Up the Orinoco and down the Magdalena

by J. A. Zahm

But where did the money come from for the erection of such a noble structure? The people all seemed very poor, and quite unable to keep such an edifice in repair after its completion, not to speak of supplying the means for building it. We frequently found ourselves asking this same question in other parts of South America, when contemplating the large and beautiful ecclesiastical structures that are often met with where one should least expect to find them. The builders of them evidently belonged to those ages of faith that have bequeathed to us those marvels of architecture—the great cathedrals of Europe.

Something that always afforded us great comfort, and that was rarely far away, after we left Villavicencio, was the telegraph line. For weeks we had been far away from it, and, in case of need, it could not have been reached. It was then that we really felt that we were indeed a long way off from home and friends. To communicate with them by letter would then have required the best part of a year, for there was no regular postal service to which we could have had recourse. With the friendly and willing telegraph ever near, it was quite different. By its means we could, in a few hours at most, convey a message to the most distant parts of the world.

When leaving any given place in the morning our whole party—peons with baggage, mules included—would be together. But it was not long until we were far in advance of the vaqueano and peons, whom we would not again see until evening or, as it sometimes happened, until the following morning. There was rarely any danger of losing our path, for the simple reason that there was, as a rule, only a single path from one place to another. We had, therefore, nothing to do but to keep to the trail. Occasionally, however, we would come to a point where it was necessary to choose between two diverging trails. Then it was that the telegraph line was an invaluable guide. We followed the trail which it paralleled, and in so doing we never went astray.

It was now several months since we had received a letter from home. We had not even seen a newspaper of any kind, and were, consequently, in utter ignorance of what was occurring in the great and busy world we had left behind us. But strange as it may seem, the traveler in Nature’s wilds seems soon to grow indifferent to the world’s doings. Even those who at home consider the morning and evening papers indispensable necessities, seem to forget that there are such things. Nay, they even experience a sense of relief that they have gotten beyond the reach of post and telegraph, and that, for once in their lives, they can call their time their own. Indeed, the absence of the daily paper, with its countless dispatches, far from being a privation, soon impressed us as a positive blessing.

We enjoyed a sense of freedom—the freedom of the child of the forest—we had never known before. We were beginning to see how easy it was to dispense with many things that are so often regarded as essentials to pleasure and comfort. If we had been unavoidably detained at some Indian encampment for a few months or found it necessary to tarry a year or so in one of the little bamboo cottages on the eastern slope of the Andes, we should not have regarded it as an unmixed evil. Even as I pen these lines, I have a vivid recollection of a score of tiny cots along the Rio Negro and the Rio Caqueza, near a purling brook or a musical cascade, shaded by palms and surrounded by smiling citrus trees, where it would be a delight to live and commune with Nature at her best.

I can fully sympathize with Waterton’s longing for the wild and his love of tropical life. Every lover of nature, who has spent some time in the heart of the equatorial forests, is affected in the same way. The wanderlust and abenteuergeist—the love of travel and adventure—grows on one, it seems, in the wilds of South America more than elsewhere. Is it because the conquistadores and other early explorers have impregnated the atmosphere with their spirit, or because the environment of itself has the power of inoculating the visitor from the north with the microbe of a life-long wanderleben? Dicant Paduani.

Recording his impressions of travel in Andean highlands a writer in the early part of the last century says: “A sense of extreme loneliness and remoteness from the world seizes on his,” the traveler’s mind, “and is heightened by the dead silence that prevails; not a sound being heard but the scream of the condor, and the monotonous murmur of the distant waterfalls.”[4]

Peons Fording a River in the Andes.