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.