The morning we started was cold and bright, the Andean sky a clear and benevolent blue above us. My mule was a rangy white animal with a mind of his own, a cargo mule unaccustomed to the vagaries of a Gringa. He knew where he wanted to go and, in spite of all my blandishments, chose his own method of going there. He reminded me a little of Rosinante; in fact, the whole expedition had a sort of windmill-tilling air about it. Sandoval’s mule was a sad-eyed beast which, as the South Americans say, was muy mula, very mule. There were two cargo mules more or less to match.
But Juan, the mule driver—there was a bird of a different color! He was, I think, the only loquacious Indian I have ever known. We did about twenty miles the first day, and he, loping beside his animals, talked to them every inch of the way. Sometimes he spoke to them politely, and sometimes very intimately. He carried on long conversations with them about the passengers—the fine lady and gentleman they carried, which evidently they should consider an honor. Once, when a pack mule stumbled and fell and the load was loosened, he was severe. “Now thou and I, little mule, are not together worth a tenth of this fine cargo we carry. Doubtless it contains Champagne and fine sweets, delicate biscuits…” There his imagination seemed suddenly to fail him, for he sang out abruptly “Carajo, carajo, on with you!”
Later I emulated Juan when my beast, instead of going around a thicket, plunged through it, leaving me in a tangle of burrs and brush. “Carajo!” I said angrily. Juan came bouncing up in time to hear me. “Señora!“ he exclaimed in a shocked voice. “Ladies don’t use that word.”
The first night, we slept in the stone house of Indians known to Juan, but late in the afternoon of the second day we were deep in a beautiful but deserted woodland valley through which ran a noisy little river.
“We spend the night here,” said Sandoval. “It is too late to go farther.”
“But where do we sleep?” I asked, as I could see nothing but a bridge that spanned the stream. A very picturesque one, too, that reminded me of New England covered bridges, for this one was much like them except that its roof was of thatch. It was also a little reminiscent of the tile-roofed bridges of Western China.
“On the bridge, of course,” replied Sandoval.
“Oh,” I said.
Many are the strange places I have slept … Buddhist ghost temples, Tibetan lamaseries, Indian dak bungalows, once in the Shanghai customs house, caves, often in the open … but never on a bridge. As we progressed deeper into the country, the greeting of the infrequent travelers would be, “Where have you slept?” The answer was, “On the bridge of San Nicolas,” or whatever bridge it happened to be.
Sandoval unpacked and set up my camp cot (a luxury which he scorned), and we set about preparations for dinner. By the time Sandoval had a fire going on the flat stones at one end of the bridge, other travelers had arrived … two families of Indians, complete with a mule for each, and babies slung on their mothers’ backs.
We were both ravenously hungry, but we decided first to have coffee, as I was planning a rather elaborate meal and needed the two cooking pots at the same time. Sandoval sat sipping the scalding, black brew and feeding twigs to the fire, while I cut up the remnants of our pot-roasted beef (we’d eaten most of it at breakfast) and reheated it, adding a little water to speed the process. In the other pot I cooked some of the small, curly fideos with a generous quantity of chopped onions and a hit of the fiery abi. I thickened the combination to make a thin gravy, and when the spaghetti-onion mixture was done, put the two together. The resulting aroma, as it rose in the still-darkening air, was, I think, the most tantalizing ever to tickle my nostrils.
We ate the mixture poured over the flat, toasted buns on battered tin plates in the glow of the cooking fire, while the river under us sang of the glaciers of the high Andes. One of the Indians on the other end of the bridge brought us two oranges, and we gave him a little of our ambrosia in return.
One loses all sense of time on such a journey; you remember the sudden downpours of tropical rain that drench you in spite of a trench coat and a big palm-fibre hat, as umbrella. You remember arriving in the late afternoon soaking wet at an isolated chacra in a ragged forest clearing, the cheer of the kitchen fire, and the hospitality offered. Or a tiny settlement deep in a cultivated valley where there was a little bodega that sold coffee and oranges. We replenished our supply with coffee wrapped in newspaper, which I carefully smoothed out later. It was over twelve years old. At one place I asked what they thought of the war, and was met with questioning glances. What war?
There was the day when, in the late afternoon, we arrived at Omia—journey’s end, where we should find our rare zoological prize—the little silver-grey hear the campesino had. All day long we had gone up and down hill on the narrow trail that was at times a rock staircase; there had been rain, but as we followed the purling river for the last lap, the sun was hot, the sky blue, and the air filled with the chatter of parrots and the songs of brilliant birds. On the map Omia did not exist, but we knew it to be the last vestige of civilization.
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