The foregoing glimpse of Berlin which Humboldt's view of his native city affords is not without interest to-day, when the savagery of the German character—a curious development of that earlier obscure philosophy—has been brought so prominently before the world and has brought Germany to moral ruin, and what is in part financial ruin and the loss of her colonies.
As has been said, methods of travel here are less inviting to the ordinary tourist than the well-prepared fields of the Old World. Its hotels—apart, perhaps, from a few here and there—are primitive, its railways are conducted for commercial purposes, there are no planned centres of delight and ease. No roads traverse the countryside whereon the motor-tourist may spend his hours. Between the primitive mule-trail or the bypath which the simple Indian has found sufficient for his purposes since the world began, and the railway, there is no via media. The coaching days of England never had their counterpart in Spanish America. The caballero, the horseman-gentleman, transplanted from old Spain, and all he represented embodied, and still embodies, the philosophy of the road. Here no one may walk the countryside, except the necessitous Indian. The dust would smother him, the naked rocks would cut his feet, he would lose caste for being on foot. No "local" botanist, antiquarian, nature-lover sallies forth from Spanish-American villages. The country squire is unknown, the landed estate is a hacienda, a hive of peones, dependent body and soul on the will of their masters. There are no week-end cottages; the "picnic," though its English name is not unknown, is a rare event. Sport, where it exists, is an institution engrafted from abroad.
Woman here is much enclosed in the seclusion of her home, save when she ventures to the temple and the priestly Mass, or to well-chaperoned and formal events—she dare not traverse the road alone, and, it may be said, with sufficient reason! The Spanish American youth, with his patent leather shoes and breadth of cuff and collar, loves not to leave the easy pavements of his towns, or their bars and cafés, for the unknown world beyond, whose beginning is the squalid Indian quarter which fringes the place around—unless indeed he may have turned revolutionist, a phase which does not usually take place much before middle age, when the Latin American generally takes on his serious political habit. Then indeed he must take to the road, unless a fortunate golpe de estado[3] shall complete the uprising within the city plaza.
The inland method of travel is the horse or mule: the saddle. Unfortunately the horse is not very happy here. In the Day of Judgment, if the beasts of the field ever bear witness against man, the horse will have a severe indictment to bring against the Spanish American people. He and his relative the mule have nowhere perhaps been so dreadfully ill-treated as in these lands of mountains and deserts. In Mexico we see him ridden to death by the callous vaquero; his thin and starving body passing like a swift shadow across the wilderness under the stimulus of enormous spurs. Or he is gored to death in the bull-ring. In South America he climbs, with enormous loads, the dizzy ridges of the Andes, under the blows and curses of the arriero, and, stumbling over the precipice, finds rest at times a thousand feet below, where his mummified carcass remains a warning to his kind. Or he passes his life on high uplands where pasture is unknown: his fodder a little dry straw.
The fact is that the Spanish American lands, in great part, did not seem fitted by nature for the equine race, and there was no horse in America before the Europeans introduced the animal there. There was nothing but the llama, the friend of the Indian, which is not ridden, but bears a small burden. The Indian himself at first displayed great terror of the horse (especially with an armoured Iberian on its back). He himself was accustomed to carrying his burdens. When he was told to take a horse he said: "No, horses get tired; we do not." When a Spaniard rode across the Isthmus of Panama upon a jackass he met some Indians, and the animal brayed, and the Indians fell down in terror and offered up their gold ornaments!
Yet the Latin Americans are perhaps the most expert of horsemen, and train and manage their steeds as no one else can.
Spanish America is not a land for the huntsman, not a land of big game. Its zoology is stinted. The lion and the tiger are represented only by some almost insignificant felines, and the other huge quadrupeds of the sportsman's rifle came not to being in the New World, or deserted it by now fallen land bridges before their skilled tormentor appeared upon the earth. There is, relatively, but little game, and the traveller who might think to subsist upon it in his passage through the wilds will do well to ponder the experience of the early Conquistadores, some of which have been set down briefly in these pages.
Thus far the picture of travel here. There are phases on the other side to be considered. It is the explorer, the pioneer, who will find material for his desires in these lands. The geographer, the antiquarian, the naturalist, the ethnologist has before him a field which is the equal of any region, and the engineer, that most practical and valuable of travellers, has work before him in this score of independent states whose magnitude has, so far, no limit.