LAKE TITICACA AND THE CENTRAL ANDES
From Cuzco, the oldest of South American cities, with its mingled
memories of an Indian and a Spanish past, I will ask the reader to
follow me to a land of ancient silence where an aboriginal people,
under the pressure of a stern nature, and almost untouched by all that
modern civilization has brought, still lead the lives and cling to the
beliefs that their ancestors led and held many centuries ago. This is
the heart of the Andean plateau, where, in a country almost as purely
Indian as it was when it submitted to Pizarro, lies Lake Titicaca.
Ever since as a boy I had read of a great inland sea lying between
the two ranges of the Cordillera almost as high above the ocean as
is the top of the Jungfrau, I had wondered what the scenery of such
mountains and such a sea might be like, and had searched books and
questioned travellers without getting from them what I sought. There
are no other bodies of fresh water on the earth's surface nearly so
lofty, except on the plateaux of Central Asia, and none of these,
such as the Manasarowar lakes in Tibet[25] and Lake Sir-i-kul in the
Pamirs is nearly so extensive as this lake in Peru. It fills the lower
part of an immense shallow depression between the eastern and western
Cordilleras; and the land both to the north and to the south of it is
for a great distance so level that we may believe the area covered by
its waters to have been at one time far greater. Its present length is
about one hundred and twenty miles, its greatest width forty-one miles,
and its area nearly equal to that of Lake Erie. The shape is extremely
irregular, for there are many deep bays, and many far projecting
promontories. There are also many islands, two of which, famous in
Peruvian mythology, I shall presently describe.
This central plateau of Peru is a singular region. As its height
is from twelve thousand to thirteen thousand feet above sea level,
the climate is always cold, except when one is actually exposed to
the direct rays of the sun, but it varies comparatively little from
the summer to the winter months; and though snow often falls, it
soon disappears. In so inclement an air, and with a rather scanty
rainfall, only a few hardy crops can ripen, such as potatoes (the plant
is a native of South America, and there are many other species of
_Solanum_), barley, the Oca (_Oxalis tuberosa_, a sort of wood sorrel),
and the Quinoa (a kind of edible _Chenopodium_)[26] as well as maize,
but this last only in the warmer and more sheltered places. There are
few trees, and these stunted; nowhere a wood. Even the shrubs are mere
scrub, so fuel is scarce and the people use for cooking purposes in
the mountains the tufts of a large woody-rooted plant called _Yareta_,
growing in the high mountains which, like the peat of Ireland, burns
fiercely, but is soon burnt out, and, on the lower grounds, _taquia_
(the droppings of the llama), as the droppings of the yak are similarly
used in Tibet. Nobody thinks of lighting a fire for warmth: for while
the natives seem not to feel the cold, white people shiver and put on
more clothes. One is surprised that man should have continued to dwell
in a land so ungenial when not far off to the east, on the other side
of the eastern Cordillera, hot valleys and an abundant rainfall promise
easier conditions of life.
This lofty tract, stretching from the snowy peaks of the Vilcanota as
far as La Paz in Bolivia, a distance of more than two hundred miles,
the northern and western parts of it in Peru, the eastern and southern
in Bolivia, is really a pure Indian country, and is named the Collao.
In ancient days it was one of the four divisions of the Inca Empire.
The inhabitants speak a language called Aymará, allied to the Quichua
spoken farther north. In Inca days there were apparently many small
tribes, each with its own tongue, but their names and memories have
perished with their languages, and with the trifling exception of a
small and very primitive race called the Urus (to be mentioned later)
all the aborigines of the High Andes are now classified as Quichuas
and Aymarás. The modern distinction between Peru and Bolivia is purely
arbitrary and political. Aymarás dwelling west of the lake in Peru are
the same people as Aymarás dwelling east of it in Bolivia.
Like Tibet, which it most resembles in height and cold and dryness,
this strange country produces no more than what its inhabitants consume
and has nothing to export except alpaca wool and minerals, nor, at
present, very much of these latter, for only few mines are now being
worked. The population does not increase, but it holds its ground, and
wherever the soil is fit for cultivation, that is to say, wherever it
is not too stony or too swampy, it is cultivated by the Indians, who
live here in the same rude fashion as their forefathers before the
Conquest. Nor is it only on the flat bottoms of the valleys that one
sees their little patches of potatoes and barley. The steep slopes
of the hills that rise from the lake have also been terraced to make
ground level for cultivation, and each strip of soil is supported by a
wall of loose stones well fitted together. These _andenes_, as they are
called, which are common all over the hilly grounds of Peru, remind one
of the vine-bearing terraces of the Rhineland, and like them witness to
centuries of patient toil. As there is no manure nor other fertilizer,
the soil is allowed to rest by lying fallow from time to time, so the
area under cultivation in any one year is less than the number of the
terraces might suggest. Though all the tillers are Indians, most of
the land belongs to large proprietors who seldom come to it for more
than a couple of months in the year, the peasants paying them either
in a share of the crops, or a certain number of days' labour on the
proprietor's own special _hacienda_ or _finca_ (farm) which his
steward manages, or perhaps in personal service for some weeks rendered
to him in the town he inhabits. Rude and harsh is the life of these
peasants, though well above the fear of starvation and no more squalid
than that of the agricultural peasantry in some parts of Europe.
Their houses are of mud baked hard in the sun--the usual _adobe_ of
Spanish America--or perhaps of large stones roughly set in the mud as
a cement; animals often share the family bedroom, and the sleeping
places are a sort of platform or divan of earth raised a little from
the floor along the walls of the hut. Furniture there is virtually
none, for wood is scarce and costly so far from the coast on one side
and the forests on the other, but some of them have scraped together a
good deal of property, including rich dresses and ornaments fit to be
displayed at festivals. For clothing they have a shirt and drawers of
coarse cotton, with a poncho of heavy woollen cloth; for food, potatoes
frozen and squeezed dry, to enable them to be stored, and barley;
their only luxury is _chicha_ beer, or alcohol when they can get it;
their diversions, church festivals with processions in the morning and
orgiastic dances afterwards; or a fight with the inhabitants of the
neighbouring village. Yet with all this apparent poverty and squalor,
they are in this region, and have been for many ages, more advanced in
the arts of life than their neighbours, those half nomad tribes of the
trans-Andean forests, who subsist on what their arrows or blow-pipes
can kill, and live in terror of the jaguar and the anaconda and the
still more dangerous packs of wild dogs and peccaries. Agriculture and
settled life are always factors of material progress, and the Aymarás
would probably have risen out of the sort of practical serfdom in which
they lie and from which scarcely any of them emerge, if they had not
fallen under the dominion of an alien and stronger race who had no
sympathy with them and did nothing to help them upwards.
I return to the lake itself which fills the centre of this singular
plateau. Its northern and northwestern coasts, lying in Peruvian
territory, are low and the water shallow, while the eastern and
southern, in Bolivia, are generally high and bold with many rocky
promontories and isles lying off them. The greatest depth is about
six hundred feet. Storms are frequent, and the short, heavy waves
make navigation dangerous, all the more so because the water is so
cold that, as is the case in Lake Superior also, a swimmer is so soon
benumbed that his chance of reaching land is slight. Ice sometimes
forms in the shallower bays, but seldom lasts. Many are the water
birds, gulls and divers, and flamingoes, and a kind of heron, besides
eagles and hawks, though the big so-called turkey buzzard of the lower
country does not seem to come so high, and the huge condor is no longer
frequent. There are plenty of fish, but apparently of two genera only,
the species (eight are enumerated) being most of them known only in
this lake and in Lake Poopo, into which it discharges. The scantiness
both of fauna and flora is natural when the unfavourable climatic
conditions are considered. Among the water plants the commonest is a
sort of rush, apparently a species of, or allied to, the British and
North American genus _Scirpus_, and called _Totora_. It grows in water
two to six feet deep, rising several feet above the surface, and is
the material out of which the Indians, having no wood, construct their
vessels, plaiting it and tying bunches of it together, for it is tough
as well as buoyant. In these apparently frail craft, propelled by sails
of the same material, they traverse the lake, carrying in each two
or three men and sometimes a pretty heavy load. These vessels which,
having neither prow nor stern, though the ends are raised, resemble
rafts rather than boats, are steered and, when wind fails, are moved
forward by paddles. Their merit is that of being unsinkable, so that
when a storm knocks them to pieces the mariner may support himself on
any one of the rush bundles and drift to shore if he does not succumb
to the cold. They soon become waterlogged and useless, but this does
not matter, for the _totora_ can be had for the gathering, and the
supply exceeds the demand. This primitive kind of craft was known on
the coast of Peru also: the first Spanish explorers met rafts of wood
there carrying merchandise.
Nowadays four small steamers ply on the lake, one of them making a
regular tri-weekly service from Puno, in Peru, the terminus of the
Peruvian Southern railway, to Guaqui in Bolivia, whence a railway runs
to La Paz. This is at present the quickest way from Panama and the
coast of Peru to Central Bolivia.
The water of Titicaca is pure and exquisitely clear. Some have
described it as brackish, but I could discover no saline taste
whatever. Many streams enter it from the surrounding snow-clad
mountains; and it discharges southward by a river called the
Desaguadero, which flows with a gentle current across the Bolivian
plateau for one hundred and twenty miles into the large, shallow lagoon
of Poopo or Aullagas, itself once part of that great inland sea of
which Titicaca is now the largest remnant. This lake of Poopo has no
outlet to the sea. Part of its water is licked up by the fiery sun of
the desert: the rest sinks into the sands and is lost.
We spent two days sailing on the lake, visiting the famous modern
shrine of the Virgin of the Light at Copacavana on the mainland and
the famous ancient shrine of the Rock of the Sun and the Wild Cat on
the island of Titicaca which has given its name to the lake. When the
grey clouds brood low upon the hills, stern and gloomy indeed must be
the landscape in this bleak land. But our visit fell in the end of
September, the spring of Peru, when such rains as there are had begun
to refresh the land after the arid winter. The sun was bright. Only a
few white clouds were hanging high in air or clinging to the slopes of
the distant mountains; and the watery plain over which we moved was a
sheet of dazzling blue. The blue of Titicaca is peculiar, not deep and
dark, as that of the tropical ocean, nor opaque, like the blue-green of
Lake Leman nor like that warm purple of the Ægean which Homer compares
to dark red wine, but a clear, cold, crystalline blue, even as is that
of the cold sky vaulted over it. Even in this blazing sunlight it had
that sort of chilly glitter one sees in the crevasses of a glacier; and
the wavelets sparkled like diamonds.
The Peruvian shore along which we were sailing was steep and bold,
with promontories jutting out and rocky islets fringing them. Far
away to the east across the shining waters the Bolivian coast rose
in successive brown terraces, flat-topped hills where the land was
tilled, and higher up bluish grey ridges passing into a soft lilac as
they receded, and farther still, faint yet clear in the northeast, the
serrated lines of the snowy Cordillera which divides the lake basin
from the valleys that run down to the east and the Amazonian forests.
There was something of mystery and romance in these far distant peaks,
which few Europeans have ever approached, for they lie in a dry region
almost uninhabited because hardly worth inhabiting,--
"a waste land where no man goes
Or hath gone, since the making of this world."
The nearer and higher range to the southeast of the lake, which the
natives call the Cordillera Real, and geographers the range of Sorata,
was almost hidden by the thick clouds which were by this time--for
it was now ten o'clock, and the sun was raising vapours from the
valleys--gathering on its snows, and not till the evening did its grand
proportions stand disclosed. There were all sorts of colours in the
landscape, bright green rushes filling the shallow bays, deep black
lava flows from a volcanic peak on the west, and a wonderful variety
of yellows, pinks, and violets melting into each other on the distant
hills. But the predominant tone, which seems to embrace all the rest
was a grey-blue of that peculiar pearly quality which the presence of
a large body of smooth water gives. Views on a great lake can be more
impressive than almost any ocean views, because on the ocean one sees
only a little way around, whereas, where distant heights are visible
beyond the expanse of a lake, the vastness of the landscape in all
its parts is realized. Here we could see in two different directions
mountain ranges a hundred miles away: and the immensity was solemn.
The village of Copacavana, to which we first turned our course, stands
a little above the lake at the foot of rocky heights, beyond which
rises a lofty volcano, said to have been active only a century ago.
Traces of antiquity are found in the polished stone seats, two on each
side of a higher one, called the Judgment Seat of the Inca, and in
steps cut here and there, all in the hard rock, their form resembling
that of those near Cuzco, described in the last chapter, and their
purpose no less obscure.[27] Other ruins and abundant traditions prove
that the place was a noted seat of worship in Inca days. There stood
on it, say the early Spanish chroniclers, not only gilded and silvered
figures of the Sun and Moon, but also older idols, belonging to some
older local religion, one in particular which is described as having
a head like an egg with a limbless body, wreathed with snakes. When
these figures and their shrines were demolished, a church was erected
on the same spot, which presently became famous by the setting up in
it of a sacred image of Our Lady. It is the Santissima Virgen de la
Candelaria, carved by a scion of the Incas, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, in
A.D. 1583. This image had been seen by a pious friar to send out rays
of light around it: miracles followed, and an Augustinian monastery
was founded and placed in charge of the sanctuary, which soon became
the most frequented place of pilgrimage through all South America.
Even from Mexico and from Europe pilgrims come hoping for the cure
of their diseases. The figure is about a yard high, and represents a
face of the Indian type in features and colour, though less dark than
the equally sacred figure of the Virgin of the Pillar at Saragosa in
Spain. It wears a crown of gold, with a gold halo outside the crown,
has a half moon under its feet, and is adorned with many superb gems.
The church is spacious and stately. The Camarin or sacred chamber in
which the image stands is behind the great altar and approached by two
staircases, the stone steps much worn by the knees of the ascending
worshippers. The Augustinian monks were turned out in 1826, after the
revolutionary war, but recently a few Franciscans have been settled
in a home too large for them, so the wide cloisters are melancholy,
and echo to few footfalls. Nevertheless great crowds of Indians still
resort hither twice a year, on February 2, the feast of the Candelaria
(Candlemas), and on August 5 and 6. Within the sacred enclosure which
surrounds the church is a lofty cupola supported by columns, open at
its sides so that the three tall crosses within it are visible, and
roofed in a sort of Moorish style with bright green and yellow tiles,
of the kind which North Africa has borrowed from the East. Round it
are the accustomed pilgrimage "stations," and at the corners of the
court, which is entered by a lofty gateway and planted with trees, are
square brick buildings, wherein lie the bones of pilgrims. The shining
tiles of this cupola, with the similarly decorated dome and tower of
the church behind, make a striking group, whose half Moorish character
looks strange in this far western land. The scene at the great
festivals when the excited Indian crowd makes church and court resound
with hymns in Aymará and when, after the Christian services of the day,
the dances of primitive heathendom are kept up all through the darkness
with wild shoutings and jumpings, till they end in a sort of jig, is
described as strange and revolting. These dances come down from a time
when this was a seat of Indian nature worship, and when images of the
Sun and Moon were taken in pomp from the shrine here to the shrines
upon the Sacred Isles.
To those isles we now bent our course. Delightful was the voyage along
the southern shore of the lake, past shallow bays where the green water
lapped softly in the rushes, across the openings of inlets that ran
far in between walls of rock, with new islands coming into view and
glimpses of new snowpeaks in the distance rising behind the nearer
ranges, all flooded by a sunlight that had the brilliance without the
sultry power of the tropics.
Koati or Koyata, the Island of the Moon, is said to take its name from
Koya, the Quichua word for queen, the Moon being the wife of the Sun,
whose worship the Incas established wherever their power extended. The
isle is about two miles long, a steep ridge, covered in parts with
low shrubs and grass; the rest cultivated, the slopes being carefully
terraced to the top. The most interesting group of ruins stands in a
beautiful situation some sixty feet above the shore, on the uppermost
of four broad terraces, supported by walls. One of these walls is of
the finished Cuzco style of stonework, the rectangular blocks well cut
and neatly fitted to one another. It is probably of Inca date. That
the large ruined edifice above has the same origin may be concluded
from the niches which occur in the walls of its chambers. The purpose
of such niches, frequent in the Cuzco walls, and indeed all over Peru,
has never been explained. They are often too shallow for cupboards or
wardrobes, and too high for images, yet it is hard to suppose them
meant merely for ornament. This edifice, originally in two stories,
is a mass of chambers, mostly small, which are connected by narrow
passages. The large walled court which adjoins it is adorned by
stuccoed niches. The walls are well preserved, but all the ceilings and
roofs have gone. There are so few apertures for light that it is hard,
as in most of the ancient Peruvian houses to understand how light was
admitted. Probably light was sacrificed for the sake of warmth, for
the nights are extremely cold, even in summer. Doorways are covered
sometimes by a single slab, sometimes by flat stones projecting each
beyond the other, so as to have the effect of an arch, but no true arch
ever seems to have been found in Peru or anywhere else in the Western
Hemisphere. Sacrificial objects, dug up in front of the building,
confirm the legend that the place was a shrine of the Moon Mother, but
the name by which it has been known is the Palace of the Virgins of the
Sun. There may, therefore, have been in conjunction with the shrine one
of the numerous establishments in which the Incas kept the women who
were sent up to them as a tribute from the provinces, and who, among
other things, wove fine fabrics and made various articles needed for
worship. The early Spanish writers, with their heads full of Christian
nuns and Roman Vestals, called them Virgins of the Sun, but the name
was altogether inappropriate, for many of them were kept as concubines
for the reigning Inca.
Four miles from Koati and two from the mainland, lies the larger and
more sacred Island of the Sun. It is ten miles long, nowhere more than
a mile wide, and very irregular in shape, being deeply indented by
bays. A ridge of hills, rising in places to one thousand feet or more,
traverses it from end to end, and much of the surface is too steep and
rocky for tillage. There are many groups of ruins on it, the origin
and character of some among which have given rise to controversies
into which I need not enter, proposing to describe two only. One of
these is the so-called Fountain, or Bath and Garden of the Inca. Two
buildings stand on the shore, evidently of a date anterior to the
Conquest, and one was probably a royal residence. The most recent and
most competent investigators divide them into two classes: those which
the Indians call Chulpas, and are the work of an earlier race or races,
and those which they ascribe to the Incas, the latter being larger and
better built, and accompanied by pottery, weapons, and other relics,
indicating a more advanced culture. Hard by a flight of low steps,
rising from the water through a grove of trees, leads up to a spot
where a rivulet, led in a channel from the hill above, pours itself
into a receptacle hewed out of one piece of stone, whence it pursues
its course in a murmuring rill to the lake below. The terraced garden
on each side is planted with flowers, most of which are the same as
those in European or North American gardens; but the brilliant red
blossoms of the shrub called the _Flor del Inca_ give a true local
colour, and the view over the lake to the distant snows is unlike
anything else in the world. How much of the beauty we now see was
planned by the unknown monarch, who first made these terraces, and did
the spot commend itself to him by the wonderful prospect it commands?
Most of the so-called palaces of these isles occupy sites that look
across the lake to the great snowy range, but a learned archæologist
suggests that this was due not to admiration of their grandeur, but
to veneration for them as potent deities so that they might be more
readily and frequently adored.
On this majestic range our eyes had been fixed all day long. Its
northernmost summit, Illampu, stands more than twenty miles back
from the eastern shore of the lake, and more than thirty miles from
the Island of the Sun. Thence the chain trends southward, ending one
hundred miles away in the gigantic Illimani, which looks down upon La
Paz. All day long we had watched the white clouds rise and gather, and
swathe the great peaks and rest in the glacier hollows between them,
and seem to dissolve or move away, leaving some top clear for a moment,
and then settle down again, just as one sees the vapours that rise
from the Lombard plain form into clouds that float round and enwrap
Monte Rosa during the heats of a summer day. Evening was beginning to
fall when our vessel, after coasting along the island, anchored in the
secluded bay of Challa, where, behind a rocky cape, there is an Indian
hamlet and a garden and stone tank like that at the Bath of the Inca.
We landed and rambled through it, finding its thick trees and rustling
shade specially charming in this bare land. Just as we emerged from
them and regained the lake shore, the sun was setting, and as the air
cooled, the clouds that draped the mountains thinned and scattered
and suddenly vanished, and the majestic line of pinnacles stood out,
glowing rosy red in the level sunlight, and then turned in a few
moments to a ghostly white, doubly ghostly against a deep blue-grey
sky, as swift black night began to descend.
Early next morning we set off on foot along the track, well beaten
by the feet of many generations of worshippers, which leads along
the rocky slopes from Challa to the Sanctuary of the Rock. Here are
no houses, for this end of the isle is rough and bare, giving only
scanty pasture and a few aromatic flowers, but the little bays where
the green water ripples on the sands, and the picturesque cliffs, and
the vast stretch of lake beyond, made every step delightful. To our
surprise we passed a spot where some enterprising stranger had bored
for coal and found a bed, but not worth working. One could hardly be
sorry, for though fuel is badly needed here, a colliery and its chimney
would fit neither the landscape nor the associations. Less than three
miles' walking brought us to a place where the remains of a wall cross
the island, here scarcely a mile wide, and seem to mark off the sacred
part which in Inca days was entered only for the purposes of worship.
A little farther, two marks in the rock, resembling giant footprints,
are, according to Indian tradition, the footprints of the Sun God and
the Moon Goddess, when they appeared here. The marks are obviously
natural and due to the form in which a softer bit of the sandstone
rock has scaled off and left a whitish surface, while the harder part,
probably containing a little more iron, as it is browner in hue, has
been less affected by the elements. Then, after ascending a few low
steps which seem to be ancient, we came out on a level space of grass
in front of a ridge of rock about twenty-five feet high. This is Titi
Kala, the Sacred Rock, the centre of the most ancient mythology of
South America. Its face, which looks southwest over this space of
grass, apparently artificially levelled, is on that side precipitous,
presenting a not quite smooth face in which veins of slightly different
colours of brown and yellowish grey are seen. At one point these veins
so run as to present something like the head of a wild cat or puma;
and as Titi means a wild cat in Aymará, and Kala, or Kaka a rock,
this is supposed to be the origin of the name Titi Kala, which has
been extended from the rock to the island and from the island to the
lake.[28]
The rock is composed of a light yellowish brown rather hard sandstone
of carboniferous age, with a slaty cleavage. The back of the ridge is
convex, and is easily climbed. From it the ground falls rapidly to the
lake, about three hundred feet below. Except for what may possibly be
an artificial incision at the top, the rock appears to be entirely
in its natural state, the cave-like hollow at its base shewing no
sign of man's handiwork. Neither does any existing building touch it.
There are, however, traces of walls enclosing the space in front of
it, especially on the north side, where there seems to have been a
walled-in enclosure; and there are other ancient remains hard by. The
only one of these sufficiently preserved to enable us to conjecture
its purpose is a somewhat perplexing two-storied edifice, resembling,
though less large and handsome, that which I have described as existing
on the island of Koati. It is called the Chingana, or Labyrinth,
and doubtless dates from Inca times, as it contains niches and other
features characteristic of the architecture of that period. The
numerous rooms are small, scantily lighted, and connected by narrow
passages. A few flowers had rooted on the top of the walls, and I found
tufts of maidenhair fern nestling in the moist, dark corners within.
All the roofs have perished. There is nothing to suggest a place of
worship, so probably the building contained the quarters provided for
the various attendants on the religious rites performed here, and
perhaps also for the women who were kept near many sanctuaries and
palaces for the service of the Sun and the Incas. None of the other
ruins is identifiable as a temple, so we are left in doubt whether any
temple that may have existed was destroyed by the zeal of the Spanish
Conquerors, or whether the worship of the Sun and the local spirits
was conducted in the open air in front of the Rock, whose surface was,
according to some rather doubtful authorities, covered with plates of
gold and silver. In front of the Rock there lies a flat stone which
it has been conjectured may have been used for sacrifices. All our
authorities agree that the place was most sacred. Some say no one
was allowed to touch it; and at it oracles were delivered, which the
Spaniards accepted as real, while attributing them to devils who dwelt
inside the rock. Of the many legends relating to the place only two
need be mentioned. One is that here the Sun, pitying the barbarous and
wretched condition of men, took his two children, Manco Capac and
Mama (mother) Occlo, and giving them a short staff or wand of gold,
directed them to go forward, till they should find a place where the
staff on being struck against the ground entered and stuck fast. They
travelled to the north for many days, and the wand finally entered
the earth at Cuzco, where they accordingly built a city and founded
their dominion, Manco being the first of the Inca dynasty. The other
tale is that for a long, long time there was darkness over the earth
and great sorrow among men till at last the Sun suddenly rose out
of the Rock on Titicaca, which was thenceforward sacred and a place
of sacrifice and oracles. Other traditions, more or less differing
from these in details, agree in making Titicaca the original home
of the Incas, and one of them curiously recalls a Mexican story by
placing on it a great foreign Teacher whom the Spaniards identified
with St. Thomas the Apostle.[29] In these stories, some written down
by Spanish explorers or treasure seekers at the time of the Conquest
or collected subsequently by learned ecclesiastics, some still
surviving, with grotesque variations, in the minds of the peasantry,
we may distinguish three salient points,--first, the veneration for
the Rock as an object; secondly, its close relation to Sun worship;
and thirdly, its connection with the Inca rulers of Cuzco. It is a
plausible view that from ancient pre-Inca times the Rock was a _Huaca_
or sacred object (in fact a fetish, _i.e._ an object inhabited by a
spirit) to the primitive tribes of the island and lake coasts, as the
cleft rock of Delphi was to the Greeks, even as the Black Stone which
they called the Mother of the gods was to the Phrygian worshippers of
Cybele, as perhaps the Stone of Tara--perhaps even the Lia Fail or
Coronation Stone of Scone and now of Westminster Abbey--was to our
Celtic ancestors. When the Incas established their dominion over the
region round the lake they made this spot a sanctuary of the sun,
following their settled policy of superadding the imperial religion of
Sun worship--the Sun being their celestial progenitor--to the primitive
veneration and propitiation of local spirits which their subjects
practised. It was thus that the Roman Emperors added the worship of the
goddess of Rome to that of the local deities of Western Asia and Africa
and set up to her great temples, like that at Pergamos, among and above
the older shrines. If there be truth in the legend that the Incas were
themselves originally a tribe of the Collas of the plateau who quitted
their former seats to go northward to the conquest of Cuzco, it would
be all the more natural for them to honour this sanctuary as an ancient
home of their race.
The isle seems to have been abandoned and the worship forbidden soon
after the Conquest. No Christian church was ever placed near it, as
might have been done if it were deemed necessary to wean the people
from rites still practised there. What the early Spanish chroniclers
tell us of the devotion paid to it is amply confirmed by the religious
ornaments and the numerous objects connected with worship which have
been dug up near the Rock, including woollen ponchos of extraordinary
fineness of workmanship and colour, and golden figures of men (or
deities) and of llamas, the llama being a sacred animal like the
bull in Egypt. The native Indians still approach the Rock with awe.
Lightning and Thunder, as well as the Sun and the local spirits
were worshipped, and human sacrifices, frequently of children, were
offered. Standing on this lonely spot one thinks of what it may have
witnessed in old days. What weird dances and wild uproar of drums and
pipes before the Rock, and still wilder songs and cries of frenzied
worshippers! What shrieks of victims from the Stone of Sacrifice!
Now all is silence, and nothing, except the crumbling ruins of the
Chingana, speaks of the past. No sound except the sighing of the breeze
round the cliff and the splash of the wavelets as they break on the
pebbly beach beneath. There is no habitation near. The green outlying
islets, one of which is said to have run with the blood of human
sacrifices, are all desolate. The villages on the Bolivian shore to the
east and the Peruvian shore to the west are too distant to be visible,
while to the north the vast expanse of glittering blue stretches out
till the blue depths of heaven bend to meet it.
Bidding farewell to the Island of the Sun, we sailed southward through
the Straits of Tiquina, only half a mile wide, which connect the
principal lake with the shallower gulf at its southeastern end, called
the Lake of Vinamarca. On each side of the channel between heights
whose igneous rocks seemed to indicate volcanic action are picturesque
little Indian villages, St. Paul on the southwestern, St. Peter on the
northeastern shore. It was market day, and the balsas were carrying the
peasants homeward. I have already referred to these raft-like boats,
formed of bundles of _Totora_ tied together, and equipped with a small
mast carrying a sail also of the same kind of rush. There were only
passengers upon these, but the rushes are so much lighter than water
that they can support a considerable weight. Large blocks of building
stone are often carried on them. The Indians were kneeling on them and
paddling, one on each side. Progress was slow, but in this country time
is no object; it is almost the only thing of which there is more than
enough in Bolivia.
We had now got nearer to the great Cordillera Real, the range of
unbroken snow and ice which runs southward from the village of Sorata
nearly to the city of La Paz, and could better make out the several
peaks and the passes which separate them and the splendid glaciers
which stream down their hollows far below the line of perpetual snow.
Eight or nine great masses can be distinguished, the loftiest and
northernmost of which, Illampu, is nearly 22,000 feet high, the rest
ranging from 19,000 to 21,000.
Illampu consists of two peaks and is the mountain which European
travellers and maps call Sorata, from the town of that name near its
northern base. It consists of two peaks, the higher of snow, called
by the natives, Hanko Uma,[30] and the slightly lower one, of rock,
Illampu proper. This, which is the loftiest of the range, and was
sixty or seventy years ago believed to be the loftiest in the western
hemisphere, was climbed by Sir Martin Conway, who has described his
ascent and his other adventures in Bolivia, in a very interesting
book,[31] but he found the last slope just below the top so unstable,
owing to the powdery condition of the snow, that he was obliged to turn
back. So far as I know, no other summit of the range, unless Illimani
is to be accounted a part of it, has ever been ascended. At the end of
the chain the splendid pyramid of Kaka Aka, also called Huayna Potosi,
seems to approach 21,000. After it the range sinks a little till it
rises again fifty miles farther south to over 21,000 feet in the snowy
summit of Illimani. The Aymarás seem to have no special names for most
of these peaks, and when asked for one answer that it is Kunu Kollu (a
snow height).[32] That is the case in many other mountainous countries.
Neither in the White Mountains of North America nor in the Rockies and
Cascades do the aborigines seem to have had names for more than a few
separate peaks. Names were not needed, for they seldom approached the
great heights. On the other hand, in Scotland and Ireland every hill
has its Gaelic name because the herdsmen had occasion to traverse them.
In the Tatra Mountains of Northern Hungary almost the only names of
peaks are those taken from villages near their foot. Here the tract at
the foot of the range is desert; nobody, unless possibly a hunter now
and then pursuing a vicuña, has any reason for approaching it.
The Cordillera Real is not of volcanic origin, though there may be
recent eruptive rocks here and there in it. None of the great summits
shew the forms characteristic of the volcano, and my friend Sir M.
Conway tells me that all the rocks he saw seemed to be granite and
gneiss or mica schist, or perhaps very old palæozoic strata. The region
has been very little explored. There must be some superb glacier passes
across it.
The scenery of this lake of Vinamarca, which we were now traversing,
has a grand background in the Snowy Range, but the foreground is unlike
that of Titicaca, for the shores are mostly low, shallow bays covered
with water plants, over which flocks of lake fowl flutter, with the
hills softer in outline than those of the great lake, though stranger
and more varied in colour, for black masses of volcanic rock rise on
the north and bare hills of a deep red on the southwest. Here is the
point where the river Desaguadero flows out and a little to the east
is the port of Guaqui whence runs the railway to La Paz. Here we halted
for the night, a very cold one, and set off in a cold morning for the
Bolivian capital. An open valley runs south between flat-topped stony
ridges affording thin pasturage, past clusters of Indian huts; and
after some few miles, we see huge blocks of stone scattered over a
wide space of almost level ground. These are the last ruins I have to
mention, and in some respects they form the most remarkable group of
prehistoric structures not only in the Andean countries, but in the
Western Hemisphere. I will not attempt to describe them, for they are
too numerous and too chaotic, but only to convey some impression of the
more significant objects. The place is Tiahuanaco, or Tihuamacu, as the
Indians of the neighbourhood call it.
The configuration of the ground, and the remains of what seems to have
been an ancient mole for the landing of boats, suggest that in remote
ages the waters of the lake came close up to this spot, though it is
now five miles distant. I have already remarked that the character
of the western and northern shores of Titicaca, as well as Indian
traditions that places now far from the shore were once approachable
by water, seem to indicate that the lake has receded within historical
times and may be still receding. The ruins are scattered over a
very large area, but those of most interest are to be found within
a space of about half a square mile, the rest being mostly detached
and scattered blocks to which it is hard to assign any definite plan
or purpose. Within this space three deserve special notice. One is a
huge, oblong mound of earth, about fifty feet high, with steep sides
supported by stone walls. It has been called the Fortress, but there
are now no traces of defensive ramparts, and it may have been raised
for a palace or, more probably, for some religious purpose. That it was
a natural hill seems unlikely. There are no remains on it of any large
and solid building and in the middle there is now a hollow, its bottom
filled with water, which is said to have been dug out by those who
have excavated here, in old days for treasure, and more recently for
archæological purposes. Its vast proportions and the fine cutting of
the stones which are placed along the edges are evidences of the great
amount of labour employed upon it.
A little below the mound are the remains of a broad staircase of long,
low steps of sandstone, well cut, standing between two pillars of hard
diorite rock. These led up to a platform, on which a temple may have
stood. The proportions of the staircase and the pillars are good, and
the effect is not without stateliness. No fragments of the supposed
temple remain, but on the platform there are many stone figures, some
found on it, some brought from the ground beneath and placed here,
heads of animals, condors and other birds, pumas and fishes, all
forcibly, though rudely, carved. Still more notable is a human head
surmounting a square pillar or pedestal. It is much damaged, and no
wonder, for the Bolivian soldiers used it as a mark to shoot at; but
though the execution is stiff, the head has a certain dignity. Two
other human figures, sadly defaced, stand at the gate of the village
churchyard, a mile away. The style of all these is said to bear some
resemblance to the remarkable colossal figures found on Easter Island,
which lies out in the Pacific, two thousand miles west of Chile, and
which are evidently the work of some race that inhabited that isle in
ages of which no record remains.
The most striking object, however, is the monolithic sculptured
gateway, which now stands alone, the building of which it formed a part
having perished. It is hewn out of one block of dark grey trachytic
rock, is ten feet high, the doorway or aperture four and a half feet
high from the ground and two feet nine inches wide. Its top has been
broken, whether by lightning, as the Indians say, or by its fall, or by
the Spanish extirpators of idolatry, is not known. Thirty years ago it
was lying prostrate. The front is covered with elaborate carvings in
low relief, executed with admirable exactness and delicacy, and owing
their almost perfect preservation to the extreme hardness of the stone.
They represent what may be either a divine or a royal head, surrounded
by many small kneeling figures with animal heads, some human, some of
the puma, some of the condor, these being the largest quadruped and
the largest bird of prey in the Andes. The treatment is conventional
and the symbolism obscure, for we have no clue to the religion of the
people who built these monuments. The association of animal forms
with deities is a familiar thing in many ancient mythologies,--human
figures had animal heads in Egypt, and bulls and lions had human heads
in Assyria,--so one may guess at something of the kind in Peruvian
mythology. But these sculptures are unlike anything else in South
America, or in the Old World, and bear only a faint resemblance to some
of the figures in Central American temples.[33] This sculptured portal,
the unique record of a long-vanished art and worship, perhaps of a
long-vanished race, makes an impression which remains fresh and clear
in memory, because it appeals to one's imagination as the single and
solitary voice from the darkness of a lost past.
All over the flat valley bottom there lie scattered huge hewn blocks,
some of the sandstone which is here the underlying rock, some of
andesite apparently brought on balsas from quarries many miles away
(when perhaps the lake water came up this far). I measured one massive
prostrate stone lying near the staircase and found it to be thirty-four
feet long by five feet wide with one and one-half feet out of the
ground. How much there was below ground could not be ascertained. Yet
the stones that remain to-day scattered over a space more than a mile
long are few compared to those which have during centuries past been
carried away. The church and many of the houses in the village are
built of them. The Cathedral and other edifices in La Paz have been
built of them, and within the last ten years five hundred train-loads
of them were carried off by the constructors of the railway to build
bridges, station houses, and what not, along the line. It is pitiable
to think that this destruction of the most remarkable prehistoric
monument in the western world should have been consummated in our own
days.
Whether there was ever a city at Tiahuanaco there is nothing to
shew. The place may have been merely a sanctuary or, perhaps, a
royal fortress and place of worship combined. If there was ever a
population of the humble class, they lived in mud huts which would
quickly disappear and leave no trace. The modern village is composed of
such huts, with some of the stones of the ruins used as foundations.
Nevertheless the size of the church and its unusually rich decoration,
and its handsome silver altar, suggest that the place was formerly more
important than it is to-day. Pottery and small ornaments are still
found in the earth, though the treasures, if ever there were any, have
been carried off long ago. An arrow point of obsidian, which an Indian
shewed me, was interesting as evidence that the ancient inhabitants
used bows and were not, as apparently were the Peruvians of Cuzco,
content with slings as missile weapons.[34]
The valley is fertile, and much of it cultivated, but at this season,
before the crops had begun to pierce the earth, it was very dreary. The
brown hills all around are themselves bare and featureless, and they
cut off the view of the snowy Cordillera and of the lake. The sight
of this mass of ruins, where hardly one stone is left upon another in
a place where thousands of men must have toiled and many thousands
have worshipped, makes its melancholy landscape all the more doleful.
It recalls the descriptions in the Hebrew prophets of the desolation
coming upon Nineveh.
Aymará tradition, with its vague tales of giants who reared the mound
and walls and of a deity who in displeasure turned the builders into
stones and for a while darkened the world, has nothing more to tell us
than the aspect of the place suggests, viz., that here dwelt a people
possessed of great skill in stonework and obeying rulers who had a
great command of labour, and that this race has vanished, leaving no
other trace behind. Upon one point all observers and all students are
agreed. When the first Spanish conquerors came hither, they were at
once struck by the difference between these works and those of the
Incas which they had seen at Cuzco and elsewhere in Peru. The Indians
whom they questioned told them that the men who built these things
had lived long, long before their own forefathers. Who the builders
were, whence they came, how and when and whither they disappeared--of
all this the Indians knew no more than the Spaniards themselves knew,
or than we know now. The width of the interval between the greatness
of Tiahuanaco and the Conquest appears also by the fact that the Inca
sovereigns had not treated it as a sacred spot in the way they did the
shrine at Copacavana or the islands in Titicaca, nor has it to-day
any special sanctity to the Indians of the neighbourhood. To them it
is only what the Pyramids are to a wandering Arab or Stonehenge to a
Wiltshire peasant. The one thing which the walls have in common with
those in and around Cuzco is the excellence of the stonework. The style
of building is different, but the cutting itself is equally exact and
regular. This art would seem to have arisen early among the races of
the plateau, doubtless because the absence of wood turned artistic
effort towards excellence in stone.
One receives the impression here, as in some other parts of Peru,
that the semi-civilization, if we may call it so, of these regions is
extremely ancient. We seem to look back upon a vista whose length it
is impossible to conjecture, a vista of many ages, during which this
has been the home of peoples already emerged from such mere savagery as
that in which the natives of the Amazonian forests still lie. But how
many ages the process of emergence occupied, and how many more followed
down to the Spanish Conquest we may never come to know.
It is possible that immigrants may at some time, long subsequent to
the colonization of America by way of Behring's Sea, have found their
way hither across the waters of the Pacific. The similarity of the
figures on Easter Island to the figures at Tiahuanaco has been thought
to suggest such a possibility. Those figures are, I believe, unlike
anything in any other Pacific island.
Archæological research, however, does not suggest, any more than does
historical enquiry, the existence of any external influence affecting
the South American races. We may reasonably assume that among them, as
in Europe, the contact and intermixture of different stocks and types
of character and culture made for advancement. But this great factor in
the progress of mankind, which did so much for western Asia and Europe,
and to the comparative absence of which the arrested civilization of
China may be largely due, was far less conspicuously present in South
America than on the Mediterranean coasts. Think what Europe owed not
only to the mixture of stocks whence the Italo-Hellenic peoples sprang,
but also to influences radiating out from Egypt and the West Asiatic
nations. Think what Italy owed to Greece and afterwards to the East
and of what modern European nations owe to the contact of racial types
in literature, art, and ideas, such as the Celtic, the Iberian, the
Teutonic, and the Slavonic. How different was the lot of the Peruvians,
shut in between an impassable ocean on the west, a desert on the south,
and the savage tribes of a forest wilderness on the east! No ideas came
to them from without, nor from any of the inventions which Old World
peoples had been making could they profit. They were out of contact
even with the most advanced of the other American peoples, such as
those of Bogotá and Yucatan, for there was a vast space between, many
shadowy mountains and a resounding sea.
As after these ruins I saw no others in South America, for neither
southern Bolivia nor Chile nor Argentina, nor Uruguay has any to shew,
this seems the fittest place for such few thoughts on the ancient
civilization of South America as are suggested to the traveller's mind
by the remains of it which he sees and by what he reads in the books
of historians and archæologists. A large part of the interest which
Peru and Bolivia have for the modern world is the interest which this
ancient civilization awakens. It is a unique chapter in the history of
mankind.
The most distinct and constantly recurring impressions made by the
remains is this: that the time when man began to rise out of mere
savagery must, in these countries, be carried very far into the past.
Our data for any estimate either of the duration of the process by
which he attained a sort of civilization or of the several steps in
it, are extremely scanty. In the Old World the early use of writing
by a few of its peoples enables us to go a long way back. The records
which Egypt and Babylon and China have been made to yield are of some
service for perhaps three or even four thousand years--some would say
more--before the Christian era, and from those of Egypt and Babylon we
get at least glimpses of the races that lived in Asia Minor and along
the Mediterranean coast. But none of the American peoples advanced as
far as the invention of even the rudest form of writing, though in
Mexico and Yucatan pictures were to some slight extent used to preserve
the memory of events. Here, in South America, where neither writing
nor pictures aid us, our only data for what may be called prehistoric
history, are first, the remains of buildings, whether fortresses or
palaces or temples, and, secondly, works of art, such as carvings,
ornaments, or religious objects, utensils of wood or earthenware and
paintings on them, weapons of war, woollen or cotton fabrics, such as
ponchos or mummy-cloths. All such relics are more abundant in Peru
than anywhere else in the Western world, except that in Yucatan and
some parts of Central America the ruined temples have been preserved
better than here. The Peruvian relics are found not only in the Andean
plateau, but also in those parts near the coast of northern Peru where
cultivation was rendered possible by rivers. There, at the ruins of the
Chimu city, near Truxillo, and farther south at Pachacamac, near Lima,
a great deal has been obtained by excavation in ancient cemeteries and
temples; and much more would have been obtained but for the damage
wrought by generations of treasure seekers who melted down all the gold
they found and destroyed nearly everything else.
The objects found on the coast differ in style from those found on
the high Andean regions, and among these latter there are also marked
differences between things found at Cuzco, and generally in northern
Peru, and things found in the tombs and graves in the Titicaca regions.
All, however, have a certain family resemblance and form a distinct
archæological group somewhat nearer to Mexican and Central American art
than to anything in the Old World. Specimens of all can be just as well
studied in the museums of Europe and North America as here on the spot,
where the collections are neither numerous nor well arranged. There
is, perhaps, more fertility of invention, more freedom of treatment and
more humour in the objects found on the coast at Chimu and Pachacamac
than in any others; but the most impressive of all are the sculptures
of Tiahuanaco.
Considerable skill had been attained in weaving. Handsome woollen
ponchos, apparently designed for use as religious vestments, have been
found, the colour patterns harmonious and the wool exquisitely fine.
The Chimu tapestries and embroideries shew taste as well as technical
skill. Copper, the metal chiefly used in Peru, was mined and smelted in
large quantities; and the reduction of silver ores was also understood,
yet the age of stone implements was not past, either for peaceful or
for warlike purposes. As no cementing material had been discovered,
walls were rendered exceptionally strong either by carefully fitting
their stones into one another or fly clamping them together by metal.
Of this latter method there are examples at Tiahuanaco.
Taking Peruvian art as a whole, as it appears in pottery and pictures
and carvings, it is inferior in grace of form and refinement of
execution both to Egyptian and to early Greek work, such as that of
the Mycenæan period. Neither is there anything that shews such a power
of drawing the human figure and of designing ornament as the ruined
temples of Yucatan display.
The most signal excellence the Peruvians attained seems to have been
in building. The absence of wood turned their efforts towards stone,
and gave birth to works which deserve to be compared with those of
Egypt, and far surpass in solidity any to be found in North America.
Of the temples, too little remains to enable a judgment to be formed,
either of their general design or of their adornment. But the stonework
is wonderful, indicating not only a high degree of manual expertness,
but the maintenance of a severe standard of efficiency through every
part, while the skill shewn in the planning of fortifications so as
to strengthen every defensive line and turn to account the natural
features of the ground would have done credit to the military
engineering of fifteenth-century Europeans.
But the race was also in some ways strangely inept. Both the Quichua
tribes and the subjects of the Chimu sovereign on the Pacific coast
seem to have shewn no higher invention than the Aymarás, who launched
their rush balsas on Lake Titicaca, for the Spaniards found them using
nothing but small canoes on the rivers and clumsy rafts for creeping
along the shore with the help of a rude sail, though the Caribs of
Venezuela, otherwise far less advanced, carried on a brisk trade in
large sea-going canoes all the way along the line of the Antilles from
the mouth of the Orinoco to the peninsula of Yucatan.
The few songs that have been preserved do not commemorate events
or achievements like the ballads of Europe, but are mostly simple
ditties, connected with nature and agriculture. There were, however,
dramas which used to be acted, and among them one considerable work
which, long preserved by oral recitations, was written down in the
seventeenth century by Dr. Valdez, a Spaniard, the priest of Sicuani,
and generally held to be in the main of native authorship, though
perhaps touched up by Spanish taste. This is the so-called drama of
Ollantay. It has a fresh simplicity and a sort of romantic flavour
which suggest that there was something more than prosaic industry in
this people.
In the absence of literature, one seeks in the mythology of a race a
test of its imaginative quality; and in its religion, an indication of
its power of abstract thinking. In both respects, the Peruvians seem
to have stood as much below the primitive Celts and Teutons, as they
stood above the negro races, with their naïve animism and childish
though often humorous fables. Whether the Spanish ecclesiastics
were right in finding in the worship of the earth god Pachacamac a
belief in a supreme deity, creator of the world, may be doubted. But
that the worship of Sun, Moon, and Stars should have coexisted with
ancestor worship, and with a sort of fetichism which revered and feared
spirits in all objects, need excite no surprise. Such a mixture, or
rather such a coexistence without real intermixture, of different
strata of religious ideas, finds plenty of analogies in the ancient
Helleno-Italic world as it does to-day in China and other parts of
the East. There was a worship of the ghosts of the progenitors of the
family and the tribe, a worship of various more or less remarkable
natural objects, or rather of the spirits that dwelt in them, a worship
of animals such as the strongest beast and largest bird of prey, the
puma and the condor, and of the supremely useful llama (a devotion
which was compatible with the sacrificing of the animal), a worship
of plants, and especially of the maize and of the power which bade it
grow, the Maize Mother. Above all these forms, congenial to the humbler
classes, rose the worship of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (especially the
Pleiades), representing a higher range of ideas, yet connected with the
more primitive nature superstitions by the sense that the Sun evoked
life from the earth and by the finding, in the constellations, the
shapes of the animals that were sacred on the earth. Nor were these the
only points in which we discover resemblances to Old World religions.
Peru rivalled Egypt in the care taken to preserve the bodies of the
dead as mummies,[35] and these, so skilfully dried as not to offend
the senses, were sometimes placed in their dwellings. The Quichuas
practised divination by the flight of birds (like the Dyaks of Borneo),
and by the inspection of the entrails of victims, as the Romans did
down to the end of the Republic. They had oracles delivered from rocks
or rivers, like the Greeks, and the _Huillca_ through whom the spirit
spoke could, like the Delphic Pythia, sometimes be guided towards the
answer desired. Men, and especially children, were sacrificed (though
to a far smaller extent than in Mexico or among the Phœnicians). If
cannibalism existed on the Plateau, it was rare, though it still
remains among some of the wildest of the Amazonian tribes.
That there is nothing of which men are so tenacious as their
superstitions may perhaps be ascribed to the fact that life is ruled
more by emotion and habit than by reason. The Peruvians made no
fight for their religion, which, to be sure, was not necessarily
inconsistent with such Christian rites as the friars demanded. They
submitted to baptism with that singular passivity which marks nearly
all the South American races. They threw into the lakes or hid in the
ground all the temple gold that could be got away before the Spanish
plunderers fell upon them, but made little attempt to defend their
sacred places or images. Nevertheless under a nominal, not to say a
debased, Christianity, they long continued to practise the ancient
rites, and to this day wizardry and the devotion to the local _huacas_
(sacred places or objects) are strong among the people. These primeval
superstitions, which existed long before the Inca Sun worship had been
established, have long survived it. If all the people who now speak
Spanish were to depart from Peru and Bolivia, and these regions were to
be cut off from the world and left to themselves, pagan worship, mixed
with some few Christian words and usages, might probably again become,
within some twenty generations, the religion of the Andean countries,
just as tribes in the Caucasus which were converted to Christianity
in the days when the Roman Empire reached as far east as Tiflis were
found to have retained of it, after twelve centuries, nothing but the
practice of fasting in Lent and the use of the sign of the cross.
Nature worship still holds its ground, though no doubt in a highly
extenuated form, in every country of Europe.[36] Habit and emotion
are the most universal and the deepest-down things in human nature,
present where reason is feeble, and gripping the soul tighter than do
any intellectual convictions. Religious sentiment may hold men to old
beliefs and practices long after the origin and grounds of the belief
have been forgotten.
Comparing the Indians of the Andes with those of the plateau of
Anahuac, and especially with the Aztecs, the former appear a less
vigorous and forceful people, and distinctly inferior as fighting
men. The North Americans generally, including not only the Mexicans,
but such tribes as the Sioux, the Comanches, and the Iroquois, loved
war, and were as brave and fierce in it as any race the world has
seen. The South Americans, except of course the Araucanians of Chile,
the Charruas of Uruguay, and perhaps also the Caras of Quito, were
altogether softer. They still make sturdy soldiers when well led, and
do not fear death. But they shewed little of the spirit and tenacity of
the Red Men of the North. Even allowing for the terror and amazement
inspired by the horses, the firearms, the armour, and the superior
physical strength of the Spanish invaders, who were picked men, some
of them veterans from Italian wars, the resistance of the Peruvians
was strangely feeble. They were also mentally inferior. The Spaniards
thought the Mexicans far more intelligent. Neither race had made the
great discovery of alphabetic writing, but those of Anahuac had come
much nearer to it with their quasi-hieroglyphic pictures than had the
Peruvians with their _Quipus_, knotted strings of various colours.
On the other hand the rule of the Incas and their more pacific type
of civilization represent a more fully developed and better settled
system of administration than the military organization of those allied
pueblos which were led by the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City).
These latter did no more than exact tribute and require contingents in
war from the tribes who dwelt round them on the Mexican plateau and
between the plateau and the Gulf, while the Incas not only exercised
undisputed suzerainty for a thousand miles to the south of Cuzco and
nearly another thousand to the north, but had devised, in their own
domain of central Peru, a scheme of government whose elaboration
witnesses to the political capacity of the rulers. Even if we discount
a good deal of the description given by the early writers of the "State
Socialism" established by the Incas, it seems probable that more was
done in the way of regulating the productive activities of the subjects
than in any other primitive people, either of the ancient or of the
modern world. Public officials, it is said, regulated the distribution
and cultivation of the land, its produce being allotted, partly to the
Inca, partly to the service of the Sun, his temples and ministers,
partly to the cultivator or the clan to which he belonged. Thus State
Socialism was strengthened by its association with a State Church,
and as everybody was free to worship his local _huacas_ as well as
the Sun there was nothing to fear from heresy or non-conformity. The
Incas maintained roads, some of which are said to have been paved,[37]
and tambos or rest-houses along the roads, together with a service
of swift messengers whose feats of running excited the admiration of
the Spaniards. They made plans in relief of their cities, and some
accounts declare that they adorned their walls with pictures of former
sovereigns. By the general testimony of the early Spanish writers,
the country was peaceful and orderly. Other vices, including that
of drunkenness, are charged upon them, but theft and violence were
extremely rare. Indeed, the habit of obedience was cultivated only too
successfully, for it made them yield, after a few scattered outbursts
of resistance, to a handful of invaders.
The political astuteness of the Incas, visible in their practice of
moving conquered tribes, as did the Assyrian kings, to new abodes and
replacing these by colonists of more assured loyalty, was perhaps
most conspicuous in the success that attended their scheme of basing
imperial power upon national Sun worship, making the sovereign play
on earth the part which the great luminary held in the sky, and
surrounding his commands and his person with an almost equal sanctity.
The Inca was more to his subjects than any European or Asiatic monarch
has ever been to his, more than was the Mikado in Japan or the Czar to
the peasantry of Russia a century ago.
When the Spanish invasion broke like a tornado upon Peru, it was
natural that the Inca throne should be uprooted and the ancient Sun
worship with it. But the Conquerors also therewith destroyed, in the
thoughtless insolence of force and greed, the whole system of society
and government. Some of them, writing twenty or thirty years later,
expressed their regret.[38] Wretchedness had replaced prosperity; such
virtues as the people had possessed were disappearing, their spirit
was irretrievably broken. The serfdom to which the peasantry were by
the Conquest subjected was not paternal, as that of the Incas had
been, and was harsher, because the new master was a stranger without
sympathy or compassion. There was no one to befriend the Indian, save
now and then a compassionate churchman; and even if he could get the
ear of the Viceroy or bring his appeal to the Council of the Indies
in Spain, the oppressor on the spot was always able to frustrate
such benevolent efforts. How far the people died out under these new
conditions is matter of controversy, but it seems clear that the coast
valleys (already declining as the result of frequent wars) were soon
almost depopulated; and in place of the eight millions whom the Viceroy
Toledo's enumeration reported in 1575,[39] there were in 1794 only
608,000 Indians and 244,000 mestizos within the seven Intendancies of
Peru (excluding what is now Bolivia).
It is the extraordinary interest of the subject,--a religion and a
polity resembling in so many points those of Old World countries, yet
itself altogether independently developed--that has drawn me into this
digression, for all that I had intended was to describe the impression
which the existing ruins make, and what it is that they seem to tell us
about the capacities of the race that has left them as its monument.
They are far scantier than are the remains of the Egyptian and
Assyrian civilizations, and they are as inferior in material grandeur
and artistic quality to those remains as the race was intellectually
inferior not only to the Greeks, but also to our own early Celtic and
Teutonic ancestors of the first five Christian centuries who produced
few buildings and had not advanced in settled order and in wealth so
far as the subjects of the Incas. Nevertheless, the Peruvian remains
do bear witness to two elements of strength in the American race.
One of these is a capacity for the concentration of effort upon any
aim proposed and for a scrupulously exact and careful execution of
any work undertaken. The other is a certain largeness and boldness
of conception, finding expression not only in the plan of great
buildings, but also in an administrative system which secured obedience
over a vast area, which diffused its language over many diverse tribes,
and impressed upon them one worship and (to some extent at least) one
type of society. That a people who wanted so many advantages possessed
by the peoples of the Old World should have effected these things shews
the high natural quality inherent in some at least of the aboriginal
races of the Western Hemisphere.
Was this semicivilization of Peru--and one may ask the same question
regarding that of Mexico--still advancing when it was suddenly and
irretrievably swept away by the Spanish Conquest? Did it possess such
further possibilities of development as might have enabled it, had it
been spared, to have made some substantial contribution, whether in
art, or in industry, or in the way of intellectual creation, to the
general progress of mankind? Or had it already reached the full measure
of its stature, as the civilization of Egypt seems to have done some
time before the Persians conquered that country, or as that of China
did many centuries ago? This is a question which the knowledge so far
attained regarding the pre-Conquest ages of Peru does not enable us to
answer.[40] Could the voyage of Columbus have been postponed for four
or five hundred years, Peruvians and Mexicans might have risen nearer
to an equality of intelligence with the European peoples, however
inferior they had remained for the purposes of war. But America once
discovered, the invasion of Mexico and Peru was certain to follow; and
so soon as the Old-World races with their enormous superiority poured
in among those of the New World, the weaker civilization could not
but be submerged, submerged so utterly that little or nothing of it
remained to be taken up into and incorporated with that of the invaders.
It is this complete submersion that strikes one so forcibly in Peru and
Mexico; perhaps even more forcibly in the former than in the latter.
The aborigines went under at once. In Peru and Bolivia they constitute
the majority of the population. But to the moral, intellectual, and
political life of Peru and Bolivia they have made no contribution. Even
to its art and its industries they supplied nothing except painstaking
artificers, retaining the old talent for stonework, which they did at
the bidding of Spanish masters. Negatively and harmfully, they have
affected politics by preventing the growth of a white agricultural
class and by furnishing recruits to the armies raised by military
adventurers. The break between the old Peru of the Incas and the newer
Peru of colonial times was as complete as it was sudden. The earlier
has passed on nothing to the later, because the spirit of the race was
too hopelessly broken to enable it to give anything. There remains only
the submissiveness of a downtrodden peasantry and its pathetic fidelity
to its primitive superstitions. Some old evils passed away, some new
evils appeared. Human sacrifices ended, and the burning of heretics
began.