Yet with all its difficulties the day had been more than enjoyable, wandering through endless virgin forests swarming with strange and beautiful forms of plant and bird life, with rarely a habitation or a fellow-man to break the spell of pure, unadulterated nature. For break it these did. As the first hut of San Augustín intruded itself in the growing dusk there ran unbidden through my head an ancient refrain:
"Plus je vois l'homme, plus j'aîme mon chien."
Nearer the center of the collection I paused to ask a man leaning against his mud doorway whether he knew any one who would give me posada. The eagerness with which he offered to do so himself gave me visions of an exorbitant bill in the morning, but it turned out that he was merely anxious for the "honor" of lodging a stranger. This time I slept indoors. My host himself swung my hammock from two of the beams in his large, single-room house made of slats filled in with mud. Though a man of some education, subscriber to a newspaper of Salvador and an American periodical in Spanish, and surrounded by pine forests, it seemed never to have occurred to him to try to better his lot even to the extent of putting in a board floor. His mixture of knowledge and ignorance was curious. He knew most of the biography of Edison by heart, but thought Paris the capital of the United States and the population of that country 700,000.
In the house the only food was tortillas, but across the "street" meat was for sale. It proved to be tough strips a half-inch square of sun-dried beef hanging from the rafters. I made another suggestion, but the woman replied with a smile half of amusement half of sorrow that all the chickens had died. A few beans were found, and, as I ate, several men drifted into the hut and gradually and diffidently fell to asking strange and childish questions. It is hard for those of us trained to democracy and accustomed to intercourse only with "civilized" people to realize that a bearded man of forty, with tall and muscular frame, may have only an infantile grade of intelligence, following the conversation while it is kept on the plane of an eight-year-old intellect, but incapable of grasping any real thought, and staring with the open-mouthed naïveté of a child.