However, a burly American ran a hotel where the bill for supper and lodging was only $15, and if the partitions of my room were bare they were of mahogany, as were also the springs of the bed. The pilfering of an extra mattress softened this misfortune somewhat, and toward morning it grew cool enough to stop sweating. When I descended in the morning, Ems and Dakin were sitting over their coffee and eggs. They had paid $5 each to ride in a covered bullock cart from Vado Ancho--and be churned to a pulp.
Reunited, we pushed on in the morning shadows. Ems and Dakin divided the weight of the former's suitcase; but even after the "Texican" had thrown away two heavy books on locomotive driving, both groaned under their loads. The sun of Guatemala does not lighten the burdens of the trail. Ems had boarded the bullock cart the proud possessor of a bar of soap, but this morning he found it a powder and sprinkled it along the way. Soap is out of keeping with Guatemalan local color anyway. Dense forests continued, but here almost all had an undergrowth of coffee bushes. Some of the largest coffee _fincas_ of Guatemala lie along this road, producing annually to hundreds of thousands in gold. Such prosperity was not reflected in the population and toilers. The natives were ragged, but friendly, every man carrying a machete, generally in a leather scabbard, and the women almost without exception enormous loads of fruit. They were weak, unintelligent, pimple-faced mortals, speaking an Indian dialect and using Spanish only with difficulty. Ragged Indian girls were picking coffee here and there, even more tattered carriers lugged it in sacks and baskets to large, cement-floored spaces near the estate houses, where men shoveled the red berries over and over in the sun and old women hulled them in the shade of their huts.
Jungle trees, often immense and polished smooth as if they had been flayed of their bark, gave us dense cool shade, scented by countless wild flowers. But en cambio the soft dirt road climbed and wound and descended all but incessantly, gradually working its way higher, until we could look out now and then over hundreds of square miles of hot country with barely a break in all its expanse of dense, steaming vegetation. Coffee continued, but alternated now with the slender trees of rubber plantations, with their long smooth leaves, and already scarred like young warriors long inured to battle. The road was really only an enlarged trail, not laid out, but following the route of the first Indian who picked his way over these jungled hills. Huts were seldom lacking; poor, ragged, cheerful Indians never. In the afternoon the trail pitched headlong down and around through a rock-spilled barranco with two sheer walls of the densest jungle and forest shutting it in. Where it crossed a stream, Dakin and I found a shaded, sandy hollow scooped out behind a broad flat rock in the form of a huge bathtub of water, clearer than any adjective will describe. Ems, whose swarthy tint and strong features suggested the opposite, was the least able to endure the hardships of the road, and lay lifeless in the shade at every opportunity.