On the Cauca side, like the French slope of the Pyrenees, the Central Cordillera of the Andes descends almost abruptly to the valley. As we emerged from the clouds, a brilliant sun lighted up vast landscapes of labyrinthian hills and vales mottled with cloud shadows, bits of our road ahead scratched here and there on salient, sun-polished knobs and slopes far below. With noon appeared the first broad view of the rolling Cauca valley, nestled between the central and the western ranges, a bare thousand feet above sea-level, still deep-blue as some mountain-girdled lake. The little town of Salento, in the lap of an undulating, bright green plain, rose slowly up to meet us. We marched to the alcalde’s office in a weak-kneed building of compacted clay, only to find the alcalde, like beds for travelers, out of town. A stupid clerk in a room full of musty papers of varying antiquity admitted it was too bad Salento was so atrasado, but made no move to decrease that backwardness.

“And strangers who arrive?” I asked.

“Generally bring their beds with them,” he replied, “or, if not, they do the best they can.”

We took the hint and forcible possession of an empty room opening on the plaza. When, after a basin bath, I strolled out into the town to mention our strange exotic desire for sleeping accommodations, a dozen of the most influential citizens also admitted it was too bad and—and where did we come from and where were we going? Hays for once had better luck. Having left the mention of beds to simmer in the mind of one Sanchez, who amused himself at shopkeeping on a corner of the square, he was called over at dark and offered the use of several woolly white blankets that hung for sale from the blackened beams of the shop ceiling. Sanchez was shocked beyond measure when we started to carry them across the plaza ourselves. He called for a boy, nine responded, and the winner expressed great gratitude when we rewarded him with a ragged paper cent. We improvised seats and sat gazing out through the wooden reja. Far away on a fuzzy hillside our road of the morning grew dim and faded out, like an unfixed photograph, and a night lighted only by stars quickly settled down. Out of its black immensity came, a little later, the jangling of tiny bells. Across the plaza filed a half hundred boys in column of twos, weirdly lighted by flickering torches, utterly silent in their bare feet. From another direction came a similar half-seen procession of girls; the two columns joined at the door of the little bamboo church, the pagoda-like twin towers of which stood dimly forth against the background of darkness, and passed within together. For an hour a weird infantile chanting in chorus sounded almost unbrokenly, then the congregation filed forth again and melted away into the humid summer night. The faint silhouette of the priest showed him leaning over the reja of his second-story casa cural, the fitful glow of his cigarette the only light in town, until that, too, died out and left only the brilliant tropical stars above.

Beyond Salento a rolling fertile land lay on every hand. In the great forests spreading far up the range beside and behind us, the most conspicuous of the flora was the yarumo, a white-leaved tree that stood forth everywhere like blotches on the green landscape. The slender wax-palm of the eastern slope had not passed the crest. The dense-green uplands of the valley were still all but covered with virgin forests. It set us reflecting what might have been had the “Mayflower” turned southward and peopled this land of rich soil and unrivalled climate, instead of that bleak and rigorous country we had left behind. Or would this peerless climate have made us, too, salentinos?

At the hut where we paid two cents for great bowls of creamy milk, there was a decision to make. One branch of the trail led to Pereira, the other to Filandia. We tossed a coin. It fell “tails” and we struck off to the left by a soft dirt road. Filandia was a quaint old place with a wonderful gingerbread church, on a hilltop that rolled languidly away on all sides to far-off mountain ridges. The town seemed never to have seen a foreigner before. Perhaps travelers hitherto had all gone by way of Pereira. When I attempted to take a picture, the entire population, men, women, and the very babies, crowded so close around me that I could not fight them back to a focal distance.

By the next afternoon we were in quite a different country,—down in the tropics again, with coffee-trees, bananas, and endless lanes of bamboo, that giant fern, as useful as it is beautiful, which nature so unkindly denied the North. It was not a temperature for the preserving of undeveloped films and I paused with the tank beside the first clear stream. The sun gave out before I had more than hung the strips up to dry, drops of rain began to fall, and night came on apace. I pushed on, grasping a wet film in either hand. To my dismay the road turned to a narrow path through thick weeds, thigh-high, and for a long five miles, with eighteen already in my legs and thirty pounds straining from my shoulders, I tramped swiftly forward, striving to hold the films out of reach of the weeds. The natives, blacker and blacker as we descended, stared with amazement from their little bamboo shelters along the train to see a strange being scurry by, holding high above his head two black strips, like Tibetan prayer-sheets. Small wonder they crossed themselves in superstitious awe.

The night had grown completely in about me, when Hays hailed me from an unseen doorway. He had already bespoken supper and engaged a room with a bed of split bamboo and a quilted straw mattress. For me was brought what a hard-earned candle proved to be a canvas cot, made of a U. S. mail-sack. In the “dining-room” was a lounging chair of the same material.

“Where did you get it?” I asked the woolly-haired host.

“What, that fine, strong cloth? Oh, the government always has plenty of that to sell,” he replied placidly.

The same damp, pulsating jungle fenced us in all the next morning. Far ahead, across the heat-steaming spread of the Cauca valley, the jagged blue line of the Western Cordillera, that cuts it off from the Pacific, stretched to north and south as far as the eye could command, in some places five ranges visible one behind the other. At noon, suddenly topping a jungled knoll, we caught sight of the long-sought town of Cartago, reddish with the hue of its roof-tiles in the center of town, dying away in whitish and straw-colored lines of outskirt hovels. It was hours later that we reached the level of the valley floor, and strolled in heavy grass through a bamboo-built suburb into the weedy central plaza.

With a populous graveyard before the keel of the “Mayflower” was laid, Cartago has not yet advanced to what any “mushroom” town of our West can boast at the age of three months. Negroes were everywhere, though there was no sharp “color-line,” and pure whites were rare. The Cauca is to Colombia what our South is to the United States. In colonial times slaves were imported in large numbers up the Atrato river, and to this day the shiftless, happy-go-lucky African lolls in his ragged cabins, speaking a Spanish it was hard to believe was not English, so exactly did their slovenly, lazy-tongued drawl resemble that of our southern states.

The hotel advertised “Comodidad, prontitud y esmero”—“Comfort, promptness, and specklessness,”—the three things above all others a South American hotel is surest not to have. There is never an office in these hotels of the Andes. A peanut vendor somewhere up the street is manager, and all the town “assists” while the traveler makes his bargain, if, indeed, it does not gather en masse to watch his ablutions. The rooms are commonly stark empty, and are furnished to order, as one selects a chicken on the hoof for the evening meal. We had to implore each and every requisite, from cots to water, separately and individually several times over before they were supplied. When we insisted on two towels, the young but toothless landlady, muttering something about the curious ways of los gringos, tore an aged sheet in two, and as long as we remained made us feel that guests were an unmitigated nuisance. Among the luxuries of the town was wheat bread. When we demanded it with our meals, a six-foot “boy” of polished jet-black skin—and little other covering—was sent wandering down to market with a bushel basket on his arm, and in the course of the afternoon came slouching back with three tiny buns lost in the bottom of it.

But for all the slovenliness of its habits, antiquarians would have found Cartago’s hotel interesting. The barnyard patio into which we flung our wash-water formed the parquet, or stalls, of the village theater. At the back of it was an open, tile-roofed building of split bamboo floor and sides, violently painted, forming a stage quite similar to that of Shakespeare’s day. A score of bottles hung by the neck, like corpses at some medieval wholesale hanging, fringed the outer edge of the platform, the ends or drippings of what had been tallow candles showing that they had served as proscenium footlights. The second-story veranda, our dining-room, was marked with the numbers of “boxes” around its three sides, from the unspeakable kitchen to the even more unmentionable servants’ quarters. When plays were given, the masses stood in the yard below and the well-to-do looked on from their chairs along the veranda. Unfortunately, histrionic talent seemed to have completely died out in Cartago. Only the languid tinkling of a tiple, or native guitar, marked the long evenings in which we watched the golden moon rise over the bit of mossy, old-red roof and the tops of two lazily swaying palm-trees framed by our balcony window.

If my knowledge of Cartago is meager, it is because I spent most of my days there in mailing a notebook. The post-office was the lower story of a compressed-mud building cornering on the plaza. When I first made my appearance, its heavy wooden doors, studded with immense spike-heads, were securely bolted.

“Is the correo closed to-day?” I asked a lounger-by.

“SÍ, seÑor, the mails only came in yesterday. But you can knock and perhaps....”

Knocking brought no result. An hour or more later I tried again, with no better luck. Early the next afternoon, however, I found my way in by an inner door of the patio, though the place was still officially closed.

The two rooms looked much like a garret of long standing, but by no means like a post-office. Scattered everywhere, over floor and baked-mud window seats, on decrepit chairs and crippled tables, lay fat mail-bags, all stout and new, from the chief countries of the globe. The outgoing Colombian correspondence was already packed in aged grain-sacks. Pieces of mail of all sizes lay tumbled and littered over the entire two rooms. Fully half of it was from the United States, particularly pamphlets and packages from patent medicine houses. Four middle-aged men, dressed in great dignity and in Cartago’s most correct attire, with gloves and canes on chairs beside them, were seated around a table, smoking cigarettes. I handed one of them the wrapped notebook. It passed slowly from hand to hand, each feeling it over, not so much out of curiosity, though that was by no means lacking, as absent-mindedly striving to bring his attention down to it. Then all four fell to perusing a Postal Union rate-sheet, but found everything except the information needed. Finally one rose and referred the matter respectfully to a man, evidently a superior, seated in state at a corner table. The rate was found to be one peso for each fifty grams. The official turned back and wandered for some time at random about the two rooms, fingering the parcel over and over and scratching his head in a vain effort to recall what he had set out to find.

He discovered it at last,—an ancient postal-scales—tried it, found it too small, tried another, and spent an ample five minutes juggling with the odds and ends that served as weights before he computed the balance. Then he drifted languidly back to his companions in inefficiency, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, and rambled once more across the room to the scales. He had forgotten the weight! This time he took no chances, but announced the figures aloud and wrote them on the parcel,—“320 grams.” Those who do not know the South American will have difficulty in believing that the division of this by fifty, without troubling for fractions, presented a real problem. All four began pencilling long lines of figures on as many sheets of paper. Several minutes passed before one of them ventured to show his result. The others compared, and amid a sage shaking of heads one announced solemnly, “Seven cents, seÑor,” while the rest gazed dreamily at me out of the tops of their eyes, as if wondering whether I should weather the shock of so great an expense.

“And registered, seventeen cents?” I added; for I did not care to have the parcel lie a month or two about the earth floor of Cartago’s post-office, or find its final resting-place in the back yard. When the suggestion had penetrated, one of the quartet sat down to enter the grave transaction in a large ledger. I still needed a two-cent stamp. The oldest of the four shuffled to the opposite side of the table, sat down, adjusted his legs, and slowly pulled out a drawer stuffed with every manner of rubbish,—tobacco, rolled cigarettes, half-empty phials of patent medicine, everything that may come by mail,—and finally dug up a battered pasteboard box that had once held No. 60 American thread. From this he fished out a small sheet of two-peso stamps, carefully tore one off at the perforation, first on one side, then on the other, put the sheet back in the thread-box, the thread-box back in the drawer, carefully closed the latter, and handed me the stamp. I tossed before him a silver ten-cent piece. He opened the drawer again, clawed out of a far corner a wad of those ragged, germ-infested one-cent bills indigenous to Colombia, laid out eight of them, counted them a second time, sat staring at them a long minute while his attention went on furlough, asked one of his colleagues to count them, which the latter did twice at the same vertiginous speed, and finally pushed them toward me with a hesitative movement, as if he were sure he was losing somewhere in the transaction, but could not exactly figure out where.

Meanwhile, he of the ledger rose from dotting the last “i” of an entry that stretched in nicely shaded copybook letters entirely across the double page, begged me to do him the honor to be seated, dipped the clumsy steel pen into the dusty inkwell, and, with a wealth of politenesses, requested me to sign. When I had done so, he gazed long and dreamily at the signature, longer still at space in general, and finally put the parcel carefully away in a drawer with neither stamp nor mark of identification upon it.

“But,” I protested, “Do you give no receipt for registered mail?”

Great excitement arose among the officials and the half-dozen persons waiting ostensibly to buy a one-cent stamp. A long conference ensued.

“It is, seÑor,” said the postmaster himself, rising and turning to me with regal courtesy, “that no blank receipts have been sent from BogotÁ yet this year. However....”

He called aside the custodian of the precious ledger and gave him long whispered instructions. The latter hunted up a sheet of foolscap, stamped it carefully with the office seal, and wrote out with long legal flourishes—for penmanship is still an art in Colombia—a receipt for the parcel. This he tore off and carried across to the postmaster who, carefully preparing another pen, signed it with his full name, not forgetting the elaborate rÚbrica beneath it. Then he read it carefully over once more, seemed dissatisfied with something, and finally called the attention of the writer to the rough edge he had left in tearing off the paper, instructing him to lay it under a ruler and trim it with a sharp knife. The subordinate did so and at last delivered to me a memento I still have in my possession.

To one unacquainted with Latin-American ways the episode may seem overdrawn. I have told it, however, without exaggeration. From the moment I handed over the parcel until I emerged, receipt in hand, there had elapsed one hour and twenty minutes!

Nor is such a scene unusual. From the Rio Grande southward, government offices are filled with just such human driftwood, and it is common experience to see several staid and pompous men in frock-coats spend more than an hour doing what an average American boy would accomplish in two minutes.

Swinging due south next morning through the perpetual summer of the flat, grass-carpeted Cauca valley, we fell in with a straggling band of nearly a hundred youths. They were conscripts recruited under the new military law of Colombia, antioqueÑos chosen by lot to make up the quota of the Province of Antioquia, bound south from MedellÍn for six months compulsory service. The majority were crude-minded countrymen. Some, dressed in the wrecks of “European” suits, were undeveloped boys of the towns, hobbling painfully along on bruised and blistered feet, bare except for their cloth alpargatas. Among the latter was one Policarpo, a devil-may-care young fellow of high intelligence and considerable education, who had a very clear notion of the weak spots in his native land, though no inkling of a workable remedy. Another carried a tiple, as well as a pleasing baritone voice, and struck up at every opportunity the languidly mournful music of the region.

The highway now was a series of interwoven cross-country paths, fording the smaller streams, crossing the larger on little bamboo bridges with faded thatched roofs. It was hot, yet not of the oppressive heat our most northern states know in mid-summer. All along the way were flowers of many colors, and broad vistas of greenest grass stretched far across slightly rolling plains wherever woods and jungle did not choke it out. Bands of butterflies, often of the most gorgeous hues, flickered here and there across the face of the landscape. Insects hummed contentedly and lizards scuttled away through the fallen leaves. Singing birds of many kinds abounded; flocks of little parrots, brilliant green in color, flitted in and out of the bamboo groves, shrieking noisily at their games. Here and there quinchas, fences of split bamboo of basket-like weave, shut in a little cultivated patch; and all day long the distance-blue Western Cordillera, with its wrinkled folds and prominences, stretching endlessly north and south, seemed to cut off the Cauca like a world apart.

Then for a space there were no habitations, except an abandoned hut or two and the ruins of several razed ones. The recruits murmured something about an epidemic, but none appeared to know anything definite concerning it. At length we descended through a shallow valley, and from then on, locusts called chapul in the Cauca, rose in vast clouds as we advanced, covering the ground before us and veiling all the landscape as with a great screen, new myriads rising at every step, until they struck us incessantly in the face and filled our ears with a sound as of some great waterfall at a distance. In BogotÁ we had wondered to find an important government department entitled “ComisiÓn para la ExtinciÓn de la Langosta”; now it seemed small, indeed, to cope with the problem. At intervals cactus hedges bounded the way, and the organ-cactus of desert lands stretched forth its stiff arms into the brilliant sky. The Cauca was suffering one of its periodical droughts and the accompanying scourge of locusts, after which it would bloom again like a tropical garden.

The recruits so monopolized accommodations at the village of Naranjo—which had not the remnant of an orange-tree to explain its name—that we had to share a room with three none-too-white natives who permitted no ventilation whatever. At four they rose to light candles and feed their mules, and sat vociferously discussing nothing at all until daybreak. They spent more time harnessing themselves than their animals; for the Colombian never dreams of riding in anything less than the complete outfit demanded by local convention. A wide-brimmed “Panama” hat—“sombrero de junco,” or the finer “jipijapa,” he calls it—covers his head. Over his usual clothing, which must include coat, vest, cravat, gloves, and white collar, no matter how far he may be from civilization nor what the temperature, he wears a ruana, a garment similar to the sarape of Mexico, or the poncho. In the vicinity of BogotÁ this is of heavy wool and dark in color; in the Cauca it is the ruana de hilo, of light-colored cotton, generally gay with stripes. Beneath this the horseman wears zamarras, ample false trouser-legs held together by strips front and back, and legging-like at the bottom. Sometimes these are of sun-dried cowhide, or goat-skins shaggy with long white hair, reminiscent of the “chaps” of our cowboys. Far more common are those of tela de caucho, “rubber cloth,” consisting of two thicknesses of canvas and rubber woven into an impenetrable yet flexible material nearly an eighth of an inch thick. Then come his chilenas, huge wheel-like spurs; his rejo, or lariat of twisted rawhide hanging from his wrist; his alforjas, or leather saddlebags between his legs; his cuchugos, a long soft-leather pouch arched over the cantel of his saddle like a cavalryman’s blanket-roll; his long, shoe-shaped stirrups; and usually a parasol or umbrella hanging at his side, if, indeed, it does not shade him as he rides. No Colombian caballero who aspires to retain his rank as such would venture to mount a horse while lacking any item of this equipment. One trembles to think what might happen to a caucano, needing to ride instantly for the doctor, who could not lay hands on his zamarras, or who had mislaid his gloves.

The Cauca was now a broad, dry, treeless region without streams, though little humped bridges lifted us across the waterless beds of what would be such at other seasons, and which still retained the name of “river” in local parlance. Arrieros of this section put red bands about the brows of their horses and mules, perhaps only for the purpose of identification, but giving the animals the coy appearance of coquettish girls. As we advanced, the long drought grew more and more in evidence. Across the sun-cracked valley floor lay scattered the bleached bones of scores of cattle that had died of thirst. Policarpo and I, falling behind, were in danger of suffering the same fate; for the band of recruits, like another locust horde, drank the world ahead wholly dry. The rare hovels and amateur shops along the way were prepared to feed and minister to the thirst of only the customary few daily travelers; not to the ninety-four of us that suddenly descended upon them out of the north without warning. Hays and I were forced to stride on past the sponge-like avalanche of humanity for self-preservation.

Here and there we got huge glasses of chicha, the favorite native beverage, at a cent or two each. So many travelers have pictured the making of this by toothless old women chewing yuca and spitting it into a tub to ferment, that the impression should be corrected at the outset. That custom does exist, but it is found only among the untamed tribes of the upper reaches of the Amazon, scarcely trodden by one in ten thousand South American travelers. All down the great Andean chain this nectar of the Incas is made chiefly of maize, though also of other grains, berries, and of almost any vegetable matter that will ferment, by just as agreeable processes as any other cooking operation of the same region. The notion of cleanliness is, at best, rudimentary among the country people of South America, yet the brewing of chicha certainly compares favorably with the ways of our average cider-mill. A well-made chicha, indeed, resembles somewhat in taste the best cider, and is the surest thirst-quencher I have yet encountered, distinctly superior in this respect to beer. Many were the chicha recipes I gathered along the Andes. For the interest of those who wish to temper a hot summer day with an excellent heritage from the ancient Inca civilization, let me translate the most common one.

“Chicha de morocho:

Take hard, ripe corn” (morocho is one of the several excellent species of maize that, like certain grades of the potato, has never been carried from its original Andean habitat to the rest of the world) “shell, and boil for two hours. Let it cool, then grind, or crush under a stone, sprinkling from time to time with some of the water in which it has been boiled. Keep this mass in a well-covered jar. As it is needed, mix with water; one soupspoonful of the prepared mass to one liter of boiling water; add cloves, a very little vanilla, and as much sugar or rapadura as is considered necessary. Mix with an equal amount of cold water and place in jars to ferment. Once fermented, it is ready to serve.”

We reached Zarzal, beyond a blistered, red-hot plain, soon after noon, with nineteen miles already behind us. It was thus we would always have arrived; the day’s work done early in the afternoon, to wash, eat, and loaf awhile on the canvas cots in our cell-bare room; then to loll in the rawhide chairs on the broad tile-floored veranda before our door, reading the literature of the country, languidly watching the afternoon shower, and taking a stroll in the evening for exercise. In the Andes, however, the itinerary is subjected to a haphazard arrangement of stopping-places that make so ideal a plan impossible. We gave orders for dinner and supper upon our arrival. The ignorant, good-hearted old landlord literally hung over us as we ate, fingering our dishes and even our food. The place might, with entire justice, have advertised “personal services.” At two we finished a heavy dinner. At three-thirty our host waddled in to announce that the “large supper” we had ordered was ready! We managed to plead off until five, but for that concession were obliged to eat the meal cold as an abandoned hope.

A heavy rain during the night—our coming seemed to have broken the long drought—made the going lead-heavy for the first few hours, until the blazing sun had dried up the “gumbo” mud. A richer region appeared as we advanced. Once or twice it seemed as if the central and western ranges were about to join hands and cut us off, but the “unmade” road always found a way through with, at most, an occasional dip, or a slight winding climb. During the hot afternoon we picked up a recruit straggler, complaining of fever. The entire company was scattered for miles along the valley, as often panting in a patch of shade as hobbling forward on their blistered, light-shod feet. Magnificent trees stood out here and there across the rich bottom lands. Often the way led through dense gaudales, bamboo groves that waved their gigantic plumes lazily in the summer air. Here and there the vegetation vaulted entirely over a “river” into which filtered only a few rays of sun, as through the roof of an abandoned ruin. Occasionally we came upon a chacra, a little farm with a tiny thatched hut faded with age, its floor of trampled earth, surrounded by coffee bushes, papaya, chirimoya, and other fruit trees of the tropics, the sometimes recently white-washed dwelling furnished only with a few crude leather stools, a wooden bench, a lame table, and a few cÁntaros and dishes of native pottery. Pigs and chickens treated the family with perfect equality; under the trees meditated old donkeys, broken down by a lifetime of toil under heartless drivers. We were indeed approaching the scene of “MarÍa” in all its photographic detail.

We prepared to leave TuluÁ early, but we reckoned without our host, who was a half-negro of nasty temper and stupid wit, and no faith in gold coin. Hays offered him a $5 gold piece in payment of our bill, but he demanded “paper of the country.” We had none left, and a mulatto boy was sent out to change the scorned yellow metal. An hour elapsed without a second sight of him. When another had drifted into the past, a search party was organized. Investigation showed that the emissary had tried to change the coin in a couple of shops, and had then faded away. It was nearly noon when he reappeared, the coin still in his clenched hand. He had fallen into a game with other boys and “forgotten” his errand.

We took the task upon ourselves. One after another drowsy, wondering shopkeepers looked the coin over as a great curiosity and handed it back, announcing that the changing would be “muy trabajoso”—“very laborious”—for the speaker, but that we could get it changed “en to’as partes”—“anywhere,” which, as usual, meant nowhere. At last a merchant suggested that it would be changed wherever we bought anything. We called his bluff by picking out a notebook on his shelves, and had heaped up before us nearly $500 in ragged “billetes del paÍs” of chiefly one and five-peso values. The wad was burdensome, but to be caught on the road in the Andes without small money is often to go hungry, if not, indeed, thirsty. This particular shopkeeper prided himself on a knowledge of geography and the affairs of the “exterior,” the outside world, above the average of his fellow-townsmen. As we turned away, he called after us:

“By the way, do los seÑores come from New York, or from the United States?”

It was a subtle distinction we had not, to that moment, recognized.

The ancient city of Buga, one of the largest in the Cauca valley, was already familiar to us from the pages of “MarÍa.” But seeing is too often disillusionment in these “cities” of the Andes, particularly those in which the imagination has already dwelt. To have seen one long, cobbled, unswept street of Buga was to have seen them all. Checkerboard in plan, the monotonous line of its continuous house-walls, all standing close to the street in a strict “right dress,” broken here and there by a massive zaguan, stretched away out of sight in both directions. At first glimpse, it seemed unduly modest in claiming only ten thousand inhabitants; when we found that every dwelling had a patio and a garden of its own within, we realized that a one-story Andean town is by no means so large as it looks. The place was stagnant as a frog-pond, its main plaza a splendid study in “still life.” Yet Buga was old before Boston was founded, and is favored with a soil and climate superior to the best of New England. In a region where fruit should have been unlimited, the only shop that offered any for sale was slightly stocked with a few green samples. The old woman who kept it bestirred herself to finger over several of her wares, and advised us to come back maÑana or the day after when they had had time to ripen. Perhaps it is unjust to expect of Buga the energy and movement of a white man’s town. At least it has unrivalled evenings in which, after the sun has set gloriously over the western range, the traveler can lean over the parapet of the massive old Spanish bridge of many arches—how the Spaniards built to stay, yet stayed not—watching a half-moon rise and listening to the chatter of the shallow, diamond-clear little Guadalajara de las Piedras that flanks the town on the south.

Buga is a holy city. Far above all else bulks a modern Gothic church of real bricks—and bricks transported from overseas are not cheap—called “De los Milagros,” filled with more religious trophies than any Hindu temple. We were accosted in the nave by a long-unshaven priest who inquired our desires with a brusk “QuÉ se le ofrece?” that plainly revealed his knowledge that we were not of the “faithful.” His familiarity with the outside world was on a par with that of most Colombians. When we answered his question of nationality by announcing ourselves Americans, he replied complacently, “Ah, yes, Englishmen.” Finding unheeded his strong hint to leave, he at length led the way up a ladder to a cell above and back of the altar. Here he lighted a candle and fell on his knees before the “miraculous” crucifix, the figure of which was smeared with red paint to simulate blood. Pilgrims flock to Buga from hundreds of miles around. To the bugueÑos themselves, however, their “miracle” seems to offer little more than a means of easy income, through the hawking of crucifixes and holy lithographs to their pious visitors.

Like Puree, Benares, or Lourdes, the holy city is more holy at a distance, than to those who loll through life in its shadows, and it was only at El Cerrito, a day’s march beyond, that we heard the story of the Milagroso de Buga in all its details. In a faintly lighted corredor we sat with three old women, the natural authorities on such subjects, who told the tale in low, awed voices, their eyes glowing in the night with the miracle of it, their tongues breaking in frequently with a “QuÉ le parece!”—“What do you think of that!”—as the miraculous recital proceeded.

Long years ago, more than two centuries, when Buga was nothing but a row of thatched casitas on the bank of the babbling Guadalajara de las Piedras, a very poor and pious woman used to come every day to wash clothes at the river brink. The clothes of others, that is, for you must know that she had long been trying to get together sixty cents to buy a crucifix to set up in her hut, where she had nothing whatever to pray to. At last she economized the sixty cents and was toiling away on the bank of the Guadalajara, dreaming of the joy of setting up the crucifix in her casita on the morrow, when a poor lame man of Buga came by and told her he owed sixty cents to a rich caballero, and would be put in prison for debt if he did not pay it that very night. The poor washerwoman drew from within her garments the silver she had so carefully hidden away and gave it to the lame man to pay his debt. The next day—or three days later; here a great dispute arose among our informants—as the poor woman was washing and praying that she might some day gather together another sixty cents, there floated squarely into her open hands and mixed itself up with the garments—of others—she was washing, a cajita, a little box in which there was....

Only a simple little cross, the spokeswoman said, but she, having at that moment to step into the shop to sell two corn-and-cheese biscuits, the others assured us in hoarse whispers that this version was entirely erroneous; it was not a simple cross, but a crucifix with a Cristo attached, just exactly the same that you see to-day in El Milagroso de Buga, only very tiny, chiquitito, in fact. This momentous point in Buga’s history I am forced to leave unsettled, reporting merely what I heard half-whispered in the dark corredor of El Cerrito. The woman took this cross—or crucifix—home and set it up on the wall of her casita. To her surprise and alarm, the crucifix—or cross—began to grow. “QuÉ le parece!” It grew even during the night! And the noises of its stretching kept her awake. When it had grown to twice its original size, she became so alarmed that she went and told the village curate. The padre scoffed at her story, saying such things were not possible nowadays—O ye of little faith!—for miracles were no longer done. But when she showed him the thing, lo, it was even then growing! So the priest took it away with him—as priests will—and still it grew. It grew until it reached the size you see it to-day in El Milagroso de Buga. Then the padre had an intimation from the Blessed Virgin that a church should be built on the spot where the cajita had been found, and he called all the people together to build it. They put the miracle behind the altar, and there it remained more than two hundred years, in the church which is to-day the carpenter-shop beside El Milagroso. Then, in 1902, the great temple of bricks was raised, for it had long been that those who would worship and be cured by the Miraculous One could not get into the old church. And the Milagroso was moved to the new temple as easily as if it were a mere image of wood, though all the world well knows that it moves only when it wishes, and if it does not, all the horses in the Cauca cannot stir it.

“And is it true that El Milagroso has cured many invalids?” I asked.

All three exploded in the Colombian manner of expressing great world-wide truths, such as, “Is Buga larger than TuluÁ?” “Is it colder in Zarzal than in El Cerrito?” Why....

But from an embarrassment of proofs of the miraculous power of the Milagroso of Buga, I have space only for this:

A woman of Sonson had been bed-ridden with rheumatism for twenty years. At last, when they had grown large enough, her sons carried her to Buga and placed her in a chair before El Milagroso. As she prayed, she leaned forward and touched the toe of the Miraculous One, whereupon she at once rose up from her chair perfectly well and walked home to Sonson, many miles away. That, every one in the Cauca valley knows, for it happened only the other year.

“And also,” put in another of the old women, bent on rounding out the story, “El Milagroso can turn a woman young and beautiful again, back to the day of her marriage and the age of fifteen.”

“Eh!” began Hays, sitting up, “Then why ... But, no, the question would be unkind. It is too personal.”

It was in El Cerrito that we first began inquiries about Jorge Isaacs. Those who have sought information of Carlyle in Chelsea, or of Goethe in Frankfurt will be surprised to know that the people of El Cerrito had heard of the author of “MarÍa,” though the corner chicha-seller and his neighbors spoke of him with something of the scorn active men of the world always feel for mere men of letters, even though they were not averse to basking in the sunshine of his fame. Some one led us to the little bridge below which the village gossips and washes its scanty clothes, and pointed away to the east. Far across the valley, on the lower skirts of the central range, we could see plainly the “novela casa”—“the story house,” a mere white speck on the distant mountain flank.

There were few spots in Colombia to which I had looked forward with more interest than this scene of South America’s greatest novel, and the life-long home of its author. With the first graying of the night I was astir, and we were off by sunrise along a grass-grown trail at right angles to our route to Ecuador. Several times this seemed to lose its way, and split up in hopeless indecision. But the “house of my fathers,” gleaming steadily on the skirt-hem of the central range, piloted us forward. The only building to be seen, except those on the floor of the plain, it stood just high enough to gaze out across the great valley, a single evergreen tree, slender as a church-spire, close beside it. The sun shot down its rays as if bent on setting on fire all that the foliage of the trees did not defend from its rage, when we came to the edge of the plain, broken by ravines in which we separated in an attempt to keep together. There was nothing left but to strike an unmarked course for the goal. My own soon plunged down into a gully hundreds of feet deep, thick in jungle, a stream, the Zabaletas of “MarÍa,” monologuing at its bottom. I wandered long beside it before I could tear my way across, and longer still before I found the suggestion of a path by which to climb out again. Beyond were slightly sloping brown fields, with grazing herds and immense black rocks protruding from the soil, and behind, the indistinct, prairie-like valley, majestic and silent, stretched mile upon mile to the deep-blue wall of the Western Cordillera. Over the crest of the Andes above hung, like an immense veil, dense masses of fog, from which the winds of the Sierra above snatched rags of clouds that floated lazily away to the westward. Then, all at once, the modest little white house appeared close at hand, in a grove of evergreens backed by the yarumo-dotted mountain flank. I climbed a stone wall and, mounting through another brown field, pushed open a heavy rustic gate, to find myself at last at the home of “MarÍa.”

A woman of olive complexion, with streaming hair—for in this corner of the Cauca, far from the “royal highway,” travelers, to say nothing of foreigners, are rare, indeed—watched me in speechless amazement as, dripping with twelve miles of struggle, I mounted the steps of the house. On the veranda I was met by a veritable delegation of women and children, headed by a man who announced himself as Camilo DurÁn, hacendado, entirely at my service. The family was of the well-to-do farmer class of the Cauca, a bit awkward, yet proud of their rank in society, lightly clad in rural dress, and decidedly excited at the extraordinary event of a visit by a foreigner from far-off Europe—or America—who presented a document from the alcalde of BogotÁ, signed by none other than the nephew of that same “Don Jorge” for whom their home was famous. A wide-eyed negro boy whom one might have taken for “Juan Angel” in person, his woolly head protruding through the crown of what had long since been a native straw hat, came running with a chair. As I sat down in the cool corredor, surrounded by the admiring family, DurÁn called for glasses and a bottle, and just then Hays’ head appeared above the stone fence of the inner corral and his always leisurely legs brought him up the steps to be introduced as that very “Lay-O-Ice” whom the valued communication from BogotÁ mentioned—when read by natives. The aguardiente, which was “ardent water” indeed, arrived a moment later, and when DurÁn had drunk our health and we his, we turned to look about us. Would we see la novela casa? We would, indeed, and rising, entered it.

The “story house” was a more modest dwelling than the imagination pictures during the reading of “MarÍa.” But then, all the Cauca and its ways and people are simple and unassuming to the American point of view. Typical of the hacienda houses of the region, it was of one story, arranged with due regard for the natural resources and the needs of the place and climate. Built of stone and adobe, it gave evidence of being periodically disguised under a coating of whitewash. The long, deep veranda was flanked by two corner rooms and, like them, floored with what the French call dalles, dull-red tiles that remained cool even at Cauca noonday. Its thick walls were shaded by a low, projecting tile roof. Over the entrance—a genuine Latin-American touch—had been painted in what Hays referred to as “box-car letters” the information:

The main hall, or parlor, took up the entire depth of the house from the front to the back veranda, the “corredor de la montaÑa” of the novel, and was fitted with heavy hand-made furniture, of which an immense dining table of rough-hewn construction formed the center. Flanking this chief chamber were the half-dozen private rooms of the family. That at the right-hand corner of the house, encroaching on the front corredor, had been the room of “EfraÍn,” the hero, and of the novelist himself. Back of it came the sewing-room, the writer’s picture of which was so photographic that we were almost startled not to find “MarÍa” and “Emma” and her mother busy with their sewing. At the back, across the main hall, stood the oratorio, a small chapel with the same simple image of the Virgin, perhaps, before which “MarÍa” had so often prayed in vain for a happy life. Behind the back veranda stood a wing, barely connected with the house proper, with a kitchen, hive-shaped clay bake-ovens, and the staring white eyes of negro servants of all sizes that seemed gargoyle-like ornaments of the smoke-streaked and blackened place. The entire dwelling was as densely inhabited as a New York tenement. Besides the dozen boys and girls of olive tint and several women of the DurÁn family, servants and negroes swarmed, and piccaninnies peered from every opening and corner.

The way led through the sewing-room across the now weedy garden to the “pila de MarÍa,” a crystal-clear pool in the bed of the arroyo that sprang from rock to rock down the swift, light-wooded gorge at the foot of which the “story house” is situated. “MarÍa” with her unbound tresses, was no longer here; instead, several dark-skinned boys snatched their garments as we approached and sought quick shelter. The “pila” was a rock-walled basin of sandy bottom, some four feet deep and as many times larger than the less romantic bathtub of civilization, constantly renewed by the stream that wanders languidly away across the valley of the Cauca. Because of the dip of the garden, the “pila” is out of sight from the house, but from his corner room “EfraÍn” could, even as the novelist has pictured, see the girls as they returned from their morning dip, pausing to pick a flower here and there along the way. DurÁn gave us leave to take a plunge. But though few things would have been more welcome after our dripping climb from El Cerrito, it would have seemed something verging on sacrilege, something like smoking a cigar with our feet on Juliet’s balcony, to have profaned with our dusty, prosaic, vagabond forms the pool about which seemed still to flit the spirit of adorable “MarÍa.”

The scene of “MarÍa,” most famous of South American novels, and once the residence of its author. It lies some distance back from the camino real against the foothills of the Central Cordillera