His illness had reached that stage when the invalid sees the leering head of disease rising on all sides, and fancies he may run away from what he carries with him. I could not, naturally, abandon a plan of years’ standing merely because of a temporary disability, and when we had exchanged some bits of road information each crawled slowly on his way.
In the hamlet of Mollepata, near the bottom of the quebrada, an old woman stirred herself to brew me some herb tea, into which she put a branch of ajenjo (wormwood) with the assurance that this was a quick and certain cure for my ailment. The descent had been bad enough; the climb out of that breathless gash in the earth was probably the most dismal experience of my career; I had not, to that day, nor do I expect again during this life, to accomplish a more bitter task than that struggle in intermittent rain, under my leaden load and Turkish-bath poncho, from the tablachaca, or earth-covered stick-bridge across the gorge-cut river forming the northern boundary of the department of Ancachs, to heaven-hung Pallasca. To make matters worse, the natives were united in the assertion that the source of my trouble was my habit of drinking at streams along the way; that at this altitude the water was not only too cold, but held in solution many minerals that made it unsafe. Long afterward I had reason to believe that this had little to do with the matter. But ready at the time to grasp at any straw, I threw away the film-tin that had served me as drinking vessel, resolved that not another drop of “raw” water should pass my lips—or at least my throat. The resolution called for every ounce of will-power. One of the chief pleasures of a walking trip had always been to quench my thirst whenever opportunity offered. Now the mountain rivulets that babbled down across my trail were tantalizing beyond belief, and I would gladly have given a gold sovereign—as long as they lasted—to have been able to drink my fill at each with impunity. Worst of all, there were no substitutes for water to be had, neither fruits, prepared drinks, nor any other relief from torture. On the day we sailed from Panama a Zone doctor had warned Hays and me, as the first and primary rule of the journey before us, always to boil our water. He little guessed the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of obeying that apparently simple commandment in the Andes.
Black night had long since fallen when I dragged myself into the central plaza of Pallasca, silent and dark except in the densely packed, candle-lighted church. A dimly illuminated shop on a far corner proved to be a tavern. My thirst had reached the point where drink was imperative, though the sentence were sudden death. I ran my eye over the shelves.
“There is wheesky cuzqueños,” wheedled the wooden-brained keeper, “and rhum jamaïca, or French absinthe, or ...”
“Have you anything non-alcoholic?” I croaked.
“Cómo no, señor! There is wine, and beer from Lima....”
In South America anything short of forty-percent alcohol does not count as such; even the law does not rate beer and wine “alcoholic liquors.” There being nothing better, I pointed out a bottle bearing the stamp of a Lima brewery.
The sentence was not exactly sudden death, but that may be because I had grown calloused to similar hardships. This Peruvian imitation of a German “dark” beer was thick and black as crude molasses, bitter as cascarilla bark, and more nauseating than old-fashioned medicine. With only the edge of my thirst blunted, I forced the rest of the bottle upon a bystander, not maliciously, but because I knew that a lifetime in the Andes had hardened him to anything; and turned to the question of lodging.
“You come right along with me,” cried the grateful bystander, smacking his all-enduring lips. “You will stop with the señor cura, like all travelers of importance.”
But the señor cura was in no condition to receive guests. In his large, over-furnished parlor around the corner the padre lay on a couch, the slouch hat over his red-bandaged head and a two-weeks’ lack of shave giving him a startling resemblance to the Spanish bandits of operatic fancy.