CHAPTER XV

THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES

It was in the scattered _caserío_ of Marcas that I overtook a traveling

piano. I had barely installed myself by force and strategy in a mud den,

and tied Chusquito to a _molle_ tree before a heap of straw in which he

alternately rolled and ate, when a party of _gente_ arrived, among them

an old woman of the well-to-do chola class, carried astride the

shoulders of an Indian. Their chief spokesman was a lawyer named

Anchorena, a white man of some education and even a slight inkling of

geography, who was importing an upright piano for his mansion in

Ayacucho. With the descending night came a score of Indians carrying a

large, crude harp, several fifes and guitars, and a drum, to install

themselves along the mud benches of the corredor of the building inside

which the more or less drink-maudlin gente had spread themselves. It is

never the Peruvian’s way to interfere with the celebrations of his

underlings, however disturbing these may be, and far into the night the

“musicians” kept up an unbroken, dismal, tuneless, indigenous wail that

forced whoever would be heard to shout. Anchorena, professionally

inclined to like the sound of his own voice best, bellowed the evening

through in an endless account of a fellow-townsman’s visit to New York a

bare ten years before. Of all the marvelous experience, what seemed to

astonish both the teller and his hearers most, all but choking the

Indian-riding old woman with incredulity as often as he repeated it, was

the alleged fact that in the best New York hotels guests were not

permitted to spit on the floor. Come to think of it, that probably would

astonish a Peruvian.

To my surprise the natives were off ahead of us in the morning, and

Chusquito had picked his way many hundred feet down a stair-like trail

before we sighted the boxed piano, lying on its back on a bit of level

ground far below, with some twenty-five motley-arrayed Indians squatted

about it. The lawyer shook hands effusively and, putting Chusquito in

charge of the barefoot squire who was leading his own cream-colored

coast horse, invited me to listen to his endless chatter while we

continued the swift descent together.

The piano, made in Germany, had been set down in Lima for $500. Freight

to Huancayo had added ten percent. to the cost. From the end of the

railway to Ayacucho, a scant two hundred miles, the exotic plaything

must be transported on men’s backs, as the Incas imported a thousand

things—if not pianos—in the days of their power. This stage of the

journey would, under ordinary circumstances, have nearly doubled the

cost of the instrument. But Anchorena had the advantage of owning a

large hacienda in the great hot valley toward which we were descending,

and was able to cut the expense in two by drawing upon his own peons for

the labor of transportation. Three distinct gangs had been sent from his

estate, each to bear the burden a third of the distance. They were paid

the extraordinary wage of twenty cents a day, and supplied food, chicha,

and coca. Each gang carried the piano for a week, and it was the second

party celebrating the arrival of the third that had made noisy the night

at Marcas.

Each morning, shortly after midnight, the Indians rose to munch _mote_,

or boiled corn, for an hour or more, after which a heavy soup of corn,

potatoes, beans, and charqui, was served. Then for another hour the men

poked coca leaves one by one into their cheeks, mixing them with lime

from their little gourds, and by dawn, the effect of the chewing having

made itself felt, they rose to their feet and were off. Some forty peons

set their shoulders to the several poles attached to the boxed piano, a

picket-line with shovels, axes, and ropes was thrown out in advance to

widen the trail and lend assistance in the steeper places, and an army

of servants, cooks, squires, and the numerous _capatazes_, or bosses,

required for any effective Indian labor, brought up the rear of the

expedition.

From the punas of the day before, totally barren but for the dreary,

yellow ichu, we had descended through a zone of scrub bushes, lower

still through thirstless, sand-loving cactus, and were now dropping

swiftly through a dead, desert landscape by zigzag trails as painfully

steep and unpeopled as those of the Ecuador-Peruvian boundary.

Architecture changed with the altitude, so that the openwork huts became

little more than thatch roofs on poles, shading the languid, loafing

inhabitants of a place called Huarpo, hot as Panama, on the edge of a

river cutting off a broad, sandy valley I had seen from the sky the day

before. The surrounding region was a _cofardía_, that is, it belonged to

some wooden saint to whom it had been bequeathed by a _beata_, one of

the many pious old women who have thus left great tracts of the Andes

perpetually in morte main. For the desire of these sanctimonious matrons

is to provide a permanent income for the masses requisite to the repose

of their souls, and as their piety is commonly tempered with experience

of the ways of this world, they usually reject the suggestion of the

Church to sell the property and give the money directly to the priest,

lest he grow forgetful, in a way even priests have, and neglect his duty

toward the dwellers in purgatory. Huarpo is also paludic, or raging with

intermittent fevers, and no wise man drinks water within sight of it.

The appearance of a gringo in their midst aroused even these languid,

fever-hued, desert people to an unusual concentration of attention, one

bedraggled female bursting out at last with a remark in Quichua too

rapid for my ears, but which the lawyer translated: “Caramba! Si yo

estaba preñada de seguro saldría la cara gringuita!” It is a common

superstition in the Andes that a child will closely resemble the person

the mother has looked most fixedly upon during the months before its

birth.

In spite of the fact that everything I owned in South America, not only

my letter of credit and the papers necessary to prove my identity, but

even my money, had been left in my alforjas under the tender care of an

Indian boy miles behind, I did little worrying. The Andean traveler soon

grows accustomed to trusting his possessions to penniless peons, for

losses are astonishingly rare. For all that, I caught myself glancing

anxiously now and then up the wall of shale and loose rock that piled

into the sky above us. The piano-movers made good time, in spite of many

a zigzag and desert precipice, where rope and home-made tackle and the

widening of the trail were often necessary. We had not enjoyed the shade

of the huts an hour before the vanguard appeared, and shortly afterward

the lawyer’s bulky toy was laid in the baking sand beside us, and the

sweating, dust-covered carriers swarmed about the huge jar of _chicha de

molle_ that had been purchased for them. Progress would have been much

less rapid but for the fact that the third gang, knowing theirs was the

last shift, realized the advantage of finishing the journey to Ayacucho

as soon as possible. Yet their conception of hurrying was not exactly

vertiginous. They halted a long hour, not to eat, which they did only

morning and evening, but to prepare new quids of coca. From a large

grain-sack the lawyer dealt out to each of the peons with his own fair

hand a small handful of the narcotic leaves. They slunk forward one by

one, with outstretched hats, and a hint of eagerness on their besotted,

expressionless faces, with the air of men who would have sold their

souls for this few cents’ worth of brutalizing leaves.

[Illustration:

On the “road” to Ayacucho I overtook a lawyer who was importing a

piano. It required three gangs of Indians and nearly a month’s time

to transport the instrument less than 200 miles from the end of the

railway line]

[Illustration:

Carrying the piano across one of the typical bridges of the Peruvian

Andes. In many places the trail had to be widened or recut, and the

instrument had now and then to be let down or hauled up with ropes,

or block and tackle]

Chusquito, who had appeared at last, all intact but as covered with fine

sand as from a trip across the Sahara, was too tiny to have crossed the

river without wetting my baggage. It was the cream-colored coast horse

that saved me a detour of several miles to a bridge downstream. Except

for the lawyer and his mayordomos, the expedition stripped to the waist

and forded the stream inch by inch under the piano, slipping

individually, but fortunately not in unison, on the stones at the

bottom, and spending a half-hour in a precarious task that would have

been impossible in any but the dry season. In the shade of a molle grove

beyond, Anchorena, who had recently been won to up-to-date methods,

dealt out a quinine pill to each of the Indians. Few were able to

swallow them without chewing, and made wry faces and animal noises in

consequence. Several surreptitiously got rid of the detested white man’s

remedy while their master’s eyes were not upon them. Though the day was

still young, the cavalcade was to camp on the edge of the drowsy,

sand-carpeted town of Izcutaco, a bare mile above the river, and when I

left them the cooks were already heating over a blazing fire of molle

berries the enormous iron kettle, six feet in diameter, under which an

Indian had plodded, bent double, all day. When I took leave of the

lawyer, he hoped to reach Ayacucho in four days, making the journey from

Huancayo three weeks in duration, at a total cost of about $250, without

reckoning the labor lost on his hacienda while the three gangs were

going and coming and recuperating from their unwonted toil.

The molle tree covered all the great, tilted plain before me, lending it

an inviting green tinge in spite of its semi-desert character. Its

leaves are not unlike those of the willow, and it produces in clusters

great quantities of a peppery red berry somewhat resembling the currant

in appearance, and those of our red cedar in taste. These are well

supplied with saccharine and ferment readily, constituting the chief

curse of the region, in the form of an intoxicant so cheap and plentiful

that the inhabitants are more often drunk than working.

In Huanta the addressee of my Turkish letter was Don Emilio, ——, a

hearty countryman pleasantly free from the tiresome “polish” of the

Latin-American city-dweller. Early in our conversation he took pains to

inform me that he never permitted a priest to cross his threshold. A

fellow-townsman later confided to me that the prohibition dated from the

day that the oldest daughter of my host had been betrayed through the

ministrations of the confessional. There was something pleasantly

reminiscent of old patriarchial days in the way we all sat at meat

together around the long table in the back corredor, surrounded by a

flock of servants, the older, shy-mannered girls rising now and then

during the meal to tend shop. Yet it is not easy to make oneself

agreeable to such a family, for lack of intellectual interests cuts down

the conversation to the simplest matters. The women of the household

preferred the guttural Quichua, but Don Emilio found that tongue more

difficult than his accustomed Spanish. My host was one of the “city

fathers,” and perhaps the best-read man in the community, yet he

referred to the United States and Europe as “a place somewhere up the

coast,” and desired to know whether Italy was in New York, or New York

in Italy. I attempted, in my struggle to make conversation, to give the

family some conception of our northern midwinters.

“Brr! Nearly as cold as Huancavelica, it must be,” shivered the wife.

“How high is the highest Andes in your United States?” asked Don Emilio,

with a hint of suspicion in his voice.

I told him.

“Then it is impossible for it to be cold there,” he cried, conclusively,

“for that is scarcely higher than Huanta itself.”

Huanta lies close to the great _montaña_, or Amazonian hot-lands, and

the “chocolate de Huanta” is famous throughout Peru. But the trails to

that fruitful region are so nearly impassable that the interchange of

products is only a fraction of what it might be. Set in one of the dry

belts that are so frequent in the Andes, the great, tilted plain depends

on irrigation for most of its fruits. Molle, fig, and willow trees

abound, yet the ground beneath them is barren of grass. Eighty percent.

of the valley is said to be chiefly Indian in blood. Peons are paid an

average of twelve cents a day, and judging from what I saw of them, they

are grossly overpaid. Nearly a half-century ago Squier found

“drunkenness universal throughout the Sierra, and nothing neglected that

could be turned into intoxicating beverages.” To this day there is

slight improvement in this respect. Thanks to the molle berry,

intemperance is high, even for Peru, and laziness reaches its

culmination during the season when the _tunas_, ripening on the cactus

hedges, feed alike birds and Indians. In the town almost every hut is a

little drunkery, with an inviting display of bottles of all shapes and

sizes. The life of the place was typified by a soft-muscled lump of a

man sitting in the shade of his shop, drowsily switching flies off

himself with a horse’s tail mounted on a wooden handle. To have seen him

reading a book, or even whittling a stick, would have been entirely out

of keeping with the local color.

House-flies, unknown in the upper altitudes, were more than numerous.

Cats, too, were in evidence for almost the first time in the Sierra. The

assertion of scientists that these cannot endure high regions was denied

by the natives, who attributed their absence elsewhere to the lack of

rats to feed on. Dogs, unfortunately, are indifferent to either

drawback, and the Andean town has yet to be discovered that does not

swarm with them. Llamas avoid Huanta, and the climate is more fitted to

donkeys than to mountain ponies. An Indian trotted in from one of the

irrigated _alfalfares_ on the edge of town with a poncho-load of fresh,

green alfalfa, gay with purple and red flowers, soon after our arrival.

But at the first taste of this new species of fodder Chusquito showed

keen disappointment. Like myself, he preferred regions of ten thousand

feet and upward. During most of our stay he hung sad and dejected, as if

homesick for the cold, penetrating air and the wiry grass of his native

mountains, and it was here that I saw him lie down for the first time

since we had joined forces.

We pushed on to Ayacucho under no very auspicious circumstances, for the

department capital was reported to be raging with an epidemic of typhoid

and smallpox that had forced it to ask aid of the central government.

The day’s tramp varied from a blazing, semi-tropical gorge to a barren,

waterless range so lofty that I found it necessary to stretch out on my

back at the summit to catch my breath. A contrary mood, or too long a

rest, made Chusquito choose to be obstreperous beyond all custom, and

twice he set his heart wilfully on branch trails, and came perilously

near escaping with all my possessions. Thereafter I kept him tied to my

belt, and for once he set a pace more swift than I would have had it.

Early in the afternoon the blazing desert landscape was broken by the

sight of a city that could have been no other than Ayacucho, filling the

hollow of a green bowl, several hut-lined streets radiating upward from

it, like the legs of some great tarantula stretched on its back. A

perfectly level road seemed to promise a quick entrance; but almost at

the edge of the town the world fell suddenly away into a bottomless

earthquake crack, where we sweated for an hour in a headlong descent far

out of sight of human habitation, and toiled upward again to the crest

of the horizon, all to advance a bare five hundred yards. Raging with

thirst, we strode swiftly down upon the town, only to be blocked at the

edge of it by a religious procession of hundreds of girls in snow-white

dress. As if to show off before his fellow-countrymen, Chusquito

redoubled his cussedness, and persisted, in spite of all my efforts, in

taking advantage of the smooth, flagstone sidewalks, forcing two-legged

pedestrians into the rough-cobbled street. It did not occur to me that

he, too, might be footsore. At the first open door through which I spied

bottles, he attempted to enter with me, and watched me disgustedly while

I opened a bottle of native soda-water, a second, then a third, until

the proprietress all but fainted with astonishment at sight of a man who

came on foot drinking up a whole fifteen cents’ worth at once—and

actually paying for it.

Both the hotels of Ayacucho were the usual low buildings, extending

around a large court one entered beneath a topheavy archway, where

guests appeared to be considered a nuisance, to be avoided by both host

and servants as long as possible. I was finally awarded a dungeon

opening directly on all the assorted activities, misdemeanors, and

indecencies indigenous to the cobbled patios of Andean hotels, but which

had the unusual feature of a window—with wooden bars, for glass is a

luxury, even in an important department capital. The chamber was cool to

the point of sogginess and had, of course, to be cleared out and

furnished to my order. It was apparent that here was a city that would

reward several days’ stay, and I set about finding more fitting

accommodations for Chusquito than the circle about a post to which he

had been confined at every halt since he had come into my possession.

Long search and persistent inquiry brought me to a professional

_inverna_, a term supposed to designate a green pasture in which an

animal accepted as guest can wallow and gorge to his heart’s content.

Fortunately I am nothing if not sceptical in such Peruvian matters and,

sure enough, investigation proved the place to be only a bare field in

which the owner promised to give “plenty of food and water” at ten cents

a day. Promises and starvation are too closely allied in the Andes,

where he who will know his animal well fed must see to the feeding in

person. I had all but resigned myself and the maltreated beast to the

inevitable, and had ordered a load of alfalfa brought to the hotel

patio, when I ran across the piano importer, who begged me to do him the

honor of letting him send the animal to his farm a few miles out of

town. When at last I got to bed, my sleep was full of feverish dreams in

which I was dragged to destruction times without number over bottomless

precipices by a rope tied to my belt, while I gazed about me in vain for

a patch of green in a bald and blistered landscape.

At first sight this half-green hole in the ground, surrounded by

cactus-grown stretches of loose stones and bare, repulsive mountains,

seemed a queer place for a city. But the situation improves somewhat

upon closer acquaintance. Under the scanty trees that lend the hollow

its color the soil is fertile when favored by the rains, and those who

can avoid going out in the middle of the day will find the climate

little short of perfect. The main drawbacks to what might be a not

unpleasant dwelling-place are the absence of even the rudiments of

hygiene, and the whirlwinds that spring up often with sudden, unexpected

violence and envelop the town in clouds of dust and evidence of the

absence of street-sweepers, or bring down a wintry wave from the

snowclad to the south that lends its contrast to the picture.

At the time of the Conquest the only gathering of mankind corresponding

to the present city was what Prescott calls “Huamanga, midway between

Lima and Cuzco.” The story runs that an Inca, passing through the

region, was sitting at meat out-of-doors when he saw, circling above

him, a magnificent _huaman_, Quichua for falcon. Struck with admiration,

he held up a choice morsel crying, “Huaman ca!—Take it, falcon!”

Whatever the truth of the legend, the department of which Ayacucho is

the capital is still known as Huamanga. The city itself takes its name

from the Quichua terms _aya_ (corpse), and _ccucho_ (corner), in other

words, “Dead Man’s Corner.” Long before the arrival of the Spaniards all

this region was thus known because of a great battle between the fierce

local tribes and those of Cuzco, in which the latter were routed. But

the tables were turned under Huayna Ccápac, the Great, who colonized the

territory by the customary Inca method of settling it with _mitimaes_,

or “transplanted people” from another province. The great military

highway passed close to the present site, but the only town of any size

between Huancayo and Cuzco in early colonial days was Huari, now an

insignificant Indian village lost among the stony hills. Manco, the

revolted Inca, and his followers formed the chronic habit of falling

upon travelers between the ancient and the new capital of Peru, and in

1548 Pizarro ordered a city founded for their protection, usually known

as Huamanga. Not until after what is known to history as the Battle of

Ayacucho, in which Sucre defeated the Spanish veterans who had fled

before Bolívar from the icy pampa of Junín, and brought to an end the

struggle of the new world for political freedom begun in New England a

half-century before, was the older and more appropriate name revived.

In colonial times it was a far more important city. A census taken by a

German in 1736 showed a population of more than 40,000. To-day it has

barely two inhabitants for each of its 8000 feet elevation above

sea-level. Even Squier found it “laid out on a grand scale, but with

unmistakable signs of a great decline in wealth and population.”

Epidemics of smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever, the advance of

machinery and foreign importation over the local handicraft manufacture

of _tocuyo_ (cloth from the cactus fiber), _frazadas_, or hand-woven

blankets, and native shoes, with the corresponding decrease in the

growing of cotton in the region, were the chief causes of this decline.

Then, too, the building of railroads left the ancient route from Lima to

Cuzco stranded, and only a rare gringo andarín, driving a shaggy and

sun-faded chusquito, comes now to visit the once proud city. Should the

long-threatened railway across Peru ever come to pass, Ayacucho, like

Huancavelica, may come more or less into her own again.

The cities of our own land are not without their faults, but he who

would fully realize the advantages of even the most backward of them

should come and dwell for a time in one of these shipwrecked “capitals”

of the Andes. By night Ayacucho is “lighted” by dim kerosene

contrivances, mildly resembling a miner’s torch, inside square,

glass-sided lanterns of medieval origin, each house-owner paying from

five to twenty cents a month for his share of the illumination.

Gradually, however, electric lights were being installed—those pale,

ought-to-be-sixteen-candle-power bulbs indigenous to Andean

towns—against which a considerable opposition had developed because of

the threatened cost of nearly a dollar monthly to each householder. In

view of the fact that the average shop rents for $3 a month, it was

natural that so decided an increase in expenses should be resented. The

huge main plaza is garnished only with a central fountain surrounded by

the customary iron fence, “due to the untold patriotism of Juan Fulano,

ex-alcalde, etc.,” and a few ancient, backless, rough-stone benches. The

favorite loafers’ gathering-place is under the _portales_, or arcades,

that surround the square on three sides. These are lined with shops into

the blue-black shadows of which the plaza-stroller’s eyes peer

gratefully, but wellnigh blindly, from the blazing sunshine outside.

Compared even with Spain, Ayacucho harbors an unbelievable number of

non-producers. Hundreds of little shops, endlessly duplicated, stretch

away along its every street, tended by lounging men and women with no

other desire in life than to sell a few cents’ worth of something,

particularly strong drink, and not even desiring that very decidedly.

Their business methods are crude in the extreme. The town, for example,

is noted for its native chocolate. The cacao beans grown in the montaña

on the east are hulled and roasted, mixed with crude sugar and vanilla,

and crushed and rolled again and again by hand under stone rollers,

producing a gravelly, but not untoothsome product. Yet, though every

merchant in town is ready to sell these individually at 2½ cents a cake,

not one of them can be induced to sell by weight. “No es costumbre,”

answers every man, woman, and child tending shop, and though all hover

on the verge of poverty, not a man among them will overstep fixed

custom, even to this extent, to win a less precarious livelihood. For a

country where “trusts” are unknown the entire town is rather staunchly

agreed on prices. The money in use is almost exclusively silver, which

is lugged back and forth through the streets in cotton bags. Many of the

coins, having at some time served as female adornment, have holes in

them, and though these are perfectly acceptable to Ayacucho, they are

worthless elsewhere in the country, so that to my usual task of

gathering small change for the road ahead was added that of carefully

weeding out all holed pieces. The average ayacuchano has a kind of crude

insolence and an arrogance bred in isolated places which, added to his

mountaineer uncouthness, makes him not over pleasant. Toward me they

assumed a suspicious air that suggested some foreigner had once long ago

cheated some one among them out of ten cents. Even for Peruvians, the

plighted word of every grade of inhabitant is peculiarly worthless. Of a

dozen or more promises of larger or smaller importance made me during my

stay, not one ever reached even the point of attempted fulfilment. The

population is very largely Indian—often in diluted form—and genuinely

white persons are decidedly rare, certainly not ten percent., though

there are many more than that, strutting about in what Ayacucho fancies

faultless dress, who consider themselves such, and who would be

astonished at the set-back their pretentions would receive in more

exacting communities. The town swarms with tailors, chiefly boys and

youths with slight ability at their trade, who sit, like the craftsmen

of Damascus, in little shops the entire front of which is open door, and

work steadily but languidly on miserable materials that barely last long

enough for purchaser and seller to part, their attention chiefly on

whatever passes in the street. The Indians of the region still weave a

heavy wool frazada of astounding combinations of color, and the town is

somewhat noted for the filigree work and wood-carving for which it was

once famous. But for the most part it is silent, smokeless, and

industry-lacking as any village of the Andes, without a single wheeled

vehicle to rumble over its cobbles. Its water is so bad that even the

natives admitted I should not drink it. Indeed, I did not even dare

develop films in it. Not that its source is ill-chosen, but in the

several miles of open conduit to the city, the Indians make free use of

it for any of their lavatory processes. The local Quichua dialect varies

much from that of Cuzco, the Florence of the Inca tongue, so that

Indians from the two towns understand each other with difficulty.

Ayacucho is about as badly overdone in churches as any town in

church-boasting South America. In colonial days a religious edifice was

built on the slightest provocation, of cut-stone if possible, of cobbles

or adobe if necessary, until to-day the entire population might be

housed five times over in those that are left. Not a few are things of

beauty in their time-mellowed delapidation. The cathedral, centuries

old, is surpassed in all Peru only by those of Lima and Cuzco.

Externally, and at some distance, like so many things of Spanish origin,

it has an imposing and not inartistic appearance. But the interior is

disappointing. Here is the usual Latin-American garish gaudiness of

wooden, tin, and porcelain saints, with no suggestion of art, except in

the intricately carved wooden pulpit and the choir stalls flanking the

altar. Behind each of the latter a boy stands during services, holding a

candle above the chanting friar whose bulk amply fills the niche. A

spittoon is provided for each of the singers. Ash-trays had evidently

not yet come into style. An unusual feature was seats for the

congregation, which in most churches of the Andes is left to kneel on

the bare floor, or to bring a servant carrying a prie-dieu. It was the

first place in Peru where the beating of church-bells reached anything

like the hubbub of Ecuador or Colombia, for Ayacucho is so fanatical

that the law against this is openly disobeyed. Sleek, well-fed,

cigarette-smoking priests are everywhere in evidence, scores of

“barefoot” friars in their stout leather sandals waddle about town with

the self-complacency of the sacred bulls of India, and the public

appearance of the bishop brings all activity to a standstill, and all

beholders except the upper-class men to their knees.

[Illustration:

The striking headdress of the women of Ayacucho—in this case purple

embroidered with red. The _dicella_ about the shoulders is blue]

[Illustration:

The friendly and ingratiating waiters of our hotel in Ayacucho. They

had two shoes, three eyes, and not a crumb of soap between them. One

wears a bright pink shirt, the other one of brilliant maroon]

As in most centers of religious fanaticism, the town reeks with poverty.

Even for South America, the overwhelming display of rags is striking,

and ignorance and debauch is in constant evidence. Yet the children, the

babies particularly, sometimes have a brightness and an innocence about

them that suggests what might be made of them could they be caught

young, very, very young, and taken away from this environment of dirt

and ignorance and immorality and priests. Yet who knows? The more one

travels, the more one’s opinion wavers between the effects of ancestry

and environment.

It has been said of Ayacucho that her chief occupations are drinking,

cock-fighting, love-making, and religious processions. The last is most

in public evidence. The first fiesta to break out after my arrival was

that of the “Virgen de las Mercedes.” All shops closed for the occasion,

and the entire region boomed and clanged with the exertions of gangs of

boys filling every belfry and vying with each other in adding to the

uproar. At four of the afternoon, when the sun had lost some of its

glare, the cathedral disgorged a solemn throng escorting three huge

floats that began a snail-paced circuit of the broad plaza, halting

before every building of importance while the choir sang some Latin

anthem. Before the Virgin and her two accompanying saints, all flashing

with rich and many-colored silks, marched teams of sanctimonious-faced

beatas with ribbons over their shoulders, feigning to supply the motive

power which was, in reality, furnished by toiling and sweating Indians

half-concealed beneath the massive floats. As the head of the procession

reached certain points, an aged Indian acolyte set off home-made

fireworks of intricate and long-enduring design, that filled the air as

with a sudden bombardment. The instant these fell silent, swarms of boys

raced into the smoke from every side to fight with the low-caste

functionary for possession of the charred framework. Every male, as well

as the Indian women, uncovered as the figures passed—except myself, too

busy with photography to honor the local customs. Yet, where a century

ago such sign of the heretic would have caused homicidal riot, I heard

only one audible protest—from some one of the newsboy order.

Of course few inhabitants of the town had any notion of its history back

of their own lifetime, nor any real interest in abetting my

investigations, though all pretended to bubble over with enthusiasm for

them. A blank indifference hangs like moss over the records of the past

throughout all the Andes, and the curious traveler will find more by

wandering around until he stumbles upon them, than by making inquiries.

Not only are the natives ignorant of all points of historical interest,

but utterly incapable of distinguishing any such from so much junk. It

is just as useless to call upon the “representative men,” for the minds

of these differ only in slight degree from the gente del pueblo.

Ayacucho has more than the usual excuse for this ignorance of her past,

however, for in 1883 the Chilians marched into the region, took

possession of the town, its houses, goods, and attractive women, and,

camping in the city hall and the prefect’s office, boiled their soup

over the archives. For a few brief months before their arrival, Ayacucho

was the proud capital of Peru. Congress held its sessions in the old

church of San Augustín cornering on the plaza, and for a while money was

coined there.

Local information might have ended with that, but for the fact that an

ayacuchano who eked out an existence, Santiago knows how, in one of the

little shops under the portales, was “aficionado” to the history of the

region. I spent long hours with him, for clients were of scant

importance compared to his hobby. He was unshakable in his conviction

that the Indian was just as ambitionless and animal-like in his habits

before the Conquest, as to-day. Ayacucho has a local heroine in one

María Parado de Bellido about whom already strange legends have

gathered. A chola woman of the middle-class, who could neither read nor

write, she took a leading part in the revolution against Spanish rule.

Having undertaken the delivery of a treasonable letter, written at her

instigation, she was captured by the Spaniards and, swallowing the

missive, refused to betray the writer, for which hardheadedness she was

shot before the broad, central pillar of the Municipalidad. This was the

scene of many an execution in colonial times. Those condemned to die

were kept three days in the arched dungeon that forms a corner of the

building, “gorged with all spiritual and material blessings—peaches and

beefsteaks and the like,” as my informant put it, and then shot. He

asserted that in Ayacucho none were burned nor otherwise executed by the

Inquisition. But the statement has not all the earmarks of veracity. Not

only is the century-faded edifice on the adjoining corner still known as

the “Church of the Inquisition,” but a city whose population never

exceeded 40,000 that could build the twenty-four large churches and

countless chapels still existent, to say nothing of the many that have

disappeared, “just because the priest of each ward cried, ‘Come, let us

build a church!’ and they came and built it,” was not likely to be

contented without seeing an occasional heretic roasted in the central

plaza on a gala Sunday afternoon.

There was one sight which the “authorities” were so bent on my visiting

and “picturing to the world” that the prefect detailed a soldier to

accompany me to it. The so-called “Battle of Ayacucho” really took place

at La Quinua, on the sloping brown mountain-flanks some twelve miles to

the northeast of the city. From any high place in town the village,

backed by its white monument and the dark face of Cundurcunca, the

“Condor’s Nest,” is plainly visible. One can even make out the highway

on which the Spanish veterans zigzagged up to the deep quebrada in which

La Serna capitulated, almost at the very hour that Phillip V in far-off

Spain was making him “Duke of the Andes” as a reward for his victorious

campaign. There was no cable in those days. But I knew no way of telling

the prefect, without insult, that I did not choose to tramp twenty-four

thirsty, earthquake-cracked miles to gaze upon a plaster monument that I

could study to my heart’s content from where I sat, and I was reduced to

the customary strategy of Latin-American intercourse. The soldier came

to wake me at six—it is the South American way to fulfill only those

promises one hopes will be forgotten. I greeted him with the

announcement that I had decided to put off the trip until the following

week. He showed distinct signs of relief at not having to drive his

legs, with heavy, unaccustomed shoes on the ends of them, all day, and

as everything always is postponed in Ayacucho, the decision caused no

surprise.

“Is there a public library in town?” I asked a native son.

“Cómo no!” he cried, as if the question were an insult to the “culture

and progress” for which Ayacucho fancies itself famed.

Following his directions, I hurried over to the Municipalidad, cheerful

with the prospect of spending a few quiet hours unstared-at among its

books. For some time I wandered through several refuse-strewn patios and

deep-shaded corredors of the rambling, one-story building, peering into

many a room with uneven earth floor, without finding anything even

mildly resembling a library. At length I stumbled upon a chamber marked

“Secretaría,” in which six men of varying shades of color were

discussing the coming bull-fight, rolling cigarettes, sleeping, and

otherwise earning their salaries. A long search brought to light a

ten-inch key, and a procession of the full municipal force of Ayacucho

escorted me through several more empty, earth-floored rooms to a door at

the rear of the building.

“You see,” explained the official with the most nearly white collar and

the longest right to keep his hat on, “we have only just begun to form

the library, so the catalogue is not yet available nor any of the books

arranged. However....”

As the time-eaten sign over the door announced that this evidence of

culture and progress had only been founded in 1877, it was natural that

it should not yet be set in order. One cannot expect things to be done

in a minute in Latin America. The walls of the stoop-shouldered mud room

were almost hidden by books, however, nearly all of them bound in

ancient parchment or imitations of the same. I ran my eyes along them,

the six municipal employees grouped in a staring semicircle about me.

Row after row stretched books in Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French,

with such titles as, “The Infallibility of the Church,” by Padre

So-and-So, “The Life of Saint Quién Sabe,” by “A Brother of the Order”;

but nowhere was there one with a suggestion of modern utility.

“This looks much like a priest’s library,” I remarked, when I had read

most of the titles.

“Cabalmente, señor,” said the front-rank official. “Exactly; it was

given by the holy bishop who died a few years ago. Where are those

friars who were arranging the books?” he demanded querulously, glaring

at his inferiors grouped about us.

“I think they have not come back from lunch yet,” tremulously suggested

one of the five.

As the dust lay at least an eighth of an inch thick on every book in

sight, the good friars must have been called to a sumptuous repast

indeed.

“Isn’t there some book in the collection that will give me something of

interest about Ayacucho?” I asked.

“Ah—er—well, as to that—ah—cómo no, señor—yes, indeed! Here you have the

five volumes of Bossuet, and—and here is the ‘Imitación de Cristo’—very

excellent—old parchment, as you see—and....”

My slightest finger movement was followed by six pairs of eyes, as

closely as an “aficionado” of the bull-ring watches those of his

favorite matador. Had I found anything worth reading, I should not have

been left in peace to read it. First, because of the excitement which

the sight of a stranger arouses in Ayacucho, trebled by unbounded wonder

that any man should be interested in books and libraries; second,

because every Latin-American knows that any person left alone for a

moment in a library is sure to carry off as many books as he can conceal

about his person. The most modern volumes brought to light by a more

careful scrutiny were Racine’s works and a Spanish edition of

Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe”; but this last I am sure some practical

joker had given the good bishop so late in life that he had not found

time to read and destroy it before he was called to whatever reward

awaited him. We tiptoed out into the earth-carpeted hallway again, and

carefully locked up the dust and parchments, as they will no doubt

remain until the worthy friars come back from lunch.

Around the corner the cobbled street was blocked by a horseshoeing

contest. This is always considered a very serious business in the Andes,

though the average horse is so small that a real blacksmith could toss

him about at will. A barefoot, half-Indian _herrero_ had emerged from

his mud dungeon shop, containing a forge from Vulcan’s time, but by no

means the space necessary to admit the animal, and stood watching the

preparations for his feat with the anxious and critical eye of an

aviator about to attack the world’s record. One of the three attendant

Indians threw his poncho over the head of the chusco and bound its eyes.

Then a rope was drawn tightly around its neck, with a choking slip-noose

about its nose, an Indian clinging desperately to the end of it as long

as the contest lasted. Next, a llama-hair lassoo was bound to the

animal’s nigh front fetlock and the foot hoisted by another attendant on

the off side, who used the back of the trussed-up brute as a pulley. A

third Indian held the foot by hand. When all was ready, the valorous

blacksmith sneaked up and pared the hoof a bit with an instrument much

like a small, sharp, shovel with a long handle—pared it very

imperfectly, as is the way of Andean blacksmiths, leaving so much of the

toe that the animal was in constant danger of having an ankle broken on

some rough-and-tumble trail. Then he hunted up a cold horseshoe, without

caulk, just as it came from the hardware store that had imported it from

the United States—for the Andean blacksmith never heats a shoe, much

less alters it—and laid it gingerly on the hoof. Evidently, to the

inexact eye of the herrero, it fitted. He clawed around among the

cobbles and refuse of the street, where his tools lay strewn and

scattered, until he found several hand-forged horseshoe nails of the

style in vogue in our own land before the Civil War, and standing afar

off, like a man willing to risk his life to do his duty, yet not to risk

it beyond reason, started one of the nails with a Stone-Age hammer.

Suddenly the foot twitched. The blacksmith sprang backward a long yard,

with blanched countenance, the foot-holder fled, and the two remaining

Indians cried out in startled Quichua, while clinging to the far ends of

their ropes. Bit by bit the herrero crept up again and took to driving

the nails at long range, as if he were mashing the head of a venomous

snake, poised on his toes, ready to spring away at the slightest sign of

life in the blindfolded animal. Gradually the eight nails were driven,

not without several repetitions of the blanching fright, and the

operation repeated with the other hoofs. Finally the blacksmith

maneuvered to positions in which he could twist off and crudely clinch

the protruding nail-points, rubbed a rasp once or twice over them, and

the perilous job was done. The fiery steed was relieved of the blinding

poncho, the Indians went to restore their nerves with a _copita_ of

pisco, and the blacksmith, collecting fifteen cents a shoe from the

owner of the animal, shut up shop forthwith, as if he had risked his

life enough for one day.

The milking of a cow is a no less serious business in the Andes, and

requires as large a force. First the cow must be captured and confined

in a corral overnight. Calves are never weaned, but are kept away from

the mothers until the hour of milking. As each cow’s turn comes, its

calf is freed for a moment, then dragged away by main force, and either

tied to the mother’s front leg, or held by a boy close enough to deceive

the animal into fancying she is feeding her own offspring. Another

youth, after tying her hind legs together at the ankles, clings to a

rope about her neck, a third assistant holds a _socobe_, or shallow

gourd-bowl, under the udder, and a woman—why it must always be a woman I

know not, but the fact remains—squats on her heels at arm’s length on

the opposite side of the animal, and falls to milking with much the same

attentive regard for her welfare as the blacksmith. As often as the

pint-measure is filled, the milk is poured into a vessel outside the

fence or one in the hands of a waiting purchaser. The woman or one of

the boys laps up the few drops left in the socobe, and the task

continues until two teats are stripped. The two remaining belong by

ancient custom to the calf. In view of the fact that cows are milked at

most once a day, and often at irregular or broken intervals, it is not

strange that milk is rare, and butter unknown, even on large haciendas

well stocked with cattle.

Saturday is beggar’s day in Ayacucho, as in most towns of South America.

From morning till night a constant procession of disease and decrepitude

comes whining by the shops, so endless in its appeals that the town has

adopted a custom similar to the merchants of India with their bowls of

_cowries_, or sea-shells. On Saturday morning each shopkeeper opens a

package of large needles, three to four inches long, one of which he

bestows upon each beggar who presents himself. The mendicant mumbles a

“Diós pagarasunqui,” and shuffles on to the next doorway. When he has

collected ten or twelve needles, if he be so lucky, he sells them to

certain dealers for a _medio_ (2½ cents), on which, apparently, he lives

until the next Saturday. In some parts of Peru the Indians wear a large

needle in their hatbands, evidently as a weapon of defense, but those of

Ayacucho seem to have no practical use, except as legal tender. Some

time during the ensuing week the purchasers sell them back to the

shopkeepers, Saturday sees them again distributed, and so they go on

indefinitely around the circle.

Among other things of long ago Ayacucho used to have a university.

To-day her highest institution of learning is the Colegio Nacional de

San Román, corresponding to our high schools—chiefly in the impudence of

its pupils. It was for the purpose of supplying this institution with an

athletic field—incongruous possession it seemed in this community—that a

“benefit” bull-fight was perpetrated on the Sunday of my stay. The

_cuadrilla_, headed by “Currito” and “Ramito” of Sevilla, my

fellow-sufferers at the hotel, were the same simple-hearted, modest

fellows, with a noisy joy in life, that I had found most of their

fellows in Spain. Both the principals had come over with Posadas, one of

the friends of my Spanish journey, who had returned a year later only to

be killed by a “Miura,” while these his companions remained to eke out a

livelihood in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia.

All the gente decente of Ayacucho and their wives, in full powder, were

on hand when the gala corrida began. We of the élite occupied the

“palcos,” or boxes—several rows of chairs shaded by a faded strip of

canvas, up on the roof of the ancient colegio, the aged red tiles of

which were trodden to powder underfoot. The “ring” in the patio below,

fenced by poles tied to uprights and other rustic makeshifts, was

surrounded by the excited gente del pueblo. The scene was backed by a

massive, old, crumbling church—it would have been hard to avoid such a

backing in Ayacucho—and a view of most of the town sprinkled away

through its half-green valley, Rasuillca, the snowclad and the black

range of Cundurcunca, with its white battle monument and its highway

zigzagging away over into the great Amazonian montaña beyond as plainly

visible as if they stood a bare mile away. The exciting national sport

of Spain degenerates at best to a dismal pastime in the new world. The

imported toreros were well enough, but the bulls of the Andes leave much

to be desired. Even dogs lose their aggressiveness in high altitudes, it

is said. At any rate, the animals gathered for the occasion on the broad

pampas at the foot of Cundurcunca could seldom be roused to face the

toreros, and spent their efforts chiefly in racing around the “ring” in

vain efforts to escape, until they were at length tortured out of

existence. In fact, about all the gala corrida amounted to was the

substitution of these heroes from across the seas for the native

butchers accustomed to prepare Ayachucho’s weekly meat supply. As they

fell, the animals were dragged out and cut up within full sight of the

crowd, the meat in some cases being raffled off to the ticket-holders of

the _sol_. It was the dragging-out that the gathering hooted most

vociferously. Picadores and horses are rarely in evidence in the

bull-fights of Spanish-America, but the program had featured the promise

of removing the carcasses from the ring “al estilo de España,” that is,

by gaily caparisoned mules. It was this new evidence of culture and

progress that much of Ayacucho had come to see. But when the first

victim sprawled in the dust, the mules were missing, and the customary

gang of Indians crawled through the barrier and, tugging at its tail and

legs, and raising clouds of dust that half-concealed their activities,

gradually removed the fallen brute in the time-honored Andean manner.

As the supply of meat promised to exceed the demand, the fifth and sixth

bulls were merely decorated with banderillas and sent back to the

corral. Then a pair of two-year-old _novillos_ were turned over to the

“aficionados.” A dozen youths of the “best families” descended into the

“ring,” in their most impressive Sunday garb and with _capotes_ borrowed

from the toreros, and demonstrated their own skill as bull-fighters. A

Dr. Fulano, in private life a civil engineer, at least on his

visiting-card, killed the first of the frightened animals in admirable

style, and was hailed by his delighted fellow-townsmen the king of

matadores. But dusk had fallen before the amateurs had effectively

wounded the other, and the massed population gradually radiated homeward

and subsided into its humdrum weekly existence.

[Illustration:

A religious procession in the main square of Ayacucho. When the

leading figure reached certain points, an old Indian set off

elaborate pieces of fireworks, and as the smoke cleared away scores

of urchins dashed in to fight with the Indian and one another for

the framework]

[Illustration:

A gala Sunday in the improvised “bullring” of Ayacucho, in the patio

of the _Colegio_, or high school, for the benefit of which the

_corrida_ was given. The chief toreros are Spanish, and the mountain

bulls are at best somewhat lacking in ferocity]

I have come near overlooking the most striking thing in Ayacucho,—the

head-dress of its women. In the Andes fashions change not with time, but

with place. In Inca days each district had its own distinctive garb, or

at least head-gear, a custom which was strictly enforced in colonial

times, in order that Indians belonging to one province might not escape

compulsory labor by going to another. What a convenience it would be in

our own land if we could recognize each man’s place of birth by the

shape or color of his derby! The bonnets of Ayacucho are hard to

believe. Though I had been duly warned in advance, the first glimpse of

an ayacuchana caught me unawares. I fancied she was carrying home some

purchase on her head. When others like her began to appear from all

directions, however, I recalled to what lengths fair woman will go to

keep in fashion. The wildest nightmares perpetrated by the milliners of

more familiar lands by no means come so perilously near reducing the

mere male beholder to hysterics as this, which at first sight gives a

suggestion of that thrill the traveler to Mars might experience at

coming suddenly face to face with something totally new and

unprecedented. The rank and file of Ayacucho women wear on their heads a

blanket, gay in hue and large enough to serve as a bedspread, nicely

folded in triangular form, with one sharp corner protruding over the

face. Each one is distinct in color, with an embroidered border, and is

usually lined with silk. Even the half-Indian women from the suburbs,

driving to market donkeys all but hidden under loads of alfalfa—each

burden protected from its hungry carrier by a large wooden gag in the

animal’s mouth—balance this contraption on their heads through all their

labors. No one in Ayacucho could tell me the origin of so absurd a

fashion, though all were agreed it had been in vogue a very long time;

nor had any of them ever developed enough curiosity to enquire, except

the prefect, a newcomer in this region, who had investigated in vain.

Anchorena, the piano importer, had promised on his caballero honor to

have Chusquito back in the hotel patio on Sunday night, that I might

continue my journey at dawn. Knowing only too well the nebulous stuff of

which Latin-American promises are made, I set out on Saturday to jog his

memory. The houses of Ayacucho are not numbered, but the thumping of a

piano in the throes of amateur tuning easily guided me to the lawyer’s

dwelling. Surrounded by the gaudily overdecorated magnificence of his

parlor, he laughed at my absurd misgivings and repeated his “palabra de

caballero.” Yet when night fell on Sunday, no horse had appeared. I

hurried back to the Anchorena residence. The lawyer received me with

that complacent indifference to his plighted word, without even an

attempt to excuse himself, which is common to his race. As in the days

of the Conquest, when betrayal was an everyday affair, the word of the

most important resident of the Andes is not worth the breath required to

utter it. Most annoying of all, they treat any protest against their

devotion to mañana as a gringo weakness they must put up with, but to

which they hope never to fall victims themselves. Even as they listen, a

sneaking smile lurks just behind their solemn countenances, as if they

were hearing the plaints of a querulous child. Were we in this world

merely to see how easily we could drift through it, the Andean point of

view would be superb; to those of us burdened with the notion that we

are here to get some little thing done, it is maddening.

“Team ess mo-nay, eh?” squeaked the lawyer, with a condescending smirk.

“If the horse does not arrive to-night, perhaps it will come to-morrow;

or if not, what is the difference whether you go to-morrow, or the day

after?”

“The difference, my friend, between an American and a Latin-American,” I

could not refrain from replying, “and may it ever grow wider.”

Thus, when I would gladly have added Ayacucho to my past, I found myself

helpless to advance, for the lawyer would not even direct me to his

estate, that I might bring the animal myself. The next afternoon an

Indian arrived from the hacienda—with the wrong horse. I joined the

bull-fighters, strolling about town with the Monday languor customary to

their profession, and whiled away several more funereal hours. Then at

dusk I returned to the hotel, to find Chusquito lounging against a

pillar in front of my door, looking not an inch rounder for all the

“very rich feed” with which the hacienda was reputed to abound. The way

he fell upon a bundle of alfalfa, bought off the Indian woman and girl

who sleep on the cobble-stones of Santo Domingo plaza beside a heap of

it, suggested that he had spent the week grazing on bare ground. Yet the

Indian who brought him had presented an exorbitant bill for his

accommodation from the _sister_ of the man who had implored the honor of

giving him free pasture on his own hacienda.

I was awake at four—for religious reasons—and by the time the birds in

the trees began to twitter we had left the acknowledged cemetery of Dead

Man’s Corner behind, and were climbing away toward the sunrise. The

road, true to its Latin-American environment, left town with great

enthusiasm, but soon petered out to a wearisome trail. Of several

villages of Indians noted for their passive resistance to all the

demands of the traveler, the most typical was Ocros. We came out far

above it one morning, on the lofty crest of a range from which the trail

pitched for a time blindly down into a vast sea of mist hiding all the

unknown world before us. Bit by bit vast rocks loomed up out of the fog,

like black, misshapen giants; then huts appeared once more, with here

and there an Indian plowing a bit of hillside with a wooden stick and a

pair of oxen he seemed in constant peril of suddenly losing down the

sheer mountain-side. Then at last the mist cleared and disclosed,

cramped in its narrow vale far below among dwarf trees, a town which

rose gradually up to us, and at noon, after all but losing Chusquito and

my other worldly belongings through a dirt-and-branch bridge that showed

no sign of having been condemned until we were upon it, I halted at the

hut of the gobernador. He was out—which probably meant that he was

hiding in one of the half-dozen ancient mud structures that surrounded

his corral—and his females were taciturn. I displayed my government

order and asked to have food prepared.

“Manam cancha,” mumbled one of the women, all of whom kept silently and

impassively at work with their primitive spindles.

“I must have fodder for the animalito,” I protested.

“Manam cancha,” came the monotonous answer again, with that inflection

peculiar to the Andean Indian, which seems to say, “There isn’t any; but

there might be if I felt like going to get it.” I should have preferred

hunger to a scene, but I declined to allow anyone out of mere apathy to

starve Chusquito.

“Manam cancha, eh?” I cried, snatching the grass roof off a chicken-coop

and tossing it before the animal. Sentimentalists to the contrary

notwithstanding, the surest way to impress an Andean Indian is to appeal

to force. Gradually the most democratic traveler learns to adopt the

native habit of addressing him as “tu,” and to treat him like the balky

domestic animal he so closely resembles. I picked up a boy from behind

the mud wall surrounding the females, and thrusting a coin upon him,

ordered him to go and buy eggs. Once the traveler can force money into

an Indian’s possession, his prospects of provisions brighten, for it is

as easy for the latter to produce them as to come and return the coin.

The eggs were soon forthcoming and, taking possession of a table under

the projecting roof and marching into the kitchen for water, I lighted

my rum-burner and fell to preparing a meal. By the time I had

effectively demonstrated my importance, the same woman who had “manam

cancha-ed” me in the beginning came to say that if I would give her a

medio she would buy fodder; and a few moments later she returned,

carrying in her own arms a huge bundle of _chala_, or dry cornstalks,

over which Chusquito struggled during the rest of our stay in

competition with the family calf, pigs, and chickens.

It was probably as much out of a desire to inspect my cooking outfit as

fear for her chicken-coops that had won me attendance. Behind the mask

that hides his emotions the Indian of the Andes is filled with

curiosity. There runs an Andean anecdote that well illustrates this

characteristic. One of their own race, who had served in the army and

learned other things without forgetting the ways of his own people, came

at night to an Indian hut and requested lodging. When this was granted

in the customary manner—merely by not being refused—he asked for food.

“Manam cancha,” came the expected reply.

“Well, sell me something and I will cook for myself.”

“Manam cancha.”

The soldier was well aware that there were plenty of supplies hidden

away in the hut. He knew, also, the Indian temperament.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to get along on a chupe de guijarros,” he

sighed, using Spanish to make his speech more impressive.

“A stone soup!” murmured the household, betrayed by astonishment into

understanding a tongue they pretended not to know.

“Yes, it is what we use in the army when there is nothing better.”

He wandered down to the mountain stream below the hut and, returning

with a dozen large smooth pebbles, washed them carefully, and laid them

out on his bundle.

“You won’t mind lending me an olla?” he murmured to the wall of

expressionless faces about him.

A woman brought the kettle in silence. The soldier, humming a

barrack-room ballad, half-filled the pot with water, set it over the

fire, dropped in the stones one by one, and squatted on his heels with a

sigh of contentment. By and by he borrowed a wooden spoon and tasted the

concoction from time to time, throwing the residue back into the kettle

in approved Andean fashion.

“You don’t happen to have a bit of salt?” he murmured, after a time, to

the family now gathered close around him watching this possible miracle

silently but intently.

“Cachi? That we have,” said the woman, handing him a piece of purple

rock, which he beat up and sprinkled into the now steaming pot.

“Too bad I haven’t a few potatoes to put in,” he droned, as if to

himself, “it would help the flavor.”

The old woman shambled away into the darkness of a far corner, and came

back some time later to thrust silently toward him a handful of small

potatoes, her eyes glued on the miraculous pot. When these were about

half-boiled the soldier again broke off his song to murmur:

“This is going to be one of the finest chupes de guijarros I’ve ever

made. All it lacks now is a bit of ají to give it life.”

The old woman muttered something to one of the ragged girls beside her,

and the latter went to dig two red peppers out of the thatch.

“A piece of cabbage would make it perfect,” sighed the soldier.

The Indians, too engrossed in the production of a stone soup, and too

slow of mind to have caught up yet with the course of events, brought to

light a small cabbage. By this time they were so consumed with curiosity

that the old man asked innocently:

“But do you make a stone soup without meat?”

“Ah, to be sure, a strip of charqui always improves it,” replied the

soldier indifferently, “but....”

A girl was sent to fetch a sheet of sun-dried beef, which the former

conscript cut up slowly and dropped bit by bit into the now

savory-smelling chupe. A half-hour later he lifted the kettle off the

fire, the old woman handed him a gourd plate, and some cold boiled yuca

as bread, and having given half of it to the family, he ate the stone

soup with great relish—all except the dozen smooth, round stones at the

bottom of the olla.

All that afternoon we slipped and slid down a half-perpendicular

stone-quarry, that bruised my toes if not Chusquito’s, into a repulsive

molle- and cactus-grown desert in which a tropical sun blazed with

homicidal intensity. No wonder its blistering rays faded the

made-in-Germany cloth of my Ayacucho-tailored breeches, when it bleached

even Chusquito’s coat to a pale, reddish yellow. Had I not come upon an

isolated hut and a gourdful of chicha de jora just when I did, it is by

no means certain that I should not have perished of thirst before the

day was done. The “Hacienda Pajo nal,” in the valley of the Pampas river

where sunset overtook us, was in charge of a white and cultured woman

engaged in the inviting occupation of dealing out to half-drunken

Indians the concentrated sugar-cane juice of a large hogshead in the

liquor room. The husband, who loomed up through the tropical twilight,

was the graduate of an American agricultural college; but the hacienda,

under charge of his Quichua-speaking mayordomo, was farmed in the same

backward manner as in the times of the Incas, without even their energy,

and his foreign training had given him no inkling of the proper

occupation for wives. Nor did he give any evidence of ability to speak

English. After the patriarchial supper around a long, rough-hewn table,

he set in motion a large phonograph, and we heard not only the best

opera stars of the day, but such exotic selections as “The Old Gray

Bonnet,” and a tale of love and moonlight along the Wabash. A veritable

crowd of arrieros and low-caste native travelers, who had made this

their night’s stopping place, and the uncouth Indian laborers of the

hacienda, gathered on the edge of the darkness and stood like statues as

long as the entertainment lasted. Evidently they were amused, or they

would not have remained; but the absolute stoniness of their expression,

without the faintest outward evidence of pleasure, would have brought

dismay to a living entertainer. We had dropped again into a genuine

_tierra caliente_, warm as the Cauca valley, where tiny gnats decorated

my skin with an annoyance that was to last for days to come; and though

I was favored with the guest-room all important Peruvian haciendas

provide for travelers, the corredor outside my door, and all the

neighboring patios and corrals was strewn with Indians of both sexes,

stretched out among their bales and trappings.

An hour or more next morning along the flat river-bottom planted with

sugar-cane brought us to one of those swaying bridges over a roaring

stream compressed between precipitous rock-walls, so numerous in the

time of the Incas. But instead of woven willow withes, it was supported

by cables and, as if to recall the provident Incas by contrast, was

sadly in need of the repair that had just begun. Chusquito crossed the

precarious contraption only under protest, after the application of more

than moral suasion, and on the slanting and broken cross-slats I kept my

own footing with difficulty. Had he been more than a boy’s size horse,

we should have been held up at the edge of the gorge for days, until the

languid workmen finished their task. We were now in the department of

Apurímac. Some miles further along the river, through a sandy wilderness

of organ-cactus noisy with flocks of screaming green parrots, the trail

struck upward on the famous ascent of Bombón. It was another of those

infernally stony, endless, blazing, absolutely waterless climbs that

must be endured wherever a river has cut its way deep into the Andes,

requiring a day of laborious toil to advance a few miles across a chasm

that might almost be bridged. Even Chusquito seemed ready to stretch out

on his back when at last we reached the summit, the lofty plateau again

spreading away cool and inviting before us.

In Chincheros the gobernador attempted at first to deny the honor, but

being caught in the act, as it were, accepted the situation with good

grace, as became a caballero of considerable Spanish ancestry. In the

black shale of his back corredor all the local “authorities” were

gathered about a long table that groaned as with the gout each time any

of its legs was subjected to undue weight, their state papers, seals,

and ink-horns, and a goodly array of large ill-scented bottles spread

out before them. When he had spelled out my papers, the gobernador

invited me to make the veranda my home as long as I chose to grace

Chincheros with my gnat-bitten countenance, and I spent what remained of

the day amid a mixture of chicha, pisco, and justice. A fully sober

person was not to be expected at that hour in Peru, but the

“authorities” were still sufficiently aware of the dignity of their

position to whisk the bottles out of sight when I prepared to photograph

the group. That an andarín should not present a book for their seals and

signatures they took as a slight, and I was forced to submit several

pages of my note-book to their official decoration. During all the rest

of the afternoon Indians and half-Indians came slinking in before the

authoritative crowd, one of whom was a notary public, to mumble their

petitions or complaints with many a cringing “tayta-tayta,” and the air

of slaves before ill-tempered masters. The otherwise subservient

proceedings were broken once by a wordy passage-at-arms between the

gobernador and an aged caballero dressed in rags and pride, who bade a

formal farewell to the women of the family and other officials, but left

without the customary handshake with the gobernador, marking this as the

most serious quarrel I had yet witnessed in South America. When the

business of the day was over, the mellow-conditioned “authorities” all

joined in a game of “quoits,” with silver soles in place of horseshoes,

to determine which of them should supply the wine that topped off the

festivities. The family supper was served on the table so recently

occupied by the affairs of justice, and I spread my bed on two of the

benches that had sustained the weight of the august judges. Here and

there on the mud floor of the court-room an Indian slept, curled up like

a contented yellow dog on a bundle of rags or corn-stalks.

I had assigned to the long, hard day across the great range beyond

Chincheros the experience of chewing coca, said to sustain the Andean

Indian on his laborious journeyings. As we undulated across the barren,

brown top of the world, I began feeding myself leaf by leaf, adhering

strictly to the accepted rules of this indigenous sport, until I had

formed a bulging cud in my right cheek—the left is also permitted by the

rules. The taste was not unlike that of dry hay. Then I bit off several

nibbles of lime from the burnt stone I had bought in the market of

Huancayo and, mixing it with the leaves, began to chew. The only

sensation I was clearly aware of was that the lime burned my gums

atrociously, as it would have done had the coca leaf never been

discovered. I am not sure that I did not feel a slight increase in

exhilaration that caused me to lift my feet a trifle faster; but this

may easily have been due to the beauty of the scene that stretched to

infinity on every hand, for even Chusquito seemed inspired to bestir his

dainty hoofs with more than his accustomed sprightliness.

The hazy valley of the Pampas river with its biting gnats had

disappeared into the past, and only the bare, brown world spread before

us to a far distant horizon that seemed to move forward as we advanced.

Small wonder the natives were astonished that I kept the road. I could

not but be surprised myself that instinct and the slight assistance of

my pocket-compass guided me aright across this deathly-still, unpeopled

mountain-top, where the traveler must constantly watch the faintly

marked path, lest it take advantage of the briefest inattention to dodge

from under his feet and leave him hopelessly stranded high up on a

dreary puna trackless as the sea itself. On these shelterless heights it

was easy to understand why each succeeding town had watched my departure

with gaping mouths, and that the boldest inhabitants had cried out:

“Nosotros, aunque hijos del país, no nos aventuremos hasta el Cuzco sin

guía!—Even we, sons of the country, would not adventure ourselves to

Cuzco without a guide!”

[Illustration:

A familiar sight in the Andes,—a recently butchered beef hung in

sheets along the clothes-line to sun-dry into _charqui_, the

soleleather-like imitation of food on which the Andean traveler is

often forced to subsist]

[Illustration:

A typical “bed” in the guest-room provided for travelers by many

Peruvian _hacendados_,—to wit: a stone or adobe divan on which the

traveler may spread whatever bedding he brings with him. Note my

_alforjas_, kitchenette, and bottle of fuel. An auto-picture taken

by pinning a flash sheet on the opposite wall]

But luck was with me. The dull-yellow world began to subside at last,

and we came out far above a long, winding valley, in the dim end of

which I could make out a green speck that was evidently that very

Andahuaylas toward which we were headed. Far away, in the same direction

which I must follow to reach the Navel of the Inca Empire, were

tooth-shaped peaks, slightly snowclad, hung high in the sky, and below,

and about, and beyond them to the ends of the earth, the suggestion,

rather than the actual sight, of such a labyrinth of ranges as only the

disordered imagination seemed capable of creating. We began to go down

and forever down, so swiftly that we could have kicked each other in our

disgust, now slipping and stumbling along toboggans of loose stones, now

picking our way step by step down natural rock stairs, then descending

across steep meadows of mountain grass on which Chusquito, with his

caulk-less shoes, gave a ludicrous suggestion of some silly fellow

attempting to skate on all fours. At length the slope moderated its pace

and took on a thin garb of trees and vegetation, the mountain-tops on

which we had been walking a bare two hours before now towering into the

sky above. Below the village of Moyabamba, so renowned for its

horse-stealing that we lost no time in leaving it behind us, the valley

narrowed to a gorge, in which our progress was blocked by a mule-train

of Ica wine. I fell in with the chief arriero at the rear, and plodded

with him in the cloud of dust rising behind the shuffling mules like the

mists of the morning from some seaside valley. Each of the animals bore

two kegs of wine nicely balanced on his sawbuck-shaped pack-saddle, a

total weight of 250 pounds. The journey from Ica to Andahuaylas averaged

from three weeks to a month, the entire cost of transportation about

$7.50 for each animal. In the morning, horsemen and pedestrians formed

an almost unbroken procession along the rich and thickly inhabited

valley of the little Chumbau river, for all the league from Talavera to

the straggling town of Andahuaylas.

Manuel Richter, addressee of my letter, kept a little general-store on a

corner of the plaza. Chusquito and I waited in the streak of shade

before his shop until he had spelled out the missive with Teutonic

deliberation, in marked contrast to the Latin-American quickness of

welcome, which almost as quickly explodes into thin air. Our new host

had first emigrated forty years before from Poland to New York, where he

had lived several months in “Ghe-r-reen Schtreet,” a fact he never lost

an opportunity to mention, evidently under the impression that it was

still the aristocratic center of the city. During that time he had

worked in a store “way uptown in Oonion Sqvare.” He still boasted a

brother in the kosher district of Harlem, but for some reason that does

not apply to most of his race he had drifted on to Peru and become a

true Peruvian, even to taking off his hat when a tin Virgin passed in

the street. Yet we spoke German together. He seemed to prefer it to

Spanish, even after half a lifetime in the Andes and despite a Peruvian

wife and half a dozen children entirely ignorant of the former tongue.

The Richter meals were more than substantial, and his family bubbled

over with kind-heartedness. But he was forced to share the honor of a

guest from far-off América del Norte with one Da Pozzo, who dwelt in

solitary, topsy-turvy state in an ancient, two-story ruin on a knoll

across the prattling Chumbau. He was a Venetian on the sadder side of

forty, once an architect of high standing, who had laid out more than

one Plaza de Armas in Peru and Bolivia. Several turns of the wheel of

fate in the wrong direction, among them a Peruvian wife, the

confessional, and the fiery waters that partly drown such memories, had

reduced his ambition to a low level and his income to what may be picked

up by the building of mud houses in these drowsy towns of the interior.

In his customary condition he was maudlinly affectionate, to the point

of making even my cheeks the target of his bewhiskered kisses, and

vociferous in his assertion that he was a “masón” and a hater of priests

in all lands and languages. But what mattered all this, or the fact that

his junk-strewn ruin boasted only one wooden-floored bed, and that the

rotting old balcony seemed always on the point of dropping from under

one? For it overlooked splendid groves and rows of the slender,

blue-black eucalyptus where birds sang merrily, as well as the brown

flanks of the Andes rolling up out of both sides and ends of a valley

enlivened by a constant going and coming of Indians along its broad

roadway. Then, too, there was rich alfalfa on which Chusquito might

gorge himself at no other expense than an occasional medio to the Indian

boy assigned the task of cutting it—“that he have affection for you and

your horse.”

Andahuaylas is really nothing but an example of how life may be made a

perennial pastime, scattered almost thickly along the entire two leagues

from Talavera to San Jerónimo. Yet its situation and climate give it a

charm peculiarly its own, and it would be hard to imagine a better place

in which to drift through life—as its inhabitants seem to recognize.

Though the long valley is extremely fertile, it produces little. The

Indians of more or less full blood that make up the bulk of the

population will not work; the “white” man cannot, lest he forever lose

his precious caste. The laziest American laborer known to charity

bureaus will do more and better work in an hour, unwatched, than the

liveliest Indian of Andahuaylas in a day, with a boss standing over him.

Without in the least hurrying I could descend from the upper story of

our ruin to the river, return with a pail of water, complete my toilet

and throw out the water, before the Indian boy whose only duty in life

was to attend me would, if called, appear from his seat directly below

my balcony to get the pail—which he would smash before he got back, if

there was any possible way of doing so, and into which he would

certainly manage to get some sort of filth, if he had to pick it up and

throw it in. The _gente_ lay the blame of this condition on the

_escuelas fiscales_, the free government-schools, complaining that

“there is no longer service, for as soon as the cholo has been to

school, he wants to be a _person_.” “Faltan brazos—arms are lacking,”

they wail, gazing across the all but uncultivated valley; yet not one of

them notices the two hanging idly at his own sides. A shower of medios

failed to win from the Indian boy an affection sufficient to keep

Chusquito from starvation. I obtained permission to tie the animal in a

corner of the fat alfalfa field that would not come to him, and all day

long I could see him across the little river, a contented dot of red

against the deep green background of the field from which he never

raised his head the whole day through.

Yet the products of the valley are cheap enough, when they exist. Eggs

were five cents a dozen; one morning an Indian who needed the money came

to the ruin to offer me eight for a medio (2 cents). Four liters of milk

might be had for 7 cents. But let the harassed American householder

pause a moment and reflect, before he sells his chattels and hurries

down to Andahuaylas. To obtain those four liters one must take a pail

and wander several miles along the valley at about nine in the morning,

wait around some hacienda corral where the Indians have concluded not to

abandon the daily milking, and never get home before noon. The “best

families” have a special milk-servant who does nothing else—and

frequently not even that—than go milk hunting; and on an average he is

robbed on his way home of the contents of his pail about every third

morning, by some group of Indians who come upon him out of sight of any

member of the gente class.

There is a type of “white” Indian in the Andahuaylas valley, apparently

without admixture of European blood, yet with a very light skin and

delicate pink cheeks. In the color of their garments they nearly rival

those of Quito. The heavy woolen socks and hairy sandals of more lofty

regions are unknown, and the barefoot patter again reigns supreme. In

manner the aboriginal is cringing and timorous, yet if the word of the

shod minority was trustworthy, he has more than once been known to sneak

up on a sleeping gringo and mash his head with a rock. Nor will he

“squeal” on one of his own race, even when put to the torture.

In the wilderness of weeds that passed for the local cemetery I came

upon three Indians digging a child’s grave. One muscular loafer stood

less than waist-deep in the hole, scratching into a blanket spread out

at his feet a bit of dust, with a hoe Adam might have thrown away in

disgust during the first week of his existence, before he invented a

better one. To corners of the blanket were tied ropes, by which a pair

of equally muscular Indians standing on the ground above hauled up every

ten minutes or so nearly a shovelful of earth. Of course, at “coca

time,” or a dog-fight, or the passing of a drunken man, a foreigner, a

bird, or a milk-pail, they paused from their strenuous labors a

half-hour or so to stare after the attraction. At least half the time

left they spent in bandying a skull and a pair of thigh bones back and

forth between themselves and a pair of Indian women lounging in the

grass nearby.

In the church forming one side of the plaza the chief among many

absurdities testifying to the local absence of a sense of humor were the

figures in the main side-chapel. These were life-size statues of Christ

and the Virgin, the former in a sort of “precieux” gown and a

broad-brimmed red hat with a pink band, the latter in a still broader

blue one, giving the pair a ludicrous resemblance to the “shepherds”

into which the nobles of the French court of two centuries ago used to

disguise themselves, an impression increased by the cross between a

golf-stick and a back-of-the-scenes hook carried by the Cristo. Yet the

simple Indians pattered in all through the day to kneel and gaze with a

beatified expression, in which there was not the shadow of a smile, at

these absurd figures, no doubt considering them the last word in beauty.

When all is said and done, there is a subtle, lazy charm about the

valley of Andahuaylas that holds the traveler long after he should have

moved on. Sometimes, as the placid days drifted smoothly by, one caught

the native point of view, and regretted the intrusion of strenuous

gringo activity in the midst of nature’s and man’s repose; a realization

that we of the North do much which is not much even when we get it done.

Here one could lie in perfect contentment and watch the road looping

away out of the valley over a sunlit hill, without feeling too strong

for resistance the itch to be off. Yet in the end the only sure means of

enjoying an Andean range is to know that some day one is going to tramp

away into it, to follow the trail that shoulders its way mysteriously

off through those shaded valleys and rugged quebradas, beckoning one

toward another and a new world beyond.

[Illustration:

The fatherless urchin who fell in with me beyond Andahuaylas; the only

native wearing shoes I met on the road in the Andes]

[Illustration:

My body-servant in Andahuaylas, and the sickle with which he was

supposed to cut all the alfalfa “Chusquito” could eat]