TOPICS
IN THE TROPICS (Part Three)
Letter
from D. Eugene Smith.
San
Jose, Costa Rica, Feb. 23, 1883.
Costa Rica lies just north of the Isthmus of Panama, and is entered on the
eastern side at Port Limon, a miserable, swampy
town about the size of Virgil, with none of that town's attractiveness. It is
everything that is undesirable in climate, in inhabitants, in its buildings and
its accommodations. Excepting Aspinwall it is the worst town I ever saw, and even
the latter place is its superior in many points.
From
Limon a railroad runs into t he country seventy miles; and such a road! The U. I.
and E. is better! [Utica, Ithaca and Elmira Railroad--CC editor.] Even the cars look as if they had the malaria. The road lies
through a forest broken only here and there by a small clearing with from one
to a dozen palm huts in it. Eight miles of the track runs through a palmetto
swamp—a gigantic corn-field set in inky waters whose pestilential vapors spread
death for miles about. The forest itself is a vast jungle, impassable save
where the hunters have cut a path for the pursuit of game. The trees are tall
and majestic, but bushes and small palms and ferns of infinite variety fill the
space even to the earth, so that the forests are one mass of foliage.
The
terminus of the road is Rio Sucio, a name meaning Dirty River. It is a small,
straggling group of huts, compared with one of which the meanest shanty in Cortland
would be a respectable mansion. The hotel, a three dollar house, is poorer than
the poorest house in Cortland county. Here the traveler has to remain over night
before pursuing his journey farther. I pass over the unpleasant features of a
night in Rio Sucio. I endured them; it is not necessary to inflict them on the public.
At
six in the morning, with the rain pouring down in torrents, I mounted a mule, and
rode by the diseased looking huts, along the banks of the Dirty River, and
began my journey over the mountains alone. Thenceforward I was in a Spanish-speaking
country, unsettled, half-civilized. For twenty miles my road lay through very
picturesque scenery. Now at the bottom of a deep canyon, now along the edge of
precipices, and again up the zigzag paths that scale the mountain side.
Occasionally an old volcanic crater was
seen, with its peculiar colorings of red and yellow from the iron and sulphur
which had been thrown out. Now and then a grave was passed, with its rude,
unlettered wooden cross—pleasant features to one three thousand miles from an acquaintance! Waterfalls
of surprising beauty suddenly appear as the rider rounds some curve in the
road, and picturesque bridges allow a view down the canyon until it is lost in
the dense foliage that everywhere abounds. Finally the summit is
reached and the descent begins to the great Central American tableland.
The
clouds are so near that their movements seem as swift as of a railroad train,
though they were only the slow sailings of the light summer cumuli. Over
on the summit of Irazu, an adjacent volcano, the smoke is seen slowly rising
and floating away to form a new cloud hundreds of feet above the natural ones
below.
Civilization now begins to appear. A few miles brings in view the great
coffee plantations for which Central America is
celebrated. The trees, about as large as our dwarf pears, are laid out with the
same regularity that we find in our orchards, while near the house is a large plastered
square, a hundred or so feet across, whereon the coffee berries are dried for
market. A few banana, orange and lemon groves are seen, and occasionally a
little cacao.
The road
winds along over a rolling plain, in which houses begin to scatter thickly, and
finally the suburbs of San Jose are reached, and after some feeble attempts at talking Spanish I find my way to
the hotel after being eight hours in the saddle.
San
Jose is a thoroughly Spanish town. Brick houses with tile roofs, almost all
with but one story, on account of the earthquakes, and all plastered without and
painted white, pale blue or pink! The city is clean, an unheard of recommendation
for a tropical town, and the people seem of a purer blood than those in the low-lands.
The climate is perfect during this, the dry season, the thermometer indicating
always between sixty-five and eighty-five. It is the most attractive tropical
city I have seen. About it rise seven volcanoes, none of which are active save
for occasional jets of smoke and flame which do no damage. The gently sloping
sides of these mountains are extensively cultivated, being covered with coffee plantations
and vegetable gardens. Beginning at the city limits Irazu rises 9000 feet above us. South Hill in Cortland is three
hundred feet high. It would take thirty South Hills to reach the height of the
crater of this volcano, which rises a thousand feet above the clouds. I remain
here a few days, and then return to the coast for a steamer.
D. E. S.
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