line of fortifications, a work which fills the mind with
astonishment at the grandeur of the conception and the perfect
manner of its execution. It consists of three walls, the first
averaging a height of eighteen feet, the second of sixteen and
the third of fourteen, the first terrace being ten feet broad
and the second eight. The walls are built with salient and
retiring angles, twenty-one in number and corresponding with
each other in each wall, so that no one point could be attacked
without being commanded by others.... But the most marvelous
part of this fortification is the huge masses of rock of which
it is constructed (one of them being sixteen feet in height and
several more varying from ten to twelve feet), yet made to fit
exactly one into the other and forming a piece of masonry almost
unparalleled in solidity, beauty, and peculiarity of its
construction in any other part of the world. The immense masses
at Stonehenge, the great block in the tomb of Agamemnon at
Argos, and those in the cyclopean walls of Volterra and
Agrigentum are wonderful monuments of the perseverance and
knowledge of the people who raised them, but they fall
immeasurably short in beauty of execution of the fortress of
Cuzco.”
The railroad and electric lights and the telegraph and telephone have
come to Cuzco now, but in other respects the city is not much
modernized. It is still distinctly reminiscent of the royal Inca régime,
and even more of the régime of the Spanish viceroys. For many years
after the conquest it was superior in importance to Lima. Notaries were
required under severe penalties, Mozans says, “to write at the head of
all public documents, ‘_En la gran ciudad del Cuzco, cabeza de estos
reinos y provincias del Perú en las Indias_’—In the great city of Cuzco,
head of these kingdoms and provinces of Peru in the Indies. Even so late
as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” he continues, “it was,
next to Lima, the city of the greatest social importance in the
viceroyalty.” And so now, although there are the same long vistas of
low, massive buildings through the narrow streets, the view from the
hill presents a panorama of red-tiled roofs instead of thatches, of many
tall church towers, and of a great square divided into three.
On the first stories of the old Indian homes Spanish superstructures
have been built; on the foundation walls of the ancient temple of
Voricancha, the largest and richest of the sanctuaries devoted to the
worship of the Sun, has been erected the convent of Santo Domingo; the
devotees in the convent of Santa Catalina occupy cells that were once
used by the Virgins of the Sun; walls that were retained in the building
of the Church of San Lazaro are ornamented with bodies of birds having
women’s heads that were carved by the bronze chisels of the artisans of
the Incas. The grand old renaissance cathedral, which, with its massive
stone walls and pillars and vaulted roof, cost so much to build that one
of the viceroys said it would have been cheaper to build it of silver,
is one of the most imposing specimens of church architecture in America;
the pulpit in San Blas is famed as one of the most beautiful in the
world, and many of the interiors and cloisters, particularly of La
Merced, where the remains of Almagro and two of Pizarro’s brothers lie,
and the patio of the university, are perfectly superb.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF LA MERCED, LIMA—TYPE OF RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE
OF SPANISH COLONIAL PERIOD.]
Of course, like La Paz, Quito, Bogotá and many of the other old mountain
cities, which until very recently were isolated so far as the outside
world was concerned because of their inaccessible locations, Cuzco is
still behind the times in sanitary arrangements. Since there is surface
drainage, there are odors, but one need have little fear of any ill
effects in such a climate as theirs. Thanks to it, the cities are as
healthful as most; and to the archæologist and the lover of art and the
beauties of nature in her sublimest aspect, there is no more fascinating
city in South America than Cuzco.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IX
ECUADOR
Ecuador, “the Switzerland of America,” is one of the smallest of our
sister republics in the South, yet her area, of 116,000 square miles, is
equal to that of our States of Missouri and Arkansas combined, and, if
certain pending boundary disputes should be determined in her favor, her
territory would be more than doubled. Her population is now about
1,500,000, an average of a little over twelve to the square mile.
Politically, the republic is divided into sixteen provinces, not
including the Galápagos Islands. Five are maritime, occupying the strip
of coast between the Western Cordillera and the sea, ten are
interandine, and then there is the Oriente, so called, which consists of
all the country embraced in the slope between the Eastern Cordillera and
the Brazilian frontier, in the valley of the Amazon. There are two
fluvial systems, both rising in the mountains; one flowing west to the
sea and the other down the eastern slope. In all they are composed of
ninety-one rivers. Those tributary to the Guayas, flowing westward to
the sea, and many of which are of considerable size, are now of the
greater commercial importance because the country of the Oriente,
through which those tributary to the Amazon flow, is still a wilderness,
only sparsely inhabited even by what are left of the aborigines—and this
although it is the richest of all in vegetation and fertility of soil,
like the adjoining Montaña district of Peru.
Thus, ranging as it does from the sea-level of the coast on one side and
the valley of the Amazon on the other to the high interandine plateau,
and from thence to the great cloud-piercing peaks of the cordilleras,
crowned with perpetual snow, this country directly beneath the Equator,
from which it derives its very name, is possessed, as are Peru, Bolivia,
and Colombia, of every variety of climate within the sphere of a few
hours’ journey—in the lowlands, the eternal summer of the tropics; on
the high table-lands, eternal spring, and, in the glacial regions of the
mountain summits, winter without end. As the late Professor Orton so
aptly put it: “As the Ecuadorian sees all the constellations of the
firmament, so nature surrounds him with representatives of every family
of plants. Tropical, temperate and arctic fruits and flowers are here
found in profusion, or could be successfully cultivated. There are
places where the eye can embrace an entire zone, for it may look up to a
wheat or barley field or potato patch and down to the sugar cane and
pineapple.”
And, in addition to the familiar products, in many places the slopes of
the mountains between twelve and fifteen thousand feet are clothed with
a shrub peculiar to the high altitudes of the Andes, called
_chuquiragua_, the twigs of which are used for fuel and the yellow buds
as a febrifuge. In the valleys between the cordilleras a very useful and
valuable, as well as the most ordinary, plant is the American aloe, or
century plant, which under cultivation, however, blooms oftener than
once in a hundred years. It is the largest of all the herbs, and, with
its tall stem rising from a cluster of long, thick, gracefully curved
leaves, looks like a great chandelier. Most of the roads are fenced with
hedges of them. Nearly every part is said to serve some practical
purpose. The broad leaves are used for thatching huts and by the poorer
classes as a substitute for paper in writing; a sirup flows from them
when tapped; as they contain much alkali, a soap that lathers in salt
water as well as fresh is manufactured from them; the fiber of the
leaves and roots is woven into sandals and sacks; the flowers make
excellent pickles, the stock is used in building, the pith of the stem
is used by barbers for sharpening razors and the spines as needles. A
species of _yucca_, resembling the aloe, yields the hemp of Ecuador.
In the lowlands, cacao and sugar cane, coffee, tobacco, rice, cotton,
and bananas and other tropical fruits are grown. The forests contain
rubber and numerous species of useful trees, among them the tree that
yields what is known as the _taque_ nut, or vegetable ivory, from which
buttons are made, the grasses and _toquilla_ palm used in the
manufacture of the coarser grades of Panamá hats, the _chincona_ from
the bark of which quinine is obtained, the mangrove cultivated for
tanning purposes as well as its fruit, and the silk-cotton tree that
yields the valuable commercial product known as _kapok_. A considerable
portion of the Oriente is verdured with a part of that immense forest
which extends in an unbroken mass from the grassy _llanos_ of Venezuela
to the _pampas_ of Argentina. In other sections of the country are gold,
silver, copper, iron, coal, petroleum, asphalt and other minerals,
though since the colonial régime there has been little activity in
mining. Only a few years ago work was resumed in the famous mines of
Zaruma, formerly the source of much revenue to the Spaniards.
Ecuador has a treasury of wealth in her vast cacao groves. The cacao
tree, which grows wild in the forests, is from sixteen to forty feet
high and bears a fruit in which the beans lie buried in a
cucumber-shaped pod five to ten inches long and three or four inches
thick. The bean itself in its raw state resembles a thick almond. When
ripe, the pods are cut from the tree by means of a knife with a curved
blade, set on the end of a long pole, an implement specially designed to
remove them without injury. The pods are then gathered in heaps and left
on the ground to dry for a day or two before the beans are removed and
cured. From cacao comes cocoa. The name “cacao” signifies the raw, and
“cocoa” the finished product. There is still another name—coca—which is
often confused with these, but coca is nothing like cacao. Coca is the
Peruvian plant from the leaves of which cocaine is extracted. The cacao
bean contains the cocoa we drink at our breakfast tables, and our
chocolate.
On the skill employed in the curing, which is an extremely delicate
process, to a great extent depends the quality of the output and its
flavor and color. When ready for the market, the bean is dark red
outside and chocolate tinted within. Analyses show that it is rich in
fats, albuminoids, caffeine and theobromine, which last is what imparts
to it its principal characteristics. What we know as chocolate differs
from cocoa in that, in the former compound, the cocoa butter is not
extracted; from the latter it is. Cocoa is really a factory product. The
cured bean is treated differently in the various countries to suit the
taste of the public, and chocolate also is prepared in different ways
for the various uses. American and French chocolates are sold all over
the world.
The tobacco grown in the Province of Esmeraldas on the coast is claimed
to be comparable with that produced in Cuba. And this reminds me that,
unless tradition is at fault, the town of Atacames, from around which
some of the best of it comes, has quite a unique history of its own. In
1623, so the story goes, a vessel laden with seven hundred African
slaves was on its way from Panamá to Peru, where they were to be worked
in the mines. When near the mouth of the Esmeralda River, they mutinied,
massacred the officers and sailors of the ship, and, landing at
Atacames, took possession of the town and killed or drove away every man
in the neighborhood, Indian or Spanish, but spared the women, whom they
kept as wives. Afterward, however, instead of indulging in further
depredations, they kept within the territory they had conquered, and,
mixing with the Cayapas, who had attained an unusual state of
civilization for lowland Indians before the invasion, became miners and
agriculturists on their own account. These African mutineers, therefore,
protected by the reputation for ferocity they had acquired in their
stroke for freedom, were thus the founders of what afterward became an
intelligent and industrious community. The women, particularly, are
famous for their skill in making Panamá hats.
Indeed, aside from agriculture, the most important industry in all the
coast provinces is the making of these hats. Guayaquil long since
supplanted Panamá as the principal market for them. Those of the finest
texture, the ones that are so soft and delicately woven that they can be
folded and put in a coat pocket like a handkerchief and will last a
lifetime, are made of a peculiar grass called _jipi-japa_, for which the
town in the Province of Manavi is named, and, in the weaving of them,
considerable time and great skill is required. These we seldom, if ever,
see in this country. Many go to Paris, Italy, and Spain; more are taken
by the planters along the coast, and in Cuba, who are willing to pay as
much as $80 to $100 for them. They are woven by the women by hand, and
only in the moonlight, these best grades, because the sun would harden
the material, artificial light would attract insects, and the dampness
that comes with sunset is necessary to give the flexibility so essential
to their beauty. The coarser grades, such as we see here, are woven in
the daytime, but under water, in tubs.
Guayaquil, a city of about 50,000 inhabitants, is Ecuador’s principal
seaport, and, next to Valparaiso and Callao, the busiest and most
important on the Pacific side of the continent. All the way up from
Callao the steamer hugs the shore as closely as safety will permit.
There is little change in the view. The same arid strip of low-lying
coast land, dotted with rocky promontories, fringed here and there with
cliffs and crossed with occasional stretches of green where the rivers
flow through to the sea, continues day after day—the same background of
mountains rising tier on tier for thousands and thousands of feet, in
the morning partly obscured by heavy banks of clouds that later melt
away and leave the rugged contour sharply silhouetted against the bright
blue, are bathed in the evening, as the sun sinks toward the horizon, in
the purple haze that becomes them best. Yet there are also the same calm
sea and rainless sky and the same cool, aromatic breezes that make the
lazy hours on deck a continual delight.
And so it is with mixed feelings of regret and relief that one enters
the Gulf of Guayaquil—relief, for here, as we steam past the island of
Puna, where Pizarro camped for months awaiting reinforcements before
beginning the conquest of Peru, the aspect of the shore line changes and
we see foliage as fresh and green and as wildly luxuriant as any in the
basins of the interior. Passing the island, we come to the mouth of the
Guayas, the greatest of South American rivers emptying into the Pacific.
The city is sixty miles beyond at the head of the estuary. The first
glimpse we catch is of a street, called El Malecon, that extends along
the water front for two miles or more from a shipyard to a hill crowned
by a fortress. This is at once the principal shopping, café, and
amusement place, the favorite promenade, the warehouse district, and the
quay where the lighters that ply between it and the vessels anchored out
in the river take on and unload their cargoes. It is faced with what
from the deck appear to be long rows of white stone and marble buildings
of beautiful and graceful architectural design, for the most part of the
usual Moorish type. Long series of arcades in front of the shops remind
one of those of the Rue de Rivoli in Paris; above are pretty balconies
sheltered by blinds and awnings of gaily colored canvas, screening
groups of ladies who like to sit in them and watch the lively scene
below as they sip their coffee and chat.
But picturesque as it all is, one finds on going ashore, that the walls
of these imposing-looking edifices are merely shells of split bamboo,
plastered with cement, ornamented with stucco and painted to resemble
marble and stone, which sad experience has taught the people of the city
will not resist earthquakes as well as this more elastic imitation they
have been compelled to substitute. The residences of the well-to-do are
constructed of the same materials and with wide verandas from ground to
roof, enclosed with Venetian blinds. Few are elaborately furnished. In
that climate it is thought better, for the sake of spaciousness and
comfort, to forego evidences of wealth in the form of carpets, hangings,
and upholstery, which keep out air and retain the heat. The poor of the
suburbs have thatched bamboo or adobe huts with floors of hardened
earth. As in Canton, China, many of them live on the water on rafts made
from _balsa_, a species of timber nearly as buoyant as cork, or else of
hollow trunks of bamboo. A number of logs, forty or fifty feet long, are
lashed together in such a way that they can be propelled by either oars
or sails, and a bamboo hut is built in the center. These often serve as
the homes of whole families for generations, and are so substantial that
they are used in the coasting as well as the river trade for bringing
produce to market.
[Illustration: STREET SCENE IN GUAYAQUIL.]
[Illustration: CONDOR OF THE ANDES.]
In June, 1908, a long-desired and much needed railroad was completed
between Guayaquil and the capital, Quito, way up in the interandine
table-land, 9350 feet above the level of the sea, and now the trip of
nearly three hundred miles, that formerly took from twelve to fifteen
days on mule-back, and often more by foot, may be made in two days, in a
comfortably equipped passenger train. The scenery _en route_ is
gorgeous. The train speeds through forests of stately trees like those
of the Amazon—walnut, mahogany, rubber, cacao, cottonwood, with vines
entwined around their trunks and hanging from their branches, and beds
of mosses and ferns at their feet, slender bamboos shooting up straight
as an arrow, and tall, graceful palms, tipped with feathery tufts—the
whole mass aglow with scarlet passion flowers and orchids, and blossoms
of every hue. Then come broad fields covered with prickly pineapple
plants, sugar cane, coffee and snowy cotton plantations and groves of
cocoanut palms, oranges, lemons, and limes saturating the air with their
delicious fragrance, splendid mango trees with their golden fruit and
dense foliage that makes them the best of all shade trees in the
tropics, and groves of banana trees, tossing out glossy green leaves
eight feet long from their sheathlike stalks, and many bearing bunches
of this bread of the poor and delicacy of the rich that weigh from sixty
to seventy pounds. Von Humboldt calculated that “thirty-three pounds of
wheat and ninety-nine pounds of potatoes require as much space of ground
as will produce four thousand pounds of bananas.” They bear fruit but
once and die, but the roots are perennial and every year bring forth new
plants.
Then, when the traveler has crossed the coast strip, he comes to the
foothills and begins the steep, tortuous ascent. On either side of this
highland but ever green series of plateaux, crossed by _nudos_ and
ascending like steps to the one in which the capital lies, tower
mountains, the crests of forty-two of which are more than ten thousand
feet high. Twenty of them are higher than Pike’s Peak in Colorado;
fourteen are higher than the Alpine giant, Mont Blanc. It was in this
vast, magnificent “Avenue of Volcanoes” that the celebrated artist,
Frederick E. Church, painted his wonderful picture, “The Heart of the
Andes.” Here, he declared, is the grandest mountain scenery in the
world.
The most majestic of them all is snow-covered Chimborazo, near the
center of the Western Cordillera, and fortunately almost constantly in
view, for it is along its spurs that the road between Guayaquil and
Quito ascends. One would not imagine its summit so very hard to reach,
as it appears from the mountain pass at an elevation of fourteen
thousand feet; yet many explorers, from Von Humboldt down, strove for
the honor, only to fail until Edward Whymper, an Englishman, finally
achieved it in 1879. For years, with its known altitude of 21,420 feet,
it was famed as the highest point in America; now the mighty Aconcagua
in Argentina, which is recorded at the Harvard Observatory at Arequipa
as measuring 24,760 feet, has been awarded the palm. It is from
shipboard on the Pacific, though, on a clear day, rather than from the
plateau, that Chimborazo is to be seen in all the majesty of its
complete proportions, particularly when the evening shadow’s mellowing
tint creeps upward to the summit—a vision of gold, vermilion, purple,
followed by the glory of the brief tropical sunset—in the few minutes
before darkness covers the earth and “the haste of stars, trembling with
excess of light, bursts suddenly into view over the peaks,” when the
waters of the sea become so impregnated with phosphorescent flashes that
each wave seems tipped with silver and the foam that follows in the
vessel’s wake is like a stream of fire.
Conspicuous among the crests of the eastern range are Tunguragua, with
its perfect cone and great cataract tumbling down fifteen hundred feet
from the snow line to the valley beneath; fierce, Plutonic Sangai, the
most active volcano in the world; and the beautiful Altar, as it was
called by the Spaniards, which is said to have been higher than
Chimborazo a few years before the Conquest, but has since collapsed. Now
its summit presents the appearance of a superb crown, pointed with eight
jagged peaks; its snowy mantle is relieved by rents or fissures in the
rock that seem to be colored dark blue in contrast with the white.
And then there is the still more superb Cotopaxi, 19,613 feet, without a
rival in height or symmetry among the active volcanoes of the old world.
Some faint idea of its grandeur may be conceived by those who have seen
Vesuvius, for instance, when it is realized that it is more than fifteen
thousand feet—nearly three miles—higher, and that, when in eruption, it
vomits forth its fires, with ominous rumblings that can be heard for a
hundred miles, from a cone which itself is higher than Vesuvius. Mr.
Whymper, who also succeeded here in making the perilous ascent where Von
Humboldt and others had failed, described the crater as an enormous
amphitheater with a rugged crest surrounded by overhanging cliffs, some
snow-clad, others encrusted with sulphur.
“Cavernous recesses,” he says, “belched forth smoke; the sides of the
cracks and chasms shone with ruddy light. At the bottom, probably twelve
thousand feet below us, there was a ruddy circular spot about one-tenth
the diameter of the crater; it was the pipe of the volcano, its channel
of communication with the lower regions, and was filled with
incandescent if not molten lava, glowing and burning, lighted by tongues
of flame that issued from cracks in the surrounding slopes.” On the side
of the mountain is a huge rock called the “Inca’s Head.” Tradition has
it that this was the original summit, hurled down by an eruption on the
very day that Pizarro caused Atahualpa to be strangled. The great
eruption of 1859 was succeeded by an earthquake that wrought terrible
destruction and loss of life, and by a tidal wave, which in its
devastating course carried a United States warship a mile inland, over
the roofs of the houses of a town on the coast of Peru and left it high
and dry on a sandy plain. Just now the volcano is in a state of “solemn
and thoughtful suspense”; only thin clouds of smoke escape from its
crater.
At the base of Pichincha, the crater of which the astronomer, La
Condamine, likened to the “chaos of the poets,” and Orton describes as
“a frightful abyss nearly a mile in width and a half mile deep from
which a cloud of sulphurous vapors comes rolling up,” lies the city of
Quito. Its origin is shrouded in mystery, but we know that at the time
of the Conquest it was the northern stronghold of the great Inca empire,
and the place where Atahualpa resided. On this lofty site, which in the
Alps would be buried in an avalanche of snow, but in the tropics enjoys
an eternal spring, palaces more beautiful than the Alhambra are said to
have been built, glittering with the gold and emeralds of the region.
But all this passed away with the scepter of Atahualpa. Where the
pavilion of the Inca stood is now a gloomy convent; a wheat field takes
the place of the Temple of the Sun. Even the Spanish structures that
supplanted the original ones seem dilapidated enough. The population is
said to number about sixty-five thousand, but there is little of the
modern and still less in the way of opportunity for amusement, though it
is all most interesting simply because it is so old and because there is
much of romance in its history.