Ecuador, “the Switzerland of America,” is one of the smallest of our sister republics in the South, yet her area, of 116,000 square miles, is equal to that of our States of Missouri and Arkansas combined, and, if certain pending boundary disputes should be determined in her favor, her territory would be more than doubled. Her population is now about 1,500,000, an average of a little over twelve to the square mile.

Politically, the republic is divided into sixteen provinces, not including the GalÁpagos Islands. Five are maritime, occupying the strip of coast between the Western Cordillera and the sea, ten are interandine, and then there is the Oriente, so called, which consists of all the country embraced in the slope between the Eastern Cordillera and the Brazilian frontier, in the valley of the Amazon. There are two fluvial systems, both rising in the mountains; one flowing west to the sea and the other down the eastern slope. In all they are composed of ninety-one rivers. Those tributary to the Guayas, flowing westward to the sea, and many of which are of considerable size, are now of the greater commercial importance because the country of the Oriente, through which those tributary to the Amazon flow, is still a wilderness, only sparsely inhabited even by what are left of the aborigines—and this although it is the richest of all in vegetation and fertility of soil, like the adjoining MontaÑa district of Peru.

Thus, ranging as it does from the sea-level of the coast on one side and the valley of the Amazon on the other to the high interandine plateau, and from thence to the great cloud-piercing peaks of the cordilleras, crowned with perpetual snow, this country directly beneath the Equator, from which it derives its very name, is possessed, as are Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, of every variety of climate within the sphere of a few hours’ journey—in the lowlands, the eternal summer of the tropics; on the high table-lands, eternal spring, and, in the glacial regions of the mountain summits, winter without end. As the late Professor Orton so aptly put it: “As the Ecuadorian sees all the constellations of the firmament, so nature surrounds him with representatives of every family of plants. Tropical, temperate and arctic fruits and flowers are here found in profusion, or could be successfully cultivated. There are places where the eye can embrace an entire zone, for it may look up to a wheat or barley field or potato patch and down to the sugar cane and pineapple.”

And, in addition to the familiar products, in many places the slopes of the mountains between twelve and fifteen thousand feet are clothed with a shrub peculiar to the high altitudes of the Andes, called chuquiragua, the twigs of which are used for fuel and the yellow buds as a febrifuge. In the valleys between the cordilleras a very useful and valuable, as well as the most ordinary, plant is the American aloe, or century plant, which under cultivation, however, blooms oftener than once in a hundred years. It is the largest of all the herbs, and, with its tall stem rising from a cluster of long, thick, gracefully curved leaves, looks like a great chandelier. Most of the roads are fenced with hedges of them. Nearly every part is said to serve some practical purpose. The broad leaves are used for thatching huts and by the poorer classes as a substitute for paper in writing; a sirup flows from them when tapped; as they contain much alkali, a soap that lathers in salt water as well as fresh is manufactured from them; the fiber of the leaves and roots is woven into sandals and sacks; the flowers make excellent pickles, the stock is used in building, the pith of the stem is used by barbers for sharpening razors and the spines as needles. A species of yucca, resembling the aloe, yields the hemp of Ecuador.

In the lowlands, cacao and sugar cane, coffee, tobacco, rice, cotton, and bananas and other tropical fruits are grown. The forests contain rubber and numerous species of useful trees, among them the tree that yields what is known as the taque nut, or vegetable ivory, from which buttons are made, the grasses and toquilla palm used in the manufacture of the coarser grades of PanamÁ hats, the chincona from the bark of which quinine is obtained, the mangrove cultivated for tanning purposes as well as its fruit, and the silk-cotton tree that yields the valuable commercial product known as kapok. A considerable portion of the Oriente is verdured with a part of that immense forest which extends in an unbroken mass from the grassy llanos of Venezuela to the pampas of Argentina. In other sections of the country are gold, silver, copper, iron, coal, petroleum, asphalt and other minerals, though since the colonial rÉgime there has been little activity in mining. Only a few years ago work was resumed in the famous mines of Zaruma, formerly the source of much revenue to the Spaniards.

Ecuador has a treasury of wealth in her vast cacao groves. The cacao tree, which grows wild in the forests, is from sixteen to forty feet high and bears a fruit in which the beans lie buried in a cucumber-shaped pod five to ten inches long and three or four inches thick. The bean itself in its raw state resembles a thick almond. When ripe, the pods are cut from the tree by means of a knife with a curved blade, set on the end of a long pole, an implement specially designed to remove them without injury. The pods are then gathered in heaps and left on the ground to dry for a day or two before the beans are removed and cured. From cacao comes cocoa. The name “cacao” signifies the raw, and “cocoa” the finished product. There is still another name—coca—which is often confused with these, but coca is nothing like cacao. Coca is the Peruvian plant from the leaves of which cocaine is extracted. The cacao bean contains the cocoa we drink at our breakfast tables, and our chocolate.

On the skill employed in the curing, which is an extremely delicate process, to a great extent depends the quality of the output and its flavor and color. When ready for the market, the bean is dark red outside and chocolate tinted within. Analyses show that it is rich in fats, albuminoids, caffeine and theobromine, which last is what imparts to it its principal characteristics. What we know as chocolate differs from cocoa in that, in the former compound, the cocoa butter is not extracted; from the latter it is. Cocoa is really a factory product. The cured bean is treated differently in the various countries to suit the taste of the public, and chocolate also is prepared in different ways for the various uses. American and French chocolates are sold all over the world.

The tobacco grown in the Province of Esmeraldas on the coast is claimed to be comparable with that produced in Cuba. And this reminds me that, unless tradition is at fault, the town of Atacames, from around which some of the best of it comes, has quite a unique history of its own. In 1623, so the story goes, a vessel laden with seven hundred African slaves was on its way from PanamÁ to Peru, where they were to be worked in the mines. When near the mouth of the Esmeralda River, they mutinied, massacred the officers and sailors of the ship, and, landing at Atacames, took possession of the town and killed or drove away every man in the neighborhood, Indian or Spanish, but spared the women, whom they kept as wives. Afterward, however, instead of indulging in further depredations, they kept within the territory they had conquered, and, mixing with the Cayapas, who had attained an unusual state of civilization for lowland Indians before the invasion, became miners and agriculturists on their own account. These African mutineers, therefore, protected by the reputation for ferocity they had acquired in their stroke for freedom, were thus the founders of what afterward became an intelligent and industrious community. The women, particularly, are famous for their skill in making PanamÁ hats.

Indeed, aside from agriculture, the most important industry in all the coast provinces is the making of these hats. Guayaquil long since supplanted PanamÁ as the principal market for them. Those of the finest texture, the ones that are so soft and delicately woven that they can be folded and put in a coat pocket like a handkerchief and will last a lifetime, are made of a peculiar grass called jipi-japa, for which the town in the Province of Manavi is named, and, in the weaving of them, considerable time and great skill is required. These we seldom, if ever, see in this country. Many go to Paris, Italy, and Spain; more are taken by the planters along the coast, and in Cuba, who are willing to pay as much as $80 to $100 for them. They are woven by the women by hand, and only in the moonlight, these best grades, because the sun would harden the material, artificial light would attract insects, and the dampness that comes with sunset is necessary to give the flexibility so essential to their beauty. The coarser grades, such as we see here, are woven in the daytime, but under water, in tubs.

Guayaquil, a city of about 50,000 inhabitants, is Ecuador’s principal seaport, and, next to Valparaiso and Callao, the busiest and most important on the Pacific side of the continent. All the way up from Callao the steamer hugs the shore as closely as safety will permit. There is little change in the view. The same arid strip of low-lying coast land, dotted with rocky promontories, fringed here and there with cliffs and crossed with occasional stretches of green where the rivers flow through to the sea, continues day after day—the same background of mountains rising tier on tier for thousands and thousands of feet, in the morning partly obscured by heavy banks of clouds that later melt away and leave the rugged contour sharply silhouetted against the bright blue, are bathed in the evening, as the sun sinks toward the horizon, in the purple haze that becomes them best. Yet there are also the same calm sea and rainless sky and the same cool, aromatic breezes that make the lazy hours on deck a continual delight.

And so it is with mixed feelings of regret and relief that one enters the Gulf of Guayaquil—relief, for here, as we steam past the island of Puna, where Pizarro camped for months awaiting reinforcements before beginning the conquest of Peru, the aspect of the shore line changes and we see foliage as fresh and green and as wildly luxuriant as any in the basins of the interior. Passing the island, we come to the mouth of the Guayas, the greatest of South American rivers emptying into the Pacific. The city is sixty miles beyond at the head of the estuary. The first glimpse we catch is of a street, called El Malecon, that extends along the water front for two miles or more from a shipyard to a hill crowned by a fortress. This is at once the principal shopping, cafÉ, and amusement place, the favorite promenade, the warehouse district, and the quay where the lighters that ply between it and the vessels anchored out in the river take on and unload their cargoes. It is faced with what from the deck appear to be long rows of white stone and marble buildings of beautiful and graceful architectural design, for the most part of the usual Moorish type. Long series of arcades in front of the shops remind one of those of the Rue de Rivoli in Paris; above are pretty balconies sheltered by blinds and awnings of gaily colored canvas, screening groups of ladies who like to sit in them and watch the lively scene below as they sip their coffee and chat.

But picturesque as it all is, one finds on going ashore, that the walls of these imposing-looking edifices are merely shells of split bamboo, plastered with cement, ornamented with stucco and painted to resemble marble and stone, which sad experience has taught the people of the city will not resist earthquakes as well as this more elastic imitation they have been compelled to substitute. The residences of the well-to-do are constructed of the same materials and with wide verandas from ground to roof, enclosed with Venetian blinds. Few are elaborately furnished. In that climate it is thought better, for the sake of spaciousness and comfort, to forego evidences of wealth in the form of carpets, hangings, and upholstery, which keep out air and retain the heat. The poor of the suburbs have thatched bamboo or adobe huts with floors of hardened earth. As in Canton, China, many of them live on the water on rafts made from balsa, a species of timber nearly as buoyant as cork, or else of hollow trunks of bamboo. A number of logs, forty or fifty feet long, are lashed together in such a way that they can be propelled by either oars or sails, and a bamboo hut is built in the center. These often serve as the homes of whole families for generations, and are so substantial that they are used in the coasting as well as the river trade for bringing produce to market.

In June, 1908, a long-desired and much needed railroad was completed between Guayaquil and the capital, Quito, way up in the interandine table-land, 9350 feet above the level of the sea, and now the trip of nearly three hundred miles, that formerly took from twelve to fifteen days on mule-back, and often more by foot, may be made in two days, in a comfortably equipped passenger train. The scenery en route is gorgeous. The train speeds through forests of stately trees like those of the Amazon—walnut, mahogany, rubber, cacao, cottonwood, with vines entwined around their trunks and hanging from their branches, and beds of mosses and ferns at their feet, slender bamboos shooting up straight as an arrow, and tall, graceful palms, tipped with feathery tufts—the whole mass aglow with scarlet passion flowers and orchids, and blossoms of every hue. Then come broad fields covered with prickly pineapple plants, sugar cane, coffee and snowy cotton plantations and groves of cocoanut palms, oranges, lemons, and limes saturating the air with their delicious fragrance, splendid mango trees with their golden fruit and dense foliage that makes them the best of all shade trees in the tropics, and groves of banana trees, tossing out glossy green leaves eight feet long from their sheathlike stalks, and many bearing bunches of this bread of the poor and delicacy of the rich that weigh from sixty to seventy pounds. Von Humboldt calculated that “thirty-three pounds of wheat and ninety-nine pounds of potatoes require as much space of ground as will produce four thousand pounds of bananas.” They bear fruit but once and die, but the roots are perennial and every year bring forth new plants.

Then, when the traveler has crossed the coast strip, he comes to the foothills and begins the steep, tortuous ascent. On either side of this highland but ever green series of plateaux, crossed by nudos and ascending like steps to the one in which the capital lies, tower mountains, the crests of forty-two of which are more than ten thousand feet high. Twenty of them are higher than Pike’s Peak in Colorado; fourteen are higher than the Alpine giant, Mont Blanc. It was in this vast, magnificent “Avenue of Volcanoes” that the celebrated artist, Frederick E. Church, painted his wonderful picture, “The Heart of the Andes.” Here, he declared, is the grandest mountain scenery in the world.

The most majestic of them all is snow-covered Chimborazo, near the center of the Western Cordillera, and fortunately almost constantly in view, for it is along its spurs that the road between Guayaquil and Quito ascends. One would not imagine its summit so very hard to reach, as it appears from the mountain pass at an elevation of fourteen thousand feet; yet many explorers, from Von Humboldt down, strove for the honor, only to fail until Edward Whymper, an Englishman, finally achieved it in 1879. For years, with its known altitude of 21,420 feet, it was famed as the highest point in America; now the mighty Aconcagua in Argentina, which is recorded at the Harvard Observatory at Arequipa as measuring 24,760 feet, has been awarded the palm. It is from shipboard on the Pacific, though, on a clear day, rather than from the plateau, that Chimborazo is to be seen in all the majesty of its complete proportions, particularly when the evening shadow’s mellowing tint creeps upward to the summit—a vision of gold, vermilion, purple, followed by the glory of the brief tropical sunset—in the few minutes before darkness covers the earth and “the haste of stars, trembling with excess of light, bursts suddenly into view over the peaks,” when the waters of the sea become so impregnated with phosphorescent flashes that each wave seems tipped with silver and the foam that follows in the vessel’s wake is like a stream of fire.

Conspicuous among the crests of the eastern range are Tunguragua, with its perfect cone and great cataract tumbling down fifteen hundred feet from the snow line to the valley beneath; fierce, Plutonic Sangai, the most active volcano in the world; and the beautiful Altar, as it was called by the Spaniards, which is said to have been higher than Chimborazo a few years before the Conquest, but has since collapsed. Now its summit presents the appearance of a superb crown, pointed with eight jagged peaks; its snowy mantle is relieved by rents or fissures in the rock that seem to be colored dark blue in contrast with the white.

And then there is the still more superb Cotopaxi, 19,613 feet, without a rival in height or symmetry among the active volcanoes of the old world. Some faint idea of its grandeur may be conceived by those who have seen Vesuvius, for instance, when it is realized that it is more than fifteen thousand feet—nearly three miles—higher, and that, when in eruption, it vomits forth its fires, with ominous rumblings that can be heard for a hundred miles, from a cone which itself is higher than Vesuvius. Mr. Whymper, who also succeeded here in making the perilous ascent where Von Humboldt and others had failed, described the crater as an enormous amphitheater with a rugged crest surrounded by overhanging cliffs, some snow-clad, others encrusted with sulphur.

“Cavernous recesses,” he says, “belched forth smoke; the sides of the cracks and chasms shone with ruddy light. At the bottom, probably twelve thousand feet below us, there was a ruddy circular spot about one-tenth the diameter of the crater; it was the pipe of the volcano, its channel of communication with the lower regions, and was filled with incandescent if not molten lava, glowing and burning, lighted by tongues of flame that issued from cracks in the surrounding slopes.” On the side of the mountain is a huge rock called the “Inca’s Head.” Tradition has it that this was the original summit, hurled down by an eruption on the very day that Pizarro caused Atahualpa to be strangled. The great eruption of 1859 was succeeded by an earthquake that wrought terrible destruction and loss of life, and by a tidal wave, which in its devastating course carried a United States warship a mile inland, over the roofs of the houses of a town on the coast of Peru and left it high and dry on a sandy plain. Just now the volcano is in a state of “solemn and thoughtful suspense”; only thin clouds of smoke escape from its crater.

At the base of Pichincha, the crater of which the astronomer, La Condamine, likened to the “chaos of the poets,” and Orton describes as “a frightful abyss nearly a mile in width and a half mile deep from which a cloud of sulphurous vapors comes rolling up,” lies the city of Quito. Its origin is shrouded in mystery, but we know that at the time of the Conquest it was the northern stronghold of the great Inca empire, and the place where Atahualpa resided. On this lofty site, which in the Alps would be buried in an avalanche of snow, but in the tropics enjoys an eternal spring, palaces more beautiful than the Alhambra are said to have been built, glittering with the gold and emeralds of the region. But all this passed away with the scepter of Atahualpa. Where the pavilion of the Inca stood is now a gloomy convent; a wheat field takes the place of the Temple of the Sun. Even the Spanish structures that supplanted the original ones seem dilapidated enough. The population is said to number about sixty-five thousand, but there is little of the modern and still less in the way of opportunity for amusement, though it is all most interesting simply because it is so old and because there is much of romance in its history.

The train emerges from the pass on to the plain of Riobamba, the scene of many notable events in the history of the country. Here it was that the great Inca conqueror Tupac Yupanqui routed the Shiri of the Caras and began the conquest of his possessions; it was here that Atahualpa’s great general, Quizquiz, defeated the army of the Inca Huascar and proceeded to the invasion of Peru; it was here that the daring Conquistador Sebastian de BenalcÁzar defeated the victors and brought the Kingdom of Quito under the sway of Pizarro. The city of Riobamba, which is the first of importance on the line, is also said to have been the birthplace of the eminent historian Juan de Velasco and several others of South America’s most distinguished sons. It has a population of only twelve or fifteen thousand, but, thanks to the demand created by commercial travelers and the employees of the railroad, it serves as an excellent resting place, for there are two or three very tolerable hotels. From this point on to Quito, there are parts of the plain that are arid and desolate. This is attributed partly to the fact that so much of the country was long ago denuded of its trees and partly to volcanic eruptions of a peculiar kind.

Describing one of them, Mozans says:

“But, destructive as are the eruptions of the volcano when it belches forth ashes, cinders, and lava, it is even more so when its terrific operations are followed by deluges of water and avalanches of mud, carrying along with them immense blocks of ice and rock to great distances, causing death and devastation all along their course. Such an eruption took place in 1877, and, so great was the velocity of the angry flood, that it swept the plain with the momentum of an express train, carrying before it bridges, buildings, and everything that stood in its path. The very day of the eruption the irresistible torrent reached the mouth of the Esmeralda River, nearly three hundred miles distant. The catastrophe had been announced the preceding evening by an enormous column of black ashes, which the roaring mountain projected more than three miles above the crater, and which an east wind carried far out over the Pacific. Vessels going from Guayaquil to PanamÁ were suddenly enveloped in a cloud of dust and transmitted to Europe and the United States the first news of the disaster. After this eruption of ash, there was a welling of molten lava over the rim of the crater which melted the ice and snow and transformed them at once into tremendous avalanches of mud. At the same time immense blocks of ice were transported across the plain of Latacunga to a distance of thirty miles, where they remained several months before they were entirely melted. The foregoing is only one of many similar eruptions that occurred during the last century.”

“But why, it will be asked, do people live in a land in which they are constantly exposed to such sudden and awful disasters?” he continues—“where thousands of victims are sacrificed in a single moment? Why do people cling around the rich flanks of Kilauea and Mauna Loa and huddle around the treacherous slopes of vine-clad Etna and Vesuvius, or pitch their tents on quaking, incandescent Stromboli? Let philosophers reply.” But, in the neighborhood of Quito itself no more of these arid stretches are to be seen. “Notwithstanding the ever-menacing volcano towering above it, Quito,” he tells us, “was always to the Ecuadorian of the interior one of the world’s most favored cities. It was what Damascus and Bagdad in their halcyon days were to the Arabs, what Cordova and Granada were to the Moors. It was ‘Quito bonito’—charming Quito—the city above the clouds, ‘the navel of the world, the home of the continua primavera—perpetual spring—evergreen, magnificent Quito.’ It was like Heaven—Como de Cielo—where there is neither heat nor cold. It was the Paradise of delights. Had Columbus discovered the beautiful valley which it overlooks, he would, we are assured, have pronounced it the site of the Garden of Eden.”

After Lima and Santiago, the suburbs strike one as rather squalid and dilapidated. In the city proper, however, the houses improve in size and finish and continue to improve until the Grand Plaza is reached in the center. The more pretentious are of two stories, a few three, and of massive construction, with adobe walls two or three feet thick and tiled roofs, and are built around a square courtyard, or patio, in the old Spanish style, often with a fountain or flower plot in the center. Here, too, around the patios are pillared arches supporting galleries used as the passage way to rooms in the upper tier; the floors are paved with large, square, red bricks. The public buildings, some of them dating back to Philip II, are clustered about the three plazas. The most imposing, the capitol, a low building adorned with a splendid colonnade, faces the Grand Plaza. With its long rows of columns it looks a little like the Fifteenth Street side of the Treasury Building in Washington. To the right of it is an ancient but beautiful cathedral; on the other side is the palace of the Papal Nuncio. All are fine specimens of the architecture of the periods in which they were built.

The scene in the shopping district and around the market has quite an Egyptian flavor. The shops are very small and exposed; groups in gay ponchos stand chatting and smoking in front of them or lean idly against the walls, enjoying the sunlight; soldiers saunter to and fro; Indians, in every variety of costume, are scattered about guarding heaps of vegetables they have brought in from the surrounding country for sale; bronze-complexioned women in many-colored gowns peddle oranges and alligator pears from baskets carried on their heads; purchasers, mostly men and in more conventional attire, wander from store to store, for it is not here so much as in the vicinity of the churches that one is favored with a glimpse of the ladies of the upper class. They do little shopping themselves, these seÑoras and seÑoritas, yet they are very devout, and it is their custom to wrap themselves in their black mantillas and attend mass every day.