The weekly hat-fair of Azogues began on the Friday evening of my arrival. As the afternoon declined, there streamed in from every point of the compass, from every hut among the surrounding corn-fields, men, women, and children, each carrying a newly woven hat, bushy with its uncut “straw” ends. A dozen agents from Cuenca bought these as they arrived, never at the price demanded, but after a heated bargaining to which, in the end, the weavers always meekly yielded. Each buyer seemed to confine himself to some particular grade or style; this one to coarse “comunes,” that to large sizes, another to small, and only two or three to the finer weaves. As he bought them, each agent piled the hats on his own head until his face was completely hidden behind the protruding ends, from the depths of which the bargaining went on unabated.
Saturday, however, is the chief market day of Azogues. As I strode out along the highway to Cuenca next morning, throngs were pouring into the city from every direction. For a full two hours I passed an endless stream of Indians as close together as an army in column of squads, the women carrying on their backs every product known to southern Ecuador. The men, for the most part, were burdened only by a half-dozen hats, one atop the other, the untrimmed ends hiding their faces as under shaggy straw-colored beards. The scene recalled the Great Trunk Road of India, yet was of vastly less interest and variety. He who had once seen an Ecuadorian Indian had seen all the procession. A few were weaving the last strands of their weekly hat as they hurried by. Most “panama” hats are completed on Friday night or in the gray of Saturday’s dawn; for the maker, frequently overcome by indolence during the week, must bestir himself to have his product ready in time for his weekly debauch. Before he sallies forth to squander his week’s earnings, however, he carefully lays away enough to purchase another tuft of “straw,” lest he have no nest-egg from which to hatch next Saturday’s celebration. The procession had thinned considerably before it occurred to me to count the passersby, and even then 132 persons passed me in a minute, each and all bearing something for the market of Azogues. During most of the two hours the number had easily doubled that, and this was only one of the many roads and trails leading to this little-known town far from modern transportation.
My home in Cuenca, with the Montesinos family. The well-to-do classes of this city live in unusual comfort for Ecuador, and have the custom of decorating the walls under the projecting roofs, or those of the patio, with exotic scenes painted on the wall itself
Students of the Colegio of Cuenca, which confers the bachelor degree at the end of a course somewhat similar to that of our high schools. Misbehavior is punished by confinement in the upright boxes in the background
Every house of southern Ecuador has a cross in the center of its ridgepole; here they were so elaborate, so covered with devices symbolic of the religion they represent, that it was only by a stretch of the imagination that one could make out the cross itself beneath. Late in the morning I came again to the Azogues river, and a typical bridge of the Andes,—opportunity to wade thigh-deep for all who travel afoot on this main highway to southern Ecuador. Not far beyond, there cantered by me several wholesale buyers from the Azogues market, the saddlebags of each bulging with a hundred or more hats, stuffed one inside the other. Mile after mile the broad river-valley of Cuenca is forested with capulí, eucalyptus, and a Gothic-spired willow. Red, tile roofs stand strikingly forth from deep-green corn-fields, and thousands of fertile, cultivated acres are shut in by barren, sand-faced hills, though there are no imposing peaks south of Cañar, and I had seen none snow-clad since leaving Riobamba. With no census for twenty-five years, the metropolis of southern Ecuador, third city of the republic, and capital of the rich province of Azuay, estimates its population at 45,000. Some have it that this great cuenca, six leagues long, gouged out of the Andes, was the original Tomebamba, birthplace of Huayna Ccápac. Like Riobamba, the city is flat, its wide, cobbled streets, crossing at right angles, stretching their chiefly one-story length away in both directions almost as far as the eye can see. The buildings are almost all of the sun-baked adobe mud that everywhere dominates the architecture of the Andes; though some of the “best families” have striven to decorate their dwellings outwardly with huge mural paintings on the eaves-protected walls of patio and veranda.
CHAPTER VIII
THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR
As susceptible Don Giovanni falls under the succeeding spell of every pretty face, each blotting out those that went before, so the traveler down the backbone of South America frequently concludes that he has found at last the climate copied from the Garden of Eden. Such a spot is Cuenca, dimming by comparison its latest rival, Quito, and I find in my notes of the exuberant first day there the assertion: “Of all the earth, as far as I know it, Cuenca has the most perfect climate.” Always cool enough to be mildly invigorating to mind and body, yet never cold, it is unexcelled as a place for dreamy loafing. The sunshine vastly exceeds the shadow, and its situation is peerless—not in the scenery of its surrounding mountains, which are distant and low, but in the rich fertility of this great vale of Paucarbamba (“Flowery Plain”), as the Incas called it. Cuenca has no fitting excuse for not being one of the richest agricultural cities on earth. Yet its only “hotels” are dirty little Indian eating-houses without sleeping accommodations, and the traveler must fall back on the prehistoric system of hunting up a friend’s friend. For once this roundabout method brought handsome results; at the home of the Montesinos brothers I found my most home-like accommodations south of Quito, in a highly cultured family with no scent of the public hostelry about it. My front door opened on a vista across the patio and the long market plaza, usually shimmering with Indians and clashing colors, to the blue hills and a strip of Dresden-china sky to the west; and it is only fair to the Andes to mention that this extraordinary family had erected in a back patio a well-appointed lavatory, stoutly padlocked against the Indians of the household.
The Montesinos brothers, sons of a former governor of the Province of Azuay, were lawyers, as well as professors in Cuenca’s colegio, leaders in the intellectual life of the city, excellent examples of the best grade of “interandino.” One was a teacher of French and English, which did not seriously mean that he could speak either of those tongues. In 1899 this bookish, somewhat effeminate man had started a revolution against the Alfaro government in the person of General Franco, a bloodthirsty half-negro from Esmeraldas, who had been made governor of Azuay. It proved unsuccessful, and the instigator had been forced to fly to the jungled Oriente and live for months among the head-hunting Jívaros Indians. I had hesitated to believe my own convictions on certain conditions in Ecuador, but this frank and outspoken native outdid anything I might have said. His attitude was in striking contrast to that belligerent “pride” of Latin-American governments and their led mobs and self-seeking politicians. To him the thrice-beloved “patriotism” of his hot-tempered fellows was rubbish. What he wanted was an efficient government and a chance to live a free life, whether he remained a subject of the particular strip of territory known as Ecuador, or of the gigantic “Yanqui-land” so many seemed to fancy imminent. He asserted that the police of Cuenca were its worst criminals; all thieves and ruffians who could not be openly convicted were sentenced to serve as policemen. Except in the collecting of taxes and as a place of reward for its henchmen, the central government leaves Cuenca and the south of Ecuador virtually abandoned, and that tendency, so general in Latin-American countries, for the more distant parts to break away and form a free, or at least autonomous state is here marked. The region labors under a thousand petty annoyances. For instance, Quito has a parcel-post service with the outside world, but Cuenca has none, nor any money-order system, and about one piece of mail in three ever reaches an addressee in the capital of the Azuay. A package mailed from abroad to a cuencano lies in Guayaquil until the addressee appears in person, or appoints a lawyer, to lay claim to it, to pay the fees and grease the wheels of the legal and illegal formalities necessary to set it on its way to its destination.