An American resident interpreted it to mean, “Oh, some of the readers have been stealing books again”—and we recalled the cynical native of Medellín. Days later, however, when we gained unofficial admission for a few moments, we found that the 5000 volumes bequeathed by a Colombian “literato” not unknown to a wider world—Rafael Pombo, who had recently died in Paris—were being catalogued. Several frock-coated pedants were smoking innumerable cigarettes and deceiving themselves into the notion that they were at work arranging the books. But the National Library remained hermetically sealed to the public as long as we remained in the capital. It was by no means the first nor the last time we met a similar disappointment in South America.
We had put it off a long while before we gathered courage and all our woolen garments and hurried through the wintry night to Bogotá’s main theater. As in other restricted societies, entertainments are frequently “got up” here, chiefly with local talent. It is a long way to any other talent in Bogotá. This one was a velada in honor of that same Rafael Pombo. Fortunately the audience was large enough to keep the place moderately warm. Every detail, every movement, the very toilettes of the distinctly good looking, if mustached, ladies in boxes and stalls were as exact a copy as was humanly possible of similar scenes at the opera in Paris, a copy in miniature bearing the earmarks of having been taken from some novel of the boulevards. Señora la bogotana used her lorgnette exactly as she had read of her Parisian counterpart doing; the men, in faultless evening dress down to the last white eyeglass ribbon about the neck, strove to act precisely as they conceived men did on like occasions in the wider world. Again all was burdened by the solemn artificiality of the race. One after another six men burst genteelly upon the stage and declaimed something or other in that painful, flamboyant ranting so beloved of the Latin. All the cut and dried forms of “cultured” society were solemnly carried out. Flowers, some one had read, were always presented to the performers, and even the podgy, pompous old fellow who forgot his “piece” several times had solemnly thrust upon him by a stage lackey in gorgeous livery two immense wreaths of blossoms.
In one matter at least these bogotanos were at an advantage over amateurs of other lands. Natural declaimers and reciters from babyhood, their tongues always eager for utterance, almost devoid of that bashfulness that works the undoing of the less fluent but perhaps deeper thinking races, they seemed seasoned actors in those points which called for strictly histrionic ability. In another theater a few nights later we saw several Spanish comedies presented by a company of local amateurs, and were astonished at the excellence of the work. That of a few of the principals would have won praise on any stage.
Three railways leave Bogotá, though none of them gets very far away. First in importance, of course, is that to Facatativá, connecting with Jirardot. Another runs through the flower-decked suburb of Chapinero, past Caro, with its cream-colored castle on a hill above a cluster of thatched mud huts, to Nemecón, a sooty adobe town of surface coal mines where the sabana is cut off on the north. Back along it to Zapiquirá the excursionist tramps ten miles in autumn coolness, hardly realizing he is near the equator, between fields of half-grown maize, broad grassy pastures dotted with white clover, with dandelions, daisies, cowslips, and brilliant yellow “smart-weed.” Blackberry bushes here and there edge a field in which scamper plump cattle and horses; others are confined by fence posts of stone with four holes carefully drilled in each through which to pass the alambre de púas,—barbed wire from our own land. Zapiquirá is remarkable only for the bulking hill beside it, almost solid rock salt. The mouths of a score of small tunnels lie in plain sight somewhat up the slope. The salt rocks are beaten fine, dissolved in water, evaporated, pressed, and packed into two-bushel bags that are carried away by toil-stupefied women and girls with a band across their foreheads.
But the excursion par excellence is that to the falls of Tequendama, the theme of at least one poem by every bogotano writer. The unholy clatter of church-bells helped me arouse Hays one morning in time to catch the early train on the “Ferrocarril del Sur.” Some twenty miles out we descended at the isolated little station of Tequendama and struck off through a region wholly unwooded and almost desert dry. As the road mounted a bit from the bare sabana a hardy vegetation appeared, here and there a small grove of eucalypti, and a bushy natural growth thinly covering the sides of the low mountains among which we were soon winding. Before long we fell in with the narrow Bogotá river, idling placidly along, little guessing what a tremendous tumble it was due to get a bit later. Tradition has it that a god or an Inca, desiring to drain the lake that once covered the sabana, opened the gap through which the stream drops. By and by there appeared ahead a whirling mist cloud which grew until we found ourselves completely enveloped in a great fog out of which rose a dull, never-ending roar of indistinct location. Directed by a peasant, we descended through a rustic gate and for some yards down a field of heather and deep-green grass speckled with white clover blossoms and scattered with massive protruding rocks. The face of the one of these a Bogotá merchant had disfigured in impertinent American fashion with an advertisement of his “superior coffee.” We had reached the “Niagara of Colombia.”
Yet so far as seeing went we might as well have been in our cozy beds back in the capital. An ordinary brown stream some forty feet wide flowed down through bulging rocks, pitched over in a short fall on to a stony ledge at our feet, then off into the mist-blinded unknown. A mere country brook in which we could dip our fingers here, a foot beyond it was forever gone. It was as if a whole world of mystery lay below and about us, yet the curtain of swirling gray mist into which the river plunged to be seen no more hid all from view.
Celebrating Colombia’s Independence Day (July 20th) by unveiling a new statue of Sucre and renaming a plaza in his honor
Meanwhile in another square the populace marvels at the feats of “maroma nacional” of an amateur circus. Note the line of policemen in holiday attire