The sugar that is not turned into aguardiente, or native whiskey, is boiled down in the trapiche into crude brown blocks, variously known as panela, chancaca, rapadura, empanisado, papelón, etc., weighed and wrapped in banana-leaves, selling at about 5 cents for 3 pounds
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.