American Demons

Colonialism in the Mirror of Romanticism - Dramatic Shadows

Archaic arts and crafts

Half dead but in a good mood, travel writer and amateur ornithologist Cornelius Kammschneider arrives at a mission station in the Oriente region of Ecuador. Jesuits wrest the most basic hospitality from their aversion. The German Protestant seemed more suspicious to them than all "heathens", including the baptized ones. Kammschneiders reservations are even stronger. Er finds every thing on the station "roughly hewn together". He is disturbed by the compressed virility of his overseer. Jorge Salamanca is a monotonously full-blooded man. A born inquisitor. The dramatic shadow gets on Kammschneider's nerves. He calls the original population, who are encouraged by the missionaries to work regularly full dressed, fearful. Compared to the Waorani, the judgment is accurate. But the wards of the Jesuits have lost their courage rather than their ferocity. It is unwise to trust them unarmed. Their outbursts are terrible.

Kammschneider quickly leaves, but not alone. A barely grown-up boy joins him. The traveler accepts Alfonso as his companion. The two of them end up in a snow-covered area where there are no passages, unless they have been blasted into the rock by water power. They cross ice fields in a rope team. The climbers reach the Papallacta Pass, where they are welcomed in a charcoal burner's hut.

Kammschneider notes "a poor shelter", depressed by a "native family". The author has a "cold". He describes the hostess as a "Herculean woman, black with soot and with a receding chin".

Kammschneider waxes lyrical about the place:"Wretched shack you/without doors and chimney/open to all winds."

No table, no chair, no bed. Dogs keep watch against wolves that sneak into the pass at night.Everybody moves and makes room. The hospitality borders on frenzy. Kammschneider asks:

"Guys, why don't you build a proper hut?"

That's what I call tact.

"Yes, of course," replied the female head, "if it were only up to us, we would have built a smart bungalow next to the private spa long ago. But we don't have the air to breathe and not a load of wood to cut up here."

Serfdom reigns on the mountain.

Every bird builds its nest as it pleases, but man has managed to cheat nature.

"Where does your master live?"

"Oh, he lives far away and never sees us. But he has a hunter who keeps an eye on us with a whip."

In the terms of the time, the charcoal burner clan lived "among white people". Isolated from - but even more isolated from "the savages". Kammschneider: "These civilized natives are a deeply degraded, despised race. Even where it is against the law, the native is a slave, a commodity to be bought, bartered, bequeathed or taken from an insolvent debtor."

The Native can also sell himself to get out of debt.

The people at the pass are pious, their god is away. As soon as he returns, everything will certainly be fine.

The Herculean female boss flirts with the handsome European. Kammschneider soon hands over a handout, then he and Alfonso continue "on an endlessly winding hollow path". They visit "healing springs".