Head Hunters of the Amazon | Page 8

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 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