“When will mother be back?”
“Oh, perhaps in a week,” answered the innocent damsels, “She went to Mojarras with a load of corn.”
It was as useless to try to get a meal without the loss of several hours as to hope to eat it without the entire village squatted around us. Either there was nothing to cook, or no pan to cook it in, until the woman next door had baked to-morrow’s corn-bread, or the stick fire in the back-yard refused to burn, or some other unsurmountable drawback developed. Hays constantly labored under the delusion that money could expedite matters, and was given to drawing forth his worldly wealth in one wad to flourish it before the languorous cook and, incidentally, all the gaping town. The result was often a doubled or trebled price, if not an inducement for some of the village louts to lay in ambush for us somewhere up the trail, but never an earlier meal. If they could stir up their lethargy to serve us at all, it would be only at their own good leisure, whatever the price. Many a time there occurred a scene similar to that at San Miguel. Hays shook a $50 billete in the face of a bedraggled Indian woman who had, perhaps, never before seen so large a sum at one time, offering it all if she would prepare a meal at once. She would not, but after long argument served coffee, corn-cakes, and eggs—which might easily rank as a meal in the Andes—and collected a bill of seven cents.
For days at a time we tramped “aguas arriba.” The trails of the Andes are fond of this means of crossing a mountain range. High above it we caught the gorge of a river, and wound upstream in and out along the towering wall that shut us in. It was no mountain-flanking road of easy gradient, such as abound in the Alps, but one that had chiefly built itself; so that all day long we climbed and descended stony buttresses of the range, until they grew like the constant nagging of a querulous old woman, the gorge of the brawling river ever far below. Here and there a hut and clearing hung on the opposite mountain wall, or above us, in places where plows were useless. The Indians cultivated their “farms” by burning off a bit of the swift slope, threw a brush fence about it, dropped their seeds into carelessly dug holes, and sat back to wait for whatever nature chose to send them. At length, in the course of days, the trail having kept the same general level, the diminished river rose to meet it; for hours more the path jumped back and forth across the ever smaller stream, until this had dwindled to a mere brook racing down a rocky gorge from its birthplace up under the snows. Then, when there was nothing else left for it, the trail girded up its loins and scrambled alone up out of the valley and over the backing range.
Far above I could make out the rough-hewn wooden cross that marked the summit, masses of clouds scurrying past it, as if pursued by some enemy beyond. Once I passed a half-wild Indian girl with a baby on her back, who ran away down an unmarked, break-neck place in a way to suggest that she had taken me for the Fiend in person. No doubt the resemblance was striking. Higher still, two or three groups of the same tribe came down at a queer little dog-trot, the heavy loads on their backs supported by a shawl knotted across their shoulders, the plump breasts of the women undulating under their dirty, one-piece garments. In mid-morning we stood at last on the summit of the famous Ahorcado—the Hanged Man—range, so named from some episode of the Conquest, a “knife-edge” indeed, where the god of the winds seemed to have his chief warehouse. For once the view was entirely free from mist. To the east, the V-shaped valley up which we had come lay far below, twisting away to the left, to be lost at last between hazy mountain chains. There were many more farmers here than in the rich and level Cauca valley, either because the government is too far distant to drive them out by its exactions, or because the Indian is in his element among these lofty ranges. On every hand the steep mountain sides were flecked with little farms of all possible shapes, colored by green or ripening grain or corn, a tiny hut in the center of each patch, minute with distance, but as clearly visible as if only a few yards away. To the west lay a pandemonium of mighty valleys, pitched and tumbled peaks, gigantic saw-toothed ranges, seen and suggested into the uttermost distance.
The market-place of Cajibío, in the highlands of Popayán. In the right-center is the village priest, with a pole attached to a bag under his arm, demanding contributions of each hawker. Though the region is decidedly cold at night or in the shade, the unclouded sun burns the skin quickly, hence the woven-reed sunshades
But one could not stand long in so icy a wind to admire even such a scene. A few yards below, the road forked, one branch stumbling headlong down into that chaotic jumble of wooded hills and valleys, the other striking off through the forest along the flank of the range. A mistake at that height might mean hours or even days of extra toil. We chose at random and trusted to luck. The soft, almost level road plunged away through a dense green forest, as truly “bearded with moss” as any in our North, yet rich with parasites and ferns. Great oaks littered the ground with acorns. I drew ahead and marched on through utter solitude, the stillness broken only by the cold wind from the south, immense vistas of dense-wooded Andes now and then opening out through a break in the tree-tops. Where the forest began to give way, my misgivings were set at rest by a group of dull-eyed Indians of both sexes, their mouths stained with coca-leaves, plodding upward in single file, still maudlin with the fire-water that marked the vicinity of a town. All wore heavy, cream-colored felt hats, and bore varying burdens, the women carrying the heavier loads and in addition a baby slung across their breasts by a cloth knotted behind the neck.
Not far beyond, I burst out suddenly upon a full view of Almaguer, almost directly below, perched astride a narrow ridge between two mountains, serene in its precarious seat despite the raging wind that seemed constantly threatening to blow it off into oblivion. Then, as suddenly, it disappeared, and I was almost within the town before I caught sight of it again.
Here we caught one Barbara Diaz red-handed in the act of feeding her swarming family, and refused to be driven away. Lodging, however, seemed unattainable. A woman seated on her earth floor before an American sewing-machine run by hand carelessly admitted that she had a room to rent before she thought to say “further on.” But on second thoughts she decided that it would be “muy trabajoso” to prepare it for us—in other words, very tiresome to get up from the floor and produce a key. The alcalde was out of town; the one woman who owned a vacant little shop asserted with an air of finality that her husband was not at home. I turned to the court of last appeal, the village priest. He was a long-unshaven but pleasant fellow of forty, educated in the seminary of Popayán, occupying, with a discreet but attractive young “housekeeper,” the second-best building in town—the best being the mud church adjoining. His well-stocked library, in Latin and Spanish, with a few volumes in French and English, was a feast for the eyes in these bookless wilds. During our long chat the good padre asserted that all the Indians for a hundred miles around were good and faithful Catholics, and that almost all of them could read and write! He had long planned to learn English, but had “such a fearful lot of work to do, so many masses to say every day and confessions without rest.” He took down a book and requested me to read some English aloud, “just to hear how it sounds.” Casually, somewhere during the interview, I brought in a brief reference to lodging, and the padre forthwith sent across the plaza a small boy who soon returned and led us to the same woman who had last turned us away. Now that the padre ordered, she had no hesitancy in overlooking the absence of her husband. The lodging cost us nothing, which was exactly what it was worth. It was the usual mud cavern, with a floor of trodden earth, cold as a dungeon in contrast to the blazing sunshine outside, and, having once been a shop, was all but filled with a dust-carpeted counter and yawning shelves curtained and draped with cobwebs. Hays drew the counter, but I found room to stow myself away on one of the higher shelves, though with neither mattress nor covering and a wind as off the antarctic ice sweeping at express speed across the thin cuchillo between two bottomless Andean gullies, we did not look forward to darkness with pleasure.