To which the oldest of the group replied at once in fluent, though accented Spanish, without the shadow of a smile:
“Sí, señor, this is the road to Ibarra; derechito—straight ahead.”
Before noon we were sharing a gallon of chicha at the top of the range, several world-famous volcanoes thrusting their white heads through the clouds about us. Ibarra and her fertile green slopes were plainly visible; a dozen villages dotted the far-reaching landscape, and the two roads to Quito wound away over the opposite flanks of cloud-capped Imbabura, towering into the sky beyond and cutting off half the southern horizon. Below us spread the famous Yaguarcocha, the “Lake of Blood.” At the height of his power Huayna Ccápac, thirteenth Inca, had pushed his conquests over the equator, when the Caranquis, a warlike tribe of the valley before us, revolted. The army sent against them exterminated the Caranqui warriors and threw their bodies into the lake, “turning its waters blood-red,” according to the legend, and giving it the name it bears to this day. Its shores were white with encrusted salt and, like so many lakes of the Andean highlands, so completely surrounded by reedy swamps that we were forced to abandon the swim we had promised ourselves before entering the principal city of Ecuador north of the capital.
Ibarra is a still and dignified old town of some 12,000 inhabitants, founded in 1606 under the Spanish viceroy from whom it took its name, as a residence for the white men of the region between Pasto and Quito, on the site of the old Indian village of Caranqui. In spite of the extreme fertility of the surrounding valley and its peerless climate, many of its houses stood empty, and several buildings of colonial days were still the ruins the great earthquake of many years ago had left them. The keeper of the little eating-house that actually and publicly announced itself, abandoned to us her own quarters, densely furnished with photographs, frail chairs, tables, sofas, cane lounge, and an immense canopied bed, to say nothing of the extraordinary luxury of a newspaper only two days old. To offset the pleasure of the first real bed in weeks, however, the town kept us awake most of the night with a local fiesta. We had been so lacking in foresight as to arrive on the day sacred to the “Virgen de la Merced.” The celebration began early in the afternoon. An endless train of Indians in a bedlam of colors trooped across the town under great bundles of dry brush gathered far away in the hills, a haughty chief on horseback riding up and down the line giving his orders in sputtering Quichua. Men, women, and children deposited their loads on the bare plaza before a weather-tarnished old church, and ambled away for more. Five immense heaps had been laid out in the form of a cross when a priest sallied forth to sprinkle them with holy water. In the thickening dusk the entire town gathered amid a deafening din of battered church bells, the explosion of thousands of home-made fireworks and “cannon crackers,” the blare of a tireless band, and the howling of the populace and its swarming curs. The brush cross was lighted by a priest in rich vestments, and a pandemonium that may have been pleasing to the sleepless Virgin raged the whole night through.
The driftwood of the festival, in the form of chicha victims sprawled on their backs in streets and gutters, littered the town when we set out to climb to the frozen equator at Cayambe. A wide highway strode up through the Indian town of Caranqui, birthplace of Atahuallpa, best loved son of Huayna Ccápac and of Paccha, daughter of the conquered Scyri who once ruled the territory of the Quitus, and away due southward over the left shoulder of Imbabura. For the first miles it was so crowded with Indians in crude red blankets, heavy, gray felt hats, and bare legs, that it seemed the migration of some tribe from another world. All sidestepped like Hindu coolies and even the women touched their hats to us as they passed, greeting us sometimes in Spanish, but more often in Quichua. To the west rose the snow-topped peak of Cotacache, sharp as a dog’s tooth, and the view of Ibarra and her fertile valley opened up below and behind us like an unfolding map. Then a ridge wiped out town and jogging Indians, and left us only the gaunt, spreading mountain world to look upon.
Thirty miles lay behind us when we entered Cayambe, a drowsy, tumble-down place of no great size, the chill of the blue ice-fields capping the great volcano of the same name that bulks into the heavens close beside it, sweeping through the dreary streets unhampered. Next day a long and tiresome eight leagues led across a desolate and parched country, fissured by enormous earthquake cracks. But for the discovery of a new drink,—guarango, of unknown concoction—we might have stumbled across the sand-blown equator in far worse state than those who first pass it within the realms of Father Neptune. A drought had fallen upon the region so long since that even the cactus had given up in despair. All day long Cayambe stood forth clear and blue over our left shoulders, and far off to the hazy southwest the horizon was walled by a vast range, the highest point of which was evidently Pichincha, at the foot of which lay the end of our present journey.
With our goal so near at hand, we found it difficult to hold ourselves overnight in the semi-tropical oasis of Guayllabamba, the sandy streets of which were half paved with the stones of alligator pears. By daylight we had descended to the river and begun the unbroken climb of more than 5000 feet to the top of the succeeding range. A wide highway now led due west between cactus hedges through a country so desert dry that both stock and people seemed to be choking; and the fear came upon us that Quito, too, would be suffering such a famine of thirst that our plan to take up temporary residence there would turn to disappointment. Another steep, tongue-parching climb brought to view all Pichincha and its surrounding world, yet nowhere was there any sign of Quito. The highway swung south, rising and falling gently here and there between dry fields fenced with cactus or mud walls, a town tucked away in the wrinkle of the range beside us. In a shelter at the roadside an Indian woman, selling steaming soup with a bit of meat and tiny potatoes in it, served us in a single earthenware plate with wooden spoons as impassively as she did her own people. Further on, groups of aborigines were burning off, over brush fires, the bristles of slaughtered pigs that lay in batches of a half-dozen, split open, at the road edge. A carriage passed, the first we had seen in weeks; then an automobile; a man in “European” clothes, wearing shoes, yet actually walking; a clean child of well-to-do parents. A motley crowd, chiefly Indians in gaudy ponchos, came and went; large buildings grew up on either side of us; the highway, passing through green groves of eucalyptus pungent with the smell of “Australian gum,” took on the name of “18th of September,”—though it was really the 26th—and all at once Quito in its May-like afternoon burst out before us in its mountain hollow, a great grassy mound cutting off the horizon on the south. Fifty-seven days had passed since we had walked out of the central plaza of Bogotá, during fifteen of which we had done no walking. Our pedometer reported the distance thence 844 miles, and we had each spent a dollar for each day of the journey. Hays had set out weighing 180, and I, 160; we arrived weighing 160 and 161, respectively. We may not have presented quite so bedraggled an appearance as the remnant of Gonzalo Pizarro’s band on their return from the wilderness of the Amazon, but we were certainly no fit subjects for a drawing-room.
CHAPTER VI
THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR
I settled down for months in Quito. Not only were my Canal Zone experiences to be written, but I had long since planned to become a bona fide resident of a typical small South American capital. A letter of introduction won me quarters in the home of Señor Don Francisco Ordoñez V, in the calle Flores, while Hays hung up his hat in even more sumptuous surroundings around the corner.
But not so fast! Not even whole-hearted “Don Panchito” would have received me in the state of sartorial delapidation of our arrival. The people of Quito are somewhat less rigid disciples of Beau Brummel than those of Bogotá, but they are still far from negligent in dress. Most of the clothes indispensable to our entrance into the ranks of the gente decente had been mailed in Jirardot, the rest had been turned over to the American “drummer” in Cali. The first shock Quito had in store for us was the information that no parcel of any shape or description had come from Colombia in months, the second was the discovery that the traveling-man had not arrived. It was hard to realize that we had outwalked all the established means of transportation in this equatorial land.