As we pushed off, the captain announced that we had wood enough to last until the following noon. One would have fancied we had enough to last to the seventh circle and back. Here we could still “march” all night, for the river was deep in spite of its great width. As we sat in solitary glory on the upper deck watching the blood-red moon come up out of the jungle, Hays suddenly broke off a dissertation on the philosophy of life of Marcus Aurelius to exclaim:
“We ought to swear off on this. If we’re going to walk along the top of the Andes we’ll need all the chest expansion we’ve got,” and suiting the action to the word, he chucked his half-smoked $5 cigar overboard. It was not until late next morning that I saw him light the next one.
“But I thought you’d sworn off?” I reminded him.
“That’s the great value of resolutions,” he answered, “you make them to break them and feel the genuine freedom of life. But to-morrow I’ll swear off in earnest”—which he did, almost daily as long as the journey lasted. Meanwhile, my birthday making a good date for it, I gave up the habit definitely myself, none too sure of its effect in the lofty altitudes before us.
We moved at about the speed of a log-raft towed by a sunfish. Whenever there was danger of our making a reasonable Colombian distance the whistle was sure to sound and we drifted inshore to tie up for hours before another woodpile. Sometimes the flat, disappointing banks of the river were sheer for miles, with unbroken stretches of swamp grass six feet high so dense it did not seem that a snake could have wormed its way through it. The cerulean blue skies were equal to any of Italy, the light clouds wandering lazily across them sometimes forming in battle array on the rim of the horizon. Here and there were considerable fields of sugarcane about a thatched village; but the vast fertile territory was almost entirely virgin and uncleared. One morning a cry of “Caimán!” called attention to a point of sand on which lay a score of alligators, most of which slid sluggishly off into the stream as we approached. Thereafter we had only to glance along the banks to be almost sure of seeing several.
For some days Hays and I had made up the deck passenger list unassisted, sitting through our meals in dignified silence with some half-dozen waiters to miswait on us—when we could get their attention—headed by the chief steward, who never tired of boasting that he had once made cigars in the shadow of Ancon police station. His underlings received six dollars a month, such food as they could forage, and the right to wear what the passage of years had left of misfit cotton uniforms, to be turned in at the end of the trip. They were obliged to pay for all breakages, and life was indeed slender with only two economical gringos as passengers. The arrival of a new pasajero was in consequence always an exciting event. Five days up, in the region known as the Opón country, there appeared on board a native trapper of wild animals, who had been shot through the face by an arrow of the savage Opones, but had performed the rare feat of making his escape. Colombia includes within her confines several tribes of Indians not only uninfluenced by the government, but without an inkling of its existence. The Opones live far back along the tributaries of the Magdalena, descending them only in certain seasons, and attacking any human beings they come upon. Armed with a species of arch-bow, they shoot an enormous arrow with a point of iron-hard black palm barbed both ways, that can neither be pushed through nor pulled out of the body of the victim. The arrow the trapper brought with him could barely be forced into his long trunk after being broken in two, and five cruel barbs still remained after several others had been cut off and left in the body of his former companion. A few weeks before, he reported, a harmless fellow fishing somewhat back from the main river had been made the veritable pincushion of thirty-two such arrows. The trapper had it that the Opones were cannibals, asserting that a recent expedition into the Opón country had found a Colombian woman of good family who was being fattened in a cage of bamboo, but whom the savages had not yet eaten because of a suspicious sore on her leg.
Gradually low shadowy mountains began to appear in the far blue distance, with suggestions of higher ones in the clouds behind them. On the seventh day a long rugged chain, the Sierra de Peraja in the Province of Santander, had grown so near that separate peaks and suggestions of villages could be picked out of the sunlit distance. Next morning we were half surrounded by deep blue ranges, and the banks were broad natural meadows with hundreds of cattle knee-deep in rich green grass. Magnificent spreading trees now stood out against the sky and ranges. The nights had grown so cool that we took to sleeping in our “stateroom”—with barely room enough left to sneeze when our cots had been dragged in. Here we began to go aground frequently, for the tendency of the Magdalena is to spread out more and more as her sandy banks keep falling into the river. At our speed the experience was hardly hair-raising, and generally in the course of a few hours the “Alicia” worked herself loose again. There were almost no other water craft, except an occasional canoa, a dug-out log crawling along the extreme lower edge of the forest wall. Now and then we passed large balsas, rafts of hundreds of immense cedar logs, with the Colombian flag at the prow and the crew camped aft with mat beds, primitive kitchens, and sometimes their women and a numerous progeny. Great trees, which the captain called ceibas, rose slim and clear more than a hundred feet, to end in a parasol tuft of branches. Frequently a flock of parrakeets screamed noisily by overhead. In places we crawled along between sheer sand banks, gigantic trees of the dense forest hanging on the brink of miniature Culebra slides as the river washed under them.
Higher still the stream grew so shallow that we could “march” only by day, anchoring at dark. One night we tied up to the bank on an inner curve of the river, where the forest cut off the breeze completely and left us to toss in our cots until dawn. Its first glimmer of light showed that we had reached Pureto Berrío, where a little narrow-gage starts—I use the word advisedly, for it never gets there—for Medellín, second city of Colombia. The “port” itself suspended whatever it was in the habit of doing to stare at us in long silent rows from the doorways. Its male population not only wore no shirt but did not even trouble to conceal that fact by buttoning its tattered sun-bleached jacket. All the natives seemed obsessed with the notion that, as gringos, we could not speak Spanish. As often as we addressed one, though our Castilian vocabulary was as ample and our pronunciation far less slovenly than his own, he refused to believe his senses until the sensation had been several times repeated.
We were off again by noon. It had been raining in the highlands beyond and the visibly rising river was half covered with patches of thick scum. Now and then it bore by on its swift silent surface a fragment of forest snatched from somewhere above. We were now some hundreds of feet above sea-level, and the forest air was fragrant and unfevered. All day long nothing but forest trailed by. We passed timber enough in a week to supply the world for a century and rich soil enough to feed a large section of it permanently. But only very rarely did a little bamboo hut, roofed with leaves, dot the monotony of virgin nature. The river had narrowed down to a placid powerful stream; the weather was peerless, though an almost invisible gnat began to make life less motionless.
In the purple gloaming a forest-built village of some size stood out more picturesquely than usual on the nose of a land billow jutting forth and falling sheer into the river, only to have the interminable forest swallow it up again. Yet there were signs that we were approaching somewhere or other. Hays sat with his feet on the rail, discoursing on the relative merits of Turgeniev and Galdós, the point of his “last” cigar glowing in the darkness, when the captain passed with a package wrapped in the customary inefficiency of Latin-America.