Head Hunters of the Amazon | Page 7

120 litres. Thus for one cent a man could attain to
the ideal state for about twenty-four hours. Even the peons could afford
that.
The trail from La Delicia to Riobamba is reckoned first-class. It is, as a
matter of fact, composed, on the level stretches, of a sea of mud, while
on the gradients it has two distinct halves, one for ascending and 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 mŽnage 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