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It conducted us past the great spring of Yololtoca, to which the Indian girls of the pueblo of Conchagua, three miles distant, still come to get their water, and down the ancient path and over the rocks worn smooth by the naked feet of their mothers and their mothers' mothers, until, at six o'clock in the afternoon, we defiled, tired and hungry, into the sweltering streets of La Union.
The utilitarian reader will ask, at once, the motive of this gathering on the top of the volcano of Conchagua, five thousand feet above the sea, wearily attained at no small expenditure of effort and perspiration. Was it love of adventure merely? ambition to do something whereof to brag about to admiring aunts or country cousins? Hardly.
But I am not going to work up the old man of the vigia; for he was of little consequence on the 10th day of April, 1853, except as a wondering spectator on the top of Conchagua, in a group consisting of an ex-minister of the United States, an officer of the American navy, and an artist from the good city of New York, to whose ready pencil a grateful country owes many of the illustrations of tropical scenery which have of late years lent their interest to popular periodicals and books of adventure.
The leading fact of the existence of some kind of a pass having been sufficiently established by our observations from Conchagua, we next set to work to obtain such information from the natives as might assist our further proceedings.
At noon on the day of our visit, the thermometer marked a temperature of 16 deg. of Fahrenheit below that of the port. It is a singular circumstance, that Captain Sir Edward Belcher, who surveyed the Bay of Fonseca in 1838, speaks of Conchagua as a mountain exhibiting no evidences of volcanic origin.
In the low ridge which separates the Lake of Nicaragua from the Pacific are several volcanic hills, most of them active; while further to the north-west, in the district of Conchagua scarcely more than one hundred and eighty miles in length there are upwards of twenty volcanoes.
The Gulfs of Fonseca and Conchagua are deep indentations, about the middle of the coast of Guatemala, to which country Costa Rica belongs." MRS. WILTON. "The city of Guatemala was founded in 1776. It is situated on table-land, 5000 feet above the sea and enjoys a delicious climate, literally, a perpetual spring.
Yet it is simply to determine the bearings of that notch in the Cordilleras, to fix the positions of the leading features of the intervening country, and to verify the latitude and longitude of the old man's flag-staff itself, as a point of departure for future explorations, that the group of strangers is gathered on the top of Conchagua.
Our next care was to take in water, for which purpose we landed on the island of Conchagua; and after some search, we found a large bottom behind the hills, in which was a large plantain walk, and a large reservoir of rain water, which came from the mountains.
I found it everywhere; and when I subsequently visited the Indian pueblo of Conchagua, the first alcalde produced it from an obscure corner of the cahildo, as a very great treasure. He regarded it as veritable history, and thought 'Señor Birch' a most extraordinary personage and a model guerillero."
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