He did so, whereupon the beggar growled angrily:
“But you said a pair! Where is the other one?”
Few quiteño dwellings are equipped with bathrooms. I halted a passerby to inquire for a public casa de baños, and was directed to the foot of the calle Rocafuerte.
“Hot baths?” I queried, suspiciously.
“Certainly, señor,” he answered haughtily; “If you go there any morning about ten, when the sun is shining, you will find them quite caliente.”
A crumbling old adobe gate, marked “Baños de Milagro,” gave entrance to an aged two-story building of the same material. Passing through this, I was astonished to find spread out before me what looked like an immense outdoor swimming-pool. It was illusion. Nearer approach showed a broad sheet of water barely six inches deep, a half-acre of it warming in the sun. I suddenly recalled that the same word serves in Spanish for all degrees of temperature from hot to luke-warm. About the basin were many little adobe dens, in the center of each a stone basin some four feet deep, with steps leading down into it. The fee was a mere real (five cents), for the streams that course down the face of Pichincha are abundant. An Indian scrubbed out the pool with a broom fashioned from a bundle of fagots, and turned it full of a water so clear that I could have read a newspaper at the bottom. But the heating apparatus was not particularly effective. When the icy mountain water had filled the stone basin, cold as only a shaded spot at this altitude can be, the uninured gringo could only grit his teeth, clutch desperately at his 60-cent bar of imported English soap, and plunge in—and quickly out again. One such experience was enough to explain why Quito shows so decided an aversion to the bath.
My residence in the city was all but nipped in the bud by a mere matter of red tape. Again the shock was administered at the post-office. When I presented the registry slips for the package of notes on which my proposed volume depended, they were all there, sure enough, the seals still unbroken. But as I opened them for customs inspection, the startled employees cried out in horrified chorus:
“Señor, it is against the law to send manuscript by mail in Ecuador!”
“These were mailed in the United States, where it is not against the law.”
“No importa! It is illegal for them to ride in the Ecuadorian mails. They will have to be confiscated by the government.”