For a week I improved under the doctor’s care. I had already strolled once or twice around the neat little plaza, down upon which the massive, snowclad peaks gaze with paternal serenity. But my legs were still in that woven-straw condition that made my feet lead ingots; and no pleasure quite outdid that of lying abed watching the sunshine crawl across the floor, and listening to the keeper’s rooster challenging the world to combat. I should have regretted a controversy with that rooster during those days; I am sure he would have worsted me.

On Sunday, the first of June, the doctor did not appear; nor the next day, nor the next. Medicines and tonics ran out. I decided to push on next morning, before what strength I had regained evaporated entirely. But during the night there came upon me a pain under which I could only writhe and stuff my throat with bedclothes. When I had enjoyed this an hour or two, a brilliant thought struck me,—appendicitis! All the night through—for only the rooster slept within shouting distance—I painted fanciful pictures of a grave looked down upon by the paternal, serene peaks through the ages to come. For it was easy to guess how effectively the surgeons of the Andes would surge—with their butcher-knives, sheep-shears and ditch-water. In the morning I sent the caretaker to summon the doctor before he set out on his rounds. About nine he came back to announce, in a manner suspiciously sheepish, that the seÑor doctor mÉdico titular was confined to his bed. As the day wore on the fellow overcame his racial lack of initiative to the extent of bringing me a potion from the chief botica, but it had little effect. Then all at once “Taco,” the Japanese of Huaylas, grinned in on me through the bars of my window, and a half-hour later the keeper of the drug-shop had come in person.

“It is congestion of the bowels, seÑor,” he announced. “These pÍlduras will relieve it. The doctor was to have changed the treatment on Sunday to avoid this, but—”

“Is the doctor seriously ill?” I asked.

“SeÑor,” said the druggist, after a moment of hesitation, “on Saturday night the mÉdico titular took some liquor at a tertulia. It is fatal to him. He cannot stop. It is now four days that he has lain mareado” (seasick), “and he has not been able to visit one of his patients. Out in the pueblos three have already died; for there is no other doctor.”

I had been ten days in CarÁz when, in spite of a soreness within and an annoying lack of vigor, I decided to push on afoot. A broad road led south along the green and fertile valley of the Santa, shut in on either hand by the yellow, terra-cotta flanks of barren mountains as between unscalable walls. The way was well-peopled with broad-faced, stolid Indians speaking no Spanish, and a felt hat of tobacco-color was now taking the place of the dingy “panamas” that had been almost universal since southern Ecuador. It was only a simple day’s walk; eight miles to another provincial capital. But it seemed at least twenty, especially as the “perfectly level” road kept mounting steadily, for Yungay is a thousand feet higher than CarÁz. The snow-and-glacier mass of HuascarÁn, king of that magnificent snow-capped range that dwarfs the Alps, bulked menacingly almost sheer above the bucolic old plaza, when I plodded across it in the sleepy silence of noonday to the dwelling of an unusually simple-hearted subprefect.

Next morning Yungay stretched for miles along the half-cobbled highway, and had scarcely ended when Mancos began. This department of Ancachs and the valley of the Santa is the most densely populated region of Peru. The fifteen miles to CarhuÁz was what the Peruvians call an excellent road; to a people of wider outlook it would have been recognizable as a broad expanse of loose stones undulating over barren ridges, relieved by the bracing mountain air from off the blue-white bulk of HuascarÁn, here seeming to hang suspended overhead. The water of all this valley is reputed a source of several dread diseases, among them the warty verrugas indigenous to Peru. The bottle of boiled “tea-water” swinging from my leather harness lasted but a few dry miles, and I could only fall back, not without misgiving, on chicha, announced for sale by a little red flag before an occasional hut along the way. The bridge that once lifted the camino real across the swift, cold stream at the edge of the green oasis that marked the end of the day’s tramp had gone the way of most Peruvian bridges, and left me to wade waist-deep. Strangely enough, my host of Yungay had kept his word to telegraph the gobernador of CarhuÁz, and I sat down almost upon arrival with the family at a dinner served after the patriarchal manner of the Andes. To those of us at table the wife at the head granted the full meal, from the hot, peppery soup of Ancachs to the dessert of fried plantains in “honey,”—melted crude sugar. To the dozen Indian servants squatted along the wall she dished out frugally the coarser viands, to each according to his station in life, the bedraggled scullion getting only a small gourdful of boiled corn and yuca. During our Sunday stroll in the plaza the gobernador introduced me in the same careful order to every town celebrity, down to the last teniente; after which we of the Élite gathered round the town clerk in a corner of the square to hear read the weekly “bulletin,” from the two-line cable of foreign news “via Lima” to the last testimonial to the efficacy of the pills of Dr. Ross as a panacea of all earthly misfortunes.

I was miles south before the first rays of Monday’s sun fell upon me, and even after that was able to sneak along for hours in the shadow of the Cordillera, so closely did it stand above me. Town rapidly succeeded town, with miles of almost unbroken house-walls crowding a damnably cobbled road to barely the width of a wheeled vehicle. Not even along an English highway would more houses have been shops. The male population spoke a more or less fluent Spanish, weedy with terms from their native tongue; but the women either could not or would not use anything but Quichua. The dialect of the region contained a labor-saving devise in the phrase “A ’onde vueno?” serving for the more specific “Where do you come from and where are you going?” of less inventive sections. Not a few took me for a peddler, and called out from their doorways, “QuÉ lleva de venta, seÑor?” and some sent children running after me with a summons to return, lest they miss a precious opportunity for long-winded and chiefly futile bargaining. Ripened corn was being husked in the narrowing fields along the way. The repulsive, flanking ranges crowded closer and closer together, squeezing the stony road ever higher, until the hills closed in entirely, and a precipitous, barren ridge, cutting off the world to the south, left it no choice but to contract to a cobbled street of the department capital. The sun was setting when I halted at a corner of HuarÁz’ main plaza, my legs leaden with the twenty-five undulating, stony miles behind me, to inquire for that famous hotel rumor had pictured for weeks gone by.

The conviction came upon me that there would not be a hotel even in Lima. A citizen of HuarÁz did point out to me a building boasting itself the “Gran Hotel,” but all it offered was a few rooms to let. To me fell that of the zaguan, a prison-like chamber forming a front corner of the building and opening on both the street and the entrance to the patio. It had once been the oratorio of a private dwelling, and the altar and its decorations were still intact, except that the Virgin had flown from her niche. Across the way was a Chinese fonda with the same bill of fare, worse cooked, worse served, and more expensive than that of Cajamarca. This was the gathering-place of the Élite among the homeless transients. I had not the courage to investigate the dozen other Chinese and native “restaurants” scattered about town.

HuarÁz, capital of the most populous department of Peru and the largest city I had yet seen since crossing the frontier, is really but another mud village of the Andes, differing from the rest only in size. Its adobe buildings seldom rise above a story and a half in height; its rusticated inhabitants, in ragged, comic-opera costumes, the majority speaking only Quichua, were for the most part ill-bred and disagreeable in manner, especially to “gringos,” whose intelligence or cleanliness they seemed to resent. Even the small percentage of whites—real whites, that is, for there were many who no doubt mistakenly considered themselves so—were gaping mountaineers. Window-glass, to be sure, was to be found, and there were actually three or four clumsy, two-wheeled carts, like the rural wagons of England, the arrival of which was no doubt an event in the town history. Foreign residents were numerous, especially Chinamen, who owned many of the shops of importance, leaving the natives to squat in the street with their few cents’-worth of wares. The town itself has nothing “picturesque” about it, neither in the color and style of its houses nor the rags of its inhabitants; but this is far more than made up for by the magnificent range of snowclad peaks that climb up into the blue all about it, towering close above the town on the east and stretching away into the north, to end in the enormous blue-white mass of HuascarÁn. Its climate, colder than that of Quito and with a perpetually brilliant sunshine and an invigorating crispness to the air, was delightful. There was even a shelf of books for sale in one of the larger establishments, though the nearest I came to finding literature of the country for the road ahead was BjÖrnson’s “Sendas de DiÓs,” whatever it may be called in Norwegian.

Rumor had it that the tramp over the icy Cordillera Central that now lay before me would be “impossible,” even to a man in the most sturdy condition. To slip down to the coast and sail for Lima would have been easy, but a racial obstinacy forced me to pursue to the bitter end the task I had set myself, though it promised only the monotony of familiar experience and further intercourse with a people that had grown utterly antipathetic in habit, feature, and character. An American resident furnished me a horse and a peon for the first day’s journey. The prefect had favored me with the customary flowery document to his subordinates along the way, ordering them to “lend me all classes of facilities.” It would have been far more to the point had he commanded them more specifically to assist me to acquire an occasional plate of beans. The dusty road close along the diminishing river was well traveled, chiefly by long donkey trains and plodding, expressionless Indians. Huts and even small villages were frequent, the barren ranges crowding ever closer and dwindling almost to foothills, or rather seeming so to dwindle as we mounted ever higher. Beyond the bridge that carried us back to the right bank of the Santa were scores of little wheat-fields, often hanging far up the steep hillsides; and Indians were threshing the grain by driving their animals round and round the circles of hard earth in which it had been spread, and tossing it high in the air with wooden shovels until the wind had carried away the chaff. The monotonous mud town of Recuay, notorious for its horse-thieves, gazed stolidly upon us as we trotted on to Ticapampa, headquarters of a French mining company, the several tall chimneys of which were belching their smoke into the brilliant sky, their ugliness offset by the first suggestion of industry in Peru.

It cost me three days and several tramps back to Recuay to find a mount for the journey ahead. Walking would have been far less laborious. But there were sixteen leagues of bleak, foodless pÁramos and two snow-topped ranges separating me from the first suggestion of habitation on the further side of the great glacier-clad central chain of the Andes, that stretched away to north and south further than the eye could command, like an impassable barrier set by nature against the wilfulness of puny man.

Fortunately the wife of an Indian of Recuay celebrated that Sunday so effectually that she brought to bed her companions in a drunken brawl. The gobernador fined her twenty soles. Her husband possessed only ten, and her wails from the adobe cÁrcel were interfering with the bargaining in the market-place. Summoned by the walking scarecrow who boasted himself the lieutenant-governor, the head of the disrupted household admitted, after a wealth of subterfuges, that he owned two mules in condition for a journey, and the gobernador, pocketing “in the name of justice” the sovereign I handed him, ordered the abject husband to be ready at six in the morning to accompany me to Huallanga.

Some two leagues further up the contracted valley we crossed the now tiny Santa by a bridge of sticks and, catching the gorge of a little stream fed by the glaciers above, plunged due east into the mountains. The sun had burned our faces in the river valley; an hour afterward it was cold as late November. Rain began, but quickly turned to a mixture of hail and snow. Dusk overtook us at the foot of a mighty glacier, though not until we had sighted one of the rare shepherd’s huts that huddled in an occasional stony hollow. These miserable Indian chozas of the upper heights are built of cobble-stones heaped up to the height of a dog-kennel and covered with brown ichu grass, hardly as large and quite as crude as those the beaver fashions, defending their miserable inmates neither from wind nor rain. A single room, which can only be entered on hands and knees, houses the whole family, whom a sheepskin or two serves as bed, and two or three earthen pots as utensils in which to cook their scanty fare over an ichu or dried-dung fire in the center of the windowless hovel. Totally indifferent to wealth or comfort, with hardly fuel enough for cooking purposes, the stolid inhabitants slink into their squalid dens as soon as the sun has withdrawn his genial rays, and shiver through a night during which they get almost no unbroken sleep. With scarcely enough food to keep themselves from starvation, the house swarms of mangy curs that curl up among them by night, and which, being never fed, dash greedily at any offal, like the pigs of Central America. Here there was a second kennel, oval in shape, which the woman permitted us to occupy, because she was asked in her own tongue by one of her own people. Both she and her half-dozen children were barefoot and in scanty garb, yet appeared completely indifferent to the icy cold which, if less in degrees than in a Canadian mid-winter, was more penetrating. We carried blankets sufficient to pass the night comfortably, huddled close together, but as often as I stepped out into the brilliant moonlight in which the ice-fields above us stood forth like fissured and fantastic ghost-castles, the very marrow in my bones seemed to congeal.

Hoar-frost covered the earth, and ice a half-inch thick lay on the stagnant puddles when we set out in the bitter cold dawn across a region drear in the extreme. Stiff, stony climbs carried us up to the very edges of immense blue-white glaciers, and through patches of snow that threw the sharp rays of the highland sun into our eyes and faces like a spray of needles. The day was as laborious as any I had ever spent afoot,—thirty-six miles over the wintry, rock-pitched double crest of the Central Cordillera on a mule who jolted my unaccustomed frame to a loose-jointed wreck before I finally slid gratefully to the ground in the bleak mining-town of Huallanga. This was a slight oasis of imported life in a wild, almost uninhabited region, the Peruvian mine-manager of which was extraordinary from at least two points of view,—he was blond as a Norseman, and so advanced in his customs that I dared even address his wife directly at table.

Next day I joined—for a decided consideration—the caravan of a local merchant whose arrieros were bound for Cerro de Pasco with a troop of cargo-animals. A “civilized” Indian, that is, one who wore shoes and spoke Spanish, called for me with a half-size horse, the crude native saddle covered with a pellÓn, the hairy saddle-rug all high-caste horsemen use in this region, and soon after noon we jogged away down a stony little river. The merchant had duly and honestly warned me that, being only pack-animals, his chuscos were gifted with no gentle pace. But he had not warned me that I was joining a way-freight. I drew on ahead in spite of myself, and when, barely eight miles from Huallanga, the shrieks and whistles of the drivers died out behind, I waited a half-hour in vain, then went back some distance to find them lassoing the animals one by one, piling their loads or pack-saddles in a hollow square, and turning them loose with their front feet crudely hobbled. There were nineteen animals, mostly in ballast, attended by four arrieros. Too lazy apparently to unsling their pots and cook supper, the patched and weather-faded quartet munched a bit of parched corn and a sheet of sun-dried beef, and sat all night drinking and wailing maudlin ballads. The “tent” stretched over the packs was so low that I had to lie down on the ground and roll under it, and so thin that the rain dripped in upon me almost in streams.

It was still black night when the water-soaked canvas was pulled off me, and I found the arrieros already engaged in a riotous effort to round up the animals. This was no simple task, in spite of the hobbles, and the morning was well advanced before the last of the troop had been lassoed and loaded. During the operation I suggested that we prepare at least a pot of tea, but Valenzuela, the chief arriero, dismissed the matter with a grimace and a “neither wood nor grass will burn after the rain,” and I could only choke my hunger with a rock-hard lump of bread and shiver under my poncho until I mounted, this time a mule, to spare the animal of the day before.

We followed the river-gorge so long that it turned almost uncomfortably warm. Then suddenly abandoning the highway to modern HuÁnuco and the roundabout, but warm and well-populated, route to Cerro de Pasco, the arrieros drove the animals pell-mell up a steep gorge between towering mountain walls, by what looked like a spillway from a stone-crusher. This was the very route I should have chosen, for while the longer one would have been more comfortable, this followed very closely the ancient Inca highway. Topping the horizon, we trotted on across an enormous, brown-yellow plain of scanty ichu vegetation that stretched away to the hazy foot of what looked from this height like low hills. Here was just such a place as the Incas, requiring an unbroken outlook over the surrounding world and grazing land for their llamas, chose for their cities. I was not surprised, therefore, to find a long expanse of the pÁramo covered with hundreds of stone ruins, only the walls still standing, from one to eight feet high, in broken, fantastic disarray. This was “HuÁnuco el Viejo,” which the Spaniards found an important city at the time of the Conquest, but which the less hardy half-breed descendants abandoned, as in so many cases, for a warmer valley, eighteen leagues to the east. History does not reach back to the origin of old HuÁnuco, the ruins of which still occupy almost a square mile of the silent, utterly uninhabited plain. The road—a mere interweaving of faint paths across the Andean prairie—passed within five hundreds yards of the ruins, but the caravan pushed on without a halt, as if these monuments of their ancestors were mere stone-heaps, unworthy a glance of attention. I turned and trotted away across the plain, bathed in the cold, glaring sunshine of the Andean plateau, toward the site. Valenzuela, after a shout of protest, stuck close on my heels, whether out of fear that I would decamp with the mule, or lay hands on some old Inca treasure, or from some superstition connected with the “Gentiles,” I do not know. There was really little to be seen. Every one of the countless ruins of large and small buildings, arranged more or less in squares, were sections of cobble-stone walls, mere stone-heaps without sign of mortar, as crude as the chozas of shepherds, now fallen until, in many places, only their symmetrical arrangement suggested the hand of man. To this there was only one exception. Some three hundred yards from the rest of the ruins was a rectangular fortress of carefully cut and nicely fitted stone blocks, with suggestions of cement, now mere walls, some fifteen feet high, filled level full of earth on which the drear ichu grew as thickly as on the surrounding plain. Except in extent, the ruins were not to be compared with those of Marca-Huamachuco, though the “castillo” closely resembled in construction and stone-fitting the single monument of Ingapirca in southern Ecuador.

We trotted on after the pack-train, and rode for some hours over low ridges, each of which brought to view a new expanse of dreary, yellowish landscape. Occasionally an arriero broke forth in a mournful song that rose and fell with the same monotony as the undulating pÁramo. Now and then, as a pack worked loose, one of the muleteers dismounted and, deftly slipping out of his poncho, threw it over the head of the animal and readjusted the load. To my surprise, quickly followed by my disgust, the train soon after noon swung into the cobble-fenced field of a low, cobble-stone hut, similar to, but far more miserable and tiny than those of the ancient city behind. Greeting the barefoot Indian woman who emerged on all fours from the hut, the arrieros began to round up and unload the animals. Though we had not made fifteen miles, we were to stop here for the night. I swallowed my wrath, reflecting that he who joins a freight-train must not expect express speed.

It was too cold to sit, and I took to promenading weakly about the hillside. Down in a hollow beyond I came upon a family preparing their crop of potatoes after the ancient Inca fashion still common to the Andes. This chuÑo—chuÑu, in Quichua—is the chief vegetable of Andean marketplaces and the principal food of the Indians of the Sierra. The newly dug potatoes are spread out on the ground at a high altitude, preferably on the bank of a highland lake or stream, and left to freeze by night. They are small potatoes, for the Indian’s mode of selection has been to plant only the smallest, eating or selling the larger, until the tubers indigenous to Peru have degenerated to the same low level as their horses and dogs. When the sun has thawed the potatoes, the Indians of the household tread out the juice with their bare feet, then spread them in the sun to dry. This produces the chuÑo negro, or black chuÑo, which in the time of the Incas was the only kind permitted the common people, and which to-day forms the chief product of the process. Those who prefer chuÑo blanco, the “twice frozen white chuÑo” which graced only the tables of the Incas and nobles, put the tubers inside a well of cobble-stones under the surface of a river or lake, and leave them from two to eight days, after which they are dried in the sun. The result is a food that will keep indefinitely, but which has very much the same taste as so much fried sand. The most common method of preparing these frozen potatoes is to grind them in a stone mortar and use the powdered chuÑo to thicken soup.

When the head of the Indian household arrived, he opened with Valenzuela a conversation in half-breed Quichua, of which I caught enough to learn that we were to drive a league west in the morning to wait a day for some species of cargo, stop to pick up another load a few leagues beyond, and so on indefinitely. I called the arriero aside and protested that, aside from the hardships and exposure of lying out on every mountain-side, I was steadily growing worse for lack of treatment. To my surprise he proposed that I ride on alone next day. As he would never have dreamed of making such a proposal to a Peruvian stranger, it spoke well of the opinion he had gathered of Americans from contact with them in the mining town toward which we were headed. A bed of several horse-blankets was spread for me beneath the flap of the canvas covering our packs, out under the shivering stars that stood forth in the luminous highland sky with the unnatural luster of electric bulbs. During the later hours of the night, when I rolled out into the cold, still air, a brilliant full moon was flooding with almost the light of noonday the rolling mountainous world about us as far as the eye could reach.

I knew only too well that a matter settled the night before would have to be argued out anew in the morning. Dawn crept up over the eaves of the east, and the god of the Incas flung his horizontal rays across the empty plateau, but Valenzuela, assuming the customary air in such cases, that we had neither of us meant what we had said the evening before, made no move to prepare for my departure. When I reminded him of his promise, he announced that he would, of course, keep it, if I really, seriously desired it. Only, it would be utterly impossible for a man unacquainted with the route to find his way across the often unmarked punas and pampas ahead. Then, too, it was infested with bands of robbers who at times attacked whole pack-trains, to say nothing of one lone, helpless gringo. If only I would wait until to-morrow, he and I would ride on alone at breakneck speed, and make up for all the delay. I had long since learned the close resemblance of the South American maÑana to a greased pig; moreover, I had no desire to ride at breakneck speed. He muttered under his breath at this gringo obstinacy, and ordered the youngest arriero to saddle a horse and accompany me. The latter refused. Valenzuela shrugged his shoulders with a gesture that meant, “You see it is out of the question.” But the experienced Andean traveler can always win his point, if he insists long and hard enough. The chief arriero gave up at last and sent a man to lassoo and saddle, not the “stout mule” he had promised the evening before, but one of the saddest imitations of the genus horse in camp; and late in the morning I rode down through the chuÑo-producing gully and away over the brown and sterile world spread broad and high before me.

The arriero’s first prophecy came quickly true. I lost the road. A stretch of what was evidently the old Inca highway, broad and grass-grown and lined by two rows of stones, pushed straight on over all obstacles in what seemed to be the right direction, but it did not fit the descriptions that had been given me. The well-marked trail I followed led me down into two gaping hamlets that had not been mentioned, and doubled the miles to BaÑos, somnolent as an Italian village at summer noonday, down in the throat of a gorge. The frowsy chusco already gave signs of not being able to endure the journey. All I demanded was a reasonable walking pace, yet it cost me far more labor than to have made the trip afoot to keep the animal moving a scant two miles an hour. It was evident that, for all my incessant labor, we should not reach before nightfall the hacienda we were seeking, and when it came on to rain and hail in a cold, bleak bowl of mountains, I turned toward a collection of huts that stood out dimly as an animal of protective coloring on the upper edge of the saucer-shaped hollow.

The Indian men, patronizing and arrogant in their clumsy way, as usual in such situations, offered me the customary six-inch block of wood on which to squat under the eaves of the “corredor.” I took weakly to promenading the twenty-four miles in the saddle out of my legs, and furtively inspected the six huts that made up the collection. All were earth-floored dens, roofed with ichu, against several of which immense quantities of dried cow-dung were stacked like cordwood. The women squatting over the fire in the center of one of the huts handled fuel and food at one and the same time. Though they were barefoot and scantily clad, the men wore heavy, home-knit wool stockings to their knees, and crude moccasins of a strip of hairy cowhide, drawn together over the foot with a “puckering string” of rawhide. The males spoke considerable Spanish, but the women knew, or pretended to know, only Quichua. There were attached to the place at least a score of dogs, who set up a head-splitting chorus as often as I stirred, and at few-minute intervals even without that provocation. Across the shallow hollow the long line of snow-clad peaks that had grown up along the entire eastern horizon during the day stood forth in bold and impressive majesty in the light of evening, a light that seemed strained through purple-tinted crystals.

When the mountain cold settled down like an icy sheet, I asked where I might sleep.

“Why, there in the corredor, to be sure,” mumbled the Indian.

“We gente blanca have not the indifference to cold of los naturales,” I replied.

“Well, then, here in the kitchen,” he grumbled.

“How about that casita?” I asked, pointing to a pampa-grass lean-to against the largest hut.

“That is where the family sleeps.”

“And that?” I persisted, indicating a structure of beehive or beaver-house shape, built entirely of ichu and with a rounded door not three feet high, that stood forth on a knoll behind the others.

But that, it seemed, was where the watchman slept—though what he watched was not apparent. After a long conference in Quichua, however, this was assigned me with sullen grace; a boy was sent to drag out the “watchman’s” bed of sheepskins, and I struggled up to the shelter with saddle, pack, and equipment, and crawled inside on hands and knees. The choza was constructed on the same plan as the wigwams of the American “red men,”—a pole frame set up cone-shaped and covered with mountain grass, through which the bitter wind that swept across this sterile upland cut as a knife through cheesecloth, and so low that even in the center I could barely stand upright on my knees. The chusco had been turned over to a boy who was to watch it all night for a week’s wage. It was not that I took much stock in the Indian’s assertion that there was horse-stealing in these parts; but I hoped by this arrangement to forestall any rascality he might himself set afoot. The “watching,” however, was evidently by some species of aboriginal telepathy; for not only was no sign of a guardian to be seen as often as I crawled out into that interminable night, but when morning came the head of the household greeted me with:

“El chusco se ha perdido—the animal has lost itself.”

“Lost!” I cried.

“SÍ, seÑor, but it will be found again. The boy has already been sent to search for it.”

How even my long-experienced instinct for guessing aright among a hundred splendid chances to go astray saved me from getting hopelessly lost during that day, I have never been able to fathom. Across the utterly uninhabited and almost untraveled mountain-top the trail was at best faintly marked, and finally, beyond the cold, blue lake of Lauracocha, reputed the real source of the Amazon, it disappeared altogether. For hours I prodded my wretched imitation of a horse forward by compass over hill and dale, and by some stroke of luck fell upon the trail again beyond. Soon the pampa gave way to green and tremulous sod, and a swamp in which I all but mired the animal beyond recovery. Nor did the route hold to the same direction, but frequently sidestepped unexpectedly for no apparent reason, and it was only by the general lay of the hills and the instinct of long practice that I picked it up again. Once it split evenly, and the branch I chose led far up the face of a thousand-foot cliff, the path hewn in the sheer wall growing ever narrower, until the animal thumped my knee against the stone precipice and all but pitched us headlong into the appalling ravine below. To dismount was no simple task, and had the horse been a foot longer I should not have succeeded in turning him around and leading the way back to the fork. On the other side of the peak was a great natural stone stairway, down which the animal slipped and dropped with a painful succession of jolts. The gorge narrowed and deepened; then suddenly, close at hand on the steep flank of the mountain, appeared the first llamas I had seen in Peru, a whole flock of them. From then on they were so frequent that within the next half-hour I had seen far more llamas than in all the rest of my life. A new costume for men, at first sight ludicrous, came into evidence almost at the same time. Instead of trousers they wore very roomy, dark-colored breeches, cut off exactly at the knee, so that the first glimpse of their wearers at a distance was little short of startling, suggesting for a moment the astounding incongruity of an Indian woman sporting the skirt of a ballet-dancer. Below these garments they wore the long, knitted wool stockings, gray or black, and the hairy cowhide moccasins that had first appeared a few days before, and as they passed me they snatched off their heavy, brown felt hats with some mumbled greeting in Quichua.

While enjoying a racking fever in the comparatively comfortable home of the gobernador of Yanahuanca, I learned that there were two ways of reaching Cerro de Pasco. One was to ride nine bitter-cold leagues across a trackless puna, on which a lone gringo was sure to get lost and die of exposure; the other was to travel about half that distance by a well-marked road to Goyllarisquisca, where los americanos have their coal mines and whence there ran a daily train. I could not believe that fate would be so crude a practical joker as to let a man who had found his way clear from BogotÁ go astray on the last day of his journey, but I could easily conceive of the wreck of a horse wilting between my leaden legs somewhere out on the unmarked pampa; moreover, the sight of a railroad would be a comparatively new experience. I decided on the shorter route.

It necessitated the gobernador calling me at two in the morning, before a raging fever had entirely burned itself out. An Indian in flowing breeches, leading a “horse” that was to bring back some arrival by train, and another astride a pitifully small pony, led the way out into the luminous starlit night. A good road tacked gradually upward through a sleeping village, hanging like some prehensile creature on the swift hillside, where the dogs sang us a rousing chorus, and lifted us in some three hours to the razor-backed summit of a ridge, down the further slope of which sprawled headlong a still larger town, fantastic of profile in the morning starlight. We labyrinthed through it, meeting scores of panty-clad and moccasined Indians and barefoot women and girls toiling marketward under atrocious burdens; for the day was Sunday. Below the town we came out on a road paralleling a stupendous gorge; and across it, so high above that I could scarcely believe it possible a cluster of electric lights, suspended in the night between earth and heaven, mingled with the stars and half blotted out at intervals by the smoke of American industry, marked Goyllarisquisca, a city of the sky, to see which we must crane our necks like countrymen at the foot of man’s mightiest monument. The stars went out one by one, like gas-jets turned off by hurrying street-lighters; the luminous night turned to colorless opaque dawn, in which the jagged Sierra stood out flat and featureless as if cut out of cardboard. We went down and ever down into an unconscionable gorge, to cross—such is the ghastly futility of Latin-America—an insignificant stream; then quickly began to climb again. There was a path straight up the mountain-side to Goyllarisquisca, a path which a man unsusceptible to dizziness, and capable of climbing a steep stairway of a hundred thousand steps without guard-rails or a landing on which to pause for breath, might cover in a half-hour. Instead, we wound corkscrew-wise around the entire mountain, through another town, fantastic in its perpendicular setting as the last, yet reduced in the disillusioning light of day to its drab, mud-built reality; and uncovering others pitched at queer places on unattainable noses and gouged-out hollows of the range in which the shadows still lurked like skulking bandits. The mountains beyond were garbed from head to foot in white robes, and in the valleys lay seas of mist from which emerged crags and peaks like uninhabited, rocky islands. Less beautiful, perhaps, in its aspect than the more colorful Alps, the scene vastly outdid these in its rugged, masculine grandeur. Little by little we fell in with an almost unbroken procession of Indians; here and there one clad in exotic overalls whispered the approach of American influence, and at length our breathless animals staggered over the last ridge into the village of the tongue-loosening name.

Before me lay a small Pittsburgh, not so small at that, with great cranes swinging across the gorges, unsentimental stone buildings roaring and matter-of-fact chimneys belching forth the sooty smoke of industry. Long rows of decent living-quarters were interspersed with longer ones of box and flat cars, and sprawling about the higher levels were native shacks so tinged with the foreign influence that even a stove-pipe protruded here and there from their roofs of wavy sheet-iron. Across the scene floated the sweet music of a deep-voiced American train whistle, and on every hand was the evidence of diligence, masculine toil, and effective doing that quickened my northern pulse like a deep draft of wine. It was like coming back to my native world after a long absence. Scores of half-forgotten things I had never before seen in South America surged up about me, and upon me came drowsy contentment that my struggles were behind me and that I had already virtually set foot in the central plaza of Lima.

I slipped clumsily off the miserable chusco and turned him over, trappings and all, to the Indian who was to deliver him to Valenzuela when he passed through Yanahuanca. My legs obeyed me sullenly, as if weighted with ball and chain, and my physical condition gave to my movements a hesitating, deliberate dignity. At the station was a restaurant run by a Chinaman with Peruvian assistance, where the American influence by no means ceased at bacon and eggs, but had reached the height of butter and sliced bread, and rosy bottles of catsup! In a corner of the room a coal-stove blazed merrily, the first artificial heat I had felt in a long two years. I wandered out upon the platform. At the far end stood a man fondling a dog, a real dog, not an Andean cur, and as I approached he protested affectionately and ineffectually:

“Now you get down; you’re dirtying my pants.”

There was no mistaking that vocabulary, even if the strangely nasal accent that struck my unaccustomed ear rudely had not sufficed to betray the speaker’s nationality. Peruvians do not fondle dogs; nor do they refer to their nether garments in that abrupt and familiar fashion. I was soon seated in a comfortable office-chair, a stack of New York papers beside me. But I gave up in despair explaining how I had come to Goyll—well, pronounce it yourself—without having ever been either in Lima or “the Cerro”; and I fancy I had convinced my host of nothing, except that I was a clumsy and unconscionable liar, before the giant Baldwin rolled in, dragging behind it a half-dozen full-sized American freight-cars, as if some branch of the railways of my own land had pierced this lofty nook of the Andes.

The official business of the line is to transport coal to the mines at Cerro de Pasco, and passengers are accepted only on suffrance. The “first-class” coach was the familiar old American caboose, with a line of leather cushions along the walls and a coal stove in the center. It was empty when I entered, but had I not almost forgotten the ways of Latin-American travelers, I should not have been so surprised when it at length filled to overflowing with noisy, over-dressed native women, a few men of the white-collar class, drummers for the most part, hideous with rings, and every species of bundle and cumbersome baggage. Then two robust American trainmen, genuine as if they had that moment been picked off the top of a transcontinental freight-car, stamped in, climbed into their cupola, and we were off.

It was the reaction, no doubt, from the straining months behind me that brought on a paludismo that set me shaking even under my poncho. But the unaccustomed artificial heat all but choked me, and when I had accepted an orange, and gravely refused the whiskey, brandy, and black coffee my sympathetic fellow-passengers would have forced upon me as sure cures, I climbed into the cupola. The landscape would not have been joyful under the best of conditions. A bare mountain-top, faintly rolling, its frosty soil cherishing no vegetation except the dreary yellow-brown ichu of the uplands, stretched monotonously away on every hand, its surface flooded with the brilliant, thin sunshine of Andean plateaux and mottled here and there with fleecy cloud shadows. Now and then a flock of llamas lifted their absurd heads to gaze after us as we sped past. Once or twice we stopped at a wind-threshed mud-town, standing out pitifully unsheltered on the treeless waste, halted an hour at grimy, smoke-belching La FundiciÓn with its smelters, and drew up at dusk in bare and dreary Cerro de Pasco. It was June 22, three months from the Peruvian frontier and 2269 miles from BogotÁ, of which I had covered 243 on horseback and twenty-five by rail.

On the train I had been the storm-center of a heated difference of opinion. The Peruvian passengers contended that I should descend by the morning express to Lima, where I would quickly recover under the care of famous physicians of the capital; the train-crew that I should enter the hospital of the American mining company on “the Hill.” There could be no debate between entrusting myself again to the careless inefficiency of native practitioners, and the happy opportunity of entering an institution conducted by men of my own race. When I had found a boy to carry my baggage, I set out with high hopes, if slow steps, for the American hospital.

It was an imposing, one-story building, covering a space equal to a city block and forming a hollow square around an extensive cement-floored patio, on the far edge of the drear and colorless American mining town, well removed from its smoke and swirling dust and disturbing noises. My welcome was not, to be sure, exactly what a morbid imagination had led me to picture, but that was no doubt due to the fact that both doctors were at the moment absent. The head-nurse overcame in time her inclination to refuse me admittance, and sent an Indian boy, closely related in personal habits to the occupants of mountain-top chozas, to show me into a ward. In appearance it was all that a hospital ward should be, its ten imported cots all unoccupied. The boy jerked his head sidewise toward a chair and disappeared. Two empty hours dragged funereally by. Then another Indian youth, startlingly like a personification of squalor and uncleanliness in a masque gotten up by some stern disciple of the Zola school of realism, burst in upon my feverish dreams, and before I could raise a hand in protest thrust a thermometer into my mouth. Evidently it was his assigned duty to take the temperature of anyone caught on the premises. Had I come into the ward to recane the chairs, no doubt he would have forced a thermometer down my throat, like some automatic machine worked by springs, removed and shaken it, wiped it on the seat of his trousers, and pattered away on his bare feet.

Long after dark the fresh and rosy assistant-doctor dashed into the room. But he had no time to give attention to my symptoms and explanations, for dinner was about to be served, and ordering me to get into a bed, he dashed for the door again. I protested that I had brought with me the unpleasant evidence of long Andean travel, and he jerked a thumb over his shoulder with a parting mumble of “bathroom.” There was one, even as he had indicated, with all modern appliances; but like most new-fangled inventions transplanted to the Andes, it did not “function.” Another example of the Peruvian abhorrence of soap was ordered to bring a half-dozen pails of hot water, which in his haste to be done with the task he translated into the Castilian for luke-warm; and I crawled at last into one of the cots. Soon afterward the Indian boy came to climb into another, in the same identical rags he wore by day. The dinner was evidently a prolonged and engaging function, for neither the doctor nor any other sign of human interest appeared again during a night in which I tossed incessantly with fever, while the ward blazed with electric lights and the ineffectual steam-pipes thumped and pounded like an adjacent boiler-factory.

I am happy to be able to say that neither the two physicians, whom we will disguise under the pseudonyms of Dr. F and Dr. D, nor the head-nurse, of the American hospital were my fellow-countrymen; they came from further north. Materially an establishment to boast of, its condition in anything touched by the personal equation was incredible. Homeopathic in creed, it put its trust in pills, and left the rest to eight immature Indians, as devoid of human instincts as of supervision. In a second cheerless, bare ward adjoining the one I occupied were a score of injured or ailing Indian workmen; yet no precaution whatever was taken to keep infection from passing from one room to the other. A single thermometer served all alike. Twice a day the automatic youth of the bare feet went the rounds in quest of temperatures, carrying a bottle of antiseptic so low in stock that it did not reach a third as far up the instrument as did the lips of patients; and too indolent to go to the dispensary for cotton, he wiped it after each use on whatever came within reach,—his sleeve, his trousers, or the noisome rag each servant carried over a shoulder in guise of napkin. If the ten cots had been full, instead of the four that represented the maximum of occupancy during my stay, I do not know what habits we might have adopted; for there were only three cups, three tablespoons, and one teaspoon attached to the ward. The printed rules announced that meal-hours were 7; 10; and 5:30. In practice they averaged: Breakfast, 8:40 to 9, Dinner, 1 to 1:30, and Supper, about 8. The same stern placard called attention to the fact that visitors were admitted only on Sunday afternoons. Yet scarcely a night passed without a mob of Indians or cholos, male and female, friends of the internes or of some inmate, stamping into the ward as soon as darkness had settled down, and often keeping up an uproar until long after midnight. Then it was the unexplainable custom, on those days set for that ceremony, to drag out a fire-hose at four in the morning and “wash down” the ward like the deck of a ship, flooding the floor an inch or more deep in icy highland water, through which patients put to that necessity might wade to and from their cots.

In the sumptuous quarters of physicians and nurses, occupying all the front half of the building, the formal repasts were provided with every obtainable delicacy, and enlivened with music and gaiety. In the wards the ostensibly well-regulated diet monotonously reduced itself in practice to the leathery “green” beefsteaks of the Andes and two or three other articles sanctioned by prehistoric Andean costumbre. The Latin-American racial lack of initiative is nowhere more in evidence than in the kitchen. If doctor or nurse prescribed some special dish for a patient, there came back in answer—after authority had disappeared from the scene—that threadbare Peruvian prevarication, “No hay”; which meant that the cook was giving vent to his temperamental grouchiness, was too lazy to set another pot on the fire, or was keeping the delicacy for himself or some “compadre.” The youthful assistant-physician, trained in the far north, was supremely ignorant of tropical diseases, and, what was worse, had no inclination to add to his professional knowledge. His interests were confined to the contents of a row of unhomeopathic bottles and the manipulation of fifty-two small cardboards at the club-rooms a few blocks away, where he might be found—though not easily called—at almost any hour, ensconced in one of the leather-upholstered lounges before the blazing fireplace. The “gringa” head-nurse chose to do duty by day, and arising every forenoon, came in to smile at each of us about ten, and sometimes again in the early afternoon, before it was time to dress for her daily “bridge” and tea. In a loquacious moment she confided to me that she “just loved” to travel and, having always longed to see “strange foreign countries like Peru,” had been delighted to get an appointment to spend a year or two in it. The assistant-nurse was the most disturbingly beautiful Peruvian it had so far been my fortune to set eyes upon,—and she took the customary advantage of that fact by making no effort to be anything else. Being a subordinate, she was obliged to take the night-shift; but being also a Peruvian, she did not often permit that misfortune to break her night’s rest.

Five days I had studied its ceiling when the morning brought Dr. F, physician in chief, who had been absent on a round of the company’s hospitals, hurrying into the ward. He was a far more successful practitioner than his youthful assistant—in that he made the daily round in about five minutes less than the ten which Dr. D squandered. Two or three mornings later he paused at my cot to grumble querulously:

“It’s —— funny you don’t get better. It must be you are not making up your mind to. Mental attitude, you know. As soon as you had that purge, these pills should have taken hold at once.”

“That what?” I murmured.

“Oh, don’t be stupid! The castor-oil Dr. D gave you a day after you turned up here; the basis of our system of treatment.”

“I have had only pills.”

“Nonsense! Dr. D, what day did this man have his purge?”

“I prescribed it last Monday,” yawned the assistant.

“Of course. Now....”

“But I assure you I have yet to know the taste of castor-oil.”

“Who gave him the oil?” the doctor flung over a shoulder.

“SeÑorita ——,” replied the subordinate, naming the Peruvian nurse.

She chanced to pass the door in fetching street-garb a moment later, and was called in to confirm the statement.

“Ah, es verdad!” she lisped, in her beautiful nonchalance, “Me olvidÉ—I forgot,” and with a bewitching smile at the physicians she hurried away to her daytime engagements.

Determined not to celebrate my nation’s birthday as I had my own, I forced my leaden legs to carry me on an afternoon stroll through the famous mining town. The steel-blue skies of Cerro de Pasco, three miles aloft and boasting itself the highest city in the world, are clear beyond any description in mere words. Not once during my sojourn there was the penetrating brilliancy flecked by the slightest whiff of cloud. The sun blazed down with an intensity that burned the cheeks as at the open mouth of a puddling-furnace; yet even at blinding noon-time the cold had a power of penetration unknown to a northern mid-winter day on which the mercury falls far lower. Those who ascend “the Hill” from Lima complain of a leaden inertia and pains varying in intensity and duration, brought on by an altitude that is fatal to weak hearts and to victims of pneumonia. Inured to the heights and scantiness of air almost unbrokenly from far-off BogotÁ, I had no consciousness of any such effects.

Nearly a mile from the hospital, the American town, of stone buildings and even less attractive structures, such as the “Tin Can,” an ugly, red, sheet-iron barracks that houses the garden variety of gringo employees, scattered among bare, protruding rocks of a landscape dreary beyond conception, gives way to the old familiar Peruvian huts and hovels. These, in turn, develop further on into two-story dwellings above and shops below, often quaint and striking in architecture. If any city of Peru may be called “unique” in appearance, it is “el Cerro.” Even in the center of the town, roofs of ancient, weather-faded straw alternate with those of wavy sheet-iron; instead of the monotonously square blocks of other Andean cities, its older section is a tangle of narrow streets and misshapen buildings, like a change from our Middle West to Boston. Perched on the summit of the world, with scarcely a knoll overtopping it, or the suggestion of a shrub to shelter it, “the Cerro” is the unhampered playground of icy mountain winds laden with coal-dust, stinging sand, and the soot and smoke and powdered ore from its mines. Bronzed foreigners and miners in leather leggings and hob-nailed boots, squeaking through the streets afoot, or astride Texas-saddled mules, lend the place an air of modernity, for all its swarms of bovine-mannered Indians. In contrast, droves of llamas, with gaily colored ribbons in their ears, slip past in noiseless dignity, or stand in patient groups before a chicherÍa, awaiting their drivers. The hardware and similar trades offer stocks unknown to those sections of the Andes where the imports depend on transportation “en lomo de mula.” Even the pulperÍas are well-supplied with foodstuffs, testifying to the American influence. From a dust-swirling knoll rising a bit above the rest the eye is gladdened by the glimpse of a cold-blue lake of considerable size, strangely beautiful in its drear and dismal setting. From this point of vantage, too, the stranger becomes aware that “el Cerro” is much more of a city than he suspected, filling the great lap of a repulsive, barren range, and stretching away in several directions under belching smoke-stacks.

The arrieros with whom I left Huallanga, and the family inhabiting the hut shown in the preceding picture