Hours later a group of horsemen rode up out of the night and halted before the casa cural. I rose from a cramped doze on a corredor bench to find the priest dismounting. A brawny man of massive frame, more than six feet tall, with well-cut features and a powerful Roman nose, dressed in a black robe reaching to his spurs, and a huge “panama” hat of exceedingly fine weave—a present, no doubt, from some fond member of his flock among the surrounding hills—he towered far above his companions. A cigarette smouldered between his lips, a week’s growth of dense black beard half-covered a face that bore testimony to long and deep experience in worldly matters, and his voice boomed like Quito’s largest church-bell. Yet his manner was that syrupy courtesy, accompanied by a whining speech, peculiar to the region. He fawned upon all who approached him, addressing them with maudlin words of endearment,—“Ah, compadrecito!” “Oh, my dearest of friends!” “Oh, Josecito cholito, hijito mío!”—with a long-drawn, rising and falling inflection that made his speech seem even more false and insincere than it was in reality. Me he greeted in the same tone, like a long-lost “amiguito,” and assured me the casa cural was henceforth my personal property, expressing his deepest regret that he had just sent to Cuenca, where he was about to be transferred, his two phonographs and “diez mil pesos” ($5000 worth) of other toys. It was a typical cural residence of the Andes. The rough adobe walls of his cluttered study, with mud benches in the form of divans around them, were almost completely covered with large lithographs advertising various brands of whiskey and cigarettes, more than half of them showing nude female figures. Under his table was spread out to dry a six-foot square patch of tobacco, and at frequent intervals the padre reached under it for the “makings” of a cigarette, without taking his eyes off his visitors nor ceasing the flow of his cadenced endearments.
Plowing for wheat or corn on the hacienda of Cumbe. The Indians work best in “bees,” as in the time of the Incas. The plows are mere crooked sticks without a vestige of iron, the yokes are fastened in front of the horns with rawhide thongs
Two men, chiefly of Indian blood, soon joined us, one the jefe político, and the other what might be called in English chairman of the town council. The former carried a guitar, the latter a quart bottle of aguardiente, and both a stimulated gaiety even greater than that of the priest. During an affectionate three hours the trio toasted each other alternately in large glasses of this double-voltage concoction, after suffering two or three rounds of which I was forced to allege a sore throat. The moving spirit of the feast was the priest, whose powerful frame carried his liquor well, and the evening raged on amid a riot of chatter and the savage thrumming of the guitar, little more than the flushed faces visible in the dense-clouded atmosphere of cigarette smoke within the tightly closed room. The cura spoke French readily, having been in earlier years an inmate of the French monastery of Riobamba, and affected it with me all the evening. The jefe político was childishly eager to hear us speak that strange tongue; the town councilor roared with anger as often as either of us uttered a word of it, charging that we were abusing him under cover of “that cursed Castilian of the gringos.” The cura maliciously added fuel to his wrath, unostentatiously keeping the bottle moving meanwhile, sending a boy to replenish it as often as it was emptied. The enraged councilor ended at last by staggering out into the night and across the plaza, shouting drunkenly that he was going for a gun or a machete. The other two followed him, and for some time a maudlin bellowing, intermingled with the wheedling of a velvety voice of rising and falling cadence, awoke the echoes of the night, gradually subsiding until at length silence fell. The priest at last came slowly back without a suggestion of intoxication, which he seemed to lay aside as he might his long black robe, reached under the table, rolled a cigarette, and explained apologetically that, as his recent companions were the chief civil authorities, he must keep on good terms with them “whatever his own tastes and desires.” Then he implored me to spend the following day in Oña, promising that we should visit on muleback the many historical spots in the vicinity, and launching into a learned dissertation on the history of the region. Oña, he asserted, was the oldest town in Southern Ecuador, and the treaty of peace had been signed by Sucre in this very house after the battle of Tarqui. In spite of the impression that the invitation was mere surface courtesy, I finally promised to remain. He threw his arms about me in an affectionate abrazo, showering upon me endearing terms, all ending in the Spanish diminutive ito, and called upon the housekeepers to spread a mattress for me on a mud divan in the study. Then the cura, who at least had the virtue of living his life frankly, retired with the two comely cholas to an adjoining room in which, it is true, there were two beds, and silence settled down over the Andes.
In the morning I turned over for another nap. An hour later the priest and his unofficial family marched in upon me, and it was some time before I could get sufficient privacy and liquid mud to shave and dress. From that hour until night I had little more than silent suffrance from the cura and his household, and heard not a reference to those “many points of historical importance” he had painted in such enticing terms in his ardent condition of the night before. Tomás á Kempis says: “A sad morning often follows a merry evening,” or words to that effect, but the cura of Oña had evidently overlooked that particular quotation. An almost constant stream of Indians and half-Indians came to inquire in soft cadenced voices for “tayta curita,” who sat in his fly-swarming den smoking countless cigarettes and whining unlimited endearments and blessings on all comers, but resolutely squelching all applications for coin of the realm or the material things of this world, and reaching at frequent intervals for the replenished quart bottle. About eleven the two of us, and a “carpenter” who had been pottering about the house all the morning fitting together two boards that were destined never to fit, sat down in a corner of the wide back corredor of the casa cural to a substantial dinner at which cat, dog, parrot, and monkey helped themselves to every dish as freely as we. The meal was adorned with a jar of pulque, a drink which the cura had taught his cholas to make after reading of it in an account of Mexico. The rest of the day drowsed slothfully away amid the screaming of parrots, the barking of dogs, the shrieks of the monkey rattling his chain in all but successful attempts to rend and tear some unwary visitor, and a swarming of flies that sounded like a distant waterfall,—a typical parish-priest life of rural Ecuador, punctuated by the occasional chanting of the velvety, singsong voice in the mud church next door, as my host hurried through a mass for some departed soul. Toward sunset the household was augmented by a third plump and youthful chola who had been home on a visit to her parental mud hut among the hills. It seemed strange that the casa cural was so ill-kept and slatternly with so generous a supply of housekeepers.
At the summit beyond the chaotic chasm into which the world falls away below Oña, the nature of the country changed. From an endless vista of barren and often soilless rocks, the entire landscape was transformed to a heavily wooded region of hardy undergrowth, somewhat like small, bushy oaks, at times almost approaching a forest, a shaggy world rolling away as far as the eye could follow in every direction. Here and there was a larger bush completely covered with pink blossoms. Then the half-forested mountain-top took gradually to rocking, like a ship approaching a tempestuous sea, until all at once it spilled itself, like the cargo of an overturned freighter, into another enormous hole in the earth, hazy with the very depths of it. The trail pitched over the edge with the rest, like a bit of flotsam from a wreck, helplessly at the mercy of the waves. Thousands of little green farms, chiefly of corn, with an Indian hut set in a corner of each, hung at sharp angles about the enclosing walls of the valley. I had reached the famous Vale of Zaraguro, the Land of Corn,—zara is Quichua for maize—to climb at last into the scattered grass-grown village itself.
Ensconced in the great hoyo of Jubones, dividing the Azuay from the province of Loja, Zaraguro is a little world of its own. The great majority of its population is Indian, but a new type of Indian, of darker skin and more independent manner than those to the north, still humble to the gente decente when facing them singly, but verging on insolence when gathered in groups with chicha at hand. Here each owns a little patch of land and refuses serfdom. His dress is somber, in marked contrast to the gaudy colors of his quiteño cousin. In place of the loose white panties, he clothes his legs to the knee with a close-fitting coffee-hued woolen garment, and covers all the rest of the body with a poncho of the same color. He wears an immensely thick, almost white, felt hat of box-shaped crown, the brim drooping about his face, and his long, jet-black hair, instead of being confined in a tape-wound braid, is commonly flying about his head and shoulders. He buys nothing from the outside world—except masses and indulgences—shears his own sheep, the wool of which, usually black, his women spin and weave into the heavy cloth that provides the somber garments of both sexes. Besides supplying its own wants, the valley of Zaraguro exports by way of Puerto Bolívar a bit of coarse cascarilla bark, basis of quinine, at about five cents a pound.
Zaraguro assured me that the road to Loja was “todo plano”; but level has strange meanings to a people accustomed from birth to the steepest of mountains. One of the best engineered highways in Ecuador looped ever higher to the “realms of eternal silence” of the Acayana-Guagra-uma “Knot,” but from the dense-forested summit, where I had looked forward to the corresponding pleasure of looping as leisurely down the opposite flank, an atrocious trail stumbled headlong downward to the narrow valley of a small river. From the hamlet of San Lucas a long day, pouring incessantly with rain, followed the stream, the trail mounting and descending rocky headlands with the monotonous regularity of a flat car-wheel. Even where the landscape opened out again at last, the plain was calf-deep in mud, and it was only by dint of a constant struggle that I dragged myself, mud-caked and drenched, on the second evening into the southernmost city of Ecuador.
Loja, 380 miles from Quito and capital of the province least in touch with the central government, lies exactly on the fourth parallel south, in the delta of the little Zamora and Malacatos rivers, insignificant bits of the Amazon system. It is a low, flat, rather featureless town, surrounded by a fertile, fruit-producing soil, and though 7000 feet above sea-level, of a humid, semi-tropical climate that is kindly even to bananas. Birds, among them one much like the robin, make the place reminiscent of American summers. There are only rolling hills near at hand, though not far off is that “labyrinth of mountains” of Prescott’s fancy, blue-black now with the rainy season, high up among which, according to local assertion, are still to be found remnants of the great military highway of the Incas. Lojanos seemed a dull, torpid people, laborious of mind, and the town has little of the picturesque, even in costume. The pure Castilian type is well represented, but Indian blood, chiefly in the mestizo form, is still supreme, though by no means so general as to the north, and the population includes a few negroes and more zambos,—mixtures of Indian and African blood. More than eighty lawyers hover in their mud dens, ready to pick the bones of the 8000 inhabitants, largely poverty-stricken illiterates. There is some weaving of “panama” hats, and in an attempt to stimulate that industry “profesores” of the art have been imported from the Azuay to teach it, particularly in the orphan asylums. But it remains at best a dilettante occupation, foreign to the soil. The chief industry of the region round about is the raising of mules and cattle that are shipped chiefly to Peru. Lima subsists largely on Loja meat, which is, no doubt, the reason she gets virtually none herself, even when it is not some Catholic day sacred to starvation. Zaruma and Portovelo, two muleback days to the west, boast the chief American mines of Ecuador, but gringos are seldom seen in her streets.
In one matter the town is in advance of more populous Cuenca,—it has electric lights. As long ago as 1897 Loja brought in, by way of Peru, the first dynamo known to Ecuador, a sign of “progreso” of which her inhabitants never tire of boasting. Scattered in sixteen-candle-power bulbs here and there along the streets, the system did not reach as high as the littered lumber-room in which I spent the nights on a platform on legs, where the customary candle winked weakly through the humid darkness. I was overjoyed, however, to come upon a placard announcing that the municipal library was open to the public even at night! As it promised to open first at one of the afternoon, I was not surprised to find it still locked when I arrived at two. I waited a half hour, peering greedily through the bars of the reja at the long shelves of books and maps. Then I began inquiries. The adjoining shopkeeper expressed unbounded surprise that there were persons so ignorant as not to know “the government is so poor it cannot pay the librarian any more,” and that the institution had been closed for months.