186 



SOUTH AMERICA— THE ANDES REGIONS. 



founded on the Humadea, near the TJpia confluence. In favourable seasons 

 steamers from the Meta ascend to this point, within IGO miles of Bogota; but they 

 usually get no farther than the island of Orocue, 186 miles below Cabuyaro. 



Mesa — Tocaima — Girardot — -Ibague. 



On the highway from Bogota to the upper Magdalena and Ecuador the first 

 station is the town of Mesa, the " Table," so named from a conglomerate terrace 

 4,109 feet high which commands the deep gorge of the Rio Bogota below the 

 falls. At the foot of the terrace the village of Anapoima occupies the arid bed 

 of an old lake near some sulphur-springs east of the Rio Apulo. This torrent 

 descends southwards from the heights of Anolaiina, a town which, before the 

 Spanish Conquest, lay within the territory of the Panches Indians. The railway, 

 which is to ascend from Girardot up the escarpments of the plateau, stops within 

 three miles of the Apulo confluence ; the next section, by which it is to surmount 



Fig. 70. — GiEAEDOT Bend. 

 Scale 1 : 48,000. 



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75° 



West or ureenwich 



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the Mesa terrace, will be constructed on the ratchet-wheel principle, like that of 

 the Righi. 



Tocaima, a station on the same railway below Jnntas, was till recently much 

 frequented, thanks to its hot sulphur springs ; but visitors have greatly fallen off 

 since the appearance of yellow fever in the district. Agua de Dios, the most 

 noted spring in the neighbourhood of Tocaima, is reserved for the leprous, for 

 whom the State of Cundinaraarca has founded an agricultural settlement and a 

 lazaret supported b\" a special tax on legacies. In 1890 the village of Agua de 

 Dios was inhabited by 520 patients, each owning a plot 2^ acres in extent, which 

 he either cultivated himself or rented to tenants. The development of the disease, 

 which is not contagious in the Tocaima climate, is said to be nearly always 

 arrested in this district. The high rate of mortality amongst those interned in 

 Agua de Dios is due, not to the leprosy itself, but to their generally feeble con- 



