An Indian woman weaving teque-teque or native cloth, by the same method used before the Conquest
Hays, less considerable weight, and a fellow-roadster
Higher still grew quinoa, somewhat like our burdock in appearance, the top full of seeds not unlike the lentil,—a palatable grain which for some strange reason has never been carried to other parts of the world. Under progressive farmers and modern methods, the region of Pasto could be the richest agricultural section of Colombia. But the Indian clings tenaciously to the ways of his ancestors, though in this autonomous department he is a free or community owner and lives far more comfortably than do the estate laborers to the north. An American farmer would gasp at the laborious methods in vogue in a Colombian wheat-field. At harvest time, the phases of the moon being propitious, the saints and ancestral gods placated, men, women, and children wander out to the fields to cut the grain stalk by stalk, tie it into bundles as leisurely as if life were ten thousand years long, and, with a sheaf or two on their backs, toil away over the hills to their huts. There it is threshed by hand, or under the hoofs of animals; the chaff is separated by tossing the grain into the air with wicker-woven shovels, after which the wheat is spread out on a mat in the sun for days, turned over frequently and carried into the house by night. Once dry, it is ground by hand under a stone roller, beaten into flour, and baked over a fagot fire in crude adobe ovens of beehive shape. Small wonder the two soggy little loaves of bread a woman raked out of one of these, and which I went on tossing from hand to hand, cost twice what a real loaf would in the United States.
A valley with a decided tip to the south drew us swiftly on, as only easy going can, after steep and toilsome trails, and the afternoon was still young when we halted at San José, twenty-two miles from the barber’s door. Here it “made much cold,” and we were warned that it would make even more so in Pasto. But native information on this point is seldom of much value to the traveler. In the Andes, climate varies not by season but by location or altitude, and very few of the country people have any notion why one town differs in temperature from another. Accustomed all their lives to the fixed climate of their birthplace, they consider “bitter cold,” or “de un calor atroz” (of atrocious heat), a neighboring hamlet where the mercury really falls but a few degrees lower or rises a bit higher. They accept the variation with the same passive indifference that governs their lives from mother’s back to the grave, their Catholic training stifling the query “why.” The fact remains; the reason—“sabe Diós porqué.”
It was September thirteenth, the first anniversary of the beginning of my Latin-American journey, when we swung on our packs again. In spite of our resolutions, the proximity of a city had the usual effect of increasing our ordinarily leisurely gait. Sunrise overtook us striding down the great San Bernardo valley, a vast, well-inhabited gorge, cultivated far up the mountain sides. Sugarcane mottled the landscape here and there with its Nile-green. Every hut had its trapiche, a crude crusher with wooden rollers operated by oxen, or a still cruder one run by hand. Bananas were plentiful; oranges lay rotting in thousands along the way. As the sun rose higher the pastuso arrieros and horsemen threw the sides of their ruanas back over their shoulders, disclosing the bright red linings. Once it had crossed the river at the bottom of the valley, the road—and it was a real road now, speaking well of the industry of Nariño province—swung round and round the toothlike flanks of the mountain wall, rising ever higher for many miles, yet so gradually that we were scarcely conscious of climbing. Here at last we found ourselves in the Andes as the imagination had pictured them,—dry, mammoth, treeless, repulsive, wholly infertile mountains piled irregularly into the blue heavens on every hand. Under our feet the road suddenly began a buck and wing shuffle, and leaving it to its vagaries we scrambled and slid—particularly Hays in his smooth-bottomed moccasins—down toward the Juanambú river, to the pass where General Nariño fought one of the great battles of the war of independence. Two hours beyond, we came out on the nose of a cliff with a sheer fall of thousands of feet—which we took care not to take—affording a view of the country we had crossed for days past, the trail of forty-eight hours before climbing away into the sky at what seemed but a rifle shot away.
At Boesaco a woman agreed to prepare food if I would give her an “advance” sufficient to buy the necessary ingredients. When Hays arrived, we sat down to a dinner so plentiful that we rose again with difficulty. Life is like that in the Andes. The traveler must feed to bursting when the opportunity offers, and starve at times without complaint. We had already done a reasonable day’s tramping, but the nearness of Pasto overcame our better judgment. A few miles out, a group of pastusos, of almost full Caucasian blood, rode by me with silent disdain. Evidently they disapproved of our mode of travel. Just beyond, the road broke up into many faint paths across a meadow, the stony old trail of colonial days toiling up the face of the mountain to the right. I drew an arrow in the sand lest Hays, lost in some reverie, should fail to note the shod feet by which we tracked each other so easily in a world where all who walk go barefoot. A mile or two across the meadow I fell in with an excellent new highway, well engineered, that took to scolloping in and out along the flank of an enormous range, with a steady rise that never for an instant ceased as long as the day lasted. Here and there a clear, cold stream trickled from the still unhealed mountainside piled into the sky above me. The visible world was wholly uninhabited now, with cold, bleak winds sweeping across the vast panorama of ranges below and above; while ahead, great patches of mist half-concealed the dense, bearded forests through which the road climbed doggedly. In these solitary Berruecos ranges General Sucre was but one of many who had been murdered by brigands or conspirators, and every turn of the lonely road offered splendid ambush. Indeed, it seemed strange that Colombia had proved so free from highway violence, with no other policing outside the capital than, in the larger villages, an occasional mild-eyed youth in one piece of uniform, carrying a chain-twister or a home-made “night-stick.”
Toward nightfall a horseman overtook me. Six weeks on the road had left me in excellent condition, and in spite of the miles in my legs his animal could barely hold my pace. For a long time we mounted almost side by side, a new stretch of solitary highway staring us in the face at every turn, cold night settling down in utter solitude. It had grown wholly dark when we reached the summit, damp with the breath of the forest, an Arctic wind sweeping across it, with dense black night and a suggestion of vast mountain depths on all sides. The silent, gloomy pastuso was evidently suspicious of my intentions and refused to ride ahead. Nor was I too sure of him. The dislike of having an unknown traveler behind me had persisted since my tramp through Mexico, but there was no other choice than to take the lead. On the further side the road was poorer, with a sharp grade and hundreds of fine chances to sprain an ankle. Colombians do not travel by night when they can avoid it, and we met not a sign of life. The stony road descended so swiftly that I had difficulty in judging its pitch and a constant struggle to keep from falling on my face. Suddenly, at a chaos of paths, rocks, and jagged holes, as of some earthquake, I cross an unseen but noisy stream by a sagging log and, leaving the cautious horseman behind, saw him no more.
On and on the rough and broken world dropped before me, with never a moment of respite for my aching thighs. I was concluding I had lost the way entirely, when suddenly there burst upon me all the electric lights of Pasto—actually electric lights, forty-two of them, as I could count from my point of vantage, each of what would have been sixteen candle-power had each had some fourteen candles to help out. I slipped on my coat in anticipation of entering a hotbed of civilization, for was not Pasto the largest city between Bogotá and Quito?
I have ever been over-hopeful. A city it was, to be sure, in the South American sense, but travelers, other than those of the mule-driver class, come rarely to Pasto, and those who do arrive decorously by day, and seek the homes of friends. I had been given the name of the “Hotel Central.” The first passerby directed me to it, but added the information that they no longer “assisted,” that is, gave meals.