Tramping down the Andes is like walking on the ridge of a steep roof; there is a constant tendency to slip off on one side or the other and slide down to the Pacific or the Amazon. The Latin-American is only too prone to follow the line of least resistance, and that line is not along the crest of the Andes where the more manly Incas traveled. The villager obliged to journey to another town of the Sierra a hundred miles north or south will ride muleback something more than that to the nearest port, take ship to another harbor, and ride another hundred miles up into the interior to his destination. Hence the excellent highway that might have been built down all the backbone of the continent, or at least the Inca one that might have been kept up, does not exist. Each community is confined to its own valley and cut off from the rest by almost untrodden mountain ranges, or by trackless bare ridges where only sheep and their hardy shepherds can live. Under the beneficent rule of the Incas means of intercommunication were infinitely better than to-day; then, roads and bridges were kept in constant repair, and in all exposed parts, at intervals along the cold punas and among the mountain gorges, were government tambos with shelter and food for both man and llamas.

To journey from Cajamarca to Lima would have been easy; I had only to hire a mule to Pacasmayo and catch a passing steamer. But to reach there by the route I had proposed to myself was another matter. Even Raimondi’s famous map of Peru, in 25 folios, over which I spent a morning in the prefect’s parlor, offered scanty information, a few faint lines representing trails leading almost anywhere except where I would go. The only route at all suited to my purpose seemed to be one through Huamachuco and Huraraz, and along the valley of the Santa river. Near the source of this it looked as if I must turn back almost due north and climb over the uninhabited, snowclad Cordillera Central, whence it might be possible to reach Cerro de Pasco. Local information was not even equal to the assertion of Prescott—who had never been nearer South America than the southern coast of Massachusetts—that “the messengers of Pizarro from Caxamalca to Cuzco followed the elevated regions of the Cordillera through many populous towns, of which the chief were Guamachuco, GuÁnuco, and Xauxa.” At best I had to leave the scene of Atahuallpa’s undoing with little knowledge of where I was going, except southward.

Certain preparations were essential before I plunged again into the all but unknown. The trip from Loja—the longest sustained hardship I had ever undergone—had left me a sadly depleted wardrobe. Especially were my walking-boots in the last stages. The shops of Cajamarca had no heavy ones among their stock, but I had hoped, with the assistance of the prefect, to buy a pair of the shoes manufactured for the use of the garrison-police. The department chief, however, put off wiring the president, or laying the matter before congress, until it was too late. A friendly shoemaker advised me to apply privately to a soldier or policeman.

“But they have only one pair each,” I protested.

“True,” replied the zapatero, “pero se roban entre ellos—they steal from each other.”

This hint also had been too long delayed, and I was forced to trust to native patching to carry me over the indefinite region to the next source of supply. As to socks, I had found that the best for tramping the Andes were none at all; that is, a better substitute were the “fusslappen” of the German soldier,—a square of cotton flannel on which to set the foot diagonally, fold over the three corners, and thrust it into the boot. The small silver pieces that came to me each time I threw down a sovereign on the Chinaman’s counter, I had laid away for the road ahead, spending the heavy coppers and the cartwheel soles. This petty point is extremely important in the Andes, for even the man able and willing to toss out gold for every banana he buys often finds villages of the Sierra where the yellow metal will not be accepted; and those who might otherwise be willing to change a large coin are frequently afraid to show that they have so much money on hand. The rucksack style of carrying had proved burdensome. For the load that remained I made a leather harness, not unlike suspenders, with half my possessions balanced against the rest. Then, having squandered 21 cents in the greatest banquet known to the Chinaman’s back room, I climbed the fortress hill to watch for the last time the interwoven colors of the setting sun across the rich vale of Cajamarca.

It was the seventh of May when I struck southward again along the valley floor. A wide highway sidestepped out of the city; but barely had the scent of this been left behind than a shallow river took possession of the entire width of the road. There is a sort of lawlessness both of man and nature in the Andes, and many is the hacendado who thus calmly makes use of the public highway as his irrigation ditch. When Hernando de Soto was sent with fifteen horse to visit the Inca at his baths a few miles south of the city, “they followed a fine causeway across the plain and came to a small stream with a bridge, but, distrusting its strength, dashed through the water.” An hour from town I, too, was dashing through the water, boots in hand, not because I distrusted the bridge, but because there was not the vestige of a bridge left to distrust.

Beyond the stream were the famous “BaÑos del Inca,” now owned by the city of Cajamarca. In the barnyard of a stone and adobe hacienda a chola woman sent an Indian boy to open for me an adjoining baked-mud room, in the floor of which was a rough-stone swimming-pool nearly ten feet square. Into this steaming sulphurous water was pouring. But as a group of Indians were washing themselves and their rags in the source of supply outside, I was forced to relinquish the rare pleasure of a hot bath, even in so famous a setting. Historians report the existence of an ancient stone bathtub that was used by the Incas, but the woman was certain there had been none in the vicinity during her career as caretaker.

The road she pointed out emerged from the back gate of the hacienda and mounted the steaming brook. Higher up, where I thrust a hand in it, the water was just hot enough to be bearable. The valley of Cajamarca, stretching far southward, had promised level going for a day or two. But though there was plenty of space for it on the valley floor, the camino real, true to its Andean environment, preferred to clamber up and down over stony, barren, broken ridges. Before noon it had raised me to a pÁramo where several cold, blue lakes swarmed with wild ducks that were not even gun-shy. An Indian I fell in with said they were never hunted, “because when they fall there is no way to enter the water and get them.” Evidently, like his forebears of centuries ago, he had never heard of a strange invention called a boat.

Two days of stony going, now between hedges of ripe tunas, now over high ridges, gashed and tumbled, by a trail thirsty despite the frequent fording of luke-warm streams gray with decomposed rock, brought me to San Marcos in a tropical and fruitful valley withered by a long drought. On the faÇade of the little drygoods shop and government salt-store of the absent gobernador hung a huge sign beginning “SOCORRO PEONES,” implying that the owner was also a “hooker” of workmen for a German-owned sugar estate down on the coast. When I presented my order from the prefect of the department, the wife of San Marcos’ chief “authority” ordered her cholas to prepare me dinner at once.

“I did not come to the gobernador that he should personally furnish me accommodations,” I protested. “I only want him to use his authority with those who make a business of lodging strangers.”

“There is no such place in San Marcos,” replied the woman, locking up shop and leading me into her parlor, musty with disuse, “but all travelers are welcome here.”

Behind the divan to which she motioned me stood a life-size figure of the Virgin, flanked by another of Saint Somebody. In honor of the arrival of a stranger, perhaps, the matron soon reappeared with several serving-women and, stripping the “Madre de DiÓs” to her bamboo-structured nudity, reattired her in four gowns, each of which was far more costly than those worn by any of the living beings present. Then she set a newly polished crown on the head of the image and, falling on her knees before it, began to rock back and forth imploring her intercession in a monotonous singsong. With dusk appeared the gobernador, accompanied by two traveling salesmen, and having ordered the three mules picketed, he spent a long evening bewailing with them the rising cost of commodities “of first necessity, even our very aguardiente and pisco, seÑores.” In the act of looking over my papers, his eye was caught by a typewritten document in English.

“Ah, los yanquis!” he cried. “They are so up-to-date they even avoid the labor of writing by having their letters printed. But how can they afford it?”

“Una mÁquina para escribir,” I explained.

“A writing-machine!” he gasped. “Is there such a thing? I must have one at once, for I never can spell things right.”

The village church having lost its roof, most of the old women in town gathered with my hostess in the adjoining parlor and droned for hours before her bamboo saints. For a long time the gobernador gave no heed to the uproar, though it forced him to raise his voice almost to a shout. Then suddenly he broke off an enumeration of prices with an angry:

“HÁgame el favor!” (In the Andes the expression corresponds closely to our colloquial “What do you know about that?”) “Por DiÓs, those beatas would pray a man insane!” and dashing into the parlor, he broke up the meeting forthwith, and sent the manto-wrapped women scurrying out through the zaguan like startled crows.

For all her religious duties my hostess found time to set down in my note-book the recipe of the most potent beverage that has come down from the Inca civilization,—the chicha de jora, at the making of which that served with the evening meal proved her an adept. In a laborious school-girl hand, and with a wealth of misspelling that suggested that she, too, could have used a “writing-machine” to advantage, she wrote:

“Take ripe, shelled corn, cover with water and leave a week or more until the kernels have sprouted. Dry in the sun two or three days. Crush to a mass, boil, and place, when cold, in jars three-fourths full, adding sugar sufficient to cause fermentation.”

Despite her piety and attitude of Moorish seclusion, she entered into the conversation with a frankness peculiar to the Latin race. Not the least startling of her naÏve questions was:

“How many children have you?”

“I am not married,” I answered.

“Of course you are not married,” she replied, “being a traveler all over Peru and the outside world, but have you really no children at all?”

At daybreak the gobernador sent a boy and a horse to set me across—and all but spill me into—a rock-strewn river below the town, “because it is very dangerous to wet the feet in the morning.” IchocÁn, two leagues beyond San Marcos, sits high and cold on an eminence. Behind it the trail sloped languidly upward, then pitched headlong down through a stony, desert-dry wilderness, inhabited only by cactus and wild asses, to the Condebamba river, its lower valley of densest-green a relieving contrast to the dreary, arid mountain flanks. Across the roaring gorge a bridge of steel cables, supported by railway rails, has taken the place of the chaca of woven willow withes of Inca days. But it still looked frail and aËrial enough, swaying high above the racing stream that would quickly have swept a stumbling traveler through rock-walled hills to the MaraÑÓn and the Amazon, and the few arrieros who follow this route have no easy task in driving their donkeys across it.

A pole-and-mud hut on the dreary slope of the further bank housed the guardian of the bridge, a fever-laden skeleton who was barely able to crawl after an unbroken year of paludismo, the intermittent fever of the Andes that lurks in all such sunken valleys as that of the Condebamba. I might better have spent the night on the hillside beyond, than to have tossed it through on the hut floor, swarming with some species of shark-jawed insect. Luckily I was not offered the first bowl of chicha before I found the guardian’s female companion concocting the family supply, for her method was little less disillusioning than that of the yuca-chewing JÍvaros Indians. When it had been boiled in a huge kettle that spent its days of disuse as a nesting-place for the family curs, the liquid was poured off into a long, shallow tub, like a small dug-out canoe, the same one that would serve another purpose on wash-day. Squatted on the ground beside it, the woman was stirring it slowly with a stick she had caught up at random. Bit by bit two gaunt and mangy curs slunk nearer, until their noses all but touched the steaming liquid, whereupon the woman left off her stirring long enough to rap them over the head with the ladle. The dogs retreated a yard or two with cowardly yelps, only to repeat the advance over and over again. The chola’s vigilance, it turned out, was not due to any unwonted sense of cleanliness; she was merely bent on saving the animals from burning themselves. As soon as she judged the liquid cool enough, she gave a sign, and the curs fell upon the tub and greedily lapped up the scum. Thus saved the labor of skimming it, the female crawled to her feet and set the stuff away in earthen jars to ferment.

One barren, stony ridge after another in pitiless succession carried me much higher before the following noonday. My course now lay well east of south, for I had caught the swing of the west coast of South America. One last mighty surge and the world fell away before me, disclosing almost within shouting distance the provincial capital of Cajabamba. But it is a good rule in the Andes never to sit down in the plaza until you reach the town. Between me and the day’s goal lay hidden one of those mighty holes in the earth that mean the undoing and repetition of all the toil that has gone before. The shadows were beginning to climb the eastern wall of Cajabamba’s valley before I reached the century-polished cobbles of the street that had swallowed up the converging trails.

The plump young subprefect, who was awaiting me in state upon my return from the Chinese fonda to which a soldier had piloted me, would have been rosy-cheeked had not some careless ancestor faintly clouded his family tree and given a quaint kink to his hair. He returned my papers with a regal bow and bade me make my home in his office as long as I chose to honor Cajabamba with my presence. The “bed” was a blanket on the yielding, earth-covered floor; but I had twenty soldiers at my beck and call, and what mattered it if, each time I would make my toilet, I must go to jail? Luckily the rust-hinged doors and chain-weighted gates creaked with as pompous humility and dignified alacrity for my exit as to admit me, though there were those within who had not passed them in twenty years.

By the time I was city-dressed, the subprefect, pomaded and be-frocked within an inch of his life, fluttered into my boudoir to ask, in breathless oratorical periods, if, inasmuch as he had just been married last week, or during the night, and mother down on the coast was dying to know what the new acquisition looked like and there were no photographers in Cajabamba and it was a pity Peru was so backward, would I not have the fineza to take fifteen or twenty pictures of him and his novia and deliver a few dozen finished and mounted prints for him and her and their relatives and friends and compadres and associates within an hour or two? As the carelessness of my American agent had left me almost filmless, this was neither the first nor the last time I was put to the unpleasant necessity of “faking” a picture. To have refused his request, even with humble apologies and laborious explanations, would have been to win the ill-will of Cajabamba’s ruler and all his dependents, had it not resulted in the trumping up of some transparent excuse to turn me out and refuse me official assistance in finding other lodgings. A photographer speaking some Spanish could pick up much silver down the crest of the Andes; it would have been a kindness if he had made the trip a few days ahead of me. To be sure, these official requests were always useful, in a way. While the powdered and perfumed “authorities” were puffing themselves up to the requisite pomposity, the town was sure to gather alongside, and as neither the fancied nor the real subjects were well enough versed in mechanics to know whether a kodak operates endwise or sidewise, I caught many a nonchalant pose of some really worthwhile bystander that I might have begged for in vain. On this occasion the novia, having spent a few hours in completely disguising herself, as women will under the circumstances the world over, appeared at last, deathly pale with rice powder, and the pair assumed a score of fetching poses under my direction. True, it was dark by that time. But the subprefect saw no reason why a photograph should not be taken by the light of three sputtering candles. He preferred it, indeed, to embracing his newly-won treasure in the public glare of day. But the night had grown aged before he feigned to understand the impossibility of immediate delivery, and he accepted only sulkily my promise to send the finished portraits back from the next city, “if they turned out well.”

During my morning stroll about town I was accosted in English from the zaguan of a building of dilapidated adobe splendor. So often had I heard a laborious “Goot mawnin, seer, how do yo do?” from some silly youth whose knowledge of foreign tongues began and ended with that phrase, that I nodded and passed on. I have too much affection for my mother tongue to hear it gratuitously maltreated; moreover, it had lain so long idle that to speak it had come to seem an affectation.

This time, however, the speaker continued with faultless fluency:

“I hear you are an American.”

“Just so.”

“I am Carlos Traverso, at your service; graduate of an American university.”

“Which one?”

“Michigan.”

“Indeed! So am I.”

“VÁlgame DiÓs!” gasped the youth, betrayed by astonishment into his native tongue for a moment. “Can’t you come around to my room, your own house, as I should say in Peru. You probably haven’t seen the latest copy of the ‘Alumnus’?”

“Nor the twenty latest ones. With the greatest of pleasure.”

In spite of myself I found my tongue translating the set Castilian phrases I had so long been using, instead of falling into the colloquialisms of my own land. When I was ensconced in an American armchair battered with the evidence of a long journey and of the crude unloading facilities of West Coast ports, surrounded by walls hidden under banners and photographs that seemed to turn the adobe chamber into a college dormitory transported to the wilds of the Andes, the youth went on:

“The government of Peru gives four betas, that is, sends yearly an honor student to each of four American universities, with an allowance of a hundred dollars a month....”

“That is, you had $4800 for the course at Michigan?”

“Yes, with traveling expenses. You probably had about the same allowance?”

“Fortunately not, or I should long since have been gracing some home for inebriates. And is this just a present from the government?”

“No; on our return we must serve the government for three years at the same salary. I am superintendent of schools in this and the neighboring province of Huamachuco.”

The son of a Scandinavian father, Traverso had evidently overcome the handicap of an allowance the spending of which would have consumed the entire energies of a full-blooded Latin-American, and had brought back a real education. His shelves were filled with the latest treatises on pedagogy, in several languages, and a brief acquaintance was enough to show that he was earnestly striving to instill some new life into the moribund system of his native land.

“But what’s the use?” he concluded gloomily, casting aside a carefully worked out plan of study. “A man’s wings are clipped before he can start to fly. Theoretically I have full authority over school matters in my two provinces; practically I can’t alter by a hair the benighted medieval routine of studies, interwoven at every turn by the lives of the saints, that Peru has stumbled along under for centuries. I can’t fire a fifteen-dollar-a-month numskull up in one of the mountain villages, even though he doesn’t know whether Chile is in New York or in Europe. The priests have their wires attached to every government leg and arm in the country, and I feel like a man lying by, bound hand and foot, watching our children being criminally assaulted. The money the government spends on us might as well be chucked into the Pacific.”

“To say nothing of squandering on one student what would easily suffice for three,” I put in.

“Caramba, it is true! In Ann Arbor life is calm and quiet; but you ought to see what some of the betados who are sent to Paris and Rome bring back with them! VÁlgame DiÓs!”

The valley of Cajabamba leans decidedly to the west, whence the next day was largely one of mounting. But the region is so high that climbing was not laborious in the invigorating mountain air that cuts into the lungs like strong wine; and even a man inclined to that frailty could not have felt lonely with so much of the world spread out in plain sight about him. There were few long spaces without houses or pack-trains. Once I fell in with a government chasqui driving a horse and an ass laden with sacks of mail, among which stood out one marked conspicuously: “U. S. Mail
Foreign.” The correspondence, he assured me, was not bound for the “exterior,” but was merely local matter between towns of the route that had been farmed out to him, a statement that was confirmed at the next post-office.

A mighty crack in the earth, into and out of which the trail zigzagged like some badly wounded creature, marked my exit at last from the department of Cajamarca into that of Libertad. The ancient Inca highway is said to have followed this same route over these high, undulating plains, but there were no certain vestiges of it. In the late afternoon I burst suddenly out upon a broad view of the famous old city of Huamachuco, much like Quito in setting, though more dreary, backed by a ragged, black range, half cut off by a nearer slope, that might have been Pichincha itself, the two peaks streaked with the first snow I had seen since leaving central Ecuador.

Traverso had given me a note of introduction to his compadre, Dr. Alva, the mÉdico titular of Huamachuco. As government doctor, the only physician, indeed, within two hard days’ ride in any direction, he drew—theoretically, at least—a salary of $150 a month, exceeding even that of the haughty subprefect. The “son” of a hamlet far up in the hills, he was a plain, earnest, little man with a heart several times larger than the average of his fellow-countrymen. From his lips the stereotyped “Here you are in your own house” had real meaning. His library included Spanish editions of Taine, Nietzsche, Emerson—and Roosevelt; his phonograph was of high grade and his records well chosen. Edison was his ideal of manhood—indeed, a straw vote in the Andes would certainly show the “wizard of Orange” the most popular American—and he was wont to boast jokingly that his own name was the same as one of those of the inventor, “showing that some of our ancestors were the same.” Toward the end of my stay I discovered that the doctor, having installed me in his well-furnished “guest-room,” was himself huddling out the cold nights on a bag of straw and a wooden table in the mud den behind his “office.”

It was not until we had grown rather well acquainted that Dr. Alva confided to me the fact that he had “worked his way” through the medical school of Lima, “even acting as waiter, seÑor, in a fonda, and working in the summer like any peon. But don’t whisper a word of this to anyone in Peru,” he implored, as if he suddenly regretted having taken me into his confidence.

“Up in my country those of us who did that are inclined to boast of it,” I laughed.

“Ah, sÍ, seÑor, I know,” he answered in an undertone, glancing cautiously about him, “I know; even TomÁs Alva Edison was a newsboy. But if Huamachuco ever hears of it I shall be a social outcast, ranked with the Indians of the market-place.”

Huamachuco derives its name, if local authority is trustworthy, from the Quichua words huama (snow) and chuco (cap), the peak behind the town having in earlier centuries been completely snow-topped. It is the “Guamachuco” of Prescott, to which Hernando Pizarro was sent soon after the capture of Atahuallpa, to investigate the rumor that an army was being raised to rescue the imperial prisoner. Even to-day its population is largely Indian, among whom the chewing of coca leaves is general—the first place south of Almaguer in Colombia of which this could be said.

But the Huamachuco of to-day does not exactly coincide with that of Pizarro’s time. The effete descendants of a more hardy race have crawled down into a sheltering valley, leaving uninhabited the ancient “city of the Gentiles” on the mountain above. A local editor, apparently for no better reason than the pleasure of basking in a gringo smile, offered to serve me as guide. A stony road flanked ever higher along a perpendicular rock-wall, then rose and fell over lofty undulations, and at some six miles from the modern town brought us to the first ruins. Far below, across a deep quebrada, lay, like a relief map, the great rectangle of a ruined city, in perfect squares, the roofless stone gables standing forth in fantastic array above a forest of low trees. This was Viracochapampa, or “Plain of the Nobles,” the resident city at the time of the Conquest. Through its broad central street passed the great Inca highway from Quito to Cuzco.

But that was the least important part of ancient Huamachuco. Here on the barren mountain-top stood in olden times Marca-Huamachuco, protecting the dwelling-place on the stony plain below. Above the modern town are still to be found remnants of the cuchilla, or stone trough by which the ancient race brought water to this lofty summit by some system that has been lost in the haze of time. About us, as we advanced, rose ruin after stone ruin of what had evidently been an elaborate series of fortresses. These spread mile upon mile across the rugged, undulating tableland, some densely interwoven with brambles and impenetrable thickets, all surrounded by the utter silence of a world long since abandoned by man and brute. Indeed, the place was less remarkable for its construction than for the vast extent of the ruins. Several large edifices, square or triangular in shape, were built of huge blocks of stone, still in the same form in which they might have been found as mountain boulders, and, unlike the fortress of Ingapirca, nowhere nicely fitted together. On the contrary, nearly every joint was filled in with chips of stone, and in the thick interior walls had been used a sort of crude concrete, now mere gravelly mud that could be picked out with the fingers. Whether Marca-Huamachuco was built by an earlier people, or by a more careless tribe of the race that left behind the cut-stone palaces of Cuzco, their method of construction did not make for durability. The ruins were all serrated and tooth-shaped, with only here and there a jagged point suggesting the original height, the whole cutting the far-off horizon with a fantastic, broken sky-line. An enormous wall had evidently once surrounded the entire peak, and beyond, set close together, was a series of almost round fortresses, each of three stone walls, one inside the other. One more carefully constructed edifice gave evidence of having been the chief palace, and from it stretched an unobstructed view of all the surrounding landscape, in which an advancing enemy might have been sighted league upon league away in any direction.

It was in Huamachuco that the first hint of what later proved to be amoebic dysentery overtook me, recalling to memory the medicine-case I had abandoned in Cuenca as a useless burden. A disturbing lack of energy settled upon me, my appetite failed—a startling symptom, indeed—and I felt as if I had inadvertently swallowed one of the largest ruins of Marca-Huamachuco. It was with no rousing pleasure, therefore, that I set off, laden with hard-boiled eggs and a supply of the stony local bread, on the lonely twelve-league tramp that intervenes between the residence of Dr. Alva and the next town.

Four leagues south, the well-marked road swung to the right and, wading the shallow Huamachuco river, I struck off for Trujillo and comparative civilization on the coast. The faint path to the left bore me even higher across an uninhabited world, dreary with its endless expanse of dead-yellow ichu. Here were distinct remnants of the old Inca highway. For several miles across the undulating pÁramo the way lay between two rows of stones, set upright a considerable distance apart, and enclosing a space wide enough for six or seven carriages, had they existed, to pass abreast. If, as the inhabitants of the region assert, this is a good example of that great military highway of the Incas, the descriptions of chroniclers and historians have far outdone the reality. Gomara reports it “twenty-five feet wide, cut in a straight line from the living rock, or made of stone and lime, turning aside neither for mountains nor lakes.” Prescott speaks of “highways carefully constructed of cut slabs of freestone and porphyry,” which only proves how incompetent to judge things South American is the most competent man who has not been there in person. Those who have visited Spain know how easily the title “camino” is granted, and the Conquistadores, like the Peruvians of to-day, having in many cases probably never seen a real road, had no means of comparison. Certainly this Inca highway had nothing to justify the extravagant praise of those who compared it to the old Roman roads. The most that had been done in the way of road building was to clear the plain of loose rocks—in conspicuous contrast to the modern Peruvians, who look upon a road as a convenient place to toss the stones picked up in their fields. Stone-heaps here and there along the Andes mark forever the routes of travel of Inca days, but they are chiefly achapetas, piles thrown up by travelers, who tossed upon them, as votary offering, a cud of coca. Of the tambos, rest-houses maintained at frequent intervals by the imperial government, like the dak bungalows of India, not even the ruins of one in a hundred remain standing, and the traveler of to-day is far more exposed to the elements than in the times of the Incas.

The Andes rise ever higher from north to south and from west to east, whence I was far above Huamachuco when I dragged myself into the “VaquerÍa Angasmarca,” a cluster of cobblestone hovels barely four feet high, home of an Indian cow-guard, in one of the most dreary, stony settings in South America. Unable to get even hot water, I dared not eat the heavy fiambre I carried. I had huddled for hours on a stone under the projecting roof when, after dark, the vaquero himself rode in from Huamachuco. Having been a soldier, trained to a bit less immobility of temperament than his mate, he was partly cajoled, partly deceived, into ordering her to serve me a gourdful of potato soup, prepared under circumstances better imagined than described. For a long time he replied with dogged, apathetic persistence that he “only gave posado in the corredor,” but I succeeded at last in inducing him to furnish me a ragged blanket in a corner of his own sty, on the earth floor of which huddled the entire family and the customary menagerie of small animals.

The traveler who crawls out, blue with cold, after a night in one of these cobble caves of the highland Indian, to squat against the eastern wall until a gourd of warm water, savored with corn and the dung-fuel over which it is slowly half-heated, is thrust out at him, no longer wonders that the aboriginals of the Andes worshipped the sun. Every step of that day of excruciating climbs and stony descents, across dreary pÁramos on which I several times lost my way, was a bitter struggle; for all the demands of the will, my legs could not push me forward two miles an hour, and ever and anon they seemed to turn to straw and dropped me suddenly to the ground. All the visible world lay high and treeless now, with touches of snow on several black, shark-tooth peaks of the Cordillera to the eastward. During the day I had passed several more remnants of the old Inca highway, two continuous lines of weather-blackened upright stones set far apart on either side of a space a full half-block wide. Toward sunset the trail began to descend into a stony river-valley, far down which I made out a tiled building among eucalyptus trees. A passing horseman carelessly answered my question, while more engrossed in my appearance, by assuring me it was the hacienda house I was seeking; and I toiled a half-hour up the mountainside to it, only to have the solitary Indian female who occupied it point out far below, in the valley of the river, the “patrÓn’s” house of the “Hacienda Angasmarca.”

It was the most imposing country dwelling I had yet seen in Peru; a large village and two churches clustered about it, the entrance like that to some rough old medieval palace, the swarms of dependents carrying the mind back to feudal days. Around an immense flower and shrub-grown patio, in which Indian hostlers were struggling to unload a score of mules and horses, were some thirty rooms, each with a number above the door. I did not learn whether it was the custom of the owner to collect hotel charges, but the establishment was conducted in as heartless and impersonal a manner as if he did. He was a snarly old invalid who crawled about with a cane, growling orders to his cringing Indians, and too much taken up with his own infirmities to waste sympathy on others. With a grunt he thrust my letter of introduction into a pocket, ordering an Indian to unlock one of the numbered rooms. Stagnant with the atmosphere of a cheap hotel, it contained a bed with leather springs, a billowy mattress, and a sack of ichu as pillow, and only after a long struggle did I obtain a bowl of soup filled with tough beef and half-cooked yuca and potatoes, a dish barely endurable to a strong man in full health. It was late next morning before infinite patience won me a bowl of hot milk, and I dragged myself away almost due north. Across the world south of “Angasmarca” yawned a bottomless valley, beyond which a rocky mountain-wall rose to the very heavens. The road which should have followed in that direction was left to sneak out like some hunted thing for a vast detour, even before it began to crawl away eastward at right angles to the way I would have gone. At the outset was a laborious, stony climb, from the summit of which the “Hacienda Tulpo” lay in plain sight, but across one of those heartbreaking gashes in the earth so frequent in the Andes. On the left stood sharp, stark snow-peaks of the Cordillera, which seemed to grow mightier with each day southward. Noon had long since passed, yet there were barely eight miles behind me when I entered the general store of an hacienda building forming a hollow square around a dreary barnyard. The shopkeeper announced himself the owner of the estate—plainly by poetic license. There is a careful graduation of caste in the Andes that makes it easy for the experienced traveler to set any man’s place in the local society. This fellow’s dress, color, his familiar yet commanding manner toward the Indians who sneaked in all that Saturday afternoon to dawdle about the counter and buy bits of trash, draughts of native “rot-gut,” anything the place afforded except what might have been of some use to them, generally on credit, thus lengthening their slavery to the estate, all gave the lie to his assertion. But for all his posing, he turned out a kindly fellow. He not only sold me a half-dozen eggs—in itself a great kindness in the Andes—but dragged down from a shelf a sort of chafing-dish and light-boiled them. When I had drunk these, surrounded by a solid wall of stony-faced Indians who seemed to consider the feat remarkable, I still could not bestir myself to push on. By and by my eyes, wandering aimlessly over the stock that covered two walls to the ceiling, caught sight of a familiar ten-cent can of American tomatoes. I bought them at sixty cents. Long after an old woman had carried off the precious empty can, the shopkeeper spent all the leisure left him by the sluggish flow of now half-intoxicated Indians in thumbing over great sheaves of foreign bills of lading, and at length handed me thirty cents, with the announcement that he had inadvertently charged me for the “whole shipment”—of two cans!

When the dreary afternoon had at last dragged its leaden way into the past tense and chill sunset was creeping across this lofty world, I mentioned to the shopkeeper that I needed a spot on which to spend the night. The idea evidently had never occurred to him. The estate was mine, and all the wonders thereof—but for all that two more endless hours passed before a drink-saucy Indian led me to an icy harness-room and pointed out two bare saddle-pads on the earth floor.

Certainly that man is a fool who sets out on a trip down the Andes for pleasure; for after the first joys of roughing it have worn off, no more monotonously pleasureless existence is conceivable. There is, to be sure, a certain feeling of exclusiveness, a certain satisfaction in living through hardships, of moving by one’s own efforts over those parts of the earth where modern means of transportation are unknown; but even this soon wears off, and with the dreary sameness of each day the journey becomes chiefly a waste of time and effort, and a never-ending disappointment.

In the morning I crawled away along a world growing ever higher, until suddenly it fell abruptly into a chasm out-chasming anything I had yet seen in my worst nightmares. Across it, so high even from this height that it seemed not of our world, a town was pitched on the very tip of a gashed and haggard range. Fortunately my route seemed to lead off down the valley, and I was finding some grains of comfort in not having to ascend to that heavenly dwelling-place of man, whatever it might be called, when a passing horseman sapped my last drop of ambition by telling me it was Pallasca—exactly the place in which I must spend the night!

A long time had passed before I coaxed myself to creep slowly on, avoiding the view of the task before me as a criminal about to be executed might shade his eyes from the scaffold. An unconscionable distance down in the bottomless intervening valley, yet still high, I met the first foreign tramp I had yet seen on the road in South America. He was an Austrian of fifty, looking in his matted, lusterless hair and beard, and his drooping rags, like a corpse that had arisen for a stroll.

“Gehen Sie nicht weiter—Go no further south,” he pleaded weakly. “There everyone is dying of dysentery. Turn back with me to Trujillo and humanity.”

His illness had reached that stage when the invalid sees the leering head of disease rising on all sides, and fancies he may run away from what he carries with him. I could not, naturally, abandon a plan of years’ standing merely because of a temporary disability, and when we had exchanged some bits of road information each crawled slowly on his way.

In the hamlet of Mollepata, near the bottom of the quebrada, an old woman stirred herself to brew me some herb tea, into which she put a branch of ajenjo (wormwood) with the assurance that this was a quick and certain cure for my ailment. The descent had been bad enough; the climb out of that breathless gash in the earth was probably the most dismal experience of my career; I had not, to that day, nor do I expect again during this life, to accomplish a more bitter task than that struggle in intermittent rain, under my leaden load and Turkish-bath poncho, from the tablachaca, or earth-covered stick-bridge across the gorge-cut river forming the northern boundary of the department of Ancachs, to heaven-hung Pallasca. To make matters worse, the natives were united in the assertion that the source of my trouble was my habit of drinking at streams along the way; that at this altitude the water was not only too cold, but held in solution many minerals that made it unsafe. Long afterward I had reason to believe that this had little to do with the matter. But ready at the time to grasp at any straw, I threw away the film-tin that had served me as drinking vessel, resolved that not another drop of “raw” water should pass my lips—or at least my throat. The resolution called for every ounce of will-power. One of the chief pleasures of a walking trip had always been to quench my thirst whenever opportunity offered. Now the mountain rivulets that babbled down across my trail were tantalizing beyond belief, and I would gladly have given a gold sovereign—as long as they lasted—to have been able to drink my fill at each with impunity. Worst of all, there were no substitutes for water to be had, neither fruits, prepared drinks, nor any other relief from torture. On the day we sailed from Panama a Zone doctor had warned Hays and me, as the first and primary rule of the journey before us, always to boil our water. He little guessed the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of obeying that apparently simple commandment in the Andes.

Black night had long since fallen when I dragged myself into the central plaza of Pallasca, silent and dark except in the densely packed, candle-lighted church. A dimly illuminated shop on a far corner proved to be a tavern. My thirst had reached the point where drink was imperative, though the sentence were sudden death. I ran my eye over the shelves.

“There is wheesky cuzqueÑos,” wheedled the wooden-brained keeper, “and rhum jamaÏca, or French absinthe, or ...”

“Have you anything non-alcoholic?” I croaked.

“CÓmo no, seÑor! There is wine, and beer from Lima....”

In South America anything short of forty-percent alcohol does not count as such; even the law does not rate beer and wine “alcoholic liquors.” There being nothing better, I pointed out a bottle bearing the stamp of a Lima brewery.

The sentence was not exactly sudden death, but that may be because I had grown calloused to similar hardships. This Peruvian imitation of a German “dark” beer was thick and black as crude molasses, bitter as cascarilla bark, and more nauseating than old-fashioned medicine. With only the edge of my thirst blunted, I forced the rest of the bottle upon a bystander, not maliciously, but because I knew that a lifetime in the Andes had hardened him to anything; and turned to the question of lodging.

“You come right along with me,” cried the grateful bystander, smacking his all-enduring lips. “You will stop with the seÑor cura, like all travelers of importance.”

But the seÑor cura was in no condition to receive guests. In his large, over-furnished parlor around the corner the padre lay on a couch, the slouch hat over his red-bandaged head and a two-weeks’ lack of shave giving him a startling resemblance to the Spanish bandits of operatic fancy.

“No, compadre; I am sick, and I cannot give lodging,” he replied to every plea of my officious sponsor.

The several persons in the room entered into a whispered conference. Some time later I was aroused from my lethargy, and my cicerone and a light-haired youth led the way across the black plaza and up a steep, cobbled street which my legs all but refused to navigate under my heavy load—for though he would not leave a man who had treated him to the luxury of a glass of beer from the capital at a fabulous price until he had seen him safely housed, neither the bystander nor his companion could sink their baggy-kneed caste to the depth of carrying a bundle in the public street, even on a dark night.

When morning dawned I found myself rolled up in a heap of blankets on the earth floor of a long-disused parlor. Hours passed without a human being appearing. I pulled myself together and shuffled out into the patio of an immense, dilapidated house at the tiptop of the town, overlooking half a world and swept by all the winds of heaven. Pallasca has been likened to alforjas, so like a pair of saddlebags on the rump of a pack-animal does it hang down the two sides of a lofty nose of the range. Across the void, deep-blue in spite of the penetrating glare of the Andean sunshine, the Cordillera had tumbled her mountains recklessly in a tumultuous heap, as if the Builder of the world had left here his surplus of materials. The Andes have little of the color and varied charm of the Alps; but in awesome grandeur, and repulsive, savage mightiness they dwarf the latter by comparison. In a room down on the sunken street on which opened the patio zaguan, the light-haired youth and his brother kept the town drug-store. They were the sons of a German who had married in Peru, yet only their more robust frames and greater physical virility distinguished them from the common run of natives; in temperament they were as thoroughly what the Canal Zoner calls “Spig” as the most enemic of their fellow-townsmen. The older was an amateur doctor—with the accent on the adjective—the only one for scores of miles around. He prepared me a half-dozen obleas,—those saucer-shaped capsules of the Andean pharmacopoeia—of bismuth, prescribed a diet of chochoca molida—the Quichua-Spanish name for a thin cornmeal gruel—which might be substituted by chuÑo inglÉs, a sickly-sweet liquid starch—or wheat or rice soup, and assured me that I would be completely recovered in the morning. All the articles of diet were contingent on the possibility of getting the ingredients, which in the Andes is a distinct contingency. For thirst I was advised to take only boiled water with cinnamon or cimarruba bark; but even to get the former cost a constant struggle with the apathetic servants, and the necessity of dragging myself down to the stream on a corner of the plaza to cool the boiling pot.

Later in the day, while I lay contemplating the immense distance across the room, a young rag-patch came to say that the cura wished to see me. The mere novelty of a man of the cloth desiring my presence was so astonishing that it lent a bit of stiffness to my legs. I rose and wandered down across the main plaza, from the further side of which the world falls precipitously away into unfathomable void.

Detail of the ruins of “Marca-Huamachuco,” high up on the mountain above the modern town of that name. They are reputed to be at least 1000 years old