Head Hunters of the Amazon | Page 9

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 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