The heads of the two parties were Guayaquil, the ultra-liberal port city; and Quito, the immeasurably conservative fortress in the high mountains.
“Why not simply let the country fall into two halves?” Dana asked an acquaintance. “It seems that it would naturally fall into two halves, geographically, economically, politically, intellectually. I myself could draw a line where it would fall neatly into two halves.”
“So could I,” the acquaintance said. “The line of division is clear enough.”
“And then you could be two neighboring countries at peace with each other,” Dana continued as though the idea were new in him. “Neither of you has anything that the other wants.”
“Only the blood and the soul,” the acquaintance smiled. “You do not understand at all, traveler. Each one of us has these two things inside, and we are persons who dislike being split in two down the middle. I myself have lived in Quito five times and in Guayaquil five times, have been five times a conservative and clerical of the highlands, have been five times a liberal and radical of the coast. I feel it stirring in me again. I sit here and curse the Quito men and all their fruits to you, for I hate them with a hatred. But the sand is running in the little time-keeper in my head, and before another month has passed I will go up to Quito again. There I will be a Quito man again, a conservative and a clerical; and I will sit and curse the Guayaquil men and all their fruits to some listener, then I will hate them with a hatred. Without this duality in us we would die.
“Go out on the roads and trails and paths and you will see it. Rich people, middle people, poor people going up from the Guayaquil regions to work and live in the Quito regions, and you will see their faces and bearings change as they go. And you will see the same number (exactly the same number, I tell you) of rich and middle and poor people coming down from the Quito regions to work and live in the Guayaquil regions. Ah! — how their faces and gaits will change as they come down. Even the poor people will make these changes five or six times in their lives. No, no, traveler, do not ask us to cut ourselves in two. We're of this alternating and double nature; we'll die if we're cut in two.”
“How many times have you been alternately a Quito man and a Guayaquil man?” Dana asked the mixed blood native now with a smile, remembering that other conversation with another man.
“More times than I can count,” the man said. “But I am beyond that now. I must be both of those things at once; the world must be both of them at once, for Ecuador is an imperfect miniature of the world. It is the whole thing we have talked about this evening, that we must be both these things at once. Now I tell you, and your mottled friend tells you, to climb up to the condor's nest. And still you sit there. Why?”
Dana and Damisa the Leopard had been traveling upland for three days. This was a living land, a smoking land, a rumbling land. They were already into quite high land by choice (there was a lower valley way they could have taken), more than a third of the distance to Quito, right at Guaranda, and with the more than 20,000 feet high Chimborazo a few miles to their starboard.
The earth spoke constantly; it spoke as it had spoken at Sinai and Olympus, at Ararat and at Athos. There was true theophany in these high meadows and high mountains, always, every day and hour of the life there. They were never free from the feel of earthquake, never free from the mountain sickness named soroche that accompanies tremors in these high places, never free from the sight and sound and smell of volcanoes.
Dana knew now why the people of high Ecuador were always clerical and conservative; they must always feel themselves in the presence of God and the fear of God. They make a constant liturgy of their life.
But they hadn't much fear, apparently, of anything else. They seemed a bold and easy people, a smiling people (not a giggling people like those of Guayaquil and the lowlands). They had a serenity and a deep-chested strength and elation. They walked in grace. They had better walk in grace; it was holy and quaking land that they walked on.
But how should these people be of an appearance different from that of the lowland people if, as it was said, they changed from lowland to highland folk half a dozen times in their lives? Well, they did make changes in themselves as they went up or down the trails. It was as if one light was turned off in them and another sort of light was turned on. They made startling changes in their appearance.
Dana had noticed it in Damisa the Leopard, and Damisa had noticed it in Dana. Both had become very much deeper of chest in just three days, for they had panted in glorious strain for all the hours of that time. They had gone up through nine different terraces of greenery; they had been, really, in nine different countries; they had breathed nine grades of more pure but also more diffuse air. They had become at the same time more pale and more ruddy and less brown (it was only the spots or botches of Damisa that changed color). They moved with greater vigor and alertness, and became tireder with a deeper tiredness. They ate fruit and meat with a new appetite, and drank water insatiably wherever water flowed. They were much livelier in their waking hours, they were even much livelier in their sleeping hours.
They went light, or they'd never have gone so quickly. Dana had left the coffer, the child's coffin, with a land-lady in Guayaquil. He had also made her delegate or proxy over some of his affairs. The land-lady was lawyer as well as renter. Now Dana carried only a small shoulder-pack (it protects the nape and the shoulders and the upper spine from sudden attack from behind one, and it leaves the arms and hands free), wore a pistola in his belt and had a handknife inside his shirt. He also carried a number of handy things, besides his brains, in his hat. Dana's hats (the present one was an Indian derby) were always curiously packed, often to the saving of his head, and this not entirely accidental.
Damisa the Leopard seemed to carry nothing at all with him. Yet he could produce anything needed at a moment's notice. Dana had seen this mottled man drag out of his raggedy coat a small live cock, a dozen eggs (Damisa swore that they were cocks’ eggs), two steaming bowls of meat stew, a flask of wine, a still-hot baked potato, five bananas, a poncho blanket for Dana on one very cold night in the open, a wooden flute-whistle which he gave to a little boy who asked for a gift, a saddlers’ needle, a live coal (when Dana wished to start a fire one morning), a coil of woven hemp rope with eyelets when Dana wished to scale a difficult cliff to avoid a long trek around. (But Damisa had never been in mountains before — how had he known to have such things? Had he not been? Are there no mountains in Africa?) The man was like a magician in the things he could produce. (Among the Haussa of Africa, mottled persons are always trained as magicians. But if they become too proficient in their magic, so as to cause real alarm among the tribesmen, they are taken and sold away as slaves.) One could hardly go wrong on a journey with Damisa as traveling companion.
It is in these stimulating middle altitudes, high above the coast's low-lands, not yet to the extreme peaked heights, that the Ecuadorian intellectual experience often explodes. It may come as an emotional and near delirious excitement, a strange and ghostly cognitional and intuitional outpouring, a true change of life for those ascending or descending. It is sudden and sustained and startling.
Great works have been produced by travelers in travelers’ inns in Riobamba and Ambato and Latacunga; have been produced in short weeks, or even in short days and nights. Some angel of the ways ambushes mortal travelers in these places and gives them immortal moments. Nor is this experience limited to Ecuadorians in their traveling changes from one form to another. It has happened to certain Europeans, von Humbolt and others, that they were completely overwhelmed by the insights and revelations that they received in these regions.
Dana Coscuin had his own intellectual and intuitional encounters and excitements here in the stimulating altitudes. Damisa the Leopard had his also, but he was more privately entranced; Dana near burst with his own. But Dana's excitements were accompanied sometimes by a dizziness and weariness, whereas the Leopard was incapable of weariness. Besides
that, Dana's eyes hurt, the fine eyes that had never failed him. His eyes were cloudy by day and fiery by night, and he kept seeing prodigies on neighboring heights. Prodigies, or a single prodigy endlessly repeated. This prodigy was the repeated vision of a man or a creature named Ifreann Chortovitch, the person that Dana had killed on the borders of Congress Poland a year before. Only a year before? Perhaps it was more than that, perhaps it was two.
Ifreann the Son of the Devil moved with the same stilted stride that he had used in those foothills south of Krakow, but he wasn't now wearing the high jack-boots that Dana had killed him in. Ifreann was wearing some sort of Indian foot-wrapping. He moved on a course parallel to that of Dana and Damisa. Sometimes he waved to them, but Dana disdained to wave back. One does not wave greeting to a dead man.
“Who is he?” Damisa asked Dana. “Brothers of him I have known. Him I have not. I didn't know that there was another one so powerful in that family. Oh, but he is a big wild one!”
“There is nobody there,” Dana insisted. “It is only a private hallucination, a mearbhall of mine. You cannot see him.”
“Can I not see him, Dana? But I see him well and have marked him all day. Strong as he is, he cannot pick a way as well as we can. He is flamboyant, and he picks hard sites from which he may be viewed. For this reason he tires more quickly than we do. We will have a few hours rid of him now, for he must back-track, though he doesn't know it. And you are mountain-dizzy, Dana. We will go to the inn here and eat and rest.”
It was with a certain compassion and gentleness that Damisa took Dana Coscuin into the inn at Pillaro which is a little beyond Ambato. Dana didn't quite understand Damisa's concern for him. Damisa was clearly the more concerned of the two. It really seemed to be Damisa and not Dana who was mountain-dizzy.
But the inn was reassuring to Damisa. That mottled man stamped on its stone floor as if to assure himself of its solidity, and he was reassured. It was the sort of place that is called tambo in that country, a post-house where coaches stopped and horses were changed, and also a good hotel for people. This tambo inn was more solid than the mountains it was built upon. It was a pleasant, but not boisterous, place. It was a religious foundation, or it had the lean sharp flavor of one. There was a brother of the Viajeros order in attendance, a Green-Robe. There were two married couples who managed and served the place.
The travelers, except for two of them, were couples or families going up or down the roads. Most of them were not poor people; they were well outfitted and funded for their journeys. They met together easily, they prayed at table, and they ate well. They had brandy with the meat, and wine with the bread course, and then more brandy after the meal was cleared. But they were not topers. They were sober people drinking against the night's coming chill. They had tobacco provided to them there, and pipes for those who did not have such. They sang a little, in small groups, or singly. Dana sang to them in one style, and Damisa the Leopard in another. They had no instruments of a proper sort, though one small girl had what seemed no more than a long-necked gourd with strings on it.
The men argued politics and theology and the investment of money. There was some discussion about Christ's own politics — would he have been a Black or a Red in the present context? There was more discussion of Christ's own position on the matter of investment. He had not believed in idle money, in the burying of talents in the ground, that was sure. But the man who contended that by this scorn for burying money in the ground Christ meant to oppose investment of money in land was opposed by most of those present, and he justified his arguments badly.
Christ had recommended the planting of vineyards (that was practical at a two-thousand feet lower altitude; it was not practical here) and the building of vats and wine presses. But He hadn't, apparently, been in favor of building large barns. The Spanish had loved large barns but they had been mistaken in building them in Ecuador. Large barns are for regions where the seasons accord with the time of year, not with the altitude.
Christ had blessed fishing enterprises, but where had He ever blessed guano enterprises? Did He more approve of the rapid and sophisticated investment of the coastal regions, or of the more solid and measured investments of the highlands? Was He a fast-money man or a slow-money man, that was the question.
He had a clear love of boats, one man argued, and that implied a love of larger ships and of shipping. Oh yes, but He had been a boat-man and a hill-man at the same time, Dana pointed out.
He had been of the mixed-blood province of Galilee, a lady said, and that was a province of sharpers and fast-money men, a place where the Greeks and the Jews honed their wits on each other, and crafted and manufactured and traded with an openness that was not understood by the Jerusalem Jews with their horny hands tight on their shekels. He'd have been a fast-money man.
“Not so,” said a heavy-bearded man who'd have to be more Spanish than Indio or Negro, who seemed in fact to be a little bit Jewish or Greek himself. “He'd not have gone into the desert if He'd been a fast-money man; they just don't do that, unless for mineral.”
“We haven't any desert,” the lady said. “Only the poor countries of Peru and Chile have desert. Our equivalent is the volcanic peaks. He'd have gone up to the condors’ nests to pray, as the Condor does even now. But when He came down He'd still be a fast-money man. The multiplication of the loaves and fishes — that story is misunderstood. It had to do with an investment so fast (one day by one account, no more than three days by another) and of such a high return that you whistle when you think of it. I believe that it was a deal in fish futures and barley futures. I wish I'd had money in on that one from the start.”
They talked of the continuing civil wars. Most of the travelers had been on each side several times. They talked of the Indios and of the Europeans. They talked of plantations and of plantation reform, and that brought them to talk of investured lies.
“It is the men of the lodges who own it all,” said the man who had argued for ships and shipping. “They lie that it is the Church that owns it all; nevertheless it is they themselves who have looted the Church, and now the Church owns nothing. The men of the lodges claim their lie is privileged; they wrap themselves in this lie as in a mail coat and are unassailable.”
“I myself am a man of the lodges,” the bearded man said bluntly. “We do claim privilege for our stand and we will shove it down your throats. I myself don't own it all, but I own a lot of it. I wish that I owned it all.”
They talked about the Condor.
“He isn't much, he isn't much at all,” the lady said. “He's a bare-necked and wretched bird without enough feathers to cover him. It's said that everyone who goes up to him should bring a few feathers along to help the poor Condor cover his nakedness.”
“Then why are you going up to visit him?” a quieter and more pinched-in lady asked.
“Oh, I have plenty of feathers to spare,” the less quiet lady said.
“You can find the Condor?” Dana asked her.
“Travel with me in the morning, boy,” she said. “We come up to him in three days.”
They all went to bed a full hour before the middle of the night, except for the late ones still arriving. Dana and Damisa the Leopard slept in a small room with two other unfamilied men: a poor and dim-witted Spanish sort, and a rich-seeming Indio. This was often the state of the two folk, popular error to the contrary. One of the married ladies who served the house offered them a candle, but Dana said there was no need. He took a candle and flint out of his hat. He didn't need the flint. Damisa the Leopard took live coal and then flame out of his pocket and lighted the candle.
“Payasos, clowns,” the serving lady laughed, and left the four of them there.
They made a wood fire — it was quite cold in that altitude. They had four monk's cots in a small room. All four men slept clothed and with a blanket provided for each; yet they would still sleep cold.
“Dreams out of the ivory gate, and visions before midnight,”
old Thomas Browne wrote. Dana's visions were out of both the ivory gate and the horn gate, and they were of a man who was supposed to dead. His visions overflowed him so that the others in the room suffered from them also. Damisa the Leopard shivered nearby, not entirely from the cold.
Well, what was the case with the creature Ifreann?
“I am alive,” Ifreann himself had said. “Wake and see. Come and put your hand …”
“I believe that you failed to kill him,” Angelene had said. “Oh no, he isn't alive here. These are only some shadows and deliriums of him that he projects here.”
“That I never knew, what manner of fish he is, or what state he is in,” O'Boyle had said. “I never saw him in proper flesh myself.”
“I didn't know that there was another one so powerful in that family,” Damisa the Leopard had said. “Oh, but he is a big wild one! Can I not see him, Dana? But I see him well, and have marked him all day.”
“There is nobody there,” Dana had insisted. “It is only a private hallucination of mine.”
But there was somebody there. There was a giant coming there and his steps made the mountain ring like iron. This was a giant of a devil who had risen out of his death, who had risen out of his own rot and out of the earth, and walked again. What matter if he were alive or not? A dead giant who walks is fearful enough. And the sounding of his walk was loud enough and clear enough now.
Ifreann had always sent a strong aura before him and he sent it now. Damisa the Leopard whimpered in his light sleep. Damisa had known the brothers of this man and he knew their scorching red powers. The poor Spanish man mumbled “Tigre, tigre” fearfully. The rich Indio sat up and whispered “It is only one of the miscarven stone devils who has burst out of the earth and walks the night. They do this sometimes. Remember that they are no more than stone.”
Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2 Page 11
