“Siempre se van hoy?” cried our hostess, when we appeared in road garb next morning, “You are really going to-day?” It was not so much that she was striving to cover her failure to have the coffee ready; her Latin-American mind could not conceive of so definite a resolution outliving the night. “Why do you not remain until to-morrow and rest?” she rambled on.
An hour later she stood staring after us from her doorway, an act in no way conspicuous, since all that section of Popayán was similarly engaged. The entire town had expressed its sympathy that we must go “all alone and so laboriously—tan trabajoso” over the wild mountains and valleys to—well, wherever we were bound; for not a single popayanejo took seriously our assertion that we really hoped to reach Ecuador.
Pasto was said to be something like a week distant “by land,” and the route “very dangerous,” though from what source was not clear. For the first lazy hour a good road led gradually upward. But like an incorrigible small boy getting out of sight of home, its good behavior ceased at the hilltop where we caught the last view of the “cradle of savants.” Ever more winding and broken, across ravines and streams with bridges and without them, now and then seeming to drop completely out of the world about us, only to gather its forces again far below and scramble to even greater heights over a saddle of a mountain wall beyond, from the summit of which the trail of twenty-four hours before stood forth as clearly as across an alleyway between tenement houses, it struggled uncertainly southward day after day. At the hamlet of Dolores, amid rugged and tumbled mountains piled into the sky on every hand, we came to a parting of the ways and had the choice of continuing by the temperate or the torrid zone. One route went down into the Patía valley, hotter than Panama, reputed the abode of raging fevers and the breeding-place of those swarms of locusts that devastate the Cauca. The other, by way of “los pueblos,” lay cool and high, with frequent towns, though it was two days longer and much more broken and mountainous.
We chose the temperate zone. The way turned back for a time almost the way we had come, then climbed until a whole new world opened out beyond, towering peaks piercing the clouds and strangely shaped masses of earth lying heaped up tumultuously on every hand. For once the trail showed unusual intelligence in clinging to the top of the ridge, fighting its own natural tendency to pitch down into the mighty valleys on either side, and the constant struggle of the ridge to throw it off, like an ill-tempered bronco its rider. We were following now what the Colombian calls a cuchillo, a “knife,” treading the very edge of its blade. Along it, miserable mud huts were numerous; and every Indian we met had a cheek distorted and his teeth and lips discolored by a coca cud. It struck us as strange that even bad habits have their local habitat and that the magnificent mountain scenery gave the dwellers no inspiration to better their conditions.
Evidently the region held foreigners in great fear. As often as we paused to ask for lodging, some transparent excuse was trumped up to get rid of us. The naïveté of the inhabitants was amusing. At one village hut two women met our plea for posada with:
“No, señores, los maridos no están” (the husbands are out).
“We are not interested in the husbands, but in a place to sleep.”
“Yes, but the husbands will be out all night and they would make themselves very ugly” (se pondrían muy bravos). Further on my companion tried his luck again. Two plump girls, not unattractive in appearance, bade him enter. Could they give us posada? They thought so; mother usually did, but she was out just then.
“All right,” said Hays, sitting down, “I’ll wait for her.”
Some time had passed when it occurred to him to ask: