DESERT QUALITY
A certain herb lives for years underground in the desert; it feels no
necessity for a leaf-existence. Yet if the parched roots are reached by
water, they expand toward the sun in lovely bloom.
Up from the shore stretches the bare immensity of desert, ending in one
tremulous horizon with the ocean, and with the wilderness of mountains
against the pulsating sky at the other. It is the Land of Light. All
sensation of color is lost in this great sensation of light, an ardent
light “shining through things, not on them.” Even the clouds expire
from excess of light. It reduces all colors to mere hot vibration.
The translucent mountains swim in a sea of light, reflecting from it
as from wide stretches of water. Though sensation of color is lost
in light, their huge forms are distinct in the radiant atmosphere,
but unreal as if half-veiled.--One attribute of mirage is absolute
clearness of outline.--Insignificant details emerge, but they rouse
admiration only because of the light investing them.
The whole wide desert culminates in illusion and mystery of distant
outlines. Everything floats in it, as it sweeps over from the
opalescent mountains. A cross in the midst of the shelly sand,
“protruding through thin layers of mirage,” marks the spot where a
greatly feared bandit was killed. Skulls are heaped beneath it, with
matches and half-burned candles.
Water being denied, the desert is soaked with sun. It is the Land of
Heat. No plant grows in the scorching soil, no animal can endure it.
No bird, no insect flies through the burning atmosphere. Each object
shimmers until it seems but the reflection of itself. Fire descends
from the burnished sky and vibrates in the air and scalds the sand. Yet
concentrating a tropical sun, this hot solitude lies between the cold
ocean and the mountains, a region of ice.
This desert is the abode of weird phenomena. Sometimes a globe of fire
springs to the size of the sun, illuminating the sky for a quarter of
an hour; then it dissipates into an infinitude of stars, which wriggle
off into bright little tails and disappear.
A slowly moving company, muffled to the eyes, with heads done up like
Tuaregs of the Sahara, mincing across the desert on donkeys, suddenly
see themselves swinging along over their own heads, as if magnified by
a gigantic mirror in the sky. The clouds give back strange pictures
of one’s self enlarged and surrounded by a halo or a circular iris,
summoning a saint or revealing a fairy. This quality is inherent in
Peru, making ordinary moments ornamental.
Near Casma is a hill called “Dreadful,” whose continuous sandslides
when the heat is greatest give off a sound of mystery, suggesting heat,
like the roar of a distant volcano.
No matter how much the political status of Peru may change from century
to century, it remains always the lair of earthquakes. Mines of gold
and silver, islands of guano, deserts of nitrate, may be in turn
discovered, exploited, exhausted. Earthquakes destroy those who have
been enriched as those who have lived beside them in want. Even now
earthquakes are almost daily recurrent along the coast. In laying your
ear to the ground you can hear subterranean rumblings. Only in the
frequency of slight shocks do people feel secure; otherwise they know
the underground world is hoarding strength for a fury of destruction.
As a traveler of the old time expressed it: “The inhabitants are
subject to being buried in the ruins of their own houses at any time.”
The Indians say that when God rises from His throne to review the human
race, each step as He progresses is an earthquake. As soon as they feel
the pressure of His foot upon the earth, they rush from their huts to
show themselves to Him. When the rumbling becomes loud enough to be
noticeable, dogs howl, beasts of burden stop and spread their legs to
secure themselves from falling, people rush to doorways, and churches
are emptied in an instant. Reddish mists steam from the sea, bad odors
from the earth; distant thunder--complete wind-stillness. The clouds of
sea-birds rise from the earth and fly high, watching an agony in which
they have no part. Then a frightful crash, rocks are torn asunder,
great masses fall off as islands into the sea, which is still. But soon
it turns black, boiling with a smell of sulphur, and many dead fish
float about.
Omnipresent, the earthquake is a mystery which no laws can govern,
beyond man’s comprehension or control. One never gets accustomed to
it. Horror at a first shock only increases with further experience.
Earthquake is linked with freaks of nature; it lifts up a ridge across
the bed of a stream; it alters the face of the earth so that lawsuits
spring up over changed boundaries. It vitiates the soil. Blooming
fields wither, crops are lost, and cattle die from eating the scorched
grass. The fiery core of earth is nearer the cooled surface than we
imagine. But here at least there are no “torments from heaven.” In Peru
it is said that lightning is worse than earthquake, emanating as it
does from God’s own realm.
Even the climate of the coast partakes of mystery. The clouds hurrying
from the Atlantic have drenched a whole continent of jungle in tropical
downpour, and before they reach the desert, their last drop of moisture
has been wrested from them as snow--drained dry by the Andes. The
tropical sun heats, and the Antarctic current bringing its icy winds,
cools. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other. For the red-hot
desert can also be cold! The low-hanging _garuas_, the ocean mists of
half a year, chill the desert and cling to the base of the mountains,
fading lighter and lighter up and away from the black rocks where white
surf is breaking. Such are the facts of the case, but it has been
thought that the original god, Con, was responsible, for once in anger
he deprived this desert coast of rain.
The desert is majestically empty, a great “vision of nothing without
perspective.” Yet its mere emptiness suggests breadth, backward and
forward, up and down, both in time and space. An unheard silence lies
between the empty horizons, perfect except for the “great, faint sound
of breakers,” the tumble of an unused ocean of water, which destroys
without moistening the desert shores.
It seems lifeless. Harmless and peaceful at least, it presents nothing
to be destroyed by sun-blight. It remains, as it apparently always
has been, the realm of death--though even death presupposes life
before it. But disturb the desert, and a thousand forces spring into
action, furiously attacking the intruder. The heat of the sun assumes a
ghoulish love of destruction, and at night the stars look down upon a
creature shivering with fever, reeking with wet in this desert place.
Possessing all fruitful ingredients within and kindly elements without,
the desert sleeps. It needs only one thing to burst into life.
A mysterious river springs forth full-grown. From what glacier or
clear, icy fountain up on the frozen _puna_ may it not have issued? And
then, after a mysterious incubation, it returns to sparkle here in the
light, and in the leaves and flowers which the dampened earth is ready
to produce.
There are traditions that sometimes a vagrant shower escapes from the
magnetism of the mountain-tops. The flowers waiting just beneath the
surface spring up like bloom over the June earth. The water was a
shower of bluebells! A fugitive vegetation greedily spreads, quickly
as it disappears with the passing of the water. In some places cotton
grows to the height of a horse’s head, a luxuriant crop, too unexpected
for harvest. This brilliant life lasts a week, perhaps more, and then
lapses. Where do the slumbering flowers conceal themselves? Where,
indeed, does the pansy get its coloring matter?
The desert of Peru is varied: toward the south the coast is strewn with
borax, white upon the cliffs; toward the north petroleum gushes from
beneath it. Upon the red plains of Huacho are the salt lakes of Pampa
Pelada, reflecting the sun in a thousand colors. “White dust-whirlpools
dance on its white floor.” Its banks are scattered with the bones of
animals which have come there for salt, and its perpendicular cliffs
are haunted by flesh-eating birds. There, gnarled gray shrubs “loom as
if carved out of clay.” Beyond, the desert is coated with nitrate; yet
here it seems but pulverized bones, beneath acres of white skeletons
bleached by a thousand years--gaunt testimony to its desertdom since
prehistoric Indian races struggled to make it blossom.
In the Pampa of Islay the desert takes on a terra-cotta hue.
Whirlwinds progress from hollow to hollow. Above the purple mountains,
shading away from the red desert, bright blue peaks are snow-covered
to set them off from the sky. Fog shadows drop darkness here and there
over their barrenness. Even the mist has a poetry of contrast.
Across the plain a constant ocean wind sweeps fine white beach-sand
along with waves of color, no less real because impalpable. Its
pilgrimage of a thousand years toward the mountains is uninterrupted,
for the wind blows always from the southwest. It causes the rippled
waves of sand which it brings along to assume in traveling a crescent
shape--the wandering _médanos_.
Sometimes larger dunes overtake smaller ones, which, so absorbed,
become firmer in shape as they journey toward the mountains. Should two
collide, they are shivered, then blend in a new crescent, usually to
separate again.
Growing from a network of roots within the moving dune, the snowy heads
of a small plant maintain themselves just above the sand as it drifts
over the hard plateau.
The _médanos_ are scattered as thickly as the crescent shadows of
some vast eclipse, a labyrinth of nature. They are as mysterious as
“mushrooms growing in rings, marsh-fires which cannot warm, or the
shrinking of the sensitive plant.”
The sand drops constantly over the acute crest. From all about come
soft sounds, an overwhelming minor music, almost inaudible. Were you in
a forest, you might think it was the soughing of the wind through the
branches or the shuffle of locusts devouring a tree.
These playthings of the wind have been called symbols of the Moon
in the land of the Sun, since nothing in Inca days could dissociate
itself from either; a crescent Moon humbled by the Sun’s anger, allowed
to possess her former fullness but a day at a time, doomed to be
obliterated over and over again.
The worth of anything consists in the fact that through it can be seen
something more beautiful than itself, something to which it forms the
setting. Words are mere points of departure. What limitless excursions
can even one word suggest, into countries more wonderful
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
SACHACHA, A TYPICAL VILLAGE OF PERU.]
than any created by a remote if consummate artist! And what an intimate
happiness is found there, which no one else has felt nor could describe
if he had!
* * * * *
Wherever rivers descend from the mountains, green garlands are slung
across the desert. No wonder the river was a god to the desert-dweller,
bringing with it meadows and gardens. Where only dust has been, acres
of cotton, bright-green sugar-fields, and dark orchards lie between mud
walls and willow-shaded lanes. Herds graze upon alfalfa steaming in the
sun. The yellow plaster terraces and balconies of _haciendas_ among
their banana groves are shaded by cascades of glowing bougainvillea.
But wherever water is, fever follows. Disease clings to the green
spaces. Even sickness cannot abide in the desert alone.
Huge, pyramid-like mud structures spring crumbling from the soil whose
modified form they seem to be, temples and palaces of former days,
each with its legend. The ruins are inhabited by weird iguanas and
“haunted by those birds of ill omen that only nest in ruins.” Mounds
of treasure, too, linger along the desert, and fragments of the paved
road of the Incas.
A gold bell was once buried in Tambo de Mora. Older people have heard
it tolling on quiet nights. Some say it rings from the top of a hill,
some, from beneath the ground. To be sure, bells were not known to
ancient Peruvians, yet a company was properly financed to hunt for this
bell of gold.
Submerged or enchanted cities exist on every hand. A mystic race of
dwarfs live in the Andes. They guard a vault of buried treasure.
An Indian who declared he had seen it became so terrified at the
extent of the riches that he fled, not forgetting to mark his path.
Yet frequently as he had followed the trail to the very spot, he
could never again find the cavern of glittering jewels: it had sunk
completely out of sight--“You can see for yourself, Señorita, that it
has, if I take you there!”
Legends of prehistoric days take on the garb of myth, when giants came
over the sea to Peru long before the memory of man. Wishing to provide
themselves with water in the desert, they excavated enormously deep
wells, still undeniable evidence of their dominion. Moreover, their
bones of incredible size have been found. Garcilasso says a piece of
one hollow tooth weighs more than half a pound. Their footprints have
been traced as far as Patagonia. For their sin they were destroyed by a
rain of fire.
Maui, too,--the Polynesian god who caught the sun with cords of
cocoanut fiber, who lifted the sky and smoothed its arched surface with
his stone adze, who made the earth habitable for man and then created
him, and who now divides his time between fishing for islands with a
hook which is called the Plume of Beauty, and resting in the form of a
small day-fly upon the under side of a flower,--Maui, who belongs to
the length and breadth of the Pacific, once visited Peru.
Upon this coast lived aborigines with flat noses, fishing from boats of
inflated sealskins, and sleeping pell-mell in sealskin huts on heaps
of seaweed, “tall, cannibalistic fishermen ... who used bone utensils,
made primitive pottery, nets, and fabrics of osier.”
Here lived the contemporaries of the Incas, Yuncas they were called,
“dwellers in the hot lowlands,” distinct from those of the highlands,
with their hideous thoughts painted on earthenware jars, and their hazy
conception of a single god, their pragmatic worship of him by means of
anything which he had made for their support and comfort, and their
sacrifice to him of his greatest gift, human beings.
Fancy is free to play along geologic or human history. Bones of
mastodons as well as sea-bottom shells are found in the desert.
Vanished races have embellished it in passing. Man has but added to the
mystery of nature. Yet after such lapses of time the two are mingled
indistinguishably.