Guayaquil, 22d. Yesterday forty cases of bubonic plague broke out in Public School No. 5. There are seven survivors.
The resident, too, soon learns the real motives that hamper the sanitation of that pest-hole. Once it is “cleaned up,” argue its short-sighted merchants, foreign competitors will flock in upon them. As to themselves, they are, with rare exceptions, immune to the two plagues for which the port is famous, having recovered from them at some earlier period of life. Those who have not recovered have no voice in the matter. There are even foreign residents who bend their energies to upholding this barrier to competition.
These interests now, abetted by unseen European elements fostering the discontent, and the eagerness of the opposing party to make political capital out of any cloth, whole or otherwise, had stirred the noisy little native papers into a furor, genuine or financed, against the Government. The people, in their turn, had worked themselves into the conviction that the invitation was only an opening wedge of the “Colossus of the North” to gain a hand in the rule of the country, which it is always the part of the opposition papers to paint as imminent. We had not been long in Quito when the attitude of the populace grew so serious that a joint meeting of both houses of congress was called to explain the government view of the transaction. The diplomatic corps was present in force, and as much of the public as could find standing-room after the two houses had been seated in the largest chamber available in the government palace. The diminutive old Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had lived abroad long enough to acquire a point of view, explained the exact truth of the situation as clearly as a disinterested foreigner might have done. But neither congress nor the populace would hear his reasoning. The latter hooted him vociferously, calling him “Yanqui!” and accusing him of being in the pay of the United States. The congressmen rose one after another to charge him with fostering a conspiracy to surrender Ecuador to the Yankees, with many references to the “beegee steekee,” and the meeting ended with the roar of a bull-necked senator:
“Undoubtedly, Señor, we want Guayaquil sanitated; but we want it sanitated by Latin Americans.”
The pesuña and other evidences of sanitary notions of the crowd that hemmed us in gave the speech a ludicrousness that none but an enraged partizan could have missed. But that night the little Minister of Foreign Affairs resigned, and when morning broke he had disappeared.
For all the handicap of the complete absence of factories and street-cars, Quito might easily lay claim to the world’s championship in noise. The din from its church-towers alone would bring it one of the first prizes. It is pleasant to sit out on a sunny hillside listening to the music of ringing church-bells as it is borne by on the Sunday morning breeze; but in Quito they are neither bells nor are they rung. In tone they suggest suspended masses of scrap-iron, and there is not a bell-rope, as we understand the word, in the length and breadth of the Andes. Barely has midnight passed, when Indians, hired for the nefarious purpose, and mobs of street urchins eager for the opportunity, climb into the church-towers and, catching the enormous clappers by a rope-end, beat and pound as if each was vying with the others in an attempt to reproduce the primeval chaos of sound, ceasing only when they drop from exhaustion. No corner of the city is free from the metallic uproar. Santa Catalina tower was a bare hundred yards above my pillow, and I know scarcely a block of the town over which does not rise at least one such source of torture, hung with at least half a dozen bells—to use the word loosely—of varying sizes and degrees of discordance. Once awakened, the city is never permitted to fall asleep again. By the time it has begun to doze off once more, the ringers have recovered, and, taking up their joyful task with renewed vigor, repeat the performance at five-minute intervals until sunrise, and often far into the day.
The street by which one leaves Quito on the tramp to the south. In the background the church and monastery of Santo Domingo
Long before Edison thought of his poured-cement houses, the Indians of the Andes were building their fences in a similar manner. In the regions where rain is frequent they are roofed with tiles or thatch; on the desert coast further south the tops afford a place of promenade sometimes miles in length