We had shivered through our lunch, finding it difficult to believe that we were five degrees from the equator in the month of July, when suddenly the wind rose, and for a moment the mist thinned until we caught a hint of an immense chasm untold depths below; then closed in again. The excursion seemed to have been a failure. We strolled on down the highway in the fog and loafed awhile on a bushy hillside. But as we turned homeward, the mist was wiped away as suddenly as a curtain drawn aside and all Tequendama lay before us. I slid down a steep bank to the edge of the bottomless chasm and sat down where I could remain, as long as I kept my feet braced in the sod, before one of the finest sights in the world—or let them slip and drop to sudden death. From the upper ledge the stream fell a sheer unbroken thousand feet in which the entire river seemed to turn to spray and whatever was left when it struck was beaten into mist which, rising like steam from the yawning gorge as from some immense caldron, hid all the face of the adjacent country. Immeasurably below, a much smaller stream could be seen picking itself together again and winding its way dizzily off through a vast rock-faced cañon on the perpendicular walls of which clung a few hardy plants; and while we remained in the cold autumn world above, the river flowed away into the tropics, into the coffee country, the land of bananas, and the perpetual summer of the Magdalena, to help float Colombia down to the outer world.
Of the many views of Bogotá the best is that we had at the end of our stay, from the summit of Guadalupe. A bit of the backing range juts forth in two peaks, each with a little white church on its top, that seem almost sheer above the city. We climbed to the higher in something more than an hour, massed clouds breaking away now and then to flood with sunshine the ever widening sabana and the hazy, far-away mountains that seemed to cut off the world completely, and came out at last on a grassy platform where we could look down, like the astonished Conquistadores, on all the vast plain, and, unlike them, on the city they founded. North and south, as far as we could see, stretched the bleak, treeless range on which we stood. At our feet this fell abruptly away to the suburban huts of the city and her encircling Paséo de Bolívar. Every plaza and patio, many green with a clump of eucalypti, every window and roof-tile, was plainly visible. The people were so tiny we had to look for them carefully, as for insects on a carpet, before we could make them out by hundreds crawling along the light-brown streets and specking the squares. Near the brick-walled cemetery the disk of the bullring, filled now with the tents of the “Circo Keller,” seemed a canvas cover on a small squat pail. Factories, as we understand the word, being unknown, not a fleck of smoke smudged the dull-red expanse of the stoveless city. Its noises came up to us very faintly, at times borne wholly away on the wind, and from this height even the diabolic din of church-bells sounded soft and almost musical.
A recent census sets the population at 122,000. Looking down upon the City from Guadalupe, this seems at first an underestimation. But gradually one realizes that not only are its houses low, often of a single story, but largely taken up by interior patios. Then there are more than a score of churches, innumerable chapels, eight large monasteries, several seminaries, and many residences of the Church authorities. Add to this the many government buildings, and bit by bit the traveler grown skeptical from experience with Latin-American figures, begins to wonder if these are not inflated. There is not a wooden building in town. Treelessness governs the architecture, for the surrounding country is above the timber line, though the imported eucalyptus rises in groves here and there and flanks roads and railways.
A distinct line divides the city from the sabana, spread out like a rich brown carpet, cut up into irregular fields by adobe wall-fences often roofed, like the houses, with aged red tiles. In many places the sheen of shallow lakes recalled that the Zipa of the Chibchas built his Teusaquilla here on the lower skirts of the range to escape the winter floods of the plain. Off across it were dimly seen several flat towns, and here and there a farm-house or a cluster of them in a grove of the slender Australian gum-trees which merely accentuated the treelessness of the vast expanse of world. Six highways sally forth from the city, to march waveringly across the plain, mere threads lost at last in the enclosing range, broken, gnarled, pitched and tumbled into every manner of shape, bright peaks and valleys standing sharply forth where the sun strikes, great purple-black patches marking the shadows of the clouds. Beyond all else, at times lost in clouds, at others plainly visible, lay the central range of the Cordillera over which we must pass on our journey southward. Though more than a hundred miles away, it bulked into the sky like some vast supernatural wall, the broad snow-capped cone of Tolima piercing the heavens in the center of the picture.
CHAPTER III
FROM BOGOTÁ OVER THE QUINDIO
The people of Bogotá refused to take seriously our plan of walking to Quito. It was not merely that the Ecuadorian capital was far away; to the inhabitants of this isolated little world it was only a name, like Moscow or Lhassa. Those who had gone to school as far as the geography lessons had a nebulous notion that it lay somewhere to the south, and that no sea intervened; but their imaginations could not picture two lone gringos arriving by land. To seek information was simply to waste time. The nonexistent cannot be described. The best we could do was to pore over a page map in a foreign atlas, whereon a match, according to scale, was 300 miles long. Quito lay nearly three match-lengths distant “as the crow flies,” without considering the very mountainous nature of the country between. Yet the hardy Conquistadores had somehow journeyed thither, and in other parts of the world we had both traveled routes that the natives considered “impossible.”
As far away as Panama the horrors of this proposed tramp had been impressed upon me. At dinner one evening a typical, stage Englishman, accent and all, and an incurable monopolist of the conversation, proved to be the owner of mines in Colombia, and I managed once to cut in with a query about travel in that country.
“When the steamer lands you in ——,” he began, “you buy your mules, ten or twelve, hire your mozos and carriers and....”
“But I plan to walk.”
“Walk!” exploded my fellow-guest, “Why on earth should a man wish to walk?”