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I had long since learned the Latin American's love of personal exaggeration. But Suaza was above the Honduranean average; he not only read with comparative ease but cleaned his finger nails, and I looked forward with some eagerness to a coming oasis of civilization in the hitherto unsoftened wilderness.
Roosters would have made the night a torture, yet three eggs rewarded the canvassing of the entire hamlet. These it is always the Honduranean custom to puncture with a small hole before dropping into hot water, no doubt because there was no other way of getting the universal uncleanliness into them. Nor did I ever succeed in getting them more than half cooked.
It is not enough that he shall clean up and set in order these tropical pest-holes; he will have the employee fancy himself completely at home. Here I sat in one of the dozen big airy recreation halls, well stocked with man's playthings, which the government has erected on the Zone; I, who two weeks before had been thankful for lodging on the earth floor of a Honduranean hut.
In the aldea of Tutule I fell in with Alberto Suaza, a pleasant appearing, all but white Honduranean, who had once been in the army and was now returning on horseback from some government errand.
Among those who crowded the place were several men of education, in the Honduranean sense, about equal to that of a poorly trained American child in the fourth grade. But there was not one of them that did not show a monkey curiosity and irresponsibility in handling every article in my pack; my sweater "Ay que lindo!" my papers "How beautiful!" an extremely ordinary shirt "How soft and fine!
I forcibly tore myself away and struck for the surrounding wilderness. From soon after noon until sunset I climbed incessantly among tumbled rocks without seeing a human being. A cold wind howled through a vast pine forest of the highest altitude of my Honduranean journey more than six thousand feet above sea-level.
The boy refused to go and Suaza tied his horse to a bush and went in quest of one himself. I mentioned supper, hinting at my willingness to pay for anything that could be furnished, but to each article I suggested came the monotonous, indifferent Honduranean answer, "No hay."
Just around another corner we entered toward four the large dusty patio of a one-story building of mud blocks, against the adobe wall of which were lined up something over a hundred half-frightened, half-proud Honduranean Indians in brand new, dark-blue uniforms and caps, made in Germany, and armed with black night-sticks and large revolvers half-hidden in immense holsters.
An old woman of La Libertad, a collection of mud huts wedged into a little plain between jungled mountain-sides, answered my hungry query with a cheery "Como no!" and in due time set before me black beans and blacker coffee and a Honduranean tortilla, which are several times thicker and heavier than those of Mexico and taste not unlike a plank of dough.
The half-naked girl proved more skilful and I sat huddled on a stool over the fire, alternately weeping with the smoke and all but falling into the blaze as I dozed. The pills had little effect on my hostess. I gave her three more, but her Honduranean stomach was evidently zinc-lined and she groaned and moaned incessantly.
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