CHAPTER IXTHE 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 acosteroto 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 therecame 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 interandeannudoshutting 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 theteniente políticoin 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, thefamily 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 huddledunder 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-dozencholos, 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 robbersHace 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.

The guinea-pigs on which I feasted upon breaking out of the wilderness on the Peruvian frontier—and the cook. Thecuihas furnished the principal meat of the Andean Indians since prehistoric days

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-heavyrapadurathe 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 anotherdesert 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 womanin 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 severalchoclo tandas, steaming rolls of crushed green corn wrapped in husks.

Thecamino realto 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”—atambo, 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 duringthe 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 theabra, 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, flingingover 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 asol, 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.

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

The sugar that is not turned intoaguardiente, or native whiskey, is boiled down in thetrapicheinto crude brown blocks, variously known aspanela,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 Peruvianaguardienteis 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 duringthe 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 woresuecos, 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 myraison 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 thecorreo. 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 themfrom 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 footholdalong 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 ofaguardientede 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 arealand announced that the fee for crossing a river ahead would be another “peseta.” As the effects of permittingthe unbridled drinking of his health wore off, he recalled thefiambrein 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. Thechirimoya, 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 andthe 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 acceptan “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 ofarrendatarios, 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 intrapiches, crude presses run by hand, and theguarapoboiled down into blocks of rapadura and wrapped in banana leaves. Most of it was turned intoaguardientethat 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 thatSeñoraMedina 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 señoraalso 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 receivedtheir 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 Diósif 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.

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