CHAPTER IX
IN CLOUDLAND
"Knowest thou the track that o'er the mountain goes, Where the mule threads its way through mist and snows, Where dwell in caves the dragon's ancient brood, Topples the crag, and o'er it roars the flood, Knowest thou it well? O come with me! There lies our road--oh, father, let us flee."
--Mignon.
Our plan, on leaving Villavicencio, was to reach Bogotá in three days. This we could easily have accomplished, had there not been a mistake in the telegram ordering horses to be in readiness for us on our arrival at Caqueza. The morning after arriving there, when we inquired for our mounts, we were surprised to learn that we were not expected until a day later, and that it would not be possible for us to get animals until the following morning.
"Travelers usually take three days to make the trip from Villavicencio to Caqueza," said Sr. N., who was to furnish the horses, "and I did not think you would attempt to make such an arduous journey in two days. However, everything will be ready early to-morrow morning. Besides a day's rest here, preparatory to crossing the paramo, will do you no harm. Most people coming up from the llanos consider it necessary."
Not desiring to remain longer in the insectarium, in which we had spent so wretched a night, we removed to an asistencia--boarding house--in another part of the town. Here we found clean and comfortable quarters and had reason to congratulate ourselves on our involuntary detention in this interesting town. We were both quite jaded from the long ride of the previous day, and really needed some repose more than we at first realized.
"But why did we not," it may be asked, "continue our journey through to Bogotá on our mules? Are they not the best and surest-footed animals in the steep mountain trails?"
The reply is best given in the words of our host at Villavicencio, Sr. N.: "It would never do for such distinguished travelers as you are--personas tan amables y tan honorables--to enter the national capital on such lowly animals as mules. Only common people do this. Custom here makes it de rigueur for people of the better classes to travel on horseback. More than this. Our people usually send word ahead to have a carriage meet them in the suburbs of Bogotá, as they do not care to enter the city even on horseback. Permit me to order a carriage to meet you at Santa Cruz, some distance this side of the capital."
We thanked him for his kind offer, but replied that, while we should be glad to defer to the custom of the country, by exchanging our mules for horses, we should forego the usual formality of entering the city in a carriage. We were simple, plain travelers and wished to remain such till the end of our journey.
Caqueza, fully twenty-five miles from Bogotá, is the capital of a district of the same name and, in location, is not unlike that of many of the higher mountain towns of Colombia or Switzerland. It is surrounded on all sides by beautiful mountain ridges and is about five thousand and six hundred feet above sea level. The temperature at seven o'clock p. m., the day before our departure, was 72° F., but at no time during the day was it much higher. In temperature, elevation and the beauty of the surrounding mountains it is much like Caracas, and when the long-projected railroad from Bogotá to the llanos shall have been completed, it will become a commercial centre of considerable importance. The climate is salubrious and as equable as that of Bermuda, and the town, counting about two thousand inhabitants, is just such a place as the traveler from the lowlands would delight to tarry in, if he were always master of his own time.
Early the second morning after our arrival in Caqueza, we had bidden adieu to this interesting town and its hospitable people and were on our way to the crest of the Andes. Just outside of the town we crossed the Rio Caqueza, over what looked like the Devil's Bridge in ruins. Fortunately, we had grown quite accustomed to such shaky structures, although, in the beginning, we approached them with the greatest misgivings. Near San Miguel, for instance, we had to cross a raging torrent, in a dark, deep ravine, over what was but the semblance of a bridge, that threatened every moment to collapse. It was in reality nothing more than three logs laid side by side and covered with loose twigs and earth. It had no railings or balustrades at the sides, and the abutments at the two ends had become so loosened by the heavy rains that it seemed every moment on the verge of tottering into the abyss below. Even our mules balked at the treacherous structure. However, after taking a good look at the tumultuous Rio Negro, that was coursing through the wild gorge beneath, and stretching their long ears toward the opposite bank, as if to determine thereby what chance there was of a successful passage, they finally ventured on the bridge, but it was with fear and trembling. And how light was their step and how they actually felt their way until they reached terra firma! From that moment the much-abused mule rose high in our estimation. He may be obstinate, but he instinctively avoids danger. And when he concludes to go forward, you may be sure that the danger is more apparent then real. Subsequent experience only confirmed us in the impression that we then formed of him.
From the time we crossed the Rio Caqueza, our path was ever upward towards cloudland. La cumbre--the summit--of the Andes, where we were to cross it, is about midway between Caqueza and Bogotá, and is nearly a mile higher than the makeshift of a bridge over the Rio Caqueza.
We had left Caqueza only a few miles behind us when we found a large number of market women--young and old--on the road. They were mostly Indians, all carrying heavy burdens from seventy-five to a hundred pounds, and, to our surprise, they were all en route to Bogotá. I do not think we met one going to Caqueza. They were loaded down with chickens, eggs, fruits and all kinds of garden produce for the Bogotá market.
But think of carrying such burdens more than twenty miles, and that, too, over the lofty Cordilleras! And think, too, of the slight pittance that was often to reward the expenditure of such energy! Nevertheless, all of these poor people seemed to be quite happy. They were constantly chatting and singing, as they trudged along the rough, stony path, and rarely stopped to rest. They were clad in a rough, dark-colored tunic, something like the peplum or chiton of the ancient Greeks. Most of them were barefooted, although we saw some who wore alpargatas, a kind of sandal made from the fibres of the aloe, which flourishes everywhere in the uplands of Colombia. As in Mexico, so also here, this plant has from time immemorial furnished the natives many articles of daily use.
What specially attracted our attention was the number of chickens and eggs these humble folks carried with them to the market. When we observed this and noted the number of cattle, horses and other domestic animals we had seen along our route, and the variety of fruits and vegetables that were under cultivation, we could not but recall what Herrera has to say about the absence of these and other things in pre-Colombian times.
"In the other hemisphere" (America), he writes, "there were no dogs, asses, sheep, goats, swine, cats, horses, mules, camels, nor elephants. They had no oranges, lemons, pomegranates, figs, quinces, melons, vines, nor olives, nor sugar, wheat nor rice. They knew not the use of iron, knew nothing of firearms, printing or learning. Their navigation extended not beyond their sight; their government and politics were barbarous. Their mountains and vast woods were not habitable. An Indian of good natural parts being asked what was the best they had got by the Spaniards, answered: The hen's eggs, as being laid new every day; the hen herself must be either boiled or roasted, and does not always prove tender, while the egg is good every way. Then he added: The horse and artificial light, because the first carries men with ease and bears his burdens, and by means of the latter (the Indians having learned to make wax and tallow candles and oil), they lived some part of the night! and this he thought to be the most valuable acquisition from the white people." [179]
At the time of the arrival of the Spaniards in South America, there were no domestic animals except the llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig and the alco, and these were found only within the limits of the empire of the Incas.
There was a time, however, long anterior to the advent of Europeans--during the Pleistocene epoch--when horses [180] and the larger members of the camel tribe roamed over the vast plains of South America, notably in the parts now known as Argentina and Southern Brazil. It was at this period, too, that flourished in the same regions those gigantic creatures, now extinct, known as the mylodon, the ground sloth, the glyptodont, the mastodon, the toxodont and peculiar sabre-toothed tigers, vast quantities of whose remains have been found and carefully stored away in our museums. Not far toward the west of us, at the Campo de los Gigantes [181] in the Savanna of Bogotá--not to speak of those found in the bluffs along the valley of the Zulia--abundant fossil remains have been discovered of horses, taxodonts, glyptodons, and megatheriums. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that the South American continent, which has enriched the Old World with so many valuable medicinal and economic plants, has not given to it a single useful animal.
After traveling some hours we reached Chipaque, an interesting mountain town fully half a mile higher above sea level than Caqueza. Our attention was attracted by an unusually large and beautiful stone church, which was then undergoing repairs. A great bell, imported from Europe, had just been put in one of the towers. It was the gift of Gen. Reyes, then president of the republic, and the good people were not only proud of their bell but were loud in their praises of the generous donor.
But where did the money come from for the erection of such a noble structure? The people all seemed very poor, and quite unable to keep such an edifice in repair after its completion, not to speak of supplying the means for building it. We frequently found ourselves asking this same question in other parts of South America, when contemplating the large and beautiful ecclesiastical structures that are often met with where one should least expect to find them. The builders of them evidently belonged to those ages of faith that have bequeathed to us those marvels of architecture--the great cathedrals of Europe.
Something that always afforded us great comfort, and that was rarely far away, after we left Villavicencio, was the telegraph line. For weeks we had been far away from it, and, in case of need, it could not have been reached. It was then that we really felt that we were indeed a long way off from home and friends. To communicate with them by letter would then have required the best part of a year, for there was no regular postal service to which we could have had recourse. With the friendly and willing telegraph ever near, it was quite different. By its means we could, in a few hours at most, convey a message to the most distant parts of the world.
When leaving any given place in the morning our whole party--peons with baggage, mules included--would be together. But it was not long until we were far in advance of the vaqueano and peons, whom we would not again see until evening or, as it sometimes happened, until the following morning. There was rarely any danger of losing our path, for the simple reason that there was, as a rule, only a single path from one place to another. We had, therefore, nothing to do but to keep to the trail. Occasionally, however, we would come to a point where it was necessary to choose between two diverging trails. Then it was that the telegraph line was an invaluable guide. We followed the trail which it paralleled, and in so doing we never went astray.
It was now several months since we had received a letter from home. We had not even seen a newspaper of any kind, and were, consequently, in utter ignorance of what was occurring in the great and busy world we had left behind us. But strange as it may seem, the traveler in Nature's wilds seems soon to grow indifferent to the world's doings. Even those who at home consider the morning and evening papers indispensable necessities, seem to forget that there are such things. Nay, they even experience a sense of relief that they have gotten beyond the reach of post and telegraph, and that, for once in their lives, they can call their time their own. Indeed, the absence of the daily paper, with its countless dispatches, far from being a privation, soon impressed us as a positive blessing.
We enjoyed a sense of freedom--the freedom of the child of the forest--we had never known before. We were beginning to see how easy it was to dispense with many things that are so often regarded as essentials to pleasure and comfort. If we had been unavoidably detained at some Indian encampment for a few months or found it necessary to tarry a year or so in one of the little bamboo cottages on the eastern slope of the Andes, we should not have regarded it as an unmixed evil. Even as I pen these lines, I have a vivid recollection of a score of tiny cots along the Rio Negro and the Rio Caqueza, near a purling brook or a musical cascade, shaded by palms and surrounded by smiling citrus trees, where it would be a delight to live and commune with Nature at her best.
I can fully sympathize with Waterton's longing for the wild and his love of tropical life. Every lover of nature, who has spent some time in the heart of the equatorial forests, is affected in the same way. The wanderlust and abenteuergeist--the love of travel and adventure--grows on one, it seems, in the wilds of South America more than elsewhere. Is it because the conquistadores and other early explorers have impregnated the atmosphere with their spirit, or because the environment of itself has the power of inoculating the visitor from the north with the microbe of a life-long wanderleben? Dicant Paduani.
Recording his impressions of travel in Andean highlands a writer in the early part of the last century says: "A sense of extreme loneliness and remoteness from the world seizes on his," the traveler's mind, "and is heightened by the dead silence that prevails; not a sound being heard but the scream of the condor, and the monotonous murmur of the distant waterfalls." [182]
This, undoubtedly, like many similar impressions, is a question of temperament. As for ourselves we never, for a single moment, experienced anything even approaching a feeling of loneliness or remoteness from the world. Probably, like Scipio Africanus, we are among those who never felt less alone than when alone. Far from feeling lonely while crossing the Cordilleras, we congratulated ourselves that we were far away from the beaten track of personally conducted tourists.
We could not help comparing the splendid panoramas around us with the noted show places of Switzerland. In the Andes it was the forest primeval, or the humble cot, or the picturesque village of the unspoiled and simple people of eastern Colombia, where a foreigner is rarely seen, but where he is always sure of a cordial welcome. There were here no tourist resorts, no palatial hotels or restaurants, no sumptuous chalets or villas--seats of opulence and luxury--but Nature alone in all her beauty and sublimity, as she came forth from the hands of her Creator. We were far away from the land of inclined railroads, leading to every peak, and from macadamized thoroughfares, along which reckless drivers and wild chauffeurs are constantly claiming the right of way, regardless of the safety or convenience of the ordinary wayfarer.
The uplands of the Andes should be the last places in the world where the thoughtful mind should experience a sense of loneliness, or be oppressed with tedium or listlessness. There, if anywhere, such a thing as ennui should be impossible. There is so much to excite the imagination, and so much to gratify every sense, so much to exhilarate the weary spirits and to elevate the mind, that one feels oneself in a kind of mountain elysium, where every moment spent is one of unalloyed delight.
Never shall we forget the morning preceding our first crossing of the Cordilleras. The weather was ideal--neither hot nor cold--and the scenery at every turn was magnificent beyond compare. While the vegetation was quite different in character from that of the lowlands, it was, nevertheless, equally attractive and fragrant. Our route at times lay through a narrow defile with wild beetling steeps on both sides of us. Ever and anon we passed by natural bowers, sculptured in the solid rock and entwined with odorous plants and flowers, that might well serve as trysting places of fays and elves, or be the favorite resorts of Titania and Oberon. Farther on our way we descried a dark and romantic chasm which we could fancy might, under a waning moon, be haunted "by a woman waiting for her demon lover." And higher up on a lofty peak, tinged with the roseate hues of quivering sunlight, C.'s fancy told us was the home of that race of Oreads
"That haunt the hill-tops nearest the sun."
"Small wonder," said C, "that the lively fancy of the Indian should have peopled these romantic spots with the creatures of his imagination, and that he should have woven legends about objects and phenomena that had specially attracted his notice. Even we, who see these things for the first time, find ourselves under the spell of the genius loci. Considering the beautiful arbors here formed by tree and vine and flower, the fantastic shapes assumed by rock and mountain spur, the mysterious natural phenomena that frequently obtrude themselves on his attention, and his proneness to refer to supernatural agency everything that his untutored mind is unable to explain, it would be a greater wonder if such legends did not exist, and if the numerous physical features, that have so often excited our interest, were left unpeopled by creatures of the Indian's fancy."
The Indian of Colombia may know nothing of our elves and fairies; sylphs, undines and salamanders; gnomes, kobolds and hobgoblins, but his fertile imagination has, nevertheless, found similar beings to people plain and forest and mountain peak. Now, as in the days of their pre-Colombian ancestors, the Indian loves to regard stones and rocks and trees of peculiar form or extraordinary size as the abode of certain spirits, or as being in some way identified with them. Like the Scandinavians of old, they see their deceased ancestors in the dense clouds that veil the neighboring hill tops. And like the peasant in the Hartz mountains, who has a superstitious dread of the spectre of the Brocken, they quail before a similar apparition frequently seen in the summits of the Cordilleras. They venerate the rainbow, and see in volcanoes the abode of beings of power and destruction.
To them, as to peoples of other parts of the world, the owl is a bird of ill omen. One of them, called from its cry ya acabo, ya acabo--it is finished, it is finished--is, when heard fluttering around the house, regarded as a harbinger of death. Another, the pavita, is considered as the spirit of some departed relative who, like the Irish banshee, would warn his kindred against death or some imminent calamity.
The Llaneros, fearless as they are in most respects, entertain the greatest dread of espantos, ghosts or apparitions. The bola de fuego, or the light of Aguirre, the Tyrant, is one of these ghosts. It is in reality nothing more than a kind of ignis fatuus, produced by the decomposition of organic matter, but to their minds, ignorant of the true nature of such gaseous exhalations, it is the soul of the infamous traitor, Lope de Aguirre, who, in punishment for his atrocities, has been condemned to wander through the broad forests and savannas that were the witnesses of his blood-stained crimes.
In their duendes, if they have not the analogues of pucks and brownies, they certainly possess a shrewd and knavish sprite, somewhat like the English Robin Good-Fellow. Among the Llaneros he is noted for the mischievous pranks he plays in the corrals, when occupied by horses and cattle, and, if one is to credit the stories of those who live on the plains, these particular duendes give the owners of live stock a world of trouble.
The Serranos--mountaineers--have even more wonderful stories to tell than the inhabitants of the llanos. The most remarkable of them are connected with certain caves, which are so numerous in the Eastern Andes, and certain lakes in which, the Serrano assures one, are occasionally observed phenomena of an extraordinary character.
They are firmly convinced, for instance, of a certain witch or malignant sorceress, called Mancarita, who carries away lonely travelers, or those who may have lost their way in the mountains. And they rehearse the tale of an Indian who concealed a bag of silver under a certain water fall near a well-known lake. This is guarded by a serpent or a dragon, but if one will, on St. John's day, travel in a state of complete nudity, the paramo of Novagote from one end to the other, he will be able to get possession of the hidden treasure. In all these legends, and there are many of them, the Indian has as much faith as have the children of the North in the fairy stories they hear in the nursery.
Then there is that "strange, harrowing, long-drawn cry, human in its tones," alleged sometimes to be audible in the depths of the tropical forests, for which no satisfactory explanation has as yet been given. The Indians say it is "The Cry of a Lost Soul." The poet Whittier refers to it in the following verses:--
"In that black forest where, when day is done,
A cry as of the pained heart of the wood, The long, despairing moan of solitude And darkness and the absence of all good, Startles the traveller with a sound so drear, So full of hopeless agony and fear, His heart stands still, and listens with his ear. The guide, as if he heard a death-bell toll, Crosses himself, and whispers, 'A Lost Soul.'"
Some of their stories, however, seem to have some foundation in fact. Almost every paramero--inhabitant of the paramo--has a story to tell about seeing lightning or hearing thunder issue from certain lakes or wells as he was passing by on a clear night when there was not the slightest indication of rain or storm. At such times the waters of the lake may become violently agitated without any apparent cause. One's vaqueano, on being asked the reason of such a phenomenon, simply replies, "Está brava la laguna," or "Truena la laguna--the lake is disturbed, or thunders."
The Indian's answer explains nothing, but the phenomenon seems to lend itself to an explanation which is as simple as it is natural. If we suppose these lakes, as we well may, to be in the craters of extinct volcanoes, in the bottoms of which, owing to slight earth tremors, rents are made in the rocks that permit the escape of imprisoned gases, the mystery is at least partially solved. The escape of gas, in large quantity under great pressure, would account for the violent agitation of the water. If these gases should become ignited by the
## action of the electricity with which, as we have learned, the summits
of the mountains are often very highly charged, we should have in the flash of the ignited gas what the Indian takes to be lightning, and in the resulting explosion what he thinks is thunder.
I suggest this view merely as a tentative one, and hope that the phenomena in question, like those referred to in