Chapter 34

A religious procession in the main square of Ayacucho. When the leading figure reached certain points, an old Indian set off elaborate pieces of fireworks, and as the smoke cleared away scores of urchins dashed in to fight with the Indian and one another for the framework

A gala Sunday in the improvised “bullring” of Ayacucho, in the patio of theColegio, or high school, for the benefit of which thecorridawas given. The chief toreros are Spanish, and the mountain bulls are at best somewhat lacking in ferocity

I have come near overlooking the most striking thing in Ayacucho,—the head-dress of its women. In the Andes fashions change not with time, but with place. In Inca days each district had its own distinctive garb, or at least head-gear, a custom which was strictly enforced in colonial times, in order that Indians belonging to one province might not escape compulsory labor by going to another. What a convenience it would be in our own land if we could recognize each man’s place of birth by the shape or color of his derby! The bonnets of Ayacucho are hard to believe. Though I had been duly warned in advance, the first glimpse of anayacuchanacaught me unawares. Ifancied she was carrying home some purchase on her head. When others like her began to appear from all directions, however, I recalled to what lengths fair woman will go to keep in fashion. The wildest nightmares perpetrated by the milliners of more familiar lands by no means come so perilously near reducing the mere male beholder to hysterics as this, which at first sight gives a suggestion of that thrill the traveler to Mars might experience at coming suddenly face to face with something totally new and unprecedented. The rank and file of Ayacucho women wear on their heads a blanket, gay in hue and large enough to serve as a bedspread, nicely folded in triangular form, with one sharp corner protruding over the face. Each one is distinct in color, with an embroidered border, and is usually lined with silk. Even the half-Indian women from the suburbs, driving to market donkeys all but hidden under loads of alfalfa—each burden protected from its hungry carrier by a large wooden gag in the animal’s mouth—balance this contraption on their heads through all their labors. No one in Ayacucho could tell me the origin of so absurd a fashion, though all were agreed it had been in vogue a very long time; nor had any of them ever developed enough curiosity to enquire, except the prefect, a newcomer in this region, who had investigated in vain.

Anchorena, the piano importer, had promised on his caballero honor to have Chusquito back in the hotel patio on Sunday night, that I might continue my journey at dawn. Knowing only too well the nebulous stuff of which Latin-American promises are made, I set out on Saturday to jog his memory. The houses of Ayacucho are not numbered, but the thumping of a piano in the throes of amateur tuning easily guided me to the lawyer’s dwelling. Surrounded by the gaudily overdecorated magnificence of his parlor, he laughed at my absurd misgivings and repeated his “palabra de caballero.” Yet when night fell on Sunday, no horse had appeared. I hurried back to the Anchorena residence. The lawyer received me with that complacent indifference to his plighted word, without even an attempt to excuse himself, which is common to his race. As in the days of the Conquest, when betrayal was an everyday affair, the word of the most important resident of the Andes is not worth the breath required to utter it. Most annoying of all, they treat any protest against their devotion tomañanaas a gringo weakness they must put up with, but to which they hope never to fall victims themselves. Even as they listen, a sneaking smile lurks just behind their solemn countenances, as if they were hearing the plaints of a querulous child. Were we in this worldmerely to see how easily we could drift through it, the Andean point of view would be superb; to those of us burdened with the notion that we are here to get some little thing done, it is maddening.

“Team ess mo-nay, eh?” squeaked the lawyer, with a condescending smirk. “If the horse does not arrive to-night, perhaps it will come to-morrow; or if not, what is the difference whether you go to-morrow, or the day after?”

“The difference, my friend, between an American and a Latin-American,” I could not refrain from replying, “and may it ever grow wider.”

Thus, when I would gladly have added Ayacucho to my past, I found myself helpless to advance, for the lawyer would not even direct me to his estate, that I might bring the animal myself. The next afternoon an Indian arrived from the hacienda—with the wrong horse. I joined the bull-fighters, strolling about town with the Monday languor customary to their profession, and whiled away several more funereal hours. Then at dusk I returned to the hotel, to find Chusquito lounging against a pillar in front of my door, looking not an inch rounder for all the “very rich feed” with which the hacienda was reputed to abound. The way he fell upon a bundle of alfalfa, bought off the Indian woman and girl who sleep on the cobble-stones of Santo Domingo plaza beside a heap of it, suggested that he had spent the week grazing on bare ground. Yet the Indian who brought him had presented an exorbitant bill for his accommodation from thesisterof the man who had implored the honor of giving him free pasture on his own hacienda.

I was awake at four—for religious reasons—and by the time the birds in the trees began to twitter we had left the acknowledged cemetery of Dead Man’s Corner behind, and were climbing away toward the sunrise. The road, true to its Latin-American environment, left town with great enthusiasm, but soon petered out to a wearisome trail. Of several villages of Indians noted for their passive resistance to all the demands of the traveler, the most typical was Ocros. We came out far above it one morning, on the lofty crest of a range from which the trail pitched for a time blindly down into a vast sea of mist hiding all the unknown world before us. Bit by bit vast rocks loomed up out of the fog, like black, misshapen giants; then huts appeared once more, with here and there an Indian plowing a bit of hillside with a wooden stick and a pair of oxen he seemed in constant peril of suddenly losing down the sheer mountain-side. Then at last the mistcleared and disclosed, cramped in its narrow vale far below among dwarf trees, a town which rose gradually up to us, and at noon, after all but losing Chusquito and my other worldly belongings through a dirt-and-branch bridge that showed no sign of having been condemned until we were upon it, I halted at the hut of the gobernador. He was out—which probably meant that he was hiding in one of the half-dozen ancient mud structures that surrounded his corral—and his females were taciturn. I displayed my government order and asked to have food prepared.

“Manam cancha,” mumbled one of the women, all of whom kept silently and impassively at work with their primitive spindles.

“I must have fodder for theanimalito,” I protested.

“Manam cancha,” came the monotonous answer again, with that inflection peculiar to the Andean Indian, which seems to say, “There isn’t any; but there might be if I felt like going to get it.” I should have preferred hunger to a scene, but I declined to allow anyone out of mere apathy to starve Chusquito.

“Manam cancha, eh?” I cried, snatching the grass roof off a chicken-coop and tossing it before the animal. Sentimentalists to the contrary notwithstanding, the surest way to impress an Andean Indian is to appeal to force. Gradually the most democratic traveler learns to adopt the native habit of addressing him as “tu,” and to treat him like the balky domestic animal he so closely resembles. I picked up a boy from behind the mud wall surrounding the females, and thrusting a coin upon him, ordered him to go and buy eggs. Once the traveler can force money into an Indian’s possession, his prospects of provisions brighten, for it is as easy for the latter to produce them as to come and return the coin. The eggs were soon forthcoming and, taking possession of a table under the projecting roof and marching into the kitchen for water, I lighted my rum-burner and fell to preparing a meal. By the time I had effectively demonstrated my importance, the same woman who had “manam cancha-ed” me in the beginning came to say that if I would give her a medio she would buy fodder; and a few moments later she returned, carrying in her own arms a huge bundle ofchala, or dry cornstalks, over which Chusquito struggled during the rest of our stay in competition with the family calf, pigs, and chickens.

It was probably as much out of a desire to inspect my cooking outfit as fear for her chicken-coops that had won me attendance. Behind the mask that hides his emotions the Indian of the Andes is filled withcuriosity. There runs an Andean anecdote that well illustrates this characteristic. One of their own race, who had served in the army and learned other things without forgetting the ways of his own people, came at night to an Indian hut and requested lodging. When this was granted in the customary manner—merely by not being refused—he asked for food.

“Manam cancha,” came the expected reply.

“Well, sell me something and I will cook for myself.”

“Manam cancha.”

The soldier was well aware that there were plenty of supplies hidden away in the hut. He knew, also, the Indian temperament.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to get along on a chupe de guijarros,” he sighed, using Spanish to make his speech more impressive.

“A stone soup!” murmured the household, betrayed by astonishment into understanding a tongue they pretended not to know.

“Yes, it is what we use in the army when there is nothing better.”

He wandered down to the mountain stream below the hut and, returning with a dozen large smooth pebbles, washed them carefully, and laid them out on his bundle.

“You won’t mind lending me an olla?” he murmured to the wall of expressionless faces about him.

A woman brought the kettle in silence. The soldier, humming a barrack-room ballad, half-filled the pot with water, set it over the fire, dropped in the stones one by one, and squatted on his heels with a sigh of contentment. By and by he borrowed a wooden spoon and tasted the concoction from time to time, throwing the residue back into the kettle in approved Andean fashion.

“You don’t happen to have a bit of salt?” he murmured, after a time, to the family now gathered close around him watching this possible miracle silently but intently.

“Cachi?That we have,” said the woman, handing him a piece of purple rock, which he beat up and sprinkled into the now steaming pot.

“Too bad I haven’t a few potatoes to put in,” he droned, as if to himself, “it would help the flavor.”

The old woman shambled away into the darkness of a far corner, and came back some time later to thrust silently toward him a handful of small potatoes, her eyes glued on the miraculous pot. When these were about half-boiled the soldier again broke off his song to murmur:

“This is going to be one of the finest chupes de guijarros I’ve ever made. All it lacks now is a bit ofajíto give it life.”

The old woman muttered something to one of the ragged girls beside her, and the latter went to dig two red peppers out of the thatch.

“A piece of cabbage would make it perfect,” sighed the soldier.

The Indians, too engrossed in the production of a stone soup, and too slow of mind to have caught up yet with the course of events, brought to light a small cabbage. By this time they were so consumed with curiosity that the old man asked innocently:

“But do you make a stone soup without meat?”

“Ah, to be sure, a strip of charqui always improves it,” replied the soldier indifferently, “but....”

A girl was sent to fetch a sheet of sun-dried beef, which the former conscript cut up slowly and dropped bit by bit into the now savory-smelling chupe. A half-hour later he lifted the kettle off the fire, the old woman handed him a gourd plate, and some cold boiled yuca as bread, and having given half of it to the family, he ate the stone soup with great relish—all except the dozen smooth, round stones at the bottom of the olla.

All that afternoon we slipped and slid down a half-perpendicular stone-quarry, that bruised my toes if not Chusquito’s, into a repulsive molle- and cactus-grown desert in which a tropical sun blazed with homicidal intensity. No wonder its blistering rays faded the made-in-Germany cloth of my Ayacucho-tailored breeches, when it bleached even Chusquito’s coat to a pale, reddish yellow. Had I not come upon an isolated hut and a gourdful of chicha de jora just when I did, it is by no means certain that I should not have perished of thirst before the day was done. The “Hacienda Pajo nal,” in the valley of the Pampas river where sunset overtook us, was in charge of a white and cultured woman engaged in the inviting occupation of dealing out to half-drunken Indians the concentrated sugar-cane juice of a large hogshead in the liquor room. The husband, who loomed up through the tropical twilight, was the graduate of an American agricultural college; but the hacienda, under charge of his Quichua-speaking mayordomo, was farmed in the same backward manner as in the times of the Incas, without even their energy, and his foreign training had given him no inkling of the proper occupation for wives. Nor did he give any evidence of ability to speak English. After the patriarchial supper around a long, rough-hewn table, he set in motion a large phonograph, and we heard not only the best opera stars of the day, but such exotic selections as “The Old Gray Bonnet,” and a tale of love and moonlight along the Wabash. A veritable crowd of arrieros and low-castenative travelers, who had made this their night’s stopping place, and the uncouth Indian laborers of the hacienda, gathered on the edge of the darkness and stood like statues as long as the entertainment lasted. Evidently they were amused, or they would not have remained; but the absolute stoniness of their expression, without the faintest outward evidence of pleasure, would have brought dismay to a living entertainer. We had dropped again into a genuinetierra caliente, warm as the Cauca valley, where tiny gnats decorated my skin with an annoyance that was to last for days to come; and though I was favored with the guest-room all important Peruvian haciendas provide for travelers, the corredor outside my door, and all the neighboring patios and corrals was strewn with Indians of both sexes, stretched out among their bales and trappings.

An hour or more next morning along the flat river-bottom planted with sugar-cane brought us to one of those swaying bridges over a roaring stream compressed between precipitous rock-walls, so numerous in the time of the Incas. But instead of woven willow withes, it was supported by cables and, as if to recall the provident Incas by contrast, was sadly in need of the repair that had just begun. Chusquito crossed the precarious contraption only under protest, after the application of more than moral suasion, and on the slanting and broken cross-slats I kept my own footing with difficulty. Had he been more than a boy’s size horse, we should have been held up at the edge of the gorge for days, until the languid workmen finished their task. We were now in the department of Apurímac. Some miles further along the river, through a sandy wilderness of organ-cactus noisy with flocks of screaming green parrots, the trail struck upward on the famous ascent of Bombón. It was another of those infernally stony, endless, blazing, absolutely waterless climbs that must be endured wherever a river has cut its way deep into the Andes, requiring a day of laborious toil to advance a few miles across a chasm that might almost be bridged. Even Chusquito seemed ready to stretch out on his back when at last we reached the summit, the lofty plateau again spreading away cool and inviting before us.

In Chincheros the gobernador attempted at first to deny the honor, but being caught in the act, as it were, accepted the situation with good grace, as became a caballero of considerable Spanish ancestry. In the black shale of his back corredor all the local “authorities” were gathered about a long table that groaned as with the gout each time any of its legs was subjected to undue weight, their state papers, seals, andink-horns, and a goodly array of large ill-scented bottles spread out before them. When he had spelled out my papers, the gobernador invited me to make the veranda my home as long as I chose to grace Chincheros with my gnat-bitten countenance, and I spent what remained of the day amid a mixture of chicha, pisco, and justice. A fully sober person was not to be expected at that hour in Peru, but the “authorities” were still sufficiently aware of the dignity of their position to whisk the bottles out of sight when I prepared to photograph the group. That an andarín should not present a book for their seals and signatures they took as a slight, and I was forced to submit several pages of my note-book to their official decoration. During all the rest of the afternoon Indians and half-Indians came slinking in before the authoritative crowd, one of whom was a notary public, to mumble their petitions or complaints with many a cringing “tayta-tayta,” and the air of slaves before ill-tempered masters. The otherwise subservient proceedings were broken once by a wordy passage-at-arms between the gobernador and an aged caballero dressed in rags and pride, who bade a formal farewell to the women of the family and other officials, but left without the customary handshake with the gobernador, marking this as the most serious quarrel I had yet witnessed in South America. When the business of the day was over, the mellow-conditioned “authorities” all joined in a game of “quoits,” with silver soles in place of horseshoes, to determine which of them should supply the wine that topped off the festivities. The family supper was served on the table so recently occupied by the affairs of justice, and I spread my bed on two of the benches that had sustained the weight of the august judges. Here and there on the mud floor of the court-room an Indian slept, curled up like a contented yellow dog on a bundle of rags or corn-stalks.

I had assigned to the long, hard day across the great range beyond Chincheros the experience of chewing coca, said to sustain the Andean Indian on his laborious journeyings. As we undulated across the barren, brown top of the world, I began feeding myself leaf by leaf, adhering strictly to the accepted rules of this indigenous sport, until I had formed a bulging cud in my right cheek—the left is also permitted by the rules. The taste was not unlike that of dry hay. Then I bit off several nibbles of lime from the burnt stone I had bought in the market of Huancayo and, mixing it with the leaves, began to chew. The only sensation I was clearly aware of was that the lime burned my gums atrociously, as it would have done had the coca leaf neverbeen discovered. I am not sure that I did not feel a slight increase in exhilaration that caused me to lift my feet a trifle faster; but this may easily have been due to the beauty of the scene that stretched to infinity on every hand, for even Chusquito seemed inspired to bestir his dainty hoofs with more than his accustomed sprightliness.

The hazy valley of the Pampas river with its biting gnats had disappeared into the past, and only the bare, brown world spread before us to a far distant horizon that seemed to move forward as we advanced. Small wonder the natives were astonished that I kept the road. I could not but be surprised myself that instinct and the slight assistance of my pocket-compass guided me aright across this deathly-still, unpeopled mountain-top, where the traveler must constantly watch the faintly marked path, lest it take advantage of the briefest inattention to dodge from under his feet and leave him hopelessly stranded high up on a dreary puna trackless as the sea itself. On these shelterless heights it was easy to understand why each succeeding town had watched my departure with gaping mouths, and that the boldest inhabitants had cried out: “Nosotros, aunque hijos del país, no nos aventuremos hasta el Cuzco sin guía!—Even we, sons of the country, would not adventure ourselves to Cuzco without a guide!”

A familiar sight in the Andes,—a recently butchered beef hung in sheets along the clothes-line to sun-dry intocharqui, the soleleather-like imitation of food on which the Andean traveler is often forced to subsist

A typical “bed” in the guest-room provided for travelers by many Peruvianhacendados,—to wit: a stone or adobe divan on which the traveler may spread whatever bedding he brings with him. Note myalforjas, kitchenette, and bottle of fuel. An auto-picture taken by pinning a flash sheet on the opposite wall

But luck was with me. The dull-yellow world began to subside at last, and we came out far above a long, winding valley, in the dim end of which I could make out a green speck that was evidently that very Andahuaylas toward which we were headed. Far away, in the same direction which I must follow to reach the Navel of the Inca Empire, were tooth-shaped peaks, slightly snowclad, hung high in the sky, and below, and about, and beyond them to the ends of the earth, the suggestion, rather than the actual sight, of such a labyrinth of ranges as only the disordered imagination seemed capable of creating. We began to go down and forever down, so swiftly that we could have kicked each other in our disgust, now slipping and stumbling along toboggans of loose stones, now picking our way step by step down natural rock stairs, then descending across steep meadows of mountain grass on which Chusquito, with his caulk-less shoes, gave a ludicrous suggestion of some silly fellow attempting to skate on all fours. At length the slope moderated its pace and took on a thin garb of trees and vegetation, the mountain-tops on which we had been walking a bare two hours before now towering into the sky above. Below the village of Moyabamba, so renowned for its horse-stealing that we lost no time in leaving it behind us, the valley narrowed to a gorge, in which ourprogress was blocked by a mule-train of Ica wine. I fell in with the chief arriero at the rear, and plodded with him in the cloud of dust rising behind the shuffling mules like the mists of the morning from some seaside valley. Each of the animals bore two kegs of wine nicely balanced on his sawbuck-shaped pack-saddle, a total weight of 250 pounds. The journey from Ica to Andahuaylas averaged from three weeks to a month, the entire cost of transportation about $7.50 for each animal. In the morning, horsemen and pedestrians formed an almost unbroken procession along the rich and thickly inhabited valley of the little Chumbau river, for all the league from Talavera to the straggling town of Andahuaylas.

Manuel Richter, addressee of my letter, kept a little general-store on a corner of the plaza. Chusquito and I waited in the streak of shade before his shop until he had spelled out the missive with Teutonic deliberation, in marked contrast to the Latin-American quickness of welcome, which almost as quickly explodes into thin air. Our new host had first emigrated forty years before from Poland to New York, where he had lived several months in “Ghe-r-reen Schtreet,” a fact he never lost an opportunity to mention, evidently under the impression that it was still the aristocratic center of the city. During that time he had worked in a store “way uptown in Oonion Sqvare.” He still boasted a brother in the kosher district of Harlem, but for some reason that does not apply to most of his race he had drifted on to Peru and become a true Peruvian, even to taking off his hat when a tin Virgin passed in the street. Yet we spoke German together. He seemed to prefer it to Spanish, even after half a lifetime in the Andes and despite a Peruvian wife and half a dozen children entirely ignorant of the former tongue.

The Richter meals were more than substantial, and his family bubbled over with kind-heartedness. But he was forced to share the honor of a guest from far-offAmérica del Nortewith one Da Pozzo, who dwelt in solitary, topsy-turvy state in an ancient, two-story ruin on a knoll across the prattling Chumbau. He was a Venetian on the sadder side of forty, once an architect of high standing, who had laid out more than one Plaza de Armas in Peru and Bolivia. Several turns of the wheel of fate in the wrong direction, among them a Peruvian wife, the confessional, and the fiery waters that partly drown such memories, had reduced his ambition to a low level and his income to what may be picked up by the building of mud houses in these drowsy towns of the interior. In his customary condition hewas maudlinly affectionate, to the point of making even my cheeks the target of his bewhiskered kisses, and vociferous in his assertion that he was a “masón” and a hater of priests in all lands and languages. But what mattered all this, or the fact that his junk-strewn ruin boasted only one wooden-floored bed, and that the rotting old balcony seemed always on the point of dropping from under one? For it overlooked splendid groves and rows of the slender, blue-black eucalyptus where birds sang merrily, as well as the brown flanks of the Andes rolling up out of both sides and ends of a valley enlivened by a constant going and coming of Indians along its broad roadway. Then, too, there was rich alfalfa on which Chusquito might gorge himself at no other expense than an occasional medio to the Indian boy assigned the task of cutting it—“that he have affection for you and your horse.”

Andahuaylas is really nothing but an example of how life may be made a perennial pastime, scattered almost thickly along the entire two leagues from Talavera to San Jerónimo. Yet its situation and climate give it a charm peculiarly its own, and it would be hard to imagine a better place in which to drift through life—as its inhabitants seem to recognize. Though the long valley is extremely fertile, it produces little. The Indians of more or less full blood that make up the bulk of the population will not work; the “white” man cannot, lest he forever lose his precious caste. The laziest American laborer known to charity bureaus will do more and better work in an hour, unwatched, than the liveliest Indian of Andahuaylas in a day, with a boss standing over him. Without in the least hurrying I could descend from the upper story of our ruin to the river, return with a pail of water, complete my toilet and throw out the water, before the Indian boy whose only duty in life was to attend me would, if called, appear from his seat directly below my balcony to get the pail—which he would smash before he got back, if there was any possible way of doing so, and into which he would certainly manage to get some sort of filth, if he had to pick it up and throw it in. Thegentelay the blame of this condition on theescuelas fiscales, the free government-schools, complaining that “there is no longer service, for as soon as the cholo has been to school, he wants to be aperson.” “Faltan brazos—arms are lacking,” they wail, gazing across the all but uncultivated valley; yet not one of them notices the two hanging idly at his own sides. A shower of medios failed to win from the Indian boy an affection sufficient to keep Chusquito from starvation. I obtained permission to tiethe animal in a corner of the fat alfalfa field that would not come to him, and all day long I could see him across the little river, a contented dot of red against the deep green background of the field from which he never raised his head the whole day through.

Yet the products of the valley are cheap enough, when they exist. Eggs were five cents a dozen; one morning an Indian who needed the money came to the ruin to offer me eight for a medio (2 cents). Four liters of milk might be had for 7 cents. But let the harassed American householder pause a moment and reflect, before he sells his chattels and hurries down to Andahuaylas. To obtain those four liters one must take a pail and wander several miles along the valley at about nine in the morning, wait around some hacienda corral where the Indians have concluded not to abandon the daily milking, and never get home before noon. The “best families” have a special milk-servant who does nothing else—and frequently not even that—than go milk hunting; and on an average he is robbed on his way home of the contents of his pail about every third morning, by some group of Indians who come upon him out of sight of any member of the gente class.

There is a type of “white” Indian in the Andahuaylas valley, apparently without admixture of European blood, yet with a very light skin and delicate pink cheeks. In the color of their garments they nearly rival those of Quito. The heavy woolen socks and hairy sandals of more lofty regions are unknown, and the barefoot patter again reigns supreme. In manner the aboriginal is cringing and timorous, yet if the word of the shod minority was trustworthy, he has more than once been known to sneak up on a sleeping gringo and mash his head with a rock. Nor will he “squeal” on one of his own race, even when put to the torture.

In the wilderness of weeds that passed for the local cemetery I came upon three Indians digging a child’s grave. One muscular loafer stood less than waist-deep in the hole, scratching into a blanket spread out at his feet a bit of dust, with a hoe Adam might have thrown away in disgust during the first week of his existence, before he invented a better one. To corners of the blanket were tied ropes, by which a pair of equally muscular Indians standing on the ground above hauled up every ten minutes or so nearly a shovelful of earth. Of course, at “coca time,” or a dog-fight, or the passing of a drunken man, a foreigner, a bird, or a milk-pail, they paused from their strenuous labors a half-hour or so to stare after the attraction. At least half the timeleft they spent in bandying a skull and a pair of thigh bones back and forth between themselves and a pair of Indian women lounging in the grass nearby.

In the church forming one side of the plaza the chief among many absurdities testifying to the local absence of a sense of humor were the figures in the main side-chapel. These were life-size statues of Christ and the Virgin, the former in a sort of “precieux” gown and a broad-brimmed red hat with a pink band, the latter in a still broader blue one, giving the pair a ludicrous resemblance to the “shepherds” into which the nobles of the French court of two centuries ago used to disguise themselves, an impression increased by the cross between a golf-stick and a back-of-the-scenes hook carried by the Cristo. Yet the simple Indians pattered in all through the day to kneel and gaze with a beatified expression, in which there was not the shadow of a smile, at these absurd figures, no doubt considering them the last word in beauty.

When all is said and done, there is a subtle, lazy charm about the valley of Andahuaylas that holds the traveler long after he should have moved on. Sometimes, as the placid days drifted smoothly by, one caught the native point of view, and regretted the intrusion of strenuous gringo activity in the midst of nature’s and man’s repose; a realization that we of the North do much which is not much even when we get it done. Here one could lie in perfect contentment and watch the road looping away out of the valley over a sunlit hill, without feeling too strong for resistance the itch to be off. Yet in the end the only sure means of enjoying an Andean range is to know that some day one is going to tramp away into it, to follow the trail that shoulders its way mysteriously off through those shaded valleys and rugged quebradas, beckoning one toward another and a new world beyond.

The fatherless urchin who fell in with me beyond Andahuaylas; the only native wearing shoes I met on the road in the Andes

My body-servant in Andahuaylas, and the sickle with which he was supposed to cut all the alfalfa “Chusquito” could eat

Back to Index Next