Detail of the ruins of “Marca-Huamachuco,” high up on the mountain above the modern town of that name. They are reputed to be at least 1000 years old
Detail of the ruins of “Marca-Huamachuco,” high up on the mountain above the modern town of that name. They are reputed to be at least 1000 years old
Detail of the ruins of “Marca-Huamachuco,” high up on the mountain above the modern town of that name. They are reputed to be at least 1000 years old
Pallasca, to which I climbed from one of the mightiestquebradasin the Andes, sits on the tiptop of the world and falls sheer away at a corner of its plaza into a fathomless void
Pallasca, to which I climbed from one of the mightiestquebradasin the Andes, sits on the tiptop of the world and falls sheer away at a corner of its plaza into a fathomless void
Pallasca, to which I climbed from one of the mightiestquebradasin the Andes, sits on the tiptop of the world and falls sheer away at a corner of its plaza into a fathomless void
The unshaven papist still wore his slouch hat, and by day his bandit-like aspect was increased by a complexion like unpolished chamois-skin. He motioned me to a chair beneath the lithograph of a ravishing nude figure advertising a foreign brand of cigarettes, and trusted, with all the smoothness of which the Spanish tongue is capable, that I had not misunderstood his inhospitality of the night before. Gradually I turned the conversation to the history of his native region. He had made a serious study of the pre-Conquest period, and was sure that the Indians lived in just such unwashed misery under the Incas, as to-day. Only, as each group of ten had its commander, who set its tasks and carried his investigations into the very bosom of the family, theywere not then so unspeakably lazy. I had started to take my leave after some desultory remarks on my journey, during which he desired to know if I had walked all the way from Europe, when the priest remarked:
“Before going you will allow me to give you a little remembrance?”
“Cómo no! Gracias,” I answered, fancying the good-hearted old fellow was about to favor me with a tin crucifix or a bottle of holy water.
He sat up slowly and, pulling open a drawer of his massive home-made desk, took out five silversoles($2.50), and held them toward me.
“Mil gracias, no, señor,” I cried in astonishment.
“Tómaselos—take them as a memento,” he persisted, attempting to thrust the coins into my pocket. Plainly he regarded my refusal a mere preliminary formality to save my face. So ingrained is the Latin-American notion that no man exerts himself physically, except under compulsion, that, for all my explanations, he still cherished the idea that I traveled on foot because I had not the means to travel otherwise. Nor did I avoid his proposed charity without a great waste of flowery Castilian, and for all that left him somewhat offended. Even the sons of the misled German could not be made to understand why I had refused the proposed benefaction. “Andarines” of the Peyrounel variety have given these isolated towns of the Andes the impression that all foreigners arriving on foot were “living on the country.” Tramps, in our sense of the word, are unknown in the Andes. The few foreign “beach-combers” who reach Peru rarely get beyond Lima, and the Indians still cling to the Inca rule—though they may no longer know that an Inca ever existed—of each man sticking pertinaciously to his own birthplace. It is as impossible for the American to realize the absolute lack of anything approaching wanderlust in the Andean, and his dread of moving away from his native pueblo, as it is for the Indian to understand why the American is so far from home. Even among the more or less educated officials I could not shake off the title “andarín.” More than one rural “authority” showed himself aggrieved because I did not ask for his testimonial, seal, and signature, fancying himself slighted as of too little importance. Many another assured the gaping bystanders:
“Ah, ganan un platal, esa gente—Those fellows win a wad of money! When he gets back, his government will give him a great prize, at least 300,000 soles for the trip,señores.”
A prize, indeed! As if there were not a prize at every turn of the winding trail, in every new vista of tumultuous nature under the clear metallic blue of the highland sky!
I determined to push on next morning, for Pallasca was no nearer recovery than my journey’s end. The diluted Germans had promised to have an Indian carrier ready at dawn. But they were true Peruvians. The morning was half gone when I gave up in disgust and set out alone. At the zaguan, however, a fishy-eyed Indian rose to his feet to say that he had been sent by the gobernador to “assist” me, and I piled my bundle upon him forthwith.
Though Pallasca seems to perch on the very summit of the world, the trail managed to find another range to climb. Scores of cold, crystal-clear streams babbled tantalizingly across my path. A cosmic wilderness of gaunt and haggard mountains, here throwing forward bare and repulsive outliers, there weirdly decorated with shadow-pictures of clouds and jutting headlands, lay tumbled on every hand as far as the eye could range. The Indian chewed coca constantly, pausing frequently to dip a bit of lime from the gourd he carried at his waist, and appeared to have as little energy as I. When we had crawled some six miles, and a scattered hamlet was visible about as far ahead, with a deep gash of the earth between, he began to complain of pains, and finally lay down in the trail. I did not regret the halt, but when I had waited a half-hour and his groans still sounded, I sought to urge him on. It was useless. Whether he was really ailing—and Sunday may have left him with what is technically known in sporting circles as a “hang-over”—or was merely taking this means of shirking an unwelcome task, now we were far enough away so that I was not likely to return to complain to the gobernador, arguments and threats moved him exactly as they would have the rocks on which he writhed. Consigning him to the nethermost regions, I struggled to my feet under my harness and staggered on down the stony bajada.
Hours afterward, utterly exhausted by the short dozen miles, I entered the mud hamlet of Huandoval, expecting a miserable night on the earth floor of some icy dungeon hut. It was not quite so bad as that. At the first doorway where I paused to inquire for the gobernador, a half-Indian young woman of unusual Andean intelligence offered me lodging where I stood. The baked-mud den was as dreary as usual, but in a corner stood a bare slat bedstead, half-buried under an immense heap of potatoes. Early as it was, I spread my poncho and lay down, anticipating a welcome repose—only to discover that I waslodged in the Huandoval telephone exchange! On the wall hung an aged Errickson instrument, the strange vagaries of which brought the chola in upon me as often as its jangle sounded. The place, too, like telephone exchanges the world over, was exceedingly popular with the young men of the town, and when my rest was not being broken by some mistaken call from another exchange, it was disrupted by the labored wit of some rural Lothario.
It is but eight miles from Huandoval to Cabana, capital of the province; yet it required nine hours of the most concentrated effort, both mental and physical, to drive myself over the low, barren ridge that separates the two towns. The story of the next few days, trivial in detail, I give in no spirit of complaint, but merely because it sheds so direct a light on the character of the Andean Peruvian. I had learned that there was a hospital in Huaráz, the department capital, and requested the subprefect of Cabana to use his authority to help me hire a horse, as he was in duty bound to do by the official orders I carried.
“Pierda cuidado,” orated the thin, angular fellow, peering at me with his short-sighted squint, “the government will furnish you a horse and all that is needed.”
Nobody wanted the government to furnish me anything, but I did not stop to argue the matter. My entire attention was taken up just then with resisting the efforts of the “authorities” to throw me into a dank mud den, under the allegation that it was a lodging. Fortunately there was some one else than Peruvians in the town. It was through the village priest that I won at last a second-story room above the prefectura, of mud floor in spite of its elevation, supported on poles that yielded to the tread. He was a tall, powerfully-built Basque of fifty, with a massive Roman nose and, in memory of his mountain-land, aboínaset awry on his head and matching his long, flowing gown only in color. He had suffered from the same ailment during his first year in this foreign land and was sure he knew an instant cure—and instead of merely talking about it, like a native, he sent a man to prepare it. This was a half-bottle of wine boiled with the bark of a mountain tree called thecimarruba; but whatever effectiveness it might have possessed was offset by the impossibility of keeping to a proper diet, or even of getting boiled water to drink. There was no doctor in Cabana; yet all Cabana posed as physicians. Now some fellow would drop in to say, “the very best thing you can eat is pork-chops,” and he would scarcely be out of sight before another paused to assure me thatpork-chops would kill me within an hour. “Eat the whites of eggs,” cried another. “You can eat almost anything,” asserted the next comer, “except the whites of eggs.” Again the room would be darkened by a shadow in the doorway, and a man would step forward to say, “Now here is an old Indian woman from up in the mountains whose grandfather’s nephew died of dysentery, and....”
All night the town boomed with fireworks, the howling of dogs, the bawling of drunken citizens, and the atrocious uproar of a local “band,” for it was the eve of something or other. Far from finding the promised horse waiting for me at dawn, I did not see the shadow of a person until after ten. Then a stupid, insolent soldier came to ask if I wanted “breakfast.” At twelve he had not returned. I dragged myself down to the plaza. The subprefect and all his henchmen were making merry in apulpería. I requested him to have some one prepare me food, at any price. Price? They were horrified! Of course they could not think of letting mepayfor anything. I was the guest of Cabana. They wouldobsequiarme a “magnificent meal” at once, cried the subprefect, tying himself in several knots in his excess of courtesy. What would I like, roast lamb with eggs, a fine steak with.... No, I would be completely satisfied with a bowl of gruel. Ah, certainly, I should have it at once, and a basket of fruit, and ... and there they dropped the matter, until the priest, discovering my plight, well on in the afternoon, sent up a dish of rice gruel.
Everything does not come to him who waits in the Andes, and I descended again to mention the word “horse” to the now reeling subprefect.
“Have no care,” he hiccoughed, “the government will attend to all that.”
Knowing he was merely showing off before his fellow-townsmen, and that he would really let me lie where I was, or at most furnish me some crippled Rozinante to carry me to Tauca, three miles away, I refused his putative charity. He turned to the crowd about us with a pretense of being hurt to the quick, then sent a boy to summon the half-negro gobernador, likewise maudlin with the celebration.
“Since thisseñorhas declined my offer to furnish him all that is needed,” stuttered the offended subprefect, “you will have apaidhorse, with saddle and bridle, ready for him—to-morrow.”
“But why not to-day?” I protested.
“Absurd,señor! To-day is the great Corpus Cristi procession andyou would not wish to miss that, even if you could get an Indian to go with you.”
The procession, set for mid-morning, started soon after my return to my room. From the altar of the church it encircled the plaza and returned whence it had come. The route had been carefully scraped and swept—evidently for the only time during the year—by ragged Indians, forced to contribute this pious labor by the several grades of labor-dodging “authorities” howling over them. Then it had been spread with a long strip of carpet, after which came scores of barefoot women to cover it with a fixed design of flower-petals of all colors. Then forth from the mud church issued the Basque priest in cream-tinted vestments, hisboínaand incessant cigarette gone, four Indians protecting him from the dull, sunless day by a rich canopy. Proceeded, followed, or surrounded by all the bareheaded, drink-maudlin piety of Cabana, the distressing “band” blowing itself wobbly-kneed, he moved slowly forward, only his own sacred feet touching the carpet, women and children pouncing upon the flower petals behind as rapidly as they were blessed by his number-eleven tread, and carrying them off as sacred relics. Outwardly he seemed sunk in the profoundest depths of devotion, yet twice, at a sign from me, he halted the procession, as by previous understanding, until I had caught a picture. Over the door of the towered mud-hovel into which the throng crowded after him were the half-effaced words, “Haec est domus dei et porta cieli.” No doubt they were right, but it would have been easy to have mistaken it for something else.
Toward evening the subprefect’s secretary brought a wooden-minded Indian and, introducing him as the owner of a horse, called upon me to pay 75 cents at once for the use of it. The moment I had done so he produced a still dirtier Indian and, introducing him as my “guide,” demanded that he be paid fifty cents. That over, the secretary mentioned that it was customary to give a “gratification” to owner and “guide,” that they might drink my good health for the coming voyage, at the end of which, he further hinted, it was costumbre to grant the “guide” arealfor alfalfa for the animal, and something for himself for chicha, and ... but by that time I had withdrawn to my quarters.
At six in the morning I was dressed and ready; at seven the “guide” came to know if he really should bring the horse; at eight I burst in upon the sleeping subprefect to know what had become of his boisterouspromise to have food prepared for me at dawn. A soldier was sent to investigate. In due time he came back with the information that the cook was not up yet. At nine the “horse” arrived. It was a wild, hairy, mountain colt, a bit larger than an ass, which had never been shod, curried, or trimmed. The equipment it wore was wholly home-made,—a bridle of braided rawhide, without bits, like that with which our American Indian rides his mustang, a tiny, crude, wooden saddle with one thickness of leather stretched over it, and huge wooden box-stirrups.
“Now let nothing worry you,” cried the subprefect, as I bade farewell to the noble city of Cabana, the “guide” trotting on foot behind, “I’ll telegraph the gobernador of Corongo and Huaylas and the subprefect of the next province so that he can telegraph his governors and the prefect in Huaráz.No se moleste, señor; everything will be arranged by the government.”
Hours of unbroken climbing brought us to a freezing-coldpáramo, where flakes of snow actually fell and across the icy lagoons of which a wind that penetrated to the marrow swept from off the surrounding snow-peaks. So small was my animal that I expected him to drop under me at every step, so tiny that his front knees constantly knocked the stirrups off my feet, and so wobbly in his movements that it was like riding a loose-jointed hobby-horse. At last we caught the valley of a descending river, and racked and shaken in every bone, I rode into the plaza of Corongo, the near-Indian population of which seemed to take a bear-baiting pleasure in the predicaments of others. Evidently this was no new characteristic, for Stevenson, writing a century ago, states, “Corongo is certainly the most disagreeable Indian town I ever entered.”
The gobernador sat gossiping in the mud hut to which the telegraph wire led. He had not, however, received any message from Cabana. As telegrams cost “authorities” nothing, I had permitted myself to hope that at least this promise would be kept. Having no other way of getting rid of me, however, the town ruler led the way to his own hovel, where long after dark his crude-mannered females prepared me a bowl of gruel with which to break an all-day fast.
The language of Corongo is chiefly Quichua, little in evidence since Ecuador, but due from now on to be more general than Spanish. The gobernador ran no unnecessary risk of having me left on his hands, and by six next morning the owner of a new “horse,” an even more striking caricature of what he was supposed to represent than that ofthe day before, had collected his fee and that of the new “guide.” These paid, he began at once to complain that the animal could not travel far without being shod, a luxury which, like his master, he had thus far never enjoyed. On the advice of the gobernador I added a half-sol for that purpose. Two hours later I raised so effective a protest against further delay that the animal was dragged in, still unshod, as he would be to the end of time, and made ready. The price, more or less exorbitant in honor of my helpless situation and gringo blood, would not have mattered had not each “authority” stood in cahoots with the owners and wasted my time and energy with their clumsy grafts.
Under a brilliant sun we squirmed away out of town, and began a sharp descent into one of the mightiest desert gorges in all the Andes, my “guide,” a stone-headed fellow, speaking only Quichua, who had plodded at a horse’s tail all his days, slapping along behind me in his leather sandals, incessantly feeding himself lime and coca leaves. It would have been difficult enough for a man in the best of health to sit such an animal standing still on the level; let those who can imagine one with barely the strength left to hold himself together riding him down shale hillsides, often at a sharp angle, the stirrups knocked from his inert feet every few yards. Now the entire range cutting off the world on the east was capped with snow, making the scorched and thirsty valley the more tantalizing by comparison. On through blazing noon I clung to that diminutive brute with his murderous dog-trot, over blistered, waterless hills, harsh and repulsive in their barrenness, to fetch up at sunset, more dead than alive, in Yuramarca, a scattered village of far more chicha-shops than respectable inhabitants. Here, instead of the penetrating cold of Corongo, was to be feared the fever of the hot lands. The gobernador was a ragged, barefoot Indian not over eighteen, one of the few in town who spoke Spanish, and inclined to insolence in consequence. He pointed out a mud cave on the plaza as the stopping-place of all travelers. I protested against lying on the bare earth. “No hay más,” growled the haughty official. Of course there was nothing more; there never is at the first ten or twelve requests among these pitiless aboriginals. An hour’s coaxing and threatening, nicely interwoven, and the gobernador strolled across the plaza and came back with just the thing,—a six by two-foot door, covered on one side with zinc. I ordered the “guide” to place the saddle in the room, lest he decamp during the night, gave him amediofor chicha, arealto buy the tops of sugar-cane for the “horse”—forwe were far below the alfalfa line—and sent the gobernador with twice the necessary amount to find wheat for a bowl of gruel. To the unspeakable old female he ordered to prepare it. I paid a large day’s wages, yet the luke-warm “soup” she delivered long after dark had only a spoonful of chaff in it. In the Andes, cooks, workmen, and servants appropriate as much as they dare of anything they have to do with, and soldier, peon, dog, or cat, each expects to levy his toll on the traveler’s scanty rations. We of the north do not look kindly upon this species of charity, feeling that each should have his food regularly from a definite source; yet the means of avoiding a system more deadening in its effect than the “tip” of more advanced communities is yet to be found.
An Indian of Cerro de Pasco region carrying a slaughtered sheep. The women go barefoot but the men wear woolen stockings and hairy cowhide sandals
An Indian of Cerro de Pasco region carrying a slaughtered sheep. The women go barefoot but the men wear woolen stockings and hairy cowhide sandals
An Indian of Cerro de Pasco region carrying a slaughtered sheep. The women go barefoot but the men wear woolen stockings and hairy cowhide sandals
Catalino Aguilar and his wife. Fermín Alva, my nurses in the hospital of Caráz
Catalino Aguilar and his wife. Fermín Alva, my nurses in the hospital of Caráz
Catalino Aguilar and his wife. Fermín Alva, my nurses in the hospital of Caráz
Before daylight of a moonlit Sunday morning we were off again through the same dreary desert. The sun, having first to climb the snow-capped Cordillera, only overtook us as we were crossing the decrepit little bridge high above the Santa river, racing through its resounding gorge on its way to the Pacific. The endless climb beyond was by so narrow a trail along the face of a yawning precipice that my saddlebags scraped continually along the mountain wall, and here and there a jutting rock thumped me sharply on the knee. At scorching high noon we caught sight, between grim, austere mountain flanks, of a long, tilted valley lightly covered in all its extent with tiled houses among scrub trees, which my peon announced was Huaylas. I had heard such rosy reports of this “city” that my oft-disappointed hopes grew buoyant again before a view delightful to the eye weary with the savage solitudes behind. But it turned out to be but another of those bowelless, stone-hearted mountain towns whose ragged inhabitants remind one of buzzards hovering about a moribund, each snatching what he can, as soon as he dares. “Don Ricardo,” an anemic, fishy-handed dwarf of outwardly white skin, owner of the chief shop of Huaylas, ran a sort of amateur hotel at Ritz-Carlton prices. The open-air “dining-room” on the back veranda overlooked—as guests likewise struggled to do—a jumble of ancient and noisome structures and stable-yards, in the most distressing of which a leprous old hag concocted the inedible messes that were poked through a repulsive hole in the wall an unconscionable time after they were ordered. The rheumatic and dismal den to which I was assigned was below the street level, though I could see through the wooden-barred window the brilliant, sunny day outside, and catch a glimpse of the serrated line of snow peaks away to the east. But the good people of Huaylas, informed in some wayof my place of lodging, amused themselves by pounding on the window bars, shouting amiable insults in upon me, and now and then tossing in clods of earth and an occasional stone that did not always fall short of their aim. As I had had no quarrel with the priest, he could not have denounced me as a heretic. It must have been simply their racial delight in producing or watching suffering, the same trait that brings them joy during the sorriest moments of a bull-fight, and causes them to gather in crowds to tease and jeer at an idiot or a cripple. It was “Taco” who finally came to my rescue. “Taco” was a Japanese, chief servant of Don Ricardo, and the only really intelligent or humane person I had met since walking out of the doctor’s house in Huamachuco. It was with deep regret that I paid his worthless master for what the servant really furnished.
The peon who was to start with me at dawn next day was still wallowing among the chicha-shops at blazing ten, and I was weakly urging a start—for the journey was long—when an imposing personage of white skin, wearing a leather cap and real shoes, pushed through the jeering throng and announced himself the congressman for that district. Having heard my tale of woe, he gave me a card ordering themédico titularof Caráz to admit me to the hospital there, and in due time prevailed upon the besotted peon to be off. The order was addressed to one Dr. Luís A. Phillips, and vastly buoyed up by the promise inherent in such a name, I endured uncomplainingly the rib-jolting trot to which the delayed start had sentenced me.
Town after town had proved such dismal disappointments that I did not look forward to Caráz with any overwhelming glee. But my hopes rose high when we surmounted one of the countless desert ridges and sighted at last a vast, level, though somewhat tilted plain between the Santa river and the brilliant white snow peaks of the ever higher Cordillera, with hundreds upon hundreds of inviting houses specking with red its many orchards and checkered green patches of cultivation. The Andes rise to appalling heights in these parts, and take on a variety of color and form almost comparable to the Alps in beauty, vastly outdoing them in a certain wild, somber undomesticated grandeur. Under the declining sun the bold and impressive range turned from tawny brown to deep purple, then to tender violet and soft lilac as they receded, the snowy heads of the peaks seeming to hang suspended in the evening sky. The bridge to the north was in ruins, and I had to ride more than a mile beyond the town to catch the road from the south that carried us at last into the place as the shopkeepers were putting uptheir wooden shutters. It was almost a city, with evidence of considerable commerce and civilization, great glaciers gazing coldly down from the transparent sky of evening into the neat little plaza.
A considerable percentage of the inhabitants were white in color, but this was apparently only skin-deep. At the entrance to the doctor’s patio I was met by his wife, a well-dressed, auburn-haired woman, to all outward appearances educated and civilized. But environment is a powerful factor. She differed not in the least from the Indians of Corongo. Having informed me with an icy indifference that the doctor was “somewhere in the town,” she refused even to permit me to enter the patio to wait for him. There being nowhere else to go, I was forced to remain more than an hour astride the animal I could scarcely cling to after eight hours of racking trot. Not a drop of anything could I get for my raging thirst. Instead, the woman’s saucy children joined a score of other urchins of the town in crowding around me and concocting all manner of annoyances, even to throwing stones and striking the horse unawares on the legs, while a score of adults looked on from the street corners or their doorways at the “amusement.”
At first sight of the doctor, long after dark, my hopes gushed up like a spurting geyser, but they fell leadenly to the ground as he opened his lips. The son of an Englishman stranded a half-century ago in this corner of Peru, he looked as British as any stroller along Piccadilly; yet in speech, manner, and mental processes he was “Spig” to the core. With a Latin-American eagerness to be rid of anything suggesting labor or annoyance, he asked a few superficial questions, grunted twice after the manner of physicians, and led the way down the cobbled street. My habit of picturing in detail every coming scene had only been increased by my condition, and I braced myself to enter a dismal, barren mud room, with a score of beds filled with foul-tongued Peruvian soldiers, in which the pilfering of my possessions would be the least of the annoyances awaiting me. I was most agreeably disillusioned. The hospital at Caráz was a new, whitewashed, pleasant little building recently erected by a society of well-to-do inhabitants. There were not a half-dozen patients, and in painting my picture I had completely overlooked the Andean rules of caste. However nastily he may treat him otherwise, the meanest Peruvian would not so far forget his training as to put a white man among Indians or negro-tainted soldiers. I was given full possession of a long, tile-floored room, opening on the flower-decked patio and with a large barredwindow on the street; the best chamber in the building, indeed, except the director’s office. True, the bed was board-floored, and I had to ask the caretaker to remove his champion gamecock from the room—whereupon he tied him by a leg just outside the door—but who could be so cruel as to ask a Peruvian to keep his rooster where he cannot gloat over him as he works?
The doctor came for a minute and a half every morning. The hospital being a public institution and he a government doctor, he scowled at my offer to pay for treatment. The caretaker and especially his wife, with a seared and weather-worn face like that of a good-hearted old German peasant woman, were kindly if not experienced nurses. I could scarcely have fallen upon a finer spot, as nature goes, to be “laid on the shelf.” Caráz, 7,440 feet above sea-level, was at an ideal height as a place of recuperation, its splendid climate tempered and clarified by the snowclads above. An open stream made music by my window; the sun was unbrokenly brilliant from the time it crawled over the snow-peaks to the east till it dropped behind the western ranges. I needed no clock to tell the time of day. It was 7:40 when the first golden streak fell upon the whitewashed wall beneath the window; 12:14 when the golden rectangle that marked the open door to the patio stood upright; 2:20 when the window-bars cast their first shadow on the tiled floor; and 5:10 when these, elongated to emaciated slenderness, faded away into the purple darkness of evening. Two youths of the town dropped in on me one day and brought an ancient book of tales; but it goes without saying that I had no hint of what was going on in the wide world beyond the encircling ranges. The unique feature of the hospital was that no provision whatever was made for patients to wash, even face and hands. Bathing was looked upon as highly dangerous to invalids, and it was only after several days, and at the expense of much argument, that I finally caused a washtub of tepid water to be dragged into the room.