“All political or religious discussion is absolutely prohibited.”
Among the orders to the sepultero of the local cemetery were several that reflected the customs of the place:
“1. Receive no corpse without a ticket from a priest.
2. Keep three or four graves ready dug for bodies that may present themselves.
3. Make each adult grave 1½ meters deep and one wide. Relatives may, upon request, have it dug deeper.
4. Remove no bodies without the permission of an inspector or a priest.”
Why was man, whose enjoyment surely would be so much greater, denied the power of sailing freely out over the earth, as the birds circled away across the great valley of the Cauca, tinged to sepia in the oblique rays of the setting sun? When I reached the modest height that stands so directly over Cali that I could count every dull-red tile of its roofs, the little river racing over its rocks below was still alive with bathers and laundresses. A breeze from off the mountains lifted the drooping leaves of the palm-trees of the city; beyond, lay a view of the entire Cauca valley, clear across to the now hazy central chain of the Andes, the dot that to whoever has known “María” will ever remain “the house of my fathers” plainly in sight, as were many of the scenes back to Cartago and on over the range toward Bogotá that I should never again see, except in imagination. If only this magnificent valley, climate and all, were in our land! Or, no; it is better as it is. For then there would be spread out here in the sunset a great colorless stretch of plowed fields, factories sooting the peerless Cauca heavens with their strident industry; there these velvety hillsides would be covered with the gaudy villas of the more “successful” of an acquisitive race; a great, ugly American city of broken and distressing sky-line, without a single dull-red roof, would cover the most featureless, because the most “practical,” part of the valley, utterly destroying the beauty of a landscape which nature is still left to decorate in her own inimitable fashion.
CHAPTER V
DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO
From Cali a broad “road,” still fresh with early morning, led forth to the southeast, skirting some foothills of the Western Cordillera. Really a meadow, bounded by two cactus hedges and interwoven with an intricate network of paths, like the tracks of some great railway terminal, it was excellent for tramping. Birds sang merrily in the branches of the scattered trees; a telegraph wire sagged southward from bamboo pole to pole. Groups of ragged women, balancing easily on their heads a machete, a coiled rope, and a rolled straw mat, were already off to gather Cali’s daily fire-wood. Others we met market-bound, bearing, likewise on their heads, loads of a large leaf that serves as wrapping paper in the shops of the town. Here passed a man leading two pigs—except on those frequent occasions when the leadership was reversed—there a haughty horseman, and beyond, mule after donkey laden with everything from milk to alfalfa. We strode lightly forward this time, for the developing-tank had been turned over to a “drummer” from Chicago, bound to Ecuador by sea.
Before long the character of the country began to change, with a promise of mountains to climb far ahead in the hazy day-after-to-morrow. Mud-holes appeared; streams without bridges, though often with stepping-stones or the trunk of a bamboo thrown across them, grew frequent, and the sky took to muttering ominously far off to the eastward. A strong young river, bright yellow in color and flecked with spume, sped by beneath the first roofed bridge, with news of last night’s storm somewhere up in the Cordillera. Before the day was done we had several times to strip to the waist to ford torrents that had decorated themselves with leaves and flowers and the branches of trees snatched along the way.