A typical Indian hut on the outskirts of Bogotá
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 the sabana, 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.
CHAPTER II
THE CLOISTERED CITY
Our entrance into Bogotá was not exactly what we had planned or anticipated. The crowd that filled the station and its adjacent streets in honor of the thrice-weekly linking with the outside world was dressed like an American city in February, except that here black was more general and choking high collars and foppish canes far more in evidence. Wherefore, seeing two men of foreign aspect, visibly shivering in their strange feather-weight uniforms, descending upon them, the pulsating throng could be dispersed only with difficulty, and excited urchins raced beside the horse car that set us down at last before a recommended hotel. Hays, who was nothing if not self-conscious, as well as tropical blooded, lost no time in putting on every wool garment his baggage contained and dived under four blankets vowing never to be seen again in public.
We seemed to have reached the very center of this incongruous civilization of the isolated fastnesses of the Andes. Our suite took up an entire second-story corner of the hotel. There were carpets in which our feet sank half out of sight, capacious upholstered chairs, divans in every corner, tables that might have graced a French château, pier glass mirrors, gleaming chandeliers, lamps with double burners, in addition to electric lights. Our parlor, its huge windows resplendent with lace curtains, opened on a balcony overhanging the street, as did also the adjoining bedroom, as richly furnished and with two old-fashioned colonial bedsteads heaped high with mattresses, their many blankets covered with glossy vicuña hides. We were far indeed from the frontiersman steamers of the Magdalena. When the hunger of the highlands asserted itself, we sneaked down to a luxurious dining-room to find the menu and service equal to that of some travelers’ palace on the Champs Elysées. The sumptuous breakfast that a maid placed beside our beds next morning was a humorous contrast to those we had endured on the “Alicia.” Yet all these luxuries, borne to this lofty isolation by methods the most primitive known to modern days, were ours at the paltry rate of $1.50 a day. Truly, the cost of high living had not yet reached the altitude of Bogotá.
It was evident, however, that if we were to live here as anything but public curiosities we must patronize a clothing store. The Zone costume, so splendidly adapted to our future plans, was, unfortunately, original for bogotanos; and nowhere does originality of garb cause greater furore than in the mountain-cloistered capital of Colombia. When we summoned up courage to venture forth, Hays dodged into the first tailor shop that crossed his path, and instantly agreed to take whatever happened to be offered him, at any price the tailor chose to inflict—and returned to remain in hiding for the ensuing twenty-four hours until the articles were altered. Meanwhile I sallied forth from a ready-made establishment, inconspicuous in a native shirt that came perilously near being born a pajama and a heavy, temporarily black, suit of “cashmere” with a misgiving tightness across the trousers.
On second thought it was not surprising that this far away city of the Andes should be so exacting in dress. Virtually cut off from the world, it was supremely eager to appear cosmopolitan. The result is a tailor’s paradise. No one who aspires to be ranked among the gente decente ever dreams of permitting himself to be seen in public lacking any detail of the equipment, from derby to patent leathers, that makes up the bogotano’s mental picture of a Parisian boulevardier. At first we took this multitude of faultlessly dressed men to mean that the city rolled in wealth. As time went on many a dandy of fashion we had fancied a bank president, or the son of some prince of finance, turned out to be a side-street barber, or the keeper of a four-by-six book-stall, if not indeed without even so legitimate a source of income. It is due, no doubt, to some misinterpretation of the European fashion sheets that the main street corners were habitually blocked long before noon by men and youths in Prince Alberts, who spent the greater part of the day leaning with Parisian nonchalance on silver-headed canes.
The women of the better class, on the other hand, are never seen disguised as Parisians except on rare gala occasions. At morning mass, or in their circumspect tours of shopping, they appear swathed from head to foot in the black manto, a shawl-like thing of thin texture wound about head and body to the hips and leaving only a bit of the face and a bare glimpse of their blue-black hair visible. To us the costume was pleasing in its simplicity. Bogotanos, however, complain that it is triste—sad, and in time we too came to have that impression, as if the sex had gone perpetually into mourning for the ways of its male relatives.