DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE
On the morning of February eighth, “Meech” called me at five. I had
already been some time awake, such was the excitement of so unusual an
event as going on a journey. The morning mists had only begun to clothe
the flanks of Pichincha when I broke the clinch of “Don Panchito’s” last
_abrazo_ and creaked away down the cobbles of Calle Flores and across
the Plaza Santo Domingo in the hob-nailed mining-boots suited to the
long, stony trail and the rainy season ahead. The remnant of my letter
of credit I had turned into gold sovereigns and sewed them in the band
of my trousers; on my back were my worldly—or at least my South
American—possessions, including the awkward bulk of the developing-tank
packed with films and chemicals. That day had passed when I dreamed of
driving an Indian carrier before me, and experience had taught me not to
risk the assistance of the mails. Thus the world roamer must leave
behind in turn each dwelling-place, after growing somewhat attached to
it, for all its faults, to go its way alone again as in the past,
glad—or merely sorry—when once in a while the cable brings him a whisper
of it, as from some former half-forgotten existence.
It was a familiar route for the first few miles. Now and again I
overtook Indians carrying enormous loads of _tinajas_, dull-red earthen
jars and pots of all sizes enclosed in a kind of fish-net, often topped
by a great roll of _esteras_, mats made of lake-reeds which serve the
carriers as beds. Men and women alike raised their hats to me and
mumbled some obsequious greeting. They were bound for Latacunga market,
several days distant from their villages; yet even on so long a journey,
rare was the woman from whose load did not peer the head of a baby.
Lower down, inhabited haycocks and huts of swamp-grass centered in
beautiful potato fields, red or purple with blossoms. A cherry-tree,
here called by the Quichua term _capulí_, producing a fruit larger but
not unlike our “choke-cherry,” alternated with what looked like the
Canadian thistle.
Three hours later, near the eucalyptus grove of the Flores estate that
marks Quito’s southern sky-line, I topped the ridge that marked my
hitherto furthest south. The long pile of Pichincha, its three peaks now
standing sharply forth, still lay close beside me, the rolling green
lower ridges subsiding into the mountain lap where Quito, like a tiny
ant’s city, still lay visible, the Panecillo that bulks so large from
the central plaza sunk to an insignificant mole-hill. Beyond, far across
it, hovered the hazy-blue ranges of the north; Cayambe resolutely
astride the equator, pointed Cotacache, streaked near the top with
new-fallen snow, piercing the transparent highland sky. For a long time
thereafter, as often as I topped a land-billow, I kept getting little
broken glimpses of the town from the ever-rising world, until at last,
toward noon, as a mighty mountain wave tossed me high on its crest, the
view of the city of the equator flashed forth a moment more; then Quito
and all its surroundings sank away into the irretrievable past.
Before me lay a new world. With the leisurely dignity of its builder,
García Moreno, the highway descended into a great distance-blue _hoya_,
one of those saucer-shaped valleys that abound all down Ecuador’s avenue
of volcanoes. Occasionally a horseman in shaggy goatskin trousers stared
curiously at me; now and then there passed a file of donkeys under
sheet-iron roofs,—a cargo of corrugated iron, the importer of which
still prefers this primitive transportation to the more hasty railroad
with its startling freight charges. Dandelions and white clover flecked
the evergreen fields; frogs sang their bass chorus in many a brook and
_pántano_. Here the way followed more or less the route of the great
military highway of the Incas. There were two of these; one of the
llanos, or lowlands of the coast, and this more famous one along the
crest of the cordillera, built during several reigns and finished under
Huayna Ccápac.
[Illustration:
Typical huts of the _páramo_ of Tiopullo, a bleak, bare mountain-top
across which the highway to the south hurries on its way to the
warmer valleys beyond]
[Illustration:
Beyond the _páramo_ of Azuay the trail clambers over broken rock
ledges into the town of Cañar]
Near the village of Macachi, twenty-one miles from the capital, I turned
aside to the hacienda of a quiteño acquaintance. He was a boy of
eighteen, scion of one of the old “best families” of Ecuador, who have
kept their Spanish blood free from mixture, to whom had recently fallen
the ownership and management of an enormous tract of his little country.
Educated in our own land, he spoke a slow, pedantic English. Among his
equals, he was soft-spoken almost to the point of diffidence. But his
voice was commanding enough when he gave orders to his _mayordomo_ or
_escribante_, or to any of the hundred Indians who lived clustered about
the central hacienda house, all of whom addressed him as “Su Merced”
(Your Grace) and kowtowed as often as he looked at them, as their
ancestors might have done to the imperial Scyri. Before the sun set, we
had time to ride across a part of the estate. It lay somewhat too high
for wheat, distinctly so for corn. Except for the cattle that flecked
the upland fields far and wide, the potato was most at home. Fourteen
distinct varieties of this native tuber of the Andes, several of them
unknown in the North, grew on the hacienda. In one field women were
digging potatoes large as small muskmelons, though nearby were other
patches still red or purple with blossoms.
The average wage of the Indian peons was five cents a day, with
_huasi-pongo_,—space for their miserable _chozas_ in which the only
furniture consisted of a few odds and ends of home-made pottery and some
sheepskins which, spread on the earth floor by night, served the family,
its guinea-pigs and mangy curs, as bed. The women and children worked
for nothing, wages being reckoned by family rather than individually,
except that the women who milked the cows were each paid a dollar a
month. In reality, the Indians were serfs of the estate. When first
hired, they are _enganchados_, “hooked” by a labor agent, and having
spent their “advance” in a prolonged chicha debauch, must often be
arrested and forced to carry out their part of the contract, usually
remaining for years, if not a lifetime, in debt to the hacendado. It
would be an error, however, to look upon their condition from our
northern point of view. Any custom taken out of its native environment
has a far more serious aspect than the reality warrants. The Indian,
trained during many generations of Inca rule to avoid all personal
initiative or responsibility, accepts by choice this patriarchal
arrangement. The majority had been attached to the hacienda since birth;
giving the community the aspect of one immense family. Each household
had its little plot of ground for its own garden, and the privilege of
pasturing a small flock or herd. Yet the owners have the best of the
bargain. Nearer the capital were estates where _enganchados_ Indians
made adobe bricks at ten cents a day, with huasi-pongo and food, making
daily some three hundred each, which the owner sold at seventy-five
cents a hundred.
The snow-peak of Sincholagua and the rugged, ice-capped ridge of
Rumiñaui faced the hacienda. Though little higher, the place was
infinitely colder than Quito in its mountain pocket, for here we caught
the full sweep of the winds off the ice-fields. By dark, we were both
huddled in the hacienda dining-room, bleak and comfortless in spite of
its extravagant trinkets from the outer world. The peons, for all their
awe of their youthful lord, could not deny themselves the pleasure of
grouping noiselessly before the door as we ate, listening to the strange
tongue—not Quichua, stranger still, not even Spanish—which their erudite
master spoke with this traveler from unknown parts, who came on foot,
carrying his own load, like any Indian. The crack of the door grew ever
wider, the broad, expressionless faces ever more numerous, until a draft
of the bitter mountain night air caused “His Grace” to glance up in
annoyance. Both crack and faces disappeared silently and suddenly, but
came again many times before we each crawled early under four heavy
blankets.
Next morning the highway, no longer cobbled, but wide and smooth,
without wheeled traffic, soon brought snow-clad Illinaza into full sight
before me. So skillfully did it bear me upward that by noon I was
crossing the great _páramo_ of the Nudo de Tiopullo, without the
consciousness of having climbed at all. The Andean _páramo_, for which
we have no exact English word, is not the sharp mountain peak my
imagination had pictured, but is used of any broad plain so lofty that
not even the hardy Indian will live upon it, where _quinua_, most
cold-blooded of domestic plants, refuses to grow, a drear treeless
upland covered only with a tough brown bunch-grass that gives it
somewhat the aspect of our virgin prairies. To a northerner in motion,
it was not uncomfortable by sunshiny day, but no one passes these lofty
plains at night by choice. Only a rare shepherd’s shelter of stones and
_ichu_ dots the cold-brown immensity. The shivering highway hurried due
south across it, bringing to view another sea-blue _hoyo_ and, barely
pausing for a last glance back at the faint peak of Cotacache and the
long bulk of Pichincha, grown mere parts of a broad, hazy, tilted
horizon, raced downward into the softer valley.
Some seventy-five miles south of Quito begins a veritable desert. From a
distance the ranges to right and left seem green, yet the ascending
valley grows so dry and arid that even the scanty scrub trees die of
thirst. At the top of a barren divide I met head-on, panting harder than
I, and moving no faster, the little tri-weekly train from the coast,
crowded with dust-laden, weary passengers. Almost sheer above me stood
forth the beautiful cone of snow-clad Cotopaxi, equalled in symmetry on
all the earth’s surface only by Fujiyama. To the left the hoary head of
Tungaragua, far away in the blue haze of the hot, tropical Oriente it
looks down upon, rose gradually higher into the sky. Then the highway
descended and went ever more swiftly downward into a half-arid hole in
the ground, and by three I was tramping the cobbled streets of Ambato,
the “winter” resort of wealthy quiteños, a mere 8000 feet above
sea-level. To one accustomed to loftier Quito, it had a tranquil,
half-languid air; its people were more friendly, lacking that suggestion
of belligerency common to quiteños. There was, indeed, something
pleasing about it that I had never yet seen in Ecuador. It reminded one
mildly of Egypt, in air and odor, and the dust sweeping across from the
barren, arid hills that wall it in. The market of this town, hung midway
between the tropics and the temperate zone, offers the fruits of
both—_aguacates_ and mangoes side by side with apples, pears, peaches,
and cherries—the native capulí, at five cents a peck—beside raspberries
and blackberries, and the perennial “fru-u-u-till-a-a-as!”
(strawberries) that are singsong daily through the streets of Quito. It
was from the market-place of Ambato that I caught my first glimpse of
Chimborazo, the giant of the Andes, just the crown of its long, saw-like
glacier ridge brilliant white against the steely highland sky, as it
stood on tiptoe peering over the barren ridges of Carhuairazo.
Barely had I entered the hotel when its dishevelled boy-servants crowded
around me to ask if I were an “andarín.” Peyrounel, it proved, had once
favored the establishment with his distinguished, if financially
disadvantageous, presence. I pleaded too colorless garments to merit the
title. To these Andean village youths the arrival of so romantic a being
was what that of the yearly circus is to our towns of the far interior.
Yet when I offered any of them double his present wage to accompany me
and carry a few pounds of my pack, they shook their heads and shrunk
fearfully away.
It is not, as I gradually learned to my growing astonishment, merely
because they know no better that the people of the Andes sleep on wooden
beds. In Quito I had found many who refused to use the imported springs,
and I know at least two doctors who prescribed wooden beds for kidney
trouble. Here in Ambato a perfectly respectable spring-bed had been
completely floored over, and the unsuspecting gringo, instead of landing
on a soft and yielding mattress, found himself on such a couch as a
thinly carpeted floor might be. Nor was this by any means the last bed
out of which I pulled the lumber and spread the woven-reed _estera_
above the barrel-hoop springs.
Ambato claims the title of “Athens of Ecuador”; and, indeed, four of the
country’s principal writers lived and died here, which is more than can
be said of the capital. The place of honor in the main plaza, gorgeous
with geraniums of every shade of red, is occupied by the statue of Juan
Montalvo, commonly rated the country’s chief literary light. In Ambato
Juan León Mera wrote his “Cumandá,” the accepted classic among Ecuador’s
novels; and one may still visit the family of Luis Martínez, whose “A la
Costa” is worthy a place in South American literature, if only for its
magnificent descriptions of tropical scenery.
I left Ambato on a morning so cold that gloves would have been welcome;
one of those mornings, frequent in Ecuador, when the sun rises like a
beauty of the harem pushing aside the soft, white curtains of her
alcove, when the mountains, at the bases of which dense masses of clouds
and mist have gathered, seem gigantic altars on pedestals of marble.
Soon the sun grew ardent and imperious, capriciously burning away the
mist-curtains of the night, blazing down unrestrained on the rolling
plains of Huachi, so arid and monotonous. The road lay deep in sand
across a half-desert, with no other adornment than the fences of
_cabuya_, of the cactus family, that replace the dividing ditches or mud
field-walls further north, to mark the limits of the poor heritages of
the Indians. The chief industry here is the weaving of a coarse cloth
from the fibers of the _cabuya blanca_. Here and there a capulí tree
persisted, and impenetrable, bushy clumps of the thorny _sigse_ bristled
aggressively. The few planted fields were sparse and drear, though near
the town, where the thirsty _arenales_ had been transformed by
irrigation into patches of green on which the desert-weary eyes rested
gratefully, grew the strawberry, large and fragrant.
Higher and higher rose the world, though so imperceptibly that the
ascent was noted only because the landscape opened out to ever greater
vistas. It was a day of climax in volcanoes. Around the circle of the
spreading horizon the white crests of no fewer than eight of the great
vent-holes of the earth grew up about me, until I paused on a high ridge
to study them. To the right, for a time looking like a single mass of
rock and snow, stretched long, saw-toothed Carhuairazo, with Chimborazo
rising behind it; then gradually the great, glacier-blue dome of this
Everest of America detached itself and stood forth in all its immensity.
Far behind, yet perfectly clear in spite of the blue haze of some forty
miles distance, cone-shaped Cotapaxi, once so savage in its destruction,
reared itself into the sky-line like an occidental twin sister of
Fujiyama. To the left, in military precision, three snow-clads stood
shoulder to shoulder—Sincholagua, Antisana, and one above which rose a
column of smoke that marked it as Sangai, most active of the western
world, but a few days before in destructive eruption. Then came the
glacier-clad, rounded cone of Tungarahua, keeping its eternal watch over
the tropical Oriente, and to the south, noblest of all, peering forth
first in the early mists, and growing in grandeur all the morning, stood
dreaded El Altar, its beauty now completely unveiled, a fantastic mass
of peaks and pinnacles, like some phantom city of ice.
[Illustration:
Indians carrying a grand piano across the plaza of Cañar on a journey
to the interior]
[Illustration:
The Indians of Ecuador draw their droves of cattle on after them by
playing a weird, mournful “music” on the _bocina_, made of a section
of bamboo]
For hours the snow-peaked horizon continued. Across the sands of Huachi
travelers had been few; toward noon they grew plentiful. Around every
turn appeared Indians and their four-footed competitors, with such
monotonous persistency that I needed a cudgel to drive out of my way the
asses which, expressionless and impassive as their masters, were
inclined to march serenely on, irrespective of human obstacles. The rare
_chagras_, or tawny countrymen, who live in their _chozas_ along the
way, were interesting only as evidence of how clod-like man may become.
At Mocha, where I halted in the early afternoon, the deep-blue
ice-fields of Chimborazo lay piled into the sky overhead, a mountain
still, though the town stands more than two miles above the sea. All the
following morning its arctic dome towered close on my right as I plodded
along its gentle slope not far below the snow line, often waist-deep in
the ruts which generations of pack-animals and Indians had worn in the
brown, uninhabited páramo, dreary with long, slightly rolling stretches
of bunch-grass, across which I only now and then overtook a mule-train,
the drivers wrapped to their ears in their heavy ponchos. Behind, across
a hazy valley, now more than forty miles away, the symmetrical cone of
Cotapaxi gleamed faintly forth in a new dress of snow that had fallen
during the night. A cobbled highway ran along the bottom of a slight
hollow some distance off, but travelers had scorned it so long in favor
of the rutted páramo that grass was grown high between its cobbles; and
at length, as if it resented the abandonment, it swung off in the
direction of Cajabamba and was gone.
The dozen ruts across the páramo finally joined forces to form a kind of
road that, turning its back on Chimborazo, around whose white head a
storm was brewing, struck off toward a long, undulating, hazy valley
backed by blue heaps of ranges. Gradually I descended to almost a desert
again, by a road deep in sand, rising and falling over countless
sand-knolls, the peaked, grass-covered huts of Indians tossed like
abandoned old straw hats far up the flanks of the drear mountainsides on
either hand. At one of these I found the first use for my new revolver.
An enormous dog, plainly bent on destruction, bounded out upon me
without a sound, halted abruptly with a faint yelp as I pressed the
trigger, turned a complete somersault, and fell feet upward, like a
captive turtle, not two yards from me.
Ordinarily there is little to be feared from the sneaking curs of all
colors that swarm about every hut throughout the length of the Andes.
Before the Conquest, tradition has it, the Indians had only the mute
_allcu_, now exterminated—at least, it is certain that none of those
that remain are mute. These degenerate descendants of the animals
brought over by the Spaniards rival the original chaos of sound as they
rush out in cowardly packs upon any stranger—especially a non-Indian,
for as the white man’s dog abhors an Indian, so do these a white
man—while their masters gaze stolidly on, without so much as attempting
to call them off. The Indian of the Andes does not raise dogs; he has
them merely because he is too passive to get rid of them. The curs are
never treated as pets; the only caress they ever receive is a kick or a
prod from which they retreat sluggishly with a cowardly yelp, even if
the weapon misses its aim; they are never fed, but exist on such offal
as the Indian himself disdains. A mountaineer to whom I put the question
once briefly expressed the viewpoint of his race:
“How can we help having many dogs, patrón? They breed so often!”
From the village of San Andrés, picturesquely backed by the ice-palace
of El Altar, architecturally as diffuse as the Castle of Schwerin, a
spreading highway, bordered by endless cactus hedges, led toward a great
sandy plain far ahead, a small forest of eucalypti that marked the site
of Riobamba giving it center. Further on, for all the aridity, was
plenty of half-grown corn, with numberless peaked, thatched huts peering
above the vegetation on either hand. At the entrance to Riobamba I saw
the first llamas of my South American journey. Once an Indian passed
driving a llama and an ass hitched together; further on several of these
absurd “Peruvian sheep,” pasturing beyond the cactus hedge, craned their
long necks to gaze curiously after me. Times without number I had been
assured that not only was the llama never a draft or a milch animal, but
that it could never be ridden; that it would carry exactly a hundred
pounds and would irrevocably lie down if another ounce were added, and
that it could under no circumstances be urged beyond a slow, dignified
walk. Imagine my surprise, then, when suddenly I beheld a llama
bestridden by a full-grown Indian come down the road at a brisk trot,
and watched them fade away in the eucalyptus-lined distance beyond. In
the town beyond there was one llama for every two donkeys.
Riobamba, chief city between Quito and the coast, is commonly described
as “lying at the foot of Chimborazo.” The description must not be taken
too literally. I had imagined a cold, haughty little town snuggled
together in a lap of the high Andes; but if Riobamba lies at the foot of
Chimborazo, so, in only somewhat lesser degree, does Guayaquil. The
traveler turns his back on the glacier-clad giant of the Andes and
tramps a long half-day before he comes to what, in situation and general
appearance, might be a town on the sandy prairies of western Nebraska.
Its monotonously right-angled streets are unusually wide, painfully
cobbled, and swirling with sand; its architecture is drearily like that
of any other Andean city. It has been several times destroyed by
earthquake; were it not, like Quito, more than two miles aloft, it would
be even more often destroyed by its personal habits. At sunrise thrice a
week most of the town turns out to watch the trains that have
“overnighted” here leave for Quito and Guayaquil respectively; whence
its suggestion of some frontier village of railroad hotels in our
Western states. Unlike Quito, Riobamba has a street-car. It is a
platform on wheels with a flat roof supported by gas-pipes, under which
are some crosswise boards that are called seats with the same
Latin-American tolerance with which a place to lie on the floor is
called a bed, and a place the traveler may possibly be able to make his
way through is called a road. Like some Andean newspapers, it appears
“every now and then,” when a pair of blasé, world-weary mules drag it
across town to the station and back, usually only on train days. Many
ride, and the more poorly dressed seem to pay for the privilege; but the
Indians take good care not to be caught on any such risky, new-fangled
contraption.
There is commonly not a “sight” to be seen in Riobamba, unless it be the
stern, white face of Chimborazo looking down upon the city from the
middle distance to the north. The traveler who chances upon the town of
a Saturday or Sunday, however, will find it a place of interest. Then
the Indian population of a thickly inhabited region comes from thirty or
more miles around to what is rated Ecuador’s greatest market. The sandy
plaza, larger than an American city block, is so densely packed with
stolid thick-set men and women in gray felt hats and crude-colored
blankets that only by constant struggle can a purchaser thread his way
across it. From my room on the corner above, not a foot of open ground
was visible. The scene was like a swarming of myriad ants of many
colors; like a great Oriental rug undulating in the sunshine. As one
crowds along between the rows of hawkers, all the products of the region
seem to pass in procession. Here were entire families who had jogged
many miles to town under the produce of their chacras; there, a man with
only a half-grown chicken or a gaunt pig for sale; beyond, a woman sat
all day long selling bit by bit, at a net total of perhaps ten cents,
the bushel of native cherries which, together with her babe, she has
carried at least twenty miles. Here was a pile of ugly native shoes—of
very limited demand—there, homespun blankets and ponchos in colors that
scream audibly, before they mellowed by sun and rain and the habits of
their wearers. Every domestic animal and fowl known to the Andes of
to-day was displayed; cheap knives, tin spoons, trinkets from foreign
lands, native plants and bulbs; herbs that still make up the aboriginal
pharmacopœia, as in pre-Conquest days; tiny packages of dyestuffs that
are doled out a penny-worth at a time; corn bread and barley bread, even
a few soggy wheat biscuits—though the price of the latter is all but
prohibitive—cherries, strawberries, oranges, _aguacates_, a hard native
taffy known as _alfeñique_, pears, apricots, peaches, a hard little
apple that never matures, pineapples, nearly all the grains and
vegetables known in our own land, and even a greater variety of corn and
potatoes; and a countless confusion of other products that sell for what
would seem far less than the cost of bringing them to town. Beyond, was
a _tercena_, an open-air butchershop, where Indian women hacked into
bits the cows and sheep that had succumbed to amateur butchers, at the
same time fighting off the fifteen dogs which, by actual count, prowled
about the stand. In one corner scores of tawny, bare-legged Indians
squatted beside heavy grass-wrapped loads of snowy ice, Riobamba’s only
means of cooling her beverages. If one knew enough of the bastard
Quichua of Ecuador to ask its origin, the stolid fellows threw an
expressionless glance toward the icy dome of Chimborazo. About them
hovered something akin to the glamour that surrounds the Arctic
explorer. All day long was an endless motley going and coming through
the adjacent streets and plazas, amid which the imagination could easily
drop back four centuries and fancy what this Andean world may have been
before the coming of the white man.
[Illustration:
Ruins of the fortress of Ingapirca, near Cañar, where the Inca Huayna
Ccápac is said to have received the first news of the landing of
white men on the coast of his Empire]
[Illustration:
A mild example of the “road” through southern Ecuador. The trail
pitches and rolls over earthquake-gashed, utterly uninhabited
regions, sinking far out of sight in the _quebrada_ in the middle
distance, then climbs away across the world until the hill here seen
sinks to a dot on the landscape]
It was so brilliant a Sunday that Chimborazo seemed to hang almost sheer
above the town, and the whole bulk of snow-clad Tungarahua loomed
clearly forth from its tropical home, when I set out after midday for
what I had been told was an easy half-day’s tramp. Within an hour—so
sudden are the changes in weather zones here—an icy rain was pouring
down upon my shoulders bowed with the weight of a hundred-pound pack. At
last I sprawled to a summit with an all-embracing view of the entire
district of Riobamba, the city itself a mere fleck far below in an
opaque-blue landscape roofed by purple-black clouds through which the
unseen sun cast a single faint shaft, as from a weak spotlight. The
rain, which in Ecuador falls in zones sharply cut off one from another,
ceased abruptly at the top of the barrier. Here were two roads from
which to choose, and for hours thereafter I could not know whether the
one that descended a sharp valley beside a tiny stream led anywhere near
where I wished to go. Well down the bone-dry vale were scattered hamlets
of grass and mud huts of a half-wild tribe of Indians, the men in white
goatskin trousers that gave them the appearance of shaggy-legged Greek
satyrs, the dwellings often hung far up the steep walls that enclosed
the growing stream. Many of the inhabitants ran away at my approach; the
rest stared at me from safe heights as I sped on down the valley. Ugly
white curs abounded; in the scanty trees a bird sang now and then; but
for the most part only the sound of the stream leaping from rock to rock
broke the mountain-walled silence.
Cold darkness fell, and still the broken trail descended swiftly. At
rare intervals a corner of the moon peered through the clouds. Then, in
the blackest of nights, the road forked again, giving me another random
choice. A wild, windy, uninhabited hour beyond, the path fell suddenly
away under my feet and I found myself involved in a labyrinth of
_quebradas_, holes and chasms large as two-story houses, as if the
region had been wrecked by a long series of earthquakes. A score of
times I climbed down hand over hand into immense ruts with walls high
above my head, certain I had lost my way, yet with no other choice than
to press on. Two hours, at least, this riot of the earth’s surface
continued before there appeared suddenly the lights of a considerable
town, dimly seen through the night across a wet, blurred valley backed
by an all but invisible mountainside. A trail picked itself together
again under my feet, pitched headlong down to a roaring little river
straddled by an aged stone bridge, ghostly white in the pallid
moonlight, and led me stumbling into the railroad village of Guamote,
still booming with the tomtoms of the Sunday fiesta that had left its
scattered débris of drunken Indians through all the length of the town.
From Guamote I followed the silent but well-kept Quito-Guayaquil Railway
through a landscape like that of southern Texas, winding in and out
between dreary hills peopled only by a rare weather-worn shepherd in
goatskin trousers; then across broad stretches of sear-brown, slightly
rolling desert scantily covered with bunch-grass, the sand sweeping over
it in clouds. From Palmira,—two dismal little station buildings at some
11,000 feet elevation—the railroad drops steadily for all the more than
a hundred miles to the coast. Some way down the descending valley, the
land turned almost suddenly from dreary brown to the green of another
rain-belt that gradually climbed the ever-higher mountain walls that
shut me in. Beyond Alausí next morning I made a swift descent, even
swifter by sliding down the face of the notorious “Devil’s Nose,” where
the track mounts in three sections, one above the other, and reached the
little town of Huigra in time for “breakfast.” Here, in a green valley
between high hills falling abruptly into a prattling stream, are the
main offices and hospitals of the railroad, and an American atmosphere,
tempered with whiffs of England and Ecuador, to which the fever and
bubonic of Guayaquil do not mount, nor the ills of Quito descend.
At Huigra my route was to turn southward over the enclosing mountain
wall. But I had no objection to coasting down into the tropics on a
side-trip to Guayaquil—except Guayaquil itself; and when the chief
engineer promised a screened refuge from sun to sun, I accepted the
invitation gladly. All that is necessary to travel from Huigra to
sea-level is to get something on wheels of the right gage and “let her
slide”—or rather, let her slide within very definite limits, lest one
reach the bottom far sooner and in poorer condition than was planned.
With a native employee behind, the two of us sat on the sheer front edge
of the track automobile, the experienced hand of the chief on the brake,
and roared in and out and ever down the mountain cañon, the towering
walls on either side rising higher above us with every yard forward, a
foaming river keeping us a not much slower company. Huigra is at
kilometer 117. At 110 we suddenly reached the tree-line. Forests in
striking contrast to the bare upland plateau of Ecuador grew up about us
as if by magic. Foaming mountain brooks dashed down from either towering
wall to join the river—and to save the company the expense of building
water-tanks. Swiftly the trees changed in species,—from hardy highland
shrubs to voluptuous tropical growths, till the airy bamboo, noblest of
ferns, bowed to us in graceful dignity from the crowded forest as we
screamed past.
Before noon we swung out of the gorge I had followed from Palmira, and
halted at Bucay. It had been like dropping in two hours from May to a
dense and heavy July, from a northern scene to one like that of Panama,
with the same sticky atmosphere, negroes, and outdoor life. Here we took
possession of the empty pay-car on the rear of the day’s passenger-train
and sat with our feet on the back railing, watching the dead-flat
tropical world run away and shrink up to nothingness behind us. The
track lay straight as a cannon-ball’s course through the tunnel of
forest and jungle. Indians and their gay garments had disappeared; here
were only the colors of nature. Along the way, thatched houses of split
bamboo slouched in languid attitudes, half-black and slightly dressed
families peering from their sort of hole-in-the-wall verandas behind
partly raised blinds hinged at the top. For all the lazy languor of the
scene, jungle products succeeded each other swiftly. Cacao, then
palm-trees gladdened the eyes; the air grew heavier; now and then a
great field of sugar-cane broke briefly the endless tunnel of forest;
beautiful bamboo groves alternated with immense tropical trees cutting
into the sky-line.
The natives, afoot or ahorse, used the track as a trail, for all else
was impenetrable wilderness. Here and there the jungle crowded so close
that it side-swiped the car, though along the way were many
section-gangs fighting it back with machetes, the favorite tool and
weapon of the _costeño_, who saluted us—or, more exactly, my
companion—as we sped past. Pineapple fields grew numerous; at stations
the fruit lay in piles at the feet of indifferent chocolate-colored
vendors. The brown castor-bean on its small green trees appeared;
splendid cocoanut palms, heavy with nuts, heralded the sea; maidenly
slender rubber-trees; broad fields of light-green rice, growing arm in
arm with Indian corn; the plebeian bread-fruit tree, with its broad
leaves fancily cut as with scissors in the hands of an inventive child;
and always gigantic tropical trees cut fantastically into the sky-line
of the light-gray day above. Behind, always, fixed as fate itself, the
dim and clouded range of the Andes, a giant wall, blue and unbroken,
shut off the world beyond. Here and there a hoary peak showed above the
clouds, so high one could not believe it possible. Far off in the
heavens like a great cloud, Chimborazo stood white and immovable. As in
the forest one sees only trees, so only down here, looking at the chain
as a whole, could one realize the loftiness of those realms where one
had been living for months more than two miles above the sea.
Naked brown babies, huts on ever longer legs, hammocks, grew numerous,
and languid loungers to fill them; here and there appeared a Chinaman;
some large towns, bamboo-built and all on stilts, like a thin-shanked
army; buzzards circling lazily overhead amid scents that whispered of
plague and sudden death. Then on either hand began to appear the low,
dense-wooded hills of Durán, more properly deep green islands in this
flood-time. Fluffy white flowers in myriads smiled bravely above the
black waters that would soon swallow them up. The vast mountain wall
across the world behind had grown a shade bluer when we drew into Durán
on the banks of the Guayas, and brushing both clear with housewifely
care of any lurking mosquito, dodged through the double screen-doors
into the railroad quarters. Here were shower-baths and phonographs, New
York papers, a frequent nasal twang, and only outside and seeming far
off as in some distant place, the scent of Ecuador.
Sudden death is reputed to fly chiefly by night along the Guayas. So
only when the sun was high did we venture across to Ecuador’s metropolis
and far-famed death-trap, Guayaquil. Outwardly, the low, heat-steaming
city looked far cleaner than Quito. But here filth grants no immunity.
During three hours we saw the black funeral street-car pass nine
times—and by no means all the population can afford so splendid an exit
from the world. Yet here were electric tramways for the first time since
Bogotá, larger shops and more ambitious displays than in Quito, and
signs of greater commercial activity. The houses were of wood or split
bamboo, low and earthquake-fearing, all the windows with wooden blinds
hinged at the top, from behind which peered half the female population,
seldom seen on the streets. Compared to Quito, it was a town of no color
at all. Among the foreign residents was a curious indifference to local
dangers, always seeming greater at a distance than on the spot.
Americans yawned at the mention of “Yellow Jack” and Bubonic and went
about their business with as little apparent worry as a New Yorker of
death by a street accident. Nothing in the attitude of the people
suggested an unusually precarious hold on life—except that ever
recurrent black funeral car, electrically operated, as if horses were
not fast enough for its incessant labors. Long before the sun had lost
its mastery of the situation, we had retreated again to Durán. The lone
traveler in far-off lands runs many perils, but if I must succumb to one
of them, let it be with a fighting chance, not this insidious, sneaking
death that flies on all but invisible wings.
[Illustration:
Cuenca, third city of Ecuador, lies in one of the most fertile and
beautiful valleys of the Andes]
Next morning the passenger-train lifted us back to Huigra, where a new
experience awaited me. That evening I sat writing in the railroad
quarters. Two fellow-countrymen were parading the broad, second-story
veranda of the light wooden building. The only other sound was the
muffled chatter of the stream below. Suddenly the heavy table beneath my
arm began to move as at some spiritualist séance, the windows took to
rattling as if in some sudden terror to escape from their frames, the
wall decorations swung back and forth like pendulums, and for what
seemed a long minute the entire building shook as with a paludic fever.
I opened my mouth to protest against what I took for a moment to be
physical exuberance of the veranda paraders; but I closed it again as I
realized that I had passed through my first earthquake, and had gone on
writing for a line or more before I recognized the good fortune of being
in a wooden house. Outside, the strollers had not even interrupted their
chat, except to remark, “Pretty good one, eh?” and when the natives in
the town below had left off shouting, evidently in an attempt to scare
off the dreaded spirit within the bowels of the earth, life returned to
its customary languor, the silence broken only by the stream still
prattling on through the darkness. In the morning the telegraph wire
brought word that the instruments of Durán had registered seven quakes,
and that several houses and a church had fallen in the adobe interior.
On the morning of February 24th I crossed the little bridge over
Huigra’s garrulous stream and, trailing away up the mountain wall that
shuts off the railroad valley on the south, disappeared from the modern
world. All but twenty pounds of my baggage I had turned over to a native
_fletero_, proprietor of a mule-and-jackass express company that
operated as far south as Cuenca. It was in the nature of things,
however, that even under a light load I should pay for my descent to
Huigra by much sweating toil, before raising again its paltry 4000 feet
to the two miles or more of the Andean chain. In the valley a brilliant
sun set me dripping; above was driving mist to chill me through if I
dared to pause, and out of which now and then floated the gentle
exhortations of unseen arrieros to their toiling animals:
“Anda, macho! Mula, caramba! Vaya, sinvergüenza!”
An experienced gringo had assured me I was approaching the most
impassable region in Ecuador, a place where it rained steadily and
heavily a hundred and four weeks a year, where my mules would sink to
their ears in mud and be left to perish, where I myself would infallibly
die of exposure if my caravan were overtaken by night out on the lofty
páramo. I easily forestalled the peril to my mules, and the second I
resolved to avoid by not letting night overtake me.
It was not, certainly, an ideal road. There were places where the
writhing trail was for miles a series of earth ridges with deep ditches
of mud and water between, like an endless corduroy road, and these made
hard going indeed for laden animals. For as often as one of them set
foot on one of these _camelones_, as they are called in the Andes, it
slipped off into the muddy ditch between, as likely backward as forward,
giving a very exaggerated imitation of the gait of a camel. In fact, it
is this constant slipping and sliding of passing pack-trains that turns
certain wet regions of the Andes into camelones. In places the
mud-reeking slope climbed steep mountainsides through narrow trails worn
twenty feet deep, down or up which horses or cargo mules stumbled and
sprawled constantly, threatening to smash their packs against the side
walls or underfoot.
But it was a route far worse for horsemen than for a man afoot. I
stepped blithely from ridge to ridge, not only dry-shod but at my
regular pace, easily leaving all four-footed competitors behind; and
while there were germs of truth in the warning that a mule and his
cargo, slipping and falling upon me in one of the gullies, might bring
my journey to a halt, the very simple remedy for that possibility was
not to be found loitering beneath an animal when he fell. Donkey
carcasses and the rain-bleached skeletons of mules and horses were
frequent along the way; and always, now broken, now for a time
incessant, came out of the blind mist the raucous bawling of arrieros:
“Anda, mula, caramba!”
The dense, heavy fog turned to pouring rain. Indeed there were evidences
to verify the assertion that this was one of the zones of Ecuador where
the rainy season reigns perennially. In mid-afternoon I passed a few
Indian hovels. I had been warned to stop for the night in the last of
these rare habitations, if I would not end my wayward career out on the
arctic páramo of the Nudo de Azuay. But the stolid-featured native
assured me there were others a half-league on, and I had climbed twice
that distance across a dismal stretch of bunch-grass without a sign of
life, except a scanty herd of wild, shaggy, rain-drenched cattle, before
I realized that the Indian had told the old lie to be rid of an
importunate guest. Within me there grew the conviction that, in spite of
my best intentions, I should some day shoot a large, round, soft-nosed,
38-caliber hole through some Indian for sending me “further up” into the
uninhabited night.
However, there I was, exactly where, of all places in Ecuador, I had so
often been warned in several tongues not to let night overtake me. The
gray walls about me dimmed like a lamp turned out. These páramo trails
being, even by day, only a straggling of interwoven paths often effaced,
it was not in the order of things that I should keep the route long in
unmitigated night. For a time I stumbled along an irregular,
rock-littered ground, full of leg-breaking holes, picking every step
ahead with my stick, like a blind man, and even at that now and then
sprawling on all fours. As to direction, I could only trust to luck.
Then I felt water-soaked bunch-grass under foot, and all efforts to find
the trail again were wasted. Vaguely I felt that I had come out on the
nose of a mountain. Through the rain-drenched night there came faintly
to my ears the sound of a waterfall, and from somewhere far off the
dismal howling of a dog rode by on the raging wind. The ground under my
feet took on the angle of a steep roof; it required stick, hands, and
extreme vigilance to keep from pitching headlong down into the
bottomless unknown. I felt my way inch by inch several hundred feet
downward without finding a level space as large as my hand. In the end I
could only sit down on my bundle in the mud, brace my feet against a
tuft of bunch-grass and, piling my most perishable possessions in my
lap, button my llama-hair poncho over my head, sup on a three-inch butt
of bread, and settle down to keep my precarious seat until daylight.
He who fancies an Ecuadorian mountainside a pleasant night’s
lodging-place, merely because it is near the equator, has still
something of geography to learn. Strangely enough, it might have been
worse. The poncho was almost impervious to cold, entirely so to rain. As
the Scottish chieftain of earlier days soaked his tartan before lying
down for a night in the highland heather, so the wetness of all about me
seemed to add warmth. The rain redoubled, yet I should scarcely have
known it but for its pelting above my head. I dozed now and then into a
nap. After one of them I peered out into the wintry night, to find the
mist alive with hardy fireflies so large that those which started up
near me seemed to my dull fancy the lanterns of some prowling band.
Twice some animal, perhaps a wild mountain-horse, romped by me. When I
looked out again a bright moon was shining, yet I felt too comfortable
as I was to take advantage of it to push on, and fell asleep again, not
without a drowsy misgiving that some diligent hunter might try a shot at
my huddled, shaggy form standing out in the moonlight against the swift
mountainside; until I remembered that no native ever ventures out upon
an Andean páramo except in the full light of day.
Dawn showed the lost trail zigzagging in three branches down the face of
the mountain. The waterfall lay directly below me, yet so steep was the
slope on which I was perched that I had to crawl back again up the trail
on all fours and descend with it. Far away across a valley so deep I
could not see its bottom, lay in plain sight what I knew to be the town
of Cañar, a mere white speck halfway up the great mountainside beyond.
It is chiefly noted for its outlook upon the world. From a distance, it
seemed to hang upright on the vertical mountain flank; once arrived, I
found it occupied the flat top of one of the countless hills that pile
higher and higher into the sky, to culminate in a great Andean chain.
Here was a land of stone. Everywhere, in field and valley, rocks lay
more profusely and far larger in size than on any abandoned New England
farm. If the tumble-down old town of Cañar had any features at all
different from hundreds of others down the crest of the Andes, it was
its large proportion of stone buildings over those of sun-baked mud.
It is perhaps the existence of stone, rarer to the north, that accounts
for the presence near Cañar of the first ruins of unquestionably Inca
origin. Their victorious march to the north, too, was so quickly
followed by the arrival of the Spaniards, that the Children of the Sun
left no permanent works about Quito and beyond. The imperial highway
from Cuzco to what is to-day Ecuador, built by a race less fearful of
the lofty places and mighty cañons of the Andes, was more direct than
the modern haphazard route. Where it descended from the páramo of Azuay
and climbed out of the gorge beyond, there was built a fortress and a
_tambo_ for the housing of the imperial cortège that is known to-day as
Ingapirca, which some believe to be that same Tomebamba where Huayna
Ccápac, the Great, was born, and where the news of the landing on the
coast of a strange tribe cut short his journey southward in his old age.
[Illustration:
A detail of the “Panama”-hat market of Azogues. The hats are bought
unfinished and the wholesalers pile one after another on their heads
until their faces are all but concealed by the protruding “straw”
ends]
[Illustration:
Arrived at the wholesale establishments of Cuenca, the hats are
finished,—the “straw”-ends tucked in and cut off, the hats beaten
with wooden mallets on wooden blocks, given a sulphur bath and
sun-bleached, then folded flat for shipment]
He who would visit Ingapirca must have either a guide or a working
mixture of Spanish and Quichua. I lost myself a dozen times in a
labyrinth of paths, each leading to an isolated Indian hovel. One might
have fancied the aboriginals had surrounded the sacred Inca relics with
a conspiracy of silence, for I was forced at last to drag an old man
forcibly out of a cluster of cobble-stone huts before he pointed out to
me a path that wound away upward and disappeared over the edge of the
world. Along it I came at last in sight of Ingapirca. The “Castle of the
Gentiles,” as it is locally known to-day, sits silent and grass-grown on
the summit of a rock-knoll from which the eye ranges in every direction
over a tumbled labyrinth of valleys and ridges. They built high, the
Incas, as men who preferred to see with their own eyes what was going on
about them, and they seem to have gloated over the unbroken sweep of the
cold, invigorating Andean wind. The chief ruin is that of a fortress, an
oval wall with a sheer rock face to the north, and symmetrical stone
steps leading up to the entrance on the south. Of large cut stones, and
with ornamental blind doors, or niches, it is so like the monuments of
Peru as to leave no doubt of its Inca origin. Even on the curves, the
stones are so nicely fitted, apparently without mortar—though Humboldt
reported the discovery of a kind of cement between them—that there are
few joints for which a modern contractor would berate his workmen. The
walls are double, with earth between them, the inner wall less carefully
constructed; and undisturbed centuries have filled the interior of the
fort to a grass-grown level. Above this rise the remnants of a building,
only adobe walls with some cut-stone doorways still standing; but the
many wrought stones to be found in fences and in the scattered heaps in
which dwell the modern inhabitants of the region, suggest that the adobe
walls had once a complete casing of cut stone. Slight as are the
remains, there is still sufficient setting for the fancy to picture
Huayna Ccápac striding back and forth upon his lofty promenade, looking
upon his “Four Corners of the Earth,” and halting in his meditations to
watch the imperial _chasquis_ racing toward him across the rugged
landscape with news of the landing in his imperial domains of a
pale-faced tribe with hair on their faces.
Hours of strenuous toil, piloted only by my pocket-compass, brought me
back to the main route. For a space it was a real highway, faced with
stone, but soon degenerated into a writhing chaos of ruts and rocky
_subidas_, like a road in the throes of an epileptic fit. The sun was
still high when I caught sight of Biblián, its famous sanctuary standing
out white and clear against the dull mountainside above the town. But it
was only in the thickening dusk that I finally climbed into it.
A youth replied to my first inquiry with a “cómo no!”—just as
unexcitedly as if strangers came to Biblián every year or two. In the
dingy little shop to which he led me, an old woman whose greedy face
warned me to prepare for exorbitant charges, even before I learned she
went to church four times a day, hunted up the enormous key to an
immense room above. In a corner of it stood a bed at least a century
old, covered with a marvelous lace counterpane, but harder than macadam.
While I sat at meat—or, more exactly, at vegetables, since Biblián kills
its weekly beef on Sunday and by Monday it is gone—the customary
delegation of citizens came to offer their respects. The town, it
proved, was oppressed with a great worry. The earthquake of a week
before had not merely tumbled down several mud church-towers of the
region, but had given new life to a prophesy that clanged deafeningly at
two-second intervals without a break, ex-Biblián could not sleep of
nights and the priests were reaping a rich harvest. All night long I lay
like a Hindu ascetic on his couch of nails, listening to the exquisite
torture of a broken-voiced church-bell that clanged deafeningly at
two-second intervals without a break, except for a frequent wild,
hellish jangling of several minutes’ duration. When dawn broke, the
entire population had already crowded into the church for early mass. A
bun was not to be had with my morning coffee, because my hostess had
locked up the shop to attend the second ceremony. I ordered “breakfast”
for eleven, and a boy came to inform me that I must eat it at nine,
since from that hour on señora la patrona would again be at church.
Biblián is a city of pilgrimage. By morning light it proved to be
surrounded on all sides by fields of corn, with countless capulí-trees
and masses of geraniums lending it even more color than the variegated
blankets of its inhabitants. The cup-shaped valley was scattered with
scores of tiled cottages of the half-Indian peasants, the hillsides a
network of paths and trails to their huts and tiny farms. The chief road
climbed to the _Capilla_ on a crag well above the town. It was a costly,
three-story structure richly decorated within, though a dismal mud hut
served Biblián as school. The Virgin of Biblián is noteworthy among a
host of her sisters in not having come personally to pick out a spot and
order the building of her shelter. Perhaps her history is still too
recent for the successful concoction of such traditions. In 1893 the
valley of Biblián was choking with drought. The local cura, alive to his
opportunity, set up an image in a grotto on the mountainside and,
consulting his barometer, implored rain. The drought was broken. In
honor of the feat the image was named the “Virgin of the Dew,” and
pilgrims began to flock to Biblián. In the volume which he has prepared
for their instruction the foresighted cura bewails the fact that “We
cannot tell in one book the countless cures, assistances, protections
and life-savings the Blessed Virgen del Rocío has done for the faithful
from all over Ecuador.” In the face of the appalling mass of proofs
before him he confines himself to none. But he does mention the
miraculous fact that the first chapel had been completed by August of
the following year, and that two years later the present “sumptuous,
rich, divine” sanctuary was sprinkled with holy water.
Barely was this dry when “the troops of the Liberal party, like the
barbarians at the gates of Rome, threatened the afflicted capital of the
Azuay, bringing inevitable ruin”—such, for example, as the curbing of
the power of the Church—“when the powerful Blessed Virgen del Rocío was
borne from Biblián to beleaguered Cuenca with fitting reverence and in
the midst of the most crowded and pompous procession in the annals of
that Catholic city” ..., whereupon the Liberal troops faded quickly
away, and redoubled the fame of the Virgin and the income of Biblián
parish. The Minister Plenipotentiary of the Vatican has seen fit to
grant a hundred days’ indulgence to whoever visits the sanctuary, “which
indulgence may be applied to souls in Purgatory.” The trip to Biblián is
worth at least that. Lovers of justice will rejoice to know that the
foresighted cura bids fair to enjoy for long years to come his
divine—knowledge of barometers.
It is only a league from Biblián to Azogues; an hour’s stroll along a
slight river through almost a forest of capulí-trees, the wild cherries
hanging in bunches something like the grape, though with only a few ripe
at a time. Then comes a sudden drop into summer; for the climate of
Azogues is soft and bland, with little rain. About the town were
hundreds of tile and thatch-roofed cottages among rich, green
cornfields, spreading far away up one valley and down another; and
beyond these were tawny mountain flanks mottled with every color from
sandy brown to sun-drenched green.
The town of Quicksilver is rather that of “panama” hats. As in San
Pablo, Colombia, men, women and children were braiding them everywhere;
shopkeepers and their clerks made hats in the intervals between
customers, and even while waiting on them; Indian and chola women wove
them as they tramped along the roads with a bundle, and perhaps a child,
on their backs, as European peasant women knit, or those of other parts
of Ecuador spin yarn on their crude spindles. I was assured that every
living person in Azogues knew how to _tejar sombreros_. The fops
themselves were so engaged somewhere out of sight.
The weekly hat-fair of Azogues began on the Friday evening of my
arrival. As the afternoon declined, there streamed in from every point
of the compass, from every hut among the surrounding corn-fields, men,
women, and children, each carrying a newly woven hat, bushy with its
uncut “straw” ends. A dozen agents from Cuenca bought these as they
arrived, never at the price demanded, but after a heated bargaining to
which, in the end, the weavers always meekly yielded. Each buyer seemed
to confine himself to some particular grade or style; this one to coarse
“comunes,” that to large sizes, another to small, and only two or three
to the finer weaves. As he bought them, each agent piled the hats on his
own head until his face was completely hidden behind the protruding
ends, from the depths of which the bargaining went on unabated.
Saturday, however, is the chief market day of Azogues. As I strode out
along the highway to Cuenca next morning, throngs were pouring into the
city from every direction. For a full two hours I passed an endless
stream of Indians as close together as an army in column of squads, the
women carrying on their backs every product known to southern Ecuador.
The men, for the most part, were burdened only by a half-dozen hats, one
atop the other, the untrimmed ends hiding their faces as under shaggy
straw-colored beards. The scene recalled the Great Trunk Road of India,
yet was of vastly less interest and variety. He who had once seen an
Ecuadorian Indian had seen all the procession. A few were weaving the
last strands of their weekly hat as they hurried by. Most “panama” hats
are completed on Friday night or in the gray of Saturday’s dawn; for the
maker, frequently overcome by indolence during the week, must bestir
himself to have his product ready in time for his weekly debauch. Before
he sallies forth to squander his week’s earnings, however, he carefully
lays away enough to purchase another tuft of “straw,” lest he have no
nest-egg from which to hatch next Saturday’s celebration. The procession
had thinned considerably before it occurred to me to count the
passersby, and even then 132 persons passed me in a minute, each and all
bearing something for the market of Azogues. During most of the two
hours the number had easily doubled that, and this was only one of the
many roads and trails leading to this little-known town far from modern
transportation.
[Illustration:
My home in Cuenca, with the Montesinos family. The well-to-do classes
of this city live in unusual comfort for Ecuador, and have the
custom of decorating the walls under the projecting roofs, or those
of the patio, with exotic scenes painted on the wall itself]
[Illustration:
Students of the _Colegio_ of Cuenca, which confers the bachelor degree
at the end of a course somewhat similar to that of our high schools.
Misbehavior is punished by confinement in the upright boxes in the
background]
Every house of southern Ecuador has a cross in the center of its
ridgepole; here they were so elaborate, so covered with devices symbolic
of the religion they represent, that it was only by a stretch of the
imagination that one could make out the cross itself beneath. Late in
the morning I came again to the Azogues river, and a typical bridge of
the Andes,—opportunity to wade thigh-deep for all who travel afoot on
this main highway to southern Ecuador. Not far beyond, there cantered by
me several wholesale buyers from the Azogues market, the saddlebags of
each bulging with a hundred or more hats, stuffed one inside the other.
Mile after mile the broad river-valley of Cuenca is forested with
_capulí_, eucalyptus, and a Gothic-spired willow. Red, tile roofs stand
strikingly forth from deep-green corn-fields, and thousands of fertile,
cultivated acres are shut in by barren, sand-faced hills, though there
are no imposing peaks south of Cañar, and I had seen none snow-clad
since leaving Riobamba. With no census for twenty-five years, the
metropolis of southern Ecuador, third city of the republic, and capital
of the rich province of Azuay, estimates its population at 45,000. Some
have it that this great _cuenca_, six leagues long, gouged out of the
Andes, was the original Tomebamba, birthplace of Huayna Ccápac. Like
Riobamba, the city is flat, its wide, cobbled streets, crossing at right
angles, stretching their chiefly one-story length away in both
directions almost as far as the eye can see. The buildings are almost
all of the sun-baked adobe mud that everywhere dominates the
architecture of the Andes; though some of the “best families” have
striven to decorate their dwellings outwardly with huge mural paintings
on the eaves-protected walls of patio and veranda.