“‘Sitting on my mule, to be sure,’ said the voice.
“Why, bless me, I wouldn’t go on foot in Colombia for all the gold in the bank of England!”
It was the end of July when I tiptoed out of the American Legation of Bogotá, bearing at last a letter from our magnificent chargé d’affaires—a splendid representative of Harvard, but not, thank God, of the United States—and carried it over to the government building opposite. The Minister of Foreign Affairs to whom I made my way through a line of typewriters on which cigarette-clouded officials were pounding out great international matters with two fingers, was one of those rare persons who know why a man should wish to walk, though, being a Colombian, he had never dared do so himself, and was, moreover, certain that Quito could not be reached by land. I was soon armed with a gorgeous, if misspelled, document in which the Government of Colombia permitted itself to recommend los señores americanos therein named to the authorities along the way—should any such turn up.
SOUTH AMERICA
The genuine traveler sets out on a journey by tossing a toothbrush into a pocket and strolling out of town. But even Hays had suffered somewhat from that softening of the vagabond’s moral fiber that is the penalty for dallying with the bourgeois comforts of civilization. We both had the American hobo’s disgust for the “blanket stiff” who “packs” his own bed; yet the Andes offer no proper field for orthodox hoboing. The journey of unknown duration and possibilities before us was sure to have variations in climate making extra clothing indispensable; moreover, we could not take the photographs along the way unless we carried with us means for developing the negatives. Our first plan was to buy a donkey and drive him between us down the crest of the Andes. Among the many reasons why this fond dream could not be realized was the certainty that we should have chased the animal off his feet within a week. Observation and reflection suggested that we should do better to follow the ways of the country and hire a human beast of burden. For one thing, if the latter ran away or dropped dead we lost nothing, except perhaps our tempers; if the donkey came to a like end, we would be out ten or twelve dollars. Hays abandoned the plan with double regret, for with it went the hope of some day reporting the journey under the arresting title, “Three Uncurried Asses in the Andes.”
With hundreds of animated bundles of rags trotting about the city ready to lug anything from a load of hay to a chest of drawers for a mere five-cent piece, we were certain there would be scores of native carriers eager to see the world and to substitute a dismal and intermittent hand-to-mouth existence for a steady job. We quickly discovered, however, that we were wrong in ascribing our own temperaments to the Chibcha Indian. There was not a youth among the swarming cargadores of Bogotá who had the faintest desire to see the world; the bare thought of getting out of sound of the clanging cathedral bells filled them one and all with terror. For the first time we had struck the basic economic fact that the South American aboriginal prefers to starve at home rather than to live in comparative opulence elsewhere. In prehistoric times the Indians worshipped the natural phenomena about their place of birth; each village had its cave or tree, its stone or hill, on which it depended for protection; and the dread of getting out of reach of these still courses through their primitive minds.
By dint of repeated packing and throwing away, we reduced our fundamental necessities to little more than the contents of two swollen suitcases. Word of our nefarious project to contract a carrier to bear these to some far-off, unknown world reached the last hovels of the suburbs. But the cargadores we approached quickly named an exorbitant wage and fled at the first opportunity. It was not a question of load, but of road. Hays inticed a sturdy fellow upstairs one day and pointed out our baggage on top of an enormous chest. The Indian calmly picked up chest and all, murmuring cheerfully:
“A little heavy, señores, but I can do it. Where to?”
When we suggested a long trip, however, horror crept into his eyes, though his unemotional Indian face showed none of it, and naming an impossible fee, he slowly and silently slid backward through the door.