Loja, southernmost city of Ecuador, backed by her endless labyrinth of mountains
CHAPTER IX
THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU
I had been a full half-year in Ecuador when I turned my attention to the problem of getting out of it. That disintegration, that tendency for neighboring countries to hold no communication between each other, at which the American cannot but marvel in South America, was here in full evidence. Ecuador seemed as completely cut off from the country just over her southern boundary as from Europe. The cura of Oña had assured me that the one way to reach Peru from Loja would be to walk to Puerto Bolívar on the coast, take a costero to Guayaquil, then a “big steamer” to Paita or Pacasmayo! Only he who knows South American geography well can appreciate the unconscious humor of such advice. Even the rare lojanos who admitted it might be possible to go to Peru “by land” asserted that I must walk to Piura, which would have been to cross a burning tropical desert far out of my way, to that well-traveled coast I was purposely avoiding. The government map of the province of Loja was as faulty and scanty of information as the American one I carried. It showed a road leading south from the provincial capital into that blue-black “labyrinth of mountains,” through the villages of Vilcabamba and Valladolid; but all the town was agreed that no one could travel in these modern days along the remnants of the great military highway of the Incas, crawling along the crest of the Cordillera Oriental through regions for days utterly uninhabited; and well I knew that Prescott’s “hanging withe bridges over awful chasms” were sure to be out of repair in these effeminate Latin-American times, even where they ever existed.
At length a few bold lojanos admitted that I might be able to push on to the frontier by way of Gonzanamá, though they persisted in calling it a “terrible undertaking,” even for a man who claimed to have walked from Quito. That route led far west of a line drawn through Huancabamba to Cajamarca, and there was nothing to show that it would connect with any trail beyond the frontier. The best I could do was to hope I might be able to struggle across to Ayavaca, in Peru, where I could perhaps get Peruvian information. Then there came a complete division of opinion as to the road to Gonzanamá, and Loja split into two irreconcilable factions, the one contending that I should take the road due south from the west side of the plaza, the other insisting on that due west from the south side. In the end they all washed their hands of the matter. The rainy season was nearing its height; sure death lurked along the bandit-infested frontier; none but amphibious animals and crack-brained gringos would stir forth from the cozy little city.
On the morning of April twentieth I finally took the south road. It climbed leisurely over the low interandean nudo shutting in Loja’s concave valley and, falling in with a hurried mountain stream, raced with it all day, crossing its branches sometimes by one-log bridges, more often by knee-deep fords. The few arrieros I met carried rusty old flint-locks, suggesting the dangers of the frontier; the huts along the way grew more and more rare, and degenerated from thick adobe walls to upright reeds carelessly stopped with mud. Beyond Malacatos, among its banana groves, where I spent the night on a plank bench in the casa cural of a young French priest who had already lost the habit of speaking anything but Spanish, the trail climbed relentlessly up through a scrub-wooded region as uninhabited as an undiscovered sphere. The afternoon was middle-aged before the world opened out again and gave a brief glimpse through the trees of Gonzanamá, set out in three rows on a tiny plain untold depths below. Raging rains had torn and gullied the further slope until the five miles downward was like descending the ruins of a giant’s stairway.
Gonzanamá was in fiesta. Hundreds of near-Indians and mestizos, with very little color in their garments, squatted about the church and casa cural. They were a people as simple and unsophisticated as children. It was Viernes Santo (Good Friday), and all the town gathered around to see me eat the meat a pious old woman served me with a shrug of her shoulders when I scorned her warning not to “anger the saints,” and dispersed prophesying an early calamity to me on the road ahead when I arose apparently uninjured. The son of the teniente político in whose house I was the honored guest, in so far as their means made honoring possible, proved to be an old acquaintance, a second-year medical student of Quito, home on his vacation. He was already the chief practicing physician of the region. On his journey from the capital he had performed a score of operations, among them one with a butcher-knife for abscess of the liver. The room I occupied, which was also his place of consultation, the family parlor, the municipal offices, and his own sleeping quarters, was invaded by a constant stream of uncomplaining infirmities. Outside, the entire population marched in procession until midnight, attended a two-hour service in the adobe church, and wandered the three streets with throbbing tomtoms and the gaiety imbibed from bottles until the eastern horizon paled to gray. The practicing medical student did not take to his bed until four, and an hour later he arose to set me on my way, forcing upon me, with regal eloquence, a can of salmon from “Europe, your own land,” to be opened only on Easter Sunday.
Only those rare mortals who have jaunted cross-country in the Andes can have any conception of the stone-quarry heights I scaled, the dense-jungled, bottomless quebradas through which I tore my way, the brush-tangled streams I forded, and the paths that faded out under my feet during that day. One of these last had dragged me remorselessly over every manner of ruggedness when, well on in the afternoon, it disappeared at the door of a mud-plastered hut. The trails of the Andes do not run merely from town to town, but from hovel to hovel, like foraging soldiers, giving the traveler a zigzag course that at least trebles the distance. I was prowling about this apparently unoccupied human kennel, striving to pick up the scent again, when I was set upon by three unusually large, aggressive curs. I did my best to drive them off with sticks and stones, but when there remained no other alternative I drew my weapon and sent the largest to his happy hunting-grounds. Instantly a crashing of the bushes sounded high up in a jungled patch above, and the angry voice of an unseen countryman screamed in the dialect of the region: “Scoundrel, you’ll pay me for my dog, caramba!” Crime is frequently immune so near an international boundary, and I rounded the hillside cautiously, my cocked revolver in hand; but the bellowing of the invisible native was soon swallowed up behind me, and only the oppressive silence of the mountain solitude surrounded me once more.
It was evident that I should not reach the frontier, perhaps not even shelter, before dark, when, at some distance off, in a setting of primeval forest solitude I was astonished to catch sight of a large hacienda house, a gaunt, rambling building that suggested some starving creature lost in the wilderness. Almost as I reached it a thunder-storm broke with a crash, and set a hundred brooks tearing their way down the swift mountainside on which the building clung. The house was locked and unoccupied. Two Indian boys of eight and twelve were huddled under the projecting eaves of a half-ruined outbuilding across the cobbled yard. For a full hour they answered my every question with “El patrón no ’stá,” uttered in the dull, monotonous voice of some mechanical instrument. I cajoled them at last to start a fagot-fire on the earth floor of the outbuilding, and to heat a pot of water into which I dropped three eggs they were prevailed upon to produce from a hiding-place in the thatch, and beat the mess up with a stick into a “caldo de huevos.” The smaller boy finally accepted a bribe to crawl out through a hole in the wall into the drenching downpour and snatch a half-dozen cholos, ears of green corn, which I roasted, or, more exactly, burned here and there over the scanty fire.
Prowling about the hacienda house when the storm slackened, I found in one end a room that was “locked” with a piece of string. According to the now less speechless boys, it was the hacienda “school,” in which at certain seasons an employee of the “patrón” taught the male children of those peons who paid $2 a year tuition. Like an old lumber-room or garret in appearance, the place was furnished with an ancient desk and a massive chair, as crude as if they had been carved out of tree-trunks with dull machetes, and a dozen faded copy-books and medieval inkwells hung about the walls. The school-master evidently made his home here during the school season, for in the far end of the room stood a log-hewn bedstead with a rough board flooring. Dusk was thickening into wet night when the Indian boys crept up to where I sat on the broad veranda overlooking a far-reaching, yet indistinct vista of wooded mountains and valleys, to assure me I should be killed and robbed during the night.
“We are all so poor here that when a rich man like your Grace passes everyone tries to rob him,” asserted the older, with unusual eloquence for his race. “Here all the people are robbers Hace pocos días—it is only a few days since a traveler was killed down in the valley there. Last month—”