Baron Münchausen.
The barber carefully folded the valuable document and hid it away in his garments, promising to send it at the first opportunity—in a plain envelope, unregistered: “For,” he explained, confiding to us a nation-wide secret, “the post-office officials always steal any letter they think has money in it, and to register it makes them sure it has.”
The plan was cruel, but we could think of no other. No doubt Santiago waited many anxious months for the arrival of the “system”; certainly no longer than he would have if he had managed to send real money. Meanwhile, as Latin-American enthusiasm shrinks rapidly, it may be that he grew resigned to his failure to become the dictator of San Pablo and took up again the shaving of its swarthy faces and the cutting of its coarse, black hair.
Every house of San Pablo is a factory of “panama” hats. The “straw” is furnished by the toquilla plant, a reed somewhat resembling the sugarcane in appearance, which grows in large quantities in the valley of the Patía. If left to itself, the plant at length blossoms or “leaves” out in the form of a fan-shaped fern. Once it has reached this stage, it is no longer useful to the weaver of hats. For his purposes the leaves must be nipped in the bud, so to speak,—gathered while still in the stalk. The green layers that would, but for this premature end, have expanded later into leaves, are spread out and cut into narrow strips with a comb-shaped knife. The finer the cutting, the more expensive the hat. Between the material of a $2 and a $50 “panama” there is no difference whatever, except in the width of the strips. Boiled and laid out in the sun and wind, these curl tightly together. They are then bleached white in a sulphur oven and sold to the weaver in the form of tufts not unlike the broom straw, or a bunch of prairie-grass. The Patía produces also a much heavier leaf, called mocora, from which not only coarse hats but hammocks are twisted.
The weaving of the “panama” begins at the crown, and the edge of the brim is still unfinished, with protruding “straws,” when turned over to the wholesale dealer. Packed one inside the other in bales a yard long, they are carried on muleback to Pasto. There, more skillful workmen bind in and trim the edges. They are then placed in large mud ovens of beehive shape in which quantities of sulphur are burned. Next they are laid out in the back yard of the establishment—with chickens, dogs, and other fauna common to the dwellings of the Andes wandering over them, be it said in passing—to bleach in the sun; they are rubbed with starch to give them a false whiteness, and finally men and boys pound and pound them on blocks with heavy wooden mallets, as if bent on their utter destruction, tossing them aside at last, folded and beaten flat, in the form in which they appear eventually in the show-windows of our own land. The best can be woven only morning or evening, or when the moon is full and bright, the humidity of the air being then just sufficient to give the fiber the required flexibility.
The local names for the entire process are:
“Tejar”—the task of the weaver.
“Azocar”—the drawing together and trimming of the protruding “straws.”
“Azufrar”—the baking over burning sulphur.
“Bañar en leche de azufre”—washing in a sulphur bath.