Comayagua by day was a lazy, silent place, chiefly barefoot, the few possessors of shoes being gaudily dressed young men whose homes were earth-floored huts. The place had the familiar Central American air of trying to live with the least possible exertion; its people were a mongrel breed running all the gamut from black to near-white. There were none of the fine physical specimens common to the highlands of Mexico, and the teeth were notably bad. A few of the soldiers, in blue-jean uniforms with what had once been white stripes, faded straw hats, and bare feet, were mountain Indians with well-developed chests; for military service--of the catch-them-with-a-rope variety--is compulsory in Honduras. But the population in general was anemic and stunted. Two prisoners were at work in the streets; more properly they sat smoking cigarettes and putting a finger cautiously to their lips when I passed in silent request not to wake up their guard, who was sound asleep on his back in the shade, his musket lying across his chest. The town had one policeman, a kinky-haired youth in a white cap and a pale light gray cotton uniform, who carried a black club and wore shoes! The _cartero_, or mailman, was a barefoot boy in faded khaki and an ancient straw hat, who wandered lazily and apparently aimlessly about town with the week's correspondence in hand, reading the postals and feeling the contents of each letter with a proprietary air. The sun was brilliant and hot here in the valley, and there was an aridity that had not been suggested in the view of it from the heights above.
It was no place to spend New Year's, however, stiff and sore though I was from the hardships of the road, and toward lazy, silent noonday I wandered on along the trail to the modern capital, hoping that it, at least, might have real beds and a hotel, and perhaps even white inhabitants. The battered old church bells were thumping as I topped the slight rise that hid the town from view, and it was four hours later that I saw or heard the next human being, or any other evidence of his existence except a stretch of barb-wire and one lone telegraph wire sagging from one crooked stick to another. The four stony dry but flat leagues along the valley floor had brought me to San Antonio, all the population of which was loafing and mildly celebrating New Year's, as they would celebrate any other possible excuse not to work. Here I obtained water, and new directions that led me off more toward the east and the heaped-up mountains that lay between me and Tegucigalpa. On all sides spread a dry, bushy land, aching for cultivation. I had the good fortune to fall in with a river so large I was able to swim three strokes in one of its pools, and strolled with dusk into the town of Flores on the edge of the first foothills of the ranges still to be surmounted.