PERU
A LAND OF CONTRASTS
[Illustration: IN THE MONASTERY OF SAN FRANCISCO, LIMA.
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.]
PERU
_A LAND OF CONTRASTS_
BY
MILLICENT TODD
_With Illustrations
from Photographs_
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1918
_Copyright, 1914_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 3
PART I. IN THE DESERT
CHAPTER
I. ALONG SHORE 15
II. DESERT QUALITY 25
III. DESERT PERSPECTIVE 39
IV. PICA, THE FLOWER OF THE SAND 53
V. A CLASH OF CONTRASTS 64
VI. PIRATES AND TREASURE FLEETS 76
VII. BACKGROUNDS 84
VIII. LIMA OF TWO ASPECTS 103
IX. CONVENTS OPEN AND CLOSED 110
X. ANOMALIES OF LIMA 121
PART II. IN THE MOUNTAINS
I. THE HIGH REGIONS 143
II. A MEGALITHIC CITY AND A SACRED LAKE 159
III. MYTHS AND MONUMENTS 174
IV. THE INCA AND HIS EMPIRE 188
V. SERVICE OF THE SUN-GOD 202
VI. INDIANS AND LLAMAS 214
PART III. IN THE JUNGLE
I. A LAND OF ADVENTURE 231
II. TOWARD THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY 240
III. JUNGLE GLOOM AND JUNGLE SHEEN 250
IV. ANIMALS OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT 268
V. THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX 280
CONCLUSION 296
BIBLIOGRAPHY 299
INDEX 305
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
In the Monastery of San Francisco, Lima _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Seals of the Palominos Islands 16
Sachacha, a Typical Village of Peru 34
Pampa de los Huesos--the Field of Bones 42
A Characteristic Peruvian Church 58
Wolfenbüttel-Spanish Map, _circa_ 1529 72
One of the first maps to show Pizarro’s discoveries along the
Peruvian coast.
A View of Paita from the _Miroir Oost & West Indical_,
1621 82
Grapes raised by the Barefoot Friars (_los Descalzos_),
Lima 106
A Franciscan Friar at Home, Lima 112
Santa Rosa de Lima, from _Het Wonder Leven van de H.
Rosa, Brussel_, 1668 118
A Glimpse of Old-Fashioned Lima 132
A Trestle of the Highest Railway in the World, across
the _Infiernillo_ 144
Alpacas on the Andean Puna 156
A God of Tiahuanacu 164
A Swinging Bridge near Jauja 174
An Heir of the “Makers of Ruins” 186
Indian Water Carrier, Sicuani 192
In the Market, _Plaza Principal_, Cuzco 200
A Market in Huancayo 206
In a Fertile Valley of the Uplands 212
An Indian Pastoral 218
Llamas at the Falls of Morococha 226
In the Valley of the Perené 242
A Sloth, from the _Historiae Rerum Naturalium Brasiliae_,
Amsterdam, 1648 280
INTRODUCTION
“Qui peut dire où réside le charme
d’un pays? Qui trouvera ce quelque
chose d’intime et d’insaisissable que rien
n’exprime dans les langues humaines?”
PIERRE LOTI
Peru, A Land of Contrasts
INTRODUCTION
Any statement regarding Peru implies a contrary statement equally
valid. Contrast is its characteristic quality, true as to the general
aspects of the country and ramifying through remote details. It is the
obvious point of view from which to study Peru.
The three parts of this book--the desert, the mountains, the
jungle--are the three natural divisions of the country. The shore is a
long, narrow desert, much diversified. In a fertile valley intersecting
it lies Lima, The City of the Kings. The river has come from the Andes,
on whose lofty tablelands, called _jalca_ in the north and _puna_ in
the south, flourished remote civilizations filled with mystery. Beyond
the mountain barrier lies the jungle, geographically the largest
portion of Peru, and like all other jungles a region of dread and
fascination.
Peru is a low country lying under a mild sky; but above are the mighty
Andes freezing under arctic blizzards. The desert is barren for lack
of rain; beyond the mountains, the over-productive jungle is saturated
with tropical downpours. Along the shore thunder-storms are unknown;
up on the icy tablelands of the cordillera, whose volcanoes are sealed
with snow, lightning rips open the mountainsides. Fire splits, and
water smooths. Mists are strong enough to magnify and the sky is clear
enough to do so. The _puna_ is a land of brutal elements, yet there is
found the little chinchilla, protected with softest fur.
On the coast, overhead calm is counterbalanced by subterranean fury.
“All geological phenomena are still in active operation,” the shore
rising, earthquakes changing the face of the earth, and underground
rivers dodging beneath a desert sterile for want of the water which
they are hurrying off. The people who live in this country of volcanoes
and earthquakes feed on red peppers.
If lack of water prevents the heat of the sun from making the desert
productive, so cold prevents water upon the mountain plains from
encouraging vegetation. In the jungle luxuriance of all growth conceals
any single benefit. Nature erects barriers everywhere. She has
surrounded her richest gifts with almost insurmountable difficulties.
Fertilizers come from the desert, a realm of death. Mines of the Andes
coldly hoard their riches under a life-sucking atmosphere. Agassiz
said: “An empire might esteem itself rich in any one of the sources of
industry which abound in the Amazon valley.” But these are inaccessible
from their very quantity, and they shut in beneath them a fever-laden
air. Where there is most fertilizer, the land is most barren; where
there are most precious metals, it is most incapable of supporting
human life; where richest, it is most difficult to cultivate.
Such is Peru. Elements and forces contrast; each combats each, and
all attack man. Nature wars against herself: tropic heat, arctic
cold; heavy, poisonous jungle mists, thin air of the mountain-tops;
scorching dryness, reeking wet. Even obstacles contrast in Peru. Man
is threatened everywhere by elements, by insects. He drowns here or
dies of thirst there. He can even be overcome by cold or sunstroke in
the same place.
Peru is a land of violent extremes. It has a range of mountains as
great as any in the world. The towering peaks are too high to climb.
Far above circles the condor, the largest bird in the world. Peru
is the source of the world’s greatest river system, whose luxuriant
forests are too thick to penetrate. The only representatives of a lost
geological age inhabit them, as well as the biggest snakes and the
smallest birds. Peru has great mineral deposits in the mountains; it
also has rubber in the forests. Wool is produced on the frozen plains,
and chocolate in the deep gorges lost among them. And from the valleys
intersecting the desert come cotton and sugar-cane.
All kinds of obscure substances are found in this versatile country,
ipecac and cochineal, cocaine and vanadium. Not unlike the rest of the
world, chill here produces fever, but quinine, the best remedy for the
disease of contrast, comes also from the forests of Peru.
Although nature is a supreme fact, its natural history is not the whole
of Peru. And contrast as a method of interpretation does not fail for
its other aspects. Though man seems to play so small a part, he has
lived here since antediluvian animals wandered among coal forests on
the Andes. To the charm of limitless nature is added the mystery of
great peoples destroyed before they were known. The riches of the Incas
and of the glittering, vice-regal Spanish days, when continents were
found, taken, and explored, contrast with present poverty. Consistently
throughout, the riches of Peru have impoverished it. Its gifts have
caused its ruin over and over again.
Wars and rebellions have riddled the country, and bull-fights have
filled leisure hours. Though audacity of action has fascinated
historians of Peru, its periods of peace have in them even more of
romance: a nation of slaves ruled by a monarch-god; oriental splendor
of Lima shining because of forced labor in the dark, suffocating mines;
Arab blood in the conquerors’ veins penetrating the quiet Indian
people, adding a keener edge to their sufferings. The poverty of the
present-day Indians contrasts with lavish nature, “beggars sitting on a
pile of gold.” Contrasts of nature, of people to country, of antiquity
to the present--these diverse elements are insistent wherever one turns.
The charm of contrasting facts is puissant. Almost any one of them
might be the text for an allegory. To guard against rhapsody, I have
documented every statement made. Conservative authority can be given
for every fact, however fantastic, however trivial. The few legends
are in a sense also facts: “_Une légende ment parfois moins qu’un
document._”
The tellers of Peru’s story deserve a history themselves. First came
the falcon-eyed missionaries of Spain, sword and rosary clattering
beneath priestly robes, to subject the Indians to salvation, or
mercifully to condemn them to death by torture. Had they been less
conscientious in describing all those quaint beliefs and idolatrous
practices which they came to stamp out, we should perhaps have missed
the chief source of information in regard to the Children of the Sun
and their dependent peoples. Military writers and official chroniclers
followed in close order. It took them some time to recover from their
amazement at this land of “gold, silver and pleasant monkeys.” They
wrote with convincing emphasis, “Wee that live now at Peru ... finde
not ourselves to bee hanging in the aire, our heades downward and our
feete on high.” On the contrary, they discovered that they were even
“as near unto heaven at Peru as in Spain.”
Explorers and adventurers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
were in the forefront of writers of romance. Such authors have always
found inspiration here. From Marmontel to the _Peruvian Tales_ of
Guenelette, from Frank Stockton to José-Maria de Heredia, chiseler of
faultless cameos, who himself came from a dramatic land of Spanish
conquest, Peru has been a word to conjure with. But invention has added
no glamour to history. It cannot keep pace with fact.
Accounts by various travelers of past centuries, voyages of discovery
and reports of treasure fleets are followed by the students of to-day.
Scientists write of Peru, each authority finding his specialty
accented. The geologist sees cosmic forces in active operation still.
The anthropologist studies untouched savages in the morasses of the
Amazon, the naturalist’s wonderland. Archeology now has an exciting
preëminence. Cool authorities admit the amazing antiquity of Peruvian
ruins. The historian finds a great barbaric civilization; the economist
ancient systems of state policy; the prospector an extensive system
of navigable waterways. The mining engineer discovers inexhaustible
mines, and the agriculturist unique opportunity, where the uplands of
a farm lie among snows, its lowlands under rubber groves and orange
trees. All write of Peru, and an increasing bibliography affords easy
access to every sort of statistics. I have referred to a wide range of
authorities, many of them cited in an appendix, to supplement my own
observations, made as member of an astronomical expedition, during a
stay of several months in Peru.
* * * * *
A painstaking person while in Peru wrote a journal containing all he
saw. Not an event or an observation escaped chronicle. But on reaching
home he discovered that his really poignant memories were not in his
journal. His entries, though conscientious, “were but the ingredients.
They were not the secret of the philtre.”
Facts make their own appeal. But direct assault is not the only means
of approach. Sometimes subtleties are best observed by looking at
something else. It is often easier to see the beauty, the full glitter
and glance of a thing in another object, as the play of colors in
the aurora borealis is better perceived by turning the eyes aside.
Sometimes one or two minor points chosen from an embarrassment of
interesting details are all the imagination needs, as a plant selects
only those elements from air and soil which can be used in perfecting
its tissue of stem and leaf and flower.
It can only be hoped that this book about Peru may succeed in even
suggesting its unique appeal.
PART I
IN THE DESERT
“I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be;
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows.”
SHELLEY
CHAPTER I
ALONG SHORE
The surface of the ocean is unruffled. Only the heaving of its great
body suggests the power beneath. But when it confronts the desert
cliffs, backed by the world-weight of the Andes, the force which has
been gathering all the way from Australia, so mighty that it can
be compared to nothing but itself, snarls into uncontrolled fury,
rebellious, but acknowledging the limit of its power.
The “Peaceful Ocean” lies next to a land of geological unrest; the
coast rising, subterranean torment breaking out in earthquakes, hurling
cliffs into the sea. Even the busy modern port of Callao partakes of
the mystery of this elemental land. The white ships anchored in the
clear water of its harbor gradually turn dull brown. Might it be the
crater of an extinct volcano?
No wonder the people on such a shore build bamboo cages plastered with
refuse and mud to live in, temporary for them as the present stage
is transient in the history of the land on which they live. Their
object-lessons are warring natural forces. No wonder they are brutal,
slinging cattle on board steamers by the horns, casting a stone between
the eyes of a bullock to make him turn around. Even their little
children play at bull-fights with horns of defunct cattle. The soil of
this “sea-gnawn” shore affords not one necessity for human existence,
not even a drop of water. There are no real harbors, only niches in the
jagged coast. But few lighthouses indicate danger, and the desert is
chilled by winds from the Antarctic pole.
Far out, a low cloud is skimming the surface of the gray water,
advancing in waves of blackness. From one end a shower falls; at the
other, a column rises from the water to meet the on-rushing mass, “a
great oval, rolling forwards over the sea.” It comes nearer and nearer,
till the shore shimmers as through heat waves. The quiet is complete
except for the noise of millions of laboring wings.
[Illustration: SEALS OF THE PALOMINOS ISLANDS.]
A cloud of birds! Now they fall to the water with close-clapped wings,
hundreds at a time, each a tiny splashing fountain. Their hunger
is insatiable, but not because food is lacking, for the swarms of
pilchards beneath the waves are vaster than the armies of birds which
pursue them. Ancient Indian races enriched their irrigated fields
with these little fish. A curious, tawny jewel is found upon this
shore, known as “fishes’ eyes.” Might they be fossilized eyes of those
fertilizer-fishes?
The appearance of this coast could not have been different in
antediluvian days, with the screeching birds and the mammoth terrapin
off-shore, those associates of the dodo.
The birds fly out at sunrise and spend the day in fishing, resting upon
the waves when they are tired, and at sunset return to their giant
stone islands for the night. Alone, the call of a sea-bird would be
lost in the fury of the meeting of cliff and sea. But as a mass of
white gulls can assume blackness by mere quantity, so their mingled
voices can take on an overwhelming poignancy of sound. Louder than the
crash of breakers, louder than the barking and snorting of the bald,
fat seals loping over them in droves, surges the great cry of the
birds, as, in a shower of wild calls diverse as themselves, they settle
upon the rocks: pelicans, cormorants, mollyhawks, gannets, sea-mews,
gulls, osprey, occasional tropical flamingoes lost among ice-birds
and stormy petrels, wild ducks, Inca terns, and the weird, amphibious
“bird-child,” which tries to stand erect, fluttering its cartilaginous
wings, braced by its indistinguishable tail. All the birds of the
ocean gather here, from sandpeeps to albatrosses, a surfeit of life to
accentuate the barrenness of the shore. They are multiplying every year
their already limitless myriads, useless to man as the savages of the
interior, without commercial value now of any kind, yet not annihilated
on that account. It is said that all are souls of sailors lost at sea.
In each stormy petrel a lost apprentice lives again, in each pelican
a boatswain, in each mollyhawk a chief officer, in each albatross a
sturdy old captain.
One is tempted to write of the romance of the sea-birds of Peru, if
romance has in it any of the fascination of waste on a large scale,
for like barrenness, waste must be on a large scale to be picturesque.
Where is the impertinence of it so overwhelming as in nature--her
spendthrift production of unused powers, and the daring of her
destruction?
A German scientist, investigating the guano interests, reported eleven
million birds on one of the Chincha Islands, for these are the guano
birds, and these wild, craggy islands the Guano Islands, a jewel-casket
of Peru, which now abandoned, emptied of its contents, stands wide
open, staring vacant in the sunlight, that its owners may not forget
its former fullness.
Under the stimulus of pure guano a plant will spring to mammoth
dimensions, lavishing blossoms and fruit. Ancient races, even the
foreign Incas, realized its magical endowments and made laws governing
its use. But land enriched by guano into immense fertility lapses after
a while, barer than before.
A few sailing ships, hoping to glean poor remnants of this accumulation
of the centuries, still huddle as close as possible to the black
rocks, which, because of the quantity of that very fertilizer which
has distinguished them, are made repellent to life of any kind. In
this laboratory of the strongest fertilizer, there is not the slightest
trace of vegetation--Peru in paradox.
The sunset blazes through the fissures and shoots shafts of opalescent
light under the great stone bridges toward the mountainside of the
candelabrum, veiled in a hazy shimmer. Defiantly gorgeous it is, all
but the young moon which nestles among rushing scarlet and black clouds.
A giant candelabrum, at least four hundred feet long, is hollowed
deep in the rock of the sheer volcanic headland above the sea. Its
trenches do not fill with drifting sand, though the natives of Pisco
make periodic pilgrimages across the bay, just to be sure. Some think
it is a sign of royalty, a flaunt of the Incas, or the boundary-mark of
a conquered kingdom. Some say it was a warning made by the Spaniards
after Pisco was sacked by English freebooters in the seventeenth
century, for though now over a mile inland, it was then a coast town.
Such is the equilibrium of the Peruvian coast! Others call it “the
three crosses,” the life-penance many years ago of a Franciscan friar
named Guatemala.
But a symbol does not for mere inquiry give up the secret of its hidden
mystery. Doubtless the origin and purpose of the Candelabrum of Pisco
will never be known.
* * * * *
A few small, square, purple shadows mark a town, put down at random
in the desert beside the sea. Some houses are made of the ribs and
jaws of whales. A conspicuous white building, a little removed, is for
sufferers with bubonic plague. Crosses surmount hummocks round about
the town. People are making pilgrimages to and fro. And over all,
white-headed vultures are wheeling. They spread their wings and cry in
the silence.
Dust covers the little city, clustering about a market-place of sand.
A fountain without water mutely occupies its center. Lamp-posts
without lamps surround it, and the mud houses are without windows. The
cathedral towers have no bells. Strange plaster figures are sculptured
upon the façade, and infants with hands put on backwards hold up the
portico. Beyond the door with a two-inch keyhole are Virgins in pink
silk and gold tinsel, saints with rows of parallel ribs, angels with
gauze wings, towering altars of gingerbread work, artificial flowers,
and silver-paper fringe.
Glossy-haired women, their black _mantas_ (head-shawls) thrown back,
drag stiff skirts through the dirty sand. Half-naked children gnaw at
the inside of long bean-pods. Mangy dogs with dusty skin and a sparse
sprinkling of yellow hair slink into the shadows. Black goats and their
attenuated kids search about in the sand for something to eat. Men and
women file out of black interiors, carrying gourds full of brilliant
edibles. Meal braizes over a low fire on the sand; a woman crouching
over it whips the flame with the end of her long hair. From time to
time, to make a brighter blaze, she picks up pieces of wood with her
strong toes. Near by struts a blue-eyed bird. It is a _huerequeque_,
the household scavenger. Bits of cloth hang about his tall knees. The
woman explains that they are trousers intended to keep him warm. She is
sorry I could not have come a few days later, for she is about to make
him some new ones for summer, of lighter quality, with lace edges.
The market is held in the bed of a “river,” no less dry than the
surrounding desert. Old women behind piles of tropical fruits,
_guayabas_, _pacays_, _ciruelas_, gossip to a whir of small mandolins.
Heavy-browed men in flapping sombreros drink thick liquids and purchase
pats of red and yellow _picante_ (a highly seasoned dish). Groups of
pack-horses with silver bridles are tied round about the market.
But surprises are lurking in these coast towns. Behind heavy,
unexpected doors, the single affluent family of the town receives in a
peacock-blue salon. There is a lady in brown, with trimmings of blue
velvet and cotton lace, and a perpendicular yellow hat. Another is
in purple velvet, with swan’s-down hat and photograph brooch of her
sister. A third, wearing green velvet, a salmon colored hat with red
roses, and holding a pink silk handkerchief embroidered in lavender,
sits purring beside her red-faced German fiancé. The carpet is red,
the furniture covered with brown brocade; there are statues of carved
alabaster with gilt edges and pink cuspidors. Gold mirrors, chromos of
Venetian court life, and pasteboard calendars of bygone years hang upon
the walls. The Spanish tiles of long ago are painted over.
Farther up the street a door may open upon a wilderness of vicuña rugs
as tawny as a lion and softer than moleskin. Shawls of tan-colored
wool, silkier than Liberty fabrics, lie about. One is not surprised
that vicuña wool was reserved for royal use in Inca days, nor that
blankets of it were sent by the conquerors as offerings to Philip II.
There are little foot-warmers made of vicuña fur and chinchilla skins,
wiry penguin skins and a deafening noise of singing birds in cages. A
black-eyed girl with hair like tarred rope stands making _cazuela_ (a
thick soup) and paring guavas. She claps her hands, and many doves fly
in to peck the crumbs from her lips.