Typical huts of the páramo of Tiopullo, a bleak, bare mountain-top across which the highway to the south hurries on its way to the warmer valleys beyond
Beyond the páramo of Azuay the trail clambers over broken rock ledges into the town of Cañar
Near the village of Macachi, twenty-one miles from the capital, I turned aside to the hacienda of a quiteño acquaintance. He was a boy of eighteen, scion of one of the old “best families” of Ecuador, who have kept their Spanish blood free from mixture, to whom had recently fallen the ownership and management of an enormous tract of his little country. Educated in our own land, he spoke a slow, pedantic English. Among his equals, he was soft-spoken almost to the point of diffidence. But his voice was commanding enough when he gave orders to his mayordomo or escribante, or to any of the hundred Indians who lived clustered about the central hacienda house, all of whom addressed him as “Su Merced” (Your Grace) and kowtowed as often as he looked at them, as their ancestors might have done to the imperial Scyri. Before the sun set, we had time to ride across a part of the estate. It lay somewhat too high for wheat, distinctly so for corn. Except for the cattle that flecked the upland fields far and wide, the potato was most at home. Fourteen distinct varieties of this native tuber of the Andes, several of them unknown in the North, grew on the hacienda. In one field women were digging potatoes large as small muskmelons, though nearby were other patches still red or purple with blossoms.
The average wage of the Indian peons was five cents a day, with huasi-pongo,—space for their miserable chozas in which the only furniture consisted of a few odds and ends of home-made pottery and some sheepskins which, spread on the earth floor by night, served the family, its guinea-pigs and mangy curs, as bed. The women and children worked for nothing, wages being reckoned by family rather than individually, except that the women who milked the cows were each paid a dollar a month. In reality, the Indians were serfs of the estate. When first hired, they are enganchados, “hooked” by a labor agent, and having spent their “advance” in a prolonged chicha debauch, must often be arrested and forced to carry out their part of the contract, usually remaining for years, if not a lifetime, in debt to the hacendado. It would be an error, however, to look upon their condition from our northern point of view. Any custom taken out of its native environment has a far more serious aspect than the reality warrants. The Indian, trained during many generations of Inca rule to avoid all personal initiative or responsibility, accepts by choice this patriarchal arrangement. The majority had been attached to the hacienda since birth; giving the community the aspect of one immense family. Each household had its little plot of ground for its own garden, and the privilege of pasturing a small flock or herd. Yet the owners have the best of the bargain. Nearer the capital were estates where enganchados Indians made adobe bricks at ten cents a day, with huasi-pongo and food, making daily some three hundred each, which the owner sold at seventy-five cents a hundred.
The snow-peak of Sincholagua and the rugged, ice-capped ridge of Rumiñaui faced the hacienda. Though little higher, the place was infinitely colder than Quito in its mountain pocket, for here we caught the full sweep of the winds off the ice-fields. By dark, we were both huddled in the hacienda dining-room, bleak and comfortless in spite of its extravagant trinkets from the outer world. The peons, for all their awe of their youthful lord, could not deny themselves the pleasure of grouping noiselessly before the door as we ate, listening to the strange tongue—not Quichua, stranger still, not even Spanish—which their erudite master spoke with this traveler from unknown parts, who came on foot, carrying his own load, like any Indian. The crack of the door grew ever wider, the broad, expressionless faces ever more numerous, until a draft of the bitter mountain night air caused “His Grace” to glance up in annoyance. Both crack and faces disappeared silently and suddenly, but came again many times before we each crawled early under four heavy blankets.
Next morning the highway, no longer cobbled, but wide and smooth, without wheeled traffic, soon brought snow-clad Illinaza into full sight before me. So skillfully did it bear me upward that by noon I was crossing the great páramo of the Nudo de Tiopullo, without the consciousness of having climbed at all. The Andean páramo, for which we have no exact English word, is not the sharp mountain peak my imagination had pictured, but is used of any broad plain so lofty that not even the hardy Indian will live upon it, where quinua, most cold-blooded of domestic plants, refuses to grow, a drear treeless upland covered only with a tough brown bunch-grass that gives it somewhat the aspect of our virgin prairies. To a northerner in motion, it was not uncomfortable by sunshiny day, but no one passes these lofty plains at night by choice. Only a rare shepherd’s shelter of stones and ichu dots the cold-brown immensity. The shivering highway hurried due south across it, bringing to view another sea-blue hoyo and, barely pausing for a last glance back at the faint peak of Cotacache and the long bulk of Pichincha, grown mere parts of a broad, hazy, tilted horizon, raced downward into the softer valley.
Some seventy-five miles south of Quito begins a veritable desert. From a distance the ranges to right and left seem green, yet the ascending valley grows so dry and arid that even the scanty scrub trees die of thirst. At the top of a barren divide I met head-on, panting harder than I, and moving no faster, the little tri-weekly train from the coast, crowded with dust-laden, weary passengers. Almost sheer above me stood forth the beautiful cone of snow-clad Cotopaxi, equalled in symmetry on all the earth’s surface only by Fujiyama. To the left the hoary head of Tungaragua, far away in the blue haze of the hot, tropical Oriente it looks down upon, rose gradually higher into the sky. Then the highway descended and went ever more swiftly downward into a half-arid hole in the ground, and by three I was tramping the cobbled streets of Ambato, the “winter” resort of wealthy quiteños, a mere 8000 feet above sea-level. To one accustomed to loftier Quito, it had a tranquil, half-languid air; its people were more friendly, lacking that suggestion of belligerency common to quiteños. There was, indeed, something pleasing about it that I had never yet seen in Ecuador. It reminded one mildly of Egypt, in air and odor, and the dust sweeping across from the barren, arid hills that wall it in. The market of this town, hung midway between the tropics and the temperate zone, offers the fruits of both—aguacates and mangoes side by side with apples, pears, peaches, and cherries—the native capulí, at five cents a peck—beside raspberries and blackberries, and the perennial “fru-u-u-till-a-a-as!” (strawberries) that are singsong daily through the streets of Quito. It was from the market-place of Ambato that I caught my first glimpse of Chimborazo, the giant of the Andes, just the crown of its long, saw-like glacier ridge brilliant white against the steely highland sky, as it stood on tiptoe peering over the barren ridges of Carhuairazo.
Barely had I entered the hotel when its dishevelled boy-servants crowded around me to ask if I were an “andarín.” Peyrounel, it proved, had once favored the establishment with his distinguished, if financially disadvantageous, presence. I pleaded too colorless garments to merit the title. To these Andean village youths the arrival of so romantic a being was what that of the yearly circus is to our towns of the far interior. Yet when I offered any of them double his present wage to accompany me and carry a few pounds of my pack, they shook their heads and shrunk fearfully away.
It is not, as I gradually learned to my growing astonishment, merely because they know no better that the people of the Andes sleep on wooden beds. In Quito I had found many who refused to use the imported springs, and I know at least two doctors who prescribed wooden beds for kidney trouble. Here in Ambato a perfectly respectable spring-bed had been completely floored over, and the unsuspecting gringo, instead of landing on a soft and yielding mattress, found himself on such a couch as a thinly carpeted floor might be. Nor was this by any means the last bed out of which I pulled the lumber and spread the woven-reed estera above the barrel-hoop springs.