Indeed, he wished to know, “Is Germany in the same country as the United States?”
“What do you call a native of Jaen?” I chanced to ask him in the course of our conversation.
“A Jaense, to be sure,” he replied. “Just as you call a native of Italy an italiano, or a man from the town named France a francés.”
But if his knowledge was slight, it was no less tenacious, and he could no more be talked out of his geographical conceptions than out of his conviction that all the world lives in reed-and-mud huts with earth floors, goes habitually barefoot, and considers its dwellings fit breed-places for guinea-pigs. When I asked him if the road beyond Jaen was good, I was startled to hear the assurance:
“Ah, yes, indeed. There are no bad roads in Peru!”
A divan of reeds, set into the mud wall of the single room and covered with a hairy cowhide, was quite soft enough as a bed for one who had long since left effeminate civilization behind. Until long after dark we two men and a woman squatted in home-made chairs fitting to a doll’s house, and fed ourselves over our knees. Yet the conventions of society are quite as fixed in these hovels of the wilderness as in any palace of aristocracy. It was quite à la mode, a sign of good breeding, in fact, to ask for a second helping of the bean and yuca stew—which is invariably served so boiling hot that even the experienced “gringo’s” teeth suffer—but under no circumstances for a third. When they had been emptied a second time, the gourd bowls were piled up on the floor in a corner, to be washed when the spirit moved, and, as if at a signal that there was no second course, the one glass in the house, tied together with a string and evidently regarded as a great treasure and heirloom, was filled with irrigating-ditchwater and passed around the circle, beginning with the guest. The feeble imitation of a candle soon flickered out, and by eight we were all scattered along the walls of the hut on our reed divans, quarreling pigs shaking the house as they jostled against it, and the rain that fell heavily all night long dripping upon us here and there through the thatched roof.
“Cleopatra” was so nearly rendido—“bushed”—next morning that, even under her slight load, she wabbled drunkenly and kept her footing chiefly because the heavy, glue-like mud clung to our feet like pedestals to a statue. For one considerable space the way led through a swamp, where I was several times forced to wade knee-deep to carry out the load and lift the bemired animal to her feet. Yet drinkable water was not to be had, and the choking tropical humidity was the more tantalizing as rain broke every few minutes, and everything in sight was dripping wet, though the sandy soil swallowed each shower as it fell. Toward noon the now considerable trail split, marking an important parting of the way; for the branch to the left leads quickly down to Bellavista on the bank of the Marañón, whence rafts descend to Iquitos and the rubber country, and so by the Amazon to the Atlantic, while I, bearing to the right, plodded on along the highlands of the Andes. In the dead-silent woods a few decrepit and weather-blackened huts grew up, several drowsy, half-naked beings in human form gazing languidly after me from the doorways, and before I knew it I was treading the streets of the provincial capital and “city” of Jaen.
CHAPTER X
APPROACHING INCA LAND
Small wonder that the traveler who has splashed and waded a long week through the mournful wilderness, living chiefly on fond hopes salted with the anticipations of an unschooled imagination, and washed down with river water, should fetch up in Jaen with a decided shock. Occupying a large and distinct place on the map, this provincial “capital” proved to be a disordered cluster of a half-hundred wretched, time-blackened, tumble-down, thatched huts, the roofs full of holes, the gables often missing, scattered like abandoned junk among the weeds and bushes of a half-hearted clearing in the selfsame gloomy forest and spiny jungle that had so long shut me in. The barefoot, half-clothed, fever-yellow inhabitants of mongrel breed stared curiously from their mud doorways as I stalked past, smeared with dried mud from head to foot, sunburned, shaggy with whiskers, and dragging behind me by main force an emaciated donkey trembling with excitement at the unwonted sights, or with fear at the unknown dangers of so vast a metropolis. From one hut in no way different from its neighbors issued the city school, the “teacher” with a ragged cap on his head and a drooping cigarette smouldering between his lips, to stare after me with the rest. Every building in town, the church included, consisted of a single mud room with an unleveled earth floor, windowless, and with a small reed or pole door giving entrance, exit, and such air and light as could force admittance. The “government palace,” before which I tied “Cleopatra” to the official bamboo flagpole in the geographical center of the capital, was closed. With a flourish of my papers I summoned the “authorities” to step forward and make themselves known; but the manoeuver brought only the information that the subprefect was “away for a few days, but he’ll soon be back, next week, no más, or the week after, at any rate. Entra y descansa—come in and sit down.”
The gobernador was likewise among the indefinitely missing; whence the mantle of power descended upon the shoulders of the alcalde. That worthy was soon produced, somewhat the worse for concentrated cane-juice, but remarkable for at least two features,—that he wore what might still with some stretch of veracity be called shoes, and alone of all the town could have passed for a white man, had he seen fit to remove a stringy little Indian mustache. When he had read aloud to the congregated male population all my credentials in Spanish—a task not unlike that of a one-legged man walking without his crutches after spraining his ankle and suffering a stone-bruise—he requested me to name my desires. They were modest,—room, bed, table, chair, water, food for myself and pasture for the other one of us until day after to-morrow. Slowly and bit by bit, but none the less surely, my requirements were met. A key was found that manipulated the creaking padlock of one of the thatched mud-caves with sagging reed divans around its walls. A crippled table was dragged in, and a squad of soldiers sent for old newspapers to cover it. In due time, and with the assistance of the entire population in a house to house canvass, a gourd wash-basin was discovered, then a gourd with a hole in one end, from which one drank and into which the half-Indian boy thrust a finger to carry it, after filling it at the chocolate-brown stream at the edge of the town; a chair was unofficially subtracted from the government palace and, last of all, a four-inch mirror was pinned to the mud wall. I had barely removed the hirsute adornment of a week by such light as Jaen, massed in and about the door, left me, when a barefoot female glided noiselessly into my den and, announcing herself the owner, carried off the glass as too precious a possession to be long out of her sight.