“No, compadre; I am sick, and I cannot give lodging,” he replied to every plea of my officious sponsor.
The several persons in the room entered into a whispered conference. Some time later I was aroused from my lethargy, and my cicerone and a light-haired youth led the way across the black plaza and up a steep, cobbled street which my legs all but refused to navigate under my heavy load—for though he would not leave a man who had treated him to the luxury of a glass of beer from the capital at a fabulous price until he had seen him safely housed, neither the bystander nor his companion could sink their baggy-kneed caste to the depth of carrying a bundle in the public street, even on a dark night.
When morning dawned I found myself rolled up in a heap of blankets on the earth floor of a long-disused parlor. Hours passed without a human being appearing. I pulled myself together and shuffled out into the patio of an immense, dilapidated house at the tiptop of the town, overlooking half a world and swept by all the winds of heaven. Pallasca has been likened to alforjas, so like a pair of saddlebags on the rump of a pack-animal does it hang down the two sides of a lofty nose of the range. Across the void, deep-blue in spite of the penetrating glare of the Andean sunshine, the Cordillera had tumbled her mountains recklessly in a tumultuous heap, as if the Builder of the world had left here his surplus of materials. The Andes have little of the color and varied charm of the Alps; but in awesome grandeur, and repulsive, savage mightiness they dwarf the latter by comparison. In a room down on the sunken street on which opened the patio zaguan, the light-haired youth and his brother kept the town drug-store. They were the sons of a German who had married in Peru, yet only their more robust frames and greater physical virility distinguished them from the common run of natives; in temperament they were as thoroughly what the Canal Zoner calls “Spig” as the most enemic of their fellow-townsmen. The older was an amateur doctor—with the accent on the adjective—the only one for scores of miles around. He prepared me a half-dozen obleas,—those saucer-shaped capsules of the Andean pharmacopœia—of bismuth, prescribed a diet of chochoca molida—the Quichua-Spanish name for a thin cornmeal gruel—which might be substituted by chuño inglés, a sickly-sweet liquid starch—or wheat or rice soup, and assured me that I would be completely recovered in the morning. All the articles of diet were contingent on the possibility of getting the ingredients, which in the Andes is a distinct contingency. For thirst I was advised to take only boiled water with cinnamon or cimarruba bark; but even to get the former cost a constant struggle with the apathetic servants, and the necessity of dragging myself down to the stream on a corner of the plaza to cool the boiling pot.
Later in the day, while I lay contemplating the immense distance across the room, a young rag-patch came to say that the cura wished to see me. The mere novelty of a man of the cloth desiring my presence was so astonishing that it lent a bit of stiffness to my legs. I rose and wandered down across the main plaza, from the further side of which the world falls precipitously away into unfathomable void.
Detail of the ruins of “Marca-Huamachuco,” high up on the mountain above the modern town of that name. They are reputed to be at least 1000 years old
Pallasca, to which I climbed from one of the mightiest quebradas in the Andes, sits on the tiptop of the world and falls sheer away at a corner of its plaza into a fathomless void
The unshaven papist still wore his slouch hat, and by day his bandit-like aspect was increased by a complexion like unpolished chamois-skin. He motioned me to a chair beneath the lithograph of a ravishing nude figure advertising a foreign brand of cigarettes, and trusted, with all the smoothness of which the Spanish tongue is capable, that I had not misunderstood his inhospitality of the night before. Gradually I turned the conversation to the history of his native region. He had made a serious study of the pre-Conquest period, and was sure that the Indians lived in just such unwashed misery under the Incas, as to-day. Only, as each group of ten had its commander, who set its tasks and carried his investigations into the very bosom of the family, they were not then so unspeakably lazy. I had started to take my leave after some desultory remarks on my journey, during which he desired to know if I had walked all the way from Europe, when the priest remarked:
“Before going you will allow me to give you a little remembrance?”