Page:A Glimpse at Guatemala.pdf/247

Rh oil-lamp were lost in the gloom of the far corners of the great bare room; but I could just make out Cornelio seated on the bench against the wall with his elbows pushed over the heavy well-worn table, his head resting on his hands, in rapt attention, whilst the Padre—a candle in one hand and a book in the other—was pacing up and down in front of the table, reading aloud from the pages of 'Pepita Jimenes.' "Hush" he cried, holding up the book at me and not stopping in his walk, "he is just going to do it"; and I sat quietly on the bench whilst he read page after page of that delightfully told story. Then I crept quietly off to bed—my departure unobserved by them, so absorbed were they both in the story,—and fell asleep to the distant murmur of the Padre's voice. He had taken up the book casually late in the evening and, once started, read it out loud from beginning to end.

By the 18th of February the work of plotting the traverse from Lanquin to Cajabon was finished, and, after almost endless bother, the cargadores for the forest journey had been engaged and their loads arranged; so, bidding farewell to the Padre and Cornelio, with many handshakes and mutual expressions of goodwill, we set out on our way. My party consisted of Gorgonio, Carlos, José Domingo Lopez, and about twenty Indian cargadores. We had arranged to take with us one horse and three mules, although many years had passed since anyone had attempted to take animals over the track we proposed to follow, but we knew how necessary they would be to us when the dense forest was passed and we should emerge on the savannah lands of Peten. Until we were clear of the forest neither corn nor pasture would be met with, and unluckily neither the horse nor the mules were accustomed to feed on the leaves of the Ramon tree, which is the food usually given to animals employed in forest journeys. Ramon is not a fodder which either horses or mules take to readily, and it is in some cases only after days of starvation that they will eat it at all; but having once fed on Ramon they seem to like it as well as any other food, and it keeps them in excellent condition. These trees are seldom very numerous, and when there is much traffic along a forest-path they are so systematically stripped of their branches by the muleteers that it is often difficult to find an untouched tree within a mile of the track.

The first few days of our journey are pleasanter to think over than they were to go through. Twenty unwilling overladen Indian carriers in a damp and mosquito-haunted forest would try the temper of an angel. They dawdled along and made every sort of excuse to stop and readjust their packs, and we had to keep a sharp look-out to see that none of them wandered off to their milpas and gave us the slip altogether. The loads I had given them to carry were not too heavy, and included food enough to last a fortnight