“It is congestion of the bowels, señor,” he announced. “These pílduras will relieve it. The doctor was to have changed the treatment on Sunday to avoid this, but—”
“Is the doctor seriously ill?” I asked.
“Señor,” said the druggist, after a moment of hesitation, “on Saturday night the médico titular took some liquor at a tertulia. It is fatal to him. He cannot stop. It is now four days that he has lain mareado” (seasick), “and he has not been able to visit one of his patients. Out in the pueblos three have already died; for there is no other doctor.”
I had been ten days in Caráz when, in spite of a soreness within and an annoying lack of vigor, I decided to push on afoot. A broad road led south along the green and fertile valley of the Santa, shut in on either hand by the yellow, terra-cotta flanks of barren mountains as between unscalable walls. The way was well-peopled with broad-faced, stolid Indians speaking no Spanish, and a felt hat of tobacco-color was now taking the place of the dingy “panamas” that had been almost universal since southern Ecuador. It was only a simple day’s walk; eight miles to another provincial capital. But it seemed at least twenty, especially as the “perfectly level” road kept mounting steadily, for Yungay is a thousand feet higher than Caráz. The snow-and-glacier mass of Huascarán, king of that magnificent snow-capped range that dwarfs the Alps, bulked menacingly almost sheer above the bucolic old plaza, when I plodded across it in the sleepy silence of noonday to the dwelling of an unusually simple-hearted subprefect.
Next morning Yungay stretched for miles along the half-cobbled highway, and had scarcely ended when Mancos began. This department of Ancachs and the valley of the Santa is the most densely populated region of Peru. The fifteen miles to Carhuáz was what the Peruvians call an excellent road; to a people of wider outlook it would have been recognizable as a broad expanse of loose stones undulating over barren ridges, relieved by the bracing mountain air from off the blue-white bulk of Huascarán, here seeming to hang suspended overhead. The water of all this valley is reputed a source of several dread diseases, among them the warty verrugas indigenous to Peru. The bottle of boiled “tea-water” swinging from my leather harness lasted but a few dry miles, and I could only fall back, not without misgiving, on chicha, announced for sale by a little red flag before an occasional hut along the way. The bridge that once lifted the camino real across the swift, cold stream at the edge of the green oasis that marked the end of the day’s tramp had gone the way of most Peruvian bridges, and left me to wade waist-deep. Strangely enough, my host of Yungay had kept his word to telegraph the gobernador of Carhuáz, and I sat down almost upon arrival with the family at a dinner served after the patriarchal manner of the Andes. To those of us at table the wife at the head granted the full meal, from the hot, peppery soup of Ancachs to the dessert of fried plantains in “honey,”—melted crude sugar. To the dozen Indian servants squatted along the wall she dished out frugally the coarser viands, to each according to his station in life, the bedraggled scullion getting only a small gourdful of boiled corn and yuca. During our Sunday stroll in the plaza the gobernador introduced me in the same careful order to every town celebrity, down to the last teniente; after which we of the élite gathered round the town clerk in a corner of the square to hear read the weekly “bulletin,” from the two-line cable of foreign news “via Lima” to the last testimonial to the efficacy of the pills of Dr. Ross as a panacea of all earthly misfortunes.
I was miles south before the first rays of Monday’s sun fell upon me, and even after that was able to sneak along for hours in the shadow of the Cordillera, so closely did it stand above me. Town rapidly succeeded town, with miles of almost unbroken house-walls crowding a damnably cobbled road to barely the width of a wheeled vehicle. Not even along an English highway would more houses have been shops. The male population spoke a more or less fluent Spanish, weedy with terms from their native tongue; but the women either could not or would not use anything but Quichua. The dialect of the region contained a labor-saving devise in the phrase “A ’onde vueno?” serving for the more specific “Where do you come from and where are you going?” of less inventive sections. Not a few took me for a peddler, and called out from their doorways, “Qué lleva de venta, señor?” and some sent children running after me with a summons to return, lest they miss a precious opportunity for long-winded and chiefly futile bargaining. Ripened corn was being husked in the narrowing fields along the way. The repulsive, flanking ranges crowded closer and closer together, squeezing the stony road ever higher, until the hills closed in entirely, and a precipitous, barren ridge, cutting off the world to the south, left it no choice but to contract to a cobbled street of the department capital. The sun was setting when I halted at a corner of Huaráz’ main plaza, my legs leaden with the twenty-five undulating, stony miles behind me, to inquire for that famous hotel rumor had pictured for weeks gone by.
The conviction came upon me that there would not be a hotel even in Lima. A citizen of Huaráz did point out to me a building boasting itself the “Gran Hotel,” but all it offered was a few rooms to let. To me fell that of the zaguan, a prison-like chamber forming a front corner of the building and opening on both the street and the entrance to the patio. It had once been the oratorio of a private dwelling, and the altar and its decorations were still intact, except that the Virgin had flown from her niche. Across the way was a Chinese fonda with the same bill of fare, worse cooked, worse served, and more expensive than that of Cajamarca. This was the gathering-place of the élite among the homeless transients. I had not the courage to investigate the dozen other Chinese and native “restaurants” scattered about town.
Huaráz, capital of the most populous department of Peru and the largest city I had yet seen since crossing the frontier, is really but another mud village of the Andes, differing from the rest only in size. Its adobe buildings seldom rise above a story and a half in height; its rusticated inhabitants, in ragged, comic-opera costumes, the majority speaking only Quichua, were for the most part ill-bred and disagreeable in manner, especially to “gringos,” whose intelligence or cleanliness they seemed to resent. Even the small percentage of whites—real whites, that is, for there were many who no doubt mistakenly considered themselves so—were gaping mountaineers. Window-glass, to be sure, was to be found, and there were actually three or four clumsy, two-wheeled carts, like the rural wagons of England, the arrival of which was no doubt an event in the town history. Foreign residents were numerous, especially Chinamen, who owned many of the shops of importance, leaving the natives to squat in the street with their few cents’-worth of wares. The town itself has nothing “picturesque” about it, neither in the color and style of its houses nor the rags of its inhabitants; but this is far more than made up for by the magnificent range of snowclad peaks that climb up into the blue all about it, towering close above the town on the east and stretching away into the north, to end in the enormous blue-white mass of Huascarán. Its climate, colder than that of Quito and with a perpetually brilliant sunshine and an invigorating crispness to the air, was delightful. There was even a shelf of books for sale in one of the larger establishments, though the nearest I came to finding literature of the country for the road ahead was Björnson’s “Sendas de Diós,” whatever it may be called in Norwegian.
Rumor had it that the tramp over the icy Cordillera Central that now lay before me would be “impossible,” even to a man in the most sturdy condition. To slip down to the coast and sail for Lima would have been easy, but a racial obstinacy forced me to pursue to the bitter end the task I had set myself, though it promised only the monotony of familiar experience and further intercourse with a people that had grown utterly antipathetic in habit, feature, and character. An American resident furnished me a horse and a peon for the first day’s journey. The prefect had favored me with the customary flowery document to his subordinates along the way, ordering them to “lend me all classes of facilities.” It would have been far more to the point had he commanded them more specifically to assist me to acquire an occasional plate of beans. The dusty road close along the diminishing river was well traveled, chiefly by long donkey trains and plodding, expressionless Indians. Huts and even small villages were frequent, the barren ranges crowding ever closer and dwindling almost to foothills, or rather seeming so to dwindle as we mounted ever higher. Beyond the bridge that carried us back to the right bank of the Santa were scores of little wheat-fields, often hanging far up the steep hillsides; and Indians were threshing the grain by driving their animals round and round the circles of hard earth in which it had been spread, and tossing it high in the air with wooden shovels until the wind had carried away the chaff. The monotonous mud town of Recuay, notorious for its horse-thieves, gazed stolidly upon us as we trotted on to Ticapampa, headquarters of a French mining company, the several tall chimneys of which were belching their smoke into the brilliant sky, their ugliness offset by the first suggestion of industry in Peru.
It cost me three days and several tramps back to Recuay to find a mount for the journey ahead. Walking would have been far less laborious. But there were sixteen leagues of bleak, foodless páramos and two snow-topped ranges separating me from the first suggestion of habitation on the further side of the great glacier-clad central chain of the Andes, that stretched away to north and south further than the eye could command, like an impassable barrier set by nature against the wilfulness of puny man.