Page:Guatimala or the United Provinces of Central America in 1827-8.pdf/41

Rh the echoes of the hills, calling and answering one to another as if their reverberations would never cease. One of the sailors had also dived, and brought up three fine young turtles, and these with the birds provided us no contemptible dinner.

Slowly ascending the river, and passing an immense number of beautiful little creeks, diverging to the right and left, many of which contain springs of excellent water, the traveller reaches the mouth of a second lake, where the Spaniards have erected a fort, called by them Castillo del Golfo, or the castle of the gulph. The appearance of its huts from the river is picturesque. The fort however consists only of a ruinous wall defended by about twenty carib soldiers, who live there surrounded by their families.

We landed to show our passports, and were led to the commandant's house, through rows of plantain trees, on the fruit of which he and his troops subsist. It was a miserable hut, with a clay floor not even levelled. A hammock was slung across the room in which an old woman was reclining,—a few coarse prints of the virgin, and a brass crucifix ornamented its mud walls, and two or three common wooden stools constituted the whole of its furniture. But as if to make the contrast more striking, on one of them stood several beautifully cut-glass decanters, cream jugs and tumblers, with three or