For all her religious duties my hostess found time to set down in my note-book the recipe of the most potent beverage that has come down from the Inca civilization,—the chicha de jora, at the making of which that served with the evening meal proved her an adept. In a laborious school-girl hand, and with a wealth of misspelling that suggested that she, too, could have used a “writing-machine” to advantage, she wrote:
“Take ripe, shelled corn, cover with water and leave a week or more until the kernels have sprouted. Dry in the sun two or three days. Crush to a mass, boil, and place, when cold, in jars three-fourths full, adding sugar sufficient to cause fermentation.”
Despite her piety and attitude of Moorish seclusion, she entered into the conversation with a frankness peculiar to the Latin race. Not the least startling of her naïve questions was:
“How many children have you?”
“I am not married,” I answered.
“Of course you are not married,” she replied, “being a traveler all over Peru and the outside world, but have you really no children at all?”
At daybreak the gobernador sent a boy and a horse to set me across—and all but spill me into—a rock-strewn river below the town, “because it is very dangerous to wet the feet in the morning.” Ichocán, two leagues beyond San Marcos, sits high and cold on an eminence. Behind it the trail sloped languidly upward, then pitched headlong down through a stony, desert-dry wilderness, inhabited only by cactus and wild asses, to the Condebamba river, its lower valley of densest-green a relieving contrast to the dreary, arid mountain flanks. Across the roaring gorge a bridge of steel cables, supported by railway rails, has taken the place of the chaca of woven willow withes of Inca days. But it still looked frail and aërial enough, swaying high above the racing stream that would quickly have swept a stumbling traveler through rock-walled hills to the Marañón and the Amazon, and the few arrieros who follow this route have no easy task in driving their donkeys across it.
A pole-and-mud hut on the dreary slope of the further bank housed the guardian of the bridge, a fever-laden skeleton who was barely able to crawl after an unbroken year of paludismo, the intermittent fever of the Andes that lurks in all such sunken valleys as that of the Condebamba. I might better have spent the night on the hillside beyond, than to have tossed it through on the hut floor, swarming with some species of shark-jawed insect. Luckily I was not offered the first bowl of chicha before I found the guardian’s female companion concocting the family supply, for her method was little less disillusioning than that of the yuca-chewing Jívaros Indians. When it had been boiled in a huge kettle that spent its days of disuse as a nesting-place for the family curs, the liquid was poured off into a long, shallow tub, like a small dug-out canoe, the same one that would serve another purpose on wash-day. Squatted on the ground beside it, the woman was stirring it slowly with a stick she had caught up at random. Bit by bit two gaunt and mangy curs slunk nearer, until their noses all but touched the steaming liquid, whereupon the woman left off her stirring long enough to rap them over the head with the ladle. The dogs retreated a yard or two with cowardly yelps, only to repeat the advance over and over again. The chola’s vigilance, it turned out, was not due to any unwonted sense of cleanliness; she was merely bent on saving the animals from burning themselves. As soon as she judged the liquid cool enough, she gave a sign, and the curs fell upon the tub and greedily lapped up the scum. Thus saved the labor of skimming it, the female crawled to her feet and set the stuff away in earthen jars to ferment.
One barren, stony ridge after another in pitiless succession carried me much higher before the following noonday. My course now lay well east of south, for I had caught the swing of the west coast of South America. One last mighty surge and the world fell away before me, disclosing almost within shouting distance the provincial capital of Cajabamba. But it is a good rule in the Andes never to sit down in the plaza until you reach the town. Between me and the day’s goal lay hidden one of those mighty holes in the earth that mean the undoing and repetition of all the toil that has gone before. The shadows were beginning to climb the eastern wall of Cajabamba’s valley before I reached the century-polished cobbles of the street that had swallowed up the converging trails.
The plump young subprefect, who was awaiting me in state upon my return from the Chinese fonda to which a soldier had piloted me, would have been rosy-cheeked had not some careless ancestor faintly clouded his family tree and given a quaint kink to his hair. He returned my papers with a regal bow and bade me make my home in his office as long as I chose to honor Cajabamba with my presence. The “bed” was a blanket on the yielding, earth-covered floor; but I had twenty soldiers at my beck and call, and what mattered it if, each time I would make my toilet, I must go to jail? Luckily the rust-hinged doors and chain-weighted gates creaked with as pompous humility and dignified alacrity for my exit as to admit me, though there were those within who had not passed them in twenty years.