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Rainbow Countries of Central America
By Wallace Thompson
 LIFE in the countries of Central America is colorful, as life should be, beneath the rainbow. So many of all the things man asks for in his saner moments are granted to him here. There are comfort of climate and beauty of scenery unexcelled. There are interesting people always, and romantic old houses with charming gardens and looking out on streets filled with ever-changing pictures. The world we know is far away, and there is time to enjoy a flower or a book, or to trade philosophies for as long as ever we will. And in every phase of it color--always color, never the drab sameness of the conventional lands.
Much has been written here of the beauties of Central America, but always that beauty returns to fill our eyes or color our memories. There is seldom the magnificence of the Rocky Mountains of the North, or the grandeur of the Andes of the South, for here the typical beauty is the serene, smooth cones of volcanoes, or the poetry, of gray-green mountains of lesser mass, dustydim against the sky. Through every phase of her pictures, Central America is more the jewelled wristlet of queenly Nature than her resplendent diadem. So it is with the intimate completeness of her fertile jungle, and so with the joys and the problems in the details of her towns and in the life her people live.
COSTA RICA--RED EARTH
WESTWARD from Panamá our steamer ploughs the Caribbean toward the rainbow countries. The white completeness of the Canal Zone fades behind, and with it the lonely, unaccented coast of the Panamá Republic. The Mosquito Gulf lifts us on its dark blue bosom with the uncertain, always threatening swell of the waters of the "Spanish Main." For we sail this sea, flecked with romance and mystery, toward regions that are still as wonderful and new as when Drake first came to try the prowess of his tiny ships against the might of sea and Spain.
This romance and mystery we shall not lose. With the morning we touch its outer rim, the purpled edge of the rainbow's crimson--in the solid, good red earth of Costa Rica. Dawn finds us at Port Limón, and about us a long, even coast, accented now with level forests that look like overgrown maize fields or a vast nursery of that aristocrat of the garden, the canna. And so it is the canna--a noble relative of the canna family-the banana of Costa Rica. Down to the very water's edge the groves seem to come, and only a suggestion of palm and tropical forest rises above and behind them.
NICARAGUA--ORANGE DAWN
THE orange dawn of Nicaragua is no mere figure of speech. It is one of the gorgeous realities of the tropics. All through the verdant paradise of Central America we shall find gorgeous sunrises, but none the equal of that of Corinto, the port of Nicaragua. Volcanic dust, smoke, what you will, are its causes, but the sun that rises each steaming morning behind the five sharp, peaks at Corinto seems, each morning, more gorgeous and awe-inspiring than any other dawn in the world. It is the crudest possible splendor, of a shade we declare no sunrise could ever be, declare as we gaze, open-eyed, upon it. A red that is orange and yet crude red again-a painter had needs mix all the reds and yellows of his palette to match it. Then, when the sun rises, a golden ball in the lowest valley of the volcanoes, we suddenly realize that it is rolling into a sky all pale mauves and greens and yellows, splashed through with great horizontal shafts of white light. The five peaks are black against it, where they were a living ultramarine against the orange of a moment before.
So much for the tints of orange dawn. Corinto, where we come upon it, is the port nearly to the end of the Pacific coast of Nicaragua as we sail northwestward from Costa Rica. All night and half the day we have skirted Nicaragua before we reach this haven.
HONDURAS-- YELLOW HILLS
A BROAD sea, water leaden-smooth, about us. In front an endless, irregular company of sugar-loaf islands. Far away, above and beyond them, an unbroken curtain of high, shadowy mountains. Through this sea moves our ship, sailing with a majesty that is not its own, but the gift of this gorgeous setting of peaked islands and encircling distance. The gift, too, of the broad Pacific behind us, with its long swell lifting our boat, and us, forward into the unforgettable picture.
We are in the Gulf of Fonseca, one of the magnificent harbors of the world, and the half-way station of our trip through Central America. We are on our way from Corinto, Nicaragua, to Amapala, Honduras, whence we shall take our way by launch and automobile to the capital, Tegucigalpa, an eagle's eyrie on the summit of the cordillera, of those mountains which climb dimly into the sky before us.
Our ship sails on, dipping like a sailboat in the Pacific swell, bearing on between two peaked hills which open slowly before us. All about, in these tapering, steep shores, the formations are volcanic, still, as in Nicaragua, a little steeper, perhaps, but standing out as if this great harbor were itself a crater lake from the vast prehistoric time when all Central America was cast up out of sea and fire and earth.
SALVADOR -- GREEN VALLEYS
SALVADOR, like its place in the symbolic rainbow of Central America, is almost eternal green. Salvador is tiny, and is clasped in a cup formed by Honduras and Guatemala, yet in many ways it is peculiarly isolated and unique. And in none more than in this endless green of its landscape. Even in the months when its neighbors accept the brown raiment of their annual drought, Salvador is as green as a salt marsh in an autumn landscape of the north. So exotic is the contrast that, to the traveler from Honduras or Nicaragua, Salvador suggests from the first more the semblance of late August in some temperate-zone farming country than the tropics at their season of rest. It is as if it were a pocket of New England hills that had been lifted up bodily on a summer day, and set down here in the tropics to bloom on, unchanging, through the endless noon.
Nature has been prodigal throughout all Central America, but nowhere in all the countries has she poured forth so much richness in so small an area. Salvador is fifth in size but second in commercial importance.
GUATEMALA -- BLUE GARDENS
GUATEMALA is crowned with a rim of blue volcanoes, its lakes are blue mirrors, and its cultivated fields tinge the landscape with the blue of fruits and flowers. Thus the azure of the spectrum of Central America comes, at last, in the riches and the beauty of the lovely eldest of the five rainbow sisters.
Guatemala is the second largest of the five countries, and its population is by far the greatest. Yet it is a baby amongst the nations of the earth, a child as altogether charming as if it were consciously the favorite daughter of all the world. It does not seek to intrigue us, nor does it try to give us the things of life to which it thinks we are accustomed, as Salvador does so urbanely. But Guatemala is gracious and contented, like a well-bred child, to be itself, to travel its own road, to find its own joys and to fulfil as best it may its own destiny.
Before a benign Deity placed here either the mixed bloods and white Spaniards or the Indians of old time. He built a setting as beautiful perhaps as anything in the world.
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