IX. THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU…

IX. THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU

I had been a full half-year in Ecuador when I turned my attention to the problem of getting out of it. That disintegration, that tendency for neighboring countries to hold no communication between each other, at which the American cannot but marvel in South America, was here in full evidence. Ecuador seemed as completely cut off from the country just over her southern boundary as from Europe. The cura of Oña had assured me that the one way to reach Peru from Loja would be to walk to Puerto Bolívar on the coast, take a costero to Guayaquil, then a “big steamer” to Paita or Pacasmayo! Only he who knows South American geography well can appreciate the unconscious humor of such advice. Even the rare lojanos who admitted it might be possible to go to Peru “by land” asserted that I must walk to Piura, which would have been to cross a burning tropical desert far out of my way, to that well-traveled coast I was purposely avoiding. The government map of the province of Loja was as faulty and scanty of information as the American one I carried. It showed a road leading south from the provincial capital into that blue-black “labyrinth of mountains,” through the villages of Vilcabamba and Valladolid; but all the town was agreed that no one could travel in these modern days along the remnants of the great military highway of the Incas, crawling along the crest of the Cordillera Oriental through regions for days utterly uninhabited; and well I knew that Prescott’s “hanging withe bridges over awful chasms” were sure to be out of repair in these effeminate Latin-American times, even where they ever existed.

At length a few bold lojanos admitted that I might be able to push on to the frontier by way of Gonzanamá, though they persisted in calling it a “terrible undertaking,” even for a man who claimed to have walked from Quito. That route led far west of a line drawn through Huancabamba to Cajamarca, and there was nothing to show that it would connect with any trail beyond the frontier. The best I could do was to hope I might be able to struggle across to Ayavaca, in Peru, where I could perhaps get Peruvian information. Then there came a complete division of opinion as to the road to Gonzanamá, and Loja split into two irreconcilable factions, the one contending that I should take the road due south from the west side of the plaza, the other insisting on that due west from the south side. In the end they all washed their hands of the matter. The rainy season was nearing its height; sure death lurked along the bandit-infested frontier; none but amphibious animals and crack-brained gringos would stir forth from the cozy little city.

On the morning of April twentieth I finally took the south road. It climbed leisurely over the low interandean nudo shutting in Loja’s concave valley and, falling in with a hurried mountain stream, raced with it all day, crossing its branches sometimes by one-log bridges, more often by knee-deep fords. The few arrieros I met carried rusty old flint-locks, suggesting the dangers of the frontier; the huts along the way grew more and more rare, and degenerated from thick adobe walls to upright reeds carelessly stopped with mud. Beyond Malacatos, among its banana groves, where I spent the night on a plank bench in the casa cural of a young French priest who had already lost the habit of speaking anything but Spanish, the trail climbed relentlessly up through a scrub-wooded region as uninhabited as an undiscovered sphere. The afternoon was middle-aged before the world opened out again and gave a brief glimpse through the trees of Gonzanamá, set out in three rows on a tiny plain untold depths below. Raging rains had torn and gullied the further slope until the five miles downward was like descending the ruins of a giant’s stairway.

Gonzanamá was in fiesta. Hundreds of near-Indians and mestizos, with very little color in their garments, squatted about the church and casa cural. They were a people as simple and unsophisticated as children. It was Viernes Santo (Good Friday), and all the town gathered around to see me eat the meat a pious old woman served me with a shrug of her shoulders when I scorned her warning not to “anger the saints,” and dispersed prophesying an early calamity to me on the road ahead when I arose apparently uninjured. The son of the teniente político in whose house I was the honored guest, in so far as their means made honoring possible, proved to be an old acquaintance, a second-year medical student of Quito, home on his vacation. He was already the chief practicing physician of the region. On his journey from the capital he had performed a score of operations, among them one with a butcher-knife for abscess of the liver. The room I occupied, which was also his place of consultation, the family parlor, the municipal offices, and his own sleeping quarters, was invaded by a constant stream of uncomplaining infirmities. Outside, the entire population marched in procession until midnight, attended a two-hour service in the adobe church, and wandered the three streets with throbbing tomtoms and the gaiety imbibed from bottles until the eastern horizon paled to gray. The practicing medical student did not take to his bed until four, and an hour later he arose to set me on my way, forcing upon me, with regal eloquence, a can of salmon from “Europe, your own land,” to be opened only on Easter Sunday.

Only those rare mortals who have jaunted cross-country in the Andes can have any conception of the stone-quarry heights I scaled, the dense-jungled, bottomless quebradas through which I tore my way, the brush-tangled streams I forded, and the paths that faded out under my feet during that day. One of these last had dragged me remorselessly over every manner of ruggedness when, well on in the afternoon, it disappeared at the door of a mud-plastered hut. The trails of the Andes do not run merely from town to town, but from hovel to hovel, like foraging soldiers, giving the traveler a zigzag course that at least trebles the distance. I was prowling about this apparently unoccupied human kennel, striving to pick up the scent again, when I was set upon by three unusually large, aggressive curs. I did my best to drive them off with sticks and stones, but when there remained no other alternative I drew my weapon and sent the largest to his happy hunting-grounds. Instantly a crashing of the bushes sounded high up in a jungled patch above, and the angry voice of an unseen countryman screamed in the dialect of the region: “Scoundrel, you’ll pay me for my dog, caramba!” Crime is frequently immune so near an international boundary, and I rounded the hillside cautiously, my cocked revolver in hand; but the bellowing of the invisible native was soon swallowed up behind me, and only the oppressive silence of the mountain solitude surrounded me once more.

It was evident that I should not reach the frontier, perhaps not even shelter, before dark, when, at some distance off, in a setting of primeval forest solitude I was astonished to catch sight of a large hacienda house, a gaunt, rambling building that suggested some starving creature lost in the wilderness. Almost as I reached it a thunder-storm broke with a crash, and set a hundred brooks tearing their way down the swift mountainside on which the building clung. The house was locked and unoccupied. Two Indian boys of eight and twelve were huddled under the projecting eaves of a half-ruined outbuilding across the cobbled yard. For a full hour they answered my every question with “El patrón no ’stá,” uttered in the dull, monotonous voice of some mechanical instrument. I cajoled them at last to start a fagot-fire on the earth floor of the outbuilding, and to heat a pot of water into which I dropped three eggs they were prevailed upon to produce from a hiding-place in the thatch, and beat the mess up with a stick into a “caldo de huevos.” The smaller boy finally accepted a bribe to crawl out through a hole in the wall into the drenching downpour and snatch a half-dozen cholos, ears of green corn, which I roasted, or, more exactly, burned here and there over the scanty fire.

Prowling about the hacienda house when the storm slackened, I found in one end a room that was “locked” with a piece of string. According to the now less speechless boys, it was the hacienda “school,” in which at certain seasons an employee of the “patrón” taught the male children of those peons who paid $2 a year tuition. Like an old lumber-room or garret in appearance, the place was furnished with an ancient desk and a massive chair, as crude as if they had been carved out of tree-trunks with dull machetes, and a dozen faded copy-books and medieval inkwells hung about the walls. The school-master evidently made his home here during the school season, for in the far end of the room stood a log-hewn bedstead with a rough board flooring. Dusk was thickening into wet night when the Indian boys crept up to where I sat on the broad veranda overlooking a far-reaching, yet indistinct vista of wooded mountains and valleys, to assure me I should be killed and robbed during the night.

“We are all so poor here that when a rich man like your Grace passes everyone tries to rob him,” asserted the older, with unusual eloquence for his race. “Here all the people are robbers Hace pocos días—it is only a few days since a traveler was killed down in the valley there. Last month—”

I glanced over my travel-worn and bespattered form in vain for the evidences of wealth so patent to other eyes, yet I could not but recall the carcass of a dog a few miles back, and the golden weight of the band of my trousers reminded me that several evil-eyed fellows had halted awhile under the hacienda eaves during the height of the storm and slipped away somewhere into the night. Moreover, the prophesied destruction of all Ecuador by earthquake was at hand, for the morrow would be—if it ever came—Easter Sunday. Plainly, all the signs pointed to an exciting night.

My small faith in prophecy did not, however, hinder me from making sure that my revolver was well-oiled and hung on a bed-post. The window of the school-room, high above the ground, but only a few feet from the roof of an old ruin, was heavily barred—with bars of wood! The massive double-leaf plank doors had no lock. The log-like pupils’ bench, topped by the old colonial teacher’s chair, piled against it, however, promised racket enough to wake me in case of attempted intrusion. I found several old sacks to serve as “mattress” and, stripping off my sweat-heavy day garb, slipped into the woolen union-suit and socks that made up my sleeping costume. However much I might reduce my load in my indifference to outward appearance, I would not have been without this complete change for the night if I had had to make two trips to fetch them. I had no matches, and the boys had been unable to produce a candle. The rain had died down and everywhere utter stillness reigned. I rolled up in my poncho and fell asleep.

A suspicious noise woke me in what was probably a few minutes. Scores of mice were scampering over the uneven floor, squeaking hilariously. By the time I had grown accustomed to the sound, I had dozed off again. From a chaotic dream of crowded and varied incidents I came gradually to the consciousness of a rattling at the wooden window-bars. I sprang across the floor and peered out into the unfathomable mountain night; but I have never been certain whether the sound I heard was the hurrying of bare feet in soft mud and the tail of a whisper, or the creature of a startled imagination. With thirty half-perpendicular miles in my legs I was in no mood to sit up waiting for trouble, and making sure once more that my revolver was within easy reach, I set the bed-floor creaking again. My next consciousness was of a dawn bright with the promise of an unclouded day peering in upon me through the window-bars, and of the Indian boys whispering through the barricaded door to know whether I was still alive and ready for the two raw eggs they had collected.

An erratic mountain path that it was not easy to distinguish from the beds of mountain brooks, and generally deep in mud, clambered without apparent direction into dripping-wet wooden mountain ranges, sometimes plunging headlong down through bottomless valleys, sometimes flanking them in enormous horseshoe curves. How I pushed on all the morning without getting lost I do not know, for certainly there were a score of times when there was no plausible excuse for picking the right one of a half-dozen paths. I sighted several miserable huts, and once a village, but these were never near the trail; and when I decided to apply for food at the next one, another of those sudden changes of climate left the dripping forested mountains behind me, and underfoot was a desert-dry world which even the hardy dwellers of two decrepit knock-kneed huts had long since abandoned. In southern Ecuador and northern Peru the Andes break up and all but disintegrate. There are still plenty of mountains, but, true to their Latin-American environment, they lack team-work, and do not stick together sufficiently to give the traveler footing upon them. Directly before me Ecuador fell unfathomably away to the Macará, like an auburn hair across a painted landscape, while beyond, to appearances unattainable, Peru lay piled pell-mell into the southern sky. It was as if the Carpenter of the Universe had said: “Let here be the dividing line between two distrusting nations,” and had smote the earth with His mightiest tool. Over all the scene was a sun-baked, utterly uninhabited silence, as of some valley of desolation from which all life had forever fled.

The trail down which I jolted had exploded into a score of barely visible paths that spread in every direction over the drear, furnace-hot hills. It seemed as if, once near the frontier, every traveler either dashed blindly forward to get quickly across it unseen, or lost his courage and fled back into the interior. I set a due course for the thread-like river almost directly below. At high noon, my every joint jarred loose, I stood at last on the extreme edge of Ecuador, the reddish-brown waters of the Macará lapping at my blistered feet, and on every hand a blazing, utterly unpeopled desert, with nowhere the vestige of track or trail.

The river, nearly a quarter-mile wide, swollen by the rains above, raged swiftly by, a barrier of unknown possibilities. Its surface, covered everywhere with ripples, suggested that it was less deep than broad. I piled my baggage on the shore and, stripping to the waist, waded in. The powerful current all but swept me off my feet and the water quickly reached my upper garments. I returned to strip entirely, strapped my revolver about my chest and, picking a stout stick from the undergrowth, fought my way inch by inch to the opposite shore. But I had to go back to Ecuador for my possessions. It required five crossings, trusting only a few of them at a time to the treacherous current, and more than an hour of unremitting vigilance, before I had landed my bedraggled belongings at last on the shores of Peru, more forlorn than at the landing of Pizarro and his fellow-adventurers. By careful calculation, checked by native record, I was 466 miles south of Quito and 630 from the Colombian border.

Under some barbed bushes I picked a sand-burr spot as nearly shaded as could be found along the desert bank, and, having shaved, that I might enter the new republic in disguise, dipped up a can of coffee-colored Macará and fell upon the lead-heavy rapadura the Indian boys had sold me, and the can of salmon which I had preserved for Easter Sunday only by the exercise of sternest will-power. It was three fourths full of a pale, watery, soup-like liquid in which floated dejectedly a few small lumps of what had once long ago been carp or dog-fish. Luckily there was a difference in the size of the cans, so that I could generally tell whether I was drinking salmon or the Macará. Then, when I had written up my notes, I proceeded to turn the meal into a banquet in comparison, by reading that chapter of Prescott recounting what Pizarro and his fellow-tramps did not find to eat on their first landing. Being far from mortal ken in an uncharted crack of the earth, it may be fancied I should have been eager to hurry on. Somehow, now I had reached Peru, there came over me a languorous indifference to further advance. The sun was low before I rose and turned my attention to the task of discovering my whereabouts.

I found myself gazing along a dreary, sheer mountain-wall, grown only with sparse, bristling cactus shrubs that refused a hand-hold, seeking a place to insert my toes and start southward. Leisurely, but decidedly, I grasped the first possibility, and for an hour or more might have been seen—had there been eyes to see—playing goat along the face of calcined hills that fell so abruptly into the racing Macará that they came a score of times uncomfortably near taking me with them. During that hour I advanced fully five hundred yards—in a direction I did not care to go—gathering cactus thorns at every step, and ended down at the edge of the river again, exactly as far into Peru as when I had begun the struggle upward an hour before. Here were a few yards of level shore, and when I had drunk the stream perceptibly lower, I made my way along until I came upon a labyrinth of cow-paths. That one which most nearly agreed with my compass turned due east and crawled off through the bushes, as if fearful of being followed, and left me standing pathless in a maze of barren, cactus-grown hills. Tearing my way over them by dead reckoning, now struggling to a thorn-barricaded summit from which stretched vistas of more thorny-jungled hills, now crashing with lacerated skin down into another desert valley, where a few wild jack-asses browsed on the scanty leaves of bristling bushes, I surmounted again and again the same identical scene of dreary nothingness as far as the eye could see beyond.

The region was waterless. Evidently I was doomed to suffer that hell of the desert traveler, an all-night thirst; for dusk was already thickening. The very leaves of the invariably thorny bushes were shrivelled and brown. Even the air seemed wholly devoid of moisture. Then suddenly, as I tore my way to another tangled summit, there sounded faintly, far off to the right, the sweetest music known to the tropical wanderer,—the babble of running water. I plunged down through the militant vegetation to where a clear little river was hurrying down along a bed several times too large for it to join the parent Macará. Enormous boulders and tumbled rocks bordered the stream. In the tail of the day I stumbled along up it, jealous of being separated from it as from a beloved being; and when night called a halt I stacked my belongings and spread my poncho on the stony bank with its prattle in my ears, that it should not escape unheard during the night. The brigands reputed to infest the frontier had faded away into the nebulous realms of fiction. I would almost have invited robbery for an opportunity to inquire my whereabouts. But the stream muffled my movements and the munching of the lump of crude sugar, and when I had listened awhile to the singing of the tropical night, and watched the fireflies coming with their lanterns to look me over, I fell asleep, uncovered and but slightly dressed, so warm was this sunken chasm of the Andes.

The fate of serving as banquet-board to platoons of tropical insects robbed me of the sound sleep the lullaby of the stream should have afforded. Dawn found me emerging from a dip, and when I had disciplined a stomach that seemed sure to have its plaints unheeded for the rest of the day at least by eating bit by bit the remaining lump of rapadura, I took up the serious problem of how to get somewhere else. The ghost of a path crossed the stream not far above, but soon played the stale joke of fading to a goat trail, then into thin air, and left me to tear my way back to the stream. This, I noted, came down more or less from the south, and I set out along it, determined to push as far up country as possible. For several hours I had explored my way more or less southward, crossing the wandering stream every few yards by goat-like jumps from rock to rock, when I was suddenly startled by the sight of human beings. A sun-scorched Indian woman in some remnants of garments, a child astride her back, a boy at her heels, appeared from nowhere in the boulder-strewn river-bed. With a laconic greeting, she led the way up-stream. Once she took to the jungled plain beside it, and sent the boy up a tree to knock down some half-green oranges. Down in the river-bed again the god of the Incas poured down his perpendicular rays like molten lead. At length the woman mumbled a few words in a monotone, pointed out a faint path up the face of the eastern sand cliff, in which hundreds of screaming parrakeets had their nests, grasped the coin I held out to her, and glided noiselessly away into the wilderness. The path disappeared even sooner than I had expected. I clambered up several more perpendicular miles, only to descend and lose myself in a jungle-tangled quebrada. Inch by inch I tore my way through the densest wilderness of briars and brambles, struggling to release the bundle on my shoulders after I had myself escaped, ever on the watch for snakes and wild animals. Without real food for days, burning with tropical thirst, my hand to hand conflict with the jungle was near a dead-lock when there appeared far above me three scattered Indian huts. A precipitous ravine, armed to the teeth, lay between. I dived down into it, to emerge almost an hour afterward, torn, bleeding, and smeared with earth, at the edge of another and hitherto unseen jungled chasm, backed by a nearly impassable patch of uncultivated sugar-cane. My legs were as ropes of sand when I approached an Indian in his hut door, but I set up a stern outward appearance to suggest what might happen if he refused me food and drink.

Though expressionless as all his race, he proved unusually tractable, and soon brought out to where I sat in the shade against the eastern hut-wall a steaming gourdful of the ordinarily despised yuca, and what seemed to be very young pork. I had half-emptied the dish before a bone too tiny for such an origin caused me to look up inquiringly.

“Cui,” said the Indian laconically.

Though I had often heard them squeaking about the earth floors of wayside huts, it was my first taste of guinea-pig, to this day the chief meat of the Andean Indian. I think it was not entirely due to my prolonged fast that I found it more palatable than pork; but small, distressingly small, even after the Indian’s mate had added several choclo tandas, steaming rolls of crushed green corn wrapped in husks.

The camino real to Ayavaca lay in plain sight across the gully, and the town, according to the Indian, was but two leagues off. But the Andean traveler must learn not to let his hopes grow buoyant and playful, and to remember that two leagues from the lips of an aboriginal is as apt to mean a hard day’s travel as an hour’s stroll. Never once did the “royal highway” pause in its climb into the lofty range ahead. My spirits rose and fell with each opportunity to inquire the distance. Within two hours I had been answered: “Two leagues,” “six leagues,” “four hours,” “ya no ’stá lejos,” “Todavía ’stá retiradita,” “Ah, it is far away, patrón,” and “More than two tambos”—a tambo, from the Inca word for inn, or rest-house, seems to mean about a half day’s travel. Sunset found me far up on a great bleak tableland, a rolling, broken world, wherein was no suggestion of a town, stretching away on all sides as far as the eye could reach even in the transparent air of these heights.

Beyond, the trail passed close to a large tiled house where a barefoot man of Indian type, though white of skin as myself, answered my request for posada by silently spreading a small square of cloth on a log under the projecting eaves, and went on with his task of mending with an adz the crooked stick that served him as plow. An enamelled sign on the house-wall, announcing it an “Estanco de Sal,” was the only outward evidence that I had left Ecuador behind. In Peru, salt, like tobacco, is a government monopoly, sold only in licensed shops. Near me several thinly attired women were balling newly dyed yarn, and children were sprawling about the ground with goats, chickens, and yellow curs. A heavy rain was falling. Uncomfortable as was my position, I could do nothing else than keep it. It was not that the family was indifferent or hard-hearted, merely that I had reached what, to their apathetic way of life, was a happy state,—sitting on a log under the eaves, and it would hardly have been possible to explain to them that something else would have been needed for perfect comfort. The man was plainly of kindly temperament, with some education, of a sort, yet I was left to squat on the log until black night had settled down, without even an opportunity to remove the outer evidence of the gaunt and strenuous days behind.

Well after dark a half-Indian girl set before me a little wooden box, covered it with a cloth, and served me an egg soup, followed by a hot stew of yuca and beans. Gradually the family advanced from self-conscious silence to Latin garrulousness. By the time I had been invited inside and given one of several bare divans of reeds set into the mud walls, the conversation I had sought in vain to set going during the first hours ran on unchecked until long after I would have been asleep.

A dense fog enveloping the mountainside turned to rain as I waded away in the morning. Only by waiting hours could I have gotten anything more than the “aguita,” a cup of hot water with a bit of rapadura melted in it, on which I set out for whatever the new day had in store. I had only half-suspected the height of the world before me. For hours I strained upward into ever cooler, green mountains, reeking mud underfoot, with some travel, yet always a sense of solitude, even just over the next knoll beyond a passing group. Once I met a blind traveler picking his way quite swiftly with his stick along the slippery, descending mountain road. By noon I was far up where the rivers are born, fog and clouds hiding all but the immediate world about me. All the hunger of the past days seemed to have accumulated, until I felt like some starving beast of prey, ready to pounce pitilessly upon whatever fell in my way. Just beyond the abra, the cold, fog-swept pass at the summit of the climb, I came upon a house of considerable size. Half skating, half wading down to the door, I found an old and a young woman of much Indian blood squatting in the earth-floored kitchen near a large steaming kettle over the familiar three-stone cooking-stove of the Andes.

“No hay absolutamente nada,” they replied unfeelingly.

I stepped in, swung off my load, and, showing Peruvian silver, announced that I had come to stay until they had sold me food. The women sat motionless, with that passiveness the Indian so often depends upon to drive off importunate persons. I offered any reasonable price for one of the chickens wandering about the room. The older woman mumbled that clumsy, threadbare lie, “Son ajenos” (they belong to someone else). To my suggestion of roasted plantains she answered that she was ill. When I inquired the contents of the kettle, both took refuge in the exasperating silence that is the last weapon of their race. A certain amount of patience is a virtue; too much is an asininity. I picked the kettle off the fire, raked from the ashes one of the roasting plantains, found a tin plate and a wooden spoon stuck behind a sapling beam of the mud wall, and retired again to the block of wood on which I had been seated. The pair watched me in stolid silence. When I had filled the plate the younger one rose to carry off the kettle. I requested her, in the voice of an ill-tempered general commanding a widely scattered regiment, to leave it where it was until I had had my fill, and the pair fled precipitously from the room, flinging over their shoulders some threat of calling the man of the house. I knew the Andean Indian too well to fear trouble, but turned my face to the door and loosened my revolver in its holster. The kettle contained a boiling-hot stew of beans and corn, sufficient to have fed a dozen men. Six of them might still have feasted on what was left when I tossed a sol, easily four times the whole kettle’s worth, into the empty plate and marched on down the reeking mountainside.

Had I but known it, however, I might have avoided resorting to force. Barely a mile beyond appeared Ayavaca, a dismal and orderless collection of gloomy adobe, tiled houses, sprawling on the edge of what evidently would have been a great valley on a clear day, and literally running with red mud. I skated down into the plaza and, marching into the open office of the subprefect, sent the bedraggled soldier on guard to announce my arrival. A gaping group of awkward, mud-bespattered mountaineers quickly surrounded me, but with them arrived several white men in modern garb, one of whom announced himself subprefect of the province of Ayavaca, entirely at my service. I displayed my American and Ecuadorian documents, requesting him to take official cognizance of my entry into Peru, and expressed my august desire to rent for a day or two a room with bed, table, chair and water supply—experience teaches the Andean traveler to specify in detail—and to be handed the menu card.

“Here you are in your own house,” replied the subprefect, assuming the attitude of a sovereign receiving credentials from an ambassador; “You have only to ask.”

A cloth was soon spread on the official government desk and, less than an hour after requisitioning rations in the mountain hut, I was sitting with the provincial commander and his assistants before an abundance of native viands that included even the luxury of wheat bread. For I had chanced to arrive just in time for the “banquet” offered by the town to its new ruler in honor of his inauguration.

But alas, I had gained nothing in comfort by coming to Peru. The available chamber in “my own house” proved to be a den adjoining the subprefect’s quarters, the provincial harness-and-lamp room. It was only by much cajolery that I finally got it furnished with a narrow five-foot plank bench and a pair of ragged horse-blankets. But at least I could read by night such literature as I chanced to have with me—by depriving the town of one of its few street-lamps when a soldier came to distribute them in the evening.

Life was dismal at best in Ayavaca. The cold and clammy downpour continued unabated. While I developed my exposed films in water supplied by an eavestrough, the population blocked the doorway of my “room,” making every exit and entry like boarding a subway train in the rush hour. There were no real shops in the dreary mountain town, but only gloomy mud huts where a few products were unofficially sold. The one sidewalk was taken up by drenched and downcast asses, forcing pedestrians to splash through the unpaved street. The products of the soil were not high priced: A guinea-pig—next to children the most plentiful product of the town—cost five cents; a live chicken, fifteen; but it was always easier to pay the price than to find the chicken for sale. Commerce was on the friend-to-friend basis, and he who would purchase must be well acquainted with the seller, or a protégé of the all-powerful subprefect. Only liquor was to be had in abundance. The provincial officials, from my host down to the village school-master, were more or less intoxicated from mid-morning to midnight. In that state, frankness protruded through their racial courtesy, and they were divided in their assertions between the opinion that I was a spy sent out by my government and the conviction that I had been offered some colossal prize for covering the world on foot. It was with difficulty that I avoided sinking into the general intoxication. Whenever two or three are gathered together in Peru, it is the custom for one of the group to fill a glass from the inevitable bottle—and Peruvian aguardiente is no harmless nectar—then ask permission to drink the health of Tal Fulano on his right. “Muchas gracias,” says Tal Fulano, and proceeds to drink next—from the same glass—the health of his nearest companion; and so on round and round the circle to infinity and complete insobriety. The inexperienced gringo who fails in the etiquette of this custom, whatever the number of rounds, is looked upon with much the same contempt as the American who lets his saloon companions “set ’em up” repeatedly without offering to do so himself; and runs the risk of having an incensed subprefect, too far gone in frankness, turn upon him and invite him to make his home elsewhere.

Every minute of the day following my arrival it rained, slackening somewhat at rare intervals, only to begin again with a roar that sounded like an avalanche down a nearby mountainside. Twenty-four hours later my films were as wet as when first hung up. Water and mud invaded even our minds. Rivers of liquid mud raced down every street and across the broad, half-cobbled plaza. Not once during the day did the eye catch a hint of the great valley on the edge of which Ayavaca is perched. The few residents forced to go out of doors wore suecos, wooden clog overshoes, something like the rainy-day footwear of the Japanese, that increased the wearer’s height by a half-foot or more. The majority huddled in their dreary mud houses, crowding into the low doorways to stare after me when I passed, commenting aloud on my raison d’être.

The postmaster of Ayavaca was a comely young woman of considerable Indian blood, her office scattered promiscuously about the baked mud-dwelling of her parents. I had concluded to mail the films and notebooks on hand, rather than risk their loss or destruction in what promised to be difficult going ahead, and having ransacked the town for the necessary wrapping paper, and tied the package with government tape, I presented it for registry. It seemed better to make a clear breast of the matter than to risk the Pandoric curiosity of the Ayavaca postal system, and I explained that, while the contents was of vast value to me and the future history of Peru, it was of none whatever to anyone else. Stamps were at length found in the right-hand drawer of the hand sewing-machine on the earth floor, a native ink was brewed over the fagot-fire in the kitchen for the imprinting of the official seal, dug out from a chest of stockings and feminine small-clothes, and after a social call of more than an hour’s duration I shook hands with the entire family, twice with the post-mistress herself, and left with her repeated reassurance ringing in my ears:

“No tenga cuidado—lose no sleep over it, señor; it will go safely to Europe and the United States without being lost.”

Some time after dark, the rain having at last left off with sullen grace, I was limbering up my legs for an early start in the morning when I chanced to pass the correo. The door was closed; but this was one of the few houses of Ayavaca boasting a window—though without glass, unknown to most towns of the Andes—barricaded with wooden bars. Inside, gathered about an apathetic candle, sat the post-mistress and her entire family, the open package in her lap—passing my films from hand to hand and puzzling in vain over my notebooks, with a leisureliness that showed they had settled down to make the most of a long evening’s entertainment. My first impulse to snatch open the door was succeeded by reflection. Knowing the extreme sensibility of these Andean townsmen, I suspected that, were my discovery known to her, the post-mistress would be more than apt, out of pique, to lose or destroy the cause of her undoing before I could recover them from government possession. I swallowed the impulse and splashed on through the night.

Months afterward I had word that the package reached the addressee in perfect condition, though in disorder.

With little more information than that the next town I must hunt out of the wilderness was Huancabamba, I slid down the red slopes from Ayavaca, now and then glancing back to wonder what excuse even Spaniards could have considered sufficient to found a town in such a location. The subprefect, far from providing the Indian guide and carrier he had so often promised in his cups, had bade me “adiós” from his bed, with the cheering assurance that I was bound soon to lose my way and perish. My load was several pounds heavier than on my arrival; for I had added to it not only a block of rapadura and seventeen loaves of bread—Ayavaca size—but a huge chunk of fresh beef. Even my money had become a burden again, for instead of the bills of Ecuador my “road-change” must now be carried in silver. The semi-monthly daily of Ayavaca had appeared the evening before with an astonishing history of the town’s distinguished guest, honoring me with the title of “that intrepid explorer,” a designation which the subprefect made use of in his official orders to his subordinates along the way, and which, copied from one document to another, was destined to cling to me all the length of Peru. My eye never fell upon it that I did not recall the native dishes I was so often forced to delve into during the journey.

Gibbon asserts that the civilization of a country may best be gaged by the number and condition of its roads. If so, northern Peru is sunk in the depths of barbarism. The Incas swung bridges of withes along their great military highways, the Spaniards built some of stone; the modern inhabitants of this region merely let their roads grow up of themselves, like brambles in an uncultivated field. At a mountain summit, beyond a raging mountain current in which I all but lost my possessions, immense gray curtains of fog left me only instinct and my compass by which to choose between the faint sandy paths that split and forked at every opportunity. The trail I happened to take zigzagged quickly down into the bed of a snarling mountain stream between sheer rock walls, choked with tough, thorny undergrowth, along which it sprang back and forth from rock to rock, dragging me in pursuit through an endless tangle of vegetation, often by vaulted tunnels through which I could only tear my way by creeping on all fours. By dusk it had widened sufficiently to give the path foothold along one bank, and when darkness brought me to a halt, I found space under a scraggly tree to spread my poncho. In my pack the seventeen loaves of bread had amalgamated with the crude sugar and formed a coating about the boiled beef. I stowed away in my hat, for safekeeping, the few more or less whole loaves, and fell upon the pulp that remained. It was a dry meal, for all the rain. Though the stream close below sounded tantalizingly in my ears all the night through, an impenetrable jungle cut me off from it, and only the few wild lemons I had picked along the way ministered to the after-thirst of a long day’s tramp.

The pleasure of dressing at dawn in garments still dripping wet was enhanced by the discovery that a colony of red ants, appointing a night-shift, had formed a bread-line from my hat to their neighboring village and reduced me to a breakfast of river water where the trail again touched the stream a mile beyond. Three solitary hours later I came upon a miserable little shack of open-work reeds and upright poles topped by thatch. On the ground beside it a slatternly female was cooking for several horsemen. Two rivers ahead were reported greatly swollen, and I accepted an invitation to wait and accompany a youth bound for his employer’s hacienda. Wait I did, a full three hours, amid the usual fauna of an Andean hut, while the travelers took final leave of each other a score of times in as many rounds of aguardiente de caña, a native concoction of distilled sugarcane, each swallow of which is to an ordinary mortal not unlike a sudden blow on the head with a spiked war-club. In the end, a calabash of yuca stew rewarded my patience. The youth staggered aboard his shaggy horse at last and we descended quickly into a dense, damp-hot valley with a broad, swift river. I mounted the horse’s rump to cross two arms of the stream and a stretch of swamp between, in constant peril of tobogganing down the animal’s tail, my load dragging heavily from my shoulders. The moment I slipped off on dry land, the youth, still distinctly under the influence of concentrated sugar-cane, demanded a “peseta” for his services. Long, hot hours we marched along thick-jungled river beds in narrow, fertile valleys enclosed by sterile, though green-tinted mountainsides bristling with cactus. The trail panted frequently over a steep desert hillock, the crupper of the animal saving me much time in disrobing at a dozen smaller brooks, between which my companion rode at my heels in gloomy silence. At a larger stream he collected a real and announced that the fee for crossing a river ahead would be another “peseta.” As the effects of permitting the unbridled drinking of his health wore off, he recalled the fiambre in his saddle-bags, and paused to offer me, with the patronizing air befitting a horseman toward a man afoot, a handful of parched corn and a rag of sun-dried beef. Gradually he became less taciturn, then garrulous and gay. He was by no means a peon, being assistant mayordomo of the estate toward which we were headed, and even wore shoes. Yet when I photographed him, it required considerable explanation to give him any clear conception of what the result would be of “pointing the foolish little machine” at him.

“Y su aposento, donde está?” (Where is your lodging—i.e., native land?) he inquired.

When I had answered, he rode fully ten minutes in puzzled silence. Then he called out over his shoulder:

“Y ese país suyo, ese Esta’os Uni’os, es pueblo ó hacienda?” (That country of yours, is it a village or a plantation?)

The world, as he knew it—and his knowledge was on a par with that of thousands of dwellers in the Andes—was made up of those two divisions.

We left a curving river, labored over a divide, and descended to the Aranza, a furlong wide, roaring angrily. At sight of it the youth regretted the bargain he had made, fearing his horse could not breast the swift current under the weight of both of us, and suggested that I strip and swim, letting him carry my clothing and bundle. There seemed to be no way to avoid risking the wealth in my trousers; but these simple countrymen of the Andes are commonly more reliable in matters of trust than appearances suggest, and a well-directed bullet would avert any tendency to decamp. I strapped my revolver about my head and plunged in for a ten-minute struggle with the current, but it was not without relief that I landed beside the exhausted horse and regained my possessions. We were already within the territory of the “Hacienda San Pablo,” though still miles from the dwelling. On all sides, as far as the eye could strain, the river valley and the mountains above were unbroken wilderness, utterly uninhabited. Yet the region was rich in produce. The chirimoya, that vegetable icecream of the tropics, hung in car-loads from the trees; small, but compact and juicy wild lemons, carpeted the trail. Parrots and screaming bands of parrakeets flitted in and out of guayaba and sapote trees; here and there the dense-green dome of a mango tree shouldered its way up through its punier fellows of the forest.

It was nearing dusk, and I was near exhaustion under my load and the pitiless tropical sun of seven unbroken hours of swift, rough tramping, when my companion pointed out far ahead, where the wall of the Central Cordillera shut off the horizon, a red dot in the green immensity,—the hacienda house. Black night had fallen when we reached the half-constructed building, and we stumbled on for some time more before we came upon the rambling thatched ruin in which the owner still lived. He was Eduardo Medina, once a law student in the University of San Marcos of Lima, a sane, well-read, earnest man, contrasting strangely with the uncouth countrymen about him. His wife, a handsome limeña, was the first woman of education I had so far seen in rural South America. This extraordinary Latin-American couple, noting the swarms of lawyers that vegetate in provincial capitals, had renounced the uninspiring fleshpots of the cities, and purchasing for a song some twenty-five square leagues of semi-tropical solitude, had come to start life anew in this wilderness with the shaggy world piled up on all sides, and set their race a much needed example. Here was such a welcome as the wilderness traveler often dreams, but seldom attains. Not merely did they offer the accommodation Andean custom requires all hacendados to furnish travelers, each according to his caste, but their hospitality was genuine and active. The adobe lean-to into which I was led, for the astonishing Andean purpose of “washing up before supper,” had not only a real bed, mattress and all, on springs of split bamboo, but the first sheets and pillows and suggestion of civilized comfort I had seen in Peru. It did not require the reminder that the morrow was Sunday, and Medina’s assertion that they were famished for civilized conversation, to make me accept his invitation to prolong my stay. My companion of the day never recovered from his astonishment at seeing the “patrón” seat at his own table and treat as an equal a man who traveled on foot; and as often as I caught his eye among the group that hovered about the door all the evening, he gazed at me in a manner that seemed to implore me not to mention the reals he had collected under the impression that I was a mere man, and not a caballero.

Fertile tracts of valleys and mountains twenty-five miles square can be bought in this section of Peru for $250. Yet this does not mean that wealth awaits the purchaser. “Faltan brazos,” as the Peruvian puts it; “arms” are lacking. The scanty population has no stimulus to exertion in a region where nature supplies their simple wants almost without labor, and to Medina life was a constant struggle for employees. In days of fiesta, when money was needed to pay the priest or celebrate a festival, many came to contract their services and accept an “advance,” but with no representative of government at hand, there was no means of forcing them to do the work for which they had been prepaid. Some labored languidly and intermittently a few weeks a year, none more than half the days that were not sacred to some festival and general drunkenness. On the hacienda were a scattered score of arrendatarios, native families who rent a patch of ground on which to build a hut and plant a bit of yuca and corn, with the right to pasture a few cattle on the estate, all for a yearly rental of $2, which was commonly as hard to collect as labor. The almost total lack of transportation gave no market for any excess of produce, and here was the extraordinary case of a university-educated man and wife owning what would be with us an entire county, living a hand-to-mouth existence very little above abject poverty. Oranges, which the owner asserted he would be only too happy to sell at five cents a hundred, rotted under the trees faster than the hogs could eat them; mangoes lay where they fell, and the splendid chirimoya was a mere worthless wild fruit no one took the trouble to gather, except as personal appetite prompted. The sugarcane they succeeded in raising they were glad to get any price for, after it had been squeezed in trapiches, crude presses run by hand, and the guarapo boiled down into blocks of rapadura and wrapped in banana leaves. Most of it was turned into aguardiente that could occasionally be sent to town.

My postal experience in Ayavaca recalled to Medina one of his own. Before they left Lima to take up their newly acquired residence, the couple had found there were two post-offices, at Ayavaca and Pacaipampa, about equal distance from it,—two days on muleback. It chanced that Señora Medina had ordered her “Modas Femininas” sent to Ayavaca, while her husband gave Pacaipampa as his address to the subscription department of the daily “El Comercio.” After the first few numbers only one or two copies of the newspaper adorned the weekly mail-bag of the hacienda. La señora also noted that she was not receiving her fashion journal regularly. The hacendado started an investigation. He found that the comely post-mistress of Ayavaca had recently acquired a considerable reputation as an authority on up-to-date fashions. In Pacaipampa he discovered that the government mail service was in the hands of an old man unusually well versed in the politics of the day. Husband and wife wrote to Lima ordering “El Comercio” sent to Ayavaca and the “Modas Femininas” by way of Pacaipampa. Since then both had received their respective journals as regularly as transportation conditions in these primitive regions made reasonable.

“You have no inconvenience in riding?” asked my host, as we set out on horseback to visit the estate on Sunday.

“Not at all, señor.”

“Then I shall furnish you a mount to Huancabamba,” he announced.

I declined. It seemed foolish to besmirch my long, unbroken record afoot. But he insisted on at least sending a peon to carry my baggage and to serve as “guide,” and actually kept his promise!

“It dawned raining,” as they say in the Andes, but the peon assigned the task, because his rent was in arrears, was already astride a good saddle-horse when I stepped out into the storm. Another debtor had been ordered to furnish a boiled chicken, the cook, a bag of rice. With few respites we zigzagged all day up into the Cordillera Central, ever vaster views of the valleys about San Pablo opening out, though advancing little except upward. Relieved of my load I seemed to have wings, and in the steeper places had often to wait for the horseman. Barely a hut and not a traveler did we pass during a day which ended with a perpendicular climb to a miserable mud hovel on a high and wintry pampa. Alone, accommodation might have been refused me, but my companion was distantly related to the two crabbed females who, with their tawny flock of half-naked children, existed in this cheerless spot, and I was passively suffered to remain. In their mud den, where the usual fagot-fire was blazing under an ancient and enormous kettle set on three stones, I sat down on a sort of short trough with six-inch legs, one of the “chairs” of this region, when any exist, and some time later we were served in bowls made of gourds a boiling-hot mixture of potatoes, habas, and some mountain mystery. Still unsatisfied, I drew out my bag of rice. Válgame Diós if that lazy cook of the “Hacienda San Pablo” had not delivered it to me uncooked! I followed the custom of the place and circumstances by presenting the women with enough of the grain to feed her entire family for a day or two, then asked that a bowlful be cooked for me.

“Now hay manteca—there is no lard,” mumbled one of the females.

“Eureka!” I cried, “Then for once I can have it cooked as it should be.”

“There is no other kettle,” said the woman in a faint monotone, projecting her lips toward that containing the stew.

“I will wait until it is empty,” I replied cheerfully.

With no other excuse to offer, she took refuge in silence. An hour passed before I broke it again.

“And the rice, señora,” I suggested.

“No hay manteca,” she repeated in the same dull monotone, and the conversation went on again around the same vicious circle. For more than an hour I coaxed and cajoled, for a single harsh or loud word to these unwashed mountain-dwellers can undo a day’s careful pleading. As constant dripping of water in time wears away even stone, so my incessant return to the subject at length became even more painful than the stirring from their customary lethargy. The younger female rose languidly and took from the wall in a dark corner a perfectly sound kettle just suited to the purpose and, after deftly stealing about half of it, set to boiling what I had kept for myself.

The adjoining den had not only an earth floor, but the hillside had not been levelled before building. The peon spread a saddle-blanket and one of his own ponchos for me as solicitously as a valet preparing his master’s quarters; yet in as impersonal a manner as he might have herded his sheep into their corral for the night. With this protection, and my own garments wrapped about my head, I passed a tolerable night, virtually on the ridge of the central range of the Andes. My peon, the two women, several children, two half-Indian youths who had arrived long after dark, at least six dogs, and a score of guinea-pigs all slept in the same room—all, that is, except the cuis, which spent most of it squeaking about in the dark, and now and then running over my prostrate form.

On the bleak, rolling pampa of sear yellow bunch-grass, dotted by a few shaggy wild cattle, across which howled wintry winds, I was not uncomfortable afoot; but the peon from the “tierra caliente” of his native valley was blue-lipped and chattering with cold, even with his head through several heavy blankets and a scarf about his face. I was passing back over the Cordillera Central for the first time since Hays and I had traversed it by the Quindío pass. Not far below the arctic summit we sighted the Huancabamba river, born a few leagues to the north, its broad, swift-sloping valley-walls spotted with little green chacras, and gradually dropped into summer again. Trees grew up about us, birds began once more to sing, cultivated fields shut in by cactus hedges bordered the trail. When at last we sighted the town of Huancabamba from far off, the peon halted and asked to be allowed to turn back. He seemed to fancy his services had been chiefly those of “guide,” instead of baggage-carrier. I refused to take up my burden again merely for what I took to be a whim to be back lolling in the shade of his own mango tree. It was not until later that I realized that, like most country youths of his class in Peru, he dreaded entering the provincial capital, lest he be held and forced to serve in the army.

The swift Huancabamba river we crossed astride the peon’s horse, though not both at a time. When I had dismounted on the further bank, my companion called the animal back by a peculiar sound, half whistle, half cluck, and not long afterward we clattered into the famous city of Huancabamba. Once dismissed, the peon left town at once, though darkness was already at hand. Medina had insisted that I pay him nothing, as he owed the hacienda more than two years’ rent—namely, nearly four dollars.

On the map Huancabamba seems of about the size and importance of Philadelphia; on the ground it is a moribund mud village in a half-sterile hollow between barren, towering mountains. Historically it is famous. Prescott assures us that “Guancabamba was large, populous and well-built, many of its houses of solid stone. A river which passed through the town had a bridge over which ran a fine Inca highroad.” How times do change! Officially, to be sure, it is still a city; but a “city” in this region is a place where bread is made, as those who wear shoes are white, and those who wear bayeta are cholos or Indians. Picturesqueness of costume there was none, this having disappeared near Cuenca along with the Quichua tongue. Indians of pure race and distinctive garb had been rare south of Zaraguro; here was still plenty of Indian blood, but only in the veins of “civilized” mestizos. It is not far from the watershed of the Andes. The town of Huarmaca, just up on the ridge of the Cordillera above, has a church one side of the roof of which sends its waters to the Pacific, and the other to the Atlantic.

There was no suggestion of hotel. The subprefect studied my papers in great curiosity, with half the town looking over his shoulder, before he answered my most important query with:

“Ah, it is impossible to-day, on such short notice. But to-morrow—”

“I need it to-day,” I protested, knowing it was only a question of insisting, to overcome the racial apathy.

“Then I will give you my bed and sleep on the floor!” cried the subprefect.

In that pompous moment, with a large delegation of huancabambinos looking on, no doubt he would, but such Andean self-sacrifice quickly fades away, once the limelight is switched off.

“I prefer to rent a room of my own,” I persisted.

“Ah, now that is impossible. But to-morrow—”

I bowed my way out, throwing over my shoulder the information that I would go down to the bank of the river and sleep on the ground. It would be softer, and there were bathing facilities. Horror spread over all faces. A man, an estranjero who came with the recommendations of great governments! Impossible! The city of Huancabamba could not permit it! When word of it reached the outside world...! Soldiers were sent scurrying in all directions—and two minutes later one of them found a room for rent in the home of one of the “best families,” exactly across the street from the subprefectura.

It can hardly be that I was the first stranger to enter Huancabamba since Hernando de Soto was sent by Pizarro to reconnoiter the region after the capture of the Inca. Yet one might have fancied so. Whether it was due to some canine sense of smell we of less favored lands lack, I never succeeded in getting within ten yards of a huancabambino before he was staring at me with bulging eyes and hanging jaw, all work, movement, and even conversation ceasing as I drew near. If I passed behind a group on a street corner, their necks went round with one accord, like those of owls, and they stared after me in unbroken silence as long as I remained in sight. Men and women, well-dressed and outwardly intelligent, dodged back into their house or shop as I appeared, to call wife or children as they might for a passing circus parade. The few sidewalks were really house verandas, sometimes roofed, and on all ordinary occasions pedestrians strolled along the center of the street. Now there was a stranger in town, virtually all took pains to cross to my side of the way, and though it required a distinct exertion to climb up to and down from this few yards of raised sidewalk, every inhabitant seemed to find some excuse every few minutes to wander by my door at a snail’s pace in his noiseless bare feet. If I began any species of activity,—to write, load my kodak, read, or even to wash my hands, the human stream was clogged like a log-raft against a snag and the population stacked up about my door until a well-aimed anything broke the keystone log, and gave me again for a moment light and air. It was the hospitable huancabambino custom to give me greeting, even when I was busy well inside the room, and to repeat the phrase in a louder and louder voice until I acknowledged it. Those few who passed on the further side of the street never failed to shout “Buenos días” across at me, though they might have looked in upon me a bare two minutes before. Now and then a more friendly member of society wandered complacently into the room, to peer over my shoulder, or to handle with the innocence of a three-year old child such of my possessions as took his fancy. Some drifted in even at night, long after I had retired, for, there being no other opening, to have closed the door would have been to smother.

In the far recesses of the Andes the simplest matter may become complex. My flannel road-shirt had at last succumbed to its varied hardships. Now, buying a shirt may seem too trivial an experience to be worthy of mention; in the wilds of Peru it is a transaction of deep importance. Huancabamba is overstocked with cloth-shops; but what Latin-American shopkeepers honestly believe a “very heavy shirt” would fall to pieces in three days under the exertions of a society darling. One garment promising moderate endurance I did find, but the combined jangling of all the bells of Quito was as nothing compared to its color scheme. Beside it the good old American flag would have looked dull and colorless. I set out to find a woman willing to make a new shirt on the pattern of the old. Most of them did not wish to; most of the others were too tired; two or three had less commonplace reasons, such as being in mourning, or having a pan to wash before Sunday, or a son to be married next week, or not having gone to confession recently. Toward noon I caught a shoemaker’s wife unawares, and had her promise to undertake the task before she could think of a plausible excuse. She thought a just price, I to furnish the cloth, would be twenty cents!

I canvassed the shops for heavy khaki. The stoutest on sale was flimsy as a chorus-girl’s bodice, its color plainly as evanescent as her complexion. I chose at last from a bolt of cloth designed for afternoon trousers, adding a spool of the strongest thread to be had. Experience had long since taught me that the tailors of Latin America use a thread so fine that a deep breath is almost sure to burst a seam or two. I delivered the materials and retired for a belated almuerzo in the mud hut where the daily cow sacrificed to Huancabamba’s appetite is sold in half-real nibbles. Now and then an urchin entered, clutching a nickel in one besmeared fist, to say in the uninflected monotone of a “piece” learned in school:

“Media carne, media vuelta,” (2 cents worth of meat, 2 cents change), to which the answer was almost sure to be:

“No hay vuelta” (there is no change), whereupon the emissary wandered homeward still clutching the coin, and the family evidently passed another meatless day.

Barely had I returned to my room when a fever fell upon me. At the height of the attack, when every movement was a mighty effort and every motionless moment an hour of deep enjoyment, an urchin appeared with the spool of thread I had provided, saying it was heavier than Huancabamba was accustomed to use and that I must supply a spool of No. 60. I reached for the brick that held back one of the leaves of the door, and he disappeared from my field of vision. An hour later he came back to report that the seamstress had broken a needle and refused to risk another. I suspended him by as much of a garment as he wore long enough to promise to cut off his ears, to have the subprefect put the seamstress in prison, and to bring down another earthquake upon Huancabamba unless the contract solemnly entered into was fulfilled before sundown; and I was not sharp-eyed enough to distinguish his little brown legs one from the other as he sped back to the zapatería. At dusk the shirt was delivered, an exact copy of the original, which was bequeathed to the miniature messenger.

A diet chiefly of quinine soon had me ready for the road again. My load was more burdensome than ever. A long stretch of wilderness ahead required the carrying of many pounds of food, and on down the valley of the Huancabamba I wobbled like an octogenarian. Most of the day lay across a desert of mighty broken chasms, leprous-dry under the blazing sun, scarred, gashed, and split with scores of lines, almost any of which might have been mistaken for the trail. Somehow I chanced to pick the right one and brought up at dusk at the hut of Alexandro Bobbío, far up the chasm of a small tributary.

Bobbío was a wiry man of fifty, son of an Italian, though officially a Peruvian, speaking only Spanish, but well-read, and of infinitely more industry and initiative than the natives. Unlike our own immigrants, those to South America retain for generations a distinct evidence of their origin; to the society about them they are still known as “hijos de italiano, alemán, inglés,” and the like, and the traveler is almost certain to find the man thus designated of far more worth than his neighbors, though commonly inferior to the race of his fathers. Bobbío was a government employee, stationed here in his thatched hut to check the cargoes of leaf tobacco that “salen pa’ fuera,” or pass out of Jaen province in large quantities for Huancabamba and the coast in leather-wrapped bundles on horses, mules, and cattle. Like several of Europe, the Peruvian government retains the monopoly of tobacco. For an official load of 69 kilograms it pays $10, and in some remote districts only $8.50. Each kilo produces twenty packages of cigarettes, selling for thirty centavos each; in other words the 69 kilos bring the government $208 gold. This system is directly inherited from Spain and colonial days. Stevenson found that the King purchased tobacco at three reals (three-eighths of a dollar), and sold it at $2, though much was spent on fiscales. It remained for republican Peru to open a truly enormous gulf between producer and consumer.

“I wish I could buy a burro, even a half-size one,” I sighed, half to myself, as I was straightening up under my burden next morning. Had he been an unalloyed Latin-American, Bobbío would have shrugged his shoulders and murmured something about life being a sad matter at best. Instead, he cried “Why didn’t you say so?” and, stepping out into the sunshine flooding the arid world like a shower of gold, waved his arms in some local code of wigwagging at a hut hung high up on the desert hillside across the “river.” Not long after there drifted up before the corredor where we sat in the shade a sun-scorched mestizo youth leading a small donkey, shaggy as a bear just emerging from his winter’s den. It proved to be a female of the species, about sweet sixteen as donkeys go, and due in the years to come to double in size; moreover, she was chúcaro, in other words had never yet contributed to the labor of the world, and appeared to the youth to be worth twelve soles. There ensued the usual verbal skirmish before we compromised at ten. Clipping an effigy of the King of England from my waist-band, I held it out to the mestizo. He shied at it like a colt at a flying newspaper. The Incas, we are told, forbade the common people to possess gold. Whether it is due to that prohibition, passed down by tradition to the present day, or to mere contrariness, the countrymen of the Andes still insist on doing their transactions in silver. Indeed, “plata” is the most common word for money in all the region. Bobbío had no prejudice against gold, however, and taking ten silver “cartwheels” from a hairy cowhide chest in a far corner of his hut, he dropped them into the youth’s outspread hands, and the latter sped away up the sun-flooded hillside to his hovel, leaving me in possession of a No. 4 size donkey and the ancient hawser with which it was moored to a post of Bobbío’s dwelling.

The first necessity was a name for the animal. Her startling beauty against the background of the Egyptian landscape made “Cleopatra” obvious. Then came the problem of the furniture without which no Andean donkey will carry even a man’s load. Bobbío donated an old grain-sack. Over this went my poncho. Thirty centavos seemed a just price for a corona, a donkey “saddle” of wood of saw-buck shape. For another sol I became the legal possessor of a large and stout, if rather aged, pair of alforjas, or cloth saddle-bags, in which my forty pounds could be evenly balanced. Around these, donkey and all, Bobbío wound with the intricacy of long experience several yards of rope, and at blazing ten I was off at last—to have my entire worldly possessions immediately dash away up the hillside into a jungle.

When they had been recovered, a nephew of Bobbío volunteered to pilot my new ship out of harbor. With the tow-rope and a cudgel in hand he got the craft under way, then gradually the cudgel sufficed both as rudder and throttle. A mile from home he turned the command over to me and away we went alone up the narrowing valley into the Huazcaray range, “Cleopatra” waltzing ahead of me up the slope like a school-girl on a holiday. It seemed ridiculous that any traveler with a donkey should ever have had difficulties—unless he expected a bag filled even in the middle to lie contentedly on the animal’s back. With only a slight shift to one side or the other every hour or two the alforjas rode like a cavalryman.

We zigzagged high over a range, coming out above what was evidently an immense valley, heaped full of white clouds as the basket of a plantation-picker with cotton, and began to go swiftly down through reddish mud ruts deeper than “Cleopatra” was high. Then we picked up the Tamborapo river near its source, and descended along a grassy valley walled by bushy hillsides.

In this region of northern Peru, the Andes break down into great sweltering gorges and tropical wildernesses instead of the unbroken high pampas the range seems to promise. The traveler so foolish as to journey through it catches the valley of a river as it tears its way across the jungled mountain wilderness, follows it as far as possible, then fights his way across a divide, to descend or ascend another stream. Neither waterway is likely to run in anything like the direction he would go, but by tacking like a ship against a head wind he advances bit by bit, with an exertion out of all proportion to the actual progress, toward the nebulous goal he has set himself. The distance between two hamlets a hundred miles apart is often three hundred miles in this labyrinthian province of Jaen, officially a province of Peru, but still disputed by Ecuador, as the boundary was between Atahuallpa and Huascar at the coming of the Spaniards. So low is the region that the local expression for entering “la Provincia,” as Jaen is known locally, is “Va pa’ dentro—to go down inside,” as might be designated the entrance into the realms of the unrighteous departed.

Perfection, alas, is not of this world. Now that I might have added a plentiful supply of foodstuffs to my pack without increasing my burdens—for “Cleopatra” had been sold under a guarantee to carry a hundred pounds—I had reached a section of the world where food is under no circumstances for sale. Furthermore, with a thousand miles of road just suited to donkeys behind me, it must be my fortune the morning after at last acquiring one to strike the worst possible road for them. Strictly speaking, there was no road; but for certain spaces trees enough had been felled to make passage through the forest possible, and the rainy season and tobacco-trains had combined to turn these clearings into unbroken miles of camelones, those corduroy-like ridges of hard earth with a coating of slippery mud, alternating with ditches of liquid mud from two to three feet deep. A pedestrian, even with forty pounds on his back, may trip along the tops of these as blithely as a youthful opera company counting the ties from Red Cloud to Chicago. But to attempt to drive a half-grown jackass, laden with all the driver’s earthly possessions in far from waterproof cloth sacks, through mile after monotonous mile of them, under an endless tropical downpour, is an experience to stir the most blazé and world-weary soul. Those steps at which the uncomplaining little brute did not slip off into the ditch behind the ridge on which she had set her feet were those in which she fell with a still more far-reaching splash into the ditch ahead. Usually each pair of feet was divided in its allegiance, and reduced the animal to that artistic performance popularly known in pseudo-histrionic circles as “splitting the splits.” More times than I could have counted, “Cleopatra” fell down lengthwise, crosswise, front-wise, and hind-wise, on her head, on the side of her neck, on her bedraggled tail, on every part of a donkey known to anatomy, showering me with mud from the crown of my hat to my inundated boots, soaking my possessions in seas of mud, now and then frankly lying down in despair, as often attempting to shirk her just portion of this world’s troubles by dashing into the impenetrable dripping jungle and smashing my maltreated belongings against the trees. From time to time she became hopelessly entangled with a train of pack-animals “going outside,” forcing me to wade in and lift her bodily, pack and all, out of some slough above which little more than her drooping ears were visible. In short, when this “royal highway” waded across the barnyard of the “Hacienda Charapé,” it did not require a particularly sincere invitation to cause me to spend the rest of the day there.

The hacendados of this region, owning whole ranges of mountains and valleys, live scarcely better than the Indians in their hovels. Both father and son in this case wore shoes and read the Lima newspapers—from a month to six weeks old—yet their earth-floored and walled dining-room swarmed with unspeakably dirty peon children, and pigs all but uprooted the table as we ate. The slatternly female cooking over three stones in an adjoining sty served us boiled rice mixed with cubes of pork in a single bowl from which we all helped ourselves indifferently with spoon or fingers. Father and son slept on a sort of home-made table covered with a pair of ragged blankets in a mud den overrun by domestic animals and littered with all the noisome odds and ends of a South American harness-room. Yet their speech was as redundant with formalities as that of a Spanish cavalier in the king’s court.

Though I knew there was a long, foodless, and uninhabited region ahead, I could add but little to “Cleopatra’s” nominal load in preparation for it, for to offer to buy supplies would have been considered an insult to my hosts equal to an attempt to pay for my accommodation. Costumbre, inbred for long generations, forces these rural hacendados of Peru to consider it beneath their dignity to sell anything, except the rapadura and home-made fire-water they look upon as their legitimate source of income, yet they are too miserly to give much. The best I could do was to accept, with signs of deep gratitude, two small cotton sackfuls of chifles and charol; the former, bone-hard slices of plantains warranted to keep forever in any climate and taste like oak chips to any appetite; the latter, hard squares of fried fat pork of the size of small dice. Then, of course, there was the inevitable slab of crude sugar wrapped in banana leaves.

The “road” was worse than that of the day before. Times without number I concluded the end of the journey had come for one of us, yet somehow the maltreated little brute sprawled forward through the pouring rain. Dense, dripping, unbroken forests, abounding with the red berries of wild coffee, crowded close on either hand. Below, the swollen Tamborapo roared incessantly close alongside, adding to the constant fear of losing all my possessions the continual dread of reaching some impassable stream. Toward the end of a day during which we had forded a dozen difficult tributaries, we were halted by a raging branch, plainly foolhardy to attempt. I chased “Cleopatra” up through the jungle alongside it, until darkness came on and forced us to camp in a tiny open space, my perishable possessions hung in the trees against destruction by ants, and the donkey tied to the trunk that formed my bed-post. All night long the animal walked round and round over me, though without once stepping on my prostrate form or the heaped-up baggage. In the morning we tore our way far on up the tributary before we came in sight of a “bridge,” that is, two poles tied with vines to a tree on either bank. I had piled my garments on top of the load and was just dragging my reluctant baggage-car into the stream, when a half-naked youth appeared on the opposite bank, making wild signs to me across the uproar of waters. By the time I had regained the shore, he arrived in abbreviated shirt by way of the “bridge,” carrying a stout staff and a rope. With these he dragged the donkey, stripped stark naked, into the stream and, fervently crossing himself twice, fought his way with it into the torrent; while I made three trips monkey-fashion along the tree-lashed poles with the baggage that would infallibly have been washed away but for this experienced jungle-dweller. His particular saint did not fail him and, having delivered the drenched and disgusted animal to me on the further bank, he accepted a real with a gratitude that suggested he considered himself well-paid for risking his life.

Slowly, monotonously, day after day, we pushed on through the Amazonian jungle—Amazonian not only in appearance, but because the Tamborapo, soon to join the Marañón, forms a part of the great network of the Father of Waters. The unpeopled forest, draped with vines that here and there, like broken cables, dipped their ends in the stream, seemed to have no end. The absolute solitude of the region, ever shut in by impenetrable jungle, with never a view of the horizon, with no sign of the existence of humanity and no other sounds than the occasional scream of a bird and the constant roar of the stream, had a peculiar effect on the moods. One felt abandoned by the world, and came to look upon all nature as a cruel prison-warden determined that his prisoner should never again be permitted to pick up the threads of his existence, nor even communicate with the world that had abandoned him. The very silence added to the gloom, until I felt like screaming, “Well, speak, burro!” It was a relief not to sweat under my own load, but it was distinctly more laborious to drive it before me. Day after day I beat up “Cleopatra’s” rear from dawn to dusk without a pause, yet covered scarcely half the distance I might have plodded alone. Even where the trail was level and dry, the docile, yet headstrong brute could not exceed two miles an hour; wherever a bit of slope, or stones and mud intervened, she picked her way with the cautious deliberation of an old lady entering a street-car. Insects swarmed. My unshaven face and all the expanse of skin from crown to toes were blotched and swollen with their visitations. The chifles and charol gave out and left only the lead-heavy rapadura and river-water as hunger antidotes. On the third day even the last chunk of crude sugar disappeared, and still the two of us plodded on, equally gaunt and lacking in ambition and energy.

I had lived on river-water for more than twenty-four hours, and lost my way several times on forking trails that climbed to nowhere far above, or were swallowed up in the jungle, when I guessed again at a path that climbed up out of the valley of the river. By and by it sweated up to a hut of open-work poles, where lived a vaquero in charge of the stock of a vast hacienda of the wilderness. Only a little girl of eight was at home, and she did not know that roads were meant to lead anywhere. Tying “Cleopatra” in the shade of the eaves, I sat down to await adult information. Starvation seemed to have danced its orgy for weeks before my weary eyes when the child came out with a fat, ripe chirimoya, to lisp in a shaky voice, “Le gu’ta e’ta fruta?” Hours later a gaunt, tropic-scarred man appeared, and at sight of me shouted the stereotyped greeting of all his class to any visitor ahorse or afoot:

“Apéase—dismount, señor.”

When I declined with the customary formalities, he opened preliminary inquiries as to my biography. I broke in upon them to suggest food.

“Entra y descansa, señor,” he replied, “Sientese.”

The rural Peruvian would invite one to enter and take a seat—on a block of wood—if he came to put out a fire. He produced a glass made from a broken bottle and insisted on my partaking of his hospitality to the extent of drinking his health in the aguardiente into which he turned his sugar-cane in a little thatched distillery down in a hollow nearby. But my every hint of a desire to buy food was diplomatically ignored, except that he accepted readily enough a real, and sent the child “upstairs”; that is, to crawl up to and along the reed ceiling, to fetch me a leaf-wrapped chunk of rapadura.

The invisible trail he pointed out pitched down a leg-straining and almost perpendicular bajada of loose stones to another stream, then struggled breathlessly upward through unbroken forest over the Guaranguia “range,” a jungled mountain spur, from the crest of which there spread out before me the vast panorama of an upper-Amazon hoya, the Tamborapo far below squirming away through its steep dense-wooded valley; and all about it half-barren hills of varying colors that gave the landscape the appearance of a tempestuous sea turned to jungle earth. Red cliffs, like our western buttes, flashed their faces in the sunset, and as far as the eye could reach in any direction was no sign that man had ever before entered this trackless wilderness.

It was nearing dusk when the world fell away before us into a great wooded quebrada, its bottom unfathomable, but with a trail in plain sight fighting its way up the opposite slope. The path underfoot melted away, and where “Cleopatra” led, I followed, certain she knew the way as well as I. The ghost of a trail she had chosen turned to a perpendicular cow-path down which the animal sprawled and stumbled, bumping her load against the trees, but unable to fall far through the dripping forest that grew up impenetrably about us. Dense, black night found us at the bottom of a V-shaped valley. I sought the corresponding path on the opposite side of its small stream by feeling with both feet and hands, but it was as intangible as the “straight and narrow path” of theological phraseology. To cheer things on, it began to rain in deluges. I made the most of a genuinely Peruvian situation by halting for the night where there was at least drinkingwater. So sharp was the valley that there was not even a flat space large enough to stretch out, and I could only curl up in the muddy path that had brought us to this sad pass, tumbling my soaked baggage somewhere beside me and tying the exhausted animal to something in the dark, where there was neither a leaf to eat nor a spot for the brute to lie down in.

By morning light I found that “Cleopatra’s” inexperience and asinine judgment had led us to a place where wild cattle came to drink, and we were forced to struggle back to the crest of the hill, and descend again by another trail that linked up with the one we had seen the afternoon before. At its foot was a field of swamp-grass, in which the starving animal spent the rest of the morning in regaining strength for the climb ahead. Above, a new style of landscape spread out before us. A vast, bushy plain was passable only by following the windings of a sandy and stony river-bed, and wading with monotonous frequency the stream that swung back and forth across it, like a person utterly devoid of a sense of direction or power of decision. Beyond, we tramped monotonously on through endless chaparral, thorn-bristling, bushy woods where reigned an utter solitude only enhanced by the mournful cry of some unseen bird. The most constantly recurring form of vegetation was the tusho, a sort of cottonwood tree with a trunk swollen as a gormand’s waist-line. Endlessly this dismal wilderness stretched onward from dawn to dark, until the traveler could fancy himself in solitary confinement for life, and in danger of losing the mind for which he could find no employment. The region would have been more endurable had I been able to stride forward at my own pace; but “Cleopatra” sentenced me to a monotonous, unchanging snail’s gait that gave sufficient exercise only to my right arm and the cudgel it bore. Hundreds of red centipedes littered the ground; the dead, dry silence was broken only by the rhythmic mournful cry of a jungle bird. But here the going was smooth, and for long distances our pace was so unbroken that there ran through my unoccupied mind for hours at a time the paraphrase of an old refrain:

“Two jacks with but a single gait; Six feet that walk as one.”

Next to the tusho, the tree that most often repeated itself was the guaba, producing a fruit like large brown bean-pods filled with black seeds, the white pulp of which had thirst-quenching qualities and a taste mildly resembling the watermelon.

I had lost account of days entirely, but subsequent checking up proved it was a Sunday afternoon when I halted at the “Hacienda Shumba” and, spreading out my mouldy garments on the thatch roof of its only hut, awaited the owner. He proved to be the teniente gobernador, the lieutenant-governor of the region, in the sun-bleached remnants of two garments and a hat. Having turned “Cleopatra” into a pasture, he settled down to spell out the documents I presented. Strictly speaking, he was not the hacienda owner, but only an “arrendatario.” Though I had not suspected it, I had been traveling for days through estates which, as beneficencias or cofardías, belong to the bishopric of Trujillo, and it is partly the heavy hand of the Church that keeps this region so solitary and uninhabited. The so-called owners are really agents who administer them for the tonsured landlords, collecting a rental from the few families who raise a bit of rice, cacao, and cattle. The region is far less rich than it is locally reputed. The soil of the river-valleys is fertile, but the mountains are rocky and often arid and, especially in this section, poorly served by the rains. A government official himself, my host complained bitterly against the government tax on tobacco, liquor, sugar, salt, and matches. The first, he asserted, was no longer worth planting. All non-Peruvians were “gringos” to the teniente gobernador. A fellow-countryman of mine, he asserted, had spent a night with him recently—hardly two years before. He was—let’s see—an Italian; no, a German. Though he could read and write, laboriously, and had long been a government official—on compulsion and without emoluments—the world, as he conceived it, consisted of Peru and another very much smaller country, with several towns of more or less the same size and conditions as the two villages of Jaen and Tocabamba he had seen, named Germany, Italy, Estados Unidos, and so on, from which came the various types of “gringos.”

Indeed, he wished to know, “Is Germany in the same country as the United States?”

“What do you call a native of Jaen?” I chanced to ask him in the course of our conversation.

“A Jaense, to be sure,” he replied. “Just as you call a native of Italy an italiano, or a man from the town named France a francés.”

But if his knowledge was slight, it was no less tenacious, and he could no more be talked out of his geographical conceptions than out of his conviction that all the world lives in reed-and-mud huts with earth floors, goes habitually barefoot, and considers its dwellings fit breed-places for guinea-pigs. When I asked him if the road beyond Jaen was good, I was startled to hear the assurance:

“Ah, yes, indeed. There are no bad roads in Peru!”

A divan of reeds, set into the mud wall of the single room and covered with a hairy cowhide, was quite soft enough as a bed for one who had long since left effeminate civilization behind. Until long after dark we two men and a woman squatted in home-made chairs fitting to a doll’s house, and fed ourselves over our knees. Yet the conventions of society are quite as fixed in these hovels of the wilderness as in any palace of aristocracy. It was quite à la mode, a sign of good breeding, in fact, to ask for a second helping of the bean and yuca stew—which is invariably served so boiling hot that even the experienced “gringo’s” teeth suffer—but under no circumstances for a third. When they had been emptied a second time, the gourd bowls were piled up on the floor in a corner, to be washed when the spirit moved, and, as if at a signal that there was no second course, the one glass in the house, tied together with a string and evidently regarded as a great treasure and heirloom, was filled with irrigating-ditchwater and passed around the circle, beginning with the guest. The feeble imitation of a candle soon flickered out, and by eight we were all scattered along the walls of the hut on our reed divans, quarreling pigs shaking the house as they jostled against it, and the rain that fell heavily all night long dripping upon us here and there through the thatched roof.

“Cleopatra” was so nearly rendido—“bushed”—next morning that, even under her slight load, she wabbled drunkenly and kept her footing chiefly because the heavy, glue-like mud clung to our feet like pedestals to a statue. For one considerable space the way led through a swamp, where I was several times forced to wade knee-deep to carry out the load and lift the bemired animal to her feet. Yet drinkable water was not to be had, and the choking tropical humidity was the more tantalizing as rain broke every few minutes, and everything in sight was dripping wet, though the sandy soil swallowed each shower as it fell. Toward noon the now considerable trail split, marking an important parting of the way; for the branch to the left leads quickly down to Bellavista on the bank of the Marañón, whence rafts descend to Iquitos and the rubber country, and so by the Amazon to the Atlantic, while I, bearing to the right, plodded on along the highlands of the Andes. In the dead-silent woods a few decrepit and weather-blackened huts grew up, several drowsy, half-naked beings in human form gazing languidly after me from the doorways, and before I knew it I was treading the streets of the provincial capital and “city” of Jaen.

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X. APPROACHING INCA LAND

Small wonder that the traveler who has splashed and waded a long week through the mournful wilderness, living chiefly on fond hopes salted with the anticipations of an unschooled imagination, and washed down with river water, should fetch up in Jaen with a decided shock. Occupying a large and distinct place on the map, this provincial “capital” proved to be a disordered cluster of a half-hundred wretched, time-blackened, tumble-down, thatched huts, the roofs full of holes, the gables often missing, scattered like abandoned junk among the weeds and bushes of a half-hearted clearing in the selfsame gloomy forest and spiny jungle that had so long shut me in. The barefoot, half-clothed, fever-yellow inhabitants of mongrel breed stared curiously from their mud doorways as I stalked past, smeared with dried mud from head to foot, sunburned, shaggy with whiskers, and dragging behind me by main force an emaciated donkey trembling with excitement at the unwonted sights, or with fear at the unknown dangers of so vast a metropolis. From one hut in no way different from its neighbors issued the city school, the “teacher” with a ragged cap on his head and a drooping cigarette smouldering between his lips, to stare after me with the rest. Every building in town, the church included, consisted of a single mud room with an unleveled earth floor, windowless, and with a small reed or pole door giving entrance, exit, and such air and light as could force admittance. The “government palace,” before which I tied “Cleopatra” to the official bamboo flagpole in the geographical center of the capital, was closed. With a flourish of my papers I summoned the “authorities” to step forward and make themselves known; but the manoeuver brought only the information that the subprefect was “away for a few days, but he’ll soon be back, next week, no más, or the week after, at any rate. Entra y descansa—come in and sit down.”

The gobernador was likewise among the indefinitely missing; whence the mantle of power descended upon the shoulders of the alcalde. That worthy was soon produced, somewhat the worse for concentrated cane-juice, but remarkable for at least two features,—that he wore what might still with some stretch of veracity be called shoes, and alone of all the town could have passed for a white man, had he seen fit to remove a stringy little Indian mustache. When he had read aloud to the congregated male population all my credentials in Spanish—a task not unlike that of a one-legged man walking without his crutches after spraining his ankle and suffering a stone-bruise—he requested me to name my desires. They were modest,—room, bed, table, chair, water, food for myself and pasture for the other one of us until day after to-morrow. Slowly and bit by bit, but none the less surely, my requirements were met. A key was found that manipulated the creaking padlock of one of the thatched mud-caves with sagging reed divans around its walls. A crippled table was dragged in, and a squad of soldiers sent for old newspapers to cover it. In due time, and with the assistance of the entire population in a house to house canvass, a gourd wash-basin was discovered, then a gourd with a hole in one end, from which one drank and into which the half-Indian boy thrust a finger to carry it, after filling it at the chocolate-brown stream at the edge of the town; a chair was unofficially subtracted from the government palace and, last of all, a four-inch mirror was pinned to the mud wall. I had barely removed the hirsute adornment of a week by such light as Jaen, massed in and about the door, left me, when a barefoot female glided noiselessly into my den and, announcing herself the owner, carried off the glass as too precious a possession to be long out of her sight.

The first stroll disclosed the hitherto unsuspected fact that several of the mud-dens were shops. One of them posed as a restaurant, but its restorative powers were at best anemic. Jaen is probably the hottest, and certainly the hungriest, provincial capital in Peru. To retain its rank as a “city,” it fulfilled nominally the test as a place where bread is made,—a tiny, soggy bun selling for the price of an American loaf. Milk and fruit, which might easily have been superabundant here, were unknown luxuries, and the customary food of the populace included nothing a well-bred dog would have touched in any but a ravenous state. A dozen of us without families, including the alcalde, were dependent upon the “restaurant,” and we agreed upon a fixed ration of bread and eggs, the supply of which never approached even the normal demand. But the alcalde quickly formed the habit of sneaking over before the hour set and, by virtue of his official powers, consuming most of the provender. To forestall him, the rest of us took to arriving earlier, until it grew customary to appear for the noonday meal at about nine, and to sit down to supper toward three, eyeing each other ravenously, and jealously watching the cook’s every movement. He who is accustomed to complain of the “high cost of living” should try the antidote of a journey down the Andes, where the high cost reigns supreme, without the living. In these languid corners of the world where life is reduced to its lowest terms food and lodging assume the first place of importance, and the mind is never free from these primitive apprehensions; no sooner does one eat than the worry arises as to where the next meal will come from, as each day’s pleasure on the road is tempered by wondering what hardship the night will have in store.

There were some evidences of negro blood in Jaen, though that of the aboriginal Indian tribe of the region was universal, in the percentage of one half to a far smaller fraction in varying individuals. The men wore home-made garments of the cheapest cotton, patched and sun-faded, generally no shirt, with merely a kerchief knotted about the neck above the undershirt, and sombreros de junco, hats woven of a species of swamp-grass or reeds, which a few weeks of sun and rain gave the appearance of a badly thatched roof. The women wore no hats, combed their raven-black hair flat and smooth, without adornments, and let it hang down their backs in a single braid. Like all the cholas and half-castes of the sex in the Andes, they dragged their misshapen skirts constantly in the mire of the streets and the “floors” of their huts, and were habitually even less cleanly in their habits than the men. The stage of education may be gaged from the fact that the government telegraph operator assured me I could not reach Cerro de Pasco by land, but must “cross the sea” to Lima and take the railroad from there. Jaen’s chief pastime for speeding up the monotonous stretch between the cradle and the grave is the consumption of the native “cañazo,” and only those who rose early were likely to find a completely sober man. A sort of harmless anarchy reigned. A man merry with cane-juice might sit outside the mud school-house and keep school from “functioning” all day long, without interference. An amorous youth, going on a drunken rampage among the huts or the washerwomen on the banks of the irrigating ditch, was avoided if possible, but was never forcibly restrained. As is frequent in tropical towns, there was little evidence of religion, pseudo or otherwise, which thrives best in the high, cold regions of the mysterious páramos. The mud church, with its tower melted off unevenly at the top, like a half-burned candle in a wind, had long since lost its cura, and served now as provincial jail, by the simple addition of a few poles set in adobe across the door and a few languid soldiers lolling in the general vicinity whenever they had no particular desire to be somewhere else.

On the afternoon of my arrival the rumor floated languidly over the town that the weekly cow was to be butchered next morning, but it was denied later in the evening. I made the most of my day of leisure by acquiring a bar of native soap, of the appearance of a mud-pie and the scent of boiling glue, and spending some two hours in the irrigating ditch, stringing across the main street, from a telegraph pole to a rafter of “my house,” all the garments that could be spared from use in an unexacting society. Nothing was more certain than that I should start again at daylight of the second morning—until news arrived that the river eighteen miles south was impassable until the waters receded. It was evident, too, that I must deny myself the companionship of “Cleopatra.” She hung wilted and dejected in the town pasture, and at best there was no hope that she would last many days further, even if there were any means of getting her across the swollen river. I accepted the alcalde’s offer of $3 for the animal and her “furniture,” and felt a glow of satisfaction, tempered with regret at the loss of a good companion, for all her faults, that I should no longer have to drag my feet behind me at her snail’s pace, and be dependent on my right arm for advancement.

On the morning I should have started, the rumor again ran riot that the town was going to pelar un res—“peel a beef.” This time matters went so far as to lead the octogenarian victim out into the main street, where the population gathered in an attitude of anticipation, a dozen or more armed with home-made axes and knives, the rest with pots and gourds. For a long time the languid hubbub of some discussion rose and fell about the downcast animal. Then gradually the gathering disintegrated and scattered to its huts, each pausing at sight of a face, to drone in that singularly indifferent monotone of the tropics, “No hay carne hoy”—(there is no meat to-day). Some misanthropist, an agent of a neighboring hacienda, it turned out, had offered $9 for the animal, and Jaen did not feel justified in squandering any such fortune for mere food. My rosy dream of again tasting fresh meat and of carrying supplies on my journey was once more rudely dissipated.

The east was blushing from the first kiss of the bold, tropical sun when I sallied forth on the morning I had concluded to start, river or no river, and went to wake up the “restaurant” keeper, sleeping on his dining-table with the precious bread-box under his head. The alcalde appeared almost at the same instant from the direction of the irrigation ditch, his towel about his neck. He greeted me with forced courtesy. His solemn promise to arrange to have my baggage transported to the river in consideration for the low price at which he had acquired “Cleopatra” had gone the way of most South American promises—into thin air. Now I reminded him of it, he would order a soldier to accompany me at once. The earth swung a long way eastward on its axis without any other sign of activity. Then some one came to say that a soldier would not be sent, because Anastasio Centurión, returning to his “Hacienda Algarrobo” forthwith, would be delighted to carry my belongings on his mule. An hour later he declined to carry them, then he was prevailed upon by his compadre, the lieutenant-governor, to renew his offer; then he again concluded the weight was too great, and finally sent an urchin for my saddle-bags. Before they were loaded, however, a dispute broke out over the ownership of a “silver” spur that had been picked up in the sand of the main street, and the town followed the alcalde to the mud hut that served as court of justice. It was also the city bakery, and the wife of the justice, who had put off baking the morning before, and was not yet mixing the dough, ceded a corner of the kitchen table to the court, which in the course of an hour settled the case in the customary Latin-American way—by deciding that the disputed property should remain “in the hands of justice.”

A soldier was at length sent to round up one of the donkeys grazing in the main plaza. Gradually the disgusted animal was fitted with my former donkey-furniture, amid the contrary suggestions of the populace, and the alcalde furnished me an order to the ferrymen at the river to set me across in the name of the government—and to return donkey and aparejo. A winding, narrow, stony path, that wet its feet at the very outset, squirmed away through the desert-like forest. “Down there,” said Anastasio, wrapped gloomily in his maroon poncho and viciously kicking the spur on one bare heel into the side of his heavily-laden animal, “is the camino real, pero da mucha vuelta.” How it could “give more turns” than the one we were following, it was hard to imagine. My pack-animal this time was a matron of forty, comparatively speaking, and correspondingly set in her ways. Within the first mile “se me escapó,” as the natives have it; that is, she suddenly bolted into the thorny wilderness at the first suggestion of an opening, and left me dripping with sweat and speckled with the blood of a dozen superficial lacerations before I again laid hands on her in an impassable clump of brambles and cactus. Anastasio tied her tow-rope to his saddle, and for an hour or so she seemed completely resigned to her fate. But evidently there is no trusting the sex at that age. No sooner was she paroled than she bolted again, and led me a skin-gashing chase of several miles through a wild and waterless solitude. Yet, after all, manipulating a donkey is a splendid apprenticeship for dealing with Latin-Americans; no better training could be suggested for the prospective salesman south of the Rio Grande.

The going ranged from quebradita to muy quebrada, now along the stony bed of a meandering “river,” yesterday all but impassable, to-day so bone dry there was only a bit of running mud to quench the thirst; now over a sharp knoll bristling with jagged, loose stones. At red-hot noon we reached the Huancabamba river, now grown to man’s estate, where it swings around to join the Marañón and divides the never-to-be-forgotten Province of Jaen from that of Cutervo. A laborious two hours up it brought us to the long-heralded Puerto Sauce, where the government maintains a “ferry,”—five small logs bound together with vines and manned by three balseros housed in two reed-kennels. Here we squatted out the day, watching the coffee-colored stream race by on its long journey to the Atlantic with all the impetuosity of the rainy season. The government chasqui had been sitting here nearly a week, his mail-sacks stacked and his horse tethered close at hand. Only out on the extreme edge of the bank, where an occasional breath of tepid breeze tempered the lead-heavy heat and thinned the swarms of stinging insects, was life endurable. My skin was a patchwork of mementoes of all the minute fauna of the past week, and an itching like the constant prick of myriad red-hot needles was relieved only briefly by each dip in the stream. During one of them I advanced well into the river, and it seemed I could have crossed it; that even the Peruvians might have made the passage, had they male blood in their veins. But then, had they been men they would long since have built a bridge. All through the night there kept running through my head, amid the sweep of the waters, that illuminating remark of “Kim,” “A sahib is always tied to his baggage”; and in my half-conscious condition I resolved when morning broke to cast away all but a loin-cloth and a hat, and travel henceforth in comfort al uso del país. But, alas, the least formal of us cannot rid himself of all the adjuncts of civilization; and there was photography, to say nothing of food and covering for the highlands ahead, to be considered. When dawn turned its matter-of-fact light upon the scene, the dream quickly faded and I settled down to watch another day drag by into the past tense beside the racing brown waters of the Huancabamba. The feeling was rampant that nature had played me a scurvy trick. I had bargained on following the cool and pleasant crest of the Andes, and they had crumbled away beneath me and forced upon me this unsought experience of the tropics.

Not until the morning of the third day did the balseros conclude to attempt to pass over the “government people,”—the mail-man and this impatient gringo with the official order from the alcalde. The raft had been dragged well up-stream, where we waded to it through bristling jungle and knee-deep mud. The chasqui’s horse, long experienced in these matters from years of carrying the mails over this route, was driven in and forced to swim to a sand-bar well out in the stream. For a long time the animal stood like a prisoner at bay against the shouting and stoning and shaking of cudgels of those on the bank, but at length, seeing no other escape, it set out to attempt the main branch. Its brute instinct would have proved a better guide than the opinions of more rational beings. Struggling until its snorting echoed back from the surrounding jungle, it fought the brown, racing waters, gradually nearing the further bank, yet swept even more swiftly along by the inexorable stream, amid foam-caps from the rocky passes above, strained savagely to reach the strip of beach that served as landing-place until, swept past it without gaining a footing, it seemed suddenly to give up in despair, and only its head, swinging slowly round and round with the current, was seen a short minute more, tiny against the race of the yellower waters, before it swept on out of sight down the jungle-walled torrent.

The chasqui gazed after the lost animal for a long moment, shrugged his shoulders with the resigned “Vaya!” of a confirmed fatalist, and took his seat beside me on our baggage, tied securely near the back of the frail craft. The three brown balseros, naked but for palm-leaf hats and a strip of rag between their legs, each crossed himself elaborately, and took a deep draught at Anastasio’s quart bottle of cañazo. Then they pointed the nose of the raft up-stream, pushed off, snatched up their clumsy paddles with a hoarse imploration to the Virgin, and fought for dear life and the sand-bar. This gained, we disembarked and manoeuvered to the further side, then pushed off into the main stream. It snatched at us like some greedy monster. The sand-bar raced away up-stream at express speed, the further bank sped past like a blurred cinematograph ribbon, the paddlers, urged on by their own and the mail-man’s raucous shouts and imprecations, battled as with some mortal enemy, stabbing their paddles in swift, breathless succession into the brown stream, and following each dig with a savage jerk that tore the wound wide open and brought out the lean muscles beneath their dingy skins like steel cables under leather coverings. The rules of caste are more important than life itself in South America, and both the mail-man and I had been refused paddles. Relentlessly the further shore galloped by. The bit of clearing required for landing approached, beckoned to us tantalizingly, flashed on, and the raft sped swiftly after the lost horse. The balseros, abetted by the chasqui, increased their efforts to a screaming uproar, in which I caught here and there a fragmentary “’nta Virgen . . . ’yuda!” Fortunately they did not put all their trust in superhuman assistance, and their paddles tore at the stream with a viciousness that drenched us with its aftermath. Bit by bit we strained nearer the hurrying wall of verdure. Every lunge seemed to lift the paddlers into the air; the cords on their necks stood out like creepers on a forest tree; their yells, hoarse and savage enough to have frightened off any malignant spirit of the waters, came strained and broken now, from lack of breath. Now we could all but touch the racing forest-wall. I snatched in vain at a sapling bowing its head in the stream. With a last faint gasp and a spent stroke, the balseros dropped their paddles on the raft, and all five of us grasped at the vegetation that tore and lacerated us in its struggle to escape our desperate embrace. When we had each gathered an armful of it, we clung so stoutly to this last hold to earth that the raft was all but swept from under us before we swung it up into a bit of cove, where the balseros, falling at once into their racial apathy, drooped like wilted rags at the bow, while one of them panted weakly, “A little more, señores, and we were gone sin noticias.”

As lazily as they had been energetic in the crossing, the ferrymen coaxed the raft up along the edge of the forest to the little clearing, where I swung my saddle-bags over a shoulder, waded to dry land and plodded on along the blazing hot bank of the Huancabamba. Slowly my shadow crawled from under my feet. In this sweltering desert valley, now staggering through hot sand and a dwarf vegetation savage with thorns, now clambering constantly over steep headlands that broke into cliffs at the river’s edge and stumbling down again through veritable quarries of loose stones, my burden, augmented with chancaca, a sack of rice and a roll of sun-dried beef, as well as the lead-heavy tropical sun that seemed to lean physically on my shoulders, became unbearable. I resolved to pitch camp in the first open space and wait, till doomsday if necessary, for some pack-train susceptible to the glitter of silver coins. Puerto Sauce was probably not more than seven miles behind me when I found, between trail and river, a narrow sand-strip sloping down to the racing brown waters and backed by a barren, stony cliff-face over which the “road” promised to bring out in relief against the turquí sky anyone who might pass my way.

Grass could not find sustenance on this sun-baked spot, but centipedes and a score of other venomous things might exist. Scattered along the bank were many sapling poles, the wreckage, evidently, of some hut that had been swept here by the raging river. I gathered an armful of these and laid their ends on two small logs, covered them with such brush and branches as were without thorns, and had a far more comfortable couch than the wealthiest hacendado of the region. Over me hung a wild lemon-tree, the fruit of which made the yellow Huancabamba more nearly drinkable. About its trunk, within instant reach, I strapped my revolver, and lay down almost in the “royal highway,” fully prepared for anything except a sudden burst of rain. Across the river in dense, half-cultivated, greener jungle were the huts of several natives; but they might as well have been in another world, for I could not have heard a whisper above the roar of the Huancabamba had they stood on the opposite bank screaming across at me. I possessed a maltreated copy of Prescott, and there is great compensation for the hardships of the trail in golden moments snatched like this; for nowhere does the mind grip the printed page so firmly as at the end of a day on the road, after long turning the leaves of no other page than nature’s.

The afternoon passed, faded to a violent sunset, and blackened into night, without a human sight or sound. I took another swim, careful not to lose my grasp on the shore, and turned my lounge into a bed. There had been many rumors of bears and “tigers” in these parts. The real peril was the incitement to suicide caused by the swarming insect life whenever the breeze failed for an instant. In my dreams the roar of the Huancabamba turned to that of New York, and I fancied I had suddenly left off my journey down the Andes to run home for a single day, at the end of which I should take up my task where I had left off.

When dawn awoke me I refused to rise. But hour after hour passed without a break in the drear monotony of the arid landscape. In mid-morning patience exploded and, throwing my load over a shoulder, I toiled on. When, at the end of some fifteen miles, my legs refused to push me further, I struggled through the jungle to the river-bank; but there was not a cleared space sufficient to sit on, much less to lie down in. By wading chest-deep I reached the breezy nose of an island in the Huancabamba, and made my bed on the damp beach-sand. But I had chosen poorly, if choice it might be called. Without even leaves to spread under me, the night was one of unmitigated torture. Myriads of crawling, stinging tropical life made my entire frame a pasture and playground, and at best I got only a few half-conscious snatches of sleep, troubled with the threatening rumble of the river. For safety’s sake I had hung many of my belongings in the branches of trees; but not enough of them. Daylight showed a populous colony of enormous black ants in possession of all that lay on the ground. They had not only eaten to the last crumb the chancaca I had lugged for two blazing days, and left me barely a spoonful of rice for breakfast, but they had all but destroyed the home-made cover of my kodak, had decorated my hat with a fringe, and had bitten into a dozen pieces my auto-photographic bulb, scattering all the vicinity with crumbs of red rubber.

Another lone day we struggled up-stream. I say we,—that is, myself and I; for—a point for psychologists—since taking up my own load again I could not rid myself of the fancy that I was two distinct persons, one of whom was forcing the other to make the journey. In the night I often started up fancying the other fellow—the one who did the walking and carried the load—had escaped. Could he know the truth beforehand, no sane man would sentence himself to tramp this route of the Andes, to suffer almost incessant hardships, the monotony of the same experiences over and over again, the dreary intercourse with a people so stupid, so low of intelligence that long contact with their childish minds brings with it the danger of one’s own faculties turning childish, like that of a lifetime of school-teaching. Only the American habit of carrying out to the bitter end a plan once made could force him on.

Late the next morning the most exciting event of several days happened,—I met a human being. He was lolling before a slatternly hut of reeds, inside which a half-caste woman squatted on the earth peeling camotes. On such a journey the civilized traveler unconsciously builds up a certain pity for himself which he feels should be shared by others. But he is sure of a rude awakening among these clod-like inhabitants of the wilderness. Should a living skeleton crawl into an Andean hut announcing he had not tasted food for a fortnight, had seven species of tropical fever, and had been bitten by a baker’s dozen of venomous serpents, the greeting would be the same motionless, indifferent grunt and drowsily mumbled “Vaya!” with which this female acknowledged my presence. No offer of money would have brought her to her feet, much less have induced her to cook one of the chickens—or even yellow curs—that overran the place. As I picked up my burden in disgust, however, she murmured through her half-closed lips, “Se irá usté’ almorzando?”—in other words that I might wait, if I chose, to partake of the camote stew she was lazily concocting over the stick fire in the center of the floor. On the surface this stereotyped invitation looks like genuine hospitality. At bottom it is less so than a habit, tinged with superstition and fear of malignant spirits, and above all the impossibility of an uninitiative race daring to, or even thinking of varying a custom of all their known world. It was no time to stand on my dignity, however, even had the foodless days behind left me any such support, and I sat down again. A ravenous two hours dragged by before the mess of native roots and herbs met the approval of the expressionless female, who tasted a wooden spoonful of it now and then and tossed the residue back into the kettle. Several peons had drifted in, genuine human clods, apparently as devoid of intelligence as the hogs rooting about under their hoofed feet, and gathered about a flat log raised a bit above the earth. With a steaming calabash of the tasteless, red-hot stew before each of us, and a single bowl of mote mixed with bits of pork rind into which all shovelled at once, we finished the meal in utter silence. Then the first peon, wiping his horny hand across his mouth with a disgusting sucking sound, mumbled “Diós se lo pagará,” a formula repeated by each as we rose to our feet. However much he may prefer to liquidate the matter himself, rather than to leave it to so uncertain and unindebted a source, this “God will pay you for it,” is the only return the traveler who sits in at their tasteless repasts can force upon these mongrel people of the Andean wilderness.

How far out of my course I had mounted the Huancabamba when I picked up a rock-strewn tributary along the cliff-face, only a professional geographer could say. Through the hot-lands of northern Peru direction yields to the accidents of nature, and Jaen had been as far east of a line due southward as Ayavaca had been to the west. When early sunset fell in the bottom of the deep valley, I had mounted several hundred feet above the level of the Huancabamba, and with a welcome coolness came more human manners, heralding the highlands again. Both Fructuoso Carrera and his far younger, though no less cheery wife, treated me more like a prodigal son than as an importunate guest who had fallen upon them out of the unknown. Amid the culinary operations suited to my case they gave me in detail the recipe of the choclo tandas—Quichua bread, probably used before the Conquest—that finally rounded off our repast late in the evening. For the benefit of housewives permit me to pass on the information:

Cut off the kernels of green corn while still small and fairly soft. Crush them to a pulp—under a round stone on a broad flat one out beneath the thatched eaves, if it is desired to keep the local color intact—sprinkling water lightly on the mass from time to time. When the whole has been reduced to a somewhat adhesive dough, wrap in corn-husks rolls of the stuff about the size and shape of an ear of corn and tie with strips of husk. Sit down on the earth floor in a corner of the hut—driving off the persistent guinea-pigs with any weapon at hand—and drop these packages one by one into a kettle of boiling water supported by three stones. Let boil from twenty minutes to a half hour—depending on the energy with which fagots have been gathered during the day—taking care that none of the gaunt curs prowling about between the legs of the cook and through other unexpected openings thrust their noses into the kettle, as they would be sure to be burned. Those who succeed in beginning the task while daylight still lingers should also beware any of the family chickens climbing to a convenient shoulder and springing into the pot, as this would result, not in choclo tanda, but in choclo tanda con gallina, which is a far more expensive dish. Zest is added by a successful attempt surreptitiously to get into one’s saddle-bags a couple of the choclo tandas for the land of starvation that is expected ahead.

Several times during the night I descended to alleviate my insect-bitten skin by a plunge in the clear, cold mountain stream that sounds in the Carrera family ears 365 days a year. In the morning I was forced to dress under my poncho, with far less convenience than in an upper Pullman berth; for la señora was already grinding coffee for my desayuno on the flat stone under the eaves beside me. To my diplomatically framed question as to what I owed him, Don Fructuoso replied:

“For what should you owe us anything?”

All that day the trail, wandering back and forth across the rock-boiling “river,” first by little thatched pachachacas, or earth-covered pole-bridges, then, as the stream dwindled, by precarious stepping-stones, climbed ever higher, at times through stretches of mud where dense overhanging forests had retained the rainfall. Mankind grew more frequent in this more habitable, rising world. Thatched cottages were tucked away here and there in forty-five-degree patches of bananas and coffee, and the pilfering of the tandas to weigh down my load proved an entirely gratuitous felony.

The very air of Tablabamba, where I slept on dried cane-pulp in an unwalled trapiche hung well up the side of the new constricted valley, as humid and green as Jaen Province had been desert-brown and arid, teemed with stories of robbers and assassins among the mountain defiles ahead. The only visible danger I encountered, however, was the notorious “Sal-si-puedes—Climb it if you can,” the terrors of which had grown daily more persistent for a fortnight past. This was one of those endless zigzags by which Andean trails climb from one river system, when near its source, to another, revealing its nefarious purpose only bit by bit, and subtly enticing the traveler ever upward in an undertaking he might not have the courage to face as a whole. A rut piled full of loose rocks, down which trickled enough water to suggest what the climb might have been on a rainy day, carried me into the very sky above and, taking there new foothold, scaled doggedly on into the “realms of eternal silence” where even birds were no longer heard and sturdy, squat trees, sighing fitfully as if struggling for breath, at length gave up in despair and abandoned the scene to huge, black rocks protruding from a soil that gave sustenance only to the dead-brown ichu-grass of Andean heights. “Hay mucho silencio y mucho matador,” my host of the night had mumbled lugubriously, but I was aware only of the music of the wind and the joyful realization that the broken mountains had gathered themselves together again under my feet and raised me once more to my accustomed temperate zone. By cold noonday a tumbled, blue world lay about and below me, only an insignificant dent in it representing that overheated hell locally known as the Province of Jaen. Like life itself, what had seemed at its base a mighty climb proved here at the top to have been only an insignificant little knoll down in the valley, and only when one had reached the real summit, and could look back upon the region as a whole after all was accomplished, did each little struggle and petty suffering assume its correct proportion.

Another step forward, and before my glad eyes spread one of those broad, green interandean valleys, backed by serrated black ranges, their brows wrinkled and furrowed with age, the clouds trailing their purple shadows across a panorama of little cultivated valleys, into which I descended from the unconscionable summit by a natural stairway. The blue-gray peaks turned to lilac in the last rays of the chill highland sun, then faded away into the luminous sky of night as the mountain cold settled down like an icy poncho, and with dusk I tramped through a long adobe street into the central plaza of Cutervo.

My legs seemed to have pushed me again into the outskirts of civilization. Not only did the subprefect drive off of his own initiative the open-mouthed throng that gathered about his door, rather than read my papers aloud to them, but here at last was a Peruvian town that actually recognized the existence of strangers with appetites, and a large adobe hut publicly admitted itself a fonda. Cutervo was, in reality, monotonously like any other town of the Sierra. To one coming upon it out of the trackless wilderness, however, it seemed at first sight a place of mighty importance, and only gradually dwindled to its true proportions. Like a man just returned from long months in the polar ice, I had an all but irresistible desire to rush in and buy everything in sight, as I wandered past its long line of open shop-doors. The capital of a department recently cut off from the neighboring one of Chota, it was the first place in Peru where any appreciable number of the inhabitants could unreservedly be called white, and boasted the first specimens of beauty among the fair sex. Even the Lima newspapers were there, to give me a skeleton sketch of the activities of a half-forgotten world.

There is a reserve of strength in the human body which few suspect until they tax it in an emergency; but it is only after recovery that the traveler through the rough places of the earth realizes how weak he has gradually become from hardships and lack of real nourishment. The invigorating air of the temperate zone and the meat of Cutervo’s fonda, however, had soon given me new energy, and seemed to have reduced to half the weight of my load. Hope, brutally felled to earth, ever crawls dizzily to its feet again. I could no more rid myself of the fond dream of some day ceasing to stagger under my own baggage than a leper can shake off his affliction. Yet the solemn promise of the ruler of Cutervo to furnish me a carrier resulted only in a lost day, and I struck off across the rolling mountains and valleys beyond, convinced at last, so I fancied, that I should dream no longer. So persistent had been the promise of foul play on this day’s route that, despite a lifetime of disappointments, I could not but peer hopefully into the many splendid lurking-places of the wild, rock-strewn upland I followed in utter solitude all the gorgeous day from Cutervo to Chota, the next provincial capital. Only once did I catch sight of fellow-beings. A group of arrieros with laden asses paused dubiously near the top of the range where they caught the first glimpse of me, then ventured forward and halted to ask anxiously:

“Are the robbers not attacking this morning?”

My answer they greeted with a fervent “Ave María Purísima!” and, crossing themselves ostentatiously, that the saints should not by any chance overlook their devotion, pushed hurriedly on toward Cutervo.

Early in the afternoon I came out on the upper edge of an enormous, wide-spread valley just across which, in the lap of a rolling plain sloping toward me and the hair-like winding river at its bottom, lay the end of the day’s journey,—Chota; a tiny, dull-red patch in a green-brown immensity of sun-flooded world, the two towers of its not too conspicuous church pin-pricking the horizon. In the transparent air of the highlands it seemed at most a short two hours away. In reality I had not in that time picked my stony way to the bottom of the rock-scarred valley, and it was long after night had cast its black poncho over all the world that I stumbled at last into the elusive town.

Chota, “8000 feet, 4000 inhabitants, 3000 doors”—and no windows, nearly as cold as Quito, is a provincial capital with well-cobbled streets and a broad expanse of plaza, all tilting to the north, by far the largest Peruvian city I had yet seen, almost the equal in size of Loja in Ecuador. The stock of its many little shops comes in by way of Pacasmayo and the railroad to Chilete, showing that I was “over the divide” and approaching Cajamarca. On August 30, 1882, it was destroyed by the Chilians—“los malditos chilenos,” as the inhabitants still call them—but Andean building material being plentiful, it soon rose from its mud ruins. The cura was even then superintending the cholos tramping together with their bare feet the clay and chopped ichu-grass that was to be a new church. There were numerous fondas, as befitted a great capital; that is, mud dens with a reed shanty in the barnyard behind serving as kitchen, kept by well-meaning but unprepossessing females who wiped the inside of each plate religiously on their ample hips, those same draft-horse hips on which they squatted on the earth floor to fill the receptacles similarly placed, while driving off with the free hand the curs and guinea-pigs and the chickens perching on the edge of the kettles. There were even oil-lamps in a few of the more pretentious shops and mansions, though almost all without chimneys, not easily imported from the other side of the world by ship and muleback over breakneck trails. Haughty, belligerent roosters stood tied by a leg before half the doors in town, so that each street was a long vista of pugnacious cocks frequently submitting to the anxious ministrations of their proud owners. Even without them I should not have slept unbrokenly. Official assistance had gained me lodging on the home-made counter of an empty shop hung with cobwebs and perfumed with the mustiness of several generations, the door of which, flush with the narrow sidewalk, of course, was the only source of air. There, as often as a night-hawk passed on his way home from the local “billar,” he paused to beat me awake with the rapping of his cane and to sing-song in that dulcet voice of the Latin-American, mellow with late hours, “Your door is open, señor; I will close it for you.” And if, instead of reaching under the counter for my revolver or a convenient adobe brick, I did not summon a patient courtesy I do not possess and answer, “Mil gracias, señor; no, thank you, leave it open, please,” and then rise and open it again, because he fancied his ears had deceived him, I should have lost the rating of “simpático,” and been branded a rude and discourteous gringo.

Bambamarca, an atrociously stony half-day beyond Chota and its surrounding bowl, like a mosaic of little farms where female shepherds, bare to their weather-browned knees, incessantly turn the white, brown, and black fleece of their flocks into yarn on their crude Incaic spindles, reported the trail ahead “the worst road in Peru”—which is indeed strong language. They were certain, too, that, though I might—with the accent on the verb—have arrived from “La Provincia” alive, the marauders beyond would see to it that I did not reach Cajamarca in that condition. A cold rain fell incessantly from sullen skies during a day of unbroken plodding, first up the cañon of a small river, crossed now and then by thatched bridges, until it dwindled away and left me to splash at random over a reeking mountain-top. I had been lost for hours, and was dripping water at every pore, when I spied, toward what would have been sunset, four little Indian boys huddled under the ruin of a hut, and signed to them to give me information. Instead, they took to their heels, as if all the evil spirits of the Inca religion had suddenly crested the water-soaked range. I set after them, but my best pace under my load being barely equal to theirs, I drew my revolver and fired twice into the air; whereupon they halted and awaited me in ashen fear. The one I chose as guide led me over a rolling páramo deeply gashed by rain-swollen streams, and abandoned me within sight of the imposing estate-house of what turned out to be the “Hacienda Yanacancha.” In the corredor, just out of reach of the drenching rain, stood a white man in khaki, monarch of half the visible world, and so little like the uncouth illiterate I expected that he replied in faultless Castilian to my remark about the absence of roads:

“Yes, unfortunately South America fell to the Spaniards, whereas it should have been settled by Anglo-Saxons.”

Here, for the first time in Peru, was an hacendado who had trained his dogs and servants to some understanding of their respective spheres, and had even given the latter an inkling of that thin, gray line between cleanliness and its opposite. A trivial incident will demonstrate to what lowly point of view my recent experiences had brought me. When my host showed me into a large guest-room, I caught sight, in the semi-obscurity, of a reed mat on the floor, and through me flashed a thrill of joy that I should have this to sleep on, instead of the cold, dank tiles. Whereas, on closer view this proved to be the foot-mat before a huge colonial bedstead, regally furnished with soft mattresses and spotless woolen blankets. My host even apologized for the absence of sheets. As if I should have recognized that forgotten flora, even in its native habitat! Yet my misgivings of playing the rôle of Hugo’s maltreated hero materialized. Whether it was due to the fever within me struggling for existence, or to the all-too-sudden return to luxury, I tossed sleeplessly well into the night, and it was rolled up on the mat on the tile floor that the cold, steel-gray dawn creeping in at the wooden-barred windows found me.

The “road” across soggy highland meadows and past those fantastic heaped-up peaks and splintered ranges of black rocks that give the “Hacienda Yanacancha” (“Black Rocks”) its name, was largely imaginary. At first, within sprinting distance of the house, were a few inhabited haycocks of shepherds, like Esquimaux dwellings of weather-blackened pajonal in place of snow and ice, with a hole to crawl in at on all fours. Then the visible world, straining ever higher, spread out into a rolling mountain-top, a totally uninhabited region where was heard only the mournful sighing of the wind across a boundless, rolling, yellow-brown sea of the dreary bunch-grass of the upper Andes. Across it the often invisible way undulated with such regularity that I was continually descending into or climbing out of hollows trodden to a mud pudding about the cold streams that wandered down from the scarcely more lofty heights. There were myriad hiding-places behind the jagged gray rocks piled erratically along the way, from which evil-doers might have picked me off. So notorious is this region for its mishaps to travelers that natives rarely cross it except in large groups. But the wholesome respect in which a “gringo,” especially one who carries a shooting-iron prominently displayed, is held is the best protection in Latin-America, far more so than an escort of native soldiers, the presence of which is apt to imply to the lurking bandit an admission of inability to depend on one’s gringo self, even if the soldiers do not prove confederates of the outlaws or run away at sight of them.

On and ever on the cold, desolate, inhospitable despoblado rose and fell in broad swells or billows, the barren, yellow, uninhabited world sighing mournfully to itself. This long day is obligatory on all who come to Cajamarca from the north, for there is no halting-place in all the expanse of puna south of Yanacancha. I should have covered the thirty-five miles before the day was done, had not a long dormant or newly acquired fever suddenly broken out in mid-afternoon. Every setting of one leg before the other was as great an effort as jumping over a ferry-boat, yet I must prod myself pitilessly on, for to be overtaken by night on this inhospitable, wind-swept puna would have been worse than fever. With infinite struggle I came at last to where this broadest of páramos began to fall away toward the north; then the slope contracted to a gully that gathered together the score or more of separate but not distinct paths that make up the “highway” across the lofty plain, and brought me before sunset to the first of a scattered cluster of stone and mud kennels. A leather-faced old Indian, speaking the first Quichua I had heard since Cuenca, gave me a handful of ichu-grass to sit on outside the smaller of his two huts, and left me to the company of his prowling yellow curs. Night had fallen completely before a woman brought me a gourd of boiling potato mush, but at length the chary old Indian, overcoming his racial indifference and distrust, opened the door of the hut against which I lay and let me into a sort of Incaic warehouse. In it were heaps of the huge balls of yarn spun by the Indian women on their prehistoric spindles, a supply of páramo grass I might spread on the earth floor, and several large bolts of homespun cloth of coarse texture and cruder colors with which I might feather my arctic nest, once it was late enough to hope the owner would not catch me at it.

In the adjoining family hut a baby had been crying incessantly for an hour or more. The after-chill of the fever was settling upon me when a young Indian entered, bearing the infant, and a handful of twisted grass as torch. Without preliminary he requested me, if I understood his language, to spit in the child’s face.

“I don’t get you,” I replied, in my most colloquial if imperfect Quichua.

“Do me the favor to spit in its face,” he repeated, and by way of illustration spat swiftly and lightly, with the point of his tongue between his lips, a fine spray in the face of the squalling infant.

“But why not do it yourself?” I protested.

“Manam, viracocha; it must be some one the guaguita does not know.”

When it had become evident that there was no other way of being left in peace, I rose and sprayed the infant. To my astonishment it ceased its wailing instantly, stared wide-eyed into my face until the father turned away, and was not again heard during the night. Floor-walking benedicts may adopt this bit of domestic science from the ancient civilization of the Incas free of charge.

There were but nine miles left to do in the morning, but the mere numeral gives little hint of the real task. Both road and bridges continued strikingly conspicuous by their absence; for hours the atrocious trail zigzagged unevenly, at times almost perpendicularly down what was left of the mountainside. Then it forded waist-deep the Cajamarca river, and joining a Sunday-morning procession of market-bound Indians with a clashing of colors almost equal to those of Quito, picked its way around stony foothills along a slowly widening valley gradually checkered with the varying greens of cultivation. The cool summer air and a more passable road drew me ever more swiftly on; the sound of church-bells, musically distant, floating northward on the breeze, located vaguely somewhere among the eucalyptus trees ahead the end of the third stage of my Andean journey. Huts turned to houses, thicker and thicker along the way, until they grew together into two unbroken rows. The air grew heavy with the scent of the “Australian gum”; I passed under an aged, whitewashed arch straddling the street, and on April 27, at the hour of the return from mass, found myself creaking along the canted, flagstone sidewalks of famous old Cajamarca, the first real city, even in the South-American sense, I had come upon in Peru. Armed and bedraggled, with an alforja hanging heavy over one shoulder, I presented no conventional sight. Yet the cajamarquinos gave me comparatively slight attention. No doubt they were accustomed to such apparitions; Pizarro and his fellow-roughnecks could have been little less way-worn and weather-bleached when they rode in upon Cajamarca over these same hills. According to careful calculation I had walked 1773 miles from Bogotá, 929 from Quito. Of the 79 days from the Ecuadorian capital I had spent thirty in the towns and hamlets along the way, and the remainder in whole or part on the road.

As far back as Ayavaca I had begun to hear praises of the “magnificent hotels” of Cajamarca. The disappointment was proportionately bitter. The “Hotel Internacional” was a defunct lodging-house, the “Hotel Amazonas,” further on, merely a row of rooms opening on the second-story balcony. They were tolerable rooms, with flagstone floors and wooden bed-springs, and had the extraordinary advantage of being in the second story, out of reach of staring passersby; but they were furnished only with the bare necessities and were covered everywhere with a half-inch, more or less, of dust. This was hardly to be wondered at. Pizarro and his band of tramps must have raised a deuce of a dust when they perpetrated the Conquest of Peru and took Atahuallpa into their tender keeping in the great plaza a short block away, on that Saturday evening, 381 years before. Strangest of all, the hotel rates were posted in plain sight, where even foreigners might see; forty cents a night, or thirty if the room was occupied a month or more. Evidently another fussy gringo had been here before me, for the printed rules contained the following bylaw:

“The señor passenger who shall desire to use two mattresses on the same bed will subject himself to the payment of ten cents above the ordinary pension.”

The original motive could not have been Hays; for the notice was yellow with time, and the manager-chambermaid, though he gave me many details of the doings of my erstwhile companion as he gradually got my indispensable requirements together, with great care not to remove the historic dust anywhere, did not mention any such gringo idiosyncrasy. Every non-resident of Cajamarca, be he a tawny, soil-incrusted Indian from up in the hills, or the representative of some ambitious European house, eats in one of two Chinese fondas, or take-your-chances restaurants, not far off the main plaza. The transient enters a Celestial general-store, passes through it and a dingy room, crowded with tables about which barefoot Indians, male and female, their aged felt hats on their heads, are helping themselves with spoons or fingers, and through another doorless door into a smaller chamber with a single long table covered by an oilcloth of long and troubled history, where he is sure to find a place because of the requirement of shoes. During the process he will pass close by the open kitchen with its iron cooking-range—the first I had seen in South America—manipulated by a grizzled old Chinaman. The service is à la carte and, but for the shoes and oilcloth, identical in both dining-rooms. Here one will find a greasy strip of paper with a printed menu, easily comprehensible to anyone with a Spanish and Quichua dictionary, a treatise on Peruvian coast slang, and some smacking of Chinese in Spanish misspelling; or which, in the very likely event of the client being unable to read, the barefoot waiter will recite in Shakespearean cadence and breathless continuity. Indeed, but for the language, one might fancy oneself back on the lower Bowery as the waiter bawls to the kitchen:

“Un churrasco!”

“Un bisté fogoso!”

“Hasta cuando esos choclos?”

The high cost of living, like the railroad decreed by congress in 1864, had not yet climbed over the range into Cajamarca. The dishes are 2½ or five cents each. There are, to be sure, a few ten-cent ones, but these are what terrapin would be with us, and their consumption is not encouraged, being above the tone of Cajamarca. The first price covers a dozen delicacies, such as “patitas con arroz—pigs’ feetlets with rice,” fried brains, liver, or chupe, the Irish-stew of the Andes. At five cents the epicure to whom money is no object may have a breaded “bisté” with onions, rice, and potatoes, a “baefs teak paí,” “rosbif de cordero—roast beef of mutton—” “a beefsteak of pork,” and a score of even more endurable concoctions. Chocolate, which is native to the region and excellently made, is 2½ cents; a cup of coffee, which no one in Cajamarca knows how to make, costs twice that. Eggs “in any style” are two cents each, and a loaf of bread, of the size of a biscuit, one cent—for in Cajamarca the traveler first finds the huge copper one-cent and half-cent pieces. The greatest gourmand sailing the high seas could not spend more than fifteen, or possibly twenty cents, for a dinner in Cajamarca—and a “tip” is unknown.

I had been duly warned that the table-manners would be on a par with those of Colombia and Ecuador. Before I left Quito, Hays had written, “In Peru soup is eaten with brilliancy, the high notes being sustained with great verve.” The same table utensils reached both the shod minority and the Indians under their hats; the table de luxe was supplied, after that democratic South American manner, with one drinking-glass, the only washing of which was what it inadvertently received during its varied service.

Cajamarca, as everyone whose historical education was not criminally neglected knows, was not founded; it was found; and like anything else picked up by the Spaniards of those days, was never returned. It lay already—but unprepared—spread out in the extreme northwest corner of its long, fertile valley when Pizarro and his merry men came riding down upon it across the same broad páramo, and they caught much the same view of it as I, though in those days it was not half-hidden by the adorning eucalyptus trees of to-day, nor distantly musical with church-bells. The famous town, now capital of a department, which is to Peru what a state is with us, is more or less oval in shape, some ten by twenty blocks at its widest and longest, not counting the huts that straggle out at both ends along its principal “highway” and dot the outskirts and the widening plain. It is seven degrees below the equator and somewhat warmer than Quito. It stands 2814 meters above the sea, with some half-dozen inhabitants for every meter. In all but its history it is tiresomely like any other city of the Andes. The streets, monotonously right-angled, are rudely cobbled, with open sewers down the center, the sidewalks narrow, smooth-worn flagstones on which he who would walk must jostle Indians, donkeys, and stagnant groups of less useful residents. The adobe houses, often two-story and always toeing the street-line, are red-tile roofed and anciently whitewashed. Dingy little shops of odds and ends below, the flower-decked patios of even the best-provided families are surrounded on the ground floor by the dens of servants and the ragged and more numerous population, as in Quito. It was the first place in Peru where I had seen window-glass. By night its streets are “lighted” with faroles, miniature kerosene lamps inside square, glass-sided lanterns that are given to succumbing to the first strong puff of breeze, even if those whose duty it is to light them do not have more pressing engagements. The central plaza is enormous, square in form, but coinciding more or less with the triangular one in which Pizarro and the Inca collided on that dusty Saturday evening of an earlier century. Flower-plots, tended with less monotonous formality than those of Quito, bloom chiefly with geraniums, and among them the historically informed inhabitants point out the stone on which Atahuallpa succumbed to the garrote amid the heaven-opening ministrations of good old Father Greenvale. As in Quito, there remain almost no monuments of pre-Conquest days, for the Incas seem to have built here chiefly of adobe. The most intelligent of Cajamarca’s monks doubted whether there was even a Temple of the Sun or a House of the Virgins to transform into monastery or convent. Not far off the main plaza, however, set cornerwise in the center of a modern block, is the room that was to be filled with gold for Atahuallpa’s ransom, said to be of massive dressed stone, like the palaces of Cuzco. Stevenson, who was in Cajamarca just a hundred years before me, found still visible around the wall the mark that was to measure the height of the treasure, and the room, the residence of a cacique. To-day it is an orphanage, where a German nun was teaching a score of female “orphans” to earn a livelihood on American sewing-machines, and the treasure-mark, as well as all evidence of stone structure, had been whitewashed out of existence, as something of “los Gentiles” not worth preserving.

The unique characteristic of Cajamarca, and almost her only stone buildings, are her half-dozen splendid old churches, soft-browned by time as those of Salamanca, and having the appearance of being half-ruined by earthquakes. The natives asserted, however, that they were left incomplete because in colonial days every finished building must pay tribute to the King of Spain. Whatever the cause, their condition gives an unusual architectural effect that could not have been equalled by any design of man, and all who find pleasure in the “picturesque” must hope that Cajamarca will never grow wealthy enough to finish them—a misfortune that is not imminent. The Chilians came in August, 1882, and, taking a note from Pizarro’s note-book—or, more exactly, from that of his secretary, since the swine-herder of Estremadura was not fitted to keep his own—stole all the gold and jewels of the churches, even the laboratory equipment of the schools, and anything else that chanced to be lying around; though they found no one worth holding for ransom. One of the principal churches bears an inscription, now all but effaced by the ubiquitous whitewash, announcing that “This santa eglesia was erected at the cost of one million pesos and fifteen centavos,” the extra seven cents being the cost of bell-ropes. In the great monastery of San Francisco, facing the main plaza, some forty amiable but ignorant friars loll through life, chiefly in the breezy “retiring kiosk,” carpeted, like that of Quito, with burnt matches and cigarette butts. They knew nothing of the tomb of Atahuallpa, but the Spanish organist, who looked like a ninth-inning baseball “fan” on a hot day, led me to the church and played in my honor on “the largest and best pipe-organ in Peru” not only our national air, but several Spanish fandangos and a recent Broadway favorite that is seldom admitted to ecclesiastical circles.

The Indians and gente del pueblo of Cajamarca have nearly as much color of dress as those of Quito, and are even more ragged and abjectly poverty-ridden. Filthy, maimed beggars adorn the façades of churches, and the aboriginals speak a mushy, mouthful, dialect of Quichua, though all know Spanish. None of the Chinese residents have families; yet every now and then one passes a child with quaintly shaped eyes that testify to the ingratiating manners of the Celestials. The “upper” classes struggle to keep the theoretically white collars and the dandified shoes that mark their caste, and dawdle through life as shopkeepers, lawyers without clients, doctors whose degrees furnish them little but the title, or at any makeshift occupation that will spare them from soiling their tapering fingers with vulgar labor. Opportunity is a rare visitor, yet in a century, perhaps, there has not been born in Cajamarca a boy with the initiative and energy to tramp three days over the western range and stow away for somewhere that he could make a man of himself. As to personal habits: a drug clerk graduated in Lima pours out of their bottles the pills he recommends, and plays them idly back and forth from one unwashed hand to the other before returning them to the shelf. Yet it was a relief to loll away several days in civilization, even Peruvianly speaking. If the passing stranger was not entirely free from the open mouth and vacant eye, he could pass a corner group without all falling silent and craning their necks after him, and might even sit down at the fonda table without all interrupting their noisy eating to mumble over their mouthful, “Where do you come from and where are you going?” But even a Peruvian department capital has not yet reached that stage which makes photography easy, or the coarsest sarcasm effective. As often as I opened my kodak, some “educated” member of society was sure to crowd close to me, keeping persistently in front of the lens; and when I had at length manoeuvered and tricked him out of the view, more or less, I was seeking, he was certain to bleat with his blandest smile, “Sacando una plancha, no, señor?” If I made answer, “No, my esteemed friend of ancient and noble blood, I am building an aeroplane on sleigh-runners to cross the icy stretches of the Amazon,” the half-baked son of the wilderness might reflect solemnly a moment or two before making some such inane reply as, “Yes, it is a long way to the Amazon.” Almost at the hour of my arrival an enamored youth of Cajamarca committed suicide, leaving a letter in which he declared life was a farce. Had he been with me through the Province of Jaen, he would have found it more nearly a melodrama. Only those who have endured the hardships of a long trail can know the compensating pleasure of a return to even comparative comfort, like the burgeoning of spring after a hard winter. But, after all, the joys of the trail in the Andes are chiefly those of anticipation, and the sense of accomplishment, of exclusiveness in tramping where few men have tramped before. For there can be slight pleasure of intercourse in towns where the youths of the “best families” follow the foreigner with cries of “Goot neeght. Awe right,” broken by snickers of silly laughter; and where dreams of long hours in something resembling a bed are rudely dispelled by the din of church-bells, the whistles of lonesome policemen, and all the thousand and one noises with which the Latin-American can make life hideous. In the matter of libraries and book-shops Peru is even less advanced than the countries to the north. There was, to be sure, a department library in Cajamarca, but “for the present” it was closed. In despair I canvassed the town for a book. A clerk whom I asked why no printed matter was to be had, replied:

“No hay aficionados á la lectura en estas partes, señor.”

“Amateurs of reading,” indeed! As one might say, aficionados of billiards, “fans” of cock-fighting; merely an amusing game to pass the time.

“But what on earth do people do with their minds?” I gasped.

“They go to church, señor,” replied the clerk.

But the best of Cajamarca is her wonderful green and checkered valley, as seen from the rocky hillock ten minutes above the main plaza, now serving as a quarry of soft, whitish stone, but on which, if anywhere, must have been the fortress historians tell us overlooked the Inca city. There is, indeed, to-day the remnants of a cobble-stone and adobe building on the summit, and cajamarquinos who climb there to enjoy the widespread view asserted that Atahuallpa used to watch from this height the rising and setting of the sun. Prescott might almost have sat on the rocky hillock in person when he wrote:

“The valley of Cajamarca, enamelled with all the beauties of cultivation, lay unrolled like a rich and variegated carpet of verdure, in strong contrast with the dark forms of the Andes that rose up everywhere about it. The vale is of oval shape, extending about five leagues in length by three in breadth, and was inhabited by a superior population to any the Spaniards had yet seen; with ten thousand houses of clay hardened in the sun and some ambitious dwellings of hewn stone.” The valley, stretching away south-southeast, is not so extensive as the reading of Prescott leads the imagination to picture. Except in one place, where it spreads out like the arms of a cross, it is surely not more than a league in width. But the suave spring view across it, green with the deep green of the cactus, and clumped now by the Australian eucalyptus in contrast to the treeless days of the Incas, is in certain moods and aspects the most beautiful of the Andes, though lacking the surrounding snowclads that add so much to the vale of Quito. Here I came often to sit above the murmur of the town, until the God of the Incas, after his daily journey around the earth to see that all was well, sank behind the broad páramo of Yanacancha, blotting out the valley stretching away to the southward where the trail following the old Inca highway down the backbone of the continent, was already beckoning me on.

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XI. DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL

Tramping down the Andes is like walking on the ridge of a steep roof; there is a constant tendency to slip off on one side or the other and slide down to the Pacific or the Amazon. The Latin-American is only too prone to follow the line of least resistance, and that line is not along the crest of the Andes where the more manly Incas traveled. The villager obliged to journey to another town of the Sierra a hundred miles north or south will ride muleback something more than that to the nearest port, take ship to another harbor, and ride another hundred miles up into the interior to his destination. Hence the excellent highway that might have been built down all the backbone of the continent, or at least the Inca one that might have been kept up, does not exist. Each community is confined to its own valley and cut off from the rest by almost untrodden mountain ranges, or by trackless bare ridges where only sheep and their hardy shepherds can live. Under the beneficent rule of the Incas means of intercommunication were infinitely better than to-day; then, roads and bridges were kept in constant repair, and in all exposed parts, at intervals along the cold punas and among the mountain gorges, were government tambos with shelter and food for both man and llamas.

To journey from Cajamarca to Lima would have been easy; I had only to hire a mule to Pacasmayo and catch a passing steamer. But to reach there by the route I had proposed to myself was another matter. Even Raimondi’s famous map of Peru, in 25 folios, over which I spent a morning in the prefect’s parlor, offered scanty information, a few faint lines representing trails leading almost anywhere except where I would go. The only route at all suited to my purpose seemed to be one through Huamachuco and Huraraz, and along the valley of the Santa river. Near the source of this it looked as if I must turn back almost due north and climb over the uninhabited, snowclad Cordillera Central, whence it might be possible to reach Cerro de Pasco. Local information was not even equal to the assertion of Prescott—who had never been nearer South America than the southern coast of Massachusetts—that “the messengers of Pizarro from Caxamalca to Cuzco followed the elevated regions of the Cordillera through many populous towns, of which the chief were Guamachuco, Guánuco, and Xauxa.” At best I had to leave the scene of Atahuallpa’s undoing with little knowledge of where I was going, except southward.

Certain preparations were essential before I plunged again into the all but unknown. The trip from Loja—the longest sustained hardship I had ever undergone—had left me a sadly depleted wardrobe. Especially were my walking-boots in the last stages. The shops of Cajamarca had no heavy ones among their stock, but I had hoped, with the assistance of the prefect, to buy a pair of the shoes manufactured for the use of the garrison-police. The department chief, however, put off wiring the president, or laying the matter before congress, until it was too late. A friendly shoemaker advised me to apply privately to a soldier or policeman.

“But they have only one pair each,” I protested.

“True,” replied the zapatero, “pero se roban entre ellos—they steal from each other.”

This hint also had been too long delayed, and I was forced to trust to native patching to carry me over the indefinite region to the next source of supply. As to socks, I had found that the best for tramping the Andes were none at all; that is, a better substitute were the “fusslappen” of the German soldier,—a square of cotton flannel on which to set the foot diagonally, fold over the three corners, and thrust it into the boot. The small silver pieces that came to me each time I threw down a sovereign on the Chinaman’s counter, I had laid away for the road ahead, spending the heavy coppers and the cartwheel soles. This petty point is extremely important in the Andes, for even the man able and willing to toss out gold for every banana he buys often finds villages of the Sierra where the yellow metal will not be accepted; and those who might otherwise be willing to change a large coin are frequently afraid to show that they have so much money on hand. The rucksack style of carrying had proved burdensome. For the load that remained I made a leather harness, not unlike suspenders, with half my possessions balanced against the rest. Then, having squandered 21 cents in the greatest banquet known to the Chinaman’s back room, I climbed the fortress hill to watch for the last time the interwoven colors of the setting sun across the rich vale of Cajamarca.

It was the seventh of May when I struck southward again along the valley floor. A wide highway sidestepped out of the city; but barely had the scent of this been left behind than a shallow river took possession of the entire width of the road. There is a sort of lawlessness both of man and nature in the Andes, and many is the hacendado who thus calmly makes use of the public highway as his irrigation ditch. When Hernando de Soto was sent with fifteen horse to visit the Inca at his baths a few miles south of the city, “they followed a fine causeway across the plain and came to a small stream with a bridge, but, distrusting its strength, dashed through the water.” An hour from town I, too, was dashing through the water, boots in hand, not because I distrusted the bridge, but because there was not the vestige of a bridge left to distrust.

Beyond the stream were the famous “Baños del Inca,” now owned by the city of Cajamarca. In the barnyard of a stone and adobe hacienda a chola woman sent an Indian boy to open for me an adjoining baked-mud room, in the floor of which was a rough-stone swimming-pool nearly ten feet square. Into this steaming sulphurous water was pouring. But as a group of Indians were washing themselves and their rags in the source of supply outside, I was forced to relinquish the rare pleasure of a hot bath, even in so famous a setting. Historians report the existence of an ancient stone bathtub that was used by the Incas, but the woman was certain there had been none in the vicinity during her career as caretaker.

The road she pointed out emerged from the back gate of the hacienda and mounted the steaming brook. Higher up, where I thrust a hand in it, the water was just hot enough to be bearable. The valley of Cajamarca, stretching far southward, had promised level going for a day or two. But though there was plenty of space for it on the valley floor, the camino real, true to its Andean environment, preferred to clamber up and down over stony, barren, broken ridges. Before noon it had raised me to a páramo where several cold, blue lakes swarmed with wild ducks that were not even gun-shy. An Indian I fell in with said they were never hunted, “because when they fall there is no way to enter the water and get them.” Evidently, like his forebears of centuries ago, he had never heard of a strange invention called a boat.

Two days of stony going, now between hedges of ripe tunas, now over high ridges, gashed and tumbled, by a trail thirsty despite the frequent fording of luke-warm streams gray with decomposed rock, brought me to San Marcos in a tropical and fruitful valley withered by a long drought. On the façade of the little drygoods shop and government salt-store of the absent gobernador hung a huge sign beginning “SOCORRO PEONES,” implying that the owner was also a “hooker” of workmen for a German-owned sugar estate down on the coast. When I presented my order from the prefect of the department, the wife of San Marcos’ chief “authority” ordered her cholas to prepare me dinner at once.

“I did not come to the gobernador that he should personally furnish me accommodations,” I protested. “I only want him to use his authority with those who make a business of lodging strangers.”

“There is no such place in San Marcos,” replied the woman, locking up shop and leading me into her parlor, musty with disuse, “but all travelers are welcome here.”

Behind the divan to which she motioned me stood a life-size figure of the Virgin, flanked by another of Saint Somebody. In honor of the arrival of a stranger, perhaps, the matron soon reappeared with several serving-women and, stripping the “Madre de Diós” to her bamboo-structured nudity, reattired her in four gowns, each of which was far more costly than those worn by any of the living beings present. Then she set a newly polished crown on the head of the image and, falling on her knees before it, began to rock back and forth imploring her intercession in a monotonous singsong. With dusk appeared the gobernador, accompanied by two traveling salesmen, and having ordered the three mules picketed, he spent a long evening bewailing with them the rising cost of commodities “of first necessity, even our very aguardiente and pisco, señores.” In the act of looking over my papers, his eye was caught by a typewritten document in English.

“Ah, los yanquis!” he cried. “They are so up-to-date they even avoid the labor of writing by having their letters printed. But how can they afford it?”

“Una máquina para escribir,” I explained.

“A writing-machine!” he gasped. “Is there such a thing? I must have one at once, for I never can spell things right.”

The village church having lost its roof, most of the old women in town gathered with my hostess in the adjoining parlor and droned for hours before her bamboo saints. For a long time the gobernador gave no heed to the uproar, though it forced him to raise his voice almost to a shout. Then suddenly he broke off an enumeration of prices with an angry:

“Hágame el favor!” (In the Andes the expression corresponds closely to our colloquial “What do you know about that?”) “Por Diós, those beatas would pray a man insane!” and dashing into the parlor, he broke up the meeting forthwith, and sent the manto-wrapped women scurrying out through the zaguan like startled crows.

For all her religious duties my hostess found time to set down in my note-book the recipe of the most potent beverage that has come down from the Inca civilization,—the chicha de jora, at the making of which that served with the evening meal proved her an adept. In a laborious school-girl hand, and with a wealth of misspelling that suggested that she, too, could have used a “writing-machine” to advantage, she wrote:

“Take ripe, shelled corn, cover with water and leave a week or more until the kernels have sprouted. Dry in the sun two or three days. Crush to a mass, boil, and place, when cold, in jars three-fourths full, adding sugar sufficient to cause fermentation.”

Despite her piety and attitude of Moorish seclusion, she entered into the conversation with a frankness peculiar to the Latin race. Not the least startling of her naïve questions was:

“How many children have you?”

“I am not married,” I answered.

“Of course you are not married,” she replied, “being a traveler all over Peru and the outside world, but have you really no children at all?”

At daybreak the gobernador sent a boy and a horse to set me across—and all but spill me into—a rock-strewn river below the town, “because it is very dangerous to wet the feet in the morning.” Ichocán, two leagues beyond San Marcos, sits high and cold on an eminence. Behind it the trail sloped languidly upward, then pitched headlong down through a stony, desert-dry wilderness, inhabited only by cactus and wild asses, to the Condebamba river, its lower valley of densest-green a relieving contrast to the dreary, arid mountain flanks. Across the roaring gorge a bridge of steel cables, supported by railway rails, has taken the place of the chaca of woven willow withes of Inca days. But it still looked frail and aërial enough, swaying high above the racing stream that would quickly have swept a stumbling traveler through rock-walled hills to the Marañón and the Amazon, and the few arrieros who follow this route have no easy task in driving their donkeys across it.

A pole-and-mud hut on the dreary slope of the further bank housed the guardian of the bridge, a fever-laden skeleton who was barely able to crawl after an unbroken year of paludismo, the intermittent fever of the Andes that lurks in all such sunken valleys as that of the Condebamba. I might better have spent the night on the hillside beyond, than to have tossed it through on the hut floor, swarming with some species of shark-jawed insect. Luckily I was not offered the first bowl of chicha before I found the guardian’s female companion concocting the family supply, for her method was little less disillusioning than that of the yuca-chewing Jívaros Indians. When it had been boiled in a huge kettle that spent its days of disuse as a nesting-place for the family curs, the liquid was poured off into a long, shallow tub, like a small dug-out canoe, the same one that would serve another purpose on wash-day. Squatted on the ground beside it, the woman was stirring it slowly with a stick she had caught up at random. Bit by bit two gaunt and mangy curs slunk nearer, until their noses all but touched the steaming liquid, whereupon the woman left off her stirring long enough to rap them over the head with the ladle. The dogs retreated a yard or two with cowardly yelps, only to repeat the advance over and over again. The chola’s vigilance, it turned out, was not due to any unwonted sense of cleanliness; she was merely bent on saving the animals from burning themselves. As soon as she judged the liquid cool enough, she gave a sign, and the curs fell upon the tub and greedily lapped up the scum. Thus saved the labor of skimming it, the female crawled to her feet and set the stuff away in earthen jars to ferment.

One barren, stony ridge after another in pitiless succession carried me much higher before the following noonday. My course now lay well east of south, for I had caught the swing of the west coast of South America. One last mighty surge and the world fell away before me, disclosing almost within shouting distance the provincial capital of Cajabamba. But it is a good rule in the Andes never to sit down in the plaza until you reach the town. Between me and the day’s goal lay hidden one of those mighty holes in the earth that mean the undoing and repetition of all the toil that has gone before. The shadows were beginning to climb the eastern wall of Cajabamba’s valley before I reached the century-polished cobbles of the street that had swallowed up the converging trails.

The plump young subprefect, who was awaiting me in state upon my return from the Chinese fonda to which a soldier had piloted me, would have been rosy-cheeked had not some careless ancestor faintly clouded his family tree and given a quaint kink to his hair. He returned my papers with a regal bow and bade me make my home in his office as long as I chose to honor Cajabamba with my presence. The “bed” was a blanket on the yielding, earth-covered floor; but I had twenty soldiers at my beck and call, and what mattered it if, each time I would make my toilet, I must go to jail? Luckily the rust-hinged doors and chain-weighted gates creaked with as pompous humility and dignified alacrity for my exit as to admit me, though there were those within who had not passed them in twenty years.

By the time I was city-dressed, the subprefect, pomaded and be-frocked within an inch of his life, fluttered into my boudoir to ask, in breathless oratorical periods, if, inasmuch as he had just been married last week, or during the night, and mother down on the coast was dying to know what the new acquisition looked like and there were no photographers in Cajabamba and it was a pity Peru was so backward, would I not have the fineza to take fifteen or twenty pictures of him and his novia and deliver a few dozen finished and mounted prints for him and her and their relatives and friends and compadres and associates within an hour or two? As the carelessness of my American agent had left me almost filmless, this was neither the first nor the last time I was put to the unpleasant necessity of “faking” a picture. To have refused his request, even with humble apologies and laborious explanations, would have been to win the ill-will of Cajabamba’s ruler and all his dependents, had it not resulted in the trumping up of some transparent excuse to turn me out and refuse me official assistance in finding other lodgings. A photographer speaking some Spanish could pick up much silver down the crest of the Andes; it would have been a kindness if he had made the trip a few days ahead of me. To be sure, these official requests were always useful, in a way. While the powdered and perfumed “authorities” were puffing themselves up to the requisite pomposity, the town was sure to gather alongside, and as neither the fancied nor the real subjects were well enough versed in mechanics to know whether a kodak operates endwise or sidewise, I caught many a nonchalant pose of some really worthwhile bystander that I might have begged for in vain. On this occasion the novia, having spent a few hours in completely disguising herself, as women will under the circumstances the world over, appeared at last, deathly pale with rice powder, and the pair assumed a score of fetching poses under my direction. True, it was dark by that time. But the subprefect saw no reason why a photograph should not be taken by the light of three sputtering candles. He preferred it, indeed, to embracing his newly-won treasure in the public glare of day. But the night had grown aged before he feigned to understand the impossibility of immediate delivery, and he accepted only sulkily my promise to send the finished portraits back from the next city, “if they turned out well.”

During my morning stroll about town I was accosted in English from the zaguan of a building of dilapidated adobe splendor. So often had I heard a laborious “Goot mawnin, seer, how do yo do?” from some silly youth whose knowledge of foreign tongues began and ended with that phrase, that I nodded and passed on. I have too much affection for my mother tongue to hear it gratuitously maltreated; moreover, it had lain so long idle that to speak it had come to seem an affectation.

This time, however, the speaker continued with faultless fluency:

“I hear you are an American.”

“Just so.”

“I am Carlos Traverso, at your service; graduate of an American university.”

“Which one?”

“Michigan.”

“Indeed! So am I.”

“Válgame Diós!” gasped the youth, betrayed by astonishment into his native tongue for a moment. “Can’t you come around to my room, your own house, as I should say in Peru. You probably haven’t seen the latest copy of the ‘Alumnus’?”

“Nor the twenty latest ones. With the greatest of pleasure.”

In spite of myself I found my tongue translating the set Castilian phrases I had so long been using, instead of falling into the colloquialisms of my own land. When I was ensconced in an American armchair battered with the evidence of a long journey and of the crude unloading facilities of West Coast ports, surrounded by walls hidden under banners and photographs that seemed to turn the adobe chamber into a college dormitory transported to the wilds of the Andes, the youth went on:

“The government of Peru gives four betas, that is, sends yearly an honor student to each of four American universities, with an allowance of a hundred dollars a month....”

“That is, you had $4800 for the course at Michigan?”

“Yes, with traveling expenses. You probably had about the same allowance?”

“Fortunately not, or I should long since have been gracing some home for inebriates. And is this just a present from the government?”

“No; on our return we must serve the government for three years at the same salary. I am superintendent of schools in this and the neighboring province of Huamachuco.”

The son of a Scandinavian father, Traverso had evidently overcome the handicap of an allowance the spending of which would have consumed the entire energies of a full-blooded Latin-American, and had brought back a real education. His shelves were filled with the latest treatises on pedagogy, in several languages, and a brief acquaintance was enough to show that he was earnestly striving to instill some new life into the moribund system of his native land.

“But what’s the use?” he concluded gloomily, casting aside a carefully worked out plan of study. “A man’s wings are clipped before he can start to fly. Theoretically I have full authority over school matters in my two provinces; practically I can’t alter by a hair the benighted medieval routine of studies, interwoven at every turn by the lives of the saints, that Peru has stumbled along under for centuries. I can’t fire a fifteen-dollar-a-month numskull up in one of the mountain villages, even though he doesn’t know whether Chile is in New York or in Europe. The priests have their wires attached to every government leg and arm in the country, and I feel like a man lying by, bound hand and foot, watching our children being criminally assaulted. The money the government spends on us might as well be chucked into the Pacific.”

“To say nothing of squandering on one student what would easily suffice for three,” I put in.

“Caramba, it is true! In Ann Arbor life is calm and quiet; but you ought to see what some of the betados who are sent to Paris and Rome bring back with them! Válgame Diós!”

The valley of Cajabamba leans decidedly to the west, whence the next day was largely one of mounting. But the region is so high that climbing was not laborious in the invigorating mountain air that cuts into the lungs like strong wine; and even a man inclined to that frailty could not have felt lonely with so much of the world spread out in plain sight about him. There were few long spaces without houses or pack-trains. Once I fell in with a government chasqui driving a horse and an ass laden with sacks of mail, among which stood out one marked conspicuously: “U. S. Mail Foreign.” The correspondence, he assured me, was not bound for the “exterior,” but was merely local matter between towns of the route that had been farmed out to him, a statement that was confirmed at the next post-office.

A mighty crack in the earth, into and out of which the trail zigzagged like some badly wounded creature, marked my exit at last from the department of Cajamarca into that of Libertad. The ancient Inca highway is said to have followed this same route over these high, undulating plains, but there were no certain vestiges of it. In the late afternoon I burst suddenly out upon a broad view of the famous old city of Huamachuco, much like Quito in setting, though more dreary, backed by a ragged, black range, half cut off by a nearer slope, that might have been Pichincha itself, the two peaks streaked with the first snow I had seen since leaving central Ecuador.

Traverso had given me a note of introduction to his compadre, Dr. Alva, the médico titular of Huamachuco. As government doctor, the only physician, indeed, within two hard days’ ride in any direction, he drew—theoretically, at least—a salary of $150 a month, exceeding even that of the haughty subprefect. The “son” of a hamlet far up in the hills, he was a plain, earnest, little man with a heart several times larger than the average of his fellow-countrymen. From his lips the stereotyped “Here you are in your own house” had real meaning. His library included Spanish editions of Taine, Nietzsche, Emerson—and Roosevelt; his phonograph was of high grade and his records well chosen. Edison was his ideal of manhood—indeed, a straw vote in the Andes would certainly show the “wizard of Orange” the most popular American—and he was wont to boast jokingly that his own name was the same as one of those of the inventor, “showing that some of our ancestors were the same.” Toward the end of my stay I discovered that the doctor, having installed me in his well-furnished “guest-room,” was himself huddling out the cold nights on a bag of straw and a wooden table in the mud den behind his “office.”

It was not until we had grown rather well acquainted that Dr. Alva confided to me the fact that he had “worked his way” through the medical school of Lima, “even acting as waiter, señor, in a fonda, and working in the summer like any peon. But don’t whisper a word of this to anyone in Peru,” he implored, as if he suddenly regretted having taken me into his confidence.

“Up in my country those of us who did that are inclined to boast of it,” I laughed.

“Ah, sí, señor, I know,” he answered in an undertone, glancing cautiously about him, “I know; even Tomás Alva Edison was a newsboy. But if Huamachuco ever hears of it I shall be a social outcast, ranked with the Indians of the market-place.”

Huamachuco derives its name, if local authority is trustworthy, from the Quichua words huama (snow) and chuco (cap), the peak behind the town having in earlier centuries been completely snow-topped. It is the “Guamachuco” of Prescott, to which Hernando Pizarro was sent soon after the capture of Atahuallpa, to investigate the rumor that an army was being raised to rescue the imperial prisoner. Even to-day its population is largely Indian, among whom the chewing of coca leaves is general—the first place south of Almaguer in Colombia of which this could be said.

But the Huamachuco of to-day does not exactly coincide with that of Pizarro’s time. The effete descendants of a more hardy race have crawled down into a sheltering valley, leaving uninhabited the ancient “city of the Gentiles” on the mountain above. A local editor, apparently for no better reason than the pleasure of basking in a gringo smile, offered to serve me as guide. A stony road flanked ever higher along a perpendicular rock-wall, then rose and fell over lofty undulations, and at some six miles from the modern town brought us to the first ruins. Far below, across a deep quebrada, lay, like a relief map, the great rectangle of a ruined city, in perfect squares, the roofless stone gables standing forth in fantastic array above a forest of low trees. This was Viracochapampa, or “Plain of the Nobles,” the resident city at the time of the Conquest. Through its broad central street passed the great Inca highway from Quito to Cuzco.

But that was the least important part of ancient Huamachuco. Here on the barren mountain-top stood in olden times Marca-Huamachuco, protecting the dwelling-place on the stony plain below. Above the modern town are still to be found remnants of the cuchilla, or stone trough by which the ancient race brought water to this lofty summit by some system that has been lost in the haze of time. About us, as we advanced, rose ruin after stone ruin of what had evidently been an elaborate series of fortresses. These spread mile upon mile across the rugged, undulating tableland, some densely interwoven with brambles and impenetrable thickets, all surrounded by the utter silence of a world long since abandoned by man and brute. Indeed, the place was less remarkable for its construction than for the vast extent of the ruins. Several large edifices, square or triangular in shape, were built of huge blocks of stone, still in the same form in which they might have been found as mountain boulders, and, unlike the fortress of Ingapirca, nowhere nicely fitted together. On the contrary, nearly every joint was filled in with chips of stone, and in the thick interior walls had been used a sort of crude concrete, now mere gravelly mud that could be picked out with the fingers. Whether Marca-Huamachuco was built by an earlier people, or by a more careless tribe of the race that left behind the cut-stone palaces of Cuzco, their method of construction did not make for durability. The ruins were all serrated and tooth-shaped, with only here and there a jagged point suggesting the original height, the whole cutting the far-off horizon with a fantastic, broken sky-line. An enormous wall had evidently once surrounded the entire peak, and beyond, set close together, was a series of almost round fortresses, each of three stone walls, one inside the other. One more carefully constructed edifice gave evidence of having been the chief palace, and from it stretched an unobstructed view of all the surrounding landscape, in which an advancing enemy might have been sighted league upon league away in any direction.

It was in Huamachuco that the first hint of what later proved to be amœbic dysentery overtook me, recalling to memory the medicine-case I had abandoned in Cuenca as a useless burden. A disturbing lack of energy settled upon me, my appetite failed—a startling symptom, indeed—and I felt as if I had inadvertently swallowed one of the largest ruins of Marca-Huamachuco. It was with no rousing pleasure, therefore, that I set off, laden with hard-boiled eggs and a supply of the stony local bread, on the lonely twelve-league tramp that intervenes between the residence of Dr. Alva and the next town.

Four leagues south, the well-marked road swung to the right and, wading the shallow Huamachuco river, I struck off for Trujillo and comparative civilization on the coast. The faint path to the left bore me even higher across an uninhabited world, dreary with its endless expanse of dead-yellow ichu. Here were distinct remnants of the old Inca highway. For several miles across the undulating páramo the way lay between two rows of stones, set upright a considerable distance apart, and enclosing a space wide enough for six or seven carriages, had they existed, to pass abreast. If, as the inhabitants of the region assert, this is a good example of that great military highway of the Incas, the descriptions of chroniclers and historians have far outdone the reality. Gomara reports it “twenty-five feet wide, cut in a straight line from the living rock, or made of stone and lime, turning aside neither for mountains nor lakes.” Prescott speaks of “highways carefully constructed of cut slabs of freestone and porphyry,” which only proves how incompetent to judge things South American is the most competent man who has not been there in person. Those who have visited Spain know how easily the title “camino” is granted, and the Conquistadores, like the Peruvians of to-day, having in many cases probably never seen a real road, had no means of comparison. Certainly this Inca highway had nothing to justify the extravagant praise of those who compared it to the old Roman roads. The most that had been done in the way of road building was to clear the plain of loose rocks—in conspicuous contrast to the modern Peruvians, who look upon a road as a convenient place to toss the stones picked up in their fields. Stone-heaps here and there along the Andes mark forever the routes of travel of Inca days, but they are chiefly achapetas, piles thrown up by travelers, who tossed upon them, as votary offering, a cud of coca. Of the tambos, rest-houses maintained at frequent intervals by the imperial government, like the dak bungalows of India, not even the ruins of one in a hundred remain standing, and the traveler of to-day is far more exposed to the elements than in the times of the Incas.

The Andes rise ever higher from north to south and from west to east, whence I was far above Huamachuco when I dragged myself into the “Vaquería Angasmarca,” a cluster of cobblestone hovels barely four feet high, home of an Indian cow-guard, in one of the most dreary, stony settings in South America. Unable to get even hot water, I dared not eat the heavy fiambre I carried. I had huddled for hours on a stone under the projecting roof when, after dark, the vaquero himself rode in from Huamachuco. Having been a soldier, trained to a bit less immobility of temperament than his mate, he was partly cajoled, partly deceived, into ordering her to serve me a gourdful of potato soup, prepared under circumstances better imagined than described. For a long time he replied with dogged, apathetic persistence that he “only gave posado in the corredor,” but I succeeded at last in inducing him to furnish me a ragged blanket in a corner of his own sty, on the earth floor of which huddled the entire family and the customary menagerie of small animals.

The traveler who crawls out, blue with cold, after a night in one of these cobble caves of the highland Indian, to squat against the eastern wall until a gourd of warm water, savored with corn and the dung-fuel over which it is slowly half-heated, is thrust out at him, no longer wonders that the aboriginals of the Andes worshipped the sun. Every step of that day of excruciating climbs and stony descents, across dreary páramos on which I several times lost my way, was a bitter struggle; for all the demands of the will, my legs could not push me forward two miles an hour, and ever and anon they seemed to turn to straw and dropped me suddenly to the ground. All the visible world lay high and treeless now, with touches of snow on several black, shark-tooth peaks of the Cordillera to the eastward. During the day I had passed several more remnants of the old Inca highway, two continuous lines of weather-blackened upright stones set far apart on either side of a space a full half-block wide. Toward sunset the trail began to descend into a stony river-valley, far down which I made out a tiled building among eucalyptus trees. A passing horseman carelessly answered my question, while more engrossed in my appearance, by assuring me it was the hacienda house I was seeking; and I toiled a half-hour up the mountainside to it, only to have the solitary Indian female who occupied it point out far below, in the valley of the river, the “patrón’s” house of the “Hacienda Angasmarca.”

It was the most imposing country dwelling I had yet seen in Peru; a large village and two churches clustered about it, the entrance like that to some rough old medieval palace, the swarms of dependents carrying the mind back to feudal days. Around an immense flower and shrub-grown patio, in which Indian hostlers were struggling to unload a score of mules and horses, were some thirty rooms, each with a number above the door. I did not learn whether it was the custom of the owner to collect hotel charges, but the establishment was conducted in as heartless and impersonal a manner as if he did. He was a snarly old invalid who crawled about with a cane, growling orders to his cringing Indians, and too much taken up with his own infirmities to waste sympathy on others. With a grunt he thrust my letter of introduction into a pocket, ordering an Indian to unlock one of the numbered rooms. Stagnant with the atmosphere of a cheap hotel, it contained a bed with leather springs, a billowy mattress, and a sack of ichu as pillow, and only after a long struggle did I obtain a bowl of soup filled with tough beef and half-cooked yuca and potatoes, a dish barely endurable to a strong man in full health. It was late next morning before infinite patience won me a bowl of hot milk, and I dragged myself away almost due north. Across the world south of “Angasmarca” yawned a bottomless valley, beyond which a rocky mountain-wall rose to the very heavens. The road which should have followed in that direction was left to sneak out like some hunted thing for a vast detour, even before it began to crawl away eastward at right angles to the way I would have gone. At the outset was a laborious, stony climb, from the summit of which the “Hacienda Tulpo” lay in plain sight, but across one of those heartbreaking gashes in the earth so frequent in the Andes. On the left stood sharp, stark snow-peaks of the Cordillera, which seemed to grow mightier with each day southward. Noon had long since passed, yet there were barely eight miles behind me when I entered the general store of an hacienda building forming a hollow square around a dreary barnyard. The shopkeeper announced himself the owner of the estate—plainly by poetic license. There is a careful graduation of caste in the Andes that makes it easy for the experienced traveler to set any man’s place in the local society. This fellow’s dress, color, his familiar yet commanding manner toward the Indians who sneaked in all that Saturday afternoon to dawdle about the counter and buy bits of trash, draughts of native “rot-gut,” anything the place afforded except what might have been of some use to them, generally on credit, thus lengthening their slavery to the estate, all gave the lie to his assertion. But for all his posing, he turned out a kindly fellow. He not only sold me a half-dozen eggs—in itself a great kindness in the Andes—but dragged down from a shelf a sort of chafing-dish and light-boiled them. When I had drunk these, surrounded by a solid wall of stony-faced Indians who seemed to consider the feat remarkable, I still could not bestir myself to push on. By and by my eyes, wandering aimlessly over the stock that covered two walls to the ceiling, caught sight of a familiar ten-cent can of American tomatoes. I bought them at sixty cents. Long after an old woman had carried off the precious empty can, the shopkeeper spent all the leisure left him by the sluggish flow of now half-intoxicated Indians in thumbing over great sheaves of foreign bills of lading, and at length handed me thirty cents, with the announcement that he had inadvertently charged me for the “whole shipment”—of two cans!

When the dreary afternoon had at last dragged its leaden way into the past tense and chill sunset was creeping across this lofty world, I mentioned to the shopkeeper that I needed a spot on which to spend the night. The idea evidently had never occurred to him. The estate was mine, and all the wonders thereof—but for all that two more endless hours passed before a drink-saucy Indian led me to an icy harness-room and pointed out two bare saddle-pads on the earth floor.

Certainly that man is a fool who sets out on a trip down the Andes for pleasure; for after the first joys of roughing it have worn off, no more monotonously pleasureless existence is conceivable. There is, to be sure, a certain feeling of exclusiveness, a certain satisfaction in living through hardships, of moving by one’s own efforts over those parts of the earth where modern means of transportation are unknown; but even this soon wears off, and with the dreary sameness of each day the journey becomes chiefly a waste of time and effort, and a never-ending disappointment.

In the morning I crawled away along a world growing ever higher, until suddenly it fell abruptly into a chasm out-chasming anything I had yet seen in my worst nightmares. Across it, so high even from this height that it seemed not of our world, a town was pitched on the very tip of a gashed and haggard range. Fortunately my route seemed to lead off down the valley, and I was finding some grains of comfort in not having to ascend to that heavenly dwelling-place of man, whatever it might be called, when a passing horseman sapped my last drop of ambition by telling me it was Pallasca—exactly the place in which I must spend the night!

A long time had passed before I coaxed myself to creep slowly on, avoiding the view of the task before me as a criminal about to be executed might shade his eyes from the scaffold. An unconscionable distance down in the bottomless intervening valley, yet still high, I met the first foreign tramp I had yet seen on the road in South America. He was an Austrian of fifty, looking in his matted, lusterless hair and beard, and his drooping rags, like a corpse that had arisen for a stroll.

“Gehen Sie nicht weiter—Go no further south,” he pleaded weakly. “There everyone is dying of dysentery. Turn back with me to Trujillo and humanity.”

His illness had reached that stage when the invalid sees the leering head of disease rising on all sides, and fancies he may run away from what he carries with him. I could not, naturally, abandon a plan of years’ standing merely because of a temporary disability, and when we had exchanged some bits of road information each crawled slowly on his way.

In the hamlet of Mollepata, near the bottom of the quebrada, an old woman stirred herself to brew me some herb tea, into which she put a branch of ajenjo (wormwood) with the assurance that this was a quick and certain cure for my ailment. The descent had been bad enough; the climb out of that breathless gash in the earth was probably the most dismal experience of my career; I had not, to that day, nor do I expect again during this life, to accomplish a more bitter task than that struggle in intermittent rain, under my leaden load and Turkish-bath poncho, from the tablachaca, or earth-covered stick-bridge across the gorge-cut river forming the northern boundary of the department of Ancachs, to heaven-hung Pallasca. To make matters worse, the natives were united in the assertion that the source of my trouble was my habit of drinking at streams along the way; that at this altitude the water was not only too cold, but held in solution many minerals that made it unsafe. Long afterward I had reason to believe that this had little to do with the matter. But ready at the time to grasp at any straw, I threw away the film-tin that had served me as drinking vessel, resolved that not another drop of “raw” water should pass my lips—or at least my throat. The resolution called for every ounce of will-power. One of the chief pleasures of a walking trip had always been to quench my thirst whenever opportunity offered. Now the mountain rivulets that babbled down across my trail were tantalizing beyond belief, and I would gladly have given a gold sovereign—as long as they lasted—to have been able to drink my fill at each with impunity. Worst of all, there were no substitutes for water to be had, neither fruits, prepared drinks, nor any other relief from torture. On the day we sailed from Panama a Zone doctor had warned Hays and me, as the first and primary rule of the journey before us, always to boil our water. He little guessed the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of obeying that apparently simple commandment in the Andes.

Black night had long since fallen when I dragged myself into the central plaza of Pallasca, silent and dark except in the densely packed, candle-lighted church. A dimly illuminated shop on a far corner proved to be a tavern. My thirst had reached the point where drink was imperative, though the sentence were sudden death. I ran my eye over the shelves.

“There is wheesky cuzqueños,” wheedled the wooden-brained keeper, “and rhum jamaïca, or French absinthe, or ...”

“Have you anything non-alcoholic?” I croaked.

“Cómo no, señor! There is wine, and beer from Lima....”

In South America anything short of forty-percent alcohol does not count as such; even the law does not rate beer and wine “alcoholic liquors.” There being nothing better, I pointed out a bottle bearing the stamp of a Lima brewery.

The sentence was not exactly sudden death, but that may be because I had grown calloused to similar hardships. This Peruvian imitation of a German “dark” beer was thick and black as crude molasses, bitter as cascarilla bark, and more nauseating than old-fashioned medicine. With only the edge of my thirst blunted, I forced the rest of the bottle upon a bystander, not maliciously, but because I knew that a lifetime in the Andes had hardened him to anything; and turned to the question of lodging.

“You come right along with me,” cried the grateful bystander, smacking his all-enduring lips. “You will stop with the señor cura, like all travelers of importance.”

But the señor cura was in no condition to receive guests. In his large, over-furnished parlor around the corner the padre lay on a couch, the slouch hat over his red-bandaged head and a two-weeks’ lack of shave giving him a startling resemblance to the Spanish bandits of operatic fancy.

“No, compadre; I am sick, and I cannot give lodging,” he replied to every plea of my officious sponsor.

The several persons in the room entered into a whispered conference. Some time later I was aroused from my lethargy, and my cicerone and a light-haired youth led the way across the black plaza and up a steep, cobbled street which my legs all but refused to navigate under my heavy load—for though he would not leave a man who had treated him to the luxury of a glass of beer from the capital at a fabulous price until he had seen him safely housed, neither the bystander nor his companion could sink their baggy-kneed caste to the depth of carrying a bundle in the public street, even on a dark night.

When morning dawned I found myself rolled up in a heap of blankets on the earth floor of a long-disused parlor. Hours passed without a human being appearing. I pulled myself together and shuffled out into the patio of an immense, dilapidated house at the tiptop of the town, overlooking half a world and swept by all the winds of heaven. Pallasca has been likened to alforjas, so like a pair of saddlebags on the rump of a pack-animal does it hang down the two sides of a lofty nose of the range. Across the void, deep-blue in spite of the penetrating glare of the Andean sunshine, the Cordillera had tumbled her mountains recklessly in a tumultuous heap, as if the Builder of the world had left here his surplus of materials. The Andes have little of the color and varied charm of the Alps; but in awesome grandeur, and repulsive, savage mightiness they dwarf the latter by comparison. In a room down on the sunken street on which opened the patio zaguan, the light-haired youth and his brother kept the town drug-store. They were the sons of a German who had married in Peru, yet only their more robust frames and greater physical virility distinguished them from the common run of natives; in temperament they were as thoroughly what the Canal Zoner calls “Spig” as the most enemic of their fellow-townsmen. The older was an amateur doctor—with the accent on the adjective—the only one for scores of miles around. He prepared me a half-dozen obleas,—those saucer-shaped capsules of the Andean pharmacopœia—of bismuth, prescribed a diet of chochoca molida—the Quichua-Spanish name for a thin cornmeal gruel—which might be substituted by chuño inglés, a sickly-sweet liquid starch—or wheat or rice soup, and assured me that I would be completely recovered in the morning. All the articles of diet were contingent on the possibility of getting the ingredients, which in the Andes is a distinct contingency. For thirst I was advised to take only boiled water with cinnamon or cimarruba bark; but even to get the former cost a constant struggle with the apathetic servants, and the necessity of dragging myself down to the stream on a corner of the plaza to cool the boiling pot.

Later in the day, while I lay contemplating the immense distance across the room, a young rag-patch came to say that the cura wished to see me. The mere novelty of a man of the cloth desiring my presence was so astonishing that it lent a bit of stiffness to my legs. I rose and wandered down across the main plaza, from the further side of which the world falls precipitously away into unfathomable void.

The unshaven papist still wore his slouch hat, and by day his bandit-like aspect was increased by a complexion like unpolished chamois-skin. He motioned me to a chair beneath the lithograph of a ravishing nude figure advertising a foreign brand of cigarettes, and trusted, with all the smoothness of which the Spanish tongue is capable, that I had not misunderstood his inhospitality of the night before. Gradually I turned the conversation to the history of his native region. He had made a serious study of the pre-Conquest period, and was sure that the Indians lived in just such unwashed misery under the Incas, as to-day. Only, as each group of ten had its commander, who set its tasks and carried his investigations into the very bosom of the family, they were not then so unspeakably lazy. I had started to take my leave after some desultory remarks on my journey, during which he desired to know if I had walked all the way from Europe, when the priest remarked:

“Before going you will allow me to give you a little remembrance?”

“Cómo no! Gracias,” I answered, fancying the good-hearted old fellow was about to favor me with a tin crucifix or a bottle of holy water.

He sat up slowly and, pulling open a drawer of his massive home-made desk, took out five silver soles ($2.50), and held them toward me.

“Mil gracias, no, señor,” I cried in astonishment.

“Tómaselos—take them as a memento,” he persisted, attempting to thrust the coins into my pocket. Plainly he regarded my refusal a mere preliminary formality to save my face. So ingrained is the Latin-American notion that no man exerts himself physically, except under compulsion, that, for all my explanations, he still cherished the idea that I traveled on foot because I had not the means to travel otherwise. Nor did I avoid his proposed charity without a great waste of flowery Castilian, and for all that left him somewhat offended. Even the sons of the misled German could not be made to understand why I had refused the proposed benefaction. “Andarines” of the Peyrounel variety have given these isolated towns of the Andes the impression that all foreigners arriving on foot were “living on the country.” Tramps, in our sense of the word, are unknown in the Andes. The few foreign “beach-combers” who reach Peru rarely get beyond Lima, and the Indians still cling to the Inca rule—though they may no longer know that an Inca ever existed—of each man sticking pertinaciously to his own birthplace. It is as impossible for the American to realize the absolute lack of anything approaching wanderlust in the Andean, and his dread of moving away from his native pueblo, as it is for the Indian to understand why the American is so far from home. Even among the more or less educated officials I could not shake off the title “andarín.” More than one rural “authority” showed himself aggrieved because I did not ask for his testimonial, seal, and signature, fancying himself slighted as of too little importance. Many another assured the gaping bystanders:

“Ah, ganan un platal, esa gente—Those fellows win a wad of money! When he gets back, his government will give him a great prize, at least 300,000 soles for the trip, señores.”

A prize, indeed! As if there were not a prize at every turn of the winding trail, in every new vista of tumultuous nature under the clear metallic blue of the highland sky!

I determined to push on next morning, for Pallasca was no nearer recovery than my journey’s end. The diluted Germans had promised to have an Indian carrier ready at dawn. But they were true Peruvians. The morning was half gone when I gave up in disgust and set out alone. At the zaguan, however, a fishy-eyed Indian rose to his feet to say that he had been sent by the gobernador to “assist” me, and I piled my bundle upon him forthwith.

Though Pallasca seems to perch on the very summit of the world, the trail managed to find another range to climb. Scores of cold, crystal-clear streams babbled tantalizingly across my path. A cosmic wilderness of gaunt and haggard mountains, here throwing forward bare and repulsive outliers, there weirdly decorated with shadow-pictures of clouds and jutting headlands, lay tumbled on every hand as far as the eye could range. The Indian chewed coca constantly, pausing frequently to dip a bit of lime from the gourd he carried at his waist, and appeared to have as little energy as I. When we had crawled some six miles, and a scattered hamlet was visible about as far ahead, with a deep gash of the earth between, he began to complain of pains, and finally lay down in the trail. I did not regret the halt, but when I had waited a half-hour and his groans still sounded, I sought to urge him on. It was useless. Whether he was really ailing—and Sunday may have left him with what is technically known in sporting circles as a “hang-over”—or was merely taking this means of shirking an unwelcome task, now we were far enough away so that I was not likely to return to complain to the gobernador, arguments and threats moved him exactly as they would have the rocks on which he writhed. Consigning him to the nethermost regions, I struggled to my feet under my harness and staggered on down the stony bajada.

Hours afterward, utterly exhausted by the short dozen miles, I entered the mud hamlet of Huandoval, expecting a miserable night on the earth floor of some icy dungeon hut. It was not quite so bad as that. At the first doorway where I paused to inquire for the gobernador, a half-Indian young woman of unusual Andean intelligence offered me lodging where I stood. The baked-mud den was as dreary as usual, but in a corner stood a bare slat bedstead, half-buried under an immense heap of potatoes. Early as it was, I spread my poncho and lay down, anticipating a welcome repose—only to discover that I was lodged in the Huandoval telephone exchange! On the wall hung an aged Errickson instrument, the strange vagaries of which brought the chola in upon me as often as its jangle sounded. The place, too, like telephone exchanges the world over, was exceedingly popular with the young men of the town, and when my rest was not being broken by some mistaken call from another exchange, it was disrupted by the labored wit of some rural Lothario.

It is but eight miles from Huandoval to Cabana, capital of the province; yet it required nine hours of the most concentrated effort, both mental and physical, to drive myself over the low, barren ridge that separates the two towns. The story of the next few days, trivial in detail, I give in no spirit of complaint, but merely because it sheds so direct a light on the character of the Andean Peruvian. I had learned that there was a hospital in Huaráz, the department capital, and requested the subprefect of Cabana to use his authority to help me hire a horse, as he was in duty bound to do by the official orders I carried.

“Pierda cuidado,” orated the thin, angular fellow, peering at me with his short-sighted squint, “the government will furnish you a horse and all that is needed.”

Nobody wanted the government to furnish me anything, but I did not stop to argue the matter. My entire attention was taken up just then with resisting the efforts of the “authorities” to throw me into a dank mud den, under the allegation that it was a lodging. Fortunately there was some one else than Peruvians in the town. It was through the village priest that I won at last a second-story room above the prefectura, of mud floor in spite of its elevation, supported on poles that yielded to the tread. He was a tall, powerfully-built Basque of fifty, with a massive Roman nose and, in memory of his mountain-land, a boína set awry on his head and matching his long, flowing gown only in color. He had suffered from the same ailment during his first year in this foreign land and was sure he knew an instant cure—and instead of merely talking about it, like a native, he sent a man to prepare it. This was a half-bottle of wine boiled with the bark of a mountain tree called the cimarruba; but whatever effectiveness it might have possessed was offset by the impossibility of keeping to a proper diet, or even of getting boiled water to drink. There was no doctor in Cabana; yet all Cabana posed as physicians. Now some fellow would drop in to say, “the very best thing you can eat is pork-chops,” and he would scarcely be out of sight before another paused to assure me that pork-chops would kill me within an hour. “Eat the whites of eggs,” cried another. “You can eat almost anything,” asserted the next comer, “except the whites of eggs.” Again the room would be darkened by a shadow in the doorway, and a man would step forward to say, “Now here is an old Indian woman from up in the mountains whose grandfather’s nephew died of dysentery, and....”

All night the town boomed with fireworks, the howling of dogs, the bawling of drunken citizens, and the atrocious uproar of a local “band,” for it was the eve of something or other. Far from finding the promised horse waiting for me at dawn, I did not see the shadow of a person until after ten. Then a stupid, insolent soldier came to ask if I wanted “breakfast.” At twelve he had not returned. I dragged myself down to the plaza. The subprefect and all his henchmen were making merry in a pulpería. I requested him to have some one prepare me food, at any price. Price? They were horrified! Of course they could not think of letting me pay for anything. I was the guest of Cabana. They would obsequiar me a “magnificent meal” at once, cried the subprefect, tying himself in several knots in his excess of courtesy. What would I like, roast lamb with eggs, a fine steak with.... No, I would be completely satisfied with a bowl of gruel. Ah, certainly, I should have it at once, and a basket of fruit, and ... and there they dropped the matter, until the priest, discovering my plight, well on in the afternoon, sent up a dish of rice gruel.

Everything does not come to him who waits in the Andes, and I descended again to mention the word “horse” to the now reeling subprefect.

“Have no care,” he hiccoughed, “the government will attend to all that.”

Knowing he was merely showing off before his fellow-townsmen, and that he would really let me lie where I was, or at most furnish me some crippled Rozinante to carry me to Tauca, three miles away, I refused his putative charity. He turned to the crowd about us with a pretense of being hurt to the quick, then sent a boy to summon the half-negro gobernador, likewise maudlin with the celebration.

“Since this señor has declined my offer to furnish him all that is needed,” stuttered the offended subprefect, “you will have a paid horse, with saddle and bridle, ready for him—to-morrow.”

“But why not to-day?” I protested.

“Absurd, señor! To-day is the great Corpus Cristi procession and you would not wish to miss that, even if you could get an Indian to go with you.”

The procession, set for mid-morning, started soon after my return to my room. From the altar of the church it encircled the plaza and returned whence it had come. The route had been carefully scraped and swept—evidently for the only time during the year—by ragged Indians, forced to contribute this pious labor by the several grades of labor-dodging “authorities” howling over them. Then it had been spread with a long strip of carpet, after which came scores of barefoot women to cover it with a fixed design of flower-petals of all colors. Then forth from the mud church issued the Basque priest in cream-tinted vestments, his boína and incessant cigarette gone, four Indians protecting him from the dull, sunless day by a rich canopy. Proceeded, followed, or surrounded by all the bareheaded, drink-maudlin piety of Cabana, the distressing “band” blowing itself wobbly-kneed, he moved slowly forward, only his own sacred feet touching the carpet, women and children pouncing upon the flower petals behind as rapidly as they were blessed by his number-eleven tread, and carrying them off as sacred relics. Outwardly he seemed sunk in the profoundest depths of devotion, yet twice, at a sign from me, he halted the procession, as by previous understanding, until I had caught a picture. Over the door of the towered mud-hovel into which the throng crowded after him were the half-effaced words, “HAEC EST DOMUS DEI ET PORTA CIELI.” No doubt they were right, but it would have been easy to have mistaken it for something else.

Toward evening the subprefect’s secretary brought a wooden-minded Indian and, introducing him as the owner of a horse, called upon me to pay 75 cents at once for the use of it. The moment I had done so he produced a still dirtier Indian and, introducing him as my “guide,” demanded that he be paid fifty cents. That over, the secretary mentioned that it was customary to give a “gratification” to owner and “guide,” that they might drink my good health for the coming voyage, at the end of which, he further hinted, it was costumbre to grant the “guide” a real for alfalfa for the animal, and something for himself for chicha, and ... but by that time I had withdrawn to my quarters.

At six in the morning I was dressed and ready; at seven the “guide” came to know if he really should bring the horse; at eight I burst in upon the sleeping subprefect to know what had become of his boisterous promise to have food prepared for me at dawn. A soldier was sent to investigate. In due time he came back with the information that the cook was not up yet. At nine the “horse” arrived. It was a wild, hairy, mountain colt, a bit larger than an ass, which had never been shod, curried, or trimmed. The equipment it wore was wholly home-made,—a bridle of braided rawhide, without bits, like that with which our American Indian rides his mustang, a tiny, crude, wooden saddle with one thickness of leather stretched over it, and huge wooden box-stirrups.

“Now let nothing worry you,” cried the subprefect, as I bade farewell to the noble city of Cabana, the “guide” trotting on foot behind, “I’ll telegraph the gobernador of Corongo and Huaylas and the subprefect of the next province so that he can telegraph his governors and the prefect in Huaráz. No se moleste, señor; everything will be arranged by the government.”

Hours of unbroken climbing brought us to a freezing-cold páramo, where flakes of snow actually fell and across the icy lagoons of which a wind that penetrated to the marrow swept from off the surrounding snow-peaks. So small was my animal that I expected him to drop under me at every step, so tiny that his front knees constantly knocked the stirrups off my feet, and so wobbly in his movements that it was like riding a loose-jointed hobby-horse. At last we caught the valley of a descending river, and racked and shaken in every bone, I rode into the plaza of Corongo, the near-Indian population of which seemed to take a bear-baiting pleasure in the predicaments of others. Evidently this was no new characteristic, for Stevenson, writing a century ago, states, “Corongo is certainly the most disagreeable Indian town I ever entered.”

The gobernador sat gossiping in the mud hut to which the telegraph wire led. He had not, however, received any message from Cabana. As telegrams cost “authorities” nothing, I had permitted myself to hope that at least this promise would be kept. Having no other way of getting rid of me, however, the town ruler led the way to his own hovel, where long after dark his crude-mannered females prepared me a bowl of gruel with which to break an all-day fast.

The language of Corongo is chiefly Quichua, little in evidence since Ecuador, but due from now on to be more general than Spanish. The gobernador ran no unnecessary risk of having me left on his hands, and by six next morning the owner of a new “horse,” an even more striking caricature of what he was supposed to represent than that of the day before, had collected his fee and that of the new “guide.” These paid, he began at once to complain that the animal could not travel far without being shod, a luxury which, like his master, he had thus far never enjoyed. On the advice of the gobernador I added a half-sol for that purpose. Two hours later I raised so effective a protest against further delay that the animal was dragged in, still unshod, as he would be to the end of time, and made ready. The price, more or less exorbitant in honor of my helpless situation and gringo blood, would not have mattered had not each “authority” stood in cahoots with the owners and wasted my time and energy with their clumsy grafts.

Under a brilliant sun we squirmed away out of town, and began a sharp descent into one of the mightiest desert gorges in all the Andes, my “guide,” a stone-headed fellow, speaking only Quichua, who had plodded at a horse’s tail all his days, slapping along behind me in his leather sandals, incessantly feeding himself lime and coca leaves. It would have been difficult enough for a man in the best of health to sit such an animal standing still on the level; let those who can imagine one with barely the strength left to hold himself together riding him down shale hillsides, often at a sharp angle, the stirrups knocked from his inert feet every few yards. Now the entire range cutting off the world on the east was capped with snow, making the scorched and thirsty valley the more tantalizing by comparison. On through blazing noon I clung to that diminutive brute with his murderous dog-trot, over blistered, waterless hills, harsh and repulsive in their barrenness, to fetch up at sunset, more dead than alive, in Yuramarca, a scattered village of far more chicha-shops than respectable inhabitants. Here, instead of the penetrating cold of Corongo, was to be feared the fever of the hot lands. The gobernador was a ragged, barefoot Indian not over eighteen, one of the few in town who spoke Spanish, and inclined to insolence in consequence. He pointed out a mud cave on the plaza as the stopping-place of all travelers. I protested against lying on the bare earth. “No hay más,” growled the haughty official. Of course there was nothing more; there never is at the first ten or twelve requests among these pitiless aboriginals. An hour’s coaxing and threatening, nicely interwoven, and the gobernador strolled across the plaza and came back with just the thing,—a six by two-foot door, covered on one side with zinc. I ordered the “guide” to place the saddle in the room, lest he decamp during the night, gave him a medio for chicha, a real to buy the tops of sugar-cane for the “horse”—for we were far below the alfalfa line—and sent the gobernador with twice the necessary amount to find wheat for a bowl of gruel. To the unspeakable old female he ordered to prepare it. I paid a large day’s wages, yet the luke-warm “soup” she delivered long after dark had only a spoonful of chaff in it. In the Andes, cooks, workmen, and servants appropriate as much as they dare of anything they have to do with, and soldier, peon, dog, or cat, each expects to levy his toll on the traveler’s scanty rations. We of the north do not look kindly upon this species of charity, feeling that each should have his food regularly from a definite source; yet the means of avoiding a system more deadening in its effect than the “tip” of more advanced communities is yet to be found.

Before daylight of a moonlit Sunday morning we were off again through the same dreary desert. The sun, having first to climb the snow-capped Cordillera, only overtook us as we were crossing the decrepit little bridge high above the Santa river, racing through its resounding gorge on its way to the Pacific. The endless climb beyond was by so narrow a trail along the face of a yawning precipice that my saddlebags scraped continually along the mountain wall, and here and there a jutting rock thumped me sharply on the knee. At scorching high noon we caught sight, between grim, austere mountain flanks, of a long, tilted valley lightly covered in all its extent with tiled houses among scrub trees, which my peon announced was Huaylas. I had heard such rosy reports of this “city” that my oft-disappointed hopes grew buoyant again before a view delightful to the eye weary with the savage solitudes behind. But it turned out to be but another of those bowelless, stone-hearted mountain towns whose ragged inhabitants remind one of buzzards hovering about a moribund, each snatching what he can, as soon as he dares. “Don Ricardo,” an anemic, fishy-handed dwarf of outwardly white skin, owner of the chief shop of Huaylas, ran a sort of amateur hotel at Ritz-Carlton prices. The open-air “dining-room” on the back veranda overlooked—as guests likewise struggled to do—a jumble of ancient and noisome structures and stable-yards, in the most distressing of which a leprous old hag concocted the inedible messes that were poked through a repulsive hole in the wall an unconscionable time after they were ordered. The rheumatic and dismal den to which I was assigned was below the street level, though I could see through the wooden-barred window the brilliant, sunny day outside, and catch a glimpse of the serrated line of snow peaks away to the east. But the good people of Huaylas, informed in some way of my place of lodging, amused themselves by pounding on the window bars, shouting amiable insults in upon me, and now and then tossing in clods of earth and an occasional stone that did not always fall short of their aim. As I had had no quarrel with the priest, he could not have denounced me as a heretic. It must have been simply their racial delight in producing or watching suffering, the same trait that brings them joy during the sorriest moments of a bull-fight, and causes them to gather in crowds to tease and jeer at an idiot or a cripple. It was “Taco” who finally came to my rescue. “Taco” was a Japanese, chief servant of Don Ricardo, and the only really intelligent or humane person I had met since walking out of the doctor’s house in Huamachuco. It was with deep regret that I paid his worthless master for what the servant really furnished.

The peon who was to start with me at dawn next day was still wallowing among the chicha-shops at blazing ten, and I was weakly urging a start—for the journey was long—when an imposing personage of white skin, wearing a leather cap and real shoes, pushed through the jeering throng and announced himself the congressman for that district. Having heard my tale of woe, he gave me a card ordering the médico titular of Caráz to admit me to the hospital there, and in due time prevailed upon the besotted peon to be off. The order was addressed to one Dr. Luís A. Phillips, and vastly buoyed up by the promise inherent in such a name, I endured uncomplainingly the rib-jolting trot to which the delayed start had sentenced me.

Town after town had proved such dismal disappointments that I did not look forward to Caráz with any overwhelming glee. But my hopes rose high when we surmounted one of the countless desert ridges and sighted at last a vast, level, though somewhat tilted plain between the Santa river and the brilliant white snow peaks of the ever higher Cordillera, with hundreds upon hundreds of inviting houses specking with red its many orchards and checkered green patches of cultivation. The Andes rise to appalling heights in these parts, and take on a variety of color and form almost comparable to the Alps in beauty, vastly outdoing them in a certain wild, somber undomesticated grandeur. Under the declining sun the bold and impressive range turned from tawny brown to deep purple, then to tender violet and soft lilac as they receded, the snowy heads of the peaks seeming to hang suspended in the evening sky. The bridge to the north was in ruins, and I had to ride more than a mile beyond the town to catch the road from the south that carried us at last into the place as the shopkeepers were putting up their wooden shutters. It was almost a city, with evidence of considerable commerce and civilization, great glaciers gazing coldly down from the transparent sky of evening into the neat little plaza.

A considerable percentage of the inhabitants were white in color, but this was apparently only skin-deep. At the entrance to the doctor’s patio I was met by his wife, a well-dressed, auburn-haired woman, to all outward appearances educated and civilized. But environment is a powerful factor. She differed not in the least from the Indians of Corongo. Having informed me with an icy indifference that the doctor was “somewhere in the town,” she refused even to permit me to enter the patio to wait for him. There being nowhere else to go, I was forced to remain more than an hour astride the animal I could scarcely cling to after eight hours of racking trot. Not a drop of anything could I get for my raging thirst. Instead, the woman’s saucy children joined a score of other urchins of the town in crowding around me and concocting all manner of annoyances, even to throwing stones and striking the horse unawares on the legs, while a score of adults looked on from the street corners or their doorways at the “amusement.”

At first sight of the doctor, long after dark, my hopes gushed up like a spurting geyser, but they fell leadenly to the ground as he opened his lips. The son of an Englishman stranded a half-century ago in this corner of Peru, he looked as British as any stroller along Piccadilly; yet in speech, manner, and mental processes he was “Spig” to the core. With a Latin-American eagerness to be rid of anything suggesting labor or annoyance, he asked a few superficial questions, grunted twice after the manner of physicians, and led the way down the cobbled street. My habit of picturing in detail every coming scene had only been increased by my condition, and I braced myself to enter a dismal, barren mud room, with a score of beds filled with foul-tongued Peruvian soldiers, in which the pilfering of my possessions would be the least of the annoyances awaiting me. I was most agreeably disillusioned. The hospital at Caráz was a new, whitewashed, pleasant little building recently erected by a society of well-to-do inhabitants. There were not a half-dozen patients, and in painting my picture I had completely overlooked the Andean rules of caste. However nastily he may treat him otherwise, the meanest Peruvian would not so far forget his training as to put a white man among Indians or negro-tainted soldiers. I was given full possession of a long, tile-floored room, opening on the flower-decked patio and with a large barred window on the street; the best chamber in the building, indeed, except the director’s office. True, the bed was board-floored, and I had to ask the caretaker to remove his champion gamecock from the room—whereupon he tied him by a leg just outside the door—but who could be so cruel as to ask a Peruvian to keep his rooster where he cannot gloat over him as he works?

The doctor came for a minute and a half every morning. The hospital being a public institution and he a government doctor, he scowled at my offer to pay for treatment. The caretaker and especially his wife, with a seared and weather-worn face like that of a good-hearted old German peasant woman, were kindly if not experienced nurses. I could scarcely have fallen upon a finer spot, as nature goes, to be “laid on the shelf.” Caráz, 7,440 feet above sea-level, was at an ideal height as a place of recuperation, its splendid climate tempered and clarified by the snowclads above. An open stream made music by my window; the sun was unbrokenly brilliant from the time it crawled over the snow-peaks to the east till it dropped behind the western ranges. I needed no clock to tell the time of day. It was 7:40 when the first golden streak fell upon the whitewashed wall beneath the window; 12:14 when the golden rectangle that marked the open door to the patio stood upright; 2:20 when the window-bars cast their first shadow on the tiled floor; and 5:10 when these, elongated to emaciated slenderness, faded away into the purple darkness of evening. Two youths of the town dropped in on me one day and brought an ancient book of tales; but it goes without saying that I had no hint of what was going on in the wide world beyond the encircling ranges. The unique feature of the hospital was that no provision whatever was made for patients to wash, even face and hands. Bathing was looked upon as highly dangerous to invalids, and it was only after several days, and at the expense of much argument, that I finally caused a washtub of tepid water to be dragged into the room.

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