There was one bird whom I never caught sight of, and knew only by his sweet but unsatisfactory song. This song is charmingly musical as far as it goes, but then he never finishes it: just as it is becoming most interesting, he hesitates and stops about a third short of the keynote, waits a moment as though to consider what is wrong, then begins over again, only to stop with the same half-apologetic note, leaving one with the impression that he would like to finish his song, but has forgotten how it goes.
A pair of hoary-headed, disreputable-looking zopilotes hovered about the kitchen all day long, waiting for scraps and clamouring vociferously when a chicken lost his head. When night came the owls hooted at us from the lofty branches of the great ceiba trees, and the cry of the night-jar (or "Puhuyak," as the natives call him) sounded through the wood. According to the Indian legend, the Puhuyak is one of the birds appointed to guard the gates of Xibalba, the place of departed spirits, which is thought to be situated somewhere near the banks of the Usumacinta. His fellow guardian is his relation the Whip-poor-Will, and sometimes they watch together, and at others take turn and turn about. Oddly enough, the cry of the Puhuyak sounds exactly like "Who are you?" and, chancing to awake in the stillness of the night, one would hear this question reiterated about every half-minute, without the ghost of an answer, until I used to think that if anything could add to the terror of finding one's self at the gate of Xibalba it would be to hear the Puhuyak ask that irritating question with his casual unsympathetic manner and harsh voice.
What strikes one most in riding or walking through a tropical forest of Central America is the mixed nature of the vegetation. Between the low fringe of sea-coast, where the mangroves have full sway, and the lofty hill-tops, where the pines and oaks abound, one can nowhere give a name to the forest from the predominance of any particular tree. There are no mahogany forests and no cedar forests, although both species have many representatives. Perhaps the lightness or feathery nature of the seeds helps in their distribution; certainly I never saw a native forest tree with a number of seedlings growing up round it, as one may see in the case of a sycamore or horse-chestnut at home. This characteristic applies even to the small grove round the ruins at Copan; and although I had learnt to identify a few of the most noticeable trees, I could only find a few examples of each amongst the many trees around us, and to my untrained eye all the remainder appeared to differ from one another. The monarchs of the grove were two giant Ceibas, to whose beauty and grandeur I can do no justice with words. A tent might be pitched between the buttresses from which the mighty shaft of such a giant springs, and a regiment might camp beneath its branches. As the month of April is the middle of the dry season many of the trees were changing their leaves, and the process was most interesting to watch, and often very rapid in accomplishment. Some of the trees which were fully clothed, and showed no sign of change when we arrived, dropped all their leaves, stood for a few days bare, and then completely reclothed themselves during the few weeks we remained at the ruins. Others went through the process in distinct sections, and it gave a very odd appearance to a tree when some of its branches were covered with old foliage, some branches quite bare, and others bright with the fresh green or pink of newly unfolded leaves.