Next morning the foothills began to crowd in upon the trail, now a haphazard hunted thing scurrying in and out over lomas and knolls and ever higher hills, from the tops of which we several times caught what we fancied was the last view of the great Cauca valley behind us. Slowly the mountains themselves closed in. We waded a river, toiled up a long slope, and came out far above a beautiful little vale completely boxed in by perpendicular hillsides. Only two houses were to be seen on its grassy floor, spotted with scores of grazing cattle. Over it, several hundred feet above, hung a broad column of locusts, surely a mile long, moving slowly northward with a humming whirr that we could plainly hear far beyond, and shading the country beneath like some enormous veil. Beyond, we descended again to the Cauca river. Here there was no ferry, or rather, it was out of order. Tons of merchandise lay heaped along the bank, while cursing arrieros chased their snorting mules into the stream. The negro who set us across in a long dugout collected five billetes each for the service, but this was evidently exorbitant, for the woman of his own color who went with us paid only four green plantains for herself, a piccaninny, and her load.
Luckily we had a long draught of chicha fuerte before facing the notorious subida de Aguache on the third day, for the stories we had long heard of this fearsome climb had not been exaggerated. High above anything we had seen since passing the Quindío, we came out suddenly on a “platform” on the edge of one of those bottomless ravines that abound in the Andes, a mighty hole in the earth, blue with the very depths of it. Just across, at the same height, hung in plain sight the wavering trail we could only reach by undoing all the climbing of days past and doing it all over again in one single task. Hour after hour we descended a mountainside so sheer that the struggle against gravity was like a battle with some hardy wrestler, only to face at the bottom what seemed the full unbroken wall of the Andes, the red trail zigzagging into the very sky above. All the blazing afternoon we climbed incessantly, to gain at evening a height equal to that of the morning, only a few miles further south. A task that would have seemed impossible a month earlier struck us now as amply rewarded by the indescribable panorama of mountains that spread away from the summit in every direction.
For once the trail held for a time the advantage it had gained, passing through Buenos Aires and Morales, two-row towns of thick adobe walls. Though still in the tropics, we were now in the temperate zone. Oaks abounded, and the weather was like that of our northern states in early autumn. The population was still dark in color, but negroes had faded away with the open-work architecture of the Cauca. For the first time since descending from the plateau of Bogotá we met full-blooded Indians. They were of the Guajiro tribe, dull-brown of color, sturdy, thick-legged fellows in white pajama-like garments reaching only to the knees. All, male or female, young or old, greeted us in a sing-song as we passed.
On the last of August, four days from Cali, we pushed more swiftly forward, for we were nearing the famous old city of Popayán. A forced march, dipping down through a mighty gully and panting upward through swirling dust, brought us at noon to the dry and wind-swept hilltop village of Cajibío. The population was almost entirely Indian, and the dusty central square swarmed with the Saturday market. Guajiros of both sexes and all ages, flocked into town from scores of miles around, sat with their bits of produce under woven-reed shelters, or in the open glare of the equatorial sun. Some had already exchanged their wares for the weekly chicha debauch, and staggered about maudlin and red-eyed, or lay tumbled in noisome corners. The village priest, the only visible resident of European blood, wandered in and out among the hawkers with a mochila on the end of a rod over one shoulder. Gazing away across the sepia hills and distant blue ranges, as if his mind were utterly detached from this world, the padre paused before each hawker, turned his back, and punched him—or, more often, her—with the end of the stick until a contribution to the parochial larder had been dropped into the sack.
The sun set amid corn-fields, wrapping itself in grayish-purple clouds in the crimsoning west, and still Popayán was leagues away. We plodded on into the night. There is, however, a sort of reflected light in these high altitudes, where the very mountains seem low hills, a sense of being on top of the world, with the sun just out of sight around the curve of the earth. Fires, evidently of Indians burning off their chacras, dotted the night on several sides of us. The road grew broader and took on that atrocious cobbling which follows the Spaniard everywhere, growing worse as it approaches a town. Now it stumbled down to a river, across a long stone bridge of the massive type of long ago, and into a two-row village. For a time we imagined we saw at last the lights of the famous city. It was mere illusion. Not only did we tramp another footsore hour, but when we did finally arrive, there were no lights. The place had grown up about us in the dark before we realized that we were no longer in the open country. The pedometer registered 35 miles, and our feet and appetites several times that, when we halted undecided in what some sixth sense told us was the central plaza.
Most famous of all the cities from Bogotá to Quito, boasting itself a “cradle of savants,” long the capital of a large section of Spain’s American colonies and still that of the great department of the Cauca, Popayán had seemed to promise at least the lesser comforts of civilization. For days we had slept on tables and mud benches, wrapped in the fond hope of making up here for the cold, hungry nights on the trail. We had even feared there might be difficulty in choosing from a plethora of accommodations, and had gravely set down, somewhere to the north, the name of the “Hotel Colón” as of about the grade of luxury fitted to our fortunes. It was to laugh. Though it was barely eight in the evening, Popayán was as dead as a graveyard at midnight—and darker. Later we learned that the famous city does have lights,—a few street-corner kerosene lamps that burn out within an hour, unless a puff of wind blows them out first. Having been a city, in the Spanish sense, only 376 years, it was too much to expect the place to have learned already of the existence of electricity.
We hobbled over slippery cobblestones along monotonous two-story streets and in and out of dimly-seen thatched suburbs for what seemed hours before we caught a man emerging from a candle-lighted barber-shop.
“Hotel?” he ruminated, as if striving to recall a word he had heard somewhere long ago, “You want a hotel?”
“No, you Spiggoty dolt,” growled Hays in English, nursing his blistered feet by standing on one at a time, “We only asked that because we wanted to know who won the pennant this year.”
“Hotel,” went on the musing popayanejo, unheeding, “Ah-er-where do you come from and where are you going? You will be italianos? Alemanes?”