There were few spots in Colombia to which I had looked forward with more interest than this scene of South America’s greatest novel, and the life-long home of its author. With the first graying of the night I was astir, and we were off by sunrise along a grass-grown trail at right angles to our route to Ecuador. Several times this seemed to lose its way, and split up in hopeless indecision. But the “house of my fathers,” gleaming steadily on the skirt-hem of the central range, piloted us forward. The only building to be seen, except those on the floor of the plain, it stood just high enough to gaze out across the great valley, a single evergreen tree, slender as a church-spire, close beside it. The sun shot down its rays as if bent on setting on fire all that the foliage of the trees did not defend from its rage, when we came to the edge of the plain, broken by ravines in which we separated in an attempt to keep together. There was nothing left but to strike an unmarked course for the goal. My own soon plunged down into a gully hundreds of feet deep, thick in jungle, a stream, the Zabaletas of “María,” monologuing at its bottom. I wandered long beside it before I could tear my way across, and longer still before I found the suggestion of a path by which to climb out again. Beyond were slightly sloping brown fields, with grazing herds and immense black rocks protruding from the soil, and behind, the indistinct, prairie-like valley, majestic and silent, stretched mile upon mile to the deep-blue wall of the Western Cordillera. Over the crest of the Andes above hung, like an immense veil, dense masses of fog, from which the winds of the Sierra above snatched rags of clouds that floated lazily away to the westward. Then, all at once, the modest little white house appeared close at hand, in a grove of evergreens backed by the yarumo-dotted mountain flank. I climbed a stone wall and, mounting through another brown field, pushed open a heavy rustic gate, to find myself at last at the home of “María.”

A woman of olive complexion, with streaming hair—for in this corner of the Cauca, far from the “royal highway,” travelers, to say nothing of foreigners, are rare, indeed—watched me in speechless amazement as, dripping with twelve miles of struggle, I mounted the steps of the house. On the veranda I was met by a veritable delegation of women and children, headed by a man who announced himself as Camilo Durán, hacendado, entirely at my service. The family was of the well-to-do farmer class of the Cauca, a bit awkward, yet proud of their rank in society, lightly clad in rural dress, and decidedly excited at the extraordinary event of a visit by a foreigner from far-off Europe—or America—who presented a document from the alcalde of Bogotá, signed by none other than the nephew of that same “Don Jorge” for whom their home was famous. A wide-eyed negro boy whom one might have taken for “Juan Angel” in person, his woolly head protruding through the crown of what had long since been a native straw hat, came running with a chair. As I sat down in the cool corredor, surrounded by the admiring family, Durán called for glasses and a bottle, and just then Hays’ head appeared above the stone fence of the inner corral and his always leisurely legs brought him up the steps to be introduced as that very “Lay-O-Ice” whom the valued communication from Bogotá mentioned—when read by natives. The aguardiente, which was “ardent water” indeed, arrived a moment later, and when Durán had drunk our health and we his, we turned to look about us. Would we see la novela casa? We would, indeed, and rising, entered it.

The “story house” was a more modest dwelling than the imagination pictures during the reading of “María.” But then, all the Cauca and its ways and people are simple and unassuming to the American point of view. Typical of the hacienda houses of the region, it was of one story, arranged with due regard for the natural resources and the needs of the place and climate. Built of stone and adobe, it gave evidence of being periodically disguised under a coating of whitewash. The long, deep veranda was flanked by two corner rooms and, like them, floored with what the French call dalles, dull-red tiles that remained cool even at Cauca noonday. Its thick walls were shaded by a low, projecting tile roof. Over the entrance—a genuine Latin-American touch—had been painted in what Hays referred to as “box-car letters” the information:

“Aquí Cantó y Lloró“Here Sang and Wept
Jorge Isaacs”George Isaacs”

The main hall, or parlor, took up the entire depth of the house from the front to the back veranda, the “corredor de la montaña” of the novel, and was fitted with heavy hand-made furniture, of which an immense dining table of rough-hewn construction formed the center. Flanking this chief chamber were the half-dozen private rooms of the family. That at the right-hand corner of the house, encroaching on the front corredor, had been the room of “Efraín,” the hero, and of the novelist himself. Back of it came the sewing-room, the writer’s picture of which was so photographic that we were almost startled not to find “María” and “Emma” and her mother busy with their sewing. At the back, across the main hall, stood the oratorio, a small chapel with the same simple image of the Virgin, perhaps, before which “María” had so often prayed in vain for a happy life. Behind the back veranda stood a wing, barely connected with the house proper, with a kitchen, hive-shaped clay bake-ovens, and the staring white eyes of negro servants of all sizes that seemed gargoyle-like ornaments of the smoke-streaked and blackened place. The entire dwelling was as densely inhabited as a New York tenement. Besides the dozen boys and girls of olive tint and several women of the Durán family, servants and negroes swarmed, and piccaninnies peered from every opening and corner.

The way led through the sewing-room across the now weedy garden to the “pila de María,” a crystal-clear pool in the bed of the arroyo that sprang from rock to rock down the swift, light-wooded gorge at the foot of which the “story house” is situated. “María” with her unbound tresses, was no longer here; instead, several dark-skinned boys snatched their garments as we approached and sought quick shelter. The “pila” was a rock-walled basin of sandy bottom, some four feet deep and as many times larger than the less romantic bathtub of civilization, constantly renewed by the stream that wanders languidly away across the valley of the Cauca. Because of the dip of the garden, the “pila” is out of sight from the house, but from his corner room “Efraín” could, even as the novelist has pictured, see the girls as they returned from their morning dip, pausing to pick a flower here and there along the way. Durán gave us leave to take a plunge. But though few things would have been more welcome after our dripping climb from El Cerrito, it would have seemed something verging on sacrilege, something like smoking a cigar with our feet on Juliet’s balcony, to have profaned with our dusty, prosaic, vagabond forms the pool about which seemed still to flit the spirit of adorable “María.”

The scene of “María,” most famous of South American novels, and once the residence of its author. It lies some distance back from the camino real against the foothills of the Central Cordillera

The home of “María”; and a typical hacendado family of the Cauca. The lettering over the door reads: “Here sang and wept Jorge Isaacs”