Quito lies in a pocket of the Andes, at the foot of Pichincha, more than 10,000 feet above sea level
Quito lies in a pocket of the Andes, at the foot of Pichincha, more than 10,000 feet above sea level
Quito lies in a pocket of the Andes, at the foot of Pichincha, more than 10,000 feet above sea level
A really bright man might have guessed that, also. Evidently the tongue of the Incas had left little trace in San Gabriel. Suddenly the bell of the whitewashed church whanged. The players piled their “gloves” hastily in the form of a cross, and every living person in theplaza, male or female, snatched off their hats and poured into the place of worship, from which arose some weird species of music as we pushed on into the town.
A letter from the jefe of Tulcán gave us theentréeto the parlor of one of his relatives. The fortnightly mail had just arrived, and Don Manuel was dictating letters to his daughter, who wrote slowly and painfully in a school-girl hand, dipping an ancient steel pen into a medieval inkwell between each word. When we returned at dark from a dingy little shop in which supper consisted chiefly ofquimbolos,—a kind of corn pudding wrapped in corn-husks—we found Don Manuel, his wife, and four daughters all gathered in a family conference over the letter, each offering suggestions, not as to its subject matter, but on the dotting of the “i’s” and the crossing of the “t’s,” a controversy which raged long and vociferously. Then there came marching into the room a huge mattress under which, on close inspection, we made out the feet of an Indian boy, and the family announced that they were going to visit apariente—a polite subterfuge to withdraw and leave us free to go to bed. The parlor was typical of the “best room” of well-to-do rural South Americans. A forest of chairs in shrouds and a chaos of gaudy bric-a-brac cluttered a chamber musty with little use. On the walls were framed portraits of the pudgy family ancestors back to the days of ruffles and powdered wigs, all draped with mourningcrêpe. The family library consisted of barely a half dozen books, all of the general style of Tomás á Kempis’ “Imitación de Cristo,” except for a copy of an agricultural journal in Spanish, published in Buffalo.
There are three routes from San Gabriel to Ibarra. To our surprise, we learned that all of them, far from following the high plateau, descended again into the hot country, for the valley of the Chota cuts a mighty slash entirely across Ecuador a bit north of the Imbabura volcano. The Indians told us the road waspedroso. It was the most exact information we ever had from men of their race. Anything more stony would be difficult to imagine. During all the afternoon there was not a moment in which we were not descending swiftly, our thigh muscles set with the tautness of brake-rods, by an ever more stone-strewn road that curved in and out along the flanks of a barren range, forming loops as perfect as the written “m” of an expert in penmanship; on our left an enormous gash in the earth, dreary, desert-brown, with no other vegetation than the cactus—strangely enough called “méjico” in this region,—on our right, so close it all but grazedour elbows, the tawny, shale mountainside, seeming to rise and grow as we descended. Where the cold winds of the highlands turned tepid, Indians disappeared. For a long space there was no sign of man. With every turn of the road the heat grew more tropical. A green spot appeared almost directly beneath us, hazy as a crumpled green rag with an indistinct light shining behind it. Then two negroes passed, the first we had seen since leaving the Cauca. The road pitched headlong down a slope, donkeys and more negroes appeared, and the green patch developed into fields of sugarcane. Beyond them, by a wooden-roofed bridge, we crossed the Chota river and found ourselves at sunset in the “Caserío de la Chota.”
Tropical huts of reeds and thatch, quite unlike the thick-walled adobe dwellings of the highlands, even in form, lay scattered along the further bank. The entire population was jet black in color; the life of the place as different from the plateau above as if we had suddenly been transported to another continent. Boisterous laughter broke often on the thickening dusk; above the chattering tongues resounded frequently the screams of an exploded jest or a sudden quarrel. A piccaninny bawled lustily, startling us into the realization that we had never yet heard an Indian baby cry. The insolence of these descendants of the slaves once imported in large numbers for the sugar plantations of Ecuador, who in the half century since the abolition of slavery had drifted into this tropical valley to bask in the sun, was in striking contrast to the obsequiousness of the Andean Indian.
Beside the two rows of straw and reed shacks of the negroes stood a government building of stone and mud, one end of which was the telegraph office. In it the operator, who had left two days before to “visit some relatives for a few hours,” had locked two kids that bleated incessantly. The open portion of the building was a shambles. Thirty-two miles from the top to the bottom of the Andes had left our feet no fit standing-place, even after soaking them in the Chota; yet we hesitated long before attempting to clear a space to lie down. Luckily, I still had a candle-end in my pack. In a far corner some energetic traveler had built a cot of reeds laid across two sticks, but it had long since rotted to uselessness. Rumor had it that the negroes of Chota were skilled assassins, and the demeanor of the hamlet was by no means reassuring. We laid our weapons beside us on the stone floor, but dared not close the door for fear of drowning in our own sweat. All the night through I woke frequently with the sensationof some one creeping in upon us, but dawn broke without any definite proof that the peril had been anything worse than the offspring of an overheated imagination.
It would be task enough to climb from Chota to Ibarra on the strength of a hearty meal; to make it from a lazy negro village, where not even a swallow of coffee was to be had, approached torture. Hour after hour we toiled upward through a choking desert of sand and broken stone, pitched at the angle of a steep stairway. There runs a story of the Chota, suggestive of the barrier it presents to modern progress. Archer Harman, the American who lifted the railway of Guayaquil to the plains of Quito, strolling along the streets of the Ecuadorian capital one day, chanced to meet M——, one of his American engineers.
“M——,” he said, shifting his cigar to the other cheek, “get out of here to-morrow morning and see what the chances are for a railroad to Bogotá.”
The engineer sallied forth next day on muleback, with such equipment or lack thereof as can be had in Quito in a hurry. Three months later he rode back into the city of the equator.
“Well, you’re back, eh?” said his chief. “What’d it cost us to run her through the Chota valley?”
“About seventy miles of 6% grade in shale,” replied the engineer.
“Hum!” said Harman, “There won’t be any railroad to Bogotá.”
Which is one of the many reasons why the nebulous “Pan-American Railway” still exists only in the minds of inexperienced dreamers.
Hours up, we began to pass groups of meek, well-built Indians, easily distinguishable by their costume from the tribes to the north. They spoke a guttural yet sibilant language that could be none other than Quichua, the ancient tongue of the Incas, and I took occasion to test the vocabulary we had gleaned, by putting an unnecessary question:
“Maypi ñan Ibarrata?”
To which the oldest of the group replied at once in fluent, though accented Spanish, without the shadow of a smile:
“Sí, señor, this is the road to Ibarra; derechito—straight ahead.”
Before noon we were sharing a gallon of chicha at the top of the range, several world-famous volcanoes thrusting their white heads through the clouds about us. Ibarra and her fertile green slopes were plainly visible; a dozen villages dotted the far-reaching landscape, and the two roads to Quito wound away over the opposite flanks of cloud-capped Imbabura, towering into the sky beyond and cutting off half thesouthern horizon. Below us spread the famous Yaguarcocha, the “Lake of Blood.” At the height of his power Huayna Ccápac, thirteenth Inca, had pushed his conquests over the equator, when the Caranquis, a warlike tribe of the valley before us, revolted. The army sent against them exterminated the Caranqui warriors and threw their bodies into the lake, “turning its waters blood-red,” according to the legend, and giving it the name it bears to this day. Its shores were white with encrusted salt and, like so many lakes of the Andean highlands, so completely surrounded by reedy swamps that we were forced to abandon the swim we had promised ourselves before entering the principal city of Ecuador north of the capital.
Ibarra is a still and dignified old town of some 12,000 inhabitants, founded in 1606 under the Spanish viceroy from whom it took its name, as a residence for the white men of the region between Pasto and Quito, on the site of the old Indian village of Caranqui. In spite of the extreme fertility of the surrounding valley and its peerless climate, many of its houses stood empty, and several buildings of colonial days were still the ruins the great earthquake of many years ago had left them. The keeper of the little eating-house that actually and publicly announced itself, abandoned to us her own quarters, densely furnished with photographs, frail chairs, tables, sofas, cane lounge, and an immense canopied bed, to say nothing of the extraordinary luxury of a newspaper only two days old. To offset the pleasure of the first real bed in weeks, however, the town kept us awake most of the night with a local fiesta. We had been so lacking in foresight as to arrive on the day sacred to the “Virgen de la Merced.” The celebration began early in the afternoon. An endless train of Indians in a bedlam of colors trooped across the town under great bundles of dry brush gathered far away in the hills, a haughty chief on horseback riding up and down the line giving his orders in sputtering Quichua. Men, women, and children deposited their loads on the bare plaza before a weather-tarnished old church, and ambled away for more. Five immense heaps had been laid out in the form of a cross when a priest sallied forth to sprinkle them with holy water. In the thickening dusk the entire town gathered amid a deafening din of battered church bells, the explosion of thousands of home-made fireworks and “cannon crackers,” the blare of a tireless band, and the howling of the populace and its swarming curs. The brush cross was lighted by a priest in rich vestments, and a pandemonium that may have been pleasing to the sleepless Virgin raged the whole night through.
The driftwood of the festival, in the form of chicha victims sprawled on their backs in streets and gutters, littered the town when we set out to climb to the frozen equator at Cayambe. A wide highway strode up through the Indian town of Caranqui, birthplace of Atahuallpa, best loved son of Huayna Ccápac and of Paccha, daughter of the conquered Scyri who once ruled the territory of the Quitus, and away due southward over the left shoulder of Imbabura. For the first miles it was so crowded with Indians in crude red blankets, heavy, gray felt hats, and bare legs, that it seemed the migration of some tribe from another world. All sidestepped like Hindu coolies and even the women touched their hats to us as they passed, greeting us sometimes in Spanish, but more often in Quichua. To the west rose the snow-topped peak of Cotacache, sharp as a dog’s tooth, and the view of Ibarra and her fertile valley opened up below and behind us like an unfolding map. Then a ridge wiped out town and jogging Indians, and left us only the gaunt, spreading mountain world to look upon.
Thirty miles lay behind us when we entered Cayambe, a drowsy, tumble-down place of no great size, the chill of the blue ice-fields capping the great volcano of the same name that bulks into the heavens close beside it, sweeping through the dreary streets unhampered. Next day a long and tiresome eight leagues led across a desolate and parched country, fissured by enormous earthquake cracks. But for the discovery of a new drink,—guarango, of unknown concoction—we might have stumbled across the sand-blown equator in far worse state than those who first pass it within the realms of Father Neptune. A drought had fallen upon the region so long since that even the cactus had given up in despair. All day long Cayambe stood forth clear and blue over our left shoulders, and far off to the hazy southwest the horizon was walled by a vast range, the highest point of which was evidently Pichincha, at the foot of which lay the end of our present journey.
With our goal so near at hand, we found it difficult to hold ourselves overnight in the semi-tropical oasis of Guayllabamba, the sandy streets of which were half paved with the stones of alligator pears. By daylight we had descended to the river and begun the unbroken climb of more than 5000 feet to the top of the succeeding range. A wide highway now led due west between cactus hedges through a country so desert dry that both stock and people seemed to be choking; and the fear came upon us that Quito, too, would be suffering such a famine of thirst that our plan to take up temporary residence therewould turn to disappointment. Another steep, tongue-parching climb brought to view all Pichincha and its surrounding world, yet nowhere was there any sign of Quito. The highway swung south, rising and falling gently here and there between dry fields fenced with cactus or mud walls, a town tucked away in the wrinkle of the range beside us. In a shelter at the roadside an Indian woman, selling steaming soup with a bit of meat and tiny potatoes in it, served us in a single earthenware plate with wooden spoons as impassively as she did her own people. Further on, groups of aborigines were burning off, over brush fires, the bristles of slaughtered pigs that lay in batches of a half-dozen, split open, at the road edge. A carriage passed, the first we had seen in weeks; then an automobile; a man in “European” clothes, wearing shoes, yet actually walking; acleanchild of well-to-do parents. A motley crowd, chiefly Indians in gaudy ponchos, came and went; large buildings grew up on either side of us; the highway, passing through green groves of eucalyptus pungent with the smell of “Australian gum,” took on the name of “18th of September,”—though it was really the 26th—and all at once Quito in its May-like afternoon burst out before us in its mountain hollow, a great grassy mound cutting off the horizon on the south. Fifty-seven days had passed since we had walked out of the central plaza of Bogotá, during fifteen of which we had done no walking. Our pedometer reported the distance thence 844 miles, and we had each spent a dollar for each day of the journey. Hays had set out weighing 180, and I, 160; we arrived weighing 160 and 161, respectively. We may not have presented quite so bedraggled an appearance as the remnant of Gonzalo Pizarro’s band on their return from the wilderness of the Amazon, but we were certainly no fit subjects for a drawing-room.