“No, we’re Chinamen,” I snapped, “and looking for a hotel.”

“Pués, Señor Chino,” he replied, cleverly returning the sarcasm, “There is no hotel in Popayán. But if you go down this street four cuadras in this direction and three in that and knock at the door of the second house beyond the fountain, you may find them willing to give you lodging.”

They were not, however; nor were those to whom they in turn directed us. A long hour more we winced along the uneven, slippery streets of Popayán, begging for a bite to eat and a plank to lie on as in any Indian village, only to be turned away from some of the most distressing holes ever man offered to sleep in on a wager. But the Spanish-speaking races have a proverb that “Perro que anda hueso encuentra,” and we stumbled finally upon a billiard-room in which several young bloods of the town were upholding their reputation as night-hawks. One Señor Fulano, cigarette-maker by profession—when he was sober enough—and “dope-fiend” by habit, as were several of his companions, took us in charge and led the way uncertainly to a cubby-hole of a room in his barn-like ancestral home. There, my dreams of the comforts of Popayán forever shattered, I resigned myself to sleep once more on a wooden table posing as a bed. Hays was little more fortunate, for though he drew an aged divan, he fell asleep quite literally several times before he abandoned himself to the floor which fate seemed bent on forcing him to occupy.

In the morning Fulano’s garrulous old mother made more formal arrangements for our housing. She did not pretend to run a hotel—though she had no hesitancy in charging hotel rates—but she served two greasy meals a day to several clerks from the government offices and, “out of charity,” seated us with them. But alas, however easily he may spend the day, the Latin-American leads a hard life at night. In a huge and all but empty front room was an enormous bedstead of viceregal days; but this, too, was wooden floored, and the diaphanous straw-mat that did duty as mattress had had all life crushed out of it years before. Nor did the single blanket have much influence over the penetrating mountain air of early morning. The deep window embrasures were built with steps for the use of occupants who would engage in the favorite popayanejo pastime of gazing out through the reja; but no provision whatever had been made for another convenience essential to all well-regulated households. In this respect the house was on a par with all the rest of the famous city.

“Founded” by Benalcazar, in the Spanish sense of having a scribe record under a name bristling with reference to the saints—which as usual failed to stick—an Indian town ruled over by a warlike cacique named Payán, the capital of the Cauca has, according to its latest census, 4326 men and 5890 women, a disproportion that is reflected in its customs. If its own assertion is to be taken at par, it is “notable for its fine climate and its illustrious sons.” Of the climate there can be little criticism. Just how illustrious its sons might have been in a wider world no one who has come to see where and how they lived can be blamed for wondering. Of them all, the town is evidently most proud of Caldas—a statue of whom adorns the central plaza—the tobacco-chewing savant who discovered how to determine altitude by boiling water—no one who has cooked his eggs in the Andes is long in making the same discovery—and who taught the revolted colonials how to make gunpowder—only to be shot in Bogotá for his pains.

So aged is the town that it has not a red roof left; all are faded to a time-dulled maroon. The place bristles with ancient religious edifices, mementoes of its importance in colonial days. Hardly a block is there without its huge church of cavernous and dilapidated interior. The silent grass-grown little “Universidad del Cauca,” of the aspect of some bent and toothless old man, is famous now only for its age, though in its dotage it fondly fancies itself still one of the principal seats of learning in the New World. Over its unadorned main door may still be read a crumbled inscription:

“Initium Sapientae

Timor Domini”

Summer vacation had left it uninhabited, but there was evidence of practical training in at least one respect,—the beds of its dormitory were narrow wooden boxes some five feet long.

If Popayán is dead by night, little more can be said for it by day. Languid shopkeeping is almost its only visible industry, and the population seems to live on what they sell one another. The ways of its merchants are typical of those in all the somnolent towns of the Andes. With few exceptions they treat the prospective purchaser in a manner that seems to say, “Buy at this price, or go away and let me alone. I want to read last week’s newspaper, finish my cigarette, and day-dream, and I don’t want you here in my store disturbing my meditations.” Too often, in the shops, the mañana habit prevails,—in that it is always the next place that has what you are looking for. The mortality of white ones being high on Andean trails, I entered a tienda to ask: