In the afternoon the rain again fell in unrelenting torrents, and we camped beneath a wall of rock hundreds of feet high, which the Indians called the Peña Seca, or dry stone. Great vines with bunches of scarlet flowers drooped a hundred feet below the top, like gigantic serpents, but not a drop of all the downpour reached us. The base of the cliff was blackened from the numerous camp-fires kindled by Indians on their way to Tolima in quest of salt. By way of divertisement our Indians gathered incense, which is a kind of gum that collects on certain trees, and which they intended to take home with them for use in the _santa iglesia_. I watched the social bees that live in company with termites building tubular entrances that may extend out eighteen inches or more like a coiled pipe-stem to their apartment in the nest; apparently the two different inmates of the common domicile never clash. The third night we reached the hut of an old Indian who called himself Domingo, and who was as surly a creature as ever walked the earth. As he refused us the hospitality of his hut, we camped outside his gate. We now occasionally passed through a cleared spot where grain and vegetables grew; cattle grazed on the long, tender grass, and dark-brown, wild-eyed children peered at us from under the fringed, low grass roofs of shambling Indian huts. On the top of every knoll was a row of tall wooden crosses, some newly erected, others decaying and ready to topple over; it is the custom of the natives to erect a new one each year on Good Friday, permitting the old ones to remain standing. We had reached the frontier of Huila. On Easter Sunday we had our first glimpse of San Agustin, which was decidedly disappointing. All that we could see as we descended the last steep slope was a cluster of some fifty-odd mud huts protruding from the centre of a wide, barren plain; there is no forest within a mile in any direction, and very little cultivation is carried on in the immediate vicinity. The town is very old; the inhabitants are mainly of Spanish descent, but scattered throughout the surrounding country can be found small clearings, or _fincas_, cultivated by full-blooded Indians. These latter are of a reticent though friendly disposition, emerging from the seclusion of their forest-bound homes only on market-days to dispose of the products of the soil and of their flocks.