The fortress of the former Inca city of Huánaco el Viejo, far up on the now uninhabited pampa above the sheltering valley in which cowers the modern city of the same name
A typical residence of the Indians of the high páramos, built of heaped-up stones and brown ichu-grass; so low one cannot stand upright in it. Here the family sleeps on the uneven earth floor, or on a hairy cowhide, with their yellow curs, guinea-pigs, and other domestic animals. Cooking is done outside over a fire of ichu or dung
Long after dark the fresh and rosy assistant-doctor dashed into the room. But he had no time to give attention to my symptoms and explanations, for dinner was about to be served, and ordering me to get into a bed, he dashed for the door again. I protested that I had brought with me the unpleasant evidence of long Andean travel, and he jerked a thumb over his shoulder with a parting mumble of “bathroom.” There was one, even as he had indicated, with all modern appliances; but like most new-fangled inventions transplanted to the Andes, it did not “function.” Another example of the Peruvian abhorrence of soap was ordered to bring a half-dozen pails of hot water, which in his haste to be done with the task he translated into the Castilian for luke-warm; and I crawled at last into one of the cots. Soon afterward the Indian boy came to climb into another, in the same identical rags he wore by day. The dinner was evidently a prolonged and engaging function, for neither the doctor nor any other sign of human interest appeared again during a night in which I tossed incessantly with fever, while the ward blazed with electric lights and the ineffectual steam-pipes thumped and pounded like an adjacent boiler-factory.
I am happy to be able to say that neither the two physicians, whom we will disguise under the pseudonyms of Dr. F and Dr. D, nor the head-nurse, of the American hospital were my fellow-countrymen; they came from further north. Materially an establishment to boast of, its condition in anything touched by the personal equation was incredible. Homeopathic in creed, it put its trust in pills, and left the rest to eight immature Indians, as devoid of human instincts as of supervision. In a second cheerless, bare ward adjoining the one I occupied were a score of injured or ailing Indian workmen; yet no precaution whatever was taken to keep infection from passing from one room to the other. A single thermometer served all alike. Twice a day the automatic youth of the bare feet went the rounds in quest of temperatures, carrying a bottle of antiseptic so low in stock that it did not reach a third as far up the instrument as did the lips of patients; and too indolent to go to the dispensary for cotton, he wiped it after each use on whatever came within reach,—his sleeve, his trousers, or the noisome rag each servant carried over a shoulder in guise of napkin. If the ten cots had been full, instead of the four that represented the maximum of occupancy during my stay, I do not know what habits we might have adopted; for there were only three cups, three tablespoons, and one teaspoon attached to the ward. The printed rules announced that meal-hours were 7; 10; and 5:30. In practice they averaged: Breakfast, 8:40 to 9, Dinner, 1 to 1:30, and Supper, about 8. The same stern placard called attention to the fact that visitors were admitted only on Sunday afternoons. Yet scarcely a night passed without a mob of Indians or cholos, male and female, friends of the internes or of some inmate, stamping into the ward as soon as darkness had settled down, and often keeping up an uproar until long after midnight. Then it was the unexplainable custom, on those days set for that ceremony, to drag out a fire-hose at four in the morning and “wash down” the ward like the deck of a ship, flooding the floor an inch or more deep in icy highland water, through which patients put to that necessity might wade to and from their cots.
In the sumptuous quarters of physicians and nurses, occupying all the front half of the building, the formal repasts were provided with every obtainable delicacy, and enlivened with music and gaiety. In the wards the ostensibly well-regulated diet monotonously reduced itself in practice to the leathery “green” beefsteaks of the Andes and two or three other articles sanctioned by prehistoric Andean costumbre. The Latin-American racial lack of initiative is nowhere more in evidence than in the kitchen. If doctor or nurse prescribed some special dish for a patient, there came back in answer—after authority had disappeared from the scene—that threadbare Peruvian prevarication, “No hay”; which meant that the cook was giving vent to his temperamental grouchiness, was too lazy to set another pot on the fire, or was keeping the delicacy for himself or some “compadre.” The youthful assistant-physician, trained in the far north, was supremely ignorant of tropical diseases, and, what was worse, had no inclination to add to his professional knowledge. His interests were confined to the contents of a row of unhomeopathic bottles and the manipulation of fifty-two small cardboards at the club-rooms a few blocks away, where he might be found—though not easily called—at almost any hour, ensconced in one of the leather-upholstered lounges before the blazing fireplace. The “gringa” head-nurse chose to do duty by day, and arising every forenoon, came in to smile at each of us about ten, and sometimes again in the early afternoon, before it was time to dress for her daily “bridge” and tea. In a loquacious moment she confided to me that she “just loved” to travel and, having always longed to see “strange foreign countries like Peru,” had been delighted to get an appointment to spend a year or two in it. The assistant-nurse was the most disturbingly beautiful Peruvian it had so far been my fortune to set eyes upon,—and she took the customary advantage of that fact by making no effort to be anything else. Being a subordinate, she was obliged to take the night-shift; but being also a Peruvian, she did not often permit that misfortune to break her night’s rest.
Five days I had studied its ceiling when the morning brought Dr. F, physician in chief, who had been absent on a round of the company’s hospitals, hurrying into the ward. He was a far more successful practitioner than his youthful assistant—in that he made the daily round in about five minutes less than the ten which Dr. D squandered. Two or three mornings later he paused at my cot to grumble querulously:
“It’s —— funny you don’t get better. It must be you are not making up your mind to. Mental attitude, you know. As soon as you had that purge, these pills should have taken hold at once.”
“That what?” I murmured.