THROUGH A TROPICAL QUARANTINE
One morning when the official sanitary junta--the port doctor, the town
druggist, and three shopkeepers, all of whom except the first, were
contentedly selling us supplies--were making their inspection within
easy hailing distance the returning Peruvian diplomat dealt himself a
hand in the game. In a few pointed remarks he demanded that they send a
doctor on board to make an examination. The port captain returned an
indignant oration in which, after paying tribute to the ancestral deeds
of the diplomat's forebears, he hurled shame at the diplomat for his
selfish lack of patriotism in so distrusting the conclusions and acts of
his countrymen, obviously he had been so enervated by effete foreign
associations that--that--well, it sounded like good oratory anyway.
There was no doubt in their minds that we were concealing yellow fever.
Slowly the five days of quarantine passed with this solemn official
mockery. The Chinamen ceased from troubling and yielded the daily
shilling, the chicken coop was returned to the authority of the
steward--although once, for variety, a Chinaman shared it with a couple
of turkeys for some hours--and then the final day arrived.
Leisurely the official boat rowed out. The passengers for Ecuador, it
announced, were to be transferred to the leprous-looking brigantine
where they would remain in quarantine until they could be transfered to
a northbound steamer. Incidentally they were privileged to pay twelve
sols a day, each, for board. Then the official boat was rowed back; and
that was all.
Indignantly the passengers met and decided to pay no more daily
quarantine charges--it seemed as if the company needed a little
stimulating, perhaps; the purser chuckled sympathetically and then a
self-appointed committee looked over the chicken coop with a speculative
eye. It was heartening, for at least the monotony would be broken. That
night an unofficial boat stole out of the darkness alongside; confirmed
the rumor that the port captain was holding us for a week longer to suit
his convenience; then the messenger disappeared in the night. This was
interesting as pure news matter and that was all.
Came the morning of the sixth day without change. And then the
diplomat's cables to Lima had effect. A doctor had been appointed on a
cabled order from Lima to make a real examination; he came out
accompanied by a sanitary junta of very sour officials, climbed on
board, and began his work. They pulled away and returned in the
afternoon.
The young ship's surgeon and the new doctor shouted the report across
the water. Barring the three cases of malarial fever between decks we
had a clean bill of health. The official boat drew a trifle nearer; in
the stern sheets the port doctor scanned a formidable looking medical
volume that lay open on his knees and the druggist bent his head over
the same pages. Solemnly they accepted little test tubes that the ship's
surgeon passed across to them and examined them gravely. They turned a
few pages of the book and asked a question. The new doctor answered it
promptly. Again they shuffled the pages and came back with another;
another answer, and then more hasty poring.
[Illustration: WHAT THE DIPLOMAT SAID WAS DIRECT AND VOLUBLE.]
At length came their decision: it was true that the excellent doctors
had described no such symptoms as were standardized for either yellow
fever or the _peste bubonica_, but there was nothing to prevent those
doctors from stating and confirming that which was not true; therefore
be it resolved that we had yellow fever, but were concealing it! They
were the incorruptible guardians of a nation's health.
What the diplomat said was direct and voluble and carried perfectly
across the calm evening sea: Heaven was a sad witness of his unpatriotic
perfidy for he threatened them with a touch of patriotism direct from
Lima upon the hour of his arrival--however distant or uncertain that
might be. A little conference and they voted on our admission, two and
two--could anything be fairer! Their honest hearts thanked Heaven for
the thought of this simple and adroit deadlock that preserved their
official activities and at the same time kept us in a profitable
quarantine. Tersely it was pointed out by the diplomat that by virtue of
the cabled commission the new doctor was a member of the board--vote
again!
That evening we wandered through the dust and sand of Payta and rode
grandly, and briefly, to the out-skirts of the town in the single
mule-and-rope tram that skirted the beach. It is well in the troubled
times of quarantine on the West Coast always to travel with an
accredited diplomat on board.
[Illustration: A Wide, Dusty Canal Which in the Intervals Between
Showers Serves as a Market]
All next day the whirr and clatter of the steam-winches and the bang of
cargo kept up and again we visited the dusty port, wading through the
lines of Panama hat sellers that lined up to greet the landing of our
small boat. Of hotel runners there were none, this being due to the fact
that there was but one hotel to which the stray custom is bound to
drift. At the hotel we saw a few palms and tropical blooms in tubs and
in a carefully irrigated patio, for Payta is--like all that West
Coast--rainless. As a cold matter of meteorological fact it _does_ rain
sometimes; I accidentally started an acrimonious discussion by a merely
polite remark on the weather as to whether it had been nine, eleven, or
fourteen years since the last rain. In apparent proof of this there is a
wide, dusty canal bulkheaded with piling on either side which in these
intervals between showers serves as a native market. Little red flags
flutter from the _chicherias_ where the opaque, yellow, Indian corn beer
is sold, ranging in flavor and potency from warm buttermilk to the
wicked "stone-fence" of New Jersey.
Back of the town a trail wades through the sand to the crest of the long
bluffs; the feet of countless pack trains have worn a driveway through
the ridge until, stepping through, there are suddenly spread before the
view the endless stretches of a dried and dusty desert that has been an
ocean's prehistoric bed. The hot airs quiver and boil from the twisting
valleys or ridges of blistering sand and rock and through the pulsing
heat the occasional pack train in the distance turns to a wavering,
shimmering thread. To the imagination a desert rises as a dull, gray
expanse endless in its colorless monotony; here there was a riot of
color, every hue, raw and gorgeous--except green--from the soft purples
and cool sapphire of the shadows to the blazing yellows and reds and
white of the open spaces. And in the garish stretch of a dead ocean
there slowly rises like a parching thirst a longing for a sweep of
tender green.
[Illustration: CLOSE RESEMBLANCE TO AN ARMY OF DRUNKEN BUGS.]
The little governmental touch from Lima had cleared the path of
quarantine and we began a dot-and-carry-one course down the coast from
Payta; every day our winches whirred and clattered off some dusty,
sand-blown port. Before our anchor had touched bottom in the open
road-stead a fleet of _lanchas_, heavy, double-ended, open lighters of
from ten to twenty-five tons capacity were crawling over the water; the
dozen long oars that were their means of locomotion--and that were
manipulated on an independent competitive basis--spraddled on each side
gave the fleet a close resemblance to an army of drunken bugs struggling
forward on uncertain legs. There was always a race to the _Mapocho's_
side and the first to get there caught the heaving line.
Once a lancha defeated in a close finish came on and cut the heaving
line so that its rival was left with the useless section while it
hurriedly hauled in on the hawser. Instantly a fine naval engagement was
in progress as the lanchas locked like a couple of old Carthaginian
galleys. By the aid of force peace was established and the rightful and
original award of the hawser sustained; had it not been, as the first
officer explained, they would need a new heaving line at every port.
The bluffs of the coast gave way to hills and these in turn to higher
ones; the Andes were closing in on the Pacific. At times the great
mountain chain towered from the very water's edge in a succession of
steep cliffs, each receding tier softening in the distance and rising
through the slowly shifting strata of clouds until only the gashes of
white snow picked out the towering peaks. Here and there steep, rocky
islets fringed the coast line and we stood far out to save the chances,
and yet there was no appreciable change in the proportions of the
tremendous mountain range. The sense of proportion and distance was lost
in the comparison of these vast reaches. A rocky islet, a steep
sugar-loaf affair, rose from the ocean perhaps five feet--not much as an
island or a mountain peak. Through the binoculars a tiny unknown speck
at the base developed into a full-rigged bark with tapering masts above
which the sugar-loaf rock rose for thousands of feet in the clear air,
and on it was a wretched colony of guano workers.
Then the coast opened out into level reaches again with occasional lines
of irrigation ditches showing a thread of green. Occasionally--twice I
think--there was actually a landlocked harbor. It was one of these,
Chimbote, that James G. Blaine proposed to use or secure as a naval base
and coaling station. It is perfectly sheltered with a narrow,
bottle-neck entrance guarded by a rocky island in the middle which is
covered with a wriggling film of seals that are perfectly indifferent to
the close passage of ships or men.
[Illustration: Every Day our Winches Whirred and Clattered off some
Dusty, Sand-blown Port]
In this harbor rode the queerest of sea-going craft. In Mexico I had
once seen a Chinaman fit himself up a home from about eight feet of one
end of a hopelessly wrecked dugout, take in a partner, and then the two
of them paddle off up the river in the fishing business, sleeping and
eating aboard the flat-iron shaped thing. Here in this case was a bow
and stern bolted together without a midship section. And both the bow
and stern were those of a fairly full size tramp freighter. The bow was
the ram bow of a war ship and back of it there was barely room to
squeeze in a capstan and a tiny hatch; the foremast shared the bridge, a
funnel and whistle jammed themselves up against the bridge, while the
short distance to the stern rail gave room for a squat cabin out of
which rose the mainmast. A score of Chimbote lanchas were as
big--bigger--and where this telescoped liner would find room for cargo
or coal after providing for engines and a galley is a mystery. Yet it
does carry cargo and ambles along from port to port a tragic marvel of
compression.
The day before, off Huanchazo, where a storm far out had piled up a
heavy, oily groundswell, that even put the racks on the tables, a
wealthy old Peruvian lady had been hoisted abroad in a cask clinging to
her son. She was a garrulous old soul, powdered like a marshmallow, with
three chins and a little moustache, and her son was the very apple of
her eye. Therefore, son was what one might expect. His adolescent and
mature ambition was to be the amorous cut-up of the coast and so far he
had succeeded generously in making a smug, self-satisfied nuisance of
himself. He counted doting mother's allowance publicly, drank warm
champagne noisily when thrifty mother was not around, and dressed in the
Huanchazo idea of French fashions for men. In the morning he did not
appear. Mother explained fondly--but not the truth. She did not know it.
Passengers are warned not to go between decks after dark, the steerage
hutches and the crew have the freedom of that deck. Son prowled down on
some shifty little romantic project of his own. In the darkness he
suddenly felt two sharp little pricks in the skin of his back and one
sharp little prod in front; they felt very, very much like the points of
knives. Up went son's hands promptly and in the blackness he felt heavy
hands pulling out his maternal allowance--the beautiful money with which
he was to flaunt his fascinations in Lima. Hence no Limanean gay
life--mother it seemed was a thrifty Spartan in money matters--and son
was in his berth, weeping. A steward told us the latter, confidentially
of course.
Samancho, Chimbote, Salivari, Suppe, and then at last, in the daybreak
of the morning after the last named and in the midst of a soft, clouded
day, Callao. There was the usual customs search of the baggage--a
maddening process to an Englishman, mildly irritating to a Frenchman,
and accepted meekly and placidly by Americans as a matter of course from
a thorough training in our own home ports. I have never passed through
any country that could give as close an imitation of our own thorough
methods of dock robbery and tariff brigandage as Peru. A quarter of an
hour by train through a rich soil that can be worked only by irrigation
and Lima, the first halt on the continent, has been attained.
For two weeks there was nothing to do but to idle in Lima. A delightful
city full of the old contrasts of highly civilized, sybaritic pleasures
alongside of the squalid, aimless poverty of the survivors of a
devastated empire. There is the Bois where fashionable equipages with
cockaded, copper-colored lackeys--possibly in bare or sandaled feet--on
the box, silver-mounted harness and heavy, Chilean bred coach horses
jingle past in procession on Sunday afternoons while some gallant
Peruano lopes alongside with huge silver stirrups and a saddle almost
solid with bullion; the sodden side streets where the buzzard and the
scavenger pig are man's best friend; the cathedral where lies the
dessicated body of Pizarro in a marble casket like an aquarium, the one
open side covered with glass through which may be seen the remains of
that treacherous old buccaneer, with his head re-fastened by a silver
wire to guard against a repetition of the theft; the cathedral itself
with its murky interior smoked by the votive candles of millions of
conscript converts; its queer carvings where the ecclesiastical memories
of architecture have been freely rendered by the Indian stone-cutters;
the clubs, the cafés--and the ambrosial coffee--chapels with the bullion
covered walls, the wretched tobacco at high tariff--extorted prices--all
these and then the Hotel Maury.
[Illustration: Lima, a Delightful City of Contrasts]
Peace be to Savarin, to Delmonico, and to Chamberlain. They did well in
their way. But they never served a squid, or cuttlefish, floating like a
small hot-water bottle, tender and delicious in an inky sauce of their
own founding; nor a starfish sprawled in a five-pointed dream of savory,
lobster-like succulence; nor "_señoritas_"--a delicate species of
scallop--each with its tiny scarlet tongue draped across the pearl-white
bivalve bosom and that, steamed or not, melted in one supreme ecstatic
flavor; nor five inch _langostin_ fresh from the cold waters of the
Andean hills, nor compounded or invented a strawberry gin cocktail of
surpassing allurement--cooled by a piece of ice kept in a flannel-lined
drawer and returned thereto after stirring. None of these things had
they and so by just that much they fell short.
In the Hotel Maury there was a written bill of fare for those who could
merely read. But for the expert, the fastidious--or the
adventurous--there was a redoubt in the main room whose flanking
bastions and crest were a solid array of great joints and little joints,
steaks, chops, unnamed fish in platoons and señoritas in brigades,
fruits, vegetables and all of the foregoing--and more--laid out in tiers
and terraces whose foundations were of cool, inviting seaweeds and
mosses, and still further seductively embellished with a variety of
paper ribbons and crests and cockades until one almost lost sight of the
pagodas of gaudy, many-storied cakes and confections that rose like
watch towers at judicious intervals along the battlements. It was a
salon.
To the shuffling, woolen-capped, sandaled, or bare-footed Indian at
one's heels the directions were given, you chose what you would as they
thus reposed in the altogether and then repaired to await in a
sawdust-floored cavern at one side and in a state of serene and
expectant bliss the certain pleasures of the very immediate future. You
waited, it is true, at a warped table with a stained cloth on which a
bent cruet supplied the only note of elegance. And, lest any of the
precious viands be lost in transit or breakage, you knew that you would
be served with a substantial, hard-shell crockery only slightly more
vulnerable than reinforced concrete. Presently your Indian reappeared in
a shuffling trot scattering sawdust from the prow of each sandal like a
harbor pile-driver under full speed--the hard-shell crockery is white
hot, but he has the hands of a salamander--and then with a flourish he
drops an assorted collection of tableware somewhere within reach--you
are served. And what a repast! Peace be to Savarin, Delmonico
and--enough. Comparisons are invidious and the Maury can stand alone in
the continent of his choosing.
Very shortly the sailing day came for, since it was not possible to land
in Mollendo owing to that port being afflicted with a quarantine, it had
been necessary to catch a steamer that would put us through the surf at
Quilca, a hole in a cliff that has its only function in these times of
quarantine. A farewell inspection of the redoubt and bastions, a
recharging of the bottle of salicylic acid and alcohol, which while it
had in no way abated the fleas of the Hotel Maury, yet had mitigated
their consequences, and Lima and Callao drifted into the background with
the closing day. From Quilca in some way we would connect by muleback
and packtrain across the desert to the desert station of La Joya with
the railroad to Arequipa and thence to Lake Titicaca and across to La
Paz.