“Are the robbers not attacking this morning?”
My answer they greeted with a fervent “Ave María Purísima!” and, crossing themselves ostentatiously, that the saints should not by any chance overlook their devotion, pushed hurriedly on toward Cutervo.
Early in the afternoon I came out on the upper edge of an enormous, wide-spread valley just across which, in the lap of a rolling plain sloping toward me and the hair-like winding river at its bottom, lay the end of the day’s journey,—Chota; a tiny, dull-red patch in a green-brown immensity of sun-flooded world, the two towers of its not too conspicuous church pin-pricking the horizon. In the transparent air of the highlands it seemed at most a short two hours away. In reality I had not in that time picked my stony way to the bottom of the rock-scarred valley, and it was long after night had cast its black poncho over all the world that I stumbled at last into the elusive town.
Chota, “8000 feet, 4000 inhabitants, 3000 doors”—and no windows, nearly as cold as Quito, is a provincial capital with well-cobbled streets and a broad expanse of plaza, all tilting to the north, by far the largest Peruvian city I had yet seen, almost the equal in size of Loja in Ecuador. The stock of its many little shops comes in by way of Pacasmayo and the railroad to Chilete, showing that I was “over the divide” and approaching Cajamarca. On August 30, 1882, it was destroyed by the Chilians—“los malditos chilenos,” as the inhabitants still call them—but Andean building material being plentiful, it soon rose from its mud ruins. The cura was even then superintending the cholos tramping together with their bare feet the clay and chopped ichu-grass that was to be a new church. There were numerous fondas, as befitted a great capital; that is, mud dens with a reed shanty in the barnyard behind serving as kitchen, kept by well-meaning but unprepossessing females who wiped the inside of each plate religiously on their ample hips, those same draft-horse hips on which they squatted on the earth floor to fill the receptacles similarly placed, while driving off with the free hand the curs and guinea-pigs and the chickens perching on the edge of the kettles. There were even oil-lamps in a few of the more pretentious shops and mansions, though almost all without chimneys, not easily imported from the other side of the world by ship and muleback over breakneck trails. Haughty, belligerent roosters stood tied by a leg before half the doors in town, so that each street was a long vista of pugnacious cocks frequently submitting to the anxious ministrations of their proud owners. Even without them I should not have slept unbrokenly. Official assistance had gained me lodging on the home-made counter of an empty shop hung with cobwebs and perfumed with the mustiness of several generations, the door of which, flush with the narrow sidewalk, of course, was the only source of air. There, as often as a night-hawk passed on his way home from the local “billar,” he paused to beat me awake with the rapping of his cane and to sing-song in that dulcet voice of the Latin-American, mellow with late hours, “Your door is open, señor; I will close it for you.” And if, instead of reaching under the counter for my revolver or a convenient adobe brick, I did not summon a patient courtesy I do not possess and answer, “Mil gracias, señor; no, thank you, leave it open, please,” and then rise and open it again, because he fancied his ears had deceived him, I should have lost the rating of “simpático,” and been branded a rude and discourteous gringo.
Bambamarca, an atrociously stony half-day beyond Chota and its surrounding bowl, like a mosaic of little farms where female shepherds, bare to their weather-browned knees, incessantly turn the white, brown, and black fleece of their flocks into yarn on their crude Incaic spindles, reported the trail ahead “the worst road in Peru”—which is indeed strong language. They were certain, too, that, though I might—with the accent on the verb—have arrived from “La Provincia” alive, the marauders beyond would see to it that I did not reach Cajamarca in that condition. A cold rain fell incessantly from sullen skies during a day of unbroken plodding, first up the cañon of a small river, crossed now and then by thatched bridges, until it dwindled away and left me to splash at random over a reeking mountain-top. I had been lost for hours, and was dripping water at every pore, when I spied, toward what would have been sunset, four little Indian boys huddled under the ruin of a hut, and signed to them to give me information. Instead, they took to their heels, as if all the evil spirits of the Inca religion had suddenly crested the water-soaked range. I set after them, but my best pace under my load being barely equal to theirs, I drew my revolver and fired twice into the air; whereupon they halted and awaited me in ashen fear. The one I chose as guide led me over a rolling páramo deeply gashed by rain-swollen streams, and abandoned me within sight of the imposing estate-house of what turned out to be the “Hacienda Yanacancha.” In the corredor, just out of reach of the drenching rain, stood a white man in khaki, monarch of half the visible world, and so little like the uncouth illiterate I expected that he replied in faultless Castilian to my remark about the absence of roads:
“Yes, unfortunately South America fell to the Spaniards, whereas it should have been settled by Anglo-Saxons.”
Here, for the first time in Peru, was an hacendado who had trained his dogs and servants to some understanding of their respective spheres, and had even given the latter an inkling of that thin, gray line between cleanliness and its opposite. A trivial incident will demonstrate to what lowly point of view my recent experiences had brought me. When my host showed me into a large guest-room, I caught sight, in the semi-obscurity, of a reed mat on the floor, and through me flashed a thrill of joy that I should have this to sleep on, instead of the cold, dank tiles. Whereas, on closer view this proved to be the foot-mat before a huge colonial bedstead, regally furnished with soft mattresses and spotless woolen blankets. My host even apologized for the absence of sheets. As if I should have recognized that forgotten flora, even in its native habitat! Yet my misgivings of playing the rôle of Hugo’s maltreated hero materialized. Whether it was due to the fever within me struggling for existence, or to the all-too-sudden return to luxury, I tossed sleeplessly well into the night, and it was rolled up on the mat on the tile floor that the cold, steel-gray dawn creeping in at the wooden-barred windows found me.
The “road” across soggy highland meadows and past those fantastic heaped-up peaks and splintered ranges of black rocks that give the “Hacienda Yanacancha” (“Black Rocks”) its name, was largely imaginary. At first, within sprinting distance of the house, were a few inhabited haycocks of shepherds, like Esquimaux dwellings of weather-blackened pajonal in place of snow and ice, with a hole to crawl in at on all fours. Then the visible world, straining ever higher, spread out into a rolling mountain-top, a totally uninhabited region where was heard only the mournful sighing of the wind across a boundless, rolling, yellow-brown sea of the dreary bunch-grass of the upper Andes. Across it the often invisible way undulated with such regularity that I was continually descending into or climbing out of hollows trodden to a mud pudding about the cold streams that wandered down from the scarcely more lofty heights. There were myriad hiding-places behind the jagged gray rocks piled erratically along the way, from which evil-doers might have picked me off. So notorious is this region for its mishaps to travelers that natives rarely cross it except in large groups. But the wholesome respect in which a “gringo,” especially one who carries a shooting-iron prominently displayed, is held is the best protection in Latin-America, far more so than an escort of native soldiers, the presence of which is apt to imply to the lurking bandit an admission of inability to depend on one’s gringo self, even if the soldiers do not prove confederates of the outlaws or run away at sight of them.
On and ever on the cold, desolate, inhospitable despoblado rose and fell in broad swells or billows, the barren, yellow, uninhabited world sighing mournfully to itself. This long day is obligatory on all who come to Cajamarca from the north, for there is no halting-place in all the expanse of puna south of Yanacancha. I should have covered the thirty-five miles before the day was done, had not a long dormant or newly acquired fever suddenly broken out in mid-afternoon. Every setting of one leg before the other was as great an effort as jumping over a ferry-boat, yet I must prod myself pitilessly on, for to be overtaken by night on this inhospitable, wind-swept puna would have been worse than fever. With infinite struggle I came at last to where this broadest of páramos began to fall away toward the north; then the slope contracted to a gully that gathered together the score or more of separate but not distinct paths that make up the “highway” across the lofty plain, and brought me before sunset to the first of a scattered cluster of stone and mud kennels. A leather-faced old Indian, speaking the first Quichua I had heard since Cuenca, gave me a handful of ichu-grass to sit on outside the smaller of his two huts, and left me to the company of his prowling yellow curs. Night had fallen completely before a woman brought me a gourd of boiling potato mush, but at length the chary old Indian, overcoming his racial indifference and distrust, opened the door of the hut against which I lay and let me into a sort of Incaic warehouse. In it were heaps of the huge balls of yarn spun by the Indian women on their prehistoric spindles, a supply of páramo grass I might spread on the earth floor, and several large bolts of homespun cloth of coarse texture and cruder colors with which I might feather my arctic nest, once it was late enough to hope the owner would not catch me at it.
In the adjoining family hut a baby had been crying incessantly for an hour or more. The after-chill of the fever was settling upon me when a young Indian entered, bearing the infant, and a handful of twisted grass as torch. Without preliminary he requested me, if I understood his language, to spit in the child’s face.