To the stranger, perhaps the feature of Cuenca that will remain longest in his memory is her street lights; certainly, if it happens to be his lot to have to find his way home on a black night after a sad, candle-lighted “comedy” in the local theater—the school-room of the colegio. The laws of Cuenca require that every resident in the principal streets set up a candle before his house. But as the two-cent velas which are satisfactory to the law are short and not particularly inflammable, and the wind is given to blowing its hardest during the first hour after dusk, the city changes long before eight from long, faintly-guessed lanes between unseen house-walls to a medieval inky blackness. The inhabitant who stirs abroad carries a square glass box containing a flickering candle, or is accompanied by a “link-boy,” in true medieval fashion. The stranger who, being no smoker, chances not even to have matches with him, feels his way homeward for an uncertain number of blocks by counting them with his fingers, at last discovering the plaza on which he lives by hugging the corner of it. Shivering with uncertainty as to whether his lodging is the third or the fourth door from the butchershop with the protruding hook, here and there stumbling over a piece of sidewalk or into a puddle, he finally coaxes his gigantic key to fit its lock with something far more potent than satisfaction.
Thus life runs its placid course in this far-off city of the Andes. Those who come there after the railway from Huigra reaches Cuenca, if long-pondered plans some day mature, will no doubt find it different, more blasé and less likable, no longer one of the rewards of toiling over the world’s byways. Even electric lights are threatened, and before them will flee one of its most nearly unique characteristics.
The hope of securing an ass to stagger out of Cuenca under my possessions had melted day by day during my week there. In what I had been assured was the best donkey-market in Ecuador, those animals proved both scarce and high in price. Toward the end of my stay the baggage I had sent from Huigra had arrived, both developing tank and tray broken, in spite of the vociferous promises of the fletero, though still serviceable with elaborate manipulation. It was chiefly picture-taking that forced me to turn packhorse; had I been able to abandon everything connected with photography, I might have pranced along like a school-boy under his knowledge. A pack of nearly fifty pounds remained, in spite of a rigid reduction and a desperate throwing away which included even my medicine case, bequeathed to Montesinos, for ever since crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico seventeen months before I had been burdened with it, without a single excuse to swallow one of its myriad pills. If only Edison would take a day off to invent a baggage on legs that would trot, dog-fashion, after its owner—just a modest little baggage of, say, fifty pounds—it would revolutionize life.
Distinguished visitors to the cities of the Andes are, in all accounts extant, met upon their arrival and sent on their way by a cavalcade of horsemen including all the local celebrities. For the first time in my Latin-American journey I was accompanied by a guard of honor as I plodded heavily out of Cuenca on March tenth; that is, Montesinos, the master of “English,” strolled with me across the ancient cobbled bridge over the Matadero and a mile or more beyond, until he met the sun coming up from the jungled montaña of the Jívaros and turned back with the market-bound Indians to his scholastic duties. The broad highway was dry and hard as a floor. Prepared in my heavy boots for the usual Andean trail, I could have walked it in dancing-pumps. The great cuenca shrunk to an ever-narrower, fertile valley, stretching southward along a little stream called the Tarqui. A score of Indians were plowing a single field with ox-drawn plows fashioned from forest trees. So scant is his individual initiative that the Andean husbandman works well only in company with his fellows, and the experienced mayordomo conducts his farming in a succession of “bees” in which all the employees join efforts, as in the days of the Inca.
The Andes grow higher and more mountainous to the south. Beyond the hacienda and the hamlet of Cumbe next morning, the valley closed in and forced the highway to scale, like an escaping prisoner his walls, the great Andean “Knot” of Portete. Bit by bit it shrunk to a narrow road, then to a rocky trail, like a man about to begin some mighty task, with no longer time to consider his personal appearance, reducing himself to the bare essentials. Through clumps of blackberries and frost-bitten corn it climbed, then shook off even these, and split into faint, diverging paths across another of those lofty, wind-swept, solitary páramos of the Andes, broken here and there, only scantily covered with the dreary dead-brown ichu bunch-grass of the highlands, and low, bushy achupallas.
It would have been more to the point if the sympathy the old woman of the hacienda behind had taken the form of fiambre, a roadster’s lunch, with which to follow up the coffee and diaphanous roll of an Ecuadorian desayuno. By ten I was starving. By eleven I had eaten even the rose I wore in a button-hole; during the next few hours I found three blackberries, hard and green, and shook dice with sudden death by eating a handful of a wholly unknown and even more tasteless páramo berry. The one Indian I met during the afternoon misinformed me, before he sped on out of reach, that Nabón was a bare two leagues beyond; and all the rest of the day my imagination persisted in heaping up mighty banquets that toppled over and faded away as I prepared to fall upon them.
Suddenly the páramo ended as if it had been hacked off with a dull gigantic machete, and the way-worn, haggard trail stumbled blindly down into a labyrinthian chaos of jagged white rocks, like an arctic sea in upheaval, an earthquake section as split and smashed and broken as if the world had come into collision at this point with another planet or a celestial lamp-post. When at last I sighted Nabón, long after I had entered it a score of times in imagination, it was still a mere speck on a broken edge of the earth’s crust which I reached by dusk only by dint of a herculean struggle.
It was a cornfield town of thatched mud huts, of universally Indian blood. The alcalde was not at home, but the priest’s word was law, and I was soon dropping my bundle from my grateful shoulders in the “best room” of an Indian dwelling. My unwilling host removed the bedclothes and piled them on the uneven earth floor in an adjoining room, for himself, wife and child, and left me the wooden-floored bedstead. The mud walls were embellished not merely with the gaudy colored chromos of various “Virgins,” but with scores of the advertising pages of American magazines, chiefly pictorial, for the family could not even read its own tongue. I did not succeed in discovering how these exotic reminders of home had found their way to this unknown village of the Andes. The Indian and his wife kept me awake half the night with their alternating prayers and responses before a candle-lighted lithograph in the adjoining room, each prayer beginning, “Blessed Santa María, give us this; Blessed Santa María, give us that.” One would have thought María ran a department store.
It is only eighteen miles from Nabón to Oña, but no mere words can give any suggestion of the labyrinthian toil that lies between them. Down in the bottom of the mightiest chasm of this tortured section of the earth sits an isolated peak shaped like an angular haycock. From the lowest point of the day’s tramp I could not see its summit; when I looked back hours later upon the immense stretch of gashed and tumbled world behind me, the peak had sunk to a mere dot on the landscape. Yet in a way it was an ideal tramp. A sun-flooded day in the exhilarating mountain air passed in absolute silence without even the sight of a fellow mortal, except very rarely a lone shepherd so far away on a bare brown mountainside as to be merely a tiny detail of the scenery. There was one drawback, also; for the spider-leg trails split and spread at random across the world above at every opportunity, and for several hours at a time I was not at all certain I was going to Peru.
At length I rounded a lofty spur, and another great valley opened out before me. An hour later I prepared to present my note to the cura of Oña. His two housekeepers, attractive chola girls, received me with the customary coldness of their class toward strangers, and the information that the padre “had gone to the mountain.” “Ya no más de venir—he should be back at any moment”—murmured one of them; which might mean, of course, that he would be back in an hour or a week. There was no one else in this shelf-like hillside of mud huts around a dead plaza surrounded by cornfields who would be likely to house me, and I could only wait in hungry patience. Night was falling like a quick curtain at the end of a dismal act, when one of the stupid damsels admitted “probably he will not be back to-night,” but that they would serve “a little something to eat,” if I could wait awhile. I was already accustomed to that occupation. On a worktable of the earth-floored and walled corredor, among the parrots that kept calling the cholas by name, a chained monkey of homicidal tendencies, and other cural odds and ends, a meal of several courses was at length set before me as rapidly as the single tin plate could be washed and refilled. Oña does not eat bread, but so large a helping of mote was served that I succeeded in filling a coat pocket with it, well knowing that no other provisions would be forthcoming for the morrow’s uninhabited trail. As a food, this mess of boiled kernels of ripe corn, chief sustenance of the Andean Indian on his travels, is like those medicines that are worse than the ailment they are designed to cure. Then there was a plate of black beans, a corn tamale, and a tasteless preserved fruit, all stone-cold, but red-hot with the ají, or green peppers, with which all food in the Andes is enlivened.