Chapter VI: The City of the Equator (3)

But when its noise grows overwhelming and its picturesqueness pales to mere uncleanliness, the stout-legged visitor has only to climb over the outer crust of Quito in almost any direction to revel in the stillness and feast his eyes on vistas of rolling valleys and mountains, fresh spring-green to the very snow-line. A path, for instance, zigzags up the _falda_ of Pichincha, steeper than any Gothic roof, through the scattering of red-tiled Indian huts called Guarico, and climbs until all Quito in its Andean pocket sinks to a toy city far beneath. Another road mounts doggedly round and round mountain-spurs and headlands until it is lost in clouds, and only the immediate world underfoot remains visible. The air grows almost wintry; oxen and Indian women, and now and then a man of the same downcast race, come hobbling down out of the mist above, with bundles of cut brush on their backs. Far up, the road swings around on the brink of things, pauses a moment as if to gather courage, then pitches headlong down out of sight into a light-gray void, as through a curtain shutting off the “Oriente,” the hot lands and unbroken forests of eastern Ecuador, a totally different world, where the Amazon begins to weave its network, and “wild” Indians roam untrammeled.