We took leave of Pasto four days after our arrival. That night—Hays having his usual luck in winning the single wooden bench—I slept on a hairy cowhide on the earth floor of an Indian hut beside the Ancasmayu, or Blue River, about the northern limit of the Inca Empire at its height; and all night long guinea-pigs kept running over me, squeaking their incessant treble grunt, gnawing at anything that seemed edible. Besides the llama, and, perhaps, the allco, a mute dog that is said to have been exterminated by the hungry Conquistadores, the only domestic animal of the Andes at the time of the Conquest were these lively little rodents so absurdly misnamed in English, since they are neither of the porcine family nor known in Guinea, being indigenous to South America. The Spaniards more reasonably called them conejos de India—“rabbits of India.” To the natives they were, and still are, known as cui (kwee), the origin of which term is evident to anyone who has listened to their grunting squeak through an endless Andean night. In pre-Conquest days—the llama being too valuable an animal to eat, even had the herds not been the personal property of the Inca—the cui probably constituted the only meat, except wild game, of the Indian’s scanty diet. To-day every hut in the Andean highlands is overrun by them. The gente decente facetiously assert that the Indians keep them for two purposes,—to eat, and as a means of learning the art of multiplication.
Next day the road was all but impassable, or we should have reached Ipiales on the frontier that evening. Not that it was a bad road, as roads go in the Andes, but rain had fallen most of the night, and we skated down each slope in constant expectation of a mud-bath, to claw our way almost on hands and knees to the succeeding summit. Once we tobogganed thousands of feet clear through a town in which we had planned to eat, literally unable to stop until we brought up against a luckily placed boulder on the edge of a stream in a roaring gorge far below.
At Iles, where Hays, hurrying on in quest of cigarettes which he detested only next to smokelessness, for once arrived before me, I found dinner already preparing and my companion burdened with the key to a lodging. A tinsmith had left off work for the afternoon that we might have undisputed possession of his shop, stocked with a few ordinary articles of tinware, but given over chiefly to the fabrication of tin saints. Strange to say, once they had been sanctified by the priest, the results of his labors were as sacred to the tinsmith as to his fellow-townsmen. Iles was just finishing a huge new church. The only implements of the workmen were shovels, for the whole building was of native mud, even to the roof-tiles. The entire Indian population, male and female, impressed into service by the padre, trotted in constant procession from the spot where the clay was mixed with mountain grass and trampled with bare feet, carrying on their heads tiles filled with the material, the women bearing also their babies slung on their backs. The free labor system of the Incas, inherited by the Conquistadores, is still in vogue in the isolated towns of the Andes, the taskmaster of to-day being the village cura.
As we neared the frontier, population grew less and less frequent, and there were long stretches without an inhabitant. In the afternoon we turned aside from the “royal highway” to visit the “Virgen de las Lajas,” the most famous shrine in Colombia. To it come pilgrims from all the Republic, from Ecuador and even further afield, to be cured of their ills. On the way down to it we fell in with an old man driving an ass, and heard the simple story of the founding of the sacred city. Centuries ago the Virgin had appeared here and given a small child a statue of herself—“descended straight from heaven, because it has a real flesh-and-blood face that bleeds if it is pricked, or if hair is pulled out.” Then she had ordered the Bishop of Riobamba to build a chapel in the living rock of the mountain on the site of the apparition. Our informant was vociferous in his assertion that the Virgin daily cured victims of lameness, blindness, barrenness, and a hundred other ailments; but he offered no explanation of the fact that though he had lived in Las Lajas all his life, he was almost sightless from ophthalmia.
The village, stacked up the sheer wall of a gorge in the far depths of which roared a small but powerful stream, had about it that something peculiar to all “sacred” cities,—an intangible hint of unknown danger, perhaps from fanaticism, of ignorance, something of the sadness that comes upon the traveler at such evidences of the gullibility of mankind. Several “posadas de peligrinos,” crude copies of the hospices of Jerusalem, and many little shops and stalls like those of Puree, town of the Juggernaut, furnish pilgrims with lodgings, food, blessed trinkets, and tons of English candles to burn before the miraculous image. Ragged boys left off their top-spinning to beg “una limosnita—a little alms for the Virgin,” as we descended through the town and went down by the sharpest zigzags to the white, four-story temple with its twin towers, hanging on the edge of the rocky gorge like encrusted foam of the waterfall that pitched into it. Though they make long journeys to implore her favor, the pilgrims have not reverence enough for their Virgin to reform their unspeakable personal habits, and every story of the holy edifice was an offence to eyes and nose. The worker of miracles was the usual placid faced doll in rich vestments and gleaming jewels—or more likely paste imitations of those which the monks keep safely locked away in their vaults—behind a thick glass screen against which sad-eyed Indians flattened their noses in supplication.
The rolling hills of Ecuador lay close before us when we strode into Ipiales, the last town of Colombia and the coldest place we had known since our last northern winter. At this rate the equator would prove ice-bound. The place was said to have much commerce with the neighboring Republic, but the only signs we saw of it were a few troops of shivering donkeys. A mere five miles separates Ipiales from the frontier, and we had soon left behind the land of “Liberty and Order” and entered that of the equator. The road, crawling dizzily along the face of a death-dealing precipice, descends to a collection of huts called Rumichaca—Quichua for “rock bridge,” which it is, indeed, for the boundary river, Carchi, races under a huge natural arch across which the camino real passes without a tremor. To our surprise, there were no frontier formalities whatever. Ecuador was not even represented; the two Colombian customs officials, diffident, slow-witted, but kindly pastusos, asserted that no duties were collected on goods passing between the two countries, unless they were of foreign origin. Their task was merely to keep account of whatever passed the boundary; for what purpose was not apparent, unless it was to provide a sinecure for political henchmen.
An hour later we were surprising the Ecuadorians lolling about the bare, sanded plaza of Tulcán. Only a lone telegraph wire had followed us over the frontier, yet the two countries blended into each other so completely that an uninformed traveler would not have guessed that he had crossed an international boundary. In the cuartel were housed a half-hundred soldiers, rather insolent fellows despite their Indian blood, their gaily colored ruanas giving Tulcán a needed touch of color, engaged in the rather passive occupation of protecting their little wedge-shaped country from the pressure of the larger one above. By the time I had lessened our burden of silver by changing it into bills of the country, Hays had fallen in with the jefe político, the commander-in-chief of all the canton, who bade us make our home in his bachelor parlor as long as we chose to remain. The room was the most magnificent we had seen since Bogotá, with long, solemn rows of upholstered chairs, straight-backed and dignified, framed family portraits that would not have gladdened an artist’s heart, and two long but sadly narrow sofas covered with a horse-hair cloth that, after weeks on the planks and trodden-earth floors of Colombia, seemed elusive luxury personified. The jefe bade us keep our hats on, and left us with the Quito newspapers of a week back, our first touch with the outside world in some time.
I suspected that Tulcán’s chief dignitary had not treated us so regally out of mere kindness of heart; and the suspicion was duly verified. We had stretched out on our elusive couches, and Hays was already asleep—or feigning it most successfully,—when the jefe arrived from a merry evening with his aids and drew me into a conversation that promised to have no end. Under the guise of giving me information, he set himself to finding out, entirely by indirection, what might be our real motive in entering Ecuador by the back door, unannounced. Though he never for a moment suggested his suspicions openly, it was a late hour before he gave any evidence of being convinced that there was nothing sinister and perilous to the welfare of his country behind our simple story. Then he grew confidential and announced that, as men who had, and might again be, wandering in foreign parts, we were sure to run across two miscreants on whom he would like to lay his hands. One was Deciderio Vanquathem of Belgium, described as a ferrotype photographer and a sleight-of-hand performer of no mean ability. He had married a cousin of the jefe and borrowed a thousand sucres of our host to start a magic-lantern show, only to disappear a week later leaving his wife, but not the thousand sucres, behind. The impression left by the jefe’s complaint was that if he had reversed the process, there would have been no hard feeling. We were asked to keep an eye out also for one Francisco Fabra, boasting himself a Frenchman, who had written from “Ashcord” (Akron?), Ohio, proposing marriage to one of the jefe’s sisters, but who had dropped out of sight upon receipt of her photograph. “No se debe burlarse así de las mujeres—no man should play such jests on a woman,” cried the jefe fiercely.
Had we not fallen in next morning with two Indians likewise bound, I am not sure we should ever have reached San Gabriel. We were soon engaged in an utterly unpeopled series of páramos, lofty mountain-tops swept by icy winds, covered only with tufts of yellow bunch-grass and myriads of “frailejones,” clumps of mullen-like leaves on a palm-like stem from six inches to two feet high, that peered at us through the mist like shivering, diffident mountain children. Our companions assured us that the plant was thus known because of its resemblance to a priest in his pulpit, and that the leaves were highly efficacious against headache. There was also the achupalla, a kind of wild pineapple with sword-like leaves that gave it the appearance of that form of cactus known as “Spanish bayonet,” the heart of which, resembling a large onion or a small cabbage, is sold as food in the markets of the region. Then, for a long way, the trail led through a moss-grown forest reeking in mud, which we could only pass by jumping from bog to bog and clinging to trees along the way.
San Gabriel sits conspicuously, and apparently unashamed, on the summit of an Andean knoll, its streets falling away into the valley on every side. In the outskirts we came upon a game new to both of us. In the irregular field that formed the plaza before a bulking mud church, a half-hundred barefoot Indian men and boys, each in a ruana of distinctive gay color reaching to the knees, were pursuing a sphere about half the size of a football. Each player had bound on his right hand, like the cesta of the Spanish pelota player, a large, round instrument of rawhide, of the form of a flat snare-drum or a double-headed banjo. The rules of the game were evidently similar to handball or tennis. Hoping for some suggestion of aboriginal originality, I asked a player what the game was called.