The grey turned white, became discoloured and bits of green were thrown up. We were descending now. The green was almost black in the damp cloud; then it was olive, the unfenced margin of road beside the gorge which a skid would land us into. No one would see us drop; there would be no sound but a gulp as we were swallowed at the pit of that mile-deep gullet.
The bus door was open - broken on its hinge. The bus swerved, and at one bend there was a thump. An Indian on one of the front seats had been holding a bundle on his lap; the bundle had bounced out of his hands, rolled across the floor and out of the open door.
The Indian stood up.
'Please, sir,' he said. 'I have five pesos in that.'
About fifteen cents. The driver slowed down.
'And some of my things,' said the Indian.
The driver stopped in the middle of the road. He could hardly have pulled off to the side - five feet to the right there was only emptiness. The Indian got out and, poncho flapping, he ran down the road for his bundle.
'Five pesos,' said the driver. 'That is valuable, eh?' He pulled at his moustache and the passengers roared with laughter. The driver was encouraged. 'What does it matter if we have to travel in the darkness? That fellow needs his bundle and his five pesos, eh?'
The passengers were still burbling when the Indian returned. He put the bundle on his seat and thumped it and sat on it. We continued through segments of cloud which filtered the sun and made it pale yellow and dripped this yellow colour onto the trees and the grass. Ahead, in another valley, lay a yellow town flanked by yellow fields and yellow hills. This was Armenia.
Armenia, Antioquia, and not far away the town of Circasia. The names were Asiatic and baffling, but I was too tired to wonder at them. The bus rumbled through town, and though it was dark I saw a large hotel in the middle of a block. I asked the driver to stop, then walked back to that hotel and checked in. I thought that working on my diary until midnight would put me to sleep, but the altitude and the cold made me wakeful. I decided to go for a walk and see a bit of Armenia.
If the town had been dark or in any way threatening, I would not have gone out alone. But it was well-lighted and as it was a Friday night - Saturday was market-day - it was full of country folk who had come into town to sell their vegetables. There were crowds of people standing in front of the windows of electrical shops, watching television. They were mainly farmers, Indians and peasants from villages which had no lights, let alone televisions. I watched with one group. The programme was a documentary about Australian aborigines. Many of the aborigines were naked, but an equal number wore slouch hats and cast-off clothes that were not very different from those worn by these fascinated watchers in Armenia.
'. . . these paleolithic people,' said the narrator; and the aborigines were shown building lean-tos, and overturning logs and gathering witchetty-grubs, and impaling lizards and roasting them over fires. The aborigines, seen from this Colombian valley, did not seem so badly off. It was sunny there in the Australian outback and, stalking a kangaroo, the aborigines looked alert and full of hunter's cunning. And here were the aborigine children. The narrator made some condescending remarks about their health and their history, and in Bogotá this probably did seem like the dawn of the world and a scratching settlement of cavemen. But the people in Armenia marvelled only at the nakedness, the lank penis, the fallen breasts. They laughed in embarrassment. The know-it-all voice of the narrator droned on, calling attention to the meal of maggots, the dwellings of twigs, the crude digging tools.
'Look, look,' said the watchers here in front of the electrical shop. 'Where is this place? Is it Africa?'
'Far,' said one man. 'Very far away.'
Five minutes later, walking back to the hotel, I paused on the pavement to light my pipe. I heard coughing; it came from a dark doorway, and it was the coughing of a child. An adult's cough is frequently an annoyance, a child's is always helpless and pathetic. I peered into the doorway and said, 'Are you all right?'
Three children jumped to their feet. The tallest was black and wore a man's suit-jacket which came to his knees; the others, in torn shirts and shorts, were sleepy-eyed Spanish-looking boys. They said hello. I asked them their ages. The black boy was ten, the others were both nine; it was one of the nine-year-olds - a thin, sickly boy - who had been coughing.
'I was just doing this arithmetic,' said the other nine-year-old. He showed me a scrap of paper with a column of figures written on it; they were neatly-done in pencil and covered the paper. 'Look, I made a million.'
'Good for you,' I said. 'Your teacher will like that.'
They laughed. The black boy said, 'We don't have a teacher.'
'No school?'
'We used to go.'
'Where do you come from?'
The black boy's village was unintelligible to me. He said his parents were there, but they had sent him away because there were too many children at home. How many? I asked. More than ten, he said. The house was small, there was no food.
The second boy said, 'My mother and father are in Cali. That is where my house is. I have a lot of brothers and sisters. But there was a problem. My father was always hitting me and beating me. I was afraid, so one day I came here to Armenia.'
I said, 'Is this your brother?'
The third boy giggled and began again to cough.
'That is my friend.'
'Look,' I said, 'if I give you some money, will you share it?'
'Yes,' said the second boy. He put his arm around the black boy. 'This is my best friend.'
'What about him?' I indicated the third boy.
He was the smallest and the most ragged, he wore no shoes, his arms were thin and dirty; he raised them as he coughed.
The black boy said, 'He is with us, too. He wants to stay with us. He is afraid to be alone.' The black boy was a bit doubtful. I could tell from his tone that this frail boy was considered a burden.
I gave them some money and told them to share it, then I asked (but I knew what the answer would be), 'What are you doing out so late?'
The second boy said, 'We were trying to sleep.'
'Where do you sleep?'
'Here.' They .pointed to the doorway, where a rectangle of cardboard, a small flattened box, lay like a doormat next to the sidewalk. It was a damp chilly night and this side street in Armenia - all the shop-windows shuttered - was as dark and windswept as a mountain pass.
'Where do you eat?'
'People give us food.'
I said, 'You should go home.'
'That is worse,' said the second boy.
'We can't go home,' said the black boy. 'It is too far and too difficult. We can live here.'
'It is not a good idea to live here, is it?'
'We have to.'
It was past midnight, but their replies were prompt; their intelligence was obvious and, for moments, it was possible to forget that they were small children. They were street-wise and as alert as adults; but there was nothing in this doorway they inhabited but that piece of cardboard. I had seen children "begging in India, the mechanical request for a rupee, the rehearsed story; they were as poor and as lost. But the Indian beggar is unapproachable; he is fearful and cringing, and there is the language barrier. My Spanish was adequate for me to inquire about the lives of these little boys and every reply broke my heart. Though they spoke about themselves with an air of independence, they could not know how they looked, so sad and waif-like. What hope could they possibly have, living outside on this street? Of course, they would die; and anyone who used their small corpses to illustrate his outrage would be accused of having Bolshevik sympathies. This was a democracy, was it not? The election was last week; and there was no shortage of Colombians in Bogotá to tell me what a rich and pleasant country this was if you were careful and steered clear of muggers and gamins. What utter crap that was, and how monstrous that children should be killed this way.