Theteniente-gobernador, or “lieutenant-governor,” of Jaen, whose duty it was, at sight of my official papers, to find me lodging, food, pasture, and make himself generally useful
Theteniente-gobernador, or “lieutenant-governor,” of Jaen, whose duty it was, at sight of my official papers, to find me lodging, food, pasture, and make himself generally useful
Theteniente-gobernador, or “lieutenant-governor,” of Jaen, whose duty it was, at sight of my official papers, to find me lodging, food, pasture, and make himself generally useful
The two of us. “Cleopatra” and I in the hungry jungles of Jaen some forty-eight hours after the last glimpse of a human being
The two of us. “Cleopatra” and I in the hungry jungles of Jaen some forty-eight hours after the last glimpse of a human being
The two of us. “Cleopatra” and I in the hungry jungles of Jaen some forty-eight hours after the last glimpse of a human being
“I will wait until it is empty,” I replied cheerfully.
With no other excuse to offer, she took refuge in silence. An hour passed before I broke it again.
“And the rice,señora,” I suggested.
“No hay manteca,” she repeated in the same dull monotone, and the conversation went on again around the same vicious circle. For more than an hour I coaxed and cajoled, for a single harsh or loud word to these unwashed mountain-dwellers can undo a day’s careful pleading. As constant dripping of water in time wears away even stone, so my incessant return to the subject at length became even more painful than the stirring from their customary lethargy. The younger female rose languidly and took from the wall in a dark corner a perfectly sound kettle just suited to the purpose and, after deftly stealing about half of it, set to boiling what I had kept for myself.
The adjoining den had not only an earth floor, but the hillside had not been levelled before building. The peon spread a saddle-blanket and one of his own ponchos for me as solicitously as a valet preparing his master’s quarters; yet in as impersonal a manner as he might have herded his sheep into their corral for the night. With this protection, and my own garments wrapped about my head, I passed a tolerable night, virtually on the ridge of the central range of the Andes. My peon, the two women, several children, two half-Indian youths who had arrived long after dark, at least six dogs, and a score of guinea-pigs all slept in the same room—all, that is, except thecuis, which spent most of it squeaking about in the dark, and now and then running over my prostrate form.
On the bleak, rolling pampa of sear yellow bunch-grass, dotted by a few shaggy wild cattle, across which howled wintry winds, I was not uncomfortable afoot; but the peon from the “tierra caliente” of his native valley was blue-lipped and chattering with cold, even with his head through several heavy blankets and a scarf about his face. I was passing back over the Cordillera Central for the first time since Hays and I had traversed it by the Quindío pass. Not far below the arctic summit we sighted the Huancabamba river, born a few leagues to the north, its broad, swift-sloping valley-walls spotted with little greenchacras, and gradually dropped into summer again. Trees grew up about us, birds began once more to sing, cultivated fields shut in by cactus hedges bordered the trail. When at last we sighted the town of Huancabamba from far off, the peon halted and asked to be allowed to turn back. He seemed to fancy his services had been chiefly thoseof “guide,” instead of baggage-carrier. I refused to take up my burden again merely for what I took to be a whim to be back lolling in the shade of his own mango tree. It was not until later that I realized that, like most country youths of his class in Peru, he dreaded entering the provincial capital, lest he be held and forced to serve in the army.
The swift Huancabamba river we crossed astride the peon’s horse, though not both at a time. When I had dismounted on the further bank, my companion called the animal back by a peculiar sound, half whistle, half cluck, and not long afterward we clattered into the famous city of Huancabamba. Once dismissed, the peon left town at once, though darkness was already at hand. Medina had insisted that I pay him nothing, as he owed the hacienda more than two years’ rent—namely, nearly four dollars.
On the map Huancabamba seems of about the size and importance of Philadelphia; on the ground it is a moribund mud village in a half-sterile hollow between barren, towering mountains. Historically it is famous. Prescott assures us that “Guancabamba was large, populous and well-built, many of its houses of solid stone. A river which passed through the town had a bridge over which ran a fine Inca highroad.” How times do change! Officially, to be sure, it is still a city; but a “city” in this region is a place where bread is made, as those who wear shoes are white, and those who wear bayeta are cholos or Indians. Picturesqueness of costume there was none, this having disappeared near Cuenca along with the Quichua tongue. Indians of pure race and distinctive garb had been rare south of Zaraguro; here was still plenty of Indian blood, but only in the veins of “civilized” mestizos. It is not far from the watershed of the Andes. The town of Huarmaca, just up on the ridge of the Cordillera above, has a church one side of the roof of which sends its waters to the Pacific, and the other to the Atlantic.
There was no suggestion of hotel. The subprefect studied my papers in great curiosity, with half the town looking over his shoulder, before he answered my most important query with:
“Ah, it is impossible to-day, on such short notice. But to-morrow—”
“I need it to-day,” I protested, knowing it was only a question of insisting, to overcome the racial apathy.
“Then I will give youmybed and sleep on the floor!” cried the subprefect.
In that pompous moment, with a large delegation of huancabambinos looking on, no doubt he would, but such Andean self-sacrifice quickly fades away, once the limelight is switched off.
“I prefer to rent a room of my own,” I persisted.
“Ah,nowthat is impossible. But to-morrow—”
I bowed my way out, throwing over my shoulder the information that I would go down to the bank of the river and sleep on the ground. It would be softer, and there were bathing facilities. Horror spread over all faces. A man, an estranjero who came with the recommendations of great governments! Impossible! The city of Huancabamba could not permit it! When word of it reached the outside world...! Soldiers were sent scurrying in all directions—and two minutes later one of them found a room for rent in the home of one of the “best families,” exactly across the street from the subprefectura.
It can hardly be that I was the first stranger to enter Huancabamba since Hernando de Soto was sent by Pizarro to reconnoiter the region after the capture of the Inca. Yet one might have fancied so. Whether it was due to some canine sense of smell we of less favored lands lack, I never succeeded in getting within ten yards of a huancabambino before he was staring at me with bulging eyes and hanging jaw, all work, movement, and even conversation ceasing as I drew near. If I passed behind a group on a street corner, their necks went round with one accord, like those of owls, and they stared after me in unbroken silence as long as I remained in sight. Men and women, well-dressed and outwardly intelligent, dodged back into their house or shop as I appeared, to call wife or children as they might for a passing circus parade. The few sidewalks were really house verandas, sometimes roofed, and on all ordinary occasions pedestrians strolled along the center of the street. Now there was a stranger in town, virtually all took pains to cross to my side of the way, and though it required a distinct exertion to climb up to and down from this few yards of raised sidewalk, every inhabitant seemed to find some excuse every few minutes to wander by my door at a snail’s pace in his noiseless bare feet. If I began any species of activity,—to write, load my kodak, read, or even to wash my hands, the human stream was clogged like a log-raft against a snag and the population stacked up about my door until a well-aimed anything broke the keystone log, and gave me again for a moment light and air. It was the hospitable huancabambino custom to give me greeting, even when I was busy well inside the room, and to repeat the phrase in a louder and louder voice until I acknowledgedit. Those few who passed on the further side of the street never failed to shout “Buenos días” across at me, though they might have looked in upon me a bare two minutes before. Now and then a more friendly member of society wandered complacently into the room, to peer over my shoulder, or to handle with the innocence of a three-year old child such of my possessions as took his fancy. Some drifted in even at night, long after I had retired, for, there being no other opening, to have closed the door would have been to smother.
In the far recesses of the Andes the simplest matter may become complex. My flannel road-shirt had at last succumbed to its varied hardships. Now, buying a shirt may seem too trivial an experience to be worthy of mention; in the wilds of Peru it is a transaction of deep importance. Huancabamba is overstocked with cloth-shops; but what Latin-American shopkeepers honestly believe a “very heavy shirt” would fall to pieces in three days under the exertions of a society darling. One garment promising moderate endurance I did find, but the combined jangling of all the bells of Quito was as nothing compared to its color scheme. Beside it the good old American flag would have looked dull and colorless. I set out to find a woman willing to make a new shirt on the pattern of the old. Most of them did not wish to; most of the others were too tired; two or three had less commonplace reasons, such as being in mourning, or having a pan to wash before Sunday, or a son to be married next week, or not having gone to confession recently. Toward noon I caught a shoemaker’s wife unawares, and had her promise to undertake the task before she could think of a plausible excuse. She thought a just price, I to furnish the cloth, would be twenty cents!
I canvassed the shops for heavy khaki. The stoutest on sale was flimsy as a chorus-girl’s bodice, its color plainly as evanescent as her complexion. I chose at last from a bolt of cloth designed for afternoon trousers, adding a spool of the strongest thread to be had. Experience had long since taught me that the tailors of Latin America use a thread so fine that a deep breath is almost sure to burst a seam or two. I delivered the materials and retired for a belatedalmuerzoin the mud hut where the daily cow sacrificed to Huancabamba’s appetite is sold in half-realnibbles. Now and then an urchin entered, clutching a nickel in one besmeared fist, to say in the uninflected monotone of a “piece” learned in school:
“Media carne, media vuelta,” (2 cents worth of meat, 2 cents change), to which the answer was almost sure to be:
“No hay vuelta” (there is no change), whereupon the emissary wandered homeward still clutching the coin, and the family evidently passed another meatless day.
Barely had I returned to my room when a fever fell upon me. At the height of the attack, when every movement was a mighty effort and every motionless moment an hour of deep enjoyment, an urchin appeared with the spool of thread I had provided, saying it was heavier than Huancabamba was accustomed to use and that I must supply a spool of No. 60. I reached for the brick that held back one of the leaves of the door, and he disappeared from my field of vision. An hour later he came back to report that the seamstress had broken a needle and refused to risk another. I suspended him by as much of a garment as he wore long enough to promise to cut off his ears, to have the subprefect put the seamstress in prison, and to bring down another earthquake upon Huancabamba unless the contract solemnly entered into was fulfilled before sundown; and I was not sharp-eyed enough to distinguish his little brown legs one from the other as he sped back to the zapatería. At dusk the shirt was delivered, an exact copy of the original, which was bequeathed to the miniature messenger.
A diet chiefly of quinine soon had me ready for the road again. My load was more burdensome than ever. A long stretch of wilderness ahead required the carrying of many pounds of food, and on down the valley of the Huancabamba I wobbled like an octogenarian. Most of the day lay across a desert of mighty broken chasms, leprous-dry under the blazing sun, scarred, gashed, and split with scores of lines, almost any of which might have been mistaken for the trail. Somehow I chanced to pick the right one and brought up at dusk at the hut of Alexandro Bobbío, far up the chasm of a small tributary.
Bobbío was a wiry man of fifty, son of an Italian, though officially a Peruvian, speaking only Spanish, but well-read, and of infinitely more industry and initiative than the natives. Unlike our own immigrants, those to South America retain for generations a distinct evidence of their origin; to the society about them they are still known as “hijos de italiano, alemán, inglés,” and the like, and the traveler is almost certain to find the man thus designated of far more worth than his neighbors, though commonly inferior to the race of his fathers. Bobbío was a government employee, stationed here in his thatched hut to check the cargoes of leaf tobacco that “salen pa’ fuera,” or pass out of Jaen province in large quantities for Huancabamba and the coast in leather-wrapped bundles on horses, mules, and cattle. Like severalof Europe, the Peruvian government retains the monopoly of tobacco. For an official load of 69 kilograms it pays $10, and in some remote districts only $8.50. Each kilo produces twenty packages of cigarettes, selling for thirty centavos each; in other words the 69 kilos bring the government $208 gold. This system is directly inherited from Spain and colonial days. Stevenson found that the King purchased tobacco at three reals (three-eighths of a dollar), and sold it at $2, though much was spent onfiscales. It remained for republican Peru to open a truly enormous gulf between producer and consumer.
“I wish I could buy a burro, even a half-size one,” I sighed, half to myself, as I was straightening up under my burden next morning. Had he been an unalloyed Latin-American, Bobbío would have shrugged his shoulders and murmured something about life being a sad matter at best. Instead, he cried “Why didn’t you say so?” and, stepping out into the sunshine flooding the arid world like a shower of gold, waved his arms in some local code of wigwagging at a hut hung high up on the desert hillside across the “river.” Not long after there drifted up before the corredor where we sat in the shade a sun-scorched mestizo youth leading a small donkey, shaggy as a bear just emerging from his winter’s den. It proved to be a female of the species, about sweet sixteen as donkeys go, and due in the years to come to double in size; moreover, she waschúcaro, in other words had never yet contributed to the labor of the world, and appeared to the youth to be worth twelvesoles. There ensued the usual verbal skirmish before we compromised at ten. Clipping an effigy of the King of England from my waist-band, I held it out to the mestizo. He shied at it like a colt at a flying newspaper. The Incas, we are told, forbade the common people to possess gold. Whether it is due to that prohibition, passed down by tradition to the present day, or to mere contrariness, the countrymen of the Andes still insist on doing their transactions in silver. Indeed, “plata” is the most common word for money in all the region. Bobbío had no prejudice against gold, however, and taking ten silver “cartwheels” from a hairy cowhide chest in a far corner of his hut, he dropped them into the youth’s outspread hands, and the latter sped away up the sun-flooded hillside to his hovel, leaving me in possession of a No. 4 size donkey and the ancient hawser with which it was moored to a post of Bobbío’s dwelling.
The first necessity was a name for the animal. Her startling beauty against the background of the Egyptian landscape made “Cleopatra” obvious. Then came the problem of the furniture without whichno Andean donkey will carry even a man’s load. Bobbío donated an old grain-sack. Over this went my poncho. Thirty centavos seemed a just price for acorona, a donkey “saddle” of wood of saw-buck shape. For another sol I became the legal possessor of a large and stout, if rather aged, pair ofalforjas, or cloth saddle-bags, in which my forty pounds could be evenly balanced. Around these, donkey and all, Bobbío wound with the intricacy of long experience several yards of rope, and at blazing ten I was off at last—to have my entire worldly possessions immediately dash away up the hillside into a jungle.
When they had been recovered, a nephew of Bobbío volunteered to pilot my new ship out of harbor. With the tow-rope and a cudgel in hand he got the craft under way, then gradually the cudgel sufficed both as rudder and throttle. A mile from home he turned the command over to me and away we went alone up the narrowing valley into the Huazcaray range, “Cleopatra” waltzing ahead of me up the slope like a school-girl on a holiday. It seemed ridiculous that any traveler with a donkey should ever have had difficulties—unless he expected a bag filled even in the middle to lie contentedly on the animal’s back. With only a slight shift to one side or the other every hour or two thealforjasrode like a cavalryman.
We zigzagged high over a range, coming out above what was evidently an immense valley, heaped full of white clouds as the basket of a plantation-picker with cotton, and began to go swiftly down through reddish mud ruts deeper than “Cleopatra” was high. Then we picked up the Tamborapo river near its source, and descended along a grassy valley walled by bushy hillsides.
In this region of northern Peru, the Andes break down into great sweltering gorges and tropical wildernesses instead of the unbroken high pampas the range seems to promise. The traveler so foolish as to journey through it catches the valley of a river as it tears its way across the jungled mountain wilderness, follows it as far as possible, then fights his way across a divide, to descend or ascend another stream. Neither waterway is likely to run in anything like the direction he would go, but by tacking like a ship against a head wind he advances bit by bit, with an exertion out of all proportion to the actual progress, toward the nebulous goal he has set himself. The distance between two hamlets a hundred miles apart is often three hundred miles in this labyrinthian province of Jaen, officially a province of Peru, but still disputed by Ecuador, as the boundary was between Atahuallpa and Huascar at the coming of the Spaniards. So low is the region thatthe local expression for entering “la Provincia,” as Jaen is known locally, is “Va pa’ dentro—to go down inside,” as might be designated the entrance into the realms of the unrighteous departed.
Perfection, alas, is not of this world. Now that I might have added a plentiful supply of foodstuffs to my pack without increasing my burdens—for “Cleopatra” had been sold under a guarantee to carry a hundred pounds—I had reached a section of the world where food is under no circumstances for sale. Furthermore, with a thousand miles of road just suited to donkeys behind me, it must be my fortune the morning after at last acquiring one to strike the worst possible road for them. Strictly speaking, there was no road; but for certain spaces trees enough had been felled to make passage through the forest possible, and the rainy season and tobacco-trains had combined to turn these clearings into unbroken miles ofcamelones, those corduroy-like ridges of hard earth with a coating of slippery mud, alternating with ditches of liquid mud from two to three feet deep. A pedestrian, even with forty pounds on his back, may trip along the tops of these as blithely as a youthful opera company counting the ties from Red Cloud to Chicago. But to attempt to drive a half-grown jackass, laden with all the driver’s earthly possessions in far from waterproof cloth sacks, through mile after monotonous mile of them, under an endless tropical downpour, is an experience to stir the most blazé and world-weary soul. Those steps at which the uncomplaining little brute did not slip off into the ditch behind the ridge on which she had set her feet were those in which she fell with a still more far-reaching splash into the ditch ahead. Usually each pair of feet was divided in its allegiance, and reduced the animal to that artistic performance popularly known in pseudo-histrionic circles as “splitting the splits.” More times than I could have counted, “Cleopatra” fell down lengthwise, crosswise, front-wise, and hind-wise, on her head, on the side of her neck, on her bedraggled tail, on every part of a donkey known to anatomy, showering me with mud from the crown of my hat to my inundated boots, soaking my possessions in seas of mud, now and then frankly lying down in despair, as often attempting to shirk her just portion of this world’s troubles by dashing into the impenetrable dripping jungle and smashing my maltreated belongings against the trees. From time to time she became hopelessly entangled with a train of pack-animals “going outside,” forcing me to wade in and lift her bodily, pack and all, out of some slough above which little more than her drooping ears were visible. In short, when this “royal highway” waded across the barnyard of the “Hacienda Charapé,” it did not require a particularly sincere invitation to cause me to spend the rest of the day there.
The main street of the great provincial capital of Jaen, with the flagpole to which I tied “Cleopatra” before the official residence of the local governor
The main street of the great provincial capital of Jaen, with the flagpole to which I tied “Cleopatra” before the official residence of the local governor
The main street of the great provincial capital of Jaen, with the flagpole to which I tied “Cleopatra” before the official residence of the local governor
The government “ferry” across the Huancabamba, with thebalserosimbibing the last Dutch courage before attempting to set thechasqui, or mail-man, and me, with our baggage, across the flood-swollen stream
The government “ferry” across the Huancabamba, with thebalserosimbibing the last Dutch courage before attempting to set thechasqui, or mail-man, and me, with our baggage, across the flood-swollen stream
The government “ferry” across the Huancabamba, with thebalserosimbibing the last Dutch courage before attempting to set thechasqui, or mail-man, and me, with our baggage, across the flood-swollen stream
The hacendados of this region, owning whole ranges of mountains and valleys, live scarcely better than the Indians in their hovels. Both father and son in this case wore shoes and read the Lima newspapers—from a month to six weeks old—yet their earth-floored and walled dining-room swarmed with unspeakably dirty peon children, and pigs all but uprooted the table as we ate. The slatternly female cooking over three stones in an adjoining sty served us boiled rice mixed with cubes of pork in a single bowl from which we all helped ourselves indifferently with spoon or fingers. Father and son slept on a sort of home-made table covered with a pair of ragged blankets in a mud den overrun by domestic animals and littered with all the noisome odds and ends of a South American harness-room. Yet their speech was as redundant with formalities as that of a Spanish cavalier in the king’s court.
Though I knew there was a long, foodless, and uninhabited region ahead, I could add but little to “Cleopatra’s” nominal load in preparation for it, for to offer tobuysupplies would have been considered an insult to my hosts equal to an attempt to pay for my accommodation.Costumbre, inbred for long generations, forces these rural hacendados of Peru to consider it beneath their dignity to sell anything, except the rapadura and home-made fire-water they look upon as their legitimate source of income, yet they are too miserly to give much. The best I could do was to accept, with signs of deep gratitude, two small cotton sackfuls ofchiflesandcharol; the former, bone-hard slices of plantains warranted to keep forever in any climate and taste like oak chips to any appetite; the latter, hard squares of fried fat pork of the size of small dice. Then, of course, there was the inevitable slab of crude sugar wrapped in banana leaves.
The “road” was worse than that of the day before. Times without number I concluded the end of the journey had come for one of us, yet somehow the maltreated little brute sprawled forward through the pouring rain. Dense, dripping, unbroken forests, abounding with the red berries of wild coffee, crowded close on either hand. Below, the swollen Tamborapo roared incessantly close alongside, adding to the constant fear of losing all my possessions the continual dread of reaching some impassable stream. Toward the end of a day during which we had forded a dozen difficult tributaries, we were halted by a ragingbranch, plainly foolhardy to attempt. I chased “Cleopatra” up through the jungle alongside it, until darkness came on and forced us to camp in a tiny open space, my perishable possessions hung in the trees against destruction by ants, and the donkey tied to the trunk that formed my bed-post. All night long the animal walked round and round over me, though without once stepping on my prostrate form or the heaped-up baggage. In the morning we tore our way far on up the tributary before we came in sight of a “bridge,” that is, two poles tied with vines to a tree on either bank. I had piled my garments on top of the load and was just dragging my reluctant baggage-car into the stream, when a half-naked youth appeared on the opposite bank, making wild signs to me across the uproar of waters. By the time I had regained the shore, he arrived in abbreviated shirt by way of the “bridge,” carrying a stout staff and a rope. With these he dragged the donkey, stripped stark naked, into the stream and, fervently crossing himself twice, fought his way with it into the torrent; while I made three trips monkey-fashion along the tree-lashed poles with the baggage that would infallibly have been washed away but for this experienced jungle-dweller. His particular saint did not fail him and, having delivered the drenched and disgusted animal to me on the further bank, he accepted arealwith a gratitude that suggested he considered himself well-paid for risking his life.
Slowly, monotonously, day after day, we pushed on through the Amazonian jungle—Amazonian not only in appearance, but because the Tamborapo, soon to join the Marañón, forms a part of the great network of the Father of Waters. The unpeopled forest, draped with vines that here and there, like broken cables, dipped their ends in the stream, seemed to have no end. The absolute solitude of the region, ever shut in by impenetrable jungle, with never a view of the horizon, with no sign of the existence of humanity and no other sounds than the occasional scream of a bird and the constant roar of the stream, had a peculiar effect on the moods. One felt abandoned by the world, and came to look upon all nature as a cruel prison-warden determined that his prisoner should never again be permitted to pick up the threads of his existence, nor even communicate with the world that had abandoned him. The very silence added to the gloom, until I felt like screaming, “Well, speak, burro!” It was a relief not to sweat under my own load, but it was distinctly more laborious to drive it before me. Day after day I beat up “Cleopatra’s” rear from dawn to dusk without a pause, yet covered scarcely half the distance I might have ploddedalone. Even where the trail was level and dry, the docile, yet headstrong brute could not exceed two miles an hour; wherever a bit of slope, or stones and mud intervened, she picked her way with the cautious deliberation of an old lady entering a street-car. Insects swarmed. My unshaven face and all the expanse of skin from crown to toes were blotched and swollen with their visitations. The chifles and charol gave out and left only the lead-heavy rapadura and river-water as hunger antidotes. On the third day even the last chunk of crude sugar disappeared, and still the two of us plodded on, equally gaunt and lacking in ambition and energy.
I had lived on river-water for more than twenty-four hours, and lost my way several times on forking trails that climbed to nowhere far above, or were swallowed up in the jungle, when I guessed again at a path that climbed up out of the valley of the river. By and by it sweated up to a hut of open-work poles, where lived avaqueroin charge of the stock of a vast hacienda of the wilderness. Only a little girl of eight was at home, and she did not know that roads were meant to lead anywhere. Tying “Cleopatra” in the shade of the eaves, I sat down to await adult information. Starvation seemed to have danced its orgy for weeks before my weary eyes when the child came out with a fat, ripe chirimoya, to lisp in a shaky voice, “Le gu’ta e’ta fruta?” Hours later a gaunt, tropic-scarred man appeared, and at sight of me shouted the stereotyped greeting of all his class to any visitor ahorse or afoot:
“Apéase—dismount,señor.”
When I declined with the customary formalities, he opened preliminary inquiries as to my biography. I broke in upon them to suggest food.
“Entra y descansa, señor,” he replied, “Sientese.”
The rural Peruvian would invite one to enter and take a seat—on a block of wood—if he came to put out a fire. He produced a glass made from a broken bottle and insisted on my partaking of his hospitality to the extent of drinking his health in theaguardienteinto which he turned his sugar-cane in a little thatched distillery down in a hollow nearby. But my every hint of a desire to buy food was diplomatically ignored, except that he accepted readily enough a real, and sent the child “upstairs”; that is, to crawl up to and along the reed ceiling, to fetch me a leaf-wrapped chunk of rapadura.
The invisible trail he pointed out pitched down a leg-straining and almost perpendicularbajadaof loose stones to another stream, thenstruggled breathlessly upward through unbroken forest over the Guaranguia “range,” a jungled mountain spur, from the crest of which there spread out before me the vast panorama of an upper-Amazonhoya, the Tamborapo far below squirming away through its steep dense-wooded valley; and all about it half-barren hills of varying colors that gave the landscape the appearance of a tempestuous sea turned to jungle earth. Red cliffs, like our westernbuttes, flashed their faces in the sunset, and as far as the eye could reach in any direction was no sign that man had ever before entered this trackless wilderness.
It was nearing dusk when the world fell away before us into a great wooded quebrada, its bottom unfathomable, but with a trail in plain sight fighting its way up the opposite slope. The path underfoot melted away, and where “Cleopatra” led, I followed, certain she knew the way as well as I. The ghost of a trail she had chosen turned to a perpendicular cow-path down which the animal sprawled and stumbled, bumping her load against the trees, but unable to fall far through the dripping forest that grew up impenetrably about us. Dense, black night found us at the bottom of a V-shaped valley. I sought the corresponding path on the opposite side of its small stream by feeling with both feet and hands, but it was as intangible as the “straight and narrow path” of theological phraseology. To cheer things on, it began to rain in deluges. I made the most of a genuinely Peruvian situation by halting for the night where there was at least drinkingwater. So sharp was the valley that there was not even a flat space large enough to stretch out, and I could only curl up in the muddy path that had brought us to this sad pass, tumbling my soaked baggage somewhere beside me and tying the exhausted animal to something in the dark, where there was neither a leaf to eat nor a spot for the brute to lie down in.
By morning light I found that “Cleopatra’s” inexperience and asinine judgment had led us to a place where wild cattle came to drink, and we were forced to struggle back to the crest of the hill, and descend again by another trail that linked up with the one we had seen the afternoon before. At its foot was a field of swamp-grass, in which the starving animal spent the rest of the morning in regaining strength for the climb ahead. Above, a new style of landscape spread out before us. A vast, bushy plain was passable only by following the windings of a sandy and stony river-bed, and wading with monotonous frequency the stream that swung back and forth across it, like a person utterlydevoid of a sense of direction or power of decision. Beyond, we tramped monotonously on through endless chaparral, thorn-bristling, bushy woods where reigned an utter solitude only enhanced by the mournful cry of some unseen bird. The most constantly recurring form of vegetation was thetusho, a sort of cottonwood tree with a trunk swollen as a gormand’s waist-line. Endlessly this dismal wilderness stretched onward from dawn to dark, until the traveler could fancy himself in solitary confinement for life, and in danger of losing the mind for which he could find no employment. The region would have been more endurable had I been able to stride forward at my own pace; but “Cleopatra” sentenced me to a monotonous, unchanging snail’s gait that gave sufficient exercise only to my right arm and the cudgel it bore. Hundreds of red centipedes littered the ground; the dead, dry silence was broken only by the rhythmic mournful cry of a jungle bird. But here the going was smooth, and for long distances our pace was so unbroken that there ran through my unoccupied mind for hours at a time the paraphrase of an old refrain:
“Two jacks with but a single gait;Six feet that walk as one.”
“Two jacks with but a single gait;Six feet that walk as one.”
“Two jacks with but a single gait;Six feet that walk as one.”
“Two jacks with but a single gait;
Six feet that walk as one.”
Next to thetusho, the tree that most often repeated itself was theguaba, producing a fruit like large brown bean-pods filled with black seeds, the white pulp of which had thirst-quenching qualities and a taste mildly resembling the watermelon.
I had lost account of days entirely, but subsequent checking up proved it was a Sunday afternoon when I halted at the “Hacienda Shumba” and, spreading out my mouldy garments on the thatch roof of its only hut, awaited the owner. He proved to be the teniente gobernador, the lieutenant-governor of the region, in the sun-bleached remnants of two garments and a hat. Having turned “Cleopatra” into a pasture, he settled down to spell out the documents I presented. Strictly speaking, he was not the hacienda owner, but only an “arrendatario.” Though I had not suspected it, I had been traveling for days through estates which, asbeneficenciasorcofardías, belong to the bishopric of Trujillo, and it is partly the heavy hand of the Church that keeps this region so solitary and uninhabited. The so-called owners are really agents who administer them for the tonsured landlords, collecting a rental from the few families who raise a bit of rice, cacao, and cattle. The region is far less rich than it is locally reputed. The soil of the river-valleys is fertile, but the mountains are rocky and often arid and, especially in this section, poorly served by the rains.A government official himself, my host complained bitterly against the government tax on tobacco, liquor, sugar, salt, and matches. The first, he asserted, was no longer worth planting. All non-Peruvians were “gringos” to the teniente gobernador. A fellow-countryman of mine, he asserted, had spent a night with him recently—hardly two years before. He was—let’s see—an Italian; no, a German. Though he could read and write, laboriously, and had long been a government official—on compulsion and without emoluments—the world, as he conceived it, consisted of Peru and another very much smaller country, with several towns of more or less the same size and conditions as the two villages of Jaen and Tocabamba he had seen, named Germany, Italy, Estados Unidos, and so on, from which came the various types of “gringos.”
Indeed, he wished to know, “Is Germany in the same country as the United States?”
“What do you call a native of Jaen?” I chanced to ask him in the course of our conversation.
“A Jaense, to be sure,” he replied. “Just as you call a native of Italy an italiano, or a man from the town named France a francés.”
But if his knowledge was slight, it was no less tenacious, and he could no more be talked out of his geographical conceptions than out of his conviction that all the world lives in reed-and-mud huts with earth floors, goes habitually barefoot, and considers its dwellings fit breed-places for guinea-pigs. When I asked him if the road beyond Jaen was good, I was startled to hear the assurance:
“Ah, yes, indeed. There are no bad roads in Peru!”
A divan of reeds, set into the mud wall of the single room and covered with a hairy cowhide, was quite soft enough as a bed for one who had long since left effeminate civilization behind. Until long after dark we two men and a woman squatted in home-made chairs fitting to a doll’s house, and fed ourselves over our knees. Yet the conventions of society are quite as fixed in these hovels of the wilderness as in any palace of aristocracy. It was quiteà la mode, a sign of good breeding, in fact, to ask for a second helping of the bean and yuca stew—which is invariably served so boiling hot that even the experienced “gringo’s” teeth suffer—but under no circumstances for a third. When they had been emptied a second time, the gourd bowls were piled up on the floor in a corner, to be washed when the spirit moved, and, as if at a signal that there was no second course, the one glass in the house, tied together with a string and evidently regarded asa great treasure and heirloom, was filled with irrigating-ditchwater and passed around the circle, beginning with the guest. The feeble imitation of a candle soon flickered out, and by eight we were all scattered along the walls of the hut on our reed divans, quarreling pigs shaking the house as they jostled against it, and the rain that fell heavily all night long dripping upon us here and there through the thatched roof.
“Cleopatra” was so nearlyrendido—“bushed”—next morning that, even under her slight load, she wabbled drunkenly and kept her footing chiefly because the heavy, glue-like mud clung to our feet like pedestals to a statue. For one considerable space the way led through a swamp, where I was several times forced to wade knee-deep to carry out the load and lift the bemired animal to her feet. Yet drinkable water was not to be had, and the choking tropical humidity was the more tantalizing as rain broke every few minutes, and everything in sight was dripping wet, though the sandy soil swallowed each shower as it fell. Toward noon the now considerable trail split, marking an important parting of the way; for the branch to the left leads quickly down to Bellavista on the bank of the Marañón, whence rafts descend to Iquitos and the rubber country, and so by the Amazon to the Atlantic, while I, bearing to the right, plodded on along the highlands of the Andes. In the dead-silent woods a few decrepit and weather-blackened huts grew up, several drowsy, half-naked beings in human form gazing languidly after me from the doorways, and before I knew it I was treading the streets of the provincial capital and “city” of Jaen.