Loja was once the center of the commerce in cascarilla, the bark of a tree not unlike the cherry in appearance, that abounds in the ravines of the mountains to the eastward of the city. Nearly three centuries ago a missionary to the region found the Indians grinding the bitter bark in their stone mortars and swallowing it as a specific against intermittent fevers, as they do to this day. When the wife of the Conde de Chinchón, viceroy of Peru, lay ill of a fever in Lima, the corregidor of Loja sent to her physician a parcel of the powdered bark. Upon her return to Europe the condesa carried a quantity of the magic powder with her, whence it was for a long time known as chinchona. Meanwhile Jesuit missionaries of Brazil had sent parcels of it to Rome, whence it was distributed among the brotherhood, nothing loathe to add to their reputation for miraculous powers and to the income from their drug-stores, and the name “Jesuits’ bark” became widespread. The tree, however, has always been known to the Indians by the Quichua name of “quinaquina,” and in time the refined product took on its modern name of quinine. The tree in its original habitat has been ruthlessly treated, being often felled merely to avoid the labor of barking it standing, and to-day, with large chinchona plantations in India, southern Ecuador has but a fraction of the income it might have from one of its most valuable indigenous products. It is typical of Latin-American conditions that a capsule—or more commonly an oblea, like two saucers stuck together—of quinine, reimported from Europe and paying heavy custom duties, costs four times as much in the boticas of Loja as in the United States.
In one of the quaint two-story houses with an air of decayed gentility, facing the main plaza and grazing ground of Loja, lives Augustin Carrión, inventor of the “celífono,” by means of which a piano can be played by electricity and given the soft, long-drawn notes of an organ. He is the chief “sight” of the region, yet held in a certain ill-concealed disdain by the mass of his fellow-townsmen, even while they are basking in the sunshine of his fame; a striking example of those rare mortals who struggle to raise themselves above the low level of their deadening environment in these buried cities far from the moving modern world.
I found him in his rambling parlor, of undusted efforts at grandeur, its walls decorated with large maps of Paris and New York, both of which he had once visited in an effort to patent and place his invention, interspersed with the customary inartistic family portraits draped with aged mourning crêpe. A member of one of Loja’s chief families, of pure Spanish blood, speaking a cultured Castilian with the diction of a man of books, he was in appearance a ludicrous mixture of the typical inventor of the comic supplements and of the Latin-American stickler for formal dress. Scraggly gray whiskers pursued themselves about his unimpressive face; a hair-cut months overdue emphasized his narrow shoulders and flat chest. His hands, thin almost to transparency, suggested something weak and harmless in need of protection. His once stiff white shirt was innocent of buttons, and with his energetic, or, more exactly, nervous movements, frequently opened to disclose a flaccid skin and a Catholic charm hanging low about his neck. A collar, buttoned only at one end, was adorned with a cravat that was not a cravat, but only a strip of black ribbon that floated here and there about his throat. His frock-coat, sine qua non of Latin-American respectability, was gray with dust, trousers unacquainted with the pressing-board were spotted with the mementoes of laboratory accidents, and the slender aristocratic shoes, possessing in common three buttons, had been worn completely heelless. Here, in the bosom of his disdainful family, he wore a greasy old cap; later in the day I met him promenading under the portales of the plaza in the same costume, but for the added glory of a “stove-pipe” hat of at least twenty years of harried existence.
His taller, or workshop, overlooking the main square, was a chaos of odds and ends gathered by a man who had given his life chiefly to the study of physics, and who was alternately tinkering at a score of inventions. In the absence of a real source of supply his apparatus was almost entirely home-made, or, as he himself put it, “Loja-made,” a collection fashioned from cigar boxes, string, tin cans, and whatever makeshifts fell in his way, resembling nothing so much as the playthings of some isolated but inventive farmer’s boy. A shoemaker’s needle, on the plan of a sewing-machine shuttle, that was designed to revolutionize the making of footwear, had been constructed from the shell of a rifle cartridge. Of as plebeian materials he had built a little transparent box to place above the needle of a phonograph, to do away with the metallic sound of that instrument—but in Latin-American fashion his phonograph was out of order and did not “function.” Another crude apparatus he pointed out as a proof that “a sphere can revolve on two axes at once,”—a ball of yarn representing the earth was twirled by a tiny dynamo, and at the same time given a rotary motion by a string belt—and so on through all the realms of physics, which he taught here in his taller several times a week to the boys of the local colegio. The Loja-made original of his most important invention was out of order, and I was not favored with a test of the “celífono” on which he had tinkered intermittently more than thirty years.
His inventiveness did not confine itself to merely physical matters. Before I left, he pressed upon me a pamphlet of which he was the author. It was entitled “The Virgin María in America before its Discovery by Columbus,” wherein the writer “proved beyond question,” to use his own words, “that the Blessed Virgin was not an unknown personage in America when it was discovered by the Spaniards.” Beginning a visionary journey in Canada, he descended step by step through all the western hemisphere, “proving” by shaky tradition, by the doctored yarns of early missionaries, and by personal lucubrations that “all the Indian tribes had the tradition of Adam and Eve, of the serpent and the apple, of ‘original sin,’ and of a god born of a virgin.” The fact that the city of Loja had published this masterpiece fully describes its mentality.
I had known him three or four days before the inventor took me into his confidence and whispered that the invention of the “celífono” had been merely a means to an end; that he had taken it to New York and Europe in the hope of raising funds to pursue his “really important invention,” which he had thought on for forty years and already perfected “in his mind,” though he had not yet begun its construction. This was a “flying machine that is neither balloon nor aeroplane, perfectly safe and commercially practicable.” As nearly as my unmechanical faculties grasped the situation from his elaborate explanation, it was a close replica of that of “Darius Green,” whose fame has never reached this corner of the Andes. Fortunately there is no building in Loja high enough to bring the inventor to serious grief, should he ever succeed in collecting the materials essential to the actual construction of this perfected child of his imagination. But his hope was still youthful, and he besought my advice as to how a poor inventor could get his masterpiece before the world without being despoiled of the fruits of his labors, as in the case of the “celífono,” by the “practical business men” of that great universe beyond his mountain-bounded horizon. I regretted my ignorance of any panacea for that condition.
Carrión is but a type of those “closet” geniuses who live, toil, and fade away unknown in the dim recesses of the Andes, men in some cases who might have ranked high among modern inventors, writers, or artists, had their lot been cast in happier climes than in this leaden environment of impracticability, burdened by enervating superstitions, denied the simplest materials for their purposes in a land where even twine and wrapping-paper are commonly unobtainable, and so lacking in that grasping self-assertiveness so necessary to front modern society successfully that even the scant fruits of their labors go to swell the already swollen pockets of more “practical” men of the world, while they dream on like this gray-haired boy pottering among his home-made toys.
The church, and the dwelling of my host, the priest of Oña
