Ambato claims the title of “Athens of Ecuador”; and, indeed, four of the country’s principal writers lived and died here, which is more than can be said of the capital. The place of honor in the main plaza, gorgeous with geraniums of every shade of red, is occupied by the statue of Juan Montalvo, commonly rated the country’s chief literary light. In Ambato Juan León Mera wrote his “Cumandá,” the accepted classic among Ecuador’s novels; and one may still visit the family of Luis Martínez, whose “A la Costa” is worthy a place in South American literature, if only for its magnificent descriptions of tropical scenery.
I left Ambato on a morning so cold that gloves would have been welcome; one of those mornings, frequent in Ecuador, when the sun rises like a beauty of the harem pushing aside the soft, white curtains of her alcove, when the mountains, at the bases of which dense masses of clouds and mist have gathered, seem gigantic altars on pedestals of marble. Soon the sun grew ardent and imperious, capriciously burning away the mist-curtains of the night, blazing down unrestrained on the rolling plains of Huachi, so arid and monotonous. The road lay deep in sand across a half-desert, with no other adornment than the fences of cabuya, of the cactus family, that replace the dividing ditches or mud field-walls further north, to mark the limits of the poor heritages of the Indians. The chief industry here is the weaving of a coarse cloth from the fibers of the cabuya blanca. Here and there a capulí tree persisted, and impenetrable, bushy clumps of the thorny sigse bristled aggressively. The few planted fields were sparse and drear, though near the town, where the thirsty arenales had been transformed by irrigation into patches of green on which the desert-weary eyes rested gratefully, grew the strawberry, large and fragrant.
Higher and higher rose the world, though so imperceptibly that the ascent was noted only because the landscape opened out to ever greater vistas. It was a day of climax in volcanoes. Around the circle of the spreading horizon the white crests of no fewer than eight of the great vent-holes of the earth grew up about me, until I paused on a high ridge to study them. To the right, for a time looking like a single mass of rock and snow, stretched long, saw-toothed Carhuairazo, with Chimborazo rising behind it; then gradually the great, glacier-blue dome of this Everest of America detached itself and stood forth in all its immensity. Far behind, yet perfectly clear in spite of the blue haze of some forty miles distance, cone-shaped Cotapaxi, once so savage in its destruction, reared itself into the sky-line like an occidental twin sister of Fujiyama. To the left, in military precision, three snow-clads stood shoulder to shoulder—Sincholagua, Antisana, and one above which rose a column of smoke that marked it as Sangai, most active of the western world, but a few days before in destructive eruption. Then came the glacier-clad, rounded cone of Tungarahua, keeping its eternal watch over the tropical Oriente, and to the south, noblest of all, peering forth first in the early mists, and growing in grandeur all the morning, stood dreaded El Altar, its beauty now completely unveiled, a fantastic mass of peaks and pinnacles, like some phantom city of ice.
Indians carrying a grand piano across the plaza of Cañar on a journey to the interior
The Indians of Ecuador draw their droves of cattle on after them by playing a weird, mournful “music” on the bocina, made of a section of bamboo
For hours the snow-peaked horizon continued. Across the sands of Huachi travelers had been few; toward noon they grew plentiful. Around every turn appeared Indians and their four-footed competitors, with such monotonous persistency that I needed a cudgel to drive out of my way the asses which, expressionless and impassive as their masters, were inclined to march serenely on, irrespective of human obstacles. The rare chagras, or tawny countrymen, who live in their chozas along the way, were interesting only as evidence of how clod-like man may become. At Mocha, where I halted in the early afternoon, the deep-blue ice-fields of Chimborazo lay piled into the sky overhead, a mountain still, though the town stands more than two miles above the sea. All the following morning its arctic dome towered close on my right as I plodded along its gentle slope not far below the snow line, often waist-deep in the ruts which generations of pack-animals and Indians had worn in the brown, uninhabited páramo, dreary with long, slightly rolling stretches of bunch-grass, across which I only now and then overtook a mule-train, the drivers wrapped to their ears in their heavy ponchos. Behind, across a hazy valley, now more than forty miles away, the symmetrical cone of Cotapaxi gleamed faintly forth in a new dress of snow that had fallen during the night. A cobbled highway ran along the bottom of a slight hollow some distance off, but travelers had scorned it so long in favor of the rutted páramo that grass was grown high between its cobbles; and at length, as if it resented the abandonment, it swung off in the direction of Cajabamba and was gone.
The dozen ruts across the páramo finally joined forces to form a kind of road that, turning its back on Chimborazo, around whose white head a storm was brewing, struck off toward a long, undulating, hazy valley backed by blue heaps of ranges. Gradually I descended to almost a desert again, by a road deep in sand, rising and falling over countless sand-knolls, the peaked, grass-covered huts of Indians tossed like abandoned old straw hats far up the flanks of the drear mountainsides on either hand. At one of these I found the first use for my new revolver. An enormous dog, plainly bent on destruction, bounded out upon me without a sound, halted abruptly with a faint yelp as I pressed the trigger, turned a complete somersault, and fell feet upward, like a captive turtle, not two yards from me.
Ordinarily there is little to be feared from the sneaking curs of all colors that swarm about every hut throughout the length of the Andes. Before the Conquest, tradition has it, the Indians had only the mute allcu, now exterminated—at least, it is certain that none of those that remain are mute. These degenerate descendants of the animals brought over by the Spaniards rival the original chaos of sound as they rush out in cowardly packs upon any stranger—especially a non-Indian, for as the white man’s dog abhors an Indian, so do these a white man—while their masters gaze stolidly on, without so much as attempting to call them off. The Indian of the Andes does not raise dogs; he has them merely because he is too passive to get rid of them. The curs are never treated as pets; the only caress they ever receive is a kick or a prod from which they retreat sluggishly with a cowardly yelp, even if the weapon misses its aim; they are never fed, but exist on such offal as the Indian himself disdains. A mountaineer to whom I put the question once briefly expressed the viewpoint of his race: