Over the lofty, tumbled world ahead the way was often so steep and stony and contorted that Chusquito more than once fell on his neck, and threatened to twist himself permanently out of shape. It was a land so dry and barren that only the half-liter of pisco kept my thirst endurable. Whenever I paused for a sip, my companion glanced furtively and anxiously back at me, as if he remembered other masters who had got bad tempers out of bottles along the way. But his was none of your meek and canine dispositions that permit abuse unprotestingly. On the level, high pampas, with all the world spread out in full view about us, the exhilaration of scene and air caused me unconsciously to set so swift a pace that I was obliged frequently to kick the brute out from under my feet—until he retaliated by suddenly projecting one small, shod hoof against a shin that I was distinctly aware of for days afterward.
One afternoon, not fifty miles beyond Acobamba, I was threatened with violence for the first time during my fifteen months in South America. I sat beside a mountain pool, coaxing my cooking-outfit under shelter of my alforjas, when two half-Indians, bleary-eyed with drink, appeared on stout mules. They had nearly passed when they caught sight of me, and charged forward in drunken insolence, all but trampling my possessions under the hoofs of their animals. In the haste of the moment I made the error of showing aggressiveness to the point of drawing my revolver—and came perilously near having to use it for my mistake. When reflection caused me to change my tactics and humor them like the witless children they were, the danger was dissipated like a puff of smoke. Within ten minutes the pair grew so maudlinly affectionate that they insisted on shaking hands alternately a dozen times each, and at length rode slowly away, casting frequent besotted, loving glances behind them.
Across a barren páramo ahead the mood struck me to cheer the long hours with my mouth-organ. Even the Indian carries one of these, or a reed flute on his journeys, and whiles away the sky-gazing solitudes with monotonous ditties. But I was soon forced to forgo the pleasure. Not merely did that plebian instrument in the hands of a gringo bring glances of unconcealed contempt from the rare horsemen who passed, but I could no sooner strike up than Chusquito, unhumanly frank and honest in his criticisms, would lay back his ears and trot ahead well out of hearing, with some peril to my pack, before he would consent to fall again into a walk.
CHAPTER XV
THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES
It was in the scattered caserío of Marcas that I overtook a traveling piano. I had barely installed myself by force and strategy in a mud den, and tied Chusquito to a molle tree before a heap of straw in which he alternately rolled and ate, when a party of gente arrived, among them an old woman of the well-to-do chola class, carried astride the shoulders of an Indian. Their chief spokesman was a lawyer named Anchorena, a white man of some education and even a slight inkling of geography, who was importing an upright piano for his mansion in Ayacucho. With the descending night came a score of Indians carrying a large, crude harp, several fifes and guitars, and a drum, to install themselves along the mud benches of the corredor of the building inside which the more or less drink-maudlin gente had spread themselves. It is never the Peruvian’s way to interfere with the celebrations of his underlings, however disturbing these may be, and far into the night the “musicians” kept up an unbroken, dismal, tuneless, indigenous wail that forced whoever would be heard to shout. Anchorena, professionally inclined to like the sound of his own voice best, bellowed the evening through in an endless account of a fellow-townsman’s visit to New York a bare ten years before. Of all the marvelous experience, what seemed to astonish both the teller and his hearers most, all but choking the Indian-riding old woman with incredulity as often as he repeated it, was the alleged fact that in the best New York hotels guests were not permitted to spit on the floor. Come to think of it, that probably would astonish a Peruvian.
To my surprise the natives were off ahead of us in the morning, and Chusquito had picked his way many hundred feet down a stair-like trail before we sighted the boxed piano, lying on its back on a bit of level ground far below, with some twenty-five motley-arrayed Indians squatted about it. The lawyer shook hands effusively and, putting Chusquito in charge of the barefoot squire who was leading his own cream-colored coast horse, invited me to listen to his endless chatter while we continued the swift descent together.
The piano, made in Germany, had been set down in Lima for $500. Freight to Huancayo had added ten percent. to the cost. From the end of the railway to Ayacucho, a scant two hundred miles, the exotic plaything must be transported on men’s backs, as the Incas imported a thousand things—if not pianos—in the days of their power. This stage of the journey would, under ordinary circumstances, have nearly doubled the cost of the instrument. But Anchorena had the advantage of owning a large hacienda in the great hot valley toward which we were descending, and was able to cut the expense in two by drawing upon his own peons for the labor of transportation. Three distinct gangs had been sent from his estate, each to bear the burden a third of the distance. They were paid the extraordinary wage of twenty cents a day, and supplied food, chicha, and coca. Each gang carried the piano for a week, and it was the second party celebrating the arrival of the third that had made noisy the night at Marcas.
Each morning, shortly after midnight, the Indians rose to munch mote, or boiled corn, for an hour or more, after which a heavy soup of corn, potatoes, beans, and charqui, was served. Then for another hour the men poked coca leaves one by one into their cheeks, mixing them with lime from their little gourds, and by dawn, the effect of the chewing having made itself felt, they rose to their feet and were off. Some forty peons set their shoulders to the several poles attached to the boxed piano, a picket-line with shovels, axes, and ropes was thrown out in advance to widen the trail and lend assistance in the steeper places, and an army of servants, cooks, squires, and the numerous capatazes, or bosses, required for any effective Indian labor, brought up the rear of the expedition.
From the punas of the day before, totally barren but for the dreary, yellow ichu, we had descended through a zone of scrub bushes, lower still through thirstless, sand-loving cactus, and were now dropping swiftly through a dead, desert landscape by zigzag trails as painfully steep and unpeopled as those of the Ecuador-Peruvian boundary. Architecture changed with the altitude, so that the openwork huts became little more than thatch roofs on poles, shading the languid, loafing inhabitants of a place called Huarpo, hot as Panama, on the edge of a river cutting off a broad, sandy valley I had seen from the sky the day before. The surrounding region was a cofardía, that is, it belonged to some wooden saint to whom it had been bequeathed by a beata, one of the many pious old women who have thus left great tracts of the Andes perpetually in morte main. For the desire of these sanctimonious matrons is to provide a permanent income for the masses requisite to the repose of their souls, and as their piety is commonly tempered with experience of the ways of this world, they usually reject the suggestion of the Church to sell the property and give the money directly to the priest, lest he grow forgetful, in a way even priests have, and neglect his duty toward the dwellers in purgatory. Huarpo is also paludic, or raging with intermittent fevers, and no wise man drinks water within sight of it. The appearance of a gringo in their midst aroused even these languid, fever-hued, desert people to an unusual concentration of attention, one bedraggled female bursting out at last with a remark in Quichua too rapid for my ears, but which the lawyer translated: “Caramba! Si yo estaba preñada de seguro saldría la cara gringuita!” It is a common superstition in the Andes that a child will closely resemble the person the mother has looked most fixedly upon during the months before its birth.
In spite of the fact that everything I owned in South America, not only my letter of credit and the papers necessary to prove my identity, but even my money, had been left in my alforjas under the tender care of an Indian boy miles behind, I did little worrying. The Andean traveler soon grows accustomed to trusting his possessions to penniless peons, for losses are astonishingly rare. For all that, I caught myself glancing anxiously now and then up the wall of shale and loose rock that piled into the sky above us. The piano-movers made good time, in spite of many a zigzag and desert precipice, where rope and home-made tackle and the widening of the trail were often necessary. We had not enjoyed the shade of the huts an hour before the vanguard appeared, and shortly afterward the lawyer’s bulky toy was laid in the baking sand beside us, and the sweating, dust-covered carriers swarmed about the huge jar of chicha de molle that had been purchased for them. Progress would have been much less rapid but for the fact that the third gang, knowing theirs was the last shift, realized the advantage of finishing the journey to Ayacucho as soon as possible. Yet their conception of hurrying was not exactly vertiginous. They halted a long hour, not to eat, which they did only morning and evening, but to prepare new quids of coca. From a large grain-sack the lawyer dealt out to each of the peons with his own fair hand a small handful of the narcotic leaves. They slunk forward one by one, with outstretched hats, and a hint of eagerness on their besotted, expressionless faces, with the air of men who would have sold their souls for this few cents’ worth of brutalizing leaves.