ANOMALIES OF LIMA
I
They sat about the dinner table--a delightful, stammering, scientific
gentleman, who advised my carrying home some live _camarones_
(crayfish); a young English curate, here to sketch all the caterpillars
of all the butterflies he could find, and their cocoons; the grandson
of a former president of Peru, who spoke of his grandfather’s battles;
and a cousin of the actual president, who told tales of ostrich-hunting
in the pampas of Argentina, a cosmopolitan club man, whose chief
interests in Lima were cricket and polo. There was a man who was
collecting everything from pearls to reduced heads and whose gold
watch-fob was a Peruvian tongue-weight for the dead. A Chilean lady
with the grace of an older generation spoke of the islands of Juan
Fernandez and their prehistoric monuments, which have a nose and chin,
face the sun, and are too big to enter the British Museum. That led
toward the archeologist.
We were eating _cuculis_--desert doves--and alligator-pear salad, while
we listened to stories of pre-Inca civilizations from the man who has
done most to unravel their mysteries. In Peru the alligator-pear is
called _palta_, a shiny, dark-green, leather-covered shell concealing
its soft, nutty flesh. It hangs at the end of a fine twig, which is
dragged down by its weight. A stiff mayonnaise so disguises the _palta_
that it is almost impossible to tell where fruit ends and sauce begins.
A lady of mixed races wore twice about her neck a heavily-carved chain,
on her breast the large cross at its end. She spoke of a friend who
had searched for years until he should find a gift exactly suited to
her; at last he beheld this chain about the neck of a pope of the Greek
church. The pope parted with it reluctantly, for in a cavity in the
back of the cross he kept his sacred relics.
She twirled the great cross between her fingers.
“_Très chic, n’est-ce pas?_” she said. “And you see,” touching the
clasp to loosen a little lid, “it’s just the size for a powder-puff!”
A folk-lore-specialist-explorer was discussing swinging bridges in the
Andes with a lady whose husband had left her in Lima while he took a
distant journey in the interior to make a census of savage tribes.
“What have you been doing to-day?” she asked.
“Bless my soul, I don’t remember,” he replied. “Oh, yes! buying slaves
in the jungle.”
Two young English people at the remote end of the table had just
arrived in Lima from a honeymoon adventure up the Amazon. They had
sailed as far as Iquitos; then they had paddled, they had ridden
mule-back, they had tramped over the mountains, and, fording streams to
their waists, had lain down in their wet clothes to sleep in the cold
wind. We all inquired about fever.
“Oh, yes,” said the red-cheeked little lady, “my husband got the fever
one day in Iquitos; it turned his eyes red and his face blue, and the
whole house shook with his chills.”
He seemed to like to talk about their adventures. They had been
paddling all one day, he said, and were paddling still, as night
settled down upon the Amazon. Suddenly there was a whirring sound like
a great cataract.
“Paddle for your life,” shrieked the guide, and swinging the canoe
about, they fled down-stream.
The whirlpool! Its encounter the greatest calamity that can befall a
traveler upon the Amazon! No craft, however strong, once caught by
the outermost edge of a whirlpool, can escape. Whether it is caused
by a sudden squall brushing through the forest or a piece of the bank
falling in, is not known. It is certain only that a whirlpool never
occurs twice in the same place.
“Death in that region,” he went on, “is commoner than life. There is a
horrible beast which the natives call a flying snake, with a blue head
and a long prong upon it. It flies sting foremost. You are sauntering
from your hammock to your cabin door. The thing flies against you, and
presto! you fall with the poison of his contact, and another grave must
be dug on the sposhy banks of the Amazon.
“In Iquitos a woman bears a friend a grudge. She pays the police a
small sum, and the next time her friend emerges, she is bound by the
guardian of the peace, beaten until she falls, and is carried home to
die. Prisoners there are allowed to order their own meals,” he added.
Then came stewed guavas, served with whirls of white of egg and pink
and white pellets.
II
Nearly everybody makes collections in Lima. In the ancient house of
a marquis, with its court fountain, bougainvillea, and tall Norfolk
Island pine, were benches of ebony with lower rounds worn into hollows
by the feet of nuns; embroidered muslin stoles; queer manuscripts;
tortoise-shell combs tall enough to be filled in with flowers; silver
porringers; and a point lace parasol with a carved ivory handle--all
relics of vice-regal days.
One room was musty as seventeen mummies could make it. Fifteen _soles_,
they told us, was the price of a mummy. There were ancient, inlaid
chests filled with cases of butterflies from beyond the mountains,
huge snake-skins, overgrown orioles’ nests, necklaces of mummies’
teeth, and carved cases of _huacos_ dug from Yunca grave-mounds--the
pottery of mummies. Partly filled with water and rocked back and forth,
the quaint things gave forth the same little half-whistle, half-sigh
which notified their owners a thousand years ago that the precious
water was being stolen. A soft bubbling, somewhere within the clay
form, was supposed to imitate the voice of the animal painted on the
outside. The liquids were meant to refresh a thirsty mummy on his death
journey. He still holds his aching head. But the varnished lips were
never parted, and the gurgling liquid of smoky flavor has never been
sipped.
These jars were the ephemeral tablets on which a whole people chose to
leave records of itself. The work of their hands can be held in ours.
We can look into the staring Indian faces or upon the weird animals
which pleased them, shining under a glaze which is the forgotten
accomplishment of those remote tribes.
There are finely drawn portraits of the dead man’s friends, whom he
may have wished as fellow pilgrims, heads of men and women singing or
smiling, some distorted with pain. The human face twisted to the same
lines then as now.
Wonderful fish glide among aquatic plants, the fox enamored of the
moon languishes along her thin crescent. “The sneaking cat, the sleepy
pelican, the supercilious, impudent parrot,” in softest yellow, white,
red-brown, or black, glance all the iris shades under a purple glaze.
It was not enough to paint the manners and customs of the people, the
fauna and flora of their country; they chose also to represent what
they thought and believed as well as the adjustment of their sandals.
We can peer into their monstrous, often loathsome, mythology and into
their intangible land of fancy. Cats fight with griffins. A lizard with
the face of an owl wears a jacket and bracelets. A chieftain in full
regalia has a girdle ending in a fringe of almond-eyed, many-footed
scorpions, each with a different number of feet. With snakes’ heads
as earrings, a warrior with canine teeth smaller than the snail with
forked tongue beside him is fishing for an octopus with a snake-line,
whose head, as bait, has caught a man. Crab-hands grasp from ears at a
fleeing figure with a snake-like body, numerous feet intermingle with
a human leg, two arms with nippers, and a fantastic head with waving
antennae. A cactus forms the background.
The sun looks forth from the heart of a starfish. A fanciful eye, all
alone, with unknown appendages and impossible proboscis, glitters
under its dark, lustrous sheen. A ghastly face with wings presides at
a dance of stags. And here is a vessel completely covered by a pair of
elaborated nippers! In it are placed some passion-flowers, a whirl of
purple and black.
Every uncanny suggestion in an animal is worked out to complete
development. We may do the Yuncas the honor to call it allegorical. It
recalls the Mexican legend that “the present order of things will be
swept away, perhaps by hideous beings with the faces of serpents, who
walk with one foot, whose heads are in their breasts, whose huge hands
serve as sunshades, and who can fold themselves in their immense ears.”
It is primarily this portrait pottery which proves the great antiquity
of races in Peru. And the deeper one digs, the finer the designs.
Sitting on the ebony bench with the skin of a jaguar across its back,
we ate _dulces_ (sweets) made of eggs, and drank tea out of ancient
porcelain against a background of embroidered Spanish shawls. A yellow
bird, a _cheireoque_, who knows everything, sat upon a perch but did
not sing.
III
Ricardo Palma, Peru’s delightful _littérateur_, has collected the
national library since its destruction by Chilean soldiers in the
late war. Storekeepers in those days wrapped up their goods in pages
of “fathers of the church.” The Chileans destroyed the annals of the
Inquisition. They also killed the golden oriole which had sung in the
trenches early one morning before the battle had begun.
The distinguished writer of Peruvian traditions sat in his long gown,
reading parchment tomes of bygone centuries, his silk cap pulled down
to his eyes. I sat near him at a table surrounded by books under a
far-away skylight. There happened to be open a volume of historical
sketches of Limaneans done in color by Pancho Fierro: a man dressed
for the gallows riding beneath balconies of interested ladies; monks
and nuns in every garb; Indian dances with whirls of color; the Lord
Mayor’s procession with his big mace of silver, and black servants in
green velvet holding a red umbrella over his head; every known variety
of eatable-seller; women with bright green trousers, whose veils
covered them all but one eye, and uniforms of every profession and
occupation.
About the time when the Puritans were landing in Massachusetts Bay, a
law was passed prohibiting ladies of Lima from covering the face. The
animals of the coachman in whose carriage rode ladies violating this
law would be confiscated, and any man who spoke to such a lady must pay
a hundred _pesos_. But enforcement of the law was too difficult, and
the custom of the veil persisted until a few years since.
Don Ricardo turned and put into my hands a book of his own. The sun
streamed through the distant skylight. I began to read: “Odoray is
the most beautiful blossom of the flower garden of America, a white
lily scented with the breath of seraphim. Her soul is an aeolian harp
which the sentiment of love causes to vibrate, and the sounds which it
exhales are soft as the complaint of a lark.
“Odoray is fifteen years old, and her heart cannot leave off
throbbing before the image of the beloved of her soul. Fifteen and
not love--impossible! At that age love is for the soul what the ray
of spring sun is to the meadows. Her lips have the red of the coral,
the aroma of the violet. They are a scarlet line above the velvet of a
marguerite.
“The faint tint of innocence and modesty colors her face as twilight
the snow of our cordillera. The locks of hair which fall in graceful
disorder over the ermine of her shoulders, imitate the gold filaments
which the Father of the Incas scattered through space on a spring
morning.
“Her voice is loving and feeling as the echo of the _quena_ (flute).
Her smile has all the charm of the wife in the Song of Solomon, all the
modesty of prayer. _Svelte_ as the sugar-cane of our valleys, if the
place where it has passed can be recognized, it is not on account of
the trace which its short plant leaves in the sand, but by the perfume
of angelic purity which lingers behind.
“It is an afternoon of April, 1534. Twilight sheds its undivided gleam
above the plains. The sun taking off its crown of topazes is about to
retire on the bed of foam to which the ocean entices it. Creation is at
this instant a lyre letting fall soft sounds. The desirous breeze that
passes giving a kiss to the jasmine, the petal that falls jostled by
the wings of the painted humming-bird, the _turpial_ that sings a song
of agony in the aspen foliage, the sun that sets, firing the horizon
... all is beautiful. The last hours of the afternoon and all things
elevate the created toward the Creator.
“To hear in the distance the soft murmur of the brook slipping along,
to feel that our temples are brushed by the zephyr filled with the
perfume which is exhaled by the flower of the lemon-tree and the rushy
ground, and in the midst of this concert of nature” ... such is the
imagery of the literature of Peru.
[Illustration: A GLIMPSE OF OLD-FASHIONED LIMA.]
IV
A woman in lilac called Dolores, a pretty woman with a vapid face, was
absent-mindedly turning a green glass globe between her fingers and
selling guavas. Young soldiers whose swords trailed along the pavement
were eating the guavas.
We got out of the carriage and rattled at a door until a keeper with
jangling keys came to open it. The walls were spiked and covered with
broken glass. The door banged together behind us.
A thin, delicately featured man in a black silk cap and stock came
forward in welcome. “The composer of _Ollanta_, the national opera,”
some one introduced. He led us toward a bare room scattered with
manuscript music as fine as copper-plate. I looked at the iron bars
across the windows. Over the piano hung three dusty laurel wreaths,
the people’s tribute to a genius they could not understand. After a
three weeks’ presentation by an uncomprehending Italian troupe, Lima
demanded _Mignon_, and the manuscript opera was returned to the upper,
right-hand drawer from which its composer now drew it.
“I am transcribing the melodies of the Indians of the highlands, some
of them survivals of Inca days,” he explained.
He played the weird, syncopated music of the Andes, bringing the
indefinable “shiver of unknown rhythm,” the wheedling love-songs and
the sad _yaravís_ which suggested those deep valleys lost among the
mountain-tops.
“You know the _yaraví_ of the Indians? It is a peculiar music, a
melancholy idyl reflecting the somber Indian character--a music of
extremes, for no other is so dismal and so sweet. It wails in a minor
key through strange Quichua words, the language of the Indians.
“Many of these melodies I have used unchanged. Nothing so speaks to
the spirit as they.... A secret music like that of falling water--one
cannot hear it without thinking of the riddle of the world. It has a
full, pent-up significance, as when a bird puts all the fervor of its
song into pianissimo. It moves like the music of birds, and like it
does not admit of criticism.”
I asked if the Indians sang unaccompanied.
“There is sometimes a reed-flute accompaniment,” he said, “as simple
as the song. The flute is called a _quena_. Then, too, they play
upon a pipe-of-Pan, supposed to have persisted since Inca days. But
melody suggests to them things far lovelier than they can conceive by
words. What they wish to say is made intelligible by the sadness or
cheerfulness of the tune.”
There is a legend that a priest in early Spanish days loved a beautiful
Indian girl who died. In desolation he mourned for years, until he dug
up her skeleton and made a flute out of the big leg-bone. Then upon it
he played weird, sad tunes and was comforted. This is the origin of the
human-bone flute so widely used.
“Have you ever heard of the ‘Jug of Mourning?’” he suddenly asked.
“Sometimes at evening the Indians play on flutes inserted in a large
earthenware jar to make their tragic tones more resonant, and, sitting
grouped around it at a little distance, they cry aloud and shed tears
for the downfall of the race. The Indians’ misfortune is infinite
indeed, but a misfortune terribly uniform; and so is their music. Yes,
even their suffering is consistently monotonous.”
I asked about the libretto of _Ollanta_.
“It is the only one of the great dramas dealing with exploits of kings,
acted before the Inca by young nobles, still told by the people.
Ollanta was a provincial governor who dared to love a daughter of the
Sun and was commanded not to raise his eyes.”
“Have you had anything published?” I ventured.
“This,” he said, handing me an _Elégie_ bearing a Paris publisher’s
mark.
“Could I find it?”
“Oh, no. It was out of print long ago.... Now I am working at
_Atahualpa_, an opera. I consider it by far my greatest work; let me
show you,” and he took some loose leaves from a portfolio.
He began to play again. His whole body swayed to the spectacular
rhythm. There are occasions when rhythm is music, when melody is a
refinement hardly necessary. Everything in nature keeps time to such
a rhythm. Nothing can be indifferent. It turns a whole landscape
theatrical. We were whirled up into the midst of the frenzied
feather-dance, and beyond into a lofty sky where condors scarce can
breathe. In the distance glittered the ice-cold _puna_ cities. There
is nothing I could not do if that thrilling moment could have been
indefinitely prolonged!
“But you are interested in seeing the boys at work, I feel sure,” he
broke in.
The composer of _Ollanta_--sub-manager of a school of correction!
“The boys are either bad or abandoned by their families at an early
age. They are brought here and taught trades. They do all the work of
the school.
“Here is their swimming pool and their dormitory. In their schoolroom
you will see object-lessons upon the walls, pictures of what will
befall them if they are bad.
“The worst thing they can do is to run away. They are put into prison
when they return--here,” and he unlocked a big door. There were four
little doors on each side of a dark room. Those on the right opened
into closets two feet wide and six long, with bars overhead, all
painted black, “to keep them from writing on the walls,” he explained.
When the padlock was removed, the cubby-holes on the left were opened;
two feet square, black.
“Here they must stand.”
I gasped.
“Oh, yes.”
“How long do you keep them in such a place? Surely not over night?”
“Not more than eight days.”
“And in the other side?”
“Not over ninety days in there.”
“Is any one in here now?”
“Yes, two,” he said.
V
Certainly nowhere in Peru are contrasts more marked than in Lima of
to-day, with its splendidly carved balconies of former times, its
scavenger birds, and mud roofs strewn with ashes; its dim, candle-lit,
incense-filled churches with their leper windows, and its international
horse-racing; its collections of ancient, battered, gold idols, silver
llamas, dishes and spoons, and its aeroplane called _The Inca_!
Lima is a city where bull-fights are not only an amusement of the
people, but of the finest and best intellects which the country
has produced as well. Bull-fighters with queues, gold and silver
embroidery, lace fronts, and red silk stockings are seen in the
streets. Formerly the archbishop, religious orders, and monks all
came to the bull-fights. The viceroy, shouting “Long live the King,”
threw a golden key into the bull cage, and the fight under most august
patronage began.
The market of Lima is a picturesque place: Chilean peppers (_aji_),
orange and red, pats of goat’s-milk cheese in palm leaves, unsalted
butter in green corn husks, piles of ripe olives of various maroon
hues, strawberries in hand-woven baskets. Fighting cocks glisten in the
intense sunlight. Ladies in mantillas float by, closely followed by boy
servants, their arms full of bundles. Here and there Franciscans with
“sandaled feet and clattering crucifixes” are amassing tribute. There
are said to be about six thousand ecclesiastics now in the city.
Lima--with its botanical gardens, condors and llamas in cages, long
_allées_ of royal palms, and its cement tennis courts where English
people are drinking tea; its venerable university, the oldest in
America, and its aimless daily driving around and around the Paséo
Colón; its proverbial milk-women in hand-woven shawls among shining
cans perched high on ponies, and its craze for _art-nouveau_; its
treasuring of Pizarro’s bony remnant (which a guide explains is
“_completamente momificato_”) and its earthquake-rooms of solid
masonry! Lima--where one discusses at some time or another everything
from men-of-war to tapir-skin muffs! Lima--with its mediaeval
festivals, when priests’ chanting fills the streets, incense rises,
blossoms fall, and candles twinkle in a ray of sunlight! As the old
saying goes: “It were possible to die of hunger in Lima, but not to
leave it.”
PART II
IN THE MOUNTAINS
“And daily how through hardy enterprise
Many great regions are discoverèd,
Which to late age were never mentionèd,
Who ever heard of th’ Indian Peru?
Or who in venturous vessels measurèd
The Amazon huge river, now found true?
* * * * *
Why then should witless man so much misween
That nothing is, but that which he hath seen?”
SPENSER
CHAPTER I
THE HIGH REGIONS
I
No Peruvian thinks of zones differing from his own as being remote
geographical localities. Peru contains them all. He does not have to
travel over the face of the earth for a change of climate, but makes
short, domestic, vertical journeys instead. Living under his banana
groves among his sugar-fields in the lush coast valley, if he feels
need of fresher air, he takes a trip up to the temperate zone, where
apple orchards and wheat-fields lie spread out in a recess of the
mountains, and strawberries redden to perfection. Has he curiosity
to see an arctic storm, he goes a little higher, coming out upon the
bitter table-land where crests of glaciers cut the sky.
The Andes, youngest of mountains--what a weirdly tossed world! All the
most obscure and harsh substances of the planet have been heaped up
here. The rough places of earth have turned over and reached up where
they brush against the firmament.
Volcanic power has its domain in these high regions of earth, where
nature is in anarchy, possessed of unnatural powers. It is a great,
uneasy wilderness, where torrents rattle through daring gorges, only to
fall a thousand feet, scattering into a dust of foam. Icicles hang from
every joint between the stones.
It is a colossal, brutal land, fresh from the cataclysm, whose
ponderous masses of rock are all sterile from cold, all silent
under perpetual snow. In its clearness of atmosphere sparkles a new
conception of the night-time sky. It is a land where thin layers of
lichens are the only trace of plant life, where condors wheel about the
highest pinnacles, and silver lies buried deep in the ground. It is the
lair of mercury-mines which paralyze those working in them, where hot
and cold fountains mingle to make one river, where springs of tar and
rivers of peat ooze from suffocation within.
[Illustration: A TRESTLE OF THE HIGHEST RAILWAY IN THE WORLD, ACROSS
THE _INFIERNILLO_.]
Hot from their passage through the glowing veins of the mountains,
springs bubble into life, sour, turbid, saturated with gases, possessed
of weird powers, capable of giving life as well as of taking it away.
Their waters turn to stone as they spread over the plain. In this
frozen waste of glaciers, sheltering fire and magnetic iron within, all
forces and elements are seething, though shrouded with snow. As the
noise of water fills the desert, so the roar of fire can be heard among
the frozen mountain-tops.
Long, long ago, a volcano was puffing out asphyxiating fumes. It melted
the metal on the edge of its crater, and turned rocks burst from its
own black mouth-pit to red and yellow and green. Fire boiled over the
edge and advanced in a tide of flame down the mountainside and into the
valleys. The favorites of the Sun who lived beside it complained to
him of the ruin caused by the volcano. Somewhat irritated himself, he
“smothered the genius of devastation in his lair,” covering the top of
the mountain with an impenetrable cap of snow, leaving little, seraphic
blue lakes here and there upon it as a hostage. This frozen giant,
whose entrails the fire is devouring, still lies sleeping with his
granite dreams.
When all the beneficent qualities inherent in a world have been wrested
from it, and life has disappeared toward experiences elsewhere, or when
a comet’s tail has swished life suddenly away, a wilderness like that
of the high Andes would result--a place where chaos and disorder is the
only rule. Yet the law of chaos we must believe is no law at all.
Stretched among these mountains is the vast table-land called _puna_,
on which flourished the Indian civilizations so famous in history.
Abundant rain falls, but cold prevents it from covering the ground
with flowers. Reveling in the high pressure of the mountain-tops,
humming-birds flit about in the snow. The finest morning begets the
heaviest afternoon clouds, and warm atmospheric currents, quite
definitely confined in the cold air, travel through the desolation.
The wind, seeming to tear up the ground and pulverize the summits,
is unable to dissipate a mist which magnifies the rocks and presents
the traveler’s giant shadow with a whole system of concentric rainbow
halos--his apotheosis in the clouds. The wind brings with it cold
clouds of dust laid only by a fresh fall of snow. It mummifies the
beasts of burden which fall by the way. Mirages, too, the escort of
tropical heat, shimmer upon these arctic plains.
With all the paraphernalia of the torrid zone, limitless vagaries of
torrid force which knows no law of custom, the _puna_ has no enjoyment
of it. For the cold seems also to have taken on the exuberance of
tropical nature.
* * * * *
You may lose your way in a snow-storm; or in the hot and stifling
valleys, where the tropical sun can concentrate, you may die of the
bite of a venomous serpent. Parched by fever-thirst, you may not drink
the water, for it brings varieties of diseases, bounded by their
valleys’ walls.
Your mule may sink into a morass or break his leg in a _viscacha_
burrow. He may eat a poisonous _mala yerba_ or _garbanzillos_. Broadly
laden, he may be scraped off a bridle-path clinging to the sheer
precipice. He may be carried away by the swift current of a glacier
stream in attempting to ford it. He may collapse from lack of air and
leave you stranded in a lifeless desert. _Soroche_-sick and burned to
a crisp by the relentless cold, you urge on the staggering mule as he
stops constantly to gulp the thin air. He cannot be satisfied, although
he has a second set of nostrils cut through to ease his breathing and
avert _soroche_.
Still the glaciers crawl down from brooding peaks above. The sun,
magician of the bleak mountain regions, comes out and glints green on
broken strata of the red mountains. It discovers all the bright colors
in the hills of porphyry and clothes them with fresh shadows. It runs
along a vein of shining mica to accuse it. It plunges into the middle
of a lake of polished jet settled in the snow, “making a great, golden
hole.”
A single hill in sunlight glows with streaks of iris-color, matching
the rainbow forms as they appear above and fade again. Little cloud
islets surround far-off peaks, sunk beneath the horizon. Pyramids of
ice twinkle, and fantastic stone needles stand in rows too precipitous
for snow to cling to their bare sides. They are called early
inhabitants, which Pachacamac in his anger turned to stone. The air,
though thin almost to disappearance, cuts like a razor-edge.
With eyelashes frozen together, you can yet be sunstruck. Teeth to
teeth, cold and heat meet upon “the waste, chaotic battlefield of
Frost and Fire.” Cold is besieged in vain by the sun at its hottest.
This land of silent chaos takes on the cold of outer space so near by,
which, shot through by the fierce heat of the sun, is incapable of
absorbing any warmth.
The magical sun, dispelling somewhat the mountain-sickness, only brings
with it another, even worse. For blazing across the snow-fields in its
tropical fury, _surumpe_ follows, snow-blindness, cured only by fresh
vicuña flesh laid upon the eyes, so the Indians say.
The over-arching vault is indigo. Desolation is brightened by a radiant
light, infinitely attenuated, “diaphanous as the starry void.” It
caresses the bristling scenery. It penetrates caverns and fills them
with a gold and purple mist. In the world of light and shade which it
creates, even the shade gives light. Upon water, the light, startled
by its own reflection, sparkles and dances and leaps.
Words give no idea of the brilliancy of the snow on the crests of
the Andes, because there are no words made of sunlight and crystals:
luminous, empyreal snowshine, shattered by the sun now and then
into rainbow colors. As silence is perfect only because it has the
possibility of being broken at any instant by a gigantic crash, so
whiteness is the emblem of perfect purity only because the possibility
of all color lies within.
He who has not galloped across an Andean _puna_ chased by a tempest,
has not known the full, wild force of the elements. Lost in a whirl of
lightning, wind, and snow, his mule, maddened by electricity snapping
off the ends of his ears, dashes from the thunder chasing at arms’
length. Red lightning zigzags between the summits. Blood-red cataracts
tumble over the volcanic crags. Huge pieces of rock break loose and
crash from the cliffs. Deep furrows are ripped up, following the
lightning as it runs along close to the ground.
Lack of air and bitter cold are forgotten. Each flash acts like a
fresh whip-sting to the mule. The compass snaps against its box.
Magnetic sand leaps into the air and flies about in sheets. The rocks
seem ablaze, the whole sky is on fire. The atmosphere quivers with
uninterrupted peals, smothered in the gorges of granite, buffeted
by the mountainsides, torn apart by the high peaks, till, finally
overtaking each other, they are confounded in a mighty burst of thunder
that breaks loose in the sky, and in a cosmic roar reverberates against
the nothingness of outer space.
Then the sun slowly settles in calm. The striped walls flare in
the sunset light, flamboyant as the bang of brass mortars in pagan
idolatry. The mountains shine from base to summit, while “the night,
grazing the soil and step by step raising its wide flight,--the dying
light, fleeing from crest to crest, makes the most sublime summit
resplendent, until the shadow covers all with its wing.”
All vague sounds subside into an “excess of silence.”
The last incandescent peak shines, and goes out.
II
How appropriate it is that quicksilver, a liquid heaviest of metals,
should come from this land of contrast. The most elusive product of
a mysterious country, imperceptibly by fumes it enters the nostrils
of those who seek it, either destroying their teeth or disintegrating
their limbs; a metal which, becoming mere vapor, is again transformed
by a sudden chill to metal; though it rises as steam, it falls as
quicksilver. Pliny calls it the poison of all things, the “eternal
sweat,” since nothing can consume it. To the Incas it remained a
mystery, for although its “quick and lively motions” were admired, its
search, being harmful to the seeker, was forbidden. They did, however,
use the vermilion found with it: handsome women streaked their temples
with vermilion.
Silver also is born in certain cold and solitary deserts of the
mountain-tops, melted by subterranean fires within its deep veins.
Silver being the only produce of the soil, the necessities of life have
to be brought from afar. It seems as if the vigor that vegetation
would absorb goes into the silver.
The mountain-tops are full of legends of mine discoveries usually
intertwined with romance. Greedy lovers have sacrificed their love for
a mine, and many are the mines filled with revengeful floods. Huira
Capcha, a shepherd who had been guarding his flocks near Cerro de
Pasco, awoke one day to find the stone beneath the ashes of his fire
turned to silver.
It is told in connection with the mine of Huancayo that an Indian
friend gave a Franciscan monk a bag of silver ore. The eager friar
wished to know where more could be found. The Indian consented to show
him, but blindfolded the friar, who took the precaution to drop a bead
of his rosary here and there as he went along. When at last the monk
stood marveling at the bright masses of silver, his Indian friend gave
him a handful of unstrung beads. “Father,” he said, “you dropped your
rosary on the way!”
In 1545, an Indian called Hualpa was pursuing a vicuña up the
mountainside. He grasped at the bushes as he scrambled up a steep
cliff. One came up by the roots, which were hung with globules of
silver. That particular vicuña hunt took place on a mountain called
Potosí. The discoverer of the mine of Potosí was murdered by a Spaniard
named Villarroel, who became its proprietor. The murder was an
unnecessary precaution, however, since a mysterious voice had commanded
the Indians to take no silver from this hill, which was destined for
other owners. From that romantic mountain has flowed far “more silver
than from all the mines of Mexico.” “Prior to 1593 the royal fifth had
been paid on three hundred and ninety-six millions of silver.” The
only difficulty the Spaniards encountered was in finding water enough
to wash the silver. The hills about Potosí gleamed with as many as
six thousand little fires, smelting furnaces belching horrid odors,
scattering liquid silver pellets. They had to be carried where the wind
blew, sometimes higher up and sometimes lower down.
So this splendid Imperial City grew up in the subtle air, varied by icy
winds and storm. The extraction of its prodigious wealth was a means
of torture to those who worked in continual darkness without knowledge
of day or night.
Yet, even among the tops of the Andes, living things are adjusted to
their environment, queer little animals of the heights giving the only
human atmosphere there is. Leaping _viscachas_, with cat-like tails,
carve through the frozen ground village burrows made to last forever,
treacherous pitfalls for a traveler’s mule. With the finest, silkiest
fur, valued by even the Incas, chinchillas sit in the shadows, never
in the sun. They appear suddenly on the steep cliffs at dusk and
nibble stiff grasses; then disappear like magic, leaving little chains
of footprints in the snow. A small toad inhabits the boundaries of
perpetual snow, and a nice little plant called _maca_ has its best
flavor only above an altitude of thirteen thousand feet, where all
flavoring ingredients have long been left behind.
The wild gazelle of the Andes, with fur the color of dried roses, the
graceful vicuña, creature of quickness and flight, lives upon the
coldest heaths and in the most secluded fastnesses of the mighty Andes
and seldom descends below the limit of perpetual snow. His back,
burned tawny by the tropical sun, is covered with snow.
Far in the distance a flock is grazing. The single male stands near by
upon a rock. A foreign sight or sound, a quick movement of his foot,
a short, shrill whistle vibrating through the clear, _puna_ air, a
flash of golden brown, and the whole flock is lost in the wilderness of
rocks, fleeing miles without stopping. It is said that if the male is
wounded, the females surround him, allowing themselves to be shot down
rather than leave.
The vicuña defies pursuit or capture and disappears at the first
glimpse of intruders, driving the young before him. He is no less
wild than in the days when he was royal purveyor of softest fabric
to the Incas’ wardrobes. His habits are as elusive now as then, when
Indians thirty thousand strong entrapped the wild animals among the
mountain-tops. These solemn huntings took place every fourth year.
Meanwhile the wise men kept account of the flocks with colored threads,
so-called _quipus_, their method of enumeration.
[Illustration: ALPACAS ON THE ANDEAN PUNA.]
Cousins of the vicuña are the awkward _huanacus_, which drink brackish
water as gladly as fresh and seek a favorite valley where they may
breathe their last and pile up their accumulated bones--as sea-lions
go to particular islands to die, the wounded being helped thither by
companions. The Incas worshipped the llama, alpaca, and these wild
relatives of theirs; they carved their grotesque forms in stone and
fashioned their likeness in gold and silver for household gods.
Far above the limit of human life, even beyond the haunts of vicuñas,
there is still one living creature. His shadow sweeps over the
wilderness as he passes between it and the sun--a shadow the only
appearance of life. It is the condor, who lays her white eggs on the
bare rock of the loftiest mountain peaks and knows where the heart of
each animal lies.
The mighty condor, who can kill an ox with his beak of steel, who can
swallow a sheep or exist a month without food.
The majestic condor, who swims in the highest air or sweeps down upon
his prey with a deafening whir of wings.
The condor, a symbol of light, who circles up to the ether of outer
space on an almost imperceptible, tremulous motion, or proceeds
undisturbed, without effort or flutter of wings, in the icy teeth of a
tempest, a symbol of storm.
He watches the sun rise over a continent-jungle, glimmering with heat
and dampness, and long after the sunset glow has faded from the highest
snowy peak, he sees its fiery ball drop beyond the farthest edge of the
Pacific.
The fabulous condor, known in Europe when Peru was a myth, a hostage
from a fairyland of gold and silver; a griffin which revels in solitude
and in evidences of things gone by.
Loneliness is the condor’s only friend.
The wind howls through his broadened wings.
CHAPTER II
A MEGALITHIC CITY AND A SACRED LAKE
I
There is something more mysterious than the sea, and that is the
desert; something more mysterious than the desert, and that is the
mountains; something more mysterious than the mountains, and that is
the jungle. Yet there is something with a deeper mystery than all--the
tradition of a great race that has struggled to a climax and subsided.
Where is there a more unbridled ocean? Where a more pitiless desert?
Where other Andes? Where so limitless a jungle? And where, in the
history of the whole world, so picturesque a dynasty--whose god was the
Sun, whose insignia the rainbow, who dwelt in houses lined with gold,
who tamed the earth’s resources so that their aqueducts in a rainless
land are still ministering to the descendants of a people who destroyed
them, and who left not one written word to testify that they had ever
been created at all.
What can be said of the Incas, the theme of romance ever since the
greed of the Spaniard reduced them to a legend--romances pale indeed
beside facts recorded by sober historians? A people who used copper
for iron, _quipus_ for writing, llamas for horses; who sacrificed
condors and humming-birds to their gods on the frozen plains; whose
accumulations of precious metals exceeded stories of Ophir’s wealth;
whose ears were enlarged that they might better hear the complaints
of the oppressed, and who were brought to destruction by a handful
of adventurers whom the whole training of the people had led them to
worship as gods.
Yet the Incas were only the final stage in a series of races that
flourished on the heights of Peru back through the ages. They were but
the last flicker of a guttering civilization without a name, which has
left only a few silent ruins built by unknown peoples, of whom these
“symptoms of architecture” reveal to us the forgotten existence. The
mystery that fires our imagination in contemplating the Incas had
shrouded their predecessors from them with an impenetrable veil.
Humboldt once remarked that the problem of the first population of
America is no more the province of history than questions on the origin
of plants and animals are part of natural science. In considering
this megalithic age, we have to do with pure speculation, not with
any legitimate domain of knowledge. Learned treatises end only with a
question. Dr. Bingham has recently discovered among these mountains
glacial human bones, possibly twenty thousand to forty thousand years
old. They may shed new light upon the identity of the makers of those
mysterious terraces which appear coeval with the creation of the world.
Vestiges of past civilizations are everywhere about, “monuments which
themselves memorials need;” terraces hollowed out of the mountains
to the very summits, bits of stone walls, roads, aqueducts, or an
occasional stone idol with a shallow vessel for the blood of victims,
perhaps a staring face on a pillar with projecting tusks and snakes
intertwined on its cheeks.
* * * * *
Tiahuanacu was made by a race which as far antedates the Incas as they
the dominant race to come. Everything to do with it is remote and
forgotten. Of necessity even its name is modern, having been given by
the Inca Yupanqui to his “resting-place.” The great pillars of the
City of the Phoenix rise from the roof of the world, “as strong and as
freshly new as the day when they were raised upon these frozen heights
by means which are a mystery.” Single stones measure thirty feet in
length. Heads of huge statues lie about and hard black stones difficult
to hew, the corners as sharp as when chiseled before the memory of man.
Niches and doorways are cut from the middle of single blocks, whose
corners are perfect right angles.
Many finely sculptured stones are now used for grinding chocolate, some
of the larger ones for making railroads. Prehistoric idols lean as
doorkeepers against flimsy, modern walls in the almost deserted modern
town, and one weird face has found its way as far as the Alameda in La
Paz. Beyond the protecting opening of a still perfect monolith lies the
burial-place for still-born Christian children.
A monolithic doorway, beautifully sculptured, lies broken in two by
lightning. A square-headed, legless, impenetrable god, speaking from
right-angled lips, still stares from behind his square eyelids. Weeping
three square tears from each eye, he surveys the waste and desolation
about him, just as he looked unmoved upon the golden pageants of Inca
days that did him honor as a superhuman deity who had sprung into being
in one night with a whole city about him. His hands wield snaky-necked
scepters, each the head of a condor, the lightning bird; and rows of
square little worshippers in wings and condor-fringes kneel beneath
crowns of rays fading off into the heads of birds with reversed combs.
No one yet knows the meaning of the sculptured deity which confused
Inca _amautas_ (wise men) a thousand years ago. Though the Creator is
supposed to have lived in Tiahuanacu, an eminent German, Rudolph Falb,
says the weeping god is a hero of the flood, his tears the symbol of
the deluge.
A tradition of the sixteenth century ascribes these monuments to an
age before the appearance of the sun in the heavens. Their builders
were destroyed by a flood sent by the wrathful god, Con Tici Uiracocha,
who came from the south, converting “heights into plains and plains
into tall heights, causing springs to flow out of bare rocks.” Half in
regret that he had destroyed his race of men, he created sun and moon
to render visible the waste he had made.
This information is as accurate and authentic as any which a long
line of distinguished explorers and archeologists have been able to
substitute for it. Men of sane judgment agree in admitting that there
is nothing to justify any conclusion. But they also agree that the
significance of Tiahuanacu exceeds everything hitherto discovered in
Peru. It recalls Carnac and Philae. It stands with the dolmens of
Brittany, Stonehenge, and the cyclopean terraces of the South Sea
Islands, as a great riddle of human history.
[Illustration: A GOD OF TIAHUANACU.]
II
Dropped in the bottom of yawning red gulfs, with snow-peaks glistening
overhead, are wild valleys of differing climates, the mighty
_quebradas_ of the Andes. These canyons, which the famous hanging
bridges used to span, intersect the wilderness. They lie in dusk while
the over-arching cliffs are bathed in full sunlight, for sunrise and
sunset are within a few hours of each other. The warm air, steaming
upward, pushes the snow boundary far above. Strata of black sand on the
valley’s walls have been tunneled by cave-dwellers of ancient times.
French sisters of charity move about in cloisters under eucalyptus
trees.
Such a surprise is Yucay, tucked in snugly between two mountains,
wrapped in soft air and scents of unknown flowers, the loveliest spot
in all the empire of the Incas. Streams of clear water descend to it
from above and form the smooth, deep river of Yucay. The Incas sought
it out for their gardens of pleasure and were lulled to rest by bells
of gold tied to the hammocks in which they slept.
Water has a very tranquillizing effect. It sweeps along a valley, and
the jagged remnants of volcanic action are smoothed out into long
undulating lines.
Water collects in all crevices; lakes green as iron vitriol, fed by
subterranean springs, lie in the surly country like jewels in their
setting. When night shadows have settled in the valleys, the alpine
glow is reflected in the quiet surface.
There are no fish in the lake of Chinchaycocha, Laguna de Reyes. Though
their element is water and they die in air, here they die in pure water
for lack of air. The _ingahuallpa_ sings a monotonous note from the
bank at the close of every hour during the night. The outlet of the
lake is narrow and deep, and its clear water flows smoothly and without
noise.
All the lakes have their secrets. The little lake of Orcos still holds
the golden chain with links wrist-thick made by Huayna Ccapac at the
birth of his eldest son. It encompassed the market-place of Cuzco.
It was so weighty that “two hundred Indians having seized the links
of it to the rings in their ears were scarce able to raise it from
the ground.” After the coming of the Spaniards, it was thrown for
safe-keeping into this round, deep pool filled by unknown springs.
Safe indeed it is. Orcos has not given up its charge, though repeated
attempts have been made to reach the bottom. Trying to drain it by a
sluice and trench, the Spaniards “unhappily crossed upon a vein of hard
rock, at which, pecking a long time, they found that they struck more
fire out of it than they drew water"--the opposite element from the one
they expected.
Up against the sky lies a sea where men sail in boats of grass--Lake
Titicaca, where ships are silently struck by lightning without crash
of thunder. On these high seas the navigator has to go by instinct,
because of the loadstone round about--magnetic iron, it is now less
picturesquely called. Saint Elmo’s fire blazes from ships’ masts on
stormy nights. Sometimes a pointed tongue of black clouds swings from
above, “like the trunk of some gigantic elephant searching the ground.”
A similar one raises itself from the surface of the water, slapping
back and forth, seeking the point of the tongue above, and when they
have found each other, they join in a mighty, black column, out of
which burst thunder and lightning. It whirls off everything within
reach and sucks down a passing _balsa_ (boat of reeds) into a depth
never sounded.
The water of Lake Titicaca is ice-cold and brackish. Its strangely
fashioned fishes never come to the surface. It is inhabited by great
animals like sea-cows, occasionally seen resting on a beach of some
remote inlet. The grottoes along the shore are guarded by gray and
black night herons and inhabited by the sea-cow or other monsters!
Queer birds haunt the wide stretches of _totora_ growing along the
shore, reeds whose stems are used for making boats, and whose tips are
used as salad. Here live the stately _puna_ geese, dazzling white, with
green wings shading into violet; black water-hens, white _quinlla_,
dark green _yanahuico_ with long, thin, bent bills, finely etched
ducks, ibises, _licli_, metallically bright, and sea-gulls from the
Atlantic.
Coal is found on the shores of Titicaca, which suggests a mystery. At
what elevation could tropical coal plants grow? The bones of mastodons
are also here. But rocks even higher up are smoothed as if by waves,
and beaches are found like those of the actual sea. Both Humboldt
and Darwin found shells, once crawling on the bottom of the sea, now
embedded fourteen thousand feet above its level.
Small lakes are sources of small rivers, by which they are emptied.
But great Titicaca forms no stream at all. Its outlet has no outlet of
its own. The rush of nauseous water is poured into a shallow lake-twin
not far away--Poopo, through whose mysterious whirlpools the water
drops back again in subterranean escapes. This tumultuous torrent, the
Desaguadero, was spanned in former days by a bridge of reeds.
Recent measurements show that the level of these two lakes is
constantly lowering, and eventually they will disappear. They were once
the source of the greatest river in the world, but some day there will
be only a salty deposit in the hollows they now fill.
_Titi_, the cat, _kaka_, the rock, Lake Titicaca was named for a
little island within it, around which cluster legends of the origins
of things. It was the most revered shrine in the empire of the Incas.
Neither the wide fields of Chita, where the flocks of the Sun gamboled,
nor the valley of Yucay could equal this enchanted isle of Titicaca.
Before the arrival of man, the island was inhabited by a tiger,
carrying on its head a magnificent ruby, whose light illuminated the
whole lake as the afterglow the snow-covered peaks above. The Hawaiians
have an expression for the shifting of colors in a rainbow. The Indians
on Lake Titicaca have special words for the glow of fading sunlight on
the mountain summits and the purple of the glaciers in their hollows.
The Sun had preserved himself from the flood by hiding in the depths
of Lake Titicaca. This was his island, out of whose sacred rock, after
the deluge, he soared like a big flame into the sky. His footsteps are
still to be seen perpetuated in iron ore. The original Incas were let
down by the Sun, their father, on to the small island and commanded to
go forth to teach the savage inhabitants.
But the worship given this spot by the Incas was only absorbed in that
of former times. This “Island of the Wild Cat” is a field of aboriginal
myth and tradition.
The sacred cliff where the Sun had risen was covered by the Incas
with sheets of gold and silver, “so that, in rising, he might see the
whole rock ablaze, a signal to worship.” “Sixteen hundred attendants
manufactured _chicha_ to throw at it, and pilgrims from the entire
empire brought offerings of silver and gold.” Garcilasso says that
“after all the vessels and ornaments of the temple were supplied, there
was enough gold and silver left to raise and complete another temple
without other material whatsoever.” All the treasure was thrown into
Lake Titicaca to save it from the Spaniards. Ten of them were drowned
in 1541, while hunting for it. Titicaca guards its secrets well.
The approach to the temple was a very complicated structure known
as “the place where people lose themselves.” The pilgrims, after
much fasting on the sacred ground of the island, were allowed to
pass barefoot through the first gate above, the “door of the puma,”
_pumapuncu_. After more fasting, they might go down through the second
gate, the “door of the humming-bird,” _kenti-puncu_, so called from
feathers of humming-birds plastered over its inner side. They were
especially honored by the Incas, colored like the rainbow emblem. After
more ceremonies, the pilgrims were allowed to go through the “door of
hope,” _pillco-puncu_, covered with feathers of the bird of hope. Those
who had come so far might now worship the holy cliff, but they were not
allowed to touch the face of the cliff nor to walk upon it. Sacrifices
to it were small children, whose heads the priests cut off with sharp
stones. The sacrificial stone of the Island of Titicaca still remains,
rubbed smooth by the iron tooth of time, split into three pieces by
a thunderbolt. So does the queen’s meadow below the terraces, where
the carmine, yellow, and white _cantut_, _flor-del-Inca_, recalls the
blazing color of other days, when fruit ripened here twelve thousand
feet above the sea, and maize of which Sun-virgins made the bread of
sacrifice.
Beyond, is the island called Coati, consecrated to the Moon, where her
temple used to be. The life-size statue of a woman was found here,
gold in the upper half, silver in the lower.
The Fountain of the Incas still gushes two streams of clear water. “A
stolid Indian sits watching it pour away, never dreaming whence it
comes, as no one, indeed, knows.”
CHAPTER III
MYTHS AND MONUMENTS
I
The Indian worshipped the Inca, his sovereign, because of his divine
origin, being the descendant of Manco Ccapac, founder of his race,
who was the son of the Sun. Thus, religion was the substance of the
empire. But as the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was a pantheon of idols,
sacred each one in the mind of some visiting chieftain, though always
remaining the Sun Temple, so the religion itself was a synthesis of all
the beliefs which those idols represented; blended yet dominated by the
all-searching light of the Sun. This may explain, for instance, the
confusion of Pachacamac, the supreme deity of the ancient coast tribes,
with Uiracocha of the mountains, whom Acosta, among others, declares to
be one and the same. Clear-cut
[Illustration: A SWINGING BRIDGE NEAR JAUJA.]
distinctions are impossible. The stories are all vague, even among
confident writers of legends.
As to the Sun’s descent, the wise men of the Incas learned
from their predecessors that he was made by The Ancient Cause,
The First Beginning, The Maker of All Created Things, The
Supreme Deity, Illa Tici Uira Cocha--the four ultimate,
visible forms of the Infinite, to quote the _Peruvian
Star-chart_ of Salcamayhua. There is in Quichua a word to express
“the-essence-of-being-in-general-as-existent-in-humanity.” Sometimes
the name is given as Con Tici Uiracocha, an identification with the
supreme god, Con, the center of another group of legends of belief.
The mystery surrounding this great, invisible god, generally called
Uiracocha, is as complete now as it was to the Sun-worshipping Incas, a
sort of dim background for the glittering splendor of Sun-ritual.
Uiracocha has many identities: Uiracocha, the Supreme God; Uiracocha,
the hero-god, the white and bearded man in long robes, who with a
strange animal in his hand, appeared to that Inca afterwards called by
his name, tending the flocks of the Sun among the tops of the Andes;
Uiracocha, who raised up an army for the Inca on the Field of Blood
out of stones that he set on fire from a sling of gold; he who changed
the revelers of Tiahuanacu to stone in wrath. (However misty the
connection between Uiracocha, stones, and human beings, it is certain
that Peruvians held stones in great awe. The temple to Uiracocha, the
war-god, is at the foot of an extinct volcano whence a lava stream
had issued. It is paved with black and made of carved and polished
stone. The interior was obscure, with an altar for human sacrifices.)
Uiracocha who, as Betanzos relates, came out of a lake when all was
dark, lord of light and lord of wind, who, as dawn appeared, spread his
mantle over the waves of the lake and was wafted away into the rays of
morning light. The curling waves followed his evanescent passage, and
so he was called Uiracocha, the Foam of the Sea. He gave his wand to
the chief in the House of the Dawn. It afterwards became the golden
staff of Manco Ccapac, his son.
Uiracocha was the universal god of the Quichua-speaking people. The Sun
was peculiar to the Incas.
The hazy red deity Con was the personification of subterranean fire.
“He is light as air, has neither arms nor legs, nor muscles nor bones,
nor joints nor nerves nor flesh, but runs very fast in all directions.”
He came from the sea and flattened the hills and filled up the valleys,
and by his simple word gave life to man. Viciously he converted the
race of men he had created into black cats and other horrible animals,
devastated the earth, deprived it of rain, and--retreated into the sea.
His first temple was a volcano.
This left a free field for his equally omnipotent, equally hazy brother
Pachacamac, who benignly created another race of men. Since Pachacamac
was invisible and beyond their conception, the Incas built him no
temples, but gave him secretly a superstitious worship, bowing their
heads, lifting their eyes, and kissing the air as evidences of the
reverence they felt at the mention of his name.
Here is a prayer reported by Geronimo de Ore: “O Pachacamac, thou who
hast existed from the beginning, and shalt exist unto the end, powerful
and pitiful; who createdst man by saying, ‘Let man be;’ who defendest
us from evil, and preserves! our life and health;--art thou in the
sky or in the earth, in the clouds or in the depths? Hear the voice
of him who implores thee, and grant him his petitions. Give us life
everlasting, preserve us, and accept this our sacrifice.”
The Inca mind could not reconcile the anterior existence of Uiracocha,
Con, and Pachacamac with Sun-supremacy. We find them all called sons of
the Sun, and so their importance could consistently fade away.
The origin of the two first Incas was mystery-veiled. Men discussed
whether they were saved from the primeval waters robed in garments
of light, or whether they came from three shining eggs laid by the
lightning in a mountain cave after the deluge. Did they escape from
the lower world through a giant reed, or were they imprisoned in a
cave, over which Uiracocha appeared with wings of brilliant feathers
to give Manco Ccapac the insignia--the scarlet fillet and the round
gold plates? Some thought they emerged from Paccari-tampu, the Lodgings
of the Dawn, not far from Cuzco. They had been led thither through
caverns of the earth. Sarmiento relates that the Incas came out of
a rich window, by order of Uiracocha, without parentage. The first
Inca had an enchanted bird and a staff of gold, and came conferring
fairy-tale benefits to mankind.
The legend most widely accepted taught that the Incas, who in the
person of Manco Ccapac and his wife and sister Mama Ocllo came out of
the cave of Paccari-tampu, were children of the Sun. He himself placed
them on the Island of Titicaca and told them to wander until they
should reach a place where their wedge of gold would be swallowed up
by the ground at a touch. There they should build the capital of their
empire. At the foot of the fortress of Sachsahuaman it disappeared, and
so the city of Cuzco, the Navel of the World, was founded.
The poetic fiction of all these legends conceals an historic background
of curious details. But with Father Acosta we should consider that
“it is not matter of any great importance to know what the Indians
themselves report of their beginning, being more like unto dreams than
to true histories.” He continued: “They believe confidently they
were created at their first beginning at this new world where they
now dwell. But we have freed them of this error by our faith, which
teacheth us that all men came from the first man.”
Besides all this maze of divinity and a symbolic astronomy, everything
in nature had for them a soul that they might pray to for help. Not
only the sun, moon, stars, thunder, and lightning, the rainbow, the
elements, and rivers, but that deep sea from which they issued had
a mysterious worship. They adored high mountains, homes of majestic
gods whom they never saw, whence streams proceeded to water their
terraces. They sacrificed to distant objects by blowing the ashes of
burnt sacrifices into the air, offering them to the hills and to the
wind. They adored all great stones, the mouths of rivers, all things in
nature different from the rest, and offered to them small stones or a
handful of earth or an eyelash.
Moreover, there was an elaborate fetishism. They had idols with a
personal interest; they carried talismans; they had miniature domestic
altars, where they offered _chicha_ or flowers.
They tried to appease things that might injure them. They drank a
handful of water from a dangerous river before crossing, and ate a bit
of the stone which had harmed them, and offered in sacrifice a leaf of
coca. The mysteries of coca epitomize the country where it grows. It
not only fortifies the teeth, controlling mountain sickness, preventing
fatigue, keeping off disease, strengthening broken bones; it cheers
the spirit and invigorates the mind, and gives courage to perform
impossible tasks.
Its juice softens hard veins of metal. The odor of burning coca
propitiates the deities-of-metals, who would render the mountains
impenetrable without it. Coca-leaves in the mouths of the dead insure a
welcome in lands beyond.
No wonder it was the divine plant of the Incas. A sacrifice at
festivals, its smoke an offering to the gods, whose priests chewed
the solemn herb to gain their favor, it was a benediction for any
enterprise. Mama-coca, its spirit, was worshipped.
Coca, preferred to gold, silver, or precious stones, was dubbed by the
Spaniards “_una elusión del demonio_.”
II
Almost as well known as the stories of silver and gold from Peru are
those relating to its mammoth buildings made of mammoth stones. The
ruins are a better witness to the greatness of the ancient Peruvians
than the wealth looted from them.
It is the first fact mentioned by a homecoming traveler that there is
a twelve-cornered stone in the Street of Triumph in Cuzco, and into
and around each corner other stones are so perfectly fitted that a
knife-blade cannot be inserted between them. That fact is perfectly
true. So also is the fact that ancient Peruvians transported stones
weighing tons with llamas and human beings as their only beasts of
burden. They lifted them to great heights without machinery, cut them
without steel implements, blasted them without gunpowder, and polished
by rubbing them with other stones and bundles of rough grass. They
had no resources in building but their own energy. The vast “stones
were raised by social institutions, supplying want of instruments
by numbers of people.” This world of ruins, comparable to Egypt, “is
isolated in the region of the clouds.”
Stupendous scenes upon these elevated plains were object
lessons--nearness of gigantic peaks, appalling depth of chasms. The
Incas learned much from nature: from salt-strewn deserts to lay waste
their criminals’ property, sowing their fields with salt; from the
sea, maker of terraces. They finished off the mountain-sides with
small _andenes_, or hanging gardens, which received the flow of water
bestowed by the Inca upon his subjects with every patch of ground. They
brought loam from the jungle in baskets and created land upon bare
rocks. Where opportunity offered, the terraces widened, following the
natural excrescences of the mountain.
And when nature failed to point lessons, models were provided by
far-receding civilizations so remote that they almost seemed to have
relapsed into the domain of nature. Each served as the foundation for
the next, like the rhythmic life of the jungle.
Ancient Peruvians hesitated at nothing. They built an artificial
city on a high, cold, almost waterless, plain, with a palace for the
Inca to visit in, a garrison for his protection, and magazines and
granaries for his soldiers’ food. Countless royal palaces, too, their
niches covered with plates of gold, and convents like the House of the
Virgins of the Sun in Cuzco, were duplicated all over the empire for
other wives of the Inca as he chose among them, “storehouses sheltering
his tribute in women.” There were baths and fountains and places of
pleasure and round stone _chulpas_, towers of the dead.
Since no one traveled except by order of the Inca, the highways were
reserved for himself, the armies, and the _chasqui_, or royal runners.
From Zarate to Humboldt, they have been described as fit to rank with
the seven wonders of the world. One highway pierced walls of solid
rock, crossing profound chasms and the treacherous marshes of the
_puna_ on walls of solid masonry. Being a pedestrian road, it slipped
in flights of stone steps over the brow of the mountains. It traversed
the whole empire for two thousand miles among the mountain-tops. The
other, flanked by mud walls, lay along the low deserts of the coast,
“shaded by trees whose branches hung over the road loaded with fruit,
and filled with parrots and other birds,” to quote Cieza de Leon.
Humboldt said that “part of the coast road was macadamized.”
At regular intervals, “every ten thousand paces,” _tambos_ were
scattered along the roads, houses of pleasure for the Inca and
waiting-houses for the relays of messengers of the Sun as they bore
news of royal necessity, or brought fish from the sea or other
delicacies from distant provinces to the Inca’s table. Garcilasso
describes the stone stairs up to these inns “where the chairmen who
carried the sedans did usually rest, where the Incas did sit for some
time taking the air, and surveying in a most pleasant prospect all
the high and lower parts of the mountains, which wore their coverings
of snow, or on which the snow was falling, for from the tops of some
mountains one might see a hundred leagues round.”
The Incas threw a swinging osier-bridge of spider-web construction
across a vicious torrent to lead their armies over. So-called
historians tell of bridges of feathers used in Inca days, but, as
Garcilasso adds, “omit to declare the manner and fashion of them!”
The secrets of the Inca ruins are not yet told. For their industry
moulded underground as well, connecting palaces and convents by hidden
passageways, and chambers and depositories for army supplies like those
made by the great Yupanqui in his campaign against the Chimus.
The subterranean system of water-works was stupendous. Near Cajamarca
is a channel several hundred miles long paved with flagstones
throughout its entire length. It forms the outlet to a little lake.
Another aqueduct traversed the whole province of Cuntisuyu, twelve
feet deep and over one hundred and twenty leagues long, leading
waters of the snows to barren plains. Water was stored in cisterns on
the mountain-tops. “They conducted rivers in straightened channels
through hills of solid rock,” they brought water through pipes of gold
from distant hot and cold springs, whose sources are now unknown. It
trickled into the baths of the Inca through golden jaws of animals,
birds, or snakes, and then welled
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
AN HEIR OF THE “MAKERS OF RUINS.”]
over through properly regulated pathways to the terraces, where growing
things were in want of irrigation.
This civilization had taken ages to evolve, as the development of
certain plants and animals alone would show. It was reduced in a few
years to an empire of ruin. One shivers at the “hideous energy of
destruction evinced by man.” But in spite of all that has been done
to annihilate the achievements of the Incas, benefits accruing from
them still remain. “Makers of ruins” indeed, yet by them the present
flimsy civilization exists. Upon their terraces, climbing to the
mountain-tops, Indians now live in mud huts, little towns clutching at
a far-off slope, apparently deserted but for the cemetery. Irrigating
prospectors stand aghast before their mighty systems. The railway
builder may take lessons in road construction.
There is practical value in ruins, if from them comes inspiration for
modern industry. And there is poetry in ruins, because they speak of
men and things which are gone, never to return, “the shrines of by-gone
ideals, makable when they were made and then only.”
CHAPTER IV
THE INCA AND HIS EMPIRE
No one dared to look upon the Inca, as he radiated the light of his
divine Sun-father. He lived and ruled as a deity, representative of
God, supreme arbiter of all creatures breathing the air or living in
the water. “The very birds will suspend their flight if I command it,”
Atahualpa once said. His person being holy, his body after death,
preserved in its living likeness, was still worshipped. Carried about
on a golden litter, the Prince Powerful in Riches moved from palace to
palace, and his feet never touched any but sacred ground, consecrated
by his contact, if not previously hallowed. To carry his person was
so singular an honor that his weight was not a burden, as cultivating
his fields was a labor performed with hymns of joy. This Sun of
Cheerfulness passed beneath flower-covered arches, while his bearers
crushed out sweet odors from flowers beneath their feet. Indeed, “the
shouts of the multitude as he passed along caused the birds flying over
to fall to the ground!”
If these “facts” seem more like romance than truth, they have at least
masqueraded under the guise of history for more than three hundred
years.
The Inca was clothed in garments made of the silky hair of the vicuña,
which lives above the line of perpetual snow. Woven as they were to
be worn, from threads of invisible fineness, the soft garments were
made by cloistered Virgins of the Sun. They were enriched with bits
of gold, silver, emeralds, a fringe of gorgeous feathers, and with
mother-of-pearl. Pearls were not used, as their “search endangered the
lives of the seekers.” The Inca wore a suit but twice, then conferring
it upon some person of royal blood. These were the garments taken as
sumptuous gifts to the monarchs of Spain.
Many were the Incas’ marks of distinction. Their heads were shorn, all
but one lock, as Manco Ccapac had ordained. The “shearing” was done by
means of a sharp flint. Another distinction was enlarging the velvet
of the ear by inserting ornaments, so that it reached the shoulder,
suggesting the Spanish title, _Orejones_.
The peculiar badge of the Inca was a fringe encircling his brow, called
the _llautu_, “the mark whereby he took possession of the realm, a
red roll of wool more fine than silk, which hung in the midst of his
forehead.” And his chief distinction, worn in his colored wreath and
pointing upward, were the two long pinions of the _corequenque_, that
mysterious pair of birds which, isolated in a snowy desert beside a
little lake, lived at the foot of an inaccessible mountain. Though
there are other snowy deserts and other little lakes and other
inaccessible mountains, no similar pair of birds could ever be found.
In fact, there never were but two alive at the same time--symbol of
the two original parents. They recall the screaming _oo_, a blackbird
of the Hawaiian Islands, famed for concealing under each wing a single
yellow feather, used in making those magical feather cloaks for the
kings on ceremonial occasions.
Each Inca must have new pinions, as each must have his new palace, for
the apartments of a dead sovereign were closed at death; his golden
utensils, jewels, and treasure were buried with him. Men and women,
practised in the art of lamentation, cried for one year after his
death, when his account was closed. Then the heir “bound his head with
the colored wreath” and started forth through his dominions.
With the rainbow as their emblem, even Inca facts had distinctive
colors and were interwoven with facts of other colors, ideas being
expressed directly without the technique of words. Knots in a
parti-colored twist were their hieroglyphics, the famous _quipus_, and
the Officers of the Knots were their historians. They intertwined the
bright filaments of different sizes as well as colors, and tied into
remembrance everything from laws and army supplies to ballads of the
poets, sung on days of triumph.
Such a Sovereign-deity as the Inca could force the equality of all his
people, commanding them to be happy. Here was a whole nation moved
by sameness of will--desire to please their sovereign. Observance of
law was natural to these industrious subjects, who were treated with
absolute justice by an absolute despot. Each was just as well fed,
just as well clothed, just as well housed, just as well amused, as
his neighbor. Emissaries from the king inspected his neighbor to see
that it should remain so. All persons had to allow messengers from the
Inca to inspect what they were doing at any time. Such as were found
commendable were praised in public. Such as were idle and slovenly
were scourged on the arms and legs. One punishment was whipping by a
deformed Indian with a lash of nettles.
“There never could be any scarcity or famine, for, if a man failed to
take his turn at the water for irrigation, he received publicly three
or four thumps on the back with a stone ... shamed with the disgraceful
term of ... _mizqui tullu_, being a word compounded of _mizqui_, which
signifies sweet, and _tullu_, which is bones.”
As labor was the only tribute, the rich were not taxed more than the
poor. The blind were required to cleanse cotton of seeds and rub maize
from the ears. “The old men and women were set to affright away the
birds from the corn, and thereby gained their bread and clothing.” No
one, however impotent, could
[Illustration: INDIAN WATER CARRIER, SICUANI.]
escape tribute. The poorest gave lice, “making themselves clean and not
void of employment in so doing.” Who, indeed, were the poor? Those who
were incapable of work, who had to be fed and clothed out of the king’s
store.
“There were no particular tradesmen ... but every one learned what was
needful for their persons and houses and provided for themselves.”
Laws would hardly seem necessary to control so exemplary a nation.
Here, however, are a few paternal laws, thought necessary by the Lover
of the Poor: against the adornment of clothing with gold and silver
and jewels; against profuseness in banquet and delicacies in diet;
against the ill manners of children; of good husbandry and hospitality;
providing a new division of lands every year, according to the increase
and diminution of families; punishing those who destroyed landmarks or
turned the water aside; devoting the services of all master workmen to
the Inca, and supplying them with gold and silver and other materials
for the exercise of their ingenuity.
Since the Sun-god, or the Inca, had benignly bestowed them for the
people’s good, laws received the same veneration as the precepts of
religion, from which no subject of the Incas could dissociate them. A
breaker of the law was guilty of sacrilege, and no punishment could be
too severe. In fact, most crimes were punishable by death. The sinner
was thrown over a precipice or into a ditch of serpents, jaguars, and
pumas. The worst sin of all, high treason, exacted in expiation not
only the death of the sinner, but that of his family, even of his
neighbors. His very trees were pulled up by the roots, and his fields
sown with salt. “But as there was never any such offense committed, so
there was never any such severity executed,” a mitigating remark of
Garcilasso in connection with a certain crime.
The basis of the Inca government was tribute, personal labor given
to the Sun and to the Inca, a source of continual delight, a supreme
privilege. So the Sun, or his representative the Inca, was furnished
by his people with food, tilled by them from his own ground; clothing
for his soldiers or his needy from the wool of his own flocks; bows
and arrows, lances and clubs, ropes for carrying burdens, helmets
and targets each where most easily procurable. Temples and palaces of
the Inca, his aqueducts, roads, and bridges were built with hymns of
rejoicing. The laborers never got out of breath so as to spoil the
cadence of the hymn of triumph; the chroniclers fail to say whether in
obedience to law or from a sense of good taste.
In addition, all the provinces paid tribute of the most beautiful
women, who were kept in convents as wives of the Inca; and he might
choose any who suited him.
The great maxim of the Incas was increase of empire, their plea being
the best interest of the tribes they were to conquer. The Inca sent
word that he would come “not to take away their lives or estates, but
to confer upon them all those benefits which the Sun, his father, had
commanded him to perform toward the Indians. He (would come) to do them
good, by teaching them to live according to rules of reason and laws of
nature, and that, leaving their idols, they should henceforward adore
the Sun for their only god, by whose gracious command he had received
them to pardon. To which end, and to no other purpose (for he stood in
no need of their service) he traveled from country to country.”
So well did most of the surrounding tribes realize this, that messages
of submission came before the conquerors had even turned in their
direction. If it happened that because of ignorance they held out
against the benefits an indulgent sovereign was waiting to bestow, the
Inca’s messengers informed them of his exact intentions. All good gifts
would be theirs, provided only they would renounce their independence,
their language and religion, and send their chief god as an hostage of
submission to the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco. Honored servants of the
Inca would come to them in return to acquaint them more in particular
with the new benefits they were about to receive. Skilled workmen would
teach them the arts. The sons of their _cacique_ (chieftain) would be
sent to Cuzco to receive instruction. Moreover, the Inca would confer
upon them the garments worn by his own gracious person.
Nearly all perceived the wisdom of such a course at once. But if in
blindness any still rebelled, messengers brought word that “the Inca
pitied their folly which had so unnecessarily betrayed them to the last
extremity of want and famine.” For enlightened they were to be, in
spite of themselves.
Wonderful are the tales of these victorious campaigns, for the Inca’s
army never knew defeat. The soldiers were as plentifully supplied from
vast granaries as if in Cuzco. If the march led through lowlands, the
entire army was relieved every two months. Though the Indians of the
mountain-tops did not object to cold, they succumbed to fevers soon
after descending into the comfortable valleys. When a new province had
been incorporated, the gracious Inca “confirmed the right of possession
to the natives of it.”
The empire extended from the Chibchas and Caras of Ecuador, beyond the
Chilean deserts. Only one region dared defiance; that was the primeval
jungle. The armies might skirmish about upon its edges, and exact
exotic tribute of the savages who ventured forth. But within its grim
interior they were secure.
In the provinces of Antis, people “killed one another as they casually
met,” and worshipped a jaguar, the original lord of the jungle. They
sacrificed hearts and blood of men to huge snakes “thicker than a man’s
thigh.” They made war only to eat the flesh of their enemies. They
were called “nose of iron” because they bored the bridge between the
nostrils to hang in it a jewel or long piece of gold or silver. With
a handful of men, Yupanqui visited these savages below the Andes and
imposed worship of the Sun. With a handful of men, the Spaniards wiped
the great organization of the Empire of the Sun off the face of the
earth and established upon its ruins a Christian civilization.
The people in the Valley of Palta bound tablets upon the head of a
new-born child and tightened them each day for three years, until the
skull was elongated, in order to fit the pointed woolen cap which it
was the fashion to wear.
The Chachapoyas wore a black binder about their heads, stitched with
white flies, and instead of a feather, the tip of a deer’s horn. Their
chief weapons were slings bound about their heads, and they adored the
condor as their principal god.
The Chancas were the most dangerous opponents of Cuzco, a powerful race
owing their origin to a jaguar, who dressed in skins of their god and
carried effigies of jaguars with a man’s head to their sacrifices of
children, by whose eyes they prognosticated.
The _caciques_ of all dependent tribes were obliged to appear once a
year at court, or if they lived very far away, once in two years. They
brought with them gold and silver from their mines, for all such things
were devoted to worship of the Inca. Failing these, they presented
jaguars, droll monkeys, parrots, wondrous condors, and giant toads
and snakes that were very fierce, kept in dens for the grandeur of
the court. People from all climates presented indigenous gifts, the
most beautiful or the most curious of any creature or plant within
their domains. Any known thing preëminent in any way added the name
of its peculiar excellence to the titles of the Inca. His court in
Cuzco consisted of more than eight thousand persons, nobles who traced
descent from the Sun, and representatives of all the fantastic tribes
blest by the Inca’s clemency. Even the greatest lords carried bundles
in his presence.
The noble city of Cuzco, where the children of Inti first stopped with
their wedge of gold, was itself worshipped. Those who lived in Cuzco
had a certain superiority. Divisions of the city were the Terrace of
Flowers, the Lion Picket with the dens of pumas, the Field of Speech,
the Quarter of the Great Serpents, the Scarlet Cantut--the flower of
the Inca--the Holy Gate, the Shoulder Blade, the Seaweed Bridge, and so
on, bounded by small streams and long, somber walls of perfectly fitted
stones.
Up above the city hangs the stupendous fortress of Sachsahuaman,
exceeding all the seven wonders of the world, a cyclopean work of the
primitive age. Squier says: “The largest stone in the fortress has a
computed weight of 361 tons.” Sachsahuaman must indeed have been raised
by enchantment in a night like Tiahuanacu, for it surpasses the art of
man, the labyrinth of passageways contracting here and there so that
a single man could keep back an army, subterranean tunnels leading to
temples
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
IN THE MARKET, _PLAZA PRINCIPAL_, CUZCO.]
and palaces of the city. From the inmost recesses of the fortress, a
fountain of clear water bubbles. Its mysterious murmur fills the secret
passageways.
Even a single stone destined as a part of the fortress partakes of the
enchantment. According to legend, twenty thousand Indians had dragged
it from a distant quarry, up and down over the wild mountains. Once it
fell, killing “three or four thousand of those Indians who were the
guides to direct and support it.” And when, after its painful journey,
the monster finally beheld the lofty fortress of which it was to form a
part, it fell for the last time, shedding bloody tears from the hollow
orbs of its eyes. It still lies on the same spot, receding deeper and
deeper into the ground whenever attempts are made to remove it.
CHAPTER V
SERVICE OF THE SUN-GOD
“In the beginning there arose the golden child. He was the one born
lord of all that is. He established the earth and the sky.
“Who is the god to whom we shall offer sacrifice?
“He who gives life; he who gives strength; whose command all the
bright gods revere; whose light is immortality; whose shadow is
death. He who through his power is the one god of the breathing and
awakening world.... He whose greatness these snowy mountains, whose
greatness the sea proclaims, with the distant river. He through
whom the sky is bright and the earth firm.... He who measured out
the light in the air, ... wherever the mighty water clouds went,
where they placed the seed and lit the fire, thence arose he who is
the sole life of the bright gods.... He to whom heaven and earth,
standing firm by his will, look up, trembling inwardly....
“May he not destroy us! He, the creator of the earth; he, the
righteous, who created heaven."--_Hymn of Indian Sun-worship from
the Rig-Veda._
Primitive peoples usually adore that natural force which is their
greatest good. Gratitude for benefits conferred is the basis of all
pagan religion. Primitive peoples also worship the sky and the bright
objects within it. Sun worshippers combine the two.
Inti, the Sun, child of the Universal Spirit, is his mighty emblem, a
symbol of his uncreated glory, the quickening principle in nature, the
great wizard of Peru, the only source of vitality upon earth, by whose
energy the winds arise, the glaciers slide over the mountains, by whose
energy even the rain descends, the rivers swell, and cascades leap
through the valleys down toward the sea. In how much more real a sense
than the Incas knew is Peru the land of the sun!
The Sun, ruler of the stars, together with Quilla, the Moon, ruler
of winds and waters, his sister, wife, and queen, created beautiful
Chasca, the Dawn, “whose time was the gloaming and twilight, whose
messengers the fleecy clouds which sail through the sky ... and who,
when he shakes his clustering hair, drops noiselessly pearls of dew on
the green grass fields.”
The light-rays emanating from the Sun and the morning star of double
course are his messengers, bringing strength and power. They precede to
announce his coming in the morning, and follow him as, by the force of
his power and heat, the sea parts in the evening to receive him.
The name of Sun-temples in Peru was Intihuatana, the binding of the
Sun, the place where the eternal light or fire was held fast. Though
there were many such throughout the kingdom, the Holy of Holies was
at Cuzco, the Place of Gold, Inti-cancha, oriented to the sunrise,
golden crown gleaming, sheltering walls and cornices lined with gold
plates under its roof of straw. There flamed the great golden image
of the Sun, glistening with emeralds and other precious stones,
completely covering one side of the temple opposite the eastern portal.
The mummies of all former kings, perfect replicas of themselves, sat
staring as in more active days from their thrones of gold along the
walls, the eyes shining with a mixture of gold. “And so light were
these bodies that an Indian could easily carry one of them in his arms
to the houses of Spanish gentlemen who desired to see them.”
Beyond, twinkled the temple of the Moon, the Sun’s _coya_. The queens,
her descendants, were also called _coya_, “not being worthy a title so
truly magnificent as Inca.” This was the Place of Silver, surrounded by
the dark shadow of night, receiving the silent homage of the queens,
the sister-wives of the Incas, reposing on silver thrones. At full moon
the festival of the deities of water was held here.
A white cross of crystalline jasper hung from a silver chain in a
secret place. The white light in it increased and decreased with the
moon. It was beneficent and associated with the morning light, whose
compartment came next, sacred to the Dawn with the Morning Star,
_chasca coyllur_, ragged with earth mist, he of the long curling locks,
the page of the Sun. The royal runners were named for him, messengers
of the Inca as he of the Sun. All the other stars, companions of the
Moon, which vanish at the coming of the Sun, glittered each in its
proper magnitude from a starry ceiling.
The temple belonging to Thunder, Lightning, and the
Thunderbolt--servants of the Sun, but messengers of an angry god--shone
with tiles of gold, but was without symbol. As the arms of the
Inca, the dread liquid fire which darted from heaven like a golden
serpent with quick spring and mortal bite, surrounded the Rainbow,
beautiful _cuychi_, whose image spanned one wall of the room beyond,
a multi-colored ray of the Sun, flickering over the showery hillside,
announcing his gracious reappearance after the tempest and promising
peace. The all-powerful Sun could subdue the dark cloud and draw from
its depths the shining rainbow, whose fragile arch widens as the Sun
sinks. He lives in the clouds, and the rainbow is the hem of his
garment. Is it strange that the Incas should have held it in such
veneration that when they saw it in the air they shut their mouths and
clapped their hands before it? Is it not stranger that they only should
have worshipped the rainbow and placed it on their banners as an emblem
of God?
All the priests of the Sun in Cuzco were of the blood royal, a
privileged class. As many as thirty thousand officiated in Inti-cancha.
They washed the sacrifices in fountains of water which bubbled up
in golden cisterns and celebrated the great festivals in glittering
dresses of feathers with drums of serpents’ skins.
[Illustration: A MARKET IN HUANCAYO.]
In Acllahuasi, near by, lived a thousand virgins, the most beautiful of
all the pure blood of the Sun, destined as his wives, and watched over
by their _mamacunas_. Visited only by the _coya_, they spun the fine
vicuña garments for the Inca’s use and sewed upon them little plates of
gold and emeralds. They wove and embroidered the royal coca bags which
the Inca hung upon his left shoulder. They made the sacred _llautu_
with the colored fringe, and the straw-colored twist for the head of
the prince royal. They gathered bones of white llamas and burned them
with linen they had spun. Then they collected the ashes, and looking
toward the east, threw them into the air, an offering to the Sun. They
made bread for the festivals of the Sun and the _chicha_ drunk by the
Inca and his kindred, in kettles of gold and silver. For recreation
they went out to walk in their garden of silver and gold.
Nearly half the year in the Empire of the Sun was given to
celebrating--everything from the first day of the moon to the day of
marriage of the royal brides, _coyaraymi_. The beginnings of the four
seasons were festivals. At the vernal equinox degrees of chivalry were
taken by young nobles who, having gone through all possible tests,
fasting, and temptation, received at last the kiss upon the shoulder
and the jab through the ear-lobe given by the Inca with a nail of gold.
At the autumnal equinox all subjects were cleansed of whatever troubled
them, when, purified with children’s blood, they asked the midday
Sun to protect them from outward calamities and inward diseases. A
messenger of the Sun with a gold-studded lance, fluttering feathers
of many colors along its length, ran down from Sachsahuaman to the
center of the city, where four sons of the Sun waited with lances to
be touched by him, and scatter to the four quarters of the earth at
the Sun’s command, all evils which beset mankind. Each ran six leagues
in his separate direction to spread the good news. People shook their
clothes. The evils of night were driven out by lighted torches, which
were then thrown into a stream and extinguished before being borne
away. Confession of sins followed.
The greatest feast was Intiraymi, the Binding of the Sun, when his
southern shadow grew no longer, when the Sun-god by some unknown power
was hindered from progressing farther. This was always a mystery. Tupac
Yupanqui had said: “Many say that the Sun lives, and that he is the
maker of all things.... Now we know that many things receive their
beings during the absence of the Sun and therefore he is not the maker
of all things; and that the Sun hath not life is evident for that
it always moves in its circle and yet is never weary, for if it had
life it would require rest as we do and were it free it would visit
other parts of the heavens unto which it never inclines out of its own
sphere. But as a thing obliged to a particular station, moves always in
the same circle and is like an arrow which is directed by the hand of
the archer.”
Later, Huayna Ccapac said: “There must be some other whom our father,
the Sun, takes for a more supreme and more powerful lord than himself;
by whose commands he every day measures the compass of the heavens
without any intermission or hour of repose; for if he were absolute
and at his own disposal he would certainly allot himself some time of
cessation though it were only to please his own humor and fancy without
other consideration than that of liberty and change.”
But to continue with the festival of the summer solstice. At peep
of day the Inca and all the nobles of the blood of the Sun went in
procession under canopies of feathers to await his arrival. Foreign
princes and distinguished vassals, in garments plated with gold and
silver, skins of jaguars, and condors’ wings, assembled at a little
distance, the whole people filling the streets of Cuzco. All barefoot,
crouching, they waited, looking toward the east. Hardly had the first
rays touched the snowy mountain-tops when a loud shout of joy, songs
of triumph, and deafening music on rude instruments broke from the
multitude. It grew louder and louder as the god, in rising, shed more
and more light upon the people. They raised their arms, opened their
hands, and kissed the air so filled with light.
The Inca, rising, greeted the pomp of dawn. He held two great bowls of
gold filled with _chicha_ in his hands; the contents of one he poured
into a golden channel leading to the temple, and the vapor rising in
the heat, it seemed as if the Sun himself were drinking. The contents
of the other he shared with all his kindred, pouring it into little
golden goblets.
Then they all proceeded to the temple. Outside, the _curacas_, or
governors, offered to the priests images of many different animals of
gold, while the Inca and all the legitimate children of the Sun went
in and presented the goblets he had consecrated to the image of the
Sun. There were sacrifices of flocks of black llamas, the particular
property of the Sun, from which prognostications were made. The animal
to be sacrificed was held fast, and with a sliver of black obsidian
its breast was opened and the heart torn out. Sometimes as many as two
hundred thousand llamas were sacrificed during a year.
It is a horrid chapter from the Incas’ story that they made human
sacrifices along with everything else which they valued. Von Tschudi
says that they offered to the Sun as many as two hundred children at
one time. “The children were strangled and buried with the silver
figures of sheep, having first walked around the statues of the
Creator, the Sun, the Thunder, and the Moon. Sometimes they were
crushed between two stones, sometimes their mouths were stuffed with
ground coca.”
The fire for sacrifice was a direct gift of the Sun, kindled from
a great polished bracelet upon the left arm of the high priest.
The Virgins of the Sun bore away some of it to care for during the
following year. No more unhappy omen could occur than its extinction.
The Inca sat within view of all, mounted upon his gold seat, drinking
to his kindred and to the _curacas_ in order. The cups his lips had
touched were kept as idols.
The Sun had drunk of their offerings; he had kindled their sacrificial
fire; he now entertained his subjects with a banquet prepared by the
hands of his own Virgin-wives. As three days of universal fasting had
preceded the feast of the Sun, so for nine days reveling followed.
They ate the bread of the Sun Virgins, and drank their _chicha_, they
shouted and danced and masqueraded, each tribe of the empire with
differing head-dresses of feathers and grotesque
[Illustration: IN A FERTILE VALLEY OF THE UPLANDS.]
masks according to the fashion of their country. “They cast flowers
in the highways, ... and their noblemen had small plates of gold upon
their beards, and all did sing.”
CHAPTER VI
INDIANS AND LLAMAS
Had the Indians of the sixteenth century not known that their
overthrow was the will of Pachacamac, the miracles constantly favoring
the Spaniards would have forced them to recognize the fact. Pious
chroniclers tell of Saint James on a white horse, who came with
glistening sword to turn the tide of battle, and of the Virgin Mary,
whose appearance in the clouds blinded the hostile Indians.
The Incas could but succumb to the sovereign will. Some retreated
beyond the mountains, leaving indelible traces upon the people of the
jungle. Some were thrown into fortresses, which “their ancestors had
built for ostentation of their glory.” On the authority of Garcilasso,
thirty-six males of the blood of the Sun, who had been condemned to
live in Lima, the Spanish City of the Kings, had in three years’ time
all died. Sayri Tupac, a nephew of Atahualpa, had come to Lima for the
privilege of renouncing his sovereignty. The _amautas_ had consulted
the flight of birds as to whether he should surrender himself to the
Spaniards, but as Garcilasso says: “They made no inquiries of the devil
because all the oracles of that country became dumb so soon as the
sacraments of our holy mother, the church of Rome, entered into those
dominions.”
“Ah!” said Sayri Tupac, as he lifted the gold fringe of the
table-cloth, “all this cloth and its fringe were mine, and now they
give me a thread of it for my sustenance and that of all my house.” He
was allowed to withdraw to the beautiful valley of Yucay, “rather to
enjoy the air and delights of the pleasant garden formerly belonging to
his ancestors than in regard to any claim or propriety he had therein.”
But he sank into a deep melancholy and died within two years.
The Spaniards were occupied with duels and assassinations of friends,
bloody civil wars and religious disputes, usually about the Immaculate
Conception. One can read volumes of such proceedings. Indian revolts
were a constant interruption. The Spaniards gradually discovered that
it was impossible to keep the Indians quiet while an Inca remained
alive; so in 1571, less than forty years after their arrival, Tupac
Amaru, the last of the Incas, was put to death by the Spaniards in the
following manner, as described by Garcilasso de la Vega in the words of
his first English translation (1688).
“His crimes were published by the common crier, namely, that he
intended to rebel, that he had drawn into the plot with him several
Indians who were his creatures, ... designing thereby to deprive and
dispossess his Catholic majesty, King Philip the Second, who was
emperor of the new world, of his crown and dignity within the kingdom
of Peru. This sentence to have his head cut off was signified to the
poor Inca without telling him the reasons or causes of it, to which he
innocently made answer that he knew no fault he was guilty of which
could merit death, but in case the vice-king had any jealousy of him or
his people he might easily secure himself from those fears by sending
him under a secure guard into Spain, where he should be very glad to
kiss the hands of Don Philip, his lord and master. He farther argued
that ... if his father with two hundred thousand soldiers could not
overcome two hundred Spaniards whom they had besieged within the city
of Cuzco, how then could it be imagined that he could think to rebel
with the small number against such multitudes of Christians who were
now disbursed over all parts of the Empire.” How little effect the
words of Tupac Amaru produced upon the Spaniards can be judged by the
following:
“Accordingly the poor Prince was brought out of the prison and mounted
on a mule with his hands tied and a halter about his neck with a crier
before him declaring that he was a rebel and a traitor against the
crown of his Catholic majesty. The Prince not understanding the Spanish
language asked of one of the friars who went with him what it was that
the crier said, and when it was told him that he proclaimed him a
traitor against the king, his lord, he caused the crier to be called
to him and desired him to forbear to publish such horrible lies, which
he knew to be so, for that he never committed any act of treason nor
ever had it in his imaginations, as the world very well knew. ‘But,’
said he, ‘tell them that they kill me without other cause, that only
the vice-king will have it so, and I call God the Pachacamac of all
to witness that what I say is nothing but the truth.’ After which the
officers of justice proceeded to the place of execution.... The crowds
cried out with loud exclamation accompanied with a flood of tears,
saying, ‘Wherefore, Inca, do they carry thee to have thy head cut
off?... Desire the executioner to put us to death together with thee
who are thine by blood and nature and should be much more contented and
happy to accompany thee into the other world than to live here slaves
and servants to thy murderers.’
“The noise and outcry was so great that it was feared lest some
insurrection and outrage should ensue amongst such a multitude of
people gathered together, which could not be counted for less than
three hundred thousand souls. This combustion caused the officers to
hasten their way unto the scaffold, where being come the Prince walked
up the stairs with the friars who assisted at his death and followed by
the
[Illustration: AN INDIAN PASTORAL.]
executioner with his broad sword drawn in his hand. And now the Indians
feeling their Prince just upon the brink of death lamented with such
groans and outcries as rent the air.... Wherefore the priests who were
discoursing with the Prince desired him that he would command the
people to be silent, whereupon the Inca, lifting up his right hand
with the palm of his hand open, pointed it towards the place whence
the noise came and then lowered it by little and little until it came
to rest upon his right thigh, which, when the Indians observed, their
murmur calmed and so great a silence ensued as if there had not been
one soul alive within the whole city. The Spaniards and the vice-king
who were then at a window ... wondered much to see the obedience which
the Indians in all their passion showed to their dying Inca, who
received the stroke of death with that undaunted courage as the Incas
and the Indian nobles did usually show when they fell into the hands of
their enemy and were cruelly treated and unhumanly butchered.”
When they first stepped upon the shores of Peru, a Spaniard or two
could travel hundreds of leagues alone through this foreign country
on the shoulders of men and be adored as gods in passing. Before long,
an army was not secure. A Spanish governor and his escort of thirty
men were resting one day upon a high plain. The Indians, whistling to
each other with bird calls and barking like wolves in the night, “went
softly to the Spaniards’ tents, where, finding them asleep, they cut
the throats of every one of them.”
Such deeds were being done in the Empire of the Lover of the Poor, the
Deliverer of the Distressed, where formerly each individual had been
forbidden to injure even himself.
The spirit of rebellion spread among the Indians. They tried to
poison the water-supply of the City of the Kings. They tried to
burn Cuzco, imagining they could burn the Spaniards with it. Their
revolts culminated in that great rebellion of 1780 under José Gabriel
Condorcanqui, called Tupac Amaru, whose descendant, through a daughter,
he was. His followers swore their hatred of the white race and vowed
not to leave a white dog, not even a white fowl alive. They even
scraped the whitewash from the walls of their houses. They did succeed
in strangling a governor. In return, Tupac Amaru’s tongue was cut out,
and after seeing his wife, son, and brother tortured to death before
his eyes, was himself sentenced to be torn apart by wild horses.
The men were slaughtered in such numbers that the women went out to
help each other sow the fields. At sunset they returned, hand in hand,
singing a melancholy lament, until this too was prohibited by Spanish
law. All musical instruments were to be destroyed; the use of the
Quichua language was forbidden; women were ordered not to spin as they
walked; distinctive customs were to be laid aside. All lapsed into
spiritless dullness. The air of desolation spread.
* * * * *
The Indians of Peru are a silent people trained by cold and cutting
winds. They bite the end of their _ponchos_ to show anger and live
to an immense age. Their thoughts turn backwards. They grind their
teeth on the same hard corn kernels as formerly and drink the same
corn-brandy; they carry about as talismans little effigies of llamas
found in the graves of their ancestors and throw their criminals over
the same lofty precipices. The juice of the red thorn-apple leads
them into ecstasy, the only high light of their existence, for by
means of it they communicate with the spirits of their ancestors. The
only passion they have brought with them through the centuries is
remembrance of the past. The thorn-apple is called _huaca cachu_, the
plant of the grave.
The Indians squat about in groups with their little gourds of _chicha_.
There is no laughing. The mummy-like babies do not cry. The lake on
whose banks they live contains no fish. No worm, no insect, inhabits
its banks. But there is a spirit which broods from the mountain above.
He will lighten the burden of the traveler who seeks the mountain-top
and presents him offerings in the depths of night. The _achachibas_ or
piles of stones are witness to his gracious power.
Between two mountain-tops lies a steel-colored lake shimmering in its
stone basin. The Indians come here to beg for fire-water. They pour
in brandy, standing on a peak while making their libation to the
rain-god, and then leave without a word. Immediately the rain pours.
Only their religious festivals recall Inca feast days. Christianity
has never been able to abolish the bacchanales of former times; it has
merely changed their names. The call of triumph, _haylli_, has been
changed to Hallelujah, Christian anthems are set to Indian tunes, IHS
has been engraved on the stone doorways of antiquity. Over the shrines
outside the churches are effigies of sun and moon. Above the megalithic
fortress of Sachsahuaman three crosses preside where the banners once
indicated the dwelling of the Children of the Sun. Indians still
salute the Sun temple on first entering Cuzco, though the nave of the
Dominican church stands upon the spot where the Sun was worshipped in
golden chambers, its Christian walls built of mammoth stones rolled
together for the glory of the Sun. This superstructure typifies the
methods of the missionary priests.
A wooden llama filled with fire-crackers is exploded on Good Friday. By
the roadside, an Indian in a grotesque mask, with a feather crown and
bells on his arms and legs, leaps in fantastic bounds to celebrate the
day of the Holy Cross. A picture of the Virgin is carried about on her
Ascension Day. The Indians, dressed in the masks of wild animals and
multi-colored feathers with bits of savage embroidery on their loose
garments, dance about her to fifes and drum-beats and rattles of beans
and snail-shells. Wild dances, horn-blowing, ugly voices screaming, and
rattling tin--these heathen orgies swarm at the feet of effigies of
Christ.
The Indian has to be content with the scanty earnings he can get from
the transport of heavy burdens and from the wool of his llamas. By
chewing coca he is able to run all day before the rider. His world is
the valley where he lives. His occupation does not lead him to the
mountain-top above, nor does his thought soar as far. His gloom sulks
in his dress and manner of life, even in his songs and dances. When he
reaches his little smoky hut, he eats his frozen and pressed potato,
plays a wee tune on his _quena_ and goes to sleep.
Self-sufficient because in need of nothing, the llama is the
interpretation of the Indian. Both are products of the soil, like the
_yareta_ moss and the birds which swim in the icy water.
The dark-eyed llamas, with red-woolen tassels in their ears, move
slowly across the icy plateau.
Could anything equal the dignity of a llama, his serenity, his hauteur?
Why not? He knows he is indispensable. There is no one to take his
place. His wool furnishes clothing, his skin leather, his flesh food,
his dung fuel, and he is a beast of burden where no other can live on
the bare, breathless heights.
In return, he asks no shelter, warm beneath his shaggy coat. He asks
no food, for he grazes on the stiff _ychu_ grass as he journeys along.
He needs no shoes, no harness, and even provides, himself, the wool
for the homespun bags lying upon his back. When there is no water, he
carries in bags made of his own skin what is necessary for man. Nor
do his benefactions end here. The llama furnished the mystery-loving
Spaniards with that strange bezoar stone which, on account of its
miraculous endowments, they placed in the list with emeralds, pearls,
turquoises, and other precious stones from Peru.
Is it astonishing that the llama makes his own rules of conduct and
exacts entire consideration of them? Disobedience he indicates in a
way not to be forgotten! And yet such is his docility that dozens are
often kept within bounds by a single thread stretched around them
breast high,--rugged little mountain beasts herded with worsted!
Usually so gentle, if a llama is annoyed he becomes revengeful and
useless. He never will hurry, for supplying his own food he must
graze when opportunity offers. He will not be overloaded. One hundred
pounds he will cheerfully carry, but with more than that he sits down
like a camel, dreamily chewing his cud, and can be neither forced nor
persuaded to rise. In speaking of the alpaca, cousin of the llama,
Father Acosta said that “the only remedy is to stay and sit down by the
_paco_, making much on him, until the fit be passed, and that he rise;
and sometimes they are forced to stay two or three hours.”
The little variegated herd, with expressions of mild surprise, step
daintily along as if walking
[Illustration: LLAMAS AT THE FALLS OF MOROCOCHA.]
on eggs, following at even distances, each moving with authority
of a whole procession. If frightened, they huddle into a compact
group, craning their long necks toward the center. Then they look you
wistfully in the face for minutes at a time without moving. The halter
of the leader is embroidered, and small streamers flutter from it. Most
of the llamas have tassels in their ears, or little pendants or bells.
Thus they file across the snow-covered cordillera.
At night when they sink on to the _puna_ at their journey’s end,
a faint murmur like many æolian harps is wafted into the perfect
stillness of the frosty night. It is the llamas’ appreciation of rest.
PART III
IN THE JUNGLE
The land lying between Peru and Brazil is a mystery “although the
bounds be known of all sides.... Some say it is a drowned land,
full of lakes and watery places; others affirm there are great and
flourishing kingdoms, ... where they say are wonderful things.”
FATHER ACOSTA
CHAPTER I
A LAND OF ADVENTURE
What a “hereditary spell” the jungle has had upon men! How smilingly
its beauty allures--and how graciously it repels! Yet its beauty is
not merely beauty. It flashes suggestions of wondrous lands beyond,
bringing to the imagination a pleasure in its own vision like the joy
of nature in her own loveliness. The jungle is a region which men
have always peopled with strange forms pleasing to their fancies,
yet a region of dread, beyond human loneliness. It has sheltered in
turn the desideratum of each age, while surrounding it with fearful
mysteries. But though men have looked upon the jungle with awe, magic
possibilities were still within and beyond. _A chacun son infini._
Both Inca Rocca and Yupanqui attempted to conquer the jungle. Between
Paucartampu and the Madre de Díos are vestiges of an Inca road.
But downpours and floods made roads give way to watercourses. The
Incas called them “doorways” to the woods, which mountain rapids had
opened by irresistible force; but no one could pass through. Even the
executive Incas were obliged to turn back with only a fringe of jungle
conquest, great campaigns resulting only in loss of life then as now.
They retreated, submissive before nature’s impregnable stronghold.
There are tribes of strange, shy little people still showing traces of
contact with the Incas. Although so long ago, they made a profounder
impression than all subsequent invaders. Even if the conquered savages
remained in the jungle after submitting to the Incas, they were obliged
to pay tribute to them, observing the habits of their conquerors when
they emerged. Those Incas, also, who withdrew into the woods to escape
Spanish persecution, carried their customs with them. No matter how
their influence was perpetuated, tribes still show the “footprints of
Incas” in the surface of rocks, and even as far as the Mishagua are
found legends of Incas’ hidden treasure. With them in mind, the “big
ears” of some of the savages assume a strange significance.
Where the Madera and the Amazon meet there is a great island, a river
island hundreds of miles in extent. Its name is Tumpinambaranas, and
upon it are remains of gigantic buildings. Was this the fabulous
country, Paytiti of mystery, powerful in riches, a legendary home
of Manco Ccapac? Georg M. von Hassel is now investigating this hazy
subject. The people of Tumpinambaranas had legends of a race, the
Mutayces, who lived toward the south, “whose feet grew backwards so
that any one who attempted to follow them by their track, would, if he
were ignorant of this malformation, go farther from them.”
Columbus breathed the sweet air which blew across from the forests
near the mouth of the Orinoco and faithfully imagined it one of the
four great rivers flowing from paradise. Had he only dared, he said,
he would have liked to push forward to where he might hope to find the
celestial boundaries of the world, and a little farther, to have bathed
his eyes with profound humility in the light of the flaming swords
which were wielded by two seraphim before the gate of Eden.
The cavaliers in search of gold believed that El Dorado lived within
the mysterious jungle. Their expeditions were imbued with awe. Adolph
F. Bandelier has transcribed the source of the legend. It is the
ceremonial of choosing the _uzaque_ of Guatavitá:
“In front walked wailing men, nude, their bodies painted with red
ochre, the sign of deep mourning.... Groups followed of men richly
decorated with gold and emeralds, their heads adorned with feathers,
and braves clothed in jaguars’ skins. The greater number of them went
uttering joyful shouts, others blew on horns, pipes and conchs....
The rear of the procession was composed of the nobles and the chief
priests, bearing the newly elected chieftain upon a barrow hung
with discs of gold. His naked body was anointed with resinous gums
and covered all over with gold dust. This was the gilded man, _el
hombre dorado_, whose fame had reached the sea coast. Arrived at the
shore, the gilded chief and his companions stepped upon a _balsa_
and proceeded upon it to the middle of the lake. There the chief
plunged into the water and washed off his metallic covering, while the
assembled company, with shouts and the sound of instruments, threw in
the gold and the jewels they had brought with them.”
Treasures have been found in this lake, among others a group of golden
figures. The chronicler Don Rafael Zerda says: “Undoubtedly this piece
represents the ... _cacique_ of Guatavitá surrounded by Indian priests
on the raft, which was taken on the day of the ceremony to the middle
of the lake” for sacrifice to its goddess.
“Humboldt saw the staircase down which the gilded man and his train in
jaguars’ skins descended to the waters of the lake of Guatavitá. He
also found the remains of the tunnels by which the Spaniards had tried
to drain the lake.”
A joint stock company in 1903 did drain the lake of Guatavitá. But its
mud turned to cement before they could dig in it.
The “vision of the Dorado appeared like a mirage, enticing, deceiving,
leading men to destruction.” It became the name of a mythical country,
where rivers ran over sands of gold, and palaces stood on golden
pillars shining with emeralds. Infamous adventurers, brave as the
knights of the Round Table, confronted and stormed the great jungle.
Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro tried to find the glittering capital of
Manoa, which El Dorado had gradually become. For these buccaneers who
set out with an arrogant army to conquer the Cinnamon Country, nature
became the supreme fact of existence. Famine, perpetual rain, fevers,
strange insects, and reptiles attacked them. Their expeditions could
but end in the murder of each other. They followed the example of all
life in the jungle.
Doctor Middendorf says that the Amazon was named for the Coniapuyara, a
race of big women leaders, whom the Spaniards found. Condamine assures
us that light-skinned Amazons lived there. Raleigh, while searching
for Manoa, is said to have first reported them, though he found them
by going up the Orinoco. The distinguished scientist Ulloa, who went
to South America in 1758, says it is “an undoubted truth that there
had been formerly several communities of women who formed a kind of
republic, without admitting any men into the government.” Well, at
least there is nothing either to prove or disprove it. A recent report
of the Geographical Society of Lima gives a far less picturesque
explanation of the naming of the Amazon, to the effect that “the tribe
of the Nahumedes were thought to be Amazons on account of their long
hair and the _cushma_, a long, sleeveless garment which they wore.”
Close upon the adventurers came the Jesuit missionaries, who burned to
save from hell-fire the strange human beings they might find lurking
in the forest depths. One Jesuit father, Fritz, spent fifty years
(1680-1730) on the Amazon, trying to connect the aborigines by the
introduction of a common language. These missionaries left no ruins
like those in Paraguay, the Jesuit State, but their teachings are
visible in savage traditions. They transformed Bible stories to fit
jungle needs.
“A Murato was fishing in a lake of Pastasa, when a little lizard
swallowed his hook. The fisherman killed it, the mother of the lizards
was much angered and with her tail slashed the water in such a way
that it overflowed the entire vicinity. All were drowned except one,
who climbed into a small _pivai_ palm, and hung there several days
under a perpetual darkness. From time to time a fruit of the _pivai_
palm fell, but always upon the water, until one day he heard the plump
of the fruit upon dry ground. He got down from the tree, made a house
and farm, and with a little piece of his flesh, which he planted in the
earth, made for himself a wife, by whom he had many children.”
The commercial age is now having its fling. It is attempting to subdue
the jungle. The rubber hunters are not seeking paradise. They are not
looking for legendary kingdoms, nor are they wishing to save the souls
of beings of whose existence they are not even persuaded. Rubber is a
valuable product. So are other things concealed in jungle depths. Dark
crimes can also be hidden in the half-light, covered close under the
thick veil which shrouds the land of mystery.
This Peru, approachable from the Atlantic, the “monstrous thicke
wood” of the early travelers, still remains undisturbed. Illimitable
it is as you gaze down upon it, stretching away one unbroken forest
to the faint blue horizon, without a single natural approach except
the waterways. Lying close below the austere mountain-tops is a
luxuriant world of vegetation; wide stretches of unpreëmpted soil,
sparseness characteristic of polar regions hangs just above a tropical
phantasmagoria of growth. Shifting cloud-shadows and wandering rainbows
flit and interchange over the jungle like the play of colors on a
peacock’s neck.
Though we know that there are no mighty civilizations of human
making, there are no streets of gold with ruby walls, yet within the
imperturbable recesses are strange races and wonders of plant and
animal life which may interpret whole domains of knowledge. Nature’s
secrets are still locked up in this prolific laboratory. Though we
know that no great race of kings holds sway, yet it is certain that
here is a chance to study in the wild tribes the growth of human
language--beginning with the poor Inje-inje, who has not more than a
bird’s speech, and whose needs are no greater than his speech would
suggest.
CHAPTER II
TOWARD THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
From the mountain-tops the stream leads toward the east over the
Eyebrows of the Jungle, La Ceja de la Montaña, letting loose a deluge
from its black clouds. Caught between walls of red and black striped
rock, the valley grows deeper and hotter and filled with mist. The
water accumulates brightly colored pebbles. It rolls over ungathered
bits of gold in its sand and rushes them along with slivers of
glistening mica. All about is the sound of springs “whose waters
moss has turned aside.” Buried in luxuriant vegetation, it slides on
beneath thickets of guava, golden cassia, and red-leaved _tilandsia_
bushes, hung with rank passion vines, whose ripened fruit, the crackly
_granadilla_, lies everywhere upon the ground. A mammoth iguana,
munching the flesh-colored bignonias, falls occasionally from the
tree-tops.
Small, richly plumed parrots nest in the rock walls. A whole book
might be written about the parrots, various as vegetation itself,
flashing multi-colored light as they scream through the air-spaces.
There is the toucan, turning his bill with its accessory head around
to gloss his splendid plumage in a ray of sunlight. At the other end
of the scale are the meek little green parroquets with perpendicular
bills, hardly larger than sparrows, which go in pairs and move in
parallel lines. Every variety keeps together, each to its kind.
There are other large, fruit-eating birds; birds with curiously shaped
tail feathers; birds with crests and ornamental plumage. As variegated
as their forms are their curious cries. The black ox-bird bellows like
a bull, the black and red _tunqui_ grunts like a pig, and wood-pigeons
cry like children. Occasionally “jets of brilliant melody” sparkle
among the trees, but more often the notes have a mysterious, aerial
quality “like the tinkling of a far-off bell suspended in the air.”
Here hangs the wonderful nest, four feet long, of the pouched starling,
bound together with spiders’ webs as strong as silk. Such is jungle
lavishness that plants and animals are given endowments useless to them
in their struggle for existence. The bird which builds such a palatial
nest has no advantage over any other. Its wondrous, unplantlike power
gives to the sensitive plant no superiority. Struck with paralysis, it
can recoil at a touch, but that forms no link with its fellow plants.
Such a feat is not an attribute nor in any way a necessity of vegetable
life. It can hardly compensate the sensitive plant for its lack of
perfume and bright flower, the right of every growing thing.