THE COAST OF PERU
The first part of the voyage from Panama down the coast towards Peru is
enjoyable when made in a steamer, for the sea is smooth, the southerly
breeze is usually light, and after passing through the picturesque
isles that lie off Panama one sees at no great distance those Pearl
Islands which at one time rivalled the isles of Bahrein in the Persian
Gulf as the chief pearl fishery of the world. One wonders at the
difficulties experienced by the first Spanish adventurers, Vasco Nuñez
de Balboa, and after him Pizarro, in their efforts to get south, but
the reason is that a strong current sets into the Gulf, and against
it and the prevailing south winds it was hard for the clumsy craft of
those days to make progress. But on the second morning when we had got
four or five hundred miles to the south, what was our surprise to find
the temperature getting lower and the sky cloudier as we approached the
equator. It was chilly that evening and we asked for blankets. Dreams
of a delightful basking in the soft air of a sunlit sea were dispelled!
We were entering cold weather, and it was to continue with us for
thousands of miles, all the way to the Straits of Magellan.
Everybody knows nowadays how largely the climate and the flora and
the civilization of western Europe are due to the Gulf Stream. But
one may suspect that few people have heard of an ocean current on the
other side of America equal in length and volume and scarcely less
important in its influence on climate. The great Antarctic current,
or Humboldt current, as it is sometimes called from the illustrious
German who first scientifically observed and explained it, carries up
from southern Chile to some distance north of the Equator a vast body
of cold water which chills the atmosphere of the ocean and the coast
and frequently covers them both with a roof of cloud. Before he crosses
the Line, the traveller encounters this murky and ungenial weather,
which excited the wonder of the early Spanish writers, who expected to
find a zone just as torrid as they had found on the Atlantic. Seldom
thereafter (during fully half the year) does he see clear blue sky,
save for perhaps an hour or two each day, all the way southward as
far as Valparaiso. The mists and clouds which this mass of cold water
brings give the sun, the chief deity of the ancient Peruvians of the
inner country, no chance on the coast, while the fogs are so frequent
as to be a source of anxiety to the navigator, and the clouds so thick
that the great peaks of the Andes, though at some points only fifty or
sixty miles distant, can rarely be seen from the ocean.
But its cool and cloudy climate is only one of the singular features
of the coast. From the Isthmus till one gets a little way south of the
Equator at the Gulf of Guayaquil, the usual wet summer season of the
tropics prevails and the abundant rains give to the highlands along
the coast of Colombia and Ecuador splendid forests, which will one
day be a source of wealth to those countries. But at this point, or
to be more precise, about the boundary of Ecuador and Peru, near the
town of Tumbez where Pizarro landed, the climatic conditions suddenly
change, and there begins a rainless tract which extends down the coast
as far as Coquimbo in 30° S. latitude. The vaporous moisture which the
southeasterly trade winds bring up from the other side of the continent
is most of it spent in showers falling on the eastern side of the
Andes, and what remains is absorbed by the air of the dry plateaux
between the parallel chains of that range, so that hardly any passes
over to the western side of the mountains. The Antarctic current,
cooling the air of the warmer regions it enters, creates plenty of
mists but no rain, the land being warmer than the sea. Thus so much
of the coast of western South America as lies between the ocean and
the Cordillera of the Andes from Tumbez nearly to Valparaiso, for a
distance of some two thousand miles, is dry and sterile. This strip of
land varies in width from forty to sixty miles. It is crossed here and
there by small rivers fed by the snows of the Andes behind, and along
their banks are oases of verdure. Otherwise the whole coast of the
strip is a bare, brown, and dismally barren desert.
We had hoped before reaching the arid region to touch at the city
of Guayaquil, which is the chief port and only place of commercial
importance in the mountain republic of Ecuador. It had, however, been
put under quarantine by Peru, owing to the appearance in it of yellow
fever and the Oriental plague, so we had to pass on without landing,
as quarantine would have meant a loss of eight or ten days out of our
limited time. Ecuador is not the most progressive of the South American
countries, and Guayaquil enjoys the reputation of being the pest-house
of the continent, rivalling for the prevalence and malignity of its
malarial fevers such dens of disease as Fontesvilla on the Pungwe River
in South Africa and the Guinea coast itself, and adding to these the
more swift and deadly yellow fever, which has now been practically
extirpated from every other part of South America except the banks of
the Amazon. The city stands in a naturally unhealthy situation among
swamps at the mouth of a river, but since Havana and Colon and Vera
Cruz and Rio de Janeiro and even Santos, once the deadliest of the
Brazilian ports, have all been purified and rendered safe, it seems to
be high time that efforts should be made to improve conditions at a
place whose development is so essential to the development of Ecuador
itself.
Seeing far off the dim grey mountains around the Gulf of Guayaquil, but
not the snowy cone of Chimborazo which towers behind them, we touched
next morning at our first Peruvian port, the little town of Payta, and
here got our first impression of those South American deserts with
which we were to become so familiar. It is a row of huts constructed
of the whitish sun-baked mud called adobe which is the usual building
material in the flat country, with two or three shipping offices and
stores and a railway station, for a railway runs hence up the country
to the old town of Piura. A stream from the Andes gives fertility to
the long Piura valley which produces much cotton of an extremely fine
quality. There are also oil wells not far off, so Payta does some
business, offering as good an anchorage as there is on this part of the
coast. We landed and climbed to the top of the cliffs of soft strata
that rise steeply from the water, getting a wide view over the bay and
to the flat-topped hills that rise fifteen miles or more inland. The
sun had come out, the air was clear and fresh, and though the land was
as unmitigated a bit of desert as I had ever seen, with only a few
stunted, prickly, and woody stemmed plants supporting a feeble life in
the hollows of the ground, still it was exhilarating to tread at last
the soil of a new continent and receive a new impression.
The first view of Peru answers very little to that impression of a
wealthy land called up by the name of this country, more familiar
and more famous in the olden days than that of any other part of the
colonial empire of Spain. Nevertheless, it is a curious fact that the
wealth of Spanish Peru belonged more to her barren than to her fertile
and populous regions. In the days of the Incas it was otherwise.
They ruled over an agricultural people, and though they had gold in
plenty, gold to them was not wealth, but material for ornaments.
Apart, however, from agriculture, of which I shall speak later, the
riches of Peru have consisted of three natural products, which belong
to the drier tracts. These are the guano of the rainless islands off
the coast, the nitrate deposits in the province of Tarapaca and the
mines of silver and copper. Of these three, the guano has now been
nearly exhausted, and while it lasted it enriched, not the country,
but a succession of military adventurers. The nitrate regions have
been conquered by Chile and seem unlikely ever to be restored. The
most productive of the silver mines were taken away when Bolivia, in
which they are situated, was erected into a separate republic, and such
mines as remain in the High Andes, doubtless of great and not yet fully
explored value, are in the hands of foreign companies and syndicates.
Little good have these bounties of nature done to the people of Peru,
whether Spanish or Indian.
From Panama to Payta the direct steamers take five days, and from Payta
to Callao it is two days more, so the whole voyage is about as long as
that from New York to Liverpool in the quick liners. This is one of the
least troubled parts of the ocean; that is to say, gales are rare, and
hurricanes, like those of the Caribbean, unknown. There is, however,
usually a pretty heavy swell, and when there has been a storm some two
or three hundred miles out to the west, the great rollers come in and
make landing along the coast no easy matter. As the ship keeps too far
out for the details of the coast to be visible, the voyage is rather
monotonous, especially in the cloudy weather we encountered. Here in
the Antarctic current one has lost the pleasure of watching the gauzy
gleam of the flying fish, but sea-birds appear circling round the
ship and pelicans abound in the harbour. Whales, following the cold
water northward, are seen spouting and are beset and attacked by their
enemy the thresher, while whenever the ship anchors in a roadstead to
discharge or take in cargo, seals and sea lions gambolling among the
waves give a little amusement. The crew were Chileans,--they are the
only South Americans with a taste for the sea--the passengers mostly
natives of the various republics along the coast, for these steamers
furnish the only means of communication north and south, but there are
usually some English commercial men and North Americans looking after
their mining interests or prospecting for railways across the Andes.
There is much more variety than one usually finds in an Atlantic liner,
but much less than in a Mediterranean or Black Sea steamer, where on
the same deck you may see the costumes and hear the tongues of seven
or eight nations. The Spanish-Americans are not very communicative to
strangers, but whoever speaks their language can learn a good deal from
them about minerals and revolutions,--the two chief products of the
northwest coast.
To sail along a coast without a chance of examining its natural
beauties or the cities that stud it, is in most cases mortifying, but
here in the six hundred miles between Payta and Callao one has this
consolation, that there is nothing to see, and you cannot see it. The
shores are brown, bare and unpeopled, while the heavy cloud roof that
hangs over the sea, hides the tops of the hills also, and cuts off all
view of the snowy Cordillera far behind. The towns are few and small,
because the land is sterile save where one of the Andean streams gives
fertility to a valley. One would naturally suppose that the country
had always been even as it is now. But the ruins of ancient cities
here and there prove that it must once have been far more populous.
A census taken soon after the Conquest shewed that there were in the
Valley of Piura 193,000 Indians. In 1785 the inhabitants, then mostly
negroes, numbered only 44,500. Of these ruins the largest are those of
a city often called Chimu, from the title of the king who ruled there,
near the town of Truxillo, to which Pizarro, when he founded it, gave
the name of his own Estremaduran birthplace. The remains cover a wide
space and shew that the people who dwelt here and in the other coast
valleys must have made considerable advances toward civilization, for
the pottery and other utensils are better in artistic style than any
other remains found in South America. The kingdom of the Chimu was
overthrown by the Incas a century before the Spanish Conquest, and
nothing is known of the race except that its language, called Mochica,
was quite different from that of the mountain tribes who obeyed the
Incas. Whether the people perished under Spanish oppression, or whether
they moved away, when in the confusion that followed the Conquest, the
irrigation works that made cultivation possible were allowed to fall
into decay--this is one of the many riddles of Peruvian history.
Gazing from the deck hour after hour on this dreary coast, and
remembering that the Atlantic side of the Continent in the same
latitude is one of the best watered and richest parts of the tropics,
one is struck by the unfortunate physical conditions that make
useless a region whose climate, kept so cool by the Antarctic current
would otherwise have fitted it for the development of progressive
communities. Such communities did exist among the subjects of the
Chimu, but being confined to a few valleys, they were not strong enough
to resist the impact of the more numerous mountain tribes. Thus it was
only on the plateau behind that a great nation could grow up. With a
moderate rainfall these six hundred miles of coast might have been one
of the most fertile parts of South America, and the history of Peru
would have been altogether different. The absence of rain has provided
a compensation in the form of a product which, though it cannot be used
on the spot, became serviceable to other countries, and might have
given Peru the means of developing mines or building railroads. The
droppings of the swarms of sea-birds that frequent the rocky islands
along the coast instead of being, as in other countries, washed away by
showers, have accumulated till they formed those huge masses of guano
which eighty years ago began to be carried away and sold to European
countries as the most efficient fertilizers. The Inca sovereigns knew
their value and are said to have protected the birds. Unfortunately,
this easily obtained source of national wealth excited the cupidity
of revolutionary leaders, each of whom fought for power because power
meant the command of the revenue derivable from these deposits. Not
much is now left, and the republic has been none the better for them.
Some of the largest were on the Chincha Islands. The islets are all
bare, some shewing bold lines and sharp peaks which remind one of those
that fringe the coast of Norway about the Arctic circle.
The entrance to Callao, the port of the city of Lima, which lies
seven miles inland and is five hundred feet higher, has a certain
grandeur. A range of hills abuts on the sea, forming a bold cape, and
opposite to it, leaving an entrance a mile or two wide, rises a lofty
island, steep, bare and brown like the islands of the Red Sea, which
reduces the long surges of the Pacific and gives a comparatively quiet
anchorage in the spacious bay within. The town of Callao, consisting
of steamship offices and warehouses and shops dealing in the things
ships need, offers nothing of interest, except the remains of the fort
of St. Philip, the last building where the flag of Spain floated on
the mainland of the New World. So the traveller hurries by the steam
railroad or the electric line up to Lima.
We came full of the expectations stirred long ago by the fame of the
city Pizarro built, and in which he ruled and perished, hoping to find
in it another and a still more picturesque and more truly Spanish
Mexico. It was long the first city of South America, into which the
silver mines poured fabulous wealth. Its Viceroy was the greatest
man in the Continent, a potentate whose distant master could seldom
interfere with him, for there were no telegraphs or steam vessels
in those days. Nobody but the archbishop could oppose him; nor need
he fear anybody but the head of the Inquisition and the head of the
Jesuits. The pomp that surrounded him, the pageants with which his
entrance was celebrated, were like those of a Mogul Emperor.
Lima was called by Pizarro the City of the Kings, _i.e._ the Three
Wise Men of the East, but the name it now bears, a variant from that
of the river Rimac, soon prevailed. It stands in a wide flat valley,
guarded by steep mountains to the north, on both banks of the broad
stony bed of the Rimac, a large part of whose waters has been diverted
for irrigation. Except where this river water has made cultivation
possible, the plain is bare, being part of the coastal desert. The high
range of hills already mentioned guards the city on the north, and runs
out to the sea on the northwest. Lofty spurs of the Andes are visible
to the east, but for much of the year the clouds hang so low that the
hills are hardly part of the landscape and the great peaks are seldom
seen.
As in most Spanish-American cities, the streets are narrow and
straight, cutting one another at right angles. One is at first
surprised to find the houses extremely low, many of one story and
hardly any (save a few new residences on the outskirts) exceeding
two stories, and to be told that they are built of bricks, or more
commonly of cane and reeds plastered with mud. It is commonly said
that in Lima a burglar needs nothing more than a bowl of water and a
sponge to soften the plaster, and a knife to cut the canes. But the
reason is apparent when one remembers that no place on the West coast
has suffered more from earthquakes. Thus, except the convents and some
of the older churches, everything looks modern, unsubstantial, and
also unpicturesque, having little variety and little ornament in the
architecture except the long wooden balcony which usually projects
above the gateway. The bridge that spans the Rimac is hardly worthy of
a great capital. The shops are small and mediocre, and only in one or
two thoroughfares is there any throng of passers to and fro. One notes
little of the life and stir, and still less of the stateliness, that
befits an ancient and famous home of power.
Yet to this mediocrity there is one exception. It is the great central
square. In a Spanish, as in an Italian, city, one usually enquires
first for the Square, for whatever nobleness a place has is sure to be
there. The Plaza de Armas at Lima has much dignity in its ample space,
and beauty in its fine proportions, in its central fountain, in the
palms and flowering trees and statues which adorn it, besides a wealth
of historic associations in the buildings that stand around it. Most
conspicuous is the Cathedral, with its rich façade, its two quaint
towers, its spacious interior, not broken, as are most of the great
churches of Old Spain, by a central choir, its handsome carved choir
stalls, its side chapel shrines, in one of which a glass case holds
bones which tradition declares to be those of the terrible Pizarro.
That pious conqueror founded the church in 1540, but earthquakes have
made such havoc with the walls that what one sees now is of much later
date. At the opposite corner of the Plaza are the government offices,
comparatively recent buildings, low, and of no architectural interest.
In the open arcade which borders them a white marble slab in the
pavement marks the spot where Pizarro, cut down by the swords of his
enemies, the men of Chile, made the sign of the cross with his own
blood as he expired. The passage is still shown whence the assassins
emerged from a house hard by the Cathedral, where they had been
drinking together to nerve themselves, and crossed the Plaza to attack
him in his palace. Also on the Plaza, facing the Cathedral, is the
municipal building, from the gallery of which, nearly three centuries
after the Inca power had fallen under the assault of Pizarro, General
San Martin, the heroic Argentine who led the revolutionary forces to
the liberation of Peru, proclaimed to the crowd beneath the end of
Spanish rule in South America. Of the old Palace of the Viceroys,
which also fronted on the Plaza, there remains only the chapel, now
desecrated and used as a storehouse for archives, whose handsome
ceiling and walls, decorated with coloured tiles of the sixteenth
century, carry one back to the Moorish art of Spain. Other churches
there are in plenty,--seventy-two used to be enumerated,--and some of
them are large and grandiose in style, but all are of the same type,
and none either beautiful or imposing.
Few relics of antiquity are left in them or indeed anywhere in Lima.
The library of the University, the oldest seat of learning in America,
which was formerly controlled and staffed by the Society of Jesus,
suffered sadly at the hands of the Chilean invaders when they took the
city in the war of 1882. The old hall of the Inquisition, in which the
Peruvian Senate now sits, has a beautiful ceiling of dark red cedar
richly carved, a work worthy of the best days of Spain. What scenes
may it not have looked down upon during the three centuries when the
Holy Office was a power at the name of which the stoutest heart in
Lima trembled! And out of the many fine old mansions of colonial days
one has been preserved intact, with a beautiful gallery running along
its four sides of a spacious _patio_ (internal court), and in front
a long-windowed, richly decorated balcony, a gem of the domestic
architecture of the seventeenth century, perhaps the most perfect,
that earthquakes, fire, and war have permitted to survive in Spanish
America. There is so little else to remember with pleasure from the
days of the Viceroys and the Inquisitors that these relics of expiring
artistic skill may be valued all the more.
I am forced to confess that the high expectations with which we came to
Lima were scarcely realized. The environs are far less beautiful than
those of Mexico, and the city itself not only much smaller, but less
stately, and wearing less of the air of a capital. Our appreciation
may perhaps have been dulled by the weather. We were told that the
hills were pretty, but low clouds hid all but their bases from us; nor
was there any sunshine to brighten the Plaza. For more than half the
year, Lima has a peculiar climate. It is never cold enough to have
a fire, but usually cold enough to make you wish for one. It never
rains, but it is never dry; that is to say, it is not wet enough to
make one hold up an umbrella, yet wet enough to soak one's clothes.
September was as dark as a London November, and as damp as an Edinburgh
February, for the fog was of that penetrating and wetting kind which
in the east of Scotland they call a "haar." The climate being what it
is, we were the more surprised to hear what the etiquette of courtship
requires from a Limeño lover. Every _novio_ (admirer) is expected to
shew his devotion by standing for hours together in the evening under
the window of the house in which the object of his admiration lives. He
may or not cheer himself during these frequently repeated performances
by a guitar, but in so moist an atmosphere the guitar strings would
discourse feeble music.
Despite her earthquakes, and despite her damp and murky air, which
depresses the traveller who had looked for brilliant sunshine, the City
of the Kings retains that light-hearted gaiety and gift for social
enjoyment for which she was famous in the old days. Not even political
disasters, nor revolutions more frequent than earthquakes, have dulled
the edge of pleasure. There had been an attempted revolution shortly
before my visit. The President, an excellent man, courageous and
intelligent, had been suddenly seized by a band of insurgents, dragged
through the streets, threatened with death unless he should abdicate,
fired at, wounded and left for dead, until his own troops, having
recovered from their surprise and found how few their assailants were,
began to clear the streets of the revolutionaries, and discovered
their chief under a heap of slain. The insurgent general fled over the
frontier into Bolivia, where he was pointed out to me some weeks later,
planning, as was believed, another descent upon Lima. Such events
disturb the even tenor of Peruvian life little more than a street
railway strike disturbs Philadelphia or Glasgow.
Lima retains more of an old Spanish air than do the much larger
capitals of the southern republics, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.
Its viceregal court was long the centre of the best society of the
Continent. Its archbishop was the greatest ecclesiastical potentate in
the Southern Hemisphere. It had a closer connection with Spain through
its leading families, as well as through official channels, than any
other place. Loyalty to the Spanish monarchy was strongest here. It was
the last great city that held out for the Catholic King, long after
all the other countries, both to the north and south, had followed the
examples of revolt set by Mexico and Argentina. And it is also, with
the exception of remote and isolated Bogotá, where some few Spanish
families are said to have kept their European blood least touched by
native immixture, the place in which the purest Castilian is spoken
and the Castilian pride of birth is most cherished.
That a city so ancient and famous should not have more of the past
to shew, that the aspect of streets and buildings should not be more
stately, that there should be so little of that flavour of romance
which charms one in Spanish cities like Seville or Avila--these things
might be expected in a centre of industry or commerce, losing its
antique charm, like Nürnberg or Venice, under the coarsening touch
of material prosperity. But there is here no growth of industry or
commerce. The Limeños are not what a North American would call either
"progressive" or "aggressive." The railways and mines of Peru are
mostly in the hands of men from the United States, shipping business
in the hands of Englishmen and Germans, retail trade in those of
Frenchmen, Spaniards, and others from continental Europe. But the
people of Lima may answer that there are more ways than one of being
happy. They enjoy life in their own way, with more civil freedom,
and very much more religious freedom, than under the Viceroys, and
occasional revolutions--now less sanguinary than they used to be--are
better than a permanent rule of inquisitors and officials sent from
Spain. Some day or other Lima will be drawn into the whirlpool of
modern progress. But Europe and North America are still far off, and in
the meantime the inhabitants, with their pleasant, courteous manners
and their enjoyment of the everyday pleasures of life, are willing
enough to leave mines and commerce to the foreigner.
From Callao it is two days more on to Mollendo, over a cold, grey,
tumbling sea, along a brown and cloud-shadowed coast. We had, however,
changed into a much larger steamer, for at Callao begins the through
ocean service all the way to Liverpool of the Pacific Steam Navigation
Company. Their vessels, not so large nor so luxuriously fitted up as
the Atlantic liners that ply between Europe and New York, are excellent
sea boats, and commanded by careful British captains.
Next to Callao in its importance as a Peruvian port, is the little
town of Mollendo, for from it starts the principal railway in the
country, that called the Southern of Peru, which climbs the Andes,
traverses the central plateau, and sends out branches to Cuzco on the
north, and on the southeast to the frontier of Bolivia, on the shore of
Lake Titicaca. It is the main avenue to the interior of the country.
Unfortunately there is at Mollendo no harbour, only an open roadstead,
where vessels lie rolling and pitching in the ocean swell, which is
sometimes heavy enough to make landing in boats difficult or even
dangerous. A sort of breakwater has been made enclosing a tiny port,
but even in its shelter, the sweep of the great billow round the rocky
semicircle forces the disembarking passenger to jump hastily ashore and
scurry up before the next billow overtakes him. No more dreary spot
than this could be imagined. Payta in its desert was doleful enough,
but Payta had sun; and this place, under a thick roof of cloud, was
far more gloomy. Hills brown and barren rise steeply from the beach,
leaving little room for the few houses, brown as the cliff itself.
There is not a blade of grass visible, nor a drop of fresh water within
many miles, save what a pipe brings from a distant river. Yet, gloomy
as the place looked under the grey cloud roof which was hanging over
land and sea, the inhabitants find it more tolerable at this season
than such an arid and treeless land becomes when the blaze of the sun
is reflected from the rocky hill face behind.
The railroad runs south for some miles between the cliffs along a
stretch of sand, on which the surf booms in slow thunder, then leaves
the shore and turns up into the clouds, mounting in long zigzags the
steep acclivities of the mountain, and following here and there what
were hardly to be called glens, but rather waterless hollows, down
which once in nine or ten years a rain storm may send a torrent. The
mists grow thicker and damper as one rises, and with the cooler and
damper air there begins to be a little vegetation, some flowers, most
of them at this season withered, and low, thorny shrubs, such as are
usually found on arid soils. Away off to the south, occasional glimpses
are caught of a river valley far below, where the bright green and
yellow of crops on the irrigated banks make a pleasant relief to the
monotony of the brown or black slopes, up which we keep our way.
Curiosity grows more intense to know what lies behind those dreary
mountains. At last, after two hours of steady climbing to a height of
over four thousand feet, the train reaches what seems to be the top
of the range, but proves to be really the edge of a tableland, as it
emerges on to level ground, it suddenly passes out of the mists into
dazzling sunshine, and stops at a spot called Cachendo. We step out,
and have before us a view, the like of which we had never seen before.
In front, looking eastward, was a wide plain of sand and pebbles with
loose piles and shattered ridges of black rock rising here and there
from its surface, all shimmering in the sunlight. Beyond the plain,
thirty miles away, is a long line of red and grey mountains, their
sides all bare, their crags pierced by deep, dark gorges, so that they
seem full of shadows. Behind these mountains again, and some fifty or
sixty miles distant, three gigantic mountains stand up and close the
prospect. That farthest to the south is a long line of precipices,
crowned here and there by spires and towers of rock, seventeen thousand
feet in height. This is Pichu Pichu. Its faces are too steep for snow,
save in the gorges that scar them here and there, but lower down, where
the slopes are less abrupt, every gully is white with desert sand blown
up by the winds. Next to the north is a huge purplish black cone,
streaked near its top with snow beds, and lower down by lines of red or
grey ash and black lava. This is El Misti, a volcano not quite extinct,
for though there has been no eruption for centuries, faint curls of
steam still rise from the crater. It stands quite alone, evidently of
far more recent origin than the third great mass, its neighbour on the
north, Chachani, which, though also of volcanic rock, has long since
lost its crater, and rises in three great black pinnacles, divided by
valleys filled with snow. Both it and Misti exceed nineteen thousand
feet. They are not, however, the loftiest ground visible. Far, far away
to the north, there tower up two white giants, Ampato, and (farther
west) the still grander Coropuna, whose height, not yet absolutely
determined, may exceed twenty-two thousand feet and make it the rival
of Illampu in Bolivia and Aconcagua in Chile. It stands alone in a
vast wilderness, a flat-topped cone at the end of a long ridge, based
on mighty buttresses all deep with snow and fringed with glaciers.[11]
These five mountains belong to the line of the great Western Cordillera
which runs, apparently along the line of a volcanic fissure, all the
way north to Ecuador and Colombia.
This was our first view of the Andes, a view to which few parts of
the Old World furnish anything similar, for nowhere else, except in
Iceland, and in Tibet and Turkistan, do snow mountains rise out of
waterless deserts. Yet this contrast was only a part of the strange
weirdness of the landscape, a landscape unlike Alps or Pyrenees or
Apennines, unlike the Caucasus or the Himalaya, unlike the Rocky
Mountains and Sierra Nevada of North America. The foreground of
wandering sand and black stones, the sense of solitude and of boundless
space, a space useless to man and a solitude he can never people,
the grimness of these bare walls of rock and pinnacles of untrodden
snow rising out of a land with neither house nor field nor flower nor
animal life, but only two lines of steel running across the desert
floor, would have been terrible were it not for the exquisite richness
and variety of the colours. In the foreground the black rocks and
the myriad glitter of sand crystals were sharp and clear. The tints
were more delicate on the red hills beyond, and the stern severity of
the precipices in the far background was softened into tenderness by
distance. The sunlight that burned upon these lines of iron and danced
in waves of heat upon the rocks, seemed to bring out on all the nearer
hills and all the distant crags varieties of hue, sometimes contrasted,
sometimes blending into one another, for which one could find no names,
for pink melted into lilac and violet into purple. Two months later, in
the forests of Brazil, we were to see what the sun of the tropics does
in stimulating an exuberant life: here we saw what beauty he can give
to sterility.
This "Pampa," or flat stretch of ground over which the railroad runs,
is the first step eastward and upward from the sea on to the great
inner plateau of Peru, and has a height of from four to five or six
thousand feet. Its surface is generally level, yet broken by ridges
and hummocks of rock, and dotted all over by mounds of fine grey or
brownish sand composed of minute shining crystals. These sand hills,
called _médanos_, are mostly crescent shaped, much like the moon in its
first quarter, steep on the convex side, and from ten to fifteen or
even twenty feet high. They drift from place to place under the south
wind, which blows strongly and steadily during the heat of the day, the
convex of the crescent always facing the wind. Sometimes they are swept
on to and block the railway line; and when this is apprehended large
stones are heaped up at the convex of the crescent and the movement
is thus arrested or the sand dissipated. Such scanty vegetation as we
had seen on the mist-covered hills toward the coast, has here quite
disappeared under the fiery sun,--not even a cactus lifts its stiff
stem. It is all sand and rocks, till the line, having run for some
twenty miles across the Pampa, enters and begins to climb the second
stairway of mountains to another and higher level, which forms the
second terrace over which the way lies to the central plateau. The
stairway is that line of red and grey mountains which were described
as filling the middle distance in the view from Cachendo. Winding up
through their hollows and along their faces the train enters a deep
gorge or canyon, at the bottom of which, between vertical rock walls,
is seen a foaming stream, and mounts along a ledge cut out in the side
of the gorge. The canyon widens a little, and at its bottom are seen
bright green patches of alfalfa, cultivated with patient toil by the
Indians who water them by tiny rills drawn from the stream. At last
the line emerges on open and nearly level ground. One has mounted the
second step and reached the second terrace or shelf of the Peruvian
tableland. Here on a gently rising slope, in a grand amphitheatre, the
northeastern and eastern and southeastern sides of which are formed
by the three great peaks, Chachani, El Misti, and Pichu Pichu stands
Arequipa, the second city in Peru.
It is built on a gentle slope, on both sides of the river Chile,
a torrent descending from distant snows in a broad, shallow and
stony bed, and indeed owes its existence to this river, for it was
the presence of water, enabling a little oasis in the desert to
be cultivated, that caught the military eye of Francisco Pizarro.
Discerning the need for a Spanish stronghold between the interior
tableland and the coast, he chose this spot by the river at the foot
of the pass that gives the easiest access to that tableland. It had
already been a rest-house station, as its Quichua name implies, on one
of the Inca tracks from Cuzco to the sea, along which a service of
swift Indian runners is said to have been maintained by the Incas and
to have carried up fresh fish to the monarch at Cuzco. It became the
seat of a bishop, was soon well stocked with churches and convents,
and has ever since held its head high, proud of its old families,
and having escaped that occupation by the victorious Chilean army to
which Lima succumbed. The air has the desert quality of purity and
invigorating freshness. Although thin, for the height above the sea is
over seven thousand feet,[12] it is not thin enough to affect the heart
or lungs of most persons in ordinary health. The sun's heat is great
and there is plenty of it, for here one is quite above the region of
sea mists, but there is so little to do that no one needs to work in
the hot hours, and for the matter of that, nobody, except the Indians,
and the clerks of a few European firms, works at all. The nights are
deliciously cool. Plenty of water for fields and gardens and fountains
can be drawn from the river, and if the municipal authorities took
pains to clean up the city by removing rubbish, and set themselves
to make the outskirts neater and plant more trees, nothing would be
wanting to render Arequipa, so far as externals go, a delightful place
of residence. The clearness of the air has led to its being selected
as the site of an astronomical observatory maintained by Harvard
University for mapping out the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. Not
even in Egypt or in the deserts of South Africa do the constellations
shine with a more brilliant lustre. The Harvard observers placed and
for a time maintained two meteorological stations on El Misti, one near
the top, at a height of 19,200 feet, another at a point they called
Mont Blanc (15,700 feet). Those who know how recent is the love of
mountain climbing in Europe will be interested in hearing that the
volcano was ascended as far back as A.D. 1677, on which occasion the
crater was exorcised and sacred relics cast into it. The observers
also constructed a mule path to the summit, for though the face turned
to Arequipa is steep, there is no difficulty in ascending from the
north by a circuitous track. There are two craters, a newer one with
a diameter of 1500 feet inside a larger one, whose diameter is 2800
feet. I could find no record of any eruption of lava or ashes since
the Spanish Conquest, but the vapours in the new crater, always thick,
sometimes increase sufficiently to alarm the Arequipeños.
The line of perpetual snow is extremely high in this dry region, as it
is in the equally dry peaks of northern Chile. On some mountains of
19,000 feet the snow disappears in summer, except in sunless hollows.
I found myself wondering whether the fascination of the city, with
views out over the furrowed desert to the west, where the sun goes
down into the cloud bank that hangs over the Pacific, and views up
to the tall peaks that guard it to the east, would retain its power
when it had grown familiar, and wondering, also, whether, through the
four centuries since Europeans came to dwell here, there were many who
drew delight from the marvellous nature that surrounds it, and found
in the contemplation of this extraordinary scenery some relief from
the monotony of life in a society so small and so isolated. The three
great mountain masses that tower over the city, emblems of solid and
unchanging strength in their form, are always changing in their aspect.
The snows creep down in the season of rains, and ascend again when the
time of drought returns. Sunrise and sunset bring perpetual miracles of
loveliness in the varying play of colours upon snow and rocks. Pichu
Pichu, with its long, grey line of precipices, glows under the western
sun in every tint of pink and crimson. Chachani's black pinnacles turn
to a dark violet, while the snows between them redden. In the middle
the broad-based cone of El Misti, with its dark lava flows and beds
of brown or yellow ash, ranges from glowing orange to a purple deep as
if the mountain were all colour to its core. Behind it, when twilight
comes, there rises to the zenith a pale bank of pearly grey, faintly
touched by the light that is dying in the west. No wonder that this
solemn and majestic summit, traditions of whose outbursts of fire in
days gone by still survive, has been personified and worshipped by the
Indians, who, though nominally Christians, have, like other primitive
races, retained a great deal of the ancient nature religion which sees
spirits in all remarkable objects. The reverence for the mountain
deities still lingers in secret among them, though it seldom takes form
in sacrifices like those of the olden time, when, as tradition says,
youths and maidens were flung into the crater to appease the wrath of
the fire spirit. A Jesuit annalist relates how, in A.D. 1600, when the
volcano of Omate, farther to the southeast, was in violent eruption,
casting forth showers of ashes which fell round Arequipa, darkening the
sky, while a glow of lurid light shone from the distant crater, the
Indian wizards robed themselves in red and offered to Omate sacrifices
of sheep and fowls, beseeching the mountain not to overwhelm them. Then
he adds, "These wizards told the Indians that they talked to the Devil,
who told them of the approaching catastrophe, and said that Omate had
asked El Misti to join him in destroying all the Spaniards. But El
Misti answered that he could not help Omate, because he had been made
a Christian and had received the name of San Francisco; so Omate was
obliged to undertake the work alone."[13]
Built far more solidly than Lima, with house walls five or six feet
thick, and lying more out of the stream of modernizing conditions,
Arequipa has retained an air of antiquity, and, it may be said, of
dignity, superior to that of the capital. As one looks northeastward
from the lower part of the town up the rising ground, the numerous
churches, with here and there a tall conventual pile, make a varied and
effective skyline. The gardens on the higher northwestern bank of the
river relieve the mass of houses, and the yellowish grey volcanic stone
of which they are built, mellowed by the strong sun, shews well against
the purple mass of Misti. There are some picturesque street vistas too,
but one misses the bright colours of peasant dress which a city of Old
Spain or Italy would shew. The women are largely in black. The black
manta drawn over the head is absolutely prescribed for church; indeed,
even a European visitor is not allowed to enter a church anywhere in
these countries in hat or toque; she must cover her head with the manta.
The houses are low, for here, too, earthquakes are dreaded, and the
streets roughly paved with large cobblestones of hard, smooth lava.
Streams of water drawn from the river run down many of them, and other
streams water the fields along the outskirts. Here and there one
sees a garden planted with dark green trees, which relieve the glare
of light. The Plaza, less ample than that of Lima, is hardly less
striking, with the great pile of the Cathedral occupying more than
half of one side of it, arcades filled with shops bordering the other
three sides, flowers and shrubs planted in the middle. Everything
reminds one of the Asiatic or North African East,--the long, low, blank
house walls which enclose the streets, walls into which few and small
windows open, because the living rooms look into a central yard or
_patio_; the concentration of the better sort of shops in arcades which
represent the Eastern bazaar; the flat roofs on which people sit in the
evenings; the deep and pungent dust; the absence of wheeled vehicles;
for everybody rides, the richer on horses and the rest of the world on
donkeys; the scantily dressed Indians, wild looking as Bedaween, though
with reddish brown instead of yellowish brown skins. Instead of camels
there are llamas, the one native beast of burden in Peru, much smaller
than the camel and more handsome, but not unlike it in its large
lustrous eyes, and in the poise of its long neck, with the small erect
head slightly thrown back. It resembles the camel also in its firm
resolve not to move except at its own fixed pace, and to bear no load
heavier than that (of one hundred pounds) to which it is accustomed.
The brilliant light, too, and the dry, keen air are like the light and
air of the East. But no Eastern city has around it a mountain landscape
like this. One must place Tunis or Trebizond in the valley of Zermatt
to get an impression of Arequipa as it stands, encircled by snow
fields and majestic towers of rock.
The Oriental quality, which startles one in these Spanish-American
cities of the Far West is perhaps not wholly due to the Moorish
influences transmitted through their Spanish colonists. Climatic and
social conditions resembling those of northern Africa and southern
Spain have counted for a good deal. Sunlight and dryness prescribe
certain ways of building, and the Peruvian Indian resembles the Arab
or the Moor in his indifference to cleanliness and comfort. Here in
Arequipa, one begins to realize that Peru is in respect of population
still essentially a land of the aborigines. All the lower kinds of work
are done by Indians, and the class next above is at least half Indian
in blood, though not readily distinguishable from the man of Spanish
stock, either in aspect or in character and manners. The negro who
still abounds at Lima and Callao, though he is beginning to be absorbed
into the mass of whites, is no longer seen at Arequipa, for he cannot
stand this cold, thin, highland air; and even the zambo, a half-breed
of Indian and negro, who is said to want the best qualities of both
races, is a trifling element. Here and elsewhere in South America it
is impossible to determine the proportion of perfectly pure Spanish
families to the whole population. Probably it is small, not five per
cent over the whole country, but in Arequipa it may be much larger.
In one respect the city, while thoroughly Spanish, is very unlike the
East. It is, and always has been, steeped in ecclesiasticism. The
Cathedral is a long and handsome pile, rebuilt after the earthquake of
1868, with two towers on its south front, and an unusually spacious and
unadorned interior. It contains a picture attributed to Van Dyck. There
is one other church of special interest, that called the "Compañia,"
_i.e._ church of the Company of Jesus. Everywhere in South America the
Jesuits were numerous, wealthy, and powerful till their suppression
in the middle of the eighteenth century; and here, as in many Italian
and Spanish towns, their churches are the most profusely decorated
without and within. The north façade of this one, built of reddish
grey sandstone, is a wonderfully rich and finely wrought piece of
ornamentation, and the seventeenth century pictures and wood carvings
of the interior are curious if not beautiful specimens of the taste
of the time. There are scores of other churches and convents, far
more than sufficient for a city of thirty-five thousand people. Their
bells clang all day long, and clerical costumes are everywhere in the
streets. What is still more remarkable, the men, as well as the women,
are practising Catholics, and attend church regularly, a rare thing in
most parts of Spanish America. The city was always an ecclesiastical
stronghold, and during the long War of Independence, was accounted the
most conservative place in Peru. Indeed, it is so still.
But if Arequipa seems old-fashioned and conservative to-day, when
a railway connecting it with the coast brings it within three days
of Lima, what must it have been two centuries ago, when probably
one-third of the white population consisted of priests, monks, and
nuns, and the Church ruled unquestioned?
One can imagine no spot more absolutely cut off than this was from the
world outside. It was an oasis like Tadmor in the wilderness. Three
days' journey across desolate wastes lay between it and the coast, a
coast itself scarcely inhabited, and behind towards the north and east
there were only mountain solitudes, over which pastoral Indians roved.
The bishop and the head of the Jesuits were the real powers, even the
governor, and beneath him the alcalde, bowing to them. Nowhere in the
world to-day could one find anything like that uniformity of opinion
and custom which reigned in this little, remote city in those colonial
days which came down into the days of Hume and Bentham in England, of
Voltaire and Rousseau in France, and indeed down almost to the memory
of men still living. The vision of the Holy Office in the background
at Lima was hardly needed to enforce absolute submission of word and
thought in such a society. The traveller of to-day marvels at the
stillness and stagnation of one of the smaller cities in the interior
of Old Spain. Yet a Spanish city, however small or remote, is at least
in Europe: there are other cities not far off, and men come and go.
Here there were no breaks in the monotony of life, nothing but local
interests of the most trivial sort to occupy men's minds. The only
events were feast days and religious processions, with now and then an
earthquake, and once, thirty years before the War of Independence, the
terror of an Indian insurrection far up in the plateau.
Yet life was not wholly monastic. There was some learning, mostly
theological. There was also a good deal of verse making: Arequipa was
even famous for its poets. Upon what themes did their Muse employ
itself? What sighs were there from nuns behind the convent walls? What
sort of a human being was the bishop who walked in solemn processions
behind chanting choristers to and from his Cathedral? Must there not
have been even here the perpetual play of human passion, and could any
weight of conservatism and convention extinguish the possibilities of
romance? I heard from a trustworthy source a story which shews that
even in grave and rigid Arequipa love would have its way and that the
hearts of stately ecclesiastics could melt in pity. I tell it in my
informant's words.
In old colonial days there lived in Arequipa a powerful family owning
large estates and rich mines which they had inherited from their
ancestors among the Conquistadores. They wielded authority both in
Church and State. At the time when the incident to be described
happened the heads of the family were two brothers, of whom the
elder held the landed property and the younger was bishop and ruled
the Church. The elder was a widower with two children, a son and a
daughter. The great convent of Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, founded
and richly endowed by this family, always had one of its members as its
Abbess, and at that time the only sister of these two brothers held
the post. The family, being a power in Arequipa, sought to preserve
their supremacy, and accordingly decided that the young daughter of
the elder brother should enter the convent and eventually succeed her
aunt as Abbess, while her brother should marry and inherit the estates.
The girl had no vocation for a religious life and rebelled against the
fate proposed for her, but the father and uncle were inexorable, and
after a vain struggle she was forced to yield and take the veil. Her
aunt felt sympathy for the poor child, having perhaps passed through
a like experience herself, and she made the young sister's religious
duties as light as possible, allowing her to lead the choir, as she
possessed a fine voice, and giving her the business of the convent
to attend to. Embroidery was one of the occupations of the nuns,
especially fine work on linen, the designs for which were brought from
Spain; and to supervise this work and to take care of it was one of the
girl's chief pleasures. She always despatched it to the laundry herself
and received it on its return, laying it carefully in the presses
perfumed with jasmine flowers, and the laundress was the only person
from the outside world (except her own family) with whom she had any
communications. This laundress happened to be an alert and intelligent
woman, and she gave the nun all the news she had of the world outside
the convent walls. After the young sister had been about five years in
the convent the Abbess fell ill, and all the old-fashioned remedies
known to the nuns failed to help her. She grew steadily worse and they
were beginning to think of administering the last offices of the
Church when the laundress suggested to the niece of the Abbess that
the clever Scotch physician who had lately come to Arequipa should be
consulted. To consult a man and a heretic horrified the nuns, but the
laundress pressed her advice, and finally the bishop was appealed to
and was induced, since his sister's life was at stake, to give his
consent. The patient, however, even then refused to see the doctor in
person, but the niece, closely veiled, was to be allowed to have an
interview with him and to describe the symptoms. Although the doctor
was aware that an opinion given under such circumstances was of little
use, he consented to this arrangement. Accordingly, at the appointed
time he presented himself at the convent gate, under the guidance
of the laundress, and was taken to the antechamber of the Abbess's
apartment, for a lady of such high rank as the Abbess did not occupy
a cell. There the niece received him, closely veiled, and described
her aunt's condition. On his asking her if she could count the pulse,
she replied, "No, I have never tried." "If you will place your fingers
on my wrist, I will teach you," he said. Timidly she did as he bade
her, and counted the beats; and, thrilled as he was by the musical
softness of her voice, it is possible that he prolonged the lesson,
for at length she said, "I understand perfectly, and will now go and
count my aunt's pulse," and returned presently with a written report.
During her absence the doctor had made enquiries of the laundress in
regard to the Abbess's symptoms, and had decided that the old lady
was suffering from cancer and had not long to live. But the young
sister had made too profound an impression on him to let him give up
the case at once, and he prescribed some soothing remedies and offered
to return in the morning. These visits continued for several days,
and at last he succeeded in seeing the sister's beautiful face and
counting her pulse. The laundress could not always be in attendance,
and the narcotics administered to the Abbess dulled her vigilance.
Realising that his patient's days were numbered and that his work would
soon be over, he saw there was no time to lose. The scruples of the
young sister were finally overcome. Love won the day, and she promised
to fly with her lover after the death of her aunt. With the help of
the laundress he devised a plan for escape. The convent was built of
stone and the sisters' cells were solidly arched like casemates, the
only wood about them being the doors. Obtaining a skeleton from the
hospital, the doctor took it to the house of the laundress and she
conveyed it in a large linen basket to the convent the day after the
funeral of the Abbess, and concealed it in the young sister's bed. That
night the girl set fire to her bed, and in the confusion occasioned by
the smoke and the alarm she escaped unnoticed into the street, where
the laundress awaited her and took her to her house. The frightened
nuns sought for her in vain, and when finally a few charred bones were
found in her cell, which they imagined in their ignorance to be hers,
they mourned her as dead, and buried the bones with all the honour
due to her rank and station. Meanwhile the girl herself was in great
danger, for had she been discovered she would have been tried for
faithlessness to her vows, and she shuddered at the bare possibility
of the old punishment of being walled up alive. It was impossible to
stay long in the laundress's house, and the doctor implored her to
fly with him to the coast, an arduous ride of seventy miles over the
desert. Recoiling from such a step, she insisted on first trying to win
the pardon and protection of her relatives, and she resolved to throw
herself on the mercy of her uncle, the bishop, who had always shewn
her much affection and was all-powerful with the rest of the family.
Accordingly, just after twilight, and wrapped in her manta, which
concealed her face and figure, she stole into the bishop's palace,
where she found her uncle at evening prayer, and throwing herself on
her knees before him, she implored his protection. He took her at first
for her own ghost (for had he not performed the funeral service over
her remains?), and when he discovered that it was really she, in flesh
and blood, he was horrified and put her from him as he would a viper.
But as she still clung to him, telling him her story and imploring
his mercy and protection, he at last listened to her, and finally
said, "wait a moment," and left the room, returning shortly with a bag
containing money and family jewels, emeralds, which he thrust into her
hand. "Take this," he whispered, "and fly with your lover to the coast.
I will see that you are not followed." She found the doctor with horses
at the city gate, and they rode away across the desert, never stopping
except to change their mounts and to eat a little food, until they
reached the coast, where by an extraordinary piece of luck they found
an English frigate lying at anchor. Hurrying on board they told the
captain their story, and he at once summoned the chaplain, who married
them, and they were soon on their way to England.
Time passed, and the South American colonies became independent of
Spain. Many years later, the brother of the nun went on a public
mission to Europe. Before he left Peru his uncle, the bishop, told him
the story of his sister's life, which had been kept secret until then,
and after telling him where she was to be found (for through the Church
he had watched over her), he desired her brother to communicate with
her. This the nephew did in due course, and his sister was finally
forgiven, and her descendants recognized and received by their Peruvian
relatives. One of these descendants was seen by my informant wearing
the emeralds that had been in the bishop's bag.