While enjoying a racking fever in the comparatively comfortable home of the gobernador of Yanahuanca, I learned that there were two ways of reaching Cerro de Pasco. One was to ride nine bitter-cold leagues across a trackless puna, on which a lone gringo was sure to get lost and die of exposure; the other was to travel about half that distance by a well-marked road to Goyllarisquisca, where los americanos have their coal mines and whence there ran a daily train. I could not believe that fate would be so crude a practical joker as to let a man who had found his way clear from Bogotá go astray on the last day of his journey, but I could easily conceive of the wreck of a horse wilting between my leaden legs somewhere out on the unmarked pampa; moreover, the sight of a railroad would be a comparatively new experience. I decided on the shorter route.
It necessitated the gobernador calling me at two in the morning, before a raging fever had entirely burned itself out. An Indian in flowing breeches, leading a “horse” that was to bring back some arrival by train, and another astride a pitifully small pony, led the way out into the luminous starlit night. A good road tacked gradually upward through a sleeping village, hanging like some prehensile creature on the swift hillside, where the dogs sang us a rousing chorus, and lifted us in some three hours to the razor-backed summit of a ridge, down the further slope of which sprawled headlong a still larger town, fantastic of profile in the morning starlight. We labyrinthed through it, meeting scores of panty-clad and moccasined Indians and barefoot women and girls toiling marketward under atrocious burdens; for the day was Sunday. Below the town we came out on a road paralleling a stupendous gorge; and across it, so high above that I could scarcely believe it possible a cluster of electric lights, suspended in the night between earth and heaven, mingled with the stars and half blotted out at intervals by the smoke of American industry, marked Goyllarisquisca, a city of the sky, to see which we must crane our necks like countrymen at the foot of man’s mightiest monument. The stars went out one by one, like gas-jets turned off by hurrying street-lighters; the luminous night turned to colorless opaque dawn, in which the jagged Sierra stood out flat and featureless as if cut out of cardboard. We went down and ever down into an unconscionable gorge, to cross—such is the ghastly futility of Latin-America—an insignificant stream; then quickly began to climb again. There was a path straight up the mountain-side to Goyllarisquisca, a path which a man unsusceptible to dizziness, and capable of climbing a steep stairway of a hundred thousand steps without guard-rails or a landing on which to pause for breath, might cover in a half-hour. Instead, we wound corkscrew-wise around the entire mountain, through another town, fantastic in its perpendicular setting as the last, yet reduced in the disillusioning light of day to its drab, mud-built reality; and uncovering others pitched at queer places on unattainable noses and gouged-out hollows of the range in which the shadows still lurked like skulking bandits. The mountains beyond were garbed from head to foot in white robes, and in the valleys lay seas of mist from which emerged crags and peaks like uninhabited, rocky islands. Less beautiful, perhaps, in its aspect than the more colorful Alps, the scene vastly outdid these in its rugged, masculine grandeur. Little by little we fell in with an almost unbroken procession of Indians; here and there one clad in exotic overalls whispered the approach of American influence, and at length our breathless animals staggered over the last ridge into the village of the tongue-loosening name.
Before me lay a small Pittsburgh, not so small at that, with great cranes swinging across the gorges, unsentimental stone buildings roaring and matter-of-fact chimneys belching forth the sooty smoke of industry. Long rows of decent living-quarters were interspersed with longer ones of box and flat cars, and sprawling about the higher levels were native shacks so tinged with the foreign influence that even a stove-pipe protruded here and there from their roofs of wavy sheet-iron. Across the scene floated the sweet music of a deep-voiced American train whistle, and on every hand was the evidence of diligence, masculine toil, and effective doing that quickened my northern pulse like a deep draft of wine. It was like coming back to my native world after a long absence. Scores of half-forgotten things I had never before seen in South America surged up about me, and upon me came drowsy contentment that my struggles were behind me and that I had already virtually set foot in the central plaza of Lima.
I slipped clumsily off the miserable chusco and turned him over, trappings and all, to the Indian who was to deliver him to Valenzuela when he passed through Yanahuanca. My legs obeyed me sullenly, as if weighted with ball and chain, and my physical condition gave to my movements a hesitating, deliberate dignity. At the station was a restaurant run by a Chinaman with Peruvian assistance, where the American influence by no means ceased at bacon and eggs, but had reached the height of butter and sliced bread, and rosy bottles of catsup! In a corner of the room a coal-stove blazed merrily, the first artificial heat I had felt in a long two years. I wandered out upon the platform. At the far end stood a man fondling a dog, a real dog, not an Andean cur, and as I approached he protested affectionately and ineffectually:
“Now you get down; you’re dirtying my pants.”
There was no mistaking that vocabulary, even if the strangely nasal accent that struck my unaccustomed ear rudely had not sufficed to betray the speaker’s nationality. Peruvians do not fondle dogs; nor do they refer to their nether garments in that abrupt and familiar fashion. I was soon seated in a comfortable office-chair, a stack of New York papers beside me. But I gave up in despair explaining how I had come to Goyll—well, pronounce it yourself—without having ever been either in Lima or “the Cerro”; and I fancy I had convinced my host of nothing, except that I was a clumsy and unconscionable liar, before the giant Baldwin rolled in, dragging behind it a half-dozen full-sized American freight-cars, as if some branch of the railways of my own land had pierced this lofty nook of the Andes.
The official business of the line is to transport coal to the mines at Cerro de Pasco, and passengers are accepted only on suffrance. The “first-class” coach was the familiar old American caboose, with a line of leather cushions along the walls and a coal stove in the center. It was empty when I entered, but had I not almost forgotten the ways of Latin-American travelers, I should not have been so surprised when it at length filled to overflowing with noisy, over-dressed native women, a few men of the white-collar class, drummers for the most part, hideous with rings, and every species of bundle and cumbersome baggage. Then two robust American trainmen, genuine as if they had that moment been picked off the top of a transcontinental freight-car, stamped in, climbed into their cupola, and we were off.
It was the reaction, no doubt, from the straining months behind me that brought on a paludismo that set me shaking even under my poncho. But the unaccustomed artificial heat all but choked me, and when I had accepted an orange, and gravely refused the whiskey, brandy, and black coffee my sympathetic fellow-passengers would have forced upon me as sure cures, I climbed into the cupola. The landscape would not have been joyful under the best of conditions. A bare mountain-top, faintly rolling, its frosty soil cherishing no vegetation except the dreary yellow-brown ichu of the uplands, stretched monotonously away on every hand, its surface flooded with the brilliant, thin sunshine of Andean plateaux and mottled here and there with fleecy cloud shadows. Now and then a flock of llamas lifted their absurd heads to gaze after us as we sped past. Once or twice we stopped at a wind-threshed mud-town, standing out pitifully unsheltered on the treeless waste, halted an hour at grimy, smoke-belching La Fundición with its smelters, and drew up at dusk in bare and dreary Cerro de Pasco. It was June 22, three months from the Peruvian frontier and 2269 miles from Bogotá, of which I had covered 243 on horseback and twenty-five by rail.
On the train I had been the storm-center of a heated difference of opinion. The Peruvian passengers contended that I should descend by the morning express to Lima, where I would quickly recover under the care of famous physicians of the capital; the train-crew that I should enter the hospital of the American mining company on “the Hill.” There could be no debate between entrusting myself again to the careless inefficiency of native practitioners, and the happy opportunity of entering an institution conducted by men of my own race. When I had found a boy to carry my baggage, I set out with high hopes, if slow steps, for the American hospital.
It was an imposing, one-story building, covering a space equal to a city block and forming a hollow square around an extensive cement-floored patio, on the far edge of the drear and colorless American mining town, well removed from its smoke and swirling dust and disturbing noises. My welcome was not, to be sure, exactly what a morbid imagination had led me to picture, but that was no doubt due to the fact that both doctors were at the moment absent. The head-nurse overcame in time her inclination to refuse me admittance, and sent an Indian boy, closely related in personal habits to the occupants of mountain-top chozas, to show me into a ward. In appearance it was all that a hospital ward should be, its ten imported cots all unoccupied. The boy jerked his head sidewise toward a chair and disappeared. Two empty hours dragged funereally by. Then another Indian youth, startlingly like a personification of squalor and uncleanliness in a masque gotten up by some stern disciple of the Zola school of realism, burst in upon my feverish dreams, and before I could raise a hand in protest thrust a thermometer into my mouth. Evidently it was his assigned duty to take the temperature of anyone caught on the premises. Had I come into the ward to recane the chairs, no doubt he would have forced a thermometer down my throat, like some automatic machine worked by springs, removed and shaken it, wiped it on the seat of his trousers, and pattered away on his bare feet.