“But do you make a stone soup without meat?”
“Ah, to be sure, a strip of charqui always improves it,” replied the soldier indifferently, “but....”
A girl was sent to fetch a sheet of sun-dried beef, which the former conscript cut up slowly and dropped bit by bit into the now savory-smelling chupe. A half-hour later he lifted the kettle off the fire, the old woman handed him a gourd plate, and some cold boiled yuca as bread, and having given half of it to the family, he ate the stone soup with great relish—all except the dozen smooth, round stones at the bottom of the olla.
All that afternoon we slipped and slid down a half-perpendicular stone-quarry, that bruised my toes if not Chusquito’s, into a repulsive molle- and cactus-grown desert in which a tropical sun blazed with homicidal intensity. No wonder its blistering rays faded the made-in-Germany cloth of my Ayacucho-tailored breeches, when it bleached even Chusquito’s coat to a pale, reddish yellow. Had I not come upon an isolated hut and a gourdful of chicha de jora just when I did, it is by no means certain that I should not have perished of thirst before the day was done. The “Hacienda Pajo nal,” in the valley of the Pampas river where sunset overtook us, was in charge of a white and cultured woman engaged in the inviting occupation of dealing out to half-drunken Indians the concentrated sugar-cane juice of a large hogshead in the liquor room. The husband, who loomed up through the tropical twilight, was the graduate of an American agricultural college; but the hacienda, under charge of his Quichua-speaking mayordomo, was farmed in the same backward manner as in the times of the Incas, without even their energy, and his foreign training had given him no inkling of the proper occupation for wives. Nor did he give any evidence of ability to speak English. After the patriarchial supper around a long, rough-hewn table, he set in motion a large phonograph, and we heard not only the best opera stars of the day, but such exotic selections as “The Old Gray Bonnet,” and a tale of love and moonlight along the Wabash. A veritable crowd of arrieros and low-caste native travelers, who had made this their night’s stopping place, and the uncouth Indian laborers of the hacienda, gathered on the edge of the darkness and stood like statues as long as the entertainment lasted. Evidently they were amused, or they would not have remained; but the absolute stoniness of their expression, without the faintest outward evidence of pleasure, would have brought dismay to a living entertainer. We had dropped again into a genuine tierra caliente, warm as the Cauca valley, where tiny gnats decorated my skin with an annoyance that was to last for days to come; and though I was favored with the guest-room all important Peruvian haciendas provide for travelers, the corredor outside my door, and all the neighboring patios and corrals was strewn with Indians of both sexes, stretched out among their bales and trappings.
An hour or more next morning along the flat river-bottom planted with sugar-cane brought us to one of those swaying bridges over a roaring stream compressed between precipitous rock-walls, so numerous in the time of the Incas. But instead of woven willow withes, it was supported by cables and, as if to recall the provident Incas by contrast, was sadly in need of the repair that had just begun. Chusquito crossed the precarious contraption only under protest, after the application of more than moral suasion, and on the slanting and broken cross-slats I kept my own footing with difficulty. Had he been more than a boy’s size horse, we should have been held up at the edge of the gorge for days, until the languid workmen finished their task. We were now in the department of Apurímac. Some miles further along the river, through a sandy wilderness of organ-cactus noisy with flocks of screaming green parrots, the trail struck upward on the famous ascent of Bombón. It was another of those infernally stony, endless, blazing, absolutely waterless climbs that must be endured wherever a river has cut its way deep into the Andes, requiring a day of laborious toil to advance a few miles across a chasm that might almost be bridged. Even Chusquito seemed ready to stretch out on his back when at last we reached the summit, the lofty plateau again spreading away cool and inviting before us.
In Chincheros the gobernador attempted at first to deny the honor, but being caught in the act, as it were, accepted the situation with good grace, as became a caballero of considerable Spanish ancestry. In the black shale of his back corredor all the local “authorities” were gathered about a long table that groaned as with the gout each time any of its legs was subjected to undue weight, their state papers, seals, and ink-horns, and a goodly array of large ill-scented bottles spread out before them. When he had spelled out my papers, the gobernador invited me to make the veranda my home as long as I chose to grace Chincheros with my gnat-bitten countenance, and I spent what remained of the day amid a mixture of chicha, pisco, and justice. A fully sober person was not to be expected at that hour in Peru, but the “authorities” were still sufficiently aware of the dignity of their position to whisk the bottles out of sight when I prepared to photograph the group. That an andarín should not present a book for their seals and signatures they took as a slight, and I was forced to submit several pages of my note-book to their official decoration. During all the rest of the afternoon Indians and half-Indians came slinking in before the authoritative crowd, one of whom was a notary public, to mumble their petitions or complaints with many a cringing “tayta-tayta,” and the air of slaves before ill-tempered masters. The otherwise subservient proceedings were broken once by a wordy passage-at-arms between the gobernador and an aged caballero dressed in rags and pride, who bade a formal farewell to the women of the family and other officials, but left without the customary handshake with the gobernador, marking this as the most serious quarrel I had yet witnessed in South America. When the business of the day was over, the mellow-conditioned “authorities” all joined in a game of “quoits,” with silver soles in place of horseshoes, to determine which of them should supply the wine that topped off the festivities. The family supper was served on the table so recently occupied by the affairs of justice, and I spread my bed on two of the benches that had sustained the weight of the august judges. Here and there on the mud floor of the court-room an Indian slept, curled up like a contented yellow dog on a bundle of rags or corn-stalks.
I had assigned to the long, hard day across the great range beyond Chincheros the experience of chewing coca, said to sustain the Andean Indian on his laborious journeyings. As we undulated across the barren, brown top of the world, I began feeding myself leaf by leaf, adhering strictly to the accepted rules of this indigenous sport, until I had formed a bulging cud in my right cheek—the left is also permitted by the rules. The taste was not unlike that of dry hay. Then I bit off several nibbles of lime from the burnt stone I had bought in the market of Huancayo and, mixing it with the leaves, began to chew. The only sensation I was clearly aware of was that the lime burned my gums atrociously, as it would have done had the coca leaf never been discovered. I am not sure that I did not feel a slight increase in exhilaration that caused me to lift my feet a trifle faster; but this may easily have been due to the beauty of the scene that stretched to infinity on every hand, for even Chusquito seemed inspired to bestir his dainty hoofs with more than his accustomed sprightliness.
The hazy valley of the Pampas river with its biting gnats had disappeared into the past, and only the bare, brown world spread before us to a far distant horizon that seemed to move forward as we advanced. Small wonder the natives were astonished that I kept the road. I could not but be surprised myself that instinct and the slight assistance of my pocket-compass guided me aright across this deathly-still, unpeopled mountain-top, where the traveler must constantly watch the faintly marked path, lest it take advantage of the briefest inattention to dodge from under his feet and leave him hopelessly stranded high up on a dreary puna trackless as the sea itself. On these shelterless heights it was easy to understand why each succeeding town had watched my departure with gaping mouths, and that the boldest inhabitants had cried out: “Nosotros, aunque hijos del país, no nos aventuremos hasta el Cuzco sin guía!—Even we, sons of the country, would not adventure ourselves to Cuzco without a guide!”
A familiar sight in the Andes,—a recently butchered beef hung in sheets along the clothes-line to sun-dry into charqui, the soleleather-like imitation of food on which the Andean traveler is often forced to subsist