The haciendas of this region, producing chiefly tobacco, are owned by absentee landlords and managed by mayordomos. The peon laborers are paid twenty cents a day with food. Arrieros on the road average fifty cents a day and “find” themselves. A few of the latter paused to inquire our destination and otherwise satisfy a fathomless curiosity. Our usual answer,—“Al Cauca,” always brought forth a startled,—“Cómo! Por tierra?” (By land?). In the Andes the expression is used with no thought of the sea as an alternative, but as the opposite of “A caballo” (On horseback). Occasionally we purposely astounded an inquirer by telling the whole truth. After a speechless moment in which his face clouded over with an unspoken accusation, he usually answered that though we might perhaps fancy we were walking to Quito, we were misinformed, and hurried on after his animals without even the customary “Adios.”
Now and then we met a lone arriero, “singing his troubles to the solitude,” as a Colombian poet has it, and once I was overtaken by a man who cried breathlessly as soon as his voice could reach me:
“Ha visto, señor, un muchachito con un burro vacío,” to which I could only reply:
“No, I regret to have to tell you that I have not seen a small boy with an empty donkey,” and watch the distracted fellow race on over the horizon.
We early discovered the uselessness of asking countrymen of the Andes that simple little question:
“How far is it to—?”
Ramsey himself could not have catalogued all the strange answers we received, even in the first few days. A few of them ran:
“Perhaps an hour, señor.”
“Only an hour?”
“No more, señor, but because there is much cuesta (ascent or descent) perhaps it is two or three hours.”