It was in Huamachuco that the first hint of what later proved to be amœbic dysentery overtook me, recalling to memory the medicine-case I had abandoned in Cuenca as a useless burden. A disturbing lack of energy settled upon me, my appetite failed—a startling symptom, indeed—and I felt as if I had inadvertently swallowed one of the largest ruins of Marca-Huamachuco. It was with no rousing pleasure, therefore, that I set off, laden with hard-boiled eggs and a supply of the stony local bread, on the lonely twelve-league tramp that intervenes between the residence of Dr. Alva and the next town.
Four leagues south, the well-marked road swung to the right and, wading the shallow Huamachuco river, I struck off for Trujillo and comparative civilization on the coast. The faint path to the left bore me even higher across an uninhabited world, dreary with its endless expanse of dead-yellow ichu. Here were distinct remnants of the old Inca highway. For several miles across the undulating páramo the way lay between two rows of stones, set upright a considerable distance apart, and enclosing a space wide enough for six or seven carriages, had they existed, to pass abreast. If, as the inhabitants of the region assert, this is a good example of that great military highway of the Incas, the descriptions of chroniclers and historians have far outdone the reality. Gomara reports it “twenty-five feet wide, cut in a straight line from the living rock, or made of stone and lime, turning aside neither for mountains nor lakes.” Prescott speaks of “highways carefully constructed of cut slabs of freestone and porphyry,” which only proves how incompetent to judge things South American is the most competent man who has not been there in person. Those who have visited Spain know how easily the title “camino” is granted, and the Conquistadores, like the Peruvians of to-day, having in many cases probably never seen a real road, had no means of comparison. Certainly this Inca highway had nothing to justify the extravagant praise of those who compared it to the old Roman roads. The most that had been done in the way of road building was to clear the plain of loose rocks—in conspicuous contrast to the modern Peruvians, who look upon a road as a convenient place to toss the stones picked up in their fields. Stone-heaps here and there along the Andes mark forever the routes of travel of Inca days, but they are chiefly achapetas, piles thrown up by travelers, who tossed upon them, as votary offering, a cud of coca. Of the tambos, rest-houses maintained at frequent intervals by the imperial government, like the dak bungalows of India, not even the ruins of one in a hundred remain standing, and the traveler of to-day is far more exposed to the elements than in the times of the Incas.
The Andes rise ever higher from north to south and from west to east, whence I was far above Huamachuco when I dragged myself into the “Vaquería Angasmarca,” a cluster of cobblestone hovels barely four feet high, home of an Indian cow-guard, in one of the most dreary, stony settings in South America. Unable to get even hot water, I dared not eat the heavy fiambre I carried. I had huddled for hours on a stone under the projecting roof when, after dark, the vaquero himself rode in from Huamachuco. Having been a soldier, trained to a bit less immobility of temperament than his mate, he was partly cajoled, partly deceived, into ordering her to serve me a gourdful of potato soup, prepared under circumstances better imagined than described. For a long time he replied with dogged, apathetic persistence that he “only gave posado in the corredor,” but I succeeded at last in inducing him to furnish me a ragged blanket in a corner of his own sty, on the earth floor of which huddled the entire family and the customary menagerie of small animals.
The traveler who crawls out, blue with cold, after a night in one of these cobble caves of the highland Indian, to squat against the eastern wall until a gourd of warm water, savored with corn and the dung-fuel over which it is slowly half-heated, is thrust out at him, no longer wonders that the aboriginals of the Andes worshipped the sun. Every step of that day of excruciating climbs and stony descents, across dreary páramos on which I several times lost my way, was a bitter struggle; for all the demands of the will, my legs could not push me forward two miles an hour, and ever and anon they seemed to turn to straw and dropped me suddenly to the ground. All the visible world lay high and treeless now, with touches of snow on several black, shark-tooth peaks of the Cordillera to the eastward. During the day I had passed several more remnants of the old Inca highway, two continuous lines of weather-blackened upright stones set far apart on either side of a space a full half-block wide. Toward sunset the trail began to descend into a stony river-valley, far down which I made out a tiled building among eucalyptus trees. A passing horseman carelessly answered my question, while more engrossed in my appearance, by assuring me it was the hacienda house I was seeking; and I toiled a half-hour up the mountainside to it, only to have the solitary Indian female who occupied it point out far below, in the valley of the river, the “patrón’s” house of the “Hacienda Angasmarca.”
It was the most imposing country dwelling I had yet seen in Peru; a large village and two churches clustered about it, the entrance like that to some rough old medieval palace, the swarms of dependents carrying the mind back to feudal days. Around an immense flower and shrub-grown patio, in which Indian hostlers were struggling to unload a score of mules and horses, were some thirty rooms, each with a number above the door. I did not learn whether it was the custom of the owner to collect hotel charges, but the establishment was conducted in as heartless and impersonal a manner as if he did. He was a snarly old invalid who crawled about with a cane, growling orders to his cringing Indians, and too much taken up with his own infirmities to waste sympathy on others. With a grunt he thrust my letter of introduction into a pocket, ordering an Indian to unlock one of the numbered rooms. Stagnant with the atmosphere of a cheap hotel, it contained a bed with leather springs, a billowy mattress, and a sack of ichu as pillow, and only after a long struggle did I obtain a bowl of soup filled with tough beef and half-cooked yuca and potatoes, a dish barely endurable to a strong man in full health. It was late next morning before infinite patience won me a bowl of hot milk, and I dragged myself away almost due north. Across the world south of “Angasmarca” yawned a bottomless valley, beyond which a rocky mountain-wall rose to the very heavens. The road which should have followed in that direction was left to sneak out like some hunted thing for a vast detour, even before it began to crawl away eastward at right angles to the way I would have gone. At the outset was a laborious, stony climb, from the summit of which the “Hacienda Tulpo” lay in plain sight, but across one of those heartbreaking gashes in the earth so frequent in the Andes. On the left stood sharp, stark snow-peaks of the Cordillera, which seemed to grow mightier with each day southward. Noon had long since passed, yet there were barely eight miles behind me when I entered the general store of an hacienda building forming a hollow square around a dreary barnyard. The shopkeeper announced himself the owner of the estate—plainly by poetic license. There is a careful graduation of caste in the Andes that makes it easy for the experienced traveler to set any man’s place in the local society. This fellow’s dress, color, his familiar yet commanding manner toward the Indians who sneaked in all that Saturday afternoon to dawdle about the counter and buy bits of trash, draughts of native “rot-gut,” anything the place afforded except what might have been of some use to them, generally on credit, thus lengthening their slavery to the estate, all gave the lie to his assertion. But for all his posing, he turned out a kindly fellow. He not only sold me a half-dozen eggs—in itself a great kindness in the Andes—but dragged down from a shelf a sort of chafing-dish and light-boiled them. When I had drunk these, surrounded by a solid wall of stony-faced Indians who seemed to consider the feat remarkable, I still could not bestir myself to push on. By and by my eyes, wandering aimlessly over the stock that covered two walls to the ceiling, caught sight of a familiar ten-cent can of American tomatoes. I bought them at sixty cents. Long after an old woman had carried off the precious empty can, the shopkeeper spent all the leisure left him by the sluggish flow of now half-intoxicated Indians in thumbing over great sheaves of foreign bills of lading, and at length handed me thirty cents, with the announcement that he had inadvertently charged me for the “whole shipment”—of two cans!
When the dreary afternoon had at last dragged its leaden way into the past tense and chill sunset was creeping across this lofty world, I mentioned to the shopkeeper that I needed a spot on which to spend the night. The idea evidently had never occurred to him. The estate was mine, and all the wonders thereof—but for all that two more endless hours passed before a drink-saucy Indian led me to an icy harness-room and pointed out two bare saddle-pads on the earth floor.
Certainly that man is a fool who sets out on a trip down the Andes for pleasure; for after the first joys of roughing it have worn off, no more monotonously pleasureless existence is conceivable. There is, to be sure, a certain feeling of exclusiveness, a certain satisfaction in living through hardships, of moving by one’s own efforts over those parts of the earth where modern means of transportation are unknown; but even this soon wears off, and with the dreary sameness of each day the journey becomes chiefly a waste of time and effort, and a never-ending disappointment.
In the morning I crawled away along a world growing ever higher, until suddenly it fell abruptly into a chasm out-chasming anything I had yet seen in my worst nightmares. Across it, so high even from this height that it seemed not of our world, a town was pitched on the very tip of a gashed and haggard range. Fortunately my route seemed to lead off down the valley, and I was finding some grains of comfort in not having to ascend to that heavenly dwelling-place of man, whatever it might be called, when a passing horseman sapped my last drop of ambition by telling me it was Pallasca—exactly the place in which I must spend the night!
A long time had passed before I coaxed myself to creep slowly on, avoiding the view of the task before me as a criminal about to be executed might shade his eyes from the scaffold. An unconscionable distance down in the bottomless intervening valley, yet still high, I met the first foreign tramp I had yet seen on the road in South America. He was an Austrian of fifty, looking in his matted, lusterless hair and beard, and his drooping rags, like a corpse that had arisen for a stroll.
“Gehen Sie nicht weiter—Go no further south,” he pleaded weakly. “There everyone is dying of dysentery. Turn back with me to Trujillo and humanity.”