The great underlying mass of the population has no requirements in the matter of dress. In general the gente del pueblo—the “men of the people”—wear shoddy trousers of indeterminate hue, alpargatas,—hemp soles held in place by strips of canvas—without socks, a soiled “panama” always very much out of place in this climate, and, covering all else, a ruana, or native-woven blanket with a hole in the center through which to thrust the head. Their women rarely wear black, but simple gowns of some light color, at least on Sundays, after which its whiteness decreases. They go commonly bareheaded, often barefooted, and always stockingless. Every scene from street to Cathedral shrine is enlivened by the bare legs of women and girls often decidedly attractive in appearance—to those who have no great prejudice for the bath.
To be nearer the center of activities we had taken a room in the third story of the municipal building, on the site of the palace of the viceroys. Down below lay the main plaza of Colombia, Tenerani’s celebrated statue of Bolívar in its center, the still unfinished capitol building cutting it off on the right. Across the square we could look in at the door of the ancient Cathedral—and shake our fists at its constantly clanging bells. Beyond, much of the city spread out before us, the thatched huts of misery spilling a little way up the foot of the dismal black range that filled in the rest of the picture.
The altitude of Bogotá—it stands 8630 feet above the level of the sea—seldom fails to impress itself upon the newcomer. Many travelers do not risk the sudden ascent from Jirardot to the capital in a single day, but stop over between trains at a halfway town. During the first days I was content to march slowly a few blocks up and down her slightly inclined streets, and even then found myself with the faint third cousin of a headache, several mild attacks of nose bleed, and a soreness of all the body as if from undue pressure of the blood. Until the first effects wear away, energy is at its lowest ebb and time passes on leaden wings. The change in mood is as marked as in the character of the permanent inhabitants. From the moment of his arrival the traveler feels again that foresighted, looking-to-the-future attitude toward life common to the temperate zone. All the light, airy, gay and wasteful ways of Panama and the tropics fade away like the memory of some former existence, and it is easy to understand why the bogotano is quite different in temperament from the languid inhabitants along the Magdalena. Unlike many regions of high altitude, however, Bogotá is not a “nervous” city. There are lower places in Mexico, for instance, where the nerves seem always at a tension. Here we felt serene and unexcited all day long as in the first hours of waking from long refreshing sleep.
Except in the actual sunshine, the air was raw even at noon. The wind from off the backing range or across the sabana cut through our garments as if they were of cheesecloth. The thermometer falls much lower in other climes, but here artificial heat is unknown, and a more penetrating cold is inconceivable. By night the bogotano wears an overcoat of the greatest obtainable thickness, he dines and goes to the theater in a temperature that would make outdoor New York in early November seem cozy and hospitable. Well dressed men in gloves and overcoats and women in furs walking briskly across the square below our window on their way from the electric street cars to the theater or the “Circo Keller,” gave the scene quite the appearance of a similar one in an American town in the first days of winter. Yet this was July and we were barely five degrees from the equator. Beside us lay the latest newspapers from New York, half way to the north pole, bristling with such items as: “Wanted—Cool rooms for the summer months.” “Four Dead of Heat Prostration.” It is a peculiar climate. Flowers—of some Arctic species—bloom perennially, and the poorer people, inured to it from birth, seem to thrive in bare legs and summer garb. Frost is virtually unknown, not because the temperature does not warrant it, but because what would be frost elsewhere evaporates in the thin air. Once the sun has set, nothing seems quite so attractive, whatever the plans made by day, as to read for an hour huddled in all spare clothing, then to throw open the windows and dive under as many blankets as a Minnesota farmer in January. The bogotano does not, of course, believe in open windows. Though he scorns a fire—or has never thought to build one—he has a quaking fear of the night air, against which he charges a score of diseases headed by the dreaded pneumonia of high altitudes. Those who venture out at night habitually hold a handkerchief over mouth and nostrils. Yet at least this can be said, that nowhere is sleep, if properly tucked in, more sound and refreshing.
Within a week we found ourselves acclimated—or should I say altitudinated—and took to exploring the city more thoroughly. The air was still noticeably thin, but there was enough of it to furnish the lung-fuel even for the five mile stroll up to the natural stone gateway where the highway to the east clambers away through a notch and begins the descent to Venezuela. Looking down upon it from here, the misinformed traveler might easily fancy the broad sabana the sea-level plains of some northern clime, never guessing that forty miles to the west the world falls abruptly away into the torrid zone. For Bogotá is chiefly remarkable for its location. Taken somewhere else it would be like many another city of Spanish ancestry. Its streets are singularly alike, wide, straight, a few paved in macadam, more in rough cobbles, many grass-grown and all with a central line of flagstones worn smooth by the feet of generations of carriers. The chiefly two-story houses toe sidewalks so narrow that two can seldom pass abreast, and for those who know Spain or her former colonies there is nothing unusual in the architecture. The streets cross each other at solemn right angles, and those which do not fade away on the plain fetch sharply up against the rusty black range that backs the city. The system of street numbering is excellent, that of the houses clumsy, and the former is marred by the habit of the volatile government in changing familiar names as often as some new or forgotten patriot is called to its attention. Thus the Plaza San Augustín had been the Plaza Ayacucho up to a short time before our arrival, yet before we left it had become the Plaza Sucre in honor of a new statue of that general unveiled on Colombia’s Independence Day, July twentieth. In like manner the Plaza de Egipto was transformed before our very eyes into the Plaza de Maza. This weakness for honoring new heroes is characteristic of the whole country. Not only are its provinces frequently renamed, but in the short century since its independence, the nation itself has basked under a half dozen titles,—to wit: “La Gran Colombia”; “Nueva Granada”; “Confederación Granadina”; “Estados Unidos de Nueva Granada”; “Estados Unidos de Colombia”; and, since 1885, “República de Colombia”—and there are evidences that it is not yet entirely satisfied.
It is less in its material aspects than in the ways of its population that the traveler finds Bogotá interesting. About every inhabitant hovers a glamour of romance. Either he has always lived in this miniature world, or he has at least once made the laborious journey up to it. The vast majority are born, live, and die here in their lofty isolation. Shut away by weeks of wilderness from the outside world, alone with its own little trials and triumphs, it seems something long ago left behind up here under the chilly stars by a receding wave of civilization. Small wonder its people consider their city the center of the universe. Those who travel a little way out into the world see nothing to compare with it; the scant minority that reach Paris are credited with fervid imaginations, if indeed the picture of what they have seen is not effaced during the long toilsome journey back to their own beloved capital. Perhaps no other city of to-day is more nearly what a newly discovered one must have been to the happy explorers of earlier times. Now and then there comes upon the traveler the regret that it is not entirely cut off instead of nine-tenths so. A region fitted for the development of its own customs, had it been left to its aboriginal Chibchas it might have evolved a civilization entirely its own, altogether different, and not this rather crumpled copy of familiar world capitals.
Bogotá is decidedly a white man’s city. Indeed there is hardly another of its size south of the Canadian border in which the percentage of pure white complexions is higher. On rare occasions a negro who had drifted up from the hot lands below sat huddled in the main plaza in all the blankets and ruanas he could borrow, but his face was sure soon to be numbered among the missing. Brunettes predominate, of course, but blonds are by no means rare. The bootblack who served us now and then was a decided towhead. Red cheeks are almost the rule. Slight atmospheric pressure, bringing the blood nearer the surface, no doubt largely accounts for this, but there are many other evidences of general good health. At this altitude the violation of most of the rules of sanitation are lightly punished. The temperature, cold enough to be invigorating yet not so cold as to require our health-menacing artificial heat, combined with its simple, placid life, makes Bogotá a town of plump, robust figures, particularly among the women, unmarked by the dissipation common to the males. Many of the former may frankly be termed beautiful, in spite of a wide-spread tendency of the sex to wear distinctly noticeable black mustaches. Unfortunately the men of the well-to-do class are not believers in exercise, or the systematic caring for the body. Scorning every unnecessary physical exertion, letting themselves grow up haphazard, they are noticeably round-shouldered and hollow-chested. An American long resident in the city seriously advised us to “get a hump into your shoulders so you won’t attract so much attention.”
Even the descendants of the Chibchas, that make up much of the population of the outskirts and the surrounding country, have a tinge of russet in their cheeks, and are by no means so dark as our copper-skinned aborigines. Daily they swarm into the city that was once theirs. Short, yet sturdy, muscular carriers and arrieros, as often female as male, pass noiselessly through the streets with the produce of their country patches. Girls barely ten, to old women, many of comely features in spite of the encrusted dirt of years, more often so brutalized by toil as to seem hardly human, dressed in matted rags, their feet and legs bare almost to the knees, plod past under burdens an American workman could not carry a hundred yards. Early in the wintry plateau mornings they set out from their chozas, cobblestone or mud hovels thatched with the tough yellow-brown grass of the uplands, that are huddled in the mountain passes or strewn out along the wind-swept sabana, driving a bull—rarely a steer, since the former animal loses much of his belligerency at this altitude—on its back a load little larger than that which the female driver, with a strap about her brow, carries herself. They are all but indistinguishable from the men who tramp beside them. A patchwork skirt instead of tattered trousers is almost the only difference in dress, and their manner is utterly devoid of any feminine touch. Brawny as the men, they march through all the hardships of life as sturdily and uncomplainingly as our early pioneers, asking sympathy neither by word nor look. It is a commonplace sight in Bogotá to see a mere girl in years grasp the nose-ring rope of a bull and throw him to his knees, or lay hold of a cinch-strap in her calloused hands and, with one foot against the animal’s ribs, tighten the girth with the skill of an experienced arriero. Girls and boys alike are trained from their earliest years to this life of bovine toil, never looking forward to any other. Of the existence of schools they have hardly an inkling. To them life is bounded by their cheerless hovels and the chicherías of the city, numerous as the pulquerías of Mexico. In every corner of the capital these low drinking shops abound, masquerading under such misnomers as “El Nido de Amor”—“The Love Nest,”—and overrun by their besotted votaries of both sexes. Yet the bogotano Indian drunk is quiet and peaceful compared with the Mexican, for chicha seems chiefly to bring drowsiness and contentment with life as it is.
Bogotá and its sabana from the summit of Guadalupe