“I don’t get you,” I replied, in my most colloquial if imperfect Quichua.
“Do me the favor to spit in its face,” he repeated, and by way of illustration spat swiftly and lightly, with the point of his tongue between his lips, a fine spray in the face of the squalling infant.
“But why not do it yourself?” I protested.
“Manam, viracocha; it must be some one the guaguita does not know.”
When it had become evident that there was no other way of being left in peace, I rose and sprayed the infant. To my astonishment it ceased its wailing instantly, stared wide-eyed into my face until the father turned away, and was not again heard during the night. Floor-walking benedicts may adopt this bit of domestic science from the ancient civilization of the Incas free of charge.
There were but nine miles left to do in the morning, but the mere numeral gives little hint of the real task. Both road and bridges continued strikingly conspicuous by their absence; for hours the atrocious trail zigzagged unevenly, at times almost perpendicularly down what was left of the mountainside. Then it forded waist-deep the Cajamarca river, and joining a Sunday-morning procession of market-bound Indians with a clashing of colors almost equal to those of Quito, picked its way around stony foothills along a slowly widening valley gradually checkered with the varying greens of cultivation. The cool summer air and a more passable road drew me ever more swiftly on; the sound of church-bells, musically distant, floating northward on the breeze, located vaguely somewhere among the eucalyptus trees ahead the end of the third stage of my Andean journey. Huts turned to houses, thicker and thicker along the way, until they grew together into two unbroken rows. The air grew heavy with the scent of the “Australian gum”; I passed under an aged, whitewashed arch straddling the street, and on April 27, at the hour of the return from mass, found myself creaking along the canted, flagstone sidewalks of famous old Cajamarca, the first real city, even in the South-American sense, I had come upon in Peru. Armed and bedraggled, with an alforja hanging heavy over one shoulder, I presented no conventional sight. Yet the cajamarquinos gave me comparatively slight attention. No doubt they were accustomed to such apparitions; Pizarro and his fellow-roughnecks could have been little less way-worn and weather-bleached when they rode in upon Cajamarca over these same hills. According to careful calculation I had walked 1773 miles from Bogotá, 929 from Quito. Of the 79 days from the Ecuadorian capital I had spent thirty in the towns and hamlets along the way, and the remainder in whole or part on the road.
As far back as Ayavaca I had begun to hear praises of the “magnificent hotels” of Cajamarca. The disappointment was proportionately bitter. The “Hotel Internacional” was a defunct lodging-house, the “Hotel Amazonas,” further on, merely a row of rooms opening on the second-story balcony. They were tolerable rooms, with flagstone floors and wooden bed-springs, and had the extraordinary advantage of being in the second story, out of reach of staring passersby; but they were furnished only with the bare necessities and were covered everywhere with a half-inch, more or less, of dust. This was hardly to be wondered at. Pizarro and his band of tramps must have raised a deuce of a dust when they perpetrated the Conquest of Peru and took Atahuallpa into their tender keeping in the great plaza a short block away, on that Saturday evening, 381 years before. Strangest of all, the hotel rates were posted in plain sight, where even foreigners might see; forty cents a night, or thirty if the room was occupied a month or more. Evidently another fussy gringo had been here before me, for the printed rules contained the following bylaw:
“The señor passenger who shall desire to use two mattresses on the same bed will subject himself to the payment of ten cents above the ordinary pension.”
The original motive could not have been Hays; for the notice was yellow with time, and the manager-chambermaid, though he gave me many details of the doings of my erstwhile companion as he gradually got my indispensable requirements together, with great care not to remove the historic dust anywhere, did not mention any such gringo idiosyncrasy. Every non-resident of Cajamarca, be he a tawny, soil-incrusted Indian from up in the hills, or the representative of some ambitious European house, eats in one of two Chinese fondas, or take-your-chances restaurants, not far off the main plaza. The transient enters a Celestial general-store, passes through it and a dingy room, crowded with tables about which barefoot Indians, male and female, their aged felt hats on their heads, are helping themselves with spoons or fingers, and through another doorless door into a smaller chamber with a single long table covered by an oilcloth of long and troubled history, where he is sure to find a place because of the requirement of shoes. During the process he will pass close by the open kitchen with its iron cooking-range—the first I had seen in South America—manipulated by a grizzled old Chinaman. The service is à la carte and, but for the shoes and oilcloth, identical in both dining-rooms. Here one will find a greasy strip of paper with a printed menu, easily comprehensible to anyone with a Spanish and Quichua dictionary, a treatise on Peruvian coast slang, and some smacking of Chinese in Spanish misspelling; or which, in the very likely event of the client being unable to read, the barefoot waiter will recite in Shakespearean cadence and breathless continuity. Indeed, but for the language, one might fancy oneself back on the lower Bowery as the waiter bawls to the kitchen:
“Un churrasco!”