When we had “made a stake” as Canal Zone policemen, Leo Hays and I sailed from Panama to South America. On board the Royal Mail steamer the waist of the ship, to which our tickets confined us, was a screaming pandemonium of West Indian negroes, homeward bound from canal digging, and a veritable chaos of their baggage and household goods—and gods—ranging from tin trunks to pet monkeys, from battered phonographs to plush-bound Bibles. We preËmpted deck space for our suitcases and sat down upon them. It chanced to be the same day on which, eight years before, I had set out on a “vagabond journey” around the world.

Twenty-four hours after our last Zone handshake we marched down the gangplank among the little brown policemen of Cartagena, Colombia, and fought our way through a mob of dock loafers to the toy railroad train that eventually creaked away into the city. Our revolvers and cartridge belts we wore out of sight; uniforms and nightsticks no longer figured in our equipment. But the campaign costume we had chosen,—broad felt hats, Norfolk jackets and breeches of olive drab, and the leather leggings common to the Zone—were evidently more conspicuous here than we had suspected. For about us wherever we moved sounded awe-struck stage whispers:

“Psst! PolicÍa de la Zona!”

The ancient city and fortress of Cartagena—and for America it is old indeed—squats on a sandy point jutting far out into the blue Caribbean, with a beach curving inland on either hand. A sea-wall beside which that of Panama seems a plaything, of massive weather-tarnished, ocean-lashed stones, brown-gray with age, with stern, dignified old gateways, encloses the city in irregular form. On its top is a promenade varying in width from a carriage drive to a manoeuver field. Outside, down on the languidly garrulous beach, little thatched huts have drifted together under the cocoanut groves. Inside, the dust-deep streets have long since lost most of the cobbled paving of their Spanish birthright; the narrow, inadequate tile sidewalks are far from continuous, and the rules of life are so lax that only the constant sweep of the sea air accounts for old age amid conditions that should bring death early and often.

Long before we reached our hotel we regretted our penuriousness in scorning cabs and carriers. Not only did the weight of our suitcases double every few yards in the leaden tropical air, and the labyrinthian way through the city elude us at every turn, but at least a score of ragged boys trailed respectfully but hopefully in our rear with the anticipatory manner of an opera understudy waiting in the edge of the wings for the principal to break down at the next note. A generous percentage of the population crowded the doorways and children raced ahead to summon forth their families to behold what was apparently the most exciting thing that had taken place in Cartagena in months. Evidently a caballero bearing his own material burdens was a strange sight in South America. The populace stared fixedly, in as impersonal a way as ruminating oxen, and every few yards half-naked children, evidently abetted by their elders, swarmed out upon us with shrill cries of “Wan sheeling!”

We were soon reminded that we had left behind our power as well as our emoluments. The proprietress whose oily Hebrew smile greeted us at the hotel door was none other than one long “wanted” on the Zone on the charge of running a disorderly house. The room she assigned us was enormous, but the furnishings were scant and thin, the beds mere strips of canvas, as befits a country of perennial midsummer. While we unpacked and shaved, a ragged brown urchin slipped in with the Barranquilla newspaper. In a characteristic burst of generosity Hays tossed him double the price demanded—only to discover just after the vendor was out of reach that the pauperise little sheet was twenty days old. It was a “bunco game” so aged it had grown new again. Maria, the chambermaid, already in the sear and yellow leaf, shuffled in frequently, supremely indifferent to our scantiness of attire. Now and then several younger females of decidedly African ancestry strolled by as nonchalantly, one by one, to inquire whether we had any soiled clothes to wash, and loitered about in a manner to suggest that the question was meant to be taken figuratively. This friendliness was the general attitude of all the town. Outwardly at least we were shown no discourtesy, and there was little confirmation of the reputed hatred of Americans. Yet almost from the moment of our landing we noted that Colombians seemed to avoid speaking to us beyond the requirements of business or the cut and dried forms of their habitual politeness. Still, with only an anemic candle to flicker its pale shadows on the enclosing wall of the droning tropical night, we settled down to the conclusion that Colombia, alleged the deadly enemy of all things American and “heretical,” was less black than she had been painted.

We had reached the land of easy money. Merely to step into a bank with a $5 bill was to emerge with a bulging roll of $500. We could not repress a millionaire swagger when we tossed a hundred-dollar note on the counter to pay for a pair of socks, though it quickly wilted when a few nickel pieces were tendered in change. Hays dropped into a dingy little hole-in-the-wall to buy a cigar, but though it was certainly the only $5 cigar he had ever strutted behind, he soon tossed it away in disgust. The newcomer is apt to be startled when he hears a Colombian casually mention paying $10,000 for a mule—until he realizes that the speaker is really talking in cents. The Colombian notes, even those of the intrinsic value of our copper coin, are elaborately engraved, and the wonder grew how the Government could afford to print them.

For those who will exert themselves, even in the tropics, there is a splendid view of all Cartagena from La Popa, a hill standing forth Gibraltar-like above the inner harbor, on its nose a massive old church and fortress combined. From it the cruder details of the town, the startling pink and sky-blue of newer walls and balconies, fade to the general inconspicuousness of the more age-mellowed houses. The ancient red-tile roofs blend artistically into the patches of greensward and the light pink of royal poinciana trees; the whole city, edged by the landward-leaning cocoanut palms, is framed by a sea stretching away on either hand to the world’s end.

The half-grown Colombian of forty in charge of La Popa and the telescope and telephone by which incoming ships are reported, changed gradually from canny distrust to garrulous curiosity and invited us to inspect his entire domain. The purely academic dislike of Americans we soon found was overcome with little effort by those who addressed men of his class in their own tongue. Conversation at length drifted to sanitation in Panama, Colombia’s “rebel province,” as he called it. The fort-keeper listened to our tales in loose-jawed wonder and summed up his opinions of such gringo superstitions with:

“But here we do none of those things, seÑores! The mosquitos prick us every day, yet we are well.”

Our strange notion that disease could be carried by a mere insect was as absurd to him as was to us his own habit of relying for health on the plaster saint in the vaulted fortress church.

Even in Panama information on travel in Colombia had been almost as lacking as trustworthy reports on the interior conditions of Mars. Only once in my five months on the Canal Zone had I run across even an ostensible source of knowledge. He was a native of Cali, and his answers had been distinctly Latin-American.

“Does it rain much in your country?” I had asked him.

“SÍ, seÑor, when it rains it is wet. When it doesn’t it is dry.”

“Is it cold?”

“SÍ, seÑor, in the cold places it is cold, and in the hot places it is hot. No hay reglas fixas—there are no fixed rules.”

“How far is it from Cali to PopayÁn?”

“Ah, it is not near, seÑor.”

“About a hundred miles, perhaps?”

“SÍ, seÑor, just about that.”

“Isn’t it rather about three hundred?”

“PuÉs, sÍ, seÑor, perhaps just about that.”

There the matter had stood when we sailed.

Once arrived in Cartagena, however, we found that a toy train left next day for Calamar on the Magdalena and that a second-class ticket to Honda, wherever that was, cost $2000! We had barely crammed ourselves into two seats of the little piano-box car next day when Hays started up with a snort and thrust the morning newspaper across at me. Done into English the item that had drawn his attention ran:

who merits our entire confidence, informs us that yesterday there were in the city, taking photographic views of our forts and most important edifices, two foreign individuals who wore clothing of military cut of the cloth called khaki, and felt hats with wide brim. This costume, as it has been described to us, is that of the army of the United States! Can these really be American soldiers, or has a great outward similarity caused the suspicious imagination to see that which in reality did not exist? We cannot assure it!”

We had hardly aspired to be taken for a hostile invasion from the dreaded “Colossus of the North.” It was characteristic of Latin-American thinking processes for the paragrapher to fancy that spies—for such the item covertly dubbed us—would appear in uniform. We had yet to learn, however, that the makers of newspaper, and of public opinion, in so far as it exists, in South America would often rank in our own land as irresponsible and poorly trained school-boys.

The miniature train, ambling away in a morning unoppressive in spite of the tropical sunshine, wound through a thin jungle, sometimes climbing, more often stopping at languorous, staring, thatched villages, in a region suffering from drought but of fertile appearance. By and by the jungle gave way to what might almost have been called prairie, slightly rolling and used only for grazing. Toward noon, beyond some swampy land, we clattered into the carelessly whitewashed town of Calamar, drowsing on the sandy bank of the Magdalena, here a half mile wide. Even before we jolted to a halt, the car filled with a struggling mob of beggars, shrill-voiced boys, and tattered men, eager, in their indolent tropical way, for some easy errand. Such unwonted energy soon evaporated. The population was of as mongrel a mixture as the yellow dogs that slunk about in the shade of trees and house walls, and appeared to hold identically the same attitude toward life.

At length, in the cool of the following evening, the “Alicia” began to plow her way slowly upstream. She was a three-story craft with a huge paddle-wheel at the stern, her lower deck crowded with unassorted freight, domestic animals, engines and wood-piles, with deck hands, native passengers, pots and pans and unattractive habits. Among the most conspicuous of the latter were those of an open-air den that served as general kitchen. Twice a day a small tub of rice, boiled plantains and some meat mystery, all cooked in a single kettle, was carried out on one of the barges alongside, where it was fallen upon not only by the lower-deck passengers but by the even darker-skinned deck hands, dressed in what had once been trousers and the wear-forever shirts so popular in this region. A few owned spoons and others a piece of cocoanut shell, but these were no handicap to the majority, armed only with the utensils of nature. Little had we suspected the meaning of “second-class” on the Magdalena!

Luckily the English agent of the line had been so shocked at sight of our tickets, particularly, perhaps, in the hands of Hays, who was in appearance the hero of any of our modern romantic novels stepping bodily forth from the cardboard of any of our popular illustrators, that he had ordered the steward to overlook the color thereof and treat us as cabin passengers. On the upper deck the steamer was open from stem to stern, a dining table stretching along her center and the sides lined by frail, box-like “staterooms.” The little canvas cots, narrow as the charpoys of India, used alike by passengers and the unlaundered youths that passed for stewards, were dragged to any part of the craft that suited the whims of the sleeper. Our drinking water was the native Magdalena, sometimes carelessly filtered through a porous stone. There was even a shower-bath—when the paddle-wheel was elevating enough of the chocolate-colored river water to permit it to “function”—but it generally took most of the morning and all the stewards to find the misplaced key.

Frequently for days at a time there were only the two of us to occupy the cane rocking-chairs that embellished the upper foredeck. Here day after day we watched the monotonous yellow bank unroll with infinite slowness, like a film clogged in the machine. The country, flat, considerably wooded, and characterless, stood only a few feet above the river, its soil sandy, though not without fertility, with occasional clearings and many immense spreading trees. Here and there on the extreme edge of the stream hung a few scattered thatched villages, all apparently engaged in the favorite occupation of doing nothing, living on the few fruits and vegetables that grew themselves and drinking the yellow Magdalena pure.

At such times there was nothing left but to while away the languid hours in perfecting our plans for the journey ahead. For once I had chanced upon a traveling companion who had actually started when the hour of departure came, and who bade fair to pursue the expedition to the bitter end. Leo Hays had first seen the light—such as it is in Missouri—six months later than I, but had overcome that initial handicap by deflecting the sun’s rays in many a varying clime. The schools had early scowled upon him—or he upon them—and he had retaliated by gathering in his own way much that schools have never hoarded away in their impregnable warehouses. The gleaning had carried him far afield, in social strata as well as physical distance, but it had left him unburdened with the bric-a-brac of life so dear to the bourgeois soul. Wasteful of money and the petty things of life, he was never wasteful of life itself. He was of those who look at the world through a wide-angle lens. There is a breadth of vision gained in an existence varying from “hobo” printer and editor in our pulsating Southwest to sugar estate overseer in the Guianas, from the forecastle to the Moro villages of the Philippines, that makes a formal education seem cramped and restricted by comparison. To those who did not know the Canal Zone in its halcyon days a mere corporal of police demanding of himself the ability to converse intelligently a half hour on any subject from astronomy to Norse literature, from heraldry to Urdu philosophy, may seem a fantastic figure. To the experienced “Zoner” it is commonplace.

On Sunday morning the entire village of Zambrano, headed by its curate and dressed in every imaginable misfit of sun-bleached gaiety, swarmed on board and subjected us to a leisurely detailed examination that gave us the sensation of being museum exhibits. The “Alicia” was soon off again and we came to the conclusion that the town was migrating en masse. A few hundred yards beyond, however, we tied up to the bank once more and waited a long hour while all Zambrano took leave of the priest. Every inhabitant under fifteen kissed his hand, which each of the women pressed fervently, some several times over, after which the men approached him in procession, padre and layman throwing an arm about each other’s neck and slapping each other some seven times each between the shoulder-blades. It was only the customary Colombian abrazo and the formality of seeing the curate a little way on his journey. Meanwhile our half-Indian boy captain stood smilingly by, twisting the two tiny sprigs of mustache that gave him so striking a resemblance to a Chinese mandarin turned river pirate. He was far too good a Catholic to cut short the leave-taking even had he guessed that anyone on board chaffed at the delay. The day was much older before we crawled out into the middle of the stream again. But no man journeys up to BogotÁ hastily. The Land of Hurry was behind us.

When we addressed him, the priest answered us courteously enough, then dropped the conversation in a manner to suggest that he did not care to pursue it further. Like his fellow-countrymen in general he seemed to have no hunger for knowledge, no notion that he might learn from others. The attitude of all the upper-deck passengers was as if an edict had gone forth to dislike Americans. Individually none had any grievance against us, collectively they seemed banded together in a species of intellectual boycott, which none of them vented to the extent of losing his reputation for politeness. Their manner suggested pouting children, unwilling to declare their fancied grievances and fight them out like men.

There were a half dozen of us at table that evening, with the priest in the place of honor at the head. The meal passed without a spoken word, at racehorse speed. It recalled a placard I had seen in a Texas restaurant on my journey southward: “Eat first, THEN talk,” and amid the opening chorus Hays’ memory harked back to a sign that once embellished a Bowery institution: “Soup should be seen and not heard.” That we paused for speech between mouthfuls seemed to fill our companions with a mixture of disgust and amazement. It was perilous, too, for ragged, barefooted waiters more numerous than the diners, hovered over us, quick to snatch away the plate of anyone who dared raise his head. How unlike the sociable meals of Spain was this silent wolfing!

Their own parents could not have distinguished one meal from another. The soup was always of the general collection variety, the two vegetables incessantly the same; the beef varied from the hopelessly tough to the suspiciously tender; for the system on the river steamers of the Magdalena is to slaughter a steer on the lower deck the first morning of the voyage and serve it twice daily until passengers are unanimous in leaving their plates untouched, then regretfully to lead another gloomy, raw-boned animal forth to slaughter. Yet no one could have complained on the score of quantity. We no longer wondered at the sallow flabbiness of those about us in spite of their life in the open air.

The voracious engines of the “Alicia” required more halting than movement. Barely had we left the faint lights of Calamar astern when we tied up for hours before a woodpile in the edge of the jungle, and never did a half day pass without a long halt to replenish the fuel. The sight of a bamboo hut or a cluster of thatched shacks crouched in a little semicircular space gouged out of the immense forest was sure to bring a shrill scream from the whistle and in the soft air of evening we crawled up to a tiny clearing where perhaps thirty cords of wood lay awaiting a purchaser. They were heavy slabs some three feet long, the piles separated by upright poles into divisions called burros, the conventional load, perhaps, of one ass. On the utter edge of the bank hung a miserable little hut swarming with dogs and equally unwashed human beings. There were the usual endless manoeuvers to a mooring, then the entire crew went ashore on the heels of the captain, armed with his measuring stick. He and the woodsman, a sturdy, bashful fellow, gave each other the customary greeting pat on the shoulder, then stood a long time, each with a hand on the woodpile, discussing the details of the imminent financial transaction.

But they could not come to terms, and at length the steamer population returned on board and for ten minutes with much ringing of bells and screeching of whistles the “Alicia” went through the pretence of getting under way. The woodsman held his ground, though his wood looked as if he had already held it several years. At length we returned to the same mooring and a wash-basin of boiled beef and plantains was carried ashore as a peace offering. This time we struck a bargain, and the two populations exchanged places. The countrymen, of all ages and both sexes, many with evidences of loathsome diseases, one limping on a foot white with leprosy, swarmed into every corner of the craft, gazing open-mouthed at her unbelievable magnificence, sitting cautiously down in the deck chairs, thrusting their fingers into the saucers of dessert that had been set out an hour or two before meal time to give the flies fair play, passing from hand to hand anything that caught their fancy. Their protruding bellies suggested that the hookworm was prevalent. The men wore over one shoulder a satchel-like pouch called a garniel, for their clothing was not such as might safely have been entrusted with their minor possessions.

Meanwhile we had taken advantage of the opportunity to stretch our legs ashore, for whatever their faults these jungle people are not addicted to thievery. Under the edge of the forest, into the dense green depths of which we could wander a little way amid a wealth of woodland aromas and the fitful songs of birds, was planted a little field of corn, the stalks a full ten feet high, even the ears in many cases well above our heads, though the jungle was thick between the rows and there was no sign of other labor than the planting. A bit of sugarcane grew as luxuriantly, and behind the hut stood a crude trapiche, or cane crusher, a mere stump and lever above a dug-out trough. Palm, gourd, mango, and papaya trees, the females of the latter heavy with fruit and the males gay with yellow blossoms, suggested that the spot might have been one of the most flourishing gardens on earth had the inhabitants any other industry or desire than to roll about on their earth floors. From a corner of the patch the stewards cut long reeds and made trumpets of exactly the sound of army bugles.

The houses of the region are very simply built. Four posts, some six inches in diameter and rising as many feet above the ground, are set at the corners of the house to be. Halfway between these are set four smaller upright poles, giving each wall three supports. Along the tops of these, saplings about four inches in diameter are tied with green vines, after which pole rafters are raised. Across these, six to eight inches apart, are laid strips of split bamboo, also tied with vines. The roof is then thatched with dried banana leaves, laid lengthwise with the slope of the roof, those underneath secured by being bent over the bamboo strips, and layer after layer of them piled on until the thatch is a foot or more thick. Two poles, tied some distance apart with green vines, are then thrown over the peak of the roof to keep a sudden gust of wind from lifting the shelter off the dwellers’ heads, and the residence is ready for occupancy.

The deck hands, each wearing on his head a grain sack split up one side, stood in file beside the diminishing woodpile. When his turn came, each grasped the end of his sack in the right hand and held the arm at full length while others heaped it high with cordwood. As soon as he had what he considered a reasonable amount, the carrier threw a rope held in his left hand over the load, caught it deftly in the already burdened right and, pulling it taut, marched down some twenty feet of perpendicular sandy bank and across a wobbly eight-inch plank without a quiver. We envied them the exercise at every landing, but even to have carried a stick on board would have been not only to lose our own caste but to jeopardize that of all our fellow-countrymen.

Nothing would be more futile than to attempt to describe the tropical sunset, exceeded in beauty, if at all, only by sunrise, as it spread across this flat jungle and forest country, the curving river and woodlands. On into the night the languid wood loading continued, lighted up in irregular patches by the lamps of the steamer and flickering oil torches ashore. Long after dark, as the last of the burros was disappearing, the jungle dweller came on board in person and fixed upon me to figure up how much he had coming, openly putting his faith in a foreigner in preference to a native. There were 119 burros, for which he was to receive fourteen cents each. It totalled $16.66, or, as it sounded to him, $1666, and by and by the purser, who would no doubt have beaten him a few hundred dollars in the multiplication but for my pencil, came out of his cabin with an Australian gold sovereign and an immense handful of Colombian bills. I asked the recipient how long he had worked to get the pile together and received the expected South American answer:

“Ay! Muchos soles, seÑor,—many suns,” which of course was as exact as he could be about it. Strangely enough he resisted the wheedling of the ragged stewards to exchange his fortune for the cheap straw hats and brass rings they carried for sale and got safely ashore with the entire handful of what, in these wilds, could not have been of any great practical value.

As we pushed off, the captain announced that we had wood enough to last until the following noon. One would have fancied we had enough to last to the seventh circle and back. Here we could still “march” all night, for the river was deep in spite of its great width. As we sat in solitary glory on the upper deck watching the blood-red moon come up out of the jungle, Hays suddenly broke off a dissertation on the philosophy of life of Marcus Aurelius to exclaim:

“We ought to swear off on this. If we’re going to walk along the top of the Andes we’ll need all the chest expansion we’ve got,” and suiting the action to the word, he chucked his half-smoked $5 cigar overboard. It was not until late next morning that I saw him light the next one.

“But I thought you’d sworn off?” I reminded him.

“That’s the great value of resolutions,” he answered, “you make them to break them and feel the genuine freedom of life. But to-morrow I’ll swear off in earnest”—which he did, almost daily as long as the journey lasted. Meanwhile, my birthday making a good date for it, I gave up the habit definitely myself, none too sure of its effect in the lofty altitudes before us.

We moved at about the speed of a log-raft towed by a sunfish. Whenever there was danger of our making a reasonable Colombian distance the whistle was sure to sound and we drifted inshore to tie up for hours before another woodpile. Sometimes the flat, disappointing banks of the river were sheer for miles, with unbroken stretches of swamp grass six feet high so dense it did not seem that a snake could have wormed its way through it. The cerulean blue skies were equal to any of Italy, the light clouds wandering lazily across them sometimes forming in battle array on the rim of the horizon. Here and there were considerable fields of sugarcane about a thatched village; but the vast fertile territory was almost entirely virgin and uncleared. One morning a cry of “CaimÁn!” called attention to a point of sand on which lay a score of alligators, most of which slid sluggishly off into the stream as we approached. Thereafter we had only to glance along the banks to be almost sure of seeing several.

For some days Hays and I had made up the deck passenger list unassisted, sitting through our meals in dignified silence with some half-dozen waiters to miswait on us—when we could get their attention—headed by the chief steward, who never tired of boasting that he had once made cigars in the shadow of Ancon police station. His underlings received six dollars a month, such food as they could forage, and the right to wear what the passage of years had left of misfit cotton uniforms, to be turned in at the end of the trip. They were obliged to pay for all breakages, and life was indeed slender with only two economical gringos as passengers. The arrival of a new pasajero was in consequence always an exciting event. Five days up, in the region known as the OpÓn country, there appeared on board a native trapper of wild animals, who had been shot through the face by an arrow of the savage Opones, but had performed the rare feat of making his escape. Colombia includes within her confines several tribes of Indians not only uninfluenced by the government, but without an inkling of its existence. The Opones live far back along the tributaries of the Magdalena, descending them only in certain seasons, and attacking any human beings they come upon. Armed with a species of arch-bow, they shoot an enormous arrow with a point of iron-hard black palm barbed both ways, that can neither be pushed through nor pulled out of the body of the victim. The arrow the trapper brought with him could barely be forced into his long trunk after being broken in two, and five cruel barbs still remained after several others had been cut off and left in the body of his former companion. A few weeks before, he reported, a harmless fellow fishing somewhat back from the main river had been made the veritable pincushion of thirty-two such arrows. The trapper had it that the Opones were cannibals, asserting that a recent expedition into the OpÓn country had found a Colombian woman of good family who was being fattened in a cage of bamboo, but whom the savages had not yet eaten because of a suspicious sore on her leg.

Gradually low shadowy mountains began to appear in the far blue distance, with suggestions of higher ones in the clouds behind them. On the seventh day a long rugged chain, the Sierra de Peraja in the Province of Santander, had grown so near that separate peaks and suggestions of villages could be picked out of the sunlit distance. Next morning we were half surrounded by deep blue ranges, and the banks were broad natural meadows with hundreds of cattle knee-deep in rich green grass. Magnificent spreading trees now stood out against the sky and ranges. The nights had grown so cool that we took to sleeping in our “stateroom”—with barely room enough left to sneeze when our cots had been dragged in. Here we began to go aground frequently, for the tendency of the Magdalena is to spread out more and more as her sandy banks keep falling into the river. At our speed the experience was hardly hair-raising, and generally in the course of a few hours the “Alicia” worked herself loose again. There were almost no other water craft, except an occasional canoa, a dug-out log crawling along the extreme lower edge of the forest wall. Now and then we passed large balsas, rafts of hundreds of immense cedar logs, with the Colombian flag at the prow and the crew camped aft with mat beds, primitive kitchens, and sometimes their women and a numerous progeny. Great trees, which the captain called ceibas, rose slim and clear more than a hundred feet, to end in a parasol tuft of branches. Frequently a flock of parrakeets screamed noisily by overhead. In places we crawled along between sheer sand banks, gigantic trees of the dense forest hanging on the brink of miniature Culebra slides as the river washed under them.

Higher still the stream grew so shallow that we could “march” only by day, anchoring at dark. One night we tied up to the bank on an inner curve of the river, where the forest cut off the breeze completely and left us to toss in our cots until dawn. Its first glimmer of light showed that we had reached Pureto BerrÍo, where a little narrow-gage starts—I use the word advisedly, for it never gets there—for MedellÍn, second city of Colombia. The “port” itself suspended whatever it was in the habit of doing to stare at us in long silent rows from the doorways. Its male population not only wore no shirt but did not even trouble to conceal that fact by buttoning its tattered sun-bleached jacket. All the natives seemed obsessed with the notion that, as gringos, we could not speak Spanish. As often as we addressed one, though our Castilian vocabulary was as ample and our pronunciation far less slovenly than his own, he refused to believe his senses until the sensation had been several times repeated.

We were off again by noon. It had been raining in the highlands beyond and the visibly rising river was half covered with patches of thick scum. Now and then it bore by on its swift silent surface a fragment of forest snatched from somewhere above. We were now some hundreds of feet above sea-level, and the forest air was fragrant and unfevered. All day long nothing but forest trailed by. We passed timber enough in a week to supply the world for a century and rich soil enough to feed a large section of it permanently. But only very rarely did a little bamboo hut, roofed with leaves, dot the monotony of virgin nature. The river had narrowed down to a placid powerful stream; the weather was peerless, though an almost invisible gnat began to make life less motionless.

In the purple gloaming a forest-built village of some size stood out more picturesquely than usual on the nose of a land billow jutting forth and falling sheer into the river, only to have the interminable forest swallow it up again. Yet there were signs that we were approaching somewhere or other. Hays sat with his feet on the rail, discoursing on the relative merits of Turgeniev and GaldÓs, the point of his “last” cigar glowing in the darkness, when the captain passed with a package wrapped in the customary inefficiency of Latin-America.

“Here, I used to be one,” said Hays, reaching for the bundle and rearranging it.

“Used to be what?” I asked, as he handed it back.

“I was walking along the street of—of—well I don’t remember the stage setting, but it must have been in the States and a long time ago,” he began, lighting a second cigar from the butt of the first, “for I know I hadn’t been to sea or in the army yet, when I saw a sign in a window, ‘Bundle Wrapper Wanted.’ I had to pass up a hundred per as outside man for a medicine faker to take it, but it was something new and ...” and he rambled off into one of those experience sketches which, jumping erratically over the face of the globe, frequently enlivened the voyage.

In the last hours of June we bumped against the wharf of La Dorada, several hundred yards of tinware building along a sloping river front with a childish attempt at paving, its main street a forlorn pathway near the water’s edge, dying away in the forest-jungle on either hand. Here we took our leave of the “Alicia,” for cataracts make this the end of the run for steamers plying the lower Magdalena. Next afternoon a train even more diminutive than that to Calamar wound away in a half circle into the forest, with now and then glimpses of hazy, far-off Andean ranges, and three hours later set us down in Honda. To our surprise we found it a city, the first since Cartagena, as aged and intricate, as full of its own local color, including many blind and leprous beggars, as any town of old Spain. Piled close along the Magdalena, here a series of rocky rapids, it is divided by a gurgling tributary across which three picturesque bridges fling themselves. Scores of aged stone buildings, quaint walls, and steep streets of century-old pavements give it an air reminiscent of Bruges or NÜrnberg, or of some of the ancient towns of Mexico. Its narrow streets are crowded with laden mules and sunbrowned arrieros of both sexes; its patios seem primeval forests, and mountain ranges cut its horizon close off in every direction. A muleteer pointed out to us the ancient trail to BogotÁ where it crossed a high red bridge and climbed steeply away up one of the natural walls of the town on the way to FacatativÁ on the lofty plateau above. But for our baggage we should have struck out for the capital on this route of centuries.

We went on by rail in the morning. Every woman and girl in the car—not to mention Hays—was smoking the jet-black cigars of the region. The little engine with its topheavy smokestack consumed wood as gluttonously as the “Alicia,” and halted even more often to replenish its supply. Colombians fancy railroads will work the complete regeneration of their torpid country, but such as we had seen were only miniature samples of the real thing, of slight practical value even were they extended all over the republic. The natives had no notion, however, that the word train did not stand for the same tiny contraptions the world over as that to which they applied it.

On all sides were enormous stadiums of mountains, not yet high but already bulking and rock-strewn. Drought had left the country desert-dry and fine sand drifted in and deposited itself upon us in shrouds, as in crossing Nevada. The landscape suggested a cross between the tropics and a western prairie choking for rain, as did even the towns with their frontiersman disarray, their burros, mules and broken-down horses drooping in any patch of shade. Tattered boys and diseased loafers swarmed into the cars at every stop, drinking from the water jars, washing in the bowls of the first-class coach, making themselves completely at home without a suggestion of protest from the trainmen. Even were there laws against such actions, the languid officials would have lacked the moral courage to enforce them.

The railway ended at BeltrÁn, where we boarded the steamer “Caribe.” A dreary, sun-baked collection of sheds and a few choking huts made up the town, completely surrounded by desert, with plenty of bushy trees, but a desert for all that. The wind that swept across the steamer at her mooring was not the cool one of the lower Magdalena, but one laden with red-hot sands that stung the cheeks like tiny insects. When the passengers had gulped their almuerzo, the dishes were piled in the alleyway, where beggars and gaunt boys from the shore came to claw around in them, after which they were roughly half-washed. There is a fetching democracy about the road to BogotÁ. He who travels it, be he vagrant or man of wealth, must go through the same uninviting experiences. It speaks poorly of Colombians that they still endure this medieval method of travel from the outside world to their capital. Wealthy bogotanos journey to Europe in luxurious style—once they are on the ocean. It would seem wiser for them to return steerage and gradually accustom themselves to what they must endure from the landing in their own country to the arrival in BogotÁ.

All day long we sat in the sand-burning winds of BeltrÁn while barefoot and half-naked stevedores dribbled down the steep bank with all manner of cargo. There was barbed wire from Massachusetts, corrugated iron from Pittsburg, boxed street-car lines that clattered and crashed as they fell, and finally, though by no means last, four pianos from Germany that were rolled heels over head down the long stony bank. Although we had real cabin tickets this time, neither of us had influence enough to get a cabin. We dragged our cots out on the open deck and, indifferent to social rules, marched through the multitude in our pajamas. This turned out to be entirely comme il faut, for even the son of a recent president of Colombia soon appeared similarly clad and strolled about the deck chattering with his fellow-passengers of both sexes, as nonchalantly as if in full dress.

We were not off until dawn, into which the volcano Ruiz, first of the long row of snow-clad fire-vents of the Andes which we hoped in time to see disappear over our shoulders, thrust its aged head. Rock cliffs along the banks recalled the Lorelei. Fields of corn undulated like wind-snatched hair on the summits of rounded hills, at the base of which sweltered the banana groves of the tropics. As the sun was setting we passed a chorro at the foot of a low range around which the river had swept in a half-circle so many centuries that its bank was a sheer rock wall surely sixty feet high. The “Caribe,” with the nose of a washtub, panted for life against the current, spitting showers of live coals from her wood fires, seeming several times about to give up the attempt in despair. But she gained the calmer water above at last and soon after dark landed us in Jirardot.

We spent the Fourth of July in Jirardot. Not by choice, but because the train to the capital leaves only three times a week. The town swelters by day on the edge of the curving river, here hardly fifty yards wide, where for more than a mile stretches a vista of donkeys laden with kegs of water, bands of women, all more or less African in ancestry, bathing, washing, and incessantly smoking immense misshapen cigars, as do even the children of both sexes that paddle stark naked about the bank in complete immunity to the blazing sun. The place seemed the headquarters of contented poverty. At least half the inhabitants either had not enough sun-bleached garments to completely conceal their dusky skins, or had laid them away for more gala occasions. Beggars, halt, blind, misformed and idiotic, were almost as numerous as in similar towns of India. Even the less miserable inhabitants were dull, neurasthenic, utterly devoid of energy, anemics with incessant smoking, bad food, and worse habits, given to living entirely according to their appetites and never according to will power and reason.

It was not without misgiving that we turned our faces toward BogotÁ next morning. The crowd which the train from the plateau had landed the night before had been half hidden under the rugs, blankets, and overcoats they carried, and not a native of Jirardot could speak of the capital without visibly shivering, some even crossing themselves as often as they heard it mentioned. The train left at sunrise. By the rules of the line—the “Ferrocarril de Jirardot”—we were obliged to check our baggage containing all extra clothing. For the first few hours we were surrounded by mountains, though still on a slightly rising plain between them. The land appeared fertile and there was considerable Indian corn, yet it was surprising to find here in the capacious New World such swarms of beggars as in Egypt or India. The population along the way, increasingly Indian in blood, was extraordinarily slow-witted. In a window near us sat a commercial traveler who tossed at every one he caught sight of along the way a pictorial advertisement of an American panacea. The tail of the train was always well past them before a single one gathered his wits sufficiently to pick up the treasure.

Near noon we were ourselves picked out by a mountain-climbing engine, made in Schenectady, its boiler well forward and flanked by the water tanks, a small upright coalbin behind. As we began a series of switchbacks, I caught a breath of virile white man’s air for the first time in a half year, and the taste of it was so delicious that the sensation reached to my tingling toes. Regularly the vista of gouged-out valleys surrounded by rough-hewn, cool, blue ranges spread to greater distances. Passengers began to turn red-nosed, to put on overcoats, blankets, rugs, ponchos, gloves, to wrap towels about their necks. To me the temperature was delightful, but Hays, who had been long years in the tropics, took to applying other adjectives.

Now the landscape of meadows and grazing cattle backed by towering mountains suggested Switzerland. Beyond the one tunnel of the line we entered an immense valley walled by row upon row of blue ranges. Higher still, the bleak, stony highlands resembled a more rugged Scotland in late October, though cultivation was almost general and roads numerous. It struck us as strange that human beings should shiver and toil for a scant livelihood in such surroundings when a day’s walk would bring them to perpetual summer and nature’s well filled larder. A plant must remain where it chances to be born, but why should man also?

By four, the train had finished its task of lifting its breathless passengers into the thin air of FacatativÁ, and scores of half-frozen barefoot children and ragged adults dismally wandered the stony streets. A policeman muffled to the ears assured us with what seemed a suggestion of pride that FacatativÁ was even colder than BogotÁ, for which Hays gave fervent thanks. Evidently the heat of the tropics was yet in my blood, for I still felt comfortable.

An hour later we were speeding across a broad plateau by the “Ferrocarril de la Sabana,” a government railroad equipped with real trains of American cars. All the languor and ragged indifference of the tropics seemed to have been left forever behind. The conductor was as business-like—and as light in color—as any in our own land. We stopped briefly at towns boasting all the adjuncts of civilized life, somehow dragged up to these lofty realms. Here was a country built from the center outwardly; the nearer we came to its capital, the further we left the world behind, the more modern and well furnished did it become. It recalled fanciful tales of men who, toiling for weeks through unknown wildernesses, suddenly burst forth upon an unknown valley filled with all the splendors of an ancient kingdom.

A typical Indian hut on the outskirts of BogotÁ