ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL
It is due, I suppose, to some error in my make-up that my interest in
any given corner of the earth fades in proportion as it approaches
modern civilization and easy accessibility. To your incurable vagabond
may come a momentary thrill, if not of pleasure, at least of
contentment, with the feel of city pavements once more under his feet
after long hand to hand combat with the wilderness, and the knowledge
that to go a journey he has only to signal an electric street-car on the
nearest corner. But the attraction quickly palls. Visions of the winding
trail soon begin again to torture him with their solicitations, the
placid ways of urban man take on a drab and colorless artificiality, and
once more the realization comes that to him life offers genuine
satisfaction only when he is struggling onward toward some distant and
possibly unattainable goal.
Such a place is Lima. The former capital of Spanish America has, to be
sure, its points of interest; old colonial palaces where the shades of
cloaked viceroys seem still to linger, cloistered walls inclosing the
tonsured and cowled atmosphere of the Middle Ages, narrow streets with
long vistas of overhanging Moorish balconies wherein still lurks the
charm of other days. But these things are all but buried under the
stereotyped conveniences and commonplace manners of the modern world.
Upon the romance and air of antiquity of a Spanish city of long ago,
transplanted to this sandy coast, has intruded the aggressive urge of
commerce; from between the carved mahogany bars of quaint _miradores_
peers the face of trade; in and out of massive old wooden street-doors
studded with brass come bales of merchandise, often stacked high in the
beautiful patios and secluded retreats of former generations. Here, for
the first time in South America, were rumors of strikes and complaints
of the “servant problem.” Workmen and domestics, advanced already to a
scale of wages about half that of our own land, were coming more and
more to a knowledge of their worth and power, their striving
unfortunately taking that ultra-modern form of careless workmanship and
insolence. Here, for the first time, the militant “cost of living”
weighed down on the mass of mankind like a leaden blanket. Lima’s
thousand and one restaurants—why do none of them seek a virgin field in
the highlands?—serve their clients with the mechanical impersonality of
world capitals. Like the population, these show that absence of a
“middle class” characteristic of Latin-American society, the marked
contrast of the great bulk of sandaled poor rubbing shoulders with
faultless Parisian attire; either they are repulsive workingmen’s
“dumps,” or outwardly regal in manner and inwardly of purse-flattening
properties, where nothing national and unique is to be found, unless it
be some rare local delicacy, such as _asado de chivito_,—roast leg of
young goat. Whatever exclusive and characteristic remains on the surface
is grouped in and about the great covered market-place, where long rows
of strange indigenous and familiar foreign wares stretch in many-hued
and quaint juxtaposition, or hovers about a few surviving customs of
bygone days, such as the milkman—who is more often a woman—making his
morning round astride horse or mule, with his cans hanging like
saddle-bags from between his legs.
He who comes down upon them from above will find the people of the coast
more vivacious than those of the chilly upper Andes, where the perennial
gauntness of nature inclines to perpetual gloom. The limeño has been
likened to the Andalusian in his fondness for dress, variety, and
dissipation, in his gaiety and quickness of wit, his open frankness and
tendency to extravagance. Certainly his speech has the lisp of
Andalusia—“Do’ copita’ de pi’co, señore’”—and his Castilian has not the
purity of that of Bogotá. Yet his gaiety is only comparative. There is
an innate gloominess and passive pessimism everywhere in South American
society that cannot but strike the visitor who comes direct from more
favored lands. The morose Indian of the uplands forms a scarcely
noticeable part of the population of Lima. On those rare occasions when
he comes down, or more often is brought as a conscript to serve his time
as soldier in the capital, he often falls quick victim to the white
plague, which finds easy breeding-place in the disused cells of his
overdeveloped lungs, built for the scant, thin air of the Sierra. The
cholo or mestizo, commonly of a lesser percentage of aboriginal than of
Spanish blood, makes up the bulk of the population. Then there is the
_zambo_, bred of the intermingling of the Indian and negro, a robust,
stubborn, and revengeful fellow. Merchants from all the varying
nationalities of Europe keep shop side by side, with an intermingling of
“Turks” and even more distant races, and American engineers stride
through the streets at all hours of the day. Yet Lima is essentially a
Spanish-American city, for all that; where the pallid, waxy complexion
of the gente decente is much in evidence. The women of this caste are
often beautiful; so, for that matter, are the men. In a population that
may almost be termed cosmopolitan, the Chinaman holds a considerable
place. After the abolition of slavery in 1855, large numbers of coolies
were imported for the plantations of the Peruvian coast, and Celestials
of higher caste have since taken advantage of Peru’s open-door policy
and the Japanese steamship lines. So that to-day there are temples and
joss-houses and opium dens in Lima, and men in “European” dress, who are
not Europeans, lean in the doorways of old colonial mansions transformed
into Oriental shops. The Chinese of Lima occupy a wider field of
activity than almost anywhere else in the Western hemisphere. Not only
is a large percentage of the retail and restaurant business in their
hands, but scores of _herbolarios_, “herbists,” we might say, have
stretched their signs across the old-time façades and blinded miradores
of what were in viceregal days the residences of haughty families. Only
the old men still cling to the national dress, and the pigtail has
entirely disappeared. Here, too, the Chinaman sinks to depths not
familiar to us of the north, and not only does the race furnish many of
the street-sweepers of the capital, but it is no rare sight to see an
oval-eyed personification of poverty hobbling along the main
thoroughfares “shooting snipes” in the gutters.
The “masses” of Lima dwell in _vecindades_, which are none the less
tenements for being packed together on the ground floor along either
side of narrow _callejones_, blind alleys in which all the activities of
the household from baby’s bath to the worship of a tin Virgin
intermingle, instead of being piled one above the other. The better
houses are spacious and airy within, though outwardly monotonous, built
of mud and cane and plaster, their façades here resembling marble at a
distance, there painted pale blue, or pink, or yellow. In the
mud-and-bamboo Cathedral, the most imposing in appearance in Spanish
America, the mummified skeleton of Pizarro, the jaws wired like those of
some prehistoric creature in a museum, is made a peep-show, after the
crude Spanish fashion. The “Cine” has all but driven out the theater and
whatever of national or racial the latter brought with it. The visitor
who knows no Spanish could easily guess the business of a shop
announcing itself a “Plomería y Gasfitería.” The Lima barber, calling
his establishment a “Peluquería y Perfumería,” leaves no doubt as to
what effeminate fate may befall one who ventures into his den.
This mid-winter season of July and August, they say, is no time to see
Lima at its best. The traveler who has been a thousand times assured
that rain never falls on the coast of Peru will be astonished to find
the streets often slimy and soaking wet with _garúa_, the Scotch mist
that turns everything clammy and chill, yet never reaches the point
where the shops find it worth while to include umbrellas among their
stock. For days, and even weeks, the sun is invisible, and the capital
lies heavy under leaden skies and a muggy blanket of mist, cold, dank,
and gloomy. That is a rare day in this season when a brilliant sun makes
it worth while to climb San Cristobal hill, a bare, peaked,
rock-and-shale pyramid rising close above Lima on the north, from which
he who has chosen his time well may catch a view not only of Callao and
its island framed by the intense blue of the Pacific, but of the
snowclads of the Sierra. The city with its 160,000 inhabitants lies flat
in its arid setting, the disk of the bull-ring in the foreground, an
irregular triangle with its base resting on the babbling Rimac, without
chimneys, almost without smoke-stacks; for its industries are still
chiefly confined to handicraft. The red tiles that give the prevailing
color to the cities of the Andes are here unknown. The roofs, made of
sticks and mud, are flat, like those of Palestine, and are the family
promenades and garbage-grounds, and the abode of smaller live stock,
especially of roosters, whose raucous saluting of each new day is not to
be escaped by the most fortunate resident. Cock-fighting is still the
most popular sport of the cholo classes. It is impossible to appear in
public without being pestered by a constant procession of
_suerteros_—offering _suerte_, or luck—vendors of lottery-tickets who
fill the streets with their bawling from morning—late morning, for Lima
is no early riser—to midnight.
For all its modern aspect, Lima is still Latin-American in temperament.
Dawn brings to light personal habits little less reprehensible than
those of Quito. A package of films mailed from the United States cost me
two days of red-tape at the post-office, and the charges exceeded the
original cost. A dozen bags of mail from the north were lost in Callao
harbor through the inexcusable carelessness of the bargemen; the
government refused to make reparation to the addressees on the ground
that the law relieved it of responsibility for “unavoidable losses by
shipwreck!” An abortive revolution enlivened the last days of July.
Strolling into the plaza one evening, I was jostled by a group of
youthful roughs firing revolvers into the air as they went. That night
the mob assaulted the home of a former president, with casualties of
three killed and a dozen wounded, and the executive of a year before was
lodged in a cell at the penitentiary. Yet the films at a “Cine” a block
away ran on without a tremor, and but for the fact that the shops took
down their shutters somewhat later than usual, there was nothing left
next morning to recall the occurrence. A few days later the principal
newspaper announced solemnly that the ex-president had gone to Panama
“for motives of health.”
The national museum was officially open, though unofficially closed, on
the day of my visit. But the experienced traveler can always win his
point with the doorkeeper of a South American institution, and I was
soon treading the resounding halls between lines of a dead world’s
relics. Mummies from prehistoric days, their knees drawn up to their
chins, a look half of disgust, half of pain on their osseous features,
squatted along a wall. Some were still covered with many-colored
wrappings, enclosing in clumsy bundles not merely their bodies, but all
their possessions, their protruding heads still in fantastic masks and
wigs, just as they had been found in the burial caves of the Sierra.
Others, reputed Incas, were contained in huge bales in which they stood
erect, as befitted their high caste, their heads unmasked, the whole
covered with a well-preserved linen-like cloth. The floor of one large
room was completely covered with hundreds of skulls in careful rows.
Some showed prehistoric trepanning, irregular holes sawed out of them,
and the subsequent growth of the bone proving that the warrior had lived
long after his overthrow in battle. A drowsy cholo was breaking up
skeletons and clawing earth out of skulls with the expressionless
placidity with which he might have sorted potatoes.
The director deigned to show me in person through the gallery of
paintings. We paused first before an immense canvas depicting the
funeral of Atahuallpa.
“A modern work?” I remarked, merely to make conversation.
“No, no, señor,” replied the director vehemently, “that is antigua. It
was painted nearly forty years ago.”
“The fat priest is Valverde, I suppose, and this man with a beard must
be Pizarro?”
“Just so, señor, and the man behind is Pizarro’s brother, Almagro.”
“His brother?”
[Illustration:
The semi-weekly lottery drawing in the main plaza of Lima. Two of the
men who turn the hollow spheres are blind, and the boys who thrust
in a hand to draw out a number are supposedly below the age of
corruption]
[Illustration:
All aboard! A Sunday excursion that was not posed, but was snapped
just as it came along the road near Pachacámac on the Peruvian coast]
But the director persisted in the unhistorical relationship, in which he
was confirmed by an assistant, in spite of the fact that the figure in
question represented a man some fifteen years younger than the chief
Conquistador.
“Why is the back of Almagro’s head missing?”
“Ah, señor,” sighed the director, with a shrug of the shoulders, “What
would you? The Chilians cut out this picture and carried it home. It
used to be several feet longer, and there were many other caballeros in
the group.”
Among whom was the real Almagro, no doubt. I made the circuit of the
gallery, then turned an inquiring eye on my companion.
“Ah—er—you are looking for the picture that used to be here?” he
stammered, quick to catch my expression.
“Yes, the famous portrait of Pizarro.”
“Well, it used to hang right here,” said the director, pointing to a
blank space on the wall, as at some object of extraordinary interest.
“But a few weeks ago the Señor Presidente de la República sent for it,
because he wants it in his own house.”
On my return I dropped in at the University of San Marcos, oldest in
America and antedating our most ancient by nearly a century. It was
pitifully like other Latin-American schools. The rector, having led me
through a dozen empty school-rooms grouped about several patios, and
having given the history in detail of a collection of silver cups
“graciously awarded the University” by the king of this and the emperor
of that, expressed unbounded surprise that I should wish to see a class
at work. When it became evident that he could not shake me off with
babbling courtesies, he pointed out the door of a class in law and
disappeared, as if he would not have it known who was responsible for
the unusual intrusion. Some twenty-five young men, not so young either,
being almost all adorned with mustaches, were lounging on benches of the
amphitheater. The professor, comfortably seated in a sort of pulpit, was
reading in a languid and utterly dispassionate voice—not a lecture he
had himself prepared, but from a book purchasable at a dollar or two,
and readable, I trust, by the students themselves. Meanwhile the
students napped, wrote letters, exchanged jokes, and discussed with
their neighbors the extraordinary advent of a stranger in their midst.
No doubt they had some other means and place of acquiring the knowledge
indispensable even to a South American lawyer; but what they gained by
attending classes was hard to guess. I had been the object of curiosity
for some time before the professor caught sight of me. He left off
reading at once, and sparred for time with a string of stale pedagogical
jokes until I saw fit to remove my annoying presence. Other class-rooms
demonstrated that famous old San Marcos is still in the world of long
ago, its methods of instruction as antiquated as its text-books,
heritages of a Jesuitical past, unavoidably so because of the rarity of
Spanish translations of modern works.
During all July my ambition remained at a low ebb, and my most extended
acquaintance was with the medical profession. “Yu Sui, Herbolario de
Pekin, physician extraordinary to his Excellency, the Chinese Minister,”
assured me I had dysentery, but no fever, and concocted the daily bottle
of herbs accordingly. The chief Italian specialist based his treatment
on the fact that I had fever, but no dysentery. Fortunately Lima has not
yet been invaded by that sect that would have robbed me of the gloomy
pleasure of having anything. Every gringo who had ever ventured a
hundred miles into the interior had his own individual “sure cure”; and
I had reached the point where I would have worn a tin charm about my
neck, had anyone asserted it efficacious. Yet when once I had discovered
a real physician, Anglo-Saxon in blood and of tropical experience, the
remedy—intermuscular injections of emetine—was quickly effective.
A no less potent factor in the recovery, however, was the hospitality of
mine own people in Bellavista (“Beyabi’ta,” locally) on the outskirts of
Callao. Genuine electric-cars sped across the cool, flat country in a
brief half-hour, from the capital to the edge of the Pacific I had not
seen since landing in Cartagena thirteen months before. Here it was
often brilliant summer, and from the housetop promenade spread out all
Callao harbor, jutting La Punta, and the island of San Lorenzo in their
intense blue setting, and perhaps even the snow-white line of the
Sierra, while over the capital, a bare eight miles away, hung the
opaque, mid-winter blanket of haze and gloom. The beach was near at
hand, the sea-breeze constant, and the soporific roar of the surf never
silent. The landscape, flat and arid, had a charm of its own, and a
network of mud fences, on the broad tops of which one might promenade
for miles.
One Sunday during convalescence I visited ancient Pachacámac. Swift
interurban cars bore us through morning-misty Miraflores and Barranco to
Chorillos, proudest watering-place of the rainless Peruvian coast, where
we mounted horses and rode away into the desert by a broad trail that
paralleled the shore within hearing of the dull roll of the surf. It was
a veritable Sahara, in which the sand, everywhere ankle-deep, lay in
wind-blown ridges. The horizon rose before us as at sea, and the mirage
of heat-waves seemed rivers flowing landward. The uncorrected
imagination is wont to picture the coast of Peru as utterly flat, as
well as sandy. It is so only in part. Hills of sand that were almost
mountains stretched down to the sea, like buttresses fashioned to
support the mammoth wall of the Andes that bounded the horizon on the
left. The summits of many were hidden in mists, the garúa from which had
given life to the brilliant green _lomas_ and patches where flocks feed
in certain seasons; and the smiling valley of Lurín, watered by a stream
smaller than the Rimac and still cold from the snows above, was as
inviting in its contrast to the repulsive, naked hills as any desert
oasis. Down on the floor of the valley this, too, seemed sandy and dry,
but the _acequias_ that still water it, as in the days of the Incas,
sustain a wilderness of scrubby trees, among which a chiefly negro
population lolls in open-work huts. Nature seems to have arranged her
seasons with foresight here; for when the garúa gives way to blazing
summer, the rainy season and the melting snows above swell the rivers to
a volume that affords widespread irrigation.
Pachacámac, the Animator of the Universe, not to be confused with the
Sun-god of the Incas, had his temple on the edge of this forbidding
waste of sand, overlooking the sea that chafes incessantly at its feet.
It was the Benares of the ancient Peruvians, not merely because it drew
pilgrims from all the surrounding world, but because here those who
could brought and disposed of their dead. Conquered by the Incas nearly
two centuries before the coming of the Spaniards, a Temple of the Sun
was added; but the sun-worshippers, like their conquerors in turn, were
too politic to suppress the earlier religion entirely, and merely merged
it with their own. “In a room closely shut and stinking,” says Estete,
the Spanish chronicler, “was an idol made of wood, very dirty, which
they called god, who creates and sustains us. It was held in great
veneration and at its feet were offerings.” Different, indeed, from many
an Andean place of worship to-day! It is a place of death in a double
sense. Scuttling lizards and sand-vipers are the only forms of life that
accentuate its silent, repulsive sterility. Human skulls kick about
underfoot through all the extent of the ruins, and disintegrated
skeletons lie everywhere. Only the earthen pots and _huacos_ are of
financial value to the looters; the heads of the men who made them are
not worth the gathering. The ruins are extensive, a few of the great
terraced temples still moderately well preserved. But being of clay or
adobe, dreary, yellow-brown, they offer no contrast in color to the
surrounding desert hills, and nothing to compare with the splendid
wrought-stone monuments of those wonderful architects, the ancient
Peruvians of the highlands.
The year had run over into September before I turned my face upward
again toward the Sierra, to pick up the broken thread of my journey.
Beyond Chosica the naked hills closed in, and the train climbed all day
between barren, echoing walls of rock, the exhilarating mountain air
cutting ever deeper into my lungs, as the glorious Italian skies of the
cloudless upper plateau spread their ever-broadening canopy above. Snow
appeared on far-off peaks, descended to meet us, and spread in patches
about and below us. As the air thinned, our faces flushed and tingled; a
tendency to sleepiness was succeeded by a feeling of exhilaration and an
inclination to grow talkative. My fellow-passengers began to show signs
of distress at the altitude, growing more and more red-faced, with
bloodshot eyes; then one by one they frankly succumbed to mountain
sickness as the train continued inexorably upward. As the experienced
sailor struts about among his seasick fellows, so I caught myself gazing
with haughty scorn upon the weaklings about me. Obviously a man who had
tramped the lofty páramos from far-off Bogotá, often under a heavy pack,
was immune to any effects of altitude.
But there is imbedded in ancient literature something to the effect that
pride is often closely attended by a downfall. At Ticlio, in the crisp,
cold afternoon, I noted that the mere exertion of lifting my baggage
from the main to the branch-line train set my heart in a strange
flutter. A more cautious person, too, would not have drunk three cups of
black coffee in the miserable little station lunch-room so soon after
weeks of rigid diet. Laboriously we climbed to the highest railroad
point in the world, flanked by an immense blue glacier, up again on the
bare, treeless, silent pampas, among cobble-stone hovels and ichu, the
stolid, expressionless Indians of the highlands, and drew up at dusk in
Morococha. The cheerless mining-camp, more than three miles above the
sea, lay scattered along a dreary, bowl-shaped valley, with a vista of
three cold, steel-blue lagoons, across which the enclosing snowclads
threw their violet evening shadows. In this breathless region my pulse
started savagely at every exertion, but being already arrived, I
supposed myself as safe from mountain sickness as a disembarking
passenger from mal de mer. In the manager’s cozy, stone-walled quarters
the blazing fireplace, with its unaccustomed artificial heat and its
clouds of tobacco-smoke, threatened suffocation and forced me to step
out frequently into the crisp, night air to catch my breath. But no
Indian of the highland could have boasted himself in finer physical
spirits when we wandered away toward ten, panting considerably, to be
sure, even at a very moderate pace, up the slope to the superintendent’s
dwelling.
Barely had I turned in, however, when I began gasping for breath. Within
an hour my host found that I had a respiration of 52 and a pulse of 125.
All night long I struggled open-mouthed, with the sound of an
accelerated steam-pump in bad repair, my heart engaged in what promised
to be a successful attempt to pound its way out through my back, until
my very shoulder-blades ached, and all the valley of Morococha seemed to
echo with its thumping. It was too much! To be scarcely recovered from
one long, laborious, Andean ailment, only to blow up of my own steam in
this absurd land!
In the morning the mine-doctor came with his stethescope, mumbled
“soroche” in a weary, unsympathetic voice, left some pills and
instructions, and was gone. All day long I lay fasting, the snowclads
gazing down upon me with icy, Andean indifference. Gradually the
pounding of my heart ceased to drown out all other sounds, and my lungs
resumed their accustomed action. On the following morning, though still
weak and wobbly-legged, aching from crown to toe, I was able to be
about, the day after, I strode slowly about the camp with something of
the old-time vigor. In the end the experience seemed to be advantageous,
for with every day thereafter I advanced to a faultless physical
condition that was to accompany me on all the rest of the journey.
There are a score of theories concerning this mountain-sickness, known
throughout Peru by the Quichua word _soroche_ and in the basin of the
Titicaca as _puna_. Who may be subject to it, what will prevent it,
whether or not previous experience will or will not give immunity, are
even greater mysteries than those surrounding its prototype, the bugbear
of ocean travel. No two persons are ever affected alike by it. Commonly
it is accompanied by a raging headache. All foreigners contracted for
mine employment in this region are subjected to a rigid physical
examination before they ascend “the Hill,” yet it is not unusual to make
up a special train and rush a victim down to the coast. Among horses,
with which it takes the form of blind-staggers and often renders the
animal unfit for further service, it is known as _veta_, from the
aboriginal superstition that it is caused by veins of ore (vetas) in the
earth.
Morococha, like its rival, Cerro de Pasco, is a little world of its own,
exclusively mining in its raison d’être and considerably marked by
Anglo-Saxon influence. Though many of the natives still huddle in dismal
huts, without windows and with dirt floors, the civilizing effect of the
gringo is in some evidence, at least in those superficial matters of
small habits, amusements, and clothing. American hob-nailed boots are
almost as frequently worn by the Indian men as the _llanqui_, or hairy
cowhide sandal. Bitter cold though it is, even at noonday, the Indians
of female persuasion go scantily clad and almost universally barefoot.
The miners work nine hours a day, seven days a week, and receive an
average of something more than a dollar a day—a high wage from the
Andean Indian point of view. The considerable efficiency of both Indian
and cholo workmen is curtailed by much coca-chewing and hard drinking.
Following each pay-day, and during the many fiestas, a majority of the
native miners go on an extended debauch, leaving the mines often so
short-handed that operations virtually cease. The effect of the
celebration does not wear off for several days, so that enterprise is
commonly paralyzed a week or more in every month. The company is
powerless to remedy this drawback, and the government—that scapegoat of
all imperfections throughout South America—shows no disposition to
better conditions, even were it possible. An Indian injured in the mine
is more apt to run away than to report at the hospital, and to appear
later as a litigant against the company, demanding—and with government
aid frequently winning—a sinecure for life. Even when the injured man is
attended by the mine-doctor, and his broken leg bound with splints or
his wound properly treated with antiseptic care, he is likely to be
found next morning with the bandages torn off, and with coca leaves, or
a chicken leg, or something as efficacious substituted.
It must be admitted that his gringo superiors do not set the native
miner a perfect example in his chief vice, the excessive consumption of
alcohol. In the social vacuum that must necessarily exist in such a
community, drinking and gambling are the favorite methods of putting to
rout dull care. The altitude soon gets on the nerves, seeming to call
for some such stimulant; at least, it is the custom to “lay to the
altitude” any species of misdemeanor, or the formation of habits unknown
to the subject before his arrival. Somehow it strikes the passing
observer as wicked to send these small-lunged, sea-level men of other
climes up here to gasp through life at a height fitted only to the
barrel-chested Indian and his fellow-beast of burden, the llama. Both
physically and temperamentally the effect of the altitude is curious.
Water boils at so low a temperature that a finger can almost be thrust
into it with impunity. Fireplaces are set in action by nonchalantly
throwing two or three beer-bottlesful of kerosene into the blaze. Those
accustomed to the heights for generations are far sturdier and less
vivacious than those of lower levels. Newcomers, on the other hand, are
easily excited and rattle-brained, dashing about like the proverbial
“hen with its head cut off,” futile in proportion to their striving. In
the gringo community it is a standing jest that the American or
Englishman most phlegmatic at sea-level will spend an hour trying to
shave, and grow so hen-minded over that simple task that he often gives
up in despair. The exhilaration is physical as well as mental. Baseball
players, far from losing their customary prowess in this thin air, are
given to running their legs off in their excitement, and must often be
restrained lest they burst their lungs.
It is half-jokingly asserted that after a few months in the mines it is
not safe to open a bottle or a “jack-pot” in the presence of a
minister’s son. Unfortunately the jest seems to have serious basis in
fact. The tighter the lines that bound their youth, the more completely
do the newcomers cast them off when removed from the influence of home
ties and neighborly opinion. Small wonder the Latin races accuse the
Anglo-Saxon of hypocrisy. The Americans who live and mine up and down
the Sierra have convinced Peruvians that every living American drinks
quarts of whiskey neat every day, and squanders his substance in
gambling, or if luck runs his way, in the “stews” of Lima. This is not
to say that all gringos in Morococha and Cerro de Pasco fall into an
evil manner of life, or that there are not many more who perform their
tasks fully and efficiently, in spite of an occasional debauch. Those
who bring with them very strong wills, or some equivalent for them,
retain the tautness of their moral fiber, for all the altitude. The
percentage of men who go astray is such, however, that it becomes almost
a subject for congratulation to see a well-kept frame and a wholesome,
unlined face in these Andean communities, where dissipated countenances
are rather the rule than the exception. Then, too, often arriving as
youths, with little experience of life except the half-cloistered one of
our colleges, the younger seem to feel it necessary to prove themselves
“men,” and to keep up the local reputation for what a missionary
referred to as “those rough mining fellows” by assuming a bold, gruff,
even vulgar exterior. All question of “morality” aside, the mere
materialistic problem of keeping up the efficiency of their force would
seem to make some curtailment of the prevailing customs worth the
trouble of the mine-owners. But even those sent down to assume charge
too often fall victims to that false philosophy of “a short life and a
merry one.”
Gringo employees of higher rank command generous salaries and are well
housed, with all the comforts that can conveniently be transported to
this lofty region. Coming, for the most part, directly from England or
the United States, they take naturally to the artificial heat which the
natives rarely adopt. Before the fireplace at the club the conversation
jumps from “bridge” to tetrahydrite ore, and back again to poker with,
to the layman, a vertiginous speed, amid the rattle of glasses and
bottles and the strains of a tireless phonograph. A considerable portion
of the talk might frankly be called gossip; for South America has this
in common with small towns, that every gringo up and down the continent
knows every other, at least by hearsay, his private character and his
domestic difficulties.
The traveler through South America is frequently struck by the fact that
large enterprises, even British in ownership, are more often than not
actually and practically in charge of Americans. The manager and most of
the office force may be English, but the actual motive power, the man
who makes the ore fly or sets the trains to running, is apt to be a
youthful superintendent or engineer but a few years out of one of our
technical colleges. This is no argument for or against the mentality or
ability of either nationality. These are their natural spheres of
action, purely the result of environment. The American, coming from a
land where precedent is given short shrift, and accustomed to furnish
his own initiative, is best fitted for pushing the pioneer work, for
attacking unprecedented problems and carrying the enterprise on to the
point where it is established and running smoothly. The Englishman,
product of an older and more settled society, is more easily content to
continue an established undertaking, to “stick on the job,” while the
American moves on to attack new and unfamiliar problems.
[Illustration:
The bleak mining town of Morococha, more than 16,000 feet above
sea-level. Though but twelve degrees south of the equator, dawn
often finds the place completely covered with snow, and ice forms on
the edges of the chain of lakes, the outlet from which is to the
Amazon]
[Illustration:
The American miners of Morococha live in comfort for all the altitude
and bleakness of their surroundings. In spite of their example,
however, the natives still shiver through the day and huddle through
the night without artificial heat]
I visited the chief mines of Morococha with the youthful American
superintendent. They presented nothing unusual to one acquainted with
those of Mexico, than which they were slightly more crude and
undeveloped in their methods. Some details of life were different; the
peons wore plenty of clothing, ragged and extremely bedraggled, hats,
and even footwear, for it was little less cold down in the mine
galleries than in the crisp, wintry mountain air and the brilliant yet
chill sunshine that flooded the glacier-draped valley and the
indigo-blue lakes above. We climbed and crawled and dragged ourselves by
elbows, knees, shoulders, hands and feet through ancient and modern
“stopes,” by slippery ladders, crude stairways, or slimy ropes, in an
eternal darkness made barely visible by our torches. The Indian miners,
some of them but half-grown boys, each and all had a cheek puffed out by
a quid of coca. They took a half-hour “coca-time” each afternoon, as
religiously as an Englishman does for his tea. Those who shoveled away
the mountain of ore in the sunshine outside earned seventy cents a day;
in the Natividad mine, where water poured incessantly and required
oilskins, the workmen nearly doubled this wage. The practical gringo
miners of to-day had somewhat different views of the ancient Peruvian
civilization than its historians, and considered the stories of Inca
wealth vastly exaggerated. Many a time, to be sure, a vein that promised
rich reward was soon found to have been “stoped out” by the Incas or
colonial Spaniards; but these neither knew enough about effective
mining, nor went deep enough to get any such quantity of gold as
tradition ascribes to them. Moreover, copper is the chief ore of Peru,
and even silver owes its importance here almost entirely to the fact
that the copper is highly argentiferous.
Beyond Oroya the railways of central Peru spread out in a Y, at the
right-hand end of which is Huancayo, something more than two hundred
miles from Lima, as is Cerro de Pasco on the other branch. Some time
after the hour set, an engine was found somewhere in or about the
junction, and toward noon we drifted away down a gorge into which
portly, dry hills thrust themselves alternately from either side.
Country women were washing their clothes in the scanty river; here and
there, at the base of amphitheatrical bluffs, wheat was being threshed
under the hoofs of circling horses. There were several dust-blown
stations, but no signs of towns, nor, indeed, a patch on which one might
have existed, except the one mud village of Llocllapampa in
mid-afternoon, familiar with its old Andean red-tile roofs. In the
first-class car was a crowd almost exclusively Peruvian, huge scarfs and
shawls about their throats, and many in overcoats; for not only had
Americans in their leather leggings disappeared, but even the outward
evidence of gringo influence; and I was once more swallowed up in the
purely native life of the Sierra. At length the gorge closed in,
squeezed us through three tunnels, and there opened out an interandean
valley, spreading far away north and south, cloud-shadows flecking its
surface, two snowclad peaks contemplating us with a lofty disdain from
over the crest of the enclosing wall. The train turned crab-wise toward
the nearer end of the valley, and set us down within walking distance of
Jauja.
The famous “Xauxa” of Prescott is rather colorless in its personality
and barren in its setting. The bells of llama trains, followed by their
as soft-footed, coca-chewing drivers, jangled by my window and died away
down the street. A considerable proportion of the population was
constantly struggling about the hydrant in the center of the plaza; the
rest were either simple Indians with coca- and pisco-brutalized faces,
or the haughty keepers of glorified peanut-stands. Smoke there was none,
of course, neither of industry nor of domestic comfort, and in contrast
to the bitter cold nights and the ice-box frigidity of every shade and
shadow, the uncovered sun was burning. Not even the murmur of open
sewers broke the languorous Andean silence, and in nothing but a few
slight details was the monotony of all towns of the Sierra broken. I was
back once more in the kingdom of candles, with its dreary, interminable,
read-less evenings.
The ancient Inca highway passed through “Sausa,” on the heights above
the present town, the beginnings of which Pizarro laid on his way to
Cuzco. The ruins were far more easily accessible than those of
Huamachuco, and neither so important nor so throttled with vegetation.
The surviving walls are chiefly of broken stone, some of lines of
square, some of round, rooms. The chief ruins appeared to have been a
double line of fortresses, which hung on the brow of the hill with a
truly Incaic view over the surrounding world. Strictly speaking, these
were not Inca monuments, but constructions of the Huancas, improved by
the Emperors of Cuzco. The tribe that once inhabited this broad valley
were conquered by the militant Incas, and forced to give tribute and
adopt the tongue of their conquerors, a dialect of which still persists
in the region. The plain was once a lake-bottom, stretching from beyond
Jauja to distant Huancayo. An hour’s walk from the town still brings one
to a cool and placid lagoon, surrounded by all but impenetrable marshes
and reeds, with numerous wild ducks winging their V-shaped course across
it. To-day the Mantaro river, like an unravelled cord, swings southward
past a few _pueblocitos_, among green groves that give relieving touches
of color to a scene at best bald and barren in aspect.
Long before train-time most of the population of Jauja, having no better
means of whiling away the afternoon, wandered out along the dusty road
to the station, isolated as some house of pestilence. That American
habit of racing breathlessly across the platform at the last moment is
not prevalent in Peru. For one thing, the _boletería_ ceases to
“function” long before the scheduled hour of departure, and he who
embarks without a ticket subjects himself to a fifty percent. increase
in fare—unless he has the fortune to be a compadre of some member of the
train-crew. In the second-class coach the travelers ranged from
broad-faced Indians to cholos in “civilized” garb and rubber collars,
the corresponding females wrapped from head to foot in crow-black
mantos. With the human deluge came corpulently stuffed alforjas, crude
implements of husbandry, distorted bundles of household effects, and, on
the backs of the Indian women, bulky in their heavy skirts unevenly
gathered about their draught-horse hips, loads of varying size from
which, with few exceptions, peered the face of a wide-eyed baby. All
these—the infants only excepted—my fellow-passengers proceeded to stuff
under the four lengthwise benches, into the racks above, or to hang from
the roof supports, until the car took on the aspect of an overstocked
pawnshop in which a multitude of tenement dwellers had taken sudden
refuge.
Above the door was the information, “96 ASIENTOS,” all of which were all
more than fully occupied when the engineer embraced the station-master
for the last time and the massed population of Jauja began to recede
into the distance. Within the car the prevailing tongue was Quichua. The
native conductor “grafted” with a fetching frankness here and there in
his struggle through the welter of humanity; the brakemen spent most of
the journey drinking the health of a group of cholos in a corner of the
coach. Chicha flowed like water. At every station old women crowded
through the car selling that nectar of the Incas, all purchasers
drinking from the same cup, and generally several from the same filling,
while the scrawny hags, waiting for its return, idly rubbed their bony
talons about the spout of the _cántaro_ under their arms. Almost every
traveler had his own supply of a more potent native beverage. The pisco
bottle with its licorice smell passed constantly from hand to hand, eyes
grew more and more bloodshot, tongues thicker, yet more talkative—for
the Andean Indian is taciturn in exact proportion to his
sobriety—eyelids heavy, and limbs clumsy. The tippling knew no limits
either of sex or age. Infants barely two years old frequently took a
long drink at the fiery bottle, and cooed with delight at the taste. The
railway company not only permitted, but abetted Peru’s national vice. If
the universal pastime threatened to flag for a moment, it was
resuscitated by the fifty-year old dwarf of a train-boy, who waded
incessantly through our legs with a bottle under each arm and a single
opaque glass in hand, urging all, from the aged Indian dreaming over the
cud of coca in his cheek to the best-dressed chola, to drink and be
merry, for to-morrow—he would be bound in the other direction.
Not a few of the Indian and cholo girls were robustly pretty, their
cheeks rosy in spite of their coppery tint. At one station there entered
the car a white Peruvian baby, richly dressed as some little princess,
fingerless white gloves on her tiny hands, borne on the back of an
unbelievably dirty Indian girl of twelve, whose filthy felt hat the
regally clad infant alternately picked and thrust its fingers into its
mouth. Its parents were enjoying babyless freedom with their friends in
the first-class car, and incidentally saving the difference in the
servant’s fare. Thus the unwashed Indian intrudes everywhere, always,
from altar to kitchen, from nursemaid to grave-digger, and the fact
never strikes the most haughty Andean as incongruous. Had the old
Spanish chroniclers been of the realistic school, we should no doubt
have learned that the Inca’s bread was also dropped on a mud floor, and
picked up with unwashed fingers before it was presented to him on a
golden platter. In all the pages of Prescott there is no suggestion of
uncleanliness. His Indians are as spotless as if they had been scrubbed
and scoured with New England zeal before they were admitted to the
muslin-shaded twilight of his study. Yet he who has physically traveled
through what was once the Empire of the Incas cannot but suspect that
the Puritan-bred historian, for all his marvelously living and breathing
masterpiece, inadvertently—or puritanically—gave in this respect a false
picture of the ancient kingdom.
[Illustration:
Miners of Morococha,—a Welch foreman and two of his gang, whom I had
brought to the surface from some 2000 feet underground. Note the
mine lamps. This particular “Natividad” mine is so wet that oilskins
are required]
[Illustration:
A typical miner of the high Peruvian Andes. The cloth around his head
under his hat is pink; his poncho, red and black; his feet are
covered with the hairy buskins worn by the men only]
It was nearing sunset when groves of eucalypti began to ride close by
the train-windows, then rows of mud huts alternating with little farms
of alfalfa, then larger adobe houses, and at length we drew up at
Huancayo, the end of railroading in central Peru. For many years there
have been plans to carry the railway on to Ayacucho, and even a wild
project of some day pushing it across to Cuzco, and of linking it up
with the railways of the south. Fortunately, nothing had yet come of the
scheme, and what lay before me depended thereafter on my own exertions,
with whatever of charm that remained to the ancient but now slightly
traveled route through the heart of Peru, as the reward.
Huancayo, boasting—as towns of the Sierra will—10,000 inhabitants, in a
rich and, in better seasons, well-watered valley, consists chiefly of
one long, broad street, perhaps the broadest in Peru, paved with small,
round stones, a ditch of water stagnating through its center. On either
side it is lined by wrought-iron rejas and open shop-doors; at either
end it dies out in sand and cactus-bordered paths between mud-huts. As
the main plaza of Riobamba is to Ecuador, this street forms the center
of what is reputed the greatest native market in Peru. Each Sunday it
offers a pulsating vista of Indians from a hundred miles around, in
every color known to an artist’s palette—and some which the boldest of
painters would not venture to use—an unbroken stretch of humanity,
shimmering in the glaring sunshine. An expert stenographer might wander
all day through the surging throng without being able to set down the
mere names of the wares displayed, to say nothing of the endless variety
of garments, types, faces, and customs. So packed with details is the
far-famed market, that only a cinematograph ribbon could give even a
faint notion of its activities; mere words are as powerless to paint its
motley variety as to catch the subtle charm of Huancayo itself, with its
perfect climate and crystalline sunshine.