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.
In the semi-tropical Province of Jaen, in north Peru, sugarcane grows luxuriantly. Lack of labor and transportation, however, renders it difficult to make full use of the fertility
