CHAPTER 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.

[Illustration:

The market-place of Cajibío, in the highlands of Popayán. In the

right-center is the village priest, with a pole attached to a bag

under his arm, demanding contributions of each hawker. Though the

region is decidedly cold at night or in the shade, the unclouded sun

burns the skin quickly, hence the woven-reed sunshades]

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.

[Illustration:

Crossing the Cauca River with a pack-train by one of the typical

“ferries” of the Andes]

[Illustration:

A village of the mountainous region south of Popayán]

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.

[Illustration:

An Indian woman weaving _teque-teque_ or native cloth, by the same

method used before the Conquest]

[Illustration:

Hays, less considerable weight, and a fellow-roadster]

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.

[Illustration:

Quito lies in a pocket of the Andes, at the foot of Pichincha, more

than 10,000 feet above sea level]

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.