I WOKE UP tired in damp clothes and remembered we were still on the mountain — Father, Zambus, and ice. Father had fallen on his side and, slap on the ground, had gone to sleep with his arms folded and his baseball hat squashed against his cheek. But he woke quickly and denied that he had even dozed off. He said he had got bored, watching us snore. He said, "No, we haven't failed!" and told me to fill the canvas bag with the water that had dripped into the mess-kit pan.
"Don't bother to get harnessed." He was peeking under the cover of the ice block. He shoved the cakes of ice into the knapsacks. Each cake was about the size of a football, speckled with brown broken leaf, and had the rotten texture of a hard sponge. This was all that was left of the great ice block we had dragged out of Jeronimo.
"Don't say anything. Don't ask me any questions. I don't want to hear a peep out of anyone. Now let's march!"
He sprinted up the path, his knapsack rising and falling, bumping his back, whop-whop. Francis Lungley followed behind with the other knapsack, then Bucky and John, empty-handed, and Jerry and I, trying our best to keep up. I carried the long water bag. It slapped against my knees and prevented me from running.
It was a bright cool dawn, washed in light, with parcels of cloud lying against the mountainside like ghosts of dead mackerel. Up ahead, Father had halted near an outcrop of rock. I thought he was waiting for us, but I saw that he had reached another ridge of the mountain. It was the last ridge. Below us — but it was a plateau, not the deep valley we had expected — was all of Honduras.
Such an empty world. I did not think wilderness could look so sad.
This was a different country from the one we knew: limitless jungle, volcanoes, and no ocean. No rivers that we could see, no water at all. It was a surface of treetops and skimming birds. Its vastness made me feel small and puny. No smoke, no roads, nothing to say that people lived here. It was Olancho, but that was only a name. It was anybody's.
"It looks so desolate," I said.
"You've never seen Chicago!"
The treetops beneath us continued to the horizon, and the unbroken greenness gave it such a strong suggestion of depth that it hardly looked like forest at all. It was a brimming ocean of wild leaves, a tide so high it had risen to the mountain range. Father was smiling at it all, and yet it was Father who had told us that the deepest tides tricked you with their flatness — if you stuck your foot in them, they would drag you out and drown you in their undertow.
"It's all downhill from now on." There was no path. Father set off, running beside the trickle of a stony creek.
The Zambus said we were to look out for more bees. The Indians here were beekeepers and always had hives near their huts. And dogs — half-wild ones — they kept those, too. But we smelled smoke before we saw either bees or dogs, and when the creek widened to a stream, we knew we must be near a village. The forest was darker — we were under that ocean of trees we had seen, and moving down. My senses told me more than I could logically explain. The smell of stagnant water and woodsmoke and burned meat, and a hairier, dirtier, rancid-yam smell of latrines and dogs — all boiled together. It was a stew-stink I now associated with human habitation — not ours but other people's. Jeronimo's cleanliness educated my nose to these sharp odors.
We might have missed the huts. They were leafy and made of peeled sticks and were the same color as the trees dying near them. But the starved dogs had rushed up to us and Francis was saying, "Fadder! Fadder!" and two macaws croaked at him from a branch.
"Leave this to me," Father said. He saw some lemon trees and whispered, "Juice balls."
In the stream that ran past the village there were women kneeling in muck doing laundry, slapping shirts and pants on boulders.
"Those women are washing clothes," I said.
Jerry said, "So what?"
"No one's wearing clothes," I said. "Not that kind."
The Indian men in the village clearing were practically naked. Shorts were all they wore, and these were in rags — more like aprons.
"Maybe they've only got one pair."
The washerwomen scattered when they saw Father, but he did not pause. He splashed across the stream, then kicked the water from his sandals and kept going toward the Indians and the huts. These were not the sagging tin-roofed huts that river Creoles lived in, and they were much larger than the rats' nests we had seen in collapsing Seville. They were tall stilted rectangles, with protruding roofs and a sort of attic space beneath the grass and leaf thatching. There were ten of them. Father was saying, "No beer cans, no candy wrappers, no flashlight batteries—"
We stayed right behind him.
"And no bows and arrows," he said. "No weapons of any kind. We're probably the first white men they've ever seen. Don't do anything to frighten them. No loud noises. No sudden movements."
They were brown Indians, about a dozen of them, with Chinese eyes and heavy faces and short legs. Some had long hanks of hair bunched at the backs of their heads. Just this squinting fence of men — the women had hidden themselves, and there were no children that we could see.
"Raise your arms slowly," Father said.
We raised our arms slowly.
"Francis, you're the Miskito expert. Tell them who we are."
Francis Lungley looked confused. "Who we are, Fadder?" he asked.
"Tell them we're their friends."
"Friend!" Francis howled. "Friend!"
"Not in English, dummy. Tell them in Miskito, or whatever crazy lingo—"
The Indians watched Father and Francis quarrel.
"They ain't Miskito feller. They Paya or Twahka feller. Maybe we give them bunce banana."
"You're driving me bananas," Father said, and pushed Francis aside. Now he spoke in Spanish. He asked them if they spoke Spanish. They stared at him. He said in Spanish that we were friends— wc had come from far away, over the mountains. They still stared. He said we had a present for them. They went on staring under their swollen Chinese eyelids.
"Maybe they're all deaf." Father said. He shook the knapsack from his shoulders and went close to the men. "Go on, open it," he said, and spelled this out in sign language for the men, motioning with his hands.
An Indian knelt down and opened the knapsack.
"See? He understands me perfectly."
The Indian looked inside, then turned the limp knapsack upside-down and poured water out of it. He spoke one word, which none of us understood.
"Quick. Francis, give me your knapsack!"
Francis unbuckled the second knapsack and said, "She all water, Fadder."
"There must be some of it left — maybe a little piece."
The Indians watched Father and Francis sorting through the soup in the wet knapsack. "Got it!" Father said, and held up a twig of ice — all that was left of the ice block — maybe two ounces. We followed as he went forward to show the men.
He placed it in his palm. Maybe his impatience heated his hand, or maybe it was the small size of the ice twig. Whatever it was, the small thing disappeared. Before they could look closely at it, it melted away and slipped through the cracks between his fingers.
Father still held his wet hand out, but the Indians were staring at his finger stump.
"I don't believe this," Father said quietly. He started to walk away. For a moment, I thought he was heading back to Jeronimo. But no — he was mumbling in Spanish and English. He had left us facing these bewildered Indians. Now he returned and gave a speech.
He had brought them a present, he said. But the present had disappeared. What kind of present can disappear? Well, that was the interesting thing — it was water, but a form of water they had never seen before, as solid as a rock and twice as useful, good for preserving meat or killing pain. It was very cold! We called it ice, he said, and we had an invention over the mountains for making it out of river water. He had brought a block of it that had been as big as two men, but it had gotten smaller and smaller, and by the time we reached the village it was tiny. That was unfortunate, he said, because now it was gone, and a moment ago he could have showed it to them.