A detail of the “Panama”-hat market of Azogues. The hats are bought unfinished and the wholesalers pile one after another on their heads until their faces are all but concealed by the protruding “straw” ends
Arrived at the wholesale establishments of Cuenca, the hats are finished,—the “straw”-ends tucked in and cut off, the hats beaten with wooden mallets on wooden blocks, given a sulphur bath and sun-bleached, then folded flat for shipment
He who would visit Ingapirca must have either a guide or a working mixture of Spanish and Quichua. I lost myself a dozen times in a labyrinth of paths, each leading to an isolated Indian hovel. One might have fancied the aboriginals had surrounded the sacred Inca relics with a conspiracy of silence, for I was forced at last to drag an old man forcibly out of a cluster of cobble-stone huts before he pointed out to me a path that wound away upward and disappeared over the edge of the world. Along it I came at last in sight of Ingapirca. The “Castle of the Gentiles,” as it is locally known to-day, sits silent and grass-grown on the summit of a rock-knoll from which the eye ranges in every direction over a tumbled labyrinth of valleys and ridges. They built high, the Incas, as men who preferred to see with their own eyes what was going on about them, and they seem to have gloated over the unbroken sweep of the cold, invigorating Andean wind. The chief ruin is that of a fortress, an oval wall with a sheer rock face to the north, and symmetrical stone steps leading up to the entrance on the south. Of large cut stones, and with ornamental blind doors, or niches, it is so like the monuments of Peru as to leave no doubt of its Inca origin. Even on the curves, the stones are so nicely fitted, apparently without mortar—though Humboldt reported the discovery of a kind of cement between them—that there are few joints for which a modern contractor would berate his workmen. The walls are double, with earth between them, the inner wall less carefully constructed; and undisturbed centuries have filled the interior of the fort to a grass-grown level. Above this rise the remnants of a building, only adobe walls with some cut-stone doorways still standing; but the many wrought stones to be found in fences and in the scattered heaps in which dwell the modern inhabitants of the region, suggest that the adobe walls had once a complete casing of cut stone. Slight as are the remains, there is still sufficient setting for the fancy to picture Huayna Ccápac striding back and forth upon his lofty promenade, looking upon his “Four Corners of the Earth,” and halting in his meditations to watch the imperial chasquis racing toward him across the rugged landscape with news of the landing in his imperial domains of a pale-faced tribe with hair on their faces.
Hours of strenuous toil, piloted only by my pocket-compass, brought me back to the main route. For a space it was a real highway, faced with stone, but soon degenerated into a writhing chaos of ruts and rocky subidas, like a road in the throes of an epileptic fit. The sun was still high when I caught sight of Biblián, its famous sanctuary standing out white and clear against the dull mountainside above the town. But it was only in the thickening dusk that I finally climbed into it.
A youth replied to my first inquiry with a “cómo no!”—just as unexcitedly as if strangers came to Biblián every year or two. In the dingy little shop to which he led me, an old woman whose greedy face warned me to prepare for exorbitant charges, even before I learned she went to church four times a day, hunted up the enormous key to an immense room above. In a corner of it stood a bed at least a century old, covered with a marvelous lace counterpane, but harder than macadam. While I sat at meat—or, more exactly, at vegetables, since Biblián kills its weekly beef on Sunday and by Monday it is gone—the customary delegation of citizens came to offer their respects. The town, it proved, was oppressed with a great worry. The earthquake of a week before had not merely tumbled down several mud church-towers of the region, but had given new life to a prophesy that clanged deafeningly at two-second intervals without a break, ex-Biblián could not sleep of nights and the priests were reaping a rich harvest. All night long I lay like a Hindu ascetic on his couch of nails, listening to the exquisite torture of a broken-voiced church-bell that clanged deafeningly at two-second intervals without a break, except for a frequent wild, hellish jangling of several minutes’ duration. When dawn broke, the entire population had already crowded into the church for early mass. A bun was not to be had with my morning coffee, because my hostess had locked up the shop to attend the second ceremony. I ordered “breakfast” for eleven, and a boy came to inform me that I must eat it at nine, since from that hour on señora la patrona would again be at church.
Biblián is a city of pilgrimage. By morning light it proved to be surrounded on all sides by fields of corn, with countless capulí-trees and masses of geraniums lending it even more color than the variegated blankets of its inhabitants. The cup-shaped valley was scattered with scores of tiled cottages of the half-Indian peasants, the hillsides a network of paths and trails to their huts and tiny farms. The chief road climbed to the Capilla on a crag well above the town. It was a costly, three-story structure richly decorated within, though a dismal mud hut served Biblián as school. The Virgin of Biblián is noteworthy among a host of her sisters in not having come personally to pick out a spot and order the building of her shelter. Perhaps her history is still too recent for the successful concoction of such traditions. In 1893 the valley of Biblián was choking with drought. The local cura, alive to his opportunity, set up an image in a grotto on the mountainside and, consulting his barometer, implored rain. The drought was broken. In honor of the feat the image was named the “Virgin of the Dew,” and pilgrims began to flock to Biblián. In the volume which he has prepared for their instruction the foresighted cura bewails the fact that “We cannot tell in one book the countless cures, assistances, protections and life-savings the Blessed Virgen del Rocío has done for the faithful from all over Ecuador.” In the face of the appalling mass of proofs before him he confines himself to none. But he does mention the miraculous fact that the first chapel had been completed by August of the following year, and that two years later the present “sumptuous, rich, divine” sanctuary was sprinkled with holy water.
Barely was this dry when “the troops of the Liberal party, like the barbarians at the gates of Rome, threatened the afflicted capital of the Azuay, bringing inevitable ruin”—such, for example, as the curbing of the power of the Church—“when the powerful Blessed Virgen del Rocío was borne from Biblián to beleaguered Cuenca with fitting reverence and in the midst of the most crowded and pompous procession in the annals of that Catholic city” ..., whereupon the Liberal troops faded quickly away, and redoubled the fame of the Virgin and the income of Biblián parish. The Minister Plenipotentiary of the Vatican has seen fit to grant a hundred days’ indulgence to whoever visits the sanctuary, “which indulgence may be applied to souls in Purgatory.” The trip to Biblián is worth at least that. Lovers of justice will rejoice to know that the foresighted cura bids fair to enjoy for long years to come his divine—knowledge of barometers.
It is only a league from Biblián to Azogues; an hour’s stroll along a slight river through almost a forest of capulí-trees, the wild cherries hanging in bunches something like the grape, though with only a few ripe at a time. Then comes a sudden drop into summer; for the climate of Azogues is soft and bland, with little rain. About the town were hundreds of tile and thatch-roofed cottages among rich, green cornfields, spreading far away up one valley and down another; and beyond these were tawny mountain flanks mottled with every color from sandy brown to sun-drenched green.
The town of Quicksilver is rather that of “panama” hats. As in San Pablo, Colombia, men, women and children were braiding them everywhere; shopkeepers and their clerks made hats in the intervals between customers, and even while waiting on them; Indian and chola women wove them as they tramped along the roads with a bundle, and perhaps a child, on their backs, as European peasant women knit, or those of other parts of Ecuador spin yarn on their crude spindles. I was assured that every living person in Azogues knew how to tejar sombreros. The fops themselves were so engaged somewhere out of sight.