“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.