“In South America are many arid regions through which travel and the transportation of baggage is difficult.”
Yet there are those who hold that text-books are not closely related to practical life!
Well on in the day, however, we did get two feeble youths to agree to carry a suitcase each to Jirardot for $180 and third-class fare back to La Mesa. At this rate we could soon have better afforded to build a railroad. Indeed, we had already reduced to an absurdity the experiment of trying to mix the tramp and the gentleman. “A sahib,” said Kim, “is always tied to his baggage.” It dominates every movement and is, after all, of scant value in proportion to the burden it imposes. Hire a carrier and he is always intruding upon your dreams and meditations, and with all the expense and trouble no article of the pack can you lay hands on during all the day’s tramp. Moreover, I am not of that kidney that can make a beast of burden of my fellow-man. I soon found that a cargador toiling under my load behind me made me far more weary than to carry it myself. We decided to revert to type at the next halt and play the “sahib” no longer.
The road, now chiefly deshecho (“unmade”), descended swiftly into the genuine tropics and the next afternoon we sweated into Jirardot on the Magdalena, a month from the day we had left it to ascend to Bogotá. For all our resolutions, however, neither of us contemplated with pleasure the prospect of turning ourselves into pack-animals. We set afoot word that we would pay a high monthly wage to any lad with a stout back and no particular grade of intelligence who would consent to leave home. But the youths of Jirardot were even less ambitious than those of the capital. We set a time limit, advanced it, and at last fell upon our possessions with the rage of despair. What we did not succeed in throwing away we made into two bundles of the maximum weight allowed by parcel-post and sent them down the Magdalena to Panama and Quito. We were forced to sacrifice even the “One-Volume Library,” which did not matter, for we had found it more convenient to buy native novels and toss them away leaf by leaf, thus daily reducing our load. Moreover, we had resolved to read thenceforth only the literature of the country in which we were traveling. Even then there swung from our shoulders some fifteen pounds each, besides the awkward developing-tank filled with films and chemicals with which we alternately burdened ourselves, when we crossed the little toll-bridge over the Magdalena and, leaving the department of Cundinamarca behind, struck off into that of Tolima.
Approaching the Central Cordillera of the Andes. A typical Andean camino real, or “royal highway,” with a pack-train bound for the capital
An extensive plain, half desert with drought now, blazing hot and sandy, spread far away before us. At first, mud huts were frequent, and many country people passed driving drooping donkeys. Curs abounded. Here and there a leper, squatted beside the trail, languidly held out his supplicating stumps. Everywhere were the rock-hard hills of termite “ants,” sharp-pointed as the volcanoes of Guatemala, while trains of stinging red ones crossed the road at frequent intervals. Fields of tobacco and corn stood shriveled beneath the unclouded sun; troops of horses and mules laden with the narcotic weed, rolled into cigarros de Ambalema and wrapped in dry plantain-leaves, shuffled past in the dust before their shrieking and whistling arrieros, bound for Jirardot and modern transportation. The camino real, still a “royal highway” in spite of its condition, passed now and then through clumsy swinging gates that marked the limits of otherwise unbounded haciendas. We met several haughty horsemen in ruanas and the conventional wealth of accoutrement, and once a cavalcade of men and women, the latter lurching uncomfortably back and forth on their high side-saddles. The half-Indian peon dog-trotting behind them carried on his back a large chair with a sheet over it, only the squalling that accompanied him suggesting what it concealed. The caste system was noticeable even here on the broad plain. When we had carriers behind us, natives afoot raised their hats and horsemen gave us friendly greetings. Now, with our possessions on our own backs, we received only frozen stares, except from an occasional peon who grunted at us as equals. A few miles beyond the Magdalena we came to the parting of the ways. One sandy trail led south to Neiva and Popayán; the other, with which we swung to the right, struck off for Ibagué and the Quindío pass over the Central Cordillera of the Andes. We took this longer route to Quito that we might traverse the great Cauca valley.
The pedometer registered a mere ten miles when we halted at an adobe hut that to the natives was a “very fine posada.” A bedraggled old woman pottered nearly two hours over a stick fire in the back yard before she brought us two fried eggs and a small dish of fried plantains, as succulent as wooden chips. Our “bed” she prepared by throwing a reed mat on the hardest earth floor known to geography, and by no means as level as the surrounding plain. My shoes and leggings did poor service as pillow, and Hays charged Ramsey with lack of foresight in not binding his grammar in upholstered plush. We were awakened from the first nap by the hubbub of a group of fellow-travelers, nearly all women, who piled their bundles in a corner and stretched themselves out on such floor-space as we had left unoccupied. Yet the ethics of the road are such in Spanish-America that we felt no misgiving in leaving our unprotected possessions on a bench at the door.
With the first hint of dawn our fellow-lodgers stole silently away. Hays was still abed when I struck off in a gorgeous morning across a sea of light-brown bunch-grass, surrounded on all sides by far-off mountain ranges. Behind, blue-purple with distance, the face of the plateau on which sits Bogotá in its solitude, stretched wall-like across the eastern horizon, high indeed, yet how slightly above the earth as a whole. Ahead, the snow-clad rounded cone of Tolima stood sharply forth above a nearer range that cut off its base, while a tumbled mountain landscape beyond promised less monotonous if more laborious days to come.
A native carpenter working on the new toll bridge over the brawling Collo river assured us he would much rather be on the road with us, but that “unfortunately,” he was contracted. For a time broken ground and rocky foothills cut down our progress. Soon we were back again on a level plain of vast extent, a bit higher than the preceding, a garden spot in fertility, though largely uncultivated, with mountains on every hand and Tolima close on the west. As I had already found in Honduras, these upland plains, perfectly level, covered with grass but for a threading of faint paths all following the same general direction, afford the finest walking in the world. Never hard, always high enough to catch a cool breeze, often shaded, generally winding enough to avoid the monotony of a straight road, they make the journey like strolling across an endless lawn or through some vast orchard. Now and then we passed a tinkling mule-train, a horseman, or an Indian short-distance pedestrian, but never a vehicle to disturb the reflective peace of a perfect tramp. Every hour or two we drifted together, generally at a hut selling guarapo, a half-fermented beverage of crude sugar and water, tasting mildly like cider and extremely thirst-quenching. Every species of pack-animal appeared,—mules, horses, donkeys, steers, bulls, women, children, and even men, all toiling eastward. Often a dozen horses marched in a sort of lockstep, the halter of each tied to the tail of the animal ahead. Many had one or both ears cropped short, not by some accident or gratuitous cruelty, as we at first imagined, but as a system of branding. Now and then a shifting load brought an arriero running to throw his ruana over the animal’s eyes, blind-folding it until it was prepared to go on again. One mule-train of more than forty animals was loaded with large boxes marked “Ausfuhrgut; Antwerpen, Colon, Buenaventura.” German goods consumed in Bogotá often make this roundabout journey,—to Panama, by ship to Buenaventura, by train over the western range, and more than half way across Colombia on pack animals, all to avoid the exorbitant rates of English-owned steamers up the Magdalena.