“Chusquito” descending one of the few remnants of the old Inca highway I found from Quito to Cuzco
A detail of the market of Huancayo, with a bit of pottery like that of the days of the Incas
Having led Chusquito to the river to drink and heaped before him half of a five-cent bundle of alcazer—green barley, for grain does not ripen at this altitude—and locked the rest inside my chamber, I stalked in solitary grandeur through the gaping billiard-players to the dining-room, and sat down at the end of a long oil-clothed table near a small opening in the wall that looked like an enlarged rat-hole. The poncho-clad proprietor proceeded with fitting gravity to serve me a thoroughly Peruvian meal, of which the chief ingredient was a churrasco, or steak, not of beef, as I at first fancied, but of llama, a favorite Huancavelican dish which would not exactly win the unstinted praise of an epicure. Between each course he repaired to the kitchen in a corner of the barnyard to poke the various dishes through the hole in the wall, and then reappeared within to serve them. It may have been a long time since he had been honored with a guest, but he had not forgotten the proper form of service. After each trip he balanced on alternate legs, staring at me silently, until at last his tongue refused longer to obey his will, when he burst out tremulously:
“Usté’—ah—señor, es andarín, no?”
“Not at all,” I replied, to his patent disappointment. “You see I haven’t a single medal on my chest.”
“Ah, then you travel to sell something; jewelry perhaps, like all franceses?”
Squier, traveling through the Andes a half-century ago, found that “in the Sierra all foreigners are supposed to be French in nationality and peddlers of jewelry by profession,” and conditions have changed little to this day. The landlord-waiter was openly incredulous of my second denial, but once the sluice-gates of his curiosity had been opened, the flow of words swamped even the service, and the soup had long since become a memory of the dim past before he poked the pastre of melted panela through to himself. I made my escape at last, and went to sit on the wooden sofa in the billiard-room, as the only place in town with light enough to see oneself by; but my distinguished presence was so evidently the cause of bad shots that gradually turned the players bitterly resentful, and the atmosphere was so decidedly wintry, that I soon “hit the hay”—quite literally, for such proved to be the filling of the outwardly luxurious-looking mattress.
I had barely ventured into the street next morning when I was dragged into the shop of the two Palestinians. After a bitter and noisy struggle we patched up a truce as follows: Since I was already enstalled there, I was to keep my room at the hotel, but it was at their house that I must take breakfast and dinner....