Our entrance into BogotÁ was not exactly what we had planned or anticipated. The crowd that filled the station and its adjacent streets in honor of the thrice-weekly linking with the outside world was dressed like an American city in February, except that here black was more general and choking high collars and foppish canes far more in evidence. Wherefore, seeing two men of foreign aspect, visibly shivering in their strange feather-weight uniforms, descending upon them, the pulsating throng could be dispersed only with difficulty, and excited urchins raced beside the horse car that set us down at last before a recommended hotel. Hays, who was nothing if not self-conscious, as well as tropical blooded, lost no time in putting on every wool garment his baggage contained and dived under four blankets vowing never to be seen again in public.

We seemed to have reached the very center of this incongruous civilization of the isolated fastnesses of the Andes. Our suite took up an entire second-story corner of the hotel. There were carpets in which our feet sank half out of sight, capacious upholstered chairs, divans in every corner, tables that might have graced a French chÂteau, pier glass mirrors, gleaming chandeliers, lamps with double burners, in addition to electric lights. Our parlor, its huge windows resplendent with lace curtains, opened on a balcony overhanging the street, as did also the adjoining bedroom, as richly furnished and with two old-fashioned colonial bedsteads heaped high with mattresses, their many blankets covered with glossy vicuÑa hides. We were far indeed from the frontiersman steamers of the Magdalena. When the hunger of the highlands asserted itself, we sneaked down to a luxurious dining-room to find the menu and service equal to that of some travelers’ palace on the Champs ElysÉes. The sumptuous breakfast that a maid placed beside our beds next morning was a humorous contrast to those we had endured on the “Alicia.” Yet all these luxuries, borne to this lofty isolation by methods the most primitive known to modern days, were ours at the paltry rate of $1.50 a day. Truly, the cost of high living had not yet reached the altitude of BogotÁ.

It was evident, however, that if we were to live here as anything but public curiosities we must patronize a clothing store. The Zone costume, so splendidly adapted to our future plans, was, unfortunately, original for bogotanos; and nowhere does originality of garb cause greater furore than in the mountain-cloistered capital of Colombia. When we summoned up courage to venture forth, Hays dodged into the first tailor shop that crossed his path, and instantly agreed to take whatever happened to be offered him, at any price the tailor chose to inflict—and returned to remain in hiding for the ensuing twenty-four hours until the articles were altered. Meanwhile I sallied forth from a ready-made establishment, inconspicuous in a native shirt that came perilously near being born a pajama and a heavy, temporarily black, suit of “cashmere” with a misgiving tightness across the trousers.

On second thought it was not surprising that this far away city of the Andes should be so exacting in dress. Virtually cut off from the world, it was supremely eager to appear cosmopolitan. The result is a tailor’s paradise. No one who aspires to be ranked among the gente decente ever dreams of permitting himself to be seen in public lacking any detail of the equipment, from derby to patent leathers, that makes up the bogotano’s mental picture of a Parisian boulevardier. At first we took this multitude of faultlessly dressed men to mean that the city rolled in wealth. As time went on many a dandy of fashion we had fancied a bank president, or the son of some prince of finance, turned out to be a side-street barber, or the keeper of a four-by-six book-stall, if not indeed without even so legitimate a source of income. It is due, no doubt, to some misinterpretation of the European fashion sheets that the main street corners were habitually blocked long before noon by men and youths in Prince Alberts, who spent the greater part of the day leaning with Parisian nonchalance on silver-headed canes.

The women of the better class, on the other hand, are never seen disguised as Parisians except on rare gala occasions. At morning mass, or in their circumspect tours of shopping, they appear swathed from head to foot in the black manto, a shawl-like thing of thin texture wound about head and body to the hips and leaving only a bit of the face and a bare glimpse of their blue-black hair visible. To us the costume was pleasing in its simplicity. Bogotanos, however, complain that it is triste—sad, and in time we too came to have that impression, as if the sex had gone perpetually into mourning for the ways of its male relatives.

The great underlying mass of the population has no requirements in the matter of dress. In general the gente del pueblo—the “men of the people”—wear shoddy trousers of indeterminate hue, alpargatas,—hemp soles held in place by strips of canvas—without socks, a soiled “panama” always very much out of place in this climate, and, covering all else, a ruana, or native-woven blanket with a hole in the center through which to thrust the head. Their women rarely wear black, but simple gowns of some light color, at least on Sundays, after which its whiteness decreases. They go commonly bareheaded, often barefooted, and always stockingless. Every scene from street to Cathedral shrine is enlivened by the bare legs of women and girls often decidedly attractive in appearance—to those who have no great prejudice for the bath.

To be nearer the center of activities we had taken a room in the third story of the municipal building, on the site of the palace of the viceroys. Down below lay the main plaza of Colombia, Tenerani’s celebrated statue of BolÍvar in its center, the still unfinished capitol building cutting it off on the right. Across the square we could look in at the door of the ancient Cathedral—and shake our fists at its constantly clanging bells. Beyond, much of the city spread out before us, the thatched huts of misery spilling a little way up the foot of the dismal black range that filled in the rest of the picture.

The altitude of BogotÁ—it stands 8630 feet above the level of the sea—seldom fails to impress itself upon the newcomer. Many travelers do not risk the sudden ascent from Jirardot to the capital in a single day, but stop over between trains at a halfway town. During the first days I was content to march slowly a few blocks up and down her slightly inclined streets, and even then found myself with the faint third cousin of a headache, several mild attacks of nose bleed, and a soreness of all the body as if from undue pressure of the blood. Until the first effects wear away, energy is at its lowest ebb and time passes on leaden wings. The change in mood is as marked as in the character of the permanent inhabitants. From the moment of his arrival the traveler feels again that foresighted, looking-to-the-future attitude toward life common to the temperate zone. All the light, airy, gay and wasteful ways of Panama and the tropics fade away like the memory of some former existence, and it is easy to understand why the bogotano is quite different in temperament from the languid inhabitants along the Magdalena. Unlike many regions of high altitude, however, BogotÁ is not a “nervous” city. There are lower places in Mexico, for instance, where the nerves seem always at a tension. Here we felt serene and unexcited all day long as in the first hours of waking from long refreshing sleep.

Except in the actual sunshine, the air was raw even at noon. The wind from off the backing range or across the sabana cut through our garments as if they were of cheesecloth. The thermometer falls much lower in other climes, but here artificial heat is unknown, and a more penetrating cold is inconceivable. By night the bogotano wears an overcoat of the greatest obtainable thickness, he dines and goes to the theater in a temperature that would make outdoor New York in early November seem cozy and hospitable. Well dressed men in gloves and overcoats and women in furs walking briskly across the square below our window on their way from the electric street cars to the theater or the “Circo Keller,” gave the scene quite the appearance of a similar one in an American town in the first days of winter. Yet this was July and we were barely five degrees from the equator. Beside us lay the latest newspapers from New York, half way to the north pole, bristling with such items as: “Wanted—Cool rooms for the summer months.” “Four Dead of Heat Prostration.” It is a peculiar climate. Flowers—of some Arctic species—bloom perennially, and the poorer people, inured to it from birth, seem to thrive in bare legs and summer garb. Frost is virtually unknown, not because the temperature does not warrant it, but because what would be frost elsewhere evaporates in the thin air. Once the sun has set, nothing seems quite so attractive, whatever the plans made by day, as to read for an hour huddled in all spare clothing, then to throw open the windows and dive under as many blankets as a Minnesota farmer in January. The bogotano does not, of course, believe in open windows. Though he scorns a fire—or has never thought to build one—he has a quaking fear of the night air, against which he charges a score of diseases headed by the dreaded pneumonia of high altitudes. Those who venture out at night habitually hold a handkerchief over mouth and nostrils. Yet at least this can be said, that nowhere is sleep, if properly tucked in, more sound and refreshing.

Within a week we found ourselves acclimated—or should I say altitudinated—and took to exploring the city more thoroughly. The air was still noticeably thin, but there was enough of it to furnish the lung-fuel even for the five mile stroll up to the natural stone gateway where the highway to the east clambers away through a notch and begins the descent to Venezuela. Looking down upon it from here, the misinformed traveler might easily fancy the broad sabana the sea-level plains of some northern clime, never guessing that forty miles to the west the world falls abruptly away into the torrid zone. For BogotÁ is chiefly remarkable for its location. Taken somewhere else it would be like many another city of Spanish ancestry. Its streets are singularly alike, wide, straight, a few paved in macadam, more in rough cobbles, many grass-grown and all with a central line of flagstones worn smooth by the feet of generations of carriers. The chiefly two-story houses toe sidewalks so narrow that two can seldom pass abreast, and for those who know Spain or her former colonies there is nothing unusual in the architecture. The streets cross each other at solemn right angles, and those which do not fade away on the plain fetch sharply up against the rusty black range that backs the city. The system of street numbering is excellent, that of the houses clumsy, and the former is marred by the habit of the volatile government in changing familiar names as often as some new or forgotten patriot is called to its attention. Thus the Plaza San AugustÍn had been the Plaza Ayacucho up to a short time before our arrival, yet before we left it had become the Plaza Sucre in honor of a new statue of that general unveiled on Colombia’s Independence Day, July twentieth. In like manner the Plaza de Egipto was transformed before our very eyes into the Plaza de Maza. This weakness for honoring new heroes is characteristic of the whole country. Not only are its provinces frequently renamed, but in the short century since its independence, the nation itself has basked under a half dozen titles,—to wit: “La Gran Colombia”; “Nueva Granada”; “ConfederaciÓn Granadina”; “Estados Unidos de Nueva Granada”; “Estados Unidos de Colombia”; and, since 1885, “RepÚblica de Colombia”—and there are evidences that it is not yet entirely satisfied.

It is less in its material aspects than in the ways of its population that the traveler finds BogotÁ interesting. About every inhabitant hovers a glamour of romance. Either he has always lived in this miniature world, or he has at least once made the laborious journey up to it. The vast majority are born, live, and die here in their lofty isolation. Shut away by weeks of wilderness from the outside world, alone with its own little trials and triumphs, it seems something long ago left behind up here under the chilly stars by a receding wave of civilization. Small wonder its people consider their city the center of the universe. Those who travel a little way out into the world see nothing to compare with it; the scant minority that reach Paris are credited with fervid imaginations, if indeed the picture of what they have seen is not effaced during the long toilsome journey back to their own beloved capital. Perhaps no other city of to-day is more nearly what a newly discovered one must have been to the happy explorers of earlier times. Now and then there comes upon the traveler the regret that it is not entirely cut off instead of nine-tenths so. A region fitted for the development of its own customs, had it been left to its aboriginal Chibchas it might have evolved a civilization entirely its own, altogether different, and not this rather crumpled copy of familiar world capitals.

BogotÁ is decidedly a white man’s city. Indeed there is hardly another of its size south of the Canadian border in which the percentage of pure white complexions is higher. On rare occasions a negro who had drifted up from the hot lands below sat huddled in the main plaza in all the blankets and ruanas he could borrow, but his face was sure soon to be numbered among the missing. Brunettes predominate, of course, but blonds are by no means rare. The bootblack who served us now and then was a decided towhead. Red cheeks are almost the rule. Slight atmospheric pressure, bringing the blood nearer the surface, no doubt largely accounts for this, but there are many other evidences of general good health. At this altitude the violation of most of the rules of sanitation are lightly punished. The temperature, cold enough to be invigorating yet not so cold as to require our health-menacing artificial heat, combined with its simple, placid life, makes BogotÁ a town of plump, robust figures, particularly among the women, unmarked by the dissipation common to the males. Many of the former may frankly be termed beautiful, in spite of a wide-spread tendency of the sex to wear distinctly noticeable black mustaches. Unfortunately the men of the well-to-do class are not believers in exercise, or the systematic caring for the body. Scorning every unnecessary physical exertion, letting themselves grow up haphazard, they are noticeably round-shouldered and hollow-chested. An American long resident in the city seriously advised us to “get a hump into your shoulders so you won’t attract so much attention.”

Even the descendants of the Chibchas, that make up much of the population of the outskirts and the surrounding country, have a tinge of russet in their cheeks, and are by no means so dark as our copper-skinned aborigines. Daily they swarm into the city that was once theirs. Short, yet sturdy, muscular carriers and arrieros, as often female as male, pass noiselessly through the streets with the produce of their country patches. Girls barely ten, to old women, many of comely features in spite of the encrusted dirt of years, more often so brutalized by toil as to seem hardly human, dressed in matted rags, their feet and legs bare almost to the knees, plod past under burdens an American workman could not carry a hundred yards. Early in the wintry plateau mornings they set out from their chozas, cobblestone or mud hovels thatched with the tough yellow-brown grass of the uplands, that are huddled in the mountain passes or strewn out along the wind-swept sabana, driving a bull—rarely a steer, since the former animal loses much of his belligerency at this altitude—on its back a load little larger than that which the female driver, with a strap about her brow, carries herself. They are all but indistinguishable from the men who tramp beside them. A patchwork skirt instead of tattered trousers is almost the only difference in dress, and their manner is utterly devoid of any feminine touch. Brawny as the men, they march through all the hardships of life as sturdily and uncomplainingly as our early pioneers, asking sympathy neither by word nor look. It is a commonplace sight in BogotÁ to see a mere girl in years grasp the nose-ring rope of a bull and throw him to his knees, or lay hold of a cinch-strap in her calloused hands and, with one foot against the animal’s ribs, tighten the girth with the skill of an experienced arriero. Girls and boys alike are trained from their earliest years to this life of bovine toil, never looking forward to any other. Of the existence of schools they have hardly an inkling. To them life is bounded by their cheerless hovels and the chicherÍas of the city, numerous as the pulquerÍas of Mexico. In every corner of the capital these low drinking shops abound, masquerading under such misnomers as “El Nido de Amor”—“The Love Nest,”—and overrun by their besotted votaries of both sexes. Yet the bogotano Indian drunk is quiet and peaceful compared with the Mexican, for chicha seems chiefly to bring drowsiness and contentment with life as it is.

Ever since our arrival Hays and I had been threatening to patronize one of the two public bath houses with a first-class bogotano reputation rumor had it existed in the capital. But in a land where the temperature rarely reaches fifty, and the floors are tiled, it takes courage, and we had been satisfying ourselves and our duty to humanity by bravely splashing a basin of icy water over our manly forms each morning on arising. By dint of strong resolutions often repeated to be up at six and visit one of the casas de baÑos, we did finally manage one morning to find ourselves wandering the streets by eight, with towel and soap under our arms, and stared at by all we met. We discovered “La Violeta” at last, next door to a blacksmith shop. The keeper we woke up told us we might have a cold bath, but that the sign on the front wall: “Hot Baths at all Hours,” was to be taken with a bogotano meaning.

A few mornings later we did actually find the other establishment open. We entered a large patio, the most striking of several buildings within which was a round, or, more exactly, an eight-sided house, and in time succeeded in arousing the place to the extent of bringing down upon us a youth hugely excited at the appearance of a crowd of two whole bathers all at one time. It turned out that each of the eight sides of the strange building was—theoretically—a bathroom of the shape of a slice of cake, with a frigid tile floor and an aged porcelain tub in which a bath cost only $10. At the back was a larger, though none the less dreary, chamber with a regadera, or shower-bath. The youth assured us there was plenty of hot water. I won the toss and was soon stripped. But the shower was colder than the ice-fields bounding the pole. When I had caught my breath I bawled my repertory of profane Spanish at the youth, who could be seen through a hole above pottering with some sort of upright boiler and firebox and now and then peering down upon me. Suddenly the water grew warm, hot, boiling, then, just when I had soaped myself from crown to toe in the steam, it turned as suddenly cold again, and an instant later stopped entirely. My eyes tight closed, I shouted at the youth above.

“Es que el agua caliente se acabÓ,” he droned. “It is that the hot water has finished itself.”

There being no deadly weapon at hand, I turned on a tap of ice-cold water and raced to the dressing-room still half soaped. Hays, scantily clad, was gazing fiercely at the youth through a hole in the door.

“Then there isn’t any more hot water?” he demanded.

“Not now, seÑor, but there will be soon.”

“Good. How soon?”

“Early to-morrow morning, seÑor.”

“But I want to bathe now!”

“Ah, you want to bathe?” repeated the youth, with wide-open eyes.

“No, you cross-eyed Son of Spigdom,” exploded the ordinarily even-tempered ex-corporal, “I came here and stripped to an undershirt that I might dance in my bare feet on this tile floor in honor of JosÉ MarÍa de la Santa Trinidad SimÓn BolÍvar! Get up on that roof and fire up or ...”

The youth was already feverishly stoking armsful of wood under the upright boiler, and by the time I left for home Hays was shadow boxing to keep warm, with a fair chance of getting a bath before the day was done.

As is to be expected from its isolation, the Colombian capital is a deeply religious, not to say a fanatical, city. An infernal din of church bells of the tone of suspended pans or broken boilers makes the early morning hours hideous and continues at frequent intervals throughout the day. Here, contrary to the custom in most centers of the Latin race, the men as well as the women go to church. College professors and literary lights of no mean ability seriously contend that the shinbone of some saint in this shrine or that “temple” has miraculous power; but the superstition of isolation hangs particularly heavy over the uneducated masses. Of late years the Liberals and the Masons have grown nearly as powerful as the Conservatives, and do not hesitate to express themselves freely in public, knowing that in case of attack any representative body of the population includes fellow-Liberals who will come to their rescue. Every public gathering is pregnant with possibilities of an outburst between the two divisions of society. The very school-boys talk politics—here inextricably entangled with religion—and the foreigner who wishes to hold the attention of a Colombian for a conversation of any length must have some knowledge, or at least a plausible pretense of knowledge, of interior political questions. It was a bare three years since a Protestant missionary had been stoned by the populace of BogotÁ, though he now held his services in peace in what, despite the lack of outward signs, was really a church. Policemen armed with rifles liberally besprinkle every meeting in theater, cathedral, or public square. Shortly before our arrival a dozen officers and citizens had been killed in a religious riot in the bullring.

Were they less hump-shouldered, these policemen of BogotÁ might easily be taken for Irishmen, and an absent-minded American fancy himself back in the New York of a decade ago. The uniform of the day force is a copy of that of our own metropolis before the helmets were abolished. At night the scene changes. In every street spring up officers in high caps and long capes who might have stepped directly from the arrondissements of Paris, with even the short sword in place of the daytime “night-stick.” They are a well disciplined body of men, quite unlike the childish, inefficient guardians of law and disorder so familiar from the Rio Grande southward. The bogotano officer would no sooner be seen sitting, lounging, or smoking on duty than would one in our own large cities. As in all Latin-American countries, however, the chief drawback to a really efficient service is the caste system. The policemen are of necessity recruited from the gente del pueblo, and though they have no hesitancy in arresting one of their own class, the sight of a white collar paralyzes them with their ingrown deference to the more powerful rank of society. The result is that a well-dressed person can commit anything short of serious crime under the very eyes of the police. The officer may keep the culprit under surveillance, but rarely summons up courage actually to arrest him until he has definite orders from a white-collared superior.

There are curious local customs in BogotÁ. Her small shops, for example, have a system of signs intelligible only to the initiated. A red flag announces meat for sale; a red flag with a yellow star, meat and bones; a white flag, milk; a green one, vegetables and grains. A cabbage or a lettuce-head thrust forth on the end of a stick marks the entrance to a cheap restaurant; a tuft of faded flowers, a chicherÍa. The bogotano sees nothing incongruous in a building that announces itself a “Primary School” above and an “American Bar” below. On week days the pedestrian slinks through many of the chief residential streets apparently unseen; on a gala Sunday afternoon the same stroll is to run an unbroken gauntlet of feminine eyes. For then the seÑoritas who are seen, if at all, during the week, hurrying to mass all but concealed in their mantos, don their most resplendent garb and, with cushions under their plump elbows, lean in their window embrasures oggling and being oggled through the iron rejas.

A native of MedellÍn, where envy of the capital and her self-seeking politicians is rife, had assured us as far away as Panama:

“All they do in BogotÁ is study and steal.”

We had only to glance out our windows to find basis for the first part of the assertion. The plaza below was always alive with students from the local institutions of higher learning for males marching slowly back and forth conning the day’s lessons. The fireless houses are cold and dungeon-like, particularly in the morning, and the city long ago formed the habit of studying afoot. The racial dislike of solitude and the eagerness to be seen and recognized by their fellows as devotees of learning may also have some part in a practice that many a bogotano continues through life. It is commonplace to pass in almost any street men even past middle age strolling along with an open book in one hand and the inevitable silver-headed cane in the other.

In colonial times BogotÁ won the reputation, if not the actual position, of “literary capital of South America.” Her speech is still the best Castilian of America, with little of that slovenliness of pronunciation so general from the Rio Grande southward. To this day the city has a considerable intellectual life, wider perhaps than it is deep. “Everyone” writes. He is a rare public man who has not published at least a handful of “versos” in his youth. Poets, writers, painters, and musical composers are more numerous than in many a far larger center of civilization. The placid isolation of life in BogotÁ, almost completely severed from the feverish distractions of the modern world, makes this natural. There is nothing else to do. Then, too, lack of opportunity to compare their work with that of a wider world no doubt gives the “literatos” of BogotÁ a self-complacency that might otherwise be slighter. The cheap local printing-presses pour out a constant flood of five-cent volumes of the local “poets,” those same “cachacos” and “filipichines” in frock-tailed coats who lean with such Parisian grace on their canes at the principal street corners. The youth who sees his smudged likeness appear on the tissue-paper cover of the weekly pamphlet seethes with ill-suppressed joy at his entrance into the glorious, if crowded, ranks of the “intelectuales.” It is chiefly a dilettante literature, rarely of material reward and of no visible connection with life. But a considerable stream of flowery verse, languidly melancholy in its temperament and not overburdened with deep thought, flows constantly, and the boiling down by time has left BogotÁ credited with a few works of genuine worth.

A lecture was given one evening at the Jurisprudence Club on the momentous subject of “The Necessity of a Legal Revolution in Colombia.” Hays reneged at the last moment, but I accepted the invitation issued to the “general public.” I was the only foreigner among the hundred present, yet no American audience could have been more universally white of complexion. Indeed, the gathering was strikingly like a similar one in our own country—on a March evening when the furnace had broken down or the janitor gone on strike. All wore overcoats and kept constantly bundled up. The solemn whispering of the audience as it gathered, the unattractiveness of the women, all of whom had long since left youth behind, the staid mien of the men in their frock coats, gave the scene the atmosphere of a meeting of “highbrows” in a corner of far-away New England. But there was superimposed a pompous solemnity and a funereal tone peculiar to the Latin-American, to a race that lays more stress on the correctness of its manner than the weight of its matter. A misstatement or a palpably erroneous fact or conclusion, one felt, might pass muster, but not a slip in the “urbanities” of society or the incorrect knotting of a cravat.

It was a “lecture” in the French sense. When the president had taken his place and all was arranged in faultless Parisian order, the speaker removed his neck-scarf and began solemnly to read from typewritten manuscript. He was a man of forty, wearing glasses, with the perpendicular wrinkles of close study on his brow. A score of countries could have reproduced him ad libitum. He read drearily, monotonously, with constant care never to spill over into the merely human. The discourse based itself on the narrow national patriotism common to Latin-America. Yet at times the speaker talked plainly, admitting that Colombia is 88% illiterate and that half the remainder can barely read and write. The Church he assailed bitterly for its shortcomings, yet never mentioned it directly. In time, as is bound to happen sooner or later in any public meeting in Colombia, he drifted into the great national grievance and whined through several pages on “the wickedness of taking the rebel province of Panama away from us, a weak and helpless people”—here I caught several of the audience gazing fixedly at me, as if they fancied I had taken some active part in that debateable action. Through all the latter part of the lecture the church bells across the way kept up a constant jangling that completely swallowed up whatever conclusions he had gained from his laborious dissertation. It was strangely as if the voice of religion and superstition were trying by din and hubbub to drown out that of reason and reflection, as it has since the first medicine-man danced howling into the circle of elders in conference in the Stone Age.

On the “Panama question” the attitude of the Colombian man in the street is not exactly that of the Government. A well-educated native holding a small post, though clinging to the same convictions on the “taking” of the “rebel province” as the bulk of his countrymen, expressed himself to me as follows:

“We ordinary citizens feel that our country should be paid for the loss of Panama, and the slight to our national honor. But we hope very much that your United States will not pay our government a large sum of money in cash, as contemplated by the proposed treaty. For almost all of it would go into the pockets of the dozen politicians who hold the reins of government. Give us obras hechas,—finished works,—a railway from the coast to BogotÁ, or a perfected harbor with docks and modern facilities.”

One day soon after our arrival we strolled over to the Biblioteca Nacional to begin the Colombian reading we had planned. It was wasted effort. We brought up against a heavy colonial door bearing the announcement: “Suspended until further notice, by order of the Ministry of Public Instruction.”

An American resident interpreted it to mean, “Oh, some of the readers have been stealing books again”—and we recalled the cynical native of MedellÍn. Days later, however, when we gained unofficial admission for a few moments, we found that the 5000 volumes bequeathed by a Colombian “literato” not unknown to a wider world—Rafael Pombo, who had recently died in Paris—were being catalogued. Several frock-coated pedants were smoking innumerable cigarettes and deceiving themselves into the notion that they were at work arranging the books. But the National Library remained hermetically sealed to the public as long as we remained in the capital. It was by no means the first nor the last time we met a similar disappointment in South America.

We had put it off a long while before we gathered courage and all our woolen garments and hurried through the wintry night to BogotÁ’s main theater. As in other restricted societies, entertainments are frequently “got up” here, chiefly with local talent. It is a long way to any other talent in BogotÁ. This one was a velada in honor of that same Rafael Pombo. Fortunately the audience was large enough to keep the place moderately warm. Every detail, every movement, the very toilettes of the distinctly good looking, if mustached, ladies in boxes and stalls were as exact a copy as was humanly possible of similar scenes at the opera in Paris, a copy in miniature bearing the earmarks of having been taken from some novel of the boulevards. SeÑora la bogotana used her lorgnette exactly as she had read of her Parisian counterpart doing; the men, in faultless evening dress down to the last white eyeglass ribbon about the neck, strove to act precisely as they conceived men did on like occasions in the wider world. Again all was burdened by the solemn artificiality of the race. One after another six men burst genteelly upon the stage and declaimed something or other in that painful, flamboyant ranting so beloved of the Latin. All the cut and dried forms of “cultured” society were solemnly carried out. Flowers, some one had read, were always presented to the performers, and even the podgy, pompous old fellow who forgot his “piece” several times had solemnly thrust upon him by a stage lackey in gorgeous livery two immense wreaths of blossoms.

In one matter at least these bogotanos were at an advantage over amateurs of other lands. Natural declaimers and reciters from babyhood, their tongues always eager for utterance, almost devoid of that bashfulness that works the undoing of the less fluent but perhaps deeper thinking races, they seemed seasoned actors in those points which called for strictly histrionic ability. In another theater a few nights later we saw several Spanish comedies presented by a company of local amateurs, and were astonished at the excellence of the work. That of a few of the principals would have won praise on any stage.

Three railways leave BogotÁ, though none of them gets very far away. First in importance, of course, is that to FacatativÁ, connecting with Jirardot. Another runs through the flower-decked suburb of Chapinero, past Caro, with its cream-colored castle on a hill above a cluster of thatched mud huts, to NemecÓn, a sooty adobe town of surface coal mines where the sabana is cut off on the north. Back along it to ZapiquirÁ the excursionist tramps ten miles in autumn coolness, hardly realizing he is near the equator, between fields of half-grown maize, broad grassy pastures dotted with white clover, with dandelions, daisies, cowslips, and brilliant yellow “smart-weed.” Blackberry bushes here and there edge a field in which scamper plump cattle and horses; others are confined by fence posts of stone with four holes carefully drilled in each through which to pass the alambre de pÚas,—barbed wire from our own land. ZapiquirÁ is remarkable only for the bulking hill beside it, almost solid rock salt. The mouths of a score of small tunnels lie in plain sight somewhat up the slope. The salt rocks are beaten fine, dissolved in water, evaporated, pressed, and packed into two-bushel bags that are carried away by toil-stupefied women and girls with a band across their foreheads.

But the excursion par excellence is that to the falls of Tequendama, the theme of at least one poem by every bogotano writer. The unholy clatter of church-bells helped me arouse Hays one morning in time to catch the early train on the “Ferrocarril del Sur.” Some twenty miles out we descended at the isolated little station of Tequendama and struck off through a region wholly unwooded and almost desert dry. As the road mounted a bit from the bare sabana a hardy vegetation appeared, here and there a small grove of eucalypti, and a bushy natural growth thinly covering the sides of the low mountains among which we were soon winding. Before long we fell in with the narrow BogotÁ river, idling placidly along, little guessing what a tremendous tumble it was due to get a bit later. Tradition has it that a god or an Inca, desiring to drain the lake that once covered the sabana, opened the gap through which the stream drops. By and by there appeared ahead a whirling mist cloud which grew until we found ourselves completely enveloped in a great fog out of which rose a dull, never-ending roar of indistinct location. Directed by a peasant, we descended through a rustic gate and for some yards down a field of heather and deep-green grass speckled with white clover blossoms and scattered with massive protruding rocks. The face of the one of these a BogotÁ merchant had disfigured in impertinent American fashion with an advertisement of his “superior coffee.” We had reached the “Niagara of Colombia.”

Yet so far as seeing went we might as well have been in our cozy beds back in the capital. An ordinary brown stream some forty feet wide flowed down through bulging rocks, pitched over in a short fall on to a stony ledge at our feet, then off into the mist-blinded unknown. A mere country brook in which we could dip our fingers here, a foot beyond it was forever gone. It was as if a whole world of mystery lay below and about us, yet the curtain of swirling gray mist into which the river plunged to be seen no more hid all from view.

We had shivered through our lunch, finding it difficult to believe that we were five degrees from the equator in the month of July, when suddenly the wind rose, and for a moment the mist thinned until we caught a hint of an immense chasm untold depths below; then closed in again. The excursion seemed to have been a failure. We strolled on down the highway in the fog and loafed awhile on a bushy hillside. But as we turned homeward, the mist was wiped away as suddenly as a curtain drawn aside and all Tequendama lay before us. I slid down a steep bank to the edge of the bottomless chasm and sat down where I could remain, as long as I kept my feet braced in the sod, before one of the finest sights in the world—or let them slip and drop to sudden death. From the upper ledge the stream fell a sheer unbroken thousand feet in which the entire river seemed to turn to spray and whatever was left when it struck was beaten into mist which, rising like steam from the yawning gorge as from some immense caldron, hid all the face of the adjacent country. Immeasurably below, a much smaller stream could be seen picking itself together again and winding its way dizzily off through a vast rock-faced caÑon on the perpendicular walls of which clung a few hardy plants; and while we remained in the cold autumn world above, the river flowed away into the tropics, into the coffee country, the land of bananas, and the perpetual summer of the Magdalena, to help float Colombia down to the outer world.

Of the many views of BogotÁ the best is that we had at the end of our stay, from the summit of Guadalupe. A bit of the backing range juts forth in two peaks, each with a little white church on its top, that seem almost sheer above the city. We climbed to the higher in something more than an hour, massed clouds breaking away now and then to flood with sunshine the ever widening sabana and the hazy, far-away mountains that seemed to cut off the world completely, and came out at last on a grassy platform where we could look down, like the astonished Conquistadores, on all the vast plain, and, unlike them, on the city they founded. North and south, as far as we could see, stretched the bleak, treeless range on which we stood. At our feet this fell abruptly away to the suburban huts of the city and her encircling PasÉo de BolÍvar. Every plaza and patio, many green with a clump of eucalypti, every window and roof-tile, was plainly visible. The people were so tiny we had to look for them carefully, as for insects on a carpet, before we could make them out by hundreds crawling along the light-brown streets and specking the squares. Near the brick-walled cemetery the disk of the bullring, filled now with the tents of the “Circo Keller,” seemed a canvas cover on a small squat pail. Factories, as we understand the word, being unknown, not a fleck of smoke smudged the dull-red expanse of the stoveless city. Its noises came up to us very faintly, at times borne wholly away on the wind, and from this height even the diabolic din of church-bells sounded soft and almost musical.

A recent census sets the population at 122,000. Looking down upon the City from Guadalupe, this seems at first an underestimation. But gradually one realizes that not only are its houses low, often of a single story, but largely taken up by interior patios. Then there are more than a score of churches, innumerable chapels, eight large monasteries, several seminaries, and many residences of the Church authorities. Add to this the many government buildings, and bit by bit the traveler grown skeptical from experience with Latin-American figures, begins to wonder if these are not inflated. There is not a wooden building in town. Treelessness governs the architecture, for the surrounding country is above the timber line, though the imported eucalyptus rises in groves here and there and flanks roads and railways.

A distinct line divides the city from the sabana, spread out like a rich brown carpet, cut up into irregular fields by adobe wall-fences often roofed, like the houses, with aged red tiles. In many places the sheen of shallow lakes recalled that the Zipa of the Chibchas built his Teusaquilla here on the lower skirts of the range to escape the winter floods of the plain. Off across it were dimly seen several flat towns, and here and there a farm-house or a cluster of them in a grove of the slender Australian gum-trees which merely accentuated the treelessness of the vast expanse of world. Six highways sally forth from the city, to march waveringly across the plain, mere threads lost at last in the enclosing range, broken, gnarled, pitched and tumbled into every manner of shape, bright peaks and valleys standing sharply forth where the sun strikes, great purple-black patches marking the shadows of the clouds. Beyond all else, at times lost in clouds, at others plainly visible, lay the central range of the Cordillera over which we must pass on our journey southward. Though more than a hundred miles away, it bulked into the sky like some vast supernatural wall, the broad snow-capped cone of Tolima piercing the heavens in the center of the picture.