o Real on the crest of the ridge; but
the night was advancing rapidly, and crawling up such a road by
starlight was not a little dangerous. So we put up at a miserable tambo,
Pogyos by name. It was a mud hut of the rudest kind, windowless and
unfloored; very clean, if it had been left to nature, but man and beast
had rendered it intolerably filthy. Our hostess, a Quichua woman, with
tattered garments, and hair disheveled and standing up as if
electrified, set a kettle on three stones, and, making a fire under it,
prepared for us a calabash of chicken and _locro_. _Locro_, the national
dish in the mountains, is in plain English simply potato soup. Sitting
on the ground, we partook of this refreshment by the aid of fingers and
wooden spoons, enticing our appetites by the reflection that potato soup
would support life. The unkempt Indian by our side, grinning in
conscious pride over her successful cookery, did not aid us in this
matter. Fire is used in Ecuador solely for culinary purposes, not for
warmth. It is made at no particular spot on the mud floor, and there is
no particular orifice for the exit of the smoke save the chinks in the
wall. There is not a chimney in the whole republic. As the spare room in
the establishment belonged to the women, we gentlemen slept on the
ground outside, or on beds made of round poles. The night was piercingly
cold. The wished-for morning came at last, and long before the sun
looked over the mountains we were on our march. It was the same terrible
road, running zigzag, or "quingo" fashion, up to Camino Real, where it
was suddenly converted into a royal highway.

We were now fairly out of the swamps of the lowlands, and, though under
the equator, out of the tropics too. The fresh mountain breeze and the
chilly mists announced a change of climate.[12] Fevers and dysenteries,
snakes and musquitoes, the plantain and the palm, we had left behind.
Camino Real is a huddle of eight or ten dwellings perched on the summit
of a sierra a thousand feet higher than the top of Mount Washington. The
views from this stand-point compensate for all past troubles. The wild
chaos of mountains on every side, broken by profound ravines, the heaps
of ruins piled up during the lapse of geologic ages, the intense azure
of the sky, and the kingly condor majestically wheeling around the still
higher pinnacles, make up a picture rarely to be seen. Westward, the
mountains tumble down into hills and spread out into pl