DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL
Tramping down the Andes is like walking on the ridge of a steep roof;
there is a constant tendency to slip off on one side or the other and
slide down to the Pacific or the Amazon. The Latin-American is only too
prone to follow the line of least resistance, and that line is _not_
along the crest of the Andes where the more manly Incas traveled. The
villager obliged to journey to another town of the Sierra a hundred
miles north or south will ride muleback something more than that to the
nearest port, take ship to another harbor, and ride another hundred
miles up into the interior to his destination. Hence the excellent
highway that might have been built down all the backbone of the
continent, or at least the Inca one that might have been kept up, does
not exist. Each community is confined to its own valley and cut off from
the rest by almost untrodden mountain ranges, or by trackless bare
ridges where only sheep and their hardy shepherds can live. Under the
beneficent rule of the Incas means of intercommunication were infinitely
better than to-day; then, roads and bridges were kept in constant
repair, and in all exposed parts, at intervals along the cold punas and
among the mountain gorges, were government _tambos_ with shelter and
food for both man and llamas.
To journey from Cajamarca to Lima would have been easy; I had only to
hire a mule to Pacasmayo and catch a passing steamer. But to reach there
by the route I had proposed to myself was another matter. Even
Raimondi’s famous map of Peru, in 25 folios, over which I spent a
morning in the prefect’s parlor, offered scanty information, a few faint
lines representing trails leading almost anywhere except where I would
go. The only route at all suited to my purpose seemed to be one through
Huamachuco and Huraraz, and along the valley of the Santa river. Near
the source of this it looked as if I must turn back almost due north and
climb over the uninhabited, snowclad Cordillera Central, whence it might
be possible to reach Cerro de Pasco. Local information was not even
equal to the assertion of Prescott—who had never been nearer South
America than the southern coast of Massachusetts—that “the messengers of
Pizarro from Caxamalca to Cuzco followed the elevated regions of the
Cordillera through many populous towns, of which the chief were
Guamachuco, Guánuco, and Xauxa.” At best I had to leave the scene of
Atahuallpa’s undoing with little knowledge of where I was going, except
southward.
Certain preparations were essential before I plunged again into the all
but unknown. The trip from Loja—the longest sustained hardship I had
ever undergone—had left me a sadly depleted wardrobe. Especially were my
walking-boots in the last stages. The shops of Cajamarca had no heavy
ones among their stock, but I had hoped, with the assistance of the
prefect, to buy a pair of the shoes manufactured for the use of the
garrison-police. The department chief, however, put off wiring the
president, or laying the matter before congress, until it was too late.
A friendly shoemaker advised me to apply privately to a soldier or
policeman.
“But they have only one pair each,” I protested.
“True,” replied the zapatero, “pero se roban entre ellos—they steal from
each other.”
This hint also had been too long delayed, and I was forced to trust to
native patching to carry me over the indefinite region to the next
source of supply. As to socks, I had found that the best for tramping
the Andes were none at all; that is, a better substitute were the
“fusslappen” of the German soldier,—a square of cotton flannel on which
to set the foot diagonally, fold over the three corners, and thrust it
into the boot. The small silver pieces that came to me each time I threw
down a sovereign on the Chinaman’s counter, I had laid away for the road
ahead, spending the heavy coppers and the cartwheel _soles_. This petty
point is extremely important in the Andes, for even the man able and
willing to toss out gold for every banana he buys often finds villages
of the Sierra where the yellow metal will not be accepted; and those who
might otherwise be willing to change a large coin are frequently afraid
to show that they have so much money on hand. The rucksack style of
carrying had proved burdensome. For the load that remained I made a
leather harness, not unlike suspenders, with half my possessions
balanced against the rest. Then, having squandered 21 cents in the
greatest banquet known to the Chinaman’s back room, I climbed the
fortress hill to watch for the last time the interwoven colors of the
setting sun across the rich vale of Cajamarca.
It was the seventh of May when I struck southward again along the valley
floor. A wide highway sidestepped out of the city; but barely had the
scent of this been left behind than a shallow river took possession of
the entire width of the road. There is a sort of lawlessness both of man
and nature in the Andes, and many is the hacendado who thus calmly makes
use of the public highway as his irrigation ditch. When Hernando de Soto
was sent with fifteen horse to visit the Inca at his baths a few miles
south of the city, “they followed a fine causeway across the plain and
came to a small stream with a bridge, but, distrusting its strength,
dashed through the water.” An hour from town I, too, was dashing through
the water, boots in hand, not because I distrusted the bridge, but
because there was not the vestige of a bridge left to distrust.
Beyond the stream were the famous “Baños del Inca,” now owned by the
city of Cajamarca. In the barnyard of a stone and adobe hacienda a chola
woman sent an Indian boy to open for me an adjoining baked-mud room, in
the floor of which was a rough-stone swimming-pool nearly ten feet
square. Into this steaming sulphurous water was pouring. But as a group
of Indians were washing themselves and their rags in the source of
supply outside, I was forced to relinquish the rare pleasure of a hot
bath, even in so famous a setting. Historians report the existence of an
ancient stone bathtub that was used by the Incas, but the woman was
certain there had been none in the vicinity during her career as
caretaker.
The road she pointed out emerged from the back gate of the hacienda and
mounted the steaming brook. Higher up, where I thrust a hand in it, the
water was just hot enough to be bearable. The valley of Cajamarca,
stretching far southward, had promised level going for a day or two. But
though there was plenty of space for it on the valley floor, the camino
real, true to its Andean environment, preferred to clamber up and down
over stony, barren, broken ridges. Before noon it had raised me to a
páramo where several cold, blue lakes swarmed with wild ducks that were
not even gun-shy. An Indian I fell in with said they were never hunted,
“because when they fall there is no way to enter the water and get
them.” Evidently, like his forebears of centuries ago, he had never
heard of a strange invention called a boat.
[Illustration:
One of the few remaining _simpichacas_, or suspension bridges, of the
Andes. In Inca days they abounded, often sagging from one
mountain-top to another over appalling gorges. To-day steel cables
take the place of the woven willow withes of pre-Colombian times,
but the flooring is often missing and the swinging contraptions
uninviting to man or beast]
[Illustration:
A typical shop of the Andes. On the right, eggs and _chancaca_, the
brown blocks of crude sugar wrapped in banana-leaves; in the
doorway, pancake-shaped corn biscuits; on the left, oranges, green
in color though ripe, and the wheat-bread only too seldom to be had
even in this form]
Two days of stony going, now between hedges of ripe tunas, now over high
ridges, gashed and tumbled, by a trail thirsty despite the frequent
fording of luke-warm streams gray with decomposed rock, brought me to
San Marcos in a tropical and fruitful valley withered by a long drought.
On the façade of the little drygoods shop and government salt-store of
the absent gobernador hung a huge sign beginning “SOCORRO PEONES,”
implying that the owner was also a “hooker” of workmen for a
German-owned sugar estate down on the coast. When I presented my order
from the prefect of the department, the wife of San Marcos’ chief
“authority” ordered her cholas to prepare me dinner at once.
“I did not come to the gobernador that he should personally furnish me
accommodations,” I protested. “I only want him to use his authority with
those who make a business of lodging strangers.”
“There is no such place in San Marcos,” replied the woman, locking up
shop and leading me into her parlor, musty with disuse, “but all
travelers are welcome here.”
Behind the divan to which she motioned me stood a life-size figure of
the Virgin, flanked by another of Saint Somebody. In honor of the
arrival of a stranger, perhaps, the matron soon reappeared with several
serving-women and, stripping the “Madre de Diós” to her
bamboo-structured nudity, reattired her in four gowns, each of which was
far more costly than those worn by any of the living beings present.
Then she set a newly polished crown on the head of the image and,
falling on her knees before it, began to rock back and forth imploring
her intercession in a monotonous singsong. With dusk appeared the
gobernador, accompanied by two traveling salesmen, and having ordered
the three mules picketed, he spent a long evening bewailing with them
the rising cost of commodities “of first necessity, even our very
aguardiente and pisco, señores.” In the act of looking over my papers,
his eye was caught by a typewritten document in English.
“Ah, los yanquis!” he cried. “They are so up-to-date they even avoid the
labor of writing by having their letters printed. But how can they
afford it?”
“Una máquina para escribir,” I explained.
“A writing-machine!” he gasped. “Is there such a thing? I must have one
at once, for I never _can_ spell things right.”
The village church having lost its roof, most of the old women in town
gathered with my hostess in the adjoining parlor and droned for hours
before her bamboo saints. For a long time the gobernador gave no heed to
the uproar, though it forced him to raise his voice almost to a shout.
Then suddenly he broke off an enumeration of prices with an angry:
“Hágame el favor!” (In the Andes the expression corresponds closely to
our colloquial “What do you know about that?”) “Por Diós, those beatas
would pray a man insane!” and dashing into the parlor, he broke up the
meeting forthwith, and sent the manto-wrapped women scurrying out
through the zaguan like startled crows.
For all her religious duties my hostess found time to set down in my
note-book the recipe of the most potent beverage that has come down from
the Inca civilization,—the _chicha de jora_, at the making of which that
served with the evening meal proved her an adept. In a laborious
school-girl hand, and with a wealth of misspelling that suggested that
she, too, could have used a “writing-machine” to advantage, she wrote:
“Take ripe, shelled corn, cover with water and leave a week or more
until the kernels have sprouted. Dry in the sun two or three days. Crush
to a mass, boil, and place, when cold, in jars three-fourths full,
adding sugar sufficient to cause fermentation.”
Despite her piety and attitude of Moorish seclusion, she entered into
the conversation with a frankness peculiar to the Latin race. Not the
least startling of her naïve questions was:
“How many children have you?”
“I am not married,” I answered.
“Of course you are not married,” she replied, “being a traveler all over
Peru and the outside world, but have you really no children at all?”
At daybreak the gobernador sent a boy and a horse to set me across—and
all but spill me into—a rock-strewn river below the town, “because it is
very dangerous to wet the feet in the morning.” Ichocán, two leagues
beyond San Marcos, sits high and cold on an eminence. Behind it the
trail sloped languidly upward, then pitched headlong down through a
stony, desert-dry wilderness, inhabited only by cactus and wild asses,
to the Condebamba river, its lower valley of densest-green a relieving
contrast to the dreary, arid mountain flanks. Across the roaring gorge a
bridge of steel cables, supported by railway rails, has taken the place
of the _chaca_ of woven willow withes of Inca days. But it still looked
frail and aërial enough, swaying high above the racing stream that would
quickly have swept a stumbling traveler through rock-walled hills to the
Marañón and the Amazon, and the few arrieros who follow this route have
no easy task in driving their donkeys across it.
A pole-and-mud hut on the dreary slope of the further bank housed the
guardian of the bridge, a fever-laden skeleton who was barely able to
crawl after an unbroken year of _paludismo_, the intermittent fever of
the Andes that lurks in all such sunken valleys as that of the
Condebamba. I might better have spent the night on the hillside beyond,
than to have tossed it through on the hut floor, swarming with some
species of shark-jawed insect. Luckily I was not offered the first bowl
of chicha before I found the guardian’s female companion concocting the
family supply, for her method was little less disillusioning than that
of the yuca-chewing Jívaros Indians. When it had been boiled in a huge
kettle that spent its days of disuse as a nesting-place for the family
curs, the liquid was poured off into a long, shallow tub, like a small
dug-out canoe, the same one that would serve another purpose on
wash-day. Squatted on the ground beside it, the woman was stirring it
slowly with a stick she had caught up at random. Bit by bit two gaunt
and mangy curs slunk nearer, until their noses all but touched the
steaming liquid, whereupon the woman left off her stirring long enough
to rap them over the head with the ladle. The dogs retreated a yard or
two with cowardly yelps, only to repeat the advance over and over again.
The chola’s vigilance, it turned out, was not due to any unwonted sense
of cleanliness; she was merely bent on saving the animals from burning
themselves. As soon as she judged the liquid cool enough, she gave a
sign, and the curs fell upon the tub and greedily lapped up the scum.
Thus saved the labor of skimming it, the female crawled to her feet and
set the stuff away in earthen jars to ferment.
One barren, stony ridge after another in pitiless succession carried me
much higher before the following noonday. My course now lay well east of
south, for I had caught the swing of the west coast of South America.
One last mighty surge and the world fell away before me, disclosing
almost within shouting distance the provincial capital of Cajabamba. But
it is a good rule in the Andes never to sit down in the plaza until you
reach the town. Between me and the day’s goal lay hidden one of those
mighty holes in the earth that mean the undoing and repetition of all
the toil that has gone before. The shadows were beginning to climb the
eastern wall of Cajabamba’s valley before I reached the century-polished
cobbles of the street that had swallowed up the converging trails.
The plump young subprefect, who was awaiting me in state upon my return
from the Chinese fonda to which a soldier had piloted me, would have
been rosy-cheeked had not some careless ancestor faintly clouded his
family tree and given a quaint kink to his hair. He returned my papers
with a regal bow and bade me make my home in his office as long as I
chose to honor Cajabamba with my presence. The “bed” was a blanket on
the yielding, earth-covered floor; but I had twenty soldiers at my beck
and call, and what mattered it if, each time I would make my toilet, I
must go to jail? Luckily the rust-hinged doors and chain-weighted gates
creaked with as pompous humility and dignified alacrity for my exit as
to admit me, though there were those within who had not passed them in
twenty years.
By the time I was city-dressed, the subprefect, pomaded and be-frocked
within an inch of his life, fluttered into my boudoir to ask, in
breathless oratorical periods, if, inasmuch as he had just been married
last week, or during the night, and mother down on the coast was dying
to know what the new acquisition looked like and there were no
photographers in Cajabamba and it was a pity Peru was so backward, would
I not have the fineza to take fifteen or twenty pictures of him and his
novia and deliver a few dozen finished and mounted prints for him and
her and their relatives and friends and compadres and associates within
an hour or two? As the carelessness of my American agent had left me
almost filmless, this was neither the first nor the last time I was put
to the unpleasant necessity of “faking” a picture. To have refused his
request, even with humble apologies and laborious explanations, would
have been to win the ill-will of Cajabamba’s ruler and all his
dependents, had it not resulted in the trumping up of some transparent
excuse to turn me out and refuse me official assistance in finding other
lodgings. A photographer speaking some Spanish could pick up much silver
down the crest of the Andes; it would have been a kindness if he had
made the trip a few days ahead of me. To be sure, these official
requests were always useful, in a way. While the powdered and perfumed
“authorities” were puffing themselves up to the requisite pomposity, the
town was sure to gather alongside, and as neither the fancied nor the
real subjects were well enough versed in mechanics to know whether a
kodak operates endwise or sidewise, I caught many a nonchalant pose of
some really worthwhile bystander that I might have begged for in vain.
On this occasion the novia, having spent a few hours in completely
disguising herself, as women will under the circumstances the world
over, appeared at last, deathly pale with rice powder, and the pair
assumed a score of fetching poses under my direction. True, it was dark
by that time. But the subprefect saw no reason why a photograph should
not be taken by the light of three sputtering candles. He preferred it,
indeed, to embracing his newly-won treasure in the public glare of day.
But the night had grown aged before he feigned to understand the
impossibility of immediate delivery, and he accepted only sulkily my
promise to send the finished portraits back from the next city, “if they
turned out well.”
During my morning stroll about town I was accosted in English from the
zaguan of a building of dilapidated adobe splendor. So often had I heard
a laborious “Goot mawnin, seer, how do yo do?” from some silly youth
whose knowledge of foreign tongues began and ended with that phrase,
that I nodded and passed on. I have too much affection for my mother
tongue to hear it gratuitously maltreated; moreover, it had lain so long
idle that to speak it had come to seem an affectation.
This time, however, the speaker continued with faultless fluency:
“I hear you are an American.”
“Just so.”
“I am Carlos Traverso, at your service; graduate of an American
university.”
“Which one?”
“Michigan.”
“Indeed! So am I.”
“Válgame Diós!” gasped the youth, betrayed by astonishment into his
native tongue for a moment. “Can’t you come around to my room, your own
house, as I should say in Peru. You probably haven’t seen the latest
copy of the ‘Alumnus’?”
“Nor the twenty latest ones. With the greatest of pleasure.”
In spite of myself I found my tongue translating the set Castilian
phrases I had so long been using, instead of falling into the
colloquialisms of my own land. When I was ensconced in an American
armchair battered with the evidence of a long journey and of the crude
unloading facilities of West Coast ports, surrounded by walls hidden
under banners and photographs that seemed to turn the adobe chamber into
a college dormitory transported to the wilds of the Andes, the youth
went on:
“The government of Peru gives four _betas_, that is, sends yearly an
honor student to each of four American universities, with an allowance
of a hundred dollars a month....”
“That is, you had $4800 for the course at Michigan?”
“Yes, with traveling expenses. You probably had about the same
allowance?”
“Fortunately not, or I should long since have been gracing some home for
inebriates. And is this just a present from the government?”
“No; on our return we must serve the government for three years at the
same salary. I am superintendent of schools in this and the neighboring
province of Huamachuco.”
The son of a Scandinavian father, Traverso had evidently overcome the
handicap of an allowance the spending of which would have consumed the
entire energies of a full-blooded Latin-American, and had brought back a
real education. His shelves were filled with the latest treatises on
pedagogy, in several languages, and a brief acquaintance was enough to
show that he was earnestly striving to instill some new life into the
moribund system of his native land.
“But what’s the use?” he concluded gloomily, casting aside a carefully
worked out plan of study. “A man’s wings are clipped before he can start
to fly. Theoretically I have full authority over school matters in my
two provinces; practically I can’t alter by a hair the benighted
medieval routine of studies, interwoven at every turn by the lives of
the saints, that Peru has stumbled along under for centuries. I can’t
fire a fifteen-dollar-a-month numskull up in one of the mountain
villages, even though he doesn’t know whether Chile is in New York or in
Europe. The priests have their wires attached to every government leg
and arm in the country, and I feel like a man lying by, bound hand and
foot, watching our children being criminally assaulted. The money the
government spends on us might as well be chucked into the Pacific.”
“To say nothing of squandering on one student what would easily suffice
for three,” I put in.
“Caramba, it is true! In Ann Arbor life is calm and quiet; but you ought
to see what some of the betados who are sent to Paris and Rome bring
back with them! Válgame Diós!”
The valley of Cajabamba leans decidedly to the west, whence the next day
was largely one of mounting. But the region is so high that climbing was
not laborious in the invigorating mountain air that cuts into the lungs
like strong wine; and even a man inclined to that frailty could not have
felt lonely with so much of the world spread out in plain sight about
him. There were few long spaces without houses or pack-trains. Once I
fell in with a government chasqui driving a horse and an ass laden with
sacks of mail, among which stood out one marked conspicuously: “U. S.
Mail Foreign.” The correspondence, he assured me, was not bound for the
“exterior,” but was merely local matter between towns of the route that
had been farmed out to him, a statement that was confirmed at the next
post-office.
A mighty crack in the earth, into and out of which the trail zigzagged
like some badly wounded creature, marked my exit at last from the
department of Cajamarca into that of Libertad. The ancient Inca highway
is said to have followed this same route over these high, undulating
plains, but there were no certain vestiges of it. In the late afternoon
I burst suddenly out upon a broad view of the famous old city of
Huamachuco, much like Quito in setting, though more dreary, backed by a
ragged, black range, half cut off by a nearer slope, that might have
been Pichincha itself, the two peaks streaked with the first snow I had
seen since leaving central Ecuador.
Traverso had given me a note of introduction to his compadre, Dr. Alva,
the _médico titular_ of Huamachuco. As government doctor, the only
physician, indeed, within two hard days’ ride in any direction, he
drew—theoretically, at least—a salary of $150 a month, exceeding even
that of the haughty subprefect. The “son” of a hamlet far up in the
hills, he was a plain, earnest, little man with a heart several times
larger than the average of his fellow-countrymen. From his lips the
stereotyped “Here you are in your own house” had real meaning. His
library included Spanish editions of Taine, Nietzsche, Emerson—and
Roosevelt; his phonograph was of high grade and his records well chosen.
Edison was his ideal of manhood—indeed, a straw vote in the Andes would
certainly show the “wizard of Orange” the most popular American—and he
was wont to boast jokingly that his own name was the same as one of
those of the inventor, “showing that some of our ancestors were the
same.” Toward the end of my stay I discovered that the doctor, having
installed me in his well-furnished “guest-room,” was himself huddling
out the cold nights on a bag of straw and a wooden table in the mud den
behind his “office.”
It was not until we had grown rather well acquainted that Dr. Alva
confided to me the fact that he had “worked his way” through the medical
school of Lima, “even acting as waiter, señor, in a fonda, and working
in the summer like any peon. But don’t whisper a word of this to anyone
in Peru,” he implored, as if he suddenly regretted having taken me into
his confidence.
“Up in my country those of us who did that are inclined to boast of it,”
I laughed.
“Ah, sí, señor, I know,” he answered in an undertone, glancing
cautiously about him, “I know; even Tomás _Alva_ Edison was a newsboy.
But if Huamachuco ever hears of it I shall be a social outcast, ranked
with the Indians of the market-place.”
Huamachuco derives its name, if local authority is trustworthy, from the
Quichua words _huama_ (snow) and _chuco_ (cap), the peak behind the town
having in earlier centuries been completely snow-topped. It is the
“Guamachuco” of Prescott, to which Hernando Pizarro was sent soon after
the capture of Atahuallpa, to investigate the rumor that an army was
being raised to rescue the imperial prisoner. Even to-day its population
is largely Indian, among whom the chewing of coca leaves is general—the
first place south of Almaguer in Colombia of which this could be said.
But the Huamachuco of to-day does not exactly coincide with that of
Pizarro’s time. The effete descendants of a more hardy race have crawled
down into a sheltering valley, leaving uninhabited the ancient “city of
the Gentiles” on the mountain above. A local editor, apparently for no
better reason than the pleasure of basking in a gringo smile, offered to
serve me as guide. A stony road flanked ever higher along a
perpendicular rock-wall, then rose and fell over lofty undulations, and
at some six miles from the modern town brought us to the first ruins.
Far below, across a deep quebrada, lay, like a relief map, the great
rectangle of a ruined city, in perfect squares, the roofless stone
gables standing forth in fantastic array above a forest of low trees.
This was Viracochapampa, or “Plain of the Nobles,” the resident city at
the time of the Conquest. Through its broad central street passed the
great Inca highway from Quito to Cuzco.
But that was the least important part of ancient Huamachuco. Here on the
barren mountain-top stood in olden times Marca-Huamachuco, protecting
the dwelling-place on the stony plain below. Above the modern town are
still to be found remnants of the _cuchilla_, or stone trough by which
the ancient race brought water to this lofty summit by some system that
has been lost in the haze of time. About us, as we advanced, rose ruin
after stone ruin of what had evidently been an elaborate series of
fortresses. These spread mile upon mile across the rugged, undulating
tableland, some densely interwoven with brambles and impenetrable
thickets, all surrounded by the utter silence of a world long since
abandoned by man and brute. Indeed, the place was less remarkable for
its construction than for the vast extent of the ruins. Several large
edifices, square or triangular in shape, were built of huge blocks of
stone, still in the same form in which they might have been found as
mountain boulders, and, unlike the fortress of Ingapirca, nowhere nicely
fitted together. On the contrary, nearly every joint was filled in with
chips of stone, and in the thick interior walls had been used a sort of
crude concrete, now mere gravelly mud that could be picked out with the
fingers. Whether Marca-Huamachuco was built by an earlier people, or by
a more careless tribe of the race that left behind the cut-stone palaces
of Cuzco, their method of construction did not make for durability. The
ruins were all serrated and tooth-shaped, with only here and there a
jagged point suggesting the original height, the whole cutting the
far-off horizon with a fantastic, broken sky-line. An enormous wall had
evidently once surrounded the entire peak, and beyond, set close
together, was a series of almost round fortresses, each of three stone
walls, one inside the other. One more carefully constructed edifice gave
evidence of having been the chief palace, and from it stretched an
unobstructed view of all the surrounding landscape, in which an
advancing enemy might have been sighted league upon league away in any
direction.
It was in Huamachuco that the first hint of what later proved to be
amœbic dysentery overtook me, recalling to memory the medicine-case I
had abandoned in Cuenca as a useless burden. A disturbing lack of energy
settled upon me, my appetite failed—a startling symptom, indeed—and I
felt as if I had inadvertently swallowed one of the largest ruins of
Marca-Huamachuco. It was with no rousing pleasure, therefore, that I set
off, laden with hard-boiled eggs and a supply of the stony local bread,
on the lonely twelve-league tramp that intervenes between the residence
of Dr. Alva and the next town.
Four leagues south, the well-marked road swung to the right and, wading
the shallow Huamachuco river, I struck off for Trujillo and comparative
civilization on the coast. The faint path to the left bore me even
higher across an uninhabited world, dreary with its endless expanse of
dead-yellow ichu. Here were distinct remnants of the old Inca highway.
For several miles across the undulating páramo the way lay between two
rows of stones, set upright a considerable distance apart, and enclosing
a space wide enough for six or seven carriages, had they existed, to
pass abreast. If, as the inhabitants of the region assert, this is a
good example of that great military highway of the Incas, the
descriptions of chroniclers and historians have far outdone the reality.
Gomara reports it “twenty-five feet wide, cut in a straight line from
the living rock, or made of stone and lime, turning aside neither for
mountains nor lakes.” Prescott speaks of “highways carefully constructed
of cut slabs of freestone and porphyry,” which only proves how
incompetent to judge things South American is the most competent man who
has not been there in person. Those who have visited Spain know how
easily the title “camino” is granted, and the Conquistadores, like the
Peruvians of to-day, having in many cases probably never seen a real
road, had no means of comparison. Certainly this Inca highway had
nothing to justify the extravagant praise of those who compared it to
the old Roman roads. The most that had been done in the way of road
building was to clear the plain of loose rocks—in conspicuous contrast
to the modern Peruvians, who look upon a road as a convenient place to
toss the stones picked up in their fields. Stone-heaps here and there
along the Andes mark forever the routes of travel of Inca days, but they
are chiefly _achapetas_, piles thrown up by travelers, who tossed upon
them, as votary offering, a cud of coca. Of the _tambos_, rest-houses
maintained at frequent intervals by the imperial government, like the
_dak bungalows_ of India, not even the ruins of one in a hundred remain
standing, and the traveler of to-day is far more exposed to the elements
than in the times of the Incas.
The Andes rise ever higher from north to south and from west to east,
whence I was far above Huamachuco when I dragged myself into the
“Vaquería Angasmarca,” a cluster of cobblestone hovels barely four feet
high, home of an Indian cow-guard, in one of the most dreary, stony
settings in South America. Unable to get even hot water, I dared not eat
the heavy _fiambre_ I carried. I had huddled for hours on a stone under
the projecting roof when, after dark, the _vaquero_ himself rode in from
Huamachuco. Having been a soldier, trained to a bit less immobility of
temperament than his mate, he was partly cajoled, partly deceived, into
ordering her to serve me a gourdful of potato soup, prepared under
circumstances better imagined than described. For a long time he replied
with dogged, apathetic persistence that he “only gave posado in the
corredor,” but I succeeded at last in inducing him to furnish me a
ragged blanket in a corner of his own sty, on the earth floor of which
huddled the entire family and the customary menagerie of small animals.
The traveler who crawls out, blue with cold, after a night in one of
these cobble caves of the highland Indian, to squat against the eastern
wall until a gourd of warm water, savored with corn and the dung-fuel
over which it is slowly half-heated, is thrust out at him, no longer
wonders that the aboriginals of the Andes worshipped the sun. Every step
of that day of excruciating climbs and stony descents, across dreary
páramos on which I several times lost my way, was a bitter struggle; for
all the demands of the will, my legs could not push me forward two miles
an hour, and ever and anon they seemed to turn to straw and dropped me
suddenly to the ground. All the visible world lay high and treeless now,
with touches of snow on several black, shark-tooth peaks of the
Cordillera to the eastward. During the day I had passed several more
remnants of the old Inca highway, two continuous lines of
weather-blackened upright stones set far apart on either side of a space
a full half-block wide. Toward sunset the trail began to descend into a
stony river-valley, far down which I made out a tiled building among
eucalyptus trees. A passing horseman carelessly answered my question,
while more engrossed in my appearance, by assuring me it was the
hacienda house I was seeking; and I toiled a half-hour up the
mountainside to it, only to have the solitary Indian female who occupied
it point out far below, in the valley of the river, the “patrón’s” house
of the “Hacienda Angasmarca.”
It was the most imposing country dwelling I had yet seen in Peru; a
large village and two churches clustered about it, the entrance like
that to some rough old medieval palace, the swarms of dependents
carrying the mind back to feudal days. Around an immense flower and
shrub-grown patio, in which Indian hostlers were struggling to unload a
score of mules and horses, were some thirty rooms, each with a number
above the door. I did not learn whether it was the custom of the owner
to collect hotel charges, but the establishment was conducted in as
heartless and impersonal a manner as if he did. He was a snarly old
invalid who crawled about with a cane, growling orders to his cringing
Indians, and too much taken up with his own infirmities to waste
sympathy on others. With a grunt he thrust my letter of introduction
into a pocket, ordering an Indian to unlock one of the numbered rooms.
Stagnant with the atmosphere of a cheap hotel, it contained a bed with
leather springs, a billowy mattress, and a sack of ichu as pillow, and
only after a long struggle did I obtain a bowl of soup filled with tough
beef and half-cooked yuca and potatoes, a dish barely endurable to a
strong man in full health. It was late next morning before infinite
patience won me a bowl of hot milk, and I dragged myself away almost due
north. Across the world south of “Angasmarca” yawned a bottomless
valley, beyond which a rocky mountain-wall rose to the very heavens. The
road which should have followed in that direction was left to sneak out
like some hunted thing for a vast detour, even before it began to crawl
away eastward at right angles to the way I would have gone. At the
outset was a laborious, stony climb, from the summit of which the
“Hacienda Tulpo” lay in plain sight, but across one of those
heartbreaking gashes in the earth so frequent in the Andes. On the left
stood sharp, stark snow-peaks of the Cordillera, which seemed to grow
mightier with each day southward. Noon had long since passed, yet there
were barely eight miles behind me when I entered the general store of an
hacienda building forming a hollow square around a dreary barnyard. The
shopkeeper announced himself the owner of the estate—plainly by poetic
license. There is a careful graduation of caste in the Andes that makes
it easy for the experienced traveler to set any man’s place in the local
society. This fellow’s dress, color, his familiar yet commanding manner
toward the Indians who sneaked in all that Saturday afternoon to dawdle
about the counter and buy bits of trash, draughts of native “rot-gut,”
anything the place afforded except what might have been of some use to
them, generally on credit, thus lengthening their slavery to the estate,
all gave the lie to his assertion. But for all his posing, he turned out
a kindly fellow. He not only sold me a half-dozen eggs—in itself a great
kindness in the Andes—but dragged down from a shelf a sort of
chafing-dish and light-boiled them. When I had drunk these, surrounded
by a solid wall of stony-faced Indians who seemed to consider the feat
remarkable, I still could not bestir myself to push on. By and by my
eyes, wandering aimlessly over the stock that covered two walls to the
ceiling, caught sight of a familiar ten-cent can of American tomatoes. I
bought them at sixty cents. Long after an old woman had carried off the
precious empty can, the shopkeeper spent all the leisure left him by the
sluggish flow of now half-intoxicated Indians in thumbing over great
sheaves of foreign bills of lading, and at length handed me thirty
cents, with the announcement that he had inadvertently charged me for
the “whole shipment”—of two cans!
When the dreary afternoon had at last dragged its leaden way into the
past tense and chill sunset was creeping across this lofty world, I
mentioned to the shopkeeper that I needed a spot on which to spend the
night. The idea evidently had never occurred to him. The estate was
mine, and all the wonders thereof—but for all that two more endless
hours passed before a drink-saucy Indian led me to an icy harness-room
and pointed out two bare saddle-pads on the earth floor.
Certainly that man is a fool who sets out on a trip down the Andes for
pleasure; for after the first joys of roughing it have worn off, no more
monotonously pleasureless existence is conceivable. There is, to be
sure, a certain feeling of exclusiveness, a certain satisfaction in
living through hardships, of moving by one’s own efforts over those
parts of the earth where modern means of transportation are unknown; but
even this soon wears off, and with the dreary sameness of each day the
journey becomes chiefly a waste of time and effort, and a never-ending
disappointment.
In the morning I crawled away along a world growing ever higher, until
suddenly it fell abruptly into a chasm out-chasming anything I had yet
seen in my worst nightmares. Across it, so high even from this height
that it seemed not of our world, a town was pitched on the very tip of a
gashed and haggard range. Fortunately my route seemed to lead off down
the valley, and I was finding some grains of comfort in not having to
ascend to that heavenly dwelling-place of man, whatever it might be
called, when a passing horseman sapped my last drop of ambition by
telling me it was Pallasca—exactly the place in which I must spend the
night!
A long time had passed before I coaxed myself to creep slowly on,
avoiding the view of the task before me as a criminal about to be
executed might shade his eyes from the scaffold. An unconscionable
distance down in the bottomless intervening valley, yet still high, I
met the first foreign tramp I had yet seen on the road in South America.
He was an Austrian of fifty, looking in his matted, lusterless hair and
beard, and his drooping rags, like a corpse that had arisen for a
stroll.
“Gehen Sie nicht weiter—Go no further south,” he pleaded weakly. “There
everyone is dying of dysentery. Turn back with me to Trujillo and
humanity.”
His illness had reached that stage when the invalid sees the leering
head of disease rising on all sides, and fancies he may run away from
what he carries with him. I could not, naturally, abandon a plan of
years’ standing merely because of a temporary disability, and when we
had exchanged some bits of road information each crawled slowly on his
way.
In the hamlet of Mollepata, near the bottom of the quebrada, an old
woman stirred herself to brew me some herb tea, into which she put a
branch of _ajenjo_ (wormwood) with the assurance that this was a quick
and certain cure for my ailment. The descent had been bad enough; the
climb out of that breathless gash in the earth was probably the most
dismal experience of my career; I had not, to that day, nor do I expect
again during this life, to accomplish a more bitter task than that
struggle in intermittent rain, under my leaden load and Turkish-bath
poncho, from the _tablachaca_, or earth-covered stick-bridge across the
gorge-cut river forming the northern boundary of the department of
Ancachs, to heaven-hung Pallasca. To make matters worse, the natives
were united in the assertion that the source of my trouble was my habit
of drinking at streams along the way; that at this altitude the water
was not only too cold, but held in solution many minerals that made it
unsafe. Long afterward I had reason to believe that this had little to
do with the matter. But ready at the time to grasp at any straw, I threw
away the film-tin that had served me as drinking vessel, resolved that
not another drop of “raw” water should pass my lips—or at least my
throat. The resolution called for every ounce of will-power. One of the
chief pleasures of a walking trip had always been to quench my thirst
whenever opportunity offered. Now the mountain rivulets that babbled
down across my trail were tantalizing beyond belief, and I would gladly
have given a gold sovereign—as long as they lasted—to have been able to
drink my fill at each with impunity. Worst of all, there were no
substitutes for water to be had, neither fruits, prepared drinks, nor
any other relief from torture. On the day we sailed from Panama a Zone
doctor had warned Hays and me, as the first and primary rule of the
journey before us, always to boil our water. He little guessed the
difficulty, not to say impossibility, of obeying that apparently simple
commandment in the Andes.
Black night had long since fallen when I dragged myself into the central
plaza of Pallasca, silent and dark except in the densely packed,
candle-lighted church. A dimly illuminated shop on a far corner proved
to be a tavern. My thirst had reached the point where drink was
imperative, though the sentence were sudden death. I ran my eye over the
shelves.
“There is wheesky cuzqueños,” wheedled the wooden-brained keeper, “and
rhum jamaïca, or French absinthe, or ...”
“Have you anything non-alcoholic?” I croaked.
“Cómo no, señor! There is wine, and beer from Lima....”
In South America anything short of forty-percent alcohol does not count
as such; even the law does not rate beer and wine “alcoholic liquors.”
There being nothing better, I pointed out a bottle bearing the stamp of
a Lima brewery.
The sentence was not exactly sudden death, but that may be because I had
grown calloused to similar hardships. This Peruvian imitation of a
German “dark” beer was thick and black as crude molasses, bitter as
cascarilla bark, and more nauseating than old-fashioned medicine. With
only the edge of my thirst blunted, I forced the rest of the bottle upon
a bystander, not maliciously, but because I knew that a lifetime in the
Andes had hardened him to anything; and turned to the question of
lodging.
“You come right along with me,” cried the grateful bystander, smacking
his all-enduring lips. “You will stop with the señor cura, like all
travelers of importance.”
But the señor cura was in no condition to receive guests. In his large,
over-furnished parlor around the corner the padre lay on a couch, the
slouch hat over his red-bandaged head and a two-weeks’ lack of shave
giving him a startling resemblance to the Spanish bandits of operatic
fancy.
“No, compadre; I am sick, and I cannot give lodging,” he replied to
every plea of my officious sponsor.
The several persons in the room entered into a whispered conference.
Some time later I was aroused from my lethargy, and my cicerone and a
light-haired youth led the way across the black plaza and up a steep,
cobbled street which my legs all but refused to navigate under my heavy
load—for though he would not leave a man who had treated him to the
luxury of a glass of beer from the capital at a fabulous price until he
had seen him safely housed, neither the bystander nor his companion
could sink their baggy-kneed caste to the depth of carrying a bundle in
the public street, even on a dark night.
When morning dawned I found myself rolled up in a heap of blankets on
the earth floor of a long-disused parlor. Hours passed without a human
being appearing. I pulled myself together and shuffled out into the
patio of an immense, dilapidated house at the tiptop of the town,
overlooking half a world and swept by all the winds of heaven. Pallasca
has been likened to _alforjas_, so like a pair of saddlebags on the rump
of a pack-animal does it hang down the two sides of a lofty nose of the
range. Across the void, deep-blue in spite of the penetrating glare of
the Andean sunshine, the Cordillera had tumbled her mountains recklessly
in a tumultuous heap, as if the Builder of the world had left here his
surplus of materials. The Andes have little of the color and varied
charm of the Alps; but in awesome grandeur, and repulsive, savage
mightiness they dwarf the latter by comparison. In a room down on the
sunken street on which opened the patio zaguan, the light-haired youth
and his brother kept the town drug-store. They were the sons of a German
who had married in Peru, yet only their more robust frames and greater
physical virility distinguished them from the common run of natives; in
temperament they were as thoroughly what the Canal Zoner calls “Spig” as
the most enemic of their fellow-townsmen. The older was an amateur
doctor—with the accent on the adjective—the only one for scores of miles
around. He prepared me a half-dozen _obleas_,—those saucer-shaped
capsules of the Andean pharmacopœia—of bismuth, prescribed a diet of
_chochoca molida_—the Quichua-Spanish name for a thin cornmeal
gruel—which might be substituted by chuño inglés, a sickly-sweet liquid
starch—or wheat or rice soup, and assured me that I would be completely
recovered in the morning. All the articles of diet were contingent on
the possibility of getting the ingredients, which in the Andes is a
distinct contingency. For thirst I was advised to take only boiled water
with cinnamon or _cimarruba_ bark; but even to get the former cost a
constant struggle with the apathetic servants, and the necessity of
dragging myself down to the stream on a corner of the plaza to cool the
boiling pot.
Later in the day, while I lay contemplating the immense distance across
the room, a young rag-patch came to say that the cura wished to see me.
The mere novelty of a man of the cloth desiring my presence was so
astonishing that it lent a bit of stiffness to my legs. I rose and
wandered down across the main plaza, from the further side of which the
world falls precipitously away into unfathomable void.
[Illustration:
Detail of the ruins of “Marca-Huamachuco,” high up on the mountain
above the modern town of that name. They are reputed to be at least
1000 years old]
[Illustration:
Pallasca, to which I climbed from one of the mightiest _quebradas_ in
the Andes, sits on the tiptop of the world and falls sheer away at a
corner of its plaza into a fathomless void]
The unshaven papist still wore his slouch hat, and by day his
bandit-like aspect was increased by a complexion like unpolished
chamois-skin. He motioned me to a chair beneath the lithograph of a
ravishing nude figure advertising a foreign brand of cigarettes, and
trusted, with all the smoothness of which the Spanish tongue is capable,
that I had not misunderstood his inhospitality of the night before.
Gradually I turned the conversation to the history of his native region.
He had made a serious study of the pre-Conquest period, and was sure
that the Indians lived in just such unwashed misery under the Incas, as
to-day. Only, as each group of ten had its commander, who set its tasks
and carried his investigations into the very bosom of the family, they
were not then so unspeakably lazy. I had started to take my leave after
some desultory remarks on my journey, during which he desired to know if
I had walked all the way from Europe, when the priest remarked:
“Before going you will allow me to give you a little remembrance?”
“Cómo no! Gracias,” I answered, fancying the good-hearted old fellow was
about to favor me with a tin crucifix or a bottle of holy water.
He sat up slowly and, pulling open a drawer of his massive home-made
desk, took out five silver _soles_ ($2.50), and held them toward me.
“Mil gracias, no, señor,” I cried in astonishment.
“Tómaselos—take them as a memento,” he persisted, attempting to thrust
the coins into my pocket. Plainly he regarded my refusal a mere
preliminary formality to save my face. So ingrained is the
Latin-American notion that no man exerts himself physically, except
under compulsion, that, for all my explanations, he still cherished the
idea that I traveled on foot because I had not the means to travel
otherwise. Nor did I avoid his proposed charity without a great waste of
flowery Castilian, and for all that left him somewhat offended. Even the
sons of the misled German could not be made to understand why I had
refused the proposed benefaction. “Andarines” of the Peyrounel variety
have given these isolated towns of the Andes the impression that all
foreigners arriving on foot were “living on the country.” Tramps, in our
sense of the word, are unknown in the Andes. The few foreign
“beach-combers” who reach Peru rarely get beyond Lima, and the Indians
still cling to the Inca rule—though they may no longer know that an Inca
ever existed—of each man sticking pertinaciously to his own birthplace.
It is as impossible for the American to realize the absolute lack of
anything approaching wanderlust in the Andean, and his dread of moving
away from his native pueblo, as it is for the Indian to understand why
the American is so far from home. Even among the more or less educated
officials I could not shake off the title “andarín.” More than one rural
“authority” showed himself aggrieved because I did not ask for his
testimonial, seal, and signature, fancying himself slighted as of too
little importance. Many another assured the gaping bystanders:
“Ah, ganan un platal, esa gente—Those fellows win a wad of money! When
he gets back, his government will give him a great prize, at least
300,000 soles for the trip, señores.”
A prize, indeed! As if there were not a prize at every turn of the
winding trail, in every new vista of tumultuous nature under the clear
metallic blue of the highland sky!
I determined to push on next morning, for Pallasca was no nearer
recovery than my journey’s end. The diluted Germans had promised to have
an Indian carrier ready at dawn. But they were true Peruvians. The
morning was half gone when I gave up in disgust and set out alone. At
the zaguan, however, a fishy-eyed Indian rose to his feet to say that he
had been sent by the gobernador to “assist” me, and I piled my bundle
upon him forthwith.
Though Pallasca seems to perch on the very summit of the world, the
trail managed to find another range to climb. Scores of cold,
crystal-clear streams babbled tantalizingly across my path. A cosmic
wilderness of gaunt and haggard mountains, here throwing forward bare
and repulsive outliers, there weirdly decorated with shadow-pictures of
clouds and jutting headlands, lay tumbled on every hand as far as the
eye could range. The Indian chewed coca constantly, pausing frequently
to dip a bit of lime from the gourd he carried at his waist, and
appeared to have as little energy as I. When we had crawled some six
miles, and a scattered hamlet was visible about as far ahead, with a
deep gash of the earth between, he began to complain of pains, and
finally lay down in the trail. I did not regret the halt, but when I had
waited a half-hour and his groans still sounded, I sought to urge him
on. It was useless. Whether he was really ailing—and Sunday may have
left him with what is technically known in sporting circles as a
“hang-over”—or was merely taking this means of shirking an unwelcome
task, now we were far enough away so that I was not likely to return to
complain to the gobernador, arguments and threats moved him exactly as
they would have the rocks on which he writhed. Consigning him to the
nethermost regions, I struggled to my feet under my harness and
staggered on down the stony bajada.
Hours afterward, utterly exhausted by the short dozen miles, I entered
the mud hamlet of Huandoval, expecting a miserable night on the earth
floor of some icy dungeon hut. It was not quite so bad as that. At the
first doorway where I paused to inquire for the gobernador, a
half-Indian young woman of unusual Andean intelligence offered me
lodging where I stood. The baked-mud den was as dreary as usual, but in
a corner stood a bare slat bedstead, half-buried under an immense heap
of potatoes. Early as it was, I spread my poncho and lay down,
anticipating a welcome repose—only to discover that I was lodged in the
Huandoval telephone exchange! On the wall hung an aged Errickson
instrument, the strange vagaries of which brought the chola in upon me
as often as its jangle sounded. The place, too, like telephone exchanges
the world over, was exceedingly popular with the young men of the town,
and when my rest was not being broken by some mistaken call from another
exchange, it was disrupted by the labored wit of some rural Lothario.
It is but eight miles from Huandoval to Cabana, capital of the province;
yet it required nine hours of the most concentrated effort, both mental
and physical, to drive myself over the low, barren ridge that separates
the two towns. The story of the next few days, trivial in detail, I give
in no spirit of complaint, but merely because it sheds so direct a light
on the character of the Andean Peruvian. I had learned that there was a
hospital in Huaráz, the department capital, and requested the subprefect
of Cabana to use his authority to help me hire a horse, as he was in
duty bound to do by the official orders I carried.
“Pierda cuidado,” orated the thin, angular fellow, peering at me with
his short-sighted squint, “the government will furnish you a horse and
all that is needed.”
Nobody wanted the government to furnish me anything, but I did not stop
to argue the matter. My entire attention was taken up just then with
resisting the efforts of the “authorities” to throw me into a dank mud
den, under the allegation that it was a lodging. Fortunately there was
some one else than Peruvians in the town. It was through the village
priest that I won at last a second-story room above the prefectura, of
mud floor in spite of its elevation, supported on poles that yielded to
the tread. He was a tall, powerfully-built Basque of fifty, with a
massive Roman nose and, in memory of his mountain-land, a _boína_ set
awry on his head and matching his long, flowing gown only in color. He
had suffered from the same ailment during his first year in this foreign
land and was sure he knew an instant cure—and instead of merely talking
about it, like a native, he sent a man to prepare it. This was a
half-bottle of wine boiled with the bark of a mountain tree called the
_cimarruba_; but whatever effectiveness it might have possessed was
offset by the impossibility of keeping to a proper diet, or even of
getting boiled water to drink. There was no doctor in Cabana; yet all
Cabana posed as physicians. Now some fellow would drop in to say, “the
very best thing you can eat is pork-chops,” and he would scarcely be out
of sight before another paused to assure me that pork-chops would kill
me within an hour. “Eat the whites of eggs,” cried another. “You can eat
almost anything,” asserted the next comer, “except the whites of eggs.”
Again the room would be darkened by a shadow in the doorway, and a man
would step forward to say, “Now here is an old Indian woman from up in
the mountains whose grandfather’s nephew died of dysentery, and....”
All night the town boomed with fireworks, the howling of dogs, the
bawling of drunken citizens, and the atrocious uproar of a local “band,”
for it was the eve of something or other. Far from finding the promised
horse waiting for me at dawn, I did not see the shadow of a person until
after ten. Then a stupid, insolent soldier came to ask if I wanted
“breakfast.” At twelve he had not returned. I dragged myself down to the
plaza. The subprefect and all his henchmen were making merry in a
_pulpería_. I requested him to have some one prepare me food, at any
price. Price? They were horrified! Of course they could not think of
letting me _pay_ for anything. I was the guest of Cabana. They would
_obsequiar_ me a “magnificent meal” at once, cried the subprefect, tying
himself in several knots in his excess of courtesy. What would I like,
roast lamb with eggs, a fine steak with.... No, I would be completely
satisfied with a bowl of gruel. Ah, certainly, I should have it at once,
and a basket of fruit, and ... and there they dropped the matter, until
the priest, discovering my plight, well on in the afternoon, sent up a
dish of rice gruel.
Everything does not come to him who waits in the Andes, and I descended
again to mention the word “horse” to the now reeling subprefect.
“Have no care,” he hiccoughed, “the government will attend to all that.”
Knowing he was merely showing off before his fellow-townsmen, and that
he would really let me lie where I was, or at most furnish me some
crippled Rozinante to carry me to Tauca, three miles away, I refused his
putative charity. He turned to the crowd about us with a pretense of
being hurt to the quick, then sent a boy to summon the half-negro
gobernador, likewise maudlin with the celebration.
“Since this señor has declined my offer to furnish him all that is
needed,” stuttered the offended subprefect, “you will have a _paid_
horse, with saddle and bridle, ready for him—to-morrow.”
“But why not to-day?” I protested.
“Absurd, señor! To-day is the great Corpus Cristi procession and you
would not wish to miss that, even if you could get an Indian to go with
you.”
The procession, set for mid-morning, started soon after my return to my
room. From the altar of the church it encircled the plaza and returned
whence it had come. The route had been carefully scraped and
swept—evidently for the only time during the year—by ragged Indians,
forced to contribute this pious labor by the several grades of
labor-dodging “authorities” howling over them. Then it had been spread
with a long strip of carpet, after which came scores of barefoot women
to cover it with a fixed design of flower-petals of all colors. Then
forth from the mud church issued the Basque priest in cream-tinted
vestments, his boína and incessant cigarette gone, four Indians
protecting him from the dull, sunless day by a rich canopy. Proceeded,
followed, or surrounded by all the bareheaded, drink-maudlin piety of
Cabana, the distressing “band” blowing itself wobbly-kneed, he moved
slowly forward, only his own sacred feet touching the carpet, women and
children pouncing upon the flower petals behind as rapidly as they were
blessed by his number-eleven tread, and carrying them off as sacred
relics. Outwardly he seemed sunk in the profoundest depths of devotion,
yet twice, at a sign from me, he halted the procession, as by previous
understanding, until I had caught a picture. Over the door of the
towered mud-hovel into which the throng crowded after him were the
half-effaced words, “HAEC EST DOMUS DEI ET PORTA CIELI.” No doubt they
were right, but it would have been easy to have mistaken it for
something else.
Toward evening the subprefect’s secretary brought a wooden-minded Indian
and, introducing him as the owner of a horse, called upon me to pay 75
cents at once for the use of it. The moment I had done so he produced a
still dirtier Indian and, introducing him as my “guide,” demanded that
he be paid fifty cents. That over, the secretary mentioned that it was
customary to give a “gratification” to owner and “guide,” that they
might drink my good health for the coming voyage, at the end of which,
he further hinted, it was costumbre to grant the “guide” a _real_ for
alfalfa for the animal, and something for himself for chicha, and ...
but by that time I had withdrawn to my quarters.
At six in the morning I was dressed and ready; at seven the “guide” came
to know if he really should bring the horse; at eight I burst in upon
the sleeping subprefect to know what had become of his boisterous
promise to have food prepared for me at dawn. A soldier was sent to
investigate. In due time he came back with the information that the cook
was not up yet. At nine the “horse” arrived. It was a wild, hairy,
mountain colt, a bit larger than an ass, which had never been shod,
curried, or trimmed. The equipment it wore was wholly home-made,—a
bridle of braided rawhide, without bits, like that with which our
American Indian rides his mustang, a tiny, crude, wooden saddle with one
thickness of leather stretched over it, and huge wooden box-stirrups.
“Now let nothing worry you,” cried the subprefect, as I bade farewell to
the noble city of Cabana, the “guide” trotting on foot behind, “I’ll
telegraph the gobernador of Corongo and Huaylas and the subprefect of
the next province so that he can telegraph his governors and the prefect
in Huaráz. No se moleste, señor; everything will be arranged by the
government.”
Hours of unbroken climbing brought us to a freezing-cold páramo, where
flakes of snow actually fell and across the icy lagoons of which a wind
that penetrated to the marrow swept from off the surrounding snow-peaks.
So small was my animal that I expected him to drop under me at every
step, so tiny that his front knees constantly knocked the stirrups off
my feet, and so wobbly in his movements that it was like riding a
loose-jointed hobby-horse. At last we caught the valley of a descending
river, and racked and shaken in every bone, I rode into the plaza of
Corongo, the near-Indian population of which seemed to take a
bear-baiting pleasure in the predicaments of others. Evidently this was
no new characteristic, for Stevenson, writing a century ago, states,
“Corongo is certainly the most disagreeable Indian town I ever entered.”
The gobernador sat gossiping in the mud hut to which the telegraph wire
led. He had not, however, received any message from Cabana. As telegrams
cost “authorities” nothing, I had permitted myself to hope that at least
this promise would be kept. Having no other way of getting rid of me,
however, the town ruler led the way to his own hovel, where long after
dark his crude-mannered females prepared me a bowl of gruel with which
to break an all-day fast.
The language of Corongo is chiefly Quichua, little in evidence since
Ecuador, but due from now on to be more general than Spanish. The
gobernador ran no unnecessary risk of having me left on his hands, and
by six next morning the owner of a new “horse,” an even more striking
caricature of what he was supposed to represent than that of the day
before, had collected his fee and that of the new “guide.” These paid,
he began at once to complain that the animal could not travel far
without being shod, a luxury which, like his master, he had thus far
never enjoyed. On the advice of the gobernador I added a half-sol for
that purpose. Two hours later I raised so effective a protest against
further delay that the animal was dragged in, still unshod, as he would
be to the end of time, and made ready. The price, more or less
exorbitant in honor of my helpless situation and gringo blood, would not
have mattered had not each “authority” stood in cahoots with the owners
and wasted my time and energy with their clumsy grafts.
Under a brilliant sun we squirmed away out of town, and began a sharp
descent into one of the mightiest desert gorges in all the Andes, my
“guide,” a stone-headed fellow, speaking only Quichua, who had plodded
at a horse’s tail all his days, slapping along behind me in his leather
sandals, incessantly feeding himself lime and coca leaves. It would have
been difficult enough for a man in the best of health to sit such an
animal standing still on the level; let those who can imagine one with
barely the strength left to hold himself together riding him down shale
hillsides, often at a sharp angle, the stirrups knocked from his inert
feet every few yards. Now the entire range cutting off the world on the
east was capped with snow, making the scorched and thirsty valley the
more tantalizing by comparison. On through blazing noon I clung to that
diminutive brute with his murderous dog-trot, over blistered, waterless
hills, harsh and repulsive in their barrenness, to fetch up at sunset,
more dead than alive, in Yuramarca, a scattered village of far more
chicha-shops than respectable inhabitants. Here, instead of the
penetrating cold of Corongo, was to be feared the fever of the hot
lands. The gobernador was a ragged, barefoot Indian not over eighteen,
one of the few in town who spoke Spanish, and inclined to insolence in
consequence. He pointed out a mud cave on the plaza as the
stopping-place of all travelers. I protested against lying on the bare
earth. “No hay más,” growled the haughty official. Of course there was
nothing more; there never is at the first ten or twelve requests among
these pitiless aboriginals. An hour’s coaxing and threatening, nicely
interwoven, and the gobernador strolled across the plaza and came back
with just the thing,—a six by two-foot door, covered on one side with
zinc. I ordered the “guide” to place the saddle in the room, lest he
decamp during the night, gave him a _medio_ for chicha, a _real_ to buy
the tops of sugar-cane for the “horse”—for we were far below the alfalfa
line—and sent the gobernador with twice the necessary amount to find
wheat for a bowl of gruel. To the unspeakable old female he ordered to
prepare it. I paid a large day’s wages, yet the luke-warm “soup” she
delivered long after dark had only a spoonful of chaff in it. In the
Andes, cooks, workmen, and servants appropriate as much as they dare of
anything they have to do with, and soldier, peon, dog, or cat, each
expects to levy his toll on the traveler’s scanty rations. We of the
north do not look kindly upon this species of charity, feeling that each
should have his food regularly from a definite source; yet the means of
avoiding a system more deadening in its effect than the “tip” of more
advanced communities is yet to be found.
[Illustration:
An Indian of Cerro de Pasco region carrying a slaughtered sheep. The
women go barefoot but the men wear woolen stockings and hairy
cowhide sandals]
[Illustration:
Catalino Aguilar and his wife. Fermín Alva, my nurses in the hospital
of Caráz]
Before daylight of a moonlit Sunday morning we were off again through
the same dreary desert. The sun, having first to climb the snow-capped
Cordillera, only overtook us as we were crossing the decrepit little
bridge high above the Santa river, racing through its resounding gorge
on its way to the Pacific. The endless climb beyond was by so narrow a
trail along the face of a yawning precipice that my saddlebags scraped
continually along the mountain wall, and here and there a jutting rock
thumped me sharply on the knee. At scorching high noon we caught sight,
between grim, austere mountain flanks, of a long, tilted valley lightly
covered in all its extent with tiled houses among scrub trees, which my
peon announced was Huaylas. I had heard such rosy reports of this “city”
that my oft-disappointed hopes grew buoyant again before a view
delightful to the eye weary with the savage solitudes behind. But it
turned out to be but another of those bowelless, stone-hearted mountain
towns whose ragged inhabitants remind one of buzzards hovering about a
moribund, each snatching what he can, as soon as he dares. “Don
Ricardo,” an anemic, fishy-handed dwarf of outwardly white skin, owner
of the chief shop of Huaylas, ran a sort of amateur hotel at
Ritz-Carlton prices. The open-air “dining-room” on the back veranda
overlooked—as guests likewise struggled to do—a jumble of ancient and
noisome structures and stable-yards, in the most distressing of which a
leprous old hag concocted the inedible messes that were poked through a
repulsive hole in the wall an unconscionable time after they were
ordered. The rheumatic and dismal den to which I was assigned was below
the street level, though I could see through the wooden-barred window
the brilliant, sunny day outside, and catch a glimpse of the serrated
line of snow peaks away to the east. But the good people of Huaylas,
informed in some way of my place of lodging, amused themselves by
pounding on the window bars, shouting amiable insults in upon me, and
now and then tossing in clods of earth and an occasional stone that did
not always fall short of their aim. As I had had no quarrel with the
priest, he could not have denounced me as a heretic. It must have been
simply their racial delight in producing or watching suffering, the same
trait that brings them joy during the sorriest moments of a bull-fight,
and causes them to gather in crowds to tease and jeer at an idiot or a
cripple. It was “Taco” who finally came to my rescue. “Taco” was a
Japanese, chief servant of Don Ricardo, and the only really intelligent
or humane person I had met since walking out of the doctor’s house in
Huamachuco. It was with deep regret that I paid his worthless master for
what the servant really furnished.
The peon who was to start with me at dawn next day was still wallowing
among the chicha-shops at blazing ten, and I was weakly urging a
start—for the journey was long—when an imposing personage of white skin,
wearing a leather cap and real shoes, pushed through the jeering throng
and announced himself the congressman for that district. Having heard my
tale of woe, he gave me a card ordering the _médico titular_ of Caráz to
admit me to the hospital there, and in due time prevailed upon the
besotted peon to be off. The order was addressed to one Dr. Luís A.
Phillips, and vastly buoyed up by the promise inherent in such a name, I
endured uncomplainingly the rib-jolting trot to which the delayed start
had sentenced me.
Town after town had proved such dismal disappointments that I did not
look forward to Caráz with any overwhelming glee. But my hopes rose high
when we surmounted one of the countless desert ridges and sighted at
last a vast, level, though somewhat tilted plain between the Santa river
and the brilliant white snow peaks of the ever higher Cordillera, with
hundreds upon hundreds of inviting houses specking with red its many
orchards and checkered green patches of cultivation. The Andes rise to
appalling heights in these parts, and take on a variety of color and
form almost comparable to the Alps in beauty, vastly outdoing them in a
certain wild, somber undomesticated grandeur. Under the declining sun
the bold and impressive range turned from tawny brown to deep purple,
then to tender violet and soft lilac as they receded, the snowy heads of
the peaks seeming to hang suspended in the evening sky. The bridge to
the north was in ruins, and I had to ride more than a mile beyond the
town to catch the road from the south that carried us at last into the
place as the shopkeepers were putting up their wooden shutters. It was
almost a city, with evidence of considerable commerce and civilization,
great glaciers gazing coldly down from the transparent sky of evening
into the neat little plaza.
A considerable percentage of the inhabitants were white in color, but
this was apparently only skin-deep. At the entrance to the doctor’s
patio I was met by his wife, a well-dressed, auburn-haired woman, to all
outward appearances educated and civilized. But environment is a
powerful factor. She differed not in the least from the Indians of
Corongo. Having informed me with an icy indifference that the doctor was
“somewhere in the town,” she refused even to permit me to enter the
patio to wait for him. There being nowhere else to go, I was forced to
remain more than an hour astride the animal I could scarcely cling to
after eight hours of racking trot. Not a drop of anything could I get
for my raging thirst. Instead, the woman’s saucy children joined a score
of other urchins of the town in crowding around me and concocting all
manner of annoyances, even to throwing stones and striking the horse
unawares on the legs, while a score of adults looked on from the street
corners or their doorways at the “amusement.”
At first sight of the doctor, long after dark, my hopes gushed up like a
spurting geyser, but they fell leadenly to the ground as he opened his
lips. The son of an Englishman stranded a half-century ago in this
corner of Peru, he looked as British as any stroller along Piccadilly;
yet in speech, manner, and mental processes he was “Spig” to the core.
With a Latin-American eagerness to be rid of anything suggesting labor
or annoyance, he asked a few superficial questions, grunted twice after
the manner of physicians, and led the way down the cobbled street. My
habit of picturing in detail every coming scene had only been increased
by my condition, and I braced myself to enter a dismal, barren mud room,
with a score of beds filled with foul-tongued Peruvian soldiers, in
which the pilfering of my possessions would be the least of the
annoyances awaiting me. I was most agreeably disillusioned. The hospital
at Caráz was a new, whitewashed, pleasant little building recently
erected by a society of well-to-do inhabitants. There were not a
half-dozen patients, and in painting my picture I had completely
overlooked the Andean rules of caste. However nastily he may treat him
otherwise, the meanest Peruvian would not so far forget his training as
to put a white man among Indians or negro-tainted soldiers. I was given
full possession of a long, tile-floored room, opening on the
flower-decked patio and with a large barred window on the street; the
best chamber in the building, indeed, except the director’s office.
True, the bed was board-floored, and I had to ask the caretaker to
remove his champion gamecock from the room—whereupon he tied him by a
leg just outside the door—but who could be so cruel as to ask a Peruvian
to keep his rooster where he cannot gloat over him as he works?
The doctor came for a minute and a half every morning. The hospital
being a public institution and he a government doctor, he scowled at my
offer to pay for treatment. The caretaker and especially his wife, with
a seared and weather-worn face like that of a good-hearted old German
peasant woman, were kindly if not experienced nurses. I could scarcely
have fallen upon a finer spot, as nature goes, to be “laid on the
shelf.” Caráz, 7,440 feet above sea-level, was at an ideal height as a
place of recuperation, its splendid climate tempered and clarified by
the snowclads above. An open stream made music by my window; the sun was
unbrokenly brilliant from the time it crawled over the snow-peaks to the
east till it dropped behind the western ranges. I needed no clock to
tell the time of day. It was 7:40 when the first golden streak fell upon
the whitewashed wall beneath the window; 12:14 when the golden rectangle
that marked the open door to the patio stood upright; 2:20 when the
window-bars cast their first shadow on the tiled floor; and 5:10 when
these, elongated to emaciated slenderness, faded away into the purple
darkness of evening. Two youths of the town dropped in on me one day and
brought an ancient book of tales; but it goes without saying that I had
no hint of what was going on in the wide world beyond the encircling
ranges. The unique feature of the hospital was that no provision
whatever was made for patients to wash, even face and hands. Bathing was
looked upon as highly dangerous to invalids, and it was only after
several days, and at the expense of much argument, that I finally caused
a washtub of tepid water to be dragged into the room.