AREQUIPA THE CITY OF CHURCHES
The baking heat of the desert boiled in through the open doors of the
freight car, the blazing sun beat down upon the roof, and, inside, a
thousand essences from its variegated life simmered and blended.
Together with some half dozen of assorted native passengers we had
jammed ourselves in among a jumble of food-stuffs and mining hardware in
transit. The box car banged and groaned and occasionally halted on the
desert at the hail of some wayfarer whom we helped cordially up and
stirred into the odoriferous oven. Sociably we rode in this freight car
up from the desert oasis of San José because this freight car
constituted the whole of the train. Farther on at Vitor there was hope
of a real train.
In the scant space left by the cargo I had wedged myself against a stack
of dried fish while my feet reposed easily on the body of a newly dead
pig on his way to the market in Arequipa joggling in time to the
uncertain swaying of the car; Agamemnon fitted his saddle-stiff joints
into a niche in the freight and went peacefully to sleep, indifferent to
the broken barrel of lime that sifted its contents over him. And so it
was that we pulled in to Vitor, a town that hung on the edge of the
desert from which rose the foothills of the first Andean range to the
eastward. Stiffly we climbed down and out into the heated, but untainted
air and idled in the station shadow until the train should signify its
readiness to receive us.
I was passing through the patio of the station when I was briefly
conscious of a rush, a choked snarl, and in the same instant my whole
right leg seemed to have stepped into a vise clamped to a jig-saw; the
impact spun me half around and I found myself helpless in the grip of a
huge, flea-bitten mongrel that just lacked, by what appeared to be a
mere shadow of a margin, sufficient power to shake me rat fashion. I
judged that it was about eight years afterward when an Indian leisurely
appeared and clattered at the brute. Adroitly it let go and disappeared
before I could get a sufficiently able-bodied rock out of the pavement
for I was unarmed, having packed my gun when preparing to leave San
José.
[Illustration: AN AREQUIPA CARRIER]
But it turned out to have been purely illusion after all, as was
apparent on the assurances of the lean buccaneer who had the restaurant
privilege and acted as station master. There was not a dog about the
place no, señor! I pointed to the dorsal facade of my battle-scarred
person. _Caramba_--investigation, _prontissimo_! The lean buccaneer
called and an Indian responded. It was the same Indian who had driven
off the dog. He listened to the buccaneer. Then he replied at length and
with gestures. I listened, but it was in Quechua they spoke, a dialect
that sounds not unlike German interspersed with an occasional vocal
imitation of a brass band. The buccaneer again turned to me:
"Señor, it is as I said. There is no dog,--there has been no dog,--I
have no dog--it is a very great pity,--I sympathize!"
It revealed to me a power of imagination I had not suspected myself of
possessing, though Agamemnon who was pinning up the rents and counting
the punctures still regarded it as an actual occurrence.
The blistering hours on the trail across the desert had left us as
parched as a dried sponge, crackly and dusty and with brittle, peeling
skins ravenous for moisture. Outside the newly made-up train on either
side straggled a collection of grimy, sand-blown Indians--mainly
women--peddling queer, uncertain foods from earthen pots or battered tin
cans that were in great demand among the sophisticated natives while, on
a higher plane of dignity, a fat, placid Cholo sent the first native
urchin on whom his eye fell into the station presently to deliver to you
a bottle of unripe, bilious beer as warm as the hot shadow in which it
had been kept. Its color, foam, and the characteristic shape of the
bottles were means of identification, but, with the eyes closed, it did
not differ materially from catnip tea or any of the old home remedy
stand-bys. And never did an orange look more nobly luscious, for the
round, unripe, green skin of the native product enfolds a heart of
nectar.
From Vitor on we wound through twisting gorges or steep valleys, barren
of all save cactus and the desert shale and boulders. Steadily the train
climbed. Always on one side or the other were the traces of the old Inca
empire and its industrious dominion; here a fragmentary stretch of road
and a ruined gateway, now and again the almost obliterated ruins of some
old town or village, but always, running along the sides of the steep
hills or through the valleys, the dusty remains of a tremendous system
of irrigation ditches. Where once has been a busy land, soft with the
green of growing things, there are the cactus and the badger and the
occasional baked-mud hut of an Indian wringing a dull living from the
desert, Heaven knows how, where his ancestors once farmed and throve in
multitudes.
[Illustration: In Arequipa the City of Churches]
The contrast stirs the dullest fancy. And on the side of the spoilers
for their gains? Only the dessicated remains of a treacherous old pirate
that may be viewed--for a very moderate tip--through the side of a
marble aquarium back in Lima as a cathedral curio and, in Europe, an
asthmatic and toothless Spain drained to decrepitude by her own
remorseless greed and predaceous piety.
In the long rays of the sunset the train rolled across the level
stretches of the high valley in which lies the city of Arequipa. The
low, flat houses--more or less earthquake proof--and the red tile roofs
were radiant in the mellow glow. Beyond rose the dull, volcanic slopes
of Misti in an immense cone, while best of all, in the one story hotel
of rambling patios in that city of earthquakes we were once more able to
collect sufficient water at one time to accomplish a bath. In Arequipa
the first train stops exhausted; _mañana_, or at the worst only a few
days later, a second train leaves to climb the first high pass and leave
its passengers on the shores of Lake Titicaca.
Throughout the city there is scarcely a building that cannot show
patched cracks or gaping cornices that are the scars of earthquakes;
here and there a heap of rock and plaster or fragmentary walls abandoned
to the Indian beggars mark the years of great _temblors_. Rarely does a
private house attempt a second story and the marvel is how the churches
or the cathedral, with their high walls and towers, have been able to
survive at all! Though often cracked and battered, yet in some way they
have weathered the subterranean gales.
And what a city for churches! On every street, on all but every turn,
there rises an ecclesiastical edifice with its grim walls of faded,
peeling kalsomine and its porticos, perhaps ornamented with odd stone
carvings that preserve a strong Indian flavor in spite of the old
monkish guidance. Whole blocks in the heart of the city are bounded by
enormous walls enclosing the sacred precincts of a convent or monastery.
I was informed that out of every twelve inhabitants, men, women, and
children, one was in some of the many orders behind the high walls. Each
day in some part of the city is a fiesta in honor of some particular
saint who is heralded and honored by a vast popping of firecrackers,
squibs, and rockets and a grand procession through the neighborhood.
Often several saints' fiestas fall on the same day and from all
directions come the rattle of firecrackers and the plop of the daylight
bombs or rockets and any casual stroll will bring one against a
procession heavy with the smoke of incense or uncanny with the thin,
wailing chanting of the celebrants.
[Illustration: HARDLY A DAY WITHOUT ITS SAINT'S FIESTA.]
The whole city centers around an extraordinarily large central plaza on
one side of which is the ancient cathedral with its tiers of bells in
the bell tower still lashed to the massive beams by rawhide thongs. The
remaining three sides are business arcades of small shops, the pastries,
and cafés; the bullet chipped arches still confirming the earnestness
with which many a civil election has been contested between the liberal
and the clerical elements after the returns were counted--or, quite as
often, during that process.
The chief industry is in a few machine shops and central supply houses
for the mines of the interior. Outside of this there is nothing. A few
small shops with the cheapest and shabbiest of stocks cluster around the
plaza; on Sunday that same plaza is scantily filled with the select of
Arequipa while the stocky police keep it cleared of the tattered urchins
and Indians of the weekdays. There is the dull, oppressive sense of
wretched poverty or genteel destitution. It is in the sharpest contrast
with the general run of other and typical Latin cities; the whole city
seems to have become encysted in a hopeless poverty in which any form of
local energy is permitted to find expression only in ecclesiastical
fireworks or mystical parades of wailing and incense.
The start from Arequipa up to Lake Titicaca is made in the early
morning. The huge cone of Misti--looking for all the world like a vast
slag dump--stands forth with telescopic detail in the high, rare air
mellowed in the cool morning sun. Prickling and glistening on the even
slopes or in the purple shadows, the frost still clings like a lichen to
the barren rocks and there is a thin touch of briskness in the air like
the taste of fall on a September morning back home.
[Illustration: AN ANDEAN TOURING CAR]
Down at the station the departure of the train is in the nature of an
event like the sailing of a steamer. Already the train--one first-class
and two second-class coaches--is filled, aisles and seats, with a
shuffling crowd already in the ecstacy of a noisy and mournful, but
interminable leave taking. Their view of the hazards of a journey by
rail may not be so far out of the way for on the steep grades of these
Andean roads a train has been known to break in half and go scuttling
back down hill until the hand-brakes take effect; also, and later, on
the ancient engine I observed with interest the native engineer screw
down his throttle and then, in starting, bang it open with a monkey
wrench.
Presently, as the hour of departure drew near, the conductor appeared
and began sorting out the passengers. _Rebozo_-muffled ladies and
Peruvian gentlemen who failed to show tickets and who had been
picnicking in the seats burst into one final explosion of embracings and
goodbyes before descending to the tracks where they took up a position
alongside the car windows. The second-class were not admitted to their
hard benches except on proof of actually possessing a ticket, but the
stubby trainmen had their hands full in keeping the car door clear for
they were continually choked with Cholo or Indian groups committing last
messages to memory. Their windows were jammed with heads and clawing
arms exchanging or accepting dripping foods wrapped in _platano_ leaves,
bottles of _checha_, or earthen pots containing Heaven knows what.
At last the whistle screamed from the engine, a bell tinkled, and the
train moved out in state to the demonstrations of the populace. The car
was but moderately filled; a couple of _padres_ from Ecuador--one a
political refugee--a tonsured monk, a couple of black-robed nuns, and
three engineers, together with an assortment of Peruvians--the women in
the shrouding, tightly drawn _rebozo_ of funeral black against which the
heavy face-powdering showed in ghastly contrast--and a couple of small
children who turned up at intervals from under the seats, grimed with
train cinders and ecstatically sticky with _chancaca_, a raw sugar sort
of candy. And in every vacant seat was baggage, native, hairy rawhide
boxes shapeless from the many pack-mule lashings, paper bags, and
pasteboard hat boxes and bandanna bundles and somewhere in the
collection each Peruvian seemed to be able to draw on an inexhaustible
supply of the Arequipa brewed, bilious, green beer.