From Guamote I followed the silent but well-kept Quito-Guayaquil Railway through a landscape like that of southern Texas, winding in and out between dreary hills peopled only by a rare weather-worn shepherd in goatskin trousers; then across broad stretches of sear-brown, slightly rolling desert scantily covered with bunch-grass, the sand sweeping over it in clouds. From Palmira,—two dismal little station buildings at some 11,000 feet elevation—the railroad drops steadily for all the more than a hundred miles to the coast. Some way down the descending valley, the land turned almost suddenly from dreary brown to the green of another rain-belt that gradually climbed the ever-higher mountain walls that shut me in. Beyond Alausí next morning I made a swift descent, even swifter by sliding down the face of the notorious “Devil’s Nose,” where the track mounts in three sections, one above the other, and reached the little town of Huigra in time for “breakfast.” Here, in a green valley between high hills falling abruptly into a prattling stream, are the main offices and hospitals of the railroad, and an American atmosphere, tempered with whiffs of England and Ecuador, to which the fever and bubonic of Guayaquil do not mount, nor the ills of Quito descend.
At Huigra my route was to turn southward over the enclosing mountain wall. But I had no objection to coasting down into the tropics on a side-trip to Guayaquil—except Guayaquil itself; and when the chief engineer promised a screened refuge from sun to sun, I accepted the invitation gladly. All that is necessary to travel from Huigra to sea-level is to get something on wheels of the right gage and “let her slide”—or rather, let her slide within very definite limits, lest one reach the bottom far sooner and in poorer condition than was planned. With a native employee behind, the two of us sat on the sheer front edge of the track automobile, the experienced hand of the chief on the brake, and roared in and out and ever down the mountain cañon, the towering walls on either side rising higher above us with every yard forward, a foaming river keeping us a not much slower company. Huigra is at kilometer 117. At 110 we suddenly reached the tree-line. Forests in striking contrast to the bare upland plateau of Ecuador grew up about us as if by magic. Foaming mountain brooks dashed down from either towering wall to join the river—and to save the company the expense of building water-tanks. Swiftly the trees changed in species,—from hardy highland shrubs to voluptuous tropical growths, till the airy bamboo, noblest of ferns, bowed to us in graceful dignity from the crowded forest as we screamed past.
Before noon we swung out of the gorge I had followed from Palmira, and halted at Bucay. It had been like dropping in two hours from May to a dense and heavy July, from a northern scene to one like that of Panama, with the same sticky atmosphere, negroes, and outdoor life. Here we took possession of the empty pay-car on the rear of the day’s passenger-train and sat with our feet on the back railing, watching the dead-flat tropical world run away and shrink up to nothingness behind us. The track lay straight as a cannon-ball’s course through the tunnel of forest and jungle. Indians and their gay garments had disappeared; here were only the colors of nature. Along the way, thatched houses of split bamboo slouched in languid attitudes, half-black and slightly dressed families peering from their sort of hole-in-the-wall verandas behind partly raised blinds hinged at the top. For all the lazy languor of the scene, jungle products succeeded each other swiftly. Cacao, then palm-trees gladdened the eyes; the air grew heavier; now and then a great field of sugar-cane broke briefly the endless tunnel of forest; beautiful bamboo groves alternated with immense tropical trees cutting into the sky-line.
The natives, afoot or ahorse, used the track as a trail, for all else was impenetrable wilderness. Here and there the jungle crowded so close that it side-swiped the car, though along the way were many section-gangs fighting it back with machetes, the favorite tool and weapon of the costeño, who saluted us—or, more exactly, my companion—as we sped past. Pineapple fields grew numerous; at stations the fruit lay in piles at the feet of indifferent chocolate-colored vendors. The brown castor-bean on its small green trees appeared; splendid cocoanut palms, heavy with nuts, heralded the sea; maidenly slender rubber-trees; broad fields of light-green rice, growing arm in arm with Indian corn; the plebeian bread-fruit tree, with its broad leaves fancily cut as with scissors in the hands of an inventive child; and always gigantic tropical trees cut fantastically into the sky-line of the light-gray day above. Behind, always, fixed as fate itself, the dim and clouded range of the Andes, a giant wall, blue and unbroken, shut off the world beyond. Here and there a hoary peak showed above the clouds, so high one could not believe it possible. Far off in the heavens like a great cloud, Chimborazo stood white and immovable. As in the forest one sees only trees, so only down here, looking at the chain as a whole, could one realize the loftiness of those realms where one had been living for months more than two miles above the sea.
Naked brown babies, huts on ever longer legs, hammocks, grew numerous, and languid loungers to fill them; here and there appeared a Chinaman; some large towns, bamboo-built and all on stilts, like a thin-shanked army; buzzards circling lazily overhead amid scents that whispered of plague and sudden death. Then on either hand began to appear the low, dense-wooded hills of Durán, more properly deep green islands in this flood-time. Fluffy white flowers in myriads smiled bravely above the black waters that would soon swallow them up. The vast mountain wall across the world behind had grown a shade bluer when we drew into Durán on the banks of the Guayas, and brushing both clear with housewifely care of any lurking mosquito, dodged through the double screen-doors into the railroad quarters. Here were shower-baths and phonographs, New York papers, a frequent nasal twang, and only outside and seeming far off as in some distant place, the scent of Ecuador.
Sudden death is reputed to fly chiefly by night along the Guayas. So only when the sun was high did we venture across to Ecuador’s metropolis and far-famed death-trap, Guayaquil. Outwardly, the low, heat-steaming city looked far cleaner than Quito. But here filth grants no immunity. During three hours we saw the black funeral street-car pass nine times—and by no means all the population can afford so splendid an exit from the world. Yet here were electric tramways for the first time since Bogotá, larger shops and more ambitious displays than in Quito, and signs of greater commercial activity. The houses were of wood or split bamboo, low and earthquake-fearing, all the windows with wooden blinds hinged at the top, from behind which peered half the female population, seldom seen on the streets. Compared to Quito, it was a town of no color at all. Among the foreign residents was a curious indifference to local dangers, always seeming greater at a distance than on the spot. Americans yawned at the mention of “Yellow Jack” and Bubonic and went about their business with as little apparent worry as a New Yorker of death by a street accident. Nothing in the attitude of the people suggested an unusually precarious hold on life—except that ever recurrent black funeral car, electrically operated, as if horses were not fast enough for its incessant labors. Long before the sun had lost its mastery of the situation, we had retreated again to Durán. The lone traveler in far-off lands runs many perils, but if I must succumb to one of them, let it be with a fighting chance, not this insidious, sneaking death that flies on all but invisible wings.
Cuenca, third city of Ecuador, lies in one of the most fertile and beautiful valleys of the Andes
Next morning the passenger-train lifted us back to Huigra, where a new experience awaited me. That evening I sat writing in the railroad quarters. Two fellow-countrymen were parading the broad, second-story veranda of the light wooden building. The only other sound was the muffled chatter of the stream below. Suddenly the heavy table beneath my arm began to move as at some spiritualist séance, the windows took to rattling as if in some sudden terror to escape from their frames, the wall decorations swung back and forth like pendulums, and for what seemed a long minute the entire building shook as with a paludic fever. I opened my mouth to protest against what I took for a moment to be physical exuberance of the veranda paraders; but I closed it again as I realized that I had passed through my first earthquake, and had gone on writing for a line or more before I recognized the good fortune of being in a wooden house. Outside, the strollers had not even interrupted their chat, except to remark, “Pretty good one, eh?” and when the natives in the town below had left off shouting, evidently in an attempt to scare off the dreaded spirit within the bowels of the earth, life returned to its customary languor, the silence broken only by the stream still prattling on through the darkness. In the morning the telegraph wire brought word that the instruments of Durán had registered seven quakes, and that several houses and a church had fallen in the adobe interior.
On the morning of February 24th I crossed the little bridge over Huigra’s garrulous stream and, trailing away up the mountain wall that shuts off the railroad valley on the south, disappeared from the modern world. All but twenty pounds of my baggage I had turned over to a native fletero, proprietor of a mule-and-jackass express company that operated as far south as Cuenca. It was in the nature of things, however, that even under a light load I should pay for my descent to Huigra by much sweating toil, before raising again its paltry 4000 feet to the two miles or more of the Andean chain. In the valley a brilliant sun set me dripping; above was driving mist to chill me through if I dared to pause, and out of which now and then floated the gentle exhortations of unseen arrieros to their toiling animals: