“Pelota (ball), señor,” he answered laconically.
I might almost have guessed as much.
“And that?” I persisted, pointing to the banjo-shaped instrument.
“Guante (glove),” he replied.
Quito lies in a pocket of the Andes, at the foot of Pichincha, more than 10,000 feet above sea level
A really bright man might have guessed that, also. Evidently the tongue of the Incas had left little trace in San Gabriel. Suddenly the bell of the whitewashed church whanged. The players piled their “gloves” hastily in the form of a cross, and every living person in the plaza, male or female, snatched off their hats and poured into the place of worship, from which arose some weird species of music as we pushed on into the town.
A letter from the jefe of Tulcán gave us the entrée to the parlor of one of his relatives. The fortnightly mail had just arrived, and Don Manuel was dictating letters to his daughter, who wrote slowly and painfully in a school-girl hand, dipping an ancient steel pen into a medieval inkwell between each word. When we returned at dark from a dingy little shop in which supper consisted chiefly of quimbolos,—a kind of corn pudding wrapped in corn-husks—we found Don Manuel, his wife, and four daughters all gathered in a family conference over the letter, each offering suggestions, not as to its subject matter, but on the dotting of the “i’s” and the crossing of the “t’s,” a controversy which raged long and vociferously. Then there came marching into the room a huge mattress under which, on close inspection, we made out the feet of an Indian boy, and the family announced that they were going to visit a pariente—a polite subterfuge to withdraw and leave us free to go to bed. The parlor was typical of the “best room” of well-to-do rural South Americans. A forest of chairs in shrouds and a chaos of gaudy bric-a-brac cluttered a chamber musty with little use. On the walls were framed portraits of the pudgy family ancestors back to the days of ruffles and powdered wigs, all draped with mourning crêpe. The family library consisted of barely a half dozen books, all of the general style of Tomás á Kempis’ “Imitación de Cristo,” except for a copy of an agricultural journal in Spanish, published in Buffalo.
There are three routes from San Gabriel to Ibarra. To our surprise, we learned that all of them, far from following the high plateau, descended again into the hot country, for the valley of the Chota cuts a mighty slash entirely across Ecuador a bit north of the Imbabura volcano. The Indians told us the road was pedroso. It was the most exact information we ever had from men of their race. Anything more stony would be difficult to imagine. During all the afternoon there was not a moment in which we were not descending swiftly, our thigh muscles set with the tautness of brake-rods, by an ever more stone-strewn road that curved in and out along the flanks of a barren range, forming loops as perfect as the written “m” of an expert in penmanship; on our left an enormous gash in the earth, dreary, desert-brown, with no other vegetation than the cactus—strangely enough called “méjico” in this region,—on our right, so close it all but grazed our elbows, the tawny, shale mountainside, seeming to rise and grow as we descended. Where the cold winds of the highlands turned tepid, Indians disappeared. For a long space there was no sign of man. With every turn of the road the heat grew more tropical. A green spot appeared almost directly beneath us, hazy as a crumpled green rag with an indistinct light shining behind it. Then two negroes passed, the first we had seen since leaving the Cauca. The road pitched headlong down a slope, donkeys and more negroes appeared, and the green patch developed into fields of sugarcane. Beyond them, by a wooden-roofed bridge, we crossed the Chota river and found ourselves at sunset in the “Caserío de la Chota.”
Tropical huts of reeds and thatch, quite unlike the thick-walled adobe dwellings of the highlands, even in form, lay scattered along the further bank. The entire population was jet black in color; the life of the place as different from the plateau above as if we had suddenly been transported to another continent. Boisterous laughter broke often on the thickening dusk; above the chattering tongues resounded frequently the screams of an exploded jest or a sudden quarrel. A piccaninny bawled lustily, startling us into the realization that we had never yet heard an Indian baby cry. The insolence of these descendants of the slaves once imported in large numbers for the sugar plantations of Ecuador, who in the half century since the abolition of slavery had drifted into this tropical valley to bask in the sun, was in striking contrast to the obsequiousness of the Andean Indian.