The hovel where we planned to spend the night refused us posada, and, as dusk fell, we faced an all but perpendicular mountain wall, up the stony, half-wooded face of which the trail staggered. The few groups of men we met carried ancient rifles loosely, as if constantly ready for action. At dark I toiled to a summit to find Hays standing before a mud rancho arguing with the crude mountaineers who would have sent us on into the night with the threadbare Spanish prevarication, “Only a little further on there is another house all ready to receive you.” In its utter lack of comfort the place resembled the mountain hamlets of northwestern Spain. The people were shy, yet, once won over, kind-hearted. “There is no bed,” they explained, “but there is perhaps a leather you can sleep on.” By and by the woman called us into the kitchen for a bowl of caldo, hot water with chunks of potato and an egg dropped in it, served with coarse corn-bread. Then the man led the way into a cell made entirely of mud, even to the bench along the wall, on which he laid a hairy, sun-dried cowhide. Fortunately he returned a little later with several aged gunny-sacks, a tiny girl lighting the way with a rope-like native candle, or we should not have slept even the bit we did.
Streaks of pale day were beginning to steal through the chinks in our chamber when the woman appeared with black coffee and a stony corn biscuit, and we were off for another day of stiff ups and downs. Stalking down a knee-breaking descent, I heard a shout of astonishment from Hays ahead. What looked like an ordinary mountain stream cut across the trail at the bottom of a sharp little gully. But the water, coming from the bowels of Tolima that stood somewhere above us in the mists of morning, was almost hot. We had both been on the road in many a clime, but never before where nature was kind enough to heat a morning bath for us. We lost no time in stripping for a luxury rare to the traveler in Colombia.
Not far beyond we came to the edge of the valley of the Toche. Away below, like a miniature painting, reposed a peaceful little vale wholly shut in by sheer mountain walls, a thread-like stream meandering the length of it. It took us an hour to make the swift, stony descent. Not all get down so safely, as the skeletons of a horse and a mule, their shoes still on, testified. The valley floor, watered by the rock-broiling stream, was a fertile patch of earth, and the steep mountain flanks were planted far up with little perpendicular patches of corn. All the scene seemed as far removed from the wide world as if on another sphere.
A rocky trail climbed abruptly up out of the valley again from the further end, higher than ever, past rare houses, built of the red boards of a tree called cedro, from the doors of which stared shy, half-friendly people in bedraggled tatters. The Quindío pass lies only 11,440 feet above the sea, but that by no means represents the climbing necessary to surmount the Central Cordillera of the Andes. What is so called is really a long series of ranges, and no sooner did the road reach some lofty summit than it dived as swiftly and roughly down again. It was not a planned road, like the highways of the Alps, but one grown up of itself. A jaguar once wandered over the Cordillera, a man followed, and to-day the route holds to the same course. Toiling like draft-animals, gasping for breath in the rarefied air, we fancied a score of times that we had reached the summit, only to see the trail take another switchback and disclose the perfidious fact that it had found another ridge to surmount.
A few hundred feet above the Toche began clumps, then entire forests of a tall, slender wax-palm, a species named by Humboldt on his journey over the Quindío. Having only a tuft of branches at the top, these were often torn off by the winds that rage down through the gullies, leaving a thing as unromantic as a telegraph-pole. The valley below opened out until half a world, dull-brown with a tinge of green, lay below and around us. Words are hopelessly inadequate to describe this bird’s eye view of range upon range, climbing pell-mell one over the other, as if in terror to escape some savage pursuer, and fading away into the dimmest misty-blue distance.
The sun was low when we came out on as far-reaching a view ahead and saw the morrow’s task laid out before us in the form of a thread-like road twisting away out of sight over a great mountain barrier draped in clouds, the “puro Quindío,” or chief range, at last. As night descended, we entered “Volcancito,” an unusually large adobe building on a bleak slope. The dining-room, which was also the back corredor, was overrun by a large family, chiefly small girls, each in a single, thin, knee-high cotton garment, despite the wintry mountain air. Chickens, dogs, and gaunt, self-assertive pigs wandered everywhere without restraint. In a corner slouched a woman sewing garments too small for the smallest child in sight. Our plea for lodging she treated with scorn. “Volcancito” was a posada, not a hotel, the difference between the two in Spanish-America being that in a hotel the traveler is permitted to expect certain conveniences while in a posada he accepts with smiling gratitude whatever fortune chooses to furnish him.
“We have only two guest rooms,” snapped the woman, when we persisted, as if the mere giving of the information was an unusual favor. “One this señor has with his wife and baby. The other belongs to the arrieros.”
The successful guest was an actor on his way from the Cauca to Bogotá, a handsome fellow much over-dressed for such a journey, with a strikingly beautiful young wife, as we noted at a glance through the door.
“But there are five rooms on this side of the house,” I suggested.
“Family rooms,” shot back the woman.