Peru, a land of contrasts : with illustrations from photographs

PERU

A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
IN THE MONASTERY OF SAN FRANCISCO, LIMA.

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PERU

A LAND OF CONTRASTS

BY

MILLICENT TODD

With Illustrations
from Photographs

NON -REFER!

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BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1914

Copyright, 1914,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

All rights reserved
Published, September, 1914

THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. 8IMONDS CO., BOSTON, U. 8. A.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION 3

PART I. IN THE DESERT

CHAPTER

I. ALONG SHORE 15

II. DESERT QUALITY 25

III. DESERT PERSPECTIVE 39

IV. PICA, THE FLOWER OF THE SAND ... 53
V. A CLASH OF CONTRASTS 64

VI. PIRATES AND TREASURE FLEETS ... 76

VII. BACKGROUNDS 84

VIII. LIMA OF Two ASPECTS 103

IX. CONVENTS OPEN AND CLOSED . . . .no

X. ANOMALIES OF LIMA 121

PART II. IN THE MOUNTAINS

I. THE HIGH REGIONS 143

II. A MEGALITHIC CITY AND A SACRED LAKE . 159

III. MYTHS AND MONUMENTS 174

IV. THE INCA AND HIS EMPIRE . . . .188
V. SERVICE OF THE SUN - GOD .... 202

VI. INDIANS AND LLAMAS 214

[v]

CONTENTS

PART III. IN THE JUNGLE

HAPTER PACK

I. A LAND OF ADVENTURE 231

II. TOWARD THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY . . 240

III. JUNGLE GLOOM AND JUNGLE SHEEN . .250

IV. ANIMALS OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT . . . 268
V. THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX 280

CONCLUSION 296

BIBLIOGRAPHY 299

INDEX 305

[vi]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

In the Monastery of San Francisco, Lima Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

Seals of the Palominos Islands 16

Sachacha, a Typical Village of Peru .... 34

Pampa de los Huesos — the Field of Bones . . 42

A Characteristic Peruvian Church .... 58

Wolfenbiittel-Spanish Map, circa 1529 . . . . 72
One of the first maps to show Pizarro's discoveries along the
Peruvian coast.

A View of Paita from the Miroir Oost 6* West In~

dical, 1621 82

Grapes raised by the Barefoot Friars (los Descalzos),

Lima 106

A Franciscan Friar at Home, Lima . . . .112
Santa Rosa de Lima, from Het Wonder Leven van de H.

Rosa, Brussel, 1668 118

A Glimpse of Old-Fashioned Lima . . . .132
A Trestle of the Highest Railway in the World, across

the Infiernillo 144

Alpacas on the Andean Puna 156

A God of Tiahuanacu 164

A Swinging Bridge near Jauja 174

An Heir of the " Makers of Ruins " . . . .186

[vii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

Indian Water Carrier, Sicuani 192

In the Market, Plaza Principal, Cuzco .... 200

A Market in Huancayo 206

In a Fertile Valley of the Uplands . . . .212

An Indian Pastoral 218

Llamas at the Falls of Morococha . . . .226

In the Valley of the Perene 242

A Sloth, from the Historiae Rerum Naturalium Brasiliae,
Amsterdam, 1648 280

[viii]

INTRODUCTION

" Qui peut dire oii reside le charme

d'un pays? Qui trouvera ce quelque

chose d'intime et d'insaisissable que rien

n'exprime dans les langues humaines? "

PIERRE LOTI

Peru, A Land of Contrasts

INTRODUCTION

ANY statement regarding Peru implies a
contrary statement equally valid. Contrast
is its characteristic quality, true as to the gen-
eral aspects of the country and ramifying
through remote details. It is the obvious
point of view from which to study Peru.

The three parts of this book — the desert,
the mountains, the jungle — are the three
natural divisions of the country. The shore
is a long, narrow desert, much diversified. In
a fertile valley intersecting it lies Lima, The
City of the Kings. The river has come from
the Andes, on whose lofty tablelands, called
jalca in the north and puna in the south, flour-
ished remote civilizations filled with mystery.
Beyond the mountain barrier lies the jungle,
geographically the largest portion of Peru,

[3]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

and like all other jungles a region of dread and
fascination.

Peru is a low country lying under a mild sky;
but above are the mighty Andes freezing under
arctic blizzards. The desert is barren for
lack of rain; beyond the mountains, the over-
productive jungle is saturated with tropical
downpours. Along the shore thunder-storms
are unknown; up on the icy tablelands of the
Cordillera, whose volcanoes are sealed with snow,
lightning rips open the mountainsides. Fire
splits, and water smooths. Mists are strong
enough to magnify and the sky is clear enough
to do so. The puna is a land of brutal ele-
ments, yet there is found the little chinchilla,
protected with softest fur.

On the coast, overhead calm is counterbal-
anced by subterranean fury. " All geological
phenomena are still in active operation," the
shore rising, earthquakes changing the face of
the earth, and underground rivers dodging be-
neath a desert sterile for want of the water
which they are hurrying off. The people who
live in this country of volcanoes and earth-
quakes feed on red peppers.

[4]

INTRODUCTION

If lack of water prevents the heat of the
sun from making the desert productive, so cold
prevents water upon the mountain plains from
encouraging vegetation. In the jungle luxuri-
ance of all growth conceals any single benefit.
Nature erects barriers everywhere. She has
surrounded her richest gifts with almost in-
surmountable difficulties. Fertilizers come from
the desert, a realm of death. Mines of the
Andes coldly hoard their riches under a life-
sucking atmosphere. Agassiz said: " An empire
might esteem itself rich in any one of the
sources of industry which abound in the Amazon
valley." But these are inaccessible from their
very quantity, and they shut in beneath them
a fever-laden air. Where there is most fertilizer,
the land is most barren; where there are most
precious metals, it is most incapable of sup-
porting human life; where richest, it is most
difficult to cultivate.

Such is Peru. Elements and forces contrast;
each combats each, and all attack man. Nature
wars against herself: tropic heat, arctic cold;
heavy, poisonous jungle mists, thin air of the
mountain-tops; scorching dryness, reeking wet.

[5]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Even obstacles contrast in Peru. Man is
threatened everywhere by elements, by insects.
He drowns here or dies of thirst there. He can
even be overcome by cold or sunstroke in the
same place.

Peru is a land of violent extremes. It has a
range of mountains as great as any in the world.
The towering peaks are too high to climb. Far
above circles the condor, the largest bird in the
world. Peru is the source of the world's great-
est river system, whose luxuriant forests are
too thick to penetrate. The only representa-
tives of a lost geological age inhabit them, as
well as the biggest snakes and the smallest birds.
Peru has great mineral deposits in the moun-
tains; it also has rubber in the forests. Wool
is produced on the frozen plains, and chocolate
in the deep gorges lost among them. And from
the valleys intersecting the desert come cotton
and sugar-cane.

All kinds of obscure substances are found in
this versatile country, ipecac and cochineal,
cocaine and vanadium. Not unlike the rest
of the world, chill here produces fever, but
quinine, the best remedy for the disease of

[6]

INTRODUCTION

contrast, comes also from the forests of
Peru.

Although nature is a supreme fact, its natural
history is not the whole of Peru. And contrast
as a method of interpretation does not fail for
its other aspects. Though man seems to play
so small a part, he has lived here since antedi-
luvian animals wandered among coal forests
on the Andes. To the charm of limitless nature
is added the mystery of great peoples destroyed
before they were known. The riches of the
Incas and of the glittering, vice-regal Spanish
days, when continents were found, taken, and
explored, contrast with present poverty. Con-
sistently throughout, the riches of Peru have
impoverished it. Its gifts have caused its ruin
over and over again.

Wars and rebellions have riddled the country,
and bull-fights have filled leisure hours. Though
audacity of action has fascinated historians of
Peru, its periods of peace have in them even
more of romance: a nation of slaves ruled by
a monarch-god; oriental splendor of Lima
shining because of forced labor in the dark,
suffocating mines; Arab blood in the con-

[7]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

querors' veins penetrating the quiet Indian
people, adding a keener edge to their sufferings.
The poverty of the present-day Indians con-
trasts with lavish nature, " beggars sitting on a
pile of gold." Contrasts of nature, of people to
country, of antiquity to the present — these di-
verse elements are insistent wherever one turns.

The charm of contrasting facts is puissant.
Almost any one of them might be the text for
an allegory. To guard against rhapsody, I
have documented every statement made. Con-
servative authority can be given for every fact,
however fantastic, however trivial. The few
legends are in a sense also facts: " Une legende
ment parfois moins qu'un document"

The tellers of Peru's story deserve a history
themselves. First came the falcon-eyed mis-
sionaries of Spain, sword and rosary clattering
beneath priestly robes, to subject the Indians
to salvation, or mercifully to condemn them
to death by torture. Had they been less con-
scientious in describing all those quaint beliefs
and idolatrous practices which they came to
stamp out, we should perhaps have missed the
chief source of information in regard to the

[8]

INTRODUCTION

Children of the Sun and their dependent peoples.
Military writers and official chroniclers followed
in close order. It took them some time to re-
cover from their amazement at this land of
" gold, silver and pleasant monkeys." They
wrote with convincing emphasis, " Wee that
live now at Peru . . . finde not ourselves to
bee hanging in the aire, our heades downward
and our feete on high." On the contrary, they
discovered that they were even " as near unto
heaven at Peru as in Spain."

Explorers and adventurers of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries were in the forefront
of writers of romance. Such authors have al-
ways found inspiration here. From Marmontel
to the Peruvian Tales of Guenelette, from Frank
Stockton to Jose-Maria de Heredia, chiseler of
faultless cameos, who himself came from a
dramatic land of Spanish conquest, Peru has
been a word to conjure with. But invention
has added no glamour to history. It cannot keep
pace with fact.

Accounts by various travelers of past centu-
ries, voyages of discovery and reports of treas-
ure fleets are followed by the students of to-day.

[9]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Scientists write of Peru, each authority finding
his specialty accented. The geologist sees
cosmic forces in active operation still. The
anthropologist studies untouched savages in
the morasses of the Amazon, the naturalist's
wonderland. Archeology now has an exciting
preeminence. Cool authorities admit the ama-
zing antiquity of Peruvian ruins. The historian
finds a great barbaric civilization ; the economist
ancient systems of state policy; the prospector
an extensive system of navigable waterways.
The mining engineer discovers 'inexhaustible
mines, and the agriculturist unique opportu-
nity, where the uplands of a farm lie among
snows, its lowlands under rubber groves and
orange trees. All write of Peru, and an increas-
ing bibliography affords easy access to every
sort of statistics. I have referred to a wide
range of authorities, many of them cited in an
appendix, to supplement my own observations,
made as member of an astronomical expedition,
during a stay of several months in Peru.

A painstaking person while in Peru wrote a
journal containing all he saw. Not an event

[10]

INTRODUCTION

or an observation escaped chronicle. But on
reaching home he discovered that his really
poignant memories were not in his journal.
His entries, though conscientious, " were but
the ingredients. They were not the secret of
the philtre."

Facts make their own appeal. But direct
assault is not the only means of approach.
Sometimes subtleties are best observed by
looking at something else. It is often easier
to see the beauty, the full glitter and glance of
a thing in another object, as the play of colors
in the aurora borealis is better perceived by
turning the eyes aside. Sometimes one or two
minor points chosen from an embarrassment of
interesting details are all the imagination needs,
as a plant selects only those elements from air
and soil which can be used in perfecting its
tissue of stem and leaf and flower.

It can only be hoped that this book about
Peru may succeed in even suggesting its unique
appeal.

[11]

PART I
IN THE DESERT

" I love all waste

And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be;
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows."

SHELLEY

CHAPTER I

ALONG SHORE

THE surface of the ocean is unruffled. Only
the heaving of its great body suggests the power
beneath. But when it confronts the desert
cliffs, backed by the world-weight of the Andes,
the force which has been gathering all the way
from Australia, so mighty that it can be com-
pared to nothing but itself, snarls into uncon-
trolled fury, rebellious, but acknowledging the
limit of its power.

The " Peaceful Ocean " lies next to a land of
geological unrest ; the coast rising, subterranean
torment breaking out in earthquakes, hurling
cliffs into the sea. Even the busy modern port
of Callao partakes of the mystery of this ele-
mental land. The white ships anchored in the
clear water of its harbor gradually turn dull
brown. Might it be the crater of an extinct
volcano?

No wonder the people on such a shore build
[15]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

bamboo cages plastered with refuse and mud
to live in, temporary for them as the present
stage is transient in the history of the land on
which they live. Their object-lessons are war-
ring natural forces. No wonder they are brutal,
slinging cattle on board steamers by the horns,
casting a stone between the eyes of a bullock
to make him turn around. Even their little
children play at bull-fights with horns of de-
funct cattle. The soil of this " sea-gnawn "
shore affords not one necessity for human ex-
istence, not even a drop of water. There are
no real harbors, only niches in the jagged coast.
But few lighthouses indicate danger, and the
desert is chilled by winds from the Antarctic
pole.

Far out, a low cloud is skimming the surface
of the gray water, advancing in waves of black-
ness. From one end a shower falls; at the
other, a column rises from the water to meet
the on-rushing mass, " a great oval, rolling
forwards over the sea." It comes nearer and
nearer, till the shore shimmers as through heat
waves. The quiet is complete except for the
noise of millions of laboring wings.

[16]

SEALS OF THE PALOMINOS ISLANDS.

ALONG SHORE

A cloud of birds ! Now they fall to the water
with , close-clapped wings, hundreds at a time,
each a tiny splashing fountain. Their hunger
is insatiable, but not because food is lacking,
for the swarms of pilchards beneath the waves
are vaster than the armies of birds which pursue
them. Ancient Indian races enriched their
irrigated fields with these little fish. A curious,
tawny jewel is found upon this shore, known
as "fishes' eyes." Might they be fossilized eyes
of those fertilizer-fishes?

The appearance of this coast could not have
been different in antediluvian days, with the
screeching birds and the mammoth terrapin
off-shore, those associates of the dodo.

The birds fly out at sunrise and spend the day
in fishing, resting upon the waves when they
are tired, and at sunset return to their giant
stone islands for the night. Alone, the call of a
sea-bird would be lost in the fury of the meeting
of cliff and sea. But as a mass of white gulls
can assume blackness by mere quantity, so
their mingled voices can take on an overwhelm-
ing poignancy of sound. Louder than the crash
of breakers, louder than the barking and snort-

[171

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

ing of the bald, fat seals loping over them in
droves, surges the great cry of the birds, as, in
a shower of wild calls diverse as themselves,
they settle upon the rocks: pelicans, cormo-
rants, mollyhawks, gannets, sea-mews, gulls,
osprey, occasional tropical flamingoes lost among
ice-birds and stormy petrels, wild ducks, Inca
terns, and the weird, amphibious " bird-child,"
which tries to stand erect, fluttering its carti-
laginous wings, braced by its indistinguishable
tail. All the birds of the ocean gather here,
from sandpeeps to albatrosses, a surfeit of life
to accentuate the barrenness of the shore. They
are multiplying every year their already limit-
less myriads, useless to man as the savages of
the interior, without commercial value now of
any kind, yet not annihilated on that account.
It is said that all are souls of sailors lost at sea.
In each stormy petrel a lost apprentice lives
again, in each pelican a boatswain, in each
mollyhawk a chief officer, in each albatross a
sturdy old captain.

One is tempted to write of the romance of
the sea-birds of Peru, if romance has in it any
of the fascination of waste on a large scale, for

[18]

ALONG SHORE

like barrenness, waste must be on a large scale
to be picturesque. Where is the impertinence
of it so overwhelming as in nature — her spend-
thrift production of unused powers, and the
daring of her destruction?

A German scientist, investigating the guano
interests, reported eleven million birds on one
of the Chincha Islands, for these are the guano
birds, and these wild, craggy islands the Guano
Islands, a jewel-casket of Peru, which now
abandoned, emptied of its contents, stands
wide open, staring vacant in the sunlight, that
its owners may not forget its former fullness.

Under the stimulus of pure guano a plant
will spring to mammoth dimensions, lavishing
blossoms and fruit. Ancient races, even the
foreign Incas, realized its magical endowments
and made laws governing its use. But land
enriched by guano into immense fertility lapses
after a while, barer than before.

A few sailing ships, hoping to glean poor rem-
nants of this accumulation of the centuries,
still huddle as close as possible to the black
rocks, which, because of the quantity of that
very fertilizer which has distinguished them,

[19]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

are made repellent to life of any kind. In this
laboratory of the strongest fertilizer, there is
not the slightest trace of vegetation — Peru
in paradox.

The sunset blazes through the fissures and
shoots shafts of opalescent light under the great
stone bridges toward the mountainside of the
candelabrum, veiled in a hazy shimmer. De-
fiantly gorgeous it is, all but the young moon
which nestles among rushing scarlet and black
clouds.

A giant candelabrum, at least four hundred
feet long, is hollowed deep in the rock of the
sheer volcanic headland above the sea. Its
trenches do not fill with drifting sand, though
the natives of Pisco make periodic pilgrimages
across the bay, just to be sure. Some think
it is a sign of royalty, a flaunt of the Incas, or
the boundary-mark of a conquered kingdom.
Some say it was a warning made by the Span-
iards after Pisco was sacked by English free-
booters in the seventeenth century, for though
now over a mile inland, it was then a coast
town. Such is the equilibrium of the Peruvian
coast! Others call it " the three crosses," the

[20]

ALONG SHORE

life-penance many years ago of a Franciscan
friar named Guatemala.

But a symbol does not for mere inquiry give
up the secret of its hidden mystery. Doubtless
the origin and purpose of the Candelabrum of
Pisco will never be known.

A few small, square, purple shadows mark a
town, put down at random in the desert beside
the sea. Some houses are made of the ribs and
jaws of whales. A conspicuous white building,
a little removed, is for sufferers with bubonic
plague. Crosses surmount hummocks round
about the town. People are making pilgrim-
ages to and fro. And over all, white-headed
vultures are wheeling. They spread their wings
and cry in the silence.

Dust covers the little city, clustering about a
market-place of sand. A fountain without
water mutely occupies its center. Lamp-posts
without lamps surround it, and the mud houses
are without windows. The cathedral towers
have no bells. Strange plaster figures are
sculptured upon the facade, and infants with
hands put on backwards hold up the portico.

[21]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Beyond the door with a two-inch keyhole are
Virgins in pink silk and gold tinsel, saints with
rows of parallel ribs, angels with gauze wings,
towering altars of gingerbread work, artificial
flowers, and silver-paper fringe.

Glossy-haired women, their black manias
(head-shawls) thrown back, drag stiff skirts
through the dirty sand. Half -naked children
gnaw at the inside of long bean-pods. Mangy
dogs with dusty skin and a sparse sprinkling
of yellow hair slink into the shadows. Black
goats and their attenuated kids search about in
the sand for something to eat. Men and women
file out of black interiors, carrying gourds full
of brilliant edibles. Meal braizes over a low
fire on the sand; a woman crouching over it
whips the flame with the end of her long hair.
From time to time, to make a brighter blaze,
she picks up pieces of wood with her strong
toes. Near by struts a blue-eyed bird. It is a
huerequeque, the household scavenger. Bits of
cloth hang about his tall knees. The woman
explains that they are trousers intended to keep
him warm. She is sorry I could not have come
a few days later, for she is about to make him

[221

ALONG SHORE

some new ones for summer, of lighter quality,
with lace edges.

The market is held in the bed of a " river,"
no less dry than the surrounding desert. Old
women behind piles of tropical fruits, guayabas,
pacays, ciruelas, gossip to a whir of small
mandolins. Heavy-browed men in flapping
sombreros drink thick liquids and purchase
pats of red and yellow picante (a highly seasoned
dish) . Groups of pack-horses with silver bridles
are tied round about the market.

But surprises are lurking in these coast towns.
Behind heavy, unexpected doors, the single
affluent family of the town receives in a peacock-
blue salon. There is a lady in brown, with
trimmings of blue velvet and cotton lace, and
a perpendicular yellow hat. Another is in
purple velvet, with swan's-down hat and photo-
graph brooch of her sister. A third, wearing
green velvet, a salmon colored hat with red
roses, and holding a pink silk handkerchief
embroidered in lavender, sits tpurring beside
her red-faced German fiance. The carpet is
red, the furniture covered with brown brocade;
there are statues of carved alabaster with gilt

[23]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

edges and pink cuspidors. Gold mirrors, chro-
mos of Venetian court life, and pasteboard
calendars of bygone years hang upon the walls.
The Spanish tiles of long ago are painted over.
Farther up the street a door may open upon
a wilderness of vicuna rugs as tawny as a lion
and softer than moleskin. Shawls of tan-
colored wool, silkier than Liberty fabrics, lie
about. One is not surprised that vicuna wool
was reserved for royal use in Inca days, nor
that blankets of it were sent by the conquerors
as offerings to Philip II. There are little foot-
warmers made of vicuna fur and chinchilla
skins, wiry penguin skins and a deafening noise
of singing birds in cages. A black-eyed girl
with hair like tarred rope stands making cazuela
(a thick soup) and paring guavas. She claps
her hands, and many doves fly in to peck the
crumbs from her lips.

[24]

CHAPTER II

DESERT QUALITY

A CERTAIN herb lives for years underground
in the desert; it feels no necessity for a leaf-
existence. Yet if the parched roots .are reached
by water, they expand toward the sun in lovely
bloom.

Up from the shore stretches the bare im-
mensity of desert, ending in one tremulous
horizon with the ocean, and with the wilderness
of mountains against the pulsating sky at the
other. It is the Land of Light. All sensation
of color is lost in this great sensation of light,
an ardent light " shining through things, not
on them." Even the clouds expire from excess
of light. It reduces all colors to mere hot vi-
bration. The translucent mountains swim in a
sea of light, reflecting from it as from wide
stretches of water. Though sensation of color
is lost in light, their huge forms are distinct

[25]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

in the radiant atmosphere, but unreal as if half-
veiled. — One attribute of mirage is absolute
clearness of outline. — Insignificant details
emerge, but they rouse admiration only because
of the light investing them.

The whole wide desert culminates in illusion
and mystery of distant outlines. Everything
floats in it, as it sweeps over from the opalescent
mountains. A cross in the midst of the shelly
sand, " protruding through thin layers of mi-
rage," marks the spot where a greatly feared
bandit was killed. Skulls are heaped beneath
it, with matches and half -burned candles.

Water being denied, the desert is soaked with
sun. It is the Land of Heat. No plant grows
in the scorching soil, no animal can endure it.
No bird, no insect flies through the burning
atmosphere. Each object shimmers until it
seems but the reflection of itself. Fire descends
from the burnished sky and vibrates in the air
and scalds the sand. Yet concentrating a tropi-
cal sun, this hot solitude lies between the cold
ocean and the mountains, a region of ice.

This desert is the abode of weird phenomena.
Sometimes a globe of fire springs to the size of

[26]

DESERT QUALITY

the sun, illuminating the sky for a quarter of
an hour; then it dissipates into an infinitude of
stars, which wriggle off into bright little tails
and disappear.

A slowly moving company, muffled to the
eyes, with heads done up like Tuaregs of the
Sahara, mincing across the desert on donkeys,
suddenly see themselves swinging along over
their own heads, as if magnified by a gigantic
mirror in the sky. The clouds give back strange
pictures of one's self enlarged and surrounded
by a halo or a circular iris, summoning a saint
or revealing a fairy. This quality is inherent
in Peru, making ordinary moments ornamental.

Near Casma is a hill called " Dreadful,"
whose continuous sandslides when the heat is
greatest give off a sound of mystery, suggesting
heat, like the roar of a distant volcano.

No matter how much the political status of
Peru may change from century to century, it
remains always the lair of earthquakes. Mines
of gold and silver, islands of guano, deserts of
nitrate, may be in turn discovered, exploited,
exhausted. Earthquakes destroy those who
have been enriched as those who have lived

[27]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

beside them in want. Even now earthquakes
are almost daily recurrent along the coast. In
laying your ear to the ground you can hear
subterranean rumblings. Only in the frequency
of slight shocks do people feel secure; otherwise
they know the underground world is hoarding
strength for a fury of destruction. As a traveler
of the old time expressed it: " The inhabitants
are subject to being buried in the ruins of their
own houses at any time."

The Indians say that when God rises from
His throne to review the human race, each step
as He progresses is an earthquake. As soon as
they feel the pressure of His foot upon the earth,
they rush from their huts to show themselves
to Him. When the rumbling becomes loud
enough to be noticeable, dogs howl, beasts of
burden stop and spread their legs to secure
themselves from falling, people rush to door-
ways, and churches are emptied in an instant.
Reddish mists steam from the sea, bad odors
from the earth ; distant thunder — complete
wind-stillness. The clouds of sea-birds rise
from the earth and fly high, watching an agony
in which they have no part. Then a frightful

[28]

DESERT QUALITY

crash, rocks are torn asunder, great masses fall
off as islands into the sea, which is still. But
soon it turns black, boiling with a smell of
sulphur, and many dead fish float about.

Omnipresent, the earthquake is a mystery
which no laws can govern, beyond man's com-
prehension or control. One never gets accus-
tomed to it. Horror at a first shock only in-
creases with further experience. Earthquake
is linked with freaks of nature; it lifts up a
ridge across the bed of a stream; it alters the
face of the earth so that lawsuits spring up
over changed boundaries. It vitiates the soil.
Blooming fields wither, crops are lost, and
cattle die from eating the scorched grass. The
fiery core of earth is nearer the cooled surface
than we imagine. But here at least there are
no " torments from heaven." In Peru it is
said that lightning is worse than earthquake,
emanating as it does from God's own realm.

Even the climate of the coast partakes of
mystery. The clouds hurrying from the At-
lantic have drenched a whole continent of
jungle in tropical downpour, and before they
reach the desert, their last drop of moisture has

[29]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

been wrested from them as snow — drained dry
by the Andes. The tropical sun heats, and the
Antarctic current bringing its icy winds, cools.
Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the
other. For the red-hot desert can also be cold!
The low-hanging garuas, the ocean mists of half
a year, chill the desert and cling to the base of
the mountains, fading lighter and lighter up
and away from the black rocks where white
surf is breaking. Such are the facts of the case,
but it has been thought that the original god,
Con, was responsible, for once in anger he de-
prived this desert coast of rain.

The desert is majestically empty, a great
" vision of nothing without perspective." Yet
its mere emptiness suggests breadth, backward
and forward, up and down, both in time and
space. An unheard silence lies between the
empty horizons, perfect except for the "great,
faint sound of breakers," the tumble of an un-
used ocean of water, which destroys without
moistening the desert shores.

It seems lifeless. Harmless and peaceful at
least, it presents nothing to be destroyed by
sun-blight. It remains, as it apparently always

[30]

DESERT QUALITY

has been, the realm of death — though even death
presupposes life before it. But disturb the
desert, and a thousand forces spring into action,
furiously attacking the intruder. The heat
of the sun assumes a ghoulish love of destruc-
tion, and at night the stars look down upon a
creature shivering with fever, reeking with
wet in this desert place. Possessing all fruitful
ingredients within and kindly elements with-
out, the desert sleeps. It needs only one thing
to burst into life.

A mysterious river springs forth full-grown.
From what glacier or clear, icy fountain up on
the frozen puna may it not have issued? And
then, after a mysterious incubation, it returns
to sparkle here in the light, and in the leaves
and flowers which the dampened earth is ready
to produce.

There are traditions that sometimes a vagrant
shower escapes from the magnetism of the
mountain-tops. The flowers waiting just be-
neath the surface spring up like bloom over
the June earth. The water was a shower of
bluebells! A fugitive vegetation greedily
spreads, quickly as it disappears with the pass-

[31]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

ing of the water. In some places cotton grows
to the height of a horse's head, a luxuriant crop,
too unexpected for harvest. This brilliant life
lasts a week, perhaps more, and then lapses.
Where do the slumbering flowers conceal them-
selves? Where, indeed, does the pansy get its
coloring matter?

The desert of Peru is varied: toward the
south the coast is strewn with borax, white
upon the cliffs; toward the north petroleum
gushes from beneath it. Upon the red plains
of Huacho are the salt lakes of Pampa Pelada,
reflecting the sun in a thousand colors. " White
dust-whirlpools dance on its white floor." Its
banks are scattered with the bones of animals
which have come there for salt, and its perpen-
dicular cliffs are haunted by flesh-eating birds.
There, gnarled gray shrubs " loom as if carved
out of clay." Beyond, the desert is coated with
nitrate; yet here it seems but pulverized bones,
beneath acres of white skeletons bleached by a
thousand years — gaunt testimony to its desert-
dom since prehistoric Indian races struggled
to make it blossom.

In the Pampa of Islay the desert takes on a
[32]

DESERT QUALITY

terra-cotta hue. Whirlwinds progress from
hollow to hollow. Above the purple mountains,
shading away from the red desert, bright blue
peaks are snow-covered to set them off from the
sky. Fog shadows drop darkness here and
there over their barrenness. Even the mist
has a poetry of contrast.

Across the plain a constant ocean wind
sweeps fine white beach-sand along with waves
of color, no less real because impalpable. Its
pilgrimage of a thousand years toward the
mountains is uninterrupted, for the wind blows
always from the southwest. It causes the
rippled waves of sand which it brings along to
assume in traveling a crescent shape — the
wandering medanos.

Sometimes larger dunes overtake smaller ones,
which, so absorbed, become firmer in shape as
they journey toward the mountains. Should
two collide, they are shivered, then blend in a
new crescent, usually to separate again.

Growing from a network of roots within the
moving dune, the snowy heads of a small plant
maintain themselves just above the sand as it
drifts over the hard plateau.

[33]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

The medanos are scattered as thickly as the
crescent shadows of some vast eclipse, a laby-
rinth of nature. They are as mysterious as
" mushrooms growing in rings, marsh-fires which
cannot warm, or the shrinking of the sensitive
plant."

The sand drops constantly over the acute
crest. From all about come soft sounds, an
overwhelming minor music, almost inaudible.
Were you in a forest, you might think it was
the soughing of the wind through the branches
or the shuffle of locusts devouring a tree.

These playthings of the wind have been called
symbols of the Moon in the land of the
Sun, since nothing in Inca days could dissociate
itself from either; a crescent Moon humbled
by the Sun's anger, allowed to possess her
former fullness but a day at a time, doomed to
be obliterated over and over again.

The worth of anything consists in the fact
that through it can be seen something more
beautiful than itself, something to which it
forms the setting. Words are mere points of
departure. What limitless excursions can even
one word suggest, into countries more wonderful

[34]

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
SACHACHA, A TYPICAL VILLAGE OF PERU.

DESERT QUALITY

than any created by a remote if consummate
artist! And what an intimate happiness is
found there, which no one else has felt nor could
describe if he had!

Wherever rivers descend from the mountains,
green garlands are slung across the desert. No
wonder the river was a god to the desert-
dweller, bringing with it meadows and gardens.
Where only dust has been, acres of cotton,
bright-green sugar-fields, and dark orchards
lie between mud walls and willow-shaded lanes.
Herds graze upon alfalfa steaming in the sun.
The yellow plaster terraces and balconies of
haciendas among their banana groves are shaded
by cascades of glowing bougainvillea. But
wherever water is, fever follows. Disease clings
to the green spaces. Even sickness cannot
abide in the desert alone.

Huge, pyramid-like mud structures spring
crumbling from the soil whose modified form
they seem to be, temples and palaces of former
days, each with its legend. The ruins are in-
habited by weird iguanas and " haunted by
those birds of ill omen that only nest in ruins."

[35]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Mounds of treasure, too, linger along the desert,
and fragments of the paved road of the Incas.

A gold bell was once buried in Tambo de
Mora. Older people have heard it tolling on
quiet nights. Some say it rings from the top
of a hill, some, from beneath the ground. To
be sure, bells were not known to ancient Peru-
vians, yet a company was properly financed to
hunt for this bell of gold.

Submerged or enchanted cities exist on every
hand. A mystic race of dwarfs live in the
Andes. They guard a vault of buried treasure.
An Indian who declared he had seen it became
so terrified at the extent of the riches that he
fled, not forgetting to mark his path. Yet
frequently as he had followed the trail to the
very spot, he could never again find the cavern
of glittering jewels: it had sunk completely out
of sight — " You can see for yourself, Senorita,
that it has, if I take you there! "

Legends of prehistoric days take on the garb
of myth, when giants came over the sea to Peru
long before the memory of man. Wishing to
provide themselves with water in the desert,
they excavated enormously deep wells, still

[36]

undeniable evidence -of their dominion. More-
over, their bones of incredible size have been
found. Garcilasso says a piece of one hollow
tooth weighs more than half a pound. Their
footprints have been traced as far as Patagonia.
For their sin they were destroyed by a rain of
fire.

Maui, too, — the Polynesian god who caught
the sun with cords of cocoanut fiber, who lifted
the sky and smoothed its arched surface with
his stone adze, who made the earth habitable
for man and then created him, and who now
divides his time between fishing for islands with
a hook which is called the Plume of Beauty,
and resting in the form of a small day-fly upon
the under side of a flower, — Maui, who belongs
to the length and breadth of the Pacific, once
visited Peru.

Upon this coast lived aborigines with flat
noses, fishing from boats of inflated sealskins,
and sleeping pell-mell in sealskin huts on heaps
of seaweed, " tall, cannibalistic fishermen . . .
who used bone utensils, made primitive pottery,
nets, and fabrics of osier."

Here lived the contemporaries of the Incas,
[37]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Yuncas they were called, " dwellers in the hot
lowlands," distinct from those of the highlands,
with their hideous thoughts painted on earthen-
ware jars, and their hazy conception of a single
god, their pragmatic worship of him by means
of anything which he had made for their sup-
port and comfort, and their sacrifice to him
of his greatest gift, human beings.

Fancy is free to play along geologic or human
history. Bones of mastodons as well as sea-
bottom shells are found in the desert. Van-
ished races have embellished it in passing. Man
has but added to the mystery of nature. Yet
after such lapses of time the two are mingled
indistinguishably.

38]

CHAPTER III

DESERT PERSPECTIVE

THERE was once a mine of gold in Peru.
Later it became a copper mine, and now they
sell the water that collects in the bottom.

The Incas found a rainless desert intersected
by fruitful valleys as to-day, each independent,
with its own gods, its own king, its own man-
ners and customs, even its own diseases! Each
valley chieftain lived upon a platform among
the fields, but his villagers lived in the desert,
not to encroach upon land capable of cultiva-
tion. These Yuncas excelled in the arts of
weaving, fashioning metals, and m making
pottery.

In the name of the Sun the Incas descended
from regions of snow to conquer the desert-
dweller, with lofty disregard of the fact that

[39]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

the benign source of all blessings among the
high table-lands was the scourge of the lowlands,
where water-gods were worshipped. These
religious wars changed the face of the country.
Valleys were connected by a great highway.
Sun temples and convents for the Virgins of
the Sun supplanted the shrine of each valley's
chief god. Only one remained inviolate on the
whole coast, that of the awful, intangible Pacha-
camac, who, being a fish-god in his great red
temple by the sea, was not an idol, but the In-
visible, Unknown, Omnipotent God, who had
existed before either the sea or the sun; Pacha-
camac, he who formed the world out of nothing,
the Creator whose image they dared not con-
ceive. His name was mentioned with shrugging
of shoulders and lifting up of hands, and he
was served with fasting. Unlike Sun-ritual,
his cult was a personal one, the inner worship of
a people who paid tribute to golden fishes. The
Maker of all Things had been conceived by
those ancient peoples who, Balboa says, came
from the north on a fleet of rafts, when the
mountains had the climate of the valleys, and
the whole actual coast was under the ocean.

[40]

DESERT PERSPECTIVE

The aura of the Unknown God invested the
fish-idol, and the temple was held in such awe
that it was not only spared by the Incas, but
they even made pilgrimages to the shrine. Shy
in the thought of offending the Maker of the
World, Inca Yupanqui allowed his golden sea-
side temple to remain, but erected a temple to
the Sun a little above its level. To honor the
conqueror, the priests of Pachacamac " ap-
pointed a solemn fishing of many thousand In-
dians, who went to sea in their vessels of reeds."

Though the fish-idols were ejected, and a
convent for the Virgins of the Sun was founded,
worship of Pachacamac went on as before.
The Incas joined in it, identifying him with
Uiracocha of the mountains, but they extorted
Sun adoration as well, a fair barter of faith.

Then the priests of the Sun made an idol of
Pachacamac, and so it presided until, drenched
with sacrificial blood, it was chopped to pieces
by Hernando Pizarro and twenty soldiers in
January, 1533. A terrible earthquake followed,
which Pizarro called the devil's rage, and
triumphant he planted a cross above the
looted temple. Pizarro gave the golden nails

[41]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

to his pilot, as a reward for his entire venture.
But much of the temple's treasure is said to be
concealed underground, undiscovered to this day.

The temple pile glows against the blue sea
in the midst of shimmering sand. Pachacamac
lies in its magnificent ruin surrounded by acres
of skeletons. For more than two thousand
years it was the most famous burial place of
the coast. Even mummies were brought from
great distances to lie in the sacred ground.

Layers upon layers of succeeding generations
have all yielded their excavated secrets, each
throwing light on others. Time and treasure-
seekers have laid bare the most recent. His-
tories of great peoples told by their graves!

I stood upon the summit of the broad mound,
the temple to Inti, the Sun, built by the Incas
above that of Pachacamac, the fish-god. Its
crumbling walls, with traces of their brilliant
coloring, ended abruptly in mid-air. The head-
less skeletons of forty-six young girls had re-
cently been found upon the terrace where I
stood, the braided cords hanging loosely about
their skeleton necks.

[42]

DESERT PERSPECTIVE

Far below stretched the vast field of the
dead. I looked out over a desert of round
white skulls, with eye-cavities staring at the
sun — Sun-worship continued in death. Little
flurries of dust rose here and there, as men
with shovels turned over the sand, hoping for
treasure. Gallinazos, hideous vultures of the
desert, paced up and down. Below the convent
of the Virgins of the Sun, whose niches only
remain, was a small blue lagoon under palm
trees. On its reed-edges a white heron tilted
about — a curious, gnarled creature, giving an
impression of majestic grace.

Between me and the sand-hills rolling up to
the Andes lay the silent courts, the great,
roofless houses of the city of the dead caving
in over its streets of sand. The desert-river
separated this sepulchral spot from the valley
of Lurin, where cotton-fields and yellowish
expanses of sugar-cane were divided by willow
hedgerows, with glimpses of water beneath
tall mud gateways. The breeze was as sweet
as heliotrope hedges could make it and filled
with tinkling bird notes.

On the other side was the whole reach of
[43]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

the sparkling Pacific, with its far-off sound of
breakers. There is a tradition that the two
rocky islands are a goddess, Cavillaca, who
cast herself and her child into the sea a thousand
years ago. But scientists assure us that the
islands were torn away by an earthquake since
Spanish occupation. The Incas, they say, had
a temple on the islands, then a promontory.

He has not beheld the quintessence of all
human suffering who has not seen the face of a
hunchback child-mummy. Upon such bodies,
doubled up and tied securely into the smallest
possible space, whose varnished skin is stretched
over their unbending bones, even the tattoo
marks still show in designs of their owners'
choosing. They are clothed in finely-woven
garments, with sandals, pouches, shell and
bead ornaments, embroidered bands, and hair
not yet unbraided. Sometimes brilliant eyes
stare from empty sockets in the withered
mummy -faces, eyes of prehistoric cuttlefish, a
symbol of fish worship. In some of the skulls
are dents made by blunted points of stone
weapons.

[44]

DESERT PERSPECTIVE

One mummy sits in the attitude of a toper
about to drink, with a monkey on his shoulder
— for pets of the dead man accompanied him
on his journey, his dog or parrot sometimes
mummified at his feet. The men have their
slings and fish nets, the women their spindles,
needles of cactus thorns, and every implement
of household use, the children their earthen-
ware dolls. All have their little gods and talis-
mans. There are pots of provisions, too, with
lids to keep out the thin finger of time, jugs
of chicha (a beverage distilled from maize), and
ears of corn in nets from which they have
never been removed since they were put in by
hands turned to dust a thousand years ago.

From the grave of an apparently great offi-
cial with his treasure- jars, was taken only the
mummy of a puma, yellow feathers on its head,
a gold plate in its mouth, gold and silver bangles
on its legs. It had a necklace of emeralds
from the north, and its tail was full of golden
feathers from the mystic jungle beyond the
mountains.

Recently X-rays have been applied to
mummy -bundles, which show other skeletons

[45]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

within as well as the one who had died, skeletons
of those who, when those winding-sheets were
adjusted, were still alive. Gruesome sacrifice!

Pachacamac has furnished museums all over
the world and is still one of the most inexhaust-
ible of mummy supplies.

My horse descended carefully to this field of
the dead. He picked his way across stepping-
stones on which pilgrims approached the lower
court of the temple where their year of penance
before entering was to be spent. A step, and
there was the sound of crunching human bones.
Sand filled the skull cavities. They shattered
like fragile glass as the horse's hoofs clattered
across them toward the ruined city. The sand
was pulverized bones. Bits of cloth and pot-
tery attracted the collector's eye, or a deformed
or trephined skull.

The city walls are twenty feet thick. Their
ends and their beginnings are lost in sand.
Marks of fire show here and there, and traces
of forgotten industries. Flights of stairs lead
down from the tops of walls, over which was
the only entrance. The roofs were made of

[46]

DESERT PERSPECTIVE

reeds to let through necessary air and light;
none were needed against rain.

Swallows, " dovelets of Santa Rosa," flew over
from the green valley of Lurin. Bats and little
owls, always in pairs, inhabited the ruins, and
lizards basked in the blinding light and enjoyed
the quiet. Under the cactus lying loose upon
the ground there is sometimes a small black
spider whose bite takes months to cure. Its
inhabitants emphasize still further the unin-
habitability of this scorching desert.

II

One other center of power confronted the
Incas in the coast valleys, the city of Chan-
chan, belonging to the Chimus.

In the kingdom of the Grand Chimu, Si, the
Moon, was worshipped. It appeared both by
day and by night, which the sun was not able
to do. The Moon raised the tides; did such
power not demand sacrifice? On special occa-
sions the Chimus offered to it small children
wrapped in brilliant cloths.

The ocean was the medium through which
[47]

their Moon-god chose to demonstrate its power.
As it nourished them with its fish, scattered by
the fish-god Pachacamac through its waves,
they strewed white meal upon its surface as a
form of worship; incidentally to attract a large
catch of fish. Ni, the Ocean, symbolized water,
the greatest need of a desert land. It was also
their only means of communication between
the desert valleys, as they plied up and down
upon the " silent highway " to collect tribute.
Their boats were made of reeds tied together,
and they sat upon them as on " horseback,
cutting the waves of the sea, and rowing with
small reeds on either side," as Father Acosta
explains. Sometimes they had square sails of
grass. One may see these boats of bulrushes
upon the shore, for they are still in use, their
long, curved beaks leaning against each other
like stacks of mammoths' tusks.

The water cult of the Chimu included worship
of fountains, flowing streams, and of their
goddess, " She of the Emerald Skirts." The
worst criminal was a water thief, he who turned
the stream aside from his neighbor's field; and
the Grand Chimu was overcome at last only

[48]

DESERT PERSPECTIVE

because the Inca was able to cut off his water
supply. Mild Tupac Inca Yupanqui, who ruled
the mountains as the Grand Chimu controlled
the coast, preferred victory without bloodshed,
since his were religious wars to spread the
worship of the Sun.

Sun-worshippers and Moon-worshippers, liv-
ing side by side, struggled in mortal conflict,
but the Sun-worshippers prevailed; and when,
after a few generations, the Spaniards, eager
for bloodshed, came to conquer the Sun- wor-
shippers in the name of Christianity, the great
city of the worshippers of Moon and Sea was
gone. They could glut their desire only on
hidden treasure in sepulchral mounds.

Mochica, the language of the Chimus, was
so difficult that no grown person could learn it.
Here and there it was spoken as late as the
seventeenth century, and to-day near Eten,
" where the sun halted at his rising," there are
elements of it left in a curious dialect, spoken
by a little community of Indians whom no one
can understand. They braid Panama hats of
finest straw. Their huts are almost without
furniture, they wear no shoes, and dress always

[49]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

in mourning; but they wear flowers in their
hair.

An Augustinian prior, Calancha, collected
traditions of Chanchan, that great city of the
Chimus which covered twenty square miles.
He tells of the processions to the Moon temple,
when the Grand Chimu, wearing the jeweled
diadem, in robes of feather-mosaic as fine as
warp and woof, was carried in his litter by
courtiers, surrounded by musicians, minstrels,
priests, and warriors with lances and long
waving plumes.

The mounds scattered in fragments through
the desert were terraced pyramids in those
days, the walls upholding them brilliantly
painted and richly embossed. Traces can still
be seen of their paintings of wild birds and
animals, and step-patterns like the pyramids
themselves. Vines of the passion-flower drooped
their fruit over the garden walls upon the ter-
races, for water ran to the very top. Even the
avenues of trees had individual nourishment
from the distant mountains through a lofty
aqueduct, the most amazing accomplishment
of an amazing people. In the labyrinth below

[50]

DESERT PERSPECTIVE

worked the designers, dyers, potters, weavers,
and the gold- and silver-smiths, expressing the
florid taste of the Chimus.

These sea- worshippers, fish-worshippers, made
fish-gods of gold. In Chanchan their small
fish-god has been found, worth three million
dollars. With it were gold bowls, little figures
of fish, lizards, serpents, and birds, neck and
arm bands, scepters and diadems, and emeralds
from the north. The larger fish-god is yet to
be discovered. Manuscripts describe conscien-
tious attempts to unearth it.

The race has vanished; vast Chanchan is
gone. We are not even sure what this great
people called themselves. Their gold and silver
ornaments have long ago been melted into
European coin. Traditions of their wealth
and magnificence came only through their
conquerors, who themselves had no written
language. Were we to believe only Inca tra-
dition, all the Yuncas of the coast were sav-
ages, given up to unnatural sin. Fortunately
there are vestiges of their pyramids and laby-
rinthine interiors of their temples and palaces,
bits of their pottery, and patterns of their

[511

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

cotton fabrics. There are, too, fragments of
their marvelous irrigation system, a dumb
reminder to Peru that present needs- were once
supplied by the intelligence and industry of an
Indian civilization.

A bush with many-colored clusters of flowers
joined together like a bunch of grapes grows
not far from the site of Chanchan. It is said
that each flower has a different shape as well as
a different color. The name of the bush is the
" Flower of Paradise."

[52]

CHAPTER IV

PICA, THE FLOWER OF THE SAND

A TOWERING, scoop-topped wagon, fruit-filled,
dragged by nine mules, lurched through the
desert. Far in the distance, on the first low
swelling of the mighty chain of the Andes, there
was a faint dark line whence it came.

The driver of the wagon handed me a small
branch of a chirimoya tree. The three narrow,
fleshy lobes of the chirimoya flower lie close
together among the pale green foliage and send
forth a perfume as poignant, though faint, as
if there were rain-drops for conductors. The
aromatic, gently acid flesh of its fruit lies in
rays, the exquisite scent of the flower tasted
in the fruit. Warmed by the sun on its journey
from the valley oasis, the whole freshness of
the desert was condensed in this single flavor,
like the crystallization of a perfect moment.
Strange imaginings sprang from tasting it.

A gallop across the desert is a good prelude
[53]

to anywhere, especially if one has silver bridle
and stirrups and a long lariat with silver knobs.
The muleteers sat upon high black saddles of
alpaca hair. The colors of their mufflers must
have been brilliant underneath the dust. Their
trappings were embroidered in red with a red-
worsted fringe, Inca-fashion, over the mules'
temples. Our little unshod ponies picked their
way between the stones, up hill and down, over
the roadless road to Pica.

The desert of Tarapaca, now belonging to
Chile, is called the Plain of the Eagle. A fit
arena for gaunt battles in former days, a road
across it is now distinguishable by the bones of
beasts of burden which have dropped on their
way.

There are valleys of nitrate to explore, hills
of nitrate to be climbed, plains of nitrate to
gallop across, and the only break is one wind-
swept tamarugo tree. Does it exist upon the
morning mist which the sun disperses? Or does
its tough life go on underground, like some un-
couth monster in the depth of the sea? Or
does its tap-root bore down into a deeply
buried flow of water? Every one believes that

[54]

PICA, THE FLOWER OF THE SAND

there is a honeycomb of tunnels from water-
giving strata in the mountain-sides, far ante-
dating the days when Uiracocha went to Tara-
paca.

No convulsion of nature is unknown to this
pitiless land. Volcanic bombs lie about, and
fantastic heaps of lava from molten mountains
mingle with corals from the sea-bottom.
Streams come to the surface, ripple for a short
distance, and disappear. Their water tastes
of sulphate of soda. Sometimes it springs sud-
denly from a cave, suggesting a system of under-
ground rivers. Sometimes it is brought by
water- works of prehistoric days, whose exact
position is not known, making life possible for
their would-be destroyers. Whether freaks of
nature or remnants of the vast system of irri-
gation, importance enough has been given to
the underground waterways of Peru to bring
a scientist from the United States to chart
them all.

Curious symbols and conventionalized llamas
are cut into the hills of pink trachite and black
slate rock whose strata have been jostled and
overturned by earthquake. Pictures of ser-

[551

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

pents, foxes, and birds endure through ages of
merciless sun. Were they the work of a mega-
lithic people of a megalithic age, when cyclopean
stones were transported to build cyclopean
edifices, and gigantic ant-eaters and other
jungle-dwellers swarmed in this desert of Tara-
paca? Their irrefutable bones are found here,
but so are shells of the sea-bottom and water-
worn stones of green jasper with red spots.
Moreover, the nitrate is filled with the petrified
eggs and bones, even the feathers of sea-birds,
suggesting that the nitrate was originally guano.
Why should it not be true? For this desert was
once beside the sea, as it was once beneath the sea.
But the law of compensation works even here.
It has always been common opinion that the
desert of Tarapaca shelters fabulous riches.
Lured by the glisten of a fallen meteor, men
have squandered their fortunes and risked their
lives searching for gold, while they trod the
nitrate under foot.

The large dark cave was gently steaming.
The water filling it gurgled out from sunless
twilight, hot from the hold of the earth, cool as

[56]

it spread over the desert valley from the mouth
of the cave. A brown man and his little daugh-
ter, lying in it, were being waved to and fro by
the water as it issued, just their heads visible.
Saturating the bamboo tangle, it left a wake of
gardens, orange and guava trees, citrons, figs,
and slender paltas, tall chirimoyas and pacays,
grown to fruit-bearing size in six months. Trees
of the jungle bathing in incandescent desert
light! There were thick mimosas, geranium
trees, and darts of poinsettia, grape-vines a foot
across at the root, and spikes of heavy-smelling
tuberoses. Jasmine trailed on the trellis above
my head, and bougainvillea made a roof of
purple flowers.

The slope of the sand-hills was crossed in the
foreground by shadows of orange groves, " in-
definitely elongated." Domestic constellations
glowed in their black foliage. Men in ponchos
whirled up on mule-back, unbuckled their three-
inch spurs, and napped their saddles down.
This time the mirage was real.

Old Dorothea came down from her bright
green veranda, where the sunshine glistened
from a humming-bird's wings as it hovered

[57]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

above a passion flower, a whirl of black fringe
with yellow deeps, the favored blossom which
the Incas carried in their hands as a sign of
greatness. She held a dove in the crotch of her
arm and offered me a bunch of narcissus and
white fleurs-de-lis, unthinkably sweet. She
was dressed in yellow ocher and an old straw
hat which she removed on being introduced to
ladies. Her little earless dancing dog did a
cueca (native dance) for us, while she clapped
queer aboriginal time, and the gold hands
danced in her ears.

Birds sang in the thorn hedgerows, and frogs
croaked in the warm pool, frogs which die in
cold water.

Dorothea said that some day the desert will
again be covered with forests and gardens, as
it was before it became a desert.

In a cloud of dust made luminous by the
sun, a drove of llamas galloped down over the
desert hillside to drink, soft eyes wonderingly
looking out from tall fuzzy heads, legs bungling
with heavy wool. An old Indian woman in
Panama hat and brilliant blankets followed
slowly, puffing at a pipe.

[58]

A CHARACTERISTIC PERUVIAN CHURCH

PICA, THE FLOWER OF THE SAND

This pool in a shadowed vale of the western
Andes, a shady, sweet-smelling spot, lost in an
immensity of desert, is a little solitude in the
midst of a great solitude, hospitable by sweet
contrast. It takes very little water to make a
perfect pool for a tiny fish, where it will find its
world and paradise all in one, with never an
intimation of the dry bank.

A large butterfly poised gently on the water's
surface. It was sunset time, the butterflies'
drinking hour. A copper bell tolled slowly.
The reverberation pierced far into the silence
and was " prolonged by the whole surrounding
desert." A boy perched on an overhanging
rock was playing a flute. The frail sounds
echoed through the quiet air, " hesitating within
a silence almost too large." What can give
such an impression of space as a flute? Or, in
ceasing, leave such utter stillness? A gorgeous
peacock preened itself against the crimson bou-
gainvillea in the sunset, then folded its fan for
the night.

It is curious how the atmosphere of a dream
cannot be conveyed in words.

Sitting beneath the mango tree by a lily-
[59]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

edged brook, I watched the low bonfire roasting
desert quail and smelled the scent of heliotrope
hedges, while I listened to an old man's plaintive
song, mingling with a quiet desert waterfall.
A wild youth with a bullet gash across one
cheek told me of reckless escapades in the
valleys above. He twisted off oranges with a
stick of bamboo and dropped them into my lap,
as the moon, poised on the crest of the mauve-
colored Andes like a discus thrown by a mighty
arm from beyond, disengaged herself and trav-
eled upward. Moonlight, he said, is brighter in
the mountain denies. The moon sometimes
drops a rainbow up there, a faint, round, dream
rainbow, made of thin far-diluted sunlight.
Pushed by a little breeze, it divides the cloud
and disappears.

He pointed out the false Cross preceding the
true Cross, preparing its way into the sky.

" Some violets have got in here," he said
suddenly, tweaking one out by the roots. In-
trusive violets!

A man with spurs passed picante and young
kid and trays of fruit, their crevices filled with
flowers.

[601

PICA, THE FLOWER OF THE SAND

Was not Amiel right when he said that " Un
pay sage est un etat d'&me? "

It was an " ambrosial night," in a place to
attach affection, except that affection is not for
places, either actually or in retrospect. One
heart-beat faster, and the nitrate desert has
fairy illusions. Why is it that merely seeing
foreign sights leaves only craving, while a whiff
of feeling in a distant, lonely spot fills one with
the meaning and the mystery of everything
and brings tears to the eyes of memory? The
purple of the bare mountains is significant in
the afterglow. Dripping water is significant.
The moon sheds a different light. The heat of
the desert sand just below the surface becomes
suggestive. The air is filled with indefinable
odors never perceived elsewhere, and the sight
of a sand-colored bird explains all the secrets of
the universe.

The beauty which alone would have woven a
spell about the place merely lapsed into a back-
ground. In itself the voice was not faultless,
nor the moon different from other windless,
immaculate nights; but the air was sweeter,
and the guavas were at the season's climax,

[61]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

their one day of perfection. They tell you that
if you eat guavas in Pica, you become either
ill or enchanted; in either case you cannot
leave.

He must have been talking for a long time.
It was as if his voice had been beneath my range
of sound, or too soft — though I heard well
enough. All at once I began to understand.

" Perhaps you have heard of the bush which
grows in Patagonia. It is covered with pale
yellow flowers. When a match is placed be-
neath it, the bush blazes forth and is reduced
to immediate ashes, all its strength exhausted
in a single dazzling effort. It is called escan-
dalosa.

" Had you let me know two weeks ago that
you would come, I would have put a bit of
nitrate on the roots of my rose-tree, and it
would have blossomed viciously for you! "

" Yes," I said, " but afterwards? "

" Oh, to be sure. Then it would have died."

An owl screamed from the top of a ciruela
tree, a little owl-of-the-desert, just a few inches
high.

Pica, the Flower of the Sand! With what
[62]

PICA, THE FLOWER OF THE SAND

golden words borrowed from Hindoo poets
might not its charm be told? By what en-
chantment its suave breezes be recalled? Every-
body knows it is a magic spot. Its quiet exist-
ence is a sort of self-expression of inmost
thoughts without technique.

Doctor Stiibel, the earthquake specialist, says
Pica is an eruption center.

[63]

CHAPTER V

A CLASH OF CONTRASTS

WHILE the mysticism of the Middle Ages was
expanding in delicate spires of Gothic archi-
tecture, the Inca's empire was exposing its
heart of gold to the blaze of a tropical sun.
Their only similarity is that a shadowy veil,
hah7 history, half legend, floats between us and
them both. But the gold shines through, and
the veil cannot conceal its brilliancy.

Once upon a time there was a garden of
pleasure where flowers of gold opened from
silver stalks, some full blown, others in close
golden bud. Upon the walls crept strange
insects and snails, so perfectly counterfeited in
gold " that they wanted nothing but motion."
Even the trees and the paths were of gold.
Birds of gold perched upon golden boughs, their

[641

A CLASH OF CONTRASTS

heads thrown back in silent song, and upon
silver leaves gold butterflies poised in the sun-
light upon their little golden feet. Humming-
birds of gold sipped imaginary honey from long,
golden flower-bells. The old chronicler, Cieza
de Leon, says that one garden " was artificially
sown with golden maize, the stalks, as well as
the leaves and cobs being of that metal; . . .
they were so well planted that even in a high
wind they were not torn up; and besides all
this they had more than twenty golden sheep
with their lambs, and the shepherds with their
slings and hooks to watch them, all made of the
same metal." Near by were vast heaps of gold
and silver, waiting to be wrought into wonder-
ful shapes.

The Inca ate within gold-lined walls, sitting
" commonly on a stool of massive gold set on a
large, square plate of gold which served for a
pedestal." He ate from gold dishes rare viands
from distant provinces, prepared in gold pots
and kettles in a kitchen supplied with piles of
golden fagots! He bathed in cisterns of gold
in water conducted through golden pipes from
distant springs. Francisco Lopez says: " Nay,

[65]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

there was nothing in all that empire (the most
flourishing of the whole world) whereof there
was not a counterfeit in pure gold."

As hunger could not be satisfied with gold,
it was valued only for its shining beauty, es-
teemed by the Incas' subjects only as a symbol
of the Sun, those " tears which the Sun has
wept." They naturally belonged to him. His
worshippers even cast them into lakes, mirrors
in which he looks upon his own reflected glory,
and " sinks at last still gazing on it."

The greatest of all Sun-Temples was Cori-
cancha — the Ingot of Gold — where every
implement in use, even to spades and rakes of
the garden, was made of gold.

Huayna Ccapac had learned from the god
Uiracocha that a superior people would con-
quer the Incas and introduce a new religion.
They would come after the reign of twelve
kings; and " In me," he said, " the number of
twelve kings is completed."

Oracles had predicted their coming. And
what was more significant, the great oracle of
Rimac, " nothwithstanding its former readiness
of speech, was become silent! " Omens had

[66]

A CLASH OF CONTRASTS

foreshadowed them. A brilliant comet " struck
Atahualpa with such a dump of melancholy in
his spirits that he remained almost insensible."
A royal eagle pursued by hawks fell into the
market-place of Cuzco and died. Great earth-
quakes shattered the shore, and tides did not
keep their usual course. A thunderbolt fell in
the Inca's own palace. Strange apparitions
faltered in the air, terrible to behold. The
Moon, mother of Incas, had three halos; the
first blood-red, the second blackish, inclining to
green, the third like mist or smoke.

Atahualpa's atrocities had come to pass.
For the first time civil war had decimated the
empire of the Lover of the Poor, the Deliverer
of the Oppressed. Such conduct had earned its
reward. Was it not to be expected that the
dawn-heroes of fair complexion, absent for a
season, should reappear? Their vengeance was
commissioned by the Light-god.

What greater dramatic climax ever focused?
What authority was ever more solidly founded?
What identity of hero-gods more tangibly
proven? A first appearance which further facts
continued to corroborate.

[67]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

ii

Lured by rumors of a descendant of the Sun
in a city of gold, the first lean, poor adventurer,
worn with uncertainty and suffering, stepped
upon the shore of Peru. Pedro de Candia was
his name, who, having burned ten cities, had
dedicated in expiation ten lamps to the Virgin.
His " coat of mail reached to his knees, his
helmet of the best and bravest sort, his sword
girt by his side. He took a target of steel in
his left hand, and in his right a wooden cross a
yard and a half long," advancing toward the
Indians. Two fierce jaguars, " beholding the
cross," fawned upon him and cast themselves
at his feet. Taking courage at the sight, he
laid it upon their backs and dared to stroke
their heads. By virtue of that symbol a miracle
had happened. Pedro de Candia and the In-
dians were equally dumbfounded.

They followed him to the temples and palaces
furnished and plated with gold and silver, all
awed to silence, he at such magnificence in an
undiscovered country, they at the sight of the

[68]

A CLASH OF CONTRASTS

tall, fair man, whose long beard hung down
over his iron dress; all were convinced by this
first encounter, the Indians of the divinity of the
Spaniards, the Spaniards of God's patronage.
" Being abundantly satisfied with what he had
seen, he returned with all joy imaginable to his
companions, taking much larger steps back
than his gravity allowed him in his march
toward the people."

Eye-witnesses have described the Spaniards'
first glimpse of Atahualpa, the red fringe shining
on his forehead, when Hernando de Soto, the
most daring of all Pizarro's followers, caracoled
upon his miraculous beast into the very lap of
the dignified monarch. They feasted and drank
chicha from goblets of gold which young girls
presented to them, sitting upon seats of gold
like the emperor's own. Two historians were
present " who with their quipus (knots) made
certain ciphers describing ... all the passages
of that audience."

In Cajamarca, the Country of Frost, Ata-
hualpa returned the visit. He came in full
regalia, facing the pomp of a gorgeous sunset,
and the Spaniards, " brandishing their pen-

[69]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

nants toward the flaring west, saluted with a
great shout the Setting of the Sun! "

First came multitudes of people clearing the
way of stones and sweeping the road, then
singers and dancers in three divisions, many
richly dressed courtiers, and the guards, divided
into four squadrons of eight thousand men, one
before, one on each side of the Inca, and one in
the rear. High on the shoulders of distin-
guished chiefs he rode upon a golden litter lined
with brilliant feathers. His proud head, too
large for his body, was encircled by the red
fringe hanging above his wild and bloodshot
eyes. Atahualpa, that courageous fiend who
bragged that no bird flew in the air, no leaf
fluttered on a tree without his permission, who
though ransomed with a roomful of gold was
taken prisoner in the midst of his own army by
a handful of insolent adventurers, baptized in
the Christian faith " Don Juan," bound to a
post, and throttled like a common criminal!
Pizarro put himself into mourning.

The legend which had lured the Spaniards
was proven true: that the land of a powerful
king lay toward the south, where immeasurable

[70]

A CLASH OF CONTRASTS

treasure was amassed. It took a month to melt
up the gold plaques and plates, brackets and
moldings, statues of men, animals and plants,
drinking and eating utensils, jars and jewelry
of all sorts that filled Atahualpa's room of ran-
som.

A huge quantity of gold, carried by eleven
thousand llamas and intended for the ransom,
never arrived. It is said to lie buried near
Jauja, and is only one of the countless masses
of hidden treasure, both along the coast and in
the mountains, even into Ecuador. The Span-
ish messengers who were carried in hammocks
to inspect that caravan on its journey toward
Cajamarca were almost blinded by a mountain
seeming to shine from base to crest with gold.
The eleven thousand llamas had laid themselves
down to rest.

in

So they had come at last, the very image of
the god himself, strange little Uiracochas in
beards and ruffs; worthy of worship indeed,
for they let loose thunder and lightning, the

[71]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

proper arms of the Sun, from instruments held
in their hands, and rode about on amazing
beasts. (The Indians' fear of horses persisting
to this day, they are used only as infantry.)
Were the Uiracochas insensible of hunger and
thirst ; did they need sleep after toil and repose
after labor? Were they made of flesh and
bones, or had they incorruptible bodies like
those of the Sun and the Moon?

So the grisly conquerors came, half heroes,
half wild beasts, who did not grow exhausted
by fighting, nor discouraged by wounds and the
horrors of mountain-sickness.

So they came, these few poor adventurers who
fell upon a roomful of gold given them by a peo-
ple in ransom for the sovereign-deity whom this
handful of men had imprisoned. Miracles in
their favor seemed to spring up at each step;
and madly stimulated, the peaks of the cor-
dillera blazing above them, their imaginations
limitless, they strode through the empire in
the guise of gods and scraped the sacred gold
from the City of the Sun. They ripped the
plate from the walls of its temples. They
destroyed the idols. It is said that the Jesuits

[72]

rpffSEmj^

fc>

WOLFENBUTTEL- SPANISH MAP, CIRCA 1529.

Courtesy of Dr. E. L. Stevenson.
One of the first maps to show Pizarro's discoveries along the Peruvian coast.

A CLASH OF CONTRASTS

had to employ thirty persons for three days to
break up a single carved stone huaco (idol).
They dug up the treasures buried with the dead
and pillaged the towns, and they brought back
to greedy European sovereigns news of a land
of gold. Having, as it seemed to them, found
infinitely, they hoped infinitely and infinitely
dared.

The glittering career of the Indies had begun.
No empire was ever won in so grandiose a way;
no empire ever so monstrously destroyed.

IV

Picturesque are the figures of the two great
conquerors, Francisco Pizarro and Diego de
Almagro, lean and tireless soldiers, " either of
whom, single, could break through a body of a
hundred Indians," who amassed a fortune, the
greatest that had been known in many ages,
wasted it in wars with each other, and died so
poor that they were " buried of mere charity."

They dressed in the costume of their youth.
The marquis " never wore other than a jerkin
of black cloth with skirts down to his ankles,

[73]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

with a short waist a little below his breast. His
shoes were made of a white cordivant, his hat
white, with sword and dagger after the old
fashion. Sometimes upon high days, at the
instance and request of his servants, he wore a
cassock lined with martins' furs which had been
sent him from Spain," but his coat of mail was
underneath, as appropriate to his body as its
steely sheath to his heart. Illiterate, greedy,
fearless, and proud, wading through blood to
establish the Christian faith, he was murdered
at last; and as he fell, traced in his own blood
a cross upon the stone floor, kissed it, and died.
Then there was the able monster, Carvajal,
who went about accompanied by three or four
negroes to strangle people. He jeered as they
did so, " showing himself very pleasant and
facetious at that unseasonable time." He left
behind him a wake of spiked heads of " trai-
tors " to the king. He wore a Moorish burnous
and hens' feathers twined together in the form
of a cross on his hat, bought masses with emer-
alds for his soul's repose, and at the age of
eighty-four went to his execution in a basket,
saying his prayers in Latin. " Being come to

[74]

A CLASH OF CONTRASTS

the place of execution, the people crowded so
to see him that the hangman had not room to
do his duty. And thereupon he called to them
and said: ' Gentlemen, pray give the officer
room to do justice.' "

[75]

CHAPTER VI

PIRATES AND TREASURE FLEETS

" GOLD," said Columbus, " constitutes treas-
ure, and he who possesses it has all he needs
in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls
from purgatory and restoring them to the
enjoyment of paradise." Raleigh remarked
that: " Where there is store of gold, it is need-
less to remember other commodities for trade."

Gold — the evil spell overshadowing Peru,
pouring out her immeasurable riches to im-
poverish Spain. Gold — the most incorruptible
of all metals, itself the cause of most corruption !

Peru has always been cursed by wealth.
The gold of the Incas was the cause of their
destruction, the wealth of the Spanish con-
querors, theirs; it brought about wars among
themselves and ravages of foreign pirates upon
the sea. When the era of precious metals
seemed to wane, islands of guano were discov-

[76]

PIRATES AND TREASURE FLEETS

ered, apparently an endless source of wealth.
But it was greedily exhausted by foreigners.
Then came the discovery of nitrate fields,
where fortunes are merely scraped off the top
of the ground. But that particular territory
has been annexed by a prosperous neighbor.

One wonders what undiscovered wealth may
still be threatening this lavish country.

The days when fleets of treasure sailed from
the distant Cordilleras of the Spanish Main had
begun. The tall, enchanted galleons of Lima
spread sail, with their

" Escutcheoned pavisades, emblazoned poops,
Banners and painted shields and close-fights hung
With scarlet broideries. Every polished gun
Grinned through the jaws of some heraldic beast,
Gilded and carven and gleaming with all hues."

At first the argosies bore off the ransom of
Atahualpa, the golden ornaments belonging to
the Sun.

Albrecht Durer, in his Tagebuch, wrote of
having seen a boatload of such booty from the
Indies. " And, moreover, have I seen the
things which were brought from the new golden
land to the king — an entire sun of gold, a full

[77]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

fathom wide, likewise a silver moon of the
same size, also two rooms full of armor, all
manner of weapons, harness, war-trappings, and
strange accoutrements, curious raiment, bed-
draperies and many kinds of wondrous things
for divers uses, fairer to behold than marvels.
They are all so precious that they are held to
be worth a hundred thousand gulden.

" Nor have I in all the days of my life seen
aught that did so fill me with delight. For I
saw there fine-wrought things of cunning design,
and marveled at the subtle skill of men in far
countries. Nor know I how to tell of all the
things which I saw there."

Loot of golden treasure gave way to moun-
tains of silver, which poured forth their wealth
in such profusion that it staggers even oriental
imagination. Loading at Arica, ships brought
silver direct from the mines of Potosi. Then
there was plunder of Peruvian churches, jew-
eled chalices, and gold shrines. There were
emeralds from the north — a land where they
were sacred, small emeralds being sacrificed to
larger ones.

These glittering cargoes were carried home to
[78]

PIRATES AND TREASURE FLEETS

Seville, the " Queen of the Ocean." Its won-
derful Casa de Contratacion dealt with the
wealth of the Indies and, to quote Alonzo
Morgado, " the riches which flowed into its
offices would have been sufficient to pave the
streets of Seville with gold and silver slabs."

Like most stories of Peru, the gold and silver
it exported seem mere extravanganza. Con-
temporary accounts, mostly in cipher, may be
quoted.

In 1538, G. Loveday wrote to Lord Lisle:
" Spanish ships have returned from Peru so
laden that the emperor's part amounts to two
million ducats. . . . The emperor has bor-
rowed the whole from the owners." Being
" occasionally pinched for money," he found it
most convenient to seize the ships laden with
private treasure from his " Indyac of Perrow."

In July, 1555, the Venetian ambassador in
England wrote to the Doge and Senate of a
fleet of caravels, " all very richly freighted ac-
cording to the usual parlance of these Span-
iards, who invariably reckon by millions."

Federico Badoer Venetian ambassador with
the emperor, wrote (1556) that the king would

[79]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

obtain so considerable a sum of money that he
would be able to defend himself not only against
the Pope but also against France and any
other power, if necessary. By this time Peru
was raining gold and silver.

Father Acosta returned to Spain with the
fleet of 1587. In his boat were twelve chests
of gold, each weighing a hundred pounds;
eleven million pieces of silver, and two chests
of emeralds, each weighing one hundred pounds.
" The reason why there is so great an abun-
dance of metals at the Indies," he wrote, " is
the will of the Creator, who hath imparted His
gifts as it pleased Him."

Von Tschudi says that in the first twenty-five
years the Spaniards got four hundred millions
of ducats of gold and silver, which was, how-
ever, only a small part of the vast amount
buried or thrown into the mountain lakes whose
deep waters concealed it in underground caves.
" The Indians, taking a handful of grain from
a whole measure, said : ' Thus much the Chris-
tians have gained and the remainder is lodged
where neither we nor any one else is able to
assign.' "

[80]

PIRATES AND TREASURE FLEETS

Humboldt says that from the discovery of
Peru until 1800, the Old World received £516,-
471,344 worth of treasure from the New World.
No wonder Europe felt that gold lay about in
this land of gold, and that it was only neces-
sary to go and pick it up. No wonder Europe
still has an idea of America little changed
through four hundred years. And yet only
one fifth of the treasure of mines and grave-
mounds was supposed to be sent to Spain,
whose galleons came to the far-away West
Indies to receive it.

It was not long before pirates descended upon
Peru. Brittany was the first to fit out fleets
for the Indies " on pretense of carrying mer-
chandise thither," in fact, to molest vessels
coming from Peru.

Next, English buccaneers intercepted the
Spanish vessels, slow-sailing under weight of
gold.

" With the fruit of Aladdin's garden clustering thick in her

hold,
With rubies a-wash in her scuppers, and her bilge a-blaze

with gold,

A world in arms behind her to sever her heart from home,
The Golden Hynde drove onward, over the glittering foam."

[81]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Sir Francis Drake, with sixty armed ships,
looted the Pacific in the Golden Hynde. His
ballast was silver, his cargo gold and emeralds.
He dined alone with music.

In 1578 he took from the Spanish galleon
Cacafuego " twenty tons of silver bullion, thir-
teen chests of silver coins, a hundred-weight of
gold, gold nuggets in indefinite quantity, a
great store of pearls, emeralds, and diamonds,
. . . and many, many other things." Only
Queen Elizabeth and Drake knew the exact
amount that was taken.

For three centuries pirates and freebooters
harried the treasure-fleets of Spain. Toward
the end of the seventeenth century, the English
Calendar of State Papers compassionately re-
marks that foreign gluttony " keeps the poor
Spaniards in arms all along the coast of Peru
and puts them into strange apprehension, all
mankind seeming to conspire the murdering
and destroying them as common enemies, not
because they do worse, but have more than
ordinary."

Much of the twice-looted treasure never
reached Europe, for, following the example of

[821

PIRATES AND TREASURE FLEETS

the Indians, the sea-rovers buried large amounts
of gorgeous plunder in the mysterious islands
of the Pacific. Even to this day, syndicates
with steam-dredges and suction-pumps are fol-
lowing up the faded charts on which are in-
dicated the spots where piles of doubloons and
ducats and pieces-of -eight are stowed away.

[83]

CHAPTER VII

BACKGROUNDS

HERE lay Lima under a tropical sun, spark-
ling with treasure, a wilderness of rich carv-
ings and paintings, whose piles of gold and
silver shone through the thick perfume of
exotic blossoms. Long caravans, loaded with
the wealth of the provinces as well as the prod-
uce of sales in the remote interior, filed into
Lima, where countless gold- and silver-smiths
were awaiting their arrival. Weavers of silks,
velvets, and brocades, embroiderers, leather
and metal workers, sculptors, artists, makers of
glass and porcelain bells — all the most skilled
workmen flocked to the capital of New Anda-
lusia, the continent's center, for there they
found no lack of rich materials. Their fancy
might fashion uncontrolled, with assurance of
eager purchasers.

[84]

BACKGROUNDS

In Lima voyages of discovery to the Isles of
Solomon were planned. From Lima pilgrim-
ages were made in search of El Dorado, that
luxurious ruler who bathed himself in sweet-
smelling gums and then rolled in gold dust.
There is no more romantic chapter in the his-
tory of Peru than these pilgrimages in search
of El Dorado. Southey says they cost Spain
more than all the treasure received from her
South American possessions.

In Lima lived the viceroys who ruled all of
South America from Guayaquil to Buenos Aires,
" as by the divine right of kings." The viceroy
was served only by titled Spaniards. He was
drawn about by six horses, with sounding of
trumpets, and a personal guard of two hundred
Spaniards, " for the safety of his person and to
support the dignity of his office." The royal
seal, his insignia, rode under a royal flag upon
a horse saddled with black velvet and a gold
tissue foot-cloth, and was received with deep
bows. The viceroy was allowed three thousand
pesos to go to Callao, five miles away, and sixty
thousand ducats a year for personal expenses.

Greeted with a jewel sent to meet him half-
[85]

way, the viceroy reaches the bay of Callao.
Throughout Lima, the City of the Kings, —
founded " with God, for God, and in His name,"
— the streets are hung with rugs and tapestry
and adorned with green boughs and triumphal
arches. (On the arrival of the Duque de la
Plata, in 1682, eighty million piasters were
spent to pave the streets with bars of silver.)

" First comes a host of Indian warriors in
feather pomp. The city militia with pikes and
weapons glittering, the stocks of their guns
embossed with gold, the noble guard on horse-
back, . . . university professors in brilliant
gowns, the royal council and officials, the mag-
istracy in crimson velvet lined with brocade of
the same color . . . the chamber of accounts,
the audience on horses with trappings, the
scepter-carrier, heralds in armor with un-
covered heads, the master of the horse with
drawn sword, accompanied by four servants in
livery, pages with the captain of the watch, and
lastly, on a throne of red velvet whose silver
staffs are carried by the members of the corpo-
ration, while the alcaldes hold the cords, all in
velvet caps and gowns of incarnation color, rides

[86]

BACKGROUNDS

the viceroy under the royal banner and a canopy
of cloth of gold. Officers of the royal house-
hold, the royal guard in full armor with spear
and shield, bring up the rear on horseback."

The procession moves between companies
of halberdiers in a blaze of trumpets, bells,
and drums, under showers of flowers thrown
from carved balconies.

" When they reach the plaza the whole com-
pany faces the cathedral and is received by the
archbishop and by the superiors of the religious
orders; trumpets cease, knights dismount, and
the multitude sings a Te Deum.

" The procession again mounts and accom-
panies the viceroy to the palace gates."

" Five days of bull-fights follow, and prizes
are bestowed upon those who make the most
ingenious compositions in praise of the viceroy.
The rector of the university prepares a poetical
contest, at which the viceroy presides, seated
upon the rectoral chair, which for this occasion
glitters with the magnificence of an Eastern
throne. The nunneries entertain him with
music and present him with curiosities."

The churches of Lima were hung with velvet
[87]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

and tapestry, with fringes of gold and silver
and plates of gold hung in design, so that the
walls were nowhere to be seen. Spanish and
Flemish paintings surrounded altars of wrought
silver. The sacred vessels were of gold, covered
with pearls and precious stones. Santo Do-
mingo, the oldest of the brotherhood, possessed
a set of thirty candelabra of massive silver,
man-high, placed in a double row along the
nave of the church. The cloister contained a
famous orange garden with wrought-iron water-
ways and life-sized paintings of Dominicus.
In its center was a fountain, whose delicious
drip belied its hidden presence under feathery
vines. Indeed, why should the church not
claim vast riches? One sixth of the population
was in the monasteries, and those who were
not of the number bought the dress of a re-
ligious order in which to be buried. The whole
city took part in the sacred feast days, as many
in the procession as looking on: legions of
monks and thousands of nuns, priests, orders,
religious societies, and brotherhoods with their
standards, holy pictures, silver crosses, scepters,
and biers.

[88]

BACKGROUNDS

II

But what was happening to the silent people
among the mountain-tops who had stripped the
Sun Temples of their offerings to enrich the
adventurers from the Isles of Pearls?

Their irrigating canals had been destroyed,
the roads and the whole system of government
broken up, the people killed in chronic fighting
or by hardship in distant campaigns. Ten
thousand of the fifteen thousand in Almagro's
Chilean army had died of cold in the moun-
tains, or of heat and thirst in the desert. The
people were starved, villages at a time, by the
destruction of their crops. Moreover, the vil-
lages were given as fiefs to the Spaniards, who
received all the tribute. Many were exhausted
by dragging heavy artillery over the precipi-
tous mountains. Garcilasso describes the im-
mense beams that crushed the Indians stagger-
ing beneath their weight, who were relieved,
only on account of necessity, at every two
hundred paces. When Gonzalo Pizarro in coat
of mail covered with cloth of gold made his

[89] -

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

triumphal entry as governor into the City of
the Kings, the twenty-two pieces of cannon
which saluted as the procession advanced
through the streets, were carried on the shoul-
ders of six thousand Indians. All these Indians
were well trained in morality and sound doc-
trine by the clergy of Spain.

And worst of all, deep within the mountains
of Peru, hollowed by the gold and silver which
they had removed to enrich a country of
whose existence they would never be aware in
any other way, the Indians were dying, thou-
sands at a time. Skeletons concealed in old
mines are now found, covered with fibers of
silver melted by subterranean fires just beneath
the cold desert. Mines now abandoned can be
traced by piles of human bones.

A pair of bright green arms, petitioning,
stretched forth from the body which has dis-
appeared, were discovered in the bottom of an
ancient copper mine. The copper water had
filtered through and covered them with a green
sheen. Every finger is tense with supplication,
every fiber as in the moment of death; not an
eager tendon or nerve quivering to the surface

[90]

BACKGROUNDS

failed of preservation. All are petrified in a
bronze of nature's molding.

Stories are still told that the Spaniards drove
ten thousand Indians at once to work in a Peru-
vian mine. When their strength was exhausted
or they died from lack of food, the Spaniards
drove up ten thousand more — an extrava-
ganza of destruction matched only by the
scale of nature's waste. It must be said, how-
ever, that cruelty to the Indians was due not to
Spanish law, but to the abuse of it.

" In twenty -five years more than eight mil-
lion Indians were worked to death in the mines
of Peru."

" In a century, nine tenths of the people had
been destroyed by overwork and cruelty."

No wonder Spain was able to equip an Armada !

in

Against such a dark background flamed the
lurid Inquisition.

The working out of the encomienda, or system
of slavery, and the mita, or forced work in the
mines, was more horrible than the tortures

[91]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

going on in Lima only because of the scale on
which the destruction took place. In 1570 the
Blessing of the Inquisition had been conferred
upon Peru by Philip II. "At first heresy, then
blasphemy, sorcery, polygamy, insulting serv-
ants, opposition to jurisdiction, were punished
by whipping, banishment, prison, and death
by fire. In all cases the goods were confis-
cated." The disgrace of an executed man did
not end even with his death. " The sons and
daughters and grandchildren of the male line
lost their rights of citizenship. They might not
carry gold, silver, pearls, costly stones, corals,
silk, velvet, or fine cloth. They might not ride
on horses, carry weapons, or use any of the
things of which they were unworthy."

One star-spangled night, a man looking at
the sky remarked that the multitude of stars
was superfluous, thus assuming that God had
erred in creation, which was heretical blas-
phemy. Juan de Arianza appeared in the auto
of 1631 because, when reading the Scriptures,
he exclaimed: " Ea! There is nothing but
living and dying! " which sounded ill to those
who heard it. One man bragged that he had a

[92]

BACKGROUNDS

horse that could go sixty leagues in one day:
for that he had two hundred strokes of the lash.
Another had said he knew an herb which made
wives invisible before their husbands: he re-
ceived five years' imprisonment. A young
priest said he had seen the little Saviour in his
dreams: his punishment was two hundred
lashes and five years' work in the galleys. An-
other, who wished to found a new sect, had
called the Indians the children of Israel and had
declared that priests should marry, that there
should be no confessional, and that the Bishop
of Lima ought to be Pope. He thought the
Bible ought to be translated into the language
of the people and that he was holy as Gabriel
and patient as Job. This unfortunate was
burned alive; the proceedings of the suit against
him filled three thousand pages.

Throughout the seventeenth century Peru
was filled with mystic impostors, like the far-
famed Angela Carranza, most of whom were
dealt with by autos de fe. The use of coca was
considered a part of this sorcery and was pun-
ished severely.

The confession of a real or an accused crime
[93]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

was drawn out by torture and compelled by a
repetition of the torture. From the final judg-
ment there was no appeal. All was enacted
under seal of deepest secrecy. The torture
chamber was somewhat removed, so that the
screams of the victims could not be heard in
the street.

Three kinds of torture were used in Lima.
There was the compound pulley. A man's
hands were bound to his back, and he was
raised by a pulley to the ceiling by his hands;
heavy iron weights were attached to his feet.
Sometimes, instead of this, the victim was
strapped on a table, an iron collar about his
neck, and stretched in both directions without
risk of choking; but every bone in his body
was dislocated. The second method was smoth-
ering. The man's hands and feet were tied
above a bench, and on his upper arms, thighs,
and calves, lacing machines were adjusted.
Then a funnel was put in his mouth and water
was slowly poured in. The third method was
the worst of all. The feet were made fast, the
soles were covered with fat, then live coals
were brought gradually nearer and nearer — a

[94]

BACKGROUNDS

process of roasting. When the pain was keen-
est, a board was shoved between coals and feet,
and the sinner was asked if he would now con-
fess his crime.

By a bull of Paul III torture could not last
over an hour. After that the victim usually
had convulsions or lost his mind. A doctor
came, whenever such was the case, to authorize
further torture.

Thumbscrews were still used in 1813.

Dr. Lea says punishments in Lima were in-
flicted with greater rigor than in Spain. If it
were lashing, the penitents, without distinction
as to sex, were marched in procession through
the streets, naked from the waist up, with in-
scriptions denoting their offenses, while the
executioner plied the lash. The mob stoned
them as an act of especial piety.

The Inquisition had command of the press.
The tribunal of Inquisitors, judging all, were
judged by none and wielded absolute power.
The Holy Tribunal did not wish to shed blood,
so the accused were either strangled or burned.
The death-warrant began with the words Christi
nomine invocato, and officials of the law were

[95]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

asked to treat the condemned with pity and
moderation.

The auto de fe, the Act of Faith, was intended
as a demonstration of authority, a representa-
tion of the day of judgment, and it was the
highest exhibition of piety.

Following is a description of an auto de fe in
Lima, on the sixteenth of November, 1625,
quoted from Middendorf.

A procession went at daybreak on horseback
through the city, with trumpets, fifes, and
drums, to announce the execution. A platform
was built on the plaza, forty ells high, and a
stadium was erected for eight thousand people.
" Between eight and nine in the morning the
sinners were called for. A cross covered with
black crape belonging to the cathedral was
carried before them by four priests, all singing
miserere in a wailing tone. Each penitent
walked between two soldiers and other honor-
able persons. Silver boxes at the rear contained
the judgments.

" The viceroy came out of his palace accom-
panied by a guard of honor, musketeers, and
two trumpeters. Doctors, lawyers, and uni-

[96]

BACKGROUNDS

versity professors preceded the monks and the
priests, standard bearers in coats of mail with
clubs, the captain of the watch, and judges, the
oldest of whom walked by the viceroy, cavalry,
generals, and pages. The Inquisitors had hats
on top of their caps, worn only at that time,
decorated with the insignia of the Pope's leg-
ates. The militia had formed in line, and at
the appearance of the black and gold banner
of the Inquisition they lowered their flags in
salute. An altar was raised, a chair for the
viceroy and the high officials.

" The eldest one rose and addressed the
viceroy. ' Your Excellency swears and promises
upon his faith and word as a true Catholic
Viceroy appointed by His Catholic Highness,
to defend with all his might the Catholic faith,
which the Holy Apostolic Church in Rome
recognizes, to further its well being and growth,
to follow up the heretics and dissenters and
enemies, to give necessary help and aid to the
Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition and its serv-
ants, so that the heretics and disturbers of our
Christian religion shall be taken and punished
according to the law of the Holy Church, with-

[97]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

out your Excellency making any exception in
favor of anybody no matter what his station
in life be.'

" The viceroy replied: ' I swear it and
promise by my faith and word.'

" ' If your Excellency does so, as we expect
from your piety and Christianity you will, the
Lord God will bless all the works undertaken
by your Excellency in His holy service and will
give you health and long life as this kingdom
and the service of His Majesty needs.'

" A mass was read for the viceroy, and a
priest extolled from the chancel the glory which
comes to religion through the sacrifice of here-
tics. After the sermon, all pledged themselves
to tell any act contrary to religion which they
knew of, and not to give protection to any
heretic who was under the ban of the church.

' The denunciation was read as soon as the
culprit was named, led up out of his secret cell
and put into a cage from which he had to hear
his final judgment. He was dressed in the San
Benito, in itself a lasting shame. It reached
to the knees of the sinner and had his portrait
painted upon it surrounded by flames, devils,

[98]

BACKGROUNDS

and dragons. On his head he wore a bag-like,
high and pointed cap, on which were devils'
faces in flames. Gags were ready in case blas-
phemers should break out against the judges."
The burning is said to have taken place where
the bull-ring now is.

IV

In 1746 the city of Lima, — the gorgeous City
of the Kings, — at the climax of its luxury, was
utterly destroyed. Seventy-four churches, four-
teen monasteries with their paintings, lamps of
gold, vessels of silver, precious stones, tapestries,
and mirrors, their beautiful fountains, arches,
cloisters, and stairways in rare designs, were
laid waste. The building material was as rich
as the work upon it; as a contemporary trav-
eler expressed it: " If it did not exceed in
beauty, it at least equaled anything in the
world." In four minutes there was complete
desolation. Out of the whole city only twenty
buildings remained standing. Bridges broke,
palaces fell, the sick in the hospitals were buried
alive; nuns in their cloisters, monks in their

[991

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

cells, were suffocated in clouds of sulphurous
dust. Churches collapsed, crushing those who
were praying within. Even the Holy Inquisition
was obliged to suspend torture for the time
being.

The earth was like an animal shaking the
dust from its back. It swept forward in great
waves; walls were reeds on its shores, bending
to the tempest. Between the waves, clouds of
poisonous dust rose from the chasms.

Clocks stopped. Bells in the towers clashed
with limp bell ropes, till towers following in
turn stifled the din under smoking debris.
Everything was reversed; that which stood
still was set in violent motion, and moving
things were brought to rest. Shrieks for help
and agonized prayers mingled, until they, too,
ceased.

The sea retreated half a league from Callao,
gathered strength from unknown, hidden places,
and with a cosmic roar rushed over the entire
city, engulfing it and carrying all the ships of
the harbor across its walls and towers to be
stranded in inland gardens. All of its five
thousand inhabitants perished in the deluge,

[100]

BACKGROUNDS

and there was nothing left to give the least idea
of what Callao had been.

" To be preserved from its fury could only
be attributed to a particular and extraordinary
help of Providence." Yet thousands in Lima
who had escaped destruction or death from
fright died of fevers which came after. Those
who remained were occupied with burying the
dead in trenches. Famine as well as fever fol-
lowed, for the grain magazines of Callao had
been buried under water, ovens had fallen in,
aqueducts bringing water for .turning the mills
had been destroyed.

Nor was this all. Loath to give up its fiend-
ish hold, not yet glutted with destruction, the
underground fury visited the helpless ruins it
had created with five hundred and sixty-eight
earthquakes during the next year!

Processions of priests barefoot, with crowns
of thorns on their heads, cords about their
necks, and heavy chains on their ankles, taught
the people that the destruction was of God,
the roaring of the subterranean powers a warn-
ing against luxury. The prior of one society
went about covered with ashes; a heavy bridle

[101]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

cut his mouth, iron nails fastened his eyelids,
his back was bare. " This is the punishment
that God in heaven executes," said a lay
brother, walking behind him, as he let fall an
iron lash so heavily that the blood spurted.

The bones of Santo Toribio and Santa Rosa
were carried about; the viceroy and great per-
sons followed in mourning, with ropes about
their necks. Distinguished ladies, barefoot,
their hair shaved, walked in coarse clothes.
The dense stillness was broken by a monk's
voice: " Holy God, Holy God, be merciful to
us."

[102]

CHAPTER VIII

LIMA OF TWO ASPECTS

THE valley of the Rimac, where glisten the
towers of Lima, is only one of the river-ways
which cross the desert. The river of the ancient
oracle Rimac, " he who speaks," has given its
name in perverted form to Lima — the Spanish
city. The temple of the speaker was in ruins
long before Spanish days.

Like other streams of the west coast, the
great river Rimac has run through the gamut
of all zones. Hurrying down from the cordil-
lera, it spreads fertility far and wide over the
dry shore-valley. As far away as Chorillos,
" little water jets," the water of the Rimac
filters through, led astray for irrigation. But
its own journey to the sea is vain. The moun-
tain water is so precious to the desert that by
the time the stream has reached the shore, it
has not force enough left to make an outlet
across the beach into the ocean.

Irrigating ditches and crumbling mud walls
[103]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

divide gardens and vineyards and orchards of
wind-blown olive trees. Ruins of mud accumu-
late dust. Luxuriant nasturtiums drape every
dusty bank. Vestiges of fortresses, temples,
and grave-mounds of the three ancient cities of
the Rimac valley still terrify owners of the
sugar-fields, for the inhabitants of the sepulchers
sometimes return at night to sit beneath the
grape-arbors and listen to the murmur of irri-
gation streams which they made. Cajamar-
quilla, Armatambo, and Huadca were the names
of these cities, and the whirlwind was their
most distinguished god. His white-robed priests
ate neither salt nor pepper, and tore out the
hearts of men and of animals to offer them to
the gods on the platforms of temples.

Sometimes, too, the Huguenot hermit who
lived near the site of Huadca and who was
burned by the Inquisition returns to his little
caves at nightfall.

Lima is in the tropics. Its fruits and flowers
are those of the tropics. Yet it is neither hot
nor cold. There is no rain and not too much
sun, a pleasant monotony interrupted only by
earthquakes. An umbrella merchant once tried

[104]

LIMA OF TWO ASPECTS

to set up business in Lima. His act brought
forth an article in a local paper on rain, and
how on one occasion when it came suddenly
people had to get out of bed to find secure
places. Editorials on umbrellas followed.

No, there is little to fear from changes of
weather, not even thunder and lightning. There
is an endless summer, with streets under a con-
tinuous awning; yet, after all, only a summer.
The rainless desert is soaked in mist all winter
long. It falls suddenly like a veil over the bare
mountains and drenches the sunlight. A glimpse
through it shows a faint sheen, sharp cliffs hazy
with hues of light-green velvet, enameled on
closer inspection with multitudes of differing
flowers. Amancaes spring up dew-laden, those
queer, greenish-yellow lilies hanging on smooth,
leafless stems, giving their name to whole val-
leys which they fill. One such lies beyond the
gardens of the Barefoot Friars. A favorite
retreat for Limaneans, it is called the National
Garden. But scorpions lie under the stones.

" A suggestive kind of picture used to hang
in many a mediaeval church. It was painted

[105]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

on both sides of a board. On one side were a
pair of lovers walking hand in hand in a meadow
gay with spring. Flowers blossomed about
their feet; birds sang in the trees above their
heads.

" On the reverse was the grim figure of Death,
hour-glass and scythe in hand. The thing,
pendent from a single cord, hung free in a
draughty place, and the air twisted it about
hither and thither, so that one side and the
other was seen in swift interchange."

The Alameda, flanked with Norfolk Island
pines and marble benches, had in other days
rows upon rows of orange trees, stone fountains,
and basins as well. At five in the afternoon
gilded carriages streamed from palace gardens,
driving about so that their fair occupants could
greet their friends. Four thousand brocade-
lined, gold-trimmed carriages and innumerable
chaises shimmered through the heavy odor of
orange blossoms.

A traveler of the seventeenth century has
described the lady of Lima, clad not in linen,
but in the most expensive lace of Flanders,
slipped over an underdress of cloth of gold.

F1061

GRAPES RAISED BY THE BAREFOOT FRIARS, (LOS DESCALZOS), LIMA.

LIMA OF TWO ASPECTS

She glittered with jewels from head to foot,
her shoes were fastened with diamond buckles,
aigrettes of diamonds were in her hair — "a
splendor still the more astonishing as it is so
very common," he said. Nay, she even scat-
tered perfume through her nosegays. On great
fete days she tiptoed to church, enveloped all
but one eye in a silk-lace shawl. Beneath it
glinted a flower-embroidered dress of rarest
stuff, fluttering a multitude of ribbons; under
a petticoat of heavy brocade, miniature golden
feet peeped out, or slippers of peach-colored
velvet. The lady of Lima was famed for her
wit, entrancing the visitor as she sipped her
Paraguay tea from a silver-mounted gourd.

Little is left of former splendor. The statues,
the five rows of orange trees, the sweet smells
are gone. At the end of the long Alameda,
bordered with wind-blown trees and wrecks of
marble benches, is a fountain under palms and
Norfolk Island pines. Across a shady space
and above a high, yellow plaster wall, is the
monastery tower, where hangs a clear-toned
bell. Rugged hills rise abruptly. This is the
home of the Barefoot Friars. A labyrinth of

[107]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

paths leads to their orchards and gardens and
cells. Going every morning in pairs to the
markets to beg for food, they own nothing.
They live entirely on alms.

Just before two o'clock each day, the lame,
halt, and blind begin to gather from all the
town wards, each carrying a receptacle. One
poor woman with three or four babies seats
herself upon the plaster shelf skirting the wall,
setting down her pottery jar by the brook to
wait.

The bell strikes two long, clear tones. The
whole space is filled. The great monastery
gate is flung open, and two brown-clad monks,
sleeves rolled up, bring out between them a
steaming copper cauldron. The famished mul-
titude fall to their knees, many with difficulty,
and a prayer is intoned.

Then the procession begins: men, women,
and children in various stages of decrepitude.
Beggars with old tin cans totter forward as to
the Mecca of a long, hard journey. Decent-
looking women, very haughty, conceal their
pails under black manias. Each receives two
ladlefuls of meat, soup, and vegetables. The

[108]

LIMA OF TWO ASPECTS

kettle is filled again and refilled, till all are
served. After the little groups of people have
finished their cazuela, the heavy door clashes
together.

Beyond the turn of the wall, far down the
avenue of palms, the Mendicant Friars emerge,
four by four, and swing off across country for
their daily walk.

[109

CHAPTER IX

CONVENTS OPEN AND CLOSED

LIMA is the city of bells. Exuberant wedding
carols blend their metallic jingle with three
solemn peals for the dying. Hoarse, ill-cast
bells mingle with bells whose tones drip like
honey upon the monks beneath, who, with
cowls thrown back, are pruning monastery
gardens, bringing water to the fig- tree from the
fountain. Bells are pitched high and bells are
pitched low. Bells struck from without shake
off the clear ring circling their edges. There
are notes with a dry sonority like the clash of
bones. Sharp bells nag the persistent sinner.
Soft, sweet bells lure him to prayer. Quick
strokes near at hand only half conceal those
distant thuds, as if the tone had been struck
from the atmosphere, giving " a solemn, relig-
ious shimmer to the day."

[110]

CONVENTS OPEN AND CLOSED

Though they are more used than those else-
where, the bells of Lima, it is said, never grow
old.

The tones are of every quality, from the
tinkle of little convent bells calling the sisters
to midnight prayer, to the great bell of the
Jesuits, whose " clash, throb, and long swoon
of sound " strikes your chest. Silver and gold
in this bell cling to the clear, deep notes struck
from it and pulsate more than half a minute in
the tone, which carries far out over city roofs
to sugar-fields and vineyards. The left tower
of San Pedro was built about this bell in 1666
and it cannot be removed.

San Pedro has three portals on the fagade,
only allowed for a cathedral. The story goes
that when it was building, permission was asked
from Rome for a portal, which was given of
course without delay. When the church with
its three bronze-knobbed doors was finished,
the Vatican was outraged.

' What," word was sent, " you ask for one
door and make three? "

" For two doors one has not to have per-
mission," came the reply, " only for three. We

[111]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

would have had two, anyway; it was for the
extra one we needed to ask."

The church was finished and consecrated.
What could be done?

Monastery bells waken the monks at five
o'clock, masses follow every half-hour through-
out the morning. Burials are tolled very early
by two large, discordant bells, struck simulta-
neously, " a roaring, sinister, mournful peal."
At noon a great caroling honors the Holy One
to whom the next day is dedicated. After sun-
set three slow peals boom from all churches.
Old people stand, men take off their hats. At
eight sounds the prayer to the dead, at nine,
nine peals from every bell in the city are an
invitation to pray for those who die to-night.
This is the time when the bell in the left tower
of San Pedro rings. The left tower of the
cathedral is the home of many owls, which come
out at night to cry above the houses where the
sick are lying to warn them of approaching
death.

Because innocent voices are intercessors most
pleasing to God, Indian mothers in the moun-
tains prod the poor little savage babies, flop-

[112]

CONVENTS OPEN AND CLOSED

ping on their backs, with long, pointed, rat-tail
silver spoons, so that they wail intermittently.
In Lima the voice of the bells is lifted to avert
catastrophes and to beg for mercy in times of
earthquake. When the bells cease, the im-
portance of silence is assumed instantly, as with
the dropping of the wind.

A little jungle of cypress, magnolia, jasmine,
pomegranate, and fig clusters about a foun-
tain which one hears rather than sees. Con-
tralto bird-notes seem to come from far away,
like " the melodious songs of birds with yel-
low combs in the blessed land of Aztlan."

The garden is overgrown with passion-flowers,
concealing within their petals the sacred heart
and nails, even the crown of thorns. Night-
blooming cereus hangs darkly above the ground-
glass bells of the floriponda, so ineffably sweet
after sundown. Its leaves are narcotic. (In
Lima one is often given a nosegay of jasmine
done up in a floriponda flower.)

I sat waiting on a bench in the cloister garden.
Missionary priests were showing maps to little,
fluted nuns. Others in black robes and furry

[113]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

hats paced up and down the cloister, fondling
small missals and stopping around the corner
to gaze at me through the wrought-iron grill.
Mediaeval life in full swing, complete from a
glance of the eye to the jaunty stick cocked
under the Don Juan cloak!

One of the priests carried two phosphorescent
beetles in a piece of sugar-cane.

In this convent young girls are taught that a
" wife should be loving and faithful, tolerating
the defects of her husband, trying to make
herself esteemed by him, to soften for him the
sorrows of life, cultivating abnegation, even-
ness of disposition, tolerance, and sweetness.
She ought never to think that the faults of her
husband could excuse her own."

Very different was the Dominican convent
of Santa Rosa.

An illuminated manuscript hung at the portal,
an absolution for those who worship here, sent
by the Pope several hundred years ago. The
recess in the wall was paved with cobblestones.
Antique paintings of saints hung frameless
above. Beside the huge doorway, heavily
barred, was a turnstile in the wall, with solid

[114]

CONVENTS OPEN AND CLOSED

partitions between the shelves to prevent a
glimpse within. The staring word Paciencia
was written above it. Utter silence!

Rosa Mercedes and I tiptoed through a nar-
row doorway, under the word Modestia. We
sat on a bench in front of a wooden grill with
hexagonal openings. A vague, distinctive smell
drifted through it. On the other end of the
bench a woman was softly sobbing. We waited
half an hour or more.

The week before, the birthday of Santa Rosa
had been celebrated in the cloister where she
lived. The week after was now being cele-
brated here, where she died. As I listened,
there was an explosion of fire-crackers within.

Beyond a wide space on the other side of the
grill was a fine wire netting, so heavy that only
a shade, a brush of a veil, a suggestion of a
smile could penetrate. A soft sound came
through the blackness, and a voice unthinkably
sweet said: " Buenos dias, Rosa mia." It was
the Sister Margarita, who had been thirty years
behind those bars without a glimpse of friends,
buried to the evils of the world, consecrated to
Santa Rosa.

[115]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

The voice began to speak.

" Our glorious Rosa! Let me tell you that
when she was only three years old the lid of a
heavy chest fell upon her thumb. She looked
up at her mother and smiled. She concealed
stinging herbs in her gloves, and when visitors
came, she rubbed pepper into her eyes, so that
she could neither see them nor think of what
they were saying. Rosa santisima!

" When she sang to her garden the canticle:
' O all ye green things of the earth, bless ye
the Lord,' the trees clapped their leaves to-
gether, and even the vegetables lifted up mur-
murs of praise. She invented hymns to the
Virgin and sang them antiphonally with a bird,
though she was often surprised at being able to
understand the speech of unbaptized beings.
One day in the garden a black and white butter-
fly hovered above her. Thenceforth she under-
stood that it was decreed that she should enter
the order of Saint Dominicus. Her life from
that time on was a series of acts of self -mortifi-
cation. Rosa inocentisima!

" She divided her day into twelve hours of
prayer, ten hours of millinery work, and two

[116]

CONVENTS OPEN AND CLOSED

hours of sleep. She was constantly aware of
the presence of the angels. Rosa purisima!

" At sixteen she entered the sisterhood. She
prayed to a picture of Christ until it broke into
a sweat. She prepared clothing for the infant
Jesus by prayer — fifty litanies, nine hundred
rosaries, and five days of fasting made him a
little garment; and for toys, she said: ' I give
my tears, my sighs, my heart, and soul.'

" She wore a belt lined with nails, which she
locked about her, and threw the key down a
well. Half the nail belt is in the Santuario of
Santa Rosa, where the well was. It went dry
on the day of her death.

" She died here in ecstasy on this very spot
at the age of thirty. Rosa gloriosisima! "

I spoke with the voice. I asked about Santa
Rosa's shrine with its thousands of little silver
ex-votos in Santo Domingo.

' Yes, that is where she lies buried, except
once a year on the thirtieth of August, when
she journeys to the cathedral and back.

' The daughter of a viceroy once climbed out
of a palace window at night to take the veil of
Santa Rosa.

[117]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

" When the Pope was deliberating her canon-
ization, he was overwhelmed by a rain of roses;
when it was finally celebrated, the streets of
Lima were paved with silver bars.

" In 1720, when they dug to build her convent,
a strong odor of roses emanated from the ground.

" We keep her roses blooming throughout
the year; they grow from the 'same roots as
those she cared for; the rest of the time we
spend in embroidery and prayer."

Such a wonderful voice!

The Sister Margarita pressed a parchment-
covered book close against the netting.

" Here is a true life of Santa Rosa. It has
never left this monastery. When you read it,
you will understand why I have devoted my
life to God through the mediation of our glori-
ous Saint, our Patron, our Rosa de Lima. . . .
She stood upon these stones in the courtyard
where I now stand. Can you see why a stone
has not been changed? . . . There is no word
in this book which is not true. I know it by
heart. I will give it to you. . . .

" £5 catolica? " The voice was suddenly
directed toward Rosa Mercedes.

[118]

B.B.O5A. Hi 5-A.1TCT.A. JHAB.I.A. (fetjftlyltc Dochter
"•sent den. DertUn Rejel van. S.Deataricvy, tot LIMA, (fie vri*-

^igaeyfcjlfult van. VfefT-brDzarjocbocren dfm. 3,0 Agnt~if/6'.
:rt aLLitr qejforven de* *4.Auausfi,j<fy. vumder^aer^i. vytffekt*.

jtr in MU d!eiLoJfn,en auraiflen. Int if &e eerjfr pbmme.em vntcnt v&n.
"•f Jfmui vtferrtLlt, *&er kttplarttr* vami'H. firtSfrn. ffelaef deor At
Oyracr drr ffjc.DUi-KS.tjLi* vytjt* Kef van Jt* H.Jlftfur-tlUirf ftlfmmi^k
••ft On Jfmel Of^tJrMgtg.ffriemfihceff iefr tin ALlff Xt** intjfr Q.
I X it* 1 3 . ftf

SANTA ROSA DE LIMA, FROM HET WONDER LEVEN VAN DE H. ROSA,
BRUSSEL, 1668.

" No, protestante."

"Oh! ..."

Her voice ran down the gamut of the scale.

" You will not then believe my book? " The
voice addressed me.

I replied that I should value the book more
than any one else to whom she could have
given it.

" Ah," she sighed, " then that is why I wanted
to give it to you."

A little pause.

" Good-by-ie," she said. A glint beyond the
netting.

" Good-by-ie, mia amiga," and Rosa Mer-
cedes and I stood alone outside.

Following is a Salutation to Santa Rosa pre-
ceding her no vena, published in Lima in 1902:

" God keep thee, O admirable virgin and
patron of ours, Rose of Saint Mary!

" God save thee, joy of the world, glory of the
city, star of Lima, crown of the fatherland,
most rich gold of Peru, treasure of the Indies!

" God save thee, flower of the church, rose
of humility, white lily of purity, olive of peace,

[119]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

fire of charity, most precious pearl, most beauti-
ful dove!

" We salute thee, O most loved spouse of the
Heart of Jesus! Much cherished daughter of
most Holy Mary, living image of thy mistress
Catherine.

" We praise thee, O example of penitence!
Chosen from thousands, patron of a new world.

11 We bless thee, O Most Fragrant Rose, Most
Precious Rose, Most Innocent Rose, Most Pure
Rose, Most Illustrious Rose, Most Holy Rose,
Most Glorious Rose!

" Rosa fragrantisima, Rosa inocentisima, Rosa
purisima, Rosa ilustrisima, Rosa santisima, Rosa
gloriosisima! "

[120]

CHAPTER X

ANOMALIES OF LIMA

THEY sat about the dinner table — a delight-
ful, stammering, scientific gentleman, who ad-
vised 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 cosmo-
politan club man, whose chief interests in Lima
were cricket and polo. There was a man who
was collecting everything from pearls to re-
duced 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

[121]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

chin, face the sun, and are too big to enter the
British Museum. That led toward the archeol-
ogist.

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.

[122]

ANOMALIES OF LIMA

" Tres 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 re-
plied. "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."

[123]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

He seemed to like to talk about their adven-
tures. 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 es-
cape. 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.

[124]

ANOMALIES OF LIMA

" 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.

n

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

[125]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

beyond the mountains, huge snake-skins, over-
grown orioles' nests, necklaces of mummies'
teeth, and carved cases of huacos dug from
Yunca grave-mounds — the pottery of mum-
mies. 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 bub-
bling, somewhere within the clay form, was sup-
posed 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 var-
nished 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 fel-

[126]

ANOMALIES OF LIMA

low 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 par-
rot," 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

[127]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 fan-
tastic head with waving antennae. A cactus
forms the background.

The sun looks forth from the heart of a star-
fish. 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 pas-
sion-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
[128]

ANOMALIES OF LIMA

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 por-
celain against a background of embroidered
Spanish shawls. A yellow bird, a cheireoque,
who knows everything, sat upon a perch but
did not sing.

in

Ricardo Palma, Peru's delightful litterateur,
has collected the national library since its de-
struction 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 In-
quisition. They also killed the golden oriole
which had sung in the trenches early one morn-
ing before the battle had begun.

The distinguished writer of Peruvian tradi-
tions 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

[129]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

surrounded by books under a far-away skylight.
There happened to be open a volume of his-
torical 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 proces-
sion with his big mace of silver, and black serv-
ants 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 land-
ing 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 enforce-
ment of the law was too difficult, and the cus-
tom 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: " Odo-

[130]

ANOMALIES OF LIMA

ray 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 cor-
dillera. The locks of hair which fall in graceful
disorder over the ermine of her shoulders, imi-
tate 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

[1311

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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.

[132]

A GLIMPSE OF OLD-FASHIONED LIMA.

ANOMALIES OF LIMA

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 uncompre-
hending Italian troupe, Lima demanded Mi-
gnon, and the manuscript opera was returned to

[133]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

the upper, right-hand drawer from which its
composer now drew it.

" I am transcribing the melodies of the In-
dians 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 yaravis which suggested those deep
valleys lost among the mountain-tops.

" You know the yaravi of the Indians? It is
a peculiar music, a melancholy idyl reflecting
the somber Indian character — a music of ex-
tremes, for no other is so dismal and so sweet.
It wails in a minor key through strange Qui-
chua words, the language of the Indians.

" Many of these melodies I have used un-
changed. 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."

[ 134 ]

ANOMALIES OF LIMA

I asked if the Indians sang unaccompanied.

" There is sometimes a reed-flute accompani-
ment," 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 intel-
ligible by the sadness or cheerfulness of the
tune."

There is a legend that a priest in early Span-
ish 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 Mourn-
ing? ' 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

[135]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

terribly uniform; and so is their music. Yes,
even their suffering is consistently monoto-
nous."

I asked about the libretto of Ottanta.

" It is the only one of the great dramas deal-
ing with exploits of kings, acted before the Inca
by young nobles, still told by the people. Ol-
lanta 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 Elegie 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. Noth-

[136]

ANOMALIES OF LIMA

ing can be indifferent. It turns a whole land-
scape 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 indefi-
nitely 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

[137]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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.

Certainly nowhere in Peru are contrasts more
marked than in Lima of to-day, with its splen-
didly carved balconies of former times, its scav-
enger 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

[138]

ANOMALIES OF LIMA

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 pro-
duced 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.

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PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Lima — with its botanical gardens, condors
and llamas in cages, long allies of royal palms,
and its cement tennis courts where English
people are drinking tea; its venerable univer-
sity, the oldest in America, and its aimless daily
driving around and around the Paseo Colon;
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 earth-
quake-rooms of solid masonry! Lima — where
one discusses at some time or another every-
thing 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."

[140]

PART II

IN THE MOUNTAINS

" And daily how through hardy enterprise
Many great regions are discovered,
Which to late age were never mentioned,
Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru?
Or who in venturous vessels measured
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

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 or-
chards and wheat-fields lie spread out in a recess
of the mountains, and strawberries redden to per-
fection. 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
[143]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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.

[144]

A TRESTLE OF THE HIGHEST RAILWAY IX THE WORLD, ACROSS THE IN-

FIERXILLO.

THE HIGH REGIONS

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 ad-
vanced in a tide of flame down the mountain-
side 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,

[145]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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. Abun-
dant rain falls, but cold prevents it from cover-
ing 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

[146]

THE HIGH REGIONS

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 trop-
ical 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 col-

[147]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

lapse 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 dis-
covers all the bright colors in the hills of por-
phyry 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 hori-
zon. 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

[148]

THE HIGH REGIONS

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-blind-
ness, cured only by fresh vicuna flesh laid upon
the eyes, so the Indians say.

The over-arching vault is indigo. Desolation
is brightened by a radiant light, infinitely at-
tenuated, " 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

[149]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 possi-
bility of being broken at any instant by a gi-
gantic 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, mad-
dened 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.
[150]

THE HIGH REGIONS

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 unin-
terrupted 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.

[151]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

II

How appropriate it is that quicksilver, a liq-
uid 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 " eter-
nal 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 ver-
milion 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 sub-
terranean fires within its deep veins. Silver
being the only produce of the soil, the neces-
sities of life have to be brought from afar. It

F1521

THE HIGH REGIONS

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 re-
vengeful 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 Fran-
ciscan 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 pre-
caution to drop a bead of his rosary here and
there as he went along. When at last the
monk stood marveling a'c 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 pur-
suing a vicuna up the mountainside. He
grasped at the bushes as he scrambled up a

[153]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

steep cliff. One came up by the roots, which
were hung with globules of silver. That par-
ticular vicuna hunt took place on a mountain
called Potosi. The discoverer of the mine of
Potosi was murdered by a Spaniard named
Villarroel, who became its proprietor. The
murder was an unnecessary precaution, how-
ever, 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 en-
countered was in finding water enough to wash
the silver. The hills about Potosi gleamed
with as many as six thousand little fires, smelt-
ing 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

[164]

THE HIGH REGIONS

means of torture to those who worked in con-
tinual 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 dis-
appear like magic, leaving little chains of foot-
prints 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 vicuna, crea-
ture of quickness and flight, lives upon the
coldest heaths and in the most secluded fast-
nesses of the mighty Andes and seldom de-

[155]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

scends 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 vicuna defies pursuit or capture and dis-
appears 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 sol-
emn 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.

[156]

THE HIGH REGIONS

Cousins of the vicuna are the awkward hua-
nacus, which drink brackish water as gladly as
fresh and seek a favorite valley where they
may breathe their last and pile up their accu-
mulated 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 be-
yond the haunts of vicunas, 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 high-
est air or sweeps down upon his prey with a
deafening whir of wings.

[157]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

The condor, a symbol of light, who circles up
to the ether of outer space on an almost imper-
ceptible, tremulous motion, or proceeds undis-
turbed, 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.

[158]

CHAPTER II

A MEGALITHIC CITY AND A SACRED LAKE

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

[159]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 histori-
ans? A people who used copper for iron,
quipus for writing, llamas for horses; who sac-
rificed 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 op-
pressed, 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 with-
out a name, which has left only a few silent
ruins built by unknown peoples, of whom these

[160]

A MEGALITHIC CITY

" 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 treat-
ises 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 memo-
rials need; " terraces hollowed out of the moun-
tains to the very summits, bits of stone walls,
roads, aqueducts, or an occasional stone idol
with a shallow vessel for the blood of victims,

[161]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

perhaps a staring face on a pillar with project-
ing 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 Yu-
panqui to his "resting-place." The great pil-
lars 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

[162]

A MEGALITHIC CITY

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 sculp-
tured, 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 deso-
lation 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 light-
ning bird; and rows of square little worship-
pers 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 sculp-
tured 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

[163]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 appear-
ance 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 ex-
plorers and archeologists have been able to sub-
stitute for it. Men of sane judgment agree in
admitting that there is nothing to justify any
conclusion. But they also agree that the sig-
nificance of Tiahuanacu exceeds everything
hitherto discovered in Peru. It recalls Carnac
and Philae. It stands with the dolmens of
Brittany, Stonehenge, and the cyclopean ter-
races of the South Sea Islands, as a great riddle
of human history.

[164]

A GOD OF TIAHUANACU.

A MEGALITHIC CITY

II

Dropped in the bottom of yawning red gulfs,
with snow-peaks glistening overhead, are wild
valleys of differing climates, the mighty que-
bradas 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.

[165]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 val-
leys, the alpine glow is reflected in the quiet
surface.

There are no fish in the lake of Chinchay-
cocha, 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 out-
let 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

[166]

A MEGALITHIC CITY

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 ele-
phant searching the ground." A similar one
raises itself from the surface of the water, slap-
ping back and forth, seeking the point of the

[1671

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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

[168]

A MEGALITHIC CITY

tropical coal plants grow? The bones of mas-
todons 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 Hum-
boldt and Darwin found shells, once crawling
on the bottom of the sea, now embedded four-
teen 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 out-
let of its own. The rush of nauseous water is
poured into a shallow lake-twin not far away
— Poopo, through whose mysterious whirl-
pools the water drops back again in subterra-
nean 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

[169]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 in-
habited by a tiger, carrying on its head a mag-
nificent 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 sum-
mits 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 perpetu-
ated 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.

[170]

A MEGALITHIC CITY

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." " Six-
teen 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 hunt-
ing for it. Titicaca guards its secrets well.

The approach to the temple was a very com-
plicated 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," puma-

[171]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

puncu. 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 al-
lowed 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

[172]

A MEGALITHIC CITY

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."

[173]

CHAPTER III

MYTHS AND MONUMENTS

THE Indian worshipped the Inca, his sover-
eign, because of his divine origin, being the de-
scendant 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, de-
clares to be one and the same. Clear-cut dis-

[174]

MYTHS AND MONUMENTS

tinctions 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, Ilia 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 Uira-
cocha, 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;

[175]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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. (How-
ever 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 pas-
sage, 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 Qui-
chua-speaking people. The Sun was peculiar
to the Incas.

[176]

MYTHS AND MONUMENTS

The hazy red deity Con was the personifica-
tion 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. Vi-
ciously 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 omnipo-
tent, 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 kiss-
ing 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

[177]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 im-
plores thee, and grant him his petitions. Give
us life everlasting, preserve us, and accept this
our sacrifice."

The Inca mind could not reconcile the an-
terior existence of Uiracocha, Con, and Pacha-
camac 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 ap-
peared 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

[178]

MYTHS AND MONUMENTS

led thither through caverns of the earth. Sar-
miento relates that the Incas came out of a rich
window, by order of Uiracocha, without parent-
age. 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

[179]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 sym-
bolic 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 moun-
tains, 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 hand-
ful 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.

[180]

MYTHS AND MONUMENTS

They tried to appease things that might in*
jure 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 moun-
tain 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 bene-
diction for any enterprise. Mama-coca, its
spirit, was worshipped.

Coca, preferred to gold, silver, or precious
stones, was dubbed by the Spaniards " una
elusion del demonio"

[181]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 home-
coming 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 per-
fectly 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 gun-
powder, 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

[182]

MYTHS AND MONUMENTS

institutions, supplying want of instruments by
numbers of people." This world of ruins, com-
parable 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 ter-
races. 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 op-
portunity offered, the terraces widened, follow-
ing the natural excrescences of the mountain.

And when nature failed to point lessons,
models were provided by far-receding civiliza-
tions 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.
[183]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 em-
pire for two thousand miles among the moun-
tain-tops. The other, flanked by mud walls,

[1841

MYTHS AND MONUMENTS

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. Hum-
boldt 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 de-
scribes 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

[185]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 flag-
stones 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 con-
ducted 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

[1861

Copyright by Underwood £ Underwood, N. Y.
AX HEIR OF THE "MAKERS OF RUINS."

MYTHS AND MONUMENTS

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 ani-
mals 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. "Ma-
kers 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 ceme-
tery. 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
conies 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."

[187]

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

[188]

THE INCA AND HIS EMPIRE

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 vicuna, which lives above
the line of perpetual snow. Woven as they
were to be worn, from threads of invisible fine-
ness, the soft garments were made by cloistered
Virgins of the Sun. They were enriched with
bits of gold, silver, emeralds, a fringe of gor-
geous feathers, and with mother-of-pearl.
Pearls were not used, as their " search endan-
gered the lives of the seekers." The Inca wore
a suit but twice, then conferring it upon some
person of royal blood. These were the gar-
ments taken as sumptuous gifts to the mon-
archs 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

U891

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 dis-
tinction, worn in his colored wreath and point-
ing 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 par-
ents. 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

[190]

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 hieroglyph-
ics, 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 every-
thing 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, command-
ing 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

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PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 messen-
gers from the Inca to inspect what they were
doing at any time. Such as were found com-
mendable 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 fam-
ine, 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

[192]

INDIAN WATER CARRIER, SICUANI.

THE INCA AND HIS EMPIRE

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 them-
selves."

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 be-
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PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

nignly bestowed them for the people's good,
laws received the same veneration as the pre-
cepts 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 priv-
ilege. 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

[194]

THE INCA AND HIS EMPIRE

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 tri-
umph; 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

[1951

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 igno-
rance 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, pro-
vided only they would renounce their independ-
ence, 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

[196]

THE INCA AND HIS EMPIRE

rebelled, messengers brought word that " the
Inca pitied their folly which had so unneces-
sarily 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 sup-
plied 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 de-
scending into the comfortable valleys. When a
new province had been incorporated, the gra-
cious 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
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PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 Span-
iards wiped the great organization of the Empire
of the Sun off the face of the earth and
established upon its ruins a Christian civili-
zation.

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 in-
stead of a feather, the tip of a deer's horn.
Their chief weapons were slings bound about

[198]

their heads, and they adored the condor as their
principal god.

The Chancas were the most dangerous oppo-
nents 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 pre-
sented jaguars, droll monkeys, parrots, won-
drous condors, and giant toads and snakes that
were very fierce, kept in dens for the grandeur
of the court. People from all climates pre-
sented indigenous gifts, the most beautiful or
the most curious of any creature or plant within
their domains. Any known thing preeminent
in any way added the name of its peculiar ex-
cellence to the titles of the Inca. His court in
Cuzco consisted of more than eight thousand
persons, nobles who traced descent from the

[199]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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

[200]

THE INCA AND HIS EMPIRE

and palaces of the city. From the inmost re-
cesses 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. Accord-
ing 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.

[201

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

[202]

SERVICE OF THE SUN - GOD

sky and the bright objects within it. Sun wor-
shippers 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 gloam-
ing 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 mes-
sengers, bringing strength and power. They
precede to announce his coming in the morn-

[203]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

ing, 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 Inti-
huatana, 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,

[204]

SERVICE OF THE SUN - GOD

were also called coy a, " 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 morn-
ing 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, com-
panions 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, Light-
ning, 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

[205]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 re-
appearance 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 wor-
shipped 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 cele-
brated the great festivals in glittering dresses of
feathers with drums of serpents' skins.

[206]

SERVICE OF THE SUN - GOD

In Acllahuasi, near by, lived a thousand vir-
gins, 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 vicuna garments for the
Inca's' use and sewed upon them little plates of
gold and emeralds. They wove and embroid-
ered 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 rec-
reation 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 ver-

[207]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

nal equinox degrees of chivalry were taken by
young nobles who, having gone through all pos-
sible 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, puri-
fied with children's blood, they asked the mid-
day Sun to protect them from outward calami-
ties 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 quar-
ters 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. Con-
fession of sins followed.

The greatest feast was Intiraymi, the Binding
[208]

SERVICE OF THE SUN - GOD

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

[209]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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

[210]

SERVICE OF THE SUN - GOD

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 chil-
dren were strangled and buried with the silver

[2111

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 Vir-
gins 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

[212]

SERVICE OF THE SUN - GOD

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."

213]

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 recog-
nize the fact. Pious chroniclers tell of Saint
James on a white horse, who came with glisten-
ing 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 ostenta-
tion of their glory." On the authority of Gar-
cilasso, 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 Ata-

[214]

INDIANS AND LLAMAS

hualpa, 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, en-
tered 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 Immacu-
late Conception. One can read volumes of such
proceedings. Indian revolts were a constant

[215]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

interruption. The Spaniards gradually dis-
covered 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 In-
dians 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 sen-
tence 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

[216]

INDIANS AND LLAMAS

of Don Philip, his lord and master. He farther
argued that ... if his father with two hundred
thousand soldiers could not overcome two hun-
dred 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 com-
mitted any act of treason nor ever had it in his

[217]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 pro-
ceeded to the place of execution. . . . The
crowds cried out with loud exclamation accom-
panied with a flood of tears, saying, ' Where-
fore, 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

[218]

AN INDIAN PASTORAL.

INDIANS AND LLAMAS

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 discours-
ing 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

[219]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 In-
dians. 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 Jose Gabriel Condor-
canqui, called Tupac Amaru, whose descend-
ant, 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

[220]

INDIANS AND LLAMAS

the walls of their houses. They did succeed in
strangling a governor. In return, Tupac Ama-
ru'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; dis-
tinctive customs were to be laid aside. All
lapsed into spiritless dullness. The air of deso-
lation 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

[2211

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 an-
cestors. The only passion they have brought
with them through the centuries is remem-
brance 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 moun-
tain above. He will lighten the burden of the
traveler who seeks the mountain-top and pre-
sents 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 ma-

[222]

INDIANS AND LLAMAS

king 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, hay Hi, 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. In-
dians still salute the Sun temple on first enter-
ing Cuzco, though the nave of the Dominican
church stands upon the spot where the Sun
was worshipped in golden chambers, its Chris-
tian walls built of mammoth stones rolled to-
gether for the glory of the Sun. This super-
structure typifies the methods of the missionary
priests.

A wooden llama filled with fire-crackers is
exploded on Good Friday. By the roadside, an

[223]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 hea-
then 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.

[224]

INDIANS AND LLAMAS

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 tas-
sels 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

[225]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

placed in the list with emeralds, pearls, tur-
quoises, and other precious stones from Peru.

Is it astonishing that the llama makes his
own rules of conduct and exacts entire consid-
eration 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 hun-
dred 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 walk-

[226]

LLAMAS AT THE FALLS OF MOROCOCHA.

INDIANS AND LLAMAS

ing 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 pend-
ants 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
aeolian harps is wafted into the perfect stillness
of the frosty night. It is the llamas' apprecia-
tion of rest.

[227]

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 al-
lures — and how graciously it repels ! Yet its
beauty is not merely beauty. It flashes sug-
gestions 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 desid-
eratum 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 Dios are vestiges of an Inca road.

[231]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 re-
sulting only in loss of life then as now. They
retreated, submissive before nature's impreg-
nable 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 subse-
quent invaders. Even if the conquered sav-
ages 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 per-
secution, 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"

[232]

A LAND OF ADVENTURE

of some of the savages assume a strange signifi-
cance.

Where the Madera and the Amazon meet
there is a great island, a river island hundreds
of miles in extent. Its name is Tumpinam-
baranas, and upon it are remains of gigantic
buildings. Was this the fabulous country,
Paytiti of mystery, powerful in riches, a legend-
ary 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 mal-
formation, 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

[233]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 Guatavita:

" 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

[2341

A LAND OF ADVENTURE

middle of the lake. There the chief plunged
into the water and washed off his metallic cov-
ering, 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: " Undoubt-
edly this piece represents the . . . cacique of
Guatavita surrounded by Indian priests on the
raft, which was taken on the day of the cere-
mony to the middle of the lake " for sacrifice to
its goddess.

11 Humboldt saw the staircase down which the
gilded man and his train in jaguars' skins de-
scended to the waters of the lake of Guatavita.
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 Guatavita. 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 de-
struction." It became the name of a mythical

[235]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 Do-
rado had gradually become. For these buc-
caneers who set out with an arrogant army to
conquer the Cinnamon Country, nature became
the supreme fact of existence. Famine, per-
petual 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 Ama-
zons 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 un-
doubted truth that there had been formerly

[236]

A LAND OF ADVENTURE

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 na-
ming 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 lurk-
ing 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

[237]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

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 con-
cealed in jungle depths. Dark crimes can also
be hidden in the half-light, covered close under
the thick veil which shrouds the land of mys-
tery.

This Peru, approachable from the Atlantic,
the " monstrous thicke wood " of the early
travelers, still remains undisturbed. Illimitable

[238]

A LAND OF ADVENTURE

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 vegeta-
tion; wide stretches of unpreempted soil, sparse-
ness 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. Na-
ture'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.

[239]

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 Montana, 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 luxu-
riant 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 every-
where upon the ground. A mammoth iguana,
munching the flesh-colored bignonias, falls oc-
casionally from the tree- tops.

Small, richly plumed parrots nest in the rock
[240]

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

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

[241]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

lavishness that plants and animals are given
endowments useless to them in their struggle for
existence. The bird which builds such a pala-
tial nest has no advantage over any other. Its
wondrous, unplantlike power gives to the sensi-
tive plant no superiority. Struck with paraly-
sis, 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.

Chatter of monkeys mingles with roar of
falling water, hairy manikins, shrieking and
gamboling, " very gentle and delightful apes,"
Father Acosta called them. Tiny, blear-eyed
monkeys scream in disapproval of all they can
see, hear, or smell. Scarlet-faced monkeys, owl-
faced monkeys, swing from branch to branch
with crazy gestures, " taking one turn of the
tail at least around anything in passing, just
provisionally."

Thick masses of quinar trees are draped in
luxuriant parasites, and agave bushes are filled
with red flowers. The wonderful maguey grows

[242]

IN THE VALLEY OF THE PERENE.

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

here, yielding water, oil, and vinegar, honey,
thread, needles, and soap. Its juice boiled in
rain-water takes away weariness.

Clear water drips over blocks of granite, cov-
ering the stone with moss in falling. The ter-
rible jaguar lies curled up asleep in some far-off
notch, gently purring. Ferns and palms, fore-
runners of the great empire of vegetation below,
cluster along the brooks swelled with snow.
" Tall and whispering crowds of tree ferns "
droop their filmy fronds from lofty, slender
stems. Ferns of every conceivable size and
texture smother rocks and decaying trees. Some
are as small as mosses, others appear monstrous,
like those of a moonlight night. Humming-
birds flit above the pomegranates or lose them-
selves in a banana blossom. " The rose-colored
plumage of the silky cuckoo peeps out like a
flower from the thick foliage."

It is an earthly paradise, where bloodsucking
bats emerge at night and lightning rages un-
controlled, destroying trees and cracking open
precipices. Pumas live in these clefts hewn
through the mountains, and they spring on to
the shoulders of a victim, drawing back the

[243]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

head until the neck snaps. Pumayacu is the
stream of the puma, with its tumultuous torrent
whose very stones are treacherous.

Such are the rain-soaked slopes of the Andes,
a tangled mass of jungle. The woods are all
enchanted. Thousands of fairies dance in the
sunbeams, and during the rain myriads of them
hide in the flowers. If disturbed, they disap-
pear underground. One can never be sure that
" what one surveys is what it purports to be,
nor even, that in surveying nothing, one is not
gazing through an invisible being," as Guene-
lette observed so long ago.

The half -Indian guide began to speak, taking
a coca-leaf from his fawn-skin pouch.

" Pigmies live in the undergrowth. They are
not more than so tall, . . . and very, very wild.
No, they're not monkeys. They have a lan-
guage, although we cannot understand it. How
do I know they live here? Why! I know!
Have I ever seen them? No. But — I've seen
their shadows.

" And then there are jaguars near here, jag-
uars with the hoofs of bullocks. At night I can
hear them springing upon the thatch of my thin

[244]

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

roof. They roar and roar and one might call
them the devil himself if one did not know that
they were jaguars with the feet of bullocks.
Have I ever seen them? . . . No, but then —
I've seen the prints of their hoofs.

" Here in the bottom of the river, lying full
length, lives the great Mother of Waters. She
is so long that she could stretch from bank to
bank and lie sleeping on either side at the same
time. That is why she lies lengthwise in the
river bed. Sometimes there is an awful, rum-
bling noise, like an approaching earthquake.
Then the waters of the river are churned like
the smallest mountain torrent tumbling over a
rock in mid-stream. The great snake lifts her
head, then her heavy body from the stream bed,
and crashes off through the jungle. The track
she leaves behind her is a desert waste; no
growing thing is left, and the wake is as broad,
why, as broad as this stream, under which she
is now lying," and he pointed with wide eyes to
the water, rushing headlong to join the Amazon.

All the snakes of that particular locality did
miracles, so I was told by a wise man who could
himself turn men into beasts at will.

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PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

" This river," the guide concluded, " used to
flow up on one side and down on the other,
until white men sailed upon it. Then one half
turned about, and the river now flows in but
one direction, as you can see."

As the gloomy, bottomless ravines descend,
the forest becomes more dense, with murmurs
of flowing water everywhere. Mists hang from
above, barely concealing the jagged, black
peaks. Sheets of continuous foam veil the side
of a polished cliff. Water drips over every prec-
ipice. Cascades tumble from one mossed basin
to another or let fall a clear column into
a rock-pool deeply buried in tropical vegeta-
tion.

Finally mountains and ravines subside, and
with the energy of one final, mighty leap, the
rushing water plunges into the heart of the
jungle, comes to rest, then glides out with the
flush of a flood-tide across the Land of Water.

11 As the serpents of this basin exceed all other
serpents in size, so does the Amazon exceed all
other rivers." As the whirl of branches is to
the trunk of a tree, as everything in nature is
tributary to something else, so are streamlets

[246]

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

in the mountains of the snowy desert to this
mighty river. Collecting itself upon the frozen
puna far up among the clouds, it gets an impetus
which makes fresh, wide stretches of ocean
thousands of miles away.

So vast is the Amazon that, like the Andes
which form a barrier to separate two worlds,
different species of animals inhabit its opposite
banks. It swarms with fish that will fight for
a right to live, and some of them, the paichi,
for instance, reach the length of ten feet and
must be caught by harpooning. The water is
full of swimming animals. There are river-cows
like sea-lions, and oceanic fauna such as frigate
birds and flying-fish. In the mud along the
banks are tracks of crocodiles and tortoises.

The Amazon has gained mastery over the
land and has turned it into a sposhy ocean,
interspersed with flats of jungle flowers. A
watery labyrinth, " an aquatic not a terres-
trial basin," it is the Mediterranean of South
America. The greatest river in the world twists
and turns about, makes short cuts across its
own bends and leaves behind a delicious lagoon
here, or a little, land-locked inlet there. The

[2471

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Victoria Regia spreads its great, leathery leaves,
and scarlet ibises tilt about upon them.

This land beyond the Andes is known as the
" rain-shadow." The already overflowing rivers
are constantly swelling, since it rains so vio-
lently that a stream of the Amazon valley can
rise fifteen feet in a single night. A passing
and re-passing is continually going on, for, as
the water flows back toward the ocean, the
winds above it are returning from the Atlantic,
bringing rain to moisten the jungle and to be
stopped only by the wall of the Andes.

Rain discloses the resources of the jungle.
Plants push, burst upward in astonishing growth.
Flowers paint themselves with ineffable new
colors distilled from the rain, and those whose
day has come and gone lie in heaps of yellow,
pink, and white petals on the ground, fallen
from beyond the tree-tops.

A single, heavy tapir, anta, the somber-
colored wood-cow, roused by the rain and
encouraged by the added gloom, wanders forth
to tear off new sprouts within its reach. Pec-
caries rustle by in little droves — wild pigs
which, it is said, will bite around a tree if their

[248]

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

object of attack has climbed beyond reach.
The minute, silky marmoset, filled with peren-
nial terror and shivering at the rain, has crept
into shelter, and just daring to show its wrinkled
little face, howls dismally.

It is after a rain, too, when the wondrous
notes of the organista, the sweet flute-bird, drip
through the trees, mellow, melancholy, yet with
a musical accuracy of pitch as clear-cut as the
circle of a drop of water fallen on a slab of
alabaster. These notes share the mystery of
the vast silence itself. Even savages rest on
their paddles to listen. Would you capture the
magician and carry the jungle-silence home?
You can take the little gray bird — but it al-
ways dies in captivity.

[249]

CHAPTER III

JUNGLE GLOOM AND JUNGLE SHEEN

SINCE the earth was first moistened by rain,
and plants first grew, no limit has been set to
the rights of vegetation in the jungle. Its sway
is uncontested. It has known no master. Its
insatiable desire to reach up and out and down
has been uncurbed and undirected. And heaven
seems to wish it well. Intensest heat, light, and
moisture are showered upon it. Under such
conditions, life would spring spontaneously into
being, were there not myriads of progenitors to
be responsible for whatever form it chose to
take.

All the creative force of nature is behind the
infinitely varying forms, and the frightful luxu-
riance of reproduction. Vegetation has the ex-
travagance of first geologic ages, bursting with

[250]

JUNGLE GLOOM

life, rejoicing in weird, vegetable arabesques and
green out-thrusts of leaves.

Amazing trees yield coloring matter of yellow,
red, and blue. Trees cure bites of snakes, the
malignant manzanillo infects any one who sleeps
beneath it. Then there is the cow-tree of milky
sap, the red-wooded blood tree, and those fur-
nishing food for curious animals, which trans-
form it into curious shapes. Beneath the iron-
wood, whose sharp edges are hard as steel, crawls
the sensitive plant. There are whole forests of
cinchona, whose beautiful flowers are forgotten
because of the value of the bark. The dead
man's tree grows here, whose stems are sucked
by witch-doctors to produce a trance; also the
wonderful tree of rain, which Boussingault re-
ferred to when he said: " By the light of the
moon we could distinctly see drops of water
dripping from the branches." The drier the
night the more water it condenses, letting it fall
upon the ground beneath. Ponderous leafage
overarches great trunks, columns of a giant's
castle, each with its peculiar color. While some
are smooth, others are deeply fissured or armed
with long spikes. Most of the tree-trunks are

[251]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

indistinguishable for the mass of vines " sculp-
tured " upon them. They cleave to the smooth
bark, darting out roots as they ascend. ' The
green eaves of foliage seem supported by pillars
of leaves."

Tapering ribbons sway to and fro, tangling
themselves in the long moss-beards. " Green,
fleshy chains " festoon themselves upon the
branches, and hang heavily on slender stems.
They stretch taut from one tree to another, or
rigid, fasten tree-tops to the ground. The whole
jungle is knit together. If a supporting tree
falls, the confused masses of lianas adhering to
it snatch at whatever is nearest for a fresh start.
They twist about each other tighter and tighter,
gaining always a firmer and firmer hold as they
ascend. Far up above, they will weave back
and forth a close fabric, spreading out wide
roofs of flowers.

Indistinguishable tree from creeper, parasite
from supporter, all are clamoring for space and
light and air. Those which have struggled
through to the top reach toward the scalding
sun or alternate cooling deluge, riotous, irre-
pressible in vigor, radiant with color, distilling

[252]

JUNGLE GLOOM

intense perfume, drooping with the succulence
of their own leaves and stems, breaking with
the weight of their over-developed fruit.

Vegetation invades everything. It even
shoots out over the water, covering it with
lovely forms. Hardly a growing thing can get
its impulse directly from the soil. That was
long ago preempted. There must be other
things to grow upon or in. Wherever there is a
suspicion of foothold, a new form of life springs
up spontaneously, gleaning nourishment from
whatever it touches, exuberantly prolific from
the start, parasites one and all, living at the
expense of some earlier comer.

Even parasites have their own parasitic
growth. Parasites flourish as trees self -grafted
upon trees. Draperies and tapestries and mo-
tionless cascades, this inundation of parasitic
life falls back again to the ground in great
growing clumps. What indeed is a para-
site?

Little rifts of color have collected here and
there, concentrated deep in the nooks and crev-
ices of trees, moulded into orchid form. Some
are tiny as mosses and grow upon the ground,

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PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

dewy - looking, little violet - colored flowers.
Some lie upon the water, some droop over the
edge of precipices, their great mass of fleshy,
aerial roots sucking damp nourishment from the
air. Certain trees seem destined by nature as
orchid gardens. Numberless varieties, each
with its peculiar bearing, perch upon the limbs,
night-scented blossoms with a spongy texture
fringed and fluted in a thousand ways; beauti-
ful monsters of crimson and black, whose queer
little phantom faces, with beards of fine hairs,
make mouths at you. Hot and moist, the im-
perceptible odor of each mingles with the mass
of other imperceptible odors, oppressive at last
by sheer force of numbers.

The habits of orchids, if so they may be
called, are amazing; for example: their attrac-
tion of insects and means of scattering their
pollen about on a moth's body; their bright
color luring day-flyers and their strong odor
night-flyers to the same flower; the elastic flaps,
a resource of others for a similar end. As Dar-
win said: " With parts capable of movement
and other parts endowed with something so
like, though no doubt really different from sen-

[254]

JUNGLE GLOOM

sibility, they seem to us in our ignorance as if
modeled by the wildest caprice."

Whimsical and wayward, restrained by no
precedent, an orchid dares defiance in all the
properties it possesses, odor, form, and color,
so that the line of its descent is sometimes im-
possible to distinguish. This anarchist of flow-
ers throws out an unexpected leaf or petal
wherever it chooses, and if interfered with, re-
fuses even to produce its own blossoms, veering
off in independence. The most elegant flower
that grows, able to conventionalize even nature
herself by lusciously designed leaves — patterns
whose suitable background would be courts of
kings — riots here alone in " languid magnifi-
cence," merely glanced at by a passing hum-
ming-bird.

If a tree or a vine has a little less succulence
than its neighbor or a little less vital impulse,
nature calmly watches it pounced upon and
extinguished. No one " compassionately tries
to save the unfit from the consequences of their
unfitness." Having endowed this prolific land,
the lavish elements can withdraw and survey
unmoved the scattering showers of seeds, that

[255]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

prodigal industry of plants in busily perfect-
ing seeds which will never be given an oppor-
tunity to grow. So little chance has a seed that
new attempts at life are more secure if supplied
by the energy of the parent stem. The elements
are not responsible for the death-struggle of
vegetation which results. As far as they are
concerned, each seed that falls and each little
shoot that springs upward would be given an
equal chance. But every form being equally
favored, its neighbors contest its right to live.
Cooperation to make life possible at all, only
begins when united force is needed to conquer
a common foe. Life here is for viper and vam-
pire as well as for butterfly, and the parasite
has an equal chance with the benevolent vine.
It is a battlefield where militant nature fights
in civil warfare through the ages. Plants once
given birth demand the right to make the most
of their own particular form of life, fighting for
sun, fighting for air, fighting for the right to live.
Ironically enough, warfare is fiercest between
forms most closely allied. " They interlace,
strangle, and devour each other." Parasitic
alliances are possible only between very diver-

[256]

JUNGLE GLOOM

gent forms, each benefiting by the use of what
the other does not need. Parasites are leapt
upon by other parasites; there is strife even
among them. Forever fighting with each other,
they all suffer equally from hereditary enemies
descending from above or creeping up from below,
capturing by attack or poisoning by stealth.

Plants not only crowd their neighbors out of
the soil, they seem to dispute the air as well.
Each begrudges the other a breathing space.
The ingenuity of nature is taxed to invent com-
pensations to each for lack of what it has a right
to expect as its due. An impenetrable disguise
of buttresses is substituted for roots and want
of underground space. Air-roots drop from
branches. Smaller trees, adapted to the dim-
ness, live in the shade of larger ones. Nature
uses every subterfuge, restrained by nothing
known as customary. Plants maintain a life
whose pertinacity we have no scale for measur-
ing. Each asserts its own individuality and
insists upon it with inexhaustible energy. Each
is convinced of its own desirability, convinced
it was intended to live, proclaiming that in-
tention to the death of its neighbor.

[2571

Out of the remains of the dead arises a new
generation with an increase of vital impulse.
The instant a plant has reached a sense of com-
pleteness, it is sprung upon, twitched from decay
into the vitality of some lovely form whose time
has come. Whatever lapses into the past is at
once metamorphosed. Whatever should look
forward for opportunity would be snuffed out
by some exuberant growth determined on im-
mediate perfection.

There can be no seasons in the jungle, no
general periods of growth, maturity, or rest.
All stages of development are flaunting from
independent plants in a single locality. Each
is appropriating whatever it can use in the
elements or in its neighbor to weave into its
own perfecting tissue. Each is as little influ-
enced by the other as are two trees rubbing
against each other with the wind, mingling their
branches and blending their foliage. Though
forced during a lifetime to closest proximity, they
are members of remote families, and the nature
of neither is modified in the slightest degree.

Indeed, all seasons concentrate on a single
tree; for some of the massive fruits require

[258]

JUNGLE GLOOM

more than a year to ripen, so that fruit is matur-
ing and flowers are budding on the same tree.

Only heat can penetrate. Light is almost
excluded by the unbroken canopy of interlaced
branches. It is left up above, absorbed into
whirls of vivid flower or expanding the luscious
leaves. Heat and moisture are imprisoned.
Plants flourish in " the boundless, deep immen-
sity of shade." Left in wan half-light they push
up into the " green gloaming," adapted to the
dimness yet straining upward to the light which
would kill them if they could reach it. Even
bats sometimes make mistakes and emerge at
noonday, unhooking themselves from branches
on which the sun has never shone. All forms
are confused, and the strange shapes but half-
seen are concealed by others no less vague.

Deep within the wilderness, more silent than
the noiseless solitude itself, lies a mysterious
lagoon sacred to the giant Mother of Waters.
All about, coiled in the half-putrescent, vege-
table mould, are myriads of venomous creatures,
gliding, writhing, crawling in and out. Minute
snakes, whose bite is death, curl in tendrils or
lie like coral necklaces upon the leaves. Larger

[259]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

ones drape in vinelike garlands overhead, to be
distinguished from a blossoming festoon only by
a sudden, loose-swinging end.

But the pool! What wet blackness and horrid
mystery! The surface of the water is never
ruffled by a breeze. It has no moods. Unper-
turbed in perpetual gloom it lies in quivering
stagnation, oozing nauseous odors under the
twilight of a full, tropical noon. No roseate
spoonbill, no delicate white heron tilts about
upon its banks. The black, stagnant water can
barely cover the solid, seething mass of " hairy,
scaly, spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless
monsters, without name . . . wallowing, inter-
wriggling, and devouring each other."

Here sleeps the Mother of Waters, conge-
nially imbedded, her shining coils slipping about
over each other — the great yacumama — the
mighty boa-constrictor, who can swallow almost
any creature whole, and whose breath withers
any beast lured within reach by her fascina-
ting poison. Humanely she intoxicates before
squeezing the unyielding bones to pulp of di-
gestible consistency.

Sometimes she unfolds her darkly iridescent
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JUNGLE SHEEN

coils out into the hospitable closeness of the
jungle. Laboriously she winds upward in over-
arching trees; but, as if too languid, leaves
part of her frightful weight dragging below.
She looks moss-grown, like the stem of an old
tree, and treelike, remains motionless for days
at a time. When she does wander forth in
search of prey, a track follows through the lush,
yielding vegetation — her huge weight linger-
ing heavily upon succulent stems.

II

The atmosphere is full of color — weird,
miasmic exhalations. Next to the shade linger-
ing under the dark velvet foliage on the edges
of streams, the glossy leaves toss off sheets of
silver light or reflect a " russet glamour " from
their under sides. Beds of yellow butterflies
settle along river banks and concentrate the
sunlight with blinding intensity. Every leaf
seems to blaze like a gem; even the black
shadows pulsate with inner light. It is part of
jungle mystery that even the light comes in
iridescence.

[261]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Legions of beautifully colored spiders silently
spin their geometric webs. Insects all dipped
in silver, with waving antennae laid back along
their heads, red beetles with golden heads and
wings of chintz, buzz to and fro. Moss-grown
leaf -insects — ossified, living scarabs — walk
about on tree-trunks. Stinging bees and wasps
fill chinks of jungle trees with wild honey.
Myriads of ants swarm: driver ants; parasol
ants carrying a bit of leaf about over their
heads; fever-bearing ants, and ants that live
in the hollow, white stems of the cecropia tree
and furnish the sloth's food. Centipedes hurry
by, legs moving with " invisible rapidity like a
vibration," and numerous flies, ticks, mos-
quitoes, cicadas, dragon-flies. Some of these
strange beings need two or three years of larval
life to prepare for a flight of a single hour, pos-
sibly after sunset. What a limited idea of the
world must they have who never see the light
of day!

We are assured that the unseen world is a
very substantial place; so is the microscopic.
And an ear-trumpet reveals a new universe of
sound. What a region of ultra-violet murmur-

[262]

JUNGLE SHEEN

ings must lie beyond that we never catch at all !
If only an elemental apperception can grasp
the vastness of the jungle, what can be said of
the delicacy of its silver-point drawing? For
here is greatness on the invisible scale, " a
creation at the same time immense and imper-
ceptible."

Side by side with sloths, ant-eaters, and ar-
madillos, dwarf descendants of mastodon days,
still lumbering about undeveloped in spite
of their ancient lineage, humming-birds have
flashed through the ages. They have profited
by cycles of centuries to elaborate their little
bodies beyond imagination with pendent beards,
crests, waving ear- tufts, and ornaments colored
in fantastic manner. Their tails, fashioned in
queer shapes, always consist of ten feathers.
Even the tiny, sharp feet, minute as they are,
differ greatly in form and are sometimes cov-
ered with a delicate, white down. There are
feathers on a humming-bird's eyelids. The
little saw-edged tongues for extracting insects
from flower-honey all differ. Their bills are as
long as their bodies, and their tails are twice as
long.

[263]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

What can be said of their color, brighter than
any other in nature? The hue of every precious
stone, the luster of every metal sparkles from
some part of the diminutive body. Often only
a twinkling of emerald-gold-green or ruby-
colored light reveals their passing —

" A route of evanescence with a revolving wheel! "

Sometimes the flash comes from throat or back
or brow of iridescence, sometimes from a body
sheathed in little gold scales; sometimes from
the very tips of long white feathers frilling the
neck about. The colors come and go, shift and
change with every motion, " embers flung about
by invisible hands." The wing feathers are gray.
No eye could discern anything but a dusky film,
so a bright display would be lost!

And all this is within a thimble's compass,
for the smallest of all humming-birds grows in
Peru. It is hardly larger than a bumblebee, and
the giant of the race measures less than a swal-
low. Doctor Brehm says the Dwarf Hum-
ming-bird is the only one that has a song.

There is as much diversity in the names of
the humming-bird as in everything else pertain-

[264]

JUNGLE SHEEN

ing to it: Tresses-of-the-day-star, Rays-of-the-
sun, Sun-gems, Sun-stars, Flame-bearers, Frou-
frou, Pecker-of-flowers, Flower-sipper, Honey-
sucker, Sipper-of-roses, Fly-bird, and the sweet
Colibri. It has, besides, many local names, as
Tominejo, tomin being the smallest weight.

Birds migrate south from the tropics as well
as north. The humming-bird whirls through
the jungle and luxuriant valleys of the Andes,
out to islands in the Pacific, and follows the
fuchsia down to the very boundaries of barren-
ness in the tail of South America. A mere dab
of brain can engineer this infinitesimal motor
from Patagonia to Canada. One minute Flame-
bearer lives only inside the crater of an extinct
volcano in Veragua, marked with red like the
fire-stealer wren of Brittany, and many battle
with storms of the high Andes and can be seen
mingling their vivid flashes with snow. They
who live by means of flowers! One called
Sappho, a blend of red and green, lives upon
the bleak heights of Bolivia, frequenting the
haunts of the condor.

It has been thought that the humming-bird
has no wish-bone, its frame being more compact

[265]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

than such construction would allow, in order to
withstand the immense strain of its wings —
immense, yes, measured by millimeters. At
any rate the largest organ is the breast muscle,
and the heart is three times as large as the
stomach. Its senses are alert, and a well de-
veloped skull could prove the excellence of the
brain beneath did not its habits do so.

The humming-bird always trusts itself to the
air for however brief a distance, and flings its
supple body about from one flower to another
in vibrating flight. Now it hovers near without
disordering a petal, now it hangs from tall
grasses by the tip of its thornlike bill, a spark-
ling of wings with spurts of precious stones in a
setting of petals, lost in another instant in wide
air.

Never smutted by earth, because never touch-
ing it, the humming-bird juggles among the
flowers. It never follows all the flowers of a
single bush nor even exhausts all the sweetness
of a single flower — "a dart, a glance, a sip, and
away; " butterflies, a symbol of caprice, are not
more fickle. This utterly erratic creature per-
forming its aerial gambols holds within itself the

[266]

JUNGLE SHEEN

reason for its being unmolested by any enemy
— the chase not being worth the morsel !

Ineffable is the whole field of its labor. The
coarsest materials of its nests are the finest
straws it can pick up. Inside they are lined
with down and spiders' webs. Consistently
they are attached to a pendent branch or long-
swinging vine. Thither the humming-bird flies
to supply a family's microscopic wants.

To a giant looking through a microscope,
what a revelation of the infinite industry of
nature in worlds beyond the grasp of any sense
of his, the humming-bird would be!

[267]

CHAPTER IV

ANIMALS OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT

WHAT a land of silence! The vast forest
seems wholly uninhabited save for the chatter
of a passing train of harlequin parrots or angry
apes. And yet it is not silence. There is the
great movement of lapsing and becoming per-
petually going on; both composition and de-
composition rustling on toward completion.
They are mere phases of that " illimitable sun
force which destroys as swiftly as it generates
and generates again as swiftly as it destroys."

" So fast do the flowers expand that an actual
heat, which may be tested by the thermometer,
is given off during fructification." The tepid
water forces all growing things to prodigious
size. Exuberance seems to have no boundaries.
The length of the young shoots is only less
amazing than their growth in a single day.

[268]

ANIMALS

Leaves expand until they are twenty feet long,
and ferns tangle their own fronds in haste to
push out to the utmost limit of their nature.
One sees things growing in the damp heat as
one hears a yucca palm grow.

But where growth is on a stupendous scale,
there decay is exuberant, for " the powers that
build are the powers that putrefy." Above are
light, warmth, and moisture : such are conditions
of growth. Below are darkness, warmth, and
moisture: such are conditions of decay. Which
is more effectual, that mighty power of evo-
lution elaborating " the rain - water hurrying
aloft " into tissue of leaf and flower, or those
great forces of dissolution which can so soon
transmute the fallen trunk of iron-wood into a
pregnant, humid mound? It merely lapses into
those elements composing it, and is instantly
absorbed by fresh leaves culminating to-night.

The noble heat blends the smell of laboring
sap and that of aromatic mosses with the pun-
gent odor of decay, the damp smell of death
with those sweet poisons which drip off the
trees and envelop like a caress. The incense
tree was described by Martin Fernandez de

[269]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Enciza in the early sixteenth century. " In-
cense doth hang at its boughs," he said, " as
the ice doth at the tiles of a house in the winter
season." Over-ripe fruit drops smashing on
the ground with scent of strawberries. A
musky humming-bird leaves behind a thin trail
of heady perfume. The air is filled with vege-
table breath, weird, far-off blossoms, mere
ghosts of fragrance mingling in a wave of sweet-
ness. Smell is indeed man's most emotional
sense. It gives a poignancy to a remembered
scene which no detailed picture can, and sharp-
ens the whole sight perception. An entire chap-
ter should be written about jungle-perfume.

The silence of day is succeeded by the
" soundless tune " that fills the night. It surges
up from below and shuts down from above.
Pervasive as the murmuring of water, it spreads
out through the night, pierced by a sudden
brilliant squeak near at hand. With darkness
settles a humming, booming, drumming, croak-
ing, deafening uproar from thousands of diversi-
fied insect throats filling up every chink of space,
each one crowding out the other. Insects here
are not a miniature, far-off chorus, one ingre-

[270]

ANIMALS

dient of a summer night, but overwhelming,
terrifying, absorbing the dark atmosphere.

Mysterious animals live in the depths of the
ocean where no ray of light has ever pierced.
They light the way for their own fishing, as the
glow-worm is struck by its own brightness before
seeing any other. Fire-beetles and phosphor-
escent caterpillars and flickering fireflies — little
stitches of a shining thread in the soft, verdured
blackness of the tepid night — make the pri-
meval forest discernible.

The true life of the jungle begins with dark-
ness and ends with light. As if the habitual
gloom were not deep enough, jungle animals
wait until night has enclosed them further to
carry on their life activities, those weird crea-
tures which lurk in the shade, primeval instincts
always alert, living on suffrance in this land of
vegetation. They have persisted since early
geologic ages, the only remnants of their kind,
haunting the nights from then until now.
Dwarfs of a former age, growing constantly
smaller and fewer and less important, they will
dwindle through coming ages until zoological
gardens can no longer be supplied, and their

[271]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

toothless skulls in glass cases will be the only
evidence that they ever existed.

The antediluvian ant-eater hunches along on
his stiff, curved claws, stopping now and then
to rake out a crowded ant-hill, whose compact,
crawling interior he cleans out with an efficient
slash of his spiral tongue.

The giant armadillo, the glyptodon of former
ages, developed a complete coat-of-mail by which
his small descendant is still protected. He can
open and shut the scales at will, hiding himself
inside them. He trundles to and fro, burrowing
out well-flavored roots. His voice is dull, with-
out ring or expression. But his little shell is used
as the bowl of a curious, three-stringed guitar
from which natives can coax sweet sounds.

The tapir is another twilight animal, pro-
tected by his enormously thick hide. He snuffs
about with his long snout, follows paths made
by himself to the water, and sounds his queer
whistle as alarm.

The cavernous croak of the violet-colored
throat -bladder matches the twilight. The goat-
sucker, with softly flapping wings, rises to greet
the night, and from deep within the forest re-

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ANIMALS

sounds the drawling cry of the sloth. His small,
ghoulish face peers into the oncoming darkness.

Night settles. Bloodthirsty bats emerge,
bright eyes flashing eagerly. Leaf -nosed vam-
pires, whose empire is gloom, are prepared for
their nightly bacchanale.

When utter blackness has obliterated the
jungle, the carbunculo slinks slowly out of the
thickets. " If followed, he opens a flap in his
forehead from under which an extraordinary
brilliant and dazzling light issues, proceeding
from a precious stone; any foolhardy person
who ventures to grasp at it is blinded, the flap
is let down under the long black hair and the
animal disappears into darkness. The Incas
believed in him. The viceroys in their official
instructions to the missionaries, placed the
carbunculo in the first order of desiderata."

II

" The velvet nap which on his wings doth lie,
The silken down with which his back is dight,
His broad, outstretched horns, his hairy thighs,
His glorious colors, and his glistening eyes! "

SPENSER, Muiopotmos

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PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

With great broad strokes the tropical butter-
fly descends at sunset time to the jungle pool.
The soft color of its wings is hardly distinguish-
able from the mold. It sips the water quietly.

A small bird, ready for a feast, swoops down
with a whir of wings . . . but where is the
butterfly? In its place is a fierce owl, bulging
eyes flashing, and every feather on his head
bristling in eagerness for his prey. The little
bird of supper-intentions has precipitately de-
parted, never to return, a permanent lesson
learned in the terror of an instant; yet it was
learned from the under side of a butterfly.

Who so much as a butterfly is a child of the
sun? Evoked by his warmth, it comes forth
with all faculties developed for the fullest en-
joyment of a new life, in which it seeks out the
sun-spaces in the damp forest. What a direct
response to warmth in the up and down motion
of a butterfly's wings, wide-spread on a sunny
mass of leaves! How quickly it folds its lus-
trous wings and sinks, drooping, upon a flower
when the sun goes in, as rainbows disappear at
the sun's withdrawal!

Nor does its sun-worship end here; for Iris,
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ANIMALS

symbol of the sun, is imprisoned upon its wings.
Those magic wings! Nature writes upon them
all the changes which the organism undergoes,
the patterns of the minute feathers, the direction
of the fine veins, their shapes, their pencillings
varying with the slightest external change.
Each can be distinguished from all the rest by
what is written on these evanescent tablets, the
most delicate on which laws have ever been
inscribed.

The Peruvian butterflies have a world-wide
reputation, from the triple-tailed theclas making
up in elegance of form for their diminutive size,
to the azure morphos, those noble insects as
large as two hands laid side by side, the desider-
atum of collectors who press their burnished
wings between glass walls. Abnormal tails
reach in abnormal directions like ingrowing
horns, sharply pointed and oddly curved. An
imp-like dot of silver near by calls attention to
them. Bold, uneven blotches of gold and black
are surrounded by demure, parallel lines. A
spot of crimson pulsates in the midst of a whole
wing of iridescence. The extravagant creature
carries his black velvet body about on yellow

[2751

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

legs. Some are as finely mottled as partridge
feathers. In others the design just glimmers
through mother-of-pearl. Some are transparent
in color, a stained glass window leaded in design
with living veins. The spaces between veins,
however small, are exquisitely fashioned, and
always the corresponding patterns of the two
sides are perfectly aligned. Some are trans-
parent like dragon-flies' wings. Some are almost
veinless, visible only by a dip of color on the
tip of the wing — phantom butterflies. From
others, apparently colorless, certain lights can
flash the segment of a rainbow.

What fine fitness in a French expression for
the blues — papillons noirs!

Many of the most brilliant butterflies are so
colored because they are unpalatable, even un-
eatable, flaunting their warnings in the face of
the lizard, which might eat them unawares were
they not so conspicuous. They can flutter
lazily about, with no attempt at concealment,
preserved by their own poison. In making the
injurious butterfly resplendent, nature saves
both the butterfly and the bird which might
have gulped it down.

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ANIMALS

Others are preserved by having adopted bark-
designs or leaf -color or twig-shapes. Some even
float about mimicking each other, if advan-
tageous to do so. Some gain protection by
imitating the brilliantly colored but uneatable
butterflies for which they are mistaken. Mim-
icry or warning, each protects as is most bene-
ficial, by concealing or making conspicuous.
Seen and recognized, they are not molested; or,
hidden, they escape notice.

How varied are their habits! Poisonous ones
fly slowly. Others merely frisk about, toying
with life, air, and sunlight; skirt-dancers they
are called (megaluras), " sown and carried away
again by the light air." Some heavy-bodied
butterflies gain protection by flight so rapid as
to make them mistaken for humming-birds.
The broad, strong strokes of the wide- winged
morphos float them across wide rivers. The
flight of butterflies is a biologist's problem, as
well as their colored juices and seasonal forms.

Some, flying low, have their greatest brilliancy
on the under side of the wings; others, flying
high, are dull underneath to protect them from
enemies below, as the bell-bird, whose home is

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PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

in the dazzling sunshine above the tree-tops, is
made invisible to any eyes looking upward by
its snow-white plumage and transparent wings.

11 Crepuscular " butterflies emerge at sunset.
Such are the caligos, amazing creatures equipped
on the under side with an owl's head, which can
terrify their pursuers by merely turning wrong
side out. All animals are suspicious of a strange-
looking eye; and at dusk, when the butterfly
descends to the jungle pool to drink, the owl-
eyes are particularly effective. The harmless
butterfly spreads the one view of itself to the
enemy which could save its life, and continues
slowly to sip the dark water.

Some butterflies stop in the gloomiest shades
of the forest in darkness of noon. They all love
the damp, and quantities of them surround
puddles. Some settle with wings erect, some
expand them and rest head downward, pressed
closely against the supporting surface. The
" swallow-tails " never allow their long tails to
touch anything. Some alight upon the end of a
stick, others rest upon dead leaves, others upon
rocks or sand, some on the under surface of
leaves, entirely disappearing when they alight.

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ANIMALS

While some are protected for motion, others are
protected for rest. Flickering noiselessly into
the deep, wet shade in the network of vines and
succulent leaves, they flash out into the clear
sunlight. The glow of colors pulsates on their
shining blue wings, intense as the fathomless
blaze of a fragment of copper-saturated drift-
wood. Creatures of the sky they are, indeed,
touched with the celestial hue. It was not with-
out reason that the Greeks gave the same
name to this wondrous insect and to the soul.

[279]

CHAPTER V

THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX

" There is a strange beast, the which for his great heavi-
nesse, and slownesse in moving, they call Perico-ligero,
or the little-light-dogge; hee hath three nailes to every hand,
and mooves both hand and feete as it were by compasse,
and very heavily; it is in face like to a monkie, and hath a
shrill crie; it climeth trees, and eates ants."

FATHER ACOSTA

THE uncouth sloth ! Can any greater emblem
of misery be conceived? He hangs upside down
upon a branch like a bundle of rags on a nail.
His hair is like dried grass, stiff, with a greenish
tinge, and, as might be expected, goes the wrong
way. His long arms are jointless, swinging to
and fro like the end of a rope. He can turn
his head all about, till his round, simple face
meets the wind; then he opens his toothless
mouth to take it in, giving rise to a tradition
that he lives on air. His want of teeth is sup-
plied by long nails — his only means of attack
— with which he scrapes out ants. Whether

[280]

THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX

he lives upon cecropia buds and dew, as Doc-
tor Brehm declares, or upon armies of ants
swarming in the hollow stems of the cecropia
tree, it is certain that he haunts only that tree,
which spreads out broad leaves whose white,
lower sides reflect light into the sepulchral
shade. It furnishes him with more food than
he needs, and food is his only necessity.

The rain pours, he listlessly hugs his branch,
a sorry spectacle, emitting from time to time a
deep sigh. His eye is dull, he knows no joy,
no sorrow. He needs no sleep, no relief from a
life which is nothing but respite. The odds
seem too great against him to perform the
simplest acts of life.

The climax of activity is reached when, like a
wad, he falls to the ground, apparently devoid
of life.

After a while he unrolls and progresses with
circumspection upon closed claws to the next
cecropia tree. Then he climbs to the very top,
where he begins to eat, supplied with food on
the down journey. Hunger compelling, he un-
bends from a position of unusual discomfort and
pushes himself along his branch upside down.

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PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

Over-cautious in every motion, he never loosens
his rigid hold from one limb until securely
clamped to the next one. Each movement
causes a long, sad yowl of pain. It is amazing
that so cutting a sound can issue from his soft
mouth.

His weird cry is a jungle symbol — mysteri-
ous hint of antediluvian days when the elephan-
tine sloth lifted up a mammoth wail to be taken
up by the glyptodon and the dodo.

In the desert man exclaims: " If only there
were water! The soil is fertile. There is sun-
light and warmth enough to make a tropical
paradise. If only there were water! " And so,
although he does not exactly worship water as
the Yuncas of antiquity did, this man sings
secretly in his heart a hymn to the god of water.

Up on the icy highlands man exclaims: " If
only there were warmth ! The soil is fertile, there
is plenty of water, only warmth is lacking to
make a paradise. If only there were warmth! "
And he sympathizes with the Incas, whose god
was the Sun, and waits through the long night-
watches until, with his rising, life is renewed.

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THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX

In the jungle, water brings fertility to a soil
bathed in the light and warmth of a tropical
sun. It pours down from melting. snows of the
mountain-tops and gushes from the ground to
meet the rain. Here, where man might live with
least effort, he squats on the lowest rung of the
human ladder, his savage desires satisfied as
soon as realized. The sun needs no propitiatory
offerings, water needs no exhortation. Invisible
powers have conferred all gifts which his mind
could imagine or his heart desire.

But in the midst of luxuriant plenty, like the
Indian above the mine, poverty-struck for want
of the very riches he sits upon, he is merely
dying out for lack of everything with which he
is surrounded. With a remedy at his command
for every ill, he hangs about his neck a string of
tapirs' claws in case of need. As there is lack
of nothing to supply his wants, so there are few
wants to be supplied. A whole tribe lives on a
single species of tree, like insects depending on
one fruit or leaf for subsistence, or the sloth
hanging on the cecropia tree, which has senses
sufficient to appreciate sights and sounds and
smells, but remains insensible. The jungle

[283]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

people seem to recognize the likeness and call
one another " beast of the cecropia tree."

As there is surplus of everything here, evil
gifts have been bestowed as well. Poisonous
insects sting for life; the fierce jaguar and fatal
vampire, whose velvet kisses are a death-brand,
bite for life; so do snakes; and the huge boa
crushes the bones of its victim. The strong
attack the weak, the cunning inveigle the un-
wary. Injurious or beneficent, all must fight
for life, joining in the great struggle. Each
variety contends with every other, vegetation
fights to keep out animals, animals with birds,
insects with one another, and all against the
water, whose level silently rises over its foes.
So man must struggle against nature. The
jungle is his only teacher. He takes from it
what it offers. He is the mere imitator of the
vegetable world, a product of it in modified
form. He sees strife in air, earth, and water.
His religion can conceive only strife of two
extremes, dying and living, evil and good, one
injurious, the other beneficial. Evil spirits
inhabit birds and beasts and whirlpools of the
mighty rivers. The dim forest is filled with

[284]

THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX

powers of destruction. They lurk in the black
lizard and less dangerous ones in the parro-
quets. Since all sickness is brought by evil
spirits, it is they to whom prayers are made.
Some jungle savages believe in a transformation
into animals and name their children for them.
If there are any thoughts of a future life, they
are in jungle terms. After death these people
wish to be turned into animals, which some-
times happens. " On the eighth day a red deer
jumped from the grave and ran away into the
forest. They did not see the soul enter the deer,
but they saw the deer rise from the grave "!
Some worship sun and moon, an Inca custom.
But the moon with its phases and its weird
shadows in the jungle is involved in special
mystery. These savages understand the jungle,
but facts plain to us compose their mystery.

If a man is sick, something grows near by to
set him all right again. They use nature's
remedies against her poisons, as they have
learned from birds and beasts to do. They col-
lect various sympathetic medicines, such as
teeth of poisonous snakes, and carefully fix
them in leaves and tubes of rushes — powerful

[285]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

specifics against headache and blindness. They
fill flask-gourds with balsams, and collect odor-
ous gum for incense.

War is their only object lesson, so quite natu-
rally their only preeminence is in the art of
killing. The chief cause of war is stealing of
women; some are worth as much as a hatchet,
some only the price of a knife. In times of
fighting the savages howl through a giant reed in
blood-curdling discord. They shoot with parrot-
feathered cactus-arrows dipped in famous
poisons, or thrust through an enemy with a
macana — a wooden sword as sharp as steel —
or fell him with a club of wood like iron. Then
they make drums of his skin to serve as warning
to his friends. They protect themselves with a
shield of creeping plants interwoven, covered
with a tapir skin and edged with the feathers
of parrots.

The only amicable exchanges between tribes
are the poisons done up in reeds into which they
will dip the arrows used each against the other.
Some poisons, made by women and old men,
can kill an animal without injuring his flesh for
the use of man. Some make him merely wither

[286]

THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX

away. Some do not take effect until three days
after the wound is inflicted.

The whole history of man, beginning with the
Stone Age, could be studied among the wild
tribes of Amazonian Peru. The largest tribe
numbers nearly twenty-five thousand, many but
a few families, and one tribe has now not a
single member left. Differing each from the
other, they are similar only in that they all
represent the first steps of human development.

A savage of the jungle perforates his face to
insert feathers and shells; he gouges it with
sharp flints and rubs in indelible color. He
slashes his lips both within and without and
stretches his ear-lobes as far as the shoulder.
Then he inserts knobs of chonta-palm wood. He
paints his face yellow and suspends a red bean
from his nose. Or he paints his face in the
four quarters, blue, yellow, red, and black, and
dyes his hair red with achote, his body orange
with armatto, staining it in design with dark
juices. The Prios color their teeth; others leave
their teeth unstained and wear a long, yellow
mantle. The Conibo flattens his head, or that
of his child, between boards into fantastic

[287]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

shapes, leaving holes through which the cra-
nium can develop. He leaves single locks of
hair on conspicuous promontories. Toucans'
feathers are stuck to them with wax. On days
of celebration he dances in ropes of iridescent
birds strung through the bills, his bead girdles
of barbaric design hung with humming-birds as
tassels. He knows no fashion but personal
caprice. There is no limit to the vagaries of the
world about him, neither are any suggested for
his own decoration. Cross-wise over his shoul-
ders he slings long scarfs of brilliantly colored
birds hung at the end of chains made of their
little leg-bones, along with boxes of poison for
his arrow-heads. His necklaces are of the teeth
of jaguars, wildcats, and monkeys, or of the
curling teeth of the white-lipped peccary. From
his anklets and wristlets of heavy, wooden beans
he shakes a jungle call, wielding a feather
scepter in savage rhythm about the stiff feather
halo upon his head.

As might be expected, the jungle savage
adores music, if so it may be called. He
imitates the cries of forest animals. Some tribes
have war songs; then they use a bone flute or a

[288]

THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX

reed. The Aguarunas have a violin with three
strings. This is the most intelligent tribe, but
they use their superior intelligence in reducing
the heads of their enemies. One is often com-
pelled co wonder whether greater brain-devel-
opment means greater usefulness.

These seem to be the facts: The head of an
enemy being cut off, poisons are poured into it,
softening the bones so that they can be drawn
out through the neck. They are then replaced
by red-hot stones to which the head, reduced
to one-fifth its original size, adjusts itself in the
steam of a bonfire made of roots of certain
palms.

A jungle story runs that a scientist from Ger-
many tried to investigate these sinister proc-
esses. But his head, in miniature form, was
soon stuck upon a pole. It could be recognized
by the long, reddish beard, which had retained
its original proportions.

To qualify as a warrior a youth must possess
at least one reduced head of his own making.
As time goes on, he adorns himself with more
and more such trophies.

Some similar custom existed on the coast in
[289]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

ancient times, for these little masks have been
found in the huacas (grave mounds). The first
reduced heads were exhibited in Lima in 1862
under the rare title, " Heads of the Incas "!

The Macas and Jivaros are believed to have
this practice as well, and a tribe exists near the
Cusicuari, the Rio Negro, and the Orinoco,
reported as able to reduce entire bodies in the
same manner.

Some tribes preserve their enemies' hands,
others keep their teeth, and some eat their
enemies whole. A man speaking a different
dialect is eaten like an animal of a different
species. The Amahuacas pulverize the bones
and eat the ashes in their food, in order to
absorb the physical strength as well as the
moral virtues of the person gone before. Al-
though they are never eaten, the women of
cannibal tribes are said to be more cannibalistic
than the men. Prior to such feasts they fatten
the prisoners of war, who " rather enjoy the
prospect, and gorge themselves to accommodate
their keepers. They occupy themselves tran-
quilly with their duties as slaves without at-
tempting to escape."

[290]

THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX

Another practice of the Aguarunas is making
the tundoy, or tunduli, their jungle signal-service.
They hollow a tree-trunk and make three holes
in it with red-hot stones, then hang it aloft on
a high tree, fastening the lower end securely to
the ground. Blows upon it with a wooden
mallet reverberate as far as ten miles, and form
a code, by their swiftness or slowness and their
pitch above, between, or below the holes. As a
hundred words suffice for a language, so would
three tones for a drum of war. Primitive man
in the primeval jungle sending blood-curdling
signals to reduce the heads of his enemies!
Reverberations whose wave-lengths are inter-
cepted on their echoing passage through the
forest by the flight of royal butterflies and
challenged by the chatter of antediluvian apes!

The weaker tribes are actually, not in name
merely, pushed back into the woods. Many
traits in us find a literal, physical parallel in
them. We speak of " licking the dust; " in the
jungle there are tribes of earth-eating savages.
A civilized man in the jungle learns their literal
ways. He puts gunpowder on the bite of a
serpent and cauterizes by igniting it. Having

[291]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

no language adequately to express the venom-
ous thoughts they may feel, they use poisoned
arrows. They literally reduce an enemy's head,
and are more humane than we, doing it after
death !

The Inje-inje represent the Stone Age, both
in their tools and language. They come out of
inaccessible hiding-places to perform their pri-
meval rites by full moon and are the least known
of all the savage tribes. This small tribe of the
Inje-inje, whose name is the sum of their lan-
guage, need only a word to steer their craft
through life. As has been said, the develop-
ment of language from the primitive Inje-inje
to the somewhat developed Aguaruna can be
studied in this mysterious place. No tribe can
count further than ten; most of them use only
a movement of the fingers. Though there are
hundreds of " languages," not one Amazonian
tribe can write.

In temperate zones nature is to be relied
upon. Roots grow in the ground, branches and
leaves in the air, flowers come forth at certain
seasons, and fruit follows. Trees give us shade

[292]

THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX

in which no fever lurks. Vegetables do not
relieve agony and want, as insects and plants
do not cause it. No animals lie in wait to seize
us, no snakes to uncurl and engulf us. Rain
comes in measurable quantities. We live on a
tempered, miniature scale. We can afford to
neglect reckoning with nature, for we understand
her laws, and we direct her by that under-
standing.

But what can be said of the jungle? Had
we thought of gardens as suitably placed in
tree-tops? Or of an edge of wood as sharp as
an edge of steel? Here accustomed flowers
grow as shrubs, and shrubs as trees. It is a
region where insects are mistaken for birds,
where animals imitate a flower on the branch
where they like to rest; where plants have fra-
grance, and blossoms burst forth from roots or
rough bark; where birds gain protection by
assuming the dazzling colors of tropical sun-
light, and butterflies by the warning colors of
their neighbors. It is a region where roots grow
in the air; oils, wax, and honey are secreted by
leaves; where the death of anything gives new,
vital impulse to something else, and parasites

[293]

PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

are as significant as their supporters. Curious
region, where there are night-flying butterflies
and softly-feathered moths to fly in the day-
time; where everything is reversed: animals,
whose normal is upside down, prefer tree-tops
to the ground, birds of prey are frightened by
the painting on a butterfly's wings, caterpillars
sting, spiders kill birds, and water is the prin-
cipal element of the land.

Dramatic indeed is the silent jungle. The
insect is imprisoned in the throat of the orchid,
whose honey it had been unwarily seeking.
Trees distil venom. Plants have fangs. Per-
fumes affect the brain. Cold, green creepers
blister like fire. From vampires which suck
your blood as you sleep, to the touch of a vine
which paralyzes your entire body, the jungle
knows all modes of attack and furnishes the
cure for every ill it has created.

What can be taken as the symbol of the
jungle? The snake, mysterious, deadly, bound
together in savage traditions with lightning,
wind, fire-streams of lava, and river- whirlpools,
those emblems of serpent treachery? Or but-
terflies, with their symbolism of life-recurrent?

[294]

THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX

Or the orchid, emblem of wayward unwhole-
someness? In the troops of monkeys which
skip, swing, bounce from tree to tree, throwing
themselves to be caught by prehensile tails, is
its exuberance. In the honey dripping from
hollow trees and running off unused, is typified
its surplus. Iridescence darting from insects and
from birds, rainbows glinting over cataracts or
caught by the equatorial sunshine from misty
hillsides, might be its symbol ; or the beneficence
of jungle trees and bushes.

Not one would be more or less typical than
any other. All are equally emblematic. If we
think of caprice, there is law; of life, there is
death; of beauty, there is horror. When each
seems most dominant, then its opposite is most
uncontrolled.

The seed dies that the plant may live; the
blossom withers that the fruit may set; the
worm vanishes that the butterfly may spread
its wide wings and fly. Plus and minus signs
are never far apart indeed.

[295]

CONCLUSION

PERU is the Land of the Sun. Its light and
heat descend upon the coast with tropical fury,
reducing the desert to a shimmering vibration
which breathes back scorching odors toward
the sun. The sun alone makes life possible upon
the arctic heights where, in Inca days, it was
worshipped in name as well as in fact. Yet be-
yond the mountain-barrier the same constant
sun has no longer undisputed sway. The jungle
is " almost uninhabitable through too great
abundance of waters." Peru is the Land of
Water, without which the desert is barren,
because of which the jungle is luxuriant.

But the sun, the god of Peru, controls the
water. It can combine with its opposing ele-
ment. It is able to transfigure even the rain,
which, like human hopes, becomes iridescent
because the sun shines. The rainbow is a will-
ing Ariel, the servant of each, retreating from

[296]

CONCLUSION

the sun only as far as the rain allows and il-
lumining the rain only as far as the sun permits.

The rainbow is visible nature's alphabet. In
terms of it are spelled sky and sea, trees, birds,
and flowers. It shoots the desert-mists and
twinkles along the streams which intersect it.
It fearlessly embraces the austere crags of the
mountain-peaks and shimmers in the craters of
volcanoes.

Entire it flings itself from the heart of a
shower, follows the waves of the sea along, or
glints on a butterfly's wings or from a humming-
bird's throat.

It reveals the elements of the stars, it lists the
ingredients of the sun, and sets down upon its
ephemeral tablet the red-hot vapors rising from
the desert. Even the breath of the volcano
has a place in the rainbow alphabet.

It is hard to avoid so fundamental a thing.
Close your eyes in the sunlight, and its whole
scale is thrown in glistening repetition across
your own eyelashes.

Even the ultra-violet — the unknown, the
unperceived — must be discussed in rainbow
terms, the only letters the eye's alphabet knows.

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PERU, A LAND OF CONTRASTS

The Incas chose it for an empire's emblem
and dedicated to it a temple close to that of the
Sun.

It symbolized to the Spaniards the astound-
ing country which had fallen as by miracle into
their grasp, the land of mystery, whose romantic
wealth and dazzling promises encircled them as
with the rainbow arch, and, like it, receded as
they advanced.

Peru still keeps the rainbow symbol. Many-
colored mysteries hover about the man who
leans over its glittering jewel-casket. And
wherever the ends of its bright bow touch the
desert, flit over the mountain-tops, or sweep
across the jungle, nature's unexplored secrets
lie concealed.

There is, however, a difference. For the
rainbow-arch which mingles sunlight and water
is only an evanescent promise, vanishing almost
as quickly as it can flash a new gleam of hope
into a human heart. But Peru, with its chan-
ging beauties and its mysterious allurements, is
a fact. The pot of gold which it promises is
real.

THE END

BIBLIOGRAPHY

OF all the general works on Peru none has greater weight
than Peru; Beobachtungen und Studien (1893) by E. W.
Middendorf. He has exploited the country in a large, three-
volume work with such German thoroughness that hardly
a fact has been left for subsequent writers to disclose. I
have referred to it constantly. Other shorter, general stud-
ies of the country are Von Tschudi's Reisen durch Silda-
merika, giving much attention to folk-lore, and Twenty
Years' Residence in South America (1825) by W. B. Steven-
son, secretary to Lord Cochrane. He traveled far and wide
in Peru and made observations in regard to remote details.
Typical of descriptive writings is Two Years in Peru (1876)
by T. J. Hutchinson. Various general works by Bernard
Moses and his publications in the University of California
Chronicle are valuable, notably his work on the produce of
the mines.

Reliable observations on ruins are those made by E. G.
Squier hi his Peru: Travel and Exploration in the Land of
the Incas, by Mariano Rivero y Juan de Tschudi in Anti-
guedades Peruanas, and by Charles Wiener in Perou et Bolivie.
Studies of ruins in particular localities have been made by
many archaeologists; for example, on Tiahuanacu, L. An-
grand, in Antiquites Americaines, though his book is now out
of date, Adolph F. Bandelier in his Islands of Titicaca
and Koati, Max Uhle, with whom I visited some of the
ruins, on Tiahuanacu and Pachacamac, and Hiram Bing-
ham in recent explorations.

[299]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sir Clements Markham has spent more than fifty years
studying every stage of Peru's history from the time when
it was a land of myth to the Chilian war. His researches as
well as his careful translations have been published in a
series of volumes. Authorities on various periods of the
history are legion. Relating to pre-Inca times, in which
studies of myths and theories of ruins are intermingled,
original sources are the Memorias Historiales of Montesinos,
first published in French in 1840, and Cieza de Leon, the
soldier, whose Crdnica del Peril (1553) is authority on the
Incas. Some modern scientists who have written about the
pre-Inca period are Ernest Desjardins in his Perou avant la
Conquete Espagnole, Tylor's Primitive Culture, Meyen's Uber
die Ureinwohner wn Peru, and Brinton in his Myths of the
New World and other works. Many persons are studying
the legends, as, for instance, Professor Liborio Zerda of the
University at Bogota. The Miscelaneas Australes of Miguel
Cavello Balboa, a soldier, is an original source for knowledge
of the remote Chimus. Das Reich der Chimus by Otto von
Buchwald, and especially Das Muchik oder die Chimu Sprache
by Doctor Middendorf , who quotes largely from Calancha
and Carrera, are modern authorities.

In regard to the Incas: As a background there are the
old, picturesque chronicles which read like romances, but
on which reposes most of the knowledge that modern
authorities have corroborated in regard to the earlier in-
habitants of Peru. These contemporary accounts have to
be carefully studied in order to distinguish fact from fiction.
Next to the Crdnica of Cieza de Leon are the Comentarios
Reales of Garcilasso de la Vega, in whose own veins the tur-
bulent blood of the Conquistador mingled with the blood
of the Sun. During his lifetime the imperial race of his
mother was exterminated by the fierce adventurers becoming

[300]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

grandees, of whom his father was one. His book has the
value of personal reminiscence. His enthusiasm adds a
certain glamor; but even if his unique work has been spurned
as an Utopian romance, it has been reluctantly accredited
as the foundation of facts set forth by its critics. De las
Antiguas Gentes del Peril by Bartolome de las Casas, works by
Diego Fernandez, Betanzos, Oviedo, Sarmiento, Cobo, On-
degardo, Molina's Fables and Rites of the Incas, and the great
Miscelaneas of Balboa must be consulted. Many of them
have been translated by Sir Clements Markham and pub-
lished by the Hakluyt Society of London.

It is bewildering to try to single out one or two modern
works upon the Incas, for their name is legion. The definitive
authority in English is of course Sir Clements Markham,
whose Incas of Peru (1910) has followed numberless more
detailed works of his own upon the subject.

Der Belus oder Sonnendienst auf den Anden oder Kelten in
America by Frenzel, presents one field of theory which ob-
servations on the remains of the Incas' walls suggest. The
temptation to interpret by means of analogies to other remote
civilizations is withstood with difficulty. From John Ran-
king and his Historical Researches on the Conquest of Peru by
the Mongols, to Ignatius Donnelly and his evidence in favor
of its conquest by the Egyptians via Atlantis, Peru has
given an unlimited field for speculation. Lord Bacon be-
lieved, by the way, that Peru was a proud kingdom in the
time of Atlantis. A striking example of immense erudition
expended on a futile, though technically well-supported,
fancy, is Rudolph Falb's Das Land der Inca. Painstaking
scholars are tracing out similarities between the Peruvian lan-
guage and the Semitic and Phoenician tongues — " astound-
ing affinities," of which common stems are purest in Quichua,
so that the human race seems to have emanated from the

[301]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

tops of the Andes; similarities, too, between Peruvians and
the long-bearded Druids whose rites were chiefly sun-worship;
they also kept memoranda with strings tied in different
knots, like the quipus, and built vast structures of stone
without tools. There are analogies between Peruvians and
Hindus, who worshipped the Sun as Rama and called their
first legislator Vaivasaonta, the Son of the Sun, and between
Peru and Farther India. The Seccos have been called the
Malays of Bolivia. There are analogies between Peruvians
and Chinese, whose royal color was also yellow, whose pe-
culiar god from earliest times was the Sun, who used quipus,
who had terrace-cultivation and irrigation-systems like those
of the Incas, who used foot-messengers for royal emissaries,
and brought all the gold and silver of the realm for the
beautifying of royal temples. " The buildings, religious in-
stitutions, division of time, and mystic notions," which
" seem in Asia to indicate the very dawn of civilization,"
are found here upon the Andes. Whether there was inter-
communication, or whether such facts merely suggest the
instinctive discovery of all peoples, their origin is wrapped
only in mystery — a veil whose lightest corner is only just
lifting.

But to continue with the succeeding periods of history.
Spanish vice-regal days and the civil wars of the conquerors,
the fleets of treasure, the Inquisition, have been the subject
of romantic histories. Besides Prescott's well-loved Con-
quest of Peru, William Robertson's History of America, pub-
lished more than a century ago, gives a concise, general sur-
vey since the Conquest. Drake's Worlde Encompassed and
Southey's account of Drake's voyage in his English Seamen,
as well as Froude's, together with various Hakluyt publica-
tions, are authorities for freebooter days. Also there are
such cold authorities as the Calendars of State Papers of

[302]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

many countries, E. Armstrong's The Emperor Charles V,
and for the Inquisition, H. C. Lea, Vicuna Mackenna, and
Ricardo Palma. The reports to the Royal Council of the
Indies of the sixteenth century enter into minute details.
Father Acosta was the historian of the third council. His
Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, first published in
1590, is an indispensable book, although it has borne the
reproach of being superficial.

The French Academicians came to Quito in 1735 to
measure an arc of meridian, an enterprise which d'Alembert
considered the greatest ever attempted by science. One of
these scientists, La Condamine, made extensive studies in
quinine, named cinchona for the Countess of Chincho'n,
vice-queen, and one of the first to feel its beneficent power.
His Voyage fait dans I'lnterieur de I'Amerique Meridionale
(1745), and the Voyage Historique de I'Amerique Meridionale
by Antonio y Jorje Juan de Ulloa (Spanish edition in 1748,
French in 1752), who accompanied the French expedition,
both aim at truthfulness. Another delightful as well as
dependable work of the eighteenth century is the Voyage
dans la Mer du Sud by Amedee Francois Frezier (1716).
In particular must be mentioned Lozano's Histoire des
Tremblements de Terre arrives a Lima. Hales of the Royal
Society of London has added to this French edition of 1752
accounts of Lima in his day, trustworthy as his observations
on the geology and meteorology of the coast.

Such facts as I have stated in regard to the natural history
of the coast are vouched for by Ferdinand von Hochstetter,
Die Erdbebenfluth im Pazifischen Ocean, Friedrich Goll, Die
Erdbeben Chiles, a remote work on El Desierto de Atacama,
Humboldt's Vues des Cordilleres, Darwin's Journal of Re-
searches, and the Voyage of the Beagle, the three latter de-
scribing the natural history of the mountains as well. One

[303]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

or two of Sir Martin Conway's books, Alfons Stiibel, Die
Vulkanberge von Ecuador, and Neveu-Lemaire, Les Lacs des
Hauls Plateaux de VAmerique du Sud, may also be added.
In describing the animals of Peru I have as authority Brehm's
Thierleben.

Ricardo Palma's Revista de Lima and Carlos Romero's
Revista Histdrica de Lima, Manuel A. Fuentes' Estadistica
General de Lima, published in Paris in English as Lima in
1866, give interesting information in regard to that city.

When it comes to the Amazonian wonderland no exagger-
ation could compete with fact. But I have not withstood the
temptation wholly on that account! There is Louis Agassiz'
A Journey in Brazil, H. W. Bates' A Naturalist on the River
Amazon, two books by Alfred Russel Wallace, Tropical
Nature and Life on the Amazon, Raimondi's El Departe-
mento de Loreto as well as his El Peru, Robert Southey's
History of Brazil, and the publications of the Sociedad Geo-
grafica de Lima.

I am happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr.
Wilberforce Eames of the New York Public Library for
access to its Americana; to Dr. Martin and to Dr. Steven-
son of the Hispanic Society of America; to Mr. C. L. Ches-
ter for many of my pictures; to Dr. F. S. Archenhold,
Director of the Treptow Sternwarte at Berlin for the free-
dom of his library, where I found most of the German
works consulted, and to Don Ricardo Palma, former Libra-
rian of the Biblioteca Nacional de Lima, for permission to
inspect many of his rare books and manuscripts.

[304]

INDEX

Achachibas (piles of stones), 222.

Acllahuasi (convent of Sun-Vir-
gins), 207.

Acosta, 48, 80, 174, 179, 226, 229,
242, 280, 303.

Agassiz, L., 5, 304.

Aguarunas, 289, 291, 292.

Alameda (Lima), 106, 107; (La
Paz), 163.

Almagro, Diego de, 73, 89.

Alpacas, 54, 157, 226.
See llamas, huanacus, vicunas.

Amahuacas, 290.

Amautas (wise men),
See Incas.

Amazon, 5, 6, 10, 123, 124, 141,

233, 236, 237, 245-248, 304.
See jungle.

Amazons, 236-237.

Amiel, 61.

Andalusia, New, 84.

Andes, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 30, 36,
43. S3, 59, 60, 123, 134, 175,
247, 248, 301, 302; animals
of, 155-158; birds of, 168;
dangers of, 147-149; de-
scription of, 143-148; lakes
of, 166-167; light in, 149-
150; mines of, 152-154;
storm in, 150-151; valleys
of, 165, 240-246, 265.
See condor, cordillera, Incas,
Indians, mines, puna, valleys.

Andenes (terraces), 183.
Antarctic,

See ocean, Pacific.
Ant-eater, 56, 263, 272.
Antis, 197.
Aqueducts,

See irrigation.
Argentina, 121.
Arianza, Juan de, 92.
Arica, 78.
Armada, 91.
Armadillo, 263, 272.
Armatambo, 104.
Atahualpa, 67, 69-71, 77, 136, 188,

215-
Atlantic,

See ocean.
Auto de fe,

See Inquisition.
Aztlan, 113.

Badeor, Federico, 79.
Balboa, 40, 300, 301.
Balsa (boat of reeds), 41, 48, 168,

234-

Bandelier, A. F., 234, 299.
Bats, 47, 243, 273.
Betanzos, 176.
Bezoar stone, 225.
Bingham, Hiram, 161, 299.
Bolivia, 265.

See Tiahuanacu.
Borax, 32.

[305]

INDEX

Bougainvillea, 35, 57, 59, 125.

Boussingault, 251.

Brazil, 229, 304.

Brehm, 264, 281, 304.

Bridges, swinging, 123, 165, 185.

Brittany, 81, 164, 265.

Buccaneers, 81, 236.
See El Dorado, freebooters, pi-
rates.

Buenos Aires, 85.

Bull-fights, 7, 16, 87, 139.

Butterflies, 59, 65, 121, 125, 261,
273-279.

Cacafuego, 82.

Cacique (chieftain), 196, 199, 235.
Cajamarca, 69, 71, 186.
Cajamarquilla, 104.
Calancha, 50, 300.

See Chimus.

Callao, 15, 85, 86, 100, 101.
Camarones (crayfish), 121.
Candia, Pedro de, 68.
Cantut (flower of Incas), 172,

200.

Caras, 197.
Carbunculo (mythical animal),

273-

Carnac, 164.
Carranza, Angela, 93.
Carvajal, 74.
Casma, 27.
Cavillaca, 44.
Cazuela, (soup), 24, 109.
Cecropia, 281, 283.
Cerro de Pasco, 153.
Chancas, 199.
Chanchan,
See Chimus.

Chachapoyas, 198.
Chasca,

See Dawn.
Chasqui (runners), 184.

See Sun, messengers of the.
Cheireoque (bird), 129.
Chibchas, 197.
Chicha (beverage), 45, 69, 171,

l8o, 2O7, 2IO, 212, 222.

Chile, 54, 89, 121, 129, 197.

Chimus, 47-52, 186, 300.

Chincha Islands,
See guano.

Chinchaycocha, Lake of, 166.

Chinchilla, 4, 24, 155.

Chirimoya (fruit), 53, 57.

Chorillos, 103.

Chidpas (towers of the dead), 184.

Churches, 21, 78, 87-88, 97, 99,

100, in, 112, 138, 215.
See convents, Dominicus, Fran-
ciscans, Indians, Inquisition,
Jesuits, Lima, Santa Rosa,
Spain.

Cinchona (quinine), 6, 251, 303.

Ciruelas (fruit), 23, 62.

Civilizations, ancient,
See Indian races.

Coal, 7, 1 68.

Coast, aborigines of, 37; birds of,
see ocean; characteristics of,
3, 4, 16-18; climate of, 29-
30; geology of, 15, 20, 40,
see earthquake; inhabitants
of, 15-16; towns of, 21-24.
See desert.

Coati, 172.

Coca (cocaine), 6, 93, 181, 207,
212, 224.

[306]

INDEX

Columbus, 76, 233.

Con, 30, 175, 177, 178.

Condamine, 236, 303.

Condor, 6, 140, 144, 157-158, 160,

199, 210.
Condorcanqui,

See Tupac Amaru.
Coniapuyara, 236.
Conibos, 287.
Conquerors,

See Spaniards.
Conquest, Spanish, bibliography

of, 302-303.
Convents, closed, 114-119; open,

113-114, see Franciscans; of

Sun- Virgins, see Sun, Virgins

of the.
Cordillera, 4, 72, 77, 103, 131, 227,

303-

See Andes.

Corequenque (bird), 190.
Coricancha,

See Sun, temples of the.
Cotton, 6, 32, 35, 43, 52.
Coya (wife of Inca), 204, 207.
Coyaraymi (marriage-day), 207.
Cuculis (desert doves), 122.
Cueca (dance), 58.
Cuntisuyu, 186.
Cur ocas (governors), 211, 212.
Cushma (garment), 237.
Cusicuari, 290.

Cuzco, 67, 166, 174, 178, 179, 182,
184, 196, 197, 199, 200, 204,

206, 210, 217, 220, 223.

Darwin, 169, 254, 303.
Dawn (Chasca), 203, 205; lodg-
ings of the, 178.

Desert, 3, 4, 5, 25-26; aborigines
of, 37; climate of, 29-30,
see garuas; emptiness of, 30;
legends of, 36; lifelessness of,
30-31; phenomena of, 26-29;
character of, 32; rivers of, see
rivers; ruins of, 35; showers
in, 31; valleys of, see valleys;
vultures of, see gallinazos.

Desaguadero, 169.

Dominicus (Santo Domingo), 88,
116, 117, 223.

Drake, Francis, 82, 302.

Diirer, Albrecht, 77.

Earthquake, 4, 15, 27-29, 41, 44,

55, 63, 67, 99-102.
Ecuador, 71, 197.
El Dorado, 85, 234-236.
Elizabeth, Queen, 82.
Elmo, fire of Saint, 167.
Enciza, 270.
Encomienda (tax), 91.
Escandalosa (bush), 62.
Eten, 49.

Falb, Rudolf, 163, 301.

Fierro, Pancho, 130.

Fish- worship, 40, 41, 44, 51.

See Chimus.
Fishes' eyes, 17.
Franciscans, 21, 105, 107-109,

139, 153-

Freebooters, 20, 82.
See El Dorado, buccaneers, pi-
rates.

Gallinazos (vultures), 21, 32, 43.
Garuas (mists), 30, 105.
See desert, climate of the.

[307]

INDEX

Gold and silver, 9, 27, 51, 56, 64-
66, 68, 71, 76-83, 84, 90, 152-
155, 171, 182, 193, 199, 204-
207.

See Incas, Spaniards, Sun,
Treasure.

Golden Hynde, 81, 82.

Granadilla (fruit of passion-
flower), 240.

Guano, 19-20, 27, 56, 76.

Guavas, 24, 57, 61, 62, 125,

133-

Guayabas (fruit), 23.
Guayaquil, 85.
Guatavita, 234, 235.
Guenelette, 9, 244.

Hassel, Georg von, 233.
Heads, reduced, 289-290.
Heredia, Jose-Maria de, 9.
Huaca cachu (plant of the grave),

222.

Huacas (grave mounds), 290.
Huacho, salt lakes of, 32.
Huacos (objects in huacas), 73,

126-129.
Huadca, 104.
Hualpa, 153.

Huanacus (wild llama), 157.
Huancayo, 153.
Huayna Ccapac, 66, 166, 209.

See Incas.

Huerequeque (bird), 22.
Huguenot hermit, 104.
Huira Capcha, 153.
Humboldt, A. von, 81, 161, 169,

184, 185, 235, 303.
Humming-birds, 57, 65, 132, 146,

160, 172, 243, 263-267, 270.

[308]

Iguana, 35, 240.

Incas, aeroplane named for, 139;
amautas, 163, 215; analogies
to other races, 301-302; arms
of, 205; books about, 300-
301; bridges of, 185; bound-
aries of, 20; campaigns of, 40,
49, 195-197; at Chanchan,
47, 49, 51; chinchillas valued
by, 155; clothes of, 189, 207;
coca, divine plant of, 181;
conquest of, foretold, 66-67;
contemporaries of, 37; court
of, 199; description of, 70,
160; in desert, 39, 47; dis-
tinctive marks of, 189-191;
divinity of, 188-189; dramas
of, 136; empire of, 197-199;
festivals of, 208, 210-213;
flute of, 135; gold of, 7, 64-65,
76; human sacrifices of, 211;
irrigation works of, 186; in
jungle, 231-232, 285; last cf,
214-221; laws of, 19, 193-
194; llamas worshipped by,
157; male title, 205; mer-
cury, a mystery to, 152;
messengers of the, 192;
myths of, 175-179; Nature,
teacher of, 183; origin of,
178-179; Pachacamac spared
by, 41, 42; attitude toward
Pachacamac, 177; pageants
of, 163; passion-flower car-
ried by, 58; pleasure gardens
of, 165; pleasure houses of,
185; predecessors of, 160-
162; rainbow emblem of,
206, 298; roads of, 36, 40,

INDEX

184-185; subjects of, 66,
191-193; Sun, god of, 34,
42, 176, 282; thunderbolt in
palace of, 67; Titicaca, Is-
land of, 170-173; tribute to,
192-195; vicuna fur worn by,
24, 156; worshipped by In-
dians, 174.

See Atahualpa, Huayna Cca-
pac, Manco Ccapac, Sayri
Tupac, Tupac Amaru, Uira-
cocha, Yupanqui, also gold
and silver, and Sun.

Inca Rocca, 231.

Indians, characteristics of, 221-
224; called Children of Is-
rael, 93; Christianity of, 223-
224; near Eten, 49; saying
about God of, 28; horses
terrify, 72; lift chain of
Huayna Ccapac, 166; Incas'
attitude toward, 195; In-
cas' buildings benefit, 187;
punishment of, 192; death of
Incas witnessed by, 217-219;
Incas worshipped by, 174;
of jungle, 283-292; language
of, see Quichua; legends of,
36, 174-181, 244; the llama,
an interpretation of, 225-
227; melancholy of, 135;
mines of, 153-154; mothers
of, 112; music of, see yara-
vis; poverty of, 8; prehistoric
races of, 3, 17, 19, 32, 36, 38,
42, 52, 5S» 122, 146, 160, 161,
187; reed vessels of , see balsa;
revolts of, 215-216, 220-221;
Sachsahuaman built by, 201;

attitude toward Spaniards,
72, 214; Spaniards copy,
83; first encounters with
Spaniards, 68-71; Spaniards'
treatment of, 89-91; cure
surumpe, 149; treasure con-
cealed by, 80; vicuna hunts
of, 156; warriors, 86; yaravis,
134-

See Aguarunas, Chancas, Cha-
chapoyas, Chimus, Incas,
Inje-injes, Muratos, Nahu-
medes, Yuncas.

Indies, 73, 77, 79, 80, 81.

Inje-injes, 239, 292.

Inquisition, 91-99, 104, 302, 303.

Inti (Sun), 42, 203.
See Sun.

Inti-cancha (Cori-cancha), 66,

204, 206.
See Sun, temples of the.

Iquitos, 123, 125.

Irrigation, ancient systems of, 50,
52, 55, 89, 101, 103, 104, 161,
183, 186-187, 192, 193.

Isles, of Pearls, 89; of Solomon,

85-
Islay, Pampa of, 32.

Jaguars, 68, 129, 194, 198, 199,
210, 234, 235, 243, 244-245,
284.
Jalca (table-land), 3.

See puna.
Jauja, 71.
Jesuits, 72, in, 237.

See San Pedro, churches.
Jivaros, 290.
Juan Fernandez, Islands of, 121.

[309]

INDEX

Jungle, a land of adventure, 231-
239; Amazon basin, 246-249;
animals of, 271-273, 280-282;
appearance of, from above,
239; approach to, from An-
des, 240-246; birds of, 241;
butterflies of, 273-279; char-
acteristics of, 3-6, 10; color
of, 261; Columbus in, 233-
234; present conditions in,
238; gloom of, 259; heat in,
259; humming-birds of, 263-
267; Incas defied by, 197;
Incas in, 231-232; insects of,
262, 270-271; legends of,
244-246; lianas of, 251;
rhythmic life of, 258; loam
from, 183; Jesuits in, 237-
238; orchids of, 253-255;
paradoxes of, 292-295; para-
sites of, 253; largest part of
Peru, 3; perfume of, 269-
270; rain in, 29, 248-249;
savages of the, 10, 18, 283-
292; no seasons in, 258-259;
silence of day in, 268; night
sounds in, 270-271; Span-
iards in, 234-236; trees of,
57, 250-251; vegetation in,
250-259; warfare of vege-
tation in, 255-257.

La Paz, 163.

Lea, H. C., 95, 303.
See Inquisition.

Leon, Cieza de, 65, 185, 300.

Lima, 84-140; Alameda, 107;
bells, city of, 110-113; bishop
of, 93; books about, 304;

churches of, 87-88; climate
of, 104-105; City of Kings,
3, 86, 90, 99, 214; collec-
tions in, 125-126; composer
of national opera in, 133-138;
contrasts in, 138-140; con-
vents of, 107-109, 113-120;
destruction of, in 1746, 99-
102; dinner party in, 121-
125; galleons of, 77; Geo-
graphical Society of, 237, 304;
reduced heads exhibited in,
290; Incas in, 215; Inquisi-
tion in, 91-99; lady of seven-
teenth century in, 106-107;
national librarian in, 129-
132; market of, 139; milk-
women of, 140; Paseo Col6n,
140; Spanish splendor of, 7,
84, 85, 86, see gold and silver;
surroundings of, 103-105; uni-
versity in, 140.
See Spaniards.

Lisle, Lord, 79.

Llamas, prehistoric carvings of,
55; drove of, 58; Christian
sacrifice .of, 223; Incas' sac-
rifice of, 207, 21 1 ; Incas'
talismans, 222; Incas' use of,
160; Incas' worship of, 157;
an interpretation of Indians,
224-227; in Lima, 140; ran-
som of Atahualpa, 71.
See vicunas.

Llautu (fringe of Inca), 190,

207.
See Incas, clothes of.

Lopez, Francisco, 65.

Loti, Pierre, x.

[310]

INDEX

Loveday, G., 79.
Lurin, 43, 47.

Macas, 290.
Mamacunas,

See Sun, Virgins of the.
Mama Ocllo, 179.
Mamayacu (mother of waters),

245, 259-261.
Madera, 233.
Madre de Dfos, 231.
Maguey (plant), 242-243.
Manco Ccapac, 174, 176, 178, 179,
189, 233.

See Incas, Sun.
Manoa, 236.

Manias (head-shawls), 22, 108.
Markham, Sir Clements, 300, 301.
Marmontel, 9.
Marmoset, 249.
Mastodon, 38, 169, 263.
Maui, 37.

Medanos (sand-dunes), 33-35.
Megalithic ruins,

See Tiahuajiacu, Sachsahuaman.
Mercury, 144, 152.
Mexico, 128, 154.
Middendorf, 96, 236, 299, 300.
Mines, 5, 6, 7, 10, 27, 39, 90, 91,
152-155.

See gold and silver.
Mirage, 26, 57, 147.
Mishagua, 232.
Mita (tax), 91.
Mochica, 49.

See Chimus.

Monkeys, 9, 45, 242, 288.
Monuments,

See ruins.

Moon, (Si), (Quilla), 34, 47, 49,
50, 67, 72, 172, 203-205, 212.
Morgado, Alonzo, 79.
Mother of Waters,

See mamayacu.
Mountains,

See Andes.
Mountain-sickness,

See soroche.

Mummies, 42, 44-46, 125, 204.
Muratos, 237.
Mutayces, 233.
Myths, 36, 174-181.

Nahumedes, 237.

Negro, Rio, 290.

Nitrate, 27, 32, 54, 56, 61, 62, 77.

Ocean, Atlantic, 29, 168, 238, 248.
Pacific, 15, 44, 158; Antarctic
current of, 30; argosies on,
77-78; birds of, 16-20, 28,
56, 247; influence of, on
climate, 30, 105; islands of,
121, 265; pirates on, 81-83;
maker of terraces, 183; tidal
waves, 29, 100; winds of, 33;
worship of as Ni, 48.

Ollanta, 133, 136, 137.

Orchids, 253-255.

Orcos, Lake of, 166-167.

Ore, Geronimo de, 177.

Orellana, 236.

Organista (bird), 249.

Orinoco, 233, 236, 290.

Pacay (fruit), 23, 57.
Paccari-tampu, 178, 179.
Pachacamac, 40-47, 48, 148, 174,
177, 178, 214, 218, 299.

[311]

INDEX

Paichi (fish), 247.

Palma, Ricardo, 129-132, 303,

304-

Palta (alligator-pear), 57, 122,

198.

Paraguay, 107, 237.
Parrots, 45, 185, 240-241.
Passion-flower, 50, 58, 113, 128.

See granadilla.
Pastasa, 237.
Patagonia, 37, 62, 265.
Paucartampu, 231.
Paul III, 95.
Paytiti, 233.
Peccaries, 248, 288.
Pedro, San, in, 112.

See Jesuits.
Petroleum, 32.
Philae, 164.

Philip II, 24, 92, 216, 217.
Pica, 53-63.
Picante (sauce), 23, 60.
Pirates, 76, 81-83.

See buccaneers, freebooters, El

Dorado.

Pisco, Candelabrum of, 20-21.
Pizarro, Francisco, 69, 70, 73,
140.

Gonzalo, 89, 236.

Hernando, 41.
Plague, bubonic, 21.
Plata, Duque de la, 86.
Pliny, 152.

Poncho (cloak), 57, 221.
Poopo, Lake of, 169.
Potosi, 78, 154.
Prescott, 302.
Prios, 287.
Puma, 45, 171, 194, 243.

Puna (table-land), 3, 4, 31, 137,
146-147, 150-151, 156, 184,
227, 247.
See Andes.

Quebradas (gorges), 165.
Quena (flute), 131, 135, 224.
Quichua (language of Indians),

134, 175, 176, 221, 301.
Quick-silver,

See mercury.
Quinine,

See cinchona.
Quipus (system of knots), 69,

156, 160, 191, 302.
Quito, 303.

Races,

See Indians.
Rainbow, (cuychi), 159, 191, 206,

296-298; lunar, 60.
Raleigh, 76, 236.
Rig-Veda, 202.
Rimac, 66, 103, 104.
Rivers, buried, 4, 31, 54, 55.

See irrigation, valleys.
Rosa, Santa, 47, 102, 114-120.
Rubber, 6, 10, 238.
Rums, 10, 35, 42, 43, 46, 51, 104,
160, 161, 162-164, 182-187,
299.

See Chanchan, Pachacamac,
Sachsahuaman, Tiahuanacu.

Sachsahuaman, 179, 200-201, 208,

223.

Salcamayhua, 175.
San Benito, (mantle), 98.
Sayri Tupac, 214, 215.

[312]

INDEX

Seals, 18, 37.

Seville, 79.

Shelley, 13.

Shore,
See coast.

Silver and gold,
See gold and silver, mines.

Sloth, 263, 273, 280-282.

Soroche (mountain-sickness), 72,
148.

Soto, Hernando de, 69.

South Sea Islands, 164.

Southey, Robert, 85, 302, 304.

Spain, 74; cost to, of El Dorado,
85; gold, a curse to, 76-83;
Inquisition in, 95; mission-
aries of, 8, 50; Peru as near
unto heaven as, 9; vicuna
garments taken to, 24, 189.
See Andalusia, Seville, viceroys.

Spaniards, Arab blood of, 7-8;
arrival of, 68-73; conquerors,
24, 49, 72, 76; coca spoken of
by, 181; coming foreshad-
owed, 66-67; greed of, 160;
at Guatavita, 235; Incas as
treated by, 214-221; Inca
empire destroyed by, 198;
Indians as treated by, 89-91,
220, 221; in jungle, 236;
mines of, 154, see mines;
pirates harass, 82; rainbow
a symbol to, 298; treasure
sought by, 79, 167, 171; vice-
roy served by, 85.
See Almagro, Candia, Carva-
jal, cinchona, gold and silver,
Indians, Orellana, Philip II,
Pisco, Pizarro, Plata, Soto.

Spenser, 141, 273.

Squier, E. G., 200, 299.

State Papers, Calendar of, 82,
302.

Stonehenge, 164.

Stiibel, Alfons, 63, 304.

Sugar, 6, 35, 43, 131,143-

Sun, (Inti), arms of the, 72; blood
of the, 300; body of the, 72;
Children of the, 9, 145, 179,
200, 211, 223; City of the, 72;
cliff sacred to, 171; daughter
of the, 136; empire of the,
198, 207; Father of Incas, 68,
131, 170, 174, 188, 195; festi-
vals of the, 207-213; flocks
of the, 170, 175; gold be-
longed to, 66, 77; god of In-
cas, 34, 39, 42, 159, 176, 193,
203, 282; Incas doubt divin-
ity of, 209-210; labor given
the, 194; land of the, 34, 203,
296; messengers of the, 185,
205, 208; parentage of the,
175; priests of the, 41, 206;
ritual, 40; sacrifices to the,
211-212; service of the, 202-
213; Setting of the, 70;
temples of the, 40-42, 66, 89,
174, 196, 204-206, 223, 298;
Virgins of the, 40, 41, 43, 172,
184, 189, 207, 212; worship
of the, 41, 43, 49, 175, 178,
198, 223, 285, 301, 302.
See gold and silver.

Surumpe (snow-blindness), 149.

Tamarugo (tree), 54.
Tambo (inn), 185.

[313]

INDEX

Tambo de Mora, 36.

Tapir, 248, 272.

Tarapaca, 54, 55, 56.

Thunder and lightning, 4, 29, 67,
71, 105, 205, 212.

Tiahuanacu, 162-164, 176, 200,
299.

Titicaca, Lake, 167-173, 179.

Toribio, Santo, 102.

Torture,

See Inquisition.

Totora (reed), 168.

Treasure, buried, 36, 42, 49, 51,
71, 73, 81, 83; buried in lakes,
66, 80, 166-167, 171, 235; of
churches, 88, 99; fleets of, 9,
76-83, 302; in Lima, 84.
See gold and silver.

Tschudi, Juan de, 80, 211, 299.

Tuaregs, 27.

Tumpinambaranas, 233.

Tundoy, or tunduli (drum), 291.

Tupac Amaru, 216, 217; Condor-
canqui, called, 220, 221.

Uiracocha, Con Tici, 164, 175;
god of all Quichua-speaking
people, 176; Huayna Ccapac
speaks of, 66; identified with
Pachacamac, 41, 174; iden-
tities of, 175-176; Incas pro-
duced by, 179; Son of Sun,
178; Spaniards called after,
71-72, 220; in Tarapacd, 55.

Ulloa, 236, 303.
Uzaque (chieftain), 234.

Valleys, of desert, 3, 6, 35, 39, 40,

43, 47, 48, S3, 57, 103-105,
see Pica; of mountains, 6,
144, 147, 165, 166, 197, 198,

215, 224; of jungle, 240-
244, 246, see Amazon.

See rivers.

Vega, Garcilasso de la, 37, 89,
171, 185, 186, 194, 214, 215,

216, 300-301.
Veragua, 265.

Viceroys, 85-87, 96-98, 102, 117,

139-
Vicunas, 24, 149, 153, 155-156,

189, 207.
See llamas.
Viscachas (animal), 147, 155.

Yaravis (music of Indians), 134.

Yareta (moss), 225.

Ychu (grass), 225.

Yucay, 165, 170, 215.

Yuncas, 38, 39, 51, 126, 128,

282.

See Chimus.
Yupanqui, Tupac Inca, 41, 49,

162, 186, 198, 209, 231.

Zarate, 184.
Zerda, 235.

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