ap
propriate to that figure, but was otherwise in
distinguishable: the Frenchman was in bed. I
made a discourse on the traditional friendship of
our two countries and ordered his native wife to
prepare me some coffee. The sun came up in bar
baric splendor, the coffee was hot, and the French
man sent a message from between the blankets,
to the effect that he had always esteemed my
country highly and that the price would be ten
cents. While I was paying, a dishevelled woman
came over the hill-top of the square like a blown

'idols" of COPAN, HONDURAS

Riding to Salvador 115
bush before a tornado. She made for the sol
diery, by whom she was instantly enveloped. Like
flails on a threshing floor, her arms waved above
the encompassing crowd. She was in tears and
in anger. May classic Castile forgive her the
jargon she was talking! I understood not a
single word, and the soldiers would not tell me
what she said. But they pacified her; and she
withdrew like a burned-out meteor from my
horizon. It was time to start. So I saddled Colorada
and, after replying to usual enquiries by an un
usually clear explanation of a New York office-
building and a rough comparison of the popula
tion of that city and Quesada, I rode off through
the fields thankful that I had crossed the river on
the previous evening ahead of the heavy rain.
I had only a short ride before me. It was Sun
day, dedicate to God and brandy, a bad day for
extensive travel. Wherefore I was content to
reach Jutiapa before noon and to rest.
As I entered the town a bare-foot and un-uni-
formed soldiery was returning from rifle-practice.
Before them, like a wounded comrade upon a
stretcher, the painted figure of a wooden man was
being carried back in triumph to the dis-strains of
a band. Set up against the bleak hillside, he had
been the wretched scapegoat of his tribe. Now

ii6 The Land Beyond Mexico
even In death his bland face was drawn to an ar
chaic smile, his vapid eyes stared patiently to
ward heaven. Poor bullet-ridden eidolon! Did
the rifles really tremble less and the bullets go
straighter because that ragged soldiery felt the
thrill of his illusion and almost could make Itself
believe in him as a thing of blood and bone? And
what greyest remnant of savage Baldur or Adonis
was there in that processional carrying-home of
the god whom they had slain? Was there none
at all, just because they were themselves aware of
none? It was the feast of St. Christopher. From the
white-washed church came a strange procession.
Two boys in brilliant carmine led the way with
cross and candlestick. Behind them strode ten
knights, fresh from the fairyland of an im
promptu pantomime. Their stockings were for
get-me-not pink-and-blue. Cloth-of-gold at a
penny a yard made brave work of their uppers.
Their heads wore pointed magician-hats set with
tiny flashing mirrors. A drum and one fife made
music, a sort of Farmer Helvig's Spring-dance,
whose cmdely accentuated beat always seemed
(but was not) out of rhythm. The ten rem
nants of chivalry danced with crossing of brown
feet and of wooden swords. Behind came an
armful of rockets, whose feeble skjrward rush was

Riding to Salvador 117
meant to enliven every halt. Then came two
festival floats, set-pieces of wire-frame and colour
ed paper, mounted on kitchen tables whose un-
romantlc limbs were burled In artificial flowers
such as even the fertile jungle-lands could never
have evolved. The superstructures delved in
that realm of childish splendor dear to the
southern Roman Catholic and the country-
kitchens of our chromolithographic North. One
showed St. Christopher with pretty Christchild
on his shoulders, fording through gigantic bego
nias. The other was a waxen saint with girlish
mien and dresses. Pink and blue flowers made
her paradise and supported her enthusiastic motto,
"Long live St. Christopher!" She was carried
by Indian women, and a little girl walked beneath
the table, as though under a flowering canopy.
The rockets blew themselves to smoky bits, the
fife whistled and wheezed, the swords clashed in
wooden fervor as the mimers danced their stately
step. It was a real festival, and St. Christopher
could not have helped being pleased.
In the inn doorway I found a demure little
three-year-old, sitting stark-naked on the thresb-
hold and dipping his fingers Into a large plate of
black-bean mush. Some vague reminiscence of
Sartor Resartus suggested the young Carlyle with
his plate of porridge, and the confusion of the

1x8 The Land Beyond Mexico
two pictures was so ludicrous that the little fellow
looked up with a puzzled friendly face to see why
the stranger was laughing. On the walls of the
room behind him were some frescoes clearly be
longing to the undiscovered school of Guatemalan
Primitives, and to these I diverted my amuse
ment. But the woman of the house saw only
that I had laughed at her child and her paintings,
and I had to abandon my Intellectuallsed perver
sions to make my peace with the real world of
human things. There seems to be nothing so
ubiquitously rude as a laugh unshared or a smile
hot understood. The grave unsmlHng savage is
well on his way toward being a gentleman; and a
sense of the ludicrous is the root of ill-breeding.
Next day before sunrise I started on the last
stretch of my journey. The Indians were coming
to market, stringing out across the almost treeless
plain. All had the one question, — "How is the
river?" I had crossed it with my feet tucked up
on Colorada's neck and having managed to keep
dry could not help being optimistic. Yet it must
have been no small matter for the old women with
their heavy baskets on their heads to wade
through the swirl of the rain-swollen stream.
But if I lied to them, I lied as the Spaniards often
do, out of kindness and a desire to please; and

- Riding to Salvador 119
for that, I hope they left the stranger's memory
uncursed when they stepped down to the foam
and muddy roar of their dreaded Tamasulapa.
It was a countryside such as meets one every
where In Greece, — a stony grey-green plain shut
in by unforested hills with a merciless splendor of
light to make Its barrenness attractive. In the
dry season the brown earth must split open in
numberless cracks and the dust lie like a desert-
mantle on every leaf and twig. But in rainy
August it was almost verdant., The \air was
fresh and cool, and the mist travelled along the
hill-tops with shadowy promise of further down
pour. It was a long and steep ascent, past some fan
tastic rock-castles of century-long erosion not un
like those natural towers on which the Thessalian
monks built their unapproachable monasteries.
At the top of the ridge there were trees once more
and glimpses backward over the wide reaches of
upland plain and lowland jungle. Then came a
delightful woodland way, level and wind-blown,
and a zigzag plunge from the far-seeing ridge
down to a town buried like an English village in
the shadow of Immemorial trees.
I found a girl standing in an open doorway,
and persuaded her to take pity on my hunger.
Though I had nothing devised upon my banner.

I20 The Land Beyond Mexico
my apprehension of the shades of night and my
eagerness to be gone reduced our behavior to the
inanity of the poem. What wonder that when
the maiden actually uttered her "Oh, stay, and
rest," I was terribly embarrassed lest my bright
blue eye should continue the romantic tradition?
However, we fell to arguing, myself insisting that
I must cross the frontier before nightfall and she
maintaining that it was not possible to ride twenty-
five miles that afternoon. She was wrong in that,
and I should have proved her so, had it not been
that a black storm came over the hill-tops at three
o'clock and blustered me Into putting up for the
night In the shabbiest little border-village that ever
crept upon a map. I translated my passport with
appropriate grandiloquence to the commandant of
the lounging barefoot soldiery and received his
permission to do what I liked. I soon found
that this was an inexpensive generosity, and that
the sheik had presented me with the freedom of
the desert. My dinner was the eternal triad, —
black beans, tortillas, and coffee. My bed was
an unyoked ox-cart In the village square. Two
wandering Indians whom I had overtaken and left
behind in the early afternoon arrived at nightfall,
and, building a tiny fire beside me, cooked a pinch
of coffee in a little tin from their pack. From
the same source appeared cold tortillas to be

Riding to Salvador 121
toasted on sticks. When the llttie blaze had
smouldered and died, they rolled up in their
blankets and slept on the ground. Food and
sleep were to them an emotionless ritual, per
formed with the silent vast intensity of the pyra
mids of Gizeh. Beneath my cart a sow took
quarter for the night until I disputed with her the
justness of her assumed prerogative of using my
bed for a scratchlng-post. One cannot sleep
through quakes, be they volcanic or merely siill-
llne. It was a night of brilliant stars. In the half-
illumination of the midnight sky the black cone
of Chingo stood above me, fit staging for a phan
tom play. The warm air was vaguely sweet
with tropic perfume. To drift off into slumber
in such a world was a touch of Elysian content.
Was it not a retired seaman who gave orders
to be roused in the early morning with the mes
sage that the admiral desired his presence? So
much more did he relish his protracted slumber
when after his Invariable "Tell the admiral to go
to Hell," he sank back between the covers! I
had the same delicious sense of slumbering off a
dozen times into the tropic night, only to be
snatched back into the unpleasantness of the con
scious world. For a dozen people passed along
the road from the frontier. The dogs barked.

122 The Land Beyond Mexico
first in the distance, then close at hand. Finally
a black shadow stole across the open. Thereat
a soldier, Idling under cover at the opposite side
of the square, emitted a bawl that must have been
audible half a mile away. The bamboos heard it,
the prowlers drinking at the midnight stream
heard it, the great trees tried to stifle It, the hlU-
chffs re-echoed it ; how much more did I on my ox
cart and Colorada at her hitchlng-post suffer from
that interminable sentence which involved inter,
alia an exhortation not to go further, a command
to traverse the square, and an Intimation that the
commandant's representative would be Interested
in inspecting the traveller's papers! ... all be
cause a soldier was too lazy to cross the square
and stand guard on the road-side.
I was content to leave before dawn and to con
tinue down the narrow stream which had brought
me out of the highlands. In and out of Its bed
we splashed. "And when you have crossed it the
third time," had said the owner of my night's
lodging-place, "you will be In Salvador." It was
like the brooks in Looking-glass Land, where an
action apparently quite trivial and irrelevant was
followed by momentous consequences. . . .
So I was in Salvador I And this was no longer
Guatemala, this rocky path and washed-out track,

Riding to Salvador 123
or this famUiar mud through which we flounder
ed ! Yet it looked the same for a while. But at
length I came out on green treeless hillocks, dead
volcanoes clothed in emerald, so smooth of slope
that one could wish to see a gigantic hand reach
out to stroke that shimmering velvet. It is an
effect peculiar to volcanic regions. The Alban
hills near Rome have a little of it; and there is a
hint of It around Naples. But Italy is too dry
and arid to give those slopes their proper green.
In Salvador It makes an unending pastoral tran
quillity. I knew indeed that I was in another
land. By eleven in the morning I had ridden twenty-
five miles despite of some of the most distress
ing mud that Colorada's flanks had yet encounter
ed ; and I was back once more among streets and
houses, where there were people who had seen
London and Paris, who knew that Europe had
been at war and could feel the pity of it. For the
first time, Colorada lived in a real hotel and was
waited on by other menials than her master. The
town was Santa Ana, and there for the first time
in many weeks I looked on the face of someone
whom I could call a friend, a fellow-being in the
same ancient Aryan civilisation in which mules
and Mayas have no share.

CHAPTER V
DON QUIXOTE'S RANCH
It is only another Instance of man's inveter
ate self-complacency that he cheats the powers of
darkness by claiming rest for Paradise and yet
calling unrest divine. For my own part, in Sal
vador I was more inclined to credit Satan with
the Invention of both; for while I thought that
travel was diabolic, I found inactivity to be the
very devil. Colorada fattened in her stall, as
though her indifferent ears heard no far blowing
of mountain-winds and singing of woodland birds.
For hers was a wooden and unregenerate soul;
and I have little doubt that In her next incarna
tion she will be a fencepost. But to me the days
brought only uneasiness. Beyond the town roofs
I could see the hills, and I would think of the
rocks and woods where ran the trails — places of
birds and shadows and hilltop views. One after
noon suddenly I saddled Colorada and rode away.
Heading north on the highroad, we came near
sunset to a village without an inn. In the local
providence there was no provision for strangers;
124

Don Quixote's Ranch 125
but I found an old couple who were willing to re
ceive that ill-assorted pair of fellow-travellers, an
American man and a Guatemalan mule. Of the
two, the American was the better-bred; for the
Guatemalan broke at midnight from her tether
and allayed her curiosity with an inspection of the
town. I guarantee that she found nothing to re
ward her ambulations and that I learned as much
as she by lying on a cot and listening to two old
men mourn for the golden past.
"What young man Is there to-day," said one,
"to whom you could point as representing the old
manhood of Teixistepeque ? Not one !"
"It Is all gone," said the other, "morality, hon
esty. Industry ! The young men — what are they?
Shiftless, unthinking, good-for-nothing."
"It did not use to be so," said the former.
"Teixistepeque in our day — that was a village!
A bit of the true Salvador, the free Salvador!
The world Is growing evil."
"Yes, the world is growing evil. The men of
to-day ..."
The old Illusion!
I was tempted to tell them what their next sen
tence was to be. (It Is all written out in Greek
and Latin books of two thousand years ago.)
But the prophecy would have failed ; for a young
boy and a girl entered the house at that moment,

126 The Land Beyond Mexico
and the cheerfulness of youth cut short the grey
beards' threnody. The whole party fell to telling
marvellous fables, amid whose unimaginative and
preposterous involutions my sleepy senses soon
lost themselves, to slip from a candle-lit peasant-
room Into a blessed land void of Spanish words or
Indians or twelve-league rides to dirty towns.
But at daybreak I woke to all of these.
The old man went to his work in the fields
In the cold mist of sunless glimmer and the old
woman made me coffee. I saddled Colorada and
set out. From a cool and sleepy road of trees
the path emerged into the open among volcanic
mounds and grassy cones. Grazing horses stood
out like phantom mares on the strangely peaked
sky-line above. The ride promised to be Interest
ing. But volcanoes and horses were left behind,
the air lost its morning freshness, and the path
led for hours through hot open country. Except
for occasional strings of mules, heavy-laden and
despondent, coming down to Santa Ana from the
mines of the hill-country beyond, there was nothing
of interest except a great lake whose windless
silver stretched off to the low ranges of the Guate
malan frontier. Then came the roaring of a
river, which Colorada heeded less than I. Little
did she know In her mulish innocence that the river
which she had twice crossed at Jutiapa on her way

THE THICKET, QUIRIGUA

Don Quixote's Ranch 127
to Salvador had swung north to Intercept her once
again, swollen now by all the streams of the
Jalapa highlands. Mules do not cross rivers
until they come to them (nor always even then),
and I envied Colorada's indifference to the roar
of the white rapids beside which we rode. In the
end there was (as though by miracle) a bridge of
solid stone, luxury undreamed, deus ex machina to
our little difficulties.
On the other side of the bridge the road at once
entered deep forest filled with tropical growth and
life. The path was a-flutter with brilliant butter
flies, and there were lizards galore and new kinds
of birds. Colorada, the unssthetic, noticed only
that she had become the sudden prey of huge flies
which I slaughtered assiduously on her bleeding
neck and flanks. But the swarms, like all else,
passed, and we emerged from the deep wonder
land to catch sight of the broken cone of an old
volcano and a succession of sunken lakes, dead
craters rain-filled and edged with trees. Beyond
a larger lake we shortly came to the town of
Metapan, and there I lunched, and idled away the
remnants of the hot and radiant afternoon.
When I stole out in the grey dawn, next morn
ing, I left the Inn unobserved and unspeeded; but
Colorada, unsusceptible to furtive as to other
emotions, transformed tip-toeing to a clatter of

128 The Land Beyond Mexico
hoofs upon the deserted streets. In the village
square a dreamy sentinel blinked at me without
comment; the dock in a 'square tower (built
placidly in front of the very center of the church-
door) struck the half-hour; a lonely figure dodged
across the streets ahead of me and slipped like a
shadow through a dark doorway. Mist swam in
the leaves of the great trees and blurred the red
ridges of the roofs. There was no wind and
little light. The town seemed a graveyard. But
Colorada, being void of apprehensions, communi
cated her indifference to me. Without haste we
passed out into a countryside of dripping thickets.
A misty range of eastern mountains flanked us
like a wall, over which there shortly appeared the
red face of the sun. Across these ridges lay my
day's journey ; but as the crests seemed more than
three thousand feet above, I had little hope of
riding the needful forty miles through that
bristling land. An arch Ionian pessimist once
hailed Thasos with much the same despair, —
"Like a donkey's spine it stands
Abristle with savage wood."
I have never seen a desert-mirage, that shifting
city of pinnacles and minarets whose margin
fades; but I have learned to appreciate the baffled
temper of the caravans. Riding for Esquipulas,

Don Quixote's Ranch 129
I interrogated man, woman, and child, always
with the one question of distance yet to go. I
felt toward their answers as the Hellenes to the
Thracian tongue: " 'Tis the chltter of swallows,"
said those good-natured and contemptuous speak
ers of Greek. And chltter of swallows might
have been those answers along the road.
"It is ninety miles," said one, "and you will be
there to-morrow night."
"Over those hills," said another, "and then It
is only a short piece to ride."
At times I was a dozen leagues from my goal,
only to hear of it floating behind the nearest
woods. Toward noon I became interested in the
town of Concepclon. When it actually came Into
view among the trees, a real human village shut
in with the homely sound of running water, I felt
that I had performed as impossible a feat as
though I had stumbled upon the rainbow's pot-of-
gold. Pot-of-earth, it seemed, there was none;
for I could find nothing cooking on the hearths
of the villagers, and rode on in my chimeric
search for Esquipulas. It was a district of mines,
upland ventures of foreign capital scarring the
hills with the marks of that one quest which all
mankind can understand. I had expected to run
into countrymen of my own ; but the mines lay off
the main track and my day's goal was nebulous

130 The Land Beyond Mexico
still. On those high hills of the gods, the shirt-
sleeved young engineers curse the tropics and
their loneliness, reviling the shiftless race whose
labor will not serve. Not for them are the great
shadows above clear streams in those wild valleys,
the broken falls of sheer earth above them, and
from colored ridges the far views toward volcano-
crowned horizons. God, It seems, made the world
to be lived in, not to be looked at. So the Indians
sweat or lie indolent; the white men drink away
the damnable solitude ; the trees and flowers grow
and die under blowing winds and falling rains;
and only the sentimental journeyers delude them
selves with empty contemplation.
It was late afternoon. From water-eaten
ridges I slid into a new valley and rode out on a
high tongue of land. To right and left the
ground fell away into deepening gullies that led
to the broad green valley-plain beyond; but my
path kept level as though on an earth-built cause
way into space. In all the land beneath, there
was no town. Esquipulas, the Mecca of New
Spain, seemed as elusive amid these hills as ever
the Grail-castle was to the questing knights. I
wondered what I had come to see, whether the
Black Christ and the shining towers were not a
new- wo rid phantasy of pious minds; and while I
wondered, suddenly there was the town at my

Don Quixote's Ranch 131
feet, red rambling roofs In a long straight line and
the yellow dome and white walls of a great church,
conspicuous and splendid, like the clustered build
ings of a lonely lighthouse In the grey-purple
sea of waning day.
The artist chooses at pleasure from the world
of his experience, wise in his ehminations. If
only Memory were an artist, too ! Our past
might be like a pleasant landscape; our friends,
portraits; our disillusions dropped from the can
vas. Then Esquipulas would have been only that
company of red roofs marching to a white-tower
ed temple, toward which I descended in a sheer
plunge from a sunset ridge into the gathering
dusk of the valley-floor. But the spirit of re
membrance is a cross-grained and malicious demon
with little sense of form, content to jumble to
gether all the arbitrary and distorted elements
which he chooses to find significant. Esquipulas,
thanks to that Mephlstophelian spirit, is for me
a futurist composition, wherein are thrown inter
alia an earnest woman, pineapples, a red tin-flag
In front of a butcher-shop, the cracked keystone of
a bridge, five naked children sitting in the gutter,
an open bake-oven glowing and crackling, an In
dian spitting, five brandy-booths, an enormous
armful of mule-fodder, a raw egg without cup or
spoon, and a row of nettles waving in the moon-

132 The Land Beyond Mexico
light. And what can a writer do with such a
memory, or such a world?
There was no inn In Esquipulas. By advice of
the soldieiy I begged for quarters from a pious
widow, and was given stable-room for Colorada
and not unslmilar lodging for myself. Walls, a
celling, a floor; these the room had. But I felt
that it had acquired those members e definitione
rather than by any active interest of its own.
Luckily there was a cot available. Food there
was none for man or beast; but I soon came back
somewhat as Macduff's soldiery from Burnham
wood, looking like a moving corn-field of green
stalks. For my own consolation I ended up in the
back of a wretched brandy-shop where I ate black-
beans and tortillas by shifting candlelight in a
sooty bake-room which might have been a char
coal-burner's dream of the Inferno. There I was
pestered by the sore-eared carcass of a dog more
hungry even than myself, and annoyed by the
proximity of women whose clothes seemed to be
rotting on their backs. Nor is the picture over
drawn. On my return to the house the widow was
waiting. "One question," said she.
And when I had expressed my readiness, "I

Don Quixote's Ranch 133
am religious," she said; "but what about you?"
Now, I never answer that question very bril
liantly. Perhaps I suspect it of belligerency. I
hold that it should be marked "Beware of the
Badger!" However, that evening I was re
ligious too; and all went well until, in an un
guarded moment, I admitted my Protestantism.
Then came storm. For half an hour I swallowed
dogma, denied heresy, and acclaimed all the saints
In general, but most especially Our Lord of
Esquipulas, for whom I evolved a considerable
enthusiasm. When a man has ridden a mule
close on fifty miles he may be permitted a con
version to Baal or Moloch if they be masters of
his bed and blankets. (Primitive rehgion Is
rather of that sort anyway, and a tired man is
apt to be primitive.)
Mollified, but only half content, the local
champion of Catholicism allowed me to remain
beneath her roof. But the ordeal continued, as
she proceeded to be religious In a neighboring
room and involved the rest of her household In
song. Now, It Is a strange thing that we forgive
Nature for being out of pitch, but not mankind.
A flatted piety brings only its author nearer God.
The civilized world must have its religion and its
esthetics concordant; and it is generally only
serving-maids and men-of-business who can fall

134 The Land Beyond Mexico
victim to the unsensltive tactics of revivalism.
But I was patient. Next morning the widow
came again, to announce that I could not remain,
since her house was for Catholics and not for
heretics. I was tired of the whole dispute.
"One question," said I, and like herself on the
previous evening proceeded to ask a number.
"Have you been to Rome where the pilgrims
go ? No ? / have been to Rome.
"Have you seen the great church where the
Pope lives ? No ? / have seen that church.
"Have you seen the Pope, God's vicar here on
earth? No? / have seen God's vicar.
"I am a holy man," I said; and left her.
When I returned an hour later, I found that a
chair had been added to the furnishings of my
room. ^ 9f« 3|C ^ 3|C #fS ^
Mecca of Spanish America, shrine of the black
Image of Christ, town of the January pilgrims
encamped around the white walls and yellow
dome of a great and solitary church, — small won
der that I was eager to come there and to see it
with my own eyes. In the daylight I found half
a mile of straight street, lined with low houses of
stuccoed mud. Three squatting Indians were sell
ing pineapples. They named their price in silver

Don Quixote's Ranch 135
of Salvador, I agreed in currency of Guatemala,
and paid them with Honduranian coin, leaving
the three of them in helpless dispute. The first
maintained that I had cheated them, the second
that they had cheated me, the third that neither
had cheated the other. (This last was clearly a
pessimist confirmed.) But as they had dedicated
their lives to reconciling these three currencies, I
felt that an outsider could teach them nothing,
clutched my pineapples, and went to explore the
church. There It stood, white and high at the
end of the vista of straight street and dirty
house-fronts, with a tower-flanked fagade whose
receding stages recalled the peaked front of Dutch
houses in spite of the inevitable classic orders
and baroque scrolls of the Spanish tradition. The
four corner-towers themselves in receding stories,
passed from square through octagon to a tiny
crowning cupola. In the center was a dome
covered with lemon-coloured tile. For the rest,
every inch had been whitewashed with such ardor
that the saints In their niches were bundled up in
a dozen coats of paint and looked like dough-
sculpture floured and ready for the Christmas
oven. Before the entrance was a platform of red
brick, and there on every tile pious pilgrims had
scratched the outline of their soles. Large feet

136 The Land Beyond Mexico
and small, initialed or uncommented, they were
there by the hundreds, footprints of those that
had stood at the door of our black Lord of Esqui
pulas. I entered, to find the interior large and bare.
Whitewashed piers carried the usual barrel-vault
of the nave. At the crossing the cupola broke the
dull and heavy ceiling-lines with pierced drum and
with painted evangehsts on the four pendentives.
The floor was of red brick tile and Innocent of
bench or chair or any encumbrance of comfort.
Paintings hung on the piers of the nave and gaudy
paper flags from the impost-comlce above.
Along the side walls stretched a line of gilded
tabernacles for the gentle and highly colored
waxen saints. The rest was whitewash.
Yet when the Indian women knelt on the
bare floor with their bright shawls across their
shoulders and beyond them the acolytes In red
waved the incense, though the dimmest eye would
have been outraged by the colours and the dullest
ear by the sounds, there was something in the
strange blending of emotions to mark and to re
member. The sacrlng-bell rang, an altar-shade
rolled up, and there behind glass was the Black
Image, for native eyes so miraculous, so sacro
sanct, so mystical, the tremor of whose presence

Don Quixote's Ranch 137
ran visibly through the brilliant shawls of the
kneeling women. Whitewash and tinsel, — tinsel
and whitewash : yet I am half-ready to believe that
our Lord of Esquipulas can In tmth work his
miracles there.
Nevertheless, his fame and his power are
slowly fading. There is still fiesta from New
Year's to Mid-January; but the crowds, they say,
are less, and the great floor no longer seethes with
worshippers coming and going. In mid-summer
when I saw it, the long street of houses, beginning
with Its brandy-shops, stretched desolately away
from the steps of the church. A cynic might
claim that there was still ample spiritual elation;
but a handful of drunken go-to-meeting Indians is
a poor substitute for the festivals that once were
held when the Black Christ of Esquipulas gathered
his pilgrims from furthest Mexico and Panama.
In the course of the day, in a little church, I
found a legend stencilled on linen, setting forth
In gruesome detail the anti-Catholic laws in force
in England "since 1535." Those old religious
persecutions make sorry reading; but what of a
priesthood of to-day that uses such means to de
fame an opposing creed? No doubt, then, the
widow was persuaded that I, on my native soil,
turned my energies to fining, whipping, and

138 The Land Beyond Mexico
quartering loyal Catholics; and does it not speak
for her hospitality that I was not secretly mur
dered during the night?
Murdered, however, I was not; and next morn
ing by candle-light I stumbled upon Colorada
sleeping on her side. By candle-light she ate her
dried corn and by candle-light she was saddled
and exhorted. I pushed the house-door wide and
rode Into the empty village-street. The first
dawn explored the chinks between the paving-
stones and felt with forlorn fingers for the dirty
walls of the houses. Outside of the town it was
not better. Water oozed on the meadows and
the damp wind blew fog-wisps in dreary dances.
But after a time came sunrise ahead over ragged
hills, bloody and barbaric as blowing trumpets;
and behind, across the plain, the white towers of
our Lord of Esquipulas slowly grew out Into the
commonplace of day.
There seemed to be little or no path. Some
cowherds offered me fresh milk and gave me in
structions. For a while a little barefooted half-
breed trotted along ahead of me, the only guide
whom I ever persuaded Into my service In Guate
mala. There were frequent streams, all moving
across my way to reach the River Lempa on Its
southward course through Salvador to the Pacific.
By mid-morning I reached the hills and crossed

Don Quixote's Ranch 139
the low watershed of the continent into a wild
steep valley where all the waters turned to the
other ocean. Beyond were the blue frontier hills
of Honduras.
It was a scene full of unfriendliness. Around
me were low ridges, bristly and unkempt. The
path slipped down the steep valley-head in rocky
zigzags over the stony shelves of pine to the more
fertile shadows of the bed below. Here and
there I thought that I could distinguish the thatch
of a hut; but there was no other sign of life. Of
birds and beasts there were none. I could look
down the long valley to the near forests of green
and the far hills of blue and know that no one
would see us nor tend us nor feed us as we wan
dered our twenty remaining miles to the village of
Copan. Honduras seemed a tme land of the free
in which the individual is at liberty to go where he
likes, without guide or path, to sleep in the open,
starve without hindrance, and lose his way without
help. For once I was utterly my own master.
What wonder that I twice missed my way and all
that day had nothing to eat? As I rode down
stream I sank deeper and deeper into the low
lands. The trees grew higher, the underbush
grew thicker, till I could no longer see beyond my
immediate path. Losing the track I rode aimless
trails ; but In the end I reached the right ford of

I40 The Land Beyond Mexico
the right river, and crossed with the swift water
up to the saddle, only to find a blank hedge of
jungle beyond the pebbled shore. Peasant piety
in European lands Is glad to credit the devil with
all that is unusual In nature ; but there Is nothing
truly diabolic in Devil's Bridges and Witches'
Kitchens. They lack that sinister touch of the
intellectual, that malicious and painstaking be-
devllment which is the true caste of Mephisto.
Not so a re-entrant ford of a flooded stream.
The trick is apparent — a ricoche from bank to
island and Island to bank will carry one upstream
or down In zigzag progression. But from where
I stood I could see a foaming shingle above me
and another one below, and there was nothing to
tell me which to choose. The high water had
washed away all earlier hoof-marks, and It was
soon apparent that no one but myself had crossed
the river that day. The jungle screen was placid
and without expression, ready to crowd me off into
deep water.
Since my map told me nothing I chose at
random and crossed an arm of the stream to
the island above ; and there found track of hoofs.
Recrossing from the upper end of the shingle to
the mouth of a tributary stream, here and there
on a shallow or shelf of sand I found the same
hoofmarks leading inland, and judged that in dry

Don Quixote's Ranch 141
weather the path ran where now the red mud
swirled. But I met no one until the path emerged
from the stream and struck through thick bush to
a little clearing. There I learned that the true
passage of the ford was downstream ; and back I
rode down the swirl of red water, to do four zig
zag river-crossings before I reached the road at
last. It reads quietly and pleasantly; but the little
drama does not act so well. We of the North,
for example, never understand why the Sicilian
Greeks used to engrave a man-headed bull on their
coins when they wished to represent a river. To
be sure, a bull roars and plunges and destroys ; but
we do not guess how that grey trickle through a
bed of stones which so disappointed us in our visit
to classic lands can do the same. ,,Overnight it
may change to a red and raging animal that foams
and bellows.
At one point Colorada was swept off her feet;
but though she lost her bodily, she kept her
mental poise, and came bravely ashore under wet
saddle and saddle-bags with blowing nostrils and
a wondering eye.
We had lost our chance of reaching Copan.
Instead, after half an hour, coming out on a large
lonely rancho, I tumed In and applied for shelter.
The women-folk received me hospitably and gave

142 The Land Beyond Mexico
me black beans and tortillas with the usual ex
planation that there was nothing else in the house.
They themselves, as far as I saw, ate nothing.
At sunset the ranchero appeared, a gaunt, grim,
bespectacled old man riding a gaunt grim steed.
His head was wrapped voluminously in a large
towel. He rode slowly, like one In a dream,
without evident aim or interest. Seeing me, he
greeted me with courtesy, but paid me no further
attention. Afoot, he moved like a lank ghost: I
looked to see whether there was flesh beneath
that turban towel. He entered and I did not see
him again that evening; but in the early dawn he
rode off with the same swaying listless motion, his
head wrapped In the towel, and disappeared slowly
into the deep woods.
The whole farm was Quixotic. The large
empty house, the aimless inmates who neither
toiled nor fed, the absence of any apparent means
of livelihood gave an eerie Impression of desola
tion and self-forgetfulness. There were no
children in the house; and when I asked the
women I learned that the old knight-of-the-towel
was the last of his line. Owning large stretches
of land which he could not cultivate and cattle
which he could not tend, he saw himself growing
old and feeble and the great farm gradually dying
with the dying of his clan. Neither children nor

Don Quixote's Ranch 143
grandchildren sustained him nor took over his
cares. From habit he looked after his cattle; but
his horse had grown old with its rider, and
neither could have covered more than a few miles
each day.
I wondered why he had not bidden farewell and
decided that he must have forgotten that I was
in his house ; but when I wished to pay the women,
I heard that the ranchero had ordered them to ac
cept nothing: 'he wished me to feel that I was
his welcome guest.' And that, amid poverty, was
Quixotic, too. There was no one to feed Color
ada, and the Indian woman sulkily asserted that
there was no fodder. But I searched around,
found bran and maize, and gave Colorada plenty;
then I saddled her without comment and rode
away. So is hospitality requited when a mule
must be fed.
With the shutting in of the trees and the vanish
ing of the farm I felt as though I had read, rather
than encountered, that experience of the old
ranchero on his broken horse, that I had never
seen him In tmth, but had dreamed of Don Quix
ote and Rosinante and Imagined a Quixotic setting
for them on the frontierland of Honduras.
The path led over hot straggHng hills. Once,
at a cool and shadowy brook, there was a giant
ceiba-tree with its peculiar sharp-edged roots and

144 The Land Beyond Mexico
Its great branches. Otherwise there was little to
note until I came to a sugar-mill, where the cane
was being pressed between revolving cylinders
of steel while the sap was smoking and boiling
in large open vats, tended by Indians armed with
perforated ladles and scoops. The machinery
was made in Ohio, U. S. A.
I was told that the Copan had been unfordable
for nearly a week and that Colorada would have
to stay on the hither shore. Riding down to the
river, I found the forecast true. Great masses
of reddish brown were foaming and roaring down
the swollen bed, and though I should have liked to
take the chances of swimming, I knew that the
natives were right. Returning to the mill, I left
Colorada entranced with the faint sweetness of
the pressed cane and crossed on foot by the
swinging wire-bridge to the village of Copan.
There I found the apothecary composing verses
for a birthday wreath. He was reading them to
the general grocer for criticism and approval.
After a few minor changes, both agreed that they
were very good. I could not Identify the metre,
but liked some of the words, and bought a bottle
of beer and a pineapple. After that I went to see
the alcalde, who Informed me that the Honduran
ian government Imposed a tax on visitors for the
upkeep of the antiquities, and suggested five dol-

Don Quixote's Ranch 145
lars gold as the correct amount. Fortunately I
was able to display my wealth in Guatemalan
paper (which was quite worthless in Honduras)
and my poverty in current silver. The Hondur
anian Government thereupon lowered its impost;
but to no purpose. Finally the said Government,
noting my professional capacity and casual inten
tions, and discouraged at my Insolvency, saw fit to
remit entirely the revenue for the upkeep of the
antiquities, and gave me a barelegged escort, for
which I was tempted to thank the said Govern
ment In behalf of the learned and literary profes
sions which I represented and the nationality to
which I belonged. Thereupon I requested the
escort to look lively, as I was hungry, and
promised It twenty cents if it fulfilled Its offite to
my satisfaction. The escort collected its knife,
and we started.
******* There are numerous accounts of the antiquities
of Copan, and with these I have no ambition to
contend. The idols and mined courts are a memorable
sight, if only because they stand so desolate and
overgrown. Though I had come on purpose to
see them, the setting seemed so unlikely that the
surprise of the unexpected was not altogether dis
solved. One would as soon look for the pyra-

146 The Land Beyond Mexico
mids of Sakkhara in the plains of Dakota as for
these splendid relics of a great civilisation amid the
unlettered peasantry of the Honduranian woods.
The taU stones, carved in the overprofusion of
early decorative art with priest-kings in ritual
dress, with faces and manikins and involved
demon limbs, have enough of the proud endurance
of everlasting things. So that one needs neither
sentiment nor fantasy to feel the spell of that un
kempt hillside with Its treasure of more than a
thousand years.
It was very hot, and the tangle of undergrowth
made progress difficult and slow. If one would
study the ruins, one can learn more from looking
at the books of Stephens or Maudslay than by
travelling to Central America. I learned
nothing, yet I gained an unforgettable memory;
even as those who go to Athens find that they al
ready knew more about the Parthenon than ocu
lar Inspection will teach them, yet would not trade
for all the architectural treatises and drawings
one moment of Attic light on the golden-brown of
Its walls and columns.
At the time I thought that I must be mad, to
ride those distances with their hardships and dis
comforts only to look around me for a casual hour
at stones whose reproductions are In our Ameri
can museums. But one never knows. Stumbling

Don Quixotes Ranch 147
and sweating, I saw httle : returned to the village,
I could even ask myself whether I had noted any
thing at all. And yet from all my journey mem
ory has since singled out for its most special
pleasure that idle glimpse at the jungle-smothered
hillside above the wild and muddy river, with its
idols, its overgrown walls, and its vanished courts.
******* My failure to bring Colorada across the river
forced me to return to the lonely ranch for
another night. At dusk Don Quixote rode In,
spectral as before. He showed no surprise at
seeing me ; but inquired If I had any English books,
as he would like to learn the language. He
seemed disappointed at my negative, though he
must have known that, in the land where he would
shortly go to dwell, there is no need for learning
of other tongues.
I had brought the women a fine pineapple from
Copan. It was my only recompense for their
hospitality, as they again refused my offers of pay
ment the next morning.
On the way back to the deceptive ford which
had cost me such a wetting three days before, a
couple of brilliant red and green macaws flew
overhead In the sunlight and there were flocks of
the little green love-birds which are such common

148 The Land Beyond Mexico
household pets in this part of the land. They
have a large yellowish saucer around each eye,
and this, above a heavily bent and juridical beak,
makes them look like the wisest judge that ever
sat the bench. In captivity they become extreme
ly affectionate, incline toward a hilarious gravity
(if such a condition may exist), and are an un
ending nuisance about the house. Flying wild
across a clearing, they are a brilliant and happy
spectacle ; for a parrot free Is as different from a
parrot caged as, let us say, a sea-going lobster
from a salad" ^w mayonnaise.
The river was in still higher flood, and there
was nothing to do but to swim. To my surprise
Colorada stepped in without remonstrance and off
we swirled, both of us submerged to the chin.
The current carried us down a little, but we made
the other bank easily enough and waded up in the
swift shallows to the proper exit. Riding in wet
clothes is neither dangerous nor uncomfortable:
tme depression only sets in when the saddle-bags
are opened for inspection. Besides, a wet saddle
cloth and saddle are not apt to be merciful to an
animal's back. However, "God himself rescued
you!" cried a native whom we met; and we had
the pleasure of learning that we had been the only
ones to cross the stream during the last two days.
Poor Colorada ! The path must have climbed

Don Qtfixote's Ranch 149
nearly three thousand feet, for we tolled up to
high barren ridges looking wide over familiar and
unfamiliar valleys. Far below we could see Don
Quixote's ranch and the valley of the Copan, be
fore we turned into other watersheds, wild
scrawny uplands full of thatched huts and im
possible settlements. The descent was even more
sudden, down and down into the dense vegetation
once more, to rejoin the Copan where he broke
through rocky gorges. There, shut in by hot un
fertile hills, was a basin with two little towns that
fronted each other less than a mile apart.
Twins, they bore twin names, Camotan and
Jocotan. In either one you wish that you were
In the other.
In one of these I found shelter with a kindly
and garmlous old couple, a veritable Philemon
and Baucis in Spanish guise. . . .
"The twain the whole house are, and order and
obey." These made me truly welcome; the old man
showed me a room, while the old woman in her
out-of-door kitchen fell to cooking me a
dinner. . . . "Super omnia vultus
Accessere boni, nee iners pauperque voluntas."
The old man and I were soon fast friends, and

150 The Land Beyond Mexico
I found myself trying to explain why I rode the
country on mule-back, alone and unarmed; but I
could convince neither him nor myself, for the
problem was really too difficult.
My wet accoutrements were hung up to dry,
the old man Insisting that I should not think of
departing on the morrow. He promised to help
me to sell Colorada, and himself led her down to
the stream at dusk to water and tied her up for
the night. His ordinary kindnesses shone In that
land of indifference like the candle and the good
deed In this naughty world.
I went to bed and dreamed that I was no longer
In Guatemala.
In the morning the dear old nuisance caught me
at my shaving and was at once lost in rapturous
admiration of my safety-razor (which he called a
shaving-machine). Like a child he begged and
teased me until I gave In. With a round ball of
soap and a crumpled handful of string he con
verted his face to that of a circus-clown. Though
he got soap into his eyes and both soap and string
into his mouth, I pronounced the lather a huge
success. He settled himself In a wooden chair,
blew out his cheeks, and announced that I could
begin. Was it my professional ineptitude, or
the dullness of my razor, or the length of his
beard, or did I merely imagine those sounds of

Don Quixote's Ranch 151
rending and scraping that attended on my art?
He swore that It was the height of luxury and
comfort and that the machine was almost worth
Its fabulous price of two hundred dollars (Guate
malan). It was a day in his life, a memory for
all time.
Within ten minutes fourteen neighbors had
heard the details from his lips; and this so in
creased his prestige that he came to see that mere
thanks were an Inadequate return for my service.
His eye travelled In perplexity around his paltry
shop. I guessed that he was trying to find me a
present; but I did not speak in time.
With smiles that almost turned to foolish tears,
he begged me to be the owner of his pet, his own
little green love-bird that climbed so prettily about
the chairs and tables and sat on his wife's shoulder
while she stirred the bean-pot.
"But what shall I do with him?" said I.
"Ride with him on your shoulder," he
answered. "He will sit there all the way back
to the States. And always you will think of me."
For a time I feared that he was right; but In
the end there was no offence, and the love-bird
lived on in Jocotan.
And here, in that s^me town, comedy turned
to tragedy; for I sold my Colorada for a handful
of silver and stood by while another man rode

152 The Land Beyond Mexico
her away to an upland farm. With that she goes
out of my story, a little older and sadder than she
entered, with close on a thousand miles to the
credit of her grey legs. I taught her a little
about river-crossings, while she taught me the
hundred and one things that only a mountain-mule
knows. I hope that she found a less energetic
master than I (a more indulgent one never rode
the Guatemalan trails) . And with that wish, in
simple decency, I must mark her memory by end
ing the chapter.

CHAPTER VI
THE LOWLANDS
Colorada was made over by deed and oath to
her new master, and I was left with the remnants
of equipage and the prospect of thirty miles on
foot. I was content to wait for night and the
moon before starting; but while I talked to the
small boys of the village and kicked my heels in
front of my lodgings, the good lady of the house,
having eaten a green orange and some rancid
butter without due interval or reflection, was sud
denly convulsed with colic. The miserable
creature died hourly through all that afternoon
and evening and made a losing hazard out of my
attempts at sleep. At midnight my equally wake
ful host, seeing me prepared to go, brewed me
coffee while he reviled his consort for her per
verse failure to recover. He accompanied me a
step upon my way, past the moonlit square and
the sleeping soldiers, whom he seemed anxious to
avoid. At the edge of the village he begged me
to wait for daylight. 153

154 The Land Beyond Mexico
"Stay and sleep," said he. "There are evil
folk on the roads at night."
"But I am more evil still," said I; and on the
instant felt like a hare In full armour which I once
had seen in a Japanese picture.
The timid old man was somewhat re-assured
and sent me off with his blessing. My last wish
was for his wife's recovery. "Oh," said he, "she
will not die: she never does." And with that we
parted. By dawn I was high up In the hills, above a
gorge through which my muddy enemy, the
Copan, foamed and roared. It seemed not unlike
the South of France with its limestone clefts and
chasms and restless rivers. But better light de
stroyed the resemblance. I saw towers and roofs
In the distance, my only glimpse of that Chiqui-
mula where the Spaniards had once built a great
church. It is now a great ruin and may well be
worth a visit. But my path .turned away on a
long descent to the burning plain of Zacapa ; and
there I walked in the sun for a couple of hours
between great twisted growth of cactus and
prickly-pear which almost alone grow in that
curiously arid stretch. In the midst of an other
wise prodigal fertility the river-valley of Zacapa
is bad-land. The giant cactus, erect and fantastic-
armed, grows to a thirty-foot tree (if such a

The Lowlands 155
malevolent and leafless demon may be allowed
that shadowy and comfortable name). The
opuntia spreads out its thorny elephant-ears, from
which (like a travesty of Athena's birth) spring
new ears fully armed. There is no body, — ^only
a chain of ears with a waxy yellow flower which
runs a gamut of sunset colours as It goes to fmit.
Between them, Cereus and Opuntia cover the bare
soil with long fleshy fingers pulled out heavenward
and lop-eared monsters of unpleasant green. But
between the ranks of this mediaeval purgatory ran
the railway, and In the heart of the heat was the
town of Zacapa with its American hotel. A
civilisation of Iced drinks and screened doors and
spring-beds closed In about me, and I was at rest.
******* The river was an old friend. It was the
Motagua, which weeks earlier I had seen as a
little stream trickling through the barrancas of
Quiche. It had come down through a hundred
and twenty miles of hill-country and was now the
great river of Guatemala in an alluvial plain ten
miles wide. Below Zacapa it leaves this arid ex
panse in rapids that break through rocky bar
riers and descend to a level valley-floor. Here
on one side are the border-mountains of Hon
duras, on the other is the long spur of the range
where the ancient races dug their silver and gold.

156 The Land Beyond Mexico
All between is damp lowland, heavily flooded in
the time of greatest "rain where vast tangles of
sun-obscuring forest-growth are rapidly being con
verted Into a sea of banana-trees.
At Quirigua Station there is now no jungle to
be seen. Instead, a smooth sloping lawn, a hos
pital, a hotel, and endless banana plantations
show what the self-interested benevolence of an
American fruit dompany has done to open and
Improve the country. Improvement, however,
has an economic rather than scenic application;
for a banana farm is a dull affair. The palm
like leaves are always torn to ribbons and these
have a pleasant motion in the breeze ; but there Is
no real beauty of shadow or foliage, and the feel
ing of heat is Indissociable from the vast damp
stretches of evenly planted stems. To clear the
jungle and set bananas Is like ploughing ruined
gardens to raise wheat. The railway-traveller
may judge of this. Some ten miles below Quir
igua there is a fine stretch of jungle which the
banana Interests have not yet managed to buy.
There the vast palms and fern-trees still stretch
up their leaves, the ceibas rise to their hundred-
and-fifty foot greatness, bearded with Spanish
moss. There is hanging bread-fruit; and one
may see that strange tree, the matapalo, whose
base is a wigwam of edged roots ending below in

The Lowlands 157
"webbed feet and merging above to the giant tmnk.
When young, this tree grows around some other
for support, and in the end strangles It to death.
The great branches are loaded with tree-orchids
In full flower or cabled with "monkey-swings,"
fifty-foot vine-stalks that descend like stays to the
damp soil (from which they draw moisture in
such quantities that, if they are cut, they gush
with clear and abundant water). Yet It is not
only the strangeness and variety of the detail
which impresses. There is always in the tropical
forest a sense of something invisible just beyond,
a dayhght compacted of shadow, a dark silence
which works on the senses as though It were por
tentous of something unimaginable about to be en
countered. And all this has vanished from Quir
igua, and the monotony of the plantation has
taken its place. Monotony there is indeed. The
straight tracks of the little railways lead on in
terminably, since every spot is precisely like every
other. It Is a realization of Alice's looking-glass
adventure. Walk or run as you will, you are still
In the selfsame place. In the heat of noon the
feeling of oppressive monotony is intensified.
From the hotel verandah the drowsy eye looks
across the river-plain to the thunder-clouds that
are balled on the high blue ridges of Honduras.
Elsewhere the sky is clear, an intense blue through

158 The Land Beyond Mexico
which the sunlight descends and in which the buz
zards soar and circle, hour after hour, without
beat of wing. There is no wind, no noise, only
all-penetrating noonday heat. The foreground
Is a crude light-green of banana-plants. Two
miles distant, rises the dark green of a single
grove. This alone the fruit company has spared,
for here are hidden the most famous Indian ruins
in the land.
They have been so well pictured and described,^
their replicas are to be found in so many northern
museums, that there Is here no reason for detailed
account or Illustration. But I may still be per
mitted a few Impressions and opinions of these,
the most interesting ruins that I saw.
The site has been thoroughly cleared of trees
and undergrowth, which has increased its accessi
bility and vislblhty, but rather Impaired its
picturesqueness. No doubt it is captious to com
plain. The grove has all sprung up since the
temples were built and the obelisks erected; in
fact it is the prying strength of vegetation that
has been the main instrument of destruction. Not
the hands of succeeding savage races, but the
* See, for example : J. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in
Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. 1S40. Vol. II.
A. C. & A. P. Maudslay, A Glimpse at Guatemala. 1899.
(Sumptuously illustrated.) pp. 146-151.
Art & Archisology, 1916. pp. 269-290.

The Lowlands 159
roots and branches of the jungle have forced the
stones from their places and overthrown the
heavy walls. Once there was a village round
about. But houses with walls of split bamboo
and roofs of palm-leaf thatch are the least en
during of human habitations. Within a year
after their destruction the jungle must have come
in. For all Ithat, the jungle now belongs to
Quirigua as the Turkish minarets belong to Saint
Sophia, and I am as sorry that the ruins stand
in clearings as I am glad that around those clear
ings the great trees are still allowed to stand.
From the endless world of bananas the visitor
enters the sacred grove and comes to a clearing
with five obelisks. They are of uneven height,
but all alike are carved with strangely complicated
figures of priests or kings, standing erect, and all
have, on their shorter sides, square panels of
picture-writing. A quarter of a mile further on are the mins of
a considerable group of buildings, part excavated,
part mere mounds of tropic vegetation. Here in
19 12 an American expedition brought to light and
partially restored an ancient temple, whose seven
chambers He deep in massive walls. Nearby in
a plaza are idols, among them the Great Turtle.
The obelisks of the priest-kings are monoHths
of reddish brown sandstone tinged with faint

i6o The Land Beyond Mexico
purple. The stone was seemingly quarried in the
foothills beyond the floor of the river-valley and
floated to Its destination when the Motagua was
in flood. The largest are 25 and 26 feet in
height. The kings in consequence are greatly
more than life-size, though their great stature is
much reduced by the high plaque of ornament on
which they stand and by the towering head-dress
whose many stages wander off into vagaries of
grinning heads, monsters, and branching feather-
work. The [typical king has rather rude features,
large almond-shaped eyes, a rather triangular and
fleshy nose, lips widely parted to make an almond-
shaped mouth, a pointed beard springing from the
underside of the chin. The so-called Egyptian
cast of this countenance is merely due to the in
evitable conventions of an unemancipated art.
The squatting priestess with the marvellously
elaborate headdress, who is carved on the "Great
Turtle," may as well be compared to a Korean
Idol. The elements of such a comparison are all
of them merely the universal primitive conven
tions. Korean and Mayan art both fall victim
to the instinct for frontal presentation and seek
refuge from empty surfaces by geometric fiUIngs.
On all the carvings at Quirigua there Is a tu
mult of accessory design. Thus, the great turtle,

The Lowlands l6i
a solid stone of some twenty tons, has every inch
of surface wrought with ornaments which Irrele
vantly include human profiles and run to harsh-
angled scrolls without apparent import. Much
patience shows that these scrolls are geometric
conventionalisations of human or animal motives.
Tree and flower designs seem to be absent. The
trick of the art, then, is to make a geometric
mosaic of carving from these discontinuous forms
and to link them together by some pretence of a
general scheme. Consequently, the dominant
figure of priest or dragon ramifies into irrelevan-
cies. Each subordinate part becomes a field for
smaller Independent designs, as when the royal
boots become human masks in profile, or the nose
of the great toad becomes a human head. And
so the general plan wanders off Into borrowings
from demon and bird and snake, until every inch
of surface Is filled with these interlocking
elements, and art has become a puzzle-picture.
There are, therefore, two striking '(and I
should say, disastrous) elements in this art: first,
the trick of turning nature into a repertoire of
angular conventionalisations of human, avian,
and reptilian motives; secondly, the mania for
making each organic part of a large design serve
as a new field for wholly unrelated smaller de
signs, whose elements in turn are similarly at-

1 62 The Land Beyond Mexico
tacked and disintegrated. (The old art of the
Scythian steppes of Russia shows this same ten
dency; the art of Greece would have none of it.)
It Is perfectly just, therefore, to maintain that
Mayan art gives us just the opposite of those
qualities of formal synthesis and unity, of emo
tional expression in natural objects through sig
nificant line and mass, which are the elements of
greatness in Greek and the best of modern Euro
pean art.
Mayan sculpture, from this point of view. Is at
its weakest In large complicated subjects and at Its
best In isolated decorative elements, especially in
those where the angular treatment is In place and
expressive, — I mean, in the grotesque. Such is
the manikin-rattle or sceptre In the hand of the
priestess In the dragon's mouth; and such par ex
cellence are the manikins of the larger panels of
picture-writing on one of the obelisks. Here
there is a truly amusing inventiveness in the tor
mented positions of the little human-limbed
demon with his acrobatic agility so deftly rec-
tangularlsed. Because there is the same naive
humor of interwoven line and delight In the
affrlghtening, there Is a certain resemblance to
Chinese dragon-designs ; but the comparison goes
no further, because there is no counterpart to the

The Lowlands 163
serious and unfantastic qualities of Chinese
drawing. These little panels (perhaps because they show
the local art at Its best) bring out two further
characteristics of Mayan carving, which again
seem artistically mistaken. These are, the sub
stitution of an artificial complexity of line for the
simple and flowing contours of natural forms,
and the failure to distinguish the merely grotesque
from the imaginatively significant.
Accordingly, I cannot rate Mayan art very
high. But it has a great and absorbing Interest
which is largely Independent of Its aesthetic value.
After all, it is what it is, — a strange and marvel
lous relic of a unique civilisation. I am confident
that Quirigua will become a great place of pil
grimage. Seen in their setting the bizarre dis
tortions of its art are only the more stimulating to
the imagination which begins to play about altar
and Image and shrine in the jungle, carved and
built and abandoned more than thirteen centuries
ago. Of the Quirigua architecture there is not suffi
cient to allow an estimate of Its attainments. It
is not mechanically interesting, as it seems to use
neither columns nor arches, but depends on solid
wall-faces. In the Quirigua temple there were
seemingly two stages, the lower one plain with a

164 The Land Beyond Mexico
cornice-band of pictoglyphs, the upper a fagade
of i patterned stones. This lower portion stands
to-day. Its wall-blocks relaid in cement and
sheltered from the rain. The long box-like plan
Is clear and the pictoglyphic adornment of the
threshhold steps is preserved in place. In the
hotel at Quirigua Station is a row of idol-heads,
sombre or grotesque, which once ornamented the
wall-spaces and glowered above the doorways.
The picture-writing of the cornice records a date
which has been synchronised with 540 A. D.
These pictoglyphs have a quaint geometry
which Is all their own. Of the 200 varieties,
nearly a quarter are understood by the specialists,
though all of these (unfortunately) are connected
with phases of the Mayan calendar. The chro
nology is thus assured to us, and we read their
records like one who should read our northern
chronicles with a knowledge confined to numerals.
I fear that the accomplishment Is almost equiva
lent to ignorance, as far as the more human ele
ments of history are concerned. However, this
much Is held to be established: that the royal
obelisks range between 490 and 535 A. D. (they
are supposed to show a steady degeneration in
artistic power) ; that the temples were built and
deserted in the sixth century when the Mayas fled
northward into Yucatan, where their civilisation

The Lowlands 165
continued until the fifteenth century; but that
their ancient sites were never revisited by them.
Quirigua therefore has been lost in the jungle for
more than a millennium. Yet with the further
excavation of the site and the complete decipher
ment of the writing, it may be that even so great
a lapse of time has not sufficed to blot out the
ancient temple-town from the understanding of
mankind. Below Quirigua the railway continues to follow
the Motagua toward the sea. Banana planta
tions alternate with short stretches of unclaimed
thicket. In place of Indian villages of bamboo
and thatch appear the settlements of the negroes
who are employed on the plantations. They hve
in whitewashed wooden shanties, speak a highly
comic variant of English, and hail from distant
parts. Some have been Imported from our own
southern states. Many have come from Jamaica
in the West Indies, and most of these would like
to get back tO' that Island where, as one Informed
me, there is for them "very glorious second-class
living." But few of them have energy or ready
money enough to realize this fitful dream of re
turn. The lowland chmate has taken the energy
and the Chinese who keep the general stores have
taken the ready money. So they work on, play

1 66 The Land Beyond Mexico
music, live in their shanties, and look after their
wives. In a world of Idleness how should they
worry themselves for anything beyond?
The railway leaves the Motagua Valley and
passes through almost sunless thickets to the head
of the Gulf of Honduras. Here is Port Barrios,
where I pray Heaven that only my enemies may
ever have to live. Yet there are three large
wooden hotels, food in plenty, and refuge against
the mosquitoes, so that it would not be hard to
Imagine worse places. This Is the terminus of the
railway from Guatemala City, and here the pas
senger steamers arrive weekly from New Orleans
and fortnightly from New York. There are a
dock, a railway yard, and considerable inter
mittent activity ; for here is the gateway of Guate
mala. The weird double line of negro huts blazed up
in the middle of the night while I was in Barrios
and a midnight spectacle of Inferno brought on
a charred dawn with half of the village destroyed.
But thatched huts are like tropical vegetation and
grow up again In a couple of days. The negroes
wore new hats and shoes, mysteriously acquired
during the excitement, and there was a noticeable
Industry among the Singer sewing machines which
infest every native community, as unexpected
gowns were shaped from strangely plentiful cloth ;

The Lowlands 167
but all this subsided, and Barrios resumed its
internautic dullness.
A few miles oceanward along the bay lies
Livingston. Once it was the main Atlantic port,
before the railway diverted every cargo. It is
still the capital of Its department, vested with
official, though no longer commercial, importance.
Here the governor lives, the court legislates, and
the band plays. Of governor and judiciary I
have nothing to record; but of Livingston as a
musical centre I am better Informed.
It was Sunday, a poor day for all pursuits and
pastimes wherein precision of brain and hand
are consequent. The negro who carried my pack
from the landing was on the amusing side of that
ragged line between week-day sobriety and
Dominical hilarity. It was he who informed me
that he played bass in the village band and that
there was to be a concert that afternoon. I am
a lover of music, yet I fear that I furthered her
corruption, since by rewarding a porter I
inebriated a musician. When I reached the vil
lage square an hour later, the band had taken
their places, though their music-notes, seen
through an alcoholic haze, swayed and quadrlUed
before their eyes and refused to settle quietly on
the racks. But their leader, though a small man,
was of greater capacity than they (I speak as

1 68 The Land Beyond Mexico
well of music as of brandy), oblivious to every
thought but that of leadership. For him, the
politely attentive and unsmiling audience was for
gotten ; he saw neither square nor village, but only
his men. His face was set, and he gripped his
wand frenetically. The men must play their
notes. For all of that, they did not. They played
their neighbours', they invented, borrowed, and
discovered notes such as I have never heard, till
their faces swelled with the windy effort. The
little leader stopped them time and again, to
remonstrate, to argue, to exhort, and finally to
begin afresh. The audience waited and listened,
polite, unsmiling, unsurprised. At last, a more
than usually outrageous impasse precipitated a
long tirade against the wielder of the clarinet,
who In turn became voluble, excited, and at last
mutinous. He refused to go on, rose, and tried
to leave. At the steps, the little leader pounced
upon him from behind, seized his coat-collar, and
manfully dragged him back.
"Jesus," said he, "sit down!"
Jesus sat.
"Take that pipe !"
Jesus sullenly raised the instrument.
"Now blow those notes, and blow them right!"
said the leader; and the concert began again. I

The Lowlands 169
watched Jesus. The stops moved nimbly under
his fingers, but I could have sworn that no sound
issued forth. The leader watched him, too, with
occasional side-long glances of furious suspicion.
Each time Jesus redoubled his pantomimic zeal.
Meanwhile the drummer-boy fell asleep in the
midst of the uproar, and the selection had to be
stopped until he could be revivified. The native
audience was attentive, but unamused. For
them It was only what it purported to be, the
regular Sunday concert.
•P "P '!• "I* ^ *(• 'I*
At Livingston the Rio Dulce breaks through
the shore headlands, to form the most beautiful
river in Central America. A thirty-foot oil-
burning flat-bottomed boat runs up-stream once a
week, starting an hour before the dawn and finish
ing its run of more than a hundred miles at sunset.
In those fourteen hours it makes one of the most
interesting and beautiful of river journeys. At
four in the morning we left the landing-stage.
It was briUIant starlight. The dog-star burned
above a waning moon, and both re-appeared re
flected on the calm ocean with a brilliance that
we of the North never see. For the dog-star
can cast a shadow in those latitudes and the full
moon floods the open country with a silver day
hght. We ran inland, and soon the banks rose

170 The Land Beyond Mexico
up to shut out half of the fading starlight with
straight walls of two and three hundred feet.
By daylight, these walls are solid greenery, tree
above tree, with that dense richness of shadow
under sunlight which gives tropical forests their
effect of richness alhed to that of mid-Gothic
tracery or heavy lace. But as I saw it first, It
was all shadowy walls and starlit water, rare
and mysterious, a blend of elfland with explora
tions of the tributaries of the Amazon. With a
red sunrise streaming behind us we came out into
a lake full of grassy islands and low-lying points
and shores, which after an hour narrowed to a
slow-running stream where occasional alligators
submerged themselves at our approach. Some
twenty-five miles from Livingston an old cmmbled
Spanish fort stood guard over a final bend of the
river. Rounding the point, we came suddenly
into a great inland lake whose further shores were
mountains lost In haze, between whose lines the
water ran sheer to the horizon like a glimpse of
the open sea.
It was the Lake of Izabal, or Golfo Dulce,
thirty miles long and twelve miles wide, with a lee
shore so rough under the afternoon wind that the
native boats dare not cross. Around It are the hills,
rising Inland to ridges 5000 feet high. Yet the

The Lowlands ^ 171
effect is more akin to Neuchatel than Geneva,
for there are no peaks nor cliffs, but only low
wooded shores; and the great hills conceal their
height. The lake was windless In the bright sun,
its surface so thickly pollen-streaked that It re
sembled the rich gold veining of some blue trans
lucent stone which changed and complicated its
marking as the swell of the boat disturbed it.
Otherwise there was nothing to see, until a dozen
silver-sided fish started leaping free, and once the
brown back of an animal broke the water. This
I took to be a sea-cow. There are also said to be
tapirs In considerable number; but of these I saw
none, perhaps because of their enviable ac
complishment of crossing a lake by walking on
the bottom, perhaps because there were none to
see. Across the lake a couple of houses showed
where the village of Izabal stood. In Spanish
times and even until the railroad was built, this
was the main Atlantic port of the country. The
sailing boats were warped up the long windings
of the river to the lake and so came to their in
land destination, which was rich enough in ships
and cargo to tempt the pirate ships to their de
struction beneath the guns of San Felipe, the
Spanish fort whose mins I had seen. It is all
desolate country now and almost uninhabited.

172 The Land Beyond Mexico
But it was here that Cortes passed in 1525 on
that marvellous journey to Honduras when he
built bridges through miles of jungle-swamp, with
his horses floundering to their very ears.
He tells his adventures simply and well in his
fifth letter to the Emperor Charles V. He seems
to have treated the natives kindly, though he
speaks indifferently of burning an Indian for a
moral offence. The simple folk mistook his com
pass for a magic mirror and hesitated to conspire
against him. At Peten he was obliged to leave
behind him a horse with a bad splinter in Its foot.
He recommended the animal so strongly to his
native host that the simple Indian, In careful
veneration of so marvellous an animal, offered It
the choicest birds and flowers for food. The
poor beast was thankless and died. Later Span
iards found a carven image of It among the local
gods; but this was subsequently lost overboard
while It was being transported. To this day the
natives tell of Cortes and claim that on still days
they catch a glimpse of this statue at the bottom
of the lake.
Around the Lago Dulce in Guatemala Cortes
was unfortunate enough to meet with armed op
position and had in consequence a sorry time In
his attempts to wrest food from the scattered In-

The Lowlands 173
dians of the almost pathless jungle. The modern
traveller has still a little of the same stmggle, just
enough to let him admire the hardiness of that
great man.
******* When our little steamer reached the head of
the lake. It entered a muddy estuary between
banks of willows and marsh-grass. The stream
was narrow, but proved to be only one of many
mouths; for the delta of the Polochic is as many-
branched as Solomon's famous candlestick.
After the partings of the stream were passed, the
river proved to be of great size, winding swiftly
through endless twists and turns. The journey
Is both fascinating and monotonous. At times
the jungle-trees hang over the muddy water; In
other parts the banks are sandy flats lined with
tall plumed grasses and palms. But everywhere
the waterfront has a wonderful variety of lights
and shadows, of great trees and leafy under
growth, through which the eye cannot peer. Be
hind Its screen in the great green thicket the par
rots screech and chatter and an occasional black
baboon barks. Now and then a pair of long-
tailed macaws fly up and across the stream. If
the sun falls right, their dark silhouettes suddenly
turn to a brilhant burst of vermilion and green.

174 The Land Beyond Mexico
gorgeous and unforgettable. Like Wordsworth's
daffodils, long afterward they flash upon that In
ward eye "which Is the bliss of solitude" :
"I gazed — and gazed — ^but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought."
It was to such scenes and down this very river
that Cortes floated on his rude rafts four hundred
years agoi. At a swift hairpin bend he was
swirled Into the bank, to be showered with arrows
by the ambushed Indians who well knew this trick
of the wild current. Now, Captain Evans, god
father of the Polochic, used to run a Mississippi
paddle-wheel on this river, and one time he ran
it hard aground on one of these turns. "Evans'
Bend" said he laughingly, as we passed the spot.
But I wager that Cortes had named and cursed it
before him.
In the dry season the river runs between sand
bars and muddy flats that make navigation diffi
cult and supply sun-parlours for the unnumbered
populace of alligators. But during the time of
rains the muddy water stretches unbroken from
bank to bank and the alligators sleep in the
grasses or lie at the bottom of the stream.
As the boat passes, kingfishers fly scoldingly
from snag to snag, alligators put their heads
under water, the turtles scuttle to the bottom, the

The Lowlands 175
herons and bitterns start up. At one point we
roused a flock of those white herons whose exist
ence the aigrette hunters once so endangered.
Instead of rising above the trees and eluding us,
they flew before us mile after mile along the
stream, always vanishing around a bend of the
river, to be startled from their perch as we
rounded in pursuit. At another place a large
turtle regarded us with an air of profound
astonishment, while two butterflies settled them
selves peaceably upon his Semitic countenance.
Such are the sights of this journey; and of these
there is prodigal profusion. Yet gradually a
sense of monotony settles down, and by sunset
one is well persuaded never to journey up the
Amazon. A thousand miles of tropical river
must be the highroad to desperation or Insanity.
As the stream winds through the flat4ying
plain between the screens of jungle-growth, there
are glimpses of the high mountain-ranges which
frame the river-valley. Their forests stretch to
the very crests where the cloud-banks begin, with
their shining white and tumbled masses towering
up into the blue and sunny sky. Straight over
head it is clear, and the sun ghtters more and
more on the muddy stream as the afternoon
passes. At last the larger trees begin to throw
their shadows on the water, till finally the sun

176 The Land Beyond Mexico
sinks behind them and the cool of evening comes
suddenly over everything.
At the day's decline we rounded a bend and
found a dock and a railroad shed, for assurance
that nearby there was a village in which to pass
the night.
Panzos is in the department of Alta Verapaz.
This is a fact of administrative topography. Yet
it is easily recognizable without recourse to the
map. For the village is clean and tidy and there
is a general air of self-respect which distinguishes
the natives of this region. The women are often
handsome and well-formed ; the men are less like
cattle and more like free beings. It would need
an ethnologist to decide whether these differ
ences are due to the German and Spanish infusion
or whether the original Indians were really a dif
ferent stock; but that is a quarrel about causes,
and, in any case, the present result is plain.
Verapaz is undeservedly one of the less known
regions of the country. Nowhere else are the
customs of the Indians so varied, their temper so
kindly, their villages so profuse. They are
among the few natives whose artistic industries
are of real interest. Their painted and carved
bowls have the New-World character of the
vanished art of the old Central American races.

The Lowlands ^ 177
Without being ahke, they are almost InexpUcably
reminiscent. It is like a haunting flavour that
the tongue never fully tastes, this common quality
which makes their art American.
Panzos, however, is still in the damp lowlands,
mosquito-infested, malaria-doomed. There is
clear running water In the little plaza, with its
garrison-room for the handful of native soldiers
and its church where the sacristan's piety runs to
discordant jangling of bells and explosion of
powder in old Iron pipes (to the detriment of
nerves and slumber) . But the daily holiday and
the ceaseless fountain are only a mask of gayety
and health. The Indians, brought down from
the uplands, die of fever. Of the population of
thirty years ago only one remains to-day. Toi be
sure, the natives have children aplenty; but in the
end only the race of mosquitoes really prospers in
Panzos. This is the end of river navigation and from
here a llttie railway runs for twenty-eight miles
up to the region of firm soil and dry roads where
the ox-carts can bring down the coffee from the
upland plantations. For this is a great coffee
district, and the Alta Verapaz crop is held to be
of the finest in the world. The plants grow into
veritable trees (though their yield is not so
abundant as that of the bushes of the Pacific

178 The Land Beyond Mexico
slope ) . Owing to the great rainfall, the planta
tions are always on hill-sides, so that the water
may drain from the sloping soil. With all this
humidity, the growth is prodigious. But weeds
are more fertile than coffee, and constant hoeing
is essential. This loosens the soil, which the
heavy rains wash away. Perhaps because of this
constant loss of humus, the plantations are not
long-lived and re-planting is necessary before
twenty years are up. Coffee, which many of us
Imagine tO' be indigenous and immemorial, or at
least to date from Spanish times, has been grow
ing In the land for only fifty years. It would be
Interesting to know whether it will last many cen
turies or whether the soil will deteriorate until
Coban coffee loses its golden reputation. Amid
so much rainfall and washing-away of the soil,
neither the olive nor vine could flourish; and so
it was that, until coffee was introduced, there was
little but the scattered corn-patches of the Indians
where now the great plantations cover the hill
sides. The foreign coffee-planters have grown
rich, while the native is just where he was.
The little railway, leaving Panzos, runs inland
through the jungle, the journey for the most part
being a dull passage through disorderly under
growth. There are occasional great trees, some
hung with the baskets of the yellow-tails, whose

The Lowlands 179
colony is reminiscent of a Christmas tree loaded
with sugar-plums. The damp heat is intense and
the air vicious with mosquito-swarms. But after
twenty-five miles the ground becomes firmer, the
rocky hills close in, and the train climbs through
a fine canyon with overhanging walls, white water
falls, and marvellous trees. The Polochic is now
a mere stream running In the foam of rapids.
Beyond the canyon the country Is clearly upland
in character: the jungle has vanished as if by
magic, locked out by the walls of the defile through
which the train has come. Here the railway
ends, near the village of Pancajche. Beyond are
the wooded hills through which the road ascends
to the coffee-lands and the town of Coban in its
upland basin. At the time of my visit the ox
carts had been almost a month on a road which
is barely seventy miles in length, but unimaginable
in its mud. It may have been here that the classic
traveller was found sunken to his shoulders in
mire, who, on being extricated with difficulty,
thankfully advised his rescuers that If they were
interested in a fine mule they would find one eight
feet deeper.
From Coban one can ride northward In steep
descent to the huge unpeopled lowland province
of Peten. But of this vast lowland department
I can tell you nothing. Impassable in the rainy

i8o The Land Beyond Mexico
season, sparsely settled with Indian hamlets in
the midst of swamp and jungle, it is full of the
remnants of the ancient Mayas. It is to this
region that present-day archaeological explora
tion is directed; and perhaps those who have more
knowledge and a better will can tell you something
of this wild and unpleasant land.
From Coban it is only a four-days' ride south
ward to Guatemala City, at first through beauti
ful mountain country. From a ridge there is a
view Into a great upland cup, in whose centre shine
the red roofs of Salama. Its enclosing hills are
the celebrated "terraced mountains," wliich
ascend in even and well-defined earth-steps, as
though ancient races had put them under culti
vation. Yet the phenomenon Is undoubtedly
natural, and no hands have ever been at work
except those of the wind and the rain. There
is here no parallel for the Incas' laborious and
marvellous husbandry.
From the basin of Salama the rock-road makes
a long descent to the crossing of the Motagua;
and from this point begin familiar scenes. Here
the highlands commence once more. It Is the old
story: the saddle at daybreak, a long day's trail,
tortillas and black beans, Indians with their packs,
upland views and wooded gorges, and at sunset
the far-stretched plain of the capital city with the

The Lowlands i8i
great volcanoes black against the flame-red sky.
After more than a thousand miles of trail, I
end where I began. I have done what I could
to recount the sights and follies of that curious
circle ; and I finish without regret. But for you
who have journeyed through this book I feel a
touch of something that may be envy. For (I
warn you well!) you, and not I, have discovered
the truly enjoyable way of travelling Guatemala.
But If in spite of that, on laying down this book,
you think not over-kindly of one who has lured
you so long and so far through such an uncivilised
land, let your last thought be not of me, but of
her who journeyed diligently and without com
plaint, Colorada, my grey she-mule of the
mountains.

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