“How can we help having many dogs, patrón? They breed so often!”
From the village of San Andrés, picturesquely backed by the ice-palace of El Altar, architecturally as diffuse as the Castle of Schwerin, a spreading highway, bordered by endless cactus hedges, led toward a great sandy plain far ahead, a small forest of eucalypti that marked the site of Riobamba giving it center. Further on, for all the aridity, was plenty of half-grown corn, with numberless peaked, thatched huts peering above the vegetation on either hand. At the entrance to Riobamba I saw the first llamas of my South American journey. Once an Indian passed driving a llama and an ass hitched together; further on several of these absurd “Peruvian sheep,” pasturing beyond the cactus hedge, craned their long necks to gaze curiously after me. Times without number I had been assured that not only was the llama never a draft or a milch animal, but that it could never be ridden; that it would carry exactly a hundred pounds and would irrevocably lie down if another ounce were added, and that it could under no circumstances be urged beyond a slow, dignified walk. Imagine my surprise, then, when suddenly I beheld a llama bestridden by a full-grown Indian come down the road at a brisk trot, and watched them fade away in the eucalyptus-lined distance beyond. In the town beyond there was one llama for every two donkeys.
Riobamba, chief city between Quito and the coast, is commonly described as “lying at the foot of Chimborazo.” The description must not be taken too literally. I had imagined a cold, haughty little town snuggled together in a lap of the high Andes; but if Riobamba lies at the foot of Chimborazo, so, in only somewhat lesser degree, does Guayaquil. The traveler turns his back on the glacier-clad giant of the Andes and tramps a long half-day before he comes to what, in situation and general appearance, might be a town on the sandy prairies of western Nebraska. Its monotonously right-angled streets are unusually wide, painfully cobbled, and swirling with sand; its architecture is drearily like that of any other Andean city. It has been several times destroyed by earthquake; were it not, like Quito, more than two miles aloft, it would be even more often destroyed by its personal habits. At sunrise thrice a week most of the town turns out to watch the trains that have “overnighted” here leave for Quito and Guayaquil respectively; whence its suggestion of some frontier village of railroad hotels in our Western states. Unlike Quito, Riobamba has a street-car. It is a platform on wheels with a flat roof supported by gas-pipes, under which are some crosswise boards that are called seats with the same Latin-American tolerance with which a place to lie on the floor is called a bed, and a place the traveler may possibly be able to make his way through is called a road. Like some Andean newspapers, it appears “every now and then,” when a pair of blasé, world-weary mules drag it across town to the station and back, usually only on train days. Many ride, and the more poorly dressed seem to pay for the privilege; but the Indians take good care not to be caught on any such risky, new-fangled contraption.
There is commonly not a “sight” to be seen in Riobamba, unless it be the stern, white face of Chimborazo looking down upon the city from the middle distance to the north. The traveler who chances upon the town of a Saturday or Sunday, however, will find it a place of interest. Then the Indian population of a thickly inhabited region comes from thirty or more miles around to what is rated Ecuador’s greatest market. The sandy plaza, larger than an American city block, is so densely packed with stolid thick-set men and women in gray felt hats and crude-colored blankets that only by constant struggle can a purchaser thread his way across it. From my room on the corner above, not a foot of open ground was visible. The scene was like a swarming of myriad ants of many colors; like a great Oriental rug undulating in the sunshine. As one crowds along between the rows of hawkers, all the products of the region seem to pass in procession. Here were entire families who had jogged many miles to town under the produce of their chacras; there, a man with only a half-grown chicken or a gaunt pig for sale; beyond, a woman sat all day long selling bit by bit, at a net total of perhaps ten cents, the bushel of native cherries which, together with her babe, she has carried at least twenty miles. Here was a pile of ugly native shoes—of very limited demand—there, homespun blankets and ponchos in colors that scream audibly, before they mellowed by sun and rain and the habits of their wearers. Every domestic animal and fowl known to the Andes of to-day was displayed; cheap knives, tin spoons, trinkets from foreign lands, native plants and bulbs; herbs that still make up the aboriginal pharmacopœia, as in pre-Conquest days; tiny packages of dyestuffs that are doled out a penny-worth at a time; corn bread and barley bread, even a few soggy wheat biscuits—though the price of the latter is all but prohibitive—cherries, strawberries, oranges, aguacates, a hard native taffy known as alfeñique, pears, apricots, peaches, a hard little apple that never matures, pineapples, nearly all the grains and vegetables known in our own land, and even a greater variety of corn and potatoes; and a countless confusion of other products that sell for what would seem far less than the cost of bringing them to town. Beyond, was a tercena, an open-air butchershop, where Indian women hacked into bits the cows and sheep that had succumbed to amateur butchers, at the same time fighting off the fifteen dogs which, by actual count, prowled about the stand. In one corner scores of tawny, bare-legged Indians squatted beside heavy grass-wrapped loads of snowy ice, Riobamba’s only means of cooling her beverages. If one knew enough of the bastard Quichua of Ecuador to ask its origin, the stolid fellows threw an expressionless glance toward the icy dome of Chimborazo. About them hovered something akin to the glamour that surrounds the Arctic explorer. All day long was an endless motley going and coming through the adjacent streets and plazas, amid which the imagination could easily drop back four centuries and fancy what this Andean world may have been before the coming of the white man.
Ruins of the fortress of Ingapirca, near Cañar, where the Inca Huayna Ccápac is said to have received the first news of the landing of white men on the coast of his Empire
A mild example of the “road” through southern Ecuador. The trail pitches and rolls over earthquake-gashed, utterly uninhabited regions, sinking far out of sight in the quebrada in the middle distance, then climbs away across the world until the hill here seen sinks to a dot on the landscape
It was so brilliant a Sunday that Chimborazo seemed to hang almost sheer above the town, and the whole bulk of snow-clad Tungarahua loomed clearly forth from its tropical home, when I set out after midday for what I had been told was an easy half-day’s tramp. Within an hour—so sudden are the changes in weather zones here—an icy rain was pouring down upon my shoulders bowed with the weight of a hundred-pound pack. At last I sprawled to a summit with an all-embracing view of the entire district of Riobamba, the city itself a mere fleck far below in an opaque-blue landscape roofed by purple-black clouds through which the unseen sun cast a single faint shaft, as from a weak spotlight. The rain, which in Ecuador falls in zones sharply cut off one from another, ceased abruptly at the top of the barrier. Here were two roads from which to choose, and for hours thereafter I could not know whether the one that descended a sharp valley beside a tiny stream led anywhere near where I wished to go. Well down the bone-dry vale were scattered hamlets of grass and mud huts of a half-wild tribe of Indians, the men in white goatskin trousers that gave them the appearance of shaggy-legged Greek satyrs, the dwellings often hung far up the steep walls that enclosed the growing stream. Many of the inhabitants ran away at my approach; the rest stared at me from safe heights as I sped on down the valley. Ugly white curs abounded; in the scanty trees a bird sang now and then; but for the most part only the sound of the stream leaping from rock to rock broke the mountain-walled silence.
Cold darkness fell, and still the broken trail descended swiftly. At rare intervals a corner of the moon peered through the clouds. Then, in the blackest of nights, the road forked again, giving me another random choice. A wild, windy, uninhabited hour beyond, the path fell suddenly away under my feet and I found myself involved in a labyrinth of quebradas, holes and chasms large as two-story houses, as if the region had been wrecked by a long series of earthquakes. A score of times I climbed down hand over hand into immense ruts with walls high above my head, certain I had lost my way, yet with no other choice than to press on. Two hours, at least, this riot of the earth’s surface continued before there appeared suddenly the lights of a considerable town, dimly seen through the night across a wet, blurred valley backed by an all but invisible mountainside. A trail picked itself together again under my feet, pitched headlong down to a roaring little river straddled by an aged stone bridge, ghostly white in the pallid moonlight, and led me stumbling into the railroad village of Guamote, still booming with the tomtoms of the Sunday fiesta that had left its scattered débris of drunken Indians through all the length of the town.