We trotted on after the pack-train, and rode for some hours over low ridges, each of which brought to view a new expanse of dreary, yellowish landscape. Occasionally an arriero broke forth in a mournful song that rose and fell with the same monotony as the undulating páramo. Now and then, as a pack worked loose, one of the muleteers dismounted and, deftly slipping out of his poncho, threw it over the head of the animal and readjusted the load. To my surprise, quickly followed by my disgust, the train soon after noon swung into the cobble-fenced field of a low, cobble-stone hut, similar to, but far more miserable and tiny than those of the ancient city behind. Greeting the barefoot Indian woman who emerged on all fours from the hut, the arrieros began to round up and unload the animals. Though we had not made fifteen miles, we were to stop here for the night. I swallowed my wrath, reflecting that he who joins a freight-train must not expect express speed.
It was too cold to sit, and I took to promenading weakly about the hillside. Down in a hollow beyond I came upon a family preparing their crop of potatoes after the ancient Inca fashion still common to the Andes. This chuño—chuñu, in Quichua—is the chief vegetable of Andean marketplaces and the principal food of the Indians of the Sierra. The newly dug potatoes are spread out on the ground at a high altitude, preferably on the bank of a highland lake or stream, and left to freeze by night. They are small potatoes, for the Indian’s mode of selection has been to plant only the smallest, eating or selling the larger, until the tubers indigenous to Peru have degenerated to the same low level as their horses and dogs. When the sun has thawed the potatoes, the Indians of the household tread out the juice with their bare feet, then spread them in the sun to dry. This produces the chuño negro, or black chuño, which in the time of the Incas was the only kind permitted the common people, and which to-day forms the chief product of the process. Those who prefer chuño blanco, the “twice frozen white chuño” which graced only the tables of the Incas and nobles, put the tubers inside a well of cobble-stones under the surface of a river or lake, and leave them from two to eight days, after which they are dried in the sun. The result is a food that will keep indefinitely, but which has very much the same taste as so much fried sand. The most common method of preparing these frozen potatoes is to grind them in a stone mortar and use the powdered chuño to thicken soup.
Crossing the Central Cordillera of the Andes south of Huaráz, barely nine degrees below the equator. In the foreground is my “guide” of the obstreperous wife
When the head of the Indian household arrived, he opened with Valenzuela a conversation in half-breed Quichua, of which I caught enough to learn that we were to drive a league west in the morning to wait a day for some species of cargo, stop to pick up another load a few leagues beyond, and so on indefinitely. I called the arriero aside and protested that, aside from the hardships and exposure of lying out on every mountain-side, I was steadily growing worse for lack of treatment. To my surprise he proposed that I ride on alone next day. As he would never have dreamed of making such a proposal to a Peruvian stranger, it spoke well of the opinion he had gathered of Americans from contact with them in the mining town toward which we were headed. A bed of several horse-blankets was spread for me beneath the flap of the canvas covering our packs, out under the shivering stars that stood forth in the luminous highland sky with the unnatural luster of electric bulbs. During the later hours of the night, when I rolled out into the cold, still air, a brilliant full moon was flooding with almost the light of noonday the rolling mountainous world about us as far as the eye could reach.
I knew only too well that a matter settled the night before would have to be argued out anew in the morning. Dawn crept up over the eaves of the east, and the god of the Incas flung his horizontal rays across the empty plateau, but Valenzuela, assuming the customary air in such cases, that we had neither of us meant what we had said the evening before, made no move to prepare for my departure. When I reminded him of his promise, he announced that he would, of course, keep it, if I really, seriously desired it. Only, it would be utterly impossible for a man unacquainted with the route to find his way across the often unmarked punas and pampas ahead. Then, too, it was infested with bands of robbers who at times attacked whole pack-trains, to say nothing of one lone, helpless gringo. If only I would wait until to-morrow, he and I would ride on alone at breakneck speed, and make up for all the delay. I had long since learned the close resemblance of the South American mañana to a greased pig; moreover, I had no desire to ride at breakneck speed. He muttered under his breath at this gringo obstinacy, and ordered the youngest arriero to saddle a horse and accompany me. The latter refused. Valenzuela shrugged his shoulders with a gesture that meant, “You see it is out of the question.” But the experienced Andean traveler can always win his point, if he insists long and hard enough. The chief arriero gave up at last and sent a man to lassoo and saddle, not the “stout mule” he had promised the evening before, but one of the saddest imitations of the genus horse in camp; and late in the morning I rode down through the chuño-producing gully and away over the brown and sterile world spread broad and high before me.
The arriero’s first prophecy came quickly true. I lost the road. A stretch of what was evidently the old Inca highway, broad and grass-grown and lined by two rows of stones, pushed straight on over all obstacles in what seemed to be the right direction, but it did not fit the descriptions that had been given me. The well-marked trail I followed led me down into two gaping hamlets that had not been mentioned, and doubled the miles to Baños, somnolent as an Italian village at summer noonday, down in the throat of a gorge. The frowsy chusco already gave signs of not being able to endure the journey. All I demanded was a reasonable walking pace, yet it cost me far more labor than to have made the trip afoot to keep the animal moving a scant two miles an hour. It was evident that, for all my incessant labor, we should not reach before nightfall the hacienda we were seeking, and when it came on to rain and hail in a cold, bleak bowl of mountains, I turned toward a collection of huts that stood out dimly as an animal of protective coloring on the upper edge of the saucer-shaped hollow.
The Indian men, patronizing and arrogant in their clumsy way, as usual in such situations, offered me the customary six-inch block of wood on which to squat under the eaves of the “corredor.” I took weakly to promenading the twenty-four miles in the saddle out of my legs, and furtively inspected the six huts that made up the collection. All were earth-floored dens, roofed with ichu, against several of which immense quantities of dried cow-dung were stacked like cordwood. The women squatting over the fire in the center of one of the huts handled fuel and food at one and the same time. Though they were barefoot and scantily clad, the men wore heavy, home-knit wool stockings to their knees, and crude moccasins of a strip of hairy cowhide, drawn together over the foot with a “puckering string” of rawhide. The males spoke considerable Spanish, but the women knew, or pretended to know, only Quichua. There were attached to the place at least a score of dogs, who set up a head-splitting chorus as often as I stirred, and at few-minute intervals even without that provocation. Across the shallow hollow the long line of snow-clad peaks that had grown up along the entire eastern horizon during the day stood forth in bold and impressive majesty in the light of evening, a light that seemed strained through purple-tinted crystals.
When the mountain cold settled down like an icy sheet, I asked where I might sleep.
“Why, there in the corredor, to be sure,” mumbled the Indian.