"I have saved up $2500 myself," replied the Englishman, "which I will lend the government for the purpose, if it will add a like amount."
But when mañana came again, the president expressed his regrets that the national treasury could not endure such a strain.
The best view of Tegucigalpa is had from Picacho, a long ridge from back in the mountains, ending in a blunt nose almost sheer above the city. Whoever climbs it recognises the reason for the native saying, "He who holds Picacho sleeps in the palace." Its town-side face is almost precipitous, and on every hand spread rolling, half-bare upland mountains. All but sheer below, in the lowest depression of the visible world, sits the little capital, rather compact in the center, then scattered along the little river and in the suburb of Comayaguela beyond it. The dull-red tile roofs predominate, and the city is so directly below that one can see almost to the bottom of every tree-grown patio. A few buildings are of two stories, and the twin-towers of the little white cathedral stand somewhat above the general level. But most noticeable of any is the fact that all the vast broken plain surrounding it far and wide lies almost entirely uncultivated, for the most part neither cleared nor inhabited, crossed by several roads and trails, most conspicuous of all the two white ribbons by one of which I had arrived from the north and the other of which was already inviting me onward to the coast and new climes.
A fellow-gringo, bound for the Pacific exit on a miniature horse, packed away my baggage on his cargo mule and left me to walk unhampered. A highway some fifty feet wide and white with dust struck off uncertainly toward the southwest, a splendid highway once, built for automobiles by the combined efforts of the government and an American mining company farther up in the hills, but now suffered to fall here and there into a disrepair that made it as useless for such traffic as a mountain trail. The first day of thirty miles brought us to Sabana Grande, with a species of hotel. During the second, there were many down-grade short-cuts, full of loose stones and dusty dry under the ever warmer sun, with the most considerable bridge in Honduras over the Pasoreal River, and not a few stiff climbs to make footsore my entrance into the village of Pespire. Here was a house that frankly and openly displayed the sign "Restaurante," in a corner of which travelers of persuasive manners might be furnished _tijeras_, scissor-legged canvas cots on which to toss out the night; for Pespire is far below Tegucigalpa and on the edge of the blazing tropics.