Small wonder that the traveler who has splashed and waded a long week through the mournful wilderness, living chiefly on fond hopes salted with the anticipations of an unschooled imagination, and washed down with river water, should fetch up in Jaen with a decided shock. Occupying a large and distinct place on the map, this provincial “capital” proved to be a disordered cluster of a half-hundred wretched, time-blackened, tumble-down, thatched huts, the roofs full of holes, the gables often missing, scattered like abandoned junk among the weeds and bushes of a half-hearted clearing in the selfsame gloomy forest and spiny jungle that had so long shut me in. The barefoot, half-clothed, fever-yellow inhabitants of mongrel breed stared curiously from their mud doorways as I stalked past, smeared with dried mud from head to foot, sunburned, shaggy with whiskers, and dragging behind me by main force an emaciated donkey trembling with excitement at the unwonted sights, or with fear at the unknown dangers of so vast a metropolis. From one hut in no way different from its neighbors issued the city school, the “teacher” with a ragged cap on his head and a drooping cigarette smouldering between his lips, to stare after me with the rest. Every building in town, the church included, consisted of a single mud room with an unleveled earth floor, windowless, and with a small reed or pole door giving entrance, exit, and such air and light as could force admittance. The “government palace,” before which I tied “Cleopatra” to the official bamboo flagpole in the geographical center of the capital, was closed. With a flourish of my papers I summoned the “authorities” to step forward and make themselves known; but the manoeuver brought only the information that the subprefect was “away for a few days, but he’ll soon be back, next week, no mÁs, or the week after, at any rate. Entra y descansa—come in and sit down.”

The gobernador was likewise among the indefinitely missing; whence the mantle of power descended upon the shoulders of the alcalde. That worthy was soon produced, somewhat the worse for concentrated cane-juice, but remarkable for at least two features,—that he wore what might still with some stretch of veracity be called shoes, and alone of all the town could have passed for a white man, had he seen fit to remove a stringy little Indian mustache. When he had read aloud to the congregated male population all my credentials in Spanish—a task not unlike that of a one-legged man walking without his crutches after spraining his ankle and suffering a stone-bruise—he requested me to name my desires. They were modest,—room, bed, table, chair, water, food for myself and pasture for the other one of us until day after to-morrow. Slowly and bit by bit, but none the less surely, my requirements were met. A key was found that manipulated the creaking padlock of one of the thatched mud-caves with sagging reed divans around its walls. A crippled table was dragged in, and a squad of soldiers sent for old newspapers to cover it. In due time, and with the assistance of the entire population in a house to house canvass, a gourd wash-basin was discovered, then a gourd with a hole in one end, from which one drank and into which the half-Indian boy thrust a finger to carry it, after filling it at the chocolate-brown stream at the edge of the town; a chair was unofficially subtracted from the government palace and, last of all, a four-inch mirror was pinned to the mud wall. I had barely removed the hirsute adornment of a week by such light as Jaen, massed in and about the door, left me, when a barefoot female glided noiselessly into my den and, announcing herself the owner, carried off the glass as too precious a possession to be long out of her sight.

The first stroll disclosed the hitherto unsuspected fact that several of the mud-dens were shops. One of them posed as a restaurant, but its restorative powers were at best anemic. Jaen is probably the hottest, and certainly the hungriest, provincial capital in Peru. To retain its rank as a “city,” it fulfilled nominally the test as a place where bread is made,—a tiny, soggy bun selling for the price of an American loaf. Milk and fruit, which might easily have been superabundant here, were unknown luxuries, and the customary food of the populace included nothing a well-bred dog would have touched in any but a ravenous state. A dozen of us without families, including the alcalde, were dependent upon the “restaurant,” and we agreed upon a fixed ration of bread and eggs, the supply of which never approached even the normal demand. But the alcalde quickly formed the habit of sneaking over before the hour set and, by virtue of his official powers, consuming most of the provender. To forestall him, the rest of us took to arriving earlier, until it grew customary to appear for the noonday meal at about nine, and to sit down to supper toward three, eyeing each other ravenously, and jealously watching the cook’s every movement. He who is accustomed to complain of the “high cost of living” should try the antidote of a journey down the Andes, where the high cost reigns supreme, without the living. In these languid corners of the world where life is reduced to its lowest terms food and lodging assume the first place of importance, and the mind is never free from these primitive apprehensions; no sooner does one eat than the worry arises as to where the next meal will come from, as each day’s pleasure on the road is tempered by wondering what hardship the night will have in store.

There were some evidences of negro blood in Jaen, though that of the aboriginal Indian tribe of the region was universal, in the percentage of one half to a far smaller fraction in varying individuals. The men wore home-made garments of the cheapest cotton, patched and sun-faded, generally no shirt, with merely a kerchief knotted about the neck above the undershirt, and sombreros de junco, hats woven of a species of swamp-grass or reeds, which a few weeks of sun and rain gave the appearance of a badly thatched roof. The women wore no hats, combed their raven-black hair flat and smooth, without adornments, and let it hang down their backs in a single braid. Like all the cholas and half-castes of the sex in the Andes, they dragged their misshapen skirts constantly in the mire of the streets and the “floors” of their huts, and were habitually even less cleanly in their habits than the men. The stage of education may be gaged from the fact that the government telegraph operator assured me I could not reach Cerro de Pasco by land, but must “cross the sea” to Lima and take the railroad from there. Jaen’s chief pastime for speeding up the monotonous stretch between the cradle and the grave is the consumption of the native “caÑazo,” and only those who rose early were likely to find a completely sober man. A sort of harmless anarchy reigned. A man merry with cane-juice might sit outside the mud school-house and keep school from “functioning” all day long, without interference. An amorous youth, going on a drunken rampage among the huts or the washerwomen on the banks of the irrigating ditch, was avoided if possible, but was never forcibly restrained. As is frequent in tropical towns, there was little evidence of religion, pseudo or otherwise, which thrives best in the high, cold regions of the mysterious pÁramos. The mud church, with its tower melted off unevenly at the top, like a half-burned candle in a wind, had long since lost its cura, and served now as provincial jail, by the simple addition of a few poles set in adobe across the door and a few languid soldiers lolling in the general vicinity whenever they had no particular desire to be somewhere else.

On the afternoon of my arrival the rumor floated languidly over the town that the weekly cow was to be butchered next morning, but it was denied later in the evening. I made the most of my day of leisure by acquiring a bar of native soap, of the appearance of a mud-pie and the scent of boiling glue, and spending some two hours in the irrigating ditch, stringing across the main street, from a telegraph pole to a rafter of “my house,” all the garments that could be spared from use in an unexacting society. Nothing was more certain than that I should start again at daylight of the second morning—until news arrived that the river eighteen miles south was impassable until the waters receded. It was evident, too, that I must deny myself the companionship of “Cleopatra.” She hung wilted and dejected in the town pasture, and at best there was no hope that she would last many days further, even if there were any means of getting her across the swollen river. I accepted the alcalde’s offer of $3 for the animal and her “furniture,” and felt a glow of satisfaction, tempered with regret at the loss of a good companion, for all her faults, that I should no longer have to drag my feet behind me at her snail’s pace, and be dependent on my right arm for advancement.

On the morning I should have started, the rumor again ran riot that the town was going to pelar un res—“peel a beef.” This time matters went so far as to lead the octogenarian victim out into the main street, where the population gathered in an attitude of anticipation, a dozen or more armed with home-made axes and knives, the rest with pots and gourds. For a long time the languid hubbub of some discussion rose and fell about the downcast animal. Then gradually the gathering disintegrated and scattered to its huts, each pausing at sight of a face, to drone in that singularly indifferent monotone of the tropics, “No hay carne hoy”—(there is no meat to-day). Some misanthropist, an agent of a neighboring hacienda, it turned out, had offered $9 for the animal, and Jaen did not feel justified in squandering any such fortune for mere food. My rosy dream of again tasting fresh meat and of carrying supplies on my journey was once more rudely dissipated.

The east was blushing from the first kiss of the bold, tropical sun when I sallied forth on the morning I had concluded to start, river or no river, and went to wake up the “restaurant” keeper, sleeping on his dining-table with the precious bread-box under his head. The alcalde appeared almost at the same instant from the direction of the irrigation ditch, his towel about his neck. He greeted me with forced courtesy. His solemn promise to arrange to have my baggage transported to the river in consideration for the low price at which he had acquired “Cleopatra” had gone the way of most South American promises—into thin air. Now I reminded him of it, he would order a soldier to accompany me at once. The earth swung a long way eastward on its axis without any other sign of activity. Then some one came to say that a soldier would not be sent, because Anastasio CenturiÓn, returning to his “Hacienda Algarrobo” forthwith, would be delighted to carry my belongings on his mule. An hour later he declined to carry them, then he was prevailed upon by his compadre, the lieutenant-governor, to renew his offer; then he again concluded the weight was too great, and finally sent an urchin for my saddle-bags. Before they were loaded, however, a dispute broke out over the ownership of a “silver” spur that had been picked up in the sand of the main street, and the town followed the alcalde to the mud hut that served as court of justice. It was also the city bakery, and the wife of the justice, who had put off baking the morning before, and was not yet mixing the dough, ceded a corner of the kitchen table to the court, which in the course of an hour settled the case in the customary Latin-American way—by deciding that the disputed property should remain “in the hands of justice.”

A soldier was at length sent to round up one of the donkeys grazing in the main plaza. Gradually the disgusted animal was fitted with my former donkey-furniture, amid the contrary suggestions of the populace, and the alcalde furnished me an order to the ferrymen at the river to set me across in the name of the government—and to return donkey and aparejo. A winding, narrow, stony path, that wet its feet at the very outset, squirmed away through the desert-like forest. “Down there,” said Anastasio, wrapped gloomily in his maroon poncho and viciously kicking the spur on one bare heel into the side of his heavily-laden animal, “is the camino real, pero da mucha vuelta.” How it could “give more turns” than the one we were following, it was hard to imagine. My pack-animal this time was a matron of forty, comparatively speaking, and correspondingly set in her ways. Within the first mile “se me escapÓ,” as the natives have it; that is, she suddenly bolted into the thorny wilderness at the first suggestion of an opening, and left me dripping with sweat and speckled with the blood of a dozen superficial lacerations before I again laid hands on her in an impassable clump of brambles and cactus. Anastasio tied her tow-rope to his saddle, and for an hour or so she seemed completely resigned to her fate. But evidently there is no trusting the sex at that age. No sooner was she paroled than she bolted again, and led me a skin-gashing chase of several miles through a wild and waterless solitude. Yet, after all, manipulating a donkey is a splendid apprenticeship for dealing with Latin-Americans; no better training could be suggested for the prospective salesman south of the Rio Grande.

The going ranged from quebradita to muy quebrada, now along the stony bed of a meandering “river,” yesterday all but impassable, to-day so bone dry there was only a bit of running mud to quench the thirst; now over a sharp knoll bristling with jagged, loose stones. At red-hot noon we reached the Huancabamba river, now grown to man’s estate, where it swings around to join the MaraÑÓn and divides the never-to-be-forgotten Province of Jaen from that of Cutervo. A laborious two hours up it brought us to the long-heralded Puerto Sauce, where the government maintains a “ferry,”—five small logs bound together with vines and manned by three balseros housed in two reed-kennels. Here we squatted out the day, watching the coffee-colored stream race by on its long journey to the Atlantic with all the impetuosity of the rainy season. The government chasqui had been sitting here nearly a week, his mail-sacks stacked and his horse tethered close at hand. Only out on the extreme edge of the bank, where an occasional breath of tepid breeze tempered the lead-heavy heat and thinned the swarms of stinging insects, was life endurable. My skin was a patchwork of mementoes of all the minute fauna of the past week, and an itching like the constant prick of myriad red-hot needles was relieved only briefly by each dip in the stream. During one of them I advanced well into the river, and it seemed I could have crossed it; that even the Peruvians might have made the passage, had they male blood in their veins. But then, had they been men they would long since have built a bridge. All through the night there kept running through my head, amid the sweep of the waters, that illuminating remark of “Kim,” “A sahib is always tied to his baggage”; and in my half-conscious condition I resolved when morning broke to cast away all but a loin-cloth and a hat, and travel henceforth in comfort al uso del paÍs. But, alas, the least formal of us cannot rid himself of all the adjuncts of civilization; and there was photography, to say nothing of food and covering for the highlands ahead, to be considered. When dawn turned its matter-of-fact light upon the scene, the dream quickly faded and I settled down to watch another day drag by into the past tense beside the racing brown waters of the Huancabamba. The feeling was rampant that nature had played me a scurvy trick. I had bargained on following the cool and pleasant crest of the Andes, and they had crumbled away beneath me and forced upon me this unsought experience of the tropics.

Not until the morning of the third day did the balseros conclude to attempt to pass over the “government people,”—the mail-man and this impatient gringo with the official order from the alcalde. The raft had been dragged well up-stream, where we waded to it through bristling jungle and knee-deep mud. The chasqui’s horse, long experienced in these matters from years of carrying the mails over this route, was driven in and forced to swim to a sand-bar well out in the stream. For a long time the animal stood like a prisoner at bay against the shouting and stoning and shaking of cudgels of those on the bank, but at length, seeing no other escape, it set out to attempt the main branch. Its brute instinct would have proved a better guide than the opinions of more rational beings. Struggling until its snorting echoed back from the surrounding jungle, it fought the brown, racing waters, gradually nearing the further bank, yet swept even more swiftly along by the inexorable stream, amid foam-caps from the rocky passes above, strained savagely to reach the strip of beach that served as landing-place until, swept past it without gaining a footing, it seemed suddenly to give up in despair, and only its head, swinging slowly round and round with the current, was seen a short minute more, tiny against the race of the yellower waters, before it swept on out of sight down the jungle-walled torrent.

The chasqui gazed after the lost animal for a long moment, shrugged his shoulders with the resigned “Vaya!” of a confirmed fatalist, and took his seat beside me on our baggage, tied securely near the back of the frail craft. The three brown balseros, naked but for palm-leaf hats and a strip of rag between their legs, each crossed himself elaborately, and took a deep draught at Anastasio’s quart bottle of caÑazo. Then they pointed the nose of the raft up-stream, pushed off, snatched up their clumsy paddles with a hoarse imploration to the Virgin, and fought for dear life and the sand-bar. This gained, we disembarked and manoeuvered to the further side, then pushed off into the main stream. It snatched at us like some greedy monster. The sand-bar raced away up-stream at express speed, the further bank sped past like a blurred cinematograph ribbon, the paddlers, urged on by their own and the mail-man’s raucous shouts and imprecations, battled as with some mortal enemy, stabbing their paddles in swift, breathless succession into the brown stream, and following each dig with a savage jerk that tore the wound wide open and brought out the lean muscles beneath their dingy skins like steel cables under leather coverings. The rules of caste are more important than life itself in South America, and both the mail-man and I had been refused paddles. Relentlessly the further shore galloped by. The bit of clearing required for landing approached, beckoned to us tantalizingly, flashed on, and the raft sped swiftly after the lost horse. The balseros, abetted by the chasqui, increased their efforts to a screaming uproar, in which I caught here and there a fragmentary “’nta Virgen ... ’yuda!” Fortunately they did not put all their trust in superhuman assistance, and their paddles tore at the stream with a viciousness that drenched us with its aftermath. Bit by bit we strained nearer the hurrying wall of verdure. Every lunge seemed to lift the paddlers into the air; the cords on their necks stood out like creepers on a forest tree; their yells, hoarse and savage enough to have frightened off any malignant spirit of the waters, came strained and broken now, from lack of breath. Now we could all but touch the racing forest-wall. I snatched in vain at a sapling bowing its head in the stream. With a last faint gasp and a spent stroke, the balseros dropped their paddles on the raft, and all five of us grasped at the vegetation that tore and lacerated us in its struggle to escape our desperate embrace. When we had each gathered an armful of it, we clung so stoutly to this last hold to earth that the raft was all but swept from under us before we swung it up into a bit of cove, where the balseros, falling at once into their racial apathy, drooped like wilted rags at the bow, while one of them panted weakly, “A little more, seÑores, and we were gone sin noticias.”

As lazily as they had been energetic in the crossing, the ferrymen coaxed the raft up along the edge of the forest to the little clearing, where I swung my saddle-bags over a shoulder, waded to dry land and plodded on along the blazing hot bank of the Huancabamba. Slowly my shadow crawled from under my feet. In this sweltering desert valley, now staggering through hot sand and a dwarf vegetation savage with thorns, now clambering constantly over steep headlands that broke into cliffs at the river’s edge and stumbling down again through veritable quarries of loose stones, my burden, augmented with chancaca, a sack of rice and a roll of sun-dried beef, as well as the lead-heavy tropical sun that seemed to lean physically on my shoulders, became unbearable. I resolved to pitch camp in the first open space and wait, till doomsday if necessary, for some pack-train susceptible to the glitter of silver coins. Puerto Sauce was probably not more than seven miles behind me when I found, between trail and river, a narrow sand-strip sloping down to the racing brown waters and backed by a barren, stony cliff-face over which the “road” promised to bring out in relief against the turquÍ sky anyone who might pass my way.

Grass could not find sustenance on this sun-baked spot, but centipedes and a score of other venomous things might exist. Scattered along the bank were many sapling poles, the wreckage, evidently, of some hut that had been swept here by the raging river. I gathered an armful of these and laid their ends on two small logs, covered them with such brush and branches as were without thorns, and had a far more comfortable couch than the wealthiest hacendado of the region. Over me hung a wild lemon-tree, the fruit of which made the yellow Huancabamba more nearly drinkable. About its trunk, within instant reach, I strapped my revolver, and lay down almost in the “royal highway,” fully prepared for anything except a sudden burst of rain. Across the river in dense, half-cultivated, greener jungle were the huts of several natives; but they might as well have been in another world, for I could not have heard a whisper above the roar of the Huancabamba had they stood on the opposite bank screaming across at me. I possessed a maltreated copy of Prescott, and there is great compensation for the hardships of the trail in golden moments snatched like this; for nowhere does the mind grip the printed page so firmly as at the end of a day on the road, after long turning the leaves of no other page than nature’s.

The afternoon passed, faded to a violent sunset, and blackened into night, without a human sight or sound. I took another swim, careful not to lose my grasp on the shore, and turned my lounge into a bed. There had been many rumors of bears and “tigers” in these parts. The real peril was the incitement to suicide caused by the swarming insect life whenever the breeze failed for an instant. In my dreams the roar of the Huancabamba turned to that of New York, and I fancied I had suddenly left off my journey down the Andes to run home for a single day, at the end of which I should take up my task where I had left off.

When dawn awoke me I refused to rise. But hour after hour passed without a break in the drear monotony of the arid landscape. In mid-morning patience exploded and, throwing my load over a shoulder, I toiled on. When, at the end of some fifteen miles, my legs refused to push me further, I struggled through the jungle to the river-bank; but there was not a cleared space sufficient to sit on, much less to lie down in. By wading chest-deep I reached the breezy nose of an island in the Huancabamba, and made my bed on the damp beach-sand. But I had chosen poorly, if choice it might be called. Without even leaves to spread under me, the night was one of unmitigated torture. Myriads of crawling, stinging tropical life made my entire frame a pasture and playground, and at best I got only a few half-conscious snatches of sleep, troubled with the threatening rumble of the river. For safety’s sake I had hung many of my belongings in the branches of trees; but not enough of them. Daylight showed a populous colony of enormous black ants in possession of all that lay on the ground. They had not only eaten to the last crumb the chancaca I had lugged for two blazing days, and left me barely a spoonful of rice for breakfast, but they had all but destroyed the home-made cover of my kodak, had decorated my hat with a fringe, and had bitten into a dozen pieces my auto-photographic bulb, scattering all the vicinity with crumbs of red rubber.

Another lone day we struggled up-stream. I say we,—that is, myself and I; for—a point for psychologists—since taking up my own load again I could not rid myself of the fancy that I was two distinct persons, one of whom was forcing the other to make the journey. In the night I often started up fancying the other fellow—the one who did the walking and carried the load—had escaped. Could he know the truth beforehand, no sane man would sentence himself to tramp this route of the Andes, to suffer almost incessant hardships, the monotony of the same experiences over and over again, the dreary intercourse with a people so stupid, so low of intelligence that long contact with their childish minds brings with it the danger of one’s own faculties turning childish, like that of a lifetime of school-teaching. Only the American habit of carrying out to the bitter end a plan once made could force him on.

Late the next morning the most exciting event of several days happened,—I met a human being. He was lolling before a slatternly hut of reeds, inside which a half-caste woman squatted on the earth peeling camotes. On such a journey the civilized traveler unconsciously builds up a certain pity for himself which he feels should be shared by others. But he is sure of a rude awakening among these clod-like inhabitants of the wilderness. Should a living skeleton crawl into an Andean hut announcing he had not tasted food for a fortnight, had seven species of tropical fever, and had been bitten by a baker’s dozen of venomous serpents, the greeting would be the same motionless, indifferent grunt and drowsily mumbled “Vaya!” with which this female acknowledged my presence. No offer of money would have brought her to her feet, much less have induced her to cook one of the chickens—or even yellow curs—that overran the place. As I picked up my burden in disgust, however, she murmured through her half-closed lips, “Se irÁ ustÉ’ almorzando?”—in other words that I might wait, if I chose, to partake of the camote stew she was lazily concocting over the stick fire in the center of the floor. On the surface this stereotyped invitation looks like genuine hospitality. At bottom it is less so than a habit, tinged with superstition and fear of malignant spirits, and above all the impossibility of an uninitiative race daring to, or even thinking of varying a custom of all their known world. It was no time to stand on my dignity, however, even had the foodless days behind left me any such support, and I sat down again. A ravenous two hours dragged by before the mess of native roots and herbs met the approval of the expressionless female, who tasted a wooden spoonful of it now and then and tossed the residue back into the kettle. Several peons had drifted in, genuine human clods, apparently as devoid of intelligence as the hogs rooting about under their hoofed feet, and gathered about a flat log raised a bit above the earth. With a steaming calabash of the tasteless, red-hot stew before each of us, and a single bowl of mote mixed with bits of pork rind into which all shovelled at once, we finished the meal in utter silence. Then the first peon, wiping his horny hand across his mouth with a disgusting sucking sound, mumbled “DiÓs se lo pagarÁ,” a formula repeated by each as we rose to our feet. However much he may prefer to liquidate the matter himself, rather than to leave it to so uncertain and unindebted a source, this “God will pay you for it,” is the only return the traveler who sits in at their tasteless repasts can force upon these mongrel people of the Andean wilderness.

How far out of my course I had mounted the Huancabamba when I picked up a rock-strewn tributary along the cliff-face, only a professional geographer could say. Through the hot-lands of northern Peru direction yields to the accidents of nature, and Jaen had been as far east of a line due southward as Ayavaca had been to the west. When early sunset fell in the bottom of the deep valley, I had mounted several hundred feet above the level of the Huancabamba, and with a welcome coolness came more human manners, heralding the highlands again. Both Fructuoso Carrera and his far younger, though no less cheery wife, treated me more like a prodigal son than as an importunate guest who had fallen upon them out of the unknown. Amid the culinary operations suited to my case they gave me in detail the recipe of the choclo tandas—Quichua bread, probably used before the Conquest—that finally rounded off our repast late in the evening. For the benefit of housewives permit me to pass on the information:

Cut off the kernels of green corn while still small and fairly soft. Crush them to a pulp—under a round stone on a broad flat one out beneath the thatched eaves, if it is desired to keep the local color intact—sprinkling water lightly on the mass from time to time. When the whole has been reduced to a somewhat adhesive dough, wrap in corn-husks rolls of the stuff about the size and shape of an ear of corn and tie with strips of husk. Sit down on the earth floor in a corner of the hut—driving off the persistent guinea-pigs with any weapon at hand—and drop these packages one by one into a kettle of boiling water supported by three stones. Let boil from twenty minutes to a half hour—depending on the energy with which fagots have been gathered during the day—taking care that none of the gaunt curs prowling about between the legs of the cook and through other unexpected openings thrust their noses into the kettle, as they would be sure to be burned. Those who succeed in beginning the task while daylight still lingers should also beware any of the family chickens climbing to a convenient shoulder and springing into the pot, as this would result, not in choclo tanda, but in choclo tanda con gallina, which is a far more expensive dish. Zest is added by a successful attempt surreptitiously to get into one’s saddle-bags a couple of the choclo tandas for the land of starvation that is expected ahead.

Several times during the night I descended to alleviate my insect-bitten skin by a plunge in the clear, cold mountain stream that sounds in the Carrera family ears 365 days a year. In the morning I was forced to dress under my poncho, with far less convenience than in an upper Pullman berth; for la seÑora was already grinding coffee for my desayuno on the flat stone under the eaves beside me. To my diplomatically framed question as to what I owed him, Don Fructuoso replied:

“For what should you owe us anything?”

All that day the trail, wandering back and forth across the rock-boiling “river,” first by little thatched pachachacas, or earth-covered pole-bridges, then, as the stream dwindled, by precarious stepping-stones, climbed ever higher, at times through stretches of mud where dense overhanging forests had retained the rainfall. Mankind grew more frequent in this more habitable, rising world. Thatched cottages were tucked away here and there in forty-five-degree patches of bananas and coffee, and the pilfering of the tandas to weigh down my load proved an entirely gratuitous felony.

The very air of Tablabamba, where I slept on dried cane-pulp in an unwalled trapiche hung well up the side of the new constricted valley, as humid and green as Jaen Province had been desert-brown and arid, teemed with stories of robbers and assassins among the mountain defiles ahead. The only visible danger I encountered, however, was the notorious “Sal-si-puedes—Climb it if you can,” the terrors of which had grown daily more persistent for a fortnight past. This was one of those endless zigzags by which Andean trails climb from one river system, when near its source, to another, revealing its nefarious purpose only bit by bit, and subtly enticing the traveler ever upward in an undertaking he might not have the courage to face as a whole. A rut piled full of loose rocks, down which trickled enough water to suggest what the climb might have been on a rainy day, carried me into the very sky above and, taking there new foothold, scaled doggedly on into the “realms of eternal silence” where even birds were no longer heard and sturdy, squat trees, sighing fitfully as if struggling for breath, at length gave up in despair and abandoned the scene to huge, black rocks protruding from a soil that gave sustenance only to the dead-brown ichu-grass of Andean heights. “Hay mucho silencio y mucho matador,” my host of the night had mumbled lugubriously, but I was aware only of the music of the wind and the joyful realization that the broken mountains had gathered themselves together again under my feet and raised me once more to my accustomed temperate zone. By cold noonday a tumbled, blue world lay about and below me, only an insignificant dent in it representing that overheated hell locally known as the Province of Jaen. Like life itself, what had seemed at its base a mighty climb proved here at the top to have been only an insignificant little knoll down in the valley, and only when one had reached the real summit, and could look back upon the region as a whole after all was accomplished, did each little struggle and petty suffering assume its correct proportion.

Another step forward, and before my glad eyes spread one of those broad, green interandean valleys, backed by serrated black ranges, their brows wrinkled and furrowed with age, the clouds trailing their purple shadows across a panorama of little cultivated valleys, into which I descended from the unconscionable summit by a natural stairway. The blue-gray peaks turned to lilac in the last rays of the chill highland sun, then faded away into the luminous sky of night as the mountain cold settled down like an icy poncho, and with dusk I tramped through a long adobe street into the central plaza of Cutervo.

My legs seemed to have pushed me again into the outskirts of civilization. Not only did the subprefect drive off of his own initiative the open-mouthed throng that gathered about his door, rather than read my papers aloud to them, but here at last was a Peruvian town that actually recognized the existence of strangers with appetites, and a large adobe hut publicly admitted itself a fonda. Cutervo was, in reality, monotonously like any other town of the Sierra. To one coming upon it out of the trackless wilderness, however, it seemed at first sight a place of mighty importance, and only gradually dwindled to its true proportions. Like a man just returned from long months in the polar ice, I had an all but irresistible desire to rush in and buy everything in sight, as I wandered past its long line of open shop-doors. The capital of a department recently cut off from the neighboring one of Chota, it was the first place in Peru where any appreciable number of the inhabitants could unreservedly be called white, and boasted the first specimens of beauty among the fair sex. Even the Lima newspapers were there, to give me a skeleton sketch of the activities of a half-forgotten world.

There is a reserve of strength in the human body which few suspect until they tax it in an emergency; but it is only after recovery that the traveler through the rough places of the earth realizes how weak he has gradually become from hardships and lack of real nourishment. The invigorating air of the temperate zone and the meat of Cutervo’s fonda, however, had soon given me new energy, and seemed to have reduced to half the weight of my load. Hope, brutally felled to earth, ever crawls dizzily to its feet again. I could no more rid myself of the fond dream of some day ceasing to stagger under my own baggage than a leper can shake off his affliction. Yet the solemn promise of the ruler of Cutervo to furnish me a carrier resulted only in a lost day, and I struck off across the rolling mountains and valleys beyond, convinced at last, so I fancied, that I should dream no longer. So persistent had been the promise of foul play on this day’s route that, despite a lifetime of disappointments, I could not but peer hopefully into the many splendid lurking-places of the wild, rock-strewn upland I followed in utter solitude all the gorgeous day from Cutervo to Chota, the next provincial capital. Only once did I catch sight of fellow-beings. A group of arrieros with laden asses paused dubiously near the top of the range where they caught the first glimpse of me, then ventured forward and halted to ask anxiously:

“Are the robbers not attacking this morning?”

My answer they greeted with a fervent “Ave MarÍa PurÍsima!” and, crossing themselves ostentatiously, that the saints should not by any chance overlook their devotion, pushed hurriedly on toward Cutervo.

Early in the afternoon I came out on the upper edge of an enormous, wide-spread valley just across which, in the lap of a rolling plain sloping toward me and the hair-like winding river at its bottom, lay the end of the day’s journey,—Chota; a tiny, dull-red patch in a green-brown immensity of sun-flooded world, the two towers of its not too conspicuous church pin-pricking the horizon. In the transparent air of the highlands it seemed at most a short two hours away. In reality I had not in that time picked my stony way to the bottom of the rock-scarred valley, and it was long after night had cast its black poncho over all the world that I stumbled at last into the elusive town.

Chota, “8000 feet, 4000 inhabitants, 3000 doors”—and no windows, nearly as cold as Quito, is a provincial capital with well-cobbled streets and a broad expanse of plaza, all tilting to the north, by far the largest Peruvian city I had yet seen, almost the equal in size of Loja in Ecuador. The stock of its many little shops comes in by way of Pacasmayo and the railroad to Chilete, showing that I was “over the divide” and approaching Cajamarca. On August 30, 1882, it was destroyed by the Chilians—“los malditos chilenos,” as the inhabitants still call them—but Andean building material being plentiful, it soon rose from its mud ruins. The cura was even then superintending the cholos tramping together with their bare feet the clay and chopped ichu-grass that was to be a new church. There were numerous fondas, as befitted a great capital; that is, mud dens with a reed shanty in the barnyard behind serving as kitchen, kept by well-meaning but unprepossessing females who wiped the inside of each plate religiously on their ample hips, those same draft-horse hips on which they squatted on the earth floor to fill the receptacles similarly placed, while driving off with the free hand the curs and guinea-pigs and the chickens perching on the edge of the kettles. There were even oil-lamps in a few of the more pretentious shops and mansions, though almost all without chimneys, not easily imported from the other side of the world by ship and muleback over breakneck trails. Haughty, belligerent roosters stood tied by a leg before half the doors in town, so that each street was a long vista of pugnacious cocks frequently submitting to the anxious ministrations of their proud owners. Even without them I should not have slept unbrokenly. Official assistance had gained me lodging on the home-made counter of an empty shop hung with cobwebs and perfumed with the mustiness of several generations, the door of which, flush with the narrow sidewalk, of course, was the only source of air. There, as often as a night-hawk passed on his way home from the local “billar,” he paused to beat me awake with the rapping of his cane and to sing-song in that dulcet voice of the Latin-American, mellow with late hours, “Your door is open, seÑor; I will close it for you.” And if, instead of reaching under the counter for my revolver or a convenient adobe brick, I did not summon a patient courtesy I do not possess and answer, “Mil gracias, seÑor; no, thank you, leave it open, please,” and then rise and open it again, because he fancied his ears had deceived him, I should have lost the rating of “simpÁtico,” and been branded a rude and discourteous gringo.

Bambamarca, an atrociously stony half-day beyond Chota and its surrounding bowl, like a mosaic of little farms where female shepherds, bare to their weather-browned knees, incessantly turn the white, brown, and black fleece of their flocks into yarn on their crude Incaic spindles, reported the trail ahead “the worst road in Peru”—which is indeed strong language. They were certain, too, that, though I might—with the accent on the verb—have arrived from “La Provincia” alive, the marauders beyond would see to it that I did not reach Cajamarca in that condition. A cold rain fell incessantly from sullen skies during a day of unbroken plodding, first up the caÑon of a small river, crossed now and then by thatched bridges, until it dwindled away and left me to splash at random over a reeking mountain-top. I had been lost for hours, and was dripping water at every pore, when I spied, toward what would have been sunset, four little Indian boys huddled under the ruin of a hut, and signed to them to give me information. Instead, they took to their heels, as if all the evil spirits of the Inca religion had suddenly crested the water-soaked range. I set after them, but my best pace under my load being barely equal to theirs, I drew my revolver and fired twice into the air; whereupon they halted and awaited me in ashen fear. The one I chose as guide led me over a rolling pÁramo deeply gashed by rain-swollen streams, and abandoned me within sight of the imposing estate-house of what turned out to be the “Hacienda Yanacancha.” In the corredor, just out of reach of the drenching rain, stood a white man in khaki, monarch of half the visible world, and so little like the uncouth illiterate I expected that he replied in faultless Castilian to my remark about the absence of roads:

“Yes, unfortunately South America fell to the Spaniards, whereas it should have been settled by Anglo-Saxons.”

Here, for the first time in Peru, was an hacendado who had trained his dogs and servants to some understanding of their respective spheres, and had even given the latter an inkling of that thin, gray line between cleanliness and its opposite. A trivial incident will demonstrate to what lowly point of view my recent experiences had brought me. When my host showed me into a large guest-room, I caught sight, in the semi-obscurity, of a reed mat on the floor, and through me flashed a thrill of joy that I should have this to sleep on, instead of the cold, dank tiles. Whereas, on closer view this proved to be the foot-mat before a huge colonial bedstead, regally furnished with soft mattresses and spotless woolen blankets. My host even apologized for the absence of sheets. As if I should have recognized that forgotten flora, even in its native habitat! Yet my misgivings of playing the rÔle of Hugo’s maltreated hero materialized. Whether it was due to the fever within me struggling for existence, or to the all-too-sudden return to luxury, I tossed sleeplessly well into the night, and it was rolled up on the mat on the tile floor that the cold, steel-gray dawn creeping in at the wooden-barred windows found me.

The “road” across soggy highland meadows and past those fantastic heaped-up peaks and splintered ranges of black rocks that give the “Hacienda Yanacancha” (“Black Rocks”) its name, was largely imaginary. At first, within sprinting distance of the house, were a few inhabited haycocks of shepherds, like Esquimaux dwellings of weather-blackened pajonal in place of snow and ice, with a hole to crawl in at on all fours. Then the visible world, straining ever higher, spread out into a rolling mountain-top, a totally uninhabited region where was heard only the mournful sighing of the wind across a boundless, rolling, yellow-brown sea of the dreary bunch-grass of the upper Andes. Across it the often invisible way undulated with such regularity that I was continually descending into or climbing out of hollows trodden to a mud pudding about the cold streams that wandered down from the scarcely more lofty heights. There were myriad hiding-places behind the jagged gray rocks piled erratically along the way, from which evil-doers might have picked me off. So notorious is this region for its mishaps to travelers that natives rarely cross it except in large groups. But the wholesome respect in which a “gringo,” especially one who carries a shooting-iron prominently displayed, is held is the best protection in Latin-America, far more so than an escort of native soldiers, the presence of which is apt to imply to the lurking bandit an admission of inability to depend on one’s gringo self, even if the soldiers do not prove confederates of the outlaws or run away at sight of them.

On and ever on the cold, desolate, inhospitable despoblado rose and fell in broad swells or billows, the barren, yellow, uninhabited world sighing mournfully to itself. This long day is obligatory on all who come to Cajamarca from the north, for there is no halting-place in all the expanse of puna south of Yanacancha. I should have covered the thirty-five miles before the day was done, had not a long dormant or newly acquired fever suddenly broken out in mid-afternoon. Every setting of one leg before the other was as great an effort as jumping over a ferry-boat, yet I must prod myself pitilessly on, for to be overtaken by night on this inhospitable, wind-swept puna would have been worse than fever. With infinite struggle I came at last to where this broadest of pÁramos began to fall away toward the north; then the slope contracted to a gully that gathered together the score or more of separate but not distinct paths that make up the “highway” across the lofty plain, and brought me before sunset to the first of a scattered cluster of stone and mud kennels. A leather-faced old Indian, speaking the first Quichua I had heard since Cuenca, gave me a handful of ichu-grass to sit on outside the smaller of his two huts, and left me to the company of his prowling yellow curs. Night had fallen completely before a woman brought me a gourd of boiling potato mush, but at length the chary old Indian, overcoming his racial indifference and distrust, opened the door of the hut against which I lay and let me into a sort of Incaic warehouse. In it were heaps of the huge balls of yarn spun by the Indian women on their prehistoric spindles, a supply of pÁramo grass I might spread on the earth floor, and several large bolts of homespun cloth of coarse texture and cruder colors with which I might feather my arctic nest, once it was late enough to hope the owner would not catch me at it.

In the adjoining family hut a baby had been crying incessantly for an hour or more. The after-chill of the fever was settling upon me when a young Indian entered, bearing the infant, and a handful of twisted grass as torch. Without preliminary he requested me, if I understood his language, to spit in the child’s face.

“I don’t get you,” I replied, in my most colloquial if imperfect Quichua.

“Do me the favor to spit in its face,” he repeated, and by way of illustration spat swiftly and lightly, with the point of his tongue between his lips, a fine spray in the face of the squalling infant.

“But why not do it yourself?” I protested.

“Manam, viracocha; it must be some one the guaguita does not know.”

When it had become evident that there was no other way of being left in peace, I rose and sprayed the infant. To my astonishment it ceased its wailing instantly, stared wide-eyed into my face until the father turned away, and was not again heard during the night. Floor-walking benedicts may adopt this bit of domestic science from the ancient civilization of the Incas free of charge.

There were but nine miles left to do in the morning, but the mere numeral gives little hint of the real task. Both road and bridges continued strikingly conspicuous by their absence; for hours the atrocious trail zigzagged unevenly, at times almost perpendicularly down what was left of the mountainside. Then it forded waist-deep the Cajamarca river, and joining a Sunday-morning procession of market-bound Indians with a clashing of colors almost equal to those of Quito, picked its way around stony foothills along a slowly widening valley gradually checkered with the varying greens of cultivation. The cool summer air and a more passable road drew me ever more swiftly on; the sound of church-bells, musically distant, floating northward on the breeze, located vaguely somewhere among the eucalyptus trees ahead the end of the third stage of my Andean journey. Huts turned to houses, thicker and thicker along the way, until they grew together into two unbroken rows. The air grew heavy with the scent of the “Australian gum”; I passed under an aged, whitewashed arch straddling the street, and on April 27, at the hour of the return from mass, found myself creaking along the canted, flagstone sidewalks of famous old Cajamarca, the first real city, even in the South-American sense, I had come upon in Peru. Armed and bedraggled, with an alforja hanging heavy over one shoulder, I presented no conventional sight. Yet the cajamarquinos gave me comparatively slight attention. No doubt they were accustomed to such apparitions; Pizarro and his fellow-roughnecks could have been little less way-worn and weather-bleached when they rode in upon Cajamarca over these same hills. According to careful calculation I had walked 1773 miles from BogotÁ, 929 from Quito. Of the 79 days from the Ecuadorian capital I had spent thirty in the towns and hamlets along the way, and the remainder in whole or part on the road.

As far back as Ayavaca I had begun to hear praises of the “magnificent hotels” of Cajamarca. The disappointment was proportionately bitter. The “Hotel Internacional” was a defunct lodging-house, the “Hotel Amazonas,” further on, merely a row of rooms opening on the second-story balcony. They were tolerable rooms, with flagstone floors and wooden bed-springs, and had the extraordinary advantage of being in the second story, out of reach of staring passersby; but they were furnished only with the bare necessities and were covered everywhere with a half-inch, more or less, of dust. This was hardly to be wondered at. Pizarro and his band of tramps must have raised a deuce of a dust when they perpetrated the Conquest of Peru and took Atahuallpa into their tender keeping in the great plaza a short block away, on that Saturday evening, 381 years before. Strangest of all, the hotel rates were posted in plain sight, where even foreigners might see; forty cents a night, or thirty if the room was occupied a month or more. Evidently another fussy gringo had been here before me, for the printed rules contained the following bylaw:

“The seÑor passenger who shall desire to use two mattresses on the same bed will subject himself to the payment of ten cents above the ordinary pension.”

The original motive could not have been Hays; for the notice was yellow with time, and the manager-chambermaid, though he gave me many details of the doings of my erstwhile companion as he gradually got my indispensable requirements together, with great care not to remove the historic dust anywhere, did not mention any such gringo idiosyncrasy. Every non-resident of Cajamarca, be he a tawny, soil-incrusted Indian from up in the hills, or the representative of some ambitious European house, eats in one of two Chinese fondas, or take-your-chances restaurants, not far off the main plaza. The transient enters a Celestial general-store, passes through it and a dingy room, crowded with tables about which barefoot Indians, male and female, their aged felt hats on their heads, are helping themselves with spoons or fingers, and through another doorless door into a smaller chamber with a single long table covered by an oilcloth of long and troubled history, where he is sure to find a place because of the requirement of shoes. During the process he will pass close by the open kitchen with its iron cooking-range—the first I had seen in South America—manipulated by a grizzled old Chinaman. The service is À la carte and, but for the shoes and oilcloth, identical in both dining-rooms. Here one will find a greasy strip of paper with a printed menu, easily comprehensible to anyone with a Spanish and Quichua dictionary, a treatise on Peruvian coast slang, and some smacking of Chinese in Spanish misspelling; or which, in the very likely event of the client being unable to read, the barefoot waiter will recite in Shakespearean cadence and breathless continuity. Indeed, but for the language, one might fancy oneself back on the lower Bowery as the waiter bawls to the kitchen:

“Un churrasco!”

“Un bistÉ fogoso!”

“Hasta cuando esos choclos?”

The high cost of living, like the railroad decreed by congress in 1864, had not yet climbed over the range into Cajamarca. The dishes are 2½ or five cents each. There are, to be sure, a few ten-cent ones, but these are what terrapin would be with us, and their consumption is not encouraged, being above the tone of Cajamarca. The first price covers a dozen delicacies, such as “patitas con arroz—pigs’ feetlets with rice,” fried brains, liver, or chupe, the Irish-stew of the Andes. At five cents the epicure to whom money is no object may have a breaded “bistÉ” with onions, rice, and potatoes, a “baefs teak paÍ,” “rosbif de cordero—roast beef of mutton—” “a beefsteak of pork,” and a score of even more endurable concoctions. Chocolate, which is native to the region and excellently made, is 2½ cents; a cup of coffee, which no one in Cajamarca knows how to make, costs twice that. Eggs “in any style” are two cents each, and a loaf of bread, of the size of a biscuit, one cent—for in Cajamarca the traveler first finds the huge copper one-cent and half-cent pieces. The greatest gourmand sailing the high seas could not spend more than fifteen, or possibly twenty cents, for a dinner in Cajamarca—and a “tip” is unknown.

The only wheeled vehicle I saw in Peru during my first three months in that country