Just then the alcalde’s perfume gladdened our nostrils, and one of the men, rounded up by a soldier, having accepted what was still an exorbitant day’s wage, we were off at last. The day was bright and sunny. Behind, across the sabana, masses of white clouds hung over unseen Bogotá and her distant black range. I could keep pace with “Rain in the Face,” as Hays had dubbed our new acquisition, only by holding each foot a second or more before setting it down. If I paused to let him get a bit ahead, he was sure to wait for me a few yards beyond. Ten cents spent in a little wayside drunkery gave him new life, but only for a short half-hour. Once he fell in with a friend driving an “empty” donkey, and for a space we moved a little less slowly. Then the friend turned off toward his village and with a groan “Rain in the Face” took up his burden again and crawled snail-like behind me.
Soon after we came to the edge of the world. The sabana had ended abruptly. Before us lay only a great swirling white mist into which disappeared the old Spanish highway that led in broad, low steps down and ever down into an unseen abyss. The carrier began to tremble visibly. The year before, he confided in a choked whisper, he had been held up here by bandits, who had killed and robbed his employer. Only when one of us went close in front and the other at his heels could he be induced to move forward and downward.
Now and then a group of Indians, men and women as heavily burdened as their pack-animals, loomed forth from the clouds and toiled slowly upward past us. An hour down we came upon a rock grotto into which bareheaded arrieros were crawling with lighted candles.
“It is,” explained one of them, “that San Antonio once appeared here, and all caminantes stop to pray, because he aids, protects, and betters us.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, curious to hear his answer.
“Sure?” he cried, staring at me with startled eyes, “Señor, I have been arriero on this road since I was a boy, always bringing a candle for San Antonio; in all those years I have been robbed only three times—and then I had no money.”
He crossed himself thrice in the intricate South American manner and sped noiselessly away into the clouds after his animals.
It may have been our failure to offer tribute to the saint of the grotto that all but brought our expedition to grief thus early. The mist had thinned and the landscape that opened out became more and more tropical. A single palm-tree, then clusters of them, grew up beside me. Banana plants and clumps of bamboo, like gigantic ferns, nodded sluggishly; a spreading tree pink with blossoms added the needed touch of color. Suddenly I realized that my companions were not with me, and sat down to wait. A half-hour passed. I strolled back along the road, then hurried upward at sharper pace. Fully a mile up I sighted Hays, driving the wabbly-kneed Indian before him. They had already tiptoed on the edge of an adventure. Barely had I passed from view when there had fallen in with them, one by one, four evil-faced fellows carrying sugarcane staffs. As thirst came, each fell to peeling and munching his cane. Hays, lost in some problem of Urdu philology, was suddenly recalled to the material world by a throat gurgle from “Rain in the Face.” He looked up to find the four wayfarers, long sheath-knives in hand, still ostensibly engaged in peeling sugarcane, but closing in around him and the shivering cargador. Hays had taken for fiction the stories of dangers on the road, and his automatic was packed away on the carrier’s back. But he had been too long a soldier to betray anxiety in the face of danger. The quartet continued their innocent occupation, crowding ever closer, but had not quite summoned up courage to try their fortunes against so stern-featured a gringo when they fell in with another group of travelers, and the four gradually faded away behind. Thenceforth we took care to wear our weapons in plain sight.
“Rain in the Face” had with great difficulty been coaxed to his feet again. When darkness fell, he was still wheezing slowly onward far from the day’s goal. The abrupt, stony descent was broken now and then by sharp rises, and we stumbled and sprawled over uncounted loose stones and solid boulders. At length white huts began to stand dimly forth from the night; the voices of unseen groups in the doorways under faintly suggested thatch roofs fell silent with astonishment as we passed; and in a climate in pleasant contrast to that of night-time Bogotá we entered at last the little hotel of La Mesa. “Rain in the Face” set down his load for the last time with a stage groan, grasped his fee after the customary plea for more, and with the parting information that he was “poor but honest,” raised his wreck of a straw hat and disappeared to be seen no more.
Morning found us in a long town on a shelf-edge overhanging a great tumbled valley, still a mile above sea-level, again facing the problem of how to make our baggage get up and walk. When we had tramped a hot and stony half-day without getting a yard further on our journey, we returned to the hotel. Hays stretched out on—and over—his bed and drew out his faithful Ramsey, bent on drowning his worldly troubles in study. The first sentence that stepped forth from the page, inviting translation into Spanish, asserted: