VI. THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR…

VI. THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR

I settled down for months in Quito. Not only were my Canal Zone experiences to be written, but I had long since planned to become a bona fide resident of a typical small South American capital. A letter of introduction won me quarters in the home of Señor Don Francisco Ordoñez V, in the calle Flores, while Hays hung up his hat in even more sumptuous surroundings around the corner.

But not so fast! Not even whole-hearted “Don Panchito” would have received me in the state of sartorial delapidation of our arrival. The people of Quito are somewhat less rigid disciples of Beau Brummel than those of Bogotá, but they are still far from negligent in dress. Most of the clothes indispensable to our entrance into the ranks of the gente decente had been mailed in Jirardot, the rest had been turned over to the American “drummer” in Cali. The first shock Quito had in store for us was the information that no parcel of any shape or description had come from Colombia in months, the second was the discovery that the traveling-man had not arrived. It was hard to realize that we had outwalked all the established means of transportation in this equatorial land.

An unavoidable round of the shops wiped out the remnant of my savings as a policeman, and brought me down again to the letter of credit that had lain fallow more than a half year. Except for tailor-made suits, the cost of replenishing a wardrobe was startling. Ready-made clothing for men is rare in the cities of the Andes, and it is far more economical to be fitted to order in one of the sastrerías that abound in almost every street,—dingy little rooms, their fronts all doorway, in which sit anemic half-breed youths sewing languidly, yet incessantly, now and then carrying the charcoal-filled “goose” out into the street to blow out the ashes, and as dependent on the passing throng for inspiration as the craftsmen of Damascus. As in the more northern capital, the chief line of demarkation between the gente and the pueblo of Quito is the white collar. Naturally, the tendency is to make it as wide and distinct as possible. I had canvassed the entire city before I found my customary brand of neckwear—at four times its American price—only to discover that the lowest collar in stock was designed for some species of human giraffe.

“You misunderstand me,” I protested, “I did not ask for a cuff.”

“This is a collar, señor,” cried the shopkeeper.

“Something lower, please.”

“But this is a very low collar! It is so low that no one in Quito will wear it, and we are not importing any more of this brand.”

In the matter of shoes, I found at last a Massachusetts product that might have served; but when I had beaten the dealer down to about twice the American price, a seven was found to be the largest size in stock. The merchant seemed on the verge of tears.

“Why, señor,” he gasped, gazing resentfully at the offending member, “there is not a foot in Quito as large as that shoe.”

He did not mean exactly what he said, but it was natural that he should have had in mind only the minority of quiteños who wear shoes. These squeeze their feet into articles of effeminate, toothpick shape for custom’s sake, as they force their necks into collars that come little short of hanging, and have their trousers made sailor-fashion, that their feet may look still more ladylike. One cannot, of course, pose as an aristocrat on the broad hoofs of an Indian. In the end I was forced to submit to botas de hule, an imitation patent-leather shoe made in Guayaquil.

Hays concluded that with a general overhauling he could pass muster until our bundles arrived. But on one point immediate renewal was unavoidable. He paused in the doorway of one of the little sewing dens to ask:

“Can you make me a pair of trousers by Saturday night?”

In spite of having pillowed for weeks on Ramsey, Hays never could remember that Castilian trousers come singly.

“Un par, señor!” cried the tailor, “Ah, no, that is impossible so soon. I can make you a trouser by then, but not two of them. Then, while you are wearing the one, I can perhaps make the other, if the señor is in such haste.”

“Oh, all right,” said Hays, suddenly recalling that trousers are—I mean is—singular in Spanish, “go ahead. I’ll try to get along with one over Sunday.”

The error persisted, however. It was not three days later that he was halted at the door of his lodgings by a whining beggar.

“Una caridad, caballero! Have you not perhaps some old clothes to give a poor unfortunate?”

“Sure,” said the generous ex-corporal of police. “I’ll bring you down a pair of trousers.”

He did so, whereupon the beggar growled angrily:

“But you said a pair! Where is the other one?”

Few quiteño dwellings are equipped with bathrooms. I halted a passerby to inquire for a public casa de baños, and was directed to the foot of the calle Rocafuerte.

“Hot baths?” I queried, suspiciously.

“Certainly, señor,” he answered haughtily; “If you go there any morning about ten, when the sun is shining, you will find them quite caliente.”

A crumbling old adobe gate, marked “Baños de Milagro,” gave entrance to an aged two-story building of the same material. Passing through this, I was astonished to find spread out before me what looked like an immense outdoor swimming-pool. It was illusion. Nearer approach showed a broad sheet of water barely six inches deep, a half-acre of it warming in the sun. I suddenly recalled that the same word serves in Spanish for all degrees of temperature from hot to luke-warm. About the basin were many little adobe dens, in the center of each a stone basin some four feet deep, with steps leading down into it. The fee was a mere real (five cents), for the streams that course down the face of Pichincha are abundant. An Indian scrubbed out the pool with a broom fashioned from a bundle of fagots, and turned it full of a water so clear that I could have read a newspaper at the bottom. But the heating apparatus was not particularly effective. When the icy mountain water had filled the stone basin, cold as only a shaded spot at this altitude can be, the uninured gringo could only grit his teeth, clutch desperately at his 60-cent bar of imported English soap, and plunge in—and quickly out again. One such experience was enough to explain why Quito shows so decided an aversion to the bath.

My residence in the city was all but nipped in the bud by a mere matter of red tape. Again the shock was administered at the post-office. When I presented the registry slips for the package of notes on which my proposed volume depended, they were all there, sure enough, the seals still unbroken. But as I opened them for customs inspection, the startled employees cried out in horrified chorus:

“Señor, it is against the law to send manuscript by mail in Ecuador!”

“These were mailed in the United States, where it is not against the law.”

“No importa! It is illegal for them to ride in the Ecuadorian mails. They will have to be confiscated by the government.”

“What can the government do with them?” I asked, innocently.

“Burn them, of course,” replied the clerk.

Luckily the laws of Ecuador are not so inexorable and incorruptible as those of some other lands, but I passed a far from pleasant hour before I discovered that saving fact. Just where the line is drawn between “manuscrito” and mere letters, I was never able to learn. At any rate the sender of the offending notes is still “wanted,” I believe, to serve a year in the penitentiary of Quito.

I had not been three days in the city of the equator when I began to feel the necessity for exercise. The “best families” lead a very sedentary and physically idle existence, virtually spending their lives at the bottom of a hole in the ground, for such the central plaza and the few adjoining squares about which it is customary to stroll might be called. Yet there are innumerable views and picturesque corners to reward him who will climb out; and climb he must, for the city lies in a fold of the skirts of Pichincha, out of which almost every street mounts more or less steeply.

The main plaza is the heart of Ecuador. In its center, instead of the “handsome brass fountain” of Stevenson’s day, rises a tall, showy monument topped by a bronze Victory or Liberty, or some other exotic bird, while at its base cringes an allegorical Spanish lion with a look of pained disgust on his face and an arrow through his liver. Much of the square is floored with cement, blinding to the eyes under the equatorial sun and only mildly relieved by staid and too carefully tended plots where violets, pansies, yellow poppies, and many a flower known only to the region bloom perennially. Its diagonal walks see most of Quito pass at least once a day. But neither Indians nor the ragged classes pause to sit on its grass-green benches; nor may anyone carrying a bundle pass its gates—unless the guard chances to be doing something other than his appointed duty. On the east the square is flanked by the two-story government “palace,” housing the presidency, the ministry, both houses of congress, the custom-house, Ecuador’s main post-office, and considerable else, yet still finding room for several cubby-hole shops under its portico. To the south, siding on, rather than facing the square, its towers barely rising above the roof, is the low cathedral, in which are the tombs both of Sucre and his reputed assassin, Flores, the “Washington of Ecuador.” The third and fourth sides are flanked by the archbishop’s palace and the municipality, both with portales, arcades beneath which are dozens of little den-like shops, and filled from pillar to pillar with hawkers and their no less motley wares.

Every street of the city is roughly cobbled, with a row of flagstones along its center for Indian carriers and four-footed beasts of burden, and on either side a narrow, slanting slab-stone walk on which the pedestrian whose appearance suggests the lower social standing is expected to yield the passage. Rambling over a rolling, at times almost hilly site, every street is due sooner or later to run off into the air on a hillside, or to fade suddenly away into a noisome lane.

Quito has no residential section. Its chiefly two-story buildings are, with rare exceptions, constructed of mud blocks on frames of chaguarquero, the light, pithy stalk of the giant cactus, with roofs of the familiar dull-red tiles. Whitewash and paint of many colors strive in vain to conceal this plebeian material, and many a façade is gay with ornamentation. Well-to-do people, who are commonly the owners of the building they dwell in, occupy the second floor. The lower story of the city is the business section. That portion of the house facing the street is almost certain to be given over to from one to several shops, the patio serving as a yard for the loading and unloading of pack-animals, while the bare adobe cells opening on it house the family servants and Indian retainers. To dwell almost anywhere in Quito is to live in the upper air of a combination of slums and business houses, and whatever the wealth or boasted aristocracy of a family, it is certain to come into daily contact with the unwashed gente del pueblo that inhabits its lower regions and performs its menial tasks.

There are shops enough in Quito, to all appearances, to supply the demands, if not the needs, of all the million and a half inhabitants of Ecuador. These are, for the most part, small, one-room dungeons without windows, flush with the sidewalk, with no other front than the doors that stand wide open during business hours, and present at other times their blank faces ornamented with several enormous padlocks. The quiteño puts no trust in the small locks of modern days. Many a shop, the entire stock of which is not worth a hundred dollars, is protected not only by bolts and bars within, but by half a dozen of those huge and clumsy contrivances that the rest of the world used in the Middle Ages. To “shut up shop” is a real task in Quito, of which the lugging home of the enormous keys is by no means the least burdensome. Naturally, if a real burglar cared to take the trouble to journey to Quito, he would find far less difficulty at his trade than in a city ostensibly less secure.

Besides the establishments of hundreds of men who would rather wear a white collar than work, there are innumerable little holes in the wall, run by “women of the people” in conjunction with their scanty household duties, where chicha and stronger drinks, and the few foodstuffs of the Indians and the poorer classes are displayed—and sometimes sold, though there are barely customers enough to go round. Clothing stores, or more exactly, cloth-shops, are perhaps most numerous, countless useless duplications of the selfsame stock, with hundreds of bolts of as many different weaves piled high in the open doorways. Every merchant, however meager his supplies, announces himself an “importer and exporter,” and after morning mass manto-wrapped women wander for hours from shop to shop, haggling for a fancied difference of a half cent in some purchase which, in the end, is more apt than not to be abandoned. Business is petty at best; its ethics low, and the native quiteño is a weak competitor of the foreigners that swarm in the city. Italians, especially the wily Neapolitan, and “Turks,” as the ubiquitous Syrians are called in all South America, capture much of the trade. A foreigner remains a foreigner in Ecuador, for the country has but weak powers of assimilation.

A unique note in the life of Quito are the “Propiedad” signs. Revolution, with its accompanying looting, is ever imminent. The native shopkeepers are frankly at the mercy of the looters, who only too often are the Government itself. But the foreigner despoiled of his wares can always lodge a complaint with his home Government; reparation may follow, and even the punishment of the looters is conceivable. To warn these of their peril, and to induce sober thought in times of anarchy, the foreign merchant paints on his shop-front a huge flag of his country, similar to that used by neutral steamers in wartime, with surcharged words conveying the same information to those unacquainted with the colors. Thus the German’s place of business is distinguished with a:

+-----------+ ¦ (black) ¦ ¦ PROPIEDAD ¦ +-----------¦ ¦ (white) ¦ ¦ ALEMANA ¦ +-----------¦ ¦ (red) ¦ +-----------+

Within a few blocks of the main plaza may be noted the following “Propiedades”: “Española, Francesa, Alemana, Belga, Danesa, Inglesa, Italiana, Holondesa, Sueca, Chilena, Colombiana, Peruana, Venezolana, Turca,” and one or two more. The Stars and Stripes and the words “Propiedad Americana” appear only once—on the door of a small export house.

Apparently every one is entitled to three guesses on the population of Quito. The estimates range from fifty to a hundred thousand, with the truth probably somewhere near the seventy-five thousand attributed to it in Stevenson’s day. Its tendency of late years has been to overflow its banks; the suburb of Guarico climbs a considerable way up the skirts of Pichincha, and the huts of Indians have scrambled well up the flanks of the other enclosing ridges. Though more in touch with the outside world than Bogotá, it has much the same atmosphere of a world apart, a peaceful, restful little sphere supplied with a few modern conveniences of a crude, break-down-often sort, but with little of the complicated life of twentieth-century cities. It is a splendid place to play at life, to lie fallow and catch up with oneself, with nothing more exciting to stir up existence than the semi-weekly concert in the plaza mayor. A score of carriages rattle over its cobbled streets; the rails of a tramway line had been laid years before our arrival, but the cars had not yet been ordered. Somewhere there may be a finer climate, but it would scarcely be worth while going far to look for it. Standing at a height which, in the temperate zone, would be covered by eternal snows, the city is sheltered by the surrounding ranges from the bitter chill that descends so often upon less lofty Bogotá. In the Colombian capital we were always suffering more or less from cold in our waking hours, except at midday; in Quito it was possible to sit comfortably on a plaza bench at midnight. With all the stages of nature, from planting through blossoms, fruit, and harvest, existing side by side, its days are like the best half-dozen culled from a northern May. There is a popular saying that it rains thirteen months a year in Quito. But this is slander. During my long stay, there were, to be sure, few days when it did not rain; but the shower came almost always at a more or less fixed hour of the afternoon, and the resident soon learned to make his plans accordingly. The rain seemed heavier than it was in reality, for tin spouts pour the water noisily out into the cobbled streets, the wide, projecting eaves protecting the sidewalks. Now and then came a day heavy with massed clouds; far more often all but an hour or so was brilliant with sunshine.

Yet an American schoolma’am accustomed to tell her pupils that the people of Quito all dress in white because it lies on the equator, would be startled to see what attention even a woman in light-colored garb attracts in its streets. On rare occasions a man in white cotton passed through the overcoated plaza during the evening concert; but this meant only that the tri-weekly train from Guayaquil had arrived. We met, too, an American “drummer,” more noted for his ability as a “mixer” than for his knowledge of geography, who had arrived with a carefully chosen wardrobe of white linen suits—and proved a godsend to the local tailors. Incidentally, he had come down to introduce American plumbing in Ecuador; but that is another and still sadder story. The truth is that moderate winter clothing is never out of place in the city of the equator. Even at noon, with one’s shadow a round disk under foot and the sun glaring to the eyes and burning the skin in this thin, upland air, a leisurely climb up one of the longest streets brought no memories of the tropics.

As in all high altitudes, there is a marked difference between sunshine and shade. The first greeting in a quiteño house is sure to be “Cúbrese usted” (“Put on your hat”), and however impolite it may seem to the newcomer, none but the unwise will disregard the suggestion. Only when one has become acclimated to the room may one uncover with impunity, for to catch cold in Quito is a serious matter, and the road from a cold to pneumonia is short and swift in this thin air. Thanks to the altitude, it is the common experience of newcomers to be either unduly exhilarated or sunk in the depths of despondency.

There is not a chimney in Quito, and no breath of smoke is ever known to smudge her transparent equatorial sky. Factories, in the modern sense, are unknown; cooking is the same simple operation as in the rural districts of the Andes. The quiteño knows artificial heat, if at all, only by hearsay. I chanced to be in the reception-room of the Minister of Foreign Affairs one afternoon when a newly appointed Argentine ambassador dropped in for his first informal call. In the course of the polished small-talk that ensued, the diplomat mentioned a new law in Buenos Aires requiring the heating of public buildings during certain months of the year. The Minister, an unusually well-educated man for Ecuador, stared a moment with a puzzled expression, then leaning forward with undiplomatic eagerness, replied:

“Why, I suppose you would have to have some kind of artificial heat in those cold countries!”

From the center of the city itself not one of the snow-clad volcanoes that encircle it like the tents of a besieging army are visible; but a climb to the rim of the basin in any direction leads to some point of vantage overlooking all Quito and its surroundings. Of a score of far-reaching views, that is perhaps most striking from the summit of the Panecillo. The “Little Loaf” that bottles up the town on the south is well-named; it resembles nothing so much as a fat biscuit, lush green in its covering of perpetual spring. Antiquarians have never agreed whether the Panecillo is a natural hill, or partly or wholly built by man. Geologically it is out of place, for all the rest of the region is rocky and broken, and nowhere else in the vicinity has nature constructed any symmetrical thing. Some have it that an already existing hill was rounded off before the Conquest, as a pedestal for the Temple of the Sun which tradition asserts adorned the summit long before the coming of the Incas. If it is entirely man-built, the construction of the pyramids was an afternoon sport in comparison. Somehow the imagination likes to picture thousands of Indians of both sexes and all ages jogging like lines of tropical ants up and down the sacred mound, with baskets of earth on their uncomplaining backs, as they still trot to-day through the streets of Quito under loads of every description.

A road runs round and round the Panecillo, making two full revolutions in so leisurely and dignified a manner that it would seem almost level did not the city below open out more and more with each step forward. At the summit, across which sweeps a never-failing wind from the south, is a view worth many times such a climb. All Quito lies huddled in its pocket below, like the body of a dull-red spider with its legs cut off at varying lengths. The city is clearly visible in its every detail, from the very roof-tiles of its houses to the gay-colored ponchos of the Indians, crawling like minute specks across its squares and along its ditch-like streets. Along the earth-wrinkle at the base of Pichincha’s long ridge are glimpses of small villages, and countless little green fields, standing edge-up on the flank of the range, seem so close at hand as to be almost within touch. Here the early riser may watch the birth of clouds. At sunrise the Andes stand out sharp and clear, as if the sky had been carefully swept during the night. Then a tiny patch of mist detaches itself here and there from the damp flanks of Pichincha, streaks of steel-gray clouds begin to rise under the warming sun, like a curtain drawn from the bottom; soon the entire ridge is steaming from end to end, and before one’s very eyes come into being and float away across the world those masses of clouds that greet the late riser full-grown.

In the transparent air of the highlands the eye embraces far more than the city. The surrounding world, being above the tree-line, is bare of any vegetation other than the brown bunch-grass; as would be the city and its environs, also, but for the thousands of eucalyptus trees imported in the days of García Moreno. Swinging round the circle, one catches sight of a dozen famous volcanoes, all more or less capped with snow. Almost due north rises the glacier-clad bulk of Cayambe, squatted squarely on the equator, perhaps forty miles away, yet seeming just over the ridge beyond the city. Near it, jagged Cotacache pierces the blue heavens. Further around comes Antisana, then Sincholagua, the giant that not many years ago blew its head off in a fit of rage. To the east stands Pasochoa, close followed by Rumiñaui, the “Stony-Eyed,” of the same name as the Inca-quiteño general who continued the war against the Spaniards after the capture of Atahuallpa. Over its shoulder peers the tip of Cotapaxi; little Corazon comes next, with Iliniza striving in vain to hide behind it, until finally the eye has swung back to the broad flanks of Pichincha, up which clamber Indian huts, like captive turtles striving to escape from their enclosing basin. Above them two ragged rock and lava peaks, often streaked with snow, the Rucu and Guagua (“Man” and “Baby”) Pichincha, invisible from the city itself, stand forth close at hand against the chill steel-blue of the upland sky. Pichincha is rated a dead volcano, having given no signs of life since 1660; but the early history of Quito is strewn with its ashes and destruction. Quiteños are much given to bewailing their “triste” landscape; yet few of her canvases has Nature painted with so masterly a hand.

Three weeks after our arrival Hays burst in upon me one morning with the information that the bundles we had mailed in Jirardot had come. Well on in the afternoon the post-office officials saw fit to lay them before us. A ragged boy cut the strings and spread out the contents for customs inspection. This over, we were preparing to carry them off, when we were halted by the grunt of an official deep in some long arithmetical process at a nearby desk. By and by he rose and pushed toward each of us a long list of figures:

Mercancías (Merchandise)—8500 grams. Derechos (Duty) thereon at $2 a kilogram $ 17.00 Más 100% (Plus 100%) 17.00 Defensa Nacional 1.70 Aforro 1.57 Muellaje (wharfage) 2.23 Bodega (storage). .93 Brokerage 2.30 Timbre (stamp) .15 ——— Total $ 42.88

“These are personal belongings, chiefly clothing, all more or less worn,” I began, scenting a long controversy.

“True, señor.”

“You surely do not ask us to pay duty on personal baggage? Travelers arrive at Guayaquil every week with several trunks, and pay no duty.”

“Only that is baggage which the traveler personally brings in with him. The charges are $42.88—for each, señores, since the parcels are of the same weight.”

“But you can see for yourself that they are marked ‘Value $7.’”

“The law goes by weight only, señor.”

“Why the 100% addition?”

“The new law requires all duties to be levied twice.”

“And this third item?”

“For the up-keep of the national army and navy.”

“Well, what is this aforro?”

“That is the freight from Panamá.”

“But the postage was prepaid from Jirardot to Quito—one dollar. Doesn’t Ecuador belong to the Postal Union?”

“Naturally, señor, but by a special treaty with the United States parcel-post packages pay freight across the Isthmus, and from Panamá to here.”

“And this muellaje—?”

“The landing charges in the port of Guayaquil. Bodega is for warehouse storage charges—”

“But the bundles came through in a mail-bag, without so much as entering a warehouse.”

“Those are fixed charges, irrespective of special conditions. The brokerage covers my fee here in the office, and the stamp is that which you see on the document here. The total charges are $42.88.”

“Keep ’em,” growled Hays, turning away. “Make a present of them to your president, or dress up one of your statues of Liberty.” Naturally, he spoke in English, for we still planned to live some time in Quito.

As we reached the door, a word from the official caused us to turn back. He was up to his ears in another set of figures.

“We can call it cotton instead of clothing,” he said, presenting a new list; “then the charges will be only $12.25.”

“Make it old clothing,” suggested Hays.

“The law mentions clothing, without qualifications,” replied the official, with that patient courtesy that is the chief virtue of his race.

“The bundles do not weigh that, anyway,” I persisted. “Most of it is in the wrappings.”

“The law specifies bulk, not net weight.”

“Keep them, with our compliments,” growled Hays, turning away.

“I’ll tell you what you can do, señores,” suggested the official; “Go buy a stamped sheet of government paper at thirty cents and write the Director of Posts—”

“Why can’t we write him on ordinary paper?”

“It would not be legal. Go buy a thirty-cent stamped paper and put a ten-cent stamp on it—”

“What’s that for?”

“For the up-keep of the national army. Write the Director of Posts reclaiming the duty you have paid—”

“After we have paid it?” cried Hays. “Hardly! I have had too much experience with Latin-American governments.”

In the end we bought the stamped paper and wrote the director, leaving the letter with the official, who promised to forward it to his chief—to-morrow. As the bundles contained some rather indispensable odds and ends, and because I wished to investigate Ecuadorian government processes to the bottom, I followed the matter up. Next day we called twice at the post-office and finally, late in the afternoon, signed a blank request to be given the packages duty free, without which, it appeared, the matter could not be officially considered. Two days later we were informed that a junta had been ordered to meet and pass on the case; there being no precedent for action. A week passed. The junta showed no ability to get together. I took up the quest again—and spent an afternoon in gaining admittance to the sanctum of the Director of Posts. He was courtesy itself, but the gist of his remarks was:

“That is not baggage which comes in by mail. It is only legally so when it crosses the frontier with its owner. However, if you wish, you might call on the Minister of Public Instruction—who happens to be also at the present time acting Minister of the Interior, to which department the matter refers—and ask to have the bundles passed as baggage.”

I spent the better part of two days in the anteroom of the Ministry, a sumptuous pink and blue adobe chamber with a score of bullet holes in the walls—mementoes of the latest request of the populace for the resignation of the president—only to learn:

“The law mentions no difference between old and new clothing; between fresh and soiled linen. All clothing entering Ecuador—except as baggage—pays the same duty; hence I see no way you can avoid it.”

I did not succeed in getting the matter before Congress—officially, at least—though I only missed taking it up with the president through an oversight of one of his aids. In the end I paid the $6.25 to which, by some strange manipulation, the post-office official had reduced the charges, and carried the object of controversy home to the calle Flores.

These small countries of tropical America remind one less of nations than of groups of polite bandits who have taken possession of a few mountains and valleys that they may levy tribute on whoever falls into their hands. All of them have imitated larger powers by enacting a “protective tariff,” without even the scant excuse that has been bloated into a reason for it in other lands; for here there is no industry to “protect.” Here it is not the lobbies of large financial interests that are back of the movement, but the politicians who constitute the “government”; the tariffs are “for revenue only”—largely for the pockets of the politicians themselves. We of more powerful nations hardly realize what it means to live in so small a country as Ecuador, until it is brought home by some such incident as hearing the entire Congress debating several hours on the question of whether two new electric-light bulbs shall or shall not be placed in front of the government “palace.”

Religiously, Quito is still in the Middle Ages. Looked down upon from any point of vantage, it has the aspect of an ecclesiastical capital. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that half the city is taken up by the Church. Besides its many bulking “temples” and innumerable chapels, enormous sections of the town are swallowed up within the confines of convents and monasteries. The largest is San Francisco, reputed the most extensive in America. The Franciscans got in on the ground floor in Quito. The ink with which the city was founded was barely dry when three monks of that order arrived afoot and breathless from Guayaquil; to be given an immense grant of land running far up the flanks of Pichincha. The great stone cloisters were a century in building; a veritable Chinese Wall of brick, backed by clustered hovels of the poor, encloses what would have been six city blocks, and the holdings of the order in haciendas and other rich properties spread far and wide over Ecuador. During the irruption of Pichincha in 1575, the Franciscans won the perennial worship of the masses by the simple method of raising aloft the Hostia and commanding the flow of lava to cease—and continuing to hold it aloft until the command was obeyed. To-day they still loll under such withered laurels.

Two youths of Quito’s “best families” accompanied me to San Francisco. A monk in brown greeted my companions as befitted their high rank and potential power of beneficence; yet with an undercurrent of insincerity and of dislike for these sons of “Liberals,” which he was unable wholly to conceal. We passed through several flowery patios musical with fountains and surrounded by pillared arcades, off which opened large, vaulted chambers, to an Elysian orchard under the trees of which a score of well-fed, well-slept monks strolled in pastoral contentment far from the hubbub and cares of the modern world. Cigarette butts littered the floor of a kiosk in the center; scarcely a face was to be seen in which the signs of frequent debauch could not plainly be read. The walls and ceiling of the adjoining church were so covered with gold that the imagination harked back to the ransom of Atahuallpa. My companions whispered that an American had recently offered $15,000 for the privilege of removing what remained of the genuine metal, promising to regild the church so expertly that the transaction would never be detected. The offer had been considered, but declined when some suspicion of the deal reached the public ear. The monks were still open to similar propositions, however. Over a door of the monastery hung an old painting of “María Dolorosa” by a famous Spanish artist. One of my companions, himself a painter of some ability, offered a tempting sum for permission to replace the “dusty old thing” with a brand new copy; and the impression left by a deal of murmuring and pantomime was that the offer would eventually be accepted.

When we asked permission to climb to the tower for a view of the town, however, the monk gave us a quick, sidelong glance and regretted that the Father Superior no longer permitted it. My companions exchanged winks, but found no opportunity to enlighten me until we had taken our ceremonious leave. Once outside I learned—to my astonishment—that not merely foreigners resent having each night’s sleep broken up into a series of detached naps by the unearthly din of Quito’s church-bells. A few months before, several young men of the well-to-do class had formed a conspiracy to taste the unknown luxury of one night of unbroken slumber. Gaining admission on various pretexts to all the church-towers of the city, the conspirators had stolen the badajos—clappers, I believe we call them in English—and got rid of them so effectually that few were ever discovered. The priests were distracted—until their faithful henchmen of the masses had replaced the pilfered property with pieces of railroad iron. Since then the church-towers had been closed to the educated youth of the city.

Not far from San Francisco rises the florid façade of “La Compañía.” The Jesuits reached the present capital of Ecuador a bit later than many of their competitors, but they quickly overcame the handicap. They established the first boticas, or drug-stores, and brooked no competition. Besides enormous tracts of the most fertile land in the colony, they were granted a monopoly of cattle-breeding and, being free from taxes and the necessity of paying the King’s share, and holding the Indians in virtual slavery at less than a nominal wage, most of which returned to their coffers in the form of church tithes and levies, they easily choked private competition and soon outdistanced in wealth even the Franciscans. Their expulsion from Spanish soil greatly reduced their power and holdings. To-day, what was once a part of their monastery is occupied by the University and the National Library, but they are still scarcely cramped for space. An Alsatian Jesuit, of an esthetical cast of countenance in striking contrast to his Ecuadorian brothers, led me fearlessly even into the belfry. He was a plainspoken man, for all his astuteness—or perhaps by reason of it—and openly bewailed the immorality of the native friars and what he called the “silly superstitions” of the people. The dormitories of the boarding-school within the monastery were divided into small cells by low wooden partitions covered with chicken-wire, like the ten-cent lodging-houses of Chicago. Before I had time to put a question, the Alsatian explained:

“In these countries we must keep the boys locked in their own rooms at night, for morality’s sake.”

It is more than unusual in Latin-America, but at least one enterprising pupil found it possible to “work his way” through the colegio of the Jesuit Fathers of Quito. His fame was still green among the gilded youths of the city. By the rules of the institution each student is required to go to confession once a week. The enterprising lad long relieved his comrades of the unpleasant formality by impersonating each in turn before the perforated disk—at the equivalent of fifty cents a head.

Merced, Corazon, Buen Pastor, San Augustín, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Carmen Antigua, Carmen Moderno, San Juan ... to name all the orders that occupy huge spaces within the city of Quito would be like writing an ecclesiastical directory. Down at the end of the calle Flores the Dominicans dwell in a monastery little less extensive than that of the Franciscans. Their wealth may be surmised from the fact that in colonial days they held the monopoly of supplying all liquor used in “divine worship” throughout the colony. In the center of the Plaza Santo Domingo is a statue of Sucre, companion of Bolívar in the wars of Spanish-American independence,—a splendid bronze of an imaginary Hercules that should be set up in some gymnasium as a model—concerning which there runs a tale suggestive of local conditions. Soon after its erection an Indian living far up the mountainside above the suburb of Guarico lost his pig. He tried every known means of recovering the animal,—prayed to every available saint with any reputation for miracles, squandered his meager substance in burning candles before every shrine in Quito, and purchased many a priestly prayer. All in vain; the pig was not to be found. At length a quiteño—whether a wag or a sincere believer is not reported—whispered to the distracted Indian that the most powerful saint of all was the new one in the Plaza Santo Domingo. The credulous fellow lost no time on his way to the square, where he knelt with a lighted candle on either side of him before the pedestal of the Hero of Ayacucho. When he looked up from his first invocation he noted that the statue was pointing to the battlefield on which its original defeated the Spaniards, far up the slope of Pichincha, which chanced also to be the location of the Indian’s hut. He hurried homeward and, sure enough, found the pig in a hollow not far from his dwelling. Since then “Saint Sucre” has had a great vogue with the Indian populace of Quito.

It would be out of place to enumerate the many proofs, from personal experiences to matters of common knowledge, from national literature to frequent notorious scandals, of the moral laxity of the quiteño priesthood. Whatever they may be elsewhere, celibacy and the confessional are undeniably ill-chosen institutions for a race of Ecuadorian caliber. The non-Catholic would not dream of berating the churchmen in any such terms as those which frequently fall from the lips of educated men of Quito. More than once I have heard a devout quiteña mother bewail the fact that she dare not send her daughter to confession, though convinced that the ceremony was requisite to the saving of her soul. One looks in vain for any connection whatever between religion and morality in this typical Andean capital. The sanctimonious old beatas, wrapped in their black mantos, who haunt the churches and accompany every religious procession with tears of hysterical ecstasy coursing down their cheeks are not infrequently procurers and go-betweens of the human vultures that dwell in, as well as out of, the monasteries. The street-walkers of Quito are almost all fervent mass-goers. Scores of the same faces that peer invitingly out upon the passerby at night may be seen next morning kneeling on the pavement of the cathedral or walking on their knees around the entire circle of plaster saints, reciting a prayer formula before each. Nor is this hypocrisy. These victims see no incongruity between the evening’s doings and the morning’s occupation. To the masses, religion is a mixture of idol worship and the performance of fixed ceremonies, wholly divorced from their personal actions. The sins of daily life are wiped out by a quarter-hour in the confessional; absolution is granted for the payment of a fee and the performance of a set devotion. The brain cells where real morality might find a foothold are packed with absurd catechisms that leave no room for it; and of religion there remains nothing but unthinking costumbre and unreasoning fanaticism.

Quito has been called the most fanatical town of South America. Among a score like it, the present archbishop tells the following story in his “History of Ecuador.” About two hundred years ago some one broke into one of the churches and stole the sacred wafers, together with the gold ciborium in which they were kept. A few days later the stolen property was found lying in the refuse of a ditch. Amid great weeping, a procession of the entire population bore the sacred emblem back to its church. For weeks the whole town dressed in deepest mourning; the audiencia gave all its attention and the police force all its efforts to running down those “vile traitors, bestial swine, and venial sinners,” as the gentle archbishop calls them, leaving little misdemeanors like robbery and murder to look after themselves. Not a clue was uncovered. At length a famous Jesuit of the time preached a sermon that lashed the populace into such fervor that the congregation poured forth into the streets beating themselves with chains and scourges, most of them, men and women, naked to the waist—I am quoting the archbishop—in a procession and religious fury that lasted from eight at night until two in the morning. A scapegoat was imperative. The officers of the audiencia, in peril of being themselves forced to assume that rôle, redoubled their efforts, and at length found, some distance south of the city, three Indians and a half-caste who were reputed to have confessed to the nefarious crime. The four miscreants were brought back to the city, kicked about the streets by the populace, trussed up in chains in the church while the priest preached a four-hour sermon on “the most atrocious crime in the history of Quito,” and were finally hanged, drawn, and quartered, and hung up, still dripping with blood, in sixteen parts of the town. The priests and their followers dug up a potful of earth where the holy wafers had been found, and deposited it in a heavy vase of solid gold that is still one of the precious relics of the cathedral. Then they caused to be erected over the spot the chapel of Jerusalem, where it stands to this day. “And,” adds the archbishop, “no fiel [faithful one] will deny that they met their just fate for so vile and unprecedented a sacrilege.”

Ah, but that was two centuries ago. True, but permit me to bring the fanaticism of Quito up to date. Less than a year before our arrival the perennial struggle between the Liberals and the Conservatives, the latter the church party, had broken out again in revolution. A queer-looking little man, with a white goatee sprouting from a mild-tempered chin, and wearing habitually a hat that would have been the envy of a slap-stick comedian, had for years been president of Ecuador. He had stolen unusually little for a Latin-American president, and had not allowed his friends to steal more than the average. Moreover, he had done the country much service, among other things having induced an American to complete the railroad from the coast to Quito. Also he had curtailed some of the unbridled graft of the church; and strangely enough the church had resented that species of reform and turned the power of the Conservatives against him. To be sure, the queer little man had objected to surrendering his office to a newly elected incumbent; but that is a common South American peccadillo. When the populace rose and drove him out, he went down to the coast and gathered an army of his fellow-costeños. But luck had deserted him. After a few battles he was captured, together with several sons, nephews, and henchmen. The Conservatives were triumphant. The Government ordered the captives to be sent up to Quito. The general in command at Guayaquil protested that such action was unsafe until the fury of the populace evaporated. The Government assured him the danger was visionary, and repeated the order. A special train was made up, and set out on the long climb to the plateau. That was on a Saturday. Next morning a priest, noted for his virulent eloquence, preached a sermon that lashed the church-going masses into fury. At noon word came that the train had arrived, and the prisoners hurried by automobile to the Panóptico, the wheel-shaped penitentiary up on the lower flanks of Pichincha. The populace quickly gathered. The bullet-holes through the false stone walls of the dismal little mud cells, in the narrow corners of which the prisoners crouched, were still fresh when we wandered through the place, months later. Among the most fanatical of the mob were the police and those whose duty it was to guard the prison. In the excitement some twoscore prisoners escaped, and joined the rioters. The little ex-president and his companions, dead or dying, were stripped naked, ropes were tied to their ankles, and they were dragged for hours through the cobbled streets of Quito, the frenzied populace raising the echoes of the surrounding ranges with shouts of, “Long Live the Church!” “Viva la Virgen María!”

I have two photographs taken by Don Jesús, nephew of my host, from the window of what was later my own room, as the bodies of the former president and his eldest son were passing. They show a throng made up exclusively of cholos, those of mixed blood, who constitute the bulk of Quito’s population. Not a white collar of the gente decente or the broad felt hat of an Indian is to be seen. On through the entire length of the city the barbaric procession continued. Near the Plaza San Blas a swarm of the lowest women in town descended with knives from their hovels and carried off gruesome mementoes of the orgy. At length the mob reached the Ejido, the broad, green playground of Quito, where they hacked in pieces the bodies of the victims with machetes and whatever implement came to hand. Some carried to their huts as souvenirs the heads of the ex-president and his sons, from which they were recovered with difficulty only after the frenzy had died down and been slept off. The rest was piled in heaps and burned. Such were los arrastres (“the draggings”), to which the educated quiteño refers, if at all, in shamed undertones.

Quito is not so light of complexion as Bogotá. Not merely is her percentage of Indian blood higher, but even those of unmixed European ancestry have a sallow or olive tint, and little of the color in their cheeks frequent in the more rigorous capital of Colombia. Negroes are unknown as residents. There is a careful gradation in caste, yet chiefly a void in place of what, in other lands, would be a middle class. The population is divided rather sharply between those brutalized from carrying ox-loads on their backs, and those who remain soft and effeminate from careful avoidance of any muscular exertion. For even the cholo is economically either Indian or white, depending on his wealth or occupation. To carry even a small package through the streets is to jeopardize one’s standing as a member of the upper class. “Don’t hurry,” a frock-tailed quiteño told me in all seriousness one day. “People will think you are ocupado,” busy, that is, with vulgar work. It is customary to raise one’s hat to every male acquaintance “of your own class or above,” to pause and shake hands with every one considered your equal, to ask him how he has amanecido (“dawned”), to inquire after his family individually, and to shake hands again before parting; and that as often as you meet him, though it be every half-hour during the day. Americans who have lived long in South America have the hand-shaking habit chronically. The greeting, or more exactly the acknowledgment of the greeting, of one’s inferior varies from a patronizing heartiness to the corner tailor to a half-audible grunt to an Indian. The latter is always addressed in the “tu” form, “because,” as one of my Beau Brummel acquaintances put it, “there is no reason whatever to show any respect to the Indian.” During several months’ acquaintance I found no great reason to show any to the speaker; but that, perhaps, is beside the point.

How wholly lacking the place is in genuine democracy is frequently illustrated. I was strolling in the plaza mayor one day, for instance, with the grandson of the “Washington of Ecuador,” a youth of American school training and of unusually high standards, when he stepped on the flagging surrounding the central monument. The cholo policeman on guard hesitated, but finally screwed up unusual courage and informed the youth in a courteous, not to say humble, manner that he had been ordered not to let any one walk on the flagging. The descendant of Ecuador’s founder turned a brilliant red, as if his noble house had been vilely insulted, then so white that his blond hair seemed to become dark brown. He strode across to the officer, who was considerably larger than he, caught him by the coat, and all but jerked him off his feet. The policeman abjectly apologized. The “best people” of Quito do not realize that it is not the individual policeman, their “inferior,” giving them orders, but lawful and orderly society speaking through him.

As in the days of Stevenson’s travels, a century ago, “the principal occupation of persons of rank is visiting their estates, particularly at harvest-time.” By far the greater portion of the year they spend in town, however, leaving their haciendas in charge of mayordomos little acquainted with modern agricultural methods. The city has so few recreative attractions that it is hard for a man of education to avoid a more or less studious life, be it only as a pastime. Yet Quito does not even aspire to rival Bogotá as the “Athens of South America.” Ecuador is not without her literature, but it has come from other towns more frequently than from the capital. The game of politics, not without its perils, engrosses the attention of many. Then, as in most Latin-American countries, not a few dissipate their energies in the “pursuit of pleasure” of a rather specific kind. So assiduously does the average quiteño devote himself to this from early youth that it is not strange that an old man of the decente class is rarely seen. There is a considerable provincialism, even among the best educated classes. I heard often such questions as “What is a sleigh?” “When is summer?” The story is well vouched for that a congressman asked a colleague just back from abroad, “Can a man get to Europe in three weeks on a good mule?”

The women of the well-dressed class in Quito are less given to the display of mustaches than those of Bogotá. Not a few are distinctly attractive, particularly in early youth. In later life too many suggest in their features some years of a rather harrowing existence. Outspoken quiteños lay this condition at the door of the priests and friars, but mere economic pressure probably plays at least as considerable a part. The up-keep of so many enormous ecclesiastical institutions cannot but drain the resources of so stagnant a city. Wealth does not abound, and feminine opportunity to earn a livelihood is narrowly restricted. It is not strange, then, if more than one family still rated in the gentle decente class remains with no other barrier against starvation than the youthful freshness of its daughters. In most parts of the world a glance suffices to distinguish a woman of public life from her respected sisters. In Quito it is not so easy. Indeed, there seems to be no hard and fast line between the two classes. Certain undercurrents suggest a tacit admission that some families have only one means of tiding over their existence until a lucky turn of politics, or of the lottery wheel, sets them on their feet again. Then, if the girl’s career has not been too public, she may be bestowed on a husband of a somewhat lower social level.

Let me not leave the impression of a general laxity among the women of Quito. The sheltered daughters of the most responsible classes are models of modesty and domesticity. But he who dwells any length of time in the city would be blind to overlook certain facts, be they the result of an impoverished society or more directly fostered by those ecclesiastical elements to whom the embittered men of higher rank charge them.

Thus far I have said little of the, if not most numerous, at least most conspicuous class in Quito,—the Indians. Ignoring the very considerable number in whose veins runs a greater or less percentage of aboriginal blood, those in whom it is still without admixture make up perhaps forty per cent. of the population, and give the city most of its color. There is not a house in town, from the bright-yellow, three-story adobe dwelling of the president down, without its Indians,—family servants and burden-bearers huddled in the mud cells about the cobbled patio of the lower story, or homeless wretches who lie by night in any unoccupied corner and pick up a precarious existence by day in competition with donkeys and pack-animals. Their earth-floored kennels form the tassel-ends of almost every street; they scatter out along all the highways, and dot the flanks of every range and mountain spur in the vicinity.

If they have changed since the Conquest, it is for the worse. In habits and condition they vary scarcely at all from those of the dreary Andean villages through which we had passed. Theirs is a purely animal existence. They have not the faintest notion of any line between filth and cleanliness, avoiding only that which is obviously poison, by an instinct common to the lower animals. I have seen them drink water I am sure a thirsty horse would not touch, and that despite the fact that fresh water was to be had a few yards away. They literally never wash so much as a finger, except on some such occasion as a church fiesta, when they may pause at a pool or mud-hole on the edge of town to scrub their feet with a stone. They speak a debauched dialect of Quichua, the tongue of the Incas, mixed with some words of the conquered Caras, though all understand Spanish, or at least the Indian-Spanish spoken in Quito.

Many consider the Andean Indian a debased Mongolian type, a theory not without its basis in his features. In a curious old book of the National Library of Ecuador—the “History of the Kingdom of Quito,” written in 1789, the Jesuit Padre Velasco takes up the question of the origin of the Indian and settles it—at least to his own satisfaction. To begin with, the Church has declared the inhabitants of the New World “rational,” that is, descended from Adam and Eve. That point being disposed of, it follows that “the men and animals who were found in America must be descendants of those who emerged from Noah’s ark; for does not the Bible say that all the world was covered with water? Even granted, for the sake of argument,” continues the razor-minded padre, “that the mountains of South America protruded a bit above the surface of those waters, is it conceivable that man could live for months on the highest peaks, eating snow, drinking snow, and sleeping in snow? Could he even have stood up for nearly a year on those pyramids of snow and ice?” I give it up. Ask some polar explorer. What then remains of the argument of those who still cling to the authoctonomous heresy? Obviously there is no other recourse then to admit that the ancestors of the race found their way to America by the Behring Strait, or across the Pacific from the shores of Asia.

Whatever his origin, the Indian of the Andes is a distinct reality, distinct, indeed, to all the five senses, and he varies little throughout the length of the continent. In build he is stocky and short, very muscular, with the strength of a mule for carrying loads on his back, indefatigable on foot, but weak for other labor. His color is between a tarnished copper and a more or less intense bronze. His head is large; his neck thick and long, his eyes small, black, and penetrating, yet at times strangely suggesting those of a dead fish; his nose is bulky, and somewhat flattened and spread; his teeth are white, even, and always in splendid condition; his long hair, worn sometimes flying loose, sometimes in a single braid wound with red tape, is jet-black, without luster, abundant, perfectly straight, strong and coarse as that of a horse’s mane, without even a tendency to baldness. His lips are thick and heavy, the lower one somewhat hanging, giving him a suggestion of sulkiness. His forehead is low, his mouth large, and his prominent cheek-bones and large ears give his face an appearance of great width. He is broad-shouldered, with a chest like a barrel, but slender of leg and small of foot. He grows no beard, and has almost no hair on the body.

Men and women alike, except a rare male with a sole of home-tanned leather secured by thongs, are bare-legged at least halfway to the knees, their feet, like calloused hoofs, marked by stony trails and years of barnyard wallowing. The male wears a broad, round, light-gray hat of thick felt, a kind of pajama shirt or blouse of fancily colored calico, or lienzo, a very roomy pair of “panties” of thinnest white cotton that reach anywhere from his knees to halfway to his undomesticated feet. Besides these garments, he is never seen without his ruana, or poncho, which serves him as a cloak and carry-all by day, and as a bed and covering by night. This is always of some startling, crude color, deep red predominating, with such screaming combinations as magenta and purple, carmine and yellow, though when sufficiently soiled and sun-bleached, the old rose and velvety brown, the brick red or turquoise blue, take on all the soft richness of Oriental rugs. It is this commonly homespun garment, and the corresponding one of the women, that make Quito such a color-splashed city.

The woman, too, copies the dress of her ancestors to remote generations. She wears the same hat as the male—hat-pins are unknown to her, all down the Andes—a beltless waist of coarse cloth, either open, or thin and ragged; several strips of colored bayeta (a woolish shoddy) wrapped tightly around her draft-horse hips from waist to calves in guise of skirt, always slit open on one side, showing an inner petticoat—once white—though sometimes in striking solid colors, in marked contrast to the outer skirt; and a blanket, smaller, but as audible in hue as the poncho of the male, thrown round her shoulders like a shawl. She is fond of gaudy earrings of colored glass or similar rubbish, ranging in size from large to colossal; from one to a dozen strings of cheap red beads, often the bean of a wild plant indigenous to the region, hang around her neck; generally brass rings adorn every finger; and often many beads are wound round and round her bare arms. She is completely devoid of feminine charm. She needs none, for she is amply worth her keep as a beast of burden.

As far as I know, there is no law in Quito requiring an Indian woman not to be seen without a babe in arms, or, rather, in shawl; but if one exists, it is seldom violated. In an hour I have seen, by actual count, more than three hundred female aborigines pass my window in the calle Flores, and not a score of them but bore on her back a child of from two weeks to two years of age, to say nothing of several other bundles and her whirling spindle. When the infant is tiny, it is carried lengthwise at the bottom of the blanket-shawl knotted across the mother’s chest. When it is older, it is tossed or climbs astride her broad back, lying face down, with legs spread, while she throws her outer garment about it, ties the knot on her chest—or on her forehead if the child is heavy—and trots along at her work the day through, without the least apparent notice of the offspring. The babe falls asleep, or gazes with curious, yet rather dull, eyes at the world as it speeds by, peering over the mother’s shoulder like an engineer from his cab, eats such food or refuse as falls into its hands, or plays with the mother’s tape-wound braid. The Indian woman never carries her offspring in any other manner unless, in her rôle as a common carrier, she picks up a load too bulky or heavy to place the infant atop, such as a bedstead, a bureau, or two full-sized sacks of wheat—these are not exaggerations, but frequent cargoes—when she hangs the child in front, in the concave of her figure, like a baby kangaroo in the maternal pouch, knotting the supporting garment across her shoulders.

The youngest baby is already inconceivably dirty, yet almost always robustly healthy in appearance, though the infant mortality of the class is appalling. It is an unusual experience to hear an Indian baby cry. From its earliest years it seems to adopt that uncomplaining attitude toward life that is so marked a characteristic of the adults. Though she treats her offspring with no active unkindness—in all the years I spent in South America I have never seen an Indian mother strike a child—the aboriginal woman seems to endure it passively, like any other burden thrust upon her from which there is no escape, carrying it where it will be least troublesome, and never, at least openly, showing any caressing fondness for it. The child old enough to toddle about the streets often remains on the mother’s back, as if to hold the place for the next comer. It is a common experience to hear an Indian child ask in a perfectly fluent tongue for a serving at the maternal source of supply.

There is scant difference in appearance between the two sexes, and none whatever in their labor, except that, if there is only one load, the woman carries it, and the baby in addition. In both the half-breed and Indian classes the women are more uncleanly than the men. Like the latter, they work at all the coarser unskilled tasks, shoveling earth, mixing and carrying mortar, cobbling streets; while in the matters of loads there is nothing under two hundred pounds in weight which, once on their backs, they cannot jog along under at a kind of limping gait that seems tireless. Almost any day the furniture and entire possessions of some moving household is displayed to public gaze as it jogs through town on the backs of an Indian family. The chief water-supply of Quito is a constant string of Indians from the fountain opposite the government palace, with huge, red earthen jars sitting on their hips and supported by a thong across the forehead. It is a commonplace to meet an Indian carrying the gaudy image of some saint larger than himself. Cheap coffins of half-rotten boards, painted sky-blue or pink and decorated with strips of gilded paper, frequently mince past, secured by the brilliant poncho of the carrier, knotted across his chest. I had occasion one day to transport a typewriter a few blocks. The Indian prepared to sling it on his back with a rope. When I objected to this method, I found that the fellow not only could not carry it in his hands, but that he could not lift it to his head. When I placed it there, however, he ambled away as if he had nothing on his mind but his hat.

Frequently an entire family takes a large job, such as carrying a building from one end of town to another, adobe brick by brick. Such a one passed my window for weeks. All day long they dog-trotted back and forth in single file along the line of smooth-worn flagstones in the middle of the street, their bare feet making absolutely no sound, never a word or a sign of complaint finding outward expression. The man and woman each bore the same number of mud bricks piled on their backs, and the latter always carried the baby in her pouch, though they made a hundred trips a day. Why the infant could not have been left at one end or the other of the journey it was hard to guess. Two children, one a little fellow of five with one brick on his back, his brother of seven or eight with two, toiled all day long between father and mother, as if they were being systematically trained for the only life before them.

The Andean Indian is even less like the tall and haughty redskin of our country in manner than in appearance. Compared with him, the Mexican Indian is self-assertive, bold, and ferocious. Silent and abstracted, he takes no apparent heed of what goes on about him. Of phlegmatic temperament, a truly wooden equanimity of temper, melancholy, taciturn, and reserved, he is noted above all for a distrust that is perhaps natural, but is more likely the result of centuries of privations since the coming of the Spaniards. He has a blind submission to authority, great attachment to the house in which he lives, and is so cowardly that he lets himself be dominated by the most despicable members of other races. A complete outsider in government and public affairs, he is treated by the rest of the population like a domestic animal. The merchant of Quito who requires a carrier to deliver some bundle does not wait for one to offer himself. He steps into the street and snatches the first Indian who passes, though he be on his way to a dying parent, or preparing his child’s funeral; and the Indian performs the task as uncomplainingly as some mechanical device, and returns to wait perhaps an hour or two for the few cents the merchant chooses to give him. Only when he is drunk does the aboriginal’s manner change. Then he is garrulous and mildly disorderly. But even on a Saturday afternoon, when the highways are lined with Indians of both sexes reeling homeward, the gringo passes unnoticed, in marked contrast with the gantlet of insolence, if not, indeed, of actual danger, which he must run under like circumstances in the highlands of Mexico.

The newcomer’s sympathy for the Indian of Quito gradually evaporates with the discovery that he is utterly devoid of ambition, as completely indifferent to his own betterment as any four-footed animal. Pad out this fact with all its details and ramifications, discarding entirely the American’s ingrown tendency to imbue every human being with a striving character, and the hopelessness of the Indian’s condition will be more clearly realized. The Government of Ecuador gives scant attention to the education of the aboriginals; even if it provided schools and forced attendance, there would still remain the problem of arousing in these people any interest in, or effort for, self-improvement.

A simple episode will go far toward visualizing the temperament of the Indian of Quito, and perhaps make a bit clearer the ease with which Pizarro and his handful of tramps overthrew the Empire of the Incas. I had gone out for a stroll one afternoon along the road to Guallabamba. Some three miles from town a light rain turned me back. There were no houses near, but numbers of Indians were going and coming. A short distance ahead was a group engaged in noisy contention. Suddenly a handsome, muscular young Indian broke away and ran toward me, his long, black hair streaming out behind him. At his heels, cursing, came three cholos, in the dark hats, more sober blankets and trousers of their caste, with shorn hair and straggling suggestions of mustaches. I was not armed—one does not trouble to carry weapons about Quito—and in my bespattered road garb I had certainly no appearance of protective authority. When he reached me, however, the frightened Indian, instead of running on, turned as sharply as about a corner, and pattered along close at my heels, breathing quickly. I continued my stroll, while the drunken half-breeds, far more muscular than I, hovered about ten steps in the rear, crying:

“Ah, coward! You run to the señor for protection!”

Yet not a step nearer did they approach during the furlong or more that the procession lasted. Then, as we passed the entrance to an hacienda, the Indian suddenly sprinted away up its avenue of eucalyptus-trees faster than the cholos could follow. When they overtook me again, one protested in plaintive tones:

“Ah, señor, ese sinvergüenza de Indio did not deserve your protection.”

Then they fell behind, while I, who had been an entirely passive actor in all the scene, strolled on into the city. It would be hard to imagine a similar incident in Mexico.

This Indian’s older daughter knocked at my door one day to say that, as it was “Don Panchito’s” birthday, the celebration in the sala next my own room would probably keep me awake all night anyway, and had I not better join the party. By eight the beating of the piano had begun. When I appeared, “Don Panchito” took me on a tour of the guests, seated in solemn quadrangle around the four walls of the room, the sexes segregated. The South American has a custom which might well be imported into our own land, to the relief of frequent embarrassment. As he was introduced, each man rose, bowed profoundly, and announced his own name in clear-cut tones,—“Enrique Burgos de Perez y Silva, servidor de usted.” The women remained seated, but made their names similarly known. A professional pianist, a patched, dishevelled, and hungry-looking young man of some Indian blood, had already begun a very nearly continuous performance at fast time, with barely two-minute intervals between the half-hour dances. In a corner sat motionless all the evening two professional chaperons—for “Don Panchito” was a widow—sour-faced, sleepy-looking old women of none too immaculate habits, wrapped in black mantos from which only nose and eyes protruded.

There were no dance cards. Each pair started in or stopped when they saw fit, quite irrespective of the others. A man stepped across the room, held out his gloved right hand to a girl, without a word, and she rose to accept an invitation that apparently could not be refused—at least, not one failed to accept it, though some of the more attractive were led out upon the floor at least fifty times in the course of the evening. Evidently it was “bad form” to carry on a conversation out of hearing of the chaperon. Neither dancer visibly spoke a word until the girl wished to stop, when she murmured “gracias” and was at once returned in silence to her seat. As the evening wore on, several young fops dropped in, alleging conflicting engagements as an excuse for their tardiness, and joined the celebration without removing their lavender gloves, which, indeed, the chilliness of the room pardoned. One of the newcomers, in particular, stirred up the ladies to almost human expressions of interest. He was son of the Minister of the Interior, just back from Paris, and lost no opportunity to display the wisdom he had gleaned in the “Capital of the World,”—a rather sharp-cornered French and an authoritative knowledge of new and more complicated manners of hopping about the floor to music. At frequent intervals our eight-year-old Indian slavey, Mercedes, familiarly known as “Meech,” arrived with fiery drinks in which we toasted “Don Panchito,” even the young girls tossing it off without a tear. At midnight the festival raged at its height. At one o’clock we sat down to dinner in a temperature far from agreeable to those of us who did not dance. Then the celebration broke out anew, though the chaperons and pianist, and even “Don Panchito,” had disappeared. The young fops removed their gloves and took turns on the stool. The clock was striking four when I retired, and little “Meech” was still serving liquid gladness as uncomplainingly and expressionlessly as ever. When I awoke at eight, she had just finished tidying up the sala, and was beginning her regular daily labors.

Gradually we made the acquaintance of various celebrities. There was “Chispa,” for instance, the little Spanish bull-fighter who gave a benefit and “last final performance” in the plaza de toros each Sunday. The royal sport of Spain is, at best, a gloomy pastime in Spanish-America. Even when skilled toreadors from across the Atlantic are to be had, the bulls raised in the Andean highlands are so manso that the game degenerates into little more than public butchery. The killing of horses is forbidden in the bull-ring of Quito, both by law and because of the high price of those rare animals, and the toreador is not permitted to stir up a sluggish bull by exploding banderillos de fuego on his flanks. “Chispa,” however, who was just such a “spark” as his apodo suggested, would have enlivened the most dreary entertainment, though his companions were local amateurs, so clumsy that he was called upon to save the life of each a dozen times during each corrida. Each succeeding “despedida” had some new feature to draw recreation-hungry Quito within the circular mud walls. One Sunday the program announced the engagement of “Hombres de Yerba” and “Hombres Gordos” (“Men of Hay” and “Fat Men”), and the inventive Spaniard was all but forced to lock the gates against the tailend of the throng. One of his amateurs was bound round and round with green alfalfa and set in the center of the ring. The bull, however, either was not hungry or in no mood for jests, and tossed the helpless fellow scornfully from his path. The “Hombres Gordos” were made up with clown faces topped by silk hats, their bodies padded to enormous size with excelsior. Still the protection was not sufficient. One was thrown so savagely that the audience agreed he had been killed—until the evening paper announced he had merely broken a leg and several ribs. The fat man is no more beloved in Quito than elsewhere, and the merriment went on unabated. It is quiteño custom for the matador to brindar (dedicate the death of each bull) to some celebrity or person of means in the audience, tossing the favored one his cap to hold during the killing, and expecting it to be thrown back with a roll of bills in proportion to the skill of the coup de grace. Toward the end of the “last final performances” the supply of local “personages” grew so low that the eye of “Chispa,” roving around the circle, fell upon Hays; but even as he opened his mouth for the speech of dedication, the ex-corporal faded from public view.

Then there was Umberto Peyrounel, our first really and truly, flesh and blood “andarín.” Derived from the Spanish word andar (to walk), the term is used in the Andes to designate a foreigner who travels on foot, without any particular excuse for traveling at all; a peculiarly Latin type of tramp, loving to attract attention and making his living by so doing. We ourselves had often been styled “andarines” on the journey from Bogotá, though this genuine article scornfully rated us “excursionistas.” The distinction seems to be, not whether a man “andars” on foot, but whether he makes his way without using his own money, if such he possesses.

We saw Umberto first at a Sunday night concert, where he was inconspicuously amusing himself by running races with several hundred newsboys and bootblacks around the plaza mayor. A stocky fellow, tall as Hays, of middle age, he was modestly dressed in a suit of sky-blue corduroy, leather leggings, and a velvet cap of the Dutch fisherman or Quartier Latin style. Across his chest hung a row of large medals; a flaring, wax-ended mustache all but touched his ears, and his luxurious black hair hung loose almost to his waist. When he called on us next morning his coiffure was done up in a simple maidenly knot at the back of his head. On closer examination the gleaming brass medals seemed to be glorified tobacco tags. He announced himself the son of Italian parents, born in the Argentine, of a sect corresponding to the Huguenots of France, known as the “martyrs of Piedmont.” Leaving home three years before, he had walked across his native land to Chile, thence to Quito, where he was preparing to push on to Bogotá. To the people along the way—and even to us, until he caught the gleam in our eyes—he announced that two great dailies of Buenos Aires and New York had offered him a prize of $100,000 to make the journey on foot from the door of one to that of the other. On the road he was accompanied by a dog, wore silver-plated spurs as a sign of his rank as a caballero, and carried, in addition to a revolver and rifle, some forty pounds of baggage, most of which consisted of bulky ledgers filled with hand-written statements of his arrival and departure on foot, signed by every corregidor, alcalde, or native official of whatever species, by merchants, lawyers, and editors of every place, large or small, he had visited, each adorned with its official seal. This collecting of signatures was no mere whim; it was the customary excuse of his fellows for surreptitiously appealing to charity. At every hamlet he opened the ledgers—ostensibly to give the residents the pleasure of adding their names to the roll of honor—and at the psychological moment slipped into their hands a printed card bearing a subtle plea for assistance in winning his great “prize.” All genuine “andarines,” Umberto assured us, did the same, and he berated us soundly for not having adopted the custom.

“How can you prove to the public that you have made the journey on foot, if you do not have the testimonials of distinguished persons along the way?” he cried, scornfully.

“The public has its choice of believing it or jumping off the end of the dock,” Hays answered for both of us.

In plain English, Peyrounel was a beggar, though he would have been shocked beyond words to hear us say so. He called himself a “Champion of God,” a bitter enemy of the priesthood, and in each town of importance gave a lecture on his journey and, later on, “if the population showed enough intelligence,” a sermon. The religious fanatic so often proves, sooner or later, to be in a sexually neurotic state that we were not surprised when, several days later, Peyrounel burst out, apropos of nothing:

“Why do girls always become enamored of strange travelers? No sooner do I enter a town than several maidens fall desperately in love with me. I can’t be expected to satisfy them all, can I? One has one’s work to do.”

“Wooden-headed ass that I am!” growled Hays. “If I’d only thought to grow curls!”

“Between you and me, as men of the same profession,” went on the collector of signatures, “I don’t mind telling you that I ride now and then by train through a bad piece of country. What’s the use of walking hundreds of hot desert miles, when the people will never know the difference? For instance; here, under the seal of ——, it says that I walked all the four hundred miles from ——. Well, I did—on a steamer most of the way.”

In short the argentino’s mental equipment was somewhat out of repair. One could not exactly put one’s finger on the loose screw, but it could frequently be heard rattling. The following Sunday we attended his first “lecture.” On the dismal daytime stage of Quito’s hitherto lifeless Teatro Sucre sat Peyrounel, utterly alone but for the faithful dog at his feet, thrown into silhouette by an uncurtained window at the back, his sky-blue uniform looking more absurd than ever, his hair hanging in long, wet, careful curls about his broad shoulders. Quito has so few entertainments that it will endure almost anything particularly if no admission is charged; and some three hundred men were scattered about in the painfully upright seats, when the “andarín” rose. He read first some incomprehensible rodomontade on the power of the will, then drew forth a manuscript purporting to give an account of his journey, in reality strictly confined to a list of the towns he had visited, with the height of each above sea-level. The “lecture” was doubly unsuccessful, for when the speaker ended with an appeal for funds to continue his statistical journey, the gathering stampeded so effectively that all but a few had escaped when he reached the door, and the reward of his labors was a bare six dollars.

“Next Sunday,” he announced, when we met him in the plaza that evening, “I am going to give the public of Quito the benefit of my conclusions on suicide. Suicide, I shall prove, is always a prompting of the devil. Therefore it cannot be the prompting of God. Ergo, a man should not commit suicide, because he should never yield to the promptings of the devil.”

Truly a Solomon of pure reason had come to Quito. Yet somehow the authorities, always backward in such matters, failed to take advantage of this splendid opportunity to give the Teatro Sucre another free airing.

Never since those days in Quito have I heard the oft-repeated word “andarín,” than the picture of Peyrounel and his curls has not come to mind. However, he had undoubtedly covered long distances on foot, and we exchanged many a practical hint of roadway information. He planned to visit all the important cities of the United States, and to reach New York within three years. His letters of introduction already included many to American officials; he carried, for instance, one to the mayor of Seattle. Being an experienced traveler, all may have gone well with him south of the Rio Grande. But beyond it lay dangers he did not suspect; for some unromantic justice of the peace, unable to distinguish between an “andarín” and a common “vag,” between the honorable profession of gathering seals and signatures, and mere begging, may have the cruelty to reward him with the notorious “year and a day.”

On October tenth there was an eclipse of the sun, total at the Ecuador-Colombia boundary, and visible in all the southern hemisphere. In the days of the Scyri and Incas such a phenomenon was taken as a threat that the end of the world was at hand; a sign that an angry god was abandoning his erring people. On this occasion many of the less-educated classes remained in the streets all night, for an earthquake had been prophesied. The local observatory had assigned a scientist to “note the peculiar actions of the populace and the lower animals during the eclipse.” It came toward seven in the morning. Gradually the brilliant sun disappeared, until only the slightest thread, of crescent shape, remained visible; the world grew dark as at early dusk on a heavily clouded evening, then slowly lighted up again in all its equatorial magnificence. Observers reported that a few fowls returned to roost; the curs slinking about the plaza seemed for a time undecided whether to seek their nightly lairs. But the actions of the populace were confined to the incessant smoking of cigarettes and to making the most of an excuse to put off their day’s task as long as possible—neither of which was unusual enough to be worthy of note. The majority, unsupplied with smoked glasses, found this no handicap, for the reflected eclipse in the plaza pool served the same purpose. World scientists had been sent to many of the larger South American cities with elaborate photographic equipment, only to find their long journeys wasted because of clouds. They would have done better to have come to Quito, where two unscientific vagabonds caught excellent pictures of the phenomenon in mere kodak snapshots.

It was on the morning of November eighteenth, five months from the day we had sailed together from the Canal Zone, that Hays and I set out along the muddy, cobbled highway to the railway station, carrying in turn a bundle of the size of a suitcase. By 7:30 the former corporal of police had taken his wooden seat in the dingy little second-class car, and had stowed his belongings under it well out of sight of the collector; for extravagant as are its fares, the Guayaquil-Quito Railway allows a second-class passenger only fifteen pounds of baggage. At eight the tri-weekly train let pass unnoticed its scheduled hour of departure. Several stocky Americans of the type easily recognized as “railroad men,” and as many English-speaking negroes could be seen shouldering their way in and out of the motley throng. The engineers were leathery-skinned Americans; the conductors fat, burly Americans; the collectors gaunt, stringy, dense-looking young Englishmen, and the brakemen West Indian negroes who spoke a more fluent Spanish that their superiors, and were better “mixers” among the native passengers. After a time they decided to repair the last coach, and lay for some time under it, tinkering at a brake-shoe. Rumor had it that this was only a ruse; that the engineer assigned to the run had been arrested the evening before, and that the train could not leave until his trial was over.

Whatever the cause for delay, it ended at last, and with a great snorting and straining and blowing of steam the little old “Baldwin” began to drag its four wagones out of the station compound. First came a box-car, crowded inside and on top with gente del pueblo; then, behind the baggage and mail car, the densely-packed second-class; and finally the coach-de-luxe with a dozen passengers, most of whom would hasten to take their lawful place in the car ahead as soon as they could escape the eyes of their fellow-townsmen thronging the station platform. The Indian of Ecuador still commonly walks, a fact easily explained by a glance at the exorbitant rate-sheet. It was only by dint of much struggle that the railroad, reaching Quito four years before, had finally settled the point that even “prominent persons” shall pay fare; now it has taken the offensive, and collects cartage even on the bundles and fruit the passengers are accustomed to stack in the car about them. The engine panted asthmatically to surmount a two-foot rise, scores of Indians and cholos running alongside, screaming farewells to their outward-bound friends, some visibly weeping for the quiteño of the masses considers death itself little less dreadful than departure. Then at length the train swung round the sandbank cutting and, catching a down-grade, was off in earnest, and reluctantly I saw “Señor Lay-O-Ice” disappear from my South American adventures.

The attack of roaditis had seized him the day before. With no task to hold him in Quito, he had been for a time content to spend his days at his favorite occupation of sitting on a plaza bench. He had even paid his rent well in advance, that he might have an anchor to windward. But it had proved a rope of sand when the road lure came upon him, and he had feverishly tossed together his indispensable junk and turned his face toward other climes. From Guayaquil, “unless Yellow Jack or Bubonic beat him to it,” he planned to push on to Cajamarca and Lima, chiefly by sea, then to strike overland to Cuzco. Beyond South America lay various nebulous projects,—a year around the Mediterranean, a journey through Spain, or perhaps a return to the Zone to earn another “stake” with which to journey to the Far East, there to adopt the yellow robe and settle down to the tranquil life of studious inactivity he loved so well.

Thus life moved on, even in Quito. “Chispa” of the bullring had taken the same train, feigning a first-class wealth until out of sight of his quiteño admirers. Peyrounel, the “andarín,” too, was gone, dog, gun, hair, medals, spurs and ledgers, to carry back to Bogotá the map that had piloted us southward. Only one lone gringo descended to the city in the folds of Pichincha, to renew the task that still forbade him to listen to the siren that beckoned him on over the encircling horizon.

To pass over in silence its uncleanliness would be to give a false picture of Quito. Only its altitude saves the city from sudden death. Its personal habits are indescribable; I do not use the adjective to avoid the labor of finding one less trite, but because no other could be more exact. If I described in detail one fourth its daily insults to the senses, no reputable publisher would print, and no self-respecting reader would read it. The city is surrounded by an iron ring of smells which the susceptible stranger, accustomed to the moderate decencies of life, can pass only in haste and trepidation. The condition of the best kitchen in Quito would arouse a vigorous protest from an American “hobo.” However foppish a quiteño family may be outwardly, anybody is considered fitted to the task of washing its dishes or waiting on its tables. Among all the tramps of the United States I have never seen one so filthy as the human creatures that hang around hotel dining-rooms, or, in the one or two higher-priced establishments, are at least to be found just behind the scenes, kicking about the earth floor the rolls which the waiter a moment later religiously lays before the guest with silver-plated pincers. Yet clients in frock-coats and outwardly immaculate garb are never known to raise a voice in protest. There is exactly one way to escape these conditions in Ecuador, and that is to keep out of the country. A modern Crœsus would be forced to endure the same, for though he brought his own servants and even his food-supplies with him, the Ecuadorian would find some means of reducing him to an equality of condition, if only by opening the supplies in customs and running his unwashed hands through them.

Among our table companions were lawyers, university professors, newspaper editors, commonly with several rings on their fingers; yet rare was the man whose finger-nails were not in deepest mourning, or whose manners were not befitting a trough. On the street the passing of the women was usually marked by an all but overwhelming scent of the cheap and pungent perfumes to which all the “decente” class, male or female, is addicted, and though their faces were daubed a rosy alabaster, it was rare to see one with clean hands, or without a distinct dead-line showing at the neck. The city is gashed by several deep gullies with trickling streams at their bottoms, which serve as general dumping-grounds. Not even the carrion-crow mounts to these heights, and the city is denied the doubtful services of this tropical scavenger. Though the world hears little of it, the death-rate from typhoid alone in the capital rivals that of “Yellow Jacket” in Guayaquil; and no precautions whatever are taken against it. When he has noted these customs and worse, the visitor will be startled into shrieks of sardonic laughter when he runs across a large two-story building bearing an elaborately painted shield announcing it the “Oficina de Sanidad.”

Yet the quiteño is extremely jealous of any offer of other races to do for him that which he gives no evidence of being able to do for himself. Once out of Colombia, we had hoped for relief from the perpetual growling at Americans, chiefly in fiery and ill-reasoned newspaper editorials. Barely had we crossed the frontier, however, than we found Ecuador raging with a new grievance. The Government had recently invited the doctor in charge of the sanitation of Panama to inspect Guayaquil and bring his recommendations to the capital. A strict censorship on cable messages keeps the outside world largely in ignorance of the real conditions in the “Pearl of the Pacific.” Inside the country, however, the real state of affairs is more nearly common knowledge. One could pick almost at random from the local newspapers such items as:

Guayaquil, 22d. Yesterday forty cases of bubonic plague broke out in Public School No. 5. There are seven survivors.

The resident, too, soon learns the real motives that hamper the sanitation of that pest-hole. Once it is “cleaned up,” argue its short-sighted merchants, foreign competitors will flock in upon them. As to themselves, they are, with rare exceptions, immune to the two plagues for which the port is famous, having recovered from them at some earlier period of life. Those who have not recovered have no voice in the matter. There are even foreign residents who bend their energies to upholding this barrier to competition.

These interests now, abetted by unseen European elements fostering the discontent, and the eagerness of the opposing party to make political capital out of any cloth, whole or otherwise, had stirred the noisy little native papers into a furor, genuine or financed, against the Government. The people, in their turn, had worked themselves into the conviction that the invitation was only an opening wedge of the “Colossus of the North” to gain a hand in the rule of the country, which it is always the part of the opposition papers to paint as imminent. We had not been long in Quito when the attitude of the populace grew so serious that a joint meeting of both houses of congress was called to explain the government view of the transaction. The diplomatic corps was present in force, and as much of the public as could find standing-room after the two houses had been seated in the largest chamber available in the government palace. The diminutive old Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had lived abroad long enough to acquire a point of view, explained the exact truth of the situation as clearly as a disinterested foreigner might have done. But neither congress nor the populace would hear his reasoning. The latter hooted him vociferously, calling him “Yanqui!” and accusing him of being in the pay of the United States. The congressmen rose one after another to charge him with fostering a conspiracy to surrender Ecuador to the Yankees, with many references to the “beegee steekee,” and the meeting ended with the roar of a bull-necked senator:

“Undoubtedly, Señor, we want Guayaquil sanitated; but we want it sanitated by Latin Americans.”

The pesuña and other evidences of sanitary notions of the crowd that hemmed us in gave the speech a ludicrousness that none but an enraged partizan could have missed. But that night the little Minister of Foreign Affairs resigned, and when morning broke he had disappeared.

For all the handicap of the complete absence of factories and street-cars, Quito might easily lay claim to the world’s championship in noise. The din from its church-towers alone would bring it one of the first prizes. It is pleasant to sit out on a sunny hillside listening to the music of ringing church-bells as it is borne by on the Sunday morning breeze; but in Quito they are neither bells nor are they rung. In tone they suggest suspended masses of scrap-iron, and there is not a bell-rope, as we understand the word, in the length and breadth of the Andes. Barely has midnight passed, when Indians, hired for the nefarious purpose, and mobs of street urchins eager for the opportunity, climb into the church-towers and, catching the enormous clappers by a rope-end, beat and pound as if each was vying with the others in an attempt to reproduce the primeval chaos of sound, ceasing only when they drop from exhaustion. No corner of the city is free from the metallic uproar. Santa Catalina tower was a bare hundred yards above my pillow, and I know scarcely a block of the town over which does not rise at least one such source of torture, hung with at least half a dozen bells—to use the word loosely—of varying sizes and degrees of discordance. Once awakened, the city is never permitted to fall asleep again. By the time it has begun to doze off once more, the ringers have recovered, and, taking up their joyful task with renewed vigor, repeat the performance at five-minute intervals until sunrise, and often far into the day.

This has disturbances of its own. The game-cocks, which no self-respecting cholo would be without, challenge one another shrilly from their respective patios; that moment is rare when a child is not squalling at the top of its voice, the mother, after the passive way of quiteños, making no effort to silence it; cholos whistle all day long at their labors or pastimes; men and boys habitually call one another by ear-splitting finger-whistles; ox-carts, mule-trains, or laden donkeys refuse to move unless several arrieros trot behind them incessantly screaming and whistling; droves of cattle are led through the streets by an Indian blowing a bocina, a horn-like, six-foot length of bamboo; unoccupied youths like nothing better than to kick an empty tin can up or down the cobbled street; every school-boy on his way home or to school twice a day takes a big copper coin, or in lieu thereof an iron washer, and throws it at every cobblestone of his route in a local game of “hit it”; the barking of dogs never ends; every Indian who loses a distant relative, or who can concoct some other fancied cause for grief, sits on the sidewalk just out of reach of the contents of one’s slop-bucket, rocking back and forth, and burdening the air with a mournful wail that rises and falls in cadenced volume; for unbroken hours iron-tired coaches clatter over the uneven cobbles; every native on horseback must show off to his admiring friends and the fair sex in general by forcing his animal to canter and capriole up and down the line of flagstones in the middle of the narrow street; three blind newsboys, brothers indistinguishable one from another, appear in succession, pausing every few yards to bellow in deepest bass a complete summary of the day’s news, as if they were reading all the headlines of the papers they carry for sale; and to it all the church-bells add their never broken clanging. Apparently there is no law against disturbing the peace; without the power to silence the church-towers it would be useless, at best.

In those rare moments around midnight when the city threatens to fall silent, it is the police themselves that tide it over. An officer’s whistle screeches at a corner, to be answered down block after block, until it all but dies out in the distance; then back it comes, and continues unbrokenly until the church-bells drown it out. Not only that, but he is a rare policeman who does not while away the night and keep up his courage by playing discordant tunes on his whistle whenever it is not in official use.

To add to its discordance, Quito’s voices, due perhaps to some climatic condition, are often distressing, particularly the shrill, raspy ones of the women of the masses, who have somewhere picked up the habit of shrieking whenever they have anything to say—which is often. Unlike Bogotá, Quito has a very faulty pronunciation. The sound “sh,” for instance, is frequent in the Quichua dialect of the region, and though not all quiteños speak the aboriginal tongue, the sound has crept into their Spanish, and they tack it on at every opportunity—“A ver-sh, Nicanor-sh.” “Le voy á llamar-sh.” As in all South America, the town has the unpleasant habit of hissing at any one whose attention is desired, and the word “pues” has been cut down to a mere “pss” to be hooked on whenever possible:—“Si, pss! Va venir-sh mañana, pss.” The “ll” has become a French “j,” as in Central America and Panama, so that a street is not a calle but a “caje,” a key is a “jave,” and the newcomer will have difficulty in recognizing the place mentioned as “Beja-Coja,” however familiar he may be with the Bella Colla. Many localisms and Quichua words have found place in the general speech. A baby is always a “guagua” (wawa), frequently corrupted with a Spanish diminutive to “guaguita”; a boy is more often a “huambra” than a muchacho; and the traveler who does not know the aboriginal term “huasi-cama” would have difficulty in referring to the Indian house-guard and general servant of the lower patio.

But when its noise grows overwhelming and its picturesqueness pales to mere uncleanliness, the stout-legged visitor has only to climb over the outer crust of Quito in almost any direction to revel in the stillness and feast his eyes on vistas of rolling valleys and mountains, fresh spring-green to the very snow-line. A path, for instance, zigzags up the falda of Pichincha, steeper than any Gothic roof, through the scattering of red-tiled Indian huts called Guarico, and climbs until all Quito in its Andean pocket sinks to a toy city far beneath. Another road mounts doggedly round and round mountain-spurs and headlands until it is lost in clouds, and only the immediate world underfoot remains visible. The air grows almost wintry; oxen and Indian women, and now and then a man of the same downcast race, come hobbling down out of the mist above, with bundles of cut brush on their backs. Far up, the road swings around on the brink of things, pauses a moment as if to gather courage, then pitches headlong down out of sight into a light-gray void, as through a curtain shutting off the “Oriente,” the hot lands and unbroken forests of eastern Ecuador, a totally different world, where the Amazon begins to weave its network, and “wild” Indians roam untrammeled.

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VII. DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE

On the morning of February eighth, “Meech” called me at five. I had already been some time awake, such was the excitement of so unusual an event as going on a journey. The morning mists had only begun to clothe the flanks of Pichincha when I broke the clinch of “Don Panchito’s” last abrazo and creaked away down the cobbles of Calle Flores and across the Plaza Santo Domingo in the hob-nailed mining-boots suited to the long, stony trail and the rainy season ahead. The remnant of my letter of credit I had turned into gold sovereigns and sewed them in the band of my trousers; on my back were my worldly—or at least my South American—possessions, including the awkward bulk of the developing-tank packed with films and chemicals. That day had passed when I dreamed of driving an Indian carrier before me, and experience had taught me not to risk the assistance of the mails. Thus the world roamer must leave behind in turn each dwelling-place, after growing somewhat attached to it, for all its faults, to go its way alone again as in the past, glad—or merely sorry—when once in a while the cable brings him a whisper of it, as from some former half-forgotten existence.

It was a familiar route for the first few miles. Now and again I overtook Indians carrying enormous loads of tinajas, dull-red earthen jars and pots of all sizes enclosed in a kind of fish-net, often topped by a great roll of esteras, mats made of lake-reeds which serve the carriers as beds. Men and women alike raised their hats to me and mumbled some obsequious greeting. They were bound for Latacunga market, several days distant from their villages; yet even on so long a journey, rare was the woman from whose load did not peer the head of a baby. Lower down, inhabited haycocks and huts of swamp-grass centered in beautiful potato fields, red or purple with blossoms. A cherry-tree, here called by the Quichua term capulí, producing a fruit larger but not unlike our “choke-cherry,” alternated with what looked like the Canadian thistle.

Three hours later, near the eucalyptus grove of the Flores estate that marks Quito’s southern sky-line, I topped the ridge that marked my hitherto furthest south. The long pile of Pichincha, its three peaks now standing sharply forth, still lay close beside me, the rolling green lower ridges subsiding into the mountain lap where Quito, like a tiny ant’s city, still lay visible, the Panecillo that bulks so large from the central plaza sunk to an insignificant mole-hill. Beyond, far across it, hovered the hazy-blue ranges of the north; Cayambe resolutely astride the equator, pointed Cotacache, streaked near the top with new-fallen snow, piercing the transparent highland sky. For a long time thereafter, as often as I topped a land-billow, I kept getting little broken glimpses of the town from the ever-rising world, until at last, toward noon, as a mighty mountain wave tossed me high on its crest, the view of the city of the equator flashed forth a moment more; then Quito and all its surroundings sank away into the irretrievable past.

Before me lay a new world. With the leisurely dignity of its builder, García Moreno, the highway descended into a great distance-blue hoya, one of those saucer-shaped valleys that abound all down Ecuador’s avenue of volcanoes. Occasionally a horseman in shaggy goatskin trousers stared curiously at me; now and then there passed a file of donkeys under sheet-iron roofs,—a cargo of corrugated iron, the importer of which still prefers this primitive transportation to the more hasty railroad with its startling freight charges. Dandelions and white clover flecked the evergreen fields; frogs sang their bass chorus in many a brook and pántano. Here the way followed more or less the route of the great military highway of the Incas. There were two of these; one of the llanos, or lowlands of the coast, and this more famous one along the crest of the cordillera, built during several reigns and finished under Huayna Ccápac.

Near the village of Macachi, twenty-one miles from the capital, I turned aside to the hacienda of a quiteño acquaintance. He was a boy of eighteen, scion of one of the old “best families” of Ecuador, who have kept their Spanish blood free from mixture, to whom had recently fallen the ownership and management of an enormous tract of his little country. Educated in our own land, he spoke a slow, pedantic English. Among his equals, he was soft-spoken almost to the point of diffidence. But his voice was commanding enough when he gave orders to his mayordomo or escribante, or to any of the hundred Indians who lived clustered about the central hacienda house, all of whom addressed him as “Su Merced” (Your Grace) and kowtowed as often as he looked at them, as their ancestors might have done to the imperial Scyri. Before the sun set, we had time to ride across a part of the estate. It lay somewhat too high for wheat, distinctly so for corn. Except for the cattle that flecked the upland fields far and wide, the potato was most at home. Fourteen distinct varieties of this native tuber of the Andes, several of them unknown in the North, grew on the hacienda. In one field women were digging potatoes large as small muskmelons, though nearby were other patches still red or purple with blossoms.

The average wage of the Indian peons was five cents a day, with huasi-pongo,—space for their miserable chozas in which the only furniture consisted of a few odds and ends of home-made pottery and some sheepskins which, spread on the earth floor by night, served the family, its guinea-pigs and mangy curs, as bed. The women and children worked for nothing, wages being reckoned by family rather than individually, except that the women who milked the cows were each paid a dollar a month. In reality, the Indians were serfs of the estate. When first hired, they are enganchados, “hooked” by a labor agent, and having spent their “advance” in a prolonged chicha debauch, must often be arrested and forced to carry out their part of the contract, usually remaining for years, if not a lifetime, in debt to the hacendado. It would be an error, however, to look upon their condition from our northern point of view. Any custom taken out of its native environment has a far more serious aspect than the reality warrants. The Indian, trained during many generations of Inca rule to avoid all personal initiative or responsibility, accepts by choice this patriarchal arrangement. The majority had been attached to the hacienda since birth; giving the community the aspect of one immense family. Each household had its little plot of ground for its own garden, and the privilege of pasturing a small flock or herd. Yet the owners have the best of the bargain. Nearer the capital were estates where enganchados Indians made adobe bricks at ten cents a day, with huasi-pongo and food, making daily some three hundred each, which the owner sold at seventy-five cents a hundred.

The snow-peak of Sincholagua and the rugged, ice-capped ridge of Rumiñaui faced the hacienda. Though little higher, the place was infinitely colder than Quito in its mountain pocket, for here we caught the full sweep of the winds off the ice-fields. By dark, we were both huddled in the hacienda dining-room, bleak and comfortless in spite of its extravagant trinkets from the outer world. The peons, for all their awe of their youthful lord, could not deny themselves the pleasure of grouping noiselessly before the door as we ate, listening to the strange tongue—not Quichua, stranger still, not even Spanish—which their erudite master spoke with this traveler from unknown parts, who came on foot, carrying his own load, like any Indian. The crack of the door grew ever wider, the broad, expressionless faces ever more numerous, until a draft of the bitter mountain night air caused “His Grace” to glance up in annoyance. Both crack and faces disappeared silently and suddenly, but came again many times before we each crawled early under four heavy blankets.

Next morning the highway, no longer cobbled, but wide and smooth, without wheeled traffic, soon brought snow-clad Illinaza into full sight before me. So skillfully did it bear me upward that by noon I was crossing the great páramo of the Nudo de Tiopullo, without the consciousness of having climbed at all. The Andean páramo, for which we have no exact English word, is not the sharp mountain peak my imagination had pictured, but is used of any broad plain so lofty that not even the hardy Indian will live upon it, where quinua, most cold-blooded of domestic plants, refuses to grow, a drear treeless upland covered only with a tough brown bunch-grass that gives it somewhat the aspect of our virgin prairies. To a northerner in motion, it was not uncomfortable by sunshiny day, but no one passes these lofty plains at night by choice. Only a rare shepherd’s shelter of stones and ichu dots the cold-brown immensity. The shivering highway hurried due south across it, bringing to view another sea-blue hoyo and, barely pausing for a last glance back at the faint peak of Cotacache and the long bulk of Pichincha, grown mere parts of a broad, hazy, tilted horizon, raced downward into the softer valley.

Some seventy-five miles south of Quito begins a veritable desert. From a distance the ranges to right and left seem green, yet the ascending valley grows so dry and arid that even the scanty scrub trees die of thirst. At the top of a barren divide I met head-on, panting harder than I, and moving no faster, the little tri-weekly train from the coast, crowded with dust-laden, weary passengers. Almost sheer above me stood forth the beautiful cone of snow-clad Cotopaxi, equalled in symmetry on all the earth’s surface only by Fujiyama. To the left the hoary head of Tungaragua, far away in the blue haze of the hot, tropical Oriente it looks down upon, rose gradually higher into the sky. Then the highway descended and went ever more swiftly downward into a half-arid hole in the ground, and by three I was tramping the cobbled streets of Ambato, the “winter” resort of wealthy quiteños, a mere 8000 feet above sea-level. To one accustomed to loftier Quito, it had a tranquil, half-languid air; its people were more friendly, lacking that suggestion of belligerency common to quiteños. There was, indeed, something pleasing about it that I had never yet seen in Ecuador. It reminded one mildly of Egypt, in air and odor, and the dust sweeping across from the barren, arid hills that wall it in. The market of this town, hung midway between the tropics and the temperate zone, offers the fruits of both—aguacates and mangoes side by side with apples, pears, peaches, and cherries—the native capulí, at five cents a peck—beside raspberries and blackberries, and the perennial “fru-u-u-till-a-a-as!” (strawberries) that are singsong daily through the streets of Quito. It was from the market-place of Ambato that I caught my first glimpse of Chimborazo, the giant of the Andes, just the crown of its long, saw-like glacier ridge brilliant white against the steely highland sky, as it stood on tiptoe peering over the barren ridges of Carhuairazo.

Barely had I entered the hotel when its dishevelled boy-servants crowded around me to ask if I were an “andarín.” Peyrounel, it proved, had once favored the establishment with his distinguished, if financially disadvantageous, presence. I pleaded too colorless garments to merit the title. To these Andean village youths the arrival of so romantic a being was what that of the yearly circus is to our towns of the far interior. Yet when I offered any of them double his present wage to accompany me and carry a few pounds of my pack, they shook their heads and shrunk fearfully away.

It is not, as I gradually learned to my growing astonishment, merely because they know no better that the people of the Andes sleep on wooden beds. In Quito I had found many who refused to use the imported springs, and I know at least two doctors who prescribed wooden beds for kidney trouble. Here in Ambato a perfectly respectable spring-bed had been completely floored over, and the unsuspecting gringo, instead of landing on a soft and yielding mattress, found himself on such a couch as a thinly carpeted floor might be. Nor was this by any means the last bed out of which I pulled the lumber and spread the woven-reed estera above the barrel-hoop springs.

Ambato claims the title of “Athens of Ecuador”; and, indeed, four of the country’s principal writers lived and died here, which is more than can be said of the capital. The place of honor in the main plaza, gorgeous with geraniums of every shade of red, is occupied by the statue of Juan Montalvo, commonly rated the country’s chief literary light. In Ambato Juan León Mera wrote his “Cumandá,” the accepted classic among Ecuador’s novels; and one may still visit the family of Luis Martínez, whose “A la Costa” is worthy a place in South American literature, if only for its magnificent descriptions of tropical scenery.

I left Ambato on a morning so cold that gloves would have been welcome; one of those mornings, frequent in Ecuador, when the sun rises like a beauty of the harem pushing aside the soft, white curtains of her alcove, when the mountains, at the bases of which dense masses of clouds and mist have gathered, seem gigantic altars on pedestals of marble. Soon the sun grew ardent and imperious, capriciously burning away the mist-curtains of the night, blazing down unrestrained on the rolling plains of Huachi, so arid and monotonous. The road lay deep in sand across a half-desert, with no other adornment than the fences of cabuya, of the cactus family, that replace the dividing ditches or mud field-walls further north, to mark the limits of the poor heritages of the Indians. The chief industry here is the weaving of a coarse cloth from the fibers of the cabuya blanca. Here and there a capulí tree persisted, and impenetrable, bushy clumps of the thorny sigse bristled aggressively. The few planted fields were sparse and drear, though near the town, where the thirsty arenales had been transformed by irrigation into patches of green on which the desert-weary eyes rested gratefully, grew the strawberry, large and fragrant.

Higher and higher rose the world, though so imperceptibly that the ascent was noted only because the landscape opened out to ever greater vistas. It was a day of climax in volcanoes. Around the circle of the spreading horizon the white crests of no fewer than eight of the great vent-holes of the earth grew up about me, until I paused on a high ridge to study them. To the right, for a time looking like a single mass of rock and snow, stretched long, saw-toothed Carhuairazo, with Chimborazo rising behind it; then gradually the great, glacier-blue dome of this Everest of America detached itself and stood forth in all its immensity. Far behind, yet perfectly clear in spite of the blue haze of some forty miles distance, cone-shaped Cotapaxi, once so savage in its destruction, reared itself into the sky-line like an occidental twin sister of Fujiyama. To the left, in military precision, three snow-clads stood shoulder to shoulder—Sincholagua, Antisana, and one above which rose a column of smoke that marked it as Sangai, most active of the western world, but a few days before in destructive eruption. Then came the glacier-clad, rounded cone of Tungarahua, keeping its eternal watch over the tropical Oriente, and to the south, noblest of all, peering forth first in the early mists, and growing in grandeur all the morning, stood dreaded El Altar, its beauty now completely unveiled, a fantastic mass of peaks and pinnacles, like some phantom city of ice.

For hours the snow-peaked horizon continued. Across the sands of Huachi travelers had been few; toward noon they grew plentiful. Around every turn appeared Indians and their four-footed competitors, with such monotonous persistency that I needed a cudgel to drive out of my way the asses which, expressionless and impassive as their masters, were inclined to march serenely on, irrespective of human obstacles. The rare chagras, or tawny countrymen, who live in their chozas along the way, were interesting only as evidence of how clod-like man may become. At Mocha, where I halted in the early afternoon, the deep-blue ice-fields of Chimborazo lay piled into the sky overhead, a mountain still, though the town stands more than two miles above the sea. All the following morning its arctic dome towered close on my right as I plodded along its gentle slope not far below the snow line, often waist-deep in the ruts which generations of pack-animals and Indians had worn in the brown, uninhabited páramo, dreary with long, slightly rolling stretches of bunch-grass, across which I only now and then overtook a mule-train, the drivers wrapped to their ears in their heavy ponchos. Behind, across a hazy valley, now more than forty miles away, the symmetrical cone of Cotapaxi gleamed faintly forth in a new dress of snow that had fallen during the night. A cobbled highway ran along the bottom of a slight hollow some distance off, but travelers had scorned it so long in favor of the rutted páramo that grass was grown high between its cobbles; and at length, as if it resented the abandonment, it swung off in the direction of Cajabamba and was gone.

The dozen ruts across the páramo finally joined forces to form a kind of road that, turning its back on Chimborazo, around whose white head a storm was brewing, struck off toward a long, undulating, hazy valley backed by blue heaps of ranges. Gradually I descended to almost a desert again, by a road deep in sand, rising and falling over countless sand-knolls, the peaked, grass-covered huts of Indians tossed like abandoned old straw hats far up the flanks of the drear mountainsides on either hand. At one of these I found the first use for my new revolver. An enormous dog, plainly bent on destruction, bounded out upon me without a sound, halted abruptly with a faint yelp as I pressed the trigger, turned a complete somersault, and fell feet upward, like a captive turtle, not two yards from me.

Ordinarily there is little to be feared from the sneaking curs of all colors that swarm about every hut throughout the length of the Andes. Before the Conquest, tradition has it, the Indians had only the mute allcu, now exterminated—at least, it is certain that none of those that remain are mute. These degenerate descendants of the animals brought over by the Spaniards rival the original chaos of sound as they rush out in cowardly packs upon any stranger—especially a non-Indian, for as the white man’s dog abhors an Indian, so do these a white man—while their masters gaze stolidly on, without so much as attempting to call them off. The Indian of the Andes does not raise dogs; he has them merely because he is too passive to get rid of them. The curs are never treated as pets; the only caress they ever receive is a kick or a prod from which they retreat sluggishly with a cowardly yelp, even if the weapon misses its aim; they are never fed, but exist on such offal as the Indian himself disdains. A mountaineer to whom I put the question once briefly expressed the viewpoint of his race:

“How can we help having many dogs, patrón? They breed so often!”

From the village of San Andrés, picturesquely backed by the ice-palace of El Altar, architecturally as diffuse as the Castle of Schwerin, a spreading highway, bordered by endless cactus hedges, led toward a great sandy plain far ahead, a small forest of eucalypti that marked the site of Riobamba giving it center. Further on, for all the aridity, was plenty of half-grown corn, with numberless peaked, thatched huts peering above the vegetation on either hand. At the entrance to Riobamba I saw the first llamas of my South American journey. Once an Indian passed driving a llama and an ass hitched together; further on several of these absurd “Peruvian sheep,” pasturing beyond the cactus hedge, craned their long necks to gaze curiously after me. Times without number I had been assured that not only was the llama never a draft or a milch animal, but that it could never be ridden; that it would carry exactly a hundred pounds and would irrevocably lie down if another ounce were added, and that it could under no circumstances be urged beyond a slow, dignified walk. Imagine my surprise, then, when suddenly I beheld a llama bestridden by a full-grown Indian come down the road at a brisk trot, and watched them fade away in the eucalyptus-lined distance beyond. In the town beyond there was one llama for every two donkeys.

Riobamba, chief city between Quito and the coast, is commonly described as “lying at the foot of Chimborazo.” The description must not be taken too literally. I had imagined a cold, haughty little town snuggled together in a lap of the high Andes; but if Riobamba lies at the foot of Chimborazo, so, in only somewhat lesser degree, does Guayaquil. The traveler turns his back on the glacier-clad giant of the Andes and tramps a long half-day before he comes to what, in situation and general appearance, might be a town on the sandy prairies of western Nebraska. Its monotonously right-angled streets are unusually wide, painfully cobbled, and swirling with sand; its architecture is drearily like that of any other Andean city. It has been several times destroyed by earthquake; were it not, like Quito, more than two miles aloft, it would be even more often destroyed by its personal habits. At sunrise thrice a week most of the town turns out to watch the trains that have “overnighted” here leave for Quito and Guayaquil respectively; whence its suggestion of some frontier village of railroad hotels in our Western states. Unlike Quito, Riobamba has a street-car. It is a platform on wheels with a flat roof supported by gas-pipes, under which are some crosswise boards that are called seats with the same Latin-American tolerance with which a place to lie on the floor is called a bed, and a place the traveler may possibly be able to make his way through is called a road. Like some Andean newspapers, it appears “every now and then,” when a pair of blasé, world-weary mules drag it across town to the station and back, usually only on train days. Many ride, and the more poorly dressed seem to pay for the privilege; but the Indians take good care not to be caught on any such risky, new-fangled contraption.

There is commonly not a “sight” to be seen in Riobamba, unless it be the stern, white face of Chimborazo looking down upon the city from the middle distance to the north. The traveler who chances upon the town of a Saturday or Sunday, however, will find it a place of interest. Then the Indian population of a thickly inhabited region comes from thirty or more miles around to what is rated Ecuador’s greatest market. The sandy plaza, larger than an American city block, is so densely packed with stolid thick-set men and women in gray felt hats and crude-colored blankets that only by constant struggle can a purchaser thread his way across it. From my room on the corner above, not a foot of open ground was visible. The scene was like a swarming of myriad ants of many colors; like a great Oriental rug undulating in the sunshine. As one crowds along between the rows of hawkers, all the products of the region seem to pass in procession. Here were entire families who had jogged many miles to town under the produce of their chacras; there, a man with only a half-grown chicken or a gaunt pig for sale; beyond, a woman sat all day long selling bit by bit, at a net total of perhaps ten cents, the bushel of native cherries which, together with her babe, she has carried at least twenty miles. Here was a pile of ugly native shoes—of very limited demand—there, homespun blankets and ponchos in colors that scream audibly, before they mellowed by sun and rain and the habits of their wearers. Every domestic animal and fowl known to the Andes of to-day was displayed; cheap knives, tin spoons, trinkets from foreign lands, native plants and bulbs; herbs that still make up the aboriginal pharmacopœia, as in pre-Conquest days; tiny packages of dyestuffs that are doled out a penny-worth at a time; corn bread and barley bread, even a few soggy wheat biscuits—though the price of the latter is all but prohibitive—cherries, strawberries, oranges, aguacates, a hard native taffy known as alfeñique, pears, apricots, peaches, a hard little apple that never matures, pineapples, nearly all the grains and vegetables known in our own land, and even a greater variety of corn and potatoes; and a countless confusion of other products that sell for what would seem far less than the cost of bringing them to town. Beyond, was a tercena, an open-air butchershop, where Indian women hacked into bits the cows and sheep that had succumbed to amateur butchers, at the same time fighting off the fifteen dogs which, by actual count, prowled about the stand. In one corner scores of tawny, bare-legged Indians squatted beside heavy grass-wrapped loads of snowy ice, Riobamba’s only means of cooling her beverages. If one knew enough of the bastard Quichua of Ecuador to ask its origin, the stolid fellows threw an expressionless glance toward the icy dome of Chimborazo. About them hovered something akin to the glamour that surrounds the Arctic explorer. All day long was an endless motley going and coming through the adjacent streets and plazas, amid which the imagination could easily drop back four centuries and fancy what this Andean world may have been before the coming of the white man.

It was so brilliant a Sunday that Chimborazo seemed to hang almost sheer above the town, and the whole bulk of snow-clad Tungarahua loomed clearly forth from its tropical home, when I set out after midday for what I had been told was an easy half-day’s tramp. Within an hour—so sudden are the changes in weather zones here—an icy rain was pouring down upon my shoulders bowed with the weight of a hundred-pound pack. At last I sprawled to a summit with an all-embracing view of the entire district of Riobamba, the city itself a mere fleck far below in an opaque-blue landscape roofed by purple-black clouds through which the unseen sun cast a single faint shaft, as from a weak spotlight. The rain, which in Ecuador falls in zones sharply cut off one from another, ceased abruptly at the top of the barrier. Here were two roads from which to choose, and for hours thereafter I could not know whether the one that descended a sharp valley beside a tiny stream led anywhere near where I wished to go. Well down the bone-dry vale were scattered hamlets of grass and mud huts of a half-wild tribe of Indians, the men in white goatskin trousers that gave them the appearance of shaggy-legged Greek satyrs, the dwellings often hung far up the steep walls that enclosed the growing stream. Many of the inhabitants ran away at my approach; the rest stared at me from safe heights as I sped on down the valley. Ugly white curs abounded; in the scanty trees a bird sang now and then; but for the most part only the sound of the stream leaping from rock to rock broke the mountain-walled silence.

Cold darkness fell, and still the broken trail descended swiftly. At rare intervals a corner of the moon peered through the clouds. Then, in the blackest of nights, the road forked again, giving me another random choice. A wild, windy, uninhabited hour beyond, the path fell suddenly away under my feet and I found myself involved in a labyrinth of quebradas, holes and chasms large as two-story houses, as if the region had been wrecked by a long series of earthquakes. A score of times I climbed down hand over hand into immense ruts with walls high above my head, certain I had lost my way, yet with no other choice than to press on. Two hours, at least, this riot of the earth’s surface continued before there appeared suddenly the lights of a considerable town, dimly seen through the night across a wet, blurred valley backed by an all but invisible mountainside. A trail picked itself together again under my feet, pitched headlong down to a roaring little river straddled by an aged stone bridge, ghostly white in the pallid moonlight, and led me stumbling into the railroad village of Guamote, still booming with the tomtoms of the Sunday fiesta that had left its scattered débris of drunken Indians through all the length of the town.

From Guamote I followed the silent but well-kept Quito-Guayaquil Railway through a landscape like that of southern Texas, winding in and out between dreary hills peopled only by a rare weather-worn shepherd in goatskin trousers; then across broad stretches of sear-brown, slightly rolling desert scantily covered with bunch-grass, the sand sweeping over it in clouds. From Palmira,—two dismal little station buildings at some 11,000 feet elevation—the railroad drops steadily for all the more than a hundred miles to the coast. Some way down the descending valley, the land turned almost suddenly from dreary brown to the green of another rain-belt that gradually climbed the ever-higher mountain walls that shut me in. Beyond Alausí next morning I made a swift descent, even swifter by sliding down the face of the notorious “Devil’s Nose,” where the track mounts in three sections, one above the other, and reached the little town of Huigra in time for “breakfast.” Here, in a green valley between high hills falling abruptly into a prattling stream, are the main offices and hospitals of the railroad, and an American atmosphere, tempered with whiffs of England and Ecuador, to which the fever and bubonic of Guayaquil do not mount, nor the ills of Quito descend.

At Huigra my route was to turn southward over the enclosing mountain wall. But I had no objection to coasting down into the tropics on a side-trip to Guayaquil—except Guayaquil itself; and when the chief engineer promised a screened refuge from sun to sun, I accepted the invitation gladly. All that is necessary to travel from Huigra to sea-level is to get something on wheels of the right gage and “let her slide”—or rather, let her slide within very definite limits, lest one reach the bottom far sooner and in poorer condition than was planned. With a native employee behind, the two of us sat on the sheer front edge of the track automobile, the experienced hand of the chief on the brake, and roared in and out and ever down the mountain cañon, the towering walls on either side rising higher above us with every yard forward, a foaming river keeping us a not much slower company. Huigra is at kilometer 117. At 110 we suddenly reached the tree-line. Forests in striking contrast to the bare upland plateau of Ecuador grew up about us as if by magic. Foaming mountain brooks dashed down from either towering wall to join the river—and to save the company the expense of building water-tanks. Swiftly the trees changed in species,—from hardy highland shrubs to voluptuous tropical growths, till the airy bamboo, noblest of ferns, bowed to us in graceful dignity from the crowded forest as we screamed past.

Before noon we swung out of the gorge I had followed from Palmira, and halted at Bucay. It had been like dropping in two hours from May to a dense and heavy July, from a northern scene to one like that of Panama, with the same sticky atmosphere, negroes, and outdoor life. Here we took possession of the empty pay-car on the rear of the day’s passenger-train and sat with our feet on the back railing, watching the dead-flat tropical world run away and shrink up to nothingness behind us. The track lay straight as a cannon-ball’s course through the tunnel of forest and jungle. Indians and their gay garments had disappeared; here were only the colors of nature. Along the way, thatched houses of split bamboo slouched in languid attitudes, half-black and slightly dressed families peering from their sort of hole-in-the-wall verandas behind partly raised blinds hinged at the top. For all the lazy languor of the scene, jungle products succeeded each other swiftly. Cacao, then palm-trees gladdened the eyes; the air grew heavier; now and then a great field of sugar-cane broke briefly the endless tunnel of forest; beautiful bamboo groves alternated with immense tropical trees cutting into the sky-line.

The natives, afoot or ahorse, used the track as a trail, for all else was impenetrable wilderness. Here and there the jungle crowded so close that it side-swiped the car, though along the way were many section-gangs fighting it back with machetes, the favorite tool and weapon of the costeño, who saluted us—or, more exactly, my companion—as we sped past. Pineapple fields grew numerous; at stations the fruit lay in piles at the feet of indifferent chocolate-colored vendors. The brown castor-bean on its small green trees appeared; splendid cocoanut palms, heavy with nuts, heralded the sea; maidenly slender rubber-trees; broad fields of light-green rice, growing arm in arm with Indian corn; the plebeian bread-fruit tree, with its broad leaves fancily cut as with scissors in the hands of an inventive child; and always gigantic tropical trees cut fantastically into the sky-line of the light-gray day above. Behind, always, fixed as fate itself, the dim and clouded range of the Andes, a giant wall, blue and unbroken, shut off the world beyond. Here and there a hoary peak showed above the clouds, so high one could not believe it possible. Far off in the heavens like a great cloud, Chimborazo stood white and immovable. As in the forest one sees only trees, so only down here, looking at the chain as a whole, could one realize the loftiness of those realms where one had been living for months more than two miles above the sea.

Naked brown babies, huts on ever longer legs, hammocks, grew numerous, and languid loungers to fill them; here and there appeared a Chinaman; some large towns, bamboo-built and all on stilts, like a thin-shanked army; buzzards circling lazily overhead amid scents that whispered of plague and sudden death. Then on either hand began to appear the low, dense-wooded hills of Durán, more properly deep green islands in this flood-time. Fluffy white flowers in myriads smiled bravely above the black waters that would soon swallow them up. The vast mountain wall across the world behind had grown a shade bluer when we drew into Durán on the banks of the Guayas, and brushing both clear with housewifely care of any lurking mosquito, dodged through the double screen-doors into the railroad quarters. Here were shower-baths and phonographs, New York papers, a frequent nasal twang, and only outside and seeming far off as in some distant place, the scent of Ecuador.

Sudden death is reputed to fly chiefly by night along the Guayas. So only when the sun was high did we venture across to Ecuador’s metropolis and far-famed death-trap, Guayaquil. Outwardly, the low, heat-steaming city looked far cleaner than Quito. But here filth grants no immunity. During three hours we saw the black funeral street-car pass nine times—and by no means all the population can afford so splendid an exit from the world. Yet here were electric tramways for the first time since Bogotá, larger shops and more ambitious displays than in Quito, and signs of greater commercial activity. The houses were of wood or split bamboo, low and earthquake-fearing, all the windows with wooden blinds hinged at the top, from behind which peered half the female population, seldom seen on the streets. Compared to Quito, it was a town of no color at all. Among the foreign residents was a curious indifference to local dangers, always seeming greater at a distance than on the spot. Americans yawned at the mention of “Yellow Jack” and Bubonic and went about their business with as little apparent worry as a New Yorker of death by a street accident. Nothing in the attitude of the people suggested an unusually precarious hold on life—except that ever recurrent black funeral car, electrically operated, as if horses were not fast enough for its incessant labors. Long before the sun had lost its mastery of the situation, we had retreated again to Durán. The lone traveler in far-off lands runs many perils, but if I must succumb to one of them, let it be with a fighting chance, not this insidious, sneaking death that flies on all but invisible wings.

Next morning the passenger-train lifted us back to Huigra, where a new experience awaited me. That evening I sat writing in the railroad quarters. Two fellow-countrymen were parading the broad, second-story veranda of the light wooden building. The only other sound was the muffled chatter of the stream below. Suddenly the heavy table beneath my arm began to move as at some spiritualist séance, the windows took to rattling as if in some sudden terror to escape from their frames, the wall decorations swung back and forth like pendulums, and for what seemed a long minute the entire building shook as with a paludic fever. I opened my mouth to protest against what I took for a moment to be physical exuberance of the veranda paraders; but I closed it again as I realized that I had passed through my first earthquake, and had gone on writing for a line or more before I recognized the good fortune of being in a wooden house. Outside, the strollers had not even interrupted their chat, except to remark, “Pretty good one, eh?” and when the natives in the town below had left off shouting, evidently in an attempt to scare off the dreaded spirit within the bowels of the earth, life returned to its customary languor, the silence broken only by the stream still prattling on through the darkness. In the morning the telegraph wire brought word that the instruments of Durán had registered seven quakes, and that several houses and a church had fallen in the adobe interior.

On the morning of February 24th I crossed the little bridge over Huigra’s garrulous stream and, trailing away up the mountain wall that shuts off the railroad valley on the south, disappeared from the modern world. All but twenty pounds of my baggage I had turned over to a native fletero, proprietor of a mule-and-jackass express company that operated as far south as Cuenca. It was in the nature of things, however, that even under a light load I should pay for my descent to Huigra by much sweating toil, before raising again its paltry 4000 feet to the two miles or more of the Andean chain. In the valley a brilliant sun set me dripping; above was driving mist to chill me through if I dared to pause, and out of which now and then floated the gentle exhortations of unseen arrieros to their toiling animals:

“Anda, macho! Mula, caramba! Vaya, sinvergüenza!”

An experienced gringo had assured me I was approaching the most impassable region in Ecuador, a place where it rained steadily and heavily a hundred and four weeks a year, where my mules would sink to their ears in mud and be left to perish, where I myself would infallibly die of exposure if my caravan were overtaken by night out on the lofty páramo. I easily forestalled the peril to my mules, and the second I resolved to avoid by not letting night overtake me.

It was not, certainly, an ideal road. There were places where the writhing trail was for miles a series of earth ridges with deep ditches of mud and water between, like an endless corduroy road, and these made hard going indeed for laden animals. For as often as one of them set foot on one of these camelones, as they are called in the Andes, it slipped off into the muddy ditch between, as likely backward as forward, giving a very exaggerated imitation of the gait of a camel. In fact, it is this constant slipping and sliding of passing pack-trains that turns certain wet regions of the Andes into camelones. In places the mud-reeking slope climbed steep mountainsides through narrow trails worn twenty feet deep, down or up which horses or cargo mules stumbled and sprawled constantly, threatening to smash their packs against the side walls or underfoot.

But it was a route far worse for horsemen than for a man afoot. I stepped blithely from ridge to ridge, not only dry-shod but at my regular pace, easily leaving all four-footed competitors behind; and while there were germs of truth in the warning that a mule and his cargo, slipping and falling upon me in one of the gullies, might bring my journey to a halt, the very simple remedy for that possibility was not to be found loitering beneath an animal when he fell. Donkey carcasses and the rain-bleached skeletons of mules and horses were frequent along the way; and always, now broken, now for a time incessant, came out of the blind mist the raucous bawling of arrieros: “Anda, mula, caramba!”

The dense, heavy fog turned to pouring rain. Indeed there were evidences to verify the assertion that this was one of the zones of Ecuador where the rainy season reigns perennially. In mid-afternoon I passed a few Indian hovels. I had been warned to stop for the night in the last of these rare habitations, if I would not end my wayward career out on the arctic páramo of the Nudo de Azuay. But the stolid-featured native assured me there were others a half-league on, and I had climbed twice that distance across a dismal stretch of bunch-grass without a sign of life, except a scanty herd of wild, shaggy, rain-drenched cattle, before I realized that the Indian had told the old lie to be rid of an importunate guest. Within me there grew the conviction that, in spite of my best intentions, I should some day shoot a large, round, soft-nosed, 38-caliber hole through some Indian for sending me “further up” into the uninhabited night.

However, there I was, exactly where, of all places in Ecuador, I had so often been warned in several tongues not to let night overtake me. The gray walls about me dimmed like a lamp turned out. These páramo trails being, even by day, only a straggling of interwoven paths often effaced, it was not in the order of things that I should keep the route long in unmitigated night. For a time I stumbled along an irregular, rock-littered ground, full of leg-breaking holes, picking every step ahead with my stick, like a blind man, and even at that now and then sprawling on all fours. As to direction, I could only trust to luck. Then I felt water-soaked bunch-grass under foot, and all efforts to find the trail again were wasted. Vaguely I felt that I had come out on the nose of a mountain. Through the rain-drenched night there came faintly to my ears the sound of a waterfall, and from somewhere far off the dismal howling of a dog rode by on the raging wind. The ground under my feet took on the angle of a steep roof; it required stick, hands, and extreme vigilance to keep from pitching headlong down into the bottomless unknown. I felt my way inch by inch several hundred feet downward without finding a level space as large as my hand. In the end I could only sit down on my bundle in the mud, brace my feet against a tuft of bunch-grass and, piling my most perishable possessions in my lap, button my llama-hair poncho over my head, sup on a three-inch butt of bread, and settle down to keep my precarious seat until daylight.

He who fancies an Ecuadorian mountainside a pleasant night’s lodging-place, merely because it is near the equator, has still something of geography to learn. Strangely enough, it might have been worse. The poncho was almost impervious to cold, entirely so to rain. As the Scottish chieftain of earlier days soaked his tartan before lying down for a night in the highland heather, so the wetness of all about me seemed to add warmth. The rain redoubled, yet I should scarcely have known it but for its pelting above my head. I dozed now and then into a nap. After one of them I peered out into the wintry night, to find the mist alive with hardy fireflies so large that those which started up near me seemed to my dull fancy the lanterns of some prowling band. Twice some animal, perhaps a wild mountain-horse, romped by me. When I looked out again a bright moon was shining, yet I felt too comfortable as I was to take advantage of it to push on, and fell asleep again, not without a drowsy misgiving that some diligent hunter might try a shot at my huddled, shaggy form standing out in the moonlight against the swift mountainside; until I remembered that no native ever ventures out upon an Andean páramo except in the full light of day.

Dawn showed the lost trail zigzagging in three branches down the face of the mountain. The waterfall lay directly below me, yet so steep was the slope on which I was perched that I had to crawl back again up the trail on all fours and descend with it. Far away across a valley so deep I could not see its bottom, lay in plain sight what I knew to be the town of Cañar, a mere white speck halfway up the great mountainside beyond. It is chiefly noted for its outlook upon the world. From a distance, it seemed to hang upright on the vertical mountain flank; once arrived, I found it occupied the flat top of one of the countless hills that pile higher and higher into the sky, to culminate in a great Andean chain. Here was a land of stone. Everywhere, in field and valley, rocks lay more profusely and far larger in size than on any abandoned New England farm. If the tumble-down old town of Cañar had any features at all different from hundreds of others down the crest of the Andes, it was its large proportion of stone buildings over those of sun-baked mud.

It is perhaps the existence of stone, rarer to the north, that accounts for the presence near Cañar of the first ruins of unquestionably Inca origin. Their victorious march to the north, too, was so quickly followed by the arrival of the Spaniards, that the Children of the Sun left no permanent works about Quito and beyond. The imperial highway from Cuzco to what is to-day Ecuador, built by a race less fearful of the lofty places and mighty cañons of the Andes, was more direct than the modern haphazard route. Where it descended from the páramo of Azuay and climbed out of the gorge beyond, there was built a fortress and a tambo for the housing of the imperial cortège that is known to-day as Ingapirca, which some believe to be that same Tomebamba where Huayna Ccápac, the Great, was born, and where the news of the landing on the coast of a strange tribe cut short his journey southward in his old age.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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VIII. THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR

As susceptible Don Giovanni falls under the succeeding spell of every pretty face, each blotting out those that went before, so the traveler down the backbone of South America frequently concludes that he has found at last the climate copied from the Garden of Eden. Such a spot is Cuenca, dimming by comparison its latest rival, Quito, and I find in my notes of the exuberant first day there the assertion: “Of all the earth, as far as I know it, Cuenca has the most perfect climate.” Always cool enough to be mildly invigorating to mind and body, yet never cold, it is unexcelled as a place for dreamy loafing. The sunshine vastly exceeds the shadow, and its situation is peerless—not in the scenery of its surrounding mountains, which are distant and low, but in the rich fertility of this great vale of Paucarbamba (“Flowery Plain”), as the Incas called it. Cuenca has no fitting excuse for not being one of the richest agricultural cities on earth. Yet its only “hotels” are dirty little Indian eating-houses without sleeping accommodations, and the traveler must fall back on the prehistoric system of hunting up a friend’s friend. For once this roundabout method brought handsome results; at the home of the Montesinos brothers I found my most home-like accommodations south of Quito, in a highly cultured family with no scent of the public hostelry about it. My front door opened on a vista across the patio and the long market plaza, usually shimmering with Indians and clashing colors, to the blue hills and a strip of Dresden-china sky to the west; and it is only fair to the Andes to mention that this extraordinary family had erected in a back patio a well-appointed lavatory, stoutly padlocked against the Indians of the household.

The Montesinos brothers, sons of a former governor of the Province of Azuay, were lawyers, as well as professors in Cuenca’s colegio, leaders in the intellectual life of the city, excellent examples of the best grade of “interandino.” One was a teacher of French and English, which did not seriously mean that he could speak either of those tongues. In 1899 this bookish, somewhat effeminate man had started a revolution against the Alfaro government in the person of General Franco, a bloodthirsty half-negro from Esmeraldas, who had been made governor of Azuay. It proved unsuccessful, and the instigator had been forced to fly to the jungled Oriente and live for months among the head-hunting Jívaros Indians. I had hesitated to believe my own convictions on certain conditions in Ecuador, but this frank and outspoken native outdid anything I might have said. His attitude was in striking contrast to that belligerent “pride” of Latin-American governments and their led mobs and self-seeking politicians. To him the thrice-beloved “patriotism” of his hot-tempered fellows was rubbish. What he wanted was an efficient government and a chance to live a free life, whether he remained a subject of the particular strip of territory known as Ecuador, or of the gigantic “Yanqui-land” so many seemed to fancy imminent. He asserted that the police of Cuenca were its worst criminals; all thieves and ruffians who could not be openly convicted were sentenced to serve as policemen. Except in the collecting of taxes and as a place of reward for its henchmen, the central government leaves Cuenca and the south of Ecuador virtually abandoned, and that tendency, so general in Latin-American countries, for the more distant parts to break away and form a free, or at least autonomous state is here marked. The region labors under a thousand petty annoyances. For instance, Quito has a parcel-post service with the outside world, but Cuenca has none, nor any money-order system, and about one piece of mail in three ever reaches an addressee in the capital of the Azuay. A package mailed from abroad to a cuencano lies in Guayaquil until the addressee appears in person, or appoints a lawyer, to lay claim to it, to pay the fees and grease the wheels of the legal and illegal formalities necessary to set it on its way to its destination.

To our modern notions Cuenca is not much of a city; yet here in the almost untracked wilderness it seemed enormous. So rarely do strangers visit it that, large as it is and in spite of my entirely conventional appearance, I could barely pause in the street without all work in the vicinity ceasing and a crowd gathering about me. Hungry to behold a new face as the crew of a windjammer that has gazed only upon themselves during long months at sea, their attitude seemed to say, “We can work to-morrow, but there is no certainty that we can have the pleasure of looking at a stranger.” It is hard for Americans, with their wide outlook and accustomed to the complicated existence of our large cities, to realize the narrowness of life in these placid old adobe towns hidden away in the Andes. Virtually cut off from the outside world, the cuencanos are a peculiarly bookish people. “We do not know,” said Montesinos, “that there are places on the globe where men live in freedom and decency, except from books.” Yet in spite of being rather uncertain of their dignity, like all isolated peoples, the educated classes were as well-meaning, as simpáticos, as any I met in Latin-America. Two things only were necessary to join the upper caste,—a white collar and visiting-cards. The former above a patched “hand-me-down” was more effective than a new $100 suit worn with a flannel shirt; and the man who has his name printed on bits of cardboard, to exchange with regal courtesy and profound bows with every upper-class acquaintance, is instantly accepted as of gente decente origin. Indeed, visiting cards should be as fixed a part of every Andean traveler’s equipment as heavy boots.

One could not but pity these ineffectually ambitious mortals, kept down by leaden environment and isolation. He who does not deal in “panama” hats has hardly an opening in Cuenca, except to study medicine, law, or theology in the local colegio; hence there is a plethora of “doctors” who can only wear their titles and live the life of enforced bookworms, forbidden by the rigid rules of caste even the privilege of turning their hands to some useful occupation. As in Bogotá, the very isolation and lack of opportunity has driven many to their studies, and Cuenca numbers many writers among her “sons,” producers chiefly of that languid, half-melancholy, pretty poetry, full of the “fine writing” the divorce from life and unlimited leisure to polish their gems of thought gives. In all Cuenca there is only one mean little bookshop, selling religious tracts and translations of American and English “penny dreadfuls.” The intelectuales can only, as it were, feed upon each other and form mutual admiration societies, where admiration soon palls from too constant familiarity and lack of new blood. Few, even of the “best families,” have ever been out of the cuenca, or basin, in which the city lies, and its isolation has given the place something of the atmosphere the traveler is always seeking—commonly in vain—of a world wholly removed from outside influence.

Their ineffective eagerness to learn was pathetic. The most nearly educated young men of the town had rented a second-story hall near the main plaza and decorated its façade with huge letters announcing it the “English Language Club.” Here the score or so of more or less English-speaking residents of the male sex gathered together several evenings a week.

For years, however, there had not been a genuine English-speaking person living permanently anywhere near Cuenca. In their eagerness to capture an authority the club drafted me at once, and whole delegations were always ready to go about and show me the town and vicinity—provided it was a not too distant vicinity, for they had as great a dread as the quiteño of getting far from the central plaza. I was received kindly and eagerly by the educated men anywhere, so long as it did not involve my intrusion on the Moorish seclusion of their family life, and became a sort of honored guest of the town, even if I was not presented with the key to it, which by comparison with the door-keys would have been a burden indeed. They were not “spenders”; money comes slowly and with too great a strain in these parts, but they were ever on the lookout to do me little kindnesses.

Barely was I settled, therefore, when I was hurried off to an evening at the “English Language Club,” convoked in special session. For an hour I sat like the chief buffoon in a comic-opera ensemble in the center of a horseshoe circle that included a score of doctors—Cuenca swarms with doctors, home-made and book-trained—the grandsons of presidents, sons of ministers to Washington and the court of St. James, while the whole gathering, like self-conscious school-boys, got off a sentence or two in more or less English in regular rotation around the circle, until some shining genius suggested that, as they had so illustrious a guest with them, it was merely a “social evening” and not a regular meeting; hence the rule demanding that only English be spoken was not in force. With a veritable explosion of relief the entire club burst into Spanish, and Alfonzo was himself again.

Later experience proved that the rule was largely a dead-letter even at regular meetings, and only to be enforced when the arrival of an illustrious stranger put the club on parade. The walls were hung with several mottoes in English, and they had gathered together some belated American magazines and a billiard table. There the members gathered several evenings a week to play “pocar,” and to practice very intermittently such English as they had learned from the printed page, forming their sentences and—what was worse—their pronunciation from the rules books had to offer, and mixing in with it a bit of a similar brand of French, as if any foreign language answered more or less the purposes of the club. The rules forbade the use within the club-room of any tongue than our own, but after the first few set greetings of “goot nig-ht, how do yô do?” the gathering settled down to an uproar of Castilian, broken only by the few phrases of Cuenca-English which custom had stereotyped. The majority came to play “pocar,” not so much because of the opportunities that pastime offered for one of the Latin-American’s chief failings—for pockets were seldom bulging—but because it smacked of the United States, the stepmother of the “English Language Club” of Cuenca. The son of a former Ecuadorian minister to Washington, who had spent a year or two in “Yanqui-land,” shared with “el Señor Doctor Montesinos, profesor de inglés en nuestro colegio,” the position of final authority on the tongue, except on those rare occasions when a traveler brought the real, dyed-in-the-wool article with him. Even the authorities were not faultless. They said “díssiples” for pupils, used habitually the expression “I can to go,” and clung tenaciously to similar choice bits of their own convictions, and, what was worse, drilled them into their fellow-members with that dogmatism strongest in those who are wrong. But the minister’s son had made the most of his American residence in learning “pocar” so thoroughly that he was as real an authority on that art as he fancied himself in English. Unfortunately, the combined efforts of the club had not unearthed among all the dog-eared classics that had drifted together in generations of Cuenca’s flirting with English the mention in print of that fascinating pastime. Whence they had been forced to adopt their own spelling and home-made phrases. On the wall appeared a warning placard, “Those which play pocar are speaking English,” and each game was sprinkled with a rapid-fire of Spanish, punctuated by fixed phrases of near-English. Thus the expressions “You bid,” or “You open,” had been concocted by the simple means of literal translation from the Castilian used in similar pastimes, and became “You speak.” Amid the crack of billiard-balls and the rattling of home-made chips the conversation ran on much as follows:

“Cordero, you are serveeng. Y hombre, ya le dije que la muchacha no . . .”

“Fife cards; all ze workeengs, Carlos.”

“Lindísima, hombre, pero su mamá. . . . Enriquito, you speak.”

“No, señor, equivocado, I am speakeeng.”

“Caramba! Es verdad. Eet ees true. And for how much are you speakeeng?”

“No, et ees meestake. Ze doctor is speakeeng, because he is sitteeng by ze side of Juancito, which ees serveeng ze cards,”—and with deep solemnity the doctor proceeded to “speak” by throwing two Cuenca-made chips on the table, the game rattling on until Muñoz broke in upon an oratorical description of the latest event of the vida social of Cuenca with a:

“And I am nameeng you now, Carlitos; with ze house full of ze whole kettle,” and throwing down a “full house,” he scraped the entire pile of chips to his corner of the table.

There were two dentists in Cuenca at the time of my visit. One of those present was not there in person, because he had gone away on a week’s journey two months before; the other had not yet arrived, though he appeared nightly at the “English Language Club,” because his instruments of torture and gold-plated diploma were still somewhere on the road from Guayaquil. Had they both been unqualifiedly present in the flesh, the wise man would have continued to endure any degree of toothache rather than submit to their amateurish mercies. The chief raison d’être of the city is its commerce in “panama” hats, though virtually none are made there. The agent sent to Azogues or other neighboring towns pencils in some cabalistic code on the inside of the hat the price paid the weaver—or as near that price as his conscience makes necessary—and delivers it to his employer. In the city are many “factories of sombreros,” from behind the downcast mud fronts of which sounds all day long the pounding of wooden mallets, and from which exudes the constant smell of sulphur. At the establishment of a club-member we posed for a local photographer in acres of hats, in various stages of the finishing process, which ranged from the huge Gualaquiza products from the Jívaros country on the east, to those of so fine a weave as to be inferior only to the famous jipijapa of Manabí.

It is just over the range from Cuenca that are to be found the Jívaros, the widely renowned head-hunters of the upper Amazon. Montesinos had lived long months among them at the time of his mishap, and knew their ways well. A proud, untamed race engaged in almost constant warfare with the neighboring tribes, they consider the white man an equal, and treat him as a friend so long as he does not transgress their strict tribal laws. The Andean Indian, with his slinking air and his heavy clothing, they look down upon as a weakling and a very inferior being. Having despatched an enemy, the Jívaros cut off the head well down on the shoulders, extract the skull by a vertical cut at the back, sew up this and the lips, and, by the insertion of hot stones and a process only imperfectly understood by any other than the tribe itself, reduce the head to the size of an orange, with the original features easily recognizable. In this state it is said to be of little use to its rightful owner, even if recovered. The desiccated head must, according to tribal laws, be kept until after the yearly ceremony to appease the spirit of the dead man, after which it is hung up as a trophy over the entrance to the successful hunter’s house, or, what is far more usual of late years, traded to some passing white man for a rifle or a supply of cartridges. One traveler I met had been so eager to obtain one of the dried heads that he offered a Jívaro chief two rifles. The chief replied sadly that, though he would do anything possible to get a rifle, unfortunately it happened that the tribe did not have a single dried head on hand. “But,” he cried a moment later, his countenance brightening visibly, “could you wait a month or so?”

A few years ago a tall, lanky German arrived in Cuenca and went down among the Jívaros to study their customs, and especially to find out exactly how they shrink heads. Month after month passed without a word from him, but cuencanos knew the Teuton way of pursuing an investigation step by step in all its details and ramifications, and thought nothing of the prolonged absence. Then one day, more than a year later, there was offered for sale in the market of Cuenca a splendid specimen of shrunken head, with long, blond hair and beard and a scholarly cast of countenance. The investigation had been thorough; but the outside world still remains in darkness on the art of shrinking heads among the Jívaros.

To the stranger, perhaps the feature of Cuenca that will remain longest in his memory is her street lights; certainly, if it happens to be his lot to have to find his way home on a black night after a sad, candle-lighted “comedy” in the local theater—the school-room of the colegio. The laws of Cuenca require that every resident in the principal streets set up a candle before his house. But as the two-cent velas which are satisfactory to the law are short and not particularly inflammable, and the wind is given to blowing its hardest during the first hour after dusk, the city changes long before eight from long, faintly-guessed lanes between unseen house-walls to a medieval inky blackness. The inhabitant who stirs abroad carries a square glass box containing a flickering candle, or is accompanied by a “link-boy,” in true medieval fashion. The stranger who, being no smoker, chances not even to have matches with him, feels his way homeward for an uncertain number of blocks by counting them with his fingers, at last discovering the plaza on which he lives by hugging the corner of it. Shivering with uncertainty as to whether his lodging is the third or the fourth door from the butchershop with the protruding hook, here and there stumbling over a piece of sidewalk or into a puddle, he finally coaxes his gigantic key to fit its lock with something far more potent than satisfaction.

Thus life runs its placid course in this far-off city of the Andes. Those who come there after the railway from Huigra reaches Cuenca, if long-pondered plans some day mature, will no doubt find it different, more blasé and less likable, no longer one of the rewards of toiling over the world’s byways. Even electric lights are threatened, and before them will flee one of its most nearly unique characteristics.

The hope of securing an ass to stagger out of Cuenca under my possessions had melted day by day during my week there. In what I had been assured was the best donkey-market in Ecuador, those animals proved both scarce and high in price. Toward the end of my stay the baggage I had sent from Huigra had arrived, both developing tank and tray broken, in spite of the vociferous promises of the fletero, though still serviceable with elaborate manipulation. It was chiefly picture-taking that forced me to turn packhorse; had I been able to abandon everything connected with photography, I might have pranced along like a school-boy under his knowledge. A pack of nearly fifty pounds remained, in spite of a rigid reduction and a desperate throwing away which included even my medicine case, bequeathed to Montesinos, for ever since crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico seventeen months before I had been burdened with it, without a single excuse to swallow one of its myriad pills. If only Edison would take a day off to invent a baggage on legs that would trot, dog-fashion, after its owner—just a modest little baggage of, say, fifty pounds—it would revolutionize life.

Distinguished visitors to the cities of the Andes are, in all accounts extant, met upon their arrival and sent on their way by a cavalcade of horsemen including all the local celebrities. For the first time in my Latin-American journey I was accompanied by a guard of honor as I plodded heavily out of Cuenca on March tenth; that is, Montesinos, the master of “English,” strolled with me across the ancient cobbled bridge over the Matadero and a mile or more beyond, until he met the sun coming up from the jungled montaña of the Jívaros and turned back with the market-bound Indians to his scholastic duties. The broad highway was dry and hard as a floor. Prepared in my heavy boots for the usual Andean trail, I could have walked it in dancing-pumps. The great cuenca shrunk to an ever-narrower, fertile valley, stretching southward along a little stream called the Tarqui. A score of Indians were plowing a single field with ox-drawn plows fashioned from forest trees. So scant is his individual initiative that the Andean husbandman works well only in company with his fellows, and the experienced mayordomo conducts his farming in a succession of “bees” in which all the employees join efforts, as in the days of the Inca.

The Andes grow higher and more mountainous to the south. Beyond the hacienda and the hamlet of Cumbe next morning, the valley closed in and forced the highway to scale, like an escaping prisoner his walls, the great Andean “Knot” of Portete. Bit by bit it shrunk to a narrow road, then to a rocky trail, like a man about to begin some mighty task, with no longer time to consider his personal appearance, reducing himself to the bare essentials. Through clumps of blackberries and frost-bitten corn it climbed, then shook off even these, and split into faint, diverging paths across another of those lofty, wind-swept, solitary páramos of the Andes, broken here and there, only scantily covered with the dreary dead-brown ichu bunch-grass of the highlands, and low, bushy achupallas.

It would have been more to the point if the sympathy the old woman of the hacienda behind had taken the form of fiambre, a roadster’s lunch, with which to follow up the coffee and diaphanous roll of an Ecuadorian desayuno. By ten I was starving. By eleven I had eaten even the rose I wore in a button-hole; during the next few hours I found three blackberries, hard and green, and shook dice with sudden death by eating a handful of a wholly unknown and even more tasteless páramo berry. The one Indian I met during the afternoon misinformed me, before he sped on out of reach, that Nabón was a bare two leagues beyond; and all the rest of the day my imagination persisted in heaping up mighty banquets that toppled over and faded away as I prepared to fall upon them.

Suddenly the páramo ended as if it had been hacked off with a dull gigantic machete, and the way-worn, haggard trail stumbled blindly down into a labyrinthian chaos of jagged white rocks, like an arctic sea in upheaval, an earthquake section as split and smashed and broken as if the world had come into collision at this point with another planet or a celestial lamp-post. When at last I sighted Nabón, long after I had entered it a score of times in imagination, it was still a mere speck on a broken edge of the earth’s crust which I reached by dusk only by dint of a herculean struggle.

It was a cornfield town of thatched mud huts, of universally Indian blood. The alcalde was not at home, but the priest’s word was law, and I was soon dropping my bundle from my grateful shoulders in the “best room” of an Indian dwelling. My unwilling host removed the bedclothes and piled them on the uneven earth floor in an adjoining room, for himself, wife and child, and left me the wooden-floored bedstead. The mud walls were embellished not merely with the gaudy colored chromos of various “Virgins,” but with scores of the advertising pages of American magazines, chiefly pictorial, for the family could not even read its own tongue. I did not succeed in discovering how these exotic reminders of home had found their way to this unknown village of the Andes. The Indian and his wife kept me awake half the night with their alternating prayers and responses before a candle-lighted lithograph in the adjoining room, each prayer beginning, “Blessed Santa María, give us this; Blessed Santa María, give us that.” One would have thought María ran a department store.

It is only eighteen miles from Nabón to Oña, but no mere words can give any suggestion of the labyrinthian toil that lies between them. Down in the bottom of the mightiest chasm of this tortured section of the earth sits an isolated peak shaped like an angular haycock. From the lowest point of the day’s tramp I could not see its summit; when I looked back hours later upon the immense stretch of gashed and tumbled world behind me, the peak had sunk to a mere dot on the landscape. Yet in a way it was an ideal tramp. A sun-flooded day in the exhilarating mountain air passed in absolute silence without even the sight of a fellow mortal, except very rarely a lone shepherd so far away on a bare brown mountainside as to be merely a tiny detail of the scenery. There was one drawback, also; for the spider-leg trails split and spread at random across the world above at every opportunity, and for several hours at a time I was not at all certain I was going to Peru.

At length I rounded a lofty spur, and another great valley opened out before me. An hour later I prepared to present my note to the cura of Oña. His two housekeepers, attractive chola girls, received me with the customary coldness of their class toward strangers, and the information that the padre “had gone to the mountain.” “Ya no más de venir—he should be back at any moment”—murmured one of them; which might mean, of course, that he would be back in an hour or a week. There was no one else in this shelf-like hillside of mud huts around a dead plaza surrounded by cornfields who would be likely to house me, and I could only wait in hungry patience. Night was falling like a quick curtain at the end of a dismal act, when one of the stupid damsels admitted “probably he will not be back to-night,” but that they would serve “a little something to eat,” if I could wait awhile. I was already accustomed to that occupation. On a worktable of the earth-floored and walled corredor, among the parrots that kept calling the cholas by name, a chained monkey of homicidal tendencies, and other cural odds and ends, a meal of several courses was at length set before me as rapidly as the single tin plate could be washed and refilled. Oña does not eat bread, but so large a helping of mote was served that I succeeded in filling a coat pocket with it, well knowing that no other provisions would be forthcoming for the morrow’s uninhabited trail. As a food, this mess of boiled kernels of ripe corn, chief sustenance of the Andean Indian on his travels, is like those medicines that are worse than the ailment they are designed to cure. Then there was a plate of black beans, a corn tamale, and a tasteless preserved fruit, all stone-cold, but red-hot with the ají, or green peppers, with which all food in the Andes is enlivened.

Hours later a group of horsemen rode up out of the night and halted before the casa cural. I rose from a cramped doze on a corredor bench to find the priest dismounting. A brawny man of massive frame, more than six feet tall, with well-cut features and a powerful Roman nose, dressed in a black robe reaching to his spurs, and a huge “panama” hat of exceedingly fine weave—a present, no doubt, from some fond member of his flock among the surrounding hills—he towered far above his companions. A cigarette smouldered between his lips, a week’s growth of dense black beard half-covered a face that bore testimony to long and deep experience in worldly matters, and his voice boomed like Quito’s largest church-bell. Yet his manner was that syrupy courtesy, accompanied by a whining speech, peculiar to the region. He fawned upon all who approached him, addressing them with maudlin words of endearment,—“Ah, compadrecito!” “Oh, my dearest of friends!” “Oh, Josecito cholito, hijito mío!”—with a long-drawn, rising and falling inflection that made his speech seem even more false and insincere than it was in reality. Me he greeted in the same tone, like a long-lost “amiguito,” and assured me the casa cural was henceforth my personal property, expressing his deepest regret that he had just sent to Cuenca, where he was about to be transferred, his two phonographs and “diez mil pesos” ($5000 worth) of other toys. It was a typical cural residence of the Andes. The rough adobe walls of his cluttered study, with mud benches in the form of divans around them, were almost completely covered with large lithographs advertising various brands of whiskey and cigarettes, more than half of them showing nude female figures. Under his table was spread out to dry a six-foot square patch of tobacco, and at frequent intervals the padre reached under it for the “makings” of a cigarette, without taking his eyes off his visitors nor ceasing the flow of his cadenced endearments.

Two men, chiefly of Indian blood, soon joined us, one the jefe político, and the other what might be called in English chairman of the town council. The former carried a guitar, the latter a quart bottle of aguardiente, and both a stimulated gaiety even greater than that of the priest. During an affectionate three hours the trio toasted each other alternately in large glasses of this double-voltage concoction, after suffering two or three rounds of which I was forced to allege a sore throat. The moving spirit of the feast was the priest, whose powerful frame carried his liquor well, and the evening raged on amid a riot of chatter and the savage thrumming of the guitar, little more than the flushed faces visible in the dense-clouded atmosphere of cigarette smoke within the tightly closed room. The cura spoke French readily, having been in earlier years an inmate of the French monastery of Riobamba, and affected it with me all the evening. The jefe político was childishly eager to hear us speak that strange tongue; the town councilor roared with anger as often as either of us uttered a word of it, charging that we were abusing him under cover of “that cursed Castilian of the gringos.” The cura maliciously added fuel to his wrath, unostentatiously keeping the bottle moving meanwhile, sending a boy to replenish it as often as it was emptied. The enraged councilor ended at last by staggering out into the night and across the plaza, shouting drunkenly that he was going for a gun or a machete. The other two followed him, and for some time a maudlin bellowing, intermingled with the wheedling of a velvety voice of rising and falling cadence, awoke the echoes of the night, gradually subsiding until at length silence fell. The priest at last came slowly back without a suggestion of intoxication, which he seemed to lay aside as he might his long black robe, reached under the table, rolled a cigarette, and explained apologetically that, as his recent companions were the chief civil authorities, he must keep on good terms with them “whatever his own tastes and desires.” Then he implored me to spend the following day in Oña, promising that we should visit on muleback the many historical spots in the vicinity, and launching into a learned dissertation on the history of the region. Oña, he asserted, was the oldest town in Southern Ecuador, and the treaty of peace had been signed by Sucre in this very house after the battle of Tarqui. In spite of the impression that the invitation was mere surface courtesy, I finally promised to remain. He threw his arms about me in an affectionate abrazo, showering upon me endearing terms, all ending in the Spanish diminutive ito, and called upon the housekeepers to spread a mattress for me on a mud divan in the study. Then the cura, who at least had the virtue of living his life frankly, retired with the two comely cholas to an adjoining room in which, it is true, there were two beds, and silence settled down over the Andes.

In the morning I turned over for another nap. An hour later the priest and his unofficial family marched in upon me, and it was some time before I could get sufficient privacy and liquid mud to shave and dress. From that hour until night I had little more than silent suffrance from the cura and his household, and heard not a reference to those “many points of historical importance” he had painted in such enticing terms in his ardent condition of the night before. Tomás á Kempis says: “A sad morning often follows a merry evening,” or words to that effect, but the cura of Oña had evidently overlooked that particular quotation. An almost constant stream of Indians and half-Indians came to inquire in soft cadenced voices for “tayta curita,” who sat in his fly-swarming den smoking countless cigarettes and whining unlimited endearments and blessings on all comers, but resolutely squelching all applications for coin of the realm or the material things of this world, and reaching at frequent intervals for the replenished quart bottle. About eleven the two of us, and a “carpenter” who had been pottering about the house all the morning fitting together two boards that were destined never to fit, sat down in a corner of the wide back corredor of the casa cural to a substantial dinner at which cat, dog, parrot, and monkey helped themselves to every dish as freely as we. The meal was adorned with a jar of pulque, a drink which the cura had taught his cholas to make after reading of it in an account of Mexico. The rest of the day drowsed slothfully away amid the screaming of parrots, the barking of dogs, the shrieks of the monkey rattling his chain in all but successful attempts to rend and tear some unwary visitor, and a swarming of flies that sounded like a distant waterfall,—a typical parish-priest life of rural Ecuador, punctuated by the occasional chanting of the velvety, singsong voice in the mud church next door, as my host hurried through a mass for some departed soul. Toward sunset the household was augmented by a third plump and youthful chola who had been home on a visit to her parental mud hut among the hills. It seemed strange that the casa cural was so ill-kept and slatternly with so generous a supply of housekeepers.

At the summit beyond the chaotic chasm into which the world falls away below Oña, the nature of the country changed. From an endless vista of barren and often soilless rocks, the entire landscape was transformed to a heavily wooded region of hardy undergrowth, somewhat like small, bushy oaks, at times almost approaching a forest, a shaggy world rolling away as far as the eye could follow in every direction. Here and there was a larger bush completely covered with pink blossoms. Then the half-forested mountain-top took gradually to rocking, like a ship approaching a tempestuous sea, until all at once it spilled itself, like the cargo of an overturned freighter, into another enormous hole in the earth, hazy with the very depths of it. The trail pitched over the edge with the rest, like a bit of flotsam from a wreck, helplessly at the mercy of the waves. Thousands of little green farms, chiefly of corn, with an Indian hut set in a corner of each, hung at sharp angles about the enclosing walls of the valley. I had reached the famous Vale of Zaraguro, the Land of Corn,—zara is Quichua for maize—to climb at last into the scattered grass-grown village itself.

Ensconced in the great hoyo of Jubones, dividing the Azuay from the province of Loja, Zaraguro is a little world of its own. The great majority of its population is Indian, but a new type of Indian, of darker skin and more independent manner than those to the north, still humble to the gente decente when facing them singly, but verging on insolence when gathered in groups with chicha at hand. Here each owns a little patch of land and refuses serfdom. His dress is somber, in marked contrast to the gaudy colors of his quiteño cousin. In place of the loose white panties, he clothes his legs to the knee with a close-fitting coffee-hued woolen garment, and covers all the rest of the body with a poncho of the same color. He wears an immensely thick, almost white, felt hat of box-shaped crown, the brim drooping about his face, and his long, jet-black hair, instead of being confined in a tape-wound braid, is commonly flying about his head and shoulders. He buys nothing from the outside world—except masses and indulgences—shears his own sheep, the wool of which, usually black, his women spin and weave into the heavy cloth that provides the somber garments of both sexes. Besides supplying its own wants, the valley of Zaraguro exports by way of Puerto Bolívar a bit of coarse cascarilla bark, basis of quinine, at about five cents a pound.

Zaraguro assured me that the road to Loja was “todo plano”; but level has strange meanings to a people accustomed from birth to the steepest of mountains. One of the best engineered highways in Ecuador looped ever higher to the “realms of eternal silence” of the Acayana-Guagra-uma “Knot,” but from the dense-forested summit, where I had looked forward to the corresponding pleasure of looping as leisurely down the opposite flank, an atrocious trail stumbled headlong downward to the narrow valley of a small river. From the hamlet of San Lucas a long day, pouring incessantly with rain, followed the stream, the trail mounting and descending rocky headlands with the monotonous regularity of a flat car-wheel. Even where the landscape opened out again at last, the plain was calf-deep in mud, and it was only by dint of a constant struggle that I dragged myself, mud-caked and drenched, on the second evening into the southernmost city of Ecuador.

Loja, 380 miles from Quito and capital of the province least in touch with the central government, lies exactly on the fourth parallel south, in the delta of the little Zamora and Malacatos rivers, insignificant bits of the Amazon system. It is a low, flat, rather featureless town, surrounded by a fertile, fruit-producing soil, and though 7000 feet above sea-level, of a humid, semi-tropical climate that is kindly even to bananas. Birds, among them one much like the robin, make the place reminiscent of American summers. There are only rolling hills near at hand, though not far off is that “labyrinth of mountains” of Prescott’s fancy, blue-black now with the rainy season, high up among which, according to local assertion, are still to be found remnants of the great military highway of the Incas. Lojanos seemed a dull, torpid people, laborious of mind, and the town has little of the picturesque, even in costume. The pure Castilian type is well represented, but Indian blood, chiefly in the mestizo form, is still supreme, though by no means so general as to the north, and the population includes a few negroes and more zambos,—mixtures of Indian and African blood. More than eighty lawyers hover in their mud dens, ready to pick the bones of the 8000 inhabitants, largely poverty-stricken illiterates. There is some weaving of “panama” hats, and in an attempt to stimulate that industry “profesores” of the art have been imported from the Azuay to teach it, particularly in the orphan asylums. But it remains at best a dilettante occupation, foreign to the soil. The chief industry of the region round about is the raising of mules and cattle that are shipped chiefly to Peru. Lima subsists largely on Loja meat, which is, no doubt, the reason she gets virtually none herself, even when it is not some Catholic day sacred to starvation. Zaruma and Portovelo, two muleback days to the west, boast the chief American mines of Ecuador, but gringos are seldom seen in her streets.

In one matter the town is in advance of more populous Cuenca,—it has electric lights. As long ago as 1897 Loja brought in, by way of Peru, the first dynamo known to Ecuador, a sign of “progreso” of which her inhabitants never tire of boasting. Scattered in sixteen-candle-power bulbs here and there along the streets, the system did not reach as high as the littered lumber-room in which I spent the nights on a platform on legs, where the customary candle winked weakly through the humid darkness. I was overjoyed, however, to come upon a placard announcing that the municipal library was open to the public even at night! As it promised to open first at one of the afternoon, I was not surprised to find it still locked when I arrived at two. I waited a half hour, peering greedily through the bars of the reja at the long shelves of books and maps. Then I began inquiries. The adjoining shopkeeper expressed unbounded surprise that there were persons so ignorant as not to know “the government is so poor it cannot pay the librarian any more,” and that the institution had been closed for months.

Loja was once the center of the commerce in cascarilla, the bark of a tree not unlike the cherry in appearance, that abounds in the ravines of the mountains to the eastward of the city. Nearly three centuries ago a missionary to the region found the Indians grinding the bitter bark in their stone mortars and swallowing it as a specific against intermittent fevers, as they do to this day. When the wife of the Conde de Chinchón, viceroy of Peru, lay ill of a fever in Lima, the corregidor of Loja sent to her physician a parcel of the powdered bark. Upon her return to Europe the condesa carried a quantity of the magic powder with her, whence it was for a long time known as chinchona. Meanwhile Jesuit missionaries of Brazil had sent parcels of it to Rome, whence it was distributed among the brotherhood, nothing loathe to add to their reputation for miraculous powers and to the income from their drug-stores, and the name “Jesuits’ bark” became widespread. The tree, however, has always been known to the Indians by the Quichua name of “quinaquina,” and in time the refined product took on its modern name of quinine. The tree in its original habitat has been ruthlessly treated, being often felled merely to avoid the labor of barking it standing, and to-day, with large chinchona plantations in India, southern Ecuador has but a fraction of the income it might have from one of its most valuable indigenous products. It is typical of Latin-American conditions that a capsule—or more commonly an oblea, like two saucers stuck together—of quinine, reimported from Europe and paying heavy custom duties, costs four times as much in the boticas of Loja as in the United States.

In one of the quaint two-story houses with an air of decayed gentility, facing the main plaza and grazing ground of Loja, lives Augustin Carrión, inventor of the “celífono,” by means of which a piano can be played by electricity and given the soft, long-drawn notes of an organ. He is the chief “sight” of the region, yet held in a certain ill-concealed disdain by the mass of his fellow-townsmen, even while they are basking in the sunshine of his fame; a striking example of those rare mortals who struggle to raise themselves above the low level of their deadening environment in these buried cities far from the moving modern world.

I found him in his rambling parlor, of undusted efforts at grandeur, its walls decorated with large maps of Paris and New York, both of which he had once visited in an effort to patent and place his invention, interspersed with the customary inartistic family portraits draped with aged mourning crêpe. A member of one of Loja’s chief families, of pure Spanish blood, speaking a cultured Castilian with the diction of a man of books, he was in appearance a ludicrous mixture of the typical inventor of the comic supplements and of the Latin-American stickler for formal dress. Scraggly gray whiskers pursued themselves about his unimpressive face; a hair-cut months overdue emphasized his narrow shoulders and flat chest. His hands, thin almost to transparency, suggested something weak and harmless in need of protection. His once stiff white shirt was innocent of buttons, and with his energetic, or, more exactly, nervous movements, frequently opened to disclose a flaccid skin and a Catholic charm hanging low about his neck. A collar, buttoned only at one end, was adorned with a cravat that was not a cravat, but only a strip of black ribbon that floated here and there about his throat. His frock-coat, sine qua non of Latin-American respectability, was gray with dust, trousers unacquainted with the pressing-board were spotted with the mementoes of laboratory accidents, and the slender aristocratic shoes, possessing in common three buttons, had been worn completely heelless. Here, in the bosom of his disdainful family, he wore a greasy old cap; later in the day I met him promenading under the portales of the plaza in the same costume, but for the added glory of a “stove-pipe” hat of at least twenty years of harried existence.

His taller, or workshop, overlooking the main square, was a chaos of odds and ends gathered by a man who had given his life chiefly to the study of physics, and who was alternately tinkering at a score of inventions. In the absence of a real source of supply his apparatus was almost entirely home-made, or, as he himself put it, “Loja-made,” a collection fashioned from cigar boxes, string, tin cans, and whatever makeshifts fell in his way, resembling nothing so much as the playthings of some isolated but inventive farmer’s boy. A shoemaker’s needle, on the plan of a sewing-machine shuttle, that was designed to revolutionize the making of footwear, had been constructed from the shell of a rifle cartridge. Of as plebeian materials he had built a little transparent box to place above the needle of a phonograph, to do away with the metallic sound of that instrument—but in Latin-American fashion his phonograph was out of order and did not “function.” Another crude apparatus he pointed out as a proof that “a sphere can revolve on two axes at once,”—a ball of yarn representing the earth was twirled by a tiny dynamo, and at the same time given a rotary motion by a string belt—and so on through all the realms of physics, which he taught here in his taller several times a week to the boys of the local colegio. The Loja-made original of his most important invention was out of order, and I was not favored with a test of the “celífono” on which he had tinkered intermittently more than thirty years.

His inventiveness did not confine itself to merely physical matters. Before I left, he pressed upon me a pamphlet of which he was the author. It was entitled “The Virgin María in America before its Discovery by Columbus,” wherein the writer “proved beyond question,” to use his own words, “that the Blessed Virgin was not an unknown personage in America when it was discovered by the Spaniards.” Beginning a visionary journey in Canada, he descended step by step through all the western hemisphere, “proving” by shaky tradition, by the doctored yarns of early missionaries, and by personal lucubrations that “all the Indian tribes had the tradition of Adam and Eve, of the serpent and the apple, of ‘original sin,’ and of a god born of a virgin.” The fact that the city of Loja had published this masterpiece fully describes its mentality.

I had known him three or four days before the inventor took me into his confidence and whispered that the invention of the “celífono” had been merely a means to an end; that he had taken it to New York and Europe in the hope of raising funds to pursue his “really important invention,” which he had thought on for forty years and already perfected “in his mind,” though he had not yet begun its construction. This was a “flying machine that is neither balloon nor aeroplane, perfectly safe and commercially practicable.” As nearly as my unmechanical faculties grasped the situation from his elaborate explanation, it was a close replica of that of “Darius Green,” whose fame has never reached this corner of the Andes. Fortunately there is no building in Loja high enough to bring the inventor to serious grief, should he ever succeed in collecting the materials essential to the actual construction of this perfected child of his imagination. But his hope was still youthful, and he besought my advice as to how a poor inventor could get his masterpiece before the world without being despoiled of the fruits of his labors, as in the case of the “celífono,” by the “practical business men” of that great universe beyond his mountain-bounded horizon. I regretted my ignorance of any panacea for that condition.

Carrión is but a type of those “closet” geniuses who live, toil, and fade away unknown in the dim recesses of the Andes, men in some cases who might have ranked high among modern inventors, writers, or artists, had their lot been cast in happier climes than in this leaden environment of impracticability, burdened by enervating superstitions, denied the simplest materials for their purposes in a land where even twine and wrapping-paper are commonly unobtainable, and so lacking in that grasping self-assertiveness so necessary to front modern society successfully that even the scant fruits of their labors go to swell the already swollen pockets of more “practical” men of the world, while they dream on like this gray-haired boy pottering among his home-made toys.

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