I had clambered a steep and rocky three hours next morning before I came upon the first evidences of humanity, a hut on a little tableland, with all the customary appurtenances and uncleanliness. Black unstrained coffee and tortillas of yellow hue gradually put strength enough in my legs to enable them to push me on through bottomless rocky barrancas, and at length, beyond the hamlet of Santa María, up one of the highest climbs of the trip to the long crest of a ridge thick with whispering pines and with splendid views of the "Great Depths," dense in woodland, on either side as far as the eye could reach. Muleteers passed frequently, often carrying on their own backs a bundle of the Santa Rosa cigars with which their animals were laden. Except for her soldiers, accustomed to "show off" before their fellows, every person I had met in Honduras had been kindly and courteous--if dirty--and never with a hint of coveting my meager hoard. Beggars seemed as unknown as robbers--perhaps from lack of initiative and energy. From Esperanza on, the Indian boys I met driving mules or carrying nets of oranges all folded their hands before them like a Buddhist at prayer when they approached me, but instead of mumbling some request for alms, as I expected, they greeted me with an almost obsequious "Adiós" and a faint smile. How the "little red schoolhouse" is lacking in this wooded mountainland! Not merely was the immense majority entirely illiterate, but very few of them had even reached the stage of desiring to learn. A paucity of intelligence and initiative made all intercourse monotonously the same. The greeting was never a hearty, individual phrase of the speaker's own choosing, but always the invariable "Adiós, Buenos días, tardes or noche," even though I had already addressed some inquiry to them. Replies to questions of distance were as stereotyped, with the diminutive _ito_ beloved of the Central Americans tacked on wherever possible:
"Larguita 'stá! A la vueltita no más! Está cerquita! De día no llega! A la tardecita llega. Ay no masito! A la oracióncita llega--"
Nothing could bring them down from these glittering generalities to a definite statement of distance, in leagues or hours, and to reach a place reported "Just around the little corner" was as apt to mean a half day's tramp as that it was over the next knoll.