“Here, I used to be one,” said Hays, reaching for the bundle and rearranging it.
“Used to be what?” I asked, as he handed it back.
“I was walking along the street of—of—well I don’t remember the stage setting, but it must have been in the States and a long time ago,” he began, lighting a second cigar from the butt of the first, “for I know I hadn’t been to sea or in the army yet, when I saw a sign in a window, ‘Bundle Wrapper Wanted.’ I had to pass up a hundred per as outside man for a medicine faker to take it, but it was something new and ...” and he rambled off into one of those experience sketches which, jumping erratically over the face of the globe, frequently enlivened the voyage.
In the last hours of June we bumped against the wharf of La Dorada, several hundred yards of tinware building along a sloping river front with a childish attempt at paving, its main street a forlorn pathway near the water’s edge, dying away in the forest-jungle on either hand. Here we took our leave of the “Alicia,” for cataracts make this the end of the run for steamers plying the lower Magdalena. Next afternoon a train even more diminutive than that to Calamar wound away in a half circle into the forest, with now and then glimpses of hazy, far-off Andean ranges, and three hours later set us down in Honda. To our surprise we found it a city, the first since Cartagena, as aged and intricate, as full of its own local color, including many blind and leprous beggars, as any town of old Spain. Piled close along the Magdalena, here a series of rocky rapids, it is divided by a gurgling tributary across which three picturesque bridges fling themselves. Scores of aged stone buildings, quaint walls, and steep streets of century-old pavements give it an air reminiscent of Bruges or Nürnberg, or of some of the ancient towns of Mexico. Its narrow streets are crowded with laden mules and sunbrowned arrieros of both sexes; its patios seem primeval forests, and mountain ranges cut its horizon close off in every direction. A muleteer pointed out to us the ancient trail to Bogotá where it crossed a high red bridge and climbed steeply away up one of the natural walls of the town on the way to Facatativá on the lofty plateau above. But for our baggage we should have struck out for the capital on this route of centuries.
A village on the banks of the Magdalena
Jirardot; end of the steamer line and beginning of the railroad to Bogotá
We went on by rail in the morning. Every woman and girl in the car—not to mention Hays—was smoking the jet-black cigars of the region. The little engine with its topheavy smokestack consumed wood as gluttonously as the “Alicia,” and halted even more often to replenish its supply. Colombians fancy railroads will work the complete regeneration of their torpid country, but such as we had seen were only miniature samples of the real thing, of slight practical value even were they extended all over the republic. The natives had no notion, however, that the word train did not stand for the same tiny contraptions the world over as that to which they applied it.
On all sides were enormous stadiums of mountains, not yet high but already bulking and rock-strewn. Drought had left the country desert-dry and fine sand drifted in and deposited itself upon us in shrouds, as in crossing Nevada. The landscape suggested a cross between the tropics and a western prairie choking for rain, as did even the towns with their frontiersman disarray, their burros, mules and broken-down horses drooping in any patch of shade. Tattered boys and diseased loafers swarmed into the cars at every stop, drinking from the water jars, washing in the bowls of the first-class coach, making themselves completely at home without a suggestion of protest from the trainmen. Even were there laws against such actions, the languid officials would have lacked the moral courage to enforce them.