76 
GUATEMALA. 
and Pansos ; but this port still fled before us, and it was 
nearly dark before I smelt human habitations. Not 
one of our company had ever been there before; but the 
Caribs were greatly amused at my assertion, and I think 
Frank smiled in his sleeve at my scent. But I certainly 
smelt them, and kept the men rowing, and blew the 
conch-shell, as the law requires on approaching a port; 
and at last, long after dark, the lights of the steamer fast 
at the wharf appeared, and we were soon alongside. 
We had been a week in our canoa, and five days 
without landing; but our troubles were not yet ended. 
The stupid soldiers flatly refused to allow us to land 
our traps without a permit from the comandante, and 
insisted that we should go with them to the Comandancia, 
nearly a quarter of a mile away. I started with Santiago, 
over a road worked into pasty mud by the ox-carts from 
Coban. It was raining and very dark, and the almost 
naked soldiers tried to light the way with splinters of fat- 
pine, called here ocote. At last the road ended in a black 
pool, into which the barelegged soldiers waded. But I 
declined to go farther unless they carried me; and it 
almost made the night bright to see the look these apol¬ 
ogies for men gave each other and the stranger who 
weighed twenty pounds more than their united weights. 
It ended as it should have begun; and Santiago went 
on with one guard to explain matters, while with the 
other I returned to the steamer. The officers of the 
steamer had kindly invited us to sleep on board; but 
the soldier on guard refused to let us pass the plank, 
so I pitched him into the river, — the proper place for 
all such stupid military men, — and went on board un¬ 
opposed. Soon word came that we might sleep where 
