Chapter 19

A detail of the “Panama”-hat market of Azogues. The hats are bought unfinished and the wholesalers pile one after another on their heads until their faces are all but concealed by the protruding “straw” ends

Arrived at the wholesale establishments of Cuenca, the hats are finished,—the “straw”-ends tucked in and cut off, the hats beaten with wooden mallets on wooden blocks, given a sulphur bath and sun-bleached, then folded flat for shipment

He who would visit Ingapirca must have either a guide or a working mixture of Spanish and Quichua. I lost myself a dozen times in a labyrinth of paths, each leading to an isolated Indian hovel. One might have fancied the aboriginals had surrounded the sacred Inca relics with a conspiracy of silence, for I was forced at last to drag an old man forcibly out of a cluster of cobble-stone huts before he pointed out to me a path that wound away upward and disappeared over the edge of the world. Along it I came at last in sight of Ingapirca. The “Castle of the Gentiles,” as it is locally known to-day, sits silent and grass-grown on the summit of a rock-knoll from which the eye ranges in every direction over a tumbled labyrinth of valleys and ridges. They built high, the Incas, as men who preferred to see with their owneyes what was going on about them, and they seem to have gloated over the unbroken sweep of the cold, invigorating Andean wind. The chief ruin is that of a fortress, an oval wall with a sheer rock face to the north, and symmetrical stone steps leading up to the entrance on the south. Of large cut stones, and with ornamental blind doors, or niches, it is so like the monuments of Peru as to leave no doubt of its Inca origin. Even on the curves, the stones are so nicely fitted, apparently without mortar—though Humboldt reported the discovery of a kind of cement between them—that there are few joints for which a modern contractor would berate his workmen. The walls are double, with earth between them, the inner wall less carefully constructed; and undisturbed centuries have filled the interior of the fort to a grass-grown level. Above this rise the remnants of a building, only adobe walls with some cut-stone doorways still standing; but the many wrought stones to be found in fences and in the scattered heaps in which dwell the modern inhabitants of the region, suggest that the adobe walls had once a complete casing of cut stone. Slight as are the remains, there is still sufficient setting for the fancy to picture Huayna Ccápac striding back and forth upon his lofty promenade, looking upon his “Four Corners of the Earth,” and halting in his meditations to watch the imperialchasquisracing toward him across the rugged landscape with news of the landing in his imperial domains of a pale-faced tribe with hair on their faces.

Hours of strenuous toil, piloted only by my pocket-compass, brought me back to the main route. For a space it was a real highway, faced with stone, but soon degenerated into a writhing chaos of ruts and rockysubidas, like a road in the throes of an epileptic fit. The sun was still high when I caught sight of Biblián, its famous sanctuary standing out white and clear against the dull mountainside above the town. But it was only in the thickening dusk that I finally climbed into it.

A youth replied to my first inquiry with a “cómo no!”—just as unexcitedly as if strangers came to Biblián every year or two. In the dingy little shop to which he led me, an old woman whose greedy face warned me to prepare for exorbitant charges, even before I learned she went to church four times a day, hunted up the enormous key to an immense room above. In a corner of it stood a bed at least a century old, covered with a marvelous lace counterpane, but harder than macadam. While I sat at meat—or, more exactly, at vegetables, since Biblián kills its weekly beef on Sunday and by Mondayit is gone—the customary delegation of citizens came to offer their respects. The town, it proved, was oppressed with a great worry. The earthquake of a week before had not merely tumbled down several mud church-towers of the region, but had given new life to a prophesy that clanged deafeningly at two-second intervals without a break, ex-Biblián could not sleep of nights and the priests were reaping a rich harvest. All night long I lay like a Hindu ascetic on his couch of nails, listening to the exquisite torture of a broken-voiced church-bell that clanged deafeningly at two-second intervals without a break, except for a frequent wild, hellish jangling of several minutes’ duration. When dawn broke, the entire population had already crowded into the church for early mass. A bun was not to be had with my morning coffee, because my hostess had locked up the shop to attend the second ceremony. I ordered “breakfast” for eleven, and a boy came to inform me that I must eat it at nine, since from that hour onseñora la patronawould again be at church.

Biblián is a city of pilgrimage. By morning light it proved to be surrounded on all sides by fields of corn, with countlesscapulí-trees and masses of geraniums lending it even more color than the variegated blankets of its inhabitants. The cup-shaped valley was scattered with scores of tiled cottages of the half-Indian peasants, the hillsides a network of paths and trails to their huts and tiny farms. The chief road climbed to theCapillaon a crag well above the town. It was a costly, three-story structure richly decorated within, though a dismal mud hut served Biblián as school. The Virgin of Biblián is noteworthy among a host of her sisters in not having come personally to pick out a spot and order the building of her shelter. Perhaps her history is still too recent for the successful concoction of such traditions. In 1893 the valley of Biblián was choking with drought. The local cura, alive to his opportunity, set up an image in a grotto on the mountainside and, consulting his barometer, implored rain. The drought was broken. In honor of the feat the image was named the “Virgin of the Dew,” and pilgrims began to flock to Biblián. In the volume which he has prepared for their instruction the foresighted cura bewails the fact that “We cannot tell in one book the countless cures, assistances, protections and life-savings the Blessed Virgen del Rocío has done for the faithful from all over Ecuador.” In the face of the appalling mass of proofs before him he confines himself to none. But he does mention the miraculous fact that the first chapel had been completed by August of the following year, and that two years laterthe present “sumptuous, rich, divine” sanctuary was sprinkled with holy water.

Barely was this dry when “the troops of the Liberal party, like the barbarians at the gates of Rome, threatened the afflicted capital of the Azuay, bringing inevitable ruin”—such, for example, as the curbing of the power of the Church—“when the powerful Blessed Virgen del Rocío was borne from Biblián to beleaguered Cuenca with fitting reverence and in the midst of the most crowded and pompous procession in the annals of that Catholic city” ..., whereupon the Liberal troops faded quickly away, and redoubled the fame of the Virgin and the income of Biblián parish. The Minister Plenipotentiary of the Vatican has seen fit to grant a hundred days’ indulgence to whoever visits the sanctuary, “which indulgence may be applied to souls in Purgatory.” The trip to Biblián is worth at least that. Lovers of justice will rejoice to know that the foresighted cura bids fair to enjoy for long years to come his divine—knowledge of barometers.

It is only a league from Biblián to Azogues; an hour’s stroll along a slight river through almost a forest ofcapulí-trees, the wild cherries hanging in bunches something like the grape, though with only a few ripe at a time. Then comes a sudden drop into summer; for the climate of Azogues is soft and bland, with little rain. About the town were hundreds of tile and thatch-roofed cottages among rich, green cornfields, spreading far away up one valley and down another; and beyond these were tawny mountain flanks mottled with every color from sandy brown to sun-drenched green.

The town of Quicksilver is rather that of “panama” hats. As in San Pablo, Colombia, men, women and children were braiding them everywhere; shopkeepers and their clerks made hats in the intervals between customers, and even while waiting on them; Indian and chola women wove them as they tramped along the roads with a bundle, and perhaps a child, on their backs, as European peasant women knit, or those of other parts of Ecuador spin yarn on their crude spindles. I was assured that every living person in Azogues knew how totejar sombreros. The fops themselves were so engaged somewhere out of sight.

The weekly hat-fair of Azogues began on the Friday evening of my arrival. As the afternoon declined, there streamed in from every point of the compass, from every hut among the surrounding corn-fields, men, women, and children, each carrying a newly woven hat, bushy with its uncut “straw” ends. A dozen agents from Cuencabought these as they arrived, never at the price demanded, but after a heated bargaining to which, in the end, the weavers always meekly yielded. Each buyer seemed to confine himself to some particular grade or style; this one to coarse “comunes,” that to large sizes, another to small, and only two or three to the finer weaves. As he bought them, each agent piled the hats on his own head until his face was completely hidden behind the protruding ends, from the depths of which the bargaining went on unabated.

Saturday, however, is the chief market day of Azogues. As I strode out along the highway to Cuenca next morning, throngs were pouring into the city from every direction. For a full two hours I passed an endless stream of Indians as close together as an army in column of squads, the women carrying on their backs every product known to southern Ecuador. The men, for the most part, were burdened only by a half-dozen hats, one atop the other, the untrimmed ends hiding their faces as under shaggy straw-colored beards. The scene recalled the Great Trunk Road of India, yet was of vastly less interest and variety. He who had once seen an Ecuadorian Indian had seen all the procession. A few were weaving the last strands of their weekly hat as they hurried by. Most “panama” hats are completed on Friday night or in the gray of Saturday’s dawn; for the maker, frequently overcome by indolence during the week, must bestir himself to have his product ready in time for his weekly debauch. Before he sallies forth to squander his week’s earnings, however, he carefully lays away enough to purchase another tuft of “straw,” lest he have no nest-egg from which to hatch next Saturday’s celebration. The procession had thinned considerably before it occurred to me to count the passersby, and even then 132 persons passed me in a minute, each and all bearing something for the market of Azogues. During most of the two hours the number had easily doubled that, and this was only one of the many roads and trails leading to this little-known town far from modern transportation.

My home in Cuenca, with the Montesinos family. The well-to-do classes of this city live in unusual comfort for Ecuador, and have the custom of decorating the walls under the projecting roofs, or those of the patio, with exotic scenes painted on the wall itself

Students of theColegioof Cuenca, which confers the bachelor degree at the end of a course somewhat similar to that of our high schools. Misbehavior is punished by confinement in the upright boxes in the background

Every house of southern Ecuador has a cross in the center of its ridgepole; here they were so elaborate, so covered with devices symbolic of the religion they represent, that it was only by a stretch of the imagination that one could make out the cross itself beneath. Late in the morning I came again to the Azogues river, and a typical bridge of the Andes,—opportunity to wade thigh-deep for all who travel afoot on this main highway to southern Ecuador. Not far beyond, there cantered by me several wholesale buyers from the Azoguesmarket, the saddlebags of each bulging with a hundred or more hats, stuffed one inside the other. Mile after mile the broad river-valley of Cuenca is forested withcapulí, eucalyptus, and a Gothic-spired willow. Red, tile roofs stand strikingly forth from deep-green corn-fields, and thousands of fertile, cultivated acres are shut in by barren, sand-faced hills, though there are no imposing peaks south of Cañar, and I had seen none snow-clad since leaving Riobamba. With no census for twenty-five years, the metropolis of southern Ecuador, third city of the republic, and capital of the rich province of Azuay, estimates its population at 45,000. Some have it that this greatcuenca, six leagues long, gouged out of the Andes, was the original Tomebamba, birthplace of Huayna Ccápac. Like Riobamba, the city is flat, its wide, cobbled streets, crossing at right angles, stretching their chiefly one-story length away in both directions almost as far as the eye can see. The buildings are almost all of the sun-baked adobe mud that everywhere dominates the architecture of the Andes; though some of the “best families” have striven to decorate their dwellings outwardly with huge mural paintings on the eaves-protected walls of patio and veranda.

Back to Index Next