Head Hunters of the Amazon | Page 8

C—rdovez ranches and plantations, the respect in which their name was held everywhere, and the knowledge that every one of them (including the old man himself) had been educated in Europe or the States, led me to expect that their houses would be models of up-to-dateness, instead of on a par with the primitive homes of their ordinary uneducated compatriots. As a matter of fact, the house in Quito which the old Se–ora C—rdovez kept with her daughter was clean, well-furnished, and systematically run. However, when Papa Domingo went to visit that portion of his family, he had to change into a dress shirt and a black jacket, which pleased him very little, so, despite his great affection for the ladies, and his great popularity in the Capital, where he was known for his wit and his hospitality, he seldom spent much time in his wife's house. He was far more at home shouting "cachi" (salt in Quichua) to his herds of cattle.
Here I must leave the story of my travels for a brief space, to make a few general remarks on my life in Ecuador and its special relation to this volume.
The present record is not intended to deal in detail with Ecuador, the object of this chapter being to explain how my stay in the country came to be a stepping-stone to the wanderings in the wilds in the interior of the South American continent which form the main subject of my book. At the same time, there are a few of the outstanding features of Ecuadorian life which I cannot pass over without some brief comment, either because they bear directly on my tale, or because they are intrinsically too rich in humour to be forgotten.
Instead, therefore, of giving a chronological account of the two years which I spent in Ecuador, almost exactly corresponding to the years of the calendar 1895-6, I propose treating the greater part of that period as a whole, picking out the salient features of my adventures, both commercial and social, and only returning to a connected narrative when I am dealing with the causes of my leaving the country in the way I did.
From the day of my arrival in Riobamba I was treated by the Count to a series of commercial propositions which took me all over the country, but only one of which ever came to a head; even that one ended for me in a most unsatisfactory way. Commercially speaking, then, my time in Ecuador was one long series of disappointments, due partly to my gullibility, and partly to the spirit of procrastination which permeated the country from end to end. The only bright spot in the whole story is the fact that I personally lost no money, as I had none to lose. Of the $100 with which I had started from New York, a few were left when I reached Bodegas; from that time on I was the guest of the C—rdovez family, until certain events of which I shall speak later took place. So my finances were not a complicated matter.
But if my finances were not very complex, the innumerable machinations of my business acquaintances, and the never-ending stream of get-rich-quick propositions with which I was deluged, certainly were. I remember how we were going to put up a furniture factory, start a modern sugar plant, clear fifty acres of forest and plant coffee, build a new road over the C—rdovez holdings to Bodegas, put on a service of mule teams for transporting produce to and from the interior, light Quito by electricity, irrigate the arid lands in the Riobamba valley with the snow on Chimborazo, erect a tannery to be run with the bark off the C—rdovez trees, bore for oil, distill fine old Scotch whiskey, and follow up a hundred other projects which our versatile minds conceived.
Every other week I would write home of the vast fortunes which I and my associates were going to amass, until at last I was myself so bewildered that for the sake of having some really definite occupation, I was ready to do anything from prospecting for a brass mine to building a health resort on the summit of Cotopaxi. Finally, however, something on which I could at any rate get busy presented itself.
At Salinas, which is 14,000 feet above sea-level (one of the highest villages in the world outside Tibet), there was a salt-spring which was worked by the Indian villagers. The land was owned by old C—rdovez, who was paid about $1,200 a year by the villagers for the mineral rights. Well, the idea was that C—rdovez should take over the active working of the spring, install modern machinery and, with me as "industrial partner" (that sounded good!), make the $30,000 a year which the spring