on called Guila, where
wooden bowls are made for the Quito market. Here we procured a fresh
Indian to take the place of one of our peons who had given out under his
burden. We advanced this day sixteen miles in ten hours, sleeping under
an old bamboo hut beside a babbling brook bearing the euphonious name of
Pachamama.

[Footnote 113: "Distance is frequently estimated by the time that a man
will occupy in taking a chew of coca," or 37-1/2 minutes.--_Herndon_.]

CHAPTER XIII.

Baeza.--The Forest.--Crossing the
Cosanga.--Curi-urcu.--Archidona.--Appearance, Customs, and Belief
of the Natives.--Napo and Napo River.

Eight hours' hard travel from Pachamama brought us to Baeza. This
"Antigua Ciudad," as Villavicencio calls it, was founded in 1552 by Don
Egilio Ramirez Davalos, and named after the quite different spot where
Scipio the Younger routed Asdrubal a thousand years before. It consists
of two habitations, the residence of two families of Tumbaco Indians,
situated in a clearing of the forest on the summit of a high ridge
running along the right bank of the Coca. This point, about one hundred
miles east of Quito, is important in the little traffic of the Oriente.
All Indian trains from the capital to the province pass through Baeza,
where the trail divides; one branch passing on easterly to San Jose, and
thence down through Abila and Loreto to Santa Rosa; the other leading to
the Napo through Archidona. Here we rested one day, taking possession of
one half of the larger hut--a mere stockade with a palm-leaf roof,
without chairs, chimney, or fire-place, except any place on the floor.
We swung our hammocks, while our Indians stretched themselves on the
ground beneath us. The island of Juan Fernandez is not a more isolated
spot than Baeza. A dense forest, impenetrable save by the trails,
stretches away on every side to the Andes and to the Atlantic, and
northerly and southerly along the slope of the entire mountain chain.
The forest is such an entangled mass of the living and the fallen, it is
difficult to say which is the predominant spirit--life or death. It is
the cemetery, as well as the birthplace, of a world of vegetation. The
trees are more lofty than on the Lower Amazon, and straight as an
arrow, but we saw none of remarkable size. A perpetual mist seems to
hang on the branches, and the dense foliage forms dark, lofty vaults,
which the sunlight never enters. The soil and air are always co