When all is said and done, there is a subtle, lazy charm about the valley of Andahuaylas that holds the traveler long after he should have moved on. Sometimes, as the placid days drifted smoothly by, one caught the native point of view, and regretted the intrusion of strenuous gringo activity in the midst of nature’s and man’s repose; a realization that we of the North do much which is not much even when we get it done. Here one could lie in perfect contentment and watch the road looping away out of the valley over a sunlit hill, without feeling too strong for resistance the itch to be off. Yet in the end the only sure means of enjoying an Andean range is to know that some day one is going to tramp away into it, to follow the trail that shoulders its way mysteriously off through those shaded valleys and rugged quebradas, beckoning one toward another and a new world beyond.
The fatherless urchin who fell in with me beyond Andahuaylas; the only native wearing shoes I met on the road in the Andes
My body-servant in Andahuaylas, and the sickle with which he was supposed to cut all the alfalfa “Chusquito” could eat
CHAPTER XVI
THE CITY OF THE SUN
I grew suddenly tired of Andahuaylas one afternoon, and sunrise next morning found me driving Chusquito over the neighboring divide. We had turned aside from the direct route to Abancay, following the valley of the Chumbau, for the least we could do for our recent hosts was to carry their greetings to an isolated compadre. His “civilized hacienda” sloped up from the shore of a beautiful mountain lake some twenty miles in circumference, deep-blue as some immense emerald, with half-cultivated mountain-flanks rising all about it, and a village tucked away in one corner. But, as so often in the high Andes, its entire shore was bordered with slime and reeds that made access almost impossible. Mine host shouldered his fowling-piece and easily provided a brace of ducks for the evening meal; but he refused vociferously to swim, and watched my preparations with patent misgiving. I succeeded in finding an entrance, and took a header into the dense-blue, seemingly bottomless immensity of icy water, to the vast astonishment of all the Indian shepherds, male and female, who live out their lives among their flocks on the edge of this magnificent body of water without ever washing a foot in it, to say nothing of contriving a boat. The lake is said to be famous for its floating islands, that blow back and forth across it with cattle grazing serenely upon them; but it was my luck to find even this Andean invention out of order and no longer “functioning.”
My lake-side host was of rare adaptability for a Latin-American, and of no slight mechanical ability. He not only had a real flour-mill, but washed his wheat before grinding it! This removes him at once and forever from the “Spig” class. His own electric plant furnished the most satisfactory light I had read by since leaving Lima; a telephone connected him with the outside world—though this ultra-modern contrivance was not yet considered a fitting messenger for the greetings of his compadres in Andahuaylas. With the advertisement of a $200 “Singola” as a model, he had fitted his small phonograph into a home-made cedar box, making it an instrument quite equal both in tone and appearance to that in the catalogue. Only he who knows how devoid of mechanical ability is the average Latin-American can realize how vastly this feat lifted the lake-side hacendado above his fellows.
I had half-skirted the lake and crossed a stony range next day when, near noon, in a collection of huts called Pincos, at the bottom of a mighty quebrada, I caught sight of something I had never before seen in South America. It was a white boy, perhaps twelve years old, wearing shoes, yet in spite of that carrying a bundle over one shoulder, like one bound on a journey.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.