Chapter 13

CHIROLOGICAL COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIAInspiration Point,Echo Park,Los Angeles,Cal. U. S. A.

CHIROLOGICAL COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA

Inspiration Point,Echo Park,Los Angeles,Cal. U. S. A.

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. Bymeans 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.

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 mightforget 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 StreetNew York, U. S. A.Pay to the order of theChirological College ofLos Angeles, Cal.,the sum of six dollars ($6).Baron Münchausen.

The Fake Bank,920 West 110th StreetNew York, U. S. A.Pay to the order of theChirological College ofLos Angeles, Cal.,the sum of six dollars ($6).

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 thetoquillaplant, 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, calledmocora, 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 fierycaña, 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 ambitiousbegin 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. Totheir makers they are known simply as “hats,” or, if it is necessary to specify, assombreros de paja(straw hats), orsombreros 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 ofjipijapa, 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 hundredfuerteshere, 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 firstpastusos, 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.

An Indian woman weavingteque-tequeor native cloth, by the same method used before the Conquest

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. AnAmerican 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 itstrapiche, 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 andhorsemen 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 foreststhrough 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 decorouslyby 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 himselflocked 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 islandport 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 oftiples, 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, andquinoa. 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, orpan 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 almostprohibitive. 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 ofmediosand, 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 thereal—the wordcentavodisappears 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 therealis 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 greatmontaña, 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 appearto 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, theallco, 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 themconejos de India—“rabbits of India.” To the natives they were, and still are, known ascui(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 ofmankind. Several “posadas de peligrinos,” crude copies of thehospicesof 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 haveguessed that he had crossed an international boundary. In thecuartelwere 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 thejefe 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 ofpáramos, 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 theachupalla, 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 thecestaof the Spanishpelotaplayer, 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.

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