At dusk we came out on a headland and saw, so directly below that a false step would have pitched us, or rather our mangled remains, down into its very plaza, the mathematically regular town of San Pablo, in the floor-flat river bottom of the Rio Mayo, with rich meadows stretching east and west to the rocky mountain walls that boxed them in. The descent was so steep that we could only hold our own by wedging our toes into the shale and keeping our thigh-muscles taut as brake-rods; so swift that the trail often split to bits from its own momentum. In the town we were startled to have the first boy we met admit that posada could be had. His own mother had a room to rent. He laid aside the hat he was weaving and, picking up a bunch of enormous keys, stepped toward an adobe building across the street. But at that moment a patched and barefoot man rushed down upon us, likewise offering us posada in a startling burst of eloquence. For a time it looked as if, for once, instead of having to fight for lodgings, lodgings were going to fight for us. We settled the dispute by the simple expedient of asking each his price.
“One real,” answered the boy, defiantly.
“In my oficina de peluquería,” said the man, haughtily, “it will cost you nothing. Moreover, foreigners always lodge there.”
Behind his bravado he seemed so nearly on the point of weeping that we should no doubt have chosen his “office of barbering,” even had there been no such gulf between the rival prices. He thanked us for the favor and, producing from somewhere about his person an enormous key, unlocked one of those unruly shop-doors indigenous to rural South America, above which projected a shingle bearing on one side the information that we were about to enter the “Peluquería Cívica,” and on the other the name of our host, Santiago Muñoz. The keyhole was of the shape of a swan; others in the town, as throughout Nariño, had the form of a man, a horse, a goose, and a dozen more as curious. These home-made doors of Andean villages, be it said in passing, never fit easily; their huge clumsy locks have always some idiosyncrasy of their own, so that by the time the traveler learns to unlock the door of his lodging without native assistance, he is ready to move on.
This one gave admittance to the usual white-washed mud den, with a tile floor, furnished as a Colombian barber-shop, which means that it was chiefly empty and by no means immaculate, with two wooden benches, three tin basins and an empty water-pitcher, a home-made—or San Pablo-made—chair, a lame table littered with newspapers from a year to three months old, a scanty supply of open razors, strops, Florida water, soap, and brushes scattered promiscuously, a couple of once-white gowns of “Mother Hubbard” form for customers, and in one corner a heap of human hair, black and coarse. Then there were the luxuries of a clumsy candlestick with six inches of candle, and a lace curtain worked with red and blue flowers to cut off the gaze of the curious, except those bold enough frankly to push it aside and stare in upon us. Santiago gave us full possession, key and all—we tossed a coin to decide which of us should burden himself with the latter—and informed us that a woman next door to the church sometimes supplied meals to travelers.
The benches were barely a foot wide, but they were of soft wood, and we were so delighted to find accommodations plentiful that I was about to make a similar suggestion when Hays yawned:
“Let’s hang over here to-morrow.”
Late next morning the barber wandered in upon us.
“Last year,” he began, “another meestare”—in the Andes the word is used as a common noun to designate not only Americans, but Europeans and even Spaniards—“stopped here. You perhaps know him. His name was Guiseppe.”
We doubted it.