Page:Incidents of travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan.djvu/58

30 mules were put on board, and we embarked. Augustin sat in the stern, holding the halter of one of the mules, and leading her like a decoy duck; but the rest had no disposition to follow. The muleteer drove them in up to their necks, but they ran back to the shore. Several times, by pelting them with sticks and stones, he drove them in as before. At length he stripped himself, and, wading to the depth of his breast, with a stick ten or twelve feet long, succeeded in getting them all afloat, and on a line within the reach of his stick. Any one that turned toward the shore received a blow on the nose, and at length they all set their faces for the opposite bank; their little heads were all that we could see, aimed directly across, but carried down by the current. One was carried below the rest; and, when she saw her companions landing, she raised a frightened cry, and almost drowned herself in struggling to reach them.

During all this time we sat in the canoe, with the hot sun beating upon our heads. For the last two hours we had suffered excessively from heat; our clothes were saturated with perspiration and stiff with mud, and we looked forward almost with rapture to a bath in the Motagua and a change of linen. We landed, and walked up to the house in which we were to pass the night. It was plastered and white washed, and adorned with streaks of red in the shape of festoons; and in front was a fence made of long reeds, six inches in diameter, split into two; altogether the appearance was favourable. To our great vexation, our luggage had gone on to a rancho three leagues beyond. Our muleteers refused to go any farther. We were unpleasantly situated, but we did not care to leave so soon the Motagua river. Our host told us that his house and all that he had were at our disposal; but he could give us nothing to eat; and, telling Augustin to ransack the village, we returned to the river. Everywhere the current was too rapid for a quiet bath. Calling our canoe man, we returned to the opposite side, and in a few minutes were enjoying an ablution, the luxury of which can only be appreciated by those who, like us, had crossed the Mico Mountain without throwing away their clothes.

There was an enjoyment in this bath greater even than that of cooling our heated bodies. It was the moment of a golden sunset. We stood up to our necks in water clear as crystal, and calm as that of some diminutive lake, at the margin of a channel along which the stream was rushing with arrowy speed. On each side were mountains several thousand feet high, with their tops illuminated by the setting sun; on a point above us was a palm-leafed hut, and before it a naked Indian sat looking at us; while flocks of parrots with brilliant plumage, almost in thousands, were flying over our heads, catching up our words, and