On the Cauca side, like the French slope of the Pyrenees, the Central Cordillera of the Andes descends almost abruptly to the valley. As we emerged from the clouds, a brilliant sun lighted up vast landscapes of labyrinthian hills and vales mottled with cloud shadows, bits of our road ahead scratched here and there on salient, sun-polished knobs and slopes far below. With noon appeared the first broad view of the rolling Cauca valley, nestled between the central and the western ranges, a bare thousand feet above sea-level, still deep-blue as some mountain-girdled lake. The little town of Salento, in the lap of an undulating, bright green plain, rose slowly up to meet us. We marched to the alcalde’s office in a weak-kneed building of compacted clay, only to find the alcalde, like beds for travelers, out of town. A stupid clerk in a room full of musty papers of varying antiquity admitted it was too bad Salento was so atrasado, but made no move to decrease that backwardness.
“And strangers who arrive?” I asked.
“Generally bring their beds with them,” he replied, “or, if not, they do the best they can.”
We took the hint and forcible possession of an empty room opening on the plaza. When, after a basin bath, I strolled out into the town to mention our strange exotic desire for sleeping accommodations, a dozen of the most influential citizens also admitted it was too bad and—and where did we come from and where were we going? Hays for once had better luck. Having left the mention of beds to simmer in the mind of one Sanchez, who amused himself at shopkeeping on a corner of the square, he was called over at dark and offered the use of several woolly white blankets that hung for sale from the blackened beams of the shop ceiling. Sanchez was shocked beyond measure when we started to carry them across the plaza ourselves. He called for a boy, nine responded, and the winner expressed great gratitude when we rewarded him with a ragged paper cent. We improvised seats and sat gazing out through the wooden reja. Far away on a fuzzy hillside our road of the morning grew dim and faded out, like an unfixed photograph, and a night lighted only by stars quickly settled down. Out of its black immensity came, a little later, the jangling of tiny bells. Across the plaza filed a half hundred boys in column of twos, weirdly lighted by flickering torches, utterly silent in their bare feet. From another direction came a similar half-seen procession of girls; the two columns joined at the door of the little bamboo church, the pagoda-like twin towers of which stood dimly forth against the background of darkness, and passed within together. For an hour a weird infantile chanting in chorus sounded almost unbrokenly, then the congregation filed forth again and melted away into the humid summer night. The faint silhouette of the priest showed him leaning over the reja of his second-story casa cural, the fitful glow of his cigarette the only light in town, until that, too, died out and left only the brilliant tropical stars above.
Beyond Salento a rolling fertile land lay on every hand. In the great forests spreading far up the range beside and behind us, the most conspicuous of the flora was the yarumo, a white-leaved tree that stood forth everywhere like blotches on the green landscape. The slender wax-palm of the eastern slope had not passed the crest. The dense-green uplands of the valley were still all but covered with virgin forests. It set us reflecting what might have been had the “Mayflower” turned southward and peopled this land of rich soil and unrivalled climate, instead of that bleak and rigorous country we had left behind. Or would this peerless climate have made us, too, salentinos?
At the hut where we paid two cents for great bowls of creamy milk, there was a decision to make. One branch of the trail led to Pereira, the other to Filandia. We tossed a coin. It fell “tails” and we struck off to the left by a soft dirt road. Filandia was a quaint old place with a wonderful gingerbread church, on a hilltop that rolled languidly away on all sides to far-off mountain ridges. The town seemed never to have seen a foreigner before. Perhaps travelers hitherto had all gone by way of Pereira. When I attempted to take a picture, the entire population, men, women, and the very babies, crowded so close around me that I could not fight them back to a focal distance.
Like those of the days of Shakespeare, the theater of Cartago consists of a stage—of split bamboo, with a tile roof—inside the patio of the “hotel.” The more expensive seats are chairs in the balcony of the second story; the populace stands in the barnyard
Cartago watching our departure. Two of the doors show no occupants only because these had dodged inside to call the rest of the family