Catalino Aguilar and his wife. Fermín Alva, my nurses in the hospital of Caráz
Before daylight of a moonlit Sunday morning we were off again through the same dreary desert. The sun, having first to climb the snow-capped Cordillera, only overtook us as we were crossing the decrepit little bridge high above the Santa river, racing through its resounding gorge on its way to the Pacific. The endless climb beyond was by so narrow a trail along the face of a yawning precipice that my saddlebags scraped continually along the mountain wall, and here and there a jutting rock thumped me sharply on the knee. At scorching high noon we caught sight, between grim, austere mountain flanks, of a long, tilted valley lightly covered in all its extent with tiled houses among scrub trees, which my peon announced was Huaylas. I had heard such rosy reports of this “city” that my oft-disappointed hopes grew buoyant again before a view delightful to the eye weary with the savage solitudes behind. But it turned out to be but another of those bowelless, stone-hearted mountain towns whose ragged inhabitants remind one of buzzards hovering about a moribund, each snatching what he can, as soon as he dares. “Don Ricardo,” an anemic, fishy-handed dwarf of outwardly white skin, owner of the chief shop of Huaylas, ran a sort of amateur hotel at Ritz-Carlton prices. The open-air “dining-room” on the back veranda overlooked—as guests likewise struggled to do—a jumble of ancient and noisome structures and stable-yards, in the most distressing of which a leprous old hag concocted the inedible messes that were poked through a repulsive hole in the wall an unconscionable time after they were ordered. The rheumatic and dismal den to which I was assigned was below the street level, though I could see through the wooden-barred window the brilliant, sunny day outside, and catch a glimpse of the serrated line of snow peaks away to the east. But the good people of Huaylas, informed in some way of my place of lodging, amused themselves by pounding on the window bars, shouting amiable insults in upon me, and now and then tossing in clods of earth and an occasional stone that did not always fall short of their aim. As I had had no quarrel with the priest, he could not have denounced me as a heretic. It must have been simply their racial delight in producing or watching suffering, the same trait that brings them joy during the sorriest moments of a bull-fight, and causes them to gather in crowds to tease and jeer at an idiot or a cripple. It was “Taco” who finally came to my rescue. “Taco” was a Japanese, chief servant of Don Ricardo, and the only really intelligent or humane person I had met since walking out of the doctor’s house in Huamachuco. It was with deep regret that I paid his worthless master for what the servant really furnished.
The peon who was to start with me at dawn next day was still wallowing among the chicha-shops at blazing ten, and I was weakly urging a start—for the journey was long—when an imposing personage of white skin, wearing a leather cap and real shoes, pushed through the jeering throng and announced himself the congressman for that district. Having heard my tale of woe, he gave me a card ordering the médico titular of Caráz to admit me to the hospital there, and in due time prevailed upon the besotted peon to be off. The order was addressed to one Dr. Luís A. Phillips, and vastly buoyed up by the promise inherent in such a name, I endured uncomplainingly the rib-jolting trot to which the delayed start had sentenced me.
Town after town had proved such dismal disappointments that I did not look forward to Caráz with any overwhelming glee. But my hopes rose high when we surmounted one of the countless desert ridges and sighted at last a vast, level, though somewhat tilted plain between the Santa river and the brilliant white snow peaks of the ever higher Cordillera, with hundreds upon hundreds of inviting houses specking with red its many orchards and checkered green patches of cultivation. The Andes rise to appalling heights in these parts, and take on a variety of color and form almost comparable to the Alps in beauty, vastly outdoing them in a certain wild, somber undomesticated grandeur. Under the declining sun the bold and impressive range turned from tawny brown to deep purple, then to tender violet and soft lilac as they receded, the snowy heads of the peaks seeming to hang suspended in the evening sky. The bridge to the north was in ruins, and I had to ride more than a mile beyond the town to catch the road from the south that carried us at last into the place as the shopkeepers were putting up their wooden shutters. It was almost a city, with evidence of considerable commerce and civilization, great glaciers gazing coldly down from the transparent sky of evening into the neat little plaza.
A considerable percentage of the inhabitants were white in color, but this was apparently only skin-deep. At the entrance to the doctor’s patio I was met by his wife, a well-dressed, auburn-haired woman, to all outward appearances educated and civilized. But environment is a powerful factor. She differed not in the least from the Indians of Corongo. Having informed me with an icy indifference that the doctor was “somewhere in the town,” she refused even to permit me to enter the patio to wait for him. There being nowhere else to go, I was forced to remain more than an hour astride the animal I could scarcely cling to after eight hours of racking trot. Not a drop of anything could I get for my raging thirst. Instead, the woman’s saucy children joined a score of other urchins of the town in crowding around me and concocting all manner of annoyances, even to throwing stones and striking the horse unawares on the legs, while a score of adults looked on from the street corners or their doorways at the “amusement.”
At first sight of the doctor, long after dark, my hopes gushed up like a spurting geyser, but they fell leadenly to the ground as he opened his lips. The son of an Englishman stranded a half-century ago in this corner of Peru, he looked as British as any stroller along Piccadilly; yet in speech, manner, and mental processes he was “Spig” to the core. With a Latin-American eagerness to be rid of anything suggesting labor or annoyance, he asked a few superficial questions, grunted twice after the manner of physicians, and led the way down the cobbled street. My habit of picturing in detail every coming scene had only been increased by my condition, and I braced myself to enter a dismal, barren mud room, with a score of beds filled with foul-tongued Peruvian soldiers, in which the pilfering of my possessions would be the least of the annoyances awaiting me. I was most agreeably disillusioned. The hospital at Caráz was a new, whitewashed, pleasant little building recently erected by a society of well-to-do inhabitants. There were not a half-dozen patients, and in painting my picture I had completely overlooked the Andean rules of caste. However nastily he may treat him otherwise, the meanest Peruvian would not so far forget his training as to put a white man among Indians or negro-tainted soldiers. I was given full possession of a long, tile-floored room, opening on the flower-decked patio and with a large barred window on the street; the best chamber in the building, indeed, except the director’s office. True, the bed was board-floored, and I had to ask the caretaker to remove his champion gamecock from the room—whereupon he tied him by a leg just outside the door—but who could be so cruel as to ask a Peruvian to keep his rooster where he cannot gloat over him as he works?
The doctor came for a minute and a half every morning. The hospital being a public institution and he a government doctor, he scowled at my offer to pay for treatment. The caretaker and especially his wife, with a seared and weather-worn face like that of a good-hearted old German peasant woman, were kindly if not experienced nurses. I could scarcely have fallen upon a finer spot, as nature goes, to be “laid on the shelf.” Caráz, 7,440 feet above sea-level, was at an ideal height as a place of recuperation, its splendid climate tempered and clarified by the snowclads above. An open stream made music by my window; the sun was unbrokenly brilliant from the time it crawled over the snow-peaks to the east till it dropped behind the western ranges. I needed no clock to tell the time of day. It was 7:40 when the first golden streak fell upon the whitewashed wall beneath the window; 12:14 when the golden rectangle that marked the open door to the patio stood upright; 2:20 when the window-bars cast their first shadow on the tiled floor; and 5:10 when these, elongated to emaciated slenderness, faded away into the purple darkness of evening. Two youths of the town dropped in on me one day and brought an ancient book of tales; but it goes without saying that I had no hint of what was going on in the wide world beyond the encircling ranges. The unique feature of the hospital was that no provision whatever was made for patients to wash, even face and hands. Bathing was looked upon as highly dangerous to invalids, and it was only after several days, and at the expense of much argument, that I finally caused a washtub of tepid water to be dragged into the room.
CHAPTER XII
THE ROOF OF PERU
For a week I improved under the doctor’s care. I had already strolled once or twice around the neat little plaza, down upon which the massive, snowclad peaks gaze with paternal serenity. But my legs were still in that woven-straw condition that made my feet lead ingots; and no pleasure quite outdid that of lying abed watching the sunshine crawl across the floor, and listening to the keeper’s rooster challenging the world to combat. I should have regretted a controversy with that rooster during those days; I am sure he would have worsted me.
On Sunday, the first of June, the doctor did not appear; nor the next day, nor the next. Medicines and tonics ran out. I decided to push on next morning, before what strength I had regained evaporated entirely. But during the night there came upon me a pain under which I could only writhe and stuff my throat with bedclothes. When I had enjoyed this an hour or two, a brilliant thought struck me,—appendicitis! All the night through—for only the rooster slept within shouting distance—I painted fanciful pictures of a grave looked down upon by the paternal, serene peaks through the ages to come. For it was easy to guess how effectively the surgeons of the Andes would surge—with their butcher-knives, sheep-shears and ditch-water. In the morning I sent the caretaker to summon the doctor before he set out on his rounds. About nine he came back to announce, in a manner suspiciously sheepish, that the señor doctor médico titular was confined to his bed. As the day wore on the fellow overcame his racial lack of initiative to the extent of bringing me a potion from the chief botica, but it had little effect. Then all at once “Taco,” the Japanese of Huaylas, grinned in on me through the bars of my window, and a half-hour later the keeper of the drug-shop had come in person.