Beside the two rows of straw and reed shacks of the negroes stood a government building of stone and mud, one end of which was the telegraph office. In it the operator, who had left two days before to “visit some relatives for a few hours,” had locked two kids that bleated incessantly. The open portion of the building was a shambles. Thirty-two miles from the top to the bottom of the Andes had left our feet no fit standing-place, even after soaking them in the Chota; yet we hesitated long before attempting to clear a space to lie down. Luckily, I still had a candle-end in my pack. In a far corner some energetic traveler had built a cot of reeds laid across two sticks, but it had long since rotted to uselessness. Rumor had it that the negroes of Chota were skilled assassins, and the demeanor of the hamlet was by no means reassuring. We laid our weapons beside us on the stone floor, but dared not close the door for fear of drowning in our own sweat. All the night through I woke frequently with the sensation of some one creeping in upon us, but dawn broke without any definite proof that the peril had been anything worse than the offspring of an overheated imagination.
It would be task enough to climb from Chota to Ibarra on the strength of a hearty meal; to make it from a lazy negro village, where not even a swallow of coffee was to be had, approached torture. Hour after hour we toiled upward through a choking desert of sand and broken stone, pitched at the angle of a steep stairway. There runs a story of the Chota, suggestive of the barrier it presents to modern progress. Archer Harman, the American who lifted the railway of Guayaquil to the plains of Quito, strolling along the streets of the Ecuadorian capital one day, chanced to meet M——, one of his American engineers.
“M——,” he said, shifting his cigar to the other cheek, “get out of here to-morrow morning and see what the chances are for a railroad to Bogotá.”
The engineer sallied forth next day on muleback, with such equipment or lack thereof as can be had in Quito in a hurry. Three months later he rode back into the city of the equator.
“Well, you’re back, eh?” said his chief. “What’d it cost us to run her through the Chota valley?”
“About seventy miles of 6% grade in shale,” replied the engineer.
“Hum!” said Harman, “There won’t be any railroad to Bogotá.”
Which is one of the many reasons why the nebulous “Pan-American Railway” still exists only in the minds of inexperienced dreamers.
Hours up, we began to pass groups of meek, well-built Indians, easily distinguishable by their costume from the tribes to the north. They spoke a guttural yet sibilant language that could be none other than Quichua, the ancient tongue of the Incas, and I took occasion to test the vocabulary we had gleaned, by putting an unnecessary question:
“Maypi ñan Ibarrata?”