Head Hunters of the Amazon | Page 9

was capable of yielding. So without any hesitation I mounted a mule and started for Salinas.
The view from Salinas is, perhaps, second to none in the world. It is bewilderingly vast. To the East, Chimborazo's mammoth dome of dazzling silver rises from the very outskirts of the town, its summit five thousand feet above. To the North stretches the Cordillera, grandeur piled on grandeur till it culminates in the broken cone of Antisana eighty miles away. Away to the South peak after peak of the same range, piled in one great structure of rock and ice, raise their heads above the sea of clouds which lies like a pall over the whole world. A hundred miles to the West and nearly three miles below, lies the Pacific faintly visible on a clear day, merging into the grey-blue haze which envelopes the littoral. Sunset is the climax of all the splendours of the day. As the sun dips to the level of the cloud blanket, its slanting beams convert it to one enormous rainbow. In a few minutes the colours fade away, and up through the gaps in the clouds shoot the last rose-coloured rays which tint the peak of Chimborazo. The world for a few brief moments is upside down. To live even for a minute in a land lighted by a sun which shines up from below through the rifts in the clouds is an experience never to be forgotten.
To reach Salinas from Riobamba one traverses some fifteen miles of desert, a wilderness of boulders and volcanic sand, when the ascent of Chimborazo commences. Five or six miles of climbing through broken, deeply fissured country, the home of the condors, where the torrents of boiling water rushed down from the crater in the old days of its activity, bring one to the Arenal, the great sloping plateau of volcanic sand about a mile broad which lies at the base of the dome of ice and snow which forms the summit of the mountain. Rounding the southern shoulder on the faintly marked trail, one gets a glimpse of the Riobamba valley, with the little white specks which are villages. Down one drops again into the land of rocks and p?ramo straw, passing under precipitate clips and through rough ca–ons until the little group of thatched huts which is Salinas comes into view.
As often as not the passage is dangerous, on account of the blizzards in which the traveller can easily lose his way and perish of cold and hunger before the sun breaks through again. We, however, were fortunate, for we crossed just after a storm which had left a foot of snow.
The story of my Salinas venture is worth relating briefly, for it bears directly on the tale I have to tell.
When I arrived at what was to be my home and the place where my fortune was to be made I cannot say that it struck me as being prepossessing. In the miserable village lived a vermin-ridden population swathed in blankets, which crawled in and out of its kennel-like huts through the only opening in the wall, and lived with the chickens and guinea pigs in the straw which served for beds and fuel. Cut off from the C—rdovez plantations by forty miles of coasting through mud astride a mule, I was to amass a fortune with the aid of the yellow water which oozed through the cracks in the rocks. My hut was no better than the rest, except that it boasted a mud partition between the kitchen and the bedroom, the furniture consisting of pots and pans and kettles, a few rocks for a fireplace, and a pile of p?ramo grass.
The sole industry of the village, when I arrived, was salt-water boiling. Every household owned its copper kettle, which it filled at one or other of the springs, and boiled on a fire in its own home. The women looked after the kettles, while the men packed fuel from the nearest scrub two or three thousand feet below. They struggled hard to make a miserable living, but my mission was to take from them all they had. Consequently from the first day I was not exactly popular.
To cut a long story short, after old C—rdovez, who accompanied me to the village when first I went, had advised the headman that he was going to work the salt-springs himself, and do away with the old system under which the privilege was rented out to the Indians, I announced that I would pay ten centavos a day for labor, male or female, and twenty per cord (about three mule-loads) of fuel. Then I set about tackling the problem of putting up a factory in that desolate spot. I imported a native coppersmith from Riobamba (paid in advance) and