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The licence to travel on mule-back which the Admiral asked for was made necessary by a law which had been passed forbidding the use of mules for this purpose throughout Spain. There had been a scarcity of horses for mounting the royal cavalry, and it was thought that the breeding of horses had been neglected on account of the greater cheapness and utility of mules.
The village is built on the edge of the virgin forest, where the red man, with his stone hatchet, wanders in wild freedom. It contains, perhaps, a hundred inhabitants, chiefly civilized Chiquitanos Indians. There is here a customs house, and a regular trade in rubber, which is brought in from the interior on mule-back, a journey which often takes from three to four months.
The licence to travel on mule-back which the Admiral asked for was made necessary by a law which had been passed forbidding the use of mules for this purpose throughout Spain. There had been a scarcity of horses for mounting the royal cavalry, and it was thought that the breeding of horses had been neglected on account of the greater cheapness and utility of mules.
He says that after the Holidays are past, he will go there if he is able. If I owe him, he must show by what reason; for I make oath that I do not know it, nor is it true. "If without importunity a licence can be procured for me to go on mule-back, I will try to leave for the Court after January, and I will even go without this licence.
With a deep sigh of relief, we stowed our box in the "prairie-schooner," made a contract to have it packed on mule-back from Dog Creek to Shasta, in consideration of one among a gross of cheap watches which we had brought for trade with Indians and Trappers, and, relieving our horses by the first canter they had enjoyed that day, sped away with the deep conviction that the man who first called chrome and white-lead light colors must have been indulging the subtile irony of a diseased mind.
I wished to be in Tegucigalpa, two hundred miles away, within five days; yet all the wealth of Croesus could not have brought me there in that time. As it was, I had broken the mule-back record, and many is the animal that succumbs to the up and down trails of Honduras. This one might, were such triteness permissible, have been most succinctly characterized by a well-known description of war.
When we came to the base of the rock, we found a way cut, a narrow path, most of the distance hewn out of the rock, winding upward along the face of the precipice. The view, as one rises, is of the break-neck description. The way is really safe enough, even on mule-back, ascending; but one would be foolhardy to ride down.
On one journey, when filming the carrying of munitions by mule-back as that was the only method by which our advanced field-guns could be supplied while they were being loaded at a dump near Wood, the mud was well above the mules' knees, and, in another instance, it was actually touching their bellies.
Now and again a cavalcade came out of the flaming desert to the south, appearing first as a thin dust-cloud down on the flat, as it drew nearer resolving itself into pack burros and men on mule-back; then jingling and clattering up the stony slope and into the corral.
Thinking, from his description, that it was only about a mile distant, I started on mule-back with him; but after riding fully a league, discovered that he actually did not know himself where it was, but was seeking for another man to show him. We at last arrived at the house of this man. He was absent. A boy showed us a small piece of the limestone.
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