APPROACHING INCA LAND
Small wonder that the traveler who has splashed and waded a long week
through the mournful wilderness, living chiefly on fond hopes salted
with the anticipations of an unschooled imagination, and washed down
with river water, should fetch up in Jaen with a decided shock.
Occupying a large and distinct place on the map, this provincial
“capital” proved to be a disordered cluster of a half-hundred wretched,
time-blackened, tumble-down, thatched huts, the roofs full of holes, the
gables often missing, scattered like abandoned junk among the weeds and
bushes of a half-hearted clearing in the selfsame gloomy forest and
spiny jungle that had so long shut me in. The barefoot, half-clothed,
fever-yellow inhabitants of mongrel breed stared curiously from their
mud doorways as I stalked past, smeared with dried mud from head to
foot, sunburned, shaggy with whiskers, and dragging behind me by main
force an emaciated donkey trembling with excitement at the unwonted
sights, or with fear at the unknown dangers of so vast a metropolis.
From one hut in no way different from its neighbors issued the city
school, the “teacher” with a ragged cap on his head and a drooping
cigarette smouldering between his lips, to stare after me with the rest.
Every building in town, the church included, consisted of a single mud
room with an unleveled earth floor, windowless, and with a small reed or
pole door giving entrance, exit, and such air and light as could force
admittance. The “government palace,” before which I tied “Cleopatra” to
the official bamboo flagpole in the geographical center of the capital,
was closed. With a flourish of my papers I summoned the “authorities” to
step forward and make themselves known; but the manoeuver brought only
the information that the subprefect was “away for a few days, but he’ll
soon be back, next week, no más, or the week after, at any rate. Entra y
descansa—come in and sit down.”
The gobernador was likewise among the indefinitely missing; whence the
mantle of power descended upon the shoulders of the alcalde. That worthy
was soon produced, somewhat the worse for concentrated cane-juice, but
remarkable for at least two features,—that he wore what might still with
some stretch of veracity be called shoes, and alone of all the town
could have passed for a white man, had he seen fit to remove a stringy
little Indian mustache. When he had read aloud to the congregated male
population all my credentials in Spanish—a task not unlike that of a
one-legged man walking without his crutches after spraining his ankle
and suffering a stone-bruise—he requested me to name my desires. They
were modest,—room, bed, table, chair, water, food for myself and pasture
for the other one of us until day after to-morrow. Slowly and bit by
bit, but none the less surely, my requirements were met. A key was found
that manipulated the creaking padlock of one of the thatched mud-caves
with sagging reed divans around its walls. A crippled table was dragged
in, and a squad of soldiers sent for old newspapers to cover it. In due
time, and with the assistance of the entire population in a house to
house canvass, a gourd wash-basin was discovered, then a gourd with a
hole in one end, from which one drank and into which the half-Indian boy
thrust a finger to carry it, after filling it at the chocolate-brown
stream at the edge of the town; a chair was unofficially subtracted from
the government palace and, last of all, a four-inch mirror was pinned to
the mud wall. I had barely removed the hirsute adornment of a week by
such light as Jaen, massed in and about the door, left me, when a
barefoot female glided noiselessly into my den and, announcing herself
the owner, carried off the glass as too precious a possession to be long
out of her sight.
The first stroll disclosed the hitherto unsuspected fact that several of
the mud-dens were shops. One of them posed as a restaurant, but its
restorative powers were at best anemic. Jaen is probably the hottest,
and certainly the hungriest, provincial capital in Peru. To retain its
rank as a “city,” it fulfilled nominally the test as a place where bread
is made,—a tiny, soggy bun selling for the price of an American loaf.
Milk and fruit, which might easily have been superabundant here, were
unknown luxuries, and the customary food of the populace included
nothing a well-bred dog would have touched in any but a ravenous state.
A dozen of us without families, including the alcalde, were dependent
upon the “restaurant,” and we agreed upon a fixed ration of bread and
eggs, the supply of which never approached even the normal demand. But
the alcalde quickly formed the habit of sneaking over before the hour
set and, by virtue of his official powers, consuming most of the
provender. To forestall him, the rest of us took to arriving earlier,
until it grew customary to appear for the noonday meal at about nine,
and to sit down to supper toward three, eyeing each other ravenously,
and jealously watching the cook’s every movement. He who is accustomed
to complain of the “high cost of living” should try the antidote of a
journey down the Andes, where the high cost reigns supreme, without the
living. In these languid corners of the world where life is reduced to
its lowest terms food and lodging assume the first place of importance,
and the mind is never free from these primitive apprehensions; no sooner
does one eat than the worry arises as to where the next meal will come
from, as each day’s pleasure on the road is tempered by wondering what
hardship the night will have in store.
There were some evidences of negro blood in Jaen, though that of the
aboriginal Indian tribe of the region was universal, in the percentage
of one half to a far smaller fraction in varying individuals. The men
wore home-made garments of the cheapest cotton, patched and sun-faded,
generally no shirt, with merely a kerchief knotted about the neck above
the undershirt, and _sombreros de junco_, hats woven of a species of
swamp-grass or reeds, which a few weeks of sun and rain gave the
appearance of a badly thatched roof. The women wore no hats, combed
their raven-black hair flat and smooth, without adornments, and let it
hang down their backs in a single braid. Like all the cholas and
half-castes of the sex in the Andes, they dragged their misshapen skirts
constantly in the mire of the streets and the “floors” of their huts,
and were habitually even less cleanly in their habits than the men. The
stage of education may be gaged from the fact that the government
telegraph operator assured me I could not reach Cerro de Pasco by land,
but must “cross the sea” to Lima and take the railroad from there.
Jaen’s chief pastime for speeding up the monotonous stretch between the
cradle and the grave is the consumption of the native “cañazo,” and only
those who rose early were likely to find a completely sober man. A sort
of harmless anarchy reigned. A man merry with cane-juice might sit
outside the mud school-house and keep school from “functioning” all day
long, without interference. An amorous youth, going on a drunken rampage
among the huts or the washerwomen on the banks of the irrigating ditch,
was avoided if possible, but was never forcibly restrained. As is
frequent in tropical towns, there was little evidence of religion,
pseudo or otherwise, which thrives best in the high, cold regions of the
mysterious páramos. The mud church, with its tower melted off unevenly
at the top, like a half-burned candle in a wind, had long since lost its
cura, and served now as provincial jail, by the simple addition of a few
poles set in adobe across the door and a few languid soldiers lolling in
the general vicinity whenever they had no particular desire to be
somewhere else.
On the afternoon of my arrival the rumor floated languidly over the town
that the weekly cow was to be butchered next morning, but it was denied
later in the evening. I made the most of my day of leisure by acquiring
a bar of native soap, of the appearance of a mud-pie and the scent of
boiling glue, and spending some two hours in the irrigating ditch,
stringing across the main street, from a telegraph pole to a rafter of
“my house,” all the garments that could be spared from use in an
unexacting society. Nothing was more certain than that I should start
again at daylight of the second morning—until news arrived that the
river eighteen miles south was impassable until the waters receded. It
was evident, too, that I must deny myself the companionship of
“Cleopatra.” She hung wilted and dejected in the town pasture, and at
best there was no hope that she would last many days further, even if
there were any means of getting her across the swollen river. I accepted
the alcalde’s offer of $3 for the animal and her “furniture,” and felt a
glow of satisfaction, tempered with regret at the loss of a good
companion, for all her faults, that I should no longer have to drag my
feet behind me at her snail’s pace, and be dependent on my right arm for
advancement.
On the morning I should have started, the rumor again ran riot that the
town was going to _pelar un res_—“peel a beef.” This time matters went
so far as to lead the octogenarian victim out into the main street,
where the population gathered in an attitude of anticipation, a dozen or
more armed with home-made axes and knives, the rest with pots and
gourds. For a long time the languid hubbub of some discussion rose and
fell about the downcast animal. Then gradually the gathering
disintegrated and scattered to its huts, each pausing at sight of a
face, to drone in that singularly indifferent monotone of the tropics,
“No hay carne hoy”—(there is no meat to-day). Some misanthropist, an
agent of a neighboring hacienda, it turned out, had offered $9 for the
animal, and Jaen did not feel justified in squandering any such fortune
for mere food. My rosy dream of again tasting fresh meat and of carrying
supplies on my journey was once more rudely dissipated.
The east was blushing from the first kiss of the bold, tropical sun when
I sallied forth on the morning I had concluded to start, river or no
river, and went to wake up the “restaurant” keeper, sleeping on his
dining-table with the precious bread-box under his head. The alcalde
appeared almost at the same instant from the direction of the irrigation
ditch, his towel about his neck. He greeted me with forced courtesy. His
solemn promise to arrange to have my baggage transported to the river in
consideration for the low price at which he had acquired “Cleopatra” had
gone the way of most South American promises—into thin air. Now I
reminded him of it, he would order a soldier to accompany me at once.
The earth swung a long way eastward on its axis without any other sign
of activity. Then some one came to say that a soldier would not be sent,
because Anastasio Centurión, returning to his “Hacienda Algarrobo”
forthwith, would be delighted to carry my belongings on his mule. An
hour later he declined to carry them, then he was prevailed upon by his
_compadre_, the lieutenant-governor, to renew his offer; then he again
concluded the weight was too great, and finally sent an urchin for my
saddle-bags. Before they were loaded, however, a dispute broke out over
the ownership of a “silver” spur that had been picked up in the sand of
the main street, and the town followed the alcalde to the mud hut that
served as court of justice. It was also the city bakery, and the wife of
the justice, who had put off baking the morning before, and was not yet
mixing the dough, ceded a corner of the kitchen table to the court,
which in the course of an hour settled the case in the customary
Latin-American way—by deciding that the disputed property should remain
“in the hands of justice.”
[Illustration:
A woman of the jungles of Jaen preparing me the first meal in days at
the typical Ecuadorian cook-stove. She declined to pose for her
picture and is watching me dust the kodak]
[Illustration:
Peruvian prisoners earn their own livelihood by weaving hats, spinning
yarn, and the like. As in the debtors’ prisons of Dickens’ day, the
whole family may go to jail to live with the imprisoned head of the
household]
A soldier was at length sent to round up one of the donkeys grazing in
the main plaza. Gradually the disgusted animal was fitted with my former
donkey-furniture, amid the contrary suggestions of the populace, and the
alcalde furnished me an order to the ferrymen at the river to set me
across in the name of the government—and to return donkey and _aparejo_.
A winding, narrow, stony path, that wet its feet at the very outset,
squirmed away through the desert-like forest. “Down there,” said
Anastasio, wrapped gloomily in his maroon poncho and viciously kicking
the spur on one bare heel into the side of his heavily-laden animal, “is
the camino real, pero da mucha vuelta.” How it could “give more turns”
than the one we were following, it was hard to imagine. My pack-animal
this time was a matron of forty, comparatively speaking, and
correspondingly set in her ways. Within the first mile “se me escapó,”
as the natives have it; that is, she suddenly bolted into the thorny
wilderness at the first suggestion of an opening, and left me dripping
with sweat and speckled with the blood of a dozen superficial
lacerations before I again laid hands on her in an impassable clump of
brambles and cactus. Anastasio tied her tow-rope to his saddle, and for
an hour or so she seemed completely resigned to her fate. But evidently
there is no trusting the sex at that age. No sooner was she paroled than
she bolted again, and led me a skin-gashing chase of several miles
through a wild and waterless solitude. Yet, after all, manipulating a
donkey is a splendid apprenticeship for dealing with Latin-Americans; no
better training could be suggested for the prospective salesman south of
the Rio Grande.
The going ranged from _quebradita_ to _muy quebrada_, now along the
stony bed of a meandering “river,” yesterday all but impassable,
to-day so bone dry there was only a bit of running mud to quench the
thirst; now over a sharp knoll bristling with jagged, loose stones. At
red-hot noon we reached the Huancabamba river, now grown to man’s
estate, where it swings around to join the Marañón and divides the
never-to-be-forgotten Province of Jaen from that of Cutervo. A
laborious two hours up it brought us to the long-heralded Puerto
Sauce, where the government maintains a “ferry,”—five small logs bound
together with vines and manned by three _balseros_ housed in two
reed-kennels. Here we squatted out the day, watching the
coffee-colored stream race by on its long journey to the Atlantic with
all the impetuosity of the rainy season. The government _chasqui_ had
been sitting here nearly a week, his mail-sacks stacked and his horse
tethered close at hand. Only out on the extreme edge of the bank,
where an occasional breath of tepid breeze tempered the lead-heavy
heat and thinned the swarms of stinging insects, was life endurable.
My skin was a patchwork of mementoes of all the minute fauna of the
past week, and an itching like the constant prick of myriad red-hot
needles was relieved only briefly by each dip in the stream. During
one of them I advanced well into the river, and it seemed I could have
crossed it; that even the Peruvians might have made the passage, had
they male blood in their veins. But then, had they been men they would
long since have built a bridge. All through the night there kept
running through my head, amid the sweep of the waters, that
illuminating remark of “Kim,” “A sahib is always tied to his baggage”;
and in my half-conscious condition I resolved when morning broke to
cast away all but a loin-cloth and a hat, and travel henceforth in
comfort _al uso del país_. But, alas, the least formal of us cannot
rid himself of all the adjuncts of civilization; and there was
photography, to say nothing of food and covering for the highlands
ahead, to be considered. When dawn turned its matter-of-fact light
upon the scene, the dream quickly faded and I settled down to watch
another day drag by into the past tense beside the racing brown waters
of the Huancabamba. The feeling was rampant that nature had played me
a scurvy trick. I had bargained on following the cool and pleasant
crest of the Andes, and they had crumbled away beneath me and forced
upon me this unsought experience of the tropics.
Not until the morning of the third day did the balseros conclude to
attempt to pass over the “government people,”—the mail-man and this
impatient gringo with the official order from the alcalde. The raft had
been dragged well up-stream, where we waded to it through bristling
jungle and knee-deep mud. The chasqui’s horse, long experienced in these
matters from years of carrying the mails over this route, was driven in
and forced to swim to a sand-bar well out in the stream. For a long time
the animal stood like a prisoner at bay against the shouting and stoning
and shaking of cudgels of those on the bank, but at length, seeing no
other escape, it set out to attempt the main branch. Its brute instinct
would have proved a better guide than the opinions of more rational
beings. Struggling until its snorting echoed back from the surrounding
jungle, it fought the brown, racing waters, gradually nearing the
further bank, yet swept even more swiftly along by the inexorable
stream, amid foam-caps from the rocky passes above, strained savagely to
reach the strip of beach that served as landing-place until, swept past
it without gaining a footing, it seemed suddenly to give up in despair,
and only its head, swinging slowly round and round with the current, was
seen a short minute more, tiny against the race of the yellower waters,
before it swept on out of sight down the jungle-walled torrent.
The chasqui gazed after the lost animal for a long moment, shrugged his
shoulders with the resigned “Vaya!” of a confirmed fatalist, and took
his seat beside me on our baggage, tied securely near the back of the
frail craft. The three brown balseros, naked but for palm-leaf hats and
a strip of rag between their legs, each crossed himself elaborately, and
took a deep draught at Anastasio’s quart bottle of cañazo. Then they
pointed the nose of the raft up-stream, pushed off, snatched up their
clumsy paddles with a hoarse imploration to the Virgin, and fought for
dear life and the sand-bar. This gained, we disembarked and manoeuvered
to the further side, then pushed off into the main stream. It snatched
at us like some greedy monster. The sand-bar raced away up-stream at
express speed, the further bank sped past like a blurred cinematograph
ribbon, the paddlers, urged on by their own and the mail-man’s raucous
shouts and imprecations, battled as with some mortal enemy, stabbing
their paddles in swift, breathless succession into the brown stream, and
following each dig with a savage jerk that tore the wound wide open and
brought out the lean muscles beneath their dingy skins like steel cables
under leather coverings. The rules of caste are more important than life
itself in South America, and both the mail-man and I had been refused
paddles. Relentlessly the further shore galloped by. The bit of clearing
required for landing approached, beckoned to us tantalizingly, flashed
on, and the raft sped swiftly after the lost horse. The balseros,
abetted by the chasqui, increased their efforts to a screaming uproar,
in which I caught here and there a fragmentary “’nta Virgen . . .
’yuda!” Fortunately they did not put all their trust in superhuman
assistance, and their paddles tore at the stream with a viciousness that
drenched us with its aftermath. Bit by bit we strained nearer the
hurrying wall of verdure. Every lunge seemed to lift the paddlers into
the air; the cords on their necks stood out like creepers on a forest
tree; their yells, hoarse and savage enough to have frightened off any
malignant spirit of the waters, came strained and broken now, from lack
of breath. Now we could all but touch the racing forest-wall. I snatched
in vain at a sapling bowing its head in the stream. With a last faint
gasp and a spent stroke, the balseros dropped their paddles on the raft,
and all five of us grasped at the vegetation that tore and lacerated us
in its struggle to escape our desperate embrace. When we had each
gathered an armful of it, we clung so stoutly to this last hold to earth
that the raft was all but swept from under us before we swung it up into
a bit of cove, where the balseros, falling at once into their racial
apathy, drooped like wilted rags at the bow, while one of them panted
weakly, “A little more, señores, and we were gone _sin noticias_.”
As lazily as they had been energetic in the crossing, the ferrymen
coaxed the raft up along the edge of the forest to the little clearing,
where I swung my saddle-bags over a shoulder, waded to dry land and
plodded on along the blazing hot bank of the Huancabamba. Slowly my
shadow crawled from under my feet. In this sweltering desert valley, now
staggering through hot sand and a dwarf vegetation savage with thorns,
now clambering constantly over steep headlands that broke into cliffs at
the river’s edge and stumbling down again through veritable quarries of
loose stones, my burden, augmented with _chancaca_, a sack of rice and a
roll of sun-dried beef, as well as the lead-heavy tropical sun that
seemed to lean physically on my shoulders, became unbearable. I resolved
to pitch camp in the first open space and wait, till doomsday if
necessary, for some pack-train susceptible to the glitter of silver
coins. Puerto Sauce was probably not more than seven miles behind me
when I found, between trail and river, a narrow sand-strip sloping down
to the racing brown waters and backed by a barren, stony cliff-face over
which the “road” promised to bring out in relief against the _turquí_
sky anyone who might pass my way.
Grass could not find sustenance on this sun-baked spot, but centipedes
and a score of other venomous things might exist. Scattered along the
bank were many sapling poles, the wreckage, evidently, of some hut that
had been swept here by the raging river. I gathered an armful of these
and laid their ends on two small logs, covered them with such brush and
branches as were without thorns, and had a far more comfortable couch
than the wealthiest hacendado of the region. Over me hung a wild
lemon-tree, the fruit of which made the yellow Huancabamba more nearly
drinkable. About its trunk, within instant reach, I strapped my
revolver, and lay down almost in the “royal highway,” fully prepared for
anything except a sudden burst of rain. Across the river in dense,
half-cultivated, greener jungle were the huts of several natives; but
they might as well have been in another world, for I could not have
heard a whisper above the roar of the Huancabamba had they stood on the
opposite bank screaming across at me. I possessed a maltreated copy of
Prescott, and there is great compensation for the hardships of the trail
in golden moments snatched like this; for nowhere does the mind grip the
printed page so firmly as at the end of a day on the road, after long
turning the leaves of no other page than nature’s.
The afternoon passed, faded to a violent sunset, and blackened into
night, without a human sight or sound. I took another swim, careful not
to lose my grasp on the shore, and turned my lounge into a bed. There
had been many rumors of bears and “tigers” in these parts. The real
peril was the incitement to suicide caused by the swarming insect life
whenever the breeze failed for an instant. In my dreams the roar of the
Huancabamba turned to that of New York, and I fancied I had suddenly
left off my journey down the Andes to run home for a single day, at the
end of which I should take up my task where I had left off.
When dawn awoke me I refused to rise. But hour after hour passed without
a break in the drear monotony of the arid landscape. In mid-morning
patience exploded and, throwing my load over a shoulder, I toiled on.
When, at the end of some fifteen miles, my legs refused to push me
further, I struggled through the jungle to the river-bank; but there was
not a cleared space sufficient to sit on, much less to lie down in. By
wading chest-deep I reached the breezy nose of an island in the
Huancabamba, and made my bed on the damp beach-sand. But I had chosen
poorly, if choice it might be called. Without even leaves to spread
under me, the night was one of unmitigated torture. Myriads of crawling,
stinging tropical life made my entire frame a pasture and playground,
and at best I got only a few half-conscious snatches of sleep, troubled
with the threatening rumble of the river. For safety’s sake I had hung
many of my belongings in the branches of trees; but not enough of them.
Daylight showed a populous colony of enormous black ants in possession
of all that lay on the ground. They had not only eaten to the last crumb
the chancaca I had lugged for two blazing days, and left me barely a
spoonful of rice for breakfast, but they had all but destroyed the
home-made cover of my kodak, had decorated my hat with a fringe, and had
bitten into a dozen pieces my auto-photographic bulb, scattering all the
vicinity with crumbs of red rubber.
Another lone day we struggled up-stream. I say we,—that is, myself and
I; for—a point for psychologists—since taking up my own load again I
could not rid myself of the fancy that I was two distinct persons, one
of whom was forcing the other to make the journey. In the night I often
started up fancying the other fellow—the one who did the walking and
carried the load—had escaped. Could he know the truth beforehand, no
sane man would sentence himself to tramp this route of the Andes, to
suffer almost incessant hardships, the monotony of the same experiences
over and over again, the dreary intercourse with a people so stupid, so
low of intelligence that long contact with their childish minds brings
with it the danger of one’s own faculties turning childish, like that of
a lifetime of school-teaching. Only the American habit of carrying out
to the bitter end a plan once made could force him on.
Late the next morning the most exciting event of several days
happened,—I met a human being. He was lolling before a slatternly hut of
reeds, inside which a half-caste woman squatted on the earth peeling
_camotes_. On such a journey the civilized traveler unconsciously builds
up a certain pity for himself which he feels should be shared by others.
But he is sure of a rude awakening among these clod-like inhabitants of
the wilderness. Should a living skeleton crawl into an Andean hut
announcing he had not tasted food for a fortnight, had seven species of
tropical fever, and had been bitten by a baker’s dozen of venomous
serpents, the greeting would be the same motionless, indifferent grunt
and drowsily mumbled “Vaya!” with which this female acknowledged my
presence. No offer of money would have brought her to her feet, much
less have induced her to cook one of the chickens—or even yellow
curs—that overran the place. As I picked up my burden in disgust,
however, she murmured through her half-closed lips, “Se irá usté’
almorzando?”—in other words that I might wait, if I chose, to partake of
the camote stew she was lazily concocting over the stick fire in the
center of the floor. On the surface this stereotyped invitation looks
like genuine hospitality. At bottom it is less so than a habit, tinged
with superstition and fear of malignant spirits, and above all the
impossibility of an uninitiative race daring to, or even thinking of
varying a custom of all their known world. It was no time to stand on my
dignity, however, even had the foodless days behind left me any such
support, and I sat down again. A ravenous two hours dragged by before
the mess of native roots and herbs met the approval of the
expressionless female, who tasted a wooden spoonful of it now and then
and tossed the residue back into the kettle. Several peons had drifted
in, genuine human clods, apparently as devoid of intelligence as the
hogs rooting about under their hoofed feet, and gathered about a flat
log raised a bit above the earth. With a steaming calabash of the
tasteless, red-hot stew before each of us, and a single bowl of _mote_
mixed with bits of pork rind into which all shovelled at once, we
finished the meal in utter silence. Then the first peon, wiping his
horny hand across his mouth with a disgusting sucking sound, mumbled
“Diós se lo pagará,” a formula repeated by each as we rose to our feet.
However much he may prefer to liquidate the matter himself, rather than
to leave it to so uncertain and unindebted a source, this “God will pay
you for it,” is the only return the traveler who sits in at their
tasteless repasts can force upon these mongrel people of the Andean
wilderness.
How far out of my course I had mounted the Huancabamba when I picked up
a rock-strewn tributary along the cliff-face, only a professional
geographer could say. Through the hot-lands of northern Peru direction
yields to the accidents of nature, and Jaen had been as far east of a
line due southward as Ayavaca had been to the west. When early sunset
fell in the bottom of the deep valley, I had mounted several hundred
feet above the level of the Huancabamba, and with a welcome coolness
came more human manners, heralding the highlands again. Both Fructuoso
Carrera and his far younger, though no less cheery wife, treated me more
like a prodigal son than as an importunate guest who had fallen upon
them out of the unknown. Amid the culinary operations suited to my case
they gave me in detail the recipe of the _choclo tandas_—Quichua bread,
probably used before the Conquest—that finally rounded off our repast
late in the evening. For the benefit of housewives permit me to pass on
the information:
Cut off the kernels of green corn while still small and fairly soft.
Crush them to a pulp—under a round stone on a broad flat one out beneath
the thatched eaves, if it is desired to keep the local color
intact—sprinkling water lightly on the mass from time to time. When the
whole has been reduced to a somewhat adhesive dough, wrap in corn-husks
rolls of the stuff about the size and shape of an ear of corn and tie
with strips of husk. Sit down on the earth floor in a corner of the
hut—driving off the persistent guinea-pigs with any weapon at hand—and
drop these packages one by one into a kettle of boiling water supported
by three stones. Let boil from twenty minutes to a half hour—depending
on the energy with which fagots have been gathered during the day—taking
care that none of the gaunt curs prowling about between the legs of the
cook and through other unexpected openings thrust their noses into the
kettle, as they would be sure to be burned. Those who succeed in
beginning the task while daylight still lingers should also beware any
of the family chickens climbing to a convenient shoulder and springing
into the pot, as this would result, not in choclo tanda, but in _choclo
tanda con gallina_, which is a far more expensive dish. Zest is added by
a successful attempt surreptitiously to get into one’s saddle-bags a
couple of the choclo tandas for the land of starvation that is expected
ahead.
Several times during the night I descended to alleviate my insect-bitten
skin by a plunge in the clear, cold mountain stream that sounds in the
Carrera family ears 365 days a year. In the morning I was forced to
dress under my poncho, with far less convenience than in an upper
Pullman berth; for la señora was already grinding coffee for my desayuno
on the flat stone under the eaves beside me. To my diplomatically framed
question as to what I owed him, Don Fructuoso replied:
“For what should you owe us anything?”
All that day the trail, wandering back and forth across the rock-boiling
“river,” first by little thatched _pachachacas_, or earth-covered
pole-bridges, then, as the stream dwindled, by precarious
stepping-stones, climbed ever higher, at times through stretches of mud
where dense overhanging forests had retained the rainfall. Mankind grew
more frequent in this more habitable, rising world. Thatched cottages
were tucked away here and there in forty-five-degree patches of bananas
and coffee, and the pilfering of the tandas to weigh down my load proved
an entirely gratuitous felony.
The very air of Tablabamba, where I slept on dried cane-pulp in an
unwalled _trapiche_ hung well up the side of the new constricted valley,
as humid and green as Jaen Province had been desert-brown and arid,
teemed with stories of robbers and assassins among the mountain defiles
ahead. The only visible danger I encountered, however, was the notorious
“Sal-si-puedes—Climb it if you can,” the terrors of which had grown
daily more persistent for a fortnight past. This was one of those
endless zigzags by which Andean trails climb from one river system, when
near its source, to another, revealing its nefarious purpose only bit by
bit, and subtly enticing the traveler ever upward in an undertaking he
might not have the courage to face as a whole. A rut piled full of loose
rocks, down which trickled enough water to suggest what the climb might
have been on a rainy day, carried me into the very sky above and, taking
there new foothold, scaled doggedly on into the “realms of eternal
silence” where even birds were no longer heard and sturdy, squat trees,
sighing fitfully as if struggling for breath, at length gave up in
despair and abandoned the scene to huge, black rocks protruding from a
soil that gave sustenance only to the dead-brown ichu-grass of Andean
heights. “Hay mucho silencio y mucho matador,” my host of the night had
mumbled lugubriously, but I was aware only of the music of the wind and
the joyful realization that the broken mountains had gathered themselves
together again under my feet and raised me once more to my accustomed
temperate zone. By cold noonday a tumbled, blue world lay about and
below me, only an insignificant dent in it representing that overheated
hell locally known as the Province of Jaen. Like life itself, what had
seemed at its base a mighty climb proved here at the top to have been
only an insignificant little knoll down in the valley, and only when one
had reached the real summit, and could look back upon the region as a
whole after all was accomplished, did each little struggle and petty
suffering assume its correct proportion.
[Illustration:
The ancient city of Cajamarca, in which Pizarro took the Inca
Atahuallpa captive and later executed him, lies in one of the most
magnificent highland valleys of the Andes]
Another step forward, and before my glad eyes spread one of those broad,
green interandean valleys, backed by serrated black ranges, their brows
wrinkled and furrowed with age, the clouds trailing their purple shadows
across a panorama of little cultivated valleys, into which I descended
from the unconscionable summit by a natural stairway. The blue-gray
peaks turned to lilac in the last rays of the chill highland sun, then
faded away into the luminous sky of night as the mountain cold settled
down like an icy poncho, and with dusk I tramped through a long adobe
street into the central plaza of Cutervo.
My legs seemed to have pushed me again into the outskirts of
civilization. Not only did the subprefect drive off of his own
initiative the open-mouthed throng that gathered about his door, rather
than read my papers aloud to them, but here at last was a Peruvian town
that actually recognized the existence of strangers with appetites, and
a large adobe hut publicly admitted itself a _fonda_. Cutervo was, in
reality, monotonously like any other town of the Sierra. To one coming
upon it out of the trackless wilderness, however, it seemed at first
sight a place of mighty importance, and only gradually dwindled to its
true proportions. Like a man just returned from long months in the polar
ice, I had an all but irresistible desire to rush in and buy everything
in sight, as I wandered past its long line of open shop-doors. The
capital of a department recently cut off from the neighboring one of
Chota, it was the first place in Peru where any appreciable number of
the inhabitants could unreservedly be called white, and boasted the
first specimens of beauty among the fair sex. Even the Lima newspapers
were there, to give me a skeleton sketch of the activities of a
half-forgotten world.
There is a reserve of strength in the human body which few suspect until
they tax it in an emergency; but it is only after recovery that the
traveler through the rough places of the earth realizes how weak he has
gradually become from hardships and lack of real nourishment. The
invigorating air of the temperate zone and the meat of Cutervo’s fonda,
however, had soon given me new energy, and seemed to have reduced to
half the weight of my load. Hope, brutally felled to earth, ever crawls
dizzily to its feet again. I could no more rid myself of the fond dream
of some day ceasing to stagger under my own baggage than a leper can
shake off his affliction. Yet the solemn promise of the ruler of Cutervo
to furnish me a carrier resulted only in a lost day, and I struck off
across the rolling mountains and valleys beyond, convinced at last, so I
fancied, that I should dream no longer. So persistent had been the
promise of foul play on this day’s route that, despite a lifetime of
disappointments, I could not but peer hopefully into the many splendid
lurking-places of the wild, rock-strewn upland I followed in utter
solitude all the gorgeous day from Cutervo to Chota, the next provincial
capital. Only once did I catch sight of fellow-beings. A group of
arrieros with laden asses paused dubiously near the top of the range
where they caught the first glimpse of me, then ventured forward and
halted to ask anxiously:
“Are the robbers not attacking this morning?”
My answer they greeted with a fervent “Ave María Purísima!” and,
crossing themselves ostentatiously, that the saints should not by any
chance overlook their devotion, pushed hurriedly on toward Cutervo.
Early in the afternoon I came out on the upper edge of an enormous,
wide-spread valley just across which, in the lap of a rolling plain
sloping toward me and the hair-like winding river at its bottom, lay the
end of the day’s journey,—Chota; a tiny, dull-red patch in a green-brown
immensity of sun-flooded world, the two towers of its not too
conspicuous church pin-pricking the horizon. In the transparent air of
the highlands it seemed at most a short two hours away. In reality I had
not in that time picked my stony way to the bottom of the rock-scarred
valley, and it was long after night had cast its black poncho over all
the world that I stumbled at last into the elusive town.
Chota, “8000 feet, 4000 inhabitants, 3000 doors”—and no windows, nearly
as cold as Quito, is a provincial capital with well-cobbled streets and
a broad expanse of plaza, all tilting to the north, by far the largest
Peruvian city I had yet seen, almost the equal in size of Loja in
Ecuador. The stock of its many little shops comes in by way of Pacasmayo
and the railroad to Chilete, showing that I was “over the divide” and
approaching Cajamarca. On August 30, 1882, it was destroyed by the
Chilians—“los malditos chilenos,” as the inhabitants still call them—but
Andean building material being plentiful, it soon rose from its mud
ruins. The cura was even then superintending the cholos tramping
together with their bare feet the clay and chopped ichu-grass that was
to be a new church. There were numerous fondas, as befitted a great
capital; that is, mud dens with a reed shanty in the barnyard behind
serving as kitchen, kept by well-meaning but unprepossessing females who
wiped the inside of each plate religiously on their ample hips, those
same draft-horse hips on which they squatted on the earth floor to fill
the receptacles similarly placed, while driving off with the free hand
the curs and guinea-pigs and the chickens perching on the edge of the
kettles. There were even oil-lamps in a few of the more pretentious
shops and mansions, though almost all without chimneys, not easily
imported from the other side of the world by ship and muleback over
breakneck trails. Haughty, belligerent roosters stood tied by a leg
before half the doors in town, so that each street was a long vista of
pugnacious cocks frequently submitting to the anxious ministrations of
their proud owners. Even without them I should not have slept
unbrokenly. Official assistance had gained me lodging on the home-made
counter of an empty shop hung with cobwebs and perfumed with the
mustiness of several generations, the door of which, flush with the
narrow sidewalk, of course, was the only source of air. There, as often
as a night-hawk passed on his way home from the local “billar,” he
paused to beat me awake with the rapping of his cane and to sing-song in
that dulcet voice of the Latin-American, mellow with late hours, “Your
door is open, señor; I will close it for you.” And if, instead of
reaching under the counter for my revolver or a convenient adobe brick,
I did not summon a patient courtesy I do not possess and answer, “Mil
gracias, señor; no, thank you, leave it open, please,” and then rise and
open it again, because he fancied his ears had deceived him, I should
have lost the rating of “simpático,” and been branded a rude and
discourteous gringo.
Bambamarca, an atrociously stony half-day beyond Chota and its
surrounding bowl, like a mosaic of little farms where female shepherds,
bare to their weather-browned knees, incessantly turn the white, brown,
and black fleece of their flocks into yarn on their crude Incaic
spindles, reported the trail ahead “the worst road in Peru”—which is
indeed strong language. They were certain, too, that, though I
might—with the accent on the verb—have arrived from “La Provincia”
alive, the marauders beyond would see to it that I did not reach
Cajamarca in that condition. A cold rain fell incessantly from sullen
skies during a day of unbroken plodding, first up the cañon of a small
river, crossed now and then by thatched bridges, until it dwindled away
and left me to splash at random over a reeking mountain-top. I had been
lost for hours, and was dripping water at every pore, when I spied,
toward what would have been sunset, four little Indian boys huddled
under the ruin of a hut, and signed to them to give me information.
Instead, they took to their heels, as if all the evil spirits of the
Inca religion had suddenly crested the water-soaked range. I set after
them, but my best pace under my load being barely equal to theirs, I
drew my revolver and fired twice into the air; whereupon they halted and
awaited me in ashen fear. The one I chose as guide led me over a rolling
páramo deeply gashed by rain-swollen streams, and abandoned me within
sight of the imposing estate-house of what turned out to be the
“Hacienda Yanacancha.” In the corredor, just out of reach of the
drenching rain, stood a white man in khaki, monarch of half the visible
world, and so little like the uncouth illiterate I expected that he
replied in faultless Castilian to my remark about the absence of roads:
“Yes, unfortunately South America fell to the Spaniards, whereas it
should have been settled by Anglo-Saxons.”
Here, for the first time in Peru, was an hacendado who had trained his
dogs and servants to some understanding of their respective spheres, and
had even given the latter an inkling of that thin, gray line between
cleanliness and its opposite. A trivial incident will demonstrate to
what lowly point of view my recent experiences had brought me. When my
host showed me into a large guest-room, I caught sight, in the
semi-obscurity, of a reed mat on the floor, and through me flashed a
thrill of joy that I should have this to sleep on, instead of the cold,
dank tiles. Whereas, on closer view this proved to be the foot-mat
before a huge colonial bedstead, regally furnished with soft mattresses
and spotless woolen blankets. My host even apologized for the absence of
sheets. As if I should have recognized that forgotten flora, even in its
native habitat! Yet my misgivings of playing the rôle of Hugo’s
maltreated hero materialized. Whether it was due to the fever within me
struggling for existence, or to the all-too-sudden return to luxury, I
tossed sleeplessly well into the night, and it was rolled up on the mat
on the tile floor that the cold, steel-gray dawn creeping in at the
wooden-barred windows found me.
The “road” across soggy highland meadows and past those fantastic
heaped-up peaks and splintered ranges of black rocks that give the
“Hacienda Yanacancha” (“Black Rocks”) its name, was largely imaginary.
At first, within sprinting distance of the house, were a few inhabited
haycocks of shepherds, like Esquimaux dwellings of weather-blackened
_pajonal_ in place of snow and ice, with a hole to crawl in at on all
fours. Then the visible world, straining ever higher, spread out into a
rolling mountain-top, a totally uninhabited region where was heard only
the mournful sighing of the wind across a boundless, rolling,
yellow-brown sea of the dreary bunch-grass of the upper Andes. Across it
the often invisible way undulated with such regularity that I was
continually descending into or climbing out of hollows trodden to a mud
pudding about the cold streams that wandered down from the scarcely more
lofty heights. There were myriad hiding-places behind the jagged gray
rocks piled erratically along the way, from which evil-doers might have
picked me off. So notorious is this region for its mishaps to travelers
that natives rarely cross it except in large groups. But the wholesome
respect in which a “gringo,” especially one who carries a shooting-iron
prominently displayed, is held is the best protection in Latin-America,
far more so than an escort of native soldiers, the presence of which is
apt to imply to the lurking bandit an admission of inability to depend
on one’s gringo self, even if the soldiers do not prove confederates of
the outlaws or run away at sight of them.
On and ever on the cold, desolate, inhospitable despoblado rose and fell
in broad swells or billows, the barren, yellow, uninhabited world
sighing mournfully to itself. This long day is obligatory on all who
come to Cajamarca from the north, for there is no halting-place in all
the expanse of puna south of Yanacancha. I should have covered the
thirty-five miles before the day was done, had not a long dormant or
newly acquired fever suddenly broken out in mid-afternoon. Every setting
of one leg before the other was as great an effort as jumping over a
ferry-boat, yet I must prod myself pitilessly on, for to be overtaken by
night on this inhospitable, wind-swept puna would have been worse than
fever. With infinite struggle I came at last to where this broadest of
páramos began to fall away toward the north; then the slope contracted
to a gully that gathered together the score or more of separate but not
distinct paths that make up the “highway” across the lofty plain, and
brought me before sunset to the first of a scattered cluster of stone
and mud kennels. A leather-faced old Indian, speaking the first Quichua
I had heard since Cuenca, gave me a handful of ichu-grass to sit on
outside the smaller of his two huts, and left me to the company of his
prowling yellow curs. Night had fallen completely before a woman brought
me a gourd of boiling potato mush, but at length the chary old Indian,
overcoming his racial indifference and distrust, opened the door of the
hut against which I lay and let me into a sort of Incaic warehouse. In
it were heaps of the huge balls of yarn spun by the Indian women on
their prehistoric spindles, a supply of páramo grass I might spread on
the earth floor, and several large bolts of homespun cloth of coarse
texture and cruder colors with which I might feather my arctic nest,
once it was late enough to hope the owner would not catch me at it.
In the adjoining family hut a baby had been crying incessantly for an
hour or more. The after-chill of the fever was settling upon me when a
young Indian entered, bearing the infant, and a handful of twisted grass
as torch. Without preliminary he requested me, if I understood his
language, to spit in the child’s face.
“I don’t get you,” I replied, in my most colloquial if imperfect
Quichua.
“Do me the favor to spit in its face,” he repeated, and by way of
illustration spat swiftly and lightly, with the point of his tongue
between his lips, a fine spray in the face of the squalling infant.
“But why not do it yourself?” I protested.
“Manam, viracocha; it must be some one the guaguita does not know.”
When it had become evident that there was no other way of being left in
peace, I rose and sprayed the infant. To my astonishment it ceased its
wailing instantly, stared wide-eyed into my face until the father turned
away, and was not again heard during the night. Floor-walking benedicts
may adopt this bit of domestic science from the ancient civilization of
the Incas free of charge.
There were but nine miles left to do in the morning, but the mere
numeral gives little hint of the real task. Both road and bridges
continued strikingly conspicuous by their absence; for hours the
atrocious trail zigzagged unevenly, at times almost perpendicularly down
what was left of the mountainside. Then it forded waist-deep the
Cajamarca river, and joining a Sunday-morning procession of market-bound
Indians with a clashing of colors almost equal to those of Quito, picked
its way around stony foothills along a slowly widening valley gradually
checkered with the varying greens of cultivation. The cool summer air
and a more passable road drew me ever more swiftly on; the sound of
church-bells, musically distant, floating northward on the breeze,
located vaguely somewhere among the eucalyptus trees ahead the end of
the third stage of my Andean journey. Huts turned to houses, thicker and
thicker along the way, until they grew together into two unbroken rows.
The air grew heavy with the scent of the “Australian gum”; I passed
under an aged, whitewashed arch straddling the street, and on April 27,
at the hour of the return from mass, found myself creaking along the
canted, flagstone sidewalks of famous old Cajamarca, the first real
city, even in the South-American sense, I had come upon in Peru. Armed
and bedraggled, with an alforja hanging heavy over one shoulder, I
presented no conventional sight. Yet the cajamarquinos gave me
comparatively slight attention. No doubt they were accustomed to such
apparitions; Pizarro and his fellow-roughnecks could have been little
less way-worn and weather-bleached when they rode in upon Cajamarca over
these same hills. According to careful calculation I had walked 1773
miles from Bogotá, 929 from Quito. Of the 79 days from the Ecuadorian
capital I had spent thirty in the towns and hamlets along the way, and
the remainder in whole or part on the road.
As far back as Ayavaca I had begun to hear praises of the “magnificent
hotels” of Cajamarca. The disappointment was proportionately bitter. The
“Hotel Internacional” was a defunct lodging-house, the “Hotel Amazonas,”
further on, merely a row of rooms opening on the second-story balcony.
They were tolerable rooms, with flagstone floors and wooden bed-springs,
and had the extraordinary advantage of being in the second story, out of
reach of staring passersby; but they were furnished only with the bare
necessities and were covered everywhere with a half-inch, more or less,
of dust. This was hardly to be wondered at. Pizarro and his band of
tramps must have raised a deuce of a dust when they perpetrated the
Conquest of Peru and took Atahuallpa into their tender keeping in the
great plaza a short block away, on that Saturday evening, 381 years
before. Strangest of all, the hotel rates were posted in plain sight,
where even foreigners might see; forty cents a night, or thirty if the
room was occupied a month or more. Evidently another fussy gringo had
been here before me, for the printed rules contained the following
bylaw:
“The señor passenger who shall desire to use two mattresses on the same
bed will subject himself to the payment of ten cents above the ordinary
pension.”
The original motive could not have been Hays; for the notice was yellow
with time, and the manager-chambermaid, though he gave me many details
of the doings of my erstwhile companion as he gradually got my
indispensable requirements together, with great care not to remove the
historic dust anywhere, did not mention any such gringo idiosyncrasy.
Every non-resident of Cajamarca, be he a tawny, soil-incrusted Indian
from up in the hills, or the representative of some ambitious European
house, eats in one of two Chinese _fondas_, or take-your-chances
restaurants, not far off the main plaza. The transient enters a
Celestial general-store, passes through it and a dingy room, crowded
with tables about which barefoot Indians, male and female, their aged
felt hats on their heads, are helping themselves with spoons or fingers,
and through another doorless door into a smaller chamber with a single
long table covered by an oilcloth of long and troubled history, where he
is sure to find a place because of the requirement of shoes. During the
process he will pass close by the open kitchen with its iron
cooking-range—the first I had seen in South America—manipulated by a
grizzled old Chinaman. The service is à la carte and, but for the shoes
and oilcloth, identical in both dining-rooms. Here one will find a
greasy strip of paper with a printed menu, easily comprehensible to
anyone with a Spanish and Quichua dictionary, a treatise on Peruvian
coast slang, and some smacking of Chinese in Spanish misspelling; or
which, in the very likely event of the client being unable to read, the
barefoot waiter will recite in Shakespearean cadence and breathless
continuity. Indeed, but for the language, one might fancy oneself back
on the lower Bowery as the waiter bawls to the kitchen:
“Un churrasco!”
“Un bisté fogoso!”
“Hasta cuando esos choclos?”
The high cost of living, like the railroad decreed by congress in 1864,
had not yet climbed over the range into Cajamarca. The dishes are 2½ or
five cents each. There are, to be sure, a few ten-cent ones, but these
are what terrapin would be with us, and their consumption is not
encouraged, being above the tone of Cajamarca. The first price covers a
dozen delicacies, such as “patitas con arroz—pigs’ feetlets with rice,”
fried brains, liver, or _chupe_, the Irish-stew of the Andes. At five
cents the epicure to whom money is no object may have a breaded “bisté”
with onions, rice, and potatoes, a “baefs teak paí,” “rosbif de
cordero—roast beef of mutton—” “a beefsteak of pork,” and a score of
even more endurable concoctions. Chocolate, which is native to the
region and excellently made, is 2½ cents; a cup of coffee, which no one
in Cajamarca knows how to make, costs twice that. Eggs “in any style”
are two cents each, and a loaf of bread, of the size of a biscuit, one
cent—for in Cajamarca the traveler first finds the huge copper one-cent
and half-cent pieces. The greatest gourmand sailing the high seas could
not spend more than fifteen, or possibly twenty cents, for a dinner in
Cajamarca—and a “tip” is unknown.
[Illustration:
The only wheeled vehicle I saw in Peru during my first three months in
that country]
[Illustration:
One of the many unfinished churches of Cajamarca]
I had been duly warned that the table-manners would be on a par with
those of Colombia and Ecuador. Before I left Quito, Hays had written,
“In Peru soup is eaten with brilliancy, the high notes being sustained
with great verve.” The same table utensils reached both the shod
minority and the Indians under their hats; the table de luxe was
supplied, after that democratic South American manner, with one
drinking-glass, the only washing of which was what it inadvertently
received during its varied service.
Cajamarca, as everyone whose historical education was not criminally
neglected knows, was not founded; it was found; and like anything else
picked up by the Spaniards of those days, was never returned. It lay
already—but unprepared—spread out in the extreme northwest corner of its
long, fertile valley when Pizarro and his merry men came riding down
upon it across the same broad páramo, and they caught much the same view
of it as I, though in those days it was not half-hidden by the adorning
eucalyptus trees of to-day, nor distantly musical with church-bells. The
famous town, now capital of a department, which is to Peru what a state
is with us, is more or less oval in shape, some ten by twenty blocks at
its widest and longest, not counting the huts that straggle out at both
ends along its principal “highway” and dot the outskirts and the
widening plain. It is seven degrees below the equator and somewhat
warmer than Quito. It stands 2814 meters above the sea, with some
half-dozen inhabitants for every meter. In all but its history it is
tiresomely like any other city of the Andes. The streets, monotonously
right-angled, are rudely cobbled, with open sewers down the center, the
sidewalks narrow, smooth-worn flagstones on which he who would walk must
jostle Indians, donkeys, and stagnant groups of less useful residents.
The adobe houses, often two-story and always toeing the street-line, are
red-tile roofed and anciently whitewashed. Dingy little shops of odds
and ends below, the flower-decked patios of even the best-provided
families are surrounded on the ground floor by the dens of servants and
the ragged and more numerous population, as in Quito. It was the first
place in Peru where I had seen window-glass. By night its streets are
“lighted” with _faroles_, miniature kerosene lamps inside square,
glass-sided lanterns that are given to succumbing to the first strong
puff of breeze, even if those whose duty it is to light them do not have
more pressing engagements. The central plaza is enormous, square in
form, but coinciding more or less with the triangular one in which
Pizarro and the Inca collided on that dusty Saturday evening of an
earlier century. Flower-plots, tended with less monotonous formality
than those of Quito, bloom chiefly with geraniums, and among them the
historically informed inhabitants point out the stone on which
Atahuallpa succumbed to the _garrote_ amid the heaven-opening
ministrations of good old Father Greenvale. As in Quito, there remain
almost no monuments of pre-Conquest days, for the Incas seem to have
built here chiefly of adobe. The most intelligent of Cajamarca’s monks
doubted whether there was even a Temple of the Sun or a House of the
Virgins to transform into monastery or convent. Not far off the main
plaza, however, set cornerwise in the center of a modern block, is the
room that was to be filled with gold for Atahuallpa’s ransom, said to be
of massive dressed stone, like the palaces of Cuzco. Stevenson, who was
in Cajamarca just a hundred years before me, found still visible around
the wall the mark that was to measure the height of the treasure, and
the room, the residence of a cacique. To-day it is an orphanage, where a
German nun was teaching a score of female “orphans” to earn a livelihood
on American sewing-machines, and the treasure-mark, as well as all
evidence of stone structure, had been whitewashed out of existence, as
something of “los Gentiles” not worth preserving.
The unique characteristic of Cajamarca, and almost her only stone
buildings, are her half-dozen splendid old churches, soft-browned by
time as those of Salamanca, and having the appearance of being
half-ruined by earthquakes. The natives asserted, however, that they
were left incomplete because in colonial days every finished building
must pay tribute to the King of Spain. Whatever the cause, their
condition gives an unusual architectural effect that could not have been
equalled by any design of man, and all who find pleasure in the
“picturesque” must hope that Cajamarca will never grow wealthy enough to
finish them—a misfortune that is not imminent. The Chilians came in
August, 1882, and, taking a note from Pizarro’s note-book—or, more
exactly, from that of his secretary, since the swine-herder of
Estremadura was not fitted to keep his own—stole all the gold and jewels
of the churches, even the laboratory equipment of the schools, and
anything else that chanced to be lying around; though they found no one
worth holding for ransom. One of the principal churches bears an
inscription, now all but effaced by the ubiquitous whitewash, announcing
that “This santa eglesia was erected at the cost of one million pesos
and fifteen centavos,” the extra seven cents being the cost of
bell-ropes. In the great monastery of San Francisco, facing the main
plaza, some forty amiable but ignorant friars loll through life, chiefly
in the breezy “retiring kiosk,” carpeted, like that of Quito, with burnt
matches and cigarette butts. They knew nothing of the tomb of
Atahuallpa, but the Spanish organist, who looked like a ninth-inning
baseball “fan” on a hot day, led me to the church and played in my honor
on “the largest and best pipe-organ in Peru” not only our national air,
but several Spanish fandangos and a recent Broadway favorite that is
seldom admitted to ecclesiastical circles.
The Indians and gente del pueblo of Cajamarca have nearly as much color
of dress as those of Quito, and are even more ragged and abjectly
poverty-ridden. Filthy, maimed beggars adorn the façades of churches,
and the aboriginals speak a mushy, mouthful, dialect of Quichua, though
all know Spanish. None of the Chinese residents have families; yet every
now and then one passes a child with quaintly shaped eyes that testify
to the ingratiating manners of the Celestials. The “upper” classes
struggle to keep the theoretically white collars and the dandified shoes
that mark their caste, and dawdle through life as shopkeepers, lawyers
without clients, doctors whose degrees furnish them little but the
title, or at any makeshift occupation that will spare them from soiling
their tapering fingers with vulgar labor. Opportunity is a rare visitor,
yet in a century, perhaps, there has not been born in Cajamarca a boy
with the initiative and energy to tramp three days over the western
range and stow away for somewhere that he could make a man of himself.
As to personal habits: a drug clerk graduated in Lima pours out of their
bottles the pills he recommends, and plays them idly back and forth from
one unwashed hand to the other before returning them to the shelf. Yet
it was a relief to loll away several days in civilization, even
Peruvianly speaking. If the passing stranger was not entirely free from
the open mouth and vacant eye, he could pass a corner group without all
falling silent and craning their necks after him, and might even sit
down at the fonda table without all interrupting their noisy eating to
mumble over their mouthful, “Where do you come from and where are you
going?” But even a Peruvian department capital has not yet reached that
stage which makes photography easy, or the coarsest sarcasm effective.
As often as I opened my kodak, some “educated” member of society was
sure to crowd close to me, keeping persistently in front of the lens;
and when I had at length manoeuvered and tricked him out of the view,
more or less, I was seeking, he was certain to bleat with his blandest
smile, “Sacando una plancha, no, señor?” If I made answer, “No, my
esteemed friend of ancient and noble blood, I am building an aeroplane
on sleigh-runners to cross the icy stretches of the Amazon,” the
half-baked son of the wilderness might reflect solemnly a moment or two
before making some such inane reply as, “Yes, it _is_ a long way to the
Amazon.” Almost at the hour of my arrival an enamored youth of Cajamarca
committed suicide, leaving a letter in which he declared life was a
farce. Had he been with me through the Province of Jaen, he would have
found it more nearly a melodrama. Only those who have endured the
hardships of a long trail can know the compensating pleasure of a return
to even comparative comfort, like the burgeoning of spring after a hard
winter. But, after all, the joys of the trail in the Andes are chiefly
those of anticipation, and the sense of accomplishment, of
_exclusiveness_ in tramping where few men have tramped before. For there
can be slight pleasure of intercourse in towns where the youths of the
“best families” follow the foreigner with cries of “Goot neeght. Awe
right,” broken by snickers of silly laughter; and where dreams of long
hours in something resembling a bed are rudely dispelled by the din of
church-bells, the whistles of lonesome policemen, and all the thousand
and one noises with which the Latin-American can make life hideous. In
the matter of libraries and book-shops Peru is even less advanced than
the countries to the north. There was, to be sure, a department library
in Cajamarca, but “for the present” it was closed. In despair I
canvassed the town for a book. A clerk whom I asked why no printed
matter was to be had, replied:
“No hay aficionados á la lectura en estas partes, señor.”
“Amateurs of reading,” indeed! As one might say, aficionados of
billiards, “fans” of cock-fighting; merely an amusing game to pass the
time.
“But what on earth do people do with their minds?” I gasped.
“They go to church, señor,” replied the clerk.
But the best of Cajamarca is her wonderful green and checkered valley,
as seen from the rocky hillock ten minutes above the main plaza, now
serving as a quarry of soft, whitish stone, but on which, if anywhere,
must have been the fortress historians tell us overlooked the Inca city.
There is, indeed, to-day the remnants of a cobble-stone and adobe
building on the summit, and cajamarquinos who climb there to enjoy the
widespread view asserted that Atahuallpa used to watch from this height
the rising and setting of the sun. Prescott might almost have sat on the
rocky hillock in person when he wrote:
“The valley of Cajamarca, enamelled with all the beauties of
cultivation, lay unrolled like a rich and variegated carpet of verdure,
in strong contrast with the dark forms of the Andes that rose up
everywhere about it. The vale is of oval shape, extending about five
leagues in length by three in breadth, and was inhabited by a superior
population to any the Spaniards had yet seen; with ten thousand houses
of clay hardened in the sun and some ambitious dwellings of hewn stone.”
The valley, stretching away south-southeast, is not so extensive as the
reading of Prescott leads the imagination to picture. Except in one
place, where it spreads out like the arms of a cross, it is surely not
more than a league in width. But the suave spring view across it, green
with the deep green of the cactus, and clumped now by the Australian
eucalyptus in contrast to the treeless days of the Incas, is in certain
moods and aspects the most beautiful of the Andes, though lacking the
surrounding snowclads that add so much to the vale of Quito. Here I came
often to sit above the murmur of the town, until the God of the Incas,
after his daily journey around the earth to see that all was well, sank
behind the broad páramo of Yanacancha, blotting out the valley
stretching away to the southward where the trail following the old Inca
highway down the backbone of the continent, was already beckoning me on.