With fifteen miles behind us I slipped gratefully from under my awkward thirty pounds before one of a cluster of thatched huts called “Hotel Mi Casa,” on the earth floor of which two broken-legged cots were placed for us. Water to drink was doled out grudgingly; washing was a luxury none indulged in. Hays was busy consuming six home-made cigars, called “tobacos comunes,” that had cost him a sum total of one cent. As we sat before the hovel watching the sunset throw its reflections on the red cliffs of the range behind us, the day went out like an extinguished lamp and the stars came suddenly forth in striking brilliancy. The north star of our home sky was now below the horizon, and many a long month was due to pass before we should see it again.
Hays, seated before the “Hotel Mi Casa” and behind one of his $5 cigars, watching the reflection of the sunset on the dull-red, broken range we had climbed during a long, stiff day
A bit of the road by which we mounted to the Quindío pass over the central range, with forests of the slender palms peculiar to the region. The trail is more prone to pitch headlong up or down the mountainside than to follow a flank in this orderly manner
The plateau ahead was even vaster than it seemed. I had walked hours next morning by one of those easy haphazard upland trails, and still it lay endless before me. Clumps of short, squat trees flecked it with shadows here and there, but for the most part it was bare alike of the planting of nature or man. Cattle grazed on every hand, and mule-trains went and came frequently. In every direction stood row upon row of jagged mountain ranges, fading away into the haziest distance. They seemed of a world wholly cut off from the whispering stillness of the broad brown plain. Turning, I could see untold mile upon mile behind me. The blue Central Cordillera that shut off the valley of the Cauca lay piled into the sky ahead. Like a hair on a colored glass, I could make out our sharply ascending trail of the days to come crawling upward toward the Quindío.
On the rim of the mountain lap that holds Ibagué, spread about a bulking church at the base of the first great buttresses of the chain, I came upon Hays in the shade of a leper’s hut. Before the marks of his ailment came upon him the outcast had climbed with his mules for many years back and forth over the great barrier, and something like a tear glistened in his eye as we turned our faces toward the land of his youth. The “Hotel Paris,” in the town below, looked a century old with its quaint wooden rejas of colonial days to peer out through—and also in at, as a half-intoxicated ibagueño demonstrated by thrusting his face in upon us while we were battling with the stains of travel. When I took him to task, he answered wonderingly, “Why, every one does it, señor,” and refused to take any hint short of a basin of water.
Ibagué, capital of the province of Tolima, claims 2300 “souls.” The count takes much for granted. It is a peaceful, roomy little town on a gentle, grassy slope where every resident has ample space to put up his chalky little straw-roofed cottage, yet all toe the street line, as if fearful of missing anything that might unexpectedly pass. Square-cornered, with almost wholly one-story buildings, its calles are atrociously cobbled, the few sidewalks worn perilously slippery and barely wide enough for two feet at once. A stream of crystal-clear water gurgles down each street through cobbled gutters, lulling the travel-weary to sleep—and furnishing a convenient means of washing photographic films. We drank less often, however, after we had strolled up to the edge of the mountain and found three none-too-handsome ladies bathing in the reservoir.
On a corner of the grass-grown plaza the nephews of Jorge Isaacs, greatest of Colombian novelists, run a clothing store. But it was our misfortune to find them out of town. On another corner I made my way up an aged stone stairway of one of the rare two-story buildings of Ibagué to the alcalde’s office. It was lined with dog-eared documents, all hand-written, each batch marked with a year, before which lounged clerks incessantly rolling cigarettes. When he had read our government paper in a stage whisper, the youthful mayor at once put the town entirely at our disposal. I suggested schools.
“Señor Ministro de Instrucción Pública!” he called out, with long, oratorical cadences.