Latin America: The Bridge

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. . . . It had been woven of osier by the Incas more than a century ago. . . . St. Louis of France protected it. . . . It was unthinkable that it should break.

To the people of the tiny Colombian village of Pauna, snuggling in the Andean foothills a day's motor drive from Bogotá, the new bridge over the deep, swift Río Minero had seemed as permanent and reassuring as Thornton Wilder's bridge of San Luis Rey....

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