IV. ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY
On the Cauca side, like the French slope of the Pyrenees, the Central Cordillera of the Andes descends almost abruptly to the valley. As we emerged from the clouds, a brilliant sun lighted up vast landscapes of labyrinthian hills and vales mottled with cloud shadows, bits of our road ahead scratched here and there on salient, sun-polished knobs and slopes far below. With noon appeared the first broad view of the rolling Cauca valley, nestled between the central and the western ranges, a bare thousand feet above sea-level, still deep-blue as some mountain-girdled lake. The little town of Salento, in the lap of an undulating, bright green plain, rose slowly up to meet us. We marched to the alcalde’s office in a weak-kneed building of compacted clay, only to find the alcalde, like beds for travelers, out of town. A stupid clerk in a room full of musty papers of varying antiquity admitted it was too bad Salento was so atrasado, but made no move to decrease that backwardness.
“And strangers who arrive?” I asked.
“Generally bring their beds with them,” he replied, “or, if not, they do the best they can.”
We took the hint and forcible possession of an empty room opening on the plaza. When, after a basin bath, I strolled out into the town to mention our strange exotic desire for sleeping accommodations, a dozen of the most influential citizens also admitted it was too bad and—and where did we come from and where were we going? Hays for once had better luck. Having left the mention of beds to simmer in the mind of one Sanchez, who amused himself at shopkeeping on a corner of the square, he was called over at dark and offered the use of several woolly white blankets that hung for sale from the blackened beams of the shop ceiling. Sanchez was shocked beyond measure when we started to carry them across the plaza ourselves. He called for a boy, nine responded, and the winner expressed great gratitude when we rewarded him with a ragged paper cent. We improvised seats and sat gazing out through the wooden reja. Far away on a fuzzy hillside our road of the morning grew dim and faded out, like an unfixed photograph, and a night lighted only by stars quickly settled down. Out of its black immensity came, a little later, the jangling of tiny bells. Across the plaza filed a half hundred boys in column of twos, weirdly lighted by flickering torches, utterly silent in their bare feet. From another direction came a similar half-seen procession of girls; the two columns joined at the door of the little bamboo church, the pagoda-like twin towers of which stood dimly forth against the background of darkness, and passed within together. For an hour a weird infantile chanting in chorus sounded almost unbrokenly, then the congregation filed forth again and melted away into the humid summer night. The faint silhouette of the priest showed him leaning over the reja of his second-story casa cural, the fitful glow of his cigarette the only light in town, until that, too, died out and left only the brilliant tropical stars above.
Beyond Salento a rolling fertile land lay on every hand. In the great forests spreading far up the range beside and behind us, the most conspicuous of the flora was the yarumo, a white-leaved tree that stood forth everywhere like blotches on the green landscape. The slender wax-palm of the eastern slope had not passed the crest. The dense-green uplands of the valley were still all but covered with virgin forests. It set us reflecting what might have been had the “Mayflower” turned southward and peopled this land of rich soil and unrivalled climate, instead of that bleak and rigorous country we had left behind. Or would this peerless climate have made us, too, salentinos?
At the hut where we paid two cents for great bowls of creamy milk, there was a decision to make. One branch of the trail led to Pereira, the other to Filandia. We tossed a coin. It fell “tails” and we struck off to the left by a soft dirt road. Filandia was a quaint old place with a wonderful gingerbread church, on a hilltop that rolled languidly away on all sides to far-off mountain ridges. The town seemed never to have seen a foreigner before. Perhaps travelers hitherto had all gone by way of Pereira. When I attempted to take a picture, the entire population, men, women, and the very babies, crowded so close around me that I could not fight them back to a focal distance.
By the next afternoon we were in quite a different country,—down in the tropics again, with coffee-trees, bananas, and endless lanes of bamboo, that giant fern, as useful as it is beautiful, which nature so unkindly denied the North. It was not a temperature for the preserving of undeveloped films and I paused with the tank beside the first clear stream. The sun gave out before I had more than hung the strips up to dry, drops of rain began to fall, and night came on apace. I pushed on, grasping a wet film in either hand. To my dismay the road turned to a narrow path through thick weeds, thigh-high, and for a long five miles, with eighteen already in my legs and thirty pounds straining from my shoulders, I tramped swiftly forward, striving to hold the films out of reach of the weeds. The natives, blacker and blacker as we descended, stared with amazement from their little bamboo shelters along the train to see a strange being scurry by, holding high above his head two black strips, like Tibetan prayer-sheets. Small wonder they crossed themselves in superstitious awe.
The night had grown completely in about me, when Hays hailed me from an unseen doorway. He had already bespoken supper and engaged a room with a bed of split bamboo and a quilted straw mattress. For me was brought what a hard-earned candle proved to be a canvas cot, made of a U. S. mail-sack. In the “dining-room” was a lounging chair of the same material.
“Where did you get it?” I asked the woolly-haired host.
“What, that fine, strong cloth? Oh, the government always has plenty of that to sell,” he replied placidly.
The same damp, pulsating jungle fenced us in all the next morning. Far ahead, across the heat-steaming spread of the Cauca valley, the jagged blue line of the Western Cordillera, that cuts it off from the Pacific, stretched to north and south as far as the eye could command, in some places five ranges visible one behind the other. At noon, suddenly topping a jungled knoll, we caught sight of the long-sought town of Cartago, reddish with the hue of its roof-tiles in the center of town, dying away in whitish and straw-colored lines of outskirt hovels. It was hours later that we reached the level of the valley floor, and strolled in heavy grass through a bamboo-built suburb into the weedy central plaza.
With a populous graveyard before the keel of the “Mayflower” was laid, Cartago has not yet advanced to what any “mushroom” town of our West can boast at the age of three months. Negroes were everywhere, though there was no sharp “color-line,” and pure whites were rare. The Cauca is to Colombia what our South is to the United States. In colonial times slaves were imported in large numbers up the Atrato river, and to this day the shiftless, happy-go-lucky African lolls in his ragged cabins, speaking a Spanish it was hard to believe was not English, so exactly did their slovenly, lazy-tongued drawl resemble that of our southern states.
The hotel advertised “Comodidad, prontitud y esmero”—“Comfort, promptness, and specklessness,”—the three things above all others a South American hotel is surest not to have. There is never an office in these hotels of the Andes. A peanut vendor somewhere up the street is manager, and all the town “assists” while the traveler makes his bargain, if, indeed, it does not gather en masse to watch his ablutions. The rooms are commonly stark empty, and are furnished to order, as one selects a chicken on the hoof for the evening meal. We had to implore each and every requisite, from cots to water, separately and individually several times over before they were supplied. When we insisted on two towels, the young but toothless landlady, muttering something about the curious ways of los gringos, tore an aged sheet in two, and as long as we remained made us feel that guests were an unmitigated nuisance. Among the luxuries of the town was wheat bread. When we demanded it with our meals, a six-foot “boy” of polished jet-black skin—and little other covering—was sent wandering down to market with a bushel basket on his arm, and in the course of the afternoon came slouching back with three tiny buns lost in the bottom of it.
But for all the slovenliness of its habits, antiquarians would have found Cartago’s hotel interesting. The barnyard patio into which we flung our wash-water formed the parquet, or stalls, of the village theater. At the back of it was an open, tile-roofed building of split bamboo floor and sides, violently painted, forming a stage quite similar to that of Shakespeare’s day. A score of bottles hung by the neck, like corpses at some medieval wholesale hanging, fringed the outer edge of the platform, the ends or drippings of what had been tallow candles showing that they had served as proscenium footlights. The second-story veranda, our dining-room, was marked with the numbers of “boxes” around its three sides, from the unspeakable kitchen to the even more unmentionable servants’ quarters. When plays were given, the masses stood in the yard below and the well-to-do looked on from their chairs along the veranda. Unfortunately, histrionic talent seemed to have completely died out in Cartago. Only the languid tinkling of a tiple, or native guitar, marked the long evenings in which we watched the golden moon rise over the bit of mossy, old-red roof and the tops of two lazily swaying palm-trees framed by our balcony window.
If my knowledge of Cartago is meager, it is because I spent most of my days there in mailing a notebook. The post-office was the lower story of a compressed-mud building cornering on the plaza. When I first made my appearance, its heavy wooden doors, studded with immense spike-heads, were securely bolted.
“Is the correo closed to-day?” I asked a lounger-by.
“Sí, señor, the mails only came in yesterday. But you can knock and perhaps....”
Knocking brought no result. An hour or more later I tried again, with no better luck. Early the next afternoon, however, I found my way in by an inner door of the patio, though the place was still officially closed.
The two rooms looked much like a garret of long standing, but by no means like a post-office. Scattered everywhere, over floor and baked-mud window seats, on decrepit chairs and crippled tables, lay fat mail-bags, all stout and new, from the chief countries of the globe. The outgoing Colombian correspondence was already packed in aged grain-sacks. Pieces of mail of all sizes lay tumbled and littered over the entire two rooms. Fully half of it was from the United States, particularly pamphlets and packages from patent medicine houses. Four middle-aged men, dressed in great dignity and in Cartago’s most correct attire, with gloves and canes on chairs beside them, were seated around a table, smoking cigarettes. I handed one of them the wrapped notebook. It passed slowly from hand to hand, each feeling it over, not so much out of curiosity, though that was by no means lacking, as absent-mindedly striving to bring his attention down to it. Then all four fell to perusing a Postal Union rate-sheet, but found everything except the information needed. Finally one rose and referred the matter respectfully to a man, evidently a superior, seated in state at a corner table. The rate was found to be one peso for each fifty grams. The official turned back and wandered for some time at random about the two rooms, fingering the parcel over and over and scratching his head in a vain effort to recall what he had set out to find.
He discovered it at last,—an ancient postal-scales—tried it, found it too small, tried another, and spent an ample five minutes juggling with the odds and ends that served as weights before he computed the balance. Then he drifted languidly back to his companions in inefficiency, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, and rambled once more across the room to the scales. He had forgotten the weight! This time he took no chances, but announced the figures aloud and wrote them on the parcel,—“320 grams.” Those who do not know the South American will have difficulty in believing that the division of this by fifty, without troubling for fractions, presented a real problem. All four began pencilling long lines of figures on as many sheets of paper. Several minutes passed before one of them ventured to show his result. The others compared, and amid a sage shaking of heads one announced solemnly, “Seven cents, señor,” while the rest gazed dreamily at me out of the tops of their eyes, as if wondering whether I should weather the shock of so great an expense.
“And registered, seventeen cents?” I added; for I did not care to have the parcel lie a month or two about the earth floor of Cartago’s post-office, or find its final resting-place in the back yard. When the suggestion had penetrated, one of the quartet sat down to enter the grave transaction in a large ledger. I still needed a two-cent stamp. The oldest of the four shuffled to the opposite side of the table, sat down, adjusted his legs, and slowly pulled out a drawer stuffed with every manner of rubbish,—tobacco, rolled cigarettes, half-empty phials of patent medicine, everything that may come by mail,—and finally dug up a battered pasteboard box that had once held No. 60 American thread. From this he fished out a small sheet of two-peso stamps, carefully tore one off at the perforation, first on one side, then on the other, put the sheet back in the thread-box, the thread-box back in the drawer, carefully closed the latter, and handed me the stamp. I tossed before him a silver ten-cent piece. He opened the drawer again, clawed out of a far corner a wad of those ragged, germ-infested one-cent bills indigenous to Colombia, laid out eight of them, counted them a second time, sat staring at them a long minute while his attention went on furlough, asked one of his colleagues to count them, which the latter did twice at the same vertiginous speed, and finally pushed them toward me with a hesitative movement, as if he were sure he was losing somewhere in the transaction, but could not exactly figure out where.
Meanwhile, he of the ledger rose from dotting the last “i” of an entry that stretched in nicely shaded copybook letters entirely across the double page, begged me to do him the honor to be seated, dipped the clumsy steel pen into the dusty inkwell, and, with a wealth of politenesses, requested me to sign. When I had done so, he gazed long and dreamily at the signature, longer still at space in general, and finally put the parcel carefully away in a drawer with neither stamp nor mark of identification upon it.
“But,” I protested, “Do you give no receipt for registered mail?”
Great excitement arose among the officials and the half-dozen persons waiting ostensibly to buy a one-cent stamp. A long conference ensued.
“It is, señor,” said the postmaster himself, rising and turning to me with regal courtesy, “that no blank receipts have been sent from Bogotá yet this year. However....”
He called aside the custodian of the precious ledger and gave him long whispered instructions. The latter hunted up a sheet of foolscap, stamped it carefully with the office seal, and wrote out with long legal flourishes—for penmanship is still an art in Colombia—a receipt for the parcel. This he tore off and carried across to the postmaster who, carefully preparing another pen, signed it with his full name, not forgetting the elaborate rúbrica beneath it. Then he read it carefully over once more, seemed dissatisfied with something, and finally called the attention of the writer to the rough edge he had left in tearing off the paper, instructing him to lay it under a ruler and trim it with a sharp knife. The subordinate did so and at last delivered to me a memento I still have in my possession.
To one unacquainted with Latin-American ways the episode may seem overdrawn. I have told it, however, without exaggeration. From the moment I handed over the parcel until I emerged, receipt in hand, there had elapsed one hour and twenty minutes!
Nor is such a scene unusual. From the Rio Grande southward, government offices are filled with just such human driftwood, and it is common experience to see several staid and pompous men in frock-coats spend more than an hour doing what an average American boy would accomplish in two minutes.
Swinging due south next morning through the perpetual summer of the flat, grass-carpeted Cauca valley, we fell in with a straggling band of nearly a hundred youths. They were conscripts recruited under the new military law of Colombia, antioqueños chosen by lot to make up the quota of the Province of Antioquia, bound south from Medellín for six months compulsory service. The majority were crude-minded countrymen. Some, dressed in the wrecks of “European” suits, were undeveloped boys of the towns, hobbling painfully along on bruised and blistered feet, bare except for their cloth alpargatas. Among the latter was one Policarpo, a devil-may-care young fellow of high intelligence and considerable education, who had a very clear notion of the weak spots in his native land, though no inkling of a workable remedy. Another carried a tiple, as well as a pleasing baritone voice, and struck up at every opportunity the languidly mournful music of the region.
The highway now was a series of interwoven cross-country paths, fording the smaller streams, crossing the larger on little bamboo bridges with faded thatched roofs. It was hot, yet not of the oppressive heat our most northern states know in mid-summer. All along the way were flowers of many colors, and broad vistas of greenest grass stretched far across slightly rolling plains wherever woods and jungle did not choke it out. Bands of butterflies, often of the most gorgeous hues, flickered here and there across the face of the landscape. Insects hummed contentedly and lizards scuttled away through the fallen leaves. Singing birds of many kinds abounded; flocks of little parrots, brilliant green in color, flitted in and out of the bamboo groves, shrieking noisily at their games. Here and there quinchas, fences of split bamboo of basket-like weave, shut in a little cultivated patch; and all day long the distance-blue Western Cordillera, with its wrinkled folds and prominences, stretching endlessly north and south, seemed to cut off the Cauca like a world apart.
Then for a space there were no habitations, except an abandoned hut or two and the ruins of several razed ones. The recruits murmured something about an epidemic, but none appeared to know anything definite concerning it. At length we descended through a shallow valley, and from then on, locusts called chapul in the Cauca, rose in vast clouds as we advanced, covering the ground before us and veiling all the landscape as with a great screen, new myriads rising at every step, until they struck us incessantly in the face and filled our ears with a sound as of some great waterfall at a distance. In Bogotá we had wondered to find an important government department entitled “Comisión para la Extinción de la Langosta”; now it seemed small, indeed, to cope with the problem. At intervals cactus hedges bounded the way, and the organ-cactus of desert lands stretched forth its stiff arms into the brilliant sky. The Cauca was suffering one of its periodical droughts and the accompanying scourge of locusts, after which it would bloom again like a tropical garden.
The recruits so monopolized accommodations at the village of Naranjo—which had not the remnant of an orange-tree to explain its name—that we had to share a room with three none-too-white natives who permitted no ventilation whatever. At four they rose to light candles and feed their mules, and sat vociferously discussing nothing at all until daybreak. They spent more time harnessing themselves than their animals; for the Colombian never dreams of riding in anything less than the complete outfit demanded by local convention. A wide-brimmed “Panama” hat—“sombrero de junco,” or the finer “jipijapa,” he calls it—covers his head. Over his usual clothing, which must include coat, vest, cravat, gloves, and white collar, no matter how far he may be from civilization nor what the temperature, he wears a ruana, a garment similar to the sarape of Mexico, or the poncho. In the vicinity of Bogotá this is of heavy wool and dark in color; in the Cauca it is the ruana de hilo, of light-colored cotton, generally gay with stripes. Beneath this the horseman wears zamarras, ample false trouser-legs held together by strips front and back, and legging-like at the bottom. Sometimes these are of sun-dried cowhide, or goat-skins shaggy with long white hair, reminiscent of the “chaps” of our cowboys. Far more common are those of tela de caucho, “rubber cloth,” consisting of two thicknesses of canvas and rubber woven into an impenetrable yet flexible material nearly an eighth of an inch thick. Then come his chilenas, huge wheel-like spurs; his rejo, or lariat of twisted rawhide hanging from his wrist; his alforjas, or leather saddlebags between his legs; his cuchugos, a long soft-leather pouch arched over the cantel of his saddle like a cavalryman’s blanket-roll; his long, shoe-shaped stirrups; and usually a parasol or umbrella hanging at his side, if, indeed, it does not shade him as he rides. No Colombian caballero who aspires to retain his rank as such would venture to mount a horse while lacking any item of this equipment. One trembles to think what might happen to a caucano, needing to ride instantly for the doctor, who could not lay hands on his zamarras, or who had mislaid his gloves.
The Cauca was now a broad, dry, treeless region without streams, though little humped bridges lifted us across the waterless beds of what would be such at other seasons, and which still retained the name of “river” in local parlance. Arrieros of this section put red bands about the brows of their horses and mules, perhaps only for the purpose of identification, but giving the animals the coy appearance of coquettish girls. As we advanced, the long drought grew more and more in evidence. Across the sun-cracked valley floor lay scattered the bleached bones of scores of cattle that had died of thirst. Policarpo and I, falling behind, were in danger of suffering the same fate; for the band of recruits, like another locust horde, drank the world ahead wholly dry. The rare hovels and amateur shops along the way were prepared to feed and minister to the thirst of only the customary few daily travelers; not to the ninety-four of us that suddenly descended upon them out of the north without warning. Hays and I were forced to stride on past the sponge-like avalanche of humanity for self-preservation.
Here and there we got huge glasses of chicha, the favorite native beverage, at a cent or two each. So many travelers have pictured the making of this by toothless old women chewing yuca and spitting it into a tub to ferment, that the impression should be corrected at the outset. That custom does exist, but it is found only among the untamed tribes of the upper reaches of the Amazon, scarcely trodden by one in ten thousand South American travelers. All down the great Andean chain this nectar of the Incas is made chiefly of maize, though also of other grains, berries, and of almost any vegetable matter that will ferment, by just as agreeable processes as any other cooking operation of the same region. The notion of cleanliness is, at best, rudimentary among the country people of South America, yet the brewing of chicha certainly compares favorably with the ways of our average cider-mill. A well-made chicha, indeed, resembles somewhat in taste the best cider, and is the surest thirst-quencher I have yet encountered, distinctly superior in this respect to beer. Many were the chicha recipes I gathered along the Andes. For the interest of those who wish to temper a hot summer day with an excellent heritage from the ancient Inca civilization, let me translate the most common one.
“Chicha de morocho:
Take hard, ripe corn” (morocho is one of the several excellent species of maize that, like certain grades of the potato, has never been carried from its original Andean habitat to the rest of the world) “shell, and boil for two hours. Let it cool, then grind, or crush under a stone, sprinkling from time to time with some of the water in which it has been boiled. Keep this mass in a well-covered jar. As it is needed, mix with water; one soupspoonful of the prepared mass to one liter of boiling water; add cloves, a very little vanilla, and as much sugar or rapadura as is considered necessary. Mix with an equal amount of cold water and place in jars to ferment. Once fermented, it is ready to serve.”
We reached Zarzal, beyond a blistered, red-hot plain, soon after noon, with nineteen miles already behind us. It was thus we would always have arrived; the day’s work done early in the afternoon, to wash, eat, and loaf awhile on the canvas cots in our cell-bare room; then to loll in the rawhide chairs on the broad tile-floored veranda before our door, reading the literature of the country, languidly watching the afternoon shower, and taking a stroll in the evening for exercise. In the Andes, however, the itinerary is subjected to a haphazard arrangement of stopping-places that make so ideal a plan impossible. We gave orders for dinner and supper upon our arrival. The ignorant, good-hearted old landlord literally hung over us as we ate, fingering our dishes and even our food. The place might, with entire justice, have advertised “personal services.” At two we finished a heavy dinner. At three-thirty our host waddled in to announce that the “large supper” we had ordered was ready! We managed to plead off until five, but for that concession were obliged to eat the meal cold as an abandoned hope.
A heavy rain during the night—our coming seemed to have broken the long drought—made the going lead-heavy for the first few hours, until the blazing sun had dried up the “gumbo” mud. A richer region appeared as we advanced. Once or twice it seemed as if the central and western ranges were about to join hands and cut us off, but the “unmade” road always found a way through with, at most, an occasional dip, or a slight winding climb. During the hot afternoon we picked up a recruit straggler, complaining of fever. The entire company was scattered for miles along the valley, as often panting in a patch of shade as hobbling forward on their blistered, light-shod feet. Magnificent trees stood out here and there across the rich bottom lands. Often the way led through dense gaudales, bamboo groves that waved their gigantic plumes lazily in the summer air. Here and there the vegetation vaulted entirely over a “river” into which filtered only a few rays of sun, as through the roof of an abandoned ruin. Occasionally we came upon a chacra, a little farm with a tiny thatched hut faded with age, its floor of trampled earth, surrounded by coffee bushes, papaya, chirimoya, and other fruit trees of the tropics, the sometimes recently white-washed dwelling furnished only with a few crude leather stools, a wooden bench, a lame table, and a few cántaros and dishes of native pottery. Pigs and chickens treated the family with perfect equality; under the trees meditated old donkeys, broken down by a lifetime of toil under heartless drivers. We were indeed approaching the scene of “María” in all its photographic detail.
We prepared to leave Tuluá early, but we reckoned without our host, who was a half-negro of nasty temper and stupid wit, and no faith in gold coin. Hays offered him a $5 gold piece in payment of our bill, but he demanded “paper of the country.” We had none left, and a mulatto boy was sent out to change the scorned yellow metal. An hour elapsed without a second sight of him. When another had drifted into the past, a search party was organized. Investigation showed that the emissary had tried to change the coin in a couple of shops, and had then faded away. It was nearly noon when he reappeared, the coin still in his clenched hand. He had fallen into a game with other boys and “forgotten” his errand.
We took the task upon ourselves. One after another drowsy, wondering shopkeepers looked the coin over as a great curiosity and handed it back, announcing that the changing would be “muy trabajoso”—“very laborious”—for the speaker, but that we could get it changed “en to’as partes”—“anywhere,” which, as usual, meant nowhere. At last a merchant suggested that it would be changed wherever we bought anything. We called his bluff by picking out a notebook on his shelves, and had heaped up before us nearly $500 in ragged “billetes del país” of chiefly one and five-peso values. The wad was burdensome, but to be caught on the road in the Andes without small money is often to go hungry, if not, indeed, thirsty. This particular shopkeeper prided himself on a knowledge of geography and the affairs of the “exterior,” the outside world, above the average of his fellow-townsmen. As we turned away, he called after us:
“By the way, do los señores come from New York, or from the United States?”
It was a subtle distinction we had not, to that moment, recognized.
The ancient city of Buga, one of the largest in the Cauca valley, was already familiar to us from the pages of “María.” But seeing is too often disillusionment in these “cities” of the Andes, particularly those in which the imagination has already dwelt. To have seen one long, cobbled, unswept street of Buga was to have seen them all. Checkerboard in plan, the monotonous line of its continuous house-walls, all standing close to the street in a strict “right dress,” broken here and there by a massive zaguan, stretched away out of sight in both directions. At first glimpse, it seemed unduly modest in claiming only ten thousand inhabitants; when we found that every dwelling had a patio and a garden of its own within, we realized that a one-story Andean town is by no means so large as it looks. The place was stagnant as a frog-pond, its main plaza a splendid study in “still life.” Yet Buga was old before Boston was founded, and is favored with a soil and climate superior to the best of New England. In a region where fruit should have been unlimited, the only shop that offered any for sale was slightly stocked with a few green samples. The old woman who kept it bestirred herself to finger over several of her wares, and advised us to come back mañana or the day after when they had had time to ripen. Perhaps it is unjust to expect of Buga the energy and movement of a white man’s town. At least it has unrivalled evenings in which, after the sun has set gloriously over the western range, the traveler can lean over the parapet of the massive old Spanish bridge of many arches—how the Spaniards built to stay, yet stayed not—watching a half-moon rise and listening to the chatter of the shallow, diamond-clear little Guadalajara de las Piedras that flanks the town on the south.
Buga is a holy city. Far above all else bulks a modern Gothic church of real bricks—and bricks transported from overseas are not cheap—called “De los Milagros,” filled with more religious trophies than any Hindu temple. We were accosted in the nave by a long-unshaven priest who inquired our desires with a brusk “Qué se le ofrece?” that plainly revealed his knowledge that we were not of the “faithful.” His familiarity with the outside world was on a par with that of most Colombians. When we answered his question of nationality by announcing ourselves Americans, he replied complacently, “Ah, yes, Englishmen.” Finding unheeded his strong hint to leave, he at length led the way up a ladder to a cell above and back of the altar. Here he lighted a candle and fell on his knees before the “miraculous” crucifix, the figure of which was smeared with red paint to simulate blood. Pilgrims flock to Buga from hundreds of miles around. To the bugueños themselves, however, their “miracle” seems to offer little more than a means of easy income, through the hawking of crucifixes and holy lithographs to their pious visitors.
Like Puree, Benares, or Lourdes, the holy city is more holy at a distance, than to those who loll through life in its shadows, and it was only at El Cerrito, a day’s march beyond, that we heard the story of the Milagroso de Buga in all its details. In a faintly lighted corredor we sat with three old women, the natural authorities on such subjects, who told the tale in low, awed voices, their eyes glowing in the night with the miracle of it, their tongues breaking in frequently with a “Qué le parece!”—“What do you think of that!”—as the miraculous recital proceeded.
Long years ago, more than two centuries, when Buga was nothing but a row of thatched casitas on the bank of the babbling Guadalajara de las Piedras, a very poor and pious woman used to come every day to wash clothes at the river brink. The clothes of others, that is, for you must know that she had long been trying to get together sixty cents to buy a crucifix to set up in her hut, where she had nothing whatever to pray to. At last she economized the sixty cents and was toiling away on the bank of the Guadalajara, dreaming of the joy of setting up the crucifix in her casita on the morrow, when a poor lame man of Buga came by and told her he owed sixty cents to a rich caballero, and would be put in prison for debt if he did not pay it that very night. The poor washerwoman drew from within her garments the silver she had so carefully hidden away and gave it to the lame man to pay his debt. The next day—or three days later; here a great dispute arose among our informants—as the poor woman was washing and praying that she might some day gather together another sixty cents, there floated squarely into her open hands and mixed itself up with the garments—of others—she was washing, a cajita, a little box in which there was....
Only a simple little cross, the spokeswoman said, but she, having at that moment to step into the shop to sell two corn-and-cheese biscuits, the others assured us in hoarse whispers that this version was entirely erroneous; it was not a simple cross, but a crucifix with a Cristo attached, just exactly the same that you see to-day in El Milagroso de Buga, only very tiny, chiquitito, in fact. This momentous point in Buga’s history I am forced to leave unsettled, reporting merely what I heard half-whispered in the dark corredor of El Cerrito. The woman took this cross—or crucifix—home and set it up on the wall of her casita. To her surprise and alarm, the crucifix—or cross—began to grow. “Qué le parece!” It grew even during the night! And the noises of its stretching kept her awake. When it had grown to twice its original size, she became so alarmed that she went and told the village curate. The padre scoffed at her story, saying such things were not possible nowadays—O ye of little faith!—for miracles were no longer done. But when she showed him the thing, lo, it was even then growing! So the priest took it away with him—as priests will—and still it grew. It grew until it reached the size you see it to-day in El Milagroso de Buga. Then the padre had an intimation from the Blessed Virgin that a church should be built on the spot where the cajita had been found, and he called all the people together to build it. They put the miracle behind the altar, and there it remained more than two hundred years, in the church which is to-day the carpenter-shop beside El Milagroso. Then, in 1902, the great temple of bricks was raised, for it had long been that those who would worship and be cured by the Miraculous One could not get into the old church. And the Milagroso was moved to the new temple as easily as if it were a mere image of wood, though all the world well knows that it moves only when it wishes, and if it does not, all the horses in the Cauca cannot stir it.
“And is it true that El Milagroso has cured many invalids?” I asked.
All three exploded in the Colombian manner of expressing great world-wide truths, such as, “Is Buga larger than Tuluá?” “Is it colder in Zarzal than in El Cerrito?” Why....
But from an embarrassment of proofs of the miraculous power of the Milagroso of Buga, I have space only for this:
A woman of Sonson had been bed-ridden with rheumatism for twenty years. At last, when they had grown large enough, her sons carried her to Buga and placed her in a chair before El Milagroso. As she prayed, she leaned forward and touched the toe of the Miraculous One, whereupon she at once rose up from her chair perfectly well and walked home to Sonson, many miles away. That, every one in the Cauca valley knows, for it happened only the other year.
“And also,” put in another of the old women, bent on rounding out the story, “El Milagroso can turn a woman young and beautiful again, back to the day of her marriage and the age of fifteen.”
“Eh!” began Hays, sitting up, “Then why ... But, no, the question would be unkind. It is too personal.”
It was in El Cerrito that we first began inquiries about Jorge Isaacs. Those who have sought information of Carlyle in Chelsea, or of Goethe in Frankfurt will be surprised to know that the people of El Cerrito had heard of the author of “María,” though the corner chicha-seller and his neighbors spoke of him with something of the scorn active men of the world always feel for mere men of letters, even though they were not averse to basking in the sunshine of his fame. Some one led us to the little bridge below which the village gossips and washes its scanty clothes, and pointed away to the east. Far across the valley, on the lower skirts of the central range, we could see plainly the “novela casa”—“the story house,” a mere white speck on the distant mountain flank.
There were few spots in Colombia to which I had looked forward with more interest than this scene of South America’s greatest novel, and the life-long home of its author. With the first graying of the night I was astir, and we were off by sunrise along a grass-grown trail at right angles to our route to Ecuador. Several times this seemed to lose its way, and split up in hopeless indecision. But the “house of my fathers,” gleaming steadily on the skirt-hem of the central range, piloted us forward. The only building to be seen, except those on the floor of the plain, it stood just high enough to gaze out across the great valley, a single evergreen tree, slender as a church-spire, close beside it. The sun shot down its rays as if bent on setting on fire all that the foliage of the trees did not defend from its rage, when we came to the edge of the plain, broken by ravines in which we separated in an attempt to keep together. There was nothing left but to strike an unmarked course for the goal. My own soon plunged down into a gully hundreds of feet deep, thick in jungle, a stream, the Zabaletas of “María,” monologuing at its bottom. I wandered long beside it before I could tear my way across, and longer still before I found the suggestion of a path by which to climb out again. Beyond were slightly sloping brown fields, with grazing herds and immense black rocks protruding from the soil, and behind, the indistinct, prairie-like valley, majestic and silent, stretched mile upon mile to the deep-blue wall of the Western Cordillera. Over the crest of the Andes above hung, like an immense veil, dense masses of fog, from which the winds of the Sierra above snatched rags of clouds that floated lazily away to the westward. Then, all at once, the modest little white house appeared close at hand, in a grove of evergreens backed by the yarumo-dotted mountain flank. I climbed a stone wall and, mounting through another brown field, pushed open a heavy rustic gate, to find myself at last at the home of “María.”
A woman of olive complexion, with streaming hair—for in this corner of the Cauca, far from the “royal highway,” travelers, to say nothing of foreigners, are rare, indeed—watched me in speechless amazement as, dripping with twelve miles of struggle, I mounted the steps of the house. On the veranda I was met by a veritable delegation of women and children, headed by a man who announced himself as Camilo Durán, hacendado, entirely at my service. The family was of the well-to-do farmer class of the Cauca, a bit awkward, yet proud of their rank in society, lightly clad in rural dress, and decidedly excited at the extraordinary event of a visit by a foreigner from far-off Europe—or America—who presented a document from the alcalde of Bogotá, signed by none other than the nephew of that same “Don Jorge” for whom their home was famous. A wide-eyed negro boy whom one might have taken for “Juan Angel” in person, his woolly head protruding through the crown of what had long since been a native straw hat, came running with a chair. As I sat down in the cool corredor, surrounded by the admiring family, Durán called for glasses and a bottle, and just then Hays’ head appeared above the stone fence of the inner corral and his always leisurely legs brought him up the steps to be introduced as that very “Lay-O-Ice” whom the valued communication from Bogotá mentioned—when read by natives. The aguardiente, which was “ardent water” indeed, arrived a moment later, and when Durán had drunk our health and we his, we turned to look about us. Would we see la novela casa? We would, indeed, and rising, entered it.
The “story house” was a more modest dwelling than the imagination pictures during the reading of “María.” But then, all the Cauca and its ways and people are simple and unassuming to the American point of view. Typical of the hacienda houses of the region, it was of one story, arranged with due regard for the natural resources and the needs of the place and climate. Built of stone and adobe, it gave evidence of being periodically disguised under a coating of whitewash. The long, deep veranda was flanked by two corner rooms and, like them, floored with what the French call dalles, dull-red tiles that remained cool even at Cauca noonday. Its thick walls were shaded by a low, projecting tile roof. Over the entrance—a genuine Latin-American touch—had been painted in what Hays referred to as “box-car letters” the information:
“Aquí Cantó y Lloró “Here Sang and Wept Jorge Isaacs” George Isaacs”
The main hall, or parlor, took up the entire depth of the house from the front to the back veranda, the “corredor de la montaña” of the novel, and was fitted with heavy hand-made furniture, of which an immense dining table of rough-hewn construction formed the center. Flanking this chief chamber were the half-dozen private rooms of the family. That at the right-hand corner of the house, encroaching on the front corredor, had been the room of “Efraín,” the hero, and of the novelist himself. Back of it came the sewing-room, the writer’s picture of which was so photographic that we were almost startled not to find “María” and “Emma” and her mother busy with their sewing. At the back, across the main hall, stood the oratorio, a small chapel with the same simple image of the Virgin, perhaps, before which “María” had so often prayed in vain for a happy life. Behind the back veranda stood a wing, barely connected with the house proper, with a kitchen, hive-shaped clay bake-ovens, and the staring white eyes of negro servants of all sizes that seemed gargoyle-like ornaments of the smoke-streaked and blackened place. The entire dwelling was as densely inhabited as a New York tenement. Besides the dozen boys and girls of olive tint and several women of the Durán family, servants and negroes swarmed, and piccaninnies peered from every opening and corner.
The way led through the sewing-room across the now weedy garden to the “pila de María,” a crystal-clear pool in the bed of the arroyo that sprang from rock to rock down the swift, light-wooded gorge at the foot of which the “story house” is situated. “María” with her unbound tresses, was no longer here; instead, several dark-skinned boys snatched their garments as we approached and sought quick shelter. The “pila” was a rock-walled basin of sandy bottom, some four feet deep and as many times larger than the less romantic bathtub of civilization, constantly renewed by the stream that wanders languidly away across the valley of the Cauca. Because of the dip of the garden, the “pila” is out of sight from the house, but from his corner room “Efraín” could, even as the novelist has pictured, see the girls as they returned from their morning dip, pausing to pick a flower here and there along the way. Durán gave us leave to take a plunge. But though few things would have been more welcome after our dripping climb from El Cerrito, it would have seemed something verging on sacrilege, something like smoking a cigar with our feet on Juliet’s balcony, to have profaned with our dusty, prosaic, vagabond forms the pool about which seemed still to flit the spirit of adorable “María.”
According to the people of the region, Colombia’s chief novel is little more than the autobiography of its author, polished into the ideal love-story in vogue a half-century ago. Isaacs, like the hero “Efraín,” was the son of an English Jew, born in Jamaica, who came to Colombia as a young man, married, and embraced Christianity. Like “Efraín,” the author had a sister Emma, in real life the recently-deceased wife of a doctor of Popayán. “Carlos,” who first offered his hand to “María,” still lived on his hacienda a few miles out across the valley. “Juan Angel,” the slave-boy of “Efraín,” was said to be still living in Cali, an old, old man. The bear and tiger hunting, the country weddings, the simple and patriarchal household, the life and scenes of the Cauca, had all been things of reality, deftly lifted into the realms of the imagination by the hero-author. Even the evil stroke of fortune that had befallen the family on that dismal night in the “hacienda of the valley” was no story-book tale, but a stern fact that had left the novelist without patrimony and brought into the hands of strangers “the house of my fathers.”
We took our leave in the early afternoon, drifting down through sloping meadows past the great black rock to which “María” used to climb to watch for the return of “Efraín” from the valley, which here spreads out in all its rich expanse, majestic and silent, to the dim Western Cordillera. Hays, long lost in meditation, broke it at last to announce that he had found the end of his wanderings; that he would return to the Zone to earn a new “stake” and come back to end his days as the owner of the “novela casa.” He was given to catching such enthusiasms—to have them die during the succeeding night. It was, indeed, the most splendid spot in all the magnificent Cauca valley, this simple dwelling set where it could see and be seen from untold leagues away, from the very crest of the western range, yet never standing forth boldly and conspicuously. Framed modestly among its evergreens, just a little way up the first easy slope of the Andean range that piles into the clouds behind it, it seemed as unassuming and removed from the hubbub of the modern world as gentle “María” herself. All the day through our eyes were drawn back to it at frequent intervals, and as long as the light lasted it stood forth plainly in this clear air, though it shrunk to a house in miniature, then to a mere speck on the skirt-hem of the central range.
All the hot afternoon we plodded onward. Some miles after falling in with the camino real again, we passed “La Manuelita,” the “hacienda of the valley” where Isaacs’ father had set up a sugar factory while the son was still a student in Bogotá, and where took place, both in the novel and real life, that pathetic scene that marked the ruin of the family. To-day the estate is the property of Russian-Americans, and its products are known throughout all Colombia. Beyond the little Amaime river the way led through a forest of bamboo, then across a monotonous and dusty despoblado. The great Cordillera Occidental, now like a badly wrinkled garment of sepia-brown hue, drew ever nearer, as did a line of bright-green trees marking the course of the Cauca river. The central range all but faded away in the east, leaving a broad expanse of fertile country longing for the plow. Further on, a broken bridge or two adorned a waterless stream, and an occasional ox-cart, the first thing on wheels we had seen since crossing the Magdalena, crawled by in the sand. The after-curse of African slavery was everywhere in evidence. In little cabins thrown together from jungle rubbish lounged swarms of ragged humanity, black or half-black in color. Yet somehow they seemed less lazy than in our own land, perhaps because the activity of their few lighter neighbors gave less contrast. Swift tropical night was spreading its cloak over all the Cauca when we sighted the sharp church-spire of Palmira, where we were soon housed in the well-named “Hotel Oasis.”
In mid-afternoon of the day following we broke out suddenly on the bank of the Cauca river. A barca, or ferry, moored to wires that sagged from shore to shore, set us across, and with sunset we plodded into Cali. Our arrival was well timed. The chief commercial city of the Cauca valley was en fête. From end to end, on the Sunday morrow of our entrance, the place was crowded with happy, rather dusky, throngs, and gay with the chiefly yellow flag of the nation and the bishop’s banner and mitre. For on that day the ancient church of Cali became a cathedral, and one of her “sons” a bishop; dividing a territory ruled over for centuries by the chief ecclesiastic of Popayán. The name of the “hijo de Cali” about to don the purple blazed forth from the façade of the church in enormous electric letters, like that of some Broadway star, and by sunset fully half the visible population was reeling drunk in honor of the honor that had fallen upon their native town.
“What you don’t look for in Cali, you won’t find,” runs a local proverb; which is a Colombian way of saying that its shops offer for sale anything man may desire. In a small and Colombian sense this is true, except on those frequent occasions when the stock is exhausted. Connected with the Pacific port of Buenaventura by seven hours muleback and four hours rail—it was hard to realize that we were again only four days from a Zone police station—the place is in more or less constant connection with the outside world. But the transportation facilities of the country are so lax that the merchants of Cali are accustomed to announce the receipt of a shipment from Europe or America with a sarcastic placard:
“POR FIN LLEGARON!” (At last they have arrived.)
The city’s rôle is chiefly that of distributing center for the vast territory about and behind it, and on the heels of this first announcement appears on the chief shop fronts the information, of interest only to arrieros and the owners of mule-trains:
“HAY CARGA PARA—There is a load for” this or that town of the interior.
Life in Cali is largely governed by placards, as if she had but recently discovered the art of printing and were making the most of it. Hardly an establishment but is adorned with its set of rules. Among those of our hotel were two of purely Latin-American tone:
“Correct dress is required of anyone presenting himself in the salons of this establishment.
“All political or religious discussion is absolutely prohibited.”
Among the orders to the sepultero of the local cemetery were several that reflected the customs of the place:
“1. Receive no corpse without a ticket from a priest.
2. Keep three or four graves ready dug for bodies that may present themselves.
3. Make each adult grave 1½ meters deep and one wide. Relatives may, upon request, have it dug deeper.
4. Remove no bodies without the permission of an inspector or a priest.”
Why was man, whose enjoyment surely would be so much greater, denied the power of sailing freely out over the earth, as the birds circled away across the great valley of the Cauca, tinged to sepia in the oblique rays of the setting sun? When I reached the modest height that stands so directly over Cali that I could count every dull-red tile of its roofs, the little river racing over its rocks below was still alive with bathers and laundresses. A breeze from off the mountains lifted the drooping leaves of the palm-trees of the city; beyond, lay a view of the entire Cauca valley, clear across to the now hazy central chain of the Andes, the dot that to whoever has known “María” will ever remain “the house of my fathers” plainly in sight, as were many of the scenes back to Cartago and on over the range toward Bogotá that I should never again see, except in imagination. If only this magnificent valley, climate and all, were in our land! Or, no; it is better as it is. For then there would be spread out here in the sunset a great colorless stretch of plowed fields, factories sooting the peerless Cauca heavens with their strident industry; there these velvety hillsides would be covered with the gaudy villas of the more “successful” of an acquisitive race; a great, ugly American city of broken and distressing sky-line, without a single dull-red roof, would cover the most featureless, because the most “practical,” part of the valley, utterly destroying the beauty of a landscape which nature is still left to decorate in her own inimitable fashion.
V. DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO
From Cali a broad “road,” still fresh with early morning, led forth to the southeast, skirting some foothills of the Western Cordillera. Really a meadow, bounded by two cactus hedges and interwoven with an intricate network of paths, like the tracks of some great railway terminal, it was excellent for tramping. Birds sang merrily in the branches of the scattered trees; a telegraph wire sagged southward from bamboo pole to pole. Groups of ragged women, balancing easily on their heads a machete, a coiled rope, and a rolled straw mat, were already off to gather Cali’s daily fire-wood. Others we met market-bound, bearing, likewise on their heads, loads of a large leaf that serves as wrapping paper in the shops of the town. Here passed a man leading two pigs—except on those frequent occasions when the leadership was reversed—there a haughty horseman, and beyond, mule after donkey laden with everything from milk to alfalfa. We strode lightly forward this time, for the developing-tank had been turned over to a “drummer” from Chicago, bound to Ecuador by sea.
Before long the character of the country began to change, with a promise of mountains to climb far ahead in the hazy day-after-to-morrow. Mud-holes appeared; streams without bridges, though often with stepping-stones or the trunk of a bamboo thrown across them, grew frequent, and the sky took to muttering ominously far off to the eastward. A strong young river, bright yellow in color and flecked with spume, sped by beneath the first roofed bridge, with news of last night’s storm somewhere up in the Cordillera. Before the day was done we had several times to strip to the waist to ford torrents that had decorated themselves with leaves and flowers and the branches of trees snatched along the way.
Next morning the foothills began to crowd in upon the trail, now a haphazard hunted thing scurrying in and out over lomas and knolls and ever higher hills, from the tops of which we several times caught what we fancied was the last view of the great Cauca valley behind us. Slowly the mountains themselves closed in. We waded a river, toiled up a long slope, and came out far above a beautiful little vale completely boxed in by perpendicular hillsides. Only two houses were to be seen on its grassy floor, spotted with scores of grazing cattle. Over it, several hundred feet above, hung a broad column of locusts, surely a mile long, moving slowly northward with a humming whirr that we could plainly hear far beyond, and shading the country beneath like some enormous veil. Beyond, we descended again to the Cauca river. Here there was no ferry, or rather, it was out of order. Tons of merchandise lay heaped along the bank, while cursing arrieros chased their snorting mules into the stream. The negro who set us across in a long dugout collected five billetes each for the service, but this was evidently exorbitant, for the woman of his own color who went with us paid only four green plantains for herself, a piccaninny, and her load.
Luckily we had a long draught of chicha fuerte before facing the notorious subida de Aguache on the third day, for the stories we had long heard of this fearsome climb had not been exaggerated. High above anything we had seen since passing the Quindío, we came out suddenly on a “platform” on the edge of one of those bottomless ravines that abound in the Andes, a mighty hole in the earth, blue with the very depths of it. Just across, at the same height, hung in plain sight the wavering trail we could only reach by undoing all the climbing of days past and doing it all over again in one single task. Hour after hour we descended a mountainside so sheer that the struggle against gravity was like a battle with some hardy wrestler, only to face at the bottom what seemed the full unbroken wall of the Andes, the red trail zigzagging into the very sky above. All the blazing afternoon we climbed incessantly, to gain at evening a height equal to that of the morning, only a few miles further south. A task that would have seemed impossible a month earlier struck us now as amply rewarded by the indescribable panorama of mountains that spread away from the summit in every direction.
For once the trail held for a time the advantage it had gained, passing through Buenos Aires and Morales, two-row towns of thick adobe walls. Though still in the tropics, we were now in the temperate zone. Oaks abounded, and the weather was like that of our northern states in early autumn. The population was still dark in color, but negroes had faded away with the open-work architecture of the Cauca. For the first time since descending from the plateau of Bogotá we met full-blooded Indians. They were of the Guajiro tribe, dull-brown of color, sturdy, thick-legged fellows in white pajama-like garments reaching only to the knees. All, male or female, young or old, greeted us in a sing-song as we passed.
On the last of August, four days from Cali, we pushed more swiftly forward, for we were nearing the famous old city of Popayán. A forced march, dipping down through a mighty gully and panting upward through swirling dust, brought us at noon to the dry and wind-swept hilltop village of Cajibío. The population was almost entirely Indian, and the dusty central square swarmed with the Saturday market. Guajiros of both sexes and all ages, flocked into town from scores of miles around, sat with their bits of produce under woven-reed shelters, or in the open glare of the equatorial sun. Some had already exchanged their wares for the weekly chicha debauch, and staggered about maudlin and red-eyed, or lay tumbled in noisome corners. The village priest, the only visible resident of European blood, wandered in and out among the hawkers with a mochila on the end of a rod over one shoulder. Gazing away across the sepia hills and distant blue ranges, as if his mind were utterly detached from this world, the padre paused before each hawker, turned his back, and punched him—or, more often, her—with the end of the stick until a contribution to the parochial larder had been dropped into the sack.
The sun set amid corn-fields, wrapping itself in grayish-purple clouds in the crimsoning west, and still Popayán was leagues away. We plodded on into the night. There is, however, a sort of reflected light in these high altitudes, where the very mountains seem low hills, a sense of being on top of the world, with the sun just out of sight around the curve of the earth. Fires, evidently of Indians burning off their chacras, dotted the night on several sides of us. The road grew broader and took on that atrocious cobbling which follows the Spaniard everywhere, growing worse as it approaches a town. Now it stumbled down to a river, across a long stone bridge of the massive type of long ago, and into a two-row village. For a time we imagined we saw at last the lights of the famous city. It was mere illusion. Not only did we tramp another footsore hour, but when we did finally arrive, there were no lights. The place had grown up about us in the dark before we realized that we were no longer in the open country. The pedometer registered 35 miles, and our feet and appetites several times that, when we halted undecided in what some sixth sense told us was the central plaza.
Most famous of all the cities from Bogotá to Quito, boasting itself a “cradle of savants,” long the capital of a large section of Spain’s American colonies and still that of the great department of the Cauca, Popayán had seemed to promise at least the lesser comforts of civilization. For days we had slept on tables and mud benches, wrapped in the fond hope of making up here for the cold, hungry nights on the trail. We had even feared there might be difficulty in choosing from a plethora of accommodations, and had gravely set down, somewhere to the north, the name of the “Hotel Colón” as of about the grade of luxury fitted to our fortunes. It was to laugh. Though it was barely eight in the evening, Popayán was as dead as a graveyard at midnight—and darker. Later we learned that the famous city does have lights,—a few street-corner kerosene lamps that burn out within an hour, unless a puff of wind blows them out first. Having been a city, in the Spanish sense, only 376 years, it was too much to expect the place to have learned already of the existence of electricity.
We hobbled over slippery cobblestones along monotonous two-story streets and in and out of dimly-seen thatched suburbs for what seemed hours before we caught a man emerging from a candle-lighted barber-shop.
“Hotel?” he ruminated, as if striving to recall a word he had heard somewhere long ago, “You want a hotel?”
“No, you Spiggoty dolt,” growled Hays in English, nursing his blistered feet by standing on one at a time, “We only asked that because we wanted to know who won the pennant this year.”
“Hotel,” went on the musing popayanejo, unheeding, “Ah-er-where do you come from and where are you going? You will be italianos? Alemanes?”
“No, we’re Chinamen,” I snapped, “and looking for a hotel.”
“Pués, Señor Chino,” he replied, cleverly returning the sarcasm, “There is no hotel in Popayán. But if you go down this street four cuadras in this direction and three in that and knock at the door of the second house beyond the fountain, you may find them willing to give you lodging.”
They were not, however; nor were those to whom they in turn directed us. A long hour more we winced along the uneven, slippery streets of Popayán, begging for a bite to eat and a plank to lie on as in any Indian village, only to be turned away from some of the most distressing holes ever man offered to sleep in on a wager. But the Spanish-speaking races have a proverb that “Perro que anda hueso encuentra,” and we stumbled finally upon a billiard-room in which several young bloods of the town were upholding their reputation as night-hawks. One Señor Fulano, cigarette-maker by profession—when he was sober enough—and “dope-fiend” by habit, as were several of his companions, took us in charge and led the way uncertainly to a cubby-hole of a room in his barn-like ancestral home. There, my dreams of the comforts of Popayán forever shattered, I resigned myself to sleep once more on a wooden table posing as a bed. Hays was little more fortunate, for though he drew an aged divan, he fell asleep quite literally several times before he abandoned himself to the floor which fate seemed bent on forcing him to occupy.
In the morning Fulano’s garrulous old mother made more formal arrangements for our housing. She did not pretend to run a hotel—though she had no hesitancy in charging hotel rates—but she served two greasy meals a day to several clerks from the government offices and, “out of charity,” seated us with them. But alas, however easily he may spend the day, the Latin-American leads a hard life at night. In a huge and all but empty front room was an enormous bedstead of viceregal days; but this, too, was wooden floored, and the diaphanous straw-mat that did duty as mattress had had all life crushed out of it years before. Nor did the single blanket have much influence over the penetrating mountain air of early morning. The deep window embrasures were built with steps for the use of occupants who would engage in the favorite popayanejo pastime of gazing out through the reja; but no provision whatever had been made for another convenience essential to all well-regulated households. In this respect the house was on a par with all the rest of the famous city.
“Founded” by Benalcazar, in the Spanish sense of having a scribe record under a name bristling with reference to the saints—which as usual failed to stick—an Indian town ruled over by a warlike cacique named Payán, the capital of the Cauca has, according to its latest census, 4326 men and 5890 women, a disproportion that is reflected in its customs. If its own assertion is to be taken at par, it is “notable for its fine climate and its illustrious sons.” Of the climate there can be little criticism. Just how illustrious its sons might have been in a wider world no one who has come to see where and how they lived can be blamed for wondering. Of them all, the town is evidently most proud of Caldas—a statue of whom adorns the central plaza—the tobacco-chewing savant who discovered how to determine altitude by boiling water—no one who has cooked his eggs in the Andes is long in making the same discovery—and who taught the revolted colonials how to make gunpowder—only to be shot in Bogotá for his pains.
So aged is the town that it has not a red roof left; all are faded to a time-dulled maroon. The place bristles with ancient religious edifices, mementoes of its importance in colonial days. Hardly a block is there without its huge church of cavernous and dilapidated interior. The silent grass-grown little “Universidad del Cauca,” of the aspect of some bent and toothless old man, is famous now only for its age, though in its dotage it fondly fancies itself still one of the principal seats of learning in the New World. Over its unadorned main door may still be read a crumbled inscription:
“Initium Sapientae Timor Domini”
Summer vacation had left it uninhabited, but there was evidence of practical training in at least one respect,—the beds of its dormitory were narrow wooden boxes some five feet long.
If Popayán is dead by night, little more can be said for it by day. Languid shopkeeping is almost its only visible industry, and the population seems to live on what they sell one another. The ways of its merchants are typical of those in all the somnolent towns of the Andes. With few exceptions they treat the prospective purchaser in a manner that seems to say, “Buy at this price, or go away and let me alone. I want to read last week’s newspaper, finish my cigarette, and day-dream, and I don’t want you here in my store disturbing my meditations.” Too often, in the shops, the mañana habit prevails,—in that it is always the next place that has what you are looking for. The mortality of white ones being high on Andean trails, I entered a tienda to ask:
“Do you sell blue handkerchiefs, señor?”
Shopkeeper, recovering from what was really a sleep, though ostensibly awake: “Ah—er—buenos días, señor. Cómo está usté’? Cómo está la familia? The señor wishes—er—ah—what was it the señor requested?”
The chances always are that he has heard the question in his dreams and, if given time, will recall it:
“Handkerchiefs, is it not, señor?”
“Blue handkerchiefs, please.”
“Ah—er—cómo para qué cosa?” (What for, for instance?)
This question, which is seldom lacking, being ignored, the shopkeeper turned to let his eyes wander dreamily over his shelves, striving in vain to bring his attention down to the matter in hand. Finally he took a stick from a corner and fished from an upper shelf a paper-wrapped bundle. Opened, it disclosed a half-dozen pairs of faded red socks, made in Germany.
“But I said....”
Shopkeeper, suddenly, but not unexpectedly, without a pause between the questions: “Where do you come from where are you going?”
The traveler answers according to his character and mood. Meanwhile the merchant had fished down a bundle of red handkerchiefs.
“I said blue, señor.”
“But this is blue, a beautiful ultramarine blue, mira usté’—just look,” and he held it up to the reflected sunlight that streamed in at the only opening to the shop,—the doorway.
“No, señor, I want blue.”
Shopkeeper, dreamily, “Ah, señor, no hay—there are none. But you can find them en to’as partes—anywhere. You are French, perhaps, señor?”
“Perhaps.” Here I caught sight of a bundle of blue handkerchiefs in plain view on a lower shelf, and pointed them out. “How much?”
Shopkeeper: “Te—Fifteen pesos, señor.”
“You must take me for a tourist, or a gringo. I’ll give you five.”
“Very well, señor, muchas gracias, buenos días, adiós pués.”
Or perhaps the stranger wishes to visit some local celebrity and pauses in a shop-door to ask:
“Can you tell me where Dr. Medrano lives?”
“You mean Dr. Medrano de Pisco y Miel?”—That is the only Dr. Medrano in town, as the merchant well knows, but the matter must be clothed in all customary formality—“His house is the second door beyond that of Dr. Enrique Castro y Pelayo, señor.”
“Yes, but I am a stranger in town and I don’t know where Don Enrique lives.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know where Dr. Enrique Castro y Pelayo lives! Why—er—but everyone knows the house of Dr. Enrique. Why—er—just ask anywhere. They can tell you en to’as partes—anyone can tell you.”
This happy-go-lucky way of life is not without its advantages. Having occasion to cash a traveler’s check, I dropped in upon a native merchant who played at being a banker. After the usual extended formalities, he took the check and looked it over with a puzzled expression, for he knew no English.
“As a banker you are, of course, familiar with the system of traveler’s checks?” I put in.
“No, señor, I have never before seen one.”
“Well, it is just as good as money and....”
“Oh, of course,” he replied, hastily, “since the señor offers it. How much do you want for it?”
“Only its face value; ten dollars in American money.”
“I shall be pleased to take it. How much is that in our money of the country?”
“Only a thousand pesos, señor,” I replied, disdaining the temptation to multiply by ten.
“Muy bién, señor,” he replied, and making out an order to his cashier for that amount, tucked the check away in a drawer.
“It is not good unless I sign it,” I suggested.
“Ah, no?” he asked, producing it again for that purpose, “A thousand thanks. Pués, adiós, señor. Until we meet again.”
So unlimited is the faith in “ingleses” in these regions that he had no hesitancy in accepting from a stranger a check which he would not have dreamed of cashing for one of his fellow townsmen without ample proof of its value.
One evening three men in frock-coats and the manners of prime ministers dropped in upon us and announced themselves editors of the newspaper “Sursum.” They had only an hour or two to spare, however, and by the time the introductory formalities were over they bowed themselves out with the information that they would come and tertuliar (interview) us—mañana. Two days later I chanced to meet one of them again.
“Did you say ‘Sursum’ is published every week?” I asked, having had no visual evidence of its existence since our arrival.
“Oh, yes, indeed!” cried the editor, rolling another cigarette. “Every week. Ah—that is, last week it did not appear, it is true; and the week before the editor-in-chief was al campo, and the week before that he was very busy, as his sister was getting married. But it is sure to come out next week, or if not, then the week after. And I am myself coming to interview you—mañana.”
It was in Popayán that we found coca leaves for sale for the first time, and met Indians whose cheeks were disfigured by a cud of them. Long before the white man appeared on his shores, the Indian of the Andes, unacquainted with the tobacco of his North American brother, was addicted to this habit. The leaves—from which is extracted the cocaine of modern days—are plucked from a shrub not unlike the orange in appearance, that grows down in the edge of the hot lands to the east of the Andean chain. Once dried, they are packed in huge bales, or crude baskets made on the spot, and sold in the marketplaces by old women who weigh out the desired amount in clumsy home-made scales, or in handfuls by eye measure. The Indians thrust the leaves one by one into their mouths, and as they become moistened, add a bit of lime or ashes, dipped with what looks like an enlarged toothpick from a tiny calabash which, with a leather pouch for the leaves themselves, constitutes the most indispensable article of the aboriginal equipment. How harmful the habit may be, it is hard to gage. Its devotees are, it is true, languid of manner and slow of intellect; but they show no great contrast in this particular from the “gente decente,” their neighbors, who rarely indulge in the leaves, except on some long and wearisome journey. So marked is this languor in Popayán that, as in most Andean towns, brawls are rare, despite the half-anarchy that reigns. Youths merry with liquor or its equivalent raced their horses up and down the roughly cobbled streets, forcing them to capriole until Hays took to cursing his loss of police powers; street women may,—though few find it necessary—ply their profession as openly as vegetable hawkers. Even when a dispute grows noisy, there is no interference. A policeman may wander up in curiosity, like any other bystander, but he is almost sure to find that the contender is some “authority,” or the second cousin of the alcalde, or a grandson of the bishop, or wears a white collar, and wanders away again, lest he get himself into trouble.
So we remained in Popayán until it had dwindled from the romantic city of the past our imaginations had pictured to the miserable reality—though in after years, veiled by the haze of memory, its charm and romance may return—and one evening asked to have our coffee served at a reasonable hour in the morning.
“Siempre se van hoy?” cried our hostess, when we appeared in road garb next morning, “You are really going to-day?” It was not so much that she was striving to cover her failure to have the coffee ready; her Latin-American mind could not conceive of so definite a resolution outliving the night. “Why do you not remain until to-morrow and rest?” she rambled on.
An hour later she stood staring after us from her doorway, an act in no way conspicuous, since all that section of Popayán was similarly engaged. The entire town had expressed its sympathy that we must go “all alone and so laboriously—tan trabajoso” over the wild mountains and valleys to—well, wherever we were bound; for not a single popayanejo took seriously our assertion that we really hoped to reach Ecuador.
Pasto was said to be something like a week distant “by land,” and the route “very dangerous,” though from what source was not clear. For the first lazy hour a good road led gradually upward. But like an incorrigible small boy getting out of sight of home, its good behavior ceased at the hilltop where we caught the last view of the “cradle of savants.” Ever more winding and broken, across ravines and streams with bridges and without them, now and then seeming to drop completely out of the world about us, only to gather its forces again far below and scramble to even greater heights over a saddle of a mountain wall beyond, from the summit of which the trail of twenty-four hours before stood forth as clearly as across an alleyway between tenement houses, it struggled uncertainly southward day after day. At the hamlet of Dolores, amid rugged and tumbled mountains piled into the sky on every hand, we came to a parting of the ways and had the choice of continuing by the temperate or the torrid zone. One route went down into the Patía valley, hotter than Panama, reputed the abode of raging fevers and the breeding-place of those swarms of locusts that devastate the Cauca. The other, by way of “los pueblos,” lay cool and high, with frequent towns, though it was two days longer and much more broken and mountainous.
We chose the temperate zone. The way turned back for a time almost the way we had come, then climbed until a whole new world opened out beyond, towering peaks piercing the clouds and strangely shaped masses of earth lying heaped up tumultuously on every hand. For once the trail showed unusual intelligence in clinging to the top of the ridge, fighting its own natural tendency to pitch down into the mighty valleys on either side, and the constant struggle of the ridge to throw it off, like an ill-tempered bronco its rider. We were following now what the Colombian calls a cuchillo, a “knife,” treading the very edge of its blade. Along it, miserable mud huts were numerous; and every Indian we met had a cheek distorted and his teeth and lips discolored by a coca cud. It struck us as strange that even bad habits have their local habitat and that the magnificent mountain scenery gave the dwellers no inspiration to better their conditions.
Evidently the region held foreigners in great fear. As often as we paused to ask for lodging, some transparent excuse was trumped up to get rid of us. The naïveté of the inhabitants was amusing. At one village hut two women met our plea for posada with:
“No, señores, los maridos no están” (the husbands are out).
“We are not interested in the husbands, but in a place to sleep.”
“Yes, but the husbands will be out all night and they would make themselves very ugly” (se pondrían muy bravos). Further on my companion tried his luck again. Two plump girls, not unattractive in appearance, bade him enter. Could they give us posada? They thought so; mother usually did, but she was out just then.
“All right,” said Hays, sitting down, “I’ll wait for her.”
Some time had passed when it occurred to him to ask:
“When will mother be back?”
“Oh, perhaps in a week,” answered the innocent damsels, “She went to Mojarras with a load of corn.”
It was as useless to try to get a meal without the loss of several hours as to hope to eat it without the entire village squatted around us. Either there was nothing to cook, or no pan to cook it in, until the woman next door had baked to-morrow’s corn-bread, or the stick fire in the back-yard refused to burn, or some other unsurmountable drawback developed. Hays constantly labored under the delusion that money could expedite matters, and was given to drawing forth his worldly wealth in one wad to flourish it before the languorous cook and, incidentally, all the gaping town. The result was often a doubled or trebled price, if not an inducement for some of the village louts to lay in ambush for us somewhere up the trail, but never an earlier meal. If they could stir up their lethargy to serve us at all, it would be only at their own good leisure, whatever the price. Many a time there occurred a scene similar to that at San Miguel. Hays shook a $50 billete in the face of a bedraggled Indian woman who had, perhaps, never before seen so large a sum at one time, offering it all if she would prepare a meal at once. She would not, but after long argument served coffee, corn-cakes, and eggs—which might easily rank as a meal in the Andes—and collected a bill of seven cents.
For days at a time we tramped “aguas arriba.” The trails of the Andes are fond of this means of crossing a mountain range. High above it we caught the gorge of a river, and wound upstream in and out along the towering wall that shut us in. It was no mountain-flanking road of easy gradient, such as abound in the Alps, but one that had chiefly built itself; so that all day long we climbed and descended stony buttresses of the range, until they grew like the constant nagging of a querulous old woman, the gorge of the brawling river ever far below. Here and there a hut and clearing hung on the opposite mountain wall, or above us, in places where plows were useless. The Indians cultivated their “farms” by burning off a bit of the swift slope, threw a brush fence about it, dropped their seeds into carelessly dug holes, and sat back to wait for whatever nature chose to send them. At length, in the course of days, the trail having kept the same general level, the diminished river rose to meet it; for hours more the path jumped back and forth across the ever smaller stream, until this had dwindled to a mere brook racing down a rocky gorge from its birthplace up under the snows. Then, when there was nothing else left for it, the trail girded up its loins and scrambled alone up out of the valley and over the backing range.
Far above I could make out the rough-hewn wooden cross that marked the summit, masses of clouds scurrying past it, as if pursued by some enemy beyond. Once I passed a half-wild Indian girl with a baby on her back, who ran away down an unmarked, break-neck place in a way to suggest that she had taken me for the Fiend in person. No doubt the resemblance was striking. Higher still, two or three groups of the same tribe came down at a queer little dog-trot, the heavy loads on their backs supported by a shawl knotted across their shoulders, the plump breasts of the women undulating under their dirty, one-piece garments. In mid-morning we stood at last on the summit of the famous Ahorcado—the Hanged Man—range, so named from some episode of the Conquest, a “knife-edge” indeed, where the god of the winds seemed to have his chief warehouse. For once the view was entirely free from mist. To the east, the V-shaped valley up which we had come lay far below, twisting away to the left, to be lost at last between hazy mountain chains. There were many more farmers here than in the rich and level Cauca valley, either because the government is too far distant to drive them out by its exactions, or because the Indian is in his element among these lofty ranges. On every hand the steep mountain sides were flecked with little farms of all possible shapes, colored by green or ripening grain or corn, a tiny hut in the center of each patch, minute with distance, but as clearly visible as if only a few yards away. To the west lay a pandemonium of mighty valleys, pitched and tumbled peaks, gigantic saw-toothed ranges, seen and suggested into the uttermost distance.
But one could not stand long in so icy a wind to admire even such a scene. A few yards below, the road forked, one branch stumbling headlong down into that chaotic jumble of wooded hills and valleys, the other striking off through the forest along the flank of the range. A mistake at that height might mean hours or even days of extra toil. We chose at random and trusted to luck. The soft, almost level road plunged away through a dense green forest, as truly “bearded with moss” as any in our North, yet rich with parasites and ferns. Great oaks littered the ground with acorns. I drew ahead and marched on through utter solitude, the stillness broken only by the cold wind from the south, immense vistas of dense-wooded Andes now and then opening out through a break in the tree-tops. Where the forest began to give way, my misgivings were set at rest by a group of dull-eyed Indians of both sexes, their mouths stained with coca-leaves, plodding upward in single file, still maudlin with the fire-water that marked the vicinity of a town. All wore heavy, cream-colored felt hats, and bore varying burdens, the women carrying the heavier loads and in addition a baby slung across their breasts by a cloth knotted behind the neck.
Not far beyond, I burst out suddenly upon a full view of Almaguer, almost directly below, perched astride a narrow ridge between two mountains, serene in its precarious seat despite the raging wind that seemed constantly threatening to blow it off into oblivion. Then, as suddenly, it disappeared, and I was almost within the town before I caught sight of it again.
Here we caught one Barbara Diaz red-handed in the act of feeding her swarming family, and refused to be driven away. Lodging, however, seemed unattainable. A woman seated on her earth floor before an American sewing-machine run by hand carelessly admitted that she had a room to rent before she thought to say “further on.” But on second thoughts she decided that it would be “muy trabajoso” to prepare it for us—in other words, very tiresome to get up from the floor and produce a key. The alcalde was out of town; the one woman who owned a vacant little shop asserted with an air of finality that her husband was not at home. I turned to the court of last appeal, the village priest. He was a long-unshaven but pleasant fellow of forty, educated in the seminary of Popayán, occupying, with a discreet but attractive young “housekeeper,” the second-best building in town—the best being the mud church adjoining. His well-stocked library, in Latin and Spanish, with a few volumes in French and English, was a feast for the eyes in these bookless wilds. During our long chat the good padre asserted that all the Indians for a hundred miles around were good and faithful Catholics, and that almost all of them could read and write! He had long planned to learn English, but had “such a fearful lot of work to do, so many masses to say every day and confessions without rest.” He took down a book and requested me to read some English aloud, “just to hear how it sounds.” Casually, somewhere during the interview, I brought in a brief reference to lodging, and the padre forthwith sent across the plaza a small boy who soon returned and led us to the same woman who had last turned us away. Now that the padre ordered, she had no hesitancy in overlooking the absence of her husband. The lodging cost us nothing, which was exactly what it was worth. It was the usual mud cavern, with a floor of trodden earth, cold as a dungeon in contrast to the blazing sunshine outside, and, having once been a shop, was all but filled with a dust-carpeted counter and yawning shelves curtained and draped with cobwebs. Hays drew the counter, but I found room to stow myself away on one of the higher shelves, though with neither mattress nor covering and a wind as off the antarctic ice sweeping at express speed across the thin cuchillo between two bottomless Andean gullies, we did not look forward to darkness with pleasure.
The only water supply of Almaguer, attached to the world only by the “royal highway” at either end, was a little wooden spout projecting from the hillside. The estanquillo had no lack of aguardiente, however, and as to washing, Almaguer avoids what would otherwise be a difficulty by never having formed the habit. The making of candles is its chief industry. A bluish wax is gathered from a “laurel” tree which abounds in the region, and even the acting alcalde spent the evening making candles by dipping pieces of string again and again into a bowl of molten wax. That worthy was also village school-master and purveyor of patent medicines to Almaguer; a lank, ungainly man in an habitual lack of shave, with a handkerchief knotted about his neck like a Liverpool wharf-rat. Before the sun had set he had given us a score of commissions, chiefly in the patent medicine line, to be fulfilled when we returned to the “Europe.” Then he fell to talking of a “Meestare Eddy Sone” and his inventions. For some time we fancied the personage in question was some local celebrity, and not until the patent-medicine-schoolmaster-alcalde had turned the conversation to a “Meestare Frunk Lean,” who was also, it seemed, a great gringo electrician, and answered to the surname of Benjamin, did we catch the drift of his monologue. He had brought up the subject, it turned out, because he had long been curious to know whether the Meestares Frunk Lean and Eddy Sone often met to plan their work together, or whether, as so often happened among the great men of Almaguer, they were unfortunately rivals and enemies.
It is always a long time night in this Andean land of no lights and little covering. The read-less evenings seem interminable. Small wonder the inhabitants are ignorant and priest-ridden when they can only sit and gossip after the sun goes down. The traveler eats supper—if it is to be had—takes a walk, talks awhile with some one—if he is gifted with the medieval art of conversation—comes “home,” sits around awhile on the earth floor or an adobe block, thinks over his past history and future plans—if any—wishes he smoked, and, finally deciding to go to bed, looks at his tin watch to find it is almost seven! In Almaguer there were none of these drawbacks. For, as I lay abed,—on my upper shelf—the “laurel” candle gave sufficient flicker by which to make out the dimly printed pages of a Bogotá masterpiece—so long as I kept wide enough awake to balance the candlestick on my forehead.
It is not far from Almaguer to its twin city of Bolívar; yet they are far apart. On the map one could stroll over in an hour or two, pausing for a nap on the way. So could one in real life but for a single drawback,—the lack of a bridge. Both towns, the largest between Popayán and Pasto, lie at about the same 7500 feet above the level of the sea; but between them is a gash in the earth which does not reach to the infernal regions simply and only because these are not situated where ancient—and some modern—theologians fancied them.
For days now there had been persistent rumors of salteadores, highway robbers, reputed experts in the art of shooting travelers in the back from any of the countless hiding-places along the trail. Every town, in turn, asserted that its own region was eminently safe; the danger was always in the next one. Each traveler we met—and they were never alone—carried a rifle or a musket. Once, at an awkward defile, we suddenly caught sight of an ugly-looking group of ruffians on a knoll above, and our back muscles twitched reflexively until we had climbed out of range. The fact that our own weapons hung in plain sight may have been the cause of their inaction. Again, in San Lorenzo, of especially evil repute, several shifty-eyed fellows showed great interest in our movements. When we took the opportunity to oil our side-arms and demonstrate their quick action, however, the group assured us that the robbers never troubled foreigners, and faded gradually away.
The danger, if it existed, was multiplied by the fact that we were forced to canvass the town until we had changed our money into silver. We were about to enter the half-autonomous Department of Nariño, southernmost of Colombia, where the paper bills of the central government have never been accepted. Yet the department has no money of its own. Silver coins of whatever origin have a fixed worth, according to size rather than face value, those with holes in them losing nothing thereby. Pieces of the weight of our silver dollar were known as fuertes, and valued at 36 cents. Our quarter, or an English shilling, was accepted as “dos reales,”—seven cents. Among the hodgepodge of coins that came into my possession was a two-peseta piece of old Spain, dated 1794 under the profile of Charles IV. The shopkeeper with whom I spent it valued it at two reales because it was somewhat smaller than the four-real piece, but after an argument accepted it as four. The twenty dollars we each gathered made a sackful nearly as heavy as all the rest of our baggage.
The landscape, too, had changed. Instead of the hot, dry, repulsive ranges behind, we were again in deep-green woods and fields, the trail climbing from bamboo-clad valleys where ran cold mountain streams so clear we could not see the water, but only the bottom of the bed, to wind-swept oaken heights. In places there were slight outcroppings of coal. Then a lung-bursting road rick-racked for hours up a wall-like mountainside, now and then, when we were ready to drop from exhaustion, bringing us out on a little level space, like a landing on an endless stairway, then scrambling on up still steeper heights. When at last we stood on the blade-edge of the Cuchillo de Bateros, dividing autonomous Nariño from the rest of Colombia, Bolívar, two days behind, lay as plainly in sight as a house across the street, the immense peak beside it sunk to an insignificant knoll. To the west we could look down into the misty valley of the Patía—and wonder whether we would not have done better to have taken its more level route, for all its fevers.
At dusk we came out on a headland and saw, so directly below that a false step would have pitched us, or rather our mangled remains, down into its very plaza, the mathematically regular town of San Pablo, in the floor-flat river bottom of the Rio Mayo, with rich meadows stretching east and west to the rocky mountain walls that boxed them in. The descent was so steep that we could only hold our own by wedging our toes into the shale and keeping our thigh-muscles taut as brake-rods; so swift that the trail often split to bits from its own momentum. In the town we were startled to have the first boy we met admit that posada could be had. His own mother had a room to rent. He laid aside the hat he was weaving and, picking up a bunch of enormous keys, stepped toward an adobe building across the street. But at that moment a patched and barefoot man rushed down upon us, likewise offering us posada in a startling burst of eloquence. For a time it looked as if, for once, instead of having to fight for lodgings, lodgings were going to fight for us. We settled the dispute by the simple expedient of asking each his price.
“One real,” answered the boy, defiantly.
“In my oficina de peluquería,” said the man, haughtily, “it will cost you nothing. Moreover, foreigners always lodge there.”
Behind his bravado he seemed so nearly on the point of weeping that we should no doubt have chosen his “office of barbering,” even had there been no such gulf between the rival prices. He thanked us for the favor and, producing from somewhere about his person an enormous key, unlocked one of those unruly shop-doors indigenous to rural South America, above which projected a shingle bearing on one side the information that we were about to enter the “Peluquería Cívica,” and on the other the name of our host, Santiago Muñoz. The keyhole was of the shape of a swan; others in the town, as throughout Nariño, had the form of a man, a horse, a goose, and a dozen more as curious. These home-made doors of Andean villages, be it said in passing, never fit easily; their huge clumsy locks have always some idiosyncrasy of their own, so that by the time the traveler learns to unlock the door of his lodging without native assistance, he is ready to move on.
This one gave admittance to the usual white-washed mud den, with a tile floor, furnished as a Colombian barber-shop, which means that it was chiefly empty and by no means immaculate, with two wooden benches, three tin basins and an empty water-pitcher, a home-made—or San Pablo-made—chair, a lame table littered with newspapers from a year to three months old, a scanty supply of open razors, strops, Florida water, soap, and brushes scattered promiscuously, a couple of once-white gowns of “Mother Hubbard” form for customers, and in one corner a heap of human hair, black and coarse. Then there were the luxuries of a clumsy candlestick with six inches of candle, and a lace curtain worked with red and blue flowers to cut off the gaze of the curious, except those bold enough frankly to push it aside and stare in upon us. Santiago gave us full possession, key and all—we tossed a coin to decide which of us should burden himself with the latter—and informed us that a woman next door to the church sometimes supplied meals to travelers.
The benches were barely a foot wide, but they were of soft wood, and we were so delighted to find accommodations plentiful that I was about to make a similar suggestion when Hays yawned:
“Let’s hang over here to-morrow.”
Late next morning the barber wandered in upon us.
“Last year,” he began, “another meestare”—in the Andes the word is used as a common noun to designate not only Americans, but Europeans and even Spaniards—“stopped here. You perhaps know him. His name was Guiseppe.”
We doubted it.
“Surely you must know him,” persisted the barber, “he was a foreigner, also.”
As he talked, Santiago kept fingering a crumpled letter. Bit by bit he half betrayed, half admitted, that he gave free lodging to _estranjeros _because he wished to keep on good terms with the “outside” world in general, and in particular because he was seeking some means of sending six dollars to that strange town beyond the national boundaries from which all foreigners came. When he had explained himself at length, he turned the letter over to us. It was in correct Spanish, mimeographed to resemble a typewritten personal communication, and told in several pages of flowery language what I can perhaps condense within reasonable limits:
CHIROLOGICAL COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA
Inspiration Point, Echo Park, Los Angeles, Cal. U. S. A.
Muy señor mío:
With great pleasure we send you a pamphlet on “Secret Force,” because we know that it contains information which will be of vast importance to you, as a means of being able to obtain that secret knowledge of the human character and of personal influence permitting you in a moment to know and understand the life of all other persons, to know their desires and their intentions, their habits and deficiencies, their plans and all that can be prejudicial to you. Following our system, you can read the character of your neighbors as an open book; if you possess the system “Natajara,” there will be no one who can deceive you; by means of it you can know beforehand under all circumstances all that others intend to do, and can direct them to your own entire satisfaction. By means of the system “Natajara” you can know exactly how much progress, how much love, how much health, and how much happiness the future has in store for you; and if it does not reserve for you as much as you desire, you can change its course to suit your ambitions.
Never, in the present century or those past, has a more potent knowledge been given to the world. It teaches precisely when and how to use the magic force by means of which one obtains the realization of all desires; it places those who possess it in a sphere superior to the generality of mankind, makes them masters of destiny.... I dare not tell you all the advantages of this knowledge, but I assure you it is what you need that your life convert itself into a true success. I beg you to read the “Secret Force,” letter by letter, and to send at once for the system “Natajara.” Remember that the sending to you of the system for a mere $6 is only a special offer that we make, and if you wish to have the privilege of being the first in your locality to possess these great secrets, you ought to send this very day.
Without further particulars, etc., I take great pleasure in signing myself
Your grateful and affectionate servant, (Signed) A. VICTOR SEGNO, President per Sec.
Dictated to No. 1 S.
There was no doubt that Santiago had followed the injunction to read the pamphlet letter by letter. Thanks to his Colombian schooling, that was the only way he could read it. But how was he to send the mere $6 to Inspiration Point without his fellow-townsmen knowing it and perhaps forestalling his opportunity to be the first in his locality to possess the powerful secret? There is no postal-order system between Colombia and the United States. He dared not send the cash, even if so large an amount of Nariño silver could be enclosed in a parcel the post would carry. So he had hidden the letter away and lain in wait for the rare foreigners that drift into San Pablo. While we read it, he sat on one of our “beds” nervously fingering his toes. When we had finished, he begged us to find some way of sending the money, imploring us, on our hopes of eternity, not to whisper a word of the secret to his fellow-townsmen. We promised to think the matter over.
“When are you going to open the shop this morning?” asked Hays, as our host turned toward the door.
“Oh, I shall not trouble to open to-day,” said the barber, in a weary voice, and wandered away with the air of a man who sees no need of common toil when he is on the point of becoming the dictator of fate in all his locality.
We hatched a scheme against his return. If we fancied he might forget the matter, we were deceived. Nothing else seemed to be weighing on his mind when he turned up again in the evening, dejected and worried. To have tried to explain the truth to him would have been only to convince him that we were agents of some rival house, sent down here purposely to ruin his chances of imposing his will upon San Pablo.
“If you feel you must have this system,” I began, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I have some money in a bank in the Estados Unidos, and I will give you a personal check for $6 that you can mail to the Chirological College.”
“Magnífico!” cried the barber, instantly transformed from the depths of gloom to the summits of glee, “A thousand thanks. That will be $600 in billetes of Colombia. I will get it at once....”
“It will be simpler,” I suggested, “to wait until you hear the check has arrived; then send it to me. Naturally I am running no risk in trusting one of the chief men of San Pablo. Anyway, it would only be in payment for our magnificent lodgings.”
The Colombian rarely needs much urging to accept a favor, and his formal protests soon died away. I sat down to write the check:
The Fake Bank, 920 West 110th Street New York, U. S. A. Pay to the order of the Chirological College of Los Angeles, Cal., the sum of six dollars ($6).
BARON MÜNCHAUSEN.
The barber carefully folded the valuable document and hid it away in his garments, promising to send it at the first opportunity—in a plain envelope, unregistered: “For,” he explained, confiding to us a nation-wide secret, “the post-office officials always steal any letter they think has money in it, and to register it makes them sure it has.”
The plan was cruel, but we could think of no other. No doubt Santiago waited many anxious months for the arrival of the “system”; certainly no longer than he would have if he had managed to send real money. Meanwhile, as Latin-American enthusiasm shrinks rapidly, it may be that he grew resigned to his failure to become the dictator of San Pablo and took up again the shaving of its swarthy faces and the cutting of its coarse, black hair.
Every house of San Pablo is a factory of “panama” hats. The “straw” is furnished by the toquilla plant, a reed somewhat resembling the sugarcane in appearance, which grows in large quantities in the valley of the Patía. If left to itself, the plant at length blossoms or “leaves” out in the form of a fan-shaped fern. Once it has reached this stage, it is no longer useful to the weaver of hats. For his purposes the leaves must be nipped in the bud, so to speak,—gathered while still in the stalk. The green layers that would, but for this premature end, have expanded later into leaves, are spread out and cut into narrow strips with a comb-shaped knife. The finer the cutting, the more expensive the hat. Between the material of a $2 and a $50 “panama” there is no difference whatever, except in the width of the strips. Boiled and laid out in the sun and wind, these curl tightly together. They are then bleached white in a sulphur oven and sold to the weaver in the form of tufts not unlike the broom straw, or a bunch of prairie-grass. The Patía produces also a much heavier leaf, called mocora, from which not only coarse hats but hammocks are twisted.
The weaving of the “panama” begins at the crown, and the edge of the brim is still unfinished, with protruding “straws,” when turned over to the wholesale dealer. Packed one inside the other in bales a yard long, they are carried on muleback to Pasto. There, more skillful workmen bind in and trim the edges. They are then placed in large mud ovens of beehive shape in which quantities of sulphur are burned. Next they are laid out in the back yard of the establishment—with chickens, dogs, and other fauna common to the dwellings of the Andes wandering over them, be it said in passing—to bleach in the sun; they are rubbed with starch to give them a false whiteness, and finally men and boys pound and pound them on blocks with heavy wooden mallets, as if bent on their utter destruction, tossing them aside at last, folded and beaten flat, in the form in which they appear eventually in the show-windows of our own land. The best can be woven only morning or evening, or when the moon is full and bright, the humidity of the air being then just sufficient to give the fiber the required flexibility.
The local names for the entire process are:
“Tejar”—the task of the weaver.
“Azocar”—the drawing together and trimming of the protruding “straws.”
“Azufrar”—the baking over burning sulphur.
“Bañar en leche de azufre”—washing in a sulphur bath.
“Limpiar con trapo”—scrubbing with rags dipped in starch.
“Mazatear”—beating with mallets.
“Darle forma”—pressing the hat tightly over a wooden form to give it the final shape, after which it is folded and ready for shipment. The complete process from buying to shipping costs the wholesale dealer about a dollar a dozen.
Virtually every inhabitant of San Pablo is, from childhood, an expert weaver of hats. We had only to glance in at a door to be almost sure to find the entire family, large and small, so engaged. They squatted on their earth floors, leaned in their doorways, wandered the streets, incessantly weaving hats; they gossiped and quarreled, they grew vociferous in political discussion, and still they went on weaving. They shouted across the plaza to the two “meestares” that were the guests of Santiago, the barber, a “Where-do-you-come-from-where-are-you-going-what-is-your-native-land?” in one single flow of words, without a pause for breath, but their fingers continued to weave hats as steadily as if they were automatic contrivances. We were told that in all the history of the town only one boy had been too stupid to learn to weave. He was now the priest of a neighboring hamlet. Some make a regular business of it and weave several hats a week, as many as one “común” a day. Only the rare victim of an artistic temperament prides himself on putting his best efforts, and from two weeks to a month of work, into an article of fine weave, to receive a small fortune of eight or ten dollars in one windfall. It is in keeping with Latin-American character that only a very few choose this extended effort, instead of the short, ready-money task of weaving “comunes.” The government telegraph operator of San Pablo—who probably averages a dozen messages a week—had a record of one hat a day, six hats a week, the year round. That was probably at least double the average output, for very few worked with any such marked industry. The overwhelming majority are amateur weavers, making one hat a week merely as an avocation in the interstices of their more regular occupations of cooking, planting, shopkeeping, school-teaching, and loafing. The boy in need of spending money, the village sport who plans a celebration, the Indian whose iron-lined stomach craves a draught of the fiery caña, the pious old woman fearful of losing the goodwill of her cura, all fall to and weave a hat in time for the Saturday market. Had they not these desires, unimportant though they may be, those in far-off lands who wear such head-dress would pay more dearly for a scarcer article. The more thrifty and ambitious begin to braid next week’s hat on the way home from market. By Sunday noon the hut is rare in all the land around in which at least one “panama” has not begun to come into being; by Monday even the liquor-soaked have begun to see the necessity of getting busy, on penalty of suffering a dry week-end. The result is that the traveler can almost tell the day of the week by the stage of development of the hats he meets along the route.
The center of the Nariño hat industry is Pasto. Not that its inhabitants are weavers, but here orders are received from the outside world and distributed among the towns of the province. Thus Jesús Diaz, local agent of San Pablo, receives one morning a telegram worded:
“Suspend 12–15; start 11–13.”
The figures refer to centimeters of brim and crown, the only variation of style being in the comparative width of these. “Castores” are made for the American trade; “parejos”—“equals,” of which brim and crown are of the same width,—go to Spain; the “ratonera,” of very narrow brim, finds its market in Habana. The weavers of San Pablo can seldom be induced to make the wide-brimmed hats for women, since these can be sold only in the United States and the market is very uncertain, “because there,” a woman confided to us, “the style is always changing, as if they do not know their own minds.” Unless they can be sold in our own land, these broad-brimmed hats are worthless, for the women of Nariño wear only what we would consider “men’s styles.” Those worn in San Pablo are of a square-topped, ugly form, roughly woven, as if each consigned to his own head those so carelessly made that they cannot be sold.
His telegram received, Jesús sends his subagents out through the hamlets with the new specifications, here and there to prepay something on the new order. For so from hand to mouth do many of the weavers live that they are frequently unable to buy the materials for the next hat without the agent’s “advance.” The “straw” for one hat costs from one to forty cents, depending on the fineness. The high price of the better grades is chiefly due to the long labor involved in the weaving, with, of course, the usual heavy middleman profits between maker and ultimate consumer. The daily hat of the telegraph operator brought him from ninety cents to a dollar; the final purchaser in the United States would pay $4 or $5 for it. The name “panama” is unknown in Nariño in connection with hats. None were ever made on the Isthmus; they took the name by which we know them because Panama was long the chief distributing center. To their makers they are known simply as “hats,” or, if it is necessary to specify, as sombreros de paja (straw hats), or sombreros de pieza. The best hats in all Colombia were said to be made in La Unión, a little town lying in plain sight on a sloping hillside to the east; but in spite of their patriotism, many admitted that the best on earth are those of jipijapa, made in Manabí, Ecuador. An old woman of La Unión had won many prizes and awards in national and even international expositions, not merely for her hats, which sold for a hundred fuertes here, and for $100 in Europe or the United States, but for aprons and other garments woven of the same “straw.” The people of San Pablo complained that the Japanese, especially of the Island of Formosa, were capturing much of the world’s trade with a clever imitation of Colombian hats, very fine and light, but of an inferior “straw” that has little durability.
Dawn, the next morning, found us clattering away down the cobble-stones of San Pablo, the gigantic key protruding from its swan-shaped hole until Santiago, the barber, saw fit to awake from his dreams of future glory. At the top of a range beyond we met the first pastusos, solemn-faced horsemen in winter garments and heavy ruanas of army blue. On the further slope and the rich uplands beyond there were many Indian hamlets, each thatched house in a little field of its own. The golden-brown grain of our homeland, the almost forgotten wheat, began to appear in patches on the hillsides, with little fenced threshing-floors of trodden earth, round and round which the peasants chased their unharnessed horses. Every family had its patch of wheat, corn, or potatoes, according to the altitude. Among the latter were many species unfamiliar to us of the north, some with red, pink, or purple blossoms, whole acres of one color; for we were nearing the original home of the potato. In his own slow way the Andean Indian still cultivates as in the days of the Incas many varieties unknown to the world at large, among others one shaped like the “double-jointed” peanuts of baseball fame, almost liquid inside.
Higher still grew quinoa, somewhat like our burdock in appearance, the top full of seeds not unlike the lentil,—a palatable grain which for some strange reason has never been carried to other parts of the world. Under progressive farmers and modern methods, the region of Pasto could be the richest agricultural section of Colombia. But the Indian clings tenaciously to the ways of his ancestors, though in this autonomous department he is a free or community owner and lives far more comfortably than do the estate laborers to the north. An American farmer would gasp at the laborious methods in vogue in a Colombian wheat-field. At harvest time, the phases of the moon being propitious, the saints and ancestral gods placated, men, women, and children wander out to the fields to cut the grain stalk by stalk, tie it into bundles as leisurely as if life were ten thousand years long, and, with a sheaf or two on their backs, toil away over the hills to their huts. There it is threshed by hand, or under the hoofs of animals; the chaff is separated by tossing the grain into the air with wicker-woven shovels, after which the wheat is spread out on a mat in the sun for days, turned over frequently and carried into the house by night. Once dry, it is ground by hand under a stone roller, beaten into flour, and baked over a fagot fire in crude adobe ovens of beehive shape. Small wonder the two soggy little loaves of bread a woman raked out of one of these, and which I went on tossing from hand to hand, cost twice what a real loaf would in the United States.
A valley with a decided tip to the south drew us swiftly on, as only easy going can, after steep and toilsome trails, and the afternoon was still young when we halted at San José, twenty-two miles from the barber’s door. Here it “made much cold,” and we were warned that it would make even more so in Pasto. But native information on this point is seldom of much value to the traveler. In the Andes, climate varies not by season but by location or altitude, and very few of the country people have any notion why one town differs in temperature from another. Accustomed all their lives to the fixed climate of their birthplace, they consider “bitter cold,” or “de un calor atroz” (of atrocious heat), a neighboring hamlet where the mercury really falls but a few degrees lower or rises a bit higher. They accept the variation with the same passive indifference that governs their lives from mother’s back to the grave, their Catholic training stifling the query “why.” The fact remains; the reason—“sabe Diós porqué.”
It was September thirteenth, the first anniversary of the beginning of my Latin-American journey, when we swung on our packs again. In spite of our resolutions, the proximity of a city had the usual effect of increasing our ordinarily leisurely gait. Sunrise overtook us striding down the great San Bernardo valley, a vast, well-inhabited gorge, cultivated far up the mountain sides. Sugarcane mottled the landscape here and there with its Nile-green. Every hut had its trapiche, a crude crusher with wooden rollers operated by oxen, or a still cruder one run by hand. Bananas were plentiful; oranges lay rotting in thousands along the way. As the sun rose higher the pastuso arrieros and horsemen threw the sides of their ruanas back over their shoulders, disclosing the bright red linings. Once it had crossed the river at the bottom of the valley, the road—and it was a real road now, speaking well of the industry of Nariño province—swung round and round the toothlike flanks of the mountain wall, rising ever higher for many miles, yet so gradually that we were scarcely conscious of climbing. Here at last we found ourselves in the Andes as the imagination had pictured them,—dry, mammoth, treeless, repulsive, wholly infertile mountains piled irregularly into the blue heavens on every hand. Under our feet the road suddenly began a buck and wing shuffle, and leaving it to its vagaries we scrambled and slid—particularly Hays in his smooth-bottomed moccasins—down toward the Juanambú river, to the pass where General Nariño fought one of the great battles of the war of independence. Two hours beyond, we came out on the nose of a cliff with a sheer fall of thousands of feet—which we took care not to take—affording a view of the country we had crossed for days past, the trail of forty-eight hours before climbing away into the sky at what seemed but a rifle shot away.
At Boesaco a woman agreed to prepare food if I would give her an “advance” sufficient to buy the necessary ingredients. When Hays arrived, we sat down to a dinner so plentiful that we rose again with difficulty. Life is like that in the Andes. The traveler must feed to bursting when the opportunity offers, and starve at times without complaint. We had already done a reasonable day’s tramping, but the nearness of Pasto overcame our better judgment. A few miles out, a group of pastusos, of almost full Caucasian blood, rode by me with silent disdain. Evidently they disapproved of our mode of travel. Just beyond, the road broke up into many faint paths across a meadow, the stony old trail of colonial days toiling up the face of the mountain to the right. I drew an arrow in the sand lest Hays, lost in some reverie, should fail to note the shod feet by which we tracked each other so easily in a world where all who walk go barefoot. A mile or two across the meadow I fell in with an excellent new highway, well engineered, that took to scolloping in and out along the flank of an enormous range, with a steady rise that never for an instant ceased as long as the day lasted. Here and there a clear, cold stream trickled from the still unhealed mountainside piled into the sky above me. The visible world was wholly uninhabited now, with cold, bleak winds sweeping across the vast panorama of ranges below and above; while ahead, great patches of mist half-concealed the dense, bearded forests through which the road climbed doggedly. In these solitary Berruecos ranges General Sucre was but one of many who had been murdered by brigands or conspirators, and every turn of the lonely road offered splendid ambush. Indeed, it seemed strange that Colombia had proved so free from highway violence, with no other policing outside the capital than, in the larger villages, an occasional mild-eyed youth in one piece of uniform, carrying a chain-twister or a home-made “night-stick.”
Toward nightfall a horseman overtook me. Six weeks on the road had left me in excellent condition, and in spite of the miles in my legs his animal could barely hold my pace. For a long time we mounted almost side by side, a new stretch of solitary highway staring us in the face at every turn, cold night settling down in utter solitude. It had grown wholly dark when we reached the summit, damp with the breath of the forest, an Arctic wind sweeping across it, with dense black night and a suggestion of vast mountain depths on all sides. The silent, gloomy pastuso was evidently suspicious of my intentions and refused to ride ahead. Nor was I too sure of him. The dislike of having an unknown traveler behind me had persisted since my tramp through Mexico, but there was no other choice than to take the lead. On the further side the road was poorer, with a sharp grade and hundreds of fine chances to sprain an ankle. Colombians do not travel by night when they can avoid it, and we met not a sign of life. The stony road descended so swiftly that I had difficulty in judging its pitch and a constant struggle to keep from falling on my face. Suddenly, at a chaos of paths, rocks, and jagged holes, as of some earthquake, I cross an unseen but noisy stream by a sagging log and, leaving the cautious horseman behind, saw him no more.
On and on the rough and broken world dropped before me, with never a moment of respite for my aching thighs. I was concluding I had lost the way entirely, when suddenly there burst upon me all the electric lights of Pasto—actually electric lights, forty-two of them, as I could count from my point of vantage, each of what would have been sixteen candle-power had each had some fourteen candles to help out. I slipped on my coat in anticipation of entering a hotbed of civilization, for was not Pasto the largest city between Bogotá and Quito?
I have ever been over-hopeful. A city it was, to be sure, in the South American sense, but travelers, other than those of the mule-driver class, come rarely to Pasto, and those who do arrive decorously by day, and seek the homes of friends. I had been given the name of the “Hotel Central.” The first passerby directed me to it, but added the information that they no longer “assisted,” that is, gave meals.
“But they have rooms?”
“No, they never did have rooms. They were only a hotel.”
Words have strange meanings in the far interior of South America.
All that was left me was the posada, an ancient, dark, and gloomy one-story building around a patio, full of the scent and noises of mules and horses, and of arrieros wrapped in their blankets. Even the corner policeman advised me to keep the “room” offered me and be thankful. It was fortunate that Hays had not arrived, for both of us could scarcely have crowded into the damp, earthy-smelling dungeon, to say nothing of occupying the plank “bed.” Evidently he had found lodging somewhere along the way. During the day I had laid forty-two miles behind me, yet so fresh had I arrived that I went out for a stroll before retiring to pass a night almost as cold as in Bogotá, dressed in every rag I owned, with two adobe bricks as pillow, and as covering against the bitter cold that crept in even through the closed door—the privilege of hugging myself.
I had taken my coffee and wandered the streets of Pasto for an hour next morning when I suddenly sighted Hays, accompanied by a ruana-clad native. Usually as immaculate as conditions permitted, he was now unwashed, unshaven, bedraggled, drawn of features and generally disreputable, with a sheepish look that turned to relief at sight of me. He had a sad story to tell. Lost in some dream, he had overlooked my arrow in the sand and taken the old stony road over the Berruecos range. It was a shorter route in miles, and had the doubtful advantage of leading him past the very spot at which Sucre was assassinated; but the now abandoned trail of colonial days was in such a condition that he had several times come near breaking a leg, if not his neck. Limping at last into town, late at night, he had wandered the streets for some time in vain, when two natives asked if he was looking for lodging. Congratulating himself on his good fortune, he fell into step with them. A square or two further on one of the pair disclosed a policeman’s “night-stick” hanging from his arm. Hays excused himself and turned away, only to be halted with the information that the law of Pasto required that any stranger arriving after eight at night be taken to the police station. The ex-corporal of the Zone, accustomed for years to order his subordinates to lock up other men, was appalled at the notion of being himself locked up. His affronted dignity favored the pair with some of the most expressive Castilian to be found within the covers of Ramsey. All in vain. At the station the lieutenant, who rose from a troubled sleep with a towel around his head, was courtesy itself, explaining that Pasto would not dream of subjecting so distinguished a foreigner to arrest. But as the night was late and the streets cold, they were doing him the favor of lodging him, not in jail, but in the police barracks. Looked at in that light, and at that hour, the affair assumed a new aspect. Hays voiced his thanks and slipped from under his pack. A policeman led him to the squad room, gave him a reed mat to spread on the floor beside the score already asleep, and covered him with one of the red and blue ruanas of Pasto. On such terms I would gladly have spent the night under arrest myself. At midnight there had rushed into the room all the policemen on duty in town. Each dragged his relief to his feet and at once dived into the vacated “bed,” leaving Pasto for a half-hour at the mercy of the lawless. At dawn the order to muster was sounded. The policemen each and all turned over for another nap, and only rose when the querulous little chief of police came to give the order in person, even then after considerable argument. Hays had started to take his leave, but was called back to give his pedigree. The government paper was in my hands. The chief apologized for the necessity, but put him in charge of the ruana-clad detective until he could examine the document in question.
We planned to spend several days in Pasto, but our efforts to get better lodgings did not meet with rosy success. We were once even on the point of renting a two-story house on a corner of the plaza—only to find that though it had room enough to accommodate a score of persons, it was furnished simply and exclusively with the wooden-floored bedsteads indigenous to the Andes. Meanwhile, the bridal chamber of the posada was vacated and we fell heirs to it—at nine cents a day each.
The capital of Colombia’s southernmost department, claiming a population of 16,000, sits in the capacious lap of the extinct Pasto volcano, seeming, in spite of its 14,000 feet elevation, a mere hill, for the city itself is more lofty than Bogotá. By no means so backward and fanatical a mountain town as described by its rivals to the north, it proved the most lively and progressive place we chanced upon between the Cauca and Ecuador. A highway links it with the outside world by way of Tuquerres and Barbacoas, thence by boat to the island port of Tumaco on the Pacific. Yet there remains much provincialism and a stout clinging to the ways and the medieval faith of colonial days. With few exceptions the entire population kneels in the street when any high churchman moves abroad. In one of the many overgrown churches is a glorified letter-box with a sign exhorting the “faithful” to write to San José, reputed to have his dwelling-place near the town, requests for those favors they wish granted, and enclosing something for José’s coin-box. Once a week the letters are removed by a monk and, the worldly offering having been extracted, are burned before the statue of the saint. Wheeled traffic, of course, is unknown in Pasto; virtually everything of importance comes up from the sea on muleback. The most ambitious native handicraft we found was the making of tiples, crude guitars of red cedar and white pine.
At first sight Pasto has the aspect of a mighty mart of trade. Every street is lined from suburb to suburb by the wide-open doorways of shallow shops crammed with wares incessantly duplicated. To all appearances, there are more sellers than buyers. Pride in hidalgo blood, however diluted, is evidently so widespread that no one works who can in any way avoid it, all preferring to sit behind a counter in the hope of selling ten cents’ worth of something a day to earning as many dollars in some productive labor at the risk of soiling their fingers. Most numerous are the food-shops, run chiefly by women, who find ample time between clients to do their housekeeping in a Colombian way. An inventory of one display, sloping from sidewalk to ceiling, is a description of all. Large, irregular bricks of salt, pinkish in color, and rectangular blocks of the muddy-brown first-product of the sugar-cane, form the basis of every heap. Next in order are cones of half-refined sugar, a variety of home-made sweets, long slabs of yellow soap from which is cut whatever amount the purchaser desires; baskets of small potatoes, of shelled corn, and quinoa. Then there are oranges and bananas of several varieties, plantains, mangoes, strings of onions, heaps of one, two, and four-cent loaves of wheat bread, or pan de queso,—a mixture of flour and grated cheese—the largest of which barely attains the size of a respectable American biscuit. An abundance of canned goods, largely from the United States, invariably forms the top of the pyramid. These imported wares seem to have little sale among the natives, being kept in stock apparently in the fond hope of the arrival of stray gringos exuding wealth at every pore. To the townsmen, indeed, the prices are almost prohibitive. A can of “salmon,” filled with pale and ancient carp and deteriorated coloring matter, cost 65 cents; a five-cent box of American crackers was valued at 36 cents! “Tabacos,” as the black stogie of local make and consumption is called, a few iron-heavy cups and saucers, odds and ends of gaudy dishes, and small edibles and trinkets, fill in the interstices of every display.
Almost as numerous are the hawkers of strong drink, likewise women, who fall back upon their sewing between customers. Competition is livelier in this line, and prices correspondingly lower. A bottle of Milwaukee beer sold at 40 cents. Countless cloth-shops, with bolts of cheap grade and of every color of the rainbow piled high in the doorways; boticas, or dingy little drug-stores of breath-taking prices; and establishments offering everything that can by any stretch of the imagination be rated hardware, appear to be the chief male pastimes. Like so many towns of the Andes, Pasto does not seem to indulge in any form of intellectual recreation; unless the art of conversation, so diligently practiced, can be rated such. There is not a bookstore in town. In a few shops are piled, among other wares, stacks of religious volumes and Catholic propaganda, including school-books dealing chiefly with the lives of the saints; but nothing more. It is a “changeless” town. There were once plenty of medios and, earlier still, cuartillos, we were informed; but these small pieces had all been given in alms to the Church. The smallest coin still in circulation is the real—the word centavo disappears at the department boundary. He who buys a lump of sugar or a salt rock must take home a needle, an onion, or a banana in change. At the post-office, where the real is accepted at something less than in the public markets, the purchaser may take his change in stamps, though the pastuso custom seems to be to give it to the clerk as a “tip.”
High as it lies, Pasto is but two days muleback from the great montaña, the hot lands and the beginning of the Amazon system. Just out beyond the cold mountain lakes of La Laguna comes a quick descent to Caquetá and the great jungles of eastern South America. Hence we saw in the streets of Pasto not merely the now familiar “civilized” Indian of the highlands, plodding behind his no more stolid bulls laden with the produce of his chacras, but also no small number of “wild men” from the wilderness. These have a free, happy, independent air, in marked contrast to the manner of the dismal mountain Indian; none of the cautious, laborious, canny attitude toward life of those subject to the environment of high altitudes. They appear to hold the domesticated Indian in great scorn, and mix far more freely with the other classes of the population. Dressed in what could easily be mistaken for the running pants of an athlete, their marvelously developed bronzed legs are bare in any weather. A light ruana covers their shoulders. A few wear a gray wool skullcap; most of them only their matted, thick, black hair, cut short across the neck in “Dutch doll” fashion. There were always several women in each group, but one must look sharply to make sure of the sex, dressed identically like their male companions, bare legs, hair-cut, and all.
We took leave of Pasto four days after our arrival. That night—Hays having his usual luck in winning the single wooden bench—I slept on a hairy cowhide on the earth floor of an Indian hut beside the Ancasmayu, or Blue River, about the northern limit of the Inca Empire at its height; and all night long guinea-pigs kept running over me, squeaking their incessant treble grunt, gnawing at anything that seemed edible. Besides the llama, and, perhaps, the allco, a mute dog that is said to have been exterminated by the hungry Conquistadores, the only domestic animal of the Andes at the time of the Conquest were these lively little rodents so absurdly misnamed in English, since they are neither of the porcine family nor known in Guinea, being indigenous to South America. The Spaniards more reasonably called them conejos de India—“rabbits of India.” To the natives they were, and still are, known as cui (kwee), the origin of which term is evident to anyone who has listened to their grunting squeak through an endless Andean night. In pre-Conquest days—the llama being too valuable an animal to eat, even had the herds not been the personal property of the Inca—the cui probably constituted the only meat, except wild game, of the Indian’s scanty diet. To-day every hut in the Andean highlands is overrun by them. The gente decente facetiously assert that the Indians keep them for two purposes,—to eat, and as a means of learning the art of multiplication.
Next day the road was all but impassable, or we should have reached Ipiales on the frontier that evening. Not that it was a bad road, as roads go in the Andes, but rain had fallen most of the night, and we skated down each slope in constant expectation of a mud-bath, to claw our way almost on hands and knees to the succeeding summit. Once we tobogganed thousands of feet clear through a town in which we had planned to eat, literally unable to stop until we brought up against a luckily placed boulder on the edge of a stream in a roaring gorge far below.
At Iles, where Hays, hurrying on in quest of cigarettes which he detested only next to smokelessness, for once arrived before me, I found dinner already preparing and my companion burdened with the key to a lodging. A tinsmith had left off work for the afternoon that we might have undisputed possession of his shop, stocked with a few ordinary articles of tinware, but given over chiefly to the fabrication of tin saints. Strange to say, once they had been sanctified by the priest, the results of his labors were as sacred to the tinsmith as to his fellow-townsmen. Iles was just finishing a huge new church. The only implements of the workmen were shovels, for the whole building was of native mud, even to the roof-tiles. The entire Indian population, male and female, impressed into service by the padre, trotted in constant procession from the spot where the clay was mixed with mountain grass and trampled with bare feet, carrying on their heads tiles filled with the material, the women bearing also their babies slung on their backs. The free labor system of the Incas, inherited by the Conquistadores, is still in vogue in the isolated towns of the Andes, the taskmaster of to-day being the village cura.
As we neared the frontier, population grew less and less frequent, and there were long stretches without an inhabitant. In the afternoon we turned aside from the “royal highway” to visit the “Virgen de las Lajas,” the most famous shrine in Colombia. To it come pilgrims from all the Republic, from Ecuador and even further afield, to be cured of their ills. On the way down to it we fell in with an old man driving an ass, and heard the simple story of the founding of the sacred city. Centuries ago the Virgin had appeared here and given a small child a statue of herself—“descended straight from heaven, because it has a real flesh-and-blood face that bleeds if it is pricked, or if hair is pulled out.” Then she had ordered the Bishop of Riobamba to build a chapel in the living rock of the mountain on the site of the apparition. Our informant was vociferous in his assertion that the Virgin daily cured victims of lameness, blindness, barrenness, and a hundred other ailments; but he offered no explanation of the fact that though he had lived in Las Lajas all his life, he was almost sightless from ophthalmia.
The village, stacked up the sheer wall of a gorge in the far depths of which roared a small but powerful stream, had about it that something peculiar to all “sacred” cities,—an intangible hint of unknown danger, perhaps from fanaticism, of ignorance, something of the sadness that comes upon the traveler at such evidences of the gullibility of mankind. Several “posadas de peligrinos,” crude copies of the hospices of Jerusalem, and many little shops and stalls like those of Puree, town of the Juggernaut, furnish pilgrims with lodgings, food, blessed trinkets, and tons of English candles to burn before the miraculous image. Ragged boys left off their top-spinning to beg “una limosnita—a little alms for the Virgin,” as we descended through the town and went down by the sharpest zigzags to the white, four-story temple with its twin towers, hanging on the edge of the rocky gorge like encrusted foam of the waterfall that pitched into it. Though they make long journeys to implore her favor, the pilgrims have not reverence enough for their Virgin to reform their unspeakable personal habits, and every story of the holy edifice was an offence to eyes and nose. The worker of miracles was the usual placid faced doll in rich vestments and gleaming jewels—or more likely paste imitations of those which the monks keep safely locked away in their vaults—behind a thick glass screen against which sad-eyed Indians flattened their noses in supplication.
The rolling hills of Ecuador lay close before us when we strode into Ipiales, the last town of Colombia and the coldest place we had known since our last northern winter. At this rate the equator would prove ice-bound. The place was said to have much commerce with the neighboring Republic, but the only signs we saw of it were a few troops of shivering donkeys. A mere five miles separates Ipiales from the frontier, and we had soon left behind the land of “Liberty and Order” and entered that of the equator. The road, crawling dizzily along the face of a death-dealing precipice, descends to a collection of huts called Rumichaca—Quichua for “rock bridge,” which it is, indeed, for the boundary river, Carchi, races under a huge natural arch across which the camino real passes without a tremor. To our surprise, there were no frontier formalities whatever. Ecuador was not even represented; the two Colombian customs officials, diffident, slow-witted, but kindly pastusos, asserted that no duties were collected on goods passing between the two countries, unless they were of foreign origin. Their task was merely to keep account of whatever passed the boundary; for what purpose was not apparent, unless it was to provide a sinecure for political henchmen.
An hour later we were surprising the Ecuadorians lolling about the bare, sanded plaza of Tulcán. Only a lone telegraph wire had followed us over the frontier, yet the two countries blended into each other so completely that an uninformed traveler would not have guessed that he had crossed an international boundary. In the cuartel were housed a half-hundred soldiers, rather insolent fellows despite their Indian blood, their gaily colored ruanas giving Tulcán a needed touch of color, engaged in the rather passive occupation of protecting their little wedge-shaped country from the pressure of the larger one above. By the time I had lessened our burden of silver by changing it into bills of the country, Hays had fallen in with the jefe político, the commander-in-chief of all the canton, who bade us make our home in his bachelor parlor as long as we chose to remain. The room was the most magnificent we had seen since Bogotá, with long, solemn rows of upholstered chairs, straight-backed and dignified, framed family portraits that would not have gladdened an artist’s heart, and two long but sadly narrow sofas covered with a horse-hair cloth that, after weeks on the planks and trodden-earth floors of Colombia, seemed elusive luxury personified. The jefe bade us keep our hats on, and left us with the Quito newspapers of a week back, our first touch with the outside world in some time.
I suspected that Tulcán’s chief dignitary had not treated us so regally out of mere kindness of heart; and the suspicion was duly verified. We had stretched out on our elusive couches, and Hays was already asleep—or feigning it most successfully,—when the jefe arrived from a merry evening with his aids and drew me into a conversation that promised to have no end. Under the guise of giving me information, he set himself to finding out, entirely by indirection, what might be our real motive in entering Ecuador by the back door, unannounced. Though he never for a moment suggested his suspicions openly, it was a late hour before he gave any evidence of being convinced that there was nothing sinister and perilous to the welfare of his country behind our simple story. Then he grew confidential and announced that, as men who had, and might again be, wandering in foreign parts, we were sure to run across two miscreants on whom he would like to lay his hands. One was Deciderio Vanquathem of Belgium, described as a ferrotype photographer and a sleight-of-hand performer of no mean ability. He had married a cousin of the jefe and borrowed a thousand sucres of our host to start a magic-lantern show, only to disappear a week later leaving his wife, but not the thousand sucres, behind. The impression left by the jefe’s complaint was that if he had reversed the process, there would have been no hard feeling. We were asked to keep an eye out also for one Francisco Fabra, boasting himself a Frenchman, who had written from “Ashcord” (Akron?), Ohio, proposing marriage to one of the jefe’s sisters, but who had dropped out of sight upon receipt of her photograph. “No se debe burlarse así de las mujeres—no man should play such jests on a woman,” cried the jefe fiercely.
Had we not fallen in next morning with two Indians likewise bound, I am not sure we should ever have reached San Gabriel. We were soon engaged in an utterly unpeopled series of páramos, lofty mountain-tops swept by icy winds, covered only with tufts of yellow bunch-grass and myriads of “frailejones,” clumps of mullen-like leaves on a palm-like stem from six inches to two feet high, that peered at us through the mist like shivering, diffident mountain children. Our companions assured us that the plant was thus known because of its resemblance to a priest in his pulpit, and that the leaves were highly efficacious against headache. There was also the achupalla, a kind of wild pineapple with sword-like leaves that gave it the appearance of that form of cactus known as “Spanish bayonet,” the heart of which, resembling a large onion or a small cabbage, is sold as food in the markets of the region. Then, for a long way, the trail led through a moss-grown forest reeking in mud, which we could only pass by jumping from bog to bog and clinging to trees along the way.
San Gabriel sits conspicuously, and apparently unashamed, on the summit of an Andean knoll, its streets falling away into the valley on every side. In the outskirts we came upon a game new to both of us. In the irregular field that formed the plaza before a bulking mud church, a half-hundred barefoot Indian men and boys, each in a ruana of distinctive gay color reaching to the knees, were pursuing a sphere about half the size of a football. Each player had bound on his right hand, like the cesta of the Spanish pelota player, a large, round instrument of rawhide, of the form of a flat snare-drum or a double-headed banjo. The rules of the game were evidently similar to handball or tennis. Hoping for some suggestion of aboriginal originality, I asked a player what the game was called.
“Pelota (ball), señor,” he answered laconically.
I might almost have guessed as much.
“And that?” I persisted, pointing to the banjo-shaped instrument.
“Guante (glove),” he replied.
A really bright man might have guessed that, also. Evidently the tongue of the Incas had left little trace in San Gabriel. Suddenly the bell of the whitewashed church whanged. The players piled their “gloves” hastily in the form of a cross, and every living person in the plaza, male or female, snatched off their hats and poured into the place of worship, from which arose some weird species of music as we pushed on into the town.
A letter from the jefe of Tulcán gave us the entrée to the parlor of one of his relatives. The fortnightly mail had just arrived, and Don Manuel was dictating letters to his daughter, who wrote slowly and painfully in a school-girl hand, dipping an ancient steel pen into a medieval inkwell between each word. When we returned at dark from a dingy little shop in which supper consisted chiefly of quimbolos,—a kind of corn pudding wrapped in corn-husks—we found Don Manuel, his wife, and four daughters all gathered in a family conference over the letter, each offering suggestions, not as to its subject matter, but on the dotting of the “i’s” and the crossing of the “t’s,” a controversy which raged long and vociferously. Then there came marching into the room a huge mattress under which, on close inspection, we made out the feet of an Indian boy, and the family announced that they were going to visit a pariente—a polite subterfuge to withdraw and leave us free to go to bed. The parlor was typical of the “best room” of well-to-do rural South Americans. A forest of chairs in shrouds and a chaos of gaudy bric-a-brac cluttered a chamber musty with little use. On the walls were framed portraits of the pudgy family ancestors back to the days of ruffles and powdered wigs, all draped with mourning crêpe. The family library consisted of barely a half dozen books, all of the general style of Tomás á Kempis’ “Imitación de Cristo,” except for a copy of an agricultural journal in Spanish, published in Buffalo.
There are three routes from San Gabriel to Ibarra. To our surprise, we learned that all of them, far from following the high plateau, descended again into the hot country, for the valley of the Chota cuts a mighty slash entirely across Ecuador a bit north of the Imbabura volcano. The Indians told us the road was pedroso. It was the most exact information we ever had from men of their race. Anything more stony would be difficult to imagine. During all the afternoon there was not a moment in which we were not descending swiftly, our thigh muscles set with the tautness of brake-rods, by an ever more stone-strewn road that curved in and out along the flanks of a barren range, forming loops as perfect as the written “m” of an expert in penmanship; on our left an enormous gash in the earth, dreary, desert-brown, with no other vegetation than the cactus—strangely enough called “méjico” in this region,—on our right, so close it all but grazed our elbows, the tawny, shale mountainside, seeming to rise and grow as we descended. Where the cold winds of the highlands turned tepid, Indians disappeared. For a long space there was no sign of man. With every turn of the road the heat grew more tropical. A green spot appeared almost directly beneath us, hazy as a crumpled green rag with an indistinct light shining behind it. Then two negroes passed, the first we had seen since leaving the Cauca. The road pitched headlong down a slope, donkeys and more negroes appeared, and the green patch developed into fields of sugarcane. Beyond them, by a wooden-roofed bridge, we crossed the Chota river and found ourselves at sunset in the “Caserío de la Chota.”
Tropical huts of reeds and thatch, quite unlike the thick-walled adobe dwellings of the highlands, even in form, lay scattered along the further bank. The entire population was jet black in color; the life of the place as different from the plateau above as if we had suddenly been transported to another continent. Boisterous laughter broke often on the thickening dusk; above the chattering tongues resounded frequently the screams of an exploded jest or a sudden quarrel. A piccaninny bawled lustily, startling us into the realization that we had never yet heard an Indian baby cry. The insolence of these descendants of the slaves once imported in large numbers for the sugar plantations of Ecuador, who in the half century since the abolition of slavery had drifted into this tropical valley to bask in the sun, was in striking contrast to the obsequiousness of the Andean Indian.
Beside the two rows of straw and reed shacks of the negroes stood a government building of stone and mud, one end of which was the telegraph office. In it the operator, who had left two days before to “visit some relatives for a few hours,” had locked two kids that bleated incessantly. The open portion of the building was a shambles. Thirty-two miles from the top to the bottom of the Andes had left our feet no fit standing-place, even after soaking them in the Chota; yet we hesitated long before attempting to clear a space to lie down. Luckily, I still had a candle-end in my pack. In a far corner some energetic traveler had built a cot of reeds laid across two sticks, but it had long since rotted to uselessness. Rumor had it that the negroes of Chota were skilled assassins, and the demeanor of the hamlet was by no means reassuring. We laid our weapons beside us on the stone floor, but dared not close the door for fear of drowning in our own sweat. All the night through I woke frequently with the sensation of some one creeping in upon us, but dawn broke without any definite proof that the peril had been anything worse than the offspring of an overheated imagination.
It would be task enough to climb from Chota to Ibarra on the strength of a hearty meal; to make it from a lazy negro village, where not even a swallow of coffee was to be had, approached torture. Hour after hour we toiled upward through a choking desert of sand and broken stone, pitched at the angle of a steep stairway. There runs a story of the Chota, suggestive of the barrier it presents to modern progress. Archer Harman, the American who lifted the railway of Guayaquil to the plains of Quito, strolling along the streets of the Ecuadorian capital one day, chanced to meet M——, one of his American engineers.
“M——,” he said, shifting his cigar to the other cheek, “get out of here to-morrow morning and see what the chances are for a railroad to Bogotá.”
The engineer sallied forth next day on muleback, with such equipment or lack thereof as can be had in Quito in a hurry. Three months later he rode back into the city of the equator.
“Well, you’re back, eh?” said his chief. “What’d it cost us to run her through the Chota valley?”
“About seventy miles of 6% grade in shale,” replied the engineer.
“Hum!” said Harman, “There won’t be any railroad to Bogotá.”
Which is one of the many reasons why the nebulous “Pan-American Railway” still exists only in the minds of inexperienced dreamers.
Hours up, we began to pass groups of meek, well-built Indians, easily distinguishable by their costume from the tribes to the north. They spoke a guttural yet sibilant language that could be none other than Quichua, the ancient tongue of the Incas, and I took occasion to test the vocabulary we had gleaned, by putting an unnecessary question:
“Maypi ñan Ibarrata?”
To which the oldest of the group replied at once in fluent, though accented Spanish, without the shadow of a smile:
“Sí, señor, this is the road to Ibarra; derechito—straight ahead.”
Before noon we were sharing a gallon of chicha at the top of the range, several world-famous volcanoes thrusting their white heads through the clouds about us. Ibarra and her fertile green slopes were plainly visible; a dozen villages dotted the far-reaching landscape, and the two roads to Quito wound away over the opposite flanks of cloud-capped Imbabura, towering into the sky beyond and cutting off half the southern horizon. Below us spread the famous Yaguarcocha, the “Lake of Blood.” At the height of his power Huayna Ccápac, thirteenth Inca, had pushed his conquests over the equator, when the Caranquis, a warlike tribe of the valley before us, revolted. The army sent against them exterminated the Caranqui warriors and threw their bodies into the lake, “turning its waters blood-red,” according to the legend, and giving it the name it bears to this day. Its shores were white with encrusted salt and, like so many lakes of the Andean highlands, so completely surrounded by reedy swamps that we were forced to abandon the swim we had promised ourselves before entering the principal city of Ecuador north of the capital.
Ibarra is a still and dignified old town of some 12,000 inhabitants, founded in 1606 under the Spanish viceroy from whom it took its name, as a residence for the white men of the region between Pasto and Quito, on the site of the old Indian village of Caranqui. In spite of the extreme fertility of the surrounding valley and its peerless climate, many of its houses stood empty, and several buildings of colonial days were still the ruins the great earthquake of many years ago had left them. The keeper of the little eating-house that actually and publicly announced itself, abandoned to us her own quarters, densely furnished with photographs, frail chairs, tables, sofas, cane lounge, and an immense canopied bed, to say nothing of the extraordinary luxury of a newspaper only two days old. To offset the pleasure of the first real bed in weeks, however, the town kept us awake most of the night with a local fiesta. We had been so lacking in foresight as to arrive on the day sacred to the “Virgen de la Merced.” The celebration began early in the afternoon. An endless train of Indians in a bedlam of colors trooped across the town under great bundles of dry brush gathered far away in the hills, a haughty chief on horseback riding up and down the line giving his orders in sputtering Quichua. Men, women, and children deposited their loads on the bare plaza before a weather-tarnished old church, and ambled away for more. Five immense heaps had been laid out in the form of a cross when a priest sallied forth to sprinkle them with holy water. In the thickening dusk the entire town gathered amid a deafening din of battered church bells, the explosion of thousands of home-made fireworks and “cannon crackers,” the blare of a tireless band, and the howling of the populace and its swarming curs. The brush cross was lighted by a priest in rich vestments, and a pandemonium that may have been pleasing to the sleepless Virgin raged the whole night through.
The driftwood of the festival, in the form of chicha victims sprawled on their backs in streets and gutters, littered the town when we set out to climb to the frozen equator at Cayambe. A wide highway strode up through the Indian town of Caranqui, birthplace of Atahuallpa, best loved son of Huayna Ccápac and of Paccha, daughter of the conquered Scyri who once ruled the territory of the Quitus, and away due southward over the left shoulder of Imbabura. For the first miles it was so crowded with Indians in crude red blankets, heavy, gray felt hats, and bare legs, that it seemed the migration of some tribe from another world. All sidestepped like Hindu coolies and even the women touched their hats to us as they passed, greeting us sometimes in Spanish, but more often in Quichua. To the west rose the snow-topped peak of Cotacache, sharp as a dog’s tooth, and the view of Ibarra and her fertile valley opened up below and behind us like an unfolding map. Then a ridge wiped out town and jogging Indians, and left us only the gaunt, spreading mountain world to look upon.
Thirty miles lay behind us when we entered Cayambe, a drowsy, tumble-down place of no great size, the chill of the blue ice-fields capping the great volcano of the same name that bulks into the heavens close beside it, sweeping through the dreary streets unhampered. Next day a long and tiresome eight leagues led across a desolate and parched country, fissured by enormous earthquake cracks. But for the discovery of a new drink,—guarango, of unknown concoction—we might have stumbled across the sand-blown equator in far worse state than those who first pass it within the realms of Father Neptune. A drought had fallen upon the region so long since that even the cactus had given up in despair. All day long Cayambe stood forth clear and blue over our left shoulders, and far off to the hazy southwest the horizon was walled by a vast range, the highest point of which was evidently Pichincha, at the foot of which lay the end of our present journey.
With our goal so near at hand, we found it difficult to hold ourselves overnight in the semi-tropical oasis of Guayllabamba, the sandy streets of which were half paved with the stones of alligator pears. By daylight we had descended to the river and begun the unbroken climb of more than 5000 feet to the top of the succeeding range. A wide highway now led due west between cactus hedges through a country so desert dry that both stock and people seemed to be choking; and the fear came upon us that Quito, too, would be suffering such a famine of thirst that our plan to take up temporary residence there would turn to disappointment. Another steep, tongue-parching climb brought to view all Pichincha and its surrounding world, yet nowhere was there any sign of Quito. The highway swung south, rising and falling gently here and there between dry fields fenced with cactus or mud walls, a town tucked away in the wrinkle of the range beside us. In a shelter at the roadside an Indian woman, selling steaming soup with a bit of meat and tiny potatoes in it, served us in a single earthenware plate with wooden spoons as impassively as she did her own people. Further on, groups of aborigines were burning off, over brush fires, the bristles of slaughtered pigs that lay in batches of a half-dozen, split open, at the road edge. A carriage passed, the first we had seen in weeks; then an automobile; a man in “European” clothes, wearing shoes, yet actually walking; a clean child of well-to-do parents. A motley crowd, chiefly Indians in gaudy ponchos, came and went; large buildings grew up on either side of us; the highway, passing through green groves of eucalyptus pungent with the smell of “Australian gum,” took on the name of “18th of September,”—though it was really the 26th—and all at once Quito in its May-like afternoon burst out before us in its mountain hollow, a great grassy mound cutting off the horizon on the south. Fifty-seven days had passed since we had walked out of the central plaza of Bogotá, during fifteen of which we had done no walking. Our pedometer reported the distance thence 844 miles, and we had each spent a dollar for each day of the journey. Hays had set out weighing 180, and I, 160; we arrived weighing 160 and 161, respectively. We may not have presented quite so bedraggled an appearance as the remnant of Gonzalo Pizarro’s band on their return from the wilderness of the Amazon, but we were certainly no fit subjects for a drawing-room.