“But,” I protested, “Do you give no receipt for registered mail?”
Great excitement arose among the officials and the half-dozen persons waiting ostensibly to buy a one-cent stamp. A long conference ensued.
“It is, señor,” said the postmaster himself, rising and turning to me with regal courtesy, “that no blank receipts have been sent from Bogotá yet this year. However....”
He called aside the custodian of the precious ledger and gave him long whispered instructions. The latter hunted up a sheet of foolscap, stamped it carefully with the office seal, and wrote out with long legal flourishes—for penmanship is still an art in Colombia—a receipt for the parcel. This he tore off and carried across to the postmaster who, carefully preparing another pen, signed it with his full name, not forgetting the elaborate rúbrica beneath it. Then he read it carefully over once more, seemed dissatisfied with something, and finally called the attention of the writer to the rough edge he had left in tearing off the paper, instructing him to lay it under a ruler and trim it with a sharp knife. The subordinate did so and at last delivered to me a memento I still have in my possession.
To one unacquainted with Latin-American ways the episode may seem overdrawn. I have told it, however, without exaggeration. From the moment I handed over the parcel until I emerged, receipt in hand, there had elapsed one hour and twenty minutes!
Nor is such a scene unusual. From the Rio Grande southward, government offices are filled with just such human driftwood, and it is common experience to see several staid and pompous men in frock-coats spend more than an hour doing what an average American boy would accomplish in two minutes.
Swinging due south next morning through the perpetual summer of the flat, grass-carpeted Cauca valley, we fell in with a straggling band of nearly a hundred youths. They were conscripts recruited under the new military law of Colombia, antioqueños chosen by lot to make up the quota of the Province of Antioquia, bound south from Medellín for six months compulsory service. The majority were crude-minded countrymen. Some, dressed in the wrecks of “European” suits, were undeveloped boys of the towns, hobbling painfully along on bruised and blistered feet, bare except for their cloth alpargatas. Among the latter was one Policarpo, a devil-may-care young fellow of high intelligence and considerable education, who had a very clear notion of the weak spots in his native land, though no inkling of a workable remedy. Another carried a tiple, as well as a pleasing baritone voice, and struck up at every opportunity the languidly mournful music of the region.
The highway now was a series of interwoven cross-country paths, fording the smaller streams, crossing the larger on little bamboo bridges with faded thatched roofs. It was hot, yet not of the oppressive heat our most northern states know in mid-summer. All along the way were flowers of many colors, and broad vistas of greenest grass stretched far across slightly rolling plains wherever woods and jungle did not choke it out. Bands of butterflies, often of the most gorgeous hues, flickered here and there across the face of the landscape. Insects hummed contentedly and lizards scuttled away through the fallen leaves. Singing birds of many kinds abounded; flocks of little parrots, brilliant green in color, flitted in and out of the bamboo groves, shrieking noisily at their games. Here and there quinchas, fences of split bamboo of basket-like weave, shut in a little cultivated patch; and all day long the distance-blue Western Cordillera, with its wrinkled folds and prominences, stretching endlessly north and south, seemed to cut off the Cauca like a world apart.
Then for a space there were no habitations, except an abandoned hut or two and the ruins of several razed ones. The recruits murmured something about an epidemic, but none appeared to know anything definite concerning it. At length we descended through a shallow valley, and from then on, locusts called chapul in the Cauca, rose in vast clouds as we advanced, covering the ground before us and veiling all the landscape as with a great screen, new myriads rising at every step, until they struck us incessantly in the face and filled our ears with a sound as of some great waterfall at a distance. In Bogotá we had wondered to find an important government department entitled “Comisión para la Extinción de la Langosta”; now it seemed small, indeed, to cope with the problem. At intervals cactus hedges bounded the way, and the organ-cactus of desert lands stretched forth its stiff arms into the brilliant sky. The Cauca was suffering one of its periodical droughts and the accompanying scourge of locusts, after which it would bloom again like a tropical garden.
The recruits so monopolized accommodations at the village of Naranjo—which had not the remnant of an orange-tree to explain its name—that we had to share a room with three none-too-white natives who permitted no ventilation whatever. At four they rose to light candles and feed their mules, and sat vociferously discussing nothing at all until daybreak. They spent more time harnessing themselves than their animals; for the Colombian never dreams of riding in anything less than the complete outfit demanded by local convention. A wide-brimmed “Panama” hat—“sombrero de junco,” or the finer “jipijapa,” he calls it—covers his head. Over his usual clothing, which must include coat, vest, cravat, gloves, and white collar, no matter how far he may be from civilization nor what the temperature, he wears a ruana, a garment similar to the sarape of Mexico, or the poncho. In the vicinity of Bogotá this is of heavy wool and dark in color; in the Cauca it is the ruana de hilo, of light-colored cotton, generally gay with stripes. Beneath this the horseman wears zamarras, ample false trouser-legs held together by strips front and back, and legging-like at the bottom. Sometimes these are of sun-dried cowhide, or goat-skins shaggy with long white hair, reminiscent of the “chaps” of our cowboys. Far more common are those of tela de caucho, “rubber cloth,” consisting of two thicknesses of canvas and rubber woven into an impenetrable yet flexible material nearly an eighth of an inch thick. Then come his chilenas, huge wheel-like spurs; his rejo, or lariat of twisted rawhide hanging from his wrist; his alforjas, or leather saddlebags between his legs; his cuchugos, a long soft-leather pouch arched over the cantel of his saddle like a cavalryman’s blanket-roll; his long, shoe-shaped stirrups; and usually a parasol or umbrella hanging at his side, if, indeed, it does not shade him as he rides. No Colombian caballero who aspires to retain his rank as such would venture to mount a horse while lacking any item of this equipment. One trembles to think what might happen to a caucano, needing to ride instantly for the doctor, who could not lay hands on his zamarras, or who had mislaid his gloves.