For which reason we rose at three to finish the half-day of sea-level country left us. The stars hung brilliant and a half moon lighted up a way that was hot even at this hour. From sunrise on huge lizards scurried up among the wayside rocks as we passed, and sat torpid, staring at us with their lack-luster eyes. Natives wearing spurs on their hoof-like bare feet rode by us now and then, and mule-trains or screaming wooden carts crawled past on their way up to the capital. All traffic between Tegucigalpa and the outside world passes either over this route or the still longer trail from Puerto Cortez, on the north coast, from which a toy railroad limps a few miles inland before losing its courage and turning back. By daylight the fantastic ranges of the interior had disappeared and the last low foothill soon left us to plod on straight across a dust-dry sandy plain with brown withered grass and mesquite bushes, among which panted scores of cattle. Honduras runs so nearly down to a point on its Pacific side that the mountains of both Salvador and Nicaragua stood out plainly to the right and left.
By sweltering ten we were swimming in the Pacific before the scattered village of San Lorenzo, though there was visible only a little arm of the sea shut in by low bushy islands. It was our good fortune not to have to charter by telegraph and at the expense of a Honduranean fortune means of transportation to the island port of Amapala; for before we could seek the shelter of our sun-faded garments a launch put in for a party that had been forming for several days past. The passengers included a shifty-eyed old priest in charge of two nuns, the rules of whose order forbade them to speak to men, and the mozo of an influential Honduranean who had shot a man the night before and was taking advantage of his master's personal friendship with the judge of the district. The launch wound between bushy banks and came out at last on a rich-blue bay shut off in the far distance by several jagged black volcanic islands, toward one of which it wheezed a hot and monotonous three hours. This was "Tiger's Island," named evidently from the one moth-eaten specimen that had once been landed here by a passing circus. At a narrow wooden wharf of this we at length gradually tied up. Ragged, barefoot soldiers stopped us to write our pedigrees, as if we were entering some new country, and addressed us in monkey signs instead of the Spanish of which experience had convinced them all traveling foreigners were ignorant.