0

HE mighty Andes encircle the basin in which the capital of Ecuador lies 9300 feet above the waves that break along the coast. It is remote, this lofty capital, and it is old. No one knows how old. Nearly four hundred years have passed since the Spaniards took possession of it in the name of their king and their cross. Before the Spaniards there were the Incas; before them the Caras; before the Caras a vague people whom they are said to have conquered; and before them? We do not know. Quito does not tell its past or its age. It has the air of remembering more years than it troubles itself to reckon. Yes, Quito is old.

Although there remain no ruins of its former civilizations, Quito seems not to forget. Even its most modern streets and squares somehow whisper of the past. Despite its flowery parques, its new and handsome buildings; despite even the brilliant white light of vertical sun-rays, the city conveys an impression of melancholy and mystery. Its very odor is ancient.

Incredibly narrow streets climb and descend steeply. The paving is of rough cobbles. In the middle of the street is a line of flat stones over which the burden-bearing Indians have trotted so long and in such numbers that their bare feet have worn in the stones deep depressions; and as they have

thus worn away the very rock, they have polished smooth its surface.

The houses of Quito are of one, two, and more rarely three stories. Balconies overhang the narrow sidewalks. Shops often occupy the ground floors, or families of Indians are found dwelling in squalor directly beneath the establishments of the prosperous. Ecuador does not, as do we, shove out of sight its poor. They kneel in the most gorgeous churches; they wander in the proudest squares. The same roofs shelter silks and rags; Lazarus actually dwells at the very door-step of Dives. This, some Ecuadorians maintain, is true democracy.

Many of the houses are weatherstained; others are pastel pinks and blues; still others are blindingly white. In the older parts of the city houses are often perched so high on the hillsides that long steep steps lead up to them, with occasional foot-bridges to connect the two sides of the street. Deep, precipitous quebradas, or ravines, carve the city into sections, and these are at intervals united by masonry bridges over which vehicles may pass. There are many churches, built to withstand earthquakes-massive Moorish churches with low, square towers. And in the towers hang bells.

Those bells waked us daily at twenty minutes after four, clashing suddenly in the darkness. They rang madly,

frantically; clanging deafeningly in the night, clanging frigidly as cold metal struck against cold metal, pealing now slow, now all at once fast and furious. There

was no sequence or cadence in their ringing. They seemed at one moment to exult in noise for the sheer love of noise, and then with a swift change of mood they would toll as though in slow bewilderment; pause, and again wildly clang.

Quito we would bask for a few moments on our balcony, sitting there in the sunshine and looking out beyond the tower of San Agustín, over the

Under a weight of gaily striped Indian blankets I would stir cautiously an inch at a time to avoid too sudden contact with surrounding arctic sheets. I would be glad not to be one of the pious called to prayer by those insistent bells. It could not be good for the soul to rise in the coldness of an Andean night to kneel upon chill stone floors at mass. Such a practice would so justify one in self-righteousness that one might complacently neglect all the small commonplace duties of life.

Thus reasoning, I would fall asleep, and when I awoke again, the smiling cholo room boy would be coming in with the breakfast tray, and the sun would be pouring through the big windows of our room at the Metropolitano.

By the time we were dressed there would be an October warmth in the sun, and before going out to explore

city to the green mountain slopes of the encircling Andes, where tumbled a silver cascade, tiny in the distance. Beneath us were tile roofs of a soft faded red, like the vague dull reds of Egyptian paintings. In the eaves of these roofs grew little flowering plants about which hovered hummingbirds, brilliantly iridescent, with

long tails so out of proportion to the size of their bodies that they looked like dragon-flies like the glorified dragon-flies of a child's dream.

If we delayed in the sun on the balcony, the bells would burst again into sound, commanding the devout to still another mass. The air would be filled with their clamor from the distant outskirts of the city to San Agustín, pealing in our very ears.

Looking into the tower, we seemed to see the materialized spirit of all those chaotic bells. We saw the poncho of an Indian swing back and forth with each mighty peal of the great bell. His body vibrated with the huge clapper, peal following swing, now fast, now slow. He also directed the lesser bells, whose controlling ropes he gathered in one hand as a driver gathers together the reins of his team.

All over Quito similar ponchos thus swayed with the clappers of many bells in many churches. Small wonder that the bells of South-American Catholicism are not as those of Europe, that they toll in no orderly fashion, in no scientific harmony or disciplined melody; for primitive man directs themprimitive man with his rapid, unaccountable changes of mood, his sudden shifting from a frantic placation of terrifying gods to a hesitating hope, a tremulous groping toward light, flickering and elusive, wandering like a will-o'-the-wisp among the shadows, lost often in the darkness of superstition, but from time to time reappearing, and expressing itself in the sweet, resonant peals which occasionally find their way into the clanging pagan medley.

Thus it is the Indian, the conquered race, who in Ecuador calls to worship cholo, mestizo, and Spaniard-the poncho summoning the cowl to prayer.

In the streets of this far-away Quito the centuries paraded. Caravans of mules came and went. They provided the only means of transportation between Quito and the towns of the northern frontier, Otovalo and Ibarra and Tulcán in Ecuador, Ipiales in Colombia. The mules entered the city in long, weary lines, gray with the dust of the desert of Mojanda. They imparted an added atmosphere of faraway-ness. They stumbled mutely over the cobbles, yet their dejected figures were eloquent of great distances, of exhausting and perilous trails. They brought into the strange little mountain capital the very breath of the great lonely wastes beyond, as the camels that pass through the gates of the Great Wall bring into Peking a consciousness of the mystery of the Gobi Desert.

It is impossible to think of Quito without seeing the holy fathers of the church moving always up and down those narrow streets, passing almost invariably in couples, as certain birds fly always two and two across the sky. There were members of the order of La Merced in long white gowns and flat black hats; Dominicans in white robes with black cowls; Franciscans in coarse brown, with their bare feet in hemp sandals; Hermanos Cristianos in black cassocks and black hats; and the frailes of San Agustín in black-hooded cowls.

These priestly robes, passing continually up and down the streets, seemed almost to equal in numbers the black mantas drawn closely about the heads of the pallid women who hurried from mass to mass like somber wraiths. Priests and manta-ed women contrasted sharply with young officers in truly gorgeous uniforms and with occasional señoritas who, with slim bare arms slipped into muffs, contrived an air of coquetry even in the black garb of mass.

These figures of Spanish-American civilization shared the streets with those aboriginal people who trotted under heavy burdens. A woman carried on her back the gruesome heads of three oxen, to which their menacing horns were still attached. Many carried whole pigs, stiff and stark and looking pitifully undressed. A family would undertake the contract of moving an entire house, and one day we saw twenty-four men hurrying under the weight of a great iron water-wheel, and yet all moving in perfect harmony of step.

Sometimes a costly limousine would dispute the way with a flock of sheep or a drove of rebellious pigs. The

Indian women who shepherded these beasts showed a complete indifference to limousines. A motor in their village would have been a sensation, but thesights of Quito did not concern them. They were there to drive their flocks to market and then to return to their own place. Dust veiled the barbaric color of their skirts. They walked with an air of great aloofness, as though they were as removed from the world of motor-cars as the year 1535 is removed from 1921. As they walked they were busily spinning, occupied only with affairs on the Indian plane of existence, where the behavior of pigs and sheep is important and there is always need of much spinning.

Often as we sat in the Parque de la Independencia, where all day little Andean whitethroats trilled cheerily in the sun, there came to our ears the bizarre shouts of passing Indians, the shriek of an automobile horn, and suddenly the crashing clang of bells.

And Quito, which at first had appeared to us so unreal, began, because of its very unlikeness, its very remoteness, to seem, after all, the one reality. It was the rest of the world that was strange and far away.

The beauty of the Ecuadorian plateau is a stern beauty-the beauty of harsh mountains and great sterile distances seen through the medium of lofty desert air. Upon this simple and austere land Catholicism in pristine pomp long ago imposed itself. Ornate churches dominate Quito. Upon crossing their thresholds one forgets that outside, in the sunshine, a new Quito is by degrees in construction.

A stone's throw from the carved façade of La Compañía de Jesús the Bank of Pichincha was erecting a building of modern type; but within the

Compañía blazed candles with all the glory of the church militant and supreme, their multiplied glimmer becoming a splendor which revealed walls and dome carved and gilded with an appalling intricacy.

There at mass kneeling figures crowded the floor. A filthy heap of rags might kneel beside the proudest lady in the capital. How glitteringly marvelous these churches must seem to the Indians whose poor life is as austere as the plateau itself! How dazzling to him must be the imposing, shining ritual!

In the kneeling multitudes of Quito I was aware of a sincerity so complete, a faith so unquestioning, that in its presence the world of skepticism and science seemed to dissolve into a vaporous nothingness. And yet the very magnitude of that faith tends to destroy faith. Here where day after day, century after century, prayer, prostration, and prayer had been incessant and faith entire, should there not have been some answer which would ring around the world? How each petition emphasized the wretchedness of mankind as over and over man implored his God to pity, pardon and pity! "Tened misericordia! Tened misericordia!" until, standing in the shadow of a great column, I felt my heart break with the silence the silence of the images before which flared the candles. But my heart need not thus have broken. There are many roads to God. Perhaps those beseeching souls heard an answer to which my ears were deaf.

In the entrance to the monastery of the Dominicans we found a young monk, white-robed and black-cowled, sketching in the figures of a mural painting. He sat upon a high scaffold, and below him passed a procession of