“Anda, macho! Mula, caramba! Vaya, sinvergüenza!”
An experienced gringo had assured me I was approaching the most impassable region in Ecuador, a place where it rained steadily and heavily a hundred and four weeks a year, where my mules would sink to their ears in mud and be left to perish, where I myself would infallibly die of exposure if my caravan were overtaken by night out on the lofty páramo. I easily forestalled the peril to my mules, and the second I resolved to avoid by not letting night overtake me.
It was not, certainly, an ideal road. There were places where the writhing trail was for miles a series of earth ridges with deep ditches of mud and water between, like an endless corduroy road, and these made hard going indeed for laden animals. For as often as one of them set foot on one of these camelones, as they are called in the Andes, it slipped off into the muddy ditch between, as likely backward as forward, giving a very exaggerated imitation of the gait of a camel. In fact, it is this constant slipping and sliding of passing pack-trains that turns certain wet regions of the Andes into camelones. In places the mud-reeking slope climbed steep mountainsides through narrow trails worn twenty feet deep, down or up which horses or cargo mules stumbled and sprawled constantly, threatening to smash their packs against the side walls or underfoot.
But it was a route far worse for horsemen than for a man afoot. I stepped blithely from ridge to ridge, not only dry-shod but at my regular pace, easily leaving all four-footed competitors behind; and while there were germs of truth in the warning that a mule and his cargo, slipping and falling upon me in one of the gullies, might bring my journey to a halt, the very simple remedy for that possibility was not to be found loitering beneath an animal when he fell. Donkey carcasses and the rain-bleached skeletons of mules and horses were frequent along the way; and always, now broken, now for a time incessant, came out of the blind mist the raucous bawling of arrieros: “Anda, mula, caramba!”
The dense, heavy fog turned to pouring rain. Indeed there were evidences to verify the assertion that this was one of the zones of Ecuador where the rainy season reigns perennially. In mid-afternoon I passed a few Indian hovels. I had been warned to stop for the night in the last of these rare habitations, if I would not end my wayward career out on the arctic páramo of the Nudo de Azuay. But the stolid-featured native assured me there were others a half-league on, and I had climbed twice that distance across a dismal stretch of bunch-grass without a sign of life, except a scanty herd of wild, shaggy, rain-drenched cattle, before I realized that the Indian had told the old lie to be rid of an importunate guest. Within me there grew the conviction that, in spite of my best intentions, I should some day shoot a large, round, soft-nosed, 38-caliber hole through some Indian for sending me “further up” into the uninhabited night.
However, there I was, exactly where, of all places in Ecuador, I had so often been warned in several tongues not to let night overtake me. The gray walls about me dimmed like a lamp turned out. These páramo trails being, even by day, only a straggling of interwoven paths often effaced, it was not in the order of things that I should keep the route long in unmitigated night. For a time I stumbled along an irregular, rock-littered ground, full of leg-breaking holes, picking every step ahead with my stick, like a blind man, and even at that now and then sprawling on all fours. As to direction, I could only trust to luck. Then I felt water-soaked bunch-grass under foot, and all efforts to find the trail again were wasted. Vaguely I felt that I had come out on the nose of a mountain. Through the rain-drenched night there came faintly to my ears the sound of a waterfall, and from somewhere far off the dismal howling of a dog rode by on the raging wind. The ground under my feet took on the angle of a steep roof; it required stick, hands, and extreme vigilance to keep from pitching headlong down into the bottomless unknown. I felt my way inch by inch several hundred feet downward without finding a level space as large as my hand. In the end I could only sit down on my bundle in the mud, brace my feet against a tuft of bunch-grass and, piling my most perishable possessions in my lap, button my llama-hair poncho over my head, sup on a three-inch butt of bread, and settle down to keep my precarious seat until daylight.
He who fancies an Ecuadorian mountainside a pleasant night’s lodging-place, merely because it is near the equator, has still something of geography to learn. Strangely enough, it might have been worse. The poncho was almost impervious to cold, entirely so to rain. As the Scottish chieftain of earlier days soaked his tartan before lying down for a night in the highland heather, so the wetness of all about me seemed to add warmth. The rain redoubled, yet I should scarcely have known it but for its pelting above my head. I dozed now and then into a nap. After one of them I peered out into the wintry night, to find the mist alive with hardy fireflies so large that those which started up near me seemed to my dull fancy the lanterns of some prowling band. Twice some animal, perhaps a wild mountain-horse, romped by me. When I looked out again a bright moon was shining, yet I felt too comfortable as I was to take advantage of it to push on, and fell asleep again, not without a drowsy misgiving that some diligent hunter might try a shot at my huddled, shaggy form standing out in the moonlight against the swift mountainside; until I remembered that no native ever ventures out upon an Andean páramo except in the full light of day.
Dawn showed the lost trail zigzagging in three branches down the face of the mountain. The waterfall lay directly below me, yet so steep was the slope on which I was perched that I had to crawl back again up the trail on all fours and descend with it. Far away across a valley so deep I could not see its bottom, lay in plain sight what I knew to be the town of Cañar, a mere white speck halfway up the great mountainside beyond. It is chiefly noted for its outlook upon the world. From a distance, it seemed to hang upright on the vertical mountain flank; once arrived, I found it occupied the flat top of one of the countless hills that pile higher and higher into the sky, to culminate in a great Andean chain. Here was a land of stone. Everywhere, in field and valley, rocks lay more profusely and far larger in size than on any abandoned New England farm. If the tumble-down old town of Cañar had any features at all different from hundreds of others down the crest of the Andes, it was its large proportion of stone buildings over those of sun-baked mud.
It is perhaps the existence of stone, rarer to the north, that accounts for the presence near Cañar of the first ruins of unquestionably Inca origin. Their victorious march to the north, too, was so quickly followed by the arrival of the Spaniards, that the Children of the Sun left no permanent works about Quito and beyond. The imperial highway from Cuzco to what is to-day Ecuador, built by a race less fearful of the lofty places and mighty cañons of the Andes, was more direct than the modern haphazard route. Where it descended from the páramo of Azuay and climbed out of the gorge beyond, there was built a fortress and a tambo for the housing of the imperial cortège that is known to-day as Ingapirca, which some believe to be that same Tomebamba where Huayna Ccápac, the Great, was born, and where the news of the landing on the coast of a strange tribe cut short his journey southward in his old age.
