I glanced over my travel-worn and bespattered form in vain for the evidences of wealth so patent to other eyes, yet I could not but recall the carcass of a dog a few miles back, and the golden weight of the band of my trousers reminded me that several evil-eyed fellows had halted awhile under the hacienda eaves during the height of the storm and slipped away somewhere into the night. Moreover, the prophesied destruction of all Ecuador by earthquake was at hand, for the morrow would be—if it ever came—Easter Sunday. Plainly, all the signs pointed to an exciting night.
The guinea-pigs on which I feasted upon breaking out of the wilderness on the Peruvian frontier—and the cook. The cui has furnished the principal meat of the Andean Indians since prehistoric days
The Indians of Zaraguro are different, both in type and costume, from the meeker types of Quito and vicinity
My small faith in prophecy did not, however, hinder me from making sure that my revolver was well-oiled and hung on a bed-post. The window of the school-room, high above the ground, but only a few feet from the roof of an old ruin, was heavily barred—with bars of wood! The massive double-leaf plank doors had no lock. The log-like pupils’ bench, topped by the old colonial teacher’s chair, piled against it, however, promised racket enough to wake me in case of attempted intrusion. I found several old sacks to serve as “mattress” and, stripping off my sweat-heavy day garb, slipped into the woolen union-suit and socks that made up my sleeping costume. However much I might reduce my load in my indifference to outward appearance, I would not have been without this complete change for the night if I had had to make two trips to fetch them. I had no matches, and the boys had been unable to produce a candle. The rain had died down and everywhere utter stillness reigned. I rolled up in my poncho and fell asleep.
A suspicious noise woke me in what was probably a few minutes. Scores of mice were scampering over the uneven floor, squeaking hilariously. By the time I had grown accustomed to the sound, I had dozed off again. From a chaotic dream of crowded and varied incidents I came gradually to the consciousness of a rattling at the wooden window-bars. I sprang across the floor and peered out into the unfathomable mountain night; but I have never been certain whether the sound I heard was the hurrying of bare feet in soft mud and the tail of a whisper, or the creature of a startled imagination. With thirty half-perpendicular miles in my legs I was in no mood to sit up waiting for trouble, and making sure once more that my revolver was within easy reach, I set the bed-floor creaking again. My next consciousness was of a dawn bright with the promise of an unclouded day peering in upon me through the window-bars, and of the Indian boys whispering through the barricaded door to know whether I was still alive and ready for the two raw eggs they had collected.
An erratic mountain path that it was not easy to distinguish from the beds of mountain brooks, and generally deep in mud, clambered without apparent direction into dripping-wet wooden mountain ranges, sometimes plunging headlong down through bottomless valleys, sometimes flanking them in enormous horseshoe curves. How I pushed on all the morning without getting lost I do not know, for certainly there were a score of times when there was no plausible excuse for picking the right one of a half-dozen paths. I sighted several miserable huts, and once a village, but these were never near the trail; and when I decided to apply for food at the next one, another of those sudden changes of climate left the dripping forested mountains behind me, and underfoot was a desert-dry world which even the hardy dwellers of two decrepit knock-kneed huts had long since abandoned. In southern Ecuador and northern Peru the Andes break up and all but disintegrate. There are still plenty of mountains, but, true to their Latin-American environment, they lack team-work, and do not stick together sufficiently to give the traveler footing upon them. Directly before me Ecuador fell unfathomably away to the Macará, like an auburn hair across a painted landscape, while beyond, to appearances unattainable, Peru lay piled pell-mell into the southern sky. It was as if the Carpenter of the Universe had said: “Let here be the dividing line between two distrusting nations,” and had smote the earth with His mightiest tool. Over all the scene was a sun-baked, utterly uninhabited silence, as of some valley of desolation from which all life had forever fled.
The trail down which I jolted had exploded into a score of barely visible paths that spread in every direction over the drear, furnace-hot hills. It seemed as if, once near the frontier, every traveler either dashed blindly forward to get quickly across it unseen, or lost his courage and fled back into the interior. I set a due course for the thread-like river almost directly below. At high noon, my every joint jarred loose, I stood at last on the extreme edge of Ecuador, the reddish-brown waters of the Macará lapping at my blistered feet, and on every hand a blazing, utterly unpeopled desert, with nowhere the vestige of track or trail.
The river, nearly a quarter-mile wide, swollen by the rains above, raged swiftly by, a barrier of unknown possibilities. Its surface, covered everywhere with ripples, suggested that it was less deep than broad. I piled my baggage on the shore and, stripping to the waist, waded in. The powerful current all but swept me off my feet and the water quickly reached my upper garments. I returned to strip entirely, strapped my revolver about my chest and, picking a stout stick from the undergrowth, fought my way inch by inch to the opposite shore. But I had to go back to Ecuador for my possessions. It required five crossings, trusting only a few of them at a time to the treacherous current, and more than an hour of unremitting vigilance, before I had landed my bedraggled belongings at last on the shores of Peru, more forlorn than at the landing of Pizarro and his fellow-adventurers. By careful calculation, checked by native record, I was 466 miles south of Quito and 630 from the Colombian border.