These speculations and the singular inquiry into which they had drawn his companion excited only a mild interest in David. The latter, strangely enough, enchanted with the picturesque novelty of the cloud-city in which he found himself, felt less of the antiquarian's zeal than when Bogota was a remote geographical possibility. Perhaps it was the stimulus of mountain air, a bracing climate, that got him out of his habitual bookishness. Here, at any rate, there was neither the warmth nor the color of the tropics to entice him to the indolent dreaming that one of his temperament might easily yield to in the lowlands of Colombia. The peculiar lustre of the grey-green Bogota tableland, the cool crystalline atmosphere, invited him to continual physical exercise. For days at a time he went on long horseback rides. Then, tiring of this, and feeling something of the restraint experienced by the stranger who exerts himself abnormally in the rarefied air of the higher Andes, he fell into the easy habits of the pleasure-loving Bogotano. Muffled warmly in a ruana, he strolled comfortably about the streets of the city, amused by the chaffering of peons in the market place, enchanted by the quaint and varied architecture of the houses and public buildings, the grotesque paintings and bas-reliefs in the churches; or else he would sit by the hour in the open window of some cafe on the Cathedral Esplanade, watching the gay throng of idlers and politicians for whom this is a favorite rendezvous. The dust and cobwebs of the Museo did not attract this former dabbler in antiquities, who abandoned himself eagerly to the fleeting impressions gathered from an altogether pleasing environment. And Raoul, naturally secretive, gave him the vaguest outline only of the course and the result of his studies.