Up the Orinoco and down the Magdalena

by J. A. Zahm

It was a little after midday when we finally reached the paramo of Chipaque—that dread paramo of which we had so frequently heard so many and so extraordinary tales. It was, we had been told, a place of eternal frost and snow, and of blasts so tempestuous that both men and animals were sometimes picked up bodily and hurled into a yawning gorge near the dizzy height which we were obliged to pass. We soon discovered, however, that most of the stories we had heard of this and similar paramos, had but little foundation in fact, or were greatly exaggerated.[5]

To begin with, we found neither frost nor snow. As a matter of fact, snow rarely falls in this paramo. All about us there was an abundance of vegetation that little comported with the region of arctic temperature. We found there a number of peasants’ huts and a large drove of cattle, that were on their way from the llanos to the Bogatá market. It took them more than two weeks to make a journey that we had made in three days. But both the cattle and their drivers—vaqueros—were more sensitive to cold than we were. For this reason, they had to proceed slowly to accustom themselves to the lower temperature and the higher altitude. The peasants living on the paramo, although lightly clad, did not seem to be affected by the cold. The vaqueros, however, who had come from the lowlands, seemed to suffer greatly. But no wonder. They made no provision for so great a change of climate. They wore the same light garments—probably they had nothing else—in crossing the Cordilleras, that they had used in the ever-heated llanos. It was not strange, then, that they should give exaggerated accounts of the cold of the paramo or of the suffering it induces. It would be surprising if it were otherwise.

It requires less than half an hour to cross the paramo—so limited is it in area—and reach the Boquerón[6]—the name given the short artificial cut, only a few rods in length—through the crest of the Andes. At this highest point our thermometer registered 48° F., and the aneroid, a fine compensated instrument, indicated an altitude of ten thousand five hundred and sixty feet. This is but little higher than Leadville, Colo., and considerably lower than some of the railway passes over the Rocky Mountains. The temperature, owing to the light atmosphere, was so mild, that we did not even think of throwing our ponchos over our shoulders, as a protection from the cold that the poor Llanero felt so keenly.

As we were passing through the Boquerón we were joined by a young hacendado who had a cattle farm in the neighborhood. After a friendly greeting he remarked, “Está sumamente fría”—It is extremely cold. And then, thinking we were too lightly clad, he said almost pleadingly, “Cubranse con sus bayetones, otramente se saca una pulmonia.” Put on your bayetones, otherwise you will get pneumonia. Then he related how, the preceding year, he had crossed this pass in a snow storm, contracted pneumonia, was confined to his bed for months, and barely escaped a premature death.

While he was thus addressing us, a number of Llaneros passed by on their way from Bogotá to their homes in the warm plains near Villavicencio. In addition to the usual covering for the head they had their ears and face protected by a kind of kerchief and seemed to suffer more from the cold than our hardy northerners would in a Dakota blizzard. Poor fellows! We pitied them. They were shivering, their teeth were chattering and they were evidently in great distress. But the reason was manifest at a glance. Aside from their head gear, they had nothing on except a pair of short trousers of flimsy material and a light poncho. They were barefooted, and, to judge from their wan and pinched features, they were suffering from hunger as well as from cold.

We had now discovered the origin of the reports so generally accepted as true in the llanos, regarding the intense cold of the paramos and of the various Andean passes. Those poor, shivering, ill-clad, half-famished peons explained all. The same causes evidently operated in occasioning the great mortality suffered by Bolivar’s army when it passed, in 1819, from the llanos of the Apure to the altiplanicies—high tablelands—of New Granada.[7]

The paramo of Pisva, through which the Republican army invaded the enemy’s country, is less than thirteen thousand[8] feet above sea level, and the passage, therefore, of the Cordilleras, at this point, was not in itself the difficult undertaking it is so often represented to have been. The frightful loss of life, usually attributed to the intense cold of Pisva Pass, was, in reality, due to the fact that Bolivar’s followers were not properly prepared for the campaign in which they were engaged. They were half-naked and half-starved and the wonder is that the hapless army did not suffer far greater losses than those actually recorded.

“The army endured many sufferings in the passage of the paramo,” writes Vergara y Velasco, “but it is a grave error to compare them with those incurred in the passage of the Alps by Hannibal and Napoleon or in the passage of the Chilean Andes by San Martin, for in Pisva there is no snow, neither is the altitude so great as that of many frequented places in our Cordilleras. The expedition, without having the romance of the others, nevertheless equals them in results and for the same reason—the ineptitude of the enemy.”[9]

The first thing that attracted our attention, on reaching the western end of the Boquerón, was the large number of flowers, of divers species, that bedecked both sides of our path. They constituted a carpet of the most brilliant hues that, with a lovely green boscage, extended to the very summit of the mountain crest. In form and beauty they were not unlike the charming blooms that gladden our forests and meadows in May and June. There was this difference, however, that the number of species in a given space was far greater than is ever found in the same space in our northern climes. Does this close juxtaposition of so many species in the tropics contribute to the more rapid formation of varieties and new species than is possible in higher latitudes, where species are fewer and more widely separated from one another? It would seem so.

We shall never forget the panorama that burst upon our vision as we made our exit from the Boquerón. It was in such marked contrast with the view which we had so much admired on the eastern side. On the east side all was verdure, bloom, and grateful shrubbery, with occasional clumps of trees. On the western declivity, with the exception of a narrow reach, already mentioned, near the mountain crest, all was as treeless and as bare and arid as the sandy plains of Nevada or Arizona.