Toward evening the subprefect’s secretary brought a wooden-minded Indian and, introducing him as the owner of a horse, called upon me to pay 75 cents at once for the use of it. The moment I had done so he produced a still dirtier Indian and, introducing him as my “guide,” demanded that he be paid fifty cents. That over, the secretary mentioned that it was customary to give a “gratification” to owner and “guide,” that they might drink my good health for the coming voyage, at the end of which, he further hinted, it was costumbre to grant the “guide” a real for alfalfa for the animal, and something for himself for chicha, and ... but by that time I had withdrawn to my quarters.
At six in the morning I was dressed and ready; at seven the “guide” came to know if he really should bring the horse; at eight I burst in upon the sleeping subprefect to know what had become of his boisterous promise to have food prepared for me at dawn. A soldier was sent to investigate. In due time he came back with the information that the cook was not up yet. At nine the “horse” arrived. It was a wild, hairy, mountain colt, a bit larger than an ass, which had never been shod, curried, or trimmed. The equipment it wore was wholly home-made,—a bridle of braided rawhide, without bits, like that with which our American Indian rides his mustang, a tiny, crude, wooden saddle with one thickness of leather stretched over it, and huge wooden box-stirrups.
“Now let nothing worry you,” cried the subprefect, as I bade farewell to the noble city of Cabana, the “guide” trotting on foot behind, “I’ll telegraph the gobernador of Corongo and Huaylas and the subprefect of the next province so that he can telegraph his governors and the prefect in Huaráz. No se moleste, señor; everything will be arranged by the government.”
Hours of unbroken climbing brought us to a freezing-cold páramo, where flakes of snow actually fell and across the icy lagoons of which a wind that penetrated to the marrow swept from off the surrounding snow-peaks. So small was my animal that I expected him to drop under me at every step, so tiny that his front knees constantly knocked the stirrups off my feet, and so wobbly in his movements that it was like riding a loose-jointed hobby-horse. At last we caught the valley of a descending river, and racked and shaken in every bone, I rode into the plaza of Corongo, the near-Indian population of which seemed to take a bear-baiting pleasure in the predicaments of others. Evidently this was no new characteristic, for Stevenson, writing a century ago, states, “Corongo is certainly the most disagreeable Indian town I ever entered.”
The gobernador sat gossiping in the mud hut to which the telegraph wire led. He had not, however, received any message from Cabana. As telegrams cost “authorities” nothing, I had permitted myself to hope that at least this promise would be kept. Having no other way of getting rid of me, however, the town ruler led the way to his own hovel, where long after dark his crude-mannered females prepared me a bowl of gruel with which to break an all-day fast.
The language of Corongo is chiefly Quichua, little in evidence since Ecuador, but due from now on to be more general than Spanish. The gobernador ran no unnecessary risk of having me left on his hands, and by six next morning the owner of a new “horse,” an even more striking caricature of what he was supposed to represent than that of the day before, had collected his fee and that of the new “guide.” These paid, he began at once to complain that the animal could not travel far without being shod, a luxury which, like his master, he had thus far never enjoyed. On the advice of the gobernador I added a half-sol for that purpose. Two hours later I raised so effective a protest against further delay that the animal was dragged in, still unshod, as he would be to the end of time, and made ready. The price, more or less exorbitant in honor of my helpless situation and gringo blood, would not have mattered had not each “authority” stood in cahoots with the owners and wasted my time and energy with their clumsy grafts.
Under a brilliant sun we squirmed away out of town, and began a sharp descent into one of the mightiest desert gorges in all the Andes, my “guide,” a stone-headed fellow, speaking only Quichua, who had plodded at a horse’s tail all his days, slapping along behind me in his leather sandals, incessantly feeding himself lime and coca leaves. It would have been difficult enough for a man in the best of health to sit such an animal standing still on the level; let those who can imagine one with barely the strength left to hold himself together riding him down shale hillsides, often at a sharp angle, the stirrups knocked from his inert feet every few yards. Now the entire range cutting off the world on the east was capped with snow, making the scorched and thirsty valley the more tantalizing by comparison. On through blazing noon I clung to that diminutive brute with his murderous dog-trot, over blistered, waterless hills, harsh and repulsive in their barrenness, to fetch up at sunset, more dead than alive, in Yuramarca, a scattered village of far more chicha-shops than respectable inhabitants. Here, instead of the penetrating cold of Corongo, was to be feared the fever of the hot lands. The gobernador was a ragged, barefoot Indian not over eighteen, one of the few in town who spoke Spanish, and inclined to insolence in consequence. He pointed out a mud cave on the plaza as the stopping-place of all travelers. I protested against lying on the bare earth. “No hay más,” growled the haughty official. Of course there was nothing more; there never is at the first ten or twelve requests among these pitiless aboriginals. An hour’s coaxing and threatening, nicely interwoven, and the gobernador strolled across the plaza and came back with just the thing,—a six by two-foot door, covered on one side with zinc. I ordered the “guide” to place the saddle in the room, lest he decamp during the night, gave him a medio for chicha, a real to buy the tops of sugar-cane for the “horse”—for we were far below the alfalfa line—and sent the gobernador with twice the necessary amount to find wheat for a bowl of gruel. To the unspeakable old female he ordered to prepare it. I paid a large day’s wages, yet the luke-warm “soup” she delivered long after dark had only a spoonful of chaff in it. In the Andes, cooks, workmen, and servants appropriate as much as they dare of anything they have to do with, and soldier, peon, dog, or cat, each expects to levy his toll on the traveler’s scanty rations. We of the north do not look kindly upon this species of charity, feeling that each should have his food regularly from a definite source; yet the means of avoiding a system more deadening in its effect than the “tip” of more advanced communities is yet to be found.
An Indian of Cerro de Pasco region carrying a slaughtered sheep. The women go barefoot but the men wear woolen stockings and hairy cowhide sandals
