FROM BOGOTÁ OVER THE QUINDIO
The people of Bogotá refused to take seriously our plan of walking to
Quito. It was not merely that the Ecuadorian capital was far away; to
the inhabitants of this isolated little world it was only a name, like
Moscow or Lhassa. Those who had gone to school as far as the geography
lessons had a nebulous notion that it lay somewhere to the south, and
that no sea intervened; but their imaginations could not picture two
lone gringos arriving by land. To seek information was simply to waste
time. The nonexistent cannot be described. The best we could do was to
pore over a page map in a foreign atlas, whereon a match, according to
scale, was 300 miles long. Quito lay nearly three match-lengths distant
“as the crow flies,” without considering the very mountainous nature of
the country between. Yet the hardy Conquistadores had somehow journeyed
thither, and in other parts of the world we had both traveled routes
that the natives considered “impossible.”
As far away as Panama the horrors of this proposed tramp had been
impressed upon me. At dinner one evening a typical, stage Englishman,
accent and all, and an incurable monopolist of the conversation, proved
to be the owner of mines in Colombia, and I managed once to cut in with
a query about travel in that country.
“When the steamer lands you in ——,” he began, “you buy your mules, ten
or twelve, hire your mozos and carriers and....”
“But I plan to walk.”
“Walk!” exploded my fellow-guest, “Why on earth should a man wish to
walk?”
“It keeps the girth reduced,” I might have replied.
“It cahn’t be done,” dogmatized the monopolist. “Absurd! Why—why—a man
cahn’t travel on foot in Colombia. His social standing depends on how
fine a mule he rides. If he walked, he’d be taken for a bally peon, lose
his caste entirely, y’ know, and all that sort of thing.”
“Horrible!” I gasped.
“Besides, you’ve got to have a mule-train to carry your tent and bed and
supplies and.... Why, what on earth would you eat?”
“Huts ...” I began.
“Eh? Of the natives? Of course, but they haven’t a blessed thing to eat,
y’ know. They live on corn cakes and beans, and bananas and bread, and
that sort of thing. Now and then a chicken perhaps, but you’d starve to
death. And if they saw a white man coming, they’d know he had a lot of
money and rob him. Bandits and that sort of thing, y’ know. And how are
you going to cross the rivers—?”
“Swim—” I tried to say, but the sentence was drowned in his cataract of
words.
“And the mud! Why, bless me, one time a party was going along the road
in Colombia and they saw a hat, an English hat, lying in a mud-hole. One
of them started to kick it, when a man’s voice shouted:
“’Ere, stop it! That’s my bally ’ead!’
“‘What on earth are you doing down there?’ said the party.
“‘Sitting on my mule, to be sure,’ said the voice.
“Why, bless me, I wouldn’t go on foot in Colombia for all the gold in
the bank of England!”
It was the end of July when I tiptoed out of the American Legation of
Bogotá, bearing at last a letter from our magnificent chargé
d’affaires—a splendid representative of Harvard, but not, thank God, of
the United States—and carried it over to the government building
opposite. The Minister of Foreign Affairs to whom I made my way through
a line of typewriters on which cigarette-clouded officials were pounding
out great international matters with two fingers, was one of those rare
persons who know why a man should wish to walk, though, being a
Colombian, he had never dared do so himself, and was, moreover, certain
that Quito could not be reached by land. I was soon armed with a
gorgeous, if misspelled, document in which the Government of Colombia
permitted itself to recommend los señores americanos therein named to
the authorities along the way—should any such turn up.
[Illustration:
SOUTH AMERICA]
The genuine traveler sets out on a journey by tossing a toothbrush into
a pocket and strolling out of town. But even Hays had suffered somewhat
from that softening of the vagabond’s moral fiber that is the penalty
for dallying with the bourgeois comforts of civilization. We both had
the American hobo’s disgust for the “blanket stiff” who “packs” his own
bed; yet the Andes offer no proper field for orthodox hoboing. The
journey of unknown duration and possibilities before us was sure to have
variations in climate making extra clothing indispensable; moreover, we
could not take the photographs along the way unless we carried with us
means for developing the negatives. Our first plan was to buy a donkey
and drive him between us down the crest of the Andes. Among the many
reasons why this fond dream could not be realized was the certainty that
we should have chased the animal off his feet within a week. Observation
and reflection suggested that we should do better to follow the ways of
the country and hire a human beast of burden. For one thing, if the
latter ran away or dropped dead we lost nothing, except perhaps our
tempers; if the donkey came to a like end, we would be out ten or twelve
dollars. Hays abandoned the plan with double regret, for with it went
the hope of some day reporting the journey under the arresting title,
“Three Uncurried Asses in the Andes.”
With hundreds of animated bundles of rags trotting about the city ready
to lug anything from a load of hay to a chest of drawers for a mere
five-cent piece, we were certain there would be scores of native
carriers eager to see the world and to substitute a dismal and
intermittent hand-to-mouth existence for a steady job. We quickly
discovered, however, that we were wrong in ascribing our own
temperaments to the Chibcha Indian. There was not a youth among the
swarming _cargadores_ of Bogotá who had the faintest desire to see the
world; the bare thought of getting out of sound of the clanging
cathedral bells filled them one and all with terror. For the first time
we had struck the basic economic fact that the South American aboriginal
prefers to starve at home rather than to live in comparative opulence
elsewhere. In prehistoric times the Indians worshipped the natural
phenomena about their place of birth; each village had its cave or tree,
its stone or hill, on which it depended for protection; and the dread of
getting out of reach of these still courses through their primitive
minds.
By dint of repeated packing and throwing away, we reduced our
fundamental necessities to little more than the contents of two swollen
suitcases. Word of our nefarious project to contract a carrier to bear
these to some far-off, unknown world reached the last hovels of the
suburbs. But the cargadores we approached quickly named an exorbitant
wage and fled at the first opportunity. It was not a question of load,
but of road. Hays inticed a sturdy fellow upstairs one day and pointed
out our baggage on top of an enormous chest. The Indian calmly picked up
chest and all, murmuring cheerfully:
“A little heavy, señores, but I can do it. Where to?”
When we suggested a long trip, however, horror crept into his eyes,
though his unemotional Indian face showed none of it, and naming an
impossible fee, he slowly and silently slid backward through the door.
To our surprise, a man captured late on the day before we planned to
start did not show this customary fear. He proved to be a native of the
_tierra caliente_, eager to get back to his tropical home, and asserted
his ability to carry four _arrobas_ (100 pounds) day after day. Our
baggage weighed far less than that.
“Why not take a contract to go with us by the month?” I suggested.
“Cómo qué pagarán los señores?” he queried reflectively.
“We’ll pay you,” I answered, setting the sum high so that Hays, to whom
money was always a minor detail, could not charge me with losing this
eleventh-hour opportunity, $1200 a month, and food.
We could see that he “fell for it” at once, and was merely
procrastinating in the hope of getting more. That dream vanished, he
announced that he must have a new hat and _ruana_ for “so important a
journey.” We agreed to supply these—when he turned up at six in the
morning ready to start.
He did not turn up. When we had shivered into our clothes and gone to
hang over our _reja_, cargadores male and female were already plentiful
in the wintry, mist-draped plaza below, squatted inside their ruanas or
wandering aimlessly about with a rope over one shoulder. Out of regard
for the proprieties we beckoned to none but the men. It was some time
before one—who, perhaps, had not yet heard our plans—appeared at the
door. We were careful to mention only the first town, a short day’s
journey away, and offered fifty cents, at least twice what he averaged
in daily earnings. Convinced we would give no more, he accepted. This
time we took good care he should not escape. When he had bound the load
with his rope—the cargador’s one indispensable possession—we put him
outside and went to breakfast.
On our return we found him waiting—naturally. He prepared for the
journey, not as we of the north would expect, by balancing the suitcases
on opposite sides, but by slinging them both on his back, the rope
cutting deeply into his shoulder, and set off bent so low, with the
weight chiefly on his hips, that he seemed some deformed creature
shuffling along behind us.
At last we were off, marching out of the main plaza of Bogotá at eight
on the morning of August first. In our flannel shirts, even with our
coats still on, we set all the capital staring as we passed. Hays
carried a kodak in one pocket and Ramsey’s Spanish Grammar in the other;
my own apparatus and the overflow from my suitcase swung from a shoulder
in a _mochila_, or woven hemp bag. Even our “One-Volume Library,”
consisting of a few favorite bits in a half-dozen languages bound into a
single book, we had been forced to pack away on the carrier’s back. We
had exchanged instructions to cover any unexpected outcome of the
journey, those which Hays had handed me consisting chiefly of the
command, “In the event of death with boots on, do not remove the boots!”
The morning paper that overtook us near the statues of Colombus and
Isabel announced that we had left for Quito the day before, but failed
to specify on foot. Readers would have taken it for a printer’s error,
anyway.
Hays volunteered to shadow the carrier for the first day. Both
experienced enough to know that the pleasure of traveling together is
enhanced by traveling apart, we each set our own pace, letting our moods
take color from the landscape, drifting together now and then when
hungry for companionship, or often enough to assure ourselves of each
other’s welfare. Epictetus says, “As the bad singer cannot sing alone,
but only in chorus, so a poor traveler cannot travel alone, but only in
company.” Hays, having a mind of his own to feed on, was by virtue
thereof an excellent traveling companion.
At first the way was lined with houses of sun-baked mud, and peopled by
dull-eyed, respectful Indians and haughty horsemen. A bright sun,
frequently clouded over, made it just the day for tramping in full garb.
The Indian crawled along so slowly that I soon forged ahead. Beyond the
outskirts the broad upland plain was cut into irregular fields by adobe
walls or fences, often tile-roofed, with massive adobe gate pillars.
Fields dense with green Indian corn alternated with yellow stretches of
ripening grain. Here and there potatoes were being planted. Masses of
big red roses, of geraniums and daisies and unfamiliar flowers,
frequently beautified the scene. Two hours away I caught the last view
of Bogotá, backed by her black, mist-topped range; then the cloistered
city sank forever from our sight as the road dipped down from the
slightest of knolls on the all but floor-flat plain.
We had not set out to rival champion pedestrians. When appetite
suggested, I stretched out at the roadside with my pocket lunch, reading
Swinburne the while and scattering him page by page on the gusty winds
of the sabana. Hays and our baggage drifted languidly past. All the day
we followed a massive stone highway, built by the Spaniards of colonial
times, now raised well above the flanking dirt roads preferred by the
soft-footed travel of to-day. A large stone bridge of clumsy lines
lifted us over the little Funza river which waters the sabana, and not
far beyond we entered the ancient town of Mosquiera, on a main corner of
which stood a statue of the Virgin, unusual only for the fact that she
was jet-black of complexion as any African chief. To the South American
the color line is not sharp, even in his picture of the after world.
Some time later, having drifted together again, we met an ox-cart headed
for Bogotá. The half-Indian driver, struck suddenly wide-eyed at sight
of our strange garb and the burdened carrier behind us, cried out in
consternation:
“Cómo! No hay más función en Bogotá?”
We appreciated the implied compliment. He had mistaken us for performers
in the “Keller Circus,” a little fourth-rate affair playing in the
capital. Having, no doubt, saved up his billetes for weeks and started
for town at last with the price of admission to this wonderful
“function,” he was quite naturally dismayed to meet what seemed to be
the show trekking southward before he arrived.
At three we strolled into Serrazuela, officially named Madrid. Hays’
pedometer registered seventeen miles. In the little one-story “hotel,”
gaping with astonishment at our appearance, we were assigned to a
mat-carpeted room opening on the patio, and furnished with two wooden
beds exactly five feet long, with very thin reed mattresses over the
board flooring that took the place of springs. In this climate there was
little gain in traveling leisurely and arriving early. Except for a few
hours near noon, it was too cold to lounge along the way; once arrived
we could only wander aimlessly about among stupid villagers,
uncommunicative as their baked-mud walls. By dark it had grown too
wintry to sit reading with comfort, even had there been any other light
than the pale flicker of a small candle. There was nothing left but to
go to bed, and that had little of the pleasure the phrase suggests to
American ears. When Hays set his feet against the footboard, his lips
nearly reached his miniature pillow. He complained of feeling like the
victim of a “trunk mystery.” Sometime in the night I awoke to hear him
growling, “No wonder these people are crooked!” My own was a folding
bed—in that I had to fold up to get into it.
[Illustration:
A section of the ancient highway, built by the Spaniards more than
three centuries ago, leading from the _sabana_ of Bogotá down into
the hot-lands of the Magdalena. It was not designed for wheeled
traffic, hence is laid in steps, with a slope to carry off the rains]
[Illustration:
Fellow-travelers at the edge of the _sabana_ of Bogotá]
Though we were afoot at chilly six, at nine we were still seeking a
cargador. The one from Bogotá had fled during the darkest hours.
Moreover, he had evidently spread startling reports of our plans. In a
town swarming with gaunt and ragged out-of-works we were a long time
finding a man who admitted that he sometimes plied the vocation of
carrier. His attitude was that of an heir to unlimited wealth whiling
away the days until he came into his own by an occasional choice and
easy task. After an endless oration in which he assured us times without
number that he was “poor but honest,” just the man required for our
“very valuable baggage,” which the “expensive leather boxes” proved it,
and which in his hands would be perfectly safe among the robbers that
swarmed in the road ahead—providing we walked close beside him—he
admitted his willingness, as a special favor, to accompany us to La
Mesa, eighteen miles away, for the paltry sum of $200. We offered fifty,
and he left in well-feigned scorn.
At the alcalde’s office that official had been due only an hour or so,
and naturally had not yet arrived. We spread our resplendent document
before his hump-shouldered secretary, demanding a cargador at once.
That’s the way the haughty traveler always did in the accounts we had
read of journeys in the Andes. But Serrazuela was evidently ill-trained.
The secretary stepped to the door and beckoned a few haughty
rag-displays nearer, suggesting in a soft voice that perhaps, as a great
favor to him personally, one of them would go with los señores and carry
a “very light little bundlet.” One by one they replied in as solemn
tones as if they fancied we believed them, that they were already
engaged for the day, that they had a lame knee, or a sore back, or an
exacting spouse, or were in mourning for a mother’s third cousin, and
faded silently away. Among the last to go was our original “poor but
honest” applicant, who paused to ask whether the offer we had made was
$50 paper or $50 gold, because if we meant the latter he....
Just then the alcalde’s perfume gladdened our nostrils, and one of the
men, rounded up by a soldier, having accepted what was still an
exorbitant day’s wage, we were off at last. The day was bright and
sunny. Behind, across the sabana, masses of white clouds hung over
unseen Bogotá and her distant black range. I could keep pace with “Rain
in the Face,” as Hays had dubbed our new acquisition, only by holding
each foot a second or more before setting it down. If I paused to let
him get a bit ahead, he was sure to wait for me a few yards beyond. Ten
cents spent in a little wayside drunkery gave him new life, but only for
a short half-hour. Once he fell in with a friend driving an “empty”
donkey, and for a space we moved a little less slowly. Then the friend
turned off toward his village and with a groan “Rain in the Face” took
up his burden again and crawled snail-like behind me.
Soon after we came to the edge of the world. The sabana had ended
abruptly. Before us lay only a great swirling white mist into which
disappeared the old Spanish highway that led in broad, low steps down
and ever down into an unseen abyss. The carrier began to tremble
visibly. The year before, he confided in a choked whisper, he had been
held up here by bandits, who had killed and robbed his employer. Only
when one of us went close in front and the other at his heels could he
be induced to move forward and downward.
Now and then a group of Indians, men and women as heavily burdened as
their pack-animals, loomed forth from the clouds and toiled slowly
upward past us. An hour down we came upon a rock grotto into which
bareheaded arrieros were crawling with lighted candles.
“It is,” explained one of them, “that San Antonio once appeared here,
and all caminantes stop to pray, because he aids, protects, and betters
us.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, curious to hear his answer.
“Sure?” he cried, staring at me with startled eyes, “Señor, I have been
arriero on this road since I was a boy, always bringing a candle for San
Antonio; in all those years I have been robbed only three times—and then
I had no money.”
He crossed himself thrice in the intricate South American manner and
sped noiselessly away into the clouds after his animals.
It may have been our failure to offer tribute to the saint of the grotto
that all but brought our expedition to grief thus early. The mist had
thinned and the landscape that opened out became more and more tropical.
A single palm-tree, then clusters of them, grew up beside me. Banana
plants and clumps of bamboo, like gigantic ferns, nodded sluggishly; a
spreading tree pink with blossoms added the needed touch of color.
Suddenly I realized that my companions were not with me, and sat down to
wait. A half-hour passed. I strolled back along the road, then hurried
upward at sharper pace. Fully a mile up I sighted Hays, driving the
wabbly-kneed Indian before him. They had already tiptoed on the edge of
an adventure. Barely had I passed from view when there had fallen in
with them, one by one, four evil-faced fellows carrying sugarcane
staffs. As thirst came, each fell to peeling and munching his cane.
Hays, lost in some problem of Urdu philology, was suddenly recalled to
the material world by a throat gurgle from “Rain in the Face.” He looked
up to find the four wayfarers, long sheath-knives in hand, still
ostensibly engaged in peeling sugarcane, but closing in around him and
the shivering cargador. Hays had taken for fiction the stories of
dangers on the road, and his automatic was packed away on the carrier’s
back. But he had been too long a soldier to betray anxiety in the face
of danger. The quartet continued their innocent occupation, crowding
ever closer, but had not quite summoned up courage to try their fortunes
against so stern-featured a gringo when they fell in with another group
of travelers, and the four gradually faded away behind. Thenceforth we
took care to wear our weapons in plain sight.
“Rain in the Face” had with great difficulty been coaxed to his feet
again. When darkness fell, he was still wheezing slowly onward far from
the day’s goal. The abrupt, stony descent was broken now and then by
sharp rises, and we stumbled and sprawled over uncounted loose stones
and solid boulders. At length white huts began to stand dimly forth from
the night; the voices of unseen groups in the doorways under faintly
suggested thatch roofs fell silent with astonishment as we passed; and
in a climate in pleasant contrast to that of night-time Bogotá we
entered at last the little hotel of La Mesa. “Rain in the Face” set down
his load for the last time with a stage groan, grasped his fee after the
customary plea for more, and with the parting information that he was
“poor but honest,” raised his wreck of a straw hat and disappeared to be
seen no more.
Morning found us in a long town on a shelf-edge overhanging a great
tumbled valley, still a mile above sea-level, again facing the problem
of how to make our baggage get up and walk. When we had tramped a hot
and stony half-day without getting a yard further on our journey, we
returned to the hotel. Hays stretched out on—and over—his bed and drew
out his faithful Ramsey, bent on drowning his worldly troubles in study.
The first sentence that stepped forth from the page, inviting
translation into Spanish, asserted:
“In South America are many arid regions through which travel and the
transportation of baggage is difficult.”
Yet there are those who hold that text-books are not closely related to
practical life!
Well on in the day, however, we did get two feeble youths to agree to
carry a suitcase each to Jirardot for $180 and third-class fare back to
La Mesa. At this rate we could soon have better afforded to build a
railroad. Indeed, we had already reduced to an absurdity the experiment
of trying to mix the tramp and the gentleman. “A sahib,” said Kim, “is
always tied to his baggage.” It dominates every movement and is, after
all, of scant value in proportion to the burden it imposes. Hire a
carrier and he is always intruding upon your dreams and meditations, and
with all the expense and trouble no article of the pack can you lay
hands on during all the day’s tramp. Moreover, I am not of that kidney
that can make a beast of burden of my fellow-man. I soon found that a
cargador toiling under my load behind me made me far more weary than to
carry it myself. We decided to revert to type at the next halt and play
the “sahib” no longer.
The road, now chiefly _deshecho_ (“unmade”), descended swiftly into the
genuine tropics and the next afternoon we sweated into Jirardot on the
Magdalena, a month from the day we had left it to ascend to Bogotá. For
all our resolutions, however, neither of us contemplated with pleasure
the prospect of turning ourselves into pack-animals. We set afoot word
that we would pay a high monthly wage to any lad with a stout back and
no particular grade of intelligence who would consent to leave home. But
the youths of Jirardot were even less ambitious than those of the
capital. We set a time limit, advanced it, and at last fell upon our
possessions with the rage of despair. What we did not succeed in
throwing away we made into two bundles of the maximum weight allowed by
parcel-post and sent them down the Magdalena to Panama and Quito. We
were forced to sacrifice even the “One-Volume Library,” which did not
matter, for we had found it more convenient to buy native novels and
toss them away leaf by leaf, thus daily reducing our load. Moreover, we
had resolved to read thenceforth only the literature of the country in
which we were traveling. Even then there swung from our shoulders some
fifteen pounds each, besides the awkward developing-tank filled with
films and chemicals with which we alternately burdened ourselves, when
we crossed the little toll-bridge over the Magdalena and, leaving the
department of Cundinamarca behind, struck off into that of Tolima.
[Illustration:
Approaching the Central Cordillera of the Andes. A typical Andean
_camino real_, or “royal highway,” with a pack-train bound for the
capital]
An extensive plain, half desert with drought now, blazing hot and sandy,
spread far away before us. At first, mud huts were frequent, and many
country people passed driving drooping donkeys. Curs abounded. Here and
there a leper, squatted beside the trail, languidly held out his
supplicating stumps. Everywhere were the rock-hard hills of termite
“ants,” sharp-pointed as the volcanoes of Guatemala, while trains of
stinging red ones crossed the road at frequent intervals. Fields of
tobacco and corn stood shriveled beneath the unclouded sun; troops of
horses and mules laden with the narcotic weed, rolled into _cigarros de
Ambalema_ and wrapped in dry plantain-leaves, shuffled past in the dust
before their shrieking and whistling arrieros, bound for Jirardot and
modern transportation. The _camino real_, still a “royal highway” in
spite of its condition, passed now and then through clumsy swinging
gates that marked the limits of otherwise unbounded haciendas. We met
several haughty horsemen in ruanas and the conventional wealth of
accoutrement, and once a cavalcade of men and women, the latter lurching
uncomfortably back and forth on their high side-saddles. The half-Indian
peon dog-trotting behind them carried on his back a large chair with a
sheet over it, only the squalling that accompanied him suggesting what
it concealed. The caste system was noticeable even here on the broad
plain. When we had carriers behind us, natives afoot raised their hats
and horsemen gave us friendly greetings. Now, with our possessions on
our own backs, we received only frozen stares, except from an occasional
peon who grunted at us as equals. A few miles beyond the Magdalena we
came to the parting of the ways. One sandy trail led south to Neiva and
Popayán; the other, with which we swung to the right, struck off for
Ibagué and the Quindío pass over the Central Cordillera of the Andes. We
took this longer route to Quito that we might traverse the great Cauca
valley.
The pedometer registered a mere ten miles when we halted at an adobe hut
that to the natives was a “very fine posada.” A bedraggled old woman
pottered nearly two hours over a stick fire in the back yard before she
brought us two fried eggs and a small dish of fried plantains, as
succulent as wooden chips. Our “bed” she prepared by throwing a reed mat
on the hardest earth floor known to geography, and by no means as level
as the surrounding plain. My shoes and leggings did poor service as
pillow, and Hays charged Ramsey with lack of foresight in not binding
his grammar in upholstered plush. We were awakened from the first nap by
the hubbub of a group of fellow-travelers, nearly all women, who piled
their bundles in a corner and stretched themselves out on such
floor-space as we had left unoccupied. Yet the ethics of the road are
such in Spanish-America that we felt no misgiving in leaving our
unprotected possessions on a bench at the door.
With the first hint of dawn our fellow-lodgers stole silently away. Hays
was still abed when I struck off in a gorgeous morning across a sea of
light-brown bunch-grass, surrounded on all sides by far-off mountain
ranges. Behind, blue-purple with distance, the face of the plateau on
which sits Bogotá in its solitude, stretched wall-like across the
eastern horizon, high indeed, yet how slightly above the earth as a
whole. Ahead, the snow-clad rounded cone of Tolima stood sharply forth
above a nearer range that cut off its base, while a tumbled mountain
landscape beyond promised less monotonous if more laborious days to
come.
A native carpenter working on the new toll bridge over the brawling
Collo river assured us he would much rather be on the road with us, but
that “unfortunately,” he was contracted. For a time broken ground and
rocky foothills cut down our progress. Soon we were back again on a
level plain of vast extent, a bit higher than the preceding, a garden
spot in fertility, though largely uncultivated, with mountains on every
hand and Tolima close on the west. As I had already found in Honduras,
these upland plains, perfectly level, covered with grass but for a
threading of faint paths all following the same general direction,
afford the finest walking in the world. Never hard, always high enough
to catch a cool breeze, often shaded, generally winding enough to avoid
the monotony of a straight road, they make the journey like strolling
across an endless lawn or through some vast orchard. Now and then we
passed a tinkling mule-train, a horseman, or an Indian short-distance
pedestrian, but never a vehicle to disturb the reflective peace of a
perfect tramp. Every hour or two we drifted together, generally at a hut
selling _guarapo_, a half-fermented beverage of crude sugar and water,
tasting mildly like cider and extremely thirst-quenching. Every species
of pack-animal appeared,—mules, horses, donkeys, steers, bulls, women,
children, and even men, all toiling eastward. Often a dozen horses
marched in a sort of lockstep, the halter of each tied to the tail of
the animal ahead. Many had one or both ears cropped short, not by some
accident or gratuitous cruelty, as we at first imagined, but as a system
of branding. Now and then a shifting load brought an arriero running to
throw his ruana over the animal’s eyes, blind-folding it until it was
prepared to go on again. One mule-train of more than forty animals was
loaded with large boxes marked “Ausfuhrgut; Antwerpen, Colon,
Buenaventura.” German goods consumed in Bogotá often make this
roundabout journey,—to Panama, by ship to Buenaventura, by train over
the western range, and more than half way across Colombia on pack
animals, all to avoid the exorbitant rates of English-owned steamers up
the Magdalena.
The haciendas of this region, producing chiefly tobacco, are owned by
absentee landlords and managed by _mayordomos_. The peon laborers are
paid twenty cents a day with food. Arrieros on the road average fifty
cents a day and “find” themselves. A few of the latter paused to inquire
our destination and otherwise satisfy a fathomless curiosity. Our usual
answer,—“Al Cauca,” always brought forth a startled,—“Cómo! Por tierra?”
(By land?). In the Andes the expression is used with no thought of the
sea as an alternative, but as the opposite of “A caballo” (On
horseback). Occasionally we purposely astounded an inquirer by telling
the whole truth. After a speechless moment in which his face clouded
over with an unspoken accusation, he usually answered that though we
might perhaps fancy we were walking to Quito, we were misinformed, and
hurried on after his animals without even the customary “Adios.”
Now and then we met a lone arriero, “singing his troubles to the
solitude,” as a Colombian poet has it, and once I was overtaken by a man
who cried breathlessly as soon as his voice could reach me:
“Ha visto, señor, un muchachito con un burro vacío,” to which I could
only reply:
“No, I regret to have to tell you that I have not seen a small boy with
an empty donkey,” and watch the distracted fellow race on over the
horizon.
We early discovered the uselessness of asking countrymen of the Andes
that simple little question:
“How far is it to—?”
Ramsey himself could not have catalogued all the strange answers we
received, even in the first few days. A few of them ran:
“Perhaps an hour, señor.”
“Only an hour?”
“No more, señor, but because there is much cuesta (ascent or descent)
perhaps it is two or three hours.”
Or the reply came:
“How far? On foot or on horseback, señor?” Or, more often, “By sea or by
land?” Some, tossing their heads toward the sun, replied:
“At evening prayers you are there,” or shook their heads with: “No
alcanzan—you will not arrive, señores.”
“Todavía ’stá lejos—It is still far.”
“How far, more or less; an hour, or three days?”
“Between the two, señores.”
“Three leagues, then?”
“Ma-a-a-a-a-ás, señores,—Much more.”
“Sigue no más—Just keep on going; Al otro ladito—On the other little
side; A la vueltita no más—Around the little corner no more; Arribita—A
little above; No más bajita queda—Just down below it remains”—and so on
through all the gamut of misinformation; never a simple “So-many miles.”
Above all, it was fatal to ask a leading question. The misinformant was
sure to agree with us at all costs, evidently out of mere politeness.
One might fancy the ancient rulers of the Andes demanded an affirmative
answer from their subjects on penalty of death; and the supposition
would account for many of the stories of miraculous appearances, of
place names and the like, gathered by the Conquistadores. At best, we
were assured:
“No hay donde perderse—There is no place to lose yourselves”—and were
almost sure to strike, within ten minutes, a misleading fork in the
trail.
With fifteen miles behind us I slipped gratefully from under my awkward
thirty pounds before one of a cluster of thatched huts called “Hotel Mi
Casa,” on the earth floor of which two broken-legged cots were placed
for us. Water to drink was doled out grudgingly; washing was a luxury
none indulged in. Hays was busy consuming six home-made cigars, called
“tobacos comunes,” that had cost him a sum total of one cent. As we sat
before the hovel watching the sunset throw its reflections on the red
cliffs of the range behind us, the day went out like an extinguished
lamp and the stars came suddenly forth in striking brilliancy. The north
star of our home sky was now below the horizon, and many a long month
was due to pass before we should see it again.
[Illustration:
Hays, seated before the “Hotel Mi Casa” and behind one of his $5
cigars, watching the reflection of the sunset on the dull-red,
broken range we had climbed during a long, stiff day]
[Illustration:
A bit of the road by which we mounted to the Quindío pass over the
central range, with forests of the slender palms peculiar to the
region. The trail is more prone to pitch headlong up or down the
mountainside than to follow a flank in this orderly manner]
The plateau ahead was even vaster than it seemed. I had walked hours
next morning by one of those easy haphazard upland trails, and still it
lay endless before me. Clumps of short, squat trees flecked it with
shadows here and there, but for the most part it was bare alike of the
planting of nature or man. Cattle grazed on every hand, and mule-trains
went and came frequently. In every direction stood row upon row of
jagged mountain ranges, fading away into the haziest distance. They
seemed of a world wholly cut off from the whispering stillness of the
broad brown plain. Turning, I could see untold mile upon mile behind me.
The blue Central Cordillera that shut off the valley of the Cauca lay
piled into the sky ahead. Like a hair on a colored glass, I could make
out our sharply ascending trail of the days to come crawling upward
toward the Quindío.
On the rim of the mountain lap that holds Ibagué, spread about a bulking
church at the base of the first great buttresses of the chain, I came
upon Hays in the shade of a leper’s hut. Before the marks of his ailment
came upon him the outcast had climbed with his mules for many years back
and forth over the great barrier, and something like a tear glistened in
his eye as we turned our faces toward the land of his youth. The “Hotel
Paris,” in the town below, looked a century old with its quaint wooden
rejas of colonial days to peer out through—and also in at, as a
half-intoxicated ibagueño demonstrated by thrusting his face in upon us
while we were battling with the stains of travel. When I took him to
task, he answered wonderingly, “Why, every one does it, señor,” and
refused to take any hint short of a basin of water.
Ibagué, capital of the province of Tolima, claims 2300 “souls.” The
count takes much for granted. It is a peaceful, roomy little town on a
gentle, grassy slope where every resident has ample space to put up his
chalky little straw-roofed cottage, yet all toe the street line, as if
fearful of missing anything that might unexpectedly pass.
Square-cornered, with almost wholly one-story buildings, its _calles_
are atrociously cobbled, the few sidewalks worn perilously slippery and
barely wide enough for two feet at once. A stream of crystal-clear water
gurgles down each street through cobbled gutters, lulling the
travel-weary to sleep—and furnishing a convenient means of washing
photographic films. We drank less often, however, after we had strolled
up to the edge of the mountain and found three none-too-handsome ladies
bathing in the reservoir.
On a corner of the grass-grown plaza the nephews of Jorge Isaacs,
greatest of Colombian novelists, run a clothing store. But it was our
misfortune to find them out of town. On another corner I made my way up
an aged stone stairway of one of the rare two-story buildings of Ibagué
to the alcalde’s office. It was lined with dog-eared documents, all
hand-written, each batch marked with a year, before which lounged clerks
incessantly rolling cigarettes. When he had read our government paper in
a stage whisper, the youthful mayor at once put the town entirely at our
disposal. I suggested schools.
“Señor Ministro de Instrucción Pública!” he called out, with long,
oratorical cadences.
Instantly there tiptoed into the room a long, tremulous man of fifty,
almost shabbily dressed, though of course with what had once been a
white collar, with a pedagogical cast of countenance and a chin barely
an inch below his upper lip. He bowed low at the alcalde’s orders and
answered that the matter would be attended to at once—mañana.
Toward ten next morning the Minister of Public Instruction, who had
evidently laundered his collar during the night, left a long line of
people waiting and set off with me.
“They are only teachers, waiting for their appointments or salaries,” he
explained.
We halted before a large building. The Minister knocked meekly with his
cane on the heavy _zaguan_, the door to the patio, and was finally
admitted by a square-faced, muscular, unshaven priest, who listened to
our request at some length and at last led us to an older churchman,
suave, slender, outwardly effusive, and of that perfectly polished
exterior that marks the Jesuit. He was also French. When time enough had
elapsed to give warning of our coming, he led the way into a room of
first-grade pupils,—all boys of six or seven, except two full-grown
Indian youths. An exceedingly young priest, giving an excellent
imitation of surprise at our appearance, snapped a sort of wooden
hand-clapper, and the entire class rose to their feet bowing profoundly.
Some other formality was imminent when I begged the teacher to go on
with the lesson just as if I were not there. He exchanged a glance with
his superior at this extraordinary gringo request, then lined the class
up in military ranks and set them to reading aloud. The theme was
strictly religious in nature and most of the words of four or five
syllables. As often as the clapper sounded, the boys changed to “next”
and read with such fluency that only the tailend of a phrase here and
there was intelligible. The priest made no corrections or criticisms
whatever, “taught,” indeed, as he might have turned a hurdy-gurdy
handle. I fancied the pupils extraordinarily well-trained—until I
strolled down the room, to the evident horror of the adults, and noted
that almost none of them had the book open at the page they were
“reading.”
In a higher-grade room I was asked to choose the lesson, and suggested
geography. A youth passed a pointer swiftly over a wall-map, spinning
off a description, learned by rote, of the principal cities, the
youthful priest lifting him back on the track whenever he forgot the
exact language of the original and came to a wordless halt. Little
helpful hints accompanied each question. A boy stood before the map of
Colombia, on which the capital was printed in enormous letters.
“What city did Quesada found in 1538?” asked the priest.
Blank silence from the boy.
The priest: “Bo—bogo—”
“Bogotá!” shouted the boy.
My fellow-visitors smiled complacently at his wisdom.
“And what place is this?” quizzed the teacher, pointing to a strip of
land that curved like a tail up into a corner of the map, “Pa—Pana—”
“Panamá” shrieked the boy, “A province of Colombia which is now in
rebellion. The....”
He was evidently going on with still more startling information when the
all but imperceptible twitching of an eye of the Jesuit superior turned
the pointer to other climes.
The teacher never lost an opportunity to give a religious twist to the
proceedings. A boy whose pointer hovered over the Mediterranean mumbled:
“And another of the cities is Nicea....”
“Ah,” cried the priest, “And what celebrated event in the history of
mankind took place in Nicea?”
“The great Council of the Church in which ...” began the youth, and
rattled on as glibly as if he had been there in person.
When we had turned out into the street, the shabby little Ministro
became confidential, explaining that the colegio toward which we were
headed had once held a large student body, “but now, señor, owing to
political changes....”
“Before the priests interfered I had an excellent experienced normal
graduate in charge of that first class,” he sighed as we parted, “and
now we have that boy in a cassock. Bah!”
We left Ibagué by taking the wrong road and had to crawl for miles along
the steep bank of a mountain stream almost back to town before we were
set right. Then began one of the greatest climbs of our joint careers.
Round and round, in intoxicated zigzags, went the trail, as if dizzy at
the task before it, down into several gullies until at last, finding no
other means of escape, it took to clambering laboriously upward. At
first the weather was hot, then gradually cooled as far-reaching views
of Ibagué and its surroundings spread out below us. The buttresses of
the range ahead were enormous, as if nature, planning to build here such
a mountain chain as never before, had started the outcropping supports
on her most gigantic scale. Toward nine I realized that I was out of the
sunshine and no longer sweating, despite the swiftness of the ascent; at
ten I paused to pick wild strawberries along the way. It did not seem
possible to mount much further, for there was nothing higher visible.
But like Jack of the Beanstalk, I climbed on entirely out of sight—into
the clouds that wholly shut off the world below. At noon, when I
stretched out on a swift slope to read a few pages of “María,” immense
reaches of mountains and cloud-stenciled valleys, half-hidden by masses
of snow-white mist, like drapery that concealed yet revealed their
plump, feminine forms, lay everywhere below and about me. Over all the
tumbled view were scattered little huts of mountaineers, each in a
setting it seemed possible to have reached only on wings.
The hovel where we planned to spend the night refused us posada, and, as
dusk fell, we faced an all but perpendicular mountain wall, up the
stony, half-wooded face of which the trail staggered. The few groups of
men we met carried ancient rifles loosely, as if constantly ready for
action. At dark I toiled to a summit to find Hays standing before a mud
_rancho_ arguing with the crude mountaineers who would have sent us on
into the night with the threadbare Spanish prevarication, “Only a little
further on there is another house all ready to receive you.” In its
utter lack of comfort the place resembled the mountain hamlets of
northwestern Spain. The people were shy, yet, once won over,
kind-hearted. “There is no bed,” they explained, “but there is perhaps a
leather you can sleep on.” By and by the woman called us into the
kitchen for a bowl of _caldo_, hot water with chunks of potato and an
egg dropped in it, served with coarse corn-bread. Then the man led the
way into a cell made entirely of mud, even to the bench along the wall,
on which he laid a hairy, sun-dried cowhide. Fortunately he returned a
little later with several aged gunny-sacks, a tiny girl lighting the way
with a rope-like native candle, or we should not have slept even the bit
we did.
Streaks of pale day were beginning to steal through the chinks in our
chamber when the woman appeared with black coffee and a stony corn
biscuit, and we were off for another day of stiff ups and downs.
Stalking down a knee-breaking descent, I heard a shout of astonishment
from Hays ahead. What looked like an ordinary mountain stream cut across
the trail at the bottom of a sharp little gully. But the water, coming
from the bowels of Tolima that stood somewhere above us in the mists of
morning, was almost hot. We had both been on the road in many a clime,
but never before where nature was kind enough to heat a morning bath for
us. We lost no time in stripping for a luxury rare to the traveler in
Colombia.
Not far beyond we came to the edge of the valley of the Toche. Away
below, like a miniature painting, reposed a peaceful little vale wholly
shut in by sheer mountain walls, a thread-like stream meandering the
length of it. It took us an hour to make the swift, stony descent. Not
all get down so safely, as the skeletons of a horse and a mule, their
shoes still on, testified. The valley floor, watered by the
rock-broiling stream, was a fertile patch of earth, and the steep
mountain flanks were planted far up with little perpendicular patches of
corn. All the scene seemed as far removed from the wide world as if on
another sphere.
A rocky trail climbed abruptly up out of the valley again from the
further end, higher than ever, past rare houses, built of the red boards
of a tree called _cedro_, from the doors of which stared shy,
half-friendly people in bedraggled tatters. The Quindío pass lies only
11,440 feet above the sea, but that by no means represents the climbing
necessary to surmount the Central Cordillera of the Andes. What is so
called is really a long series of ranges, and no sooner did the road
reach some lofty summit than it dived as swiftly and roughly down again.
It was not a planned road, like the highways of the Alps, but one grown
up of itself. A jaguar once wandered over the Cordillera, a man
followed, and to-day the route holds to the same course. Toiling like
draft-animals, gasping for breath in the rarefied air, we fancied a
score of times that we had reached the summit, only to see the trail
take another switchback and disclose the perfidious fact that it had
found another ridge to surmount.
A few hundred feet above the Toche began clumps, then entire forests of
a tall, slender wax-palm, a species named by Humboldt on his journey
over the Quindío. Having only a tuft of branches at the top, these were
often torn off by the winds that rage down through the gullies, leaving
a thing as unromantic as a telegraph-pole. The valley below opened out
until half a world, dull-brown with a tinge of green, lay below and
around us. Words are hopelessly inadequate to describe this bird’s eye
view of range upon range, climbing pell-mell one over the other, as if
in terror to escape some savage pursuer, and fading away into the
dimmest misty-blue distance.
The sun was low when we came out on as far-reaching a view ahead and saw
the morrow’s task laid out before us in the form of a thread-like road
twisting away out of sight over a great mountain barrier draped in
clouds, the “puro Quindío,” or chief range, at last. As night descended,
we entered “Volcancito,” an unusually large adobe building on a bleak
slope. The dining-room, which was also the back corredor, was overrun by
a large family, chiefly small girls, each in a single, thin, knee-high
cotton garment, despite the wintry mountain air. Chickens, dogs, and
gaunt, self-assertive pigs wandered everywhere without restraint. In a
corner slouched a woman sewing garments too small for the smallest child
in sight. Our plea for lodging she treated with scorn. “Volcancito” was
a posada, not a hotel, the difference between the two in Spanish-America
being that in a hotel the traveler is permitted to expect certain
conveniences while in a posada he accepts with smiling gratitude
whatever fortune chooses to furnish him.
“We have only two guest rooms,” snapped the woman, when we persisted, as
if the mere giving of the information was an unusual favor. “One this
señor has with his wife and baby. The other belongs to the arrieros.”
The successful guest was an actor on his way from the Cauca to Bogotá, a
handsome fellow much over-dressed for such a journey, with a strikingly
beautiful young wife, as we noted at a glance through the door.
“But there are five rooms on this side of the house,” I suggested.
“Family rooms,” shot back the woman.
“And this little room in the corner?”
“Belongs to the servant,” she mumbled, projecting her lips toward a
slatternly young female who was at that moment pursuing a thieving pig
from the dungeon-like kitchen.
“Anything will do,” sighed Hays, gazing abstractedly after the servant.
But the landlady was in no mood for crude jokes.
“There is a fine house with rooms and beds just four cuadros on,” she
lied, after a long silence. Fortunately this was by no means my first
experience with the favorite trick of Spanish-speaking races to be rid
of importunate guests, or we might have tramped all night on the
mountain top in a cold as penetrating as that of January in our own
land. I slipped surreptitiously from under my pack, assuming the
ingratiating manner that is the last resort with the apathetic people of
the Andes. We were resolved to spend the night there, though it be in
walking the floor. Nothing is more fatal than to appear anxious in such
situations, however, and we affected indifference and a pretense of
having accepted her verdict.
What fine, red-cheeked little girls she had, so pretty and healthy.
(Indeed, they looked like Irish children). Was she not from the Cauca?
She was. Ah, the magnificent Cauca, the most beautiful.... She was soon
lost in a panegyric of her native valley, as she shuffled from kitchen
to sewing-machine and back again.
“Magnificent, indeed,” I agreed, “and in only a day or two we shall be
there. So what matters a night of freezing in the mountains? By the way,
la señora can perhaps sell us a bit of coffee and a bite to eat before
we set out to tramp all night?”
She grunted assent and a half-hour later we were seated before a
plentiful, if not epicurean, meal. Before we had finished it, she
remarked casually that we might “arrange ourselves” in the room with the
arrieros. The mule-driver is seldom a pleasant bed-fellow, but compared
with a night out of doors, probably with rain, at more than two miles
above sea-level, any arrangement was welcome.
We fancied lodging had first been refused us because we were foreigners.
Soon after supper we were undeceived. Out of the darkness came the sound
of horse’s hoofs, and as it ceased there burst in upon us a handsome
young Colombian, of somewhat dissolute features, in the ruana, false
trouser-legs, ringing cartwheel spurs, and the other hundred and one
details of equipment the rules of society require of a Colombian of
“gente decente” rank who travels ahorse. He gave greeting in the
explosive speech of his class and requested lodging.
“_No hay_,” answered the woman, in the identical cold monotone she had
used toward us.
The newcomer began dancing on air, waving his ladylike hands, on which
gleamed several rings, above him. Eloquence worthy of a world congress
poured from his lips; his eyes seemed to spurt fire.
“_No hay_,” repeated the landlady, in the same dead voice.
“But señora, it is imperative. I have a lady with me! Anything will
do—such as these rooms.”
“Family rooms,” snapped the caucana, as if reciting a learned dialogue.
“But your guest rooms?”
“One this señor has with his wife and baby. The other belongs to the
arrieros—and also,” jerking her head slightly toward us, “to these two
caballeros.”
“But what am I to do?” shrieked the Colombian, “and a lady with me?”
The woman muttered a “Quién sabe” with a careless shrug of the shoulders
and continued her sewing without looking up. After a last vain oration
the Colombian dashed off angrily, his horseback garments standing out at
excited angles, and rode away into the night the way we had come, toward
better luck perhaps among the huts at the bottom of the valley.
Bedtime comes at about seven in these wintry, fireless, lightless
regions. The landlady, now thoroughly mollified, broke off some story of
the wonders of the Cauca to say:
“Next to the room of the arrieros is a harness-room where you can sleep
alone. Many ingleses—all light-haired foreigners are “Englishmen” to the
rural Colombian—have slept in it.”
Why had she not offered us this upon our arrival? Lack of confidence,
probably, common to these simple people as is the good-heartedness that
can be unearthed by a few simple wiles and flatteries. The dungeon-like
room was narrow, but long and high, strewn with the _aparejo_ of mules
and the crude implements of husbandry, with harnesses, pack-saddles and
a chaos of trappings, but with space left to spread on the earth floor
several tar-cloth wrappings of mule-loads. Moreover, the woman sent us a
blanket. Later a boy entered carrying a candle and a little round hard
pillow which he delivered with a speech apologetic with diminutives,
after the fashion of the country people of the Andes, “Aquí tienen
u’te’es una almohadita para poner la cabecita.”
[Illustration:
On the western side of the Central Cordillera the trail drops quickly
down into the tropics again, here and there through lanes of immense
fern-like bamboos. Hays, in the middle distance, has his turn at
carrying the developing-tank]
[Illustration:
The first days on the road; showing how I would have traveled by
choice, in contrast to later illustrations of how I did travel by
necessity]
For all these unexpected luxuries, I can hardly say we slept well.
Before an hour had passed, a polar winter began to creep up through the
earth floor, through the tar-cloth, through our flesh and bones, and
what with the aching of hips and other salient points that fitted the
uneven earth poorly, the night passed in an endless series of
dream-fights against death in the polar seas. As my legs grew cold
beyond endurance, I found a pair of _zamarras_, the false trouser-legs
of impervious cloth worn by horsemen of the region. But my glee quickly
evaporated, for they proved to be designed for a half-grown boy.
Humboldt spent ten days in passing the Quindío, we sincerely hoped he
had been better supplied with blankets, even though his journey was in
the summer season.
For once we felt no anger when a hoarse rooster at last greeted the
first graying of the darkness. The entire night had been a
half-conscious battle for the _cobija_ that had covered us alternately.
With creaking legs I stepped out into the icy dawn, and washed in a wind
that cut through me as a rapier through a man of straw. It was still
gray-black, and vast seas of half-seen mist lay in the bottomless chasms
roundabout. Far away to the east, where the dawn and the warmth come
from, was a triangular patch of sky, low down between two ranges and
roofed with black clouds, in which the brilliant sunshine of the _tierra
caliente_ was already blazing red. One of the bravest acts of my life
was the stripping and changing to road garb, after which we joined the
family and our fellow-guests, huddled under shawls and blankets, with
folds of woolen cloth about their throats and over their noses. The
landlady, still abed, issued orders from within to her bare-legged girls
and the servant. One of these threw into a pot of boiling water a
mud-ball of native chocolate, swirled the mess with a stick, and served
it to us with a dough-cake mixture of mashed corn and rice. It was no
homeopathic food, but none lasts long in this thin, exhilarating air,
while climbing swift mountain flanks. When we inquired for our bill, the
woman called out that we owed twenty cents each, and bade us Godspeed to
her beloved Cauca.
The road was heavy and slippery with the rain that had fallen during the
night; the air still sharp and penetrating. We had all but spent the
night on the summit of the Quindío, for the highest point was but three
miles beyond, though three miles of climbing without respite. Most of
the world was shut off by great cloud-banks, out of which came
frequently the bawling of arrieros cursing their weary animals upward.
Now and then we stopped on knolls above the trail to watch these Andean
freight-trains pass. Many of the pack-animals were bulls and steers, of
slight strength as such compared to the horse or mule, but the surest,
if slowest, cargo-beast in muddy going. The arrieros, almost without
exception, wore as ruanas what had once been United States mail-sacks,
the stripes and lettering still clear upon them.
There were several ridges so nearly alike in altitude that the exact
summit might easily have been in dispute; but at last we reached the
dividing line between the departments of Tolima and the Cauca, marked
with a weather-blackened post planted roundabout with scores of little
twig crosses set up by pious arrieros and travelers. We were so
completely surrounded by impenetrable swirling mist that we could see
nothing whatever but the patch of cold, wet ground underfoot, a few
dismal dripping bushes, and here and there a dishevelled shivering
flower of some hardy species. Not a glimpse was to be had of snow-clad
Tolima that must lie piled into the mist somewhere close at hand. It was
the highest either of us had ever been in the world. While we
appreciated the eminence, it was no place for men gifted with profane
vocabularies to linger, and we were soon legging it down the western
slope out of Cloudland.