Head Hunters of the Amazon | Page 7

one for descending. The road is cut out of the natural clay, which is heavy and slippery, with the result that the ascending side is one long series of parallel miniature ditches, twenty inches apart, where the mules set their feet, running at right angles to the direction of the road itself, while the descending side is smooth, hard and slippery, and serves as a slide down which the mules toboggan, enjoying the fun as much as the riders. There is no sport in the world, in my estimation, to equal coasting down the Equator on a mule. Many a time I have made trips down the mountains, when later on I lived at 14,000 feet, just for the fun of covering in five or six hours what it takes eight days to climb. When one reaches a spot where a slide begins, nothing in the world can persuade one's mule to keep to the corrugated side of the road and walk demurely down. It sticks out its ears, places its forefeet carefully on the top of the slide and away it goes! One ends up in the mud-hole at the bottom, which acts as a receiving station, generally on top, but not always. The trains of mules coming down the Riobamba-La Delicia trail with the empty rum barrels often get badly tangled up on the slides, as may be imagined. The arrieros (muleteers, literally "gee-upers" in Spanish) try to avoid trouble by one of their number stationing himself at the bottom and helping each mule out of the morass before the next arrives. Altogether it is a great sport. As the trail nears the timber-line it often leads along the face of a cliff, where it had been blasted out. At such places there is a ledge about twenty inches wide, but the mules, being accustomed to pack bulky loads over the same trail, always walk on the very outside edge, often with a thousand-foot drop a few inches away. Indeed the rider's leg is suspended over the clouds.
C—rdovez and I, mounted on the same picked mules as brought us to Delicia from Bodegas, covered the eighty-odd miles between Don Agosto's house and Riobamba in six days, having passed through the "Count's" own plantation on the way. At Riobamba, the second town in Ecuador, with its twenty thousand inhabitants, his father had his headquarters, and was known as "Papa Domingo," in order to distinguish him from his son whose name was also Domingo. Here we pulled up.
The C—rdovez m?nage at Riobamba was composed, apart from the old man himself, of a daughter-in-law, who kept house for him, and a number of servants and peons. The sons were scattered all over the estate, while his wife kept house (a very different kind of house to his) in Quito. He was far more at home in his rough and tumble farmhouse where the hens walked about the living-room and foraged for scraps among the refuse on the brick floor than anywhere else. He, and his sons when they paid him a visit, lived after the fashion of the peasants of the West of Ireland, only rather worse. He had no use for soap, seldom changed his clothes, and always went to bed in his boots and his hat. If you took your hat off when you sat down to supper, you were cautioned to keep it on, as everybody else did, for fear of the draught. (Most of those in whose veins runs Spanish blood live in mortal terror of a breath of fresh air.)
His house, a one-story, whitewashed red-tiled affair, had, like most others in Riobamba, a patio and a corral, the former in the centre of all the living-rooms, the latter outside the back wall. The corral was used for sanitary purposes, no modern conveniences having been introduced into the country. Cooking was a simple operation. In the middle of the kitchen floor a bonfire was built, round which the servants stood manipulating pots and pans, the smoke causing their eyes to run. The drops sizzled in the frying-pans. The fleas were so numerous and hardy in that house that I used to walk the streets in preference to trying to sleep.
Apart from the other peculiarities of the place which I have mentioned already, there are two things that stand out strongly in my memory. The boys of the family had a habit of borrowing everything I had in the way of clothes and kit, and the family always opened my inward and outward mail.
It was into that household, then, that I rode (literally, for one always enters the patio of an Ecuadorian house on horseback) one evening in February, 1895, expecting to find something rather different from what I have described. The great extent and importance of the