The people of BogotÁ refused to take seriously our plan of walking to Quito. It was not merely that the Ecuadorian capital was far away; to the inhabitants of this isolated little world it was only a name, like Moscow or Lhassa. Those who had gone to school as far as the geography lessons had a nebulous notion that it lay somewhere to the south, and that no sea intervened; but their imaginations could not picture two lone gringos arriving by land. To seek information was simply to waste time. The nonexistent cannot be described. The best we could do was to pore over a page map in a foreign atlas, whereon a match, according to scale, was 300 miles long. Quito lay nearly three match-lengths distant “as the crow flies,” without considering the very mountainous nature of the country between. Yet the hardy Conquistadores had somehow journeyed thither, and in other parts of the world we had both traveled routes that the natives considered “impossible.”

As far away as Panama the horrors of this proposed tramp had been impressed upon me. At dinner one evening a typical, stage Englishman, accent and all, and an incurable monopolist of the conversation, proved to be the owner of mines in Colombia, and I managed once to cut in with a query about travel in that country.

“When the steamer lands you in ——,” he began, “you buy your mules, ten or twelve, hire your mozos and carriers and....”

“But I plan to walk.”

“Walk!” exploded my fellow-guest, “Why on earth should a man wish to walk?”

“It keeps the girth reduced,” I might have replied.

“It cahn’t be done,” dogmatized the monopolist. “Absurd! Why—why—a man cahn’t travel on foot in Colombia. His social standing depends on how fine a mule he rides. If he walked, he’d be taken for a bally peon, lose his caste entirely, y’ know, and all that sort of thing.”

“Horrible!” I gasped.

“Besides, you’ve got to have a mule-train to carry your tent and bed and supplies and.... Why, what on earth would you eat?”

“Huts ...” I began.

“Eh? Of the natives? Of course, but they haven’t a blessed thing to eat, y’ know. They live on corn cakes and beans, and bananas and bread, and that sort of thing. Now and then a chicken perhaps, but you’d starve to death. And if they saw a white man coming, they’d know he had a lot of money and rob him. Bandits and that sort of thing, y’ know. And how are you going to cross the rivers—?”

“Swim—” I tried to say, but the sentence was drowned in his cataract of words.

“And the mud! Why, bless me, one time a party was going along the road in Colombia and they saw a hat, an English hat, lying in a mud-hole. One of them started to kick it, when a man’s voice shouted:

“’Ere, stop it! That’s my bally ’ead!’

“‘What on earth are you doing down there?’ said the party.

“‘Sitting on my mule, to be sure,’ said the voice.

“Why, bless me, I wouldn’t go on foot in Colombia for all the gold in the bank of England!”

It was the end of July when I tiptoed out of the American Legation of BogotÁ, bearing at last a letter from our magnificent chargÉ d’affaires—a splendid representative of Harvard, but not, thank God, of the United States—and carried it over to the government building opposite. The Minister of Foreign Affairs to whom I made my way through a line of typewriters on which cigarette-clouded officials were pounding out great international matters with two fingers, was one of those rare persons who know why a man should wish to walk, though, being a Colombian, he had never dared do so himself, and was, moreover, certain that Quito could not be reached by land. I was soon armed with a gorgeous, if misspelled, document in which the Government of Colombia permitted itself to recommend los seÑores americanos therein named to the authorities along the way—should any such turn up.

The genuine traveler sets out on a journey by tossing a toothbrush into a pocket and strolling out of town. But even Hays had suffered somewhat from that softening of the vagabond’s moral fiber that is the penalty for dallying with the bourgeois comforts of civilization. We both had the American hobo’s disgust for the “blanket stiff” who “packs” his own bed; yet the Andes offer no proper field for orthodox hoboing. The journey of unknown duration and possibilities before us was sure to have variations in climate making extra clothing indispensable; moreover, we could not take the photographs along the way unless we carried with us means for developing the negatives. Our first plan was to buy a donkey and drive him between us down the crest of the Andes. Among the many reasons why this fond dream could not be realized was the certainty that we should have chased the animal off his feet within a week. Observation and reflection suggested that we should do better to follow the ways of the country and hire a human beast of burden. For one thing, if the latter ran away or dropped dead we lost nothing, except perhaps our tempers; if the donkey came to a like end, we would be out ten or twelve dollars. Hays abandoned the plan with double regret, for with it went the hope of some day reporting the journey under the arresting title, “Three Uncurried Asses in the Andes.”

With hundreds of animated bundles of rags trotting about the city ready to lug anything from a load of hay to a chest of drawers for a mere five-cent piece, we were certain there would be scores of native carriers eager to see the world and to substitute a dismal and intermittent hand-to-mouth existence for a steady job. We quickly discovered, however, that we were wrong in ascribing our own temperaments to the Chibcha Indian. There was not a youth among the swarming cargadores of BogotÁ who had the faintest desire to see the world; the bare thought of getting out of sound of the clanging cathedral bells filled them one and all with terror. For the first time we had struck the basic economic fact that the South American aboriginal prefers to starve at home rather than to live in comparative opulence elsewhere. In prehistoric times the Indians worshipped the natural phenomena about their place of birth; each village had its cave or tree, its stone or hill, on which it depended for protection; and the dread of getting out of reach of these still courses through their primitive minds.

By dint of repeated packing and throwing away, we reduced our fundamental necessities to little more than the contents of two swollen suitcases. Word of our nefarious project to contract a carrier to bear these to some far-off, unknown world reached the last hovels of the suburbs. But the cargadores we approached quickly named an exorbitant wage and fled at the first opportunity. It was not a question of load, but of road. Hays inticed a sturdy fellow upstairs one day and pointed out our baggage on top of an enormous chest. The Indian calmly picked up chest and all, murmuring cheerfully:

“A little heavy, seÑores, but I can do it. Where to?”

When we suggested a long trip, however, horror crept into his eyes, though his unemotional Indian face showed none of it, and naming an impossible fee, he slowly and silently slid backward through the door.

To our surprise, a man captured late on the day before we planned to start did not show this customary fear. He proved to be a native of the tierra caliente, eager to get back to his tropical home, and asserted his ability to carry four arrobas (100 pounds) day after day. Our baggage weighed far less than that.

“Why not take a contract to go with us by the month?” I suggested.

“CÓmo quÉ pagarÁn los seÑores?” he queried reflectively.

“We’ll pay you,” I answered, setting the sum high so that Hays, to whom money was always a minor detail, could not charge me with losing this eleventh-hour opportunity, $1200 a month, and food.

We could see that he “fell for it” at once, and was merely procrastinating in the hope of getting more. That dream vanished, he announced that he must have a new hat and ruana for “so important a journey.” We agreed to supply these—when he turned up at six in the morning ready to start.

He did not turn up. When we had shivered into our clothes and gone to hang over our reja, cargadores male and female were already plentiful in the wintry, mist-draped plaza below, squatted inside their ruanas or wandering aimlessly about with a rope over one shoulder. Out of regard for the proprieties we beckoned to none but the men. It was some time before one—who, perhaps, had not yet heard our plans—appeared at the door. We were careful to mention only the first town, a short day’s journey away, and offered fifty cents, at least twice what he averaged in daily earnings. Convinced we would give no more, he accepted. This time we took good care he should not escape. When he had bound the load with his rope—the cargador’s one indispensable possession—we put him outside and went to breakfast.

On our return we found him waiting—naturally. He prepared for the journey, not as we of the north would expect, by balancing the suitcases on opposite sides, but by slinging them both on his back, the rope cutting deeply into his shoulder, and set off bent so low, with the weight chiefly on his hips, that he seemed some deformed creature shuffling along behind us.

At last we were off, marching out of the main plaza of BogotÁ at eight on the morning of August first. In our flannel shirts, even with our coats still on, we set all the capital staring as we passed. Hays carried a kodak in one pocket and Ramsey’s Spanish Grammar in the other; my own apparatus and the overflow from my suitcase swung from a shoulder in a mochila, or woven hemp bag. Even our “One-Volume Library,” consisting of a few favorite bits in a half-dozen languages bound into a single book, we had been forced to pack away on the carrier’s back. We had exchanged instructions to cover any unexpected outcome of the journey, those which Hays had handed me consisting chiefly of the command, “In the event of death with boots on, do not remove the boots!” The morning paper that overtook us near the statues of Colombus and Isabel announced that we had left for Quito the day before, but failed to specify on foot. Readers would have taken it for a printer’s error, anyway.

Hays volunteered to shadow the carrier for the first day. Both experienced enough to know that the pleasure of traveling together is enhanced by traveling apart, we each set our own pace, letting our moods take color from the landscape, drifting together now and then when hungry for companionship, or often enough to assure ourselves of each other’s welfare. Epictetus says, “As the bad singer cannot sing alone, but only in chorus, so a poor traveler cannot travel alone, but only in company.” Hays, having a mind of his own to feed on, was by virtue thereof an excellent traveling companion.

At first the way was lined with houses of sun-baked mud, and peopled by dull-eyed, respectful Indians and haughty horsemen. A bright sun, frequently clouded over, made it just the day for tramping in full garb. The Indian crawled along so slowly that I soon forged ahead. Beyond the outskirts the broad upland plain was cut into irregular fields by adobe walls or fences, often tile-roofed, with massive adobe gate pillars. Fields dense with green Indian corn alternated with yellow stretches of ripening grain. Here and there potatoes were being planted. Masses of big red roses, of geraniums and daisies and unfamiliar flowers, frequently beautified the scene. Two hours away I caught the last view of BogotÁ, backed by her black, mist-topped range; then the cloistered city sank forever from our sight as the road dipped down from the slightest of knolls on the all but floor-flat plain.

We had not set out to rival champion pedestrians. When appetite suggested, I stretched out at the roadside with my pocket lunch, reading Swinburne the while and scattering him page by page on the gusty winds of the sabana. Hays and our baggage drifted languidly past. All the day we followed a massive stone highway, built by the Spaniards of colonial times, now raised well above the flanking dirt roads preferred by the soft-footed travel of to-day. A large stone bridge of clumsy lines lifted us over the little Funza river which waters the sabana, and not far beyond we entered the ancient town of Mosquiera, on a main corner of which stood a statue of the Virgin, unusual only for the fact that she was jet-black of complexion as any African chief. To the South American the color line is not sharp, even in his picture of the after world. Some time later, having drifted together again, we met an ox-cart headed for BogotÁ. The half-Indian driver, struck suddenly wide-eyed at sight of our strange garb and the burdened carrier behind us, cried out in consternation:

“CÓmo! No hay mÁs funciÓn en BogotÁ?”

We appreciated the implied compliment. He had mistaken us for performers in the “Keller Circus,” a little fourth-rate affair playing in the capital. Having, no doubt, saved up his billetes for weeks and started for town at last with the price of admission to this wonderful “function,” he was quite naturally dismayed to meet what seemed to be the show trekking southward before he arrived.

At three we strolled into Serrazuela, officially named Madrid. Hays’ pedometer registered seventeen miles. In the little one-story “hotel,” gaping with astonishment at our appearance, we were assigned to a mat-carpeted room opening on the patio, and furnished with two wooden beds exactly five feet long, with very thin reed mattresses over the board flooring that took the place of springs. In this climate there was little gain in traveling leisurely and arriving early. Except for a few hours near noon, it was too cold to lounge along the way; once arrived we could only wander aimlessly about among stupid villagers, uncommunicative as their baked-mud walls. By dark it had grown too wintry to sit reading with comfort, even had there been any other light than the pale flicker of a small candle. There was nothing left but to go to bed, and that had little of the pleasure the phrase suggests to American ears. When Hays set his feet against the footboard, his lips nearly reached his miniature pillow. He complained of feeling like the victim of a “trunk mystery.” Sometime in the night I awoke to hear him growling, “No wonder these people are crooked!” My own was a folding bed—in that I had to fold up to get into it.

Though we were afoot at chilly six, at nine we were still seeking a cargador. The one from BogotÁ had fled during the darkest hours. Moreover, he had evidently spread startling reports of our plans. In a town swarming with gaunt and ragged out-of-works we were a long time finding a man who admitted that he sometimes plied the vocation of carrier. His attitude was that of an heir to unlimited wealth whiling away the days until he came into his own by an occasional choice and easy task. After an endless oration in which he assured us times without number that he was “poor but honest,” just the man required for our “very valuable baggage,” which the “expensive leather boxes” proved it, and which in his hands would be perfectly safe among the robbers that swarmed in the road ahead—providing we walked close beside him—he admitted his willingness, as a special favor, to accompany us to La Mesa, eighteen miles away, for the paltry sum of $200. We offered fifty, and he left in well-feigned scorn.

At the alcalde’s office that official had been due only an hour or so, and naturally had not yet arrived. We spread our resplendent document before his hump-shouldered secretary, demanding a cargador at once. That’s the way the haughty traveler always did in the accounts we had read of journeys in the Andes. But Serrazuela was evidently ill-trained. The secretary stepped to the door and beckoned a few haughty rag-displays nearer, suggesting in a soft voice that perhaps, as a great favor to him personally, one of them would go with los seÑores and carry a “very light little bundlet.” One by one they replied in as solemn tones as if they fancied we believed them, that they were already engaged for the day, that they had a lame knee, or a sore back, or an exacting spouse, or were in mourning for a mother’s third cousin, and faded silently away. Among the last to go was our original “poor but honest” applicant, who paused to ask whether the offer we had made was $50 paper or $50 gold, because if we meant the latter he....

Just then the alcalde’s perfume gladdened our nostrils, and one of the men, rounded up by a soldier, having accepted what was still an exorbitant day’s wage, we were off at last. The day was bright and sunny. Behind, across the sabana, masses of white clouds hung over unseen BogotÁ and her distant black range. I could keep pace with “Rain in the Face,” as Hays had dubbed our new acquisition, only by holding each foot a second or more before setting it down. If I paused to let him get a bit ahead, he was sure to wait for me a few yards beyond. Ten cents spent in a little wayside drunkery gave him new life, but only for a short half-hour. Once he fell in with a friend driving an “empty” donkey, and for a space we moved a little less slowly. Then the friend turned off toward his village and with a groan “Rain in the Face” took up his burden again and crawled snail-like behind me.

Soon after we came to the edge of the world. The sabana had ended abruptly. Before us lay only a great swirling white mist into which disappeared the old Spanish highway that led in broad, low steps down and ever down into an unseen abyss. The carrier began to tremble visibly. The year before, he confided in a choked whisper, he had been held up here by bandits, who had killed and robbed his employer. Only when one of us went close in front and the other at his heels could he be induced to move forward and downward.

Now and then a group of Indians, men and women as heavily burdened as their pack-animals, loomed forth from the clouds and toiled slowly upward past us. An hour down we came upon a rock grotto into which bareheaded arrieros were crawling with lighted candles.

“It is,” explained one of them, “that San Antonio once appeared here, and all caminantes stop to pray, because he aids, protects, and betters us.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, curious to hear his answer.

“Sure?” he cried, staring at me with startled eyes, “SeÑor, I have been arriero on this road since I was a boy, always bringing a candle for San Antonio; in all those years I have been robbed only three times—and then I had no money.”

He crossed himself thrice in the intricate South American manner and sped noiselessly away into the clouds after his animals.

It may have been our failure to offer tribute to the saint of the grotto that all but brought our expedition to grief thus early. The mist had thinned and the landscape that opened out became more and more tropical. A single palm-tree, then clusters of them, grew up beside me. Banana plants and clumps of bamboo, like gigantic ferns, nodded sluggishly; a spreading tree pink with blossoms added the needed touch of color. Suddenly I realized that my companions were not with me, and sat down to wait. A half-hour passed. I strolled back along the road, then hurried upward at sharper pace. Fully a mile up I sighted Hays, driving the wabbly-kneed Indian before him. They had already tiptoed on the edge of an adventure. Barely had I passed from view when there had fallen in with them, one by one, four evil-faced fellows carrying sugarcane staffs. As thirst came, each fell to peeling and munching his cane. Hays, lost in some problem of Urdu philology, was suddenly recalled to the material world by a throat gurgle from “Rain in the Face.” He looked up to find the four wayfarers, long sheath-knives in hand, still ostensibly engaged in peeling sugarcane, but closing in around him and the shivering cargador. Hays had taken for fiction the stories of dangers on the road, and his automatic was packed away on the carrier’s back. But he had been too long a soldier to betray anxiety in the face of danger. The quartet continued their innocent occupation, crowding ever closer, but had not quite summoned up courage to try their fortunes against so stern-featured a gringo when they fell in with another group of travelers, and the four gradually faded away behind. Thenceforth we took care to wear our weapons in plain sight.

“Rain in the Face” had with great difficulty been coaxed to his feet again. When darkness fell, he was still wheezing slowly onward far from the day’s goal. The abrupt, stony descent was broken now and then by sharp rises, and we stumbled and sprawled over uncounted loose stones and solid boulders. At length white huts began to stand dimly forth from the night; the voices of unseen groups in the doorways under faintly suggested thatch roofs fell silent with astonishment as we passed; and in a climate in pleasant contrast to that of night-time BogotÁ we entered at last the little hotel of La Mesa. “Rain in the Face” set down his load for the last time with a stage groan, grasped his fee after the customary plea for more, and with the parting information that he was “poor but honest,” raised his wreck of a straw hat and disappeared to be seen no more.

Morning found us in a long town on a shelf-edge overhanging a great tumbled valley, still a mile above sea-level, again facing the problem of how to make our baggage get up and walk. When we had tramped a hot and stony half-day without getting a yard further on our journey, we returned to the hotel. Hays stretched out on—and over—his bed and drew out his faithful Ramsey, bent on drowning his worldly troubles in study. The first sentence that stepped forth from the page, inviting translation into Spanish, asserted:

“In South America are many arid regions through which travel and the transportation of baggage is difficult.”

Yet there are those who hold that text-books are not closely related to practical life!

Well on in the day, however, we did get two feeble youths to agree to carry a suitcase each to Jirardot for $180 and third-class fare back to La Mesa. At this rate we could soon have better afforded to build a railroad. Indeed, we had already reduced to an absurdity the experiment of trying to mix the tramp and the gentleman. “A sahib,” said Kim, “is always tied to his baggage.” It dominates every movement and is, after all, of scant value in proportion to the burden it imposes. Hire a carrier and he is always intruding upon your dreams and meditations, and with all the expense and trouble no article of the pack can you lay hands on during all the day’s tramp. Moreover, I am not of that kidney that can make a beast of burden of my fellow-man. I soon found that a cargador toiling under my load behind me made me far more weary than to carry it myself. We decided to revert to type at the next halt and play the “sahib” no longer.

The road, now chiefly deshecho (“unmade”), descended swiftly into the genuine tropics and the next afternoon we sweated into Jirardot on the Magdalena, a month from the day we had left it to ascend to BogotÁ. For all our resolutions, however, neither of us contemplated with pleasure the prospect of turning ourselves into pack-animals. We set afoot word that we would pay a high monthly wage to any lad with a stout back and no particular grade of intelligence who would consent to leave home. But the youths of Jirardot were even less ambitious than those of the capital. We set a time limit, advanced it, and at last fell upon our possessions with the rage of despair. What we did not succeed in throwing away we made into two bundles of the maximum weight allowed by parcel-post and sent them down the Magdalena to Panama and Quito. We were forced to sacrifice even the “One-Volume Library,” which did not matter, for we had found it more convenient to buy native novels and toss them away leaf by leaf, thus daily reducing our load. Moreover, we had resolved to read thenceforth only the literature of the country in which we were traveling. Even then there swung from our shoulders some fifteen pounds each, besides the awkward developing-tank filled with films and chemicals with which we alternately burdened ourselves, when we crossed the little toll-bridge over the Magdalena and, leaving the department of Cundinamarca behind, struck off into that of Tolima.

An extensive plain, half desert with drought now, blazing hot and sandy, spread far away before us. At first, mud huts were frequent, and many country people passed driving drooping donkeys. Curs abounded. Here and there a leper, squatted beside the trail, languidly held out his supplicating stumps. Everywhere were the rock-hard hills of termite “ants,” sharp-pointed as the volcanoes of Guatemala, while trains of stinging red ones crossed the road at frequent intervals. Fields of tobacco and corn stood shriveled beneath the unclouded sun; troops of horses and mules laden with the narcotic weed, rolled into cigarros de Ambalema and wrapped in dry plantain-leaves, shuffled past in the dust before their shrieking and whistling arrieros, bound for Jirardot and modern transportation. The camino real, still a “royal highway” in spite of its condition, passed now and then through clumsy swinging gates that marked the limits of otherwise unbounded haciendas. We met several haughty horsemen in ruanas and the conventional wealth of accoutrement, and once a cavalcade of men and women, the latter lurching uncomfortably back and forth on their high side-saddles. The half-Indian peon dog-trotting behind them carried on his back a large chair with a sheet over it, only the squalling that accompanied him suggesting what it concealed. The caste system was noticeable even here on the broad plain. When we had carriers behind us, natives afoot raised their hats and horsemen gave us friendly greetings. Now, with our possessions on our own backs, we received only frozen stares, except from an occasional peon who grunted at us as equals. A few miles beyond the Magdalena we came to the parting of the ways. One sandy trail led south to Neiva and PopayÁn; the other, with which we swung to the right, struck off for IbaguÉ and the QuindÍo pass over the Central Cordillera of the Andes. We took this longer route to Quito that we might traverse the great Cauca valley.

The pedometer registered a mere ten miles when we halted at an adobe hut that to the natives was a “very fine posada.” A bedraggled old woman pottered nearly two hours over a stick fire in the back yard before she brought us two fried eggs and a small dish of fried plantains, as succulent as wooden chips. Our “bed” she prepared by throwing a reed mat on the hardest earth floor known to geography, and by no means as level as the surrounding plain. My shoes and leggings did poor service as pillow, and Hays charged Ramsey with lack of foresight in not binding his grammar in upholstered plush. We were awakened from the first nap by the hubbub of a group of fellow-travelers, nearly all women, who piled their bundles in a corner and stretched themselves out on such floor-space as we had left unoccupied. Yet the ethics of the road are such in Spanish-America that we felt no misgiving in leaving our unprotected possessions on a bench at the door.

With the first hint of dawn our fellow-lodgers stole silently away. Hays was still abed when I struck off in a gorgeous morning across a sea of light-brown bunch-grass, surrounded on all sides by far-off mountain ranges. Behind, blue-purple with distance, the face of the plateau on which sits BogotÁ in its solitude, stretched wall-like across the eastern horizon, high indeed, yet how slightly above the earth as a whole. Ahead, the snow-clad rounded cone of Tolima stood sharply forth above a nearer range that cut off its base, while a tumbled mountain landscape beyond promised less monotonous if more laborious days to come.

A native carpenter working on the new toll bridge over the brawling Collo river assured us he would much rather be on the road with us, but that “unfortunately,” he was contracted. For a time broken ground and rocky foothills cut down our progress. Soon we were back again on a level plain of vast extent, a bit higher than the preceding, a garden spot in fertility, though largely uncultivated, with mountains on every hand and Tolima close on the west. As I had already found in Honduras, these upland plains, perfectly level, covered with grass but for a threading of faint paths all following the same general direction, afford the finest walking in the world. Never hard, always high enough to catch a cool breeze, often shaded, generally winding enough to avoid the monotony of a straight road, they make the journey like strolling across an endless lawn or through some vast orchard. Now and then we passed a tinkling mule-train, a horseman, or an Indian short-distance pedestrian, but never a vehicle to disturb the reflective peace of a perfect tramp. Every hour or two we drifted together, generally at a hut selling guarapo, a half-fermented beverage of crude sugar and water, tasting mildly like cider and extremely thirst-quenching. Every species of pack-animal appeared,—mules, horses, donkeys, steers, bulls, women, children, and even men, all toiling eastward. Often a dozen horses marched in a sort of lockstep, the halter of each tied to the tail of the animal ahead. Many had one or both ears cropped short, not by some accident or gratuitous cruelty, as we at first imagined, but as a system of branding. Now and then a shifting load brought an arriero running to throw his ruana over the animal’s eyes, blind-folding it until it was prepared to go on again. One mule-train of more than forty animals was loaded with large boxes marked “Ausfuhrgut; Antwerpen, Colon, Buenaventura.” German goods consumed in BogotÁ often make this roundabout journey,—to Panama, by ship to Buenaventura, by train over the western range, and more than half way across Colombia on pack animals, all to avoid the exorbitant rates of English-owned steamers up the Magdalena.

The haciendas of this region, producing chiefly tobacco, are owned by absentee landlords and managed by mayordomos. The peon laborers are paid twenty cents a day with food. Arrieros on the road average fifty cents a day and “find” themselves. A few of the latter paused to inquire our destination and otherwise satisfy a fathomless curiosity. Our usual answer,—“Al Cauca,” always brought forth a startled,—“CÓmo! Por tierra?” (By land?). In the Andes the expression is used with no thought of the sea as an alternative, but as the opposite of “A caballo” (On horseback). Occasionally we purposely astounded an inquirer by telling the whole truth. After a speechless moment in which his face clouded over with an unspoken accusation, he usually answered that though we might perhaps fancy we were walking to Quito, we were misinformed, and hurried on after his animals without even the customary “Adios.”

Now and then we met a lone arriero, “singing his troubles to the solitude,” as a Colombian poet has it, and once I was overtaken by a man who cried breathlessly as soon as his voice could reach me:

“Ha visto, seÑor, un muchachito con un burro vacÍo,” to which I could only reply:

“No, I regret to have to tell you that I have not seen a small boy with an empty donkey,” and watch the distracted fellow race on over the horizon.

We early discovered the uselessness of asking countrymen of the Andes that simple little question:

“How far is it to—?”

Ramsey himself could not have catalogued all the strange answers we received, even in the first few days. A few of them ran:

“Perhaps an hour, seÑor.”

“Only an hour?”

“No more, seÑor, but because there is much cuesta (ascent or descent) perhaps it is two or three hours.”

Or the reply came:

“How far? On foot or on horseback, seÑor?” Or, more often, “By sea or by land?” Some, tossing their heads toward the sun, replied:

“At evening prayers you are there,” or shook their heads with: “No alcanzan—you will not arrive, seÑores.”

“TodavÍa ’stÁ lejos—It is still far.”

“How far, more or less; an hour, or three days?”

“Between the two, seÑores.”

“Three leagues, then?”

“Ma-a-a-a-a-Ás, seÑores,—Much more.”

“Sigue no mÁs—Just keep on going; Al otro ladito—On the other little side; A la vueltita no mÁs—Around the little corner no more; Arribita—A little above; No mÁs bajita queda—Just down below it remains”—and so on through all the gamut of misinformation; never a simple “So-many miles.” Above all, it was fatal to ask a leading question. The misinformant was sure to agree with us at all costs, evidently out of mere politeness. One might fancy the ancient rulers of the Andes demanded an affirmative answer from their subjects on penalty of death; and the supposition would account for many of the stories of miraculous appearances, of place names and the like, gathered by the Conquistadores. At best, we were assured:

“No hay donde perderse—There is no place to lose yourselves”—and were almost sure to strike, within ten minutes, a misleading fork in the trail.

With fifteen miles behind us I slipped gratefully from under my awkward thirty pounds before one of a cluster of thatched huts called “Hotel Mi Casa,” on the earth floor of which two broken-legged cots were placed for us. Water to drink was doled out grudgingly; washing was a luxury none indulged in. Hays was busy consuming six home-made cigars, called “tobacos comunes,” that had cost him a sum total of one cent. As we sat before the hovel watching the sunset throw its reflections on the red cliffs of the range behind us, the day went out like an extinguished lamp and the stars came suddenly forth in striking brilliancy. The north star of our home sky was now below the horizon, and many a long month was due to pass before we should see it again.

The plateau ahead was even vaster than it seemed. I had walked hours next morning by one of those easy haphazard upland trails, and still it lay endless before me. Clumps of short, squat trees flecked it with shadows here and there, but for the most part it was bare alike of the planting of nature or man. Cattle grazed on every hand, and mule-trains went and came frequently. In every direction stood row upon row of jagged mountain ranges, fading away into the haziest distance. They seemed of a world wholly cut off from the whispering stillness of the broad brown plain. Turning, I could see untold mile upon mile behind me. The blue Central Cordillera that shut off the valley of the Cauca lay piled into the sky ahead. Like a hair on a colored glass, I could make out our sharply ascending trail of the days to come crawling upward toward the QuindÍo.

On the rim of the mountain lap that holds IbaguÉ, spread about a bulking church at the base of the first great buttresses of the chain, I came upon Hays in the shade of a leper’s hut. Before the marks of his ailment came upon him the outcast had climbed with his mules for many years back and forth over the great barrier, and something like a tear glistened in his eye as we turned our faces toward the land of his youth. The “Hotel Paris,” in the town below, looked a century old with its quaint wooden rejas of colonial days to peer out through—and also in at, as a half-intoxicated ibagueÑo demonstrated by thrusting his face in upon us while we were battling with the stains of travel. When I took him to task, he answered wonderingly, “Why, every one does it, seÑor,” and refused to take any hint short of a basin of water.

IbaguÉ, capital of the province of Tolima, claims 2300 “souls.” The count takes much for granted. It is a peaceful, roomy little town on a gentle, grassy slope where every resident has ample space to put up his chalky little straw-roofed cottage, yet all toe the street line, as if fearful of missing anything that might unexpectedly pass. Square-cornered, with almost wholly one-story buildings, its calles are atrociously cobbled, the few sidewalks worn perilously slippery and barely wide enough for two feet at once. A stream of crystal-clear water gurgles down each street through cobbled gutters, lulling the travel-weary to sleep—and furnishing a convenient means of washing photographic films. We drank less often, however, after we had strolled up to the edge of the mountain and found three none-too-handsome ladies bathing in the reservoir.

On a corner of the grass-grown plaza the nephews of Jorge Isaacs, greatest of Colombian novelists, run a clothing store. But it was our misfortune to find them out of town. On another corner I made my way up an aged stone stairway of one of the rare two-story buildings of IbaguÉ to the alcalde’s office. It was lined with dog-eared documents, all hand-written, each batch marked with a year, before which lounged clerks incessantly rolling cigarettes. When he had read our government paper in a stage whisper, the youthful mayor at once put the town entirely at our disposal. I suggested schools.

“SeÑor Ministro de InstrucciÓn PÚblica!” he called out, with long, oratorical cadences.

Instantly there tiptoed into the room a long, tremulous man of fifty, almost shabbily dressed, though of course with what had once been a white collar, with a pedagogical cast of countenance and a chin barely an inch below his upper lip. He bowed low at the alcalde’s orders and answered that the matter would be attended to at once—maÑana.

Toward ten next morning the Minister of Public Instruction, who had evidently laundered his collar during the night, left a long line of people waiting and set off with me.

“They are only teachers, waiting for their appointments or salaries,” he explained.

We halted before a large building. The Minister knocked meekly with his cane on the heavy zaguan, the door to the patio, and was finally admitted by a square-faced, muscular, unshaven priest, who listened to our request at some length and at last led us to an older churchman, suave, slender, outwardly effusive, and of that perfectly polished exterior that marks the Jesuit. He was also French. When time enough had elapsed to give warning of our coming, he led the way into a room of first-grade pupils,—all boys of six or seven, except two full-grown Indian youths. An exceedingly young priest, giving an excellent imitation of surprise at our appearance, snapped a sort of wooden hand-clapper, and the entire class rose to their feet bowing profoundly. Some other formality was imminent when I begged the teacher to go on with the lesson just as if I were not there. He exchanged a glance with his superior at this extraordinary gringo request, then lined the class up in military ranks and set them to reading aloud. The theme was strictly religious in nature and most of the words of four or five syllables. As often as the clapper sounded, the boys changed to “next” and read with such fluency that only the tailend of a phrase here and there was intelligible. The priest made no corrections or criticisms whatever, “taught,” indeed, as he might have turned a hurdy-gurdy handle. I fancied the pupils extraordinarily well-trained—until I strolled down the room, to the evident horror of the adults, and noted that almost none of them had the book open at the page they were “reading.”

In a higher-grade room I was asked to choose the lesson, and suggested geography. A youth passed a pointer swiftly over a wall-map, spinning off a description, learned by rote, of the principal cities, the youthful priest lifting him back on the track whenever he forgot the exact language of the original and came to a wordless halt. Little helpful hints accompanied each question. A boy stood before the map of Colombia, on which the capital was printed in enormous letters.

“What city did Quesada found in 1538?” asked the priest.

Blank silence from the boy.

The priest: “Bo—bogo—”

“BogotÁ!” shouted the boy.

My fellow-visitors smiled complacently at his wisdom.

“And what place is this?” quizzed the teacher, pointing to a strip of land that curved like a tail up into a corner of the map, “Pa—Pana—”

“PanamÁ” shrieked the boy, “A province of Colombia which is now in rebellion. The....”

He was evidently going on with still more startling information when the all but imperceptible twitching of an eye of the Jesuit superior turned the pointer to other climes.

The teacher never lost an opportunity to give a religious twist to the proceedings. A boy whose pointer hovered over the Mediterranean mumbled:

“And another of the cities is Nicea....”

“Ah,” cried the priest, “And what celebrated event in the history of mankind took place in Nicea?”

“The great Council of the Church in which ...” began the youth, and rattled on as glibly as if he had been there in person.

When we had turned out into the street, the shabby little Ministro became confidential, explaining that the colegio toward which we were headed had once held a large student body, “but now, seÑor, owing to political changes....”

“Before the priests interfered I had an excellent experienced normal graduate in charge of that first class,” he sighed as we parted, “and now we have that boy in a cassock. Bah!”

We left IbaguÉ by taking the wrong road and had to crawl for miles along the steep bank of a mountain stream almost back to town before we were set right. Then began one of the greatest climbs of our joint careers. Round and round, in intoxicated zigzags, went the trail, as if dizzy at the task before it, down into several gullies until at last, finding no other means of escape, it took to clambering laboriously upward. At first the weather was hot, then gradually cooled as far-reaching views of IbaguÉ and its surroundings spread out below us. The buttresses of the range ahead were enormous, as if nature, planning to build here such a mountain chain as never before, had started the outcropping supports on her most gigantic scale. Toward nine I realized that I was out of the sunshine and no longer sweating, despite the swiftness of the ascent; at ten I paused to pick wild strawberries along the way. It did not seem possible to mount much further, for there was nothing higher visible. But like Jack of the Beanstalk, I climbed on entirely out of sight—into the clouds that wholly shut off the world below. At noon, when I stretched out on a swift slope to read a few pages of “MarÍa,” immense reaches of mountains and cloud-stenciled valleys, half-hidden by masses of snow-white mist, like drapery that concealed yet revealed their plump, feminine forms, lay everywhere below and about me. Over all the tumbled view were scattered little huts of mountaineers, each in a setting it seemed possible to have reached only on wings.

The hovel where we planned to spend the night refused us posada, and, as dusk fell, we faced an all but perpendicular mountain wall, up the stony, half-wooded face of which the trail staggered. The few groups of men we met carried ancient rifles loosely, as if constantly ready for action. At dark I toiled to a summit to find Hays standing before a mud rancho arguing with the crude mountaineers who would have sent us on into the night with the threadbare Spanish prevarication, “Only a little further on there is another house all ready to receive you.” In its utter lack of comfort the place resembled the mountain hamlets of northwestern Spain. The people were shy, yet, once won over, kind-hearted. “There is no bed,” they explained, “but there is perhaps a leather you can sleep on.” By and by the woman called us into the kitchen for a bowl of caldo, hot water with chunks of potato and an egg dropped in it, served with coarse corn-bread. Then the man led the way into a cell made entirely of mud, even to the bench along the wall, on which he laid a hairy, sun-dried cowhide. Fortunately he returned a little later with several aged gunny-sacks, a tiny girl lighting the way with a rope-like native candle, or we should not have slept even the bit we did.

Streaks of pale day were beginning to steal through the chinks in our chamber when the woman appeared with black coffee and a stony corn biscuit, and we were off for another day of stiff ups and downs. Stalking down a knee-breaking descent, I heard a shout of astonishment from Hays ahead. What looked like an ordinary mountain stream cut across the trail at the bottom of a sharp little gully. But the water, coming from the bowels of Tolima that stood somewhere above us in the mists of morning, was almost hot. We had both been on the road in many a clime, but never before where nature was kind enough to heat a morning bath for us. We lost no time in stripping for a luxury rare to the traveler in Colombia.

Not far beyond we came to the edge of the valley of the Toche. Away below, like a miniature painting, reposed a peaceful little vale wholly shut in by sheer mountain walls, a thread-like stream meandering the length of it. It took us an hour to make the swift, stony descent. Not all get down so safely, as the skeletons of a horse and a mule, their shoes still on, testified. The valley floor, watered by the rock-broiling stream, was a fertile patch of earth, and the steep mountain flanks were planted far up with little perpendicular patches of corn. All the scene seemed as far removed from the wide world as if on another sphere.

A rocky trail climbed abruptly up out of the valley again from the further end, higher than ever, past rare houses, built of the red boards of a tree called cedro, from the doors of which stared shy, half-friendly people in bedraggled tatters. The QuindÍo pass lies only 11,440 feet above the sea, but that by no means represents the climbing necessary to surmount the Central Cordillera of the Andes. What is so called is really a long series of ranges, and no sooner did the road reach some lofty summit than it dived as swiftly and roughly down again. It was not a planned road, like the highways of the Alps, but one grown up of itself. A jaguar once wandered over the Cordillera, a man followed, and to-day the route holds to the same course. Toiling like draft-animals, gasping for breath in the rarefied air, we fancied a score of times that we had reached the summit, only to see the trail take another switchback and disclose the perfidious fact that it had found another ridge to surmount.

A few hundred feet above the Toche began clumps, then entire forests of a tall, slender wax-palm, a species named by Humboldt on his journey over the QuindÍo. Having only a tuft of branches at the top, these were often torn off by the winds that rage down through the gullies, leaving a thing as unromantic as a telegraph-pole. The valley below opened out until half a world, dull-brown with a tinge of green, lay below and around us. Words are hopelessly inadequate to describe this bird’s eye view of range upon range, climbing pell-mell one over the other, as if in terror to escape some savage pursuer, and fading away into the dimmest misty-blue distance.

The sun was low when we came out on as far-reaching a view ahead and saw the morrow’s task laid out before us in the form of a thread-like road twisting away out of sight over a great mountain barrier draped in clouds, the “puro QuindÍo,” or chief range, at last. As night descended, we entered “Volcancito,” an unusually large adobe building on a bleak slope. The dining-room, which was also the back corredor, was overrun by a large family, chiefly small girls, each in a single, thin, knee-high cotton garment, despite the wintry mountain air. Chickens, dogs, and gaunt, self-assertive pigs wandered everywhere without restraint. In a corner slouched a woman sewing garments too small for the smallest child in sight. Our plea for lodging she treated with scorn. “Volcancito” was a posada, not a hotel, the difference between the two in Spanish-America being that in a hotel the traveler is permitted to expect certain conveniences while in a posada he accepts with smiling gratitude whatever fortune chooses to furnish him.

“We have only two guest rooms,” snapped the woman, when we persisted, as if the mere giving of the information was an unusual favor. “One this seÑor has with his wife and baby. The other belongs to the arrieros.”

The successful guest was an actor on his way from the Cauca to BogotÁ, a handsome fellow much over-dressed for such a journey, with a strikingly beautiful young wife, as we noted at a glance through the door.

“But there are five rooms on this side of the house,” I suggested.

“Family rooms,” shot back the woman.

“And this little room in the corner?”

“Belongs to the servant,” she mumbled, projecting her lips toward a slatternly young female who was at that moment pursuing a thieving pig from the dungeon-like kitchen.

“Anything will do,” sighed Hays, gazing abstractedly after the servant.

But the landlady was in no mood for crude jokes.

“There is a fine house with rooms and beds just four cuadros on,” she lied, after a long silence. Fortunately this was by no means my first experience with the favorite trick of Spanish-speaking races to be rid of importunate guests, or we might have tramped all night on the mountain top in a cold as penetrating as that of January in our own land. I slipped surreptitiously from under my pack, assuming the ingratiating manner that is the last resort with the apathetic people of the Andes. We were resolved to spend the night there, though it be in walking the floor. Nothing is more fatal than to appear anxious in such situations, however, and we affected indifference and a pretense of having accepted her verdict.

What fine, red-cheeked little girls she had, so pretty and healthy. (Indeed, they looked like Irish children). Was she not from the Cauca? She was. Ah, the magnificent Cauca, the most beautiful.... She was soon lost in a panegyric of her native valley, as she shuffled from kitchen to sewing-machine and back again.

“Magnificent, indeed,” I agreed, “and in only a day or two we shall be there. So what matters a night of freezing in the mountains? By the way, la seÑora can perhaps sell us a bit of coffee and a bite to eat before we set out to tramp all night?”

She grunted assent and a half-hour later we were seated before a plentiful, if not epicurean, meal. Before we had finished it, she remarked casually that we might “arrange ourselves” in the room with the arrieros. The mule-driver is seldom a pleasant bed-fellow, but compared with a night out of doors, probably with rain, at more than two miles above sea-level, any arrangement was welcome.

We fancied lodging had first been refused us because we were foreigners. Soon after supper we were undeceived. Out of the darkness came the sound of horse’s hoofs, and as it ceased there burst in upon us a handsome young Colombian, of somewhat dissolute features, in the ruana, false trouser-legs, ringing cartwheel spurs, and the other hundred and one details of equipment the rules of society require of a Colombian of “gente decente” rank who travels ahorse. He gave greeting in the explosive speech of his class and requested lodging.

“No hay,” answered the woman, in the identical cold monotone she had used toward us.

The newcomer began dancing on air, waving his ladylike hands, on which gleamed several rings, above him. Eloquence worthy of a world congress poured from his lips; his eyes seemed to spurt fire.

“No hay,” repeated the landlady, in the same dead voice.

“But seÑora, it is imperative. I have a lady with me! Anything will do—such as these rooms.”

“Family rooms,” snapped the caucana, as if reciting a learned dialogue.

“But your guest rooms?”

“One this seÑor has with his wife and baby. The other belongs to the arrieros—and also,” jerking her head slightly toward us, “to these two caballeros.”

“But what am I to do?” shrieked the Colombian, “and a lady with me?”

The woman muttered a “QuiÉn sabe” with a careless shrug of the shoulders and continued her sewing without looking up. After a last vain oration the Colombian dashed off angrily, his horseback garments standing out at excited angles, and rode away into the night the way we had come, toward better luck perhaps among the huts at the bottom of the valley.

Bedtime comes at about seven in these wintry, fireless, lightless regions. The landlady, now thoroughly mollified, broke off some story of the wonders of the Cauca to say:

“Next to the room of the arrieros is a harness-room where you can sleep alone. Many ingleses—all light-haired foreigners are “Englishmen” to the rural Colombian—have slept in it.”

Why had she not offered us this upon our arrival? Lack of confidence, probably, common to these simple people as is the good-heartedness that can be unearthed by a few simple wiles and flatteries. The dungeon-like room was narrow, but long and high, strewn with the aparejo of mules and the crude implements of husbandry, with harnesses, pack-saddles and a chaos of trappings, but with space left to spread on the earth floor several tar-cloth wrappings of mule-loads. Moreover, the woman sent us a blanket. Later a boy entered carrying a candle and a little round hard pillow which he delivered with a speech apologetic with diminutives, after the fashion of the country people of the Andes, “AquÍ tienen u’te’es una almohadita para poner la cabecita.”

On the western side of the Central Cordillera the trail drops quickly down into the tropics again, here and there through lanes of immense fern-like bamboos. Hays, in the middle distance, has his turn at carrying the developing-tank