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.”