23 chapters
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23 chapters
A FOREWORD OF WARNING
A FOREWORD OF WARNING
A few years ago, when I began looking over the map of the world again, I chanced to have just been reading Prescott’s “Conquest of Peru,” and it was natural that my thoughts should turn to South America. My only plan, at the outset, was to follow, if possible, the old military highway of the Incas from Quito to Cuzco. Every traveler, however, knows the tendency of a journey to grow under one’s feet. This one grew with such tropical luxuriance that before it ended I had spent, not eight months, b
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CHAPTER I UP TO BOGOTÁ
CHAPTER I UP TO BOGOTÁ
When we had “made a stake” as Canal Zone policemen, Leo Hays and I sailed from Panama to South America. On board the Royal Mail steamer the waist of the ship, to which our tickets confined us, was a screaming pandemonium of West Indian negroes, homeward bound from canal digging, and a veritable chaos of their baggage and household goods—and gods—ranging from tin trunks to pet monkeys, from battered phonographs to plush-bound Bibles. We preëmpted deck space for our suitcases and sat down upon the
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CHAPTER II THE CLOISTERED CITY
CHAPTER II THE CLOISTERED CITY
Our entrance into Bogotá was not exactly what we had planned or anticipated. The crowd that filled the station and its adjacent streets in honor of the thrice-weekly linking with the outside world was dressed like an American city in February, except that here black was more general and choking high collars and foppish canes far more in evidence. Wherefore, seeing two men of foreign aspect, visibly shivering in their strange feather-weight uniforms, descending upon them, the pulsating throng cou
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CHAPTER III FROM BOGOTÁ OVER THE QUINDIO
CHAPTER III FROM BOGOTÁ OVER THE QUINDIO
The people of Bogotá refused to take seriously our plan of walking to Quito. It was not merely that the Ecuadorian capital was far away; to the inhabitants of this isolated little world it was only a name, like Moscow or Lhassa. Those who had gone to school as far as the geography lessons had a nebulous notion that it lay somewhere to the south, and that no sea intervened; but their imaginations could not picture two lone gringos arriving by land. To seek information was simply to waste time. Th
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CHAPTER IV ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY
CHAPTER IV ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY
On the Cauca side, like the French slope of the Pyrenees, the Central Cordillera of the Andes descends almost abruptly to the valley. As we emerged from the clouds, a brilliant sun lighted up vast landscapes of labyrinthian hills and vales mottled with cloud shadows, bits of our road ahead scratched here and there on salient, sun-polished knobs and slopes far below. With noon appeared the first broad view of the rolling Cauca valley, nestled between the central and the western ranges, a bare tho
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CHAPTER V DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO
CHAPTER V DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO
From Cali a broad “road,” still fresh with early morning, led forth to the southeast, skirting some foothills of the Western Cordillera. Really a meadow, bounded by two cactus hedges and interwoven with an intricate network of paths, like the tracks of some great railway terminal, it was excellent for tramping. Birds sang merrily in the branches of the scattered trees; a telegraph wire sagged southward from bamboo pole to pole. Groups of ragged women, balancing easily on their heads a machete ,
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CHAPTER VI THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR
CHAPTER VI THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR
I settled down for months in Quito. Not only were my Canal Zone experiences to be written, but I had long since planned to become a bona fide resident of a typical small South American capital. A letter of introduction won me quarters in the home of Señor Don Francisco Ordoñez V, in the calle Flores, while Hays hung up his hat in even more sumptuous surroundings around the corner. But not so fast! Not even whole-hearted “Don Panchito” would have received me in the state of sartorial delapidation
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CHAPTER VII DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE
CHAPTER VII DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE
On the morning of February eighth, “Meech” called me at five. I had already been some time awake, such was the excitement of so unusual an event as going on a journey. The morning mists had only begun to clothe the flanks of Pichincha when I broke the clinch of “Don Panchito’s” last abrazo and creaked away down the cobbles of Calle Flores and across the Plaza Santo Domingo in the hob-nailed mining-boots suited to the long, stony trail and the rainy season ahead. The remnant of my letter of credi
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CHAPTER VIII THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR
CHAPTER VIII THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR
As susceptible Don Giovanni falls under the succeeding spell of every pretty face, each blotting out those that went before, so the traveler down the backbone of South America frequently concludes that he has found at last the climate copied from the Garden of Eden. Such a spot is Cuenca, dimming by comparison its latest rival, Quito, and I find in my notes of the exuberant first day there the assertion: “Of all the earth, as far as I know it, Cuenca has the most perfect climate.” Always cool en
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CHAPTER IX THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU
CHAPTER IX THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU
I had been a full half-year in Ecuador when I turned my attention to the problem of getting out of it. That disintegration, that tendency for neighboring countries to hold no communication between each other, at which the American cannot but marvel in South America, was here in full evidence. Ecuador seemed as completely cut off from the country just over her southern boundary as from Europe. The cura of Oña had assured me that the one way to reach Peru from Loja would be to walk to Puerto Bolív
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CHAPTER X APPROACHING INCA LAND
CHAPTER X APPROACHING INCA LAND
Small wonder that the traveler who has splashed and waded a long week through the mournful wilderness, living chiefly on fond hopes salted with the anticipations of an unschooled imagination, and washed down with river water, should fetch up in Jaen with a decided shock. Occupying a large and distinct place on the map, this provincial “capital” proved to be a disordered cluster of a half-hundred wretched, time-blackened, tumble-down, thatched huts, the roofs full of holes, the gables often missi
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CHAPTER XI DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL
CHAPTER XI DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL
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 por
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CHAPTER XII THE ROOF OF PERU
CHAPTER XII THE ROOF OF PERU
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 t
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CHAPTER XIII ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL
CHAPTER XIII ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL
It is due, I suppose, to some error in my make-up that my interest in any given corner of the earth fades in proportion as it approaches modern civilization and easy accessibility. To your incurable vagabond may come a momentary thrill, if not of pleasure, at least of contentment, with the feel of city pavements once more under his feet after long hand to hand combat with the wilderness, and the knowledge that to go a journey he has only to signal an electric street-car on the nearest corner. Bu
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CHAPTER XIV OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO
CHAPTER XIV OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO
The truly romantic thing, of course, would have been to buy a llama to bear my burdens to the capital of the ancient Inca Empire. But however in keeping with the local color that prehistoric denizen of the Andes might have been, there were at least a score of cold, practical, modern reasons why he was not suited to my purpose. A few of them, such as pace, disposition, slight powers of sustained endurance, and uncompanionable temperament, experience had demonstrated native to a donkey, also. A ho
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CHAPTER XV THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES
CHAPTER XV THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES
It was in the scattered caserío of Marcas that I overtook a traveling piano. I had barely installed myself by force and strategy in a mud den, and tied Chusquito to a molle tree before a heap of straw in which he alternately rolled and ate, when a party of gente arrived, among them an old woman of the well-to-do chola class, carried astride the shoulders of an Indian. Their chief spokesman was a lawyer named Anchorena, a white man of some education and even a slight inkling of geography, who was
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CHAPTER XVI THE CITY OF THE SUN
CHAPTER XVI THE CITY OF THE SUN
I grew suddenly tired of Andahuaylas one afternoon, and sunrise next morning found me driving Chusquito over the neighboring divide. We had turned aside from the direct route to Abancay, following the valley of the Chumbau, for the least we could do for our recent hosts was to carry their greetings to an isolated compadre . His “civilized hacienda” sloped up from the shore of a beautiful mountain lake some twenty miles in circumference, deep-blue as some immense emerald, with half-cultivated mou
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CHAPTER XVII A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES
CHAPTER XVII A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES
The traveler of to-day is seldom granted the pleasure of visiting really new territory. How much more rarely comes the joy of being one of the first of modern men to tread the streets of an entire city, unrivaled in location and unknown to history! Such, however, is the privilege of those who come up to Cuzco in these days with the time and disregard for roughing it necessary to visit Machu Picchu. The mysterious, white-granite city of the Incas or their predecessors now called by that name was
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CHAPTER XVIII THE COLLASUYU, OR “UPPER” PERU
CHAPTER XVIII THE COLLASUYU, OR “UPPER” PERU
On November 11th I took train southward. Though my original plan of following the Inca highway from Quito to Cuzco had been accomplished, the thought of turning homeward with half the continent still unexplored had become an absurdity. But the scattered life of that dreary region to the south of the Imperial City promised too little of new interest to be worth covering on foot. If I did walk down to the station, behind my belongings on jogging Indian legs, it was because to have waited for the n
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CHAPTER XIX ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA
CHAPTER XIX ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA
There are three such “railroads” running out of Cochabamba, though none of them venture more than a few miles. All were brought up piecemeal on muleback or on massive two-wheel carts, like the first steamers on Titicaca, for it is what the natives call a “mediterranean” town. One is a steam line with a single toy locomotive, which starts every hour from the central plaza, for the suburb Calacala, “noted” for its baths, splitting the ears with its infantile shriek and spitting hot cinders upon al
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CHAPTER XX LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS
CHAPTER XX LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS
Santa Cruz de la Sierra, capital of all the vast department of eastern Bolivia, owes its fame largely to its isolation. Like those eminent men of many secluded corners of South America, it is important only because of the exceeding unimportance of its neighbors. The only tropical city of Bolivia, it stands some 1500 feet above sea-level on the 18th meridian, very near the geographical center of the republic, so far from the outside world that mail deposited on January 7th reached New York on Mar
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CHAPTER XXI SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO
CHAPTER XXI SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO
We took possession of a galpón , a thatched roof on poles, up in the edge of the jungle. But the anticipated feast was scanty. El Cerro had little to sell and less desire to sell it. Konanz was so completely worn out that he threw himself down supperless, without even swinging his “hang-net.” After a hut to hut canvass I coaxed a cerrito to sell a pound of fresh beef, which, with rice and some little red beans, made such a stew as roused even the German from his stupor. We topped it off with the
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CHAPTER XXII SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND
CHAPTER XXII SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND
With a deep blast from her ocean-going whistle the Asunción of the Mihanovich Line swung out through the shipping of a crowded port and was off down the Paraguay. The steamer was easily the equal of the best on the Hudson; its officers and stewards, all argentinos, were as white as you or I, though the passengers ran to all shades, and it was little short of startling to see white waiters serving and kowtowing to haughty Brazilian half-Indians and negroes. Green jungle, occasionally broken by pr
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