THE FAT AXIIOQUI-VX. 225 



Samana, relinquished all thoughts of leaving the country. 

 Humboldt was acquainted with an inhabitant of this' 

 province so immensely bulky, that he had not met with 

 more than two mulattoes capable of carying him ; and it 

 would have been impossible for him to have returned 

 home, if these two carriers had died while he was on the 

 banks of the Magdalena, at Monpox, or at Honda. The 

 number of young men who undertook the employment 

 of beasts of burden at Choco, Ibague, and Medellin, was 

 so considerable, that the travellers sometimes met a file 

 of fifty or sixty. A few years later, when a project was 

 formed to make the passage from Naires to Antioquia 

 passable for mules, the porters presented formal remon- 

 strances against mending the road, and the government 

 yielded to their clamours. The person carried in a chair 

 by a porter was compelled to remain several hours mo- 

 tionless, and leaning backwards. The least motion was 

 suf&cient to throw him down, and his fall was so much 

 the more dangerous, as the porter, confident in his 

 own skill, generally chose the most rapid declivities, or 

 crossed a torrent on a narrow and slippery trunk of a 

 tree. These accidents were, however, rare; and those 

 which happened were attributed to the imprudence of 

 travellers, who, frightened at a false step of the porters, 

 leaped down from their chairs. 



At Ibague, before the porters started on their journey 

 across Quindiu, they plucked on the neighbouring moun- 

 tains several hundred leaves of the vijao, a plant of the 

 family of bananas. These leaves were twenty inches 

 long, and fourteen inches broad. Their lower surface was 

 covered with a farinaceous substance which fell off in 

 scales. This peculiar varnish enabled them to resist the 



10* 



