By the next afternoon we were in quite a different country,—down in the tropics again, with coffee-trees, bananas, and endless lanes of bamboo, that giant fern, as useful as it is beautiful, which nature so unkindly denied the North. It was not a temperature for the preserving of undeveloped films and I paused with the tank beside the first clear stream. The sun gave out before I had more than hung the strips up to dry, drops of rain began to fall, and night came on apace. I pushed on, grasping a wet film in either hand. To my dismay the road turned to a narrow path through thick weeds, thigh-high, and for a long five miles, with eighteen already in my legs and thirty pounds straining from my shoulders, I tramped swiftly forward, striving to hold the films out of reach of the weeds. The natives, blacker and blacker as we descended, stared with amazement from their little bamboo shelters along the train to see a strange being scurry by, holding high above his head two black strips, like Tibetan prayer-sheets. Small wonder they crossed themselves in superstitious awe.
The night had grown completely in about me, when Hays hailed me from an unseen doorway. He had already bespoken supper and engaged a room with a bed of split bamboo and a quilted straw mattress. For me was brought what a hard-earned candle proved to be a canvas cot, made of a U. S. mail-sack. In the “dining-room” was a lounging chair of the same material.
“Where did you get it?” I asked the woolly-haired host.
“What, that fine, strong cloth? Oh, the government always has plenty of that to sell,” he replied placidly.
The same damp, pulsating jungle fenced us in all the next morning. Far ahead, across the heat-steaming spread of the Cauca valley, the jagged blue line of the Western Cordillera, that cuts it off from the Pacific, stretched to north and south as far as the eye could command, in some places five ranges visible one behind the other. At noon, suddenly topping a jungled knoll, we caught sight of the long-sought town of Cartago, reddish with the hue of its roof-tiles in the center of town, dying away in whitish and straw-colored lines of outskirt hovels. It was hours later that we reached the level of the valley floor, and strolled in heavy grass through a bamboo-built suburb into the weedy central plaza.
With a populous graveyard before the keel of the “Mayflower” was laid, Cartago has not yet advanced to what any “mushroom” town of our West can boast at the age of three months. Negroes were everywhere, though there was no sharp “color-line,” and pure whites were rare. The Cauca is to Colombia what our South is to the United States. In colonial times slaves were imported in large numbers up the Atrato river, and to this day the shiftless, happy-go-lucky African lolls in his ragged cabins, speaking a Spanish it was hard to believe was not English, so exactly did their slovenly, lazy-tongued drawl resemble that of our southern states.
The hotel advertised “Comodidad, prontitud y esmero”—“Comfort, promptness, and specklessness,”—the three things above all others a South American hotel is surest not to have. There is never an office in these hotels of the Andes. A peanut vendor somewhere up the street is manager, and all the town “assists” while the traveler makes his bargain, if, indeed, it does not gather en masse to watch his ablutions. The rooms are commonly stark empty, and are furnished to order, as one selects a chicken on the hoof for the evening meal. We had to implore each and every requisite, from cots to water, separately and individually several times over before they were supplied. When we insisted on two towels, the young but toothless landlady, muttering something about the curious ways of los gringos, tore an aged sheet in two, and as long as we remained made us feel that guests were an unmitigated nuisance. Among the luxuries of the town was wheat bread. When we demanded it with our meals, a six-foot “boy” of polished jet-black skin—and little other covering—was sent wandering down to market with a bushel basket on his arm, and in the course of the afternoon came slouching back with three tiny buns lost in the bottom of it.
But for all the slovenliness of its habits, antiquarians would have found Cartago’s hotel interesting. The barnyard patio into which we flung our wash-water formed the parquet, or stalls, of the village theater. At the back of it was an open, tile-roofed building of split bamboo floor and sides, violently painted, forming a stage quite similar to that of Shakespeare’s day. A score of bottles hung by the neck, like corpses at some medieval wholesale hanging, fringed the outer edge of the platform, the ends or drippings of what had been tallow candles showing that they had served as proscenium footlights. The second-story veranda, our dining-room, was marked with the numbers of “boxes” around its three sides, from the unspeakable kitchen to the even more unmentionable servants’ quarters. When plays were given, the masses stood in the yard below and the well-to-do looked on from their chairs along the veranda. Unfortunately, histrionic talent seemed to have completely died out in Cartago. Only the languid tinkling of a tiple, or native guitar, marked the long evenings in which we watched the golden moon rise over the bit of mossy, old-red roof and the tops of two lazily swaying palm-trees framed by our balcony window.
If my knowledge of Cartago is meager, it is because I spent most of my days there in mailing a notebook. The post-office was the lower story of a compressed-mud building cornering on the plaza. When I first made my appearance, its heavy wooden doors, studded with immense spike-heads, were securely bolted.
“Is the correo closed to-day?” I asked a lounger-by.