CHAPTER VIIDOWN VOLCANO AVENUE

On the morning of February eighth, “Meech” called me at five. I had already been some time awake, such was the excitement of so unusual an event as going ona journey. The morning mists had only begun to clothe the flanks of Pichincha when I broke the clinch of “Don Panchito’s” lastabrazoand creaked away down the cobbles of Calle Flores and across the Plaza Santo Domingo in the hob-nailed mining-boots suited to the long, stony trail and the rainy season ahead. The remnant of my letter of credit I had turned into gold sovereigns and sewed them in the band of my trousers; on my back were my worldly—or at least my South American—possessions, including the awkward bulk of the developing-tank packed with films and chemicals. That day had passed when I dreamed of driving an Indian carrier before me, and experience had taught me not to risk the assistance of the mails. Thus the world roamer must leave behind in turn each dwelling-place, after growing somewhat attached to it, for all its faults, to go its way alone again as in the past, glad—or merely sorry—when once in a while the cable brings him a whisper of it, as from some former half-forgotten existence.

It was a familiar route for the first few miles. Now and again I overtook Indians carrying enormous loads oftinajas, dull-red earthen jars and pots of all sizes enclosed in a kind of fish-net, often topped by a great roll ofesteras, mats made of lake-reeds which serve the carriers as beds. Men and women alike raised their hats to me and mumbled some obsequious greeting. They were bound for Latacunga market, several days distant from their villages; yet even on so long a journey, rare was the woman from whose load did not peer the head of a baby. Lower down, inhabited haycocks and huts of swamp-grass centered in beautiful potato fields, red or purple with blossoms. A cherry-tree, here called by the Quichua termcapulí, producing a fruit larger but not unlike our “choke-cherry,” alternated with what looked like the Canadian thistle.

Three hours later, near the eucalyptus grove of the Flores estate that marks Quito’s southern sky-line, I topped the ridge that marked my hitherto furthest south. The long pile of Pichincha, its threepeaks now standing sharply forth, still lay close beside me, the rolling green lower ridges subsiding into the mountain lap where Quito, like a tiny ant’s city, still lay visible, the Panecillo that bulks so large from the central plaza sunk to an insignificant mole-hill. Beyond, far across it, hovered the hazy-blue ranges of the north; Cayambe resolutely astride the equator, pointed Cotacache, streaked near the top with new-fallen snow, piercing the transparent highland sky. For a long time thereafter, as often as I topped a land-billow, I kept getting little broken glimpses of the town from the ever-rising world, until at last, toward noon, as a mighty mountain wave tossed me high on its crest, the view of the city of the equator flashed forth a moment more; then Quito and all its surroundings sank away into the irretrievable past.

Before me lay a new world. With the leisurely dignity of its builder, García Moreno, the highway descended into a great distance-bluehoya, one of those saucer-shaped valleys that abound all down Ecuador’s avenue of volcanoes. Occasionally a horseman in shaggy goatskin trousers stared curiously at me; now and then there passed a file of donkeys under sheet-iron roofs,—a cargo of corrugated iron, the importer of which still prefers this primitive transportation to the more hasty railroad with its startling freight charges. Dandelions and white clover flecked the evergreen fields; frogs sang their bass chorus in many a brook andpántano. Here the way followed more or less the route of the great military highway of the Incas. There were two of these; one of the llanos, or lowlands of the coast, and this more famous one along the crest of the cordillera, built during several reigns and finished under Huayna Ccápac.

Typical huts of thepáramoof Tiopullo, a bleak, bare mountain-top across which the highway to the south hurries on its way to the warmer valleys beyond

Beyond thepáramoof Azuay the trail clambers over broken rock ledges into the town of Cañar

Near the village of Macachi, twenty-one miles from the capital, I turned aside to the hacienda of aquiteñoacquaintance. He was a boy of eighteen, scion of one of the old “best families” of Ecuador, who have kept their Spanish blood free from mixture, to whom had recently fallen the ownership and management of an enormous tract of his little country. Educated in our own land, he spoke a slow, pedantic English. Among his equals, he was soft-spoken almost to the point of diffidence. But his voice was commanding enough when he gave orders to hismayordomoorescribante, or to any of the hundred Indians who lived clustered about the central hacienda house, all of whom addressed him as “Su Merced” (Your Grace) and kowtowed as often as he looked at them, as their ancestors might have done to the imperial Scyri. Before the sun set, we had time to ride across a partof the estate. It lay somewhat too high for wheat, distinctly so for corn. Except for the cattle that flecked the upland fields far and wide, the potato was most at home. Fourteen distinct varieties of this native tuber of the Andes, several of them unknown in the North, grew on the hacienda. In one field women were digging potatoes large as small muskmelons, though nearby were other patches still red or purple with blossoms.

The average wage of the Indian peons was five cents a day, withhuasi-pongo,—space for their miserablechozasin which the only furniture consisted of a few odds and ends of home-made pottery and some sheepskins which, spread on the earth floor by night, served the family, its guinea-pigs and mangy curs, as bed. The women and children worked for nothing, wages being reckoned by family rather than individually, except that the women who milked the cows were each paid a dollar a month. In reality, the Indians were serfs of the estate. When first hired, they areenganchados, “hooked” by a labor agent, and having spent their “advance” in a prolonged chicha debauch, must often be arrested and forced to carry out their part of the contract, usually remaining for years, if not a lifetime, in debt to the hacendado. It would be an error, however, to look upon their condition from our northern point of view. Any custom taken out of its native environment has a far more serious aspect than the reality warrants. The Indian, trained during many generations of Inca rule to avoid all personal initiative or responsibility, accepts by choice this patriarchal arrangement. The majority had been attached to the hacienda since birth; giving the community the aspect of one immense family. Each household had its little plot of ground for its own garden, and the privilege of pasturing a small flock or herd. Yet the owners have the best of the bargain. Nearer the capital were estates whereenganchadosIndians made adobe bricks at ten cents a day, with huasi-pongo and food, making daily some three hundred each, which the owner sold at seventy-five cents a hundred.

The snow-peak of Sincholagua and the rugged, ice-capped ridge of Rumiñaui faced the hacienda. Though little higher, the place was infinitely colder than Quito in its mountain pocket, for here we caught the full sweep of the winds off the ice-fields. By dark, we were both huddled in the hacienda dining-room, bleak and comfortless in spite of its extravagant trinkets from the outer world. The peons, for all their awe of their youthful lord, could not deny themselves the pleasure of grouping noiselessly before the door as we ate, listening tothe strange tongue—not Quichua, stranger still, not even Spanish—which their erudite master spoke with this traveler from unknown parts, who came on foot, carrying his own load, like any Indian. The crack of the door grew ever wider, the broad, expressionless faces ever more numerous, until a draft of the bitter mountain night air caused “His Grace” to glance up in annoyance. Both crack and faces disappeared silently and suddenly, but came again many times before we each crawled early under four heavy blankets.

Next morning the highway, no longer cobbled, but wide and smooth, without wheeled traffic, soon brought snow-clad Illinaza into full sight before me. So skillfully did it bear me upward that by noon I was crossing the greatpáramoof the Nudo de Tiopullo, without the consciousness of having climbed at all. The Andeanpáramo, for which we have no exact English word, is not the sharp mountain peak my imagination had pictured, but is used of any broad plain so lofty that not even the hardy Indian will live upon it, wherequinua, most cold-blooded of domestic plants, refuses to grow, a drear treeless upland covered only with a tough brown bunch-grass that gives it somewhat the aspect of our virgin prairies. To a northerner in motion, it was not uncomfortable by sunshiny day, but no one passes these lofty plains at night by choice. Only a rare shepherd’s shelter of stones andichudots the cold-brown immensity. The shivering highway hurried due south across it, bringing to view another sea-bluehoyoand, barely pausing for a last glance back at the faint peak of Cotacache and the long bulk of Pichincha, grown mere parts of a broad, hazy, tilted horizon, raced downward into the softer valley.

Some seventy-five miles south of Quito begins a veritable desert. From a distance the ranges to right and left seem green, yet the ascending valley grows so dry and arid that even the scanty scrub trees die of thirst. At the top of a barren divide I met head-on, panting harder than I, and moving no faster, the little tri-weekly train from the coast, crowded with dust-laden, weary passengers. Almost sheer above me stood forth the beautiful cone of snow-clad Cotopaxi, equalled in symmetry on all the earth’s surface only by Fujiyama. To the left the hoary head of Tungaragua, far away in the blue haze of the hot, tropical Oriente it looks down upon, rose gradually higher into the sky. Then the highway descended and went ever more swiftly downward into a half-arid hole in the ground, and by three I was tramping the cobbled streets of Ambato, the “winter” resort of wealthyquiteños, a mere 8000 feet above sea-level. To one accustomedto loftier Quito, it had a tranquil, half-languid air; its people were more friendly, lacking that suggestion of belligerency common toquiteños. There was, indeed, something pleasing about it that I had never yet seen in Ecuador. It reminded one mildly of Egypt, in air and odor, and the dust sweeping across from the barren, arid hills that wall it in. The market of this town, hung midway between the tropics and the temperate zone, offers the fruits of both—aguacatesand mangoes side by side with apples, pears, peaches, and cherries—the nativecapulí, at five cents a peck—beside raspberries and blackberries, and the perennial “fru-u-u-till-a-a-as!” (strawberries) that are singsong daily through the streets of Quito. It was from the market-place of Ambato that I caught my first glimpse of Chimborazo, the giant of the Andes, just the crown of its long, saw-like glacier ridge brilliant white against the steely highland sky, as it stood on tiptoe peering over the barren ridges of Carhuairazo.

Barely had I entered the hotel when its dishevelled boy-servants crowded around me to ask if I were an “andarín.” Peyrounel, it proved, had once favored the establishment with his distinguished, if financially disadvantageous, presence. I pleaded too colorless garments to merit the title. To these Andean village youths the arrival of so romantic a being was what that of the yearly circus is to our towns of the far interior. Yet when I offered any of them double his present wage to accompany me and carry a few pounds of my pack, they shook their heads and shrunk fearfully away.

It is not, as I gradually learned to my growing astonishment, merely because they know no better that the people of the Andes sleep on wooden beds. In Quito I had found many who refused to use the imported springs, and I know at least two doctors who prescribed wooden beds for kidney trouble. Here in Ambato a perfectly respectable spring-bed had been completely floored over, and the unsuspecting gringo, instead of landing on a soft and yielding mattress, found himself on such a couch as a thinly carpeted floor might be. Nor was this by any means the last bed out of which I pulled the lumber and spread the woven-reedesteraabove the barrel-hoop springs.

Ambato claims the title of “Athens of Ecuador”; and, indeed, four of the country’s principal writers lived and died here, which is more than can be said of the capital. The place of honor in the main plaza, gorgeous with geraniums of every shade of red, is occupied by the statue of Juan Montalvo, commonly rated the country’s chief literarylight. In Ambato Juan León Mera wrote his “Cumandá,” the accepted classic among Ecuador’s novels; and one may still visit the family of Luis Martínez, whose “A la Costa” is worthy a place in South American literature, if only for its magnificent descriptions of tropical scenery.

I left Ambato on a morning so cold that gloves would have been welcome; one of those mornings, frequent in Ecuador, when the sun rises like a beauty of the harem pushing aside the soft, white curtains of her alcove, when the mountains, at the bases of which dense masses of clouds and mist have gathered, seem gigantic altars on pedestals of marble. Soon the sun grew ardent and imperious, capriciously burning away the mist-curtains of the night, blazing down unrestrained on the rolling plains of Huachi, so arid and monotonous. The road lay deep in sand across a half-desert, with no other adornment than the fences ofcabuya, of the cactus family, that replace the dividing ditches or mud field-walls further north, to mark the limits of the poor heritages of the Indians. The chief industry here is the weaving of a coarse cloth from the fibers of thecabuya blanca. Here and there acapulítree persisted, and impenetrable, bushy clumps of the thornysigsebristled aggressively. The few planted fields were sparse and drear, though near the town, where the thirstyarenaleshad been transformed by irrigation into patches of green on which the desert-weary eyes rested gratefully, grew the strawberry, large and fragrant.

Higher and higher rose the world, though so imperceptibly that the ascent was noted only because the landscape opened out to ever greater vistas. It was a day of climax in volcanoes. Around the circle of the spreading horizon the white crests of no fewer than eight of the great vent-holes of the earth grew up about me, until I paused on a high ridge to study them. To the right, for a time looking like a single mass of rock and snow, stretched long, saw-toothed Carhuairazo, with Chimborazo rising behind it; then gradually the great, glacier-blue dome of this Everest of America detached itself and stood forth in all its immensity. Far behind, yet perfectly clear in spite of the blue haze of some forty miles distance, cone-shaped Cotapaxi, once so savage in its destruction, reared itself into the sky-line like an occidental twin sister of Fujiyama. To the left, in military precision, three snow-clads stood shoulder to shoulder—Sincholagua, Antisana, and one above which rose a column of smoke that marked it as Sangai, most active of the western world, but a few days before in destructive eruption. Then came the glacier-clad, rounded cone of Tungarahua, keeping its eternal watch over the tropical Oriente, and to the south, noblest of all, peering forth first in the early mists, and growing in grandeur all the morning, stood dreaded El Altar, its beauty now completely unveiled, a fantastic mass of peaks and pinnacles, like some phantom city of ice.

Indians carrying a grand piano across the plaza of Cañar on a journey to the interior

The Indians of Ecuador draw their droves of cattle on after them by playing a weird, mournful “music” on thebocina, made of a section of bamboo

For hours the snow-peaked horizon continued. Across the sands of Huachi travelers had been few; toward noon they grew plentiful. Around every turn appeared Indians and their four-footed competitors, with such monotonous persistency that I needed a cudgel to drive out of my way the asses which, expressionless and impassive as their masters, were inclined to march serenely on, irrespective of human obstacles. The rarechagras, or tawny countrymen, who live in theirchozasalong the way, were interesting only as evidence of how clod-like man may become. At Mocha, where I halted in the early afternoon, the deep-blue ice-fields of Chimborazo lay piled into the sky overhead, a mountain still, though the town stands more than two miles above the sea. All the following morning its arctic dome towered close on my right as I plodded along its gentle slope not far below the snow line, often waist-deep in the ruts which generations of pack-animals and Indians had worn in the brown, uninhabitedpáramo, dreary with long, slightly rolling stretches of bunch-grass, across which I only now and then overtook a mule-train, the drivers wrapped to their ears in their heavy ponchos. Behind, across a hazy valley, now more than forty miles away, the symmetrical cone of Cotapaxi gleamed faintly forth in a new dress of snow that had fallen during the night. A cobbled highway ran along the bottom of a slight hollow some distance off, but travelers had scorned it so long in favor of the ruttedpáramothat grass was grown high between its cobbles; and at length, as if it resented the abandonment, it swung off in the direction of Cajabamba and was gone.

The dozen ruts across thepáramofinally joined forces to form a kind of road that, turning its back on Chimborazo, around whose white head a storm was brewing, struck off toward a long, undulating, hazy valley backed by blue heaps of ranges. Gradually I descended to almost a desert again, by a road deep in sand, rising and falling over countless sand-knolls, the peaked, grass-covered huts of Indians tossed like abandoned old straw hats far up the flanks of the drear mountainsides on either hand. At one of these I found the first use for my new revolver. An enormous dog, plainly bent on destruction, bounded out upon me without a sound, halted abruptly with a faint yelp as I pressedthe trigger, turned a complete somersault, and fell feet upward, like a captive turtle, not two yards from me.

Ordinarily there is little to be feared from the sneaking curs of all colors that swarm about every hut throughout the length of the Andes. Before the Conquest, tradition has it, the Indians had only the muteallcu, now exterminated—at least, it is certain that none of those that remain are mute. These degenerate descendants of the animals brought over by the Spaniards rival the original chaos of sound as they rush out in cowardly packs upon any stranger—especially a non-Indian, for as the white man’s dog abhors an Indian, so do these a white man—while their masters gaze stolidly on, without so much as attempting to call them off. The Indian of the Andes does not raise dogs; he has them merely because he is too passive to get rid of them. The curs are never treated as pets; the only caress they ever receive is a kick or a prod from which they retreat sluggishly with a cowardly yelp, even if the weapon misses its aim; they are never fed, but exist on such offal as the Indian himself disdains. A mountaineer to whom I put the question once briefly expressed the viewpoint of his race:

“How can we help having many dogs,patrón? They breed so often!”

From the village of San Andrés, picturesquely backed by the ice-palace of El Altar, architecturally as diffuse as the Castle of Schwerin, a spreading highway, bordered by endless cactus hedges, led toward a great sandy plain far ahead, a small forest of eucalypti that marked the site of Riobamba giving it center. Further on, for all the aridity, was plenty of half-grown corn, with numberless peaked, thatched huts peering above the vegetation on either hand. At the entrance to Riobamba I saw the first llamas of my South American journey. Once an Indian passed driving a llama and an ass hitched together; further on several of these absurd “Peruvian sheep,” pasturing beyond the cactus hedge, craned their long necks to gaze curiously after me. Times without number I had been assured that not only was the llama never a draft or a milch animal, but that it could never be ridden; that it would carry exactly a hundred pounds and would irrevocably lie down if another ounce were added, and that it could under no circumstances be urged beyond a slow, dignified walk. Imagine my surprise, then, when suddenly I beheld a llama bestridden by a full-grown Indian come down the road at a brisk trot, and watched them fade away in the eucalyptus-lined distance beyond. In the town beyond there was one llama for every two donkeys.

Riobamba, chief city between Quito and the coast, is commonly described as “lying at the foot of Chimborazo.” The description must not be taken too literally. I had imagined a cold, haughty little town snuggled together in a lap of the high Andes; but if Riobamba lies at the foot of Chimborazo, so, in only somewhat lesser degree, does Guayaquil. The traveler turns his back on the glacier-clad giant of the Andes and tramps a long half-day before he comes to what, in situation and general appearance, might be a town on the sandy prairies of western Nebraska. Its monotonously right-angled streets are unusually wide, painfully cobbled, and swirling with sand; its architecture is drearily like that of any other Andean city. It has been several times destroyed by earthquake; were it not, like Quito, more than two miles aloft, it would be even more often destroyed by its personal habits. At sunrise thrice a week most of the town turns out to watch the trains that have “overnighted” here leave for Quito and Guayaquil respectively; whence its suggestion of some frontier village of railroad hotels in our Western states. Unlike Quito, Riobamba has a street-car. It is a platform on wheels with a flat roof supported by gas-pipes, under which are some crosswise boards that are called seats with the same Latin-American tolerance with which a place to lie on the floor is called a bed, and a place the traveler may possibly be able to make his way through is called a road. Like some Andean newspapers, it appears “every now and then,” when a pair of blasé, world-weary mules drag it across town to the station and back, usually only on train days. Many ride, and the more poorly dressed seem to pay for the privilege; but the Indians take good care not to be caught on any such risky, new-fangled contraption.

There is commonly not a “sight” to be seen in Riobamba, unless it be the stern, white face of Chimborazo looking down upon the city from the middle distance to the north. The traveler who chances upon the town of a Saturday or Sunday, however, will find it a place of interest. Then the Indian population of a thickly inhabited region comes from thirty or more miles around to what is rated Ecuador’s greatest market. The sandy plaza, larger than an American city block, is so densely packed with stolid thick-set men and women in gray felt hats and crude-colored blankets that only by constant struggle can a purchaser thread his way across it. From my room on the corner above, not a foot of open ground was visible. The scene was like a swarming of myriad ants of many colors; like a great Oriental rug undulating in the sunshine. As one crowds along between the rows ofhawkers, all the products of the region seem to pass in procession. Here were entire families who had jogged many miles to town under the produce of their chacras; there, a man with only a half-grown chicken or a gaunt pig for sale; beyond, a woman sat all day long selling bit by bit, at a net total of perhaps ten cents, the bushel of native cherries which, together with her babe, she has carried at least twenty miles. Here was a pile of ugly native shoes—of very limited demand—there, homespun blankets and ponchos in colors that scream audibly, before they mellowed by sun and rain and the habits of their wearers. Every domestic animal and fowl known to the Andes of to-day was displayed; cheap knives, tin spoons, trinkets from foreign lands, native plants and bulbs; herbs that still make up the aboriginal pharmacopœia, as in pre-Conquest days; tiny packages of dyestuffs that are doled out a penny-worth at a time; corn bread and barley bread, even a few soggy wheat biscuits—though the price of the latter is all but prohibitive—cherries, strawberries, oranges,aguacates, a hard native taffy known asalfeñique, pears, apricots, peaches, a hard little apple that never matures, pineapples, nearly all the grains and vegetables known in our own land, and even a greater variety of corn and potatoes; and a countless confusion of other products that sell for what would seem far less than the cost of bringing them to town. Beyond, was atercena, an open-air butchershop, where Indian women hacked into bits the cows and sheep that had succumbed to amateur butchers, at the same time fighting off the fifteen dogs which, by actual count, prowled about the stand. In one corner scores of tawny, bare-legged Indians squatted beside heavy grass-wrapped loads of snowy ice, Riobamba’s only means of cooling her beverages. If one knew enough of the bastard Quichua of Ecuador to ask its origin, the stolid fellows threw an expressionless glance toward the icy dome of Chimborazo. About them hovered something akin to the glamour that surrounds the Arctic explorer. All day long was an endless motley going and coming through the adjacent streets and plazas, amid which the imagination could easily drop back four centuries and fancy what this Andean world may have been before the coming of the white man.

Ruins of the fortress of Ingapirca, near Cañar, where the Inca Huayna Ccápac is said to have received the first news of the landing of white men on the coast of his Empire

A mild example of the “road” through southern Ecuador. The trail pitches and rolls over earthquake-gashed, utterly uninhabited regions, sinking far out of sight in thequebradain the middle distance, then climbs away across the world until the hill here seen sinks to a dot on the landscape

It was so brilliant a Sunday that Chimborazo seemed to hang almost sheer above the town, and the whole bulk of snow-clad Tungarahua loomed clearly forth from its tropical home, when I set out after midday for what I had been told was an easy half-day’s tramp. Within an hour—so sudden are the changes in weather zones here—an icy rain was pouring down upon my shoulders bowed with the weight of ahundred-pound pack. At last I sprawled to a summit with an all-embracing view of the entire district of Riobamba, the city itself a mere fleck far below in an opaque-blue landscape roofed by purple-black clouds through which the unseen sun cast a single faint shaft, as from a weak spotlight. The rain, which in Ecuador falls in zones sharply cut off one from another, ceased abruptly at the top of the barrier. Here were two roads from which to choose, and for hours thereafter I could not know whether the one that descended a sharp valley beside a tiny stream led anywhere near where I wished to go. Well down the bone-dry vale were scattered hamlets of grass and mud huts of a half-wild tribe of Indians, the men in white goatskin trousers that gave them the appearance of shaggy-legged Greek satyrs, the dwellings often hung far up the steep walls that enclosed the growing stream. Many of the inhabitants ran away at my approach; the rest stared at me from safe heights as I sped on down the valley. Ugly white curs abounded; in the scanty trees a bird sang now and then; but for the most part only the sound of the stream leaping from rock to rock broke the mountain-walled silence.

Cold darkness fell, and still the broken trail descended swiftly. At rare intervals a corner of the moon peered through the clouds. Then, in the blackest of nights, the road forked again, giving me another random choice. A wild, windy, uninhabited hour beyond, the path fell suddenly away under my feet and I found myself involved in a labyrinth ofquebradas, holes and chasms large as two-story houses, as if the region had been wrecked by a long series of earthquakes. A score of times I climbed down hand over hand into immense ruts with walls high above my head, certain I had lost my way, yet with no other choice than to press on. Two hours, at least, this riot of the earth’s surface continued before there appeared suddenly the lights of a considerable town, dimly seen through the night across a wet, blurred valley backed by an all but invisible mountainside. A trail picked itself together again under my feet, pitched headlong down to a roaring little river straddled by an aged stone bridge, ghostly white in the pallid moonlight, and led me stumbling into the railroad village of Guamote, still booming with the tomtoms of the Sunday fiesta that had left its scattered débris of drunken Indians through all the length of the town.

From Guamote I followed the silent but well-kept Quito-Guayaquil Railway through a landscape like that of southern Texas, winding in and out between dreary hills peopled only by a rare weather-wornshepherd in goatskin trousers; then across broad stretches of sear-brown, slightly rolling desert scantily covered with bunch-grass, the sand sweeping over it in clouds. From Palmira,—two dismal little station buildings at some 11,000 feet elevation—the railroad drops steadily for all the more than a hundred miles to the coast. Some way down the descending valley, the land turned almost suddenly from dreary brown to the green of another rain-belt that gradually climbed the ever-higher mountain walls that shut me in. Beyond Alausí next morning I made a swift descent, even swifter by sliding down the face of the notorious “Devil’s Nose,” where the track mounts in three sections, one above the other, and reached the little town of Huigra in time for “breakfast.” Here, in a green valley between high hills falling abruptly into a prattling stream, are the main offices and hospitals of the railroad, and an American atmosphere, tempered with whiffs of England and Ecuador, to which the fever and bubonic of Guayaquil do not mount, nor the ills of Quito descend.

At Huigra my route was to turn southward over the enclosing mountain wall. But I had no objection to coasting down into the tropics on a side-trip to Guayaquil—except Guayaquil itself; and when the chief engineer promised a screened refuge from sun to sun, I accepted the invitation gladly. All that is necessary to travel from Huigra to sea-level is to get something on wheels of the right gage and “let her slide”—or rather, let her slide within very definite limits, lest one reach the bottom far sooner and in poorer condition than was planned. With a native employee behind, the two of us sat on the sheer front edge of the track automobile, the experienced hand of the chief on the brake, and roared in and out and ever down the mountaincañon, the towering walls on either side rising higher above us with every yard forward, a foaming river keeping us a not much slower company. Huigra is at kilometer 117. At 110 we suddenly reached the tree-line. Forests in striking contrast to the bare upland plateau of Ecuador grew up about us as if by magic. Foaming mountain brooks dashed down from either towering wall to join the river—and to save the company the expense of building water-tanks. Swiftly the trees changed in species,—from hardy highland shrubs to voluptuous tropical growths, till the airy bamboo, noblest of ferns, bowed to us in graceful dignity from the crowded forest as we screamed past.

Before noon we swung out of the gorge I had followed from Palmira, and halted at Bucay. It had been like dropping in two hours from May to a dense and heavy July, from a northern scene to one likethat of Panama, with the same sticky atmosphere, negroes, and outdoor life. Here we took possession of the empty pay-car on the rear of the day’s passenger-train and sat with our feet on the back railing, watching the dead-flat tropical world run away and shrink up to nothingness behind us. The track lay straight as a cannon-ball’s course through the tunnel of forest and jungle. Indians and their gay garments had disappeared; here were only the colors of nature. Along the way, thatched houses of split bamboo slouched in languid attitudes, half-black and slightly dressed families peering from their sort of hole-in-the-wall verandas behind partly raised blinds hinged at the top. For all the lazy languor of the scene, jungle products succeeded each other swiftly. Cacao, then palm-trees gladdened the eyes; the air grew heavier; now and then a great field of sugar-cane broke briefly the endless tunnel of forest; beautiful bamboo groves alternated with immense tropical trees cutting into the sky-line.

The natives, afoot or ahorse, used the track as a trail, for all else was impenetrable wilderness. Here and there the jungle crowded so close that it side-swiped the car, though along the way were many section-gangs fighting it back with machetes, the favorite tool and weapon of thecosteño, who saluted us—or, more exactly, my companion—as we sped past. Pineapple fields grew numerous; at stations the fruit lay in piles at the feet of indifferent chocolate-colored vendors. The brown castor-bean on its small green trees appeared; splendid cocoanut palms, heavy with nuts, heralded the sea; maidenly slender rubber-trees; broad fields of light-green rice, growing arm in arm with Indian corn; the plebeian bread-fruit tree, with its broad leaves fancily cut as with scissors in the hands of an inventive child; and always gigantic tropical trees cut fantastically into the sky-line of the light-gray day above. Behind, always, fixed as fate itself, the dim and clouded range of the Andes, a giant wall, blue and unbroken, shut off the world beyond. Here and there a hoary peak showed above the clouds, so high one could not believe it possible. Far off in the heavens like a great cloud, Chimborazo stood white and immovable. As in the forest one sees only trees, so only down here, looking at the chain as a whole, could one realize the loftiness of those realms where one had been living for months more than two miles above the sea.

Naked brown babies, huts on ever longer legs, hammocks, grew numerous, and languid loungers to fill them; here and there appeared a Chinaman; some large towns, bamboo-built and all on stilts, like a thin-shanked army; buzzards circling lazily overhead amid scents thatwhispered of plague and sudden death. Then on either hand began to appear the low, dense-wooded hills of Durán, more properly deep green islands in this flood-time. Fluffy white flowers in myriads smiled bravely above the black waters that would soon swallow them up. The vast mountain wall across the world behind had grown a shade bluer when we drew into Durán on the banks of the Guayas, and brushing both clear with housewifely care of any lurking mosquito, dodged through the double screen-doors into the railroad quarters. Here were shower-baths and phonographs, New York papers, a frequent nasal twang, and only outside and seeming far off as in some distant place, the scent of Ecuador.

Sudden death is reputed to fly chiefly by night along the Guayas. So only when the sun was high did we venture across to Ecuador’s metropolis and far-famed death-trap, Guayaquil. Outwardly, the low, heat-steaming city looked far cleaner than Quito. But here filth grants no immunity. During three hours we saw the black funeral street-car pass nine times—and by no means all the population can afford so splendid an exit from the world. Yet here were electric tramways for the first time since Bogotá, larger shops and more ambitious displays than in Quito, and signs of greater commercial activity. The houses were of wood or split bamboo, low and earthquake-fearing, all the windows with wooden blinds hinged at the top, from behind which peered half the female population, seldom seen on the streets. Compared to Quito, it was a town of no color at all. Among the foreign residents was a curious indifference to local dangers, always seeming greater at a distance than on the spot. Americans yawned at the mention of “Yellow Jack” and Bubonic and went about their business with as little apparent worry as a New Yorker of death by a street accident. Nothing in the attitude of the people suggested an unusually precarious hold on life—except that ever recurrent black funeral car, electrically operated, as if horses were not fast enough for its incessant labors. Long before the sun had lost its mastery of the situation, we had retreated again to Durán. The lone traveler in far-off lands runs many perils, but if I must succumb to one of them, let it be with a fighting chance, not this insidious, sneaking death that flies on all but invisible wings.

Cuenca, third city of Ecuador, lies in one of the most fertile and beautiful valleys of the Andes

Next morning the passenger-train lifted us back to Huigra, where a new experience awaited me. That evening I sat writing in the railroad quarters. Two fellow-countrymen were parading the broad, second-story veranda of the light wooden building. The only other soundwas the muffled chatter of the stream below. Suddenly the heavy table beneath my arm began to move as at some spiritualist séance, the windows took to rattling as if in some sudden terror to escape from their frames, the wall decorations swung back and forth like pendulums, and for what seemed a long minute the entire building shook as with a paludic fever. I opened my mouth to protest against what I took for a moment to be physical exuberance of the veranda paraders; but I closed it again as I realized that I had passed through my first earthquake, and had gone on writing for a line or more before I recognized the good fortune of being in a wooden house. Outside, the strollers had not even interrupted their chat, except to remark, “Pretty good one, eh?” and when the natives in the town below had left off shouting, evidently in an attempt to scare off the dreaded spirit within the bowels of the earth, life returned to its customary languor, the silence broken only by the stream still prattling on through the darkness. In the morning the telegraph wire brought word that the instruments of Durán had registered seven quakes, and that several houses and a church had fallen in the adobe interior.

On the morning of February 24th I crossed the little bridge over Huigra’s garrulous stream and, trailing away up the mountain wall that shuts off the railroad valley on the south, disappeared from the modern world. All but twenty pounds of my baggage I had turned over to a nativefletero, proprietor of a mule-and-jackass express company that operated as far south as Cuenca. It was in the nature of things, however, that even under a light load I should pay for my descent to Huigra by much sweating toil, before raising again its paltry 4000 feet to the two miles or more of the Andean chain. In the valley a brilliant sun set me dripping; above was driving mist to chill me through if I dared to pause, and out of which now and then floated the gentle exhortations of unseen arrieros to their toiling animals:

“Anda, macho! Mula, caramba! Vaya, sinvergüenza!”

An experienced gringo had assured me I was approaching the most impassable region in Ecuador, a place where it rained steadily and heavily a hundred and four weeks a year, where my mules would sink to their ears in mud and be left to perish, where I myself would infallibly die of exposure if my caravan were overtaken by night out on the loftypáramo. I easily forestalled the peril to my mules, and the second I resolved to avoid by not letting night overtake me.

It was not, certainly, an ideal road. There were places where the writhing trail was for miles a series of earth ridges with deep ditchesof mud and water between, like an endless corduroy road, and these made hard going indeed for laden animals. For as often as one of them set foot on one of thesecamelones, as they are called in the Andes, it slipped off into the muddy ditch between, as likely backward as forward, giving a very exaggerated imitation of the gait of a camel. In fact, it is this constant slipping and sliding of passing pack-trains that turns certain wet regions of the Andes into camelones. In places the mud-reeking slope climbed steep mountainsides through narrow trails worn twenty feet deep, down or up which horses or cargo mules stumbled and sprawled constantly, threatening to smash their packs against the side walls or underfoot.

But it was a route far worse for horsemen than for a man afoot. I stepped blithely from ridge to ridge, not only dry-shod but at my regular pace, easily leaving all four-footed competitors behind; and while there were germs of truth in the warning that a mule and his cargo, slipping and falling upon me in one of the gullies, might bring my journey to a halt, the very simple remedy for that possibility was not to be found loitering beneath an animal when he fell. Donkey carcasses and the rain-bleached skeletons of mules and horses were frequent along the way; and always, now broken, now for a time incessant, came out of the blind mist the raucous bawling of arrieros: “Anda, mula, caramba!”

The dense, heavy fog turned to pouring rain. Indeed there were evidences to verify the assertion that this was one of the zones of Ecuador where the rainy season reigns perennially. In mid-afternoon I passed a few Indian hovels. I had been warned to stop for the night in the last of these rare habitations, if I would not end my wayward career out on the arcticpáramoof the Nudo de Azuay. But the stolid-featured native assured me there were others a half-league on, and I had climbed twice that distance across a dismal stretch of bunch-grass without a sign of life, except a scanty herd of wild, shaggy, rain-drenched cattle, before I realized that the Indian had told the old lie to be rid of an importunate guest. Within me there grew the conviction that, in spite of my best intentions, I should some day shoot a large, round, soft-nosed, 38-caliber hole through some Indian for sending me “further up” into the uninhabited night.

However, there I was, exactly where, of all places in Ecuador, I had so often been warned in several tongues not to let night overtake me. The gray walls about me dimmed like a lamp turned out. Thesepáramotrails being, even by day, only a straggling of interwoven pathsoften effaced, it was not in the order of things that I should keep the route long in unmitigated night. For a time I stumbled along an irregular, rock-littered ground, full of leg-breaking holes, picking every step ahead with my stick, like a blind man, and even at that now and then sprawling on all fours. As to direction, I could only trust to luck. Then I felt water-soaked bunch-grass under foot, and all efforts to find the trail again were wasted. Vaguely I felt that I had come out on the nose of a mountain. Through the rain-drenched night there came faintly to my ears the sound of a waterfall, and from somewhere far off the dismal howling of a dog rode by on the raging wind. The ground under my feet took on the angle of a steep roof; it required stick, hands, and extreme vigilance to keep from pitching headlong down into the bottomless unknown. I felt my way inch by inch several hundred feet downward without finding a level space as large as my hand. In the end I could only sit down on my bundle in the mud, brace my feet against a tuft of bunch-grass and, piling my most perishable possessions in my lap, button my llama-hair poncho over my head, sup on a three-inch butt of bread, and settle down to keep my precarious seat until daylight.

He who fancies an Ecuadorian mountainside a pleasant night’s lodging-place, merely because it is near the equator, has still something of geography to learn. Strangely enough, it might have been worse. The poncho was almost impervious to cold, entirely so to rain. As the Scottish chieftain of earlier days soaked his tartan before lying down for a night in the highland heather, so the wetness of all about me seemed to add warmth. The rain redoubled, yet I should scarcely have known it but for its pelting above my head. I dozed now and then into a nap. After one of them I peered out into the wintry night, to find the mist alive with hardy fireflies so large that those which started up near me seemed to my dull fancy the lanterns of some prowling band. Twice some animal, perhaps a wild mountain-horse, romped by me. When I looked out again a bright moon was shining, yet I felt too comfortable as I was to take advantage of it to push on, and fell asleep again, not without a drowsy misgiving that some diligent hunter might try a shot at my huddled, shaggy form standing out in the moonlight against the swift mountainside; until I remembered that no native ever ventures out upon an Andeanpáramoexcept in the full light of day.

Dawn showed the lost trail zigzagging in three branches down the face of the mountain. The waterfall lay directly below me, yet sosteep was the slope on which I was perched that I had to crawl back again up the trail on all fours and descend with it. Far away across a valley so deep I could not see its bottom, lay in plain sight what I knew to be the town of Cañar, a mere white speck halfway up the great mountainside beyond. It is chiefly noted for its outlook upon the world. From a distance, it seemed to hang upright on the vertical mountain flank; once arrived, I found it occupied the flat top of one of the countless hills that pile higher and higher into the sky, to culminate in a great Andean chain. Here was a land of stone. Everywhere, in field and valley, rocks lay more profusely and far larger in size than on any abandoned New England farm. If the tumble-down old town of Cañar had any features at all different from hundreds of others down the crest of the Andes, it was its large proportion of stone buildings over those of sun-baked mud.

It is perhaps the existence of stone, rarer to the north, that accounts for the presence near Cañar of the first ruins of unquestionably Inca origin. Their victorious march to the north, too, was so quickly followed by the arrival of the Spaniards, that the Children of the Sun left no permanent works about Quito and beyond. The imperial highway from Cuzco to what is to-day Ecuador, built by a race less fearful of the lofty places and mighty cañons of the Andes, was more direct than the modern haphazard route. Where it descended from thepáramoof Azuay and climbed out of the gorge beyond, there was built a fortress and atambofor the housing of the imperial cortège that is known to-day as Ingapirca, which some believe to be that same Tomebamba where Huayna Ccápac, the Great, was born, and where the news of the landing on the coast of a strange tribe cut short his journey southward in his old age.

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