A typical Indian hut on the outskirts of Bogotá
A typical Indian hut on the outskirts of Bogotá
A typical Indian hut on the outskirts of Bogotá
Indian girls and women are the chief dray-horses of the Colombian capital
Indian girls and women are the chief dray-horses of the Colombian capital
Indian girls and women are the chief dray-horses of the Colombian capital
Yet we could not but wonder why, once they had reached this lofty plateau, the discoverers had not halted and built their city, instead of marching far back across it to the foot of the enclosing range. A full thirty-five miles the train fled across thesabana, an immense plain in appearance like one of our north in early April, intersected here and there by barbed-wire fences. Broad yellow fields of mustard appeared, spread, and disappeared behind us. Great droves of cattle frisked about in the autumn air as if to keep warm. Well-built country dwellings flashed by, stony and bare in setting, but embellished with huge paintings of landscapes on the walls under the veranda roofs. The sun had barely smiled upon us since noon. Now as the day declined I began to grow cold, bitter cold, colder than I had been since descending from the Mexican plateau seven months before, while Hays’ hat brim shook with his shivering. Our fellow-passengers looked like summer excursionists unexpectedly caught in straw hats by grim, relentless winter. Then as evening descended the plain came abruptly to an end, and at the very foot of a forbidding black mountain range spread a cold, smokeless city of bulking domes and towers. We had reached at last, after eighteen days of travel, the most isolated of South American capitals.