My husband rode the horse, which, although not a very magnificent-looking animal, gave a certain air of respectability to the train. Gorgonio's mule was a wise old beast with a rough and varied experience of life, who seemed to have been brought more out of sentiment than for use, for Gorgonio persistently walked up and down all the hills, and sometimes on the flat, so as to lighten her labours. He had strange stories to tell of her adventures. Once, when on a journey in Honduras, she was stolen from him and he had to return home to Coban and give up all hope of seeing her again; it was not until long afterwards that he learnt that the thief was the Juez de paz (the local Judge). At the end of a year the Governor of the Province, having heard of the shortcomings of his subordinate, took possession of the mule, but, somehow or other, forgot to give any information to her real owner, and had her sent away to a distant rancho; there possibly her existence might have been forgotten and her brand have changed its shape, had it not been that, by the merest chance, a doctor, who was an old friend of Gorgonio, recognized the mule and gave him the information which led to her recovery. Caralampio's mule was like Mr. Kipling's Battery mule--a mule; and mine was the excellent creature I have described.
On the 2nd of January we left the capital, mounting our mules just outside the main streets of the town, as a concession to my feelings of bashfulness; for I had no wish to shock the sensibilities of the fashionable society of the capital by riding through the streets in a short walking-dress, or to expose my bad horsemanship to their criticism. We passed to the right of the fort or Castle of San José, which commands the city, and then for about a mile followed the road bordered by straggling houses to the Guarda viejo. On passing through the gate we turned to the right across a narrow strip of land between deep barrancas, and then found ourselves fairly in the country.
On the plain through which our road lay there must have stood in olden times a fair-sized town, if one can judge from the large number of grass-grown mounds scattered over its surface; but it is now the mere ghost of a town, without history and without name, and the two squat figures carved in a hard stone which stand by the roadside at the gate of a small hacienda are all that remains to show the art of the builders, although careful investigation would no doubt reveal much more of interest. The sketch-plan on the next page was made by my husband some years ago.