THE CITY OF THE SUN
I grew suddenly tired of Andahuaylas one afternoon, and sunrise next
morning found me driving Chusquito over the neighboring divide. We had
turned aside from the direct route to Abancay, following the valley of
the Chumbau, for the least we could do for our recent hosts was to carry
their greetings to an isolated _compadre_. His “civilized hacienda”
sloped up from the shore of a beautiful mountain lake some twenty miles
in circumference, deep-blue as some immense emerald, with
half-cultivated mountain-flanks rising all about it, and a village
tucked away in one corner. But, as so often in the high Andes, its
entire shore was bordered with slime and reeds that made access almost
impossible. Mine host shouldered his fowling-piece and easily provided a
brace of ducks for the evening meal; but he refused vociferously to
swim, and watched my preparations with patent misgiving. I succeeded in
finding an entrance, and took a header into the dense-blue, seemingly
bottomless immensity of icy water, to the vast astonishment of all the
Indian shepherds, male and female, who live out their lives among their
flocks on the edge of this magnificent body of water without ever
washing a foot in it, to say nothing of contriving a boat. The lake is
said to be famous for its floating islands, that blow back and forth
across it with cattle grazing serenely upon them; but it was my luck to
find even this Andean invention out of order and no longer
“functioning.”
My lake-side host was of rare adaptability for a Latin-American, and of
no slight mechanical ability. He not only had a real flour-mill, but
_washed_ his wheat before grinding it! This removes him at once and
forever from the “Spig” class. His own electric plant furnished the most
satisfactory light I had read by since leaving Lima; a telephone
connected him with the outside world—though this ultra-modern
contrivance was not yet considered a fitting messenger for the greetings
of his compadres in Andahuaylas. With the advertisement of a $200
“Singola” as a model, he had fitted his small phonograph into a
home-made cedar box, making it an instrument quite equal both in tone
and appearance to that in the catalogue. Only he who knows how devoid of
mechanical ability is the average Latin-American can realize how vastly
this feat lifted the lake-side hacendado above his fellows.
I had half-skirted the lake and crossed a stony range next day when,
near noon, in a collection of huts called Pincos, at the bottom of a
mighty quebrada, I caught sight of something I had never before seen in
South America. It was a white boy, perhaps twelve years old, wearing
shoes, yet in spite of that carrying a bundle over one shoulder, like
one bound on a journey.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.
“Al Cuzco,” was the astonishing reply. A Peruvian boy actually leaving
home to go somewhere else, just like a live American!
“Then we’d better go together,” I answered, as soon as I had recovered
my breath.
The child rose without a word and turned his face with me toward the
trail looping upward across the chasm.
“What’s your name?” I began lamely, as we strained along at the heels of
Chusquito, who had seemed little less surprised than I at this
extraordinary apparition.
“Teófilo Fulano,” replied our new companion.
“Fulano! Relative, perhaps, of the Señor Fulano at whose hacienda I
spent last night?”
“Yes; Don Faustino is my father.”
“Impossible!” I cried. “He is only recently married and has no
children.”
“Not since he is married,” replied the child, innocently, “and he won’t
recognize me.”
“And your mother?” I continued after a time.
“She keeps a chicha-shop in Andahuaylas,” answered the boy. “She used to
love Don Faustino.”
For hours we rose steadily, the valley of Pincos and the little river,
frothing over the stones at its bottom, sinking lower and lower beneath
us, a damp mountain-top coolness tempering our toil and somewhat
offsetting the absence of drinkingwater. Our shadows crawled from under
our feet and grew to erectness before us, and still the rather well-kept
roadway looped upward.
“Why do you go to Cuzco?” I asked, breaking in upon the story of some
boyish prank; for, once I had won his confidence, the child was
garrulous, after the manner of his race.
“One of my relatives lives there,” he muttered. The answer was too
exactly in the tone of the same reply in another tongue I had so often
heard from the lips of “hoboing” youngsters in my own land to be taken
for more than a subterfuge. I hold it any man’s privilege to keep his
own counsel, however, even though he has not yet reached the four-foot
mark, and he was soon prattling on again as unbrokenly as if the steep
slopes of his native mountains were level plain.
A crude cross, surrounded by an irregular heap of stones tossed there
one by one by passing Indians, marked the wind-blown summit. On the bit
of pampa that preceded another stony descent stood the ruin of what may
have been an Inca fortress or lookout, with another crazy cross atop.
From it spread a vast view, with the morrow’s road plainly in sight,
squirming out of a half-concealed valley and panting away over another
of the countless Andean ridges that divide this region as with a series
of mighty walls. But it was long afterward that we came in sight of
Huancarama, wedged in the throat of the gorge and extremely inviting, at
a distance, to three famished and choking roadsters.
Our reception there was so typical that I am minded to describe it, for
all its similarity to other experiences. We had explored the place
rather thoroughly before we located the dwelling of Ezequiel Palomino,
the gobernador. It is a common ruse of the rural “authorities” of Peru
not only to hide from an arriving stranger, but to swear the rest of the
town to secrecy. Small wonder, since they hold their positions on
compulsion and without emoluments. Moreover, their inability to
visualize that which is absent gives these isolated rural officials a
contempt for the government and its orders, unless it is actually there
in person, and well armed. The doors of Don Ezequiel’s shop, facing the
grazing-ground plaza, were closed, and his Indian women in the patio as
stupid in their indifference, and as clumsy as usual at covering up
their lies. The set answer to any inquiry for the head of such a
household is a mumbled, “No ’stá ’cá,” or its Quichua equivalent. Yet if
one answer, “I did not ask where he was _not_, you wooden-headed
daughter of a father without understanding; I asked, _where_ is he?” one
is considered rude and unsimpático. A long struggle brought only the
information that the gobernador was in some indefinite place somewhere
far-away or near at hand, and that he might or might not return in the
natural course of events.
But this time there was a loophole in the defenses of the besieged. A
shopkeeper—_keeping_ it, as well as all its accumulated stock, seemed to
be the extent of his activities—across the plaza turned out to be the
alcalde, who evidently was privately disgruntled with his
fellow-official. For when my questions grew pressing, he swore me to
secrecy and whispered:
“The gobernador is at home asleep in his own house, because he is
seasick to-day”; and he winked ever so faintly at the generous display
of bottles on the shelves beside us.
Far be it from me to blame any man for whiling away an Andean existence
in the only available fashion. But poor, uncomplaining Chusquito had
already stood a long hour unfed and unwatered, his burden still upon him
and twenty-five steep and stony miles in his slender legs. I lost no
time in returning to the patio. The Indian women, seeing no way out of
it, admitted that their lord and master was “sick in bed, but ya no más
ha de venir”—which may mean, “he is coming at once,” or that he may come
the day after to-morrow. I strode up the outside stairs to the
second-story veranda and, throwing open the several doors, discovered at
last the elusive official, a bleary-eyed half-breed of the most
disgusting type. I slapped him in the face, figuratively at least, with
my government order, and with a savage leer and an unhuman growl he
ordered a servant to open for us a mud den facing the street. As to
alfalfa, that, he mumbled, was “far away.” I thrust a coin upon him,
piled our junk in the bare dungeon with the little fatherless one to
watch over it, and set out to forage food for ourselves. When I
returned, the gobernador had carried out the legal requirements of his
office by causing an Indian to toss before Chusquito a small handful of
last year’s corn-stalks. This time he had hidden himself effectually. I
began a systematic search of the premises. In a back-yard, behind the
patio wall, I found a half-dozen of the gobernador’s fat horses stuffing
themselves to bursting from an enormous heap of fresh, green alfalfa!
The Indian whom I caught by the slack of the garment and drove before me
under all the load he could carry, pocketed a _real_ with a promise to
watch over the fodder, and to repeat the dose at dawn. But I also
hovered for some time in the shadow near at hand, in the hope of
catching some one attempting to snatch away Chusquito’s hard-won meal,
that I might fittingly express my feelings with the toe of a boot. No
victim offered himself, however, and the little love-token and I rolled
up together in my ponchos on the dirt floor, to spend a night during
which the rain poured as it seldom does in the upper Andes.
[Illustration:
A view of Quito, capital of Ecuador, from the summit of the Panecillo]
[Illustration:
View of Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital, from the summit of the
Sacsahuaman]
We were off at daylight, as travelers should be, along a fertile,
V-shaped valley. The rain had given the morning a scent of fresh
lushness rare in the dry Andes; birds sang gaily in the willows along
the stream; and great masses of snow-white clouds lay banked in the
hollows of the mountains. Then came another mighty climb to a stagnant,
mountain-top lagoon, and the usual hundred yards or so of level going
before we pitched down another of the stony _bajadas_ that seem to shake
all the bolts of the anatomy loose, like a runaway railway train bumping
over the ties. Suddenly there disclosed itself to view one of those
Andean vistas so tantalizing to the photographer, since any attempt to
reproduce them on a film results only in a waste of effort and material.
The earth had been scolloped out into an enormous valley, with a very
green, thread-like river racing Amazonward far down in its rocky gorge;
hundreds of little stone-fenced patches newly plowed to await the rain,
were scattered far and near on all the fertile, enclosing mountainsides
that rose higher and higher as we descended. Each Indian chacra showed
two tiny white houses connected by a high wall, which, no doubt,
enclosed the corral, enticing—at least at a distance—in their
specklessness. Then, far, far off across a vast expanse of gashed and
tumbled valley, at the back of a great tilted field broken into squares
of the yellow-green of sugar-cane, alternating with the deeper line of
alfalfares, with a ribbon of road winding to, and swallowed up within
it, could be plainly made out the little city of Abancay, backed by
mountains capped with snow-white clouds.
The brilliant sun had reduced things again to the old, familiar
dry-as-dust condition, making a torture the long perpetual zigzag down
to the river Pachachaca, flowing north through a deep cleft in the
mountains to the hot Amazonian montaña and the Atlantic, the gleam of
its blue waters tantalizing to our choking, desert thirst. I reached at
last the stone and cement bridge of graceful arch straddling the gorge,
only to find, to my dismay, that this passed high out of reach of the
water. But we would not be choked thus in plain sight of the inviting
stream. I turned Chusquito up along the bank and tramped a long distance
through cactus and chaparral, dust and tropical heat, without finding a
break in the jungle-clad, precipitous bank. At last, unable to endure
the tantalizing sight longer, I took chance by the forelock and dragged
the animal down through the clutching trees and undergrowth as far as he
could possibly go, then unloaded him, standing on a huge rock as on a
pedestal, and carried my junk the rest of the way to a shady spot beside
the racing stream. There I cooked, ate, read, wrote, bathed, washed all
my available clothing, and napped, and it was mid-afternoon before I had
loaded again. The little son of the chicha-shop had fallen behind in the
long descent. As I ate, he crossed the bridge above, but though I fired
my revolver several times to attract his attention, he went on
unheeding. All the four hours had been burdened with the worry of
perhaps finding it impossible to get Chusquito back again up that
jungled precipice and rock-spill; but the little beast climbed it like a
chamois in his native mountains, though a real horse would have refused
to attempt it.
Abancay is one of the most insignificant of department capitals, the
lowest and most nearly tropical city of all this trans-Peruvian trip.
Hot as it is, there are snowclads close behind and seeming hardly a
rifle-shot away from the town, and back along the valley through which
we had come the double Indian houses stood out as clear white specks far
up the perpendicular mountain walls, fifteen and even twenty miles away.
The place has probably fewer than 2000 inhabitants, of whom easily
ninety percent. are more or less Indian, the few whites being chiefly
importations in the form of government officials. The town is not old,
and is somewhat built to order. Yet it has not only electric lights, but
a good water-supply—when this is not polluted on its journey as an open
brook through the town. There is a simple monument, designed by my
former host, Da Pozzo, to a local hero who rose to the lofty heights of
a department prefectship; one of the few artistic things in Peru,
because of its absence of over-ornamentation. Bread was again worth
nearly its weight in gold, the town being well below the wheat-line. A
disease known as “obero” is common among the Indians, turning the face a
sooty black. There is also a white “obero,” which gives its victims the
appearance of those negroes who seek to attain white skins by acid
treatment. Some of the chola women are decidedly pretty, in spite of
their habits; but, as so often with their sex the world over, once they
begin to suspect that fact they are prone to attempt to improve on
nature, with distressing results. Every woman wears the _dicclla_, a
square of cloth richly embroidered and worked with flowers, about her
shoulders. In it a baby is carried when the wearer attains one,
apparently not a difficult feat in Abancay. But none go without this
article of attire, and he who does not look closely will scarcely notice
whether the dicclla is full of baby, or is empty.
In my first stroll about town I came upon the boy of Andahuaylas in one
of the huts on the outskirts, where he was evidently avoiding me because
he had eaten—raw—the five eggs I had given him to carry. He had fallen
in with friends, and demonstrated his Latin-American temperament by
giving up his plan to walk to Cuzco.
The “Hotel Progreso” of Yacarias Trujillo is, like Abancay, more
easily imagined than described. A stone-paved rectangle full of
clothes-lines, flapping with garments of both sexes, of Indian and
chola women and children of all degrees of ignorance of soap, of
parrots, turkeys, a belligerent goose, chickens without number,
countless yellow curs, a dozen fat and self-assertive pigs, and an
occasional drunken man, formed its center. A wall half-separated it
from the barnyard general-convenience and kitchen, beneath which
flowed an open sewer and water-supply. My “room” was an ancient,
lopsided, scarfaced, airless den opening directly off this, with the
dust of ages on its battered and medieval furniture. The longer of the
two maltreated wooden platforms on legs that posed as bedsteads was at
least a foot shorter than I, though I make no great requirements in
that respect, and I had either to hang my legs over the razor-edge of
the footboard, or thrust one out at each corner. In these Andean
hostelries the landlord may hover around the guest on the day of his
arrival, chiefly out of curiosity, commanding the servants who furnish
the room to order. But he never does so on the succeeding days, as his
attention is fully taken up with the little grocery, drunkery, and
billiard-room on which his real income depends, and one is lucky
indeed to lay hands once a day on a servant to bring a pitcher of
water and empty the basura. As to a clean towel or a change of sheets,
the only way to obtain them, whatever the length of stay, is to move
to another hotel—in the unlikely event that one exists. But the
accomplished bachelor prefers, on the whole, to be his own
chambermaid, rather than admit to his room the average variety of
Andean hotel servant. The service was genuinely table d’hôte, in that
we gathered around the table with the entire family of our host, his
children, dogs, and chickens, some local government officials, and the
ubiquitous four-eyed German with his stale jokes and flat-footed
attempts to make himself “simpático.” On Sunday we had to dinner a
dried-up but still bright old lady who claimed to remember the battle
of Ayacucho, 88 years before, and to have seen as a small girl the
beaten Spaniards racing pell-mell through “Dead Man’s Corner.”
Yacarias had learned none of those tricks of his tribe that are the
burden of the traveler almost the world over. Though his rates were
ninety cents a day, he refused to collect for the meal or two I ran over
and when I left he forced upon me a roast chicken for my _fiambre_, or
road lunch, as “a little remembrance.” Moreover, to my astonishment he
actually had Chusquito back from his pasture and tied in the patio with
a juicy bundle of alfalfa before him, by the time the religious fiesta
had sunk into its drunken sleep and quiet had settled down over the
Andes. To have a Latin-American promise to do a thing and then to do it
the same day was a breath-taking experience, indeed.
We were off at the crack of dawn on the last stage of my march to the
ancient capital of the Inca Empire. That eagerness the traveler always
feels in nearing the scene of boyhood dreams caused me to scold
Chusquito more than usual for not keeping out from underfoot on the
famous climb to the next mountain notch, with its _achapeta_, or
stone-heap, on which Indians are said to have tossed their coca-cuds
since long before the Conquest. The descent was even swifter, and by
three we had ended the nine leagues to Curahuasi, a scattered collection
of huts on a high shelf of mountain. Chusquito had brought with him his
own dinner wrapped in my rubber poncho, in the form of a wad of alfalfa
he had not been able to finish in Abancay. But, though he managed to
make away with it, he seemed to prefer the short, dry mountain-grass of
the central plaza, consisting of a large, open space adorned by one lone
eucalyptus. I was soon possessor of the Stone-age key and padlock of the
_cabildo_, an empty mud cave furnished by the municipalidad, to which
the traveler is as legally entitled as to lodging in a French _asile de
nuit_. The same building included the jail, full of the aftermath of the
religious fiesta in the persons of bleary-eyed Indians thrusting their
faces through the wooden bars of the single window, imploring liquor and
tobacco. But though I had wine, chicha, and pisco, and Peruvian
prisoners are permitted anything they can lay hands on, it seemed wiser
to let them reflect on the error of their ways. The ragged
lieutenant-governor came to inquire if he should send a “cholita” to
keep me company, and seemed to consider my negative reply a personal
affront. Now and then an Indian, all but hidden under a load of green
alfalfa, loped across the plaza, pursued by several asses taking a bite
at every jump. It is the custom in this region for all aboriginals, men,
women, or children, to snatch off their hats and murmur “Buenas
tardes”—whatever the time of day—to every white man. If I failed to
answer, they repeated that inane, redundant, and not always truthful
remark in a loud, distressed voice until I replied, as if they feared
some punishment unless their greeting was returned. When it came to
every passerby thus insisting on recognition as often as he passed the
cabildo doorway in which I sat writing my notes, it was hard to refrain
from replying with the adobe brick nearest at hand.
[Illustration:
Building a house in Peru. Mud and chopped straw are trampled together
with the bare feet, loaded into a hod that is really a sun-dried
ox-hide, and fashioned into such a wall as that in the background]
[Illustration:
The patio of the “Hotel Progreso” of Abancay. The cook is peering
through the hole in the wall by which she thrusts out to the
servants at meal-time her nefarious concoctions]
Birds were singing merrily in the molle trees when we descended a
semi-desert bristling with cactus, then through precipitous stony
quebradas at the bottoms of which excited streams rushed headlong down
from the mountain heights in their haste to join the unseen river below
on its journey to the Atlantic. We were approaching the famous Apurímac,
the roar of whose waters already came up to us, and the crossing of
which travelers have always looked forward to with misgiving. Yet it was
only a very moderate river we came in sight of in mid-morning,
exceedingly far down in the precipitous gorge it has cut for itself
during the centuries. The leg-straining descent seemed endless; the road
wound incessantly round the mountain, far up each profound ravine and
back again, so that a two-mile walk was barely a 500-yard gain.
Travelers now were numerous. Mule-trains with goods from the outside
world by way of Cuzco appeared as dots on the sky-line crest of the
range beyond, and crawled slowly down its barren face; Indians, bearing
on their backs chickens, pigs, or the scanty produce of their chacras,
climbed past us into the hot, cactus-grown world above.
The blazing sun stood sheer overhead when we reached the river, or more
exactly Tablachaca, the “board-bridge” high above it. Since long before
the Conquest, _simpichacas_, the swaying Inca bridges of braided withes,
have been thrown across this mighty gorge at various points, so that the
passing of the Apurímac has long been synonymous with taking one’s life
in one’s hands. But the tameness of modern times has intruded even here.
To-day a solid bridge, built by a Philadelphian and maintained, not by
the government, but by the neighboring hacendados, carries the traveler
across without a tremor. In an openwork, gnat-bitten hut beside it live
the bridge-tender, a curiously old youth, and his mother, boasting
themselves the grandson and daughter respectively of the builder, yet so
purely Peruvian that they cannot even pronounce the name of their
illustrious ancestor.
Finding it possible to descend to the river by a series of natural stone
steps, I determined to enjoy the distinction of a dip into the famous
stream. The astonished bridge-tenders wished to know if I was a great
swimmer, as their father and grandfather from Philadelphia had been, and
could I even out-gringo him by swimming clear across the river. I
admitted that I could come near to making it, if there were a sheriff’s
posse at my heels and no bridge; but neither of those contingencies
staring me in the face, I saw no reason to risk coming home by way of
the Amazon in the garb of Adam by attempting a gratuitous “stunt” worthy
of a genuine andarín. As I stood soaping my gnat-bitten frame, however,
I fell to wondering why Pedro de la Gasca should have lost most of his
horses and mules here on the way to his famous pussy-wants-a-corner game
with Gonzalo Pizarro on the field of Xaquixaguana. For though it snarled
and fretted against its rocky barriers with considerable force and
speed, to any but a Spanish-speaking people the stream lapping at my
knees would not exactly seem a great river. I came to the conclusion
that his misfortune must have been due to the fact that Pedro was a
priest, and to test the theory, swam across, sat a moment against the
sheer rock wall that bounds the resounding gorge on the further side,
and swam back again. True the stream moved with something more than
Peruvian energy, and not far below there was a fall with a threatening
hollow roar where the man so foolish as to let himself be carried over
might have sustained a few bumps and gashes. But there was nothing in
the escapade to get excited over, much less to lose one’s horses.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, as I gripped my prehensile toes once
more on the hither bank, to discover, just in time to save myself from
shattering the proprieties to fragments, that all the surrounding
countryside, large and small, male and female, Indian, half-breed and
¾-breed, was hanging over the precipice and bridge above, watching with
open mouths my marvelous and unprecedented feat. As I climbed the bank,
reclad, the vigilante del puente and his mother fell upon me, insisting
that such unrivalled prowess should not pass unrecorded, and getting
possession of my note-book, they spent most of the afternoon in
concocting a certificate of my epoch-making adventure, with all the
signatures, rúbricas, and seals thereunto appertaining.
Beyond the river, now in the great department of Cuzco, we climbed a
sheer mountain face, and descended with sunset to a mass of buildings on
a bluff, among immense stretches of yellow-green canefields. This was
the hacienda “La Estrella” of Senator Montes, whom official duties held
in Lima, but whose son, once he had overcome his racial prejudice
against a man who came on foot and without a servant, appointed an
Indian valet to Chusquito and took upon himself my entertainment. His
newly constructed mansion boasted all modern improvements, from electric
lights to paintings on the walls of corredor and rooms “by a famous
imported artist.” In the well-appointed sugar-mill the cane of the
surrounding fields was turned into white, cone-shaped sugar-loaves and
concentrated merriment, the latter selling at $9 a hundred liters, of
which something more than half went to the government. Two
salt-inspectors joined us at the formal dinner in the overdecorated
mansion. Salt being a government monopoly, Peru swarms with
salt-inspectors, salt-police, salt-detectives, official salt-weighers,
and so on to national bankruptcy. The reddish rocks mined on the Montes
estate were bought by the government at ten cents a hundred-weight—and
sold in official _estancos_ at $2.50!
As we sat,—Montes the younger, his half-dozen white overseers, and the
salt-inspectors—before the door of the cabin that had been assigned me,
the tropical full moon casting over the scene a brightness almost equal
to that of a sunny day, a hundred picturesquely clad Indian peons,
carrying medieval hoes and axes, lined up before us for roll-call, then
scattered to their huts. The hacienda’s vast army of laborers refuse for
the most part to live in the tenement-like houses, in long, identical
rows, of which my own lodging was one, but insisted, with the
conservatism so deeply engrained in their race, on building their own
huts, of far poorer accommodations. Each peon was given a piece of land
on which to erect his dwelling and plant his garden, free pasturage for
a few animals, and a wage of 20 cents a day, when he worked for the
hacienda. This he did only every other month, and thanks to church
festivals and the concentrated cane-juice with which they are enlivened,
by no means all the days of that. The women had no obligations to the
hacienda, but lived on it merely as appendices to their husbands—old
maids, of course, are unknown among South American Indians—doing only
such work about the estate-house as they could be coaxed to do, or “what
they were ordered by their husbands.” Under the silver-flooding moon the
gathering of _gente_ grew reminiscent, and on every hand floated stories
of Peru, ending with one by the son which explained why Montes the elder
had become wealthy and a Senator and had had such extraordinary
all-around luck—because he had picked up at the Chicago Exposition
twenty years before a horseshoe, which was still carefully guarded.
The moon had set, though the forerunner of day had not yet appeared,
when, after trying in vain to punch awake the peon Montes had ordered to
attend me, I entered the immense hacienda corral to _pescar_, or “fish
out,” as the Peruvians say, my horselet from the army of mules and
horses munching the dry pulp of crushed sugarcane that constitutes the
fodder of these near-tropical regions. I had no difficulty in
recognizing my own animal in the dark, not only by his diminutiveness,
but by his picturesquely docked tail. Looking back on that day, however,
I am sorry I did not pescar another animal by mistake.
As I prepared to load him before my cabin door, I was startled to find
that Chusquito seemed to have turned zebra during the night. Several
dark lines ran from his spine down either side to his shaggy belly. The
sense of smell astonished me with the information that these were of
blood. I got water and washed him off, meanwhile cursing the savage
mules that had evidently spent most of the night biting the helpless
little brute. As a former Zone Policeman, trained to arrest every
Panamanian coachman who dared enter the Canal Zone with a horse
_matado_, I had taken extreme care to keep my own animal free from those
back-sores so atrociously frequent and unattended in the Andes. But the
soft alforjas could not add to his injuries. I, too, had been bitten,
until my frame was one single expanse of tattooing; and Chusquito must
bear his share of troubles unavoidable in the tropics. I arranged the
load as carefully as possible, and we were off.
It was not long, however, before I realized that something, perhaps the
impossibility of eating during the night, had decidedly sapped my
companion’s strength. He did not tramp with his old-time vim; the joy of
life seemed to have departed from him. I moderated my pace, thinking my
haste to reach the climax of my South American journey was unconsciously
causing me to outdo the pace we had long since agreed upon. Still he
would not keep out from under my feet. For almost the first time in our
acquaintance I found it necessary to touch him up with a stick. We were
moving along a semi-tropical hollow, amid the deafening scream of
parrakeets, with an occasional sharp dip into and climb out of a stony
quebrada, from which I had almost to carry him by main force. He moved
like a clock that was running down, and for the life of me I could not
contrive the means of winding him up again. Then, all at once, I
realized what had befallen him. The poor, misused brute had been bitten,
not by mules, but by those loathsome vampire bats of tropical valleys
that sometimes find even human victims for their blood-sucking
propensities.
[Illustration:
A religious procession in Abancay. Note the group of urchins in the
church-tower vying with each other in beating the bells into an
uproar]
We crawled at last into the mud village of Limatambo, only to be
informed that there was no alfalfa in town, and that we must push on at
least to the “Hacienda Challabamba,” half a league up the valley. As we
turned toward it, I was startled to find the way bordered by a splendid
wall of cut stone, about which the effete modern inhabitants had pitched
their miserable mud huts. For here, commanding the narrow entrance to
the valley, stood one of those four fortresses with which the ancient
emperors of Tavantinsuyo had defended, at some twelve leagues from the
capital, the highways radiating to the Four Corners of the Earth.
Chusquito had lost all response to any species of outside influence.
Push as I would, putting my shoulder to the wheel—I would say rump—and
digging my toes into the trail, we could not advance a mile an hour. The
drooping animal took a half minute to lift each separate foot, a pebble
caused him to stumble, a six-inch rock step made him groan audibly. He
did not look particularly worn-out; he was fatter if anything than the
day I had bought him; and surely even a man could have gone the mile or
two more “on his nerve.” Instead, he came to a complete standstill. This
would never do. At least we must reach the hacienda and its
alfalfa-fields. Much as it grieved me to raise a hand against a faithful
companion, I rapped him soundly across the quarters with my stick. He
uttered a sudden pathetic groan, and dropped in the middle of the road
as suddenly as a well-killed bull in a Spanish bull-ring; his legs
quivered a moment, his eyes opened wide, closed, then opened again in a
glassy stare.
Despite all my blustering before soulless gobernadores who would have
starved him in the midst of plenty, despite all my struggles to find him
food when even I had gone without, the patient little brute had come to
this sad end. Never had I felt the loss of a traveling companion more
keenly. For six weeks we had toiled together over lofty Andean ranges,
across vast páramos with nothing in sight but their dreary nothingness.
How often had we not listened to each other contentedly dining in our
adjacent chambers at the end of a laborious day? If we had had
differences, they had been only those which arise between all beings
with wills of their own, joined together on a long journey. And the end
of that journey had been so near at hand. I had long looked forward to
our triumphal entry into Cuzco together, to having our pictures proudly
taken side by side in the main plaza, and to the pleasure of presenting
him as a pet to the children of the one American I knew dwelt in the
ancient capital—should it turn out that the latter had any such
appendages—that he might toil no more and end his days in the beloved
mountain air of his native heights. Instead of which, here I sat on the
edge of a Peruvian trail, gazing at a shattered dream stiffening in the
blazing sunshine before me.
But the experienced traveler will not let misfortune long interfere with
the regular flow of his existence. Behind the bristling cactus hedges
lining the road were several Indian hovels. I risked leaving alone what
was left of my possessions to walk to the nearest, some fifty yards
away. Two arrieros, a boy, and a woman, were lounging within it. The
muleteers spoke a Quichua somewhat different from that I had picked up;
moreover they were half drunk. I offered them a good reward to toss my
stuff on one of their grazing mules and carry it to “Challabamba.” But
they were bound for “La Estrella”—probably five or six hours later—and
could not turn back. Perhaps it brings bad luck. The woman would not be
compromised, even to the extent of admitting my existence. As a final
straw the boy refused a “peseta” to carry a note to the hacienda.
I returned to the scene of the disaster and sat down hopelessly in the
shrinking shadow of the hedge. The connecting link between a sahib and
his baggage kept running like a refrain through my head. Indian
travelers and mule-trains passed to and fro, staring curiously and
seeming, in so far as the impassive Indian face shows anything, to smirk
with satisfaction at my plight. At least I could pull my belongings off
the corpse; though not easily, with the “diamond-hitch” and the ropes
wound round and round the body. Luckily the animal had fallen on the
side carrying my “city” clothing, and had spared the developing-tank. I
disentangled my still existent possessions and piled them beside me in
the shade. An hour crawled by; another was crawling. Something must be
done. I could neither leave my baggage unprotected here beside one of
the four royal highways leading into, or out of the City of the
Sun—depending on which way one was going, were one going at all—nor
could I carry it myself, such was the bulk to which it had accumulated.
I drew out a visiting-card, that proof of the caballero caste in South
America, and wrote upon it:
“Vengo recomendado por los señores de La Laguna, pero á ’tres
cuadras de su hacienda me ha muerto de repente el caballo. Puede V.
mandarme un indio para que me ayude con el equipaje?”
The owners of “Challabamba” were relatives of my host of the first night
out of Andahuaylas, and he had implored me to stop with them. As to the
horse, it was best not to try to explain offhand that it was not one I
had been riding. Awaiting my chance, I picked out an old Indian woman
stubbing along the stony, rising trail, twirling her ubiquitous
yarning-spindle, and explained to her in my most fluent and Incaic, not
to say archaic, Quichua, that she was to give the note to Don Francisco
when she passed his hacienda.
But like most of her race sent on errands, she probably forgot it, or
concluded I didn’t mean what I had said, or thought of some other
incomprehensible reason for not delivering it, such as not having the
consent of her _yaya_, or father confessor, or she decided to keep it as
fuel, or Don Francisco was “No ’stá ’cá” as usual, or he didn’t care to
have travelers recomendado by his relatives, or qué sé yo. The empty,
blazing minutes expanded into half hours; these in turn into hours, and
still life drifted eventlessly on. I dug out a battered copy of Marcus
Aurelius, and strove to pass the time as pleasantly as possible until
fate saw fit to make a suggestion. Limping old Epictetus would have been
far more to the point under the circumstances. The sun drew relentlessly
away on its westward journey, the handful of shade crawled on all fours
under the cactus hedge and spread into the uninviting field beyond. I
transferred my sundry, not to say sun-dried, chattels to the other side
of the road and continued my reading. An old, near-white fellow hobbled
past and desired to know what I was doing there. I replied that the
densest of human beings could see that I was installing an electric
light-and-power plant, and could he, as quite evidently the oldest
resident of these parts and a man of extraordinary intelligence, suggest
any means of starting the dynamo. His brilliant, but not wholly
unexpected reply was, “Where do you come from where are you going?” If
one dragged a Peruvian out of bed at midnight to say that his wife had
just hanged herself in the patio and should be cut down as soon as
convenient, he would certainly cry, “Y á ’onde vueno?” I finally stirred
up his drivelling intellect to the point where he announced himself the
owner of a small hacienda not far away, and he promised that as soon as
he returned from a social call up the road he would see whether he had
an animal that could carry my stuff to his house, and an Indian that
cared to fetch it. I picked up my book once more—and just then Chusquito
raised his head and gazed listlessly about him, like one of the opposite
sex coming out of a faint, or one of our own regaining the first
consciousness of the cold gray dawn of a morning after. Then getting
unsteadily to his feet, that deceitful, ungrateful, possum-playing
rascal stood up, staggered through the cactus hedge, and fell to
nibbling the stubble of the field beyond!
The octogenarian had not mentioned the date of his proposed return and,
whatever it was, it had not arrived when there appeared along the road I
would have traveled a near-Indian in some cast-off clothing and the same
kind of Spanish, leading a stout, “empty” mule. Don Francisco, as I had
suspected, was not at home, and la señora had evidently slept the siesta
on the note before acting upon it. Chusquito, though on his feet again,
was of course too weak to be reloaded, and even in the clothes he stood
in I could only drag him along a few feet to the minute by pulling like
a Dutchman—or more exactly, a Dutch woman—on a canal tow-path, the
inscrutable near-Indian, with the mule bearing my baggage, bringing up
the funereal rear. A score of times I was on the point of abandoning the
derelict far from port and alfalfa, but contained myself in patience,
recalling the former virtues of the deceiving creature, and sweated at
last with him into the hacienda corral. The estate was just then in
supreme command of a woman of such cold indifference to my sad tale that
she might as well have spoken only Quichua, instead of being so versed
in Spanish that she was performing the extraordinary feat, for a South
American country-woman, of reading a novel of Dumas in that tongue. The
“parlor” of the low adobe building was papered with the pages of
illustrated weeklies from many lands and in many languages, and there
the illustrious and the notorious of all countries rubbed shoulders,—the
latest champion of the fistic world beside the ivory-like dome of an
experienced American presidential candidate, the Pope in the act of
blessing a group of Mexican bandits, the American rector of the
University of Cuzco arm in arm, as it were, with a famous Spanish
bull-fighter.
In a corner of the corral Chusquito had fallen upon a heap of alfalfa in
a way to show that, whatever his appearance, he was far from dead. But
the hacienda people assured me the animal could not possibly carry my
stuff to Cuzco; that, like a nervous breakdown, his ailment called for
long rest and weeks of good feeding. I might perder cuidado, however, as
they would lend me a chusco and an Indian for the rest of the journey.
From their careful avoidance of any suggestions on the subject, it was
evident that they fancied I would leave Chusquito where he was, and that
they would automatically fall heir to him. I may look like that in my
pictures, but photography is at best deceiving. Moreover, I had not
forgotten that it is a common human failing to take far less care of
that which is given than of that which is bought. A wily old compadre of
the family, smelling how the wind blew, said he would buy the animal
himself were it not that he had only that week finished and a won a
27-year lawsuit against some Franciscan friars for the possession of an
hacienda, and was penniless in consequence. The brother of the absent
Don Francisco, who chanced to ride over from his neighboring hacienda,
assured me the eighteen _soles_ I had paid in Huancayo was an
“atrocious” price, and after the rest of the usual prelude to a bargain
in Peru, offered me eight. I forgot myself and accepted too quickly;
whereupon he walked slowly around the animal until, finding a discolored
fetlock or some other fatal blemish, he lightly broke his word and
offered six. After a sharp and scintillating exchange of gypsying, I
pocketed seven, and sadly watched the constant companion of my most
pleasant six weeks on the road in Peru led slowly away to a large green
spot up the valley, the order of his new master, to give him all the
alfalfa he could eat, ringing in his ears. Yet I knew only too well his
preference for the tough páramo grasses of his native upper heights.
La señora had promised that I should start by six, whence it was
unusually good luck that I actually dashed out through the hacienda gate
at seven, my possessions behind me on a little gray chusco in charge of
one of the wooden-headed Indians of the region, sent to lead the animal
to Cuzco and back. The first half of his task did not last long. After I
had paused to wait for him a dozen times or more in the first furlong, I
came back to kick him off the end of the tow-rope and take personal
charge of the expedition. Gradually the great, semi-tropical valley
where Chusquito had found the end of his journeyings shrunk to a hollow
in the earth, then to a mere hole, wavy blue with distance, that finally
disappeared forever from my eyes. The brown pampa and exhilarating air
of upper heights appeared once more, with magnificent views of the Andes
on every hand as far as the eye could range. The wooden Indian
disappeared for hours, and I fancied I was rid of him for the rest of
the journey. But he caught up, and dropped at the roadside with an
almost audible sigh of relief, the coca quid still in his cheek, the bag
of eggs I had entrusted to him still intact, where I paused for dinner
on the edge of a floor-flat plain that had evidently once been a
lake-bottom. The mood came upon me to treat him as an equal, to see what
the effect might be. I shared with him such a meal as he had certainly
never before enjoyed; but his outward expression showed neither
gratitude nor any other emotion, though he mumbled the customary
“Gracias, tayta-tayta” in the tone one would expect from a wooden
Indian. A more passive human being it would be hard to imagine. He ate
boiled oatmeal without a murmur, though it was plain he neither
recognized nor liked it. When I pointed to the approaching storm and
murmured, “Para—it rains,” he muttered, “Para, señor.” “Munanquichu
cocata?” I asked. “Ari, señor,” he mumbled, and waited like a stone
image until I had handed him a pinch of coca leaves. “Munanquichu
copita?” “Ari, señor,” and he drank the pisco as impassively as he had
eaten the oatmeal. Had I announced that it was snowing, or asked him to
take poison, I should have expected the same passive acquiescence.
The plain broadened to the immense Pampa de Anta, the “plain of
Xaquixaguana” of Prescott, stretching to far-off mountain-walls on
either hand. Along the base of these, to the left, hung some splendid
examples of ancient Inca _andenes_, or terraced fields. Thousands of
cattle speckled the plain in every direction, dim villages stood forth
on projecting headlands, while several snow-clads peered over the
bordering range to the north. The ground was half-marshy, but a broad,
partly paved, raised highway stretched straight ahead as far as the eye
could see. It began to rain. It always does on the Pampa de Anta, if
local information is trustworthy. It was such a rain as one rarely
encounters in the high Andes, mixed with hail and punctuated by roaring
crashes of thunder. Lightning is so frequent on the Pampa de Anta that
natives always fee their favorite saint before crossing it, and the
government, a bit more materialistic in its superstitions, has provided
each pole of the two-wide telegraph line with lightning-rods. A
well-meaning Peruvian had advised me, if, as was certain, I should be
overtaken by a thunder-storm on the pampa, to take refuge at once under
a telegraph-pole and remain there until the storm was over.
Instead I splashed on, wet to the thighs, singing between the crashes of
thunder, so great was my joy at approaching Cuzco. As the storm
slackened, the world about me became musical with the chorus of frogs.
All day the costume of Indians had been gradually changing. The pancake
hat of Cuzco was now in the majority; the knee breeches and skirts were
shorter; the faces were distinctly darker—or was it dirtier?—and even
more stupid than the type with which I had grown so familiar. Greetings
were more obsequious than ever. Even the women raised their hats to me
as they duck-trotted by, and more than one carried my thoughts back to
Inca days by a respectful “Buenas tardes, Viracocha.”
It became evident we could not reach Cuzco by daylight. We halted at
Izcochaca, the Indian curling up in a far corner of the mud corredor
assigned us, with only his thin semi-tropical garb upon him, too passive
to find himself the ragged old poncho I discovered in a corner and threw
over him. It rained most of the night, making much of the twelve miles
left a quagmire broken by patches of atrocious cobbling. No conquistador
of old looked forward more eagerly than I to the first glimpse of the
Navel of the Inca Empire; yet as always at the end of a long journey the
last miles seemed trebly drawn out. The road that had been perfectly
level since the preceding noonday began to clamber over bumps and rises,
from the tops of each of which I strained my eyes in vain for the
long-anticipated sight. Towns grew up along the way, birds sang in
clumps of eucalypti, the peon slapped sluggishly along behind me,
apparently seeing no further than his coca-cud; broad vistas of a
tumbled and shadow-patched mountain world, with an occasional flash of
the long snow and glacier-clad cordillera, spread and contracted as I
hurried onward. The road passed through deep-rutted hollows and under
the graceful old arch of an aqueduct ranging away with giant strides
across the rolling uplands; but still no city. Again and again I topped
a ridge, only to be newly disappointed, until I came almost to fancy
this was only some dream city of the imagination toward which we were
headed.
Then all at once, without warning, the road dived downward, turned a
sharp angle, and there, below and before me, in mid-morning of October
17, lay spread out in all its extent the City of the Sun. Like the
passing Indians, I, too, paused on the edge of the rocky shelf, and was
almost moved to follow their lead in snatching off my hat and murmuring
reverently, “O Ccoscco, Hatun Llacta, Napai cuiqui—Oh, Cuzco, Great
City, I salute thee!” For to the aboriginals Cuzco is still a sanctified
spot, venerated not only as the abode of the Incas, but of all those
deities that still, in spite of its outward Christianity, preside over
the ancient Empire of Tavantinsuyo. My peon showed not a hint of
surprise when I knelt to make a tripod of stones for my kodak, no doubt
fancying it some instrument of worship it was quite natural any human
being should set up at first sight of what to all mankind must be the
noblest scene in all the world.
In a way his veneration was justified. Some have it that Cuzco is
superior in situation to even Bogotá and Quito. In physical beauty alone
this is not quite true. But what with that, combined with its historical
memories, there are few such fascinating moments in the traveler’s
experience as this first glimpse of the ancient Inca capital. I, for one
at least, looked down upon it with a thrill exceeding even that awakened
by Rome or Jerusalem.
The city covered the northern and more elevated end of a half-green
plain, enclosed by velvety-brown mountain flanks and dying away in hazy,
labyrinthian distance. On the edge of the ridge on which we stood,
Sacsahuaman, a mere knoll from this height, with its fortress, frowned
down upon the city. A hulking, two-tower cathedral faced an immense
plaza, faded red roofs giving the scene its chief color, until this
broke into the velvet green of the plain, which in turn shaded into the
soft brown of the surrounding ranges. But neither words nor photographs
can give more than a faint hint of the charm and fascination of what is
in many respects the most interesting spot in the Western Hemisphere, a
charm enhanced by the anticipation of a long overland journey. There
came upon me pity for the tourist who comes sneaking into the famous
city by train along the valley below. This in its turn was succeeded by
a regret that the hands of time could not be set back 400 years, to the
day when Balboa first peered out upon the Pacific, that I might sit here
and watch the activities of a world totally different from that we know;
a regret that what men call the Conquest of Peru ever happened. What
days were those, when there were really new worlds to discover! What
would I not have given to have preceded Pizarro a bit—and been provided
with the magic cap of invisibility to save me from being served up as an
exotic delicacy on the Inca’s table.
A swift, stony descent that soon became a regular cobbled stairway, once
topped by the Huancapuncu, or West Gate, led through none too pleasantly
scented suburbs, the population staring agape at sight of a white man in
shirt-sleeves and belligerently armed descending afoot into the famous
city. The chusco and Indian followed at my heels across a great market
square, past a prettily flowered little rectangle, and I marched at last
out upon the broad central plaza, so densely populated with the shades
of history. I had loafed away thirty-eight days since leaving Huancayo,
though only twenty-two of them had been even partly spent on the road.
The distance had proved almost exactly 400 miles, making a total of 2380
miles that I had covered on foot since Hays and I walked out of the
central plaza of Bogotá nearly fourteen months before.
The City of the Sun, ancient capital of the Inca Empire, which Garsilaso
called Cozco and Stevenson Couzcou, is to-day but a shadow of its once
imperial grandeur. The famous Inca historian states that the name
corresponded to the Spanish _ombligo_, and from his day to this writers
have referred to it as the Navel of the Inca Empire. Educated cuzqueños
of to-day deny this derivation, asserting that the Quichua word for
navel is, and always has been, _pupu_. The talkative old successor of
Valverde chanced, when I called upon him, to have just been reading an
ancient manuscript in which the words _ccori ccoscco_ (crumbs or
shavings of gold), occurred frequently in the description of the city,
and he held this to be the real origin of the name.
Whatever of truth or exaggeration there may have been in the statements
of old chroniclers that the city gleamed with gold at the time of the
Conquest, little of that royal aspect remains. The chief and almost only
material reminders of the days of the Incas are long walls of beautiful
cut stone in the central portion of the modern city. Indeed, in all Peru
the mementoes of the ancient race are almost wholly confined to walls.
Some of these are “dressed down” so smoothly that the joints seem mere
pencil-marks. Most of them are cyclopean, rough-hewn boulders of
irregular size and shape, similar to the Pitti Palace in Florence, which
is by no means so perfect in workmanship. There are almost no curved or
circular walls, the chief exception to this being the former Temple of
the Sun, now the Dominican monastery, where, like mud huts superimposed
on the ruins of a mighty race, contented old friars lounge among the
glories of long ago. The remnants are chiefly street after street in
which the old walls have been left standing from six to twenty feet
high, the whitewashed adobe of the ambitionless modern descendants above
them. For the most part these form only one side of each street, for the
elbow-rubbing passageways of the Incas, of which one still remains
intact, were too narrow even for Spanish notions. But the city of to-day
is still defined by these long reaches of elaborately cut stones, which,
legend has it, divided the ancient capital into regular squares. They
are Egyptian in aspect, these massive walls, shrinking toward the top,
as do the rare doors and openings of Inca construction that have
survived. Here and there they have been rudely torn open to give
entrance to a blacksmith-shop, a bakery, a chicharia, or, it would seem,
for no other reason than the mere lust for destruction. Everywhere old
walls stare out upon the passerby with Indian stolidity, as if refusing
to tell the stories they might so easily if they chose. Even where the
walls themselves have disappeared to furnish building material for the
churches and monasteries of the conquerors, the magnificent doorways
have sometimes been preserved as the entrance to some modern hovel, and
give a suggestion of what this imperial city, so ruthlessly destroyed,
might have been.
It is only these walls and the historical memories with which they are
saturated that distinguish Cuzco from any other city of the Sierra. The
life of the place is drab and uninspiring, wellnigh as colorless as the
most monotonous village of the Andes. The metropolis, no doubt, of the
Western Hemisphere in the fifteenth century, in the twentieth it seems a
little backwater almost wholly cut off from the main stream of life. For
a long time after the Conquest it was queen of the Andes, greater even
than Lima. Then as the Inca highway fell into decay under the squabbling
and incompetent successors of the provident Incas, it shrunk away into
its mountain-girdled isolation, until to-day it is less known to Peru
itself than is London or Berlin. For one limeño who has visited Cuzco,
the historical gem of the continent, a hundred have journeyed to Paris.
The Conquistadores, fond of exaggerating their prowess by multiplying
the numbers of their defeated enemies, ascribed to Cuzco 200,000
inhabitants. This is inconceivable. To-day a trustworthy census, taken
by the American rector of the university a few weeks before my arrival,
shows the population to be slightly under 20,000. It may, this authority
fancies, have numbered 100,000 at the time of the Conquest. The
percentage of marriages was found to be extremely low, though the
birth-rate holds its own. A few white officials and _comerciantes_, what
would be called petty shopkeepers elsewhere, are in evidence; otherwise
Cuzco has chiefly the aspect of an Indian town, its plazas too vast for
its shrunken population.
An ancient chronicler tells us that “through the heart of the capital
ran a river of pure water, its sides faced with stone for a distance of
twenty leagues.” Granting that he carelessly wrote leagues when he would
have said _cuadras_, none but a Spaniard would call the stream a river,
and the purity of its water, if it ever existed, has long since
departed. To-day this “stone-faced” Huatenay at the bottom of its
deep-gashed gorge becomes a trickling sewer as it enters the town,
passing directly beneath the principal buildings and carrying off such
refuse as its sluggishness makes possible. The vast central plaza, far
from level and once even larger than to-day, is faced as usual by the
cathedral, second only to that of Lima, or, being of stone rather than
of reeds and plaster, perhaps to be rated the first in Peru. There is
something of the soft velvet-brown of Salamanca about the churches of
Cuzco, that calls, not for a kodak, but for an artist. The blue-black
plaster interior, pretending to be also of cut stone, is divided, after
the Spanish custom, by the choir, with splendid carved stalls. In the
sacristy are ranged the dusky portraits of all the Bishops of Cuzco,
from sophistical old Valverde to him of the gold-leaf theory. In the
scented twilight of the nave gather all the motley population, the male
_gente_ only excepted, after the free-for-all manner of Andean churches.
Dogs are not permitted to enter. But it is a strange Latin-American rule
that cannot be circumvented. I have seen a chola pause at the door,
sling her puppy in the manto on her back, as she would have carried a
baby, and enter to kneel before a tinselled image, the puppy licking her
face affectionately from time to time as she prayed.
In the center of the plaza stands a fountain topped by a life-size
bronze Indian. A figure of some great Inca? No, indeed; but a North
American “redskin,” feathers, in buckskins, unAndean haughtiness and
all, armed with such a bow and arrows as no Inca ever beheld. The exotic
is ever more pleasing than the local. The ornate façade of “La
Compañía,” testimonial to Jesuit wealth in colonial days, stares awry at
the cathedral. Around the other sides of the square are the usual arched
and pillared arcades, gaudy with everything that appeals to the eye and
purse of the Peruvian muleteer. Here are gay leather knapsacks in which
to carry his coca and less valuable possessions, richly decorated
trappings for his animals, _quenas_, or fifes, to while away the weary
hours across the unpeopled páramos, and the many-colored “skating-caps”
with earlaps which are worn not only by babies, but by many of the
Indians of surrounding hamlets. The clashing of shod hoofs sounds now
and then over the cobbles, but the absence of vehicles, which is so
curious a feature of the interior cities of the Andes, would be striking
to a newcomer. A “ferrocarril de sangre,” what we might call a
street-car of flesh and blood—a roofed platform on wheels behind
phlegmatic mules—rambles down to the station on train-days. Memories of
viceregal times hover about the rare sedan-chair that serves the same
purpose. Cuzco had no electric lights as yet, though she continued to
hope, and my friend Martinelli had enstalled a dynamo to operate his
cinema in the patio of the “Hotel Central.”
Cuzco was the first place in South America with any hint of a tourist
resort about it. Visitors have become almost familiar sights, and there
was already developing that pest of European show-places, unwashed and
officious urchins offering their services as “guides,” an occupation
undreamed of elsewhere on the continent. A wily Catalan resident pays
any street Arab twenty cents for bringing him first news of the arrival
of a foreigner—by train; those who tramp in from the north are, of
course, overlooked—taking a sporting chance on recovering the _dos
reales_ from the possible victim. But the business is still in embryo,
though there are those who prophesy that Cuzco will some day become the
Rome of South America—not entirely to its own advantage.
There are many points of similarity between Cuzco and Quito, located at
opposite ends of what is left of the ancient Inca highway. In climate
they are much alike. Being 11,380 feet above the sea and on the
thirteenth parallel south, surrounded by high and snowy mountains, even
though at some distance, one would expect the former capital of
Tavantinsuyo to be colder. But even in this rainy season, though the
atmosphere was often lead-heavy from the almost constant downpour, it
was only more dreary, not lower in temperature. Neither of the two
cities has a river worthy the name; the Machángara and the Huatenay,
with their slight branches, serve alike as dumping-grounds, and equally
break the soil with deep quebradas. Splendid views of both cities may be
had from the mountains that shut them in, though in this respect Quito
surpasses. The soft evening air, the singing of birds, the rows of tall,
maidenly-slender eucalyptus trees behind massive mud walls, the long
roads to the railway stations, are alike characteristic of the two
towns. In both an atrocious din of church-bells tortures the hours
before dawn, though here again the Ecuadorian capital wins the palm; nor
can the cuzqueño policeman rival his fellow of the equator in shrilling
away the monotonous hours of darkness. To nearly as great an extent as
in Quito the patios and lower stories are given over to Indians and
servants, with the “gente decente” holding the upper floor. Both towns
are colorful in garb; both are peerless when the sun shines, and gloomy
under clouds; both have the drowsy air of places far removed from the
real world, with many times the number of shops needed droning through a
precarious existence. On the other hand, whereas the Indians of Quito
speak Spanish also, here one must know Quichua to carry on any extended
intercourse. There are a few beautiful women in Quito, too; I never saw
one in Cuzco, though this may be merely another instance of my
abominable luck. Some Indian girls between five and fifteen are pretty,
but they are so often veiled by the grime of years that the virtue must
be chiefly accepted on faith. Nor has Cuzco anything approaching that
unrivalled circle of hoar-headed peaks that ennobles the vista of its
rival to the north. The two cities would probably be about equal in
population were Cuzco also the national capital—as it should and hopes
some day to be. “We want to free ourselves from those degenerate negroes
of Lima and establish an independent government under an American
protectorate,” a self-styled lineal descendant of the Incas by way of
Tupac Amaru confided to me. As it is, Quito is more than three times the
larger.
Cuzco has been called the dirtiest city on earth. I am not sure it
merits the title. The Andean town that aspires to that proud and haughty
position will have to exert itself constantly—no cuzqueño
characteristic—keeping always on the alert for new and hitherto
uninvented styles of uncleanliness; for it will have dogged, unrelenting
competition, vastly more determined and energetic than any other form of
industry. Quito, for instance, is a formidable rival in this also,
especially as Cuzco has the handicap of a much smaller population—and in
a contest of this kind every little one helps. But though it is too
early to prophesy the final rating, there is little doubt that the
former Inca capital will at least win honorable mention—unless she
continues to import American alcaldes.