CHAPTER VDOWN 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 amachete, 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 overlomasand 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 behindus. 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 fivebilleteseach 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 ofchicha fuertebefore facing the notorioussubida de Aguacheon 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 metfull-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 amochilaon 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 beingon topof the world, with the sun just out of sight around the curve of the earth. Fires, evidently of Indians burning off theirchacras, 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 musingpopayanejo, 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 fourcuadrasin 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 huesoencuentra,” and we stumbled finally upon a billiard-room in which several young bloods of the town were upholding their reputation as night-hawks. OneSeñorFulano, 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 favoritepopayanejopastime 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 warlikecaciquenamed 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 makingthe 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 SapientaeTimor Domini”

“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, themañanahabit prevails,—in that it is always thenextplace that has what you are looking for. The mortality of white ones being high on Andean trails, I entered atiendato 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?Theseñorwishes—er—ah—what was it theseñorrequested?”

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 shopkeeperturned 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 themen 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 youen 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 theseñoroffers 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 andtertuliar(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 wasal 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 foundcocaleaves 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 theAndes, 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 thealcalde, 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 similarlyengaged. 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 acuchillo, 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 wepaused 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 $50billetein 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 stonybuttresses 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.

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. Thealcaldewas 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 aroundwere 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 thincuchillobetween 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. Theestanquillohad no lack ofaguardiente, 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 actingalcaldespent 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-alcaldehad 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 MeestaresFrunk 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 ofsalteadores, 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 asfuertes, 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 tworealesbecause 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.

Crossing the Cauca River with a pack-train by one of the typical “ferries” of the Andes

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 itsown 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 myoficina 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, keyand 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 toestranjerosbecause 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:

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