Jocotán, on the farther bank, was a lazy, sunbaked village the chief industry of which seemed to be swinging in hammocks, though I did manage to run to earth the luxury of a dish of tough meat. Comotán was close beyond, then came two hours straight up to a region of pine-trees with vistas of never-ending mountains everywhere dense-forested, the few adobe or bamboo huts tucked in among them being as identically alike as the inhabitants. These were almost obsequious peons, wearing a sort of white pajamas and moderate-sized straw hats, all strangely clean. Each carried a machete, generally with a curved point, and not a few had guns. Toward evening I struck a bit of level going amid dense vegetation without a breath of air along the bank of a river that must be forded lower down, which fact I took advantage of to perpetrate a general laundering. This proved unwise, for the sun went down before the garments had dried and left me to lug on along the stream those the unexacting customs of the country did not require me to put on wet. Every hundred yards the trail went swiftly down into the stony bed of a tributary, with or without water, and clambered breathlessly out again. A barked heel had festered and made every other step painful.
It was more than an hour after dark that I sweated into the _aldea_ of Chupá, so scattered that as each hut refused me lodging I had to hobble on a considerable distance to the next. The fourth or fifth refusal I declined to accept and swung my hammock under the eaves. A woman was cooking on the earth floor for several peon travelers, but treated me only with a stony silence. One of the Indians, however, who had been a soldier and was more friendly or less suspicious of "gringoes," divided with me his single tortilla and bowl of frijoles. The family slept on dried cowskins spread on the bare earth.
Food was not to be had when I folded my hammock and pushed on at daylight. One of a cluster of huts farther up was given over to a squad of "soldiers," garrisoning the frontier, and an officer who would have ranked as a vagabond in another country sold me three tortillas and a shellful of coffee saved from his rations. Another cluster of huts marked the beginning of a stiff rocky climb, beyond which I passed somewhere in a swampy stretch of uninhabited ground the invisible boundary and entered Honduras, the Land of Great Depths.