The trail we followed was so rough and uncertain that at first I conceived a very poor opinion of the Honduranians for not having improved it, but as we continued scrambling upward I admired them for moving about at all under such conditions. After all, we who had chosen to take this road through curiosity had certainly no right to complain of what was to the natives their only means of communication with the Atlantic seaboard. It is interesting to think of a country absolutely and entirely dependent on such thoroughfares for every necessity of life. For whether it be a postal card or a piano, or a bale of cotton, or a box of matches, it must be brought to Tegucigalpa on the back of a mule or on the shoulders of a man, who must slip and slide and scramble either over this trail or the one on the western coast. Sometimes this high-road of commerce was cut through the living rock in steps as even and sharp as those in front of a brownstone house on Fifth Avenue, and so narrow that we had to draw up our knees to keep them from being scratched and cut on the rough walls of the passageway, and again it led through jungle so dense that if one wandered three yards from the trail he could not have found his way back again; but this danger was not imminent, as no one could go that far from the trail without having first hacked and cut his way there. It was not always so difficult; at times we came out into bare open spaces, and rode up the dry bed of a mountain stream, and felt the full force of the sun, or again it led along a ledge of rock two feet wide at the edge of a precipice, and we were fanned with cool, damp breaths from the pit a thousand feet below, where the sun had never penetrated, and where the moss and fern of centuries grew in a thick, dark tangle. [Illustration: A DRAWER OF WATER] We stopped for our first meal at a bare place on the top of a mountain, where there were a half-dozen mud huts. Jeffs went from one to another of these and collected a few eggs, and hired a woman to cook them and to make us some coffee. We added tinned things and bread to this luncheon, which, as there were no benches, we ate seated on the ground, kicking at the dogs and pigs and chickens, that snatched in a most familiar manner at the food in our hands. In Honduras there are so few hotels that travellers are entirely dependent for food and for a place in which to sleep upon the people who live along the trail, who are apparently quite hardened to having their homes invaded by strangers, and their larders levied upon at any hour of the day or night.