The railway ended at Beltrán, where we boarded the steamer “Caribe.” A dreary, sun-baked collection of sheds and a few choking huts made up the town, completely surrounded by desert, with plenty of bushy trees, but a desert for all that. The wind that swept across the steamer at her mooring was not the cool one of the lower Magdalena, but one laden with red-hot sands that stung the cheeks like tiny insects. When the passengers had gulped their almuerzo, the dishes were piled in the alleyway, where beggars and gaunt boys from the shore came to claw around in them, after which they were roughly half-washed. There is a fetching democracy about the road to Bogotá. He who travels it, be he vagrant or man of wealth, must go through the same uninviting experiences. It speaks poorly of Colombians that they still endure this medieval method of travel from the outside world to their capital. Wealthy bogotanos journey to Europe in luxurious style—once they are on the ocean. It would seem wiser for them to return steerage and gradually accustom themselves to what they must endure from the landing in their own country to the arrival in Bogotá.
All day long we sat in the sand-burning winds of Beltrán while barefoot and half-naked stevedores dribbled down the steep bank with all manner of cargo. There was barbed wire from Massachusetts, corrugated iron from Pittsburg, boxed street-car lines that clattered and crashed as they fell, and finally, though by no means last, four pianos from Germany that were rolled heels over head down the long stony bank. Although we had real cabin tickets this time, neither of us had influence enough to get a cabin. We dragged our cots out on the open deck and, indifferent to social rules, marched through the multitude in our pajamas. This turned out to be entirely comme il faut, for even the son of a recent president of Colombia soon appeared similarly clad and strolled about the deck chattering with his fellow-passengers of both sexes, as nonchalantly as if in full dress.
We were not off until dawn, into which the volcano Ruiz, first of the long row of snow-clad fire-vents of the Andes which we hoped in time to see disappear over our shoulders, thrust its aged head. Rock cliffs along the banks recalled the Lorelei. Fields of corn undulated like wind-snatched hair on the summits of rounded hills, at the base of which sweltered the banana groves of the tropics. As the sun was setting we passed a chorro at the foot of a low range around which the river had swept in a half-circle so many centuries that its bank was a sheer rock wall surely sixty feet high. The “Caribe,” with the nose of a washtub, panted for life against the current, spitting showers of live coals from her wood fires, seeming several times about to give up the attempt in despair. But she gained the calmer water above at last and soon after dark landed us in Jirardot.
We spent the Fourth of July in Jirardot. Not by choice, but because the train to the capital leaves only three times a week. The town swelters by day on the edge of the curving river, here hardly fifty yards wide, where for more than a mile stretches a vista of donkeys laden with kegs of water, bands of women, all more or less African in ancestry, bathing, washing, and incessantly smoking immense misshapen cigars, as do even the children of both sexes that paddle stark naked about the bank in complete immunity to the blazing sun. The place seemed the headquarters of contented poverty. At least half the inhabitants either had not enough sun-bleached garments to completely conceal their dusky skins, or had laid them away for more gala occasions. Beggars, halt, blind, misformed and idiotic, were almost as numerous as in similar towns of India. Even the less miserable inhabitants were dull, neurasthenic, utterly devoid of energy, anemics with incessant smoking, bad food, and worse habits, given to living entirely according to their appetites and never according to will power and reason.
It was not without misgiving that we turned our faces toward Bogotá next morning. The crowd which the train from the plateau had landed the night before had been half hidden under the rugs, blankets, and overcoats they carried, and not a native of Jirardot could speak of the capital without visibly shivering, some even crossing themselves as often as they heard it mentioned. The train left at sunrise. By the rules of the line—the “Ferrocarril de Jirardot”—we were obliged to check our baggage containing all extra clothing. For the first few hours we were surrounded by mountains, though still on a slightly rising plain between them. The land appeared fertile and there was considerable Indian corn, yet it was surprising to find here in the capacious New World such swarms of beggars as in Egypt or India. The population along the way, increasingly Indian in blood, was extraordinarily slow-witted. In a window near us sat a commercial traveler who tossed at every one he caught sight of along the way a pictorial advertisement of an American panacea. The tail of the train was always well past them before a single one gathered his wits sufficiently to pick up the treasure.
Near noon we were ourselves picked out by a mountain-climbing engine, made in Schenectady, its boiler well forward and flanked by the water tanks, a small upright coalbin behind. As we began a series of switchbacks, I caught a breath of virile white man’s air for the first time in a half year, and the taste of it was so delicious that the sensation reached to my tingling toes. Regularly the vista of gouged-out valleys surrounded by rough-hewn, cool, blue ranges spread to greater distances. Passengers began to turn red-nosed, to put on overcoats, blankets, rugs, ponchos, gloves, to wrap towels about their necks. To me the temperature was delightful, but Hays, who had been long years in the tropics, took to applying other adjectives.
Now the landscape of meadows and grazing cattle backed by towering mountains suggested Switzerland. Beyond the one tunnel of the line we entered an immense valley walled by row upon row of blue ranges. Higher still, the bleak, stony highlands resembled a more rugged Scotland in late October, though cultivation was almost general and roads numerous. It struck us as strange that human beings should shiver and toil for a scant livelihood in such surroundings when a day’s walk would bring them to perpetual summer and nature’s well filled larder. A plant must remain where it chances to be born, but why should man also?
By four, the train had finished its task of lifting its breathless passengers into the thin air of Facatativá, and scores of half-frozen barefoot children and ragged adults dismally wandered the stony streets. A policeman muffled to the ears assured us with what seemed a suggestion of pride that Facatativá was even colder than Bogotá, for which Hays gave fervent thanks. Evidently the heat of the tropics was yet in my blood, for I still felt comfortable.
An hour later we were speeding across a broad plateau by the “Ferrocarril de la Sabana,” a government railroad equipped with real trains of American cars. All the languor and ragged indifference of the tropics seemed to have been left forever behind. The conductor was as business-like—and as light in color—as any in our own land. We stopped briefly at towns boasting all the adjuncts of civilized life, somehow dragged up to these lofty realms. Here was a country built from the center outwardly; the nearer we came to its capital, the further we left the world behind, the more modern and well furnished did it become. It recalled fanciful tales of men who, toiling for weeks through unknown wildernesses, suddenly burst forth upon an unknown valley filled with all the splendors of an ancient kingdom.
