“And what place is this?” quizzed the teacher, pointing to a strip of land that curved like a tail up into a corner of the map, “Pa—Pana—”
“Panamá” shrieked the boy, “A province of Colombia which is now in rebellion. The....”
He was evidently going on with still more startling information when the all but imperceptible twitching of an eye of the Jesuit superior turned the pointer to other climes.
The teacher never lost an opportunity to give a religious twist to the proceedings. A boy whose pointer hovered over the Mediterranean mumbled:
“And another of the cities is Nicea....”
“Ah,” cried the priest, “And what celebrated event in the history of mankind took place in Nicea?”
“The great Council of the Church in which ...” began the youth, and rattled on as glibly as if he had been there in person.
When we had turned out into the street, the shabby little Ministro became confidential, explaining that the colegio toward which we were headed had once held a large student body, “but now, señor, owing to political changes....”
“Before the priests interfered I had an excellent experienced normal graduate in charge of that first class,” he sighed as we parted, “and now we have that boy in a cassock. Bah!”
We left Ibagué by taking the wrong road and had to crawl for miles along the steep bank of a mountain stream almost back to town before we were set right. Then began one of the greatest climbs of our joint careers. Round and round, in intoxicated zigzags, went the trail, as if dizzy at the task before it, down into several gullies until at last, finding no other means of escape, it took to clambering laboriously upward. At first the weather was hot, then gradually cooled as far-reaching views of Ibagué and its surroundings spread out below us. The buttresses of the range ahead were enormous, as if nature, planning to build here such a mountain chain as never before, had started the outcropping supports on her most gigantic scale. Toward nine I realized that I was out of the sunshine and no longer sweating, despite the swiftness of the ascent; at ten I paused to pick wild strawberries along the way. It did not seem possible to mount much further, for there was nothing higher visible. But like Jack of the Beanstalk, I climbed on entirely out of sight—into the clouds that wholly shut off the world below. At noon, when I stretched out on a swift slope to read a few pages of “María,” immense reaches of mountains and cloud-stenciled valleys, half-hidden by masses of snow-white mist, like drapery that concealed yet revealed their plump, feminine forms, lay everywhere below and about me. Over all the tumbled view were scattered little huts of mountaineers, each in a setting it seemed possible to have reached only on wings.