CHAPTER IX

THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU

I had been a full half-year in Ecuador when I turned my attention to the

problem of getting out of it. That disintegration, that tendency for

neighboring countries to hold no communication between each other, at

which the American cannot but marvel in South America, was here in full

evidence. Ecuador seemed as completely cut off from the country just

over her southern boundary as from Europe. The cura of Oña had assured

me that the one way to reach Peru from Loja would be to walk to Puerto

Bolívar on the coast, take a _costero_ to Guayaquil, then a “big

steamer” to Paita or Pacasmayo! Only he who knows South American

geography well can appreciate the unconscious humor of such advice. Even

the rare lojanos who admitted it might be possible to go to Peru “by

land” asserted that I must walk to Piura, which would have been to cross

a burning tropical desert far out of my way, to that well-traveled coast

I was purposely avoiding. The government map of the province of Loja was

as faulty and scanty of information as the American one I carried. It

showed a road leading south from the provincial capital into that

blue-black “labyrinth of mountains,” through the villages of Vilcabamba

and Valladolid; but all the town was agreed that no one could travel in

these modern days along the remnants of the great military highway of

the Incas, crawling along the crest of the Cordillera Oriental through

regions for days utterly uninhabited; and well I knew that Prescott’s

“hanging withe bridges over awful chasms” were sure to be out of repair

in these effeminate Latin-American times, even where they ever existed.

At length a few bold lojanos admitted that I might be able to push on to

the frontier by way of Gonzanamá, though they persisted in calling it a

“terrible undertaking,” even for a man who claimed to have walked from

Quito. That route led far west of a line drawn through Huancabamba to

Cajamarca, and there was nothing to show that it would connect with any

trail beyond the frontier. The best I could do was to hope I might be

able to struggle across to Ayavaca, in Peru, where I could perhaps get

Peruvian information. Then there came a complete division of opinion as

to the road to Gonzanamá, and Loja split into two irreconcilable

factions, the one contending that I should take the road due south from

the west side of the plaza, the other insisting on that due west from

the south side. In the end they all washed their hands of the matter.

The rainy season was nearing its height; sure death lurked along the

bandit-infested frontier; none but amphibious animals and crack-brained

gringos would stir forth from the cozy little city.

On the morning of April twentieth I finally took the south road. It

climbed leisurely over the low interandean _nudo_ shutting in Loja’s

concave valley and, falling in with a hurried mountain stream, raced

with it all day, crossing its branches sometimes by one-log bridges,

more often by knee-deep fords. The few arrieros I met carried rusty old

flint-locks, suggesting the dangers of the frontier; the huts along the

way grew more and more rare, and degenerated from thick adobe walls to

upright reeds carelessly stopped with mud. Beyond Malacatos, among its

banana groves, where I spent the night on a plank bench in the casa

cural of a young French priest who had already lost the habit of

speaking anything but Spanish, the trail climbed relentlessly up through

a scrub-wooded region as uninhabited as an undiscovered sphere. The

afternoon was middle-aged before the world opened out again and gave a

brief glimpse through the trees of Gonzanamá, set out in three rows on a

tiny plain untold depths below. Raging rains had torn and gullied the

further slope until the five miles downward was like descending the

ruins of a giant’s stairway.

Gonzanamá was in fiesta. Hundreds of near-Indians and mestizos, with

very little color in their garments, squatted about the church and casa

cural. They were a people as simple and unsophisticated as children. It

was Viernes Santo (Good Friday), and all the town gathered around to see

me eat the meat a pious old woman served me with a shrug of her

shoulders when I scorned her warning not to “anger the saints,” and

dispersed prophesying an early calamity to me on the road ahead when I

arose apparently uninjured. The son of the teniente político in whose

house I was the honored guest, in so far as their means made honoring

possible, proved to be an old acquaintance, a second-year medical

student of Quito, home on his vacation. He was already the chief

practicing physician of the region. On his journey from the capital he

had performed a score of operations, among them one with a butcher-knife

for abscess of the liver. The room I occupied, which was also his place

of consultation, the family parlor, the municipal offices, and his own

sleeping quarters, was invaded by a constant stream of uncomplaining

infirmities. Outside, the entire population marched in procession until

midnight, attended a two-hour service in the adobe church, and wandered

the three streets with throbbing tomtoms and the gaiety imbibed from

bottles until the eastern horizon paled to gray. The practicing medical

student did not take to his bed until four, and an hour later he arose

to set me on my way, forcing upon me, with regal eloquence, a can of

salmon from “Europe, your own land,” to be opened only on Easter Sunday.

Only those rare mortals who have jaunted cross-country in the Andes can

have any conception of the stone-quarry heights I scaled, the

dense-jungled, bottomless quebradas through which I tore my way, the

brush-tangled streams I forded, and the paths that faded out under my

feet during that day. One of these last had dragged me remorselessly

over every manner of ruggedness when, well on in the afternoon, it

disappeared at the door of a mud-plastered hut. The trails of the Andes

do not run merely from town to town, but from hovel to hovel, like

foraging soldiers, giving the traveler a zigzag course that at least

trebles the distance. I was prowling about this apparently unoccupied

human kennel, striving to pick up the scent again, when I was set upon

by three unusually large, aggressive curs. I did my best to drive them

off with sticks and stones, but when there remained no other alternative

I drew my weapon and sent the largest to his happy hunting-grounds.

Instantly a crashing of the bushes sounded high up in a jungled patch

above, and the angry voice of an unseen countryman screamed in the

dialect of the region: “Scoundrel, you’ll pay me for my dog, caramba!”

Crime is frequently immune so near an international boundary, and I

rounded the hillside cautiously, my cocked revolver in hand; but the

bellowing of the invisible native was soon swallowed up behind me, and

only the oppressive silence of the mountain solitude surrounded me once

more.

It was evident that I should not reach the frontier, perhaps not even

shelter, before dark, when, at some distance off, in a setting of

primeval forest solitude I was astonished to catch sight of a large

hacienda house, a gaunt, rambling building that suggested some starving

creature lost in the wilderness. Almost as I reached it a thunder-storm

broke with a crash, and set a hundred brooks tearing their way down the

swift mountainside on which the building clung. The house was locked and

unoccupied. Two Indian boys of eight and twelve were huddled under the

projecting eaves of a half-ruined outbuilding across the cobbled yard.

For a full hour they answered my every question with “El patrón no

’stá,” uttered in the dull, monotonous voice of some mechanical

instrument. I cajoled them at last to start a fagot-fire on the earth

floor of the outbuilding, and to heat a pot of water into which I

dropped three eggs they were prevailed upon to produce from a

hiding-place in the thatch, and beat the mess up with a stick into a

“caldo de huevos.” The smaller boy finally accepted a bribe to crawl out

through a hole in the wall into the drenching downpour and snatch a

half-dozen _cholos_, ears of green corn, which I roasted, or, more

exactly, burned here and there over the scanty fire.

Prowling about the hacienda house when the storm slackened, I found in

one end a room that was “locked” with a piece of string. According to

the now less speechless boys, it was the hacienda “school,” in which at

certain seasons an employee of the “patrón” taught the male children of

those peons who paid $2 a year tuition. Like an old lumber-room or

garret in appearance, the place was furnished with an ancient desk and a

massive chair, as crude as if they had been carved out of tree-trunks

with dull machetes, and a dozen faded copy-books and medieval inkwells

hung about the walls. The school-master evidently made his home here

during the school season, for in the far end of the room stood a

log-hewn bedstead with a rough board flooring. Dusk was thickening into

wet night when the Indian boys crept up to where I sat on the broad

veranda overlooking a far-reaching, yet indistinct vista of wooded

mountains and valleys, to assure me I should be killed and robbed during

the night.

“We are all so poor here that when a rich man like your Grace passes

everyone tries to rob him,” asserted the older, with unusual eloquence

for his race. “Here all the people are robbers Hace pocos días—it is

only a few days since a traveler was killed down in the valley there.

Last month—”

I glanced over my travel-worn and bespattered form in vain for the

evidences of wealth so patent to other eyes, yet I could not but recall

the carcass of a dog a few miles back, and the golden weight of the band

of my trousers reminded me that several evil-eyed fellows had halted

awhile under the hacienda eaves during the height of the storm and

slipped away somewhere into the night. Moreover, the prophesied

destruction of all Ecuador by earthquake was at hand, for the morrow

would be—if it ever came—Easter Sunday. Plainly, all the signs pointed

to an exciting night.

[Illustration:

The guinea-pigs on which I feasted upon breaking out of the wilderness

on the Peruvian frontier—and the cook. The _cui_ has furnished the

principal meat of the Andean Indians since prehistoric days]

[Illustration:

The Indians of Zaraguro are different, both in type and costume, from

the meeker types of Quito and vicinity]

My small faith in prophecy did not, however, hinder me from making sure

that my revolver was well-oiled and hung on a bed-post. The window of

the school-room, high above the ground, but only a few feet from the

roof of an old ruin, was heavily barred—with bars of wood! The massive

double-leaf plank doors had no lock. The log-like pupils’ bench, topped

by the old colonial teacher’s chair, piled against it, however, promised

racket enough to wake me in case of attempted intrusion. I found several

old sacks to serve as “mattress” and, stripping off my sweat-heavy day

garb, slipped into the woolen union-suit and socks that made up my

sleeping costume. However much I might reduce my load in my indifference

to outward appearance, I would not have been without this complete

change for the night if I had had to make two trips to fetch them. I had

no matches, and the boys had been unable to produce a candle. The rain

had died down and everywhere utter stillness reigned. I rolled up in my

poncho and fell asleep.

A suspicious noise woke me in what was probably a few minutes. Scores of

mice were scampering over the uneven floor, squeaking hilariously. By

the time I had grown accustomed to the sound, I had dozed off again.

From a chaotic dream of crowded and varied incidents I came gradually to

the consciousness of a rattling at the wooden window-bars. I sprang

across the floor and peered out into the unfathomable mountain night;

but I have never been certain whether the sound I heard was the hurrying

of bare feet in soft mud and the tail of a whisper, or the creature of a

startled imagination. With thirty half-perpendicular miles in my legs I

was in no mood to sit up waiting for trouble, and making sure once more

that my revolver was within easy reach, I set the bed-floor creaking

again. My next consciousness was of a dawn bright with the promise of an

unclouded day peering in upon me through the window-bars, and of the

Indian boys whispering through the barricaded door to know whether I was

still alive and ready for the two raw eggs they had collected.

An erratic mountain path that it was not easy to distinguish from the

beds of mountain brooks, and generally deep in mud, clambered without

apparent direction into dripping-wet wooden mountain ranges, sometimes

plunging headlong down through bottomless valleys, sometimes flanking

them in enormous horseshoe curves. How I pushed on all the morning

without getting lost I do not know, for certainly there were a score of

times when there was no plausible excuse for picking the right one of a

half-dozen paths. I sighted several miserable huts, and once a village,

but these were never near the trail; and when I decided to apply for

food at the next one, another of those sudden changes of climate left

the dripping forested mountains behind me, and underfoot was a

desert-dry world which even the hardy dwellers of two decrepit

knock-kneed huts had long since abandoned. In southern Ecuador and

northern Peru the Andes break up and all but disintegrate. There are

still plenty of mountains, but, true to their Latin-American

environment, they lack team-work, and do not stick together sufficiently

to give the traveler footing upon them. Directly before me Ecuador fell

unfathomably away to the Macará, like an auburn hair across a painted

landscape, while beyond, to appearances unattainable, Peru lay piled

pell-mell into the southern sky. It was as if the Carpenter of the

Universe had said: “Let here be the dividing line between two

distrusting nations,” and had smote the earth with His mightiest tool.

Over all the scene was a sun-baked, utterly uninhabited silence, as of

some valley of desolation from which all life had forever fled.

The trail down which I jolted had exploded into a score of barely

visible paths that spread in every direction over the drear, furnace-hot

hills. It seemed as if, once near the frontier, every traveler either

dashed blindly forward to get quickly across it unseen, or lost his

courage and fled back into the interior. I set a due course for the

thread-like river almost directly below. At high noon, my every joint

jarred loose, I stood at last on the extreme edge of Ecuador, the

reddish-brown waters of the Macará lapping at my blistered feet, and on

every hand a blazing, utterly unpeopled desert, with nowhere the vestige

of track or trail.

The river, nearly a quarter-mile wide, swollen by the rains above, raged

swiftly by, a barrier of unknown possibilities. Its surface, covered

everywhere with ripples, suggested that it was less deep than broad. I

piled my baggage on the shore and, stripping to the waist, waded in. The

powerful current all but swept me off my feet and the water quickly

reached my upper garments. I returned to strip entirely, strapped my

revolver about my chest and, picking a stout stick from the undergrowth,

fought my way inch by inch to the opposite shore. But I had to go back

to Ecuador for my possessions. It required five crossings, trusting only

a few of them at a time to the treacherous current, and more than an

hour of unremitting vigilance, before I had landed my bedraggled

belongings at last on the shores of Peru, more forlorn than at the

landing of Pizarro and his fellow-adventurers. By careful calculation,

checked by native record, I was 466 miles south of Quito and 630 from

the Colombian border.

Under some barbed bushes I picked a sand-burr spot as nearly shaded as

could be found along the desert bank, and, having shaved, that I might

enter the new republic in disguise, dipped up a can of coffee-colored

Macará and fell upon the lead-heavy _rapadura_ the Indian boys had sold

me, and the can of salmon which I had preserved for Easter Sunday only

by the exercise of sternest will-power. It was three fourths full of a

pale, watery, soup-like liquid in which floated dejectedly a few small

lumps of what had once long ago been carp or dog-fish. Luckily there was

a difference in the size of the cans, so that I could generally tell

whether I was drinking salmon or the Macará. Then, when I had written up

my notes, I proceeded to turn the meal into a banquet in comparison, by

reading that chapter of Prescott recounting what Pizarro and his

fellow-tramps did not find to eat on their first landing. Being far from

mortal ken in an uncharted crack of the earth, it may be fancied I

should have been eager to hurry on. Somehow, now I had reached Peru,

there came over me a languorous indifference to further advance. The sun

was low before I rose and turned my attention to the task of discovering

my whereabouts.

I found myself gazing along a dreary, sheer mountain-wall, grown only

with sparse, bristling cactus shrubs that refused a hand-hold, seeking a

place to insert my toes and start southward. Leisurely, but decidedly, I

grasped the first possibility, and for an hour or more might have been

seen—had there been eyes to see—playing goat along the face of calcined

hills that fell so abruptly into the racing Macará that they came a

score of times uncomfortably near taking me with them. During that hour

I advanced fully five hundred yards—in a direction I did not care to

go—gathering cactus thorns at every step, and ended down at the edge of

the river again, exactly as far into Peru as when I had begun the

struggle upward an hour before. Here were a few yards of level shore,

and when I had drunk the stream perceptibly lower, I made my way along

until I came upon a labyrinth of cow-paths. That one which most nearly

agreed with my compass turned due east and crawled off through the

bushes, as if fearful of being followed, and left me standing pathless

in a maze of barren, cactus-grown hills. Tearing my way over them by

dead reckoning, now struggling to a thorn-barricaded summit from which

stretched vistas of more thorny-jungled hills, now crashing with

lacerated skin down into another desert valley, where a few wild

jack-asses browsed on the scanty leaves of bristling bushes, I

surmounted again and again the same identical scene of dreary

nothingness as far as the eye could see beyond.

The region was waterless. Evidently I was doomed to suffer that hell of

the desert traveler, an all-night thirst; for dusk was already

thickening. The very leaves of the invariably thorny bushes were

shrivelled and brown. Even the air seemed wholly devoid of moisture.

Then suddenly, as I tore my way to another tangled summit, there sounded

faintly, far off to the right, the sweetest music known to the tropical

wanderer,—the babble of running water. I plunged down through the

militant vegetation to where a clear little river was hurrying down

along a bed several times too large for it to join the parent Macará.

Enormous boulders and tumbled rocks bordered the stream. In the tail of

the day I stumbled along up it, jealous of being separated from it as

from a beloved being; and when night called a halt I stacked my

belongings and spread my poncho on the stony bank with its prattle in my

ears, that it should not escape unheard during the night. The brigands

reputed to infest the frontier had faded away into the nebulous realms

of fiction. I would almost have invited robbery for an opportunity to

inquire my whereabouts. But the stream muffled my movements and the

munching of the lump of crude sugar, and when I had listened awhile to

the singing of the tropical night, and watched the fireflies coming with

their lanterns to look me over, I fell asleep, uncovered and but

slightly dressed, so warm was this sunken chasm of the Andes.

The fate of serving as banquet-board to platoons of tropical insects

robbed me of the sound sleep the lullaby of the stream should have

afforded. Dawn found me emerging from a dip, and when I had disciplined

a stomach that seemed sure to have its plaints unheeded for the rest of

the day at least by eating bit by bit the remaining lump of rapadura, I

took up the serious problem of how to get somewhere else. The ghost of a

path crossed the stream not far above, but soon played the stale joke of

fading to a goat trail, then into thin air, and left me to tear my way

back to the stream. This, I noted, came down more or less from the

south, and I set out along it, determined to push as far up country as

possible. For several hours I had explored my way more or less

southward, crossing the wandering stream every few yards by goat-like

jumps from rock to rock, when I was suddenly startled by the sight of

human beings. A sun-scorched Indian woman in some remnants of garments,

a child astride her back, a boy at her heels, appeared from nowhere in

the boulder-strewn river-bed. With a laconic greeting, she led the way

up-stream. Once she took to the jungled plain beside it, and sent the

boy up a tree to knock down some half-green oranges. Down in the

river-bed again the god of the Incas poured down his perpendicular rays

like molten lead. At length the woman mumbled a few words in a monotone,

pointed out a faint path up the face of the eastern sand cliff, in which

hundreds of screaming parrakeets had their nests, grasped the coin I

held out to her, and glided noiselessly away into the wilderness. The

path disappeared even sooner than I had expected. I clambered up several

more perpendicular miles, only to descend and lose myself in a

jungle-tangled quebrada. Inch by inch I tore my way through the densest

wilderness of briars and brambles, struggling to release the bundle on

my shoulders after I had myself escaped, ever on the watch for snakes

and wild animals. Without real food for days, burning with tropical

thirst, my hand to hand conflict with the jungle was near a dead-lock

when there appeared far above me three scattered Indian huts. A

precipitous ravine, armed to the teeth, lay between. I dived down into

it, to emerge almost an hour afterward, torn, bleeding, and smeared with

earth, at the edge of another and hitherto unseen jungled chasm, backed

by a nearly impassable patch of uncultivated sugar-cane. My legs were as

ropes of sand when I approached an Indian in his hut door, but I set up

a stern outward appearance to suggest what might happen if he refused me

food and drink.

Though expressionless as all his race, he proved unusually tractable,

and soon brought out to where I sat in the shade against the eastern

hut-wall a steaming gourdful of the ordinarily despised yuca, and what

seemed to be very young pork. I had half-emptied the dish before a bone

too tiny for such an origin caused me to look up inquiringly.

“Cui,” said the Indian laconically.

Though I had often heard them squeaking about the earth floors of

wayside huts, it was my first taste of guinea-pig, to this day the chief

meat of the Andean Indian. I think it was not entirely due to my

prolonged fast that I found it more palatable than pork; but small,

distressingly small, even after the Indian’s mate had added several

_choclo tandas_, steaming rolls of crushed green corn wrapped in husks.

The _camino real_ to Ayavaca lay in plain sight across the gully, and

the town, according to the Indian, was but two leagues off. But the

Andean traveler must learn not to let his hopes grow buoyant and

playful, and to remember that two leagues from the lips of an aboriginal

is as apt to mean a hard day’s travel as an hour’s stroll. Never once

did the “royal highway” pause in its climb into the lofty range ahead.

My spirits rose and fell with each opportunity to inquire the distance.

Within two hours I had been answered: “Two leagues,” “six leagues,”

“four hours,” “ya no ’stá lejos,” “Todavía ’stá retiradita,” “Ah, it is

far away, patrón,” and “More than two tambos”—a _tambo_, from the Inca

word for inn, or rest-house, seems to mean about a half day’s travel.

Sunset found me far up on a great bleak tableland, a rolling, broken

world, wherein was no suggestion of a town, stretching away on all sides

as far as the eye could reach even in the transparent air of these

heights.

Beyond, the trail passed close to a large tiled house where a barefoot

man of Indian type, though white of skin as myself, answered my request

for posada by silently spreading a small square of cloth on a log under

the projecting eaves, and went on with his task of mending with an adz

the crooked stick that served him as plow. An enamelled sign on the

house-wall, announcing it an “Estanco de Sal,” was the only outward

evidence that I had left Ecuador behind. In Peru, salt, like tobacco, is

a government monopoly, sold only in licensed shops. Near me several

thinly attired women were balling newly dyed yarn, and children were

sprawling about the ground with goats, chickens, and yellow curs. A

heavy rain was falling. Uncomfortable as was my position, I could do

nothing else than keep it. It was not that the family was indifferent or

hard-hearted, merely that I had reached what, to their apathetic way of

life, was a happy state,—sitting on a log under the eaves, and it would

hardly have been possible to explain to them that something else would

have been needed for perfect comfort. The man was plainly of kindly

temperament, with some education, of a sort, yet I was left to squat on

the log until black night had settled down, without even an opportunity

to remove the outer evidence of the gaunt and strenuous days behind.

Well after dark a half-Indian girl set before me a little wooden box,

covered it with a cloth, and served me an egg soup, followed by a hot

stew of yuca and beans. Gradually the family advanced from

self-conscious silence to Latin garrulousness. By the time I had been

invited inside and given one of several bare divans of reeds set into

the mud walls, the conversation I had sought in vain to set going during

the first hours ran on unchecked until long after I would have been

asleep.

A dense fog enveloping the mountainside turned to rain as I waded away

in the morning. Only by waiting hours could I have gotten anything more

than the “aguita,” a cup of hot water with a bit of rapadura melted in

it, on which I set out for whatever the new day had in store. I had only

half-suspected the height of the world before me. For hours I strained

upward into ever cooler, green mountains, reeking mud underfoot, with

some travel, yet always a sense of solitude, even just over the next

knoll beyond a passing group. Once I met a blind traveler picking his

way quite swiftly with his stick along the slippery, descending mountain

road. By noon I was far up where the rivers are born, fog and clouds

hiding all but the immediate world about me. All the hunger of the past

days seemed to have accumulated, until I felt like some starving beast

of prey, ready to pounce pitilessly upon whatever fell in my way. Just

beyond the _abra_, the cold, fog-swept pass at the summit of the climb,

I came upon a house of considerable size. Half skating, half wading down

to the door, I found an old and a young woman of much Indian blood

squatting in the earth-floored kitchen near a large steaming kettle over

the familiar three-stone cooking-stove of the Andes.

“No hay absolutamente nada,” they replied unfeelingly.

I stepped in, swung off my load, and, showing Peruvian silver, announced

that I had come to stay until they had sold me food. The women sat

motionless, with that passiveness the Indian so often depends upon to

drive off importunate persons. I offered any reasonable price for one of

the chickens wandering about the room. The older woman mumbled that

clumsy, threadbare lie, “Son ajenos” (they belong to someone else). To

my suggestion of roasted plantains she answered that she was ill. When I

inquired the contents of the kettle, both took refuge in the

exasperating silence that is the last weapon of their race. A certain

amount of patience is a virtue; too much is an asininity. I picked the

kettle off the fire, raked from the ashes one of the roasting plantains,

found a tin plate and a wooden spoon stuck behind a sapling beam of the

mud wall, and retired again to the block of wood on which I had been

seated. The pair watched me in stolid silence. When I had filled the

plate the younger one rose to carry off the kettle. I requested her, in

the voice of an ill-tempered general commanding a widely scattered

regiment, to leave it where it was until I had had my fill, and the pair

fled precipitously from the room, flinging over their shoulders some

threat of calling the man of the house. I knew the Andean Indian too

well to fear trouble, but turned my face to the door and loosened my

revolver in its holster. The kettle contained a boiling-hot stew of

beans and corn, sufficient to have fed a dozen men. Six of them might

still have feasted on what was left when I tossed a _sol_, easily four

times the whole kettle’s worth, into the empty plate and marched on down

the reeking mountainside.

Had I but known it, however, I might have avoided resorting to force.

Barely a mile beyond appeared Ayavaca, a dismal and orderless collection

of gloomy adobe, tiled houses, sprawling on the edge of what evidently

would have been a great valley on a clear day, and literally running

with red mud. I skated down into the plaza and, marching into the open

office of the subprefect, sent the bedraggled soldier on guard to

announce my arrival. A gaping group of awkward, mud-bespattered

mountaineers quickly surrounded me, but with them arrived several white

men in modern garb, one of whom announced himself subprefect of the

province of Ayavaca, entirely at my service. I displayed my American and

Ecuadorian documents, requesting him to take official cognizance of my

entry into Peru, and expressed my august desire to rent for a day or two

a room with bed, table, chair and water supply—experience teaches the

Andean traveler to specify in detail—and to be handed the menu card.

“Here you are in your own house,” replied the subprefect, assuming the

attitude of a sovereign receiving credentials from an ambassador; “You

have only to ask.”

A cloth was soon spread on the official government desk and, less than

an hour after requisitioning rations in the mountain hut, I was sitting

with the provincial commander and his assistants before an abundance of

native viands that included even the luxury of wheat bread. For I had

chanced to arrive just in time for the “banquet” offered by the town to

its new ruler in honor of his inauguration.

But alas, I had gained nothing in comfort by coming to Peru. The

available chamber in “my own house” proved to be a den adjoining the

subprefect’s quarters, the provincial harness-and-lamp room. It was only

by much cajolery that I finally got it furnished with a narrow five-foot

plank bench and a pair of ragged horse-blankets. But at least I could

read by night such literature as I chanced to have with me—by depriving

the town of one of its few street-lamps when a soldier came to

distribute them in the evening.

[Illustration:

In the semi-tropical Province of Jaen, in north Peru, sugarcane grows

luxuriantly. Lack of labor and transportation, however, renders it

difficult to make full use of the fertility]

[Illustration:

The sugar that is not turned into _aguardiente_, or native whiskey, is

boiled down in the _trapiche_ into crude brown blocks, variously

known as _panela_, _chancaca_, _rapadura_, _empanisado_, _papelón_,

etc., weighed and wrapped in banana-leaves, selling at about 5 cents

for 3 pounds]

Life was dismal at best in Ayavaca. The cold and clammy downpour

continued unabated. While I developed my exposed films in water supplied

by an eavestrough, the population blocked the doorway of my “room,”

making every exit and entry like boarding a subway train in the rush

hour. There were no real shops in the dreary mountain town, but only

gloomy mud huts where a few products were unofficially sold. The one

sidewalk was taken up by drenched and downcast asses, forcing

pedestrians to splash through the unpaved street. The products of the

soil were not high priced: A guinea-pig—next to children the most

plentiful product of the town—cost five cents; a live chicken, fifteen;

but it was always easier to pay the price than to find the chicken for

sale. Commerce was on the friend-to-friend basis, and he who would

purchase must be well acquainted with the seller, or a protégé of the

all-powerful subprefect. Only liquor was to be had in abundance. The

provincial officials, from my host down to the village school-master,

were more or less intoxicated from mid-morning to midnight. In that

state, frankness protruded through their racial courtesy, and they were

divided in their assertions between the opinion that I was a spy sent

out by my government and the conviction that I had been offered some

colossal prize for covering the world on foot. It was with difficulty

that I avoided sinking into the general intoxication. Whenever two or

three are gathered together in Peru, it is the custom for one of the

group to fill a glass from the inevitable bottle—and Peruvian

aguardiente is no harmless nectar—then ask permission to drink the

health of Tal Fulano on his right. “Muchas gracias,” says Tal Fulano,

and proceeds to drink next—from the same glass—the health of his nearest

companion; and so on round and round the circle to infinity and complete

insobriety. The inexperienced gringo who fails in the etiquette of this

custom, whatever the number of rounds, is looked upon with much the same

contempt as the American who lets his saloon companions “set ’em up”

repeatedly without offering to do so himself; and runs the risk of

having an incensed subprefect, too far gone in frankness, turn upon him

and invite him to make his home elsewhere.

Every minute of the day following my arrival it rained, slackening

somewhat at rare intervals, only to begin again with a roar that sounded

like an avalanche down a nearby mountainside. Twenty-four hours later my

films were as wet as when first hung up. Water and mud invaded even our

minds. Rivers of liquid mud raced down every street and across the

broad, half-cobbled plaza. Not once during the day did the eye catch a

hint of the great valley on the edge of which Ayavaca is perched. The

few residents forced to go out of doors wore _suecos_, wooden clog

overshoes, something like the rainy-day footwear of the Japanese, that

increased the wearer’s height by a half-foot or more. The majority

huddled in their dreary mud houses, crowding into the low doorways to

stare after me when I passed, commenting aloud on my raison d’être.

The postmaster of Ayavaca was a comely young woman of considerable

Indian blood, her office scattered promiscuously about the baked

mud-dwelling of her parents. I had concluded to mail the films and

notebooks on hand, rather than risk their loss or destruction in what

promised to be difficult going ahead, and having ransacked the town for

the necessary wrapping paper, and tied the package with government tape,

I presented it for registry. It seemed better to make a clear breast of

the matter than to risk the Pandoric curiosity of the Ayavaca postal

system, and I explained that, while the contents was of vast value to me

and the future history of Peru, it was of none whatever to anyone else.

Stamps were at length found in the right-hand drawer of the hand

sewing-machine on the earth floor, a native ink was brewed over the

fagot-fire in the kitchen for the imprinting of the official seal, dug

out from a chest of stockings and feminine small-clothes, and after a

social call of more than an hour’s duration I shook hands with the

entire family, twice with the post-mistress herself, and left with her

repeated reassurance ringing in my ears:

“No tenga cuidado—lose no sleep over it, señor; it will go safely to

Europe and the United States without being lost.”

Some time after dark, the rain having at last left off with sullen

grace, I was limbering up my legs for an early start in the morning when

I chanced to pass the _correo_. The door was closed; but this was one of

the few houses of Ayavaca boasting a window—though without glass,

unknown to most towns of the Andes—barricaded with wooden bars. Inside,

gathered about an apathetic candle, sat the post-mistress and her entire

family, the open package in her lap—passing my films from hand to hand

and puzzling in vain over my notebooks, with a leisureliness that showed

they had settled down to make the most of a long evening’s

entertainment. My first impulse to snatch open the door was succeeded by

reflection. Knowing the extreme sensibility of these Andean townsmen, I

suspected that, were my discovery known to her, the post-mistress would

be more than apt, out of pique, to lose or destroy the cause of her

undoing before I could recover them from government possession. I

swallowed the impulse and splashed on through the night.

Months afterward I had word that the package reached the addressee in

perfect condition, though in disorder.

With little more information than that the next town I must hunt out of

the wilderness was Huancabamba, I slid down the red slopes from Ayavaca,

now and then glancing back to wonder what excuse even Spaniards could

have considered sufficient to found a town in such a location. The

subprefect, far from providing the Indian guide and carrier he had so

often promised in his cups, had bade me “adiós” from his bed, with the

cheering assurance that I was bound soon to lose my way and perish. My

load was several pounds heavier than on my arrival; for I had added to

it not only a block of rapadura and seventeen loaves of bread—Ayavaca

size—but a huge chunk of fresh beef. Even my money had become a burden

again, for instead of the bills of Ecuador my “road-change” must now be

carried in silver. The semi-monthly daily of Ayavaca had appeared the

evening before with an astonishing history of the town’s distinguished

guest, honoring me with the title of “that intrepid explorer,” a

designation which the subprefect made use of in his official orders to

his subordinates along the way, and which, copied from one document to

another, was destined to cling to me all the length of Peru. My eye

never fell upon it that I did not recall the native dishes I was so

often forced to delve into during the journey.

Gibbon asserts that the civilization of a country may best be gaged by

the number and condition of its roads. If so, northern Peru is sunk in

the depths of barbarism. The Incas swung bridges of withes along their

great military highways, the Spaniards built some of stone; the modern

inhabitants of this region merely let their roads grow up of themselves,

like brambles in an uncultivated field. At a mountain summit, beyond a

raging mountain current in which I all but lost my possessions, immense

gray curtains of fog left me only instinct and my compass by which to

choose between the faint sandy paths that split and forked at every

opportunity. The trail I happened to take zigzagged quickly down into

the bed of a snarling mountain stream between sheer rock walls, choked

with tough, thorny undergrowth, along which it sprang back and forth

from rock to rock, dragging me in pursuit through an endless tangle of

vegetation, often by vaulted tunnels through which I could only tear my

way by creeping on all fours. By dusk it had widened sufficiently to

give the path foothold along one bank, and when darkness brought me to a

halt, I found space under a scraggly tree to spread my poncho. In my

pack the seventeen loaves of bread had amalgamated with the crude sugar

and formed a coating about the boiled beef. I stowed away in my hat, for

safekeeping, the few more or less whole loaves, and fell upon the pulp

that remained. It was a dry meal, for all the rain. Though the stream

close below sounded tantalizingly in my ears all the night through, an

impenetrable jungle cut me off from it, and only the few wild lemons I

had picked along the way ministered to the after-thirst of a long day’s

tramp.

The pleasure of dressing at dawn in garments still dripping wet was

enhanced by the discovery that a colony of red ants, appointing a

night-shift, had formed a bread-line from my hat to their neighboring

village and reduced me to a breakfast of river water where the trail

again touched the stream a mile beyond. Three solitary hours later I

came upon a miserable little shack of open-work reeds and upright poles

topped by thatch. On the ground beside it a slatternly female was

cooking for several horsemen. Two rivers ahead were reported greatly

swollen, and I accepted an invitation to wait and accompany a youth

bound for his employer’s hacienda. Wait I did, a full three hours, amid

the usual fauna of an Andean hut, while the travelers took final leave

of each other a score of times in as many rounds of _aguardiente de

caña_, a native concoction of distilled sugarcane, each swallow of which

is to an ordinary mortal not unlike a sudden blow on the head with a

spiked war-club. In the end, a calabash of yuca stew rewarded my

patience. The youth staggered aboard his shaggy horse at last and we

descended quickly into a dense, damp-hot valley with a broad, swift

river. I mounted the horse’s rump to cross two arms of the stream and a

stretch of swamp between, in constant peril of tobogganing down the

animal’s tail, my load dragging heavily from my shoulders. The moment I

slipped off on dry land, the youth, still distinctly under the influence

of concentrated sugar-cane, demanded a “peseta” for his services. Long,

hot hours we marched along thick-jungled river beds in narrow, fertile

valleys enclosed by sterile, though green-tinted mountainsides bristling

with cactus. The trail panted frequently over a steep desert hillock,

the crupper of the animal saving me much time in disrobing at a dozen

smaller brooks, between which my companion rode at my heels in gloomy

silence. At a larger stream he collected a _real_ and announced that the

fee for crossing a river ahead would be another “peseta.” As the effects

of permitting the unbridled drinking of his health wore off, he recalled

the _fiambre_ in his saddle-bags, and paused to offer me, with the

patronizing air befitting a horseman toward a man afoot, a handful of

parched corn and a rag of sun-dried beef. Gradually he became less

taciturn, then garrulous and gay. He was by no means a peon, being

assistant mayordomo of the estate toward which we were headed, and even

wore shoes. Yet when I photographed him, it required considerable

explanation to give him any clear conception of what the result would be

of “pointing the foolish little machine” at him.

“Y su aposento, donde está?” (Where is your lodging—_i.e._, native

land?) he inquired.

When I had answered, he rode fully ten minutes in puzzled silence. Then

he called out over his shoulder:

“Y ese país suyo, ese Esta’os Uni’os, es pueblo ó hacienda?” (That

country of yours, is it a village or a plantation?)

The world, as he knew it—and his knowledge was on a par with that of

thousands of dwellers in the Andes—was made up of those two divisions.

We left a curving river, labored over a divide, and descended to the

Aranza, a furlong wide, roaring angrily. At sight of it the youth

regretted the bargain he had made, fearing his horse could not breast

the swift current under the weight of both of us, and suggested that I

strip and swim, letting him carry my clothing and bundle. There seemed

to be no way to avoid risking the wealth in my trousers; but these

simple countrymen of the Andes are commonly more reliable in matters of

trust than appearances suggest, and a well-directed bullet would avert

any tendency to decamp. I strapped my revolver about my head and plunged

in for a ten-minute struggle with the current, but it was not without

relief that I landed beside the exhausted horse and regained my

possessions. We were already within the territory of the “Hacienda San

Pablo,” though still miles from the dwelling. On all sides, as far as

the eye could strain, the river valley and the mountains above were

unbroken wilderness, utterly uninhabited. Yet the region was rich in

produce. The _chirimoya_, that vegetable icecream of the tropics, hung

in car-loads from the trees; small, but compact and juicy wild lemons,

carpeted the trail. Parrots and screaming bands of parrakeets flitted in

and out of guayaba and sapote trees; here and there the dense-green dome

of a mango tree shouldered its way up through its punier fellows of the

forest.

It was nearing dusk, and I was near exhaustion under my load and the

pitiless tropical sun of seven unbroken hours of swift, rough tramping,

when my companion pointed out far ahead, where the wall of the Central

Cordillera shut off the horizon, a red dot in the green immensity,—the

hacienda house. Black night had fallen when we reached the

half-constructed building, and we stumbled on for some time more before

we came upon the rambling thatched ruin in which the owner still lived.

He was Eduardo Medina, once a law student in the University of San

Marcos of Lima, a sane, well-read, earnest man, contrasting strangely

with the uncouth countrymen about him. His wife, a handsome limeña, was

the first woman of education I had so far seen in rural South America.

This extraordinary Latin-American couple, noting the swarms of lawyers

that vegetate in provincial capitals, had renounced the uninspiring

fleshpots of the cities, and purchasing for a song some twenty-five

square leagues of semi-tropical solitude, had come to start life anew in

this wilderness with the shaggy world piled up on all sides, and set

their race a much needed example. Here was such a welcome as the

wilderness traveler often dreams, but seldom attains. Not merely did

they offer the accommodation Andean custom requires all hacendados to

furnish travelers, each according to his caste, but their hospitality

was genuine and active. The adobe lean-to into which I was led, for the

astonishing Andean purpose of “washing up before supper,” had not only a

real bed, mattress and all, on springs of split bamboo, but the first

sheets and pillows and suggestion of civilized comfort I had seen in

Peru. It did not require the reminder that the morrow was Sunday, and

Medina’s assertion that they were famished for civilized conversation,

to make me accept his invitation to prolong my stay. My companion of the

day never recovered from his astonishment at seeing the “patrón” seat at

his own table and treat as an equal a man who traveled on foot; and as

often as I caught his eye among the group that hovered about the door

all the evening, he gazed at me in a manner that seemed to implore me

not to mention the reals he had collected under the impression that I

was a mere man, and not a caballero.

Fertile tracts of valleys and mountains twenty-five miles square can be

bought in this section of Peru for $250. Yet this does not mean that

wealth awaits the purchaser. “Faltan brazos,” as the Peruvian puts it;

“arms” are lacking. The scanty population has no stimulus to exertion in

a region where nature supplies their simple wants almost without labor,

and to Medina life was a constant struggle for employees. In days of

fiesta, when money was needed to pay the priest or celebrate a festival,

many came to contract their services and accept an “advance,” but with

no representative of government at hand, there was no means of forcing

them to do the work for which they had been prepaid. Some labored

languidly and intermittently a few weeks a year, none more than half the

days that were not sacred to some festival and general drunkenness. On

the hacienda were a scattered score of _arrendatarios_, native families

who rent a patch of ground on which to build a hut and plant a bit of

yuca and corn, with the right to pasture a few cattle on the estate, all

for a yearly rental of $2, which was commonly as hard to collect as

labor. The almost total lack of transportation gave no market for any

excess of produce, and here was the extraordinary case of a

university-educated man and wife owning what would be with us an entire

county, living a hand-to-mouth existence very little above abject

poverty. Oranges, which the owner asserted he would be only too happy to

sell at five cents a hundred, rotted under the trees faster than the

hogs could eat them; mangoes lay where they fell, and the splendid

chirimoya was a mere worthless wild fruit no one took the trouble to

gather, except as personal appetite prompted. The sugarcane they

succeeded in raising they were glad to get any price for, after it had

been squeezed in _trapiches_, crude presses run by hand, and the

_guarapo_ boiled down into blocks of rapadura and wrapped in banana

leaves. Most of it was turned into aguardiente that could occasionally

be sent to town.

My postal experience in Ayavaca recalled to Medina one of his own.

Before they left Lima to take up their newly acquired residence, the

couple had found there were two post-offices, at Ayavaca and Pacaipampa,

about equal distance from it,—two days on muleback. It chanced that

Señora Medina had ordered her “Modas Femininas” sent to Ayavaca, while

her husband gave Pacaipampa as his address to the subscription

department of the daily “El Comercio.” After the first few numbers only

one or two copies of the newspaper adorned the weekly mail-bag of the

hacienda. La señora also noted that she was not receiving her fashion

journal regularly. The hacendado started an investigation. He found that

the comely post-mistress of Ayavaca had recently acquired a considerable

reputation as an authority on up-to-date fashions. In Pacaipampa he

discovered that the government mail service was in the hands of an old

man unusually well versed in the politics of the day. Husband and wife

wrote to Lima ordering “El Comercio” sent to Ayavaca and the “Modas

Femininas” by way of Pacaipampa. Since then both had received their

respective journals as regularly as transportation conditions in these

primitive regions made reasonable.

“You have no inconvenience in riding?” asked my host, as we set out on

horseback to visit the estate on Sunday.

“Not at all, señor.”

“Then I shall furnish you a mount to Huancabamba,” he announced.

I declined. It seemed foolish to besmirch my long, unbroken record

afoot. But he insisted on at least sending a peon to carry my baggage

and to serve as “guide,” and actually kept his promise!

“It dawned raining,” as they say in the Andes, but the peon assigned the

task, because his rent was in arrears, was already astride a good

saddle-horse when I stepped out into the storm. Another debtor had been

ordered to furnish a boiled chicken, the cook, a bag of rice. With few

respites we zigzagged all day up into the Cordillera Central, ever

vaster views of the valleys about San Pablo opening out, though

advancing little except upward. Relieved of my load I seemed to have

wings, and in the steeper places had often to wait for the horseman.

Barely a hut and not a traveler did we pass during a day which ended

with a perpendicular climb to a miserable mud hovel on a high and wintry

pampa. Alone, accommodation might have been refused me, but my companion

was distantly related to the two crabbed females who, with their tawny

flock of half-naked children, existed in this cheerless spot, and I was

passively suffered to remain. In their mud den, where the usual

fagot-fire was blazing under an ancient and enormous kettle set on three

stones, I sat down on a sort of short trough with six-inch legs, one of

the “chairs” of this region, when any exist, and some time later we were

served in bowls made of gourds a boiling-hot mixture of potatoes,

_habas_, and some mountain mystery. Still unsatisfied, I drew out my bag

of rice. Válgame Diós if that lazy cook of the “Hacienda San Pablo” had

not delivered it to me uncooked! I followed the custom of the place and

circumstances by presenting the women with enough of the grain to feed

her entire family for a day or two, then asked that a bowlful be cooked

for me.

“Now hay manteca—there is no lard,” mumbled one of the females.

“Eureka!” I cried, “Then for once I can have it cooked as it should be.”

“There is no other kettle,” said the woman in a faint monotone,

projecting her lips toward that containing the stew.

[Illustration:

The _teniente-gobernador_, or “lieutenant-governor,” of Jaen, whose

duty it was, at sight of my official papers, to find me lodging,

food, pasture, and make himself generally useful]

[Illustration:

The two of us. “Cleopatra” and I in the hungry jungles of Jaen some

forty-eight hours after the last glimpse of a human being]

“I will wait until it is empty,” I replied cheerfully.

With no other excuse to offer, she took refuge in silence. An hour

passed before I broke it again.

“And the rice, señora,” I suggested.

“No hay manteca,” she repeated in the same dull monotone, and the

conversation went on again around the same vicious circle. For more than

an hour I coaxed and cajoled, for a single harsh or loud word to these

unwashed mountain-dwellers can undo a day’s careful pleading. As

constant dripping of water in time wears away even stone, so my

incessant return to the subject at length became even more painful than

the stirring from their customary lethargy. The younger female rose

languidly and took from the wall in a dark corner a perfectly sound

kettle just suited to the purpose and, after deftly stealing about half

of it, set to boiling what I had kept for myself.

The adjoining den had not only an earth floor, but the hillside had not

been levelled before building. The peon spread a saddle-blanket and one

of his own ponchos for me as solicitously as a valet preparing his

master’s quarters; yet in as impersonal a manner as he might have herded

his sheep into their corral for the night. With this protection, and my

own garments wrapped about my head, I passed a tolerable night,

virtually on the ridge of the central range of the Andes. My peon, the

two women, several children, two half-Indian youths who had arrived long

after dark, at least six dogs, and a score of guinea-pigs all slept in

the same room—all, that is, except the _cuis_, which spent most of it

squeaking about in the dark, and now and then running over my prostrate

form.

On the bleak, rolling pampa of sear yellow bunch-grass, dotted by a few

shaggy wild cattle, across which howled wintry winds, I was not

uncomfortable afoot; but the peon from the “tierra caliente” of his

native valley was blue-lipped and chattering with cold, even with his

head through several heavy blankets and a scarf about his face. I was

passing back over the Cordillera Central for the first time since Hays

and I had traversed it by the Quindío pass. Not far below the arctic

summit we sighted the Huancabamba river, born a few leagues to the

north, its broad, swift-sloping valley-walls spotted with little green

_chacras_, and gradually dropped into summer again. Trees grew up about

us, birds began once more to sing, cultivated fields shut in by cactus

hedges bordered the trail. When at last we sighted the town of

Huancabamba from far off, the peon halted and asked to be allowed to

turn back. He seemed to fancy his services had been chiefly those of

“guide,” instead of baggage-carrier. I refused to take up my burden

again merely for what I took to be a whim to be back lolling in the

shade of his own mango tree. It was not until later that I realized

that, like most country youths of his class in Peru, he dreaded entering

the provincial capital, lest he be held and forced to serve in the army.

The swift Huancabamba river we crossed astride the peon’s horse, though

not both at a time. When I had dismounted on the further bank, my

companion called the animal back by a peculiar sound, half whistle, half

cluck, and not long afterward we clattered into the famous city of

Huancabamba. Once dismissed, the peon left town at once, though darkness

was already at hand. Medina had insisted that I pay him nothing, as he

owed the hacienda more than two years’ rent—namely, nearly four dollars.

On the map Huancabamba seems of about the size and importance of

Philadelphia; on the ground it is a moribund mud village in a

half-sterile hollow between barren, towering mountains. Historically it

is famous. Prescott assures us that “Guancabamba was large, populous and

well-built, many of its houses of solid stone. A river which passed

through the town had a bridge over which ran a fine Inca highroad.” How

times do change! Officially, to be sure, it is still a city; but a

“city” in this region is a place where bread is made, as those who wear

shoes are white, and those who wear bayeta are cholos or Indians.

Picturesqueness of costume there was none, this having disappeared near

Cuenca along with the Quichua tongue. Indians of pure race and

distinctive garb had been rare south of Zaraguro; here was still plenty

of Indian blood, but only in the veins of “civilized” mestizos. It is

not far from the watershed of the Andes. The town of Huarmaca, just up

on the ridge of the Cordillera above, has a church one side of the roof

of which sends its waters to the Pacific, and the other to the Atlantic.

There was no suggestion of hotel. The subprefect studied my papers in

great curiosity, with half the town looking over his shoulder, before he

answered my most important query with:

“Ah, it is impossible to-day, on such short notice. But to-morrow—”

“I need it to-day,” I protested, knowing it was only a question of

insisting, to overcome the racial apathy.

“Then I will give you _my_ bed and sleep on the floor!” cried the

subprefect.

In that pompous moment, with a large delegation of huancabambinos

looking on, no doubt he would, but such Andean self-sacrifice quickly

fades away, once the limelight is switched off.

“I prefer to rent a room of my own,” I persisted.

“Ah, _now_ that is impossible. But to-morrow—”

I bowed my way out, throwing over my shoulder the information that I

would go down to the bank of the river and sleep on the ground. It would

be softer, and there were bathing facilities. Horror spread over all

faces. A man, an estranjero who came with the recommendations of great

governments! Impossible! The city of Huancabamba could not permit it!

When word of it reached the outside world...! Soldiers were sent

scurrying in all directions—and two minutes later one of them found a

room for rent in the home of one of the “best families,” exactly across

the street from the subprefectura.

It can hardly be that I was the first stranger to enter Huancabamba

since Hernando de Soto was sent by Pizarro to reconnoiter the region

after the capture of the Inca. Yet one might have fancied so. Whether it

was due to some canine sense of smell we of less favored lands lack, I

never succeeded in getting within ten yards of a huancabambino before he

was staring at me with bulging eyes and hanging jaw, all work, movement,

and even conversation ceasing as I drew near. If I passed behind a group

on a street corner, their necks went round with one accord, like those

of owls, and they stared after me in unbroken silence as long as I

remained in sight. Men and women, well-dressed and outwardly

intelligent, dodged back into their house or shop as I appeared, to call

wife or children as they might for a passing circus parade. The few

sidewalks were really house verandas, sometimes roofed, and on all

ordinary occasions pedestrians strolled along the center of the street.

Now there was a stranger in town, virtually all took pains to cross to

my side of the way, and though it required a distinct exertion to climb

up to and down from this few yards of raised sidewalk, every inhabitant

seemed to find some excuse every few minutes to wander by my door at a

snail’s pace in his noiseless bare feet. If I began any species of

activity,—to write, load my kodak, read, or even to wash my hands, the

human stream was clogged like a log-raft against a snag and the

population stacked up about my door until a well-aimed anything broke

the keystone log, and gave me again for a moment light and air. It was

the hospitable huancabambino custom to give me greeting, even when I was

busy well inside the room, and to repeat the phrase in a louder and

louder voice until I acknowledged it. Those few who passed on the

further side of the street never failed to shout “Buenos días” across at

me, though they might have looked in upon me a bare two minutes before.

Now and then a more friendly member of society wandered complacently

into the room, to peer over my shoulder, or to handle with the innocence

of a three-year old child such of my possessions as took his fancy. Some

drifted in even at night, long after I had retired, for, there being no

other opening, to have closed the door would have been to smother.

In the far recesses of the Andes the simplest matter may become complex.

My flannel road-shirt had at last succumbed to its varied hardships.

Now, buying a shirt may seem too trivial an experience to be worthy of

mention; in the wilds of Peru it is a transaction of deep importance.

Huancabamba is overstocked with cloth-shops; but what Latin-American

shopkeepers honestly believe a “very heavy shirt” would fall to pieces

in three days under the exertions of a society darling. One garment

promising moderate endurance I did find, but the combined jangling of

all the bells of Quito was as nothing compared to its color scheme.

Beside it the good old American flag would have looked dull and

colorless. I set out to find a woman willing to make a new shirt on the

pattern of the old. Most of them did not wish to; most of the others

were too tired; two or three had less commonplace reasons, such as being

in mourning, or having a pan to wash before Sunday, or a son to be

married next week, or not having gone to confession recently. Toward

noon I caught a shoemaker’s wife unawares, and had her promise to

undertake the task before she could think of a plausible excuse. She

thought a just price, I to furnish the cloth, would be twenty cents!

I canvassed the shops for heavy khaki. The stoutest on sale was flimsy

as a chorus-girl’s bodice, its color plainly as evanescent as her

complexion. I chose at last from a bolt of cloth designed for afternoon

trousers, adding a spool of the strongest thread to be had. Experience

had long since taught me that the tailors of Latin America use a thread

so fine that a deep breath is almost sure to burst a seam or two. I

delivered the materials and retired for a belated almuerzo in the mud

hut where the daily cow sacrificed to Huancabamba’s appetite is sold in

half-_real_ nibbles. Now and then an urchin entered, clutching a nickel

in one besmeared fist, to say in the uninflected monotone of a “piece”

learned in school:

“Media carne, media vuelta,” (2 cents worth of meat, 2 cents change), to

which the answer was almost sure to be:

“No hay vuelta” (there is no change), whereupon the emissary wandered

homeward still clutching the coin, and the family evidently passed

another meatless day.

Barely had I returned to my room when a fever fell upon me. At the

height of the attack, when every movement was a mighty effort and every

motionless moment an hour of deep enjoyment, an urchin appeared with the

spool of thread I had provided, saying it was heavier than Huancabamba

was accustomed to use and that I must supply a spool of No. 60. I

reached for the brick that held back one of the leaves of the door, and

he disappeared from my field of vision. An hour later he came back to

report that the seamstress had broken a needle and refused to risk

another. I suspended him by as much of a garment as he wore long enough

to promise to cut off his ears, to have the subprefect put the

seamstress in prison, and to bring down another earthquake upon

Huancabamba unless the contract solemnly entered into was fulfilled

before sundown; and I was not sharp-eyed enough to distinguish his

little brown legs one from the other as he sped back to the zapatería.

At dusk the shirt was delivered, an exact copy of the original, which

was bequeathed to the miniature messenger.

A diet chiefly of quinine soon had me ready for the road again. My load

was more burdensome than ever. A long stretch of wilderness ahead

required the carrying of many pounds of food, and on down the valley of

the Huancabamba I wobbled like an octogenarian. Most of the day lay

across a desert of mighty broken chasms, leprous-dry under the blazing

sun, scarred, gashed, and split with scores of lines, almost any of

which might have been mistaken for the trail. Somehow I chanced to pick

the right one and brought up at dusk at the hut of Alexandro Bobbío, far

up the chasm of a small tributary.

Bobbío was a wiry man of fifty, son of an Italian, though officially a

Peruvian, speaking only Spanish, but well-read, and of infinitely more

industry and initiative than the natives. Unlike our own immigrants,

those to South America retain for generations a distinct evidence of

their origin; to the society about them they are still known as “hijos

de italiano, alemán, inglés,” and the like, and the traveler is almost

certain to find the man thus designated of far more worth than his

neighbors, though commonly inferior to the race of his fathers. Bobbío

was a government employee, stationed here in his thatched hut to check

the cargoes of leaf tobacco that “salen pa’ fuera,” or pass out of Jaen

province in large quantities for Huancabamba and the coast in

leather-wrapped bundles on horses, mules, and cattle. Like several of

Europe, the Peruvian government retains the monopoly of tobacco. For an

official load of 69 kilograms it pays $10, and in some remote districts

only $8.50. Each kilo produces twenty packages of cigarettes, selling

for thirty centavos each; in other words the 69 kilos bring the

government $208 gold. This system is directly inherited from Spain and

colonial days. Stevenson found that the King purchased tobacco at three

reals (three-eighths of a dollar), and sold it at $2, though much was

spent on _fiscales_. It remained for republican Peru to open a truly

enormous gulf between producer and consumer.

“I wish I could buy a burro, even a half-size one,” I sighed, half to

myself, as I was straightening up under my burden next morning. Had he

been an unalloyed Latin-American, Bobbío would have shrugged his

shoulders and murmured something about life being a sad matter at best.

Instead, he cried “Why didn’t you say so?” and, stepping out into the

sunshine flooding the arid world like a shower of gold, waved his arms

in some local code of wigwagging at a hut hung high up on the desert

hillside across the “river.” Not long after there drifted up before the

corredor where we sat in the shade a sun-scorched mestizo youth leading

a small donkey, shaggy as a bear just emerging from his winter’s den. It

proved to be a female of the species, about sweet sixteen as donkeys go,

and due in the years to come to double in size; moreover, she was

_chúcaro_, in other words had never yet contributed to the labor of the

world, and appeared to the youth to be worth twelve _soles_. There

ensued the usual verbal skirmish before we compromised at ten. Clipping

an effigy of the King of England from my waist-band, I held it out to

the mestizo. He shied at it like a colt at a flying newspaper. The

Incas, we are told, forbade the common people to possess gold. Whether

it is due to that prohibition, passed down by tradition to the present

day, or to mere contrariness, the countrymen of the Andes still insist

on doing their transactions in silver. Indeed, “plata” is the most

common word for money in all the region. Bobbío had no prejudice against

gold, however, and taking ten silver “cartwheels” from a hairy cowhide

chest in a far corner of his hut, he dropped them into the youth’s

outspread hands, and the latter sped away up the sun-flooded hillside to

his hovel, leaving me in possession of a No. 4 size donkey and the

ancient hawser with which it was moored to a post of Bobbío’s dwelling.

The first necessity was a name for the animal. Her startling beauty

against the background of the Egyptian landscape made “Cleopatra”

obvious. Then came the problem of the furniture without which no Andean

donkey will carry even a man’s load. Bobbío donated an old grain-sack.

Over this went my poncho. Thirty centavos seemed a just price for a

_corona_, a donkey “saddle” of wood of saw-buck shape. For another sol I

became the legal possessor of a large and stout, if rather aged, pair of

_alforjas_, or cloth saddle-bags, in which my forty pounds could be

evenly balanced. Around these, donkey and all, Bobbío wound with the

intricacy of long experience several yards of rope, and at blazing ten I

was off at last—to have my entire worldly possessions immediately dash

away up the hillside into a jungle.

When they had been recovered, a nephew of Bobbío volunteered to pilot my

new ship out of harbor. With the tow-rope and a cudgel in hand he got

the craft under way, then gradually the cudgel sufficed both as rudder

and throttle. A mile from home he turned the command over to me and away

we went alone up the narrowing valley into the Huazcaray range,

“Cleopatra” waltzing ahead of me up the slope like a school-girl on a

holiday. It seemed ridiculous that any traveler with a donkey should

ever have had difficulties—unless he expected a bag filled even in the

middle to lie contentedly on the animal’s back. With only a slight shift

to one side or the other every hour or two the alforjas rode like a

cavalryman.

We zigzagged high over a range, coming out above what was evidently an

immense valley, heaped full of white clouds as the basket of a

plantation-picker with cotton, and began to go swiftly down through

reddish mud ruts deeper than “Cleopatra” was high. Then we picked up the

Tamborapo river near its source, and descended along a grassy valley

walled by bushy hillsides.

In this region of northern Peru, the Andes break down into great

sweltering gorges and tropical wildernesses instead of the unbroken high

pampas the range seems to promise. The traveler so foolish as to journey

through it catches the valley of a river as it tears its way across the

jungled mountain wilderness, follows it as far as possible, then fights

his way across a divide, to descend or ascend another stream. Neither

waterway is likely to run in anything like the direction he would go,

but by tacking like a ship against a head wind he advances bit by bit,

with an exertion out of all proportion to the actual progress, toward

the nebulous goal he has set himself. The distance between two hamlets a

hundred miles apart is often three hundred miles in this labyrinthian

province of Jaen, officially a province of Peru, but still disputed by

Ecuador, as the boundary was between Atahuallpa and Huascar at the

coming of the Spaniards. So low is the region that the local expression

for entering “la Provincia,” as Jaen is known locally, is “Va pa’

dentro—to go down inside,” as might be designated the entrance into the

realms of the unrighteous departed.

Perfection, alas, is not of this world. Now that I might have added a

plentiful supply of foodstuffs to my pack without increasing my

burdens—for “Cleopatra” had been sold under a guarantee to carry a

hundred pounds—I had reached a section of the world where food is under

no circumstances for sale. Furthermore, with a thousand miles of road

just suited to donkeys behind me, it must be my fortune the morning

after at last acquiring one to strike the worst possible road for them.

Strictly speaking, there was no road; but for certain spaces trees

enough had been felled to make passage through the forest possible, and

the rainy season and tobacco-trains had combined to turn these clearings

into unbroken miles of _camelones_, those corduroy-like ridges of hard

earth with a coating of slippery mud, alternating with ditches of liquid

mud from two to three feet deep. A pedestrian, even with forty pounds on

his back, may trip along the tops of these as blithely as a youthful

opera company counting the ties from Red Cloud to Chicago. But to

attempt to drive a half-grown jackass, laden with all the driver’s

earthly possessions in far from waterproof cloth sacks, through mile

after monotonous mile of them, under an endless tropical downpour, is an

experience to stir the most blazé and world-weary soul. Those steps at

which the uncomplaining little brute did not slip off into the ditch

behind the ridge on which she had set her feet were those in which she

fell with a still more far-reaching splash into the ditch ahead. Usually

each pair of feet was divided in its allegiance, and reduced the animal

to that artistic performance popularly known in pseudo-histrionic

circles as “splitting the splits.” More times than I could have counted,

“Cleopatra” fell down lengthwise, crosswise, front-wise, and hind-wise,

on her head, on the side of her neck, on her bedraggled tail, on every

part of a donkey known to anatomy, showering me with mud from the crown

of my hat to my inundated boots, soaking my possessions in seas of mud,

now and then frankly lying down in despair, as often attempting to shirk

her just portion of this world’s troubles by dashing into the

impenetrable dripping jungle and smashing my maltreated belongings

against the trees. From time to time she became hopelessly entangled

with a train of pack-animals “going outside,” forcing me to wade in and

lift her bodily, pack and all, out of some slough above which little

more than her drooping ears were visible. In short, when this “royal

highway” waded across the barnyard of the “Hacienda Charapé,” it did not

require a particularly sincere invitation to cause me to spend the rest

of the day there.

[Illustration:

The main street of the great provincial capital of Jaen, with the

flagpole to which I tied “Cleopatra” before the official residence

of the local governor]

[Illustration:

The government “ferry” across the Huancabamba, with the _balseros_

imbibing the last Dutch courage before attempting to set the

_chasqui_, or mail-man, and me, with our baggage, across the

flood-swollen stream]

The hacendados of this region, owning whole ranges of mountains and

valleys, live scarcely better than the Indians in their hovels. Both

father and son in this case wore shoes and read the Lima newspapers—from

a month to six weeks old—yet their earth-floored and walled dining-room

swarmed with unspeakably dirty peon children, and pigs all but uprooted

the table as we ate. The slatternly female cooking over three stones in

an adjoining sty served us boiled rice mixed with cubes of pork in a

single bowl from which we all helped ourselves indifferently with spoon

or fingers. Father and son slept on a sort of home-made table covered

with a pair of ragged blankets in a mud den overrun by domestic animals

and littered with all the noisome odds and ends of a South American

harness-room. Yet their speech was as redundant with formalities as that

of a Spanish cavalier in the king’s court.

Though I knew there was a long, foodless, and uninhabited region ahead,

I could add but little to “Cleopatra’s” nominal load in preparation for

it, for to offer to _buy_ supplies would have been considered an insult

to my hosts equal to an attempt to pay for my accommodation.

_Costumbre_, inbred for long generations, forces these rural hacendados

of Peru to consider it beneath their dignity to sell anything, except

the rapadura and home-made fire-water they look upon as their legitimate

source of income, yet they are too miserly to give much. The best I

could do was to accept, with signs of deep gratitude, two small cotton

sackfuls of _chifles_ and _charol_; the former, bone-hard slices of

plantains warranted to keep forever in any climate and taste like oak

chips to any appetite; the latter, hard squares of fried fat pork of the

size of small dice. Then, of course, there was the inevitable slab of

crude sugar wrapped in banana leaves.

The “road” was worse than that of the day before. Times without number I

concluded the end of the journey had come for one of us, yet somehow the

maltreated little brute sprawled forward through the pouring rain.

Dense, dripping, unbroken forests, abounding with the red berries of

wild coffee, crowded close on either hand. Below, the swollen Tamborapo

roared incessantly close alongside, adding to the constant fear of

losing all my possessions the continual dread of reaching some

impassable stream. Toward the end of a day during which we had forded a

dozen difficult tributaries, we were halted by a raging branch, plainly

foolhardy to attempt. I chased “Cleopatra” up through the jungle

alongside it, until darkness came on and forced us to camp in a tiny

open space, my perishable possessions hung in the trees against

destruction by ants, and the donkey tied to the trunk that formed my

bed-post. All night long the animal walked round and round over me,

though without once stepping on my prostrate form or the heaped-up

baggage. In the morning we tore our way far on up the tributary before

we came in sight of a “bridge,” that is, two poles tied with vines to a

tree on either bank. I had piled my garments on top of the load and was

just dragging my reluctant baggage-car into the stream, when a

half-naked youth appeared on the opposite bank, making wild signs to me

across the uproar of waters. By the time I had regained the shore, he

arrived in abbreviated shirt by way of the “bridge,” carrying a stout

staff and a rope. With these he dragged the donkey, stripped stark

naked, into the stream and, fervently crossing himself twice, fought his

way with it into the torrent; while I made three trips monkey-fashion

along the tree-lashed poles with the baggage that would infallibly have

been washed away but for this experienced jungle-dweller. His particular

saint did not fail him and, having delivered the drenched and disgusted

animal to me on the further bank, he accepted a _real_ with a gratitude

that suggested he considered himself well-paid for risking his life.

Slowly, monotonously, day after day, we pushed on through the Amazonian

jungle—Amazonian not only in appearance, but because the Tamborapo, soon

to join the Marañón, forms a part of the great network of the Father of

Waters. The unpeopled forest, draped with vines that here and there,

like broken cables, dipped their ends in the stream, seemed to have no

end. The absolute solitude of the region, ever shut in by impenetrable

jungle, with never a view of the horizon, with no sign of the existence

of humanity and no other sounds than the occasional scream of a bird and

the constant roar of the stream, had a peculiar effect on the moods. One

felt abandoned by the world, and came to look upon all nature as a cruel

prison-warden determined that his prisoner should never again be

permitted to pick up the threads of his existence, nor even communicate

with the world that had abandoned him. The very silence added to the

gloom, until I felt like screaming, “Well, speak, burro!” It was a

relief not to sweat under my own load, but it was distinctly more

laborious to drive it before me. Day after day I beat up “Cleopatra’s”

rear from dawn to dusk without a pause, yet covered scarcely half the

distance I might have plodded alone. Even where the trail was level and

dry, the docile, yet headstrong brute could not exceed two miles an

hour; wherever a bit of slope, or stones and mud intervened, she picked

her way with the cautious deliberation of an old lady entering a

street-car. Insects swarmed. My unshaven face and all the expanse of

skin from crown to toes were blotched and swollen with their

visitations. The chifles and charol gave out and left only the

lead-heavy rapadura and river-water as hunger antidotes. On the third

day even the last chunk of crude sugar disappeared, and still the two of

us plodded on, equally gaunt and lacking in ambition and energy.

I had lived on river-water for more than twenty-four hours, and lost my

way several times on forking trails that climbed to nowhere far above,

or were swallowed up in the jungle, when I guessed again at a path that

climbed up out of the valley of the river. By and by it sweated up to a

hut of open-work poles, where lived a _vaquero_ in charge of the stock

of a vast hacienda of the wilderness. Only a little girl of eight was at

home, and she did not know that roads were meant to lead anywhere. Tying

“Cleopatra” in the shade of the eaves, I sat down to await adult

information. Starvation seemed to have danced its orgy for weeks before

my weary eyes when the child came out with a fat, ripe chirimoya, to

lisp in a shaky voice, “Le gu’ta e’ta fruta?” Hours later a gaunt,

tropic-scarred man appeared, and at sight of me shouted the stereotyped

greeting of all his class to any visitor ahorse or afoot:

“Apéase—dismount, señor.”

When I declined with the customary formalities, he opened preliminary

inquiries as to my biography. I broke in upon them to suggest food.

“Entra y descansa, señor,” he replied, “Sientese.”

The rural Peruvian would invite one to enter and take a seat—on a block

of wood—if he came to put out a fire. He produced a glass made from a

broken bottle and insisted on my partaking of his hospitality to the

extent of drinking his health in the aguardiente into which he turned

his sugar-cane in a little thatched distillery down in a hollow nearby.

But my every hint of a desire to buy food was diplomatically ignored,

except that he accepted readily enough a real, and sent the child

“upstairs”; that is, to crawl up to and along the reed ceiling, to fetch

me a leaf-wrapped chunk of rapadura.

The invisible trail he pointed out pitched down a leg-straining and

almost perpendicular _bajada_ of loose stones to another stream, then

struggled breathlessly upward through unbroken forest over the

Guaranguia “range,” a jungled mountain spur, from the crest of which

there spread out before me the vast panorama of an upper-Amazon _hoya_,

the Tamborapo far below squirming away through its steep dense-wooded

valley; and all about it half-barren hills of varying colors that gave

the landscape the appearance of a tempestuous sea turned to jungle

earth. Red cliffs, like our western _buttes_, flashed their faces in the

sunset, and as far as the eye could reach in any direction was no sign

that man had ever before entered this trackless wilderness.

It was nearing dusk when the world fell away before us into a great

wooded quebrada, its bottom unfathomable, but with a trail in plain

sight fighting its way up the opposite slope. The path underfoot melted

away, and where “Cleopatra” led, I followed, certain she knew the way as

well as I. The ghost of a trail she had chosen turned to a perpendicular

cow-path down which the animal sprawled and stumbled, bumping her load

against the trees, but unable to fall far through the dripping forest

that grew up impenetrably about us. Dense, black night found us at the

bottom of a V-shaped valley. I sought the corresponding path on the

opposite side of its small stream by feeling with both feet and hands,

but it was as intangible as the “straight and narrow path” of

theological phraseology. To cheer things on, it began to rain in

deluges. I made the most of a genuinely Peruvian situation by halting

for the night where there was at least drinkingwater. So sharp was the

valley that there was not even a flat space large enough to stretch out,

and I could only curl up in the muddy path that had brought us to this

sad pass, tumbling my soaked baggage somewhere beside me and tying the

exhausted animal to something in the dark, where there was neither a

leaf to eat nor a spot for the brute to lie down in.

By morning light I found that “Cleopatra’s” inexperience and asinine

judgment had led us to a place where wild cattle came to drink, and we

were forced to struggle back to the crest of the hill, and descend again

by another trail that linked up with the one we had seen the afternoon

before. At its foot was a field of swamp-grass, in which the starving

animal spent the rest of the morning in regaining strength for the climb

ahead. Above, a new style of landscape spread out before us. A vast,

bushy plain was passable only by following the windings of a sandy and

stony river-bed, and wading with monotonous frequency the stream that

swung back and forth across it, like a person utterly devoid of a sense

of direction or power of decision. Beyond, we tramped monotonously on

through endless chaparral, thorn-bristling, bushy woods where reigned an

utter solitude only enhanced by the mournful cry of some unseen bird.

The most constantly recurring form of vegetation was the _tusho_, a sort

of cottonwood tree with a trunk swollen as a gormand’s waist-line.

Endlessly this dismal wilderness stretched onward from dawn to dark,

until the traveler could fancy himself in solitary confinement for life,

and in danger of losing the mind for which he could find no employment.

The region would have been more endurable had I been able to stride

forward at my own pace; but “Cleopatra” sentenced me to a monotonous,

unchanging snail’s gait that gave sufficient exercise only to my right

arm and the cudgel it bore. Hundreds of red centipedes littered the

ground; the dead, dry silence was broken only by the rhythmic mournful

cry of a jungle bird. But here the going was smooth, and for long

distances our pace was so unbroken that there ran through my unoccupied

mind for hours at a time the paraphrase of an old refrain:

“Two jacks with but a single gait;

Six feet that walk as one.”

Next to the _tusho_, the tree that most often repeated itself was the

_guaba_, producing a fruit like large brown bean-pods filled with black

seeds, the white pulp of which had thirst-quenching qualities and a

taste mildly resembling the watermelon.

I had lost account of days entirely, but subsequent checking up proved

it was a Sunday afternoon when I halted at the “Hacienda Shumba” and,

spreading out my mouldy garments on the thatch roof of its only hut,

awaited the owner. He proved to be the teniente gobernador, the

lieutenant-governor of the region, in the sun-bleached remnants of two

garments and a hat. Having turned “Cleopatra” into a pasture, he settled

down to spell out the documents I presented. Strictly speaking, he was

not the hacienda owner, but only an “arrendatario.” Though I had not

suspected it, I had been traveling for days through estates which, as

_beneficencias_ or _cofardías_, belong to the bishopric of Trujillo, and

it is partly the heavy hand of the Church that keeps this region so

solitary and uninhabited. The so-called owners are really agents who

administer them for the tonsured landlords, collecting a rental from the

few families who raise a bit of rice, cacao, and cattle. The region is

far less rich than it is locally reputed. The soil of the river-valleys

is fertile, but the mountains are rocky and often arid and, especially

in this section, poorly served by the rains. A government official

himself, my host complained bitterly against the government tax on

tobacco, liquor, sugar, salt, and matches. The first, he asserted, was

no longer worth planting. All non-Peruvians were “gringos” to the

teniente gobernador. A fellow-countryman of mine, he asserted, had spent

a night with him recently—hardly two years before. He was—let’s see—an

Italian; no, a German. Though he could read and write, laboriously, and

had long been a government official—on compulsion and without

emoluments—the world, as he conceived it, consisted of Peru and another

very much smaller country, with several towns of more or less the same

size and conditions as the two villages of Jaen and Tocabamba he had

seen, named Germany, Italy, Estados Unidos, and so on, from which came

the various types of “gringos.”

Indeed, he wished to know, “Is Germany in the same country as the United

States?”

“What do you call a native of Jaen?” I chanced to ask him in the course

of our conversation.

“A Jaense, to be sure,” he replied. “Just as you call a native of Italy

an italiano, or a man from the town named France a francés.”

But if his knowledge was slight, it was no less tenacious, and he could

no more be talked out of his geographical conceptions than out of his

conviction that all the world lives in reed-and-mud huts with earth

floors, goes habitually barefoot, and considers its dwellings fit

breed-places for guinea-pigs. When I asked him if the road beyond Jaen

was good, I was startled to hear the assurance:

“Ah, yes, indeed. There are no bad roads in Peru!”

A divan of reeds, set into the mud wall of the single room and covered

with a hairy cowhide, was quite soft enough as a bed for one who had

long since left effeminate civilization behind. Until long after dark we

two men and a woman squatted in home-made chairs fitting to a doll’s

house, and fed ourselves over our knees. Yet the conventions of society

are quite as fixed in these hovels of the wilderness as in any palace of

aristocracy. It was quite à la mode, a sign of good breeding, in fact,

to ask for a second helping of the bean and yuca stew—which is

invariably served so boiling hot that even the experienced “gringo’s”

teeth suffer—but under no circumstances for a third. When they had been

emptied a second time, the gourd bowls were piled up on the floor in a

corner, to be washed when the spirit moved, and, as if at a signal that

there was no second course, the one glass in the house, tied together

with a string and evidently regarded as a great treasure and heirloom,

was filled with irrigating-ditchwater and passed around the circle,

beginning with the guest. The feeble imitation of a candle soon

flickered out, and by eight we were all scattered along the walls of the

hut on our reed divans, quarreling pigs shaking the house as they

jostled against it, and the rain that fell heavily all night long

dripping upon us here and there through the thatched roof.

“Cleopatra” was so nearly _rendido_—“bushed”—next morning that, even

under her slight load, she wabbled drunkenly and kept her footing

chiefly because the heavy, glue-like mud clung to our feet like

pedestals to a statue. For one considerable space the way led through a

swamp, where I was several times forced to wade knee-deep to carry out

the load and lift the bemired animal to her feet. Yet drinkable water

was not to be had, and the choking tropical humidity was the more

tantalizing as rain broke every few minutes, and everything in sight was

dripping wet, though the sandy soil swallowed each shower as it fell.

Toward noon the now considerable trail split, marking an important

parting of the way; for the branch to the left leads quickly down to

Bellavista on the bank of the Marañón, whence rafts descend to Iquitos

and the rubber country, and so by the Amazon to the Atlantic, while I,

bearing to the right, plodded on along the highlands of the Andes. In

the dead-silent woods a few decrepit and weather-blackened huts grew up,

several drowsy, half-naked beings in human form gazing languidly after

me from the doorways, and before I knew it I was treading the streets of

the provincial capital and “city” of Jaen.