Though still a lazy naked village, this one showed some hint of the far-off approach of civilization. Animals were forbidden the house in which I passed the night, and its tile-floor was almost clean. This latter virtue was doubly pleasing, for the rafters above were so high that even when I had tied my hammock by the very ends of the ropes I could only climb in by mounting a chair and swinging myself up as into a trapeze; and if I must break a leg it would be some slight compensation to do so on a clean floor. How much uncleanliness this simple little 30-cent net had kept me up out of since the day I bought it in Guatemala City!
Like many of the tasks of life, this one grew easier toward its termination. A moderate day's walk, not without rocky climbs and _bajadas_, but with considerable stretches of almost level going across solitary wind-cooled plains, brought me to Támara. A passing company of soldiers had all but gutted the village larder, but at dusk in the last hut I got not only food but meat, and permission to swing my hammock from the blackened rafters of the reed kitchen, over the open pots and pans. Incidentally, for the first time in Honduras prices were quadrupled in honor of my being a foreigner. Civilization indeed was approaching.
Half way up the wooded ridge beyond I met the sun mounting from the other side, fell in soon after with a real highway, and at eleven caught the first sight of Tegucigalpa, the "City of the Silver Hills," capital of the Sovereign and Independent Republic of Honduras. It was no very astounding sight; merely what in other lands would have been considered a large village, a chiefly one-story place with a whitewashed church, filling only a small proportion of a somewhat barren valley surrounded by high rocky and partly wooded hills. I marched down through Comayagüela in all the disreputableness of fifteen days on the trail, across the little bridge of a few arches over a shallow river which to Honduraneans far and wide is one of the greatest works of man, and into the park-like little central plaza, with its huge arbor of purple bourgainvillea.
The "Hotel Jockey Club" was not all that the imagination might have pictured, but at least there Was the satisfaction of knowing that any stranger in town, be he "gringo" or president-elect, famous or infamous, rich or honest, could stop nowhere else. Among its luxuries was a "bath," which turned out to be a massive stone vessel in the basement with a drizzle of cold water from a faucet above that was sure to run dry about the time the victim was well soaped; its frontiersman rooms were furnished with little more than weak-kneed canvas cots, and the barefoot service of the dining-room was assisted by all the dogs, fowls, and flies of the region. But there lay two hungry weeks of Central American trail behind me and for days to come I ate unquestioningly anything that came within reach of my fingers, of whatever race, color, or previous condition of servitude.