As susceptible Don Giovanni falls under the succeeding spell of every pretty face, each blotting out those that went before, so the traveler down the backbone of South America frequently concludes that he has found at last the climate copied from the Garden of Eden. Such a spot is Cuenca, dimming by comparison its latest rival, Quito, and I find in my notes of the exuberant first day there the assertion: “Of all the earth, as far as I know it, Cuenca has the most perfect climate.” Always cool enough to be mildly invigorating to mind and body, yet never cold, it is unexcelled as a place for dreamy loafing. The sunshine vastly exceeds the shadow, and its situation is peerless—not in the scenery of its surrounding mountains, which are distant and low, but in the rich fertility of this great vale of Paucarbamba (“Flowery Plain”), as the Incas called it. Cuenca has no fitting excuse for not being one of the richest agricultural cities on earth. Yet its only “hotels” are dirty little Indian eating-houses without sleeping accommodations, and the traveler must fall back on the prehistoric system of hunting up a friend’s friend. For once this roundabout method brought handsome results; at the home of the Montesinos brothers I found my most home-like accommodations south of Quito, in a highly cultured family with no scent of the public hostelry about it. My front door opened on a vista across the patio and the long market plaza, usually shimmering with Indians and clashing colors, to the blue hills and a strip of Dresden-china sky to the west; and it is only fair to the Andes to mention that this extraordinary family had erected in a back patio a well-appointed lavatory, stoutly padlocked against the Indians of the household.

The Montesinos brothers, sons of a former governor of the Province of Azuay, were lawyers, as well as professors in Cuenca’s colegio, leaders in the intellectual life of the city, excellent examples of the best grade of “interandino.” One was a teacher of French and English, which did not seriously mean that he could speak either of those tongues. In 1899 this bookish, somewhat effeminate man had started a revolution against the Alfaro government in the person of General Franco, a bloodthirsty half-negro from Esmeraldas, who had been made governor of Azuay. It proved unsuccessful, and the instigator had been forced to fly to the jungled Oriente and live for months among the head-hunting JÍvaros Indians. I had hesitated to believe my own convictions on certain conditions in Ecuador, but this frank and outspoken native outdid anything I might have said. His attitude was in striking contrast to that belligerent “pride” of Latin-American governments and their led mobs and self-seeking politicians. To him the thrice-beloved “patriotism” of his hot-tempered fellows was rubbish. What he wanted was an efficient government and a chance to live a free life, whether he remained a subject of the particular strip of territory known as Ecuador, or of the gigantic “Yanqui-land” so many seemed to fancy imminent. He asserted that the police of Cuenca were its worst criminals; all thieves and ruffians who could not be openly convicted were sentenced to serve as policemen. Except in the collecting of taxes and as a place of reward for its henchmen, the central government leaves Cuenca and the south of Ecuador virtually abandoned, and that tendency, so general in Latin-American countries, for the more distant parts to break away and form a free, or at least autonomous state is here marked. The region labors under a thousand petty annoyances. For instance, Quito has a parcel-post service with the outside world, but Cuenca has none, nor any money-order system, and about one piece of mail in three ever reaches an addressee in the capital of the Azuay. A package mailed from abroad to a cuencano lies in Guayaquil until the addressee appears in person, or appoints a lawyer, to lay claim to it, to pay the fees and grease the wheels of the legal and illegal formalities necessary to set it on its way to its destination.

To our modern notions Cuenca is not much of a city; yet here in the almost untracked wilderness it seemed enormous. So rarely do strangers visit it that, large as it is and in spite of my entirely conventional appearance, I could barely pause in the street without all work in the vicinity ceasing and a crowd gathering about me. Hungry to behold a new face as the crew of a windjammer that has gazed only upon themselves during long months at sea, their attitude seemed to say, “We can work to-morrow, but there is no certainty that we can have the pleasure of looking at a stranger.” It is hard for Americans, with their wide outlook and accustomed to the complicated existence of our large cities, to realize the narrowness of life in these placid old adobe towns hidden away in the Andes. Virtually cut off from the outside world, the cuencanos are a peculiarly bookish people. “We do not know,” said Montesinos, “that there are places on the globe where men live in freedom and decency, except from books.” Yet in spite of being rather uncertain of their dignity, like all isolated peoples, the educated classes were as well-meaning, as simpÁticos, as any I met in Latin-America. Two things only were necessary to join the upper caste,—a white collar and visiting-cards. The former above a patched “hand-me-down” was more effective than a new $100 suit worn with a flannel shirt; and the man who has his name printed on bits of cardboard, to exchange with regal courtesy and profound bows with every upper-class acquaintance, is instantly accepted as of gente decente origin. Indeed, visiting cards should be as fixed a part of every Andean traveler’s equipment as heavy boots.

One could not but pity these ineffectually ambitious mortals, kept down by leaden environment and isolation. He who does not deal in “panama” hats has hardly an opening in Cuenca, except to study medicine, law, or theology in the local colegio; hence there is a plethora of “doctors” who can only wear their titles and live the life of enforced bookworms, forbidden by the rigid rules of caste even the privilege of turning their hands to some useful occupation. As in BogotÁ, the very isolation and lack of opportunity has driven many to their studies, and Cuenca numbers many writers among her “sons,” producers chiefly of that languid, half-melancholy, pretty poetry, full of the “fine writing” the divorce from life and unlimited leisure to polish their gems of thought gives. In all Cuenca there is only one mean little bookshop, selling religious tracts and translations of American and English “penny dreadfuls.” The intelectuales can only, as it were, feed upon each other and form mutual admiration societies, where admiration soon palls from too constant familiarity and lack of new blood. Few, even of the “best families,” have ever been out of the cuenca, or basin, in which the city lies, and its isolation has given the place something of the atmosphere the traveler is always seeking—commonly in vain—of a world wholly removed from outside influence.

Their ineffective eagerness to learn was pathetic. The most nearly educated young men of the town had rented a second-story hall near the main plaza and decorated its faÇade with huge letters announcing it the “English Language Club.” Here the score or so of more or less English-speaking residents of the male sex gathered together several evenings a week.

For years, however, there had not been a genuine English-speaking person living permanently anywhere near Cuenca. In their eagerness to capture an authority the club drafted me at once, and whole delegations were always ready to go about and show me the town and vicinity—provided it was a not too distant vicinity, for they had as great a dread as the quiteÑo of getting far from the central plaza. I was received kindly and eagerly by the educated men anywhere, so long as it did not involve my intrusion on the Moorish seclusion of their family life, and became a sort of honored guest of the town, even if I was not presented with the key to it, which by comparison with the door-keys would have been a burden indeed. They were not “spenders”; money comes slowly and with too great a strain in these parts, but they were ever on the lookout to do me little kindnesses.

Barely was I settled, therefore, when I was hurried off to an evening at the “English Language Club,” convoked in special session. For an hour I sat like the chief buffoon in a comic-opera ensemble in the center of a horseshoe circle that included a score of doctors—Cuenca swarms with doctors, home-made and book-trained—the grandsons of presidents, sons of ministers to Washington and the court of St. James, while the whole gathering, like self-conscious school-boys, got off a sentence or two in more or less English in regular rotation around the circle, until some shining genius suggested that, as they had so illustrious a guest with them, it was merely a “social evening” and not a regular meeting; hence the rule demanding that only English be spoken was not in force. With a veritable explosion of relief the entire club burst into Spanish, and Alfonzo was himself again.

Later experience proved that the rule was largely a dead-letter even at regular meetings, and only to be enforced when the arrival of an illustrious stranger put the club on parade. The walls were hung with several mottoes in English, and they had gathered together some belated American magazines and a billiard table. There the members gathered several evenings a week to play “pocar,” and to practice very intermittently such English as they had learned from the printed page, forming their sentences and—what was worse—their pronunciation from the rules books had to offer, and mixing in with it a bit of a similar brand of French, as if any foreign language answered more or less the purposes of the club. The rules forbade the use within the club-room of any tongue than our own, but after the first few set greetings of “goot nig-ht, how do yÔ do?” the gathering settled down to an uproar of Castilian, broken only by the few phrases of Cuenca-English which custom had stereotyped. The majority came to play “pocar,” not so much because of the opportunities that pastime offered for one of the Latin-American’s chief failings—for pockets were seldom bulging—but because it smacked of the United States, the stepmother of the “English Language Club” of Cuenca. The son of a former Ecuadorian minister to Washington, who had spent a year or two in “Yanqui-land,” shared with “el SeÑor Doctor Montesinos, profesor de inglÉs en nuestro colegio,” the position of final authority on the tongue, except on those rare occasions when a traveler brought the real, dyed-in-the-wool article with him. Even the authorities were not faultless. They said “dÍssiples” for pupils, used habitually the expression “I can to go,” and clung tenaciously to similar choice bits of their own convictions, and, what was worse, drilled them into their fellow-members with that dogmatism strongest in those who are wrong. But the minister’s son had made the most of his American residence in learning “pocar” so thoroughly that he was as real an authority on that art as he fancied himself in English. Unfortunately, the combined efforts of the club had not unearthed among all the dog-eared classics that had drifted together in generations of Cuenca’s flirting with English the mention in print of that fascinating pastime. Whence they had been forced to adopt their own spelling and home-made phrases. On the wall appeared a warning placard, “Those which play pocar are speaking English,” and each game was sprinkled with a rapid-fire of Spanish, punctuated by fixed phrases of near-English. Thus the expressions “You bid,” or “You open,” had been concocted by the simple means of literal translation from the Castilian used in similar pastimes, and became “You speak.” Amid the crack of billiard-balls and the rattling of home-made chips the conversation ran on much as follows:

“Cordero, you are serveeng. Y hombre, ya le dije que la muchacha no ...”

“Fife cards; all ze workeengs, Carlos.”

“LindÍsima, hombre, pero su mamÁ... . Enriquito, you speak.”

“No, seÑor, equivocado, I am speakeeng.”

“Caramba! Es verdad. Eet ees true. And for how much are you speakeeng?”

“No, et ees meestake. Ze doctor is speakeeng, because he is sitteeng by ze side of Juancito, which ees serveeng ze cards,”—and with deep solemnity the doctor proceeded to “speak” by throwing two Cuenca-made chips on the table, the game rattling on until MuÑoz broke in upon an oratorical description of the latest event of the vida social of Cuenca with a:

“And I am nameeng you now, Carlitos; with ze house full of ze whole kettle,” and throwing down a “full house,” he scraped the entire pile of chips to his corner of the table.

There were two dentists in Cuenca at the time of my visit. One of those present was not there in person, because he had gone away on a week’s journey two months before; the other had not yet arrived, though he appeared nightly at the “English Language Club,” because his instruments of torture and gold-plated diploma were still somewhere on the road from Guayaquil. Had they both been unqualifiedly present in the flesh, the wise man would have continued to endure any degree of toothache rather than submit to their amateurish mercies. The chief raison d’Être of the city is its commerce in “panama” hats, though virtually none are made there. The agent sent to Azogues or other neighboring towns pencils in some cabalistic code on the inside of the hat the price paid the weaver—or as near that price as his conscience makes necessary—and delivers it to his employer. In the city are many “factories of sombreros,” from behind the downcast mud fronts of which sounds all day long the pounding of wooden mallets, and from which exudes the constant smell of sulphur. At the establishment of a club-member we posed for a local photographer in acres of hats, in various stages of the finishing process, which ranged from the huge Gualaquiza products from the JÍvaros country on the east, to those of so fine a weave as to be inferior only to the famous jipijapa of ManabÍ.

It is just over the range from Cuenca that are to be found the JÍvaros, the widely renowned head-hunters of the upper Amazon. Montesinos had lived long months among them at the time of his mishap, and knew their ways well. A proud, untamed race engaged in almost constant warfare with the neighboring tribes, they consider the white man an equal, and treat him as a friend so long as he does not transgress their strict tribal laws. The Andean Indian, with his slinking air and his heavy clothing, they look down upon as a weakling and a very inferior being. Having despatched an enemy, the JÍvaros cut off the head well down on the shoulders, extract the skull by a vertical cut at the back, sew up this and the lips, and, by the insertion of hot stones and a process only imperfectly understood by any other than the tribe itself, reduce the head to the size of an orange, with the original features easily recognizable. In this state it is said to be of little use to its rightful owner, even if recovered. The desiccated head must, according to tribal laws, be kept until after the yearly ceremony to appease the spirit of the dead man, after which it is hung up as a trophy over the entrance to the successful hunter’s house, or, what is far more usual of late years, traded to some passing white man for a rifle or a supply of cartridges. One traveler I met had been so eager to obtain one of the dried heads that he offered a JÍvaro chief two rifles. The chief replied sadly that, though he would do anything possible to get a rifle, unfortunately it happened that the tribe did not have a single dried head on hand. “But,” he cried a moment later, his countenance brightening visibly, “could you wait a month or so?”

A few years ago a tall, lanky German arrived in Cuenca and went down among the JÍvaros to study their customs, and especially to find out exactly how they shrink heads. Month after month passed without a word from him, but cuencanos knew the Teuton way of pursuing an investigation step by step in all its details and ramifications, and thought nothing of the prolonged absence. Then one day, more than a year later, there was offered for sale in the market of Cuenca a splendid specimen of shrunken head, with long, blond hair and beard and a scholarly cast of countenance. The investigation had been thorough; but the outside world still remains in darkness on the art of shrinking heads among the JÍvaros.

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.

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.

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.

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