THE ROOF OF PERU
For a week I improved under the doctor’s care. I had already strolled
once or twice around the neat little plaza, down upon which the massive,
snowclad peaks gaze with paternal serenity. But my legs were still in
that woven-straw condition that made my feet lead ingots; and no
pleasure quite outdid that of lying abed watching the sunshine crawl
across the floor, and listening to the keeper’s rooster challenging the
world to combat. I should have regretted a controversy with that rooster
during those days; I am sure he would have worsted me.
On Sunday, the first of June, the doctor did not appear; nor the next
day, nor the next. Medicines and tonics ran out. I decided to push on
next morning, before what strength I had regained evaporated entirely.
But during the night there came upon me a pain under which I could only
writhe and stuff my throat with bedclothes. When I had enjoyed this an
hour or two, a brilliant thought struck me,—appendicitis! All the night
through—for only the rooster slept within shouting distance—I painted
fanciful pictures of a grave looked down upon by the paternal, serene
peaks through the ages to come. For it was easy to guess how effectively
the surgeons of the Andes would surge—with their butcher-knives,
sheep-shears and ditch-water. In the morning I sent the caretaker to
summon the doctor before he set out on his rounds. About nine he came
back to announce, in a manner suspiciously sheepish, that the señor
doctor médico titular was confined to his bed. As the day wore on the
fellow overcame his racial lack of initiative to the extent of bringing
me a potion from the chief _botica_, but it had little effect. Then all
at once “Taco,” the Japanese of Huaylas, grinned in on me through the
bars of my window, and a half-hour later the keeper of the drug-shop had
come in person.
“It is congestion of the bowels, señor,” he announced. “These pílduras
will relieve it. The doctor was to have changed the treatment on Sunday
to avoid this, but—”
“Is the doctor seriously ill?” I asked.
“Señor,” said the druggist, after a moment of hesitation, “on Saturday
night the médico titular took some liquor at a tertulia. It is fatal to
him. He cannot stop. It is now four days that he has lain mareado”
(seasick), “and he has not been able to visit one of his patients. Out
in the pueblos three have already died; for there is no other doctor.”
I had been ten days in Caráz when, in spite of a soreness within and an
annoying lack of vigor, I decided to push on afoot. A broad road led
south along the green and fertile valley of the Santa, shut in on either
hand by the yellow, terra-cotta flanks of barren mountains as between
unscalable walls. The way was well-peopled with broad-faced, stolid
Indians speaking no Spanish, and a felt hat of tobacco-color was now
taking the place of the dingy “panamas” that had been almost universal
since southern Ecuador. It was only a simple day’s walk; eight miles to
another provincial capital. But it seemed at least twenty, especially as
the “perfectly level” road kept mounting steadily, for Yungay is a
thousand feet higher than Caráz. The snow-and-glacier mass of Huascarán,
king of that magnificent snow-capped range that dwarfs the Alps, bulked
menacingly almost sheer above the bucolic old plaza, when I plodded
across it in the sleepy silence of noonday to the dwelling of an
unusually simple-hearted subprefect.
Next morning Yungay stretched for miles along the half-cobbled highway,
and had scarcely ended when Mancos began. This department of Ancachs and
the valley of the Santa is the most densely populated region of Peru.
The fifteen miles to Carhuáz was what the Peruvians call an excellent
road; to a people of wider outlook it would have been recognizable as a
broad expanse of loose stones undulating over barren ridges, relieved by
the bracing mountain air from off the blue-white bulk of Huascarán, here
seeming to hang suspended overhead. The water of all this valley is
reputed a source of several dread diseases, among them the warty
_verrugas_ indigenous to Peru. The bottle of boiled “tea-water” swinging
from my leather harness lasted but a few dry miles, and I could only
fall back, not without misgiving, on chicha, announced for sale by a
little red flag before an occasional hut along the way. The bridge that
once lifted the camino real across the swift, cold stream at the edge of
the green oasis that marked the end of the day’s tramp had gone the way
of most Peruvian bridges, and left me to wade waist-deep. Strangely
enough, my host of Yungay had kept his word to telegraph the gobernador
of Carhuáz, and I sat down almost upon arrival with the family at a
dinner served after the patriarchal manner of the Andes. To those of us
at table the wife at the head granted the full meal, from the hot,
peppery soup of Ancachs to the dessert of fried plantains in
“honey,”—melted crude sugar. To the dozen Indian servants squatted along
the wall she dished out frugally the coarser viands, to each according
to his station in life, the bedraggled scullion getting only a small
gourdful of boiled corn and yuca. During our Sunday stroll in the plaza
the gobernador introduced me in the same careful order to every town
celebrity, down to the last teniente; after which we of the élite
gathered round the town clerk in a corner of the square to hear read the
weekly “bulletin,” from the two-line cable of foreign news “via Lima” to
the last testimonial to the efficacy of the pills of Dr. Ross as a
panacea of all earthly misfortunes.
I was miles south before the first rays of Monday’s sun fell upon me,
and even after that was able to sneak along for hours in the shadow of
the Cordillera, so closely did it stand above me. Town rapidly succeeded
town, with miles of almost unbroken house-walls crowding a damnably
cobbled road to barely the width of a wheeled vehicle. Not even along an
English highway would more houses have been shops. The male population
spoke a more or less fluent Spanish, weedy with terms from their native
tongue; but the women either could not or would not use anything but
Quichua. The dialect of the region contained a labor-saving devise in
the phrase “A ’onde vueno?” serving for the more specific “Where do you
come from and where are you going?” of less inventive sections. Not a
few took me for a peddler, and called out from their doorways, “Qué
lleva de venta, señor?” and some sent children running after me with a
summons to return, lest they miss a precious opportunity for long-winded
and chiefly futile bargaining. Ripened corn was being husked in the
narrowing fields along the way. The repulsive, flanking ranges crowded
closer and closer together, squeezing the stony road ever higher, until
the hills closed in entirely, and a precipitous, barren ridge, cutting
off the world to the south, left it no choice but to contract to a
cobbled street of the department capital. The sun was setting when I
halted at a corner of Huaráz’ main plaza, my legs leaden with the
twenty-five undulating, stony miles behind me, to inquire for that
famous hotel rumor had pictured for weeks gone by.
The conviction came upon me that there would not be a hotel even in
Lima. A citizen of Huaráz did point out to me a building boasting itself
the “GRAN HOTEL,” but all it offered was a few rooms to let. To me fell
that of the zaguan, a prison-like chamber forming a front corner of the
building and opening on both the street and the entrance to the patio.
It had once been the oratorio of a private dwelling, and the altar and
its decorations were still intact, except that the Virgin had flown from
her niche. Across the way was a Chinese fonda with the same bill of
fare, worse cooked, worse served, and more expensive than that of
Cajamarca. This was the gathering-place of the élite among the homeless
transients. I had not the courage to investigate the dozen other Chinese
and native “restaurants” scattered about town.
Huaráz, capital of the most populous department of Peru and the largest
city I had yet seen since crossing the frontier, is really but another
mud village of the Andes, differing from the rest only in size. Its
adobe buildings seldom rise above a story and a half in height; its
rusticated inhabitants, in ragged, comic-opera costumes, the majority
speaking only Quichua, were for the most part ill-bred and disagreeable
in manner, especially to “gringos,” whose intelligence or cleanliness
they seemed to resent. Even the small percentage of whites—real whites,
that is, for there were many who no doubt mistakenly considered
themselves so—were gaping mountaineers. Window-glass, to be sure, was to
be found, and there were actually three or four clumsy, two-wheeled
carts, like the rural wagons of England, the arrival of which was no
doubt an event in the town history. Foreign residents were numerous,
especially Chinamen, who owned many of the shops of importance, leaving
the natives to squat in the street with their few cents’-worth of wares.
The town itself has nothing “picturesque” about it, neither in the color
and style of its houses nor the rags of its inhabitants; but this is far
more than made up for by the magnificent range of snowclad peaks that
climb up into the blue all about it, towering close above the town on
the east and stretching away into the north, to end in the enormous
blue-white mass of Huascarán. Its climate, colder than that of Quito and
with a perpetually brilliant sunshine and an invigorating crispness to
the air, was delightful. There was even a shelf of books for sale in one
of the larger establishments, though the nearest I came to finding
literature of the country for the road ahead was Björnson’s “Sendas de
Diós,” whatever it may be called in Norwegian.
Rumor had it that the tramp over the icy Cordillera Central that now lay
before me would be “impossible,” even to a man in the most sturdy
condition. To slip down to the coast and sail for Lima would have been
easy, but a racial obstinacy forced me to pursue to the bitter end the
task I had set myself, though it promised only the monotony of familiar
experience and further intercourse with a people that had grown utterly
antipathetic in habit, feature, and character. An American resident
furnished me a horse and a peon for the first day’s journey. The prefect
had favored me with the customary flowery document to his subordinates
along the way, ordering them to “lend me all classes of facilities.” It
would have been far more to the point had he commanded them more
specifically to assist me to acquire an occasional plate of beans. The
dusty road close along the diminishing river was well traveled, chiefly
by long donkey trains and plodding, expressionless Indians. Huts and
even small villages were frequent, the barren ranges crowding ever
closer and dwindling almost to foothills, or rather seeming so to
dwindle as we mounted ever higher. Beyond the bridge that carried us
back to the right bank of the Santa were scores of little wheat-fields,
often hanging far up the steep hillsides; and Indians were threshing the
grain by driving their animals round and round the circles of hard earth
in which it had been spread, and tossing it high in the air with wooden
shovels until the wind had carried away the chaff. The monotonous mud
town of Recuay, notorious for its horse-thieves, gazed stolidly upon us
as we trotted on to Ticapampa, headquarters of a French mining company,
the several tall chimneys of which were belching their smoke into the
brilliant sky, their ugliness offset by the first suggestion of industry
in Peru.
It cost me three days and several tramps back to Recuay to find a mount
for the journey ahead. Walking would have been far less laborious. But
there were sixteen leagues of bleak, foodless páramos and two
snow-topped ranges separating me from the first suggestion of habitation
on the further side of the great glacier-clad central chain of the
Andes, that stretched away to north and south further than the eye could
command, like an impassable barrier set by nature against the wilfulness
of puny man.
[Illustration:
Though within a few degrees of the equators, Huaráz, capital of the
most populous department of Peru, has a veritable Swiss setting of
snow-clad peaks and glaciers]
[Illustration:
Threshing wheat with the aid of the wind. In the few regions of the
Andes that are neither too high nor too low for this grain, the
methods of cultivation are the most primitive]
Fortunately the wife of an Indian of Recuay celebrated that Sunday so
effectually that she brought to bed her companions in a drunken brawl.
The gobernador fined her twenty soles. Her husband possessed only ten,
and her wails from the adobe cárcel were interfering with the bargaining
in the market-place. Summoned by the walking scarecrow who boasted
himself the lieutenant-governor, the head of the disrupted household
admitted, after a wealth of subterfuges, that he owned two mules in
condition for a journey, and the gobernador, pocketing “in the name of
justice” the sovereign I handed him, ordered the abject husband to be
ready at six in the morning to accompany me to Huallanga.
Some two leagues further up the contracted valley we crossed the now
tiny Santa by a bridge of sticks and, catching the gorge of a little
stream fed by the glaciers above, plunged due east into the mountains.
The sun had burned our faces in the river valley; an hour afterward it
was cold as late November. Rain began, but quickly turned to a mixture
of hail and snow. Dusk overtook us at the foot of a mighty glacier,
though not until we had sighted one of the rare shepherd’s huts that
huddled in an occasional stony hollow. These miserable Indian _chozas_
of the upper heights are built of cobble-stones heaped up to the height
of a dog-kennel and covered with brown ichu grass, hardly as large and
quite as crude as those the beaver fashions, defending their miserable
inmates neither from wind nor rain. A single room, which can only be
entered on hands and knees, houses the whole family, whom a sheepskin or
two serves as bed, and two or three earthen pots as utensils in which to
cook their scanty fare over an ichu or dried-dung fire in the center of
the windowless hovel. Totally indifferent to wealth or comfort, with
hardly fuel enough for cooking purposes, the stolid inhabitants slink
into their squalid dens as soon as the sun has withdrawn his genial
rays, and shiver through a night during which they get almost no
unbroken sleep. With scarcely enough food to keep themselves from
starvation, the house swarms of mangy curs that curl up among them by
night, and which, being never fed, dash greedily at any offal, like the
pigs of Central America. Here there was a second kennel, oval in shape,
which the woman permitted us to occupy, because she was asked in her own
tongue by one of her own people. Both she and her half-dozen children
were barefoot and in scanty garb, yet appeared completely indifferent to
the icy cold which, if less in degrees than in a Canadian mid-winter,
was more penetrating. We carried blankets sufficient to pass the night
comfortably, huddled close together, but as often as I stepped out into
the brilliant moonlight in which the ice-fields above us stood forth
like fissured and fantastic ghost-castles, the very marrow in my bones
seemed to congeal.
Hoar-frost covered the earth, and ice a half-inch thick lay on the
stagnant puddles when we set out in the bitter cold dawn across a region
drear in the extreme. Stiff, stony climbs carried us up to the very
edges of immense blue-white glaciers, and through patches of snow that
threw the sharp rays of the highland sun into our eyes and faces like a
spray of needles. The day was as laborious as any I had ever spent
afoot,—thirty-six miles over the wintry, rock-pitched double crest of
the Central Cordillera on a mule who jolted my unaccustomed frame to a
loose-jointed wreck before I finally slid gratefully to the ground in
the bleak mining-town of Huallanga. This was a slight oasis of imported
life in a wild, almost uninhabited region, the Peruvian mine-manager of
which was extraordinary from at least two points of view,—he was blond
as a Norseman, and so advanced in his customs that I dared even address
his wife directly at table.
Next day I joined—for a decided consideration—the caravan of a local
merchant whose arrieros were bound for Cerro de Pasco with a troop of
cargo-animals. A “civilized” Indian, that is, one who wore shoes and
spoke Spanish, called for me with a half-size horse, the crude native
saddle covered with a _pellón_, the hairy saddle-rug all high-caste
horsemen use in this region, and soon after noon we jogged away down a
stony little river. The merchant had duly and honestly warned me that,
being only pack-animals, his _chuscos_ were gifted with no gentle pace.
But he had not warned me that I was joining a way-freight. I drew on
ahead in spite of myself, and when, barely eight miles from Huallanga,
the shrieks and whistles of the drivers died out behind, I waited a
half-hour in vain, then went back some distance to find them lassoing
the animals one by one, piling their loads or pack-saddles in a hollow
square, and turning them loose with their front feet crudely hobbled.
There were nineteen animals, mostly in ballast, attended by four
arrieros. Too lazy apparently to unsling their pots and cook supper, the
patched and weather-faded quartet munched a bit of parched corn and a
sheet of sun-dried beef, and sat all night drinking and wailing maudlin
ballads. The “tent” stretched over the packs was so low that I had to
lie down on the ground and roll under it, and so thin that the rain
dripped in upon me almost in streams.
It was still black night when the water-soaked canvas was pulled off me,
and I found the arrieros already engaged in a riotous effort to round up
the animals. This was no simple task, in spite of the hobbles, and the
morning was well advanced before the last of the troop had been lassoed
and loaded. During the operation I suggested that we prepare at least a
pot of tea, but Valenzuela, the chief arriero, dismissed the matter with
a grimace and a “neither wood nor grass will burn after the rain,” and I
could only choke my hunger with a rock-hard lump of bread and shiver
under my poncho until I mounted, this time a mule, to spare the animal
of the day before.
We followed the river-gorge so long that it turned almost uncomfortably
warm. Then suddenly abandoning the highway to modern Huánuco and the
roundabout, but warm and well-populated, route to Cerro de Pasco, the
arrieros drove the animals pell-mell up a steep gorge between towering
mountain walls, by what looked like a spillway from a stone-crusher.
This was the very route I should have chosen, for while the longer one
would have been more comfortable, this followed very closely the ancient
Inca highway. Topping the horizon, we trotted on across an enormous,
brown-yellow plain of scanty ichu vegetation that stretched away to the
hazy foot of what looked from this height like low hills. Here was just
such a place as the Incas, requiring an unbroken outlook over the
surrounding world and grazing land for their llamas, chose for their
cities. I was not surprised, therefore, to find a long expanse of the
páramo covered with hundreds of stone ruins, only the walls still
standing, from one to eight feet high, in broken, fantastic disarray.
This was “Huánuco el Viejo,” which the Spaniards found an important city
at the time of the Conquest, but which the less hardy half-breed
descendants abandoned, as in so many cases, for a warmer valley,
eighteen leagues to the east. History does not reach back to the origin
of old Huánuco, the ruins of which still occupy almost a square mile of
the silent, utterly uninhabited plain. The road—a mere interweaving of
faint paths across the Andean prairie—passed within five hundreds yards
of the ruins, but the caravan pushed on without a halt, as if these
monuments of their ancestors were mere stone-heaps, unworthy a glance of
attention. I turned and trotted away across the plain, bathed in the
cold, glaring sunshine of the Andean plateau, toward the site.
Valenzuela, after a shout of protest, stuck close on my heels, whether
out of fear that I would decamp with the mule, or lay hands on some old
Inca treasure, or from some superstition connected with the “Gentiles,”
I do not know. There was really little to be seen. Every one of the
countless ruins of large and small buildings, arranged more or less in
squares, were sections of cobble-stone walls, mere stone-heaps without
sign of mortar, as crude as the _chozas_ of shepherds, now fallen until,
in many places, only their symmetrical arrangement suggested the hand of
man. To this there was only one exception. Some three hundred yards from
the rest of the ruins was a rectangular fortress of carefully cut and
nicely fitted stone blocks, with suggestions of cement, now mere walls,
some fifteen feet high, filled level full of earth on which the drear
ichu grew as thickly as on the surrounding plain. Except in extent, the
ruins were not to be compared with those of Marca-Huamachuco, though the
“castillo” closely resembled in construction and stone-fitting the
single monument of Ingapirca in southern Ecuador.
We trotted on after the pack-train, and rode for some hours over low
ridges, each of which brought to view a new expanse of dreary, yellowish
landscape. Occasionally an arriero broke forth in a mournful song that
rose and fell with the same monotony as the undulating páramo. Now and
then, as a pack worked loose, one of the muleteers dismounted and,
deftly slipping out of his poncho, threw it over the head of the animal
and readjusted the load. To my surprise, quickly followed by my disgust,
the train soon after noon swung into the cobble-fenced field of a low,
cobble-stone hut, similar to, but far more miserable and tiny than those
of the ancient city behind. Greeting the barefoot Indian woman who
emerged on all fours from the hut, the arrieros began to round up and
unload the animals. Though we had not made fifteen miles, we were to
stop here for the night. I swallowed my wrath, reflecting that he who
joins a freight-train must not expect express speed.
It was too cold to sit, and I took to promenading weakly about the
hillside. Down in a hollow beyond I came upon a family preparing their
crop of potatoes after the ancient Inca fashion still common to the
Andes. This _chuño_—_chuñu_, in Quichua—is the chief vegetable of Andean
marketplaces and the principal food of the Indians of the Sierra. The
newly dug potatoes are spread out on the ground at a high altitude,
preferably on the bank of a highland lake or stream, and left to freeze
by night. They are small potatoes, for the Indian’s mode of selection
has been to plant only the smallest, eating or selling the larger, until
the tubers indigenous to Peru have degenerated to the same low level as
their horses and dogs. When the sun has thawed the potatoes, the Indians
of the household tread out the juice with their bare feet, then spread
them in the sun to dry. This produces the _chuño negro_, or black chuño,
which in the time of the Incas was the only kind permitted the common
people, and which to-day forms the chief product of the process. Those
who prefer _chuño blanco_, the “twice frozen white chuño” which graced
only the tables of the Incas and nobles, put the tubers inside a well of
cobble-stones under the surface of a river or lake, and leave them from
two to eight days, after which they are dried in the sun. The result is
a food that will keep indefinitely, but which has very much the same
taste as so much fried sand. The most common method of preparing these
frozen potatoes is to grind them in a stone mortar and use the powdered
chuño to thicken soup.
[Illustration:
Crossing the Central Cordillera of the Andes south of Huaráz, barely
nine degrees below the equator. In the foreground is my “guide” of
the obstreperous wife]
When the head of the Indian household arrived, he opened with Valenzuela
a conversation in half-breed Quichua, of which I caught enough to learn
that we were to drive a league west in the morning to wait a day for
some species of cargo, stop to pick up another load a few leagues
beyond, and so on indefinitely. I called the arriero aside and protested
that, aside from the hardships and exposure of lying out on every
mountain-side, I was steadily growing worse for lack of treatment. To my
surprise he proposed that I ride on alone next day. As he would never
have dreamed of making such a proposal to a Peruvian stranger, it spoke
well of the opinion he had gathered of Americans from contact with them
in the mining town toward which we were headed. A bed of several
horse-blankets was spread for me beneath the flap of the canvas covering
our packs, out under the shivering stars that stood forth in the
luminous highland sky with the unnatural luster of electric bulbs.
During the later hours of the night, when I rolled out into the cold,
still air, a brilliant full moon was flooding with almost the light of
noonday the rolling mountainous world about us as far as the eye could
reach.
I knew only too well that a matter settled the night before would have
to be argued out anew in the morning. Dawn crept up over the eaves of
the east, and the god of the Incas flung his horizontal rays across the
empty plateau, but Valenzuela, assuming the customary air in such cases,
that we had neither of us meant what we had said the evening before,
made no move to prepare for my departure. When I reminded him of his
promise, he announced that he would, of course, keep it, if I really,
seriously desired it. Only, it would be utterly impossible for a man
unacquainted with the route to find his way across the often unmarked
punas and pampas ahead. Then, too, it was infested with bands of robbers
who at times attacked whole pack-trains, to say nothing of one lone,
helpless gringo. If only I would wait until to-morrow, he and I would
ride on alone at breakneck speed, and make up for all the delay. I had
long since learned the close resemblance of the South American mañana to
a greased pig; moreover, I had no desire to ride at breakneck speed. He
muttered under his breath at this gringo obstinacy, and ordered the
youngest arriero to saddle a horse and accompany me. The latter refused.
Valenzuela shrugged his shoulders with a gesture that meant, “You see it
is out of the question.” But the experienced Andean traveler can always
win his point, if he insists long and hard enough. The chief arriero
gave up at last and sent a man to lassoo and saddle, not the “stout
mule” he had promised the evening before, but one of the saddest
imitations of the genus horse in camp; and late in the morning I rode
down through the chuño-producing gully and away over the brown and
sterile world spread broad and high before me.
The arriero’s first prophecy came quickly true. I lost the road. A
stretch of what was evidently the old Inca highway, broad and
grass-grown and lined by two rows of stones, pushed straight on over all
obstacles in what seemed to be the right direction, but it did not fit
the descriptions that had been given me. The well-marked trail I
followed led me down into two gaping hamlets that had not been
mentioned, and doubled the miles to Baños, somnolent as an Italian
village at summer noonday, down in the throat of a gorge. The frowsy
chusco already gave signs of not being able to endure the journey. All I
demanded was a reasonable walking pace, yet it cost me far more labor
than to have made the trip afoot to keep the animal moving a scant two
miles an hour. It was evident that, for all my incessant labor, we
should not reach before nightfall the hacienda we were seeking, and when
it came on to rain and hail in a cold, bleak bowl of mountains, I turned
toward a collection of huts that stood out dimly as an animal of
protective coloring on the upper edge of the saucer-shaped hollow.
The Indian men, patronizing and arrogant in their clumsy way, as usual
in such situations, offered me the customary six-inch block of wood on
which to squat under the eaves of the “corredor.” I took weakly to
promenading the twenty-four miles in the saddle out of my legs, and
furtively inspected the six huts that made up the collection. All were
earth-floored dens, roofed with ichu, against several of which immense
quantities of dried cow-dung were stacked like cordwood. The women
squatting over the fire in the center of one of the huts handled fuel
and food at one and the same time. Though they were barefoot and
scantily clad, the men wore heavy, home-knit wool stockings to their
knees, and crude moccasins of a strip of hairy cowhide, drawn together
over the foot with a “puckering string” of rawhide. The males spoke
considerable Spanish, but the women knew, or pretended to know, only
Quichua. There were attached to the place at least a score of dogs, who
set up a head-splitting chorus as often as I stirred, and at few-minute
intervals even without that provocation. Across the shallow hollow the
long line of snow-clad peaks that had grown up along the entire eastern
horizon during the day stood forth in bold and impressive majesty in the
light of evening, a light that seemed strained through purple-tinted
crystals.
When the mountain cold settled down like an icy sheet, I asked where I
might sleep.
“Why, there in the corredor, to be sure,” mumbled the Indian.
“We gente blanca have not the indifference to cold of los naturales,” I
replied.
“Well, then, here in the kitchen,” he grumbled.
“How about that casita?” I asked, pointing to a pampa-grass lean-to
against the largest hut.
“That is where the family sleeps.”
“And that?” I persisted, indicating a structure of beehive or
beaver-house shape, built entirely of ichu and with a rounded door not
three feet high, that stood forth on a knoll behind the others.
But that, it seemed, was where the watchman slept—though what he watched
was not apparent. After a long conference in Quichua, however, this was
assigned me with sullen grace; a boy was sent to drag out the
“watchman’s” bed of sheepskins, and I struggled up to the shelter with
saddle, pack, and equipment, and crawled inside on hands and knees. The
choza was constructed on the same plan as the wigwams of the American
“red men,”—a pole frame set up cone-shaped and covered with mountain
grass, through which the bitter wind that swept across this sterile
upland cut as a knife through cheesecloth, and so low that even in the
center I could barely stand upright on my knees. The chusco had been
turned over to a boy who was to watch it all night for a week’s wage. It
was not that I took much stock in the Indian’s assertion that there was
horse-stealing in these parts; but I hoped by this arrangement to
forestall any rascality he might himself set afoot. The “watching,”
however, was evidently by some species of aboriginal telepathy; for not
only was no sign of a guardian to be seen as often as I crawled out into
that interminable night, but when morning came the head of the household
greeted me with:
“El chusco se ha perdido—the animal has lost itself.”
“Lost!” I cried.
“Sí, señor, but it will be found again. The boy has already been sent to
search for it.”
How even my long-experienced instinct for guessing aright among a
hundred splendid chances to go astray saved me from getting hopelessly
lost during that day, I have never been able to fathom. Across the
utterly uninhabited and almost untraveled mountain-top the trail was at
best faintly marked, and finally, beyond the cold, blue lake of
Lauracocha, reputed the real source of the Amazon, it disappeared
altogether. For hours I prodded my wretched imitation of a horse forward
by compass over hill and dale, and by some stroke of luck fell upon the
trail again beyond. Soon the pampa gave way to green and tremulous sod,
and a swamp in which I all but mired the animal beyond recovery. Nor did
the route hold to the same direction, but frequently sidestepped
unexpectedly for no apparent reason, and it was only by the general lay
of the hills and the instinct of long practice that I picked it up
again. Once it split evenly, and the branch I chose led far up the face
of a thousand-foot cliff, the path hewn in the sheer wall growing ever
narrower, until the animal thumped my knee against the stone precipice
and all but pitched us headlong into the appalling ravine below. To
dismount was no simple task, and had the horse been a foot longer I
should not have succeeded in turning him around and leading the way back
to the fork. On the other side of the peak was a great natural stone
stairway, down which the animal slipped and dropped with a painful
succession of jolts. The gorge narrowed and deepened; then suddenly,
close at hand on the steep flank of the mountain, appeared the first
llamas I had seen in Peru, a whole flock of them. From then on they were
so frequent that within the next half-hour I had seen far more llamas
than in all the rest of my life. A new costume for men, at first sight
ludicrous, came into evidence almost at the same time. Instead of
trousers they wore very roomy, dark-colored breeches, cut off exactly at
the knee, so that the first glimpse of their wearers at a distance was
little short of startling, suggesting for a moment the astounding
incongruity of an Indian woman sporting the skirt of a ballet-dancer.
Below these garments they wore the long, knitted wool stockings, gray or
black, and the hairy cowhide moccasins that had first appeared a few
days before, and as they passed me they snatched off their heavy, brown
felt hats with some mumbled greeting in Quichua.
While enjoying a racking fever in the comparatively comfortable home of
the gobernador of Yanahuanca, I learned that there were two ways of
reaching Cerro de Pasco. One was to ride nine bitter-cold leagues across
a trackless puna, on which a lone gringo was sure to get lost and die of
exposure; the other was to travel about half that distance by a
well-marked road to Goyllarisquisca, where los americanos have their
coal mines and whence there ran a daily train. I could not believe that
fate would be so crude a practical joker as to let a man who had found
his way clear from Bogotá go astray on the last day of his journey, but
I could easily conceive of the wreck of a horse wilting between my
leaden legs somewhere out on the unmarked pampa; moreover, the sight of
a railroad would be a comparatively new experience. I decided on the
shorter route.
It necessitated the gobernador calling me at two in the morning, before
a raging fever had entirely burned itself out. An Indian in flowing
breeches, leading a “horse” that was to bring back some arrival by
train, and another astride a pitifully small pony, led the way out into
the luminous starlit night. A good road tacked gradually upward through
a sleeping village, hanging like some prehensile creature on the swift
hillside, where the dogs sang us a rousing chorus, and lifted us in some
three hours to the razor-backed summit of a ridge, down the further
slope of which sprawled headlong a still larger town, fantastic of
profile in the morning starlight. We labyrinthed through it, meeting
scores of panty-clad and moccasined Indians and barefoot women and girls
toiling marketward under atrocious burdens; for the day was Sunday.
Below the town we came out on a road paralleling a stupendous gorge; and
across it, so high above that I could scarcely believe it possible a
cluster of electric lights, suspended in the night between earth and
heaven, mingled with the stars and half blotted out at intervals by the
smoke of American industry, marked Goyllarisquisca, a city of the sky,
to see which we must crane our necks like countrymen at the foot of
man’s mightiest monument. The stars went out one by one, like gas-jets
turned off by hurrying street-lighters; the luminous night turned to
colorless opaque dawn, in which the jagged Sierra stood out flat and
featureless as if cut out of cardboard. We went down and ever down into
an unconscionable gorge, to cross—such is the ghastly futility of
Latin-America—an insignificant stream; then quickly began to climb
again. There was a path straight up the mountain-side to
Goyllarisquisca, a path which a man unsusceptible to dizziness, and
capable of climbing a steep stairway of a hundred thousand steps without
guard-rails or a landing on which to pause for breath, might cover in a
half-hour. Instead, we wound corkscrew-wise around the entire mountain,
through another town, fantastic in its perpendicular setting as the
last, yet reduced in the disillusioning light of day to its drab,
mud-built reality; and uncovering others pitched at queer places on
unattainable noses and gouged-out hollows of the range in which the
shadows still lurked like skulking bandits. The mountains beyond were
garbed from head to foot in white robes, and in the valleys lay seas of
mist from which emerged crags and peaks like uninhabited, rocky islands.
Less beautiful, perhaps, in its aspect than the more colorful Alps, the
scene vastly outdid these in its rugged, masculine grandeur. Little by
little we fell in with an almost unbroken procession of Indians; here
and there one clad in exotic overalls whispered the approach of American
influence, and at length our breathless animals staggered over the last
ridge into the village of the tongue-loosening name.
Before me lay a small Pittsburgh, not so small at that, with great
cranes swinging across the gorges, unsentimental stone buildings roaring
and matter-of-fact chimneys belching forth the sooty smoke of industry.
Long rows of decent living-quarters were interspersed with longer ones
of box and flat cars, and sprawling about the higher levels were native
shacks so tinged with the foreign influence that even a stove-pipe
protruded here and there from their roofs of wavy sheet-iron. Across the
scene floated the sweet music of a deep-voiced American train whistle,
and on every hand was the evidence of diligence, masculine toil, and
effective _doing_ that quickened my northern pulse like a deep draft of
wine. It was like coming back to my native world after a long absence.
Scores of half-forgotten things I had never before seen in South America
surged up about me, and upon me came drowsy contentment that my
struggles were behind me and that I had already virtually set foot in
the central plaza of Lima.
I slipped clumsily off the miserable chusco and turned him over,
trappings and all, to the Indian who was to deliver him to Valenzuela
when he passed through Yanahuanca. My legs obeyed me sullenly, as if
weighted with ball and chain, and my physical condition gave to my
movements a hesitating, deliberate dignity. At the station was a
restaurant run by a Chinaman with Peruvian assistance, where the
American influence by no means ceased at bacon and eggs, but had reached
the height of butter and sliced bread, and rosy bottles of catsup! In a
corner of the room a coal-stove blazed merrily, the first artificial
heat I had felt in a long two years. I wandered out upon the platform.
At the far end stood a man fondling a dog, a real dog, not an Andean
cur, and as I approached he protested affectionately and ineffectually:
“Now you get down; you’re dirtying my pants.”
There was no mistaking that vocabulary, even if the strangely nasal
accent that struck my unaccustomed ear rudely had not sufficed to betray
the speaker’s nationality. Peruvians do not fondle dogs; nor do they
refer to their nether garments in that abrupt and familiar fashion. I
was soon seated in a comfortable office-chair, a stack of New York
papers beside me. But I gave up in despair explaining how I had come to
Goyll—well, pronounce it yourself—without having ever been either in
Lima or “the Cerro”; and I fancy I had convinced my host of nothing,
except that I was a clumsy and unconscionable liar, before the giant
Baldwin rolled in, dragging behind it a half-dozen full-sized American
freight-cars, as if some branch of the railways of my own land had
pierced this lofty nook of the Andes.
The official business of the line is to transport coal to the mines at
Cerro de Pasco, and passengers are accepted only on suffrance. The
“first-class” coach was the familiar old American caboose, with a line
of leather cushions along the walls and a coal stove in the center. It
was empty when I entered, but had I not almost forgotten the ways of
Latin-American travelers, I should not have been so surprised when it at
length filled to overflowing with noisy, over-dressed native women, a
few men of the white-collar class, drummers for the most part, hideous
with rings, and every species of bundle and cumbersome baggage. Then two
robust American trainmen, genuine as if they had that moment been picked
off the top of a transcontinental freight-car, stamped in, climbed into
their cupola, and we were off.
It was the reaction, no doubt, from the straining months behind me that
brought on a paludismo that set me shaking even under my poncho. But the
unaccustomed artificial heat all but choked me, and when I had accepted
an orange, and gravely refused the whiskey, brandy, and black coffee my
sympathetic fellow-passengers would have forced upon me as sure cures, I
climbed into the cupola. The landscape would not have been joyful under
the best of conditions. A bare mountain-top, faintly rolling, its frosty
soil cherishing no vegetation except the dreary yellow-brown ichu of the
uplands, stretched monotonously away on every hand, its surface flooded
with the brilliant, thin sunshine of Andean plateaux and mottled here
and there with fleecy cloud shadows. Now and then a flock of llamas
lifted their absurd heads to gaze after us as we sped past. Once or
twice we stopped at a wind-threshed mud-town, standing out pitifully
unsheltered on the treeless waste, halted an hour at grimy,
smoke-belching La Fundición with its smelters, and drew up at dusk in
bare and dreary Cerro de Pasco. It was June 22, three months from the
Peruvian frontier and 2269 miles from Bogotá, of which I had covered 243
on horseback and twenty-five by rail.
On the train I had been the storm-center of a heated difference of
opinion. The Peruvian passengers contended that I should descend by the
morning express to Lima, where I would quickly recover under the care of
famous physicians of the capital; the train-crew that I should enter the
hospital of the American mining company on “the Hill.” There could be no
debate between entrusting myself again to the careless inefficiency of
native practitioners, and the happy opportunity of entering an
institution conducted by men of my own race. When I had found a boy to
carry my baggage, I set out with high hopes, if slow steps, for the
American hospital.
It was an imposing, one-story building, covering a space equal to a city
block and forming a hollow square around an extensive cement-floored
patio, on the far edge of the drear and colorless American mining town,
well removed from its smoke and swirling dust and disturbing noises. My
welcome was not, to be sure, exactly what a morbid imagination had led
me to picture, but that was no doubt due to the fact that both doctors
were at the moment absent. The head-nurse overcame in time her
inclination to refuse me admittance, and sent an Indian boy, closely
related in personal habits to the occupants of mountain-top chozas, to
show me into a ward. In appearance it was all that a hospital ward
should be, its ten imported cots all unoccupied. The boy jerked his head
sidewise toward a chair and disappeared. Two empty hours dragged
funereally by. Then another Indian youth, startlingly like a
personification of squalor and uncleanliness in a masque gotten up by
some stern disciple of the Zola school of realism, burst in upon my
feverish dreams, and before I could raise a hand in protest thrust a
thermometer into my mouth. Evidently it was his assigned duty to take
the temperature of anyone caught on the premises. Had I come into the
ward to recane the chairs, no doubt he would have forced a thermometer
down my throat, like some automatic machine worked by springs, removed
and shaken it, wiped it on the seat of his trousers, and pattered away
on his bare feet.
[Illustration:
The fortress of the former Inca city of Huánaco el Viejo, far up on
the now uninhabited pampa above the sheltering valley in which
cowers the modern city of the same name]
[Illustration:
A typical residence of the Indians of the high _páramos_, built of
heaped-up stones and brown _ichu_-grass; so low one cannot stand
upright in it. Here the family sleeps on the uneven earth floor, or
on a hairy cowhide, with their yellow curs, guinea-pigs, and other
domestic animals. Cooking is done outside over a fire of _ichu_ or
dung]
Long after dark the fresh and rosy assistant-doctor dashed into the
room. But he had no time to give attention to my symptoms and
explanations, for dinner was about to be served, and ordering me to get
into a bed, he dashed for the door again. I protested that I had brought
with me the unpleasant evidence of long Andean travel, and he jerked a
thumb over his shoulder with a parting mumble of “bathroom.” There was
one, even as he had indicated, with all modern appliances; but like most
new-fangled inventions transplanted to the Andes, it did not “function.”
Another example of the Peruvian abhorrence of soap was ordered to bring
a half-dozen pails of hot water, which in his haste to be done with the
task he translated into the Castilian for luke-warm; and I crawled at
last into one of the cots. Soon afterward the Indian boy came to climb
into another, in the same identical rags he wore by day. The dinner was
evidently a prolonged and engaging function, for neither the doctor nor
any other sign of human interest appeared again during a night in which
I tossed incessantly with fever, while the ward blazed with electric
lights and the ineffectual steam-pipes thumped and pounded like an
adjacent boiler-factory.
I am happy to be able to say that neither the two physicians, whom we
will disguise under the pseudonyms of Dr. F and Dr. D, nor the
head-nurse, of the American hospital were my fellow-countrymen; they
came from further north. Materially an establishment to boast of, its
condition in anything touched by the personal equation was incredible.
Homeopathic in creed, it put its trust in pills, and left the rest to
eight immature Indians, as devoid of human instincts as of supervision.
In a second cheerless, bare ward adjoining the one I occupied were a
score of injured or ailing Indian workmen; yet no precaution whatever
was taken to keep infection from passing from one room to the other. A
single thermometer served all alike. Twice a day the automatic youth of
the bare feet went the rounds in quest of temperatures, carrying a
bottle of antiseptic so low in stock that it did not reach a third as
far up the instrument as did the lips of patients; and too indolent to
go to the dispensary for cotton, he wiped it after each use on whatever
came within reach,—his sleeve, his trousers, or the noisome rag each
servant carried over a shoulder in guise of napkin. If the ten cots had
been full, instead of the four that represented the maximum of occupancy
during my stay, I do not know what habits we might have adopted; for
there were only three cups, three tablespoons, and one teaspoon attached
to the ward. The printed rules announced that meal-hours were 7; 10; and
5:30. In practice they averaged: Breakfast, 8:40 to 9, Dinner, 1 to
1:30, and Supper, about 8. The same stern placard called attention to
the fact that visitors were admitted only on Sunday afternoons. Yet
scarcely a night passed without a mob of Indians or cholos, male and
female, friends of the internes or of some inmate, stamping into the
ward as soon as darkness had settled down, and often keeping up an
uproar until long after midnight. Then it was the unexplainable custom,
on those days set for that ceremony, to drag out a fire-hose at four in
the morning and “wash down” the ward like the deck of a ship, flooding
the floor an inch or more deep in icy highland water, through which
patients put to that necessity might wade to and from their cots.
In the sumptuous quarters of physicians and nurses, occupying all the
front half of the building, the formal repasts were provided with every
obtainable delicacy, and enlivened with music and gaiety. In the wards
the ostensibly well-regulated diet monotonously reduced itself in
practice to the leathery “green” beefsteaks of the Andes and two or
three other articles sanctioned by prehistoric Andean _costumbre_. The
Latin-American racial lack of initiative is nowhere more in evidence
than in the kitchen. If doctor or nurse prescribed some special dish for
a patient, there came back in answer—after authority had disappeared
from the scene—that threadbare Peruvian prevarication, “No hay”; which
meant that the cook was giving vent to his temperamental grouchiness,
was too lazy to set another pot on the fire, or was keeping the delicacy
for himself or some “compadre.” The youthful assistant-physician,
trained in the far north, was supremely ignorant of tropical diseases,
and, what was worse, had no inclination to add to his professional
knowledge. His interests were confined to the contents of a row of
unhomeopathic bottles and the manipulation of fifty-two small cardboards
at the club-rooms a few blocks away, where he might be found—though not
easily called—at almost any hour, ensconced in one of the
leather-upholstered lounges before the blazing fireplace. The “gringa”
head-nurse chose to do duty by day, and arising every forenoon, came in
to smile at each of us about ten, and sometimes again in the early
afternoon, before it was time to dress for her daily “bridge” and tea.
In a loquacious moment she confided to me that she “just loved” to
travel and, having always longed to see “strange foreign countries like
Peru,” had been delighted to get an appointment to spend a year or two
in it. The assistant-nurse was the most disturbingly beautiful Peruvian
it had so far been my fortune to set eyes upon,—and she took the
customary advantage of that fact by making no effort to be anything
else. Being a subordinate, she was obliged to take the night-shift; but
being also a Peruvian, she did not often permit that misfortune to break
her night’s rest.
Five days I had studied its ceiling when the morning brought Dr. F,
physician in chief, who had been absent on a round of the company’s
hospitals, hurrying into the ward. He was a far more successful
practitioner than his youthful assistant—in that he made the daily round
in about five minutes less than the ten which Dr. D squandered. Two or
three mornings later he paused at my cot to grumble querulously:
“It’s —— funny you don’t get better. It must be you are not making up
your mind to. Mental attitude, you know. As soon as you had that purge,
these pills should have taken hold at once.”
“That what?” I murmured.
“Oh, don’t be stupid! The castor-oil Dr. D gave you a day after you
turned up here; the basis of our system of treatment.”
“I have had only pills.”
“Nonsense! Dr. D, what day did this man have his purge?”
“I prescribed it last Monday,” yawned the assistant.
“Of course. Now....”
“But I assure you I have yet to know the taste of castor-oil.”
“Who gave him the oil?” the doctor flung over a shoulder.
“Señorita ——,” replied the subordinate, naming the Peruvian nurse.
She chanced to pass the door in fetching street-garb a moment later, and
was called in to confirm the statement.
“Ah, es verdad!” she lisped, in her beautiful nonchalance, “Me olvidé—I
forgot,” and with a bewitching smile at the physicians she hurried away
to her daytime engagements.
Determined not to celebrate my nation’s birthday as I had my own, I
forced my leaden legs to carry me on an afternoon stroll through the
famous mining town. The steel-blue skies of Cerro de Pasco, three miles
aloft and boasting itself the highest city in the world, are clear
beyond any description in mere words. Not once during my sojourn there
was the penetrating brilliancy flecked by the slightest whiff of cloud.
The sun blazed down with an intensity that burned the cheeks as at the
open mouth of a puddling-furnace; yet even at blinding noon-time the
cold had a power of penetration unknown to a northern mid-winter day on
which the mercury falls far lower. Those who ascend “the Hill” from Lima
complain of a leaden inertia and pains varying in intensity and
duration, brought on by an altitude that is fatal to weak hearts and to
victims of pneumonia. Inured to the heights and scantiness of air almost
unbrokenly from far-off Bogotá, I had no consciousness of any such
effects.
Nearly a mile from the hospital, the American town, of stone buildings
and even less attractive structures, such as the “Tin Can,” an ugly,
red, sheet-iron barracks that houses the garden variety of gringo
employees, scattered among bare, protruding rocks of a landscape dreary
beyond conception, gives way to the old familiar Peruvian huts and
hovels. These, in turn, develop further on into two-story dwellings
above and shops below, often quaint and striking in architecture. If any
city of Peru may be called “unique” in appearance, it is “el Cerro.”
Even in the center of the town, roofs of ancient, weather-faded straw
alternate with those of wavy sheet-iron; instead of the monotonously
square blocks of other Andean cities, its older section is a tangle of
narrow streets and misshapen buildings, like a change from our Middle
West to Boston. Perched on the summit of the world, with scarcely a
knoll overtopping it, or the suggestion of a shrub to shelter it, “the
Cerro” is the unhampered playground of icy mountain winds laden with
coal-dust, stinging sand, and the soot and smoke and powdered ore from
its mines. Bronzed foreigners and miners in leather leggings and
hob-nailed boots, squeaking through the streets afoot, or astride
Texas-saddled mules, lend the place an air of modernity, for all its
swarms of bovine-mannered Indians. In contrast, droves of llamas, with
gaily colored ribbons in their ears, slip past in noiseless dignity, or
stand in patient groups before a chichería, awaiting their drivers. The
hardware and similar trades offer stocks unknown to those sections of
the Andes where the imports depend on transportation “en lomo de mula.”
Even the pulperías are well-supplied with foodstuffs, testifying to the
American influence. From a dust-swirling knoll rising a bit above the
rest the eye is gladdened by the glimpse of a cold-blue lake of
considerable size, strangely beautiful in its drear and dismal setting.
From this point of vantage, too, the stranger becomes aware that “el
Cerro” is much more of a city than he suspected, filling the great lap
of a repulsive, barren range, and stretching away in several directions
under belching smoke-stacks.
[Illustration:
The _arrieros_ with whom I left Huallanga, and the family inhabiting
the hut shown in the preceding picture]
[Illustration:
The immaculate staff of the Cerro de Pasco hospital]
Twelve days I had tarried in Cerro de Pasco, and had advanced from my
original ailment to one distinctly more serious, when I concluded to
descend to Lima while I still had strength to do so. The company
physician-in-chief collected a fee that more than doubled my
expenditures since leaving Quito, and spared himself the annoyance of
penning a receipt, or of any other formality beyond that of dropping the
handful of gold sovereigns into his pocket on his breathless morning
round. The night sky was turning slightly more transparent along the
cold eastern horizon when I tottered out of the hospitable Cerro de
Pasco hospital on my way to the station. The second-class car was a
stoveless ice-box, densely packed with Indians and all the bath-fearing
aboriginal is accustomed to carry with him. A glance at it sufficed to
dissipate my resolution to save a sovereign from the wreck of my
fortune. The first-class coach was an American car scantily filled with
white-collar Peruvians and weather-, experience-, and liquor-marked
Americans under forty, “husky” in build and untrammelled in manners. The
wintry July dawn climbed up over the far edge of the bleak, treeless
world, and at Smelter, cheerless beyond words in the new-born daylight,
we were joined by more cold-faced Americans, wrapped, as were also many
of the natives, in huge neck-roll sweaters. Dressed even in all the
clothing I possessed, I kept my poncho close about me, for the
coal-stove in the front end of the car was no match for the frigidity of
the vast ichu-brown pampa de Junín across which we were soon speeding.
Only by frequently scratching a peep-hole in the frosted window could I
gaze out upon the drear yellow world, with its snow peaks rising
slightly above it in the distance and its great flocks of
cold-impervious llamas feeding along the way between ice-coated streams
and pools. Off in both directions stood scattered, stone huts with
pampa-grass roofs, before which barefoot (brr!) Indian women stood or
squatted, and scantily clad children gazed after the train with the
stolidity and indifference to the bitter cold of the adobe images they
somehow suggested. Here was the scene of the great battle of Junín in
which the soldiers of Bolívar defeated the Spanish host; but it is not
likely that either pursued or pursuers dripped with perspiration. A
dreary walk, indeed, this would have been across the icy, endless,
yellow pampa.
A brilliant sun popped up instantly in a faultless sky, like some
jack-in-the-box suddenly released; but though it flooded all the visible
world with golden light, it brought slight warmth. Beside each seat of
our car was an electric button, and beneath it a list of possibilities,
in English and Spanish. One had only to press it and presto! a big black
negro—no, my memories of other days deceive me; no big black negro would
get this high in the world, unless he were dragged there by main force—a
little, dapper, noiseless, inscrutable, white-jacketed Chinaman slipped
down upon one and lent an attentive, yet haughty ear into which one
whispered the desires of the inner man, tempered by a subconscious
regard for one’s purse; calling modestly for toast and coffee, if one
were a mere American vagabond who had recently fallen among thiev—beg
pardon, physicians; or for the “whole damn works,” which meant the same
coffee and toast plus a plate of bacon and eggs, if one were an American
miner homeward bound, to whom money is as water to the man whose pocket
holdeth a quart bottle of concentrated joyfulness. Across the aisle were
two such, from whom sounded now and then some pleasant anticipation of
homecoming:
“An’ when I get back to Pittsburgh I’m goin’ into the —— House bar and
tell Joe to mix me a real, honest-to-God gin-ricky. An’ when he says
‘Where t’ell you been these two years, Hank?’ I’ll jus’ say ‘Diggin’
coal down in Goyllaris—hic—quisca, Joe,’ an’ he’ll call the bouncer to
throw me out.”
A big, blue lake, Chinchaycocha, on the distant right drew the eyes
toward it; then came a brief halt at the town of Junín, an extensive
collection of cobble-stone huts and fences, with a two-tower church in
their midst and steam rising on the wintry air from the nostrils of
every living being. Then at last, after an extended, wandering search,
the train found the rocky bed of a small river, and wound and squirmed
with it through half-hidden openings in the hills until a long-drawn
masculine whistle caused us to scratch a new peep-hole in the frosted
window, to find Oroya rising up to meet us.
Here the American train and roadbed abandoned us to the tender mercies
of the Ferrocarril Central, theoretically under English management, but
in practice dismally Latin-American from cow-catcher to trailing
draw-bar. Packed into the far corner of a seat upholstered only in name,
I had frozen from toes to the bottom of my poncho for two mortal hours
before the Peruvian engineer came to an understanding with the Peruvian
conductor and station-master, and dragged us slowly out of town. From a
spot on the earth—and nothing more—called Ticlio, summit of the line, we
began the long coast down to the Pacific, through all the customary 65
tunnels, 67 bridges and 16 switchbacks, where for the brakes to lose
control would have been to land us in Hades instead of Lima. Hour after
hour the arid, savage scenery slid upward. Here the train glided
serenely along on the bottomless edge of things; now and again we came
out directly above, a thousand feet above, a dusty, rock-scattered town,
with rows of stones laid on the sheet-iron roofs to keep them from
escaping such dreary surroundings, and zigzagged an hour, often on six
tracks one above the other, down to it, only to continue the descent as
swiftly beyond. A score of places recalled the story of the young
graduate engineer who protested to the American whose name is forever
linked with this engineering feat, “Why, Meiggs, we can’t run a railroad
along there in that sliding shale!” “Can’t, eh?” the anecdote continues,
“Well, young man, that’s just where she’s got to go, and if you can’t
find room for her on the ground, we’ll hang her from balloons.”
Bit by bit the Andes began to take on slight touches of green. The
Rimac, chattering downward toward the sea, gave us more and more
elbow-room, the well-dressed town of Chosica flashed past us like an
oasis of civilization, and we sped in truly metropolitan fashion on down
the darkening valley, surrounded by whole mountains of broken rock,
tufts of cactus and a few hardy willows drinking their life from the
widening stream, on toward the glowing sunset and into the black night.
Electric lights, real lights in their full candle-power, began to dot
the darkness, then flashed past us, throwing their insolent glare into
our dust-veiled faces; the roar of a real city, with clanging
street-cars and rumbling wagons rose about us; a long station-platform
crowded with an urban throng came to a halt beside us, and I descended
in the thickness of the summer night in the City of Kings, three miles
below where I had stepped forth that morning into the wintry dawn.