12. Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond: The old Woman and her leg, San Juan, Copán Honduras

Written by: Harry A. Franck, in 1916:
From soon after noon until sunset I climbed incessantly among tumbled
rocks without seeing a human being. A cold wind howled through a vast
pine forest of the highest altitude of my Honduranean journey--more than
six thousand feet above sea-level. Night fell in wild solitude, but I
could only plod on, for to sleep out at this height would have been
dangerous. Luckily a corner of moon lighted up weirdly a moderately wide
trail. I had tramped an hour or more into the night when a flickering
light ahead among the trees showed what might have been a camp of
bandits, but which proved to be only that of a group of muleteers, who
had stacked their bales of merchandise around three sides under an
ancient roof on poles and rolled up in their blankets close to the
blazing wood fire they had built to the leeward of it.

They gave no sign of offering me place and I marched on into the howling
night. Perhaps four miles beyond I made out a cluster of habitations
pitched on the summit and slope of a hill leaning toward the trail with
nothing above it on any side to break the raging wind. An uproar of
barking dogs greeted my arrival, and it was some time before an inmate
of one of the dark and silent huts summoned up courage to peer out upon
me. He emerged armed with a huge stick and led the way to a miserable
hovel on the hilltop, where he beat on the door and called out that an
"hombrecito" sought posada. This opened at last and I entered a mud
room in one end of which a fire of sticks blazed fitfully. A woman of
perhaps forty, though appearing much older, as is the case with most
women of Honduras, lay on a wooden bed and a girl of ten huddled among
rags near the fire. I asked for food and the woman ordered the girl to
heat me black coffee and tortillas. The child was naked to the waist,
though the bitter cold wind howled with force through the hut, the walls
and especially the gables and roof of which were far from whole. The
woman complained of great pain in her right leg, and knowing she would
otherwise groan and howl the night through in the hope of attracting the
Virgin's attention, I induced her to swallow two sedative pills. The
smoke made me weep as I swung my hammock from two soot-blackened
rafters, but the fire soon went out and I awoke from the first doze
shivering until the hut shook. The temperature was not low compared with
our northern winters, but the wind carried a penetrating chill that
reached the marrow of the bones. I rose and tried unsuccessfully to
relight the fire. The half-naked girl proved more skilful and I sat
huddled on a stool over the fire, alternately weeping with the smoke and
all but falling into the blaze as I dozed. The pills had little effect
on my hostess. I gave her three more, but her Honduranean stomach was
evidently zinc-lined and she groaned and moaned incessantly. I returned
to my hammock and spent several dream-months at the North Pole before I
was awakened at first cockcrow by the old woman kneeling on the earth
floor before a lithograph of the Virgin surrounded by withered pine
branches, wailing a singsong prayer. She left off at length with the
information that her only hope of relief was to make a pilgrimage to the
"Virgen de los Remedios," and ordered the girl to prepare coffee. I paid
my bill of two reales and gave the girl one for herself, evidently the
largest sum she had ever possessed, if indeed she remained long in
possession of it after I took my hobbling and shivering departure.


More excerpts from Harry A. Franck's:
"Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras
Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond"
Will be published every day!