XII. THE ROOF OF PERU…

XII. THE ROOF OF PERU

For a week I improved under the doctor’s care. I had already strolled once or twice around the neat little plaza, down upon which the massive, snowclad peaks gaze with paternal serenity. But my legs were still in that woven-straw condition that made my feet lead ingots; and no pleasure quite outdid that of lying abed watching the sunshine crawl across the floor, and listening to the keeper’s rooster challenging the world to combat. I should have regretted a controversy with that rooster during those days; I am sure he would have worsted me.

On Sunday, the first of June, the doctor did not appear; nor the next day, nor the next. Medicines and tonics ran out. I decided to push on next morning, before what strength I had regained evaporated entirely. But during the night there came upon me a pain under which I could only writhe and stuff my throat with bedclothes. When I had enjoyed this an hour or two, a brilliant thought struck me,—appendicitis! All the night through—for only the rooster slept within shouting distance—I painted fanciful pictures of a grave looked down upon by the paternal, serene peaks through the ages to come. For it was easy to guess how effectively the surgeons of the Andes would surge—with their butcher-knives, sheep-shears and ditch-water. In the morning I sent the caretaker to summon the doctor before he set out on his rounds. About nine he came back to announce, in a manner suspiciously sheepish, that the señor doctor médico titular was confined to his bed. As the day wore on the fellow overcame his racial lack of initiative to the extent of bringing me a potion from the chief botica, but it had little effect. Then all at once “Taco,” the Japanese of Huaylas, grinned in on me through the bars of my window, and a half-hour later the keeper of the drug-shop had come in person.

“It is congestion of the bowels, señor,” he announced. “These pílduras will relieve it. The doctor was to have changed the treatment on Sunday to avoid this, but—”

“Is the doctor seriously ill?” I asked.

“Señor,” said the druggist, after a moment of hesitation, “on Saturday night the médico titular took some liquor at a tertulia. It is fatal to him. He cannot stop. It is now four days that he has lain mareado” (seasick), “and he has not been able to visit one of his patients. Out in the pueblos three have already died; for there is no other doctor.”

I had been ten days in Caráz when, in spite of a soreness within and an annoying lack of vigor, I decided to push on afoot. A broad road led south along the green and fertile valley of the Santa, shut in on either hand by the yellow, terra-cotta flanks of barren mountains as between unscalable walls. The way was well-peopled with broad-faced, stolid Indians speaking no Spanish, and a felt hat of tobacco-color was now taking the place of the dingy “panamas” that had been almost universal since southern Ecuador. It was only a simple day’s walk; eight miles to another provincial capital. But it seemed at least twenty, especially as the “perfectly level” road kept mounting steadily, for Yungay is a thousand feet higher than Caráz. The snow-and-glacier mass of Huascarán, king of that magnificent snow-capped range that dwarfs the Alps, bulked menacingly almost sheer above the bucolic old plaza, when I plodded across it in the sleepy silence of noonday to the dwelling of an unusually simple-hearted subprefect.

Next morning Yungay stretched for miles along the half-cobbled highway, and had scarcely ended when Mancos began. This department of Ancachs and the valley of the Santa is the most densely populated region of Peru. The fifteen miles to Carhuáz was what the Peruvians call an excellent road; to a people of wider outlook it would have been recognizable as a broad expanse of loose stones undulating over barren ridges, relieved by the bracing mountain air from off the blue-white bulk of Huascarán, here seeming to hang suspended overhead. The water of all this valley is reputed a source of several dread diseases, among them the warty verrugas indigenous to Peru. The bottle of boiled “tea-water” swinging from my leather harness lasted but a few dry miles, and I could only fall back, not without misgiving, on chicha, announced for sale by a little red flag before an occasional hut along the way. The bridge that once lifted the camino real across the swift, cold stream at the edge of the green oasis that marked the end of the day’s tramp had gone the way of most Peruvian bridges, and left me to wade waist-deep. Strangely enough, my host of Yungay had kept his word to telegraph the gobernador of Carhuáz, and I sat down almost upon arrival with the family at a dinner served after the patriarchal manner of the Andes. To those of us at table the wife at the head granted the full meal, from the hot, peppery soup of Ancachs to the dessert of fried plantains in “honey,”—melted crude sugar. To the dozen Indian servants squatted along the wall she dished out frugally the coarser viands, to each according to his station in life, the bedraggled scullion getting only a small gourdful of boiled corn and yuca. During our Sunday stroll in the plaza the gobernador introduced me in the same careful order to every town celebrity, down to the last teniente; after which we of the élite gathered round the town clerk in a corner of the square to hear read the weekly “bulletin,” from the two-line cable of foreign news “via Lima” to the last testimonial to the efficacy of the pills of Dr. Ross as a panacea of all earthly misfortunes.

I was miles south before the first rays of Monday’s sun fell upon me, and even after that was able to sneak along for hours in the shadow of the Cordillera, so closely did it stand above me. Town rapidly succeeded town, with miles of almost unbroken house-walls crowding a damnably cobbled road to barely the width of a wheeled vehicle. Not even along an English highway would more houses have been shops. The male population spoke a more or less fluent Spanish, weedy with terms from their native tongue; but the women either could not or would not use anything but Quichua. The dialect of the region contained a labor-saving devise in the phrase “A ’onde vueno?” serving for the more specific “Where do you come from and where are you going?” of less inventive sections. Not a few took me for a peddler, and called out from their doorways, “Qué lleva de venta, señor?” and some sent children running after me with a summons to return, lest they miss a precious opportunity for long-winded and chiefly futile bargaining. Ripened corn was being husked in the narrowing fields along the way. The repulsive, flanking ranges crowded closer and closer together, squeezing the stony road ever higher, until the hills closed in entirely, and a precipitous, barren ridge, cutting off the world to the south, left it no choice but to contract to a cobbled street of the department capital. The sun was setting when I halted at a corner of Huaráz’ main plaza, my legs leaden with the twenty-five undulating, stony miles behind me, to inquire for that famous hotel rumor had pictured for weeks gone by.

The conviction came upon me that there would not be a hotel even in Lima. A citizen of Huaráz did point out to me a building boasting itself the “GRAN HOTEL,” but all it offered was a few rooms to let. To me fell that of the zaguan, a prison-like chamber forming a front corner of the building and opening on both the street and the entrance to the patio. It had once been the oratorio of a private dwelling, and the altar and its decorations were still intact, except that the Virgin had flown from her niche. Across the way was a Chinese fonda with the same bill of fare, worse cooked, worse served, and more expensive than that of Cajamarca. This was the gathering-place of the élite among the homeless transients. I had not the courage to investigate the dozen other Chinese and native “restaurants” scattered about town.

Huaráz, capital of the most populous department of Peru and the largest city I had yet seen since crossing the frontier, is really but another mud village of the Andes, differing from the rest only in size. Its adobe buildings seldom rise above a story and a half in height; its rusticated inhabitants, in ragged, comic-opera costumes, the majority speaking only Quichua, were for the most part ill-bred and disagreeable in manner, especially to “gringos,” whose intelligence or cleanliness they seemed to resent. Even the small percentage of whites—real whites, that is, for there were many who no doubt mistakenly considered themselves so—were gaping mountaineers. Window-glass, to be sure, was to be found, and there were actually three or four clumsy, two-wheeled carts, like the rural wagons of England, the arrival of which was no doubt an event in the town history. Foreign residents were numerous, especially Chinamen, who owned many of the shops of importance, leaving the natives to squat in the street with their few cents’-worth of wares. The town itself has nothing “picturesque” about it, neither in the color and style of its houses nor the rags of its inhabitants; but this is far more than made up for by the magnificent range of snowclad peaks that climb up into the blue all about it, towering close above the town on the east and stretching away into the north, to end in the enormous blue-white mass of Huascarán. Its climate, colder than that of Quito and with a perpetually brilliant sunshine and an invigorating crispness to the air, was delightful. There was even a shelf of books for sale in one of the larger establishments, though the nearest I came to finding literature of the country for the road ahead was Björnson’s “Sendas de Diós,” whatever it may be called in Norwegian.

Rumor had it that the tramp over the icy Cordillera Central that now lay before me would be “impossible,” even to a man in the most sturdy condition. To slip down to the coast and sail for Lima would have been easy, but a racial obstinacy forced me to pursue to the bitter end the task I had set myself, though it promised only the monotony of familiar experience and further intercourse with a people that had grown utterly antipathetic in habit, feature, and character. An American resident furnished me a horse and a peon for the first day’s journey. The prefect had favored me with the customary flowery document to his subordinates along the way, ordering them to “lend me all classes of facilities.” It would have been far more to the point had he commanded them more specifically to assist me to acquire an occasional plate of beans. The dusty road close along the diminishing river was well traveled, chiefly by long donkey trains and plodding, expressionless Indians. Huts and even small villages were frequent, the barren ranges crowding ever closer and dwindling almost to foothills, or rather seeming so to dwindle as we mounted ever higher. Beyond the bridge that carried us back to the right bank of the Santa were scores of little wheat-fields, often hanging far up the steep hillsides; and Indians were threshing the grain by driving their animals round and round the circles of hard earth in which it had been spread, and tossing it high in the air with wooden shovels until the wind had carried away the chaff. The monotonous mud town of Recuay, notorious for its horse-thieves, gazed stolidly upon us as we trotted on to Ticapampa, headquarters of a French mining company, the several tall chimneys of which were belching their smoke into the brilliant sky, their ugliness offset by the first suggestion of industry in Peru.

It cost me three days and several tramps back to Recuay to find a mount for the journey ahead. Walking would have been far less laborious. But there were sixteen leagues of bleak, foodless páramos and two snow-topped ranges separating me from the first suggestion of habitation on the further side of the great glacier-clad central chain of the Andes, that stretched away to north and south further than the eye could command, like an impassable barrier set by nature against the wilfulness of puny man.

Fortunately the wife of an Indian of Recuay celebrated that Sunday so effectually that she brought to bed her companions in a drunken brawl. The gobernador fined her twenty soles. Her husband possessed only ten, and her wails from the adobe cárcel were interfering with the bargaining in the market-place. Summoned by the walking scarecrow who boasted himself the lieutenant-governor, the head of the disrupted household admitted, after a wealth of subterfuges, that he owned two mules in condition for a journey, and the gobernador, pocketing “in the name of justice” the sovereign I handed him, ordered the abject husband to be ready at six in the morning to accompany me to Huallanga.

Some two leagues further up the contracted valley we crossed the now tiny Santa by a bridge of sticks and, catching the gorge of a little stream fed by the glaciers above, plunged due east into the mountains. The sun had burned our faces in the river valley; an hour afterward it was cold as late November. Rain began, but quickly turned to a mixture of hail and snow. Dusk overtook us at the foot of a mighty glacier, though not until we had sighted one of the rare shepherd’s huts that huddled in an occasional stony hollow. These miserable Indian chozas of the upper heights are built of cobble-stones heaped up to the height of a dog-kennel and covered with brown ichu grass, hardly as large and quite as crude as those the beaver fashions, defending their miserable inmates neither from wind nor rain. A single room, which can only be entered on hands and knees, houses the whole family, whom a sheepskin or two serves as bed, and two or three earthen pots as utensils in which to cook their scanty fare over an ichu or dried-dung fire in the center of the windowless hovel. Totally indifferent to wealth or comfort, with hardly fuel enough for cooking purposes, the stolid inhabitants slink into their squalid dens as soon as the sun has withdrawn his genial rays, and shiver through a night during which they get almost no unbroken sleep. With scarcely enough food to keep themselves from starvation, the house swarms of mangy curs that curl up among them by night, and which, being never fed, dash greedily at any offal, like the pigs of Central America. Here there was a second kennel, oval in shape, which the woman permitted us to occupy, because she was asked in her own tongue by one of her own people. Both she and her half-dozen children were barefoot and in scanty garb, yet appeared completely indifferent to the icy cold which, if less in degrees than in a Canadian mid-winter, was more penetrating. We carried blankets sufficient to pass the night comfortably, huddled close together, but as often as I stepped out into the brilliant moonlight in which the ice-fields above us stood forth like fissured and fantastic ghost-castles, the very marrow in my bones seemed to congeal.

Hoar-frost covered the earth, and ice a half-inch thick lay on the stagnant puddles when we set out in the bitter cold dawn across a region drear in the extreme. Stiff, stony climbs carried us up to the very edges of immense blue-white glaciers, and through patches of snow that threw the sharp rays of the highland sun into our eyes and faces like a spray of needles. The day was as laborious as any I had ever spent afoot,—thirty-six miles over the wintry, rock-pitched double crest of the Central Cordillera on a mule who jolted my unaccustomed frame to a loose-jointed wreck before I finally slid gratefully to the ground in the bleak mining-town of Huallanga. This was a slight oasis of imported life in a wild, almost uninhabited region, the Peruvian mine-manager of which was extraordinary from at least two points of view,—he was blond as a Norseman, and so advanced in his customs that I dared even address his wife directly at table.

Next day I joined—for a decided consideration—the caravan of a local merchant whose arrieros were bound for Cerro de Pasco with a troop of cargo-animals. A “civilized” Indian, that is, one who wore shoes and spoke Spanish, called for me with a half-size horse, the crude native saddle covered with a pellón, the hairy saddle-rug all high-caste horsemen use in this region, and soon after noon we jogged away down a stony little river. The merchant had duly and honestly warned me that, being only pack-animals, his chuscos were gifted with no gentle pace. But he had not warned me that I was joining a way-freight. I drew on ahead in spite of myself, and when, barely eight miles from Huallanga, the shrieks and whistles of the drivers died out behind, I waited a half-hour in vain, then went back some distance to find them lassoing the animals one by one, piling their loads or pack-saddles in a hollow square, and turning them loose with their front feet crudely hobbled. There were nineteen animals, mostly in ballast, attended by four arrieros. Too lazy apparently to unsling their pots and cook supper, the patched and weather-faded quartet munched a bit of parched corn and a sheet of sun-dried beef, and sat all night drinking and wailing maudlin ballads. The “tent” stretched over the packs was so low that I had to lie down on the ground and roll under it, and so thin that the rain dripped in upon me almost in streams.

It was still black night when the water-soaked canvas was pulled off me, and I found the arrieros already engaged in a riotous effort to round up the animals. This was no simple task, in spite of the hobbles, and the morning was well advanced before the last of the troop had been lassoed and loaded. During the operation I suggested that we prepare at least a pot of tea, but Valenzuela, the chief arriero, dismissed the matter with a grimace and a “neither wood nor grass will burn after the rain,” and I could only choke my hunger with a rock-hard lump of bread and shiver under my poncho until I mounted, this time a mule, to spare the animal of the day before.

We followed the river-gorge so long that it turned almost uncomfortably warm. Then suddenly abandoning the highway to modern Huánuco and the roundabout, but warm and well-populated, route to Cerro de Pasco, the arrieros drove the animals pell-mell up a steep gorge between towering mountain walls, by what looked like a spillway from a stone-crusher. This was the very route I should have chosen, for while the longer one would have been more comfortable, this followed very closely the ancient Inca highway. Topping the horizon, we trotted on across an enormous, brown-yellow plain of scanty ichu vegetation that stretched away to the hazy foot of what looked from this height like low hills. Here was just such a place as the Incas, requiring an unbroken outlook over the surrounding world and grazing land for their llamas, chose for their cities. I was not surprised, therefore, to find a long expanse of the páramo covered with hundreds of stone ruins, only the walls still standing, from one to eight feet high, in broken, fantastic disarray. This was “Huánuco el Viejo,” which the Spaniards found an important city at the time of the Conquest, but which the less hardy half-breed descendants abandoned, as in so many cases, for a warmer valley, eighteen leagues to the east. History does not reach back to the origin of old Huánuco, the ruins of which still occupy almost a square mile of the silent, utterly uninhabited plain. The road—a mere interweaving of faint paths across the Andean prairie—passed within five hundreds yards of the ruins, but the caravan pushed on without a halt, as if these monuments of their ancestors were mere stone-heaps, unworthy a glance of attention. I turned and trotted away across the plain, bathed in the cold, glaring sunshine of the Andean plateau, toward the site. Valenzuela, after a shout of protest, stuck close on my heels, whether out of fear that I would decamp with the mule, or lay hands on some old Inca treasure, or from some superstition connected with the “Gentiles,” I do not know. There was really little to be seen. Every one of the countless ruins of large and small buildings, arranged more or less in squares, were sections of cobble-stone walls, mere stone-heaps without sign of mortar, as crude as the chozas of shepherds, now fallen until, in many places, only their symmetrical arrangement suggested the hand of man. To this there was only one exception. Some three hundred yards from the rest of the ruins was a rectangular fortress of carefully cut and nicely fitted stone blocks, with suggestions of cement, now mere walls, some fifteen feet high, filled level full of earth on which the drear ichu grew as thickly as on the surrounding plain. Except in extent, the ruins were not to be compared with those of Marca-Huamachuco, though the “castillo” closely resembled in construction and stone-fitting the single monument of Ingapirca in southern Ecuador.

We trotted on after the pack-train, and rode for some hours over low ridges, each of which brought to view a new expanse of dreary, yellowish landscape. Occasionally an arriero broke forth in a mournful song that rose and fell with the same monotony as the undulating páramo. Now and then, as a pack worked loose, one of the muleteers dismounted and, deftly slipping out of his poncho, threw it over the head of the animal and readjusted the load. To my surprise, quickly followed by my disgust, the train soon after noon swung into the cobble-fenced field of a low, cobble-stone hut, similar to, but far more miserable and tiny than those of the ancient city behind. Greeting the barefoot Indian woman who emerged on all fours from the hut, the arrieros began to round up and unload the animals. Though we had not made fifteen miles, we were to stop here for the night. I swallowed my wrath, reflecting that he who joins a freight-train must not expect express speed.

It was too cold to sit, and I took to promenading weakly about the hillside. Down in a hollow beyond I came upon a family preparing their crop of potatoes after the ancient Inca fashion still common to the Andes. This chuño—chuñu, in Quichua—is the chief vegetable of Andean marketplaces and the principal food of the Indians of the Sierra. The newly dug potatoes are spread out on the ground at a high altitude, preferably on the bank of a highland lake or stream, and left to freeze by night. They are small potatoes, for the Indian’s mode of selection has been to plant only the smallest, eating or selling the larger, until the tubers indigenous to Peru have degenerated to the same low level as their horses and dogs. When the sun has thawed the potatoes, the Indians of the household tread out the juice with their bare feet, then spread them in the sun to dry. This produces the chuño negro, or black chuño, which in the time of the Incas was the only kind permitted the common people, and which to-day forms the chief product of the process. Those who prefer chuño blanco, the “twice frozen white chuño” which graced only the tables of the Incas and nobles, put the tubers inside a well of cobble-stones under the surface of a river or lake, and leave them from two to eight days, after which they are dried in the sun. The result is a food that will keep indefinitely, but which has very much the same taste as so much fried sand. The most common method of preparing these frozen potatoes is to grind them in a stone mortar and use the powdered chuño to thicken soup.

When the head of the Indian household arrived, he opened with Valenzuela a conversation in half-breed Quichua, of which I caught enough to learn that we were to drive a league west in the morning to wait a day for some species of cargo, stop to pick up another load a few leagues beyond, and so on indefinitely. I called the arriero aside and protested that, aside from the hardships and exposure of lying out on every mountain-side, I was steadily growing worse for lack of treatment. To my surprise he proposed that I ride on alone next day. As he would never have dreamed of making such a proposal to a Peruvian stranger, it spoke well of the opinion he had gathered of Americans from contact with them in the mining town toward which we were headed. A bed of several horse-blankets was spread for me beneath the flap of the canvas covering our packs, out under the shivering stars that stood forth in the luminous highland sky with the unnatural luster of electric bulbs. During the later hours of the night, when I rolled out into the cold, still air, a brilliant full moon was flooding with almost the light of noonday the rolling mountainous world about us as far as the eye could reach.

I knew only too well that a matter settled the night before would have to be argued out anew in the morning. Dawn crept up over the eaves of the east, and the god of the Incas flung his horizontal rays across the empty plateau, but Valenzuela, assuming the customary air in such cases, that we had neither of us meant what we had said the evening before, made no move to prepare for my departure. When I reminded him of his promise, he announced that he would, of course, keep it, if I really, seriously desired it. Only, it would be utterly impossible for a man unacquainted with the route to find his way across the often unmarked punas and pampas ahead. Then, too, it was infested with bands of robbers who at times attacked whole pack-trains, to say nothing of one lone, helpless gringo. If only I would wait until to-morrow, he and I would ride on alone at breakneck speed, and make up for all the delay. I had long since learned the close resemblance of the South American mañana to a greased pig; moreover, I had no desire to ride at breakneck speed. He muttered under his breath at this gringo obstinacy, and ordered the youngest arriero to saddle a horse and accompany me. The latter refused. Valenzuela shrugged his shoulders with a gesture that meant, “You see it is out of the question.” But the experienced Andean traveler can always win his point, if he insists long and hard enough. The chief arriero gave up at last and sent a man to lassoo and saddle, not the “stout mule” he had promised the evening before, but one of the saddest imitations of the genus horse in camp; and late in the morning I rode down through the chuño-producing gully and away over the brown and sterile world spread broad and high before me.

The arriero’s first prophecy came quickly true. I lost the road. A stretch of what was evidently the old Inca highway, broad and grass-grown and lined by two rows of stones, pushed straight on over all obstacles in what seemed to be the right direction, but it did not fit the descriptions that had been given me. The well-marked trail I followed led me down into two gaping hamlets that had not been mentioned, and doubled the miles to Baños, somnolent as an Italian village at summer noonday, down in the throat of a gorge. The frowsy chusco already gave signs of not being able to endure the journey. All I demanded was a reasonable walking pace, yet it cost me far more labor than to have made the trip afoot to keep the animal moving a scant two miles an hour. It was evident that, for all my incessant labor, we should not reach before nightfall the hacienda we were seeking, and when it came on to rain and hail in a cold, bleak bowl of mountains, I turned toward a collection of huts that stood out dimly as an animal of protective coloring on the upper edge of the saucer-shaped hollow.

The Indian men, patronizing and arrogant in their clumsy way, as usual in such situations, offered me the customary six-inch block of wood on which to squat under the eaves of the “corredor.” I took weakly to promenading the twenty-four miles in the saddle out of my legs, and furtively inspected the six huts that made up the collection. All were earth-floored dens, roofed with ichu, against several of which immense quantities of dried cow-dung were stacked like cordwood. The women squatting over the fire in the center of one of the huts handled fuel and food at one and the same time. Though they were barefoot and scantily clad, the men wore heavy, home-knit wool stockings to their knees, and crude moccasins of a strip of hairy cowhide, drawn together over the foot with a “puckering string” of rawhide. The males spoke considerable Spanish, but the women knew, or pretended to know, only Quichua. There were attached to the place at least a score of dogs, who set up a head-splitting chorus as often as I stirred, and at few-minute intervals even without that provocation. Across the shallow hollow the long line of snow-clad peaks that had grown up along the entire eastern horizon during the day stood forth in bold and impressive majesty in the light of evening, a light that seemed strained through purple-tinted crystals.

When the mountain cold settled down like an icy sheet, I asked where I might sleep.

“Why, there in the corredor, to be sure,” mumbled the Indian.

“We gente blanca have not the indifference to cold of los naturales,” I replied.

“Well, then, here in the kitchen,” he grumbled.

“How about that casita?” I asked, pointing to a pampa-grass lean-to against the largest hut.

“That is where the family sleeps.”

“And that?” I persisted, indicating a structure of beehive or beaver-house shape, built entirely of ichu and with a rounded door not three feet high, that stood forth on a knoll behind the others.

But that, it seemed, was where the watchman slept—though what he watched was not apparent. After a long conference in Quichua, however, this was assigned me with sullen grace; a boy was sent to drag out the “watchman’s” bed of sheepskins, and I struggled up to the shelter with saddle, pack, and equipment, and crawled inside on hands and knees. The choza was constructed on the same plan as the wigwams of the American “red men,”—a pole frame set up cone-shaped and covered with mountain grass, through which the bitter wind that swept across this sterile upland cut as a knife through cheesecloth, and so low that even in the center I could barely stand upright on my knees. The chusco had been turned over to a boy who was to watch it all night for a week’s wage. It was not that I took much stock in the Indian’s assertion that there was horse-stealing in these parts; but I hoped by this arrangement to forestall any rascality he might himself set afoot. The “watching,” however, was evidently by some species of aboriginal telepathy; for not only was no sign of a guardian to be seen as often as I crawled out into that interminable night, but when morning came the head of the household greeted me with:

“El chusco se ha perdido—the animal has lost itself.”

“Lost!” I cried.

“Sí, señor, but it will be found again. The boy has already been sent to search for it.”

How even my long-experienced instinct for guessing aright among a hundred splendid chances to go astray saved me from getting hopelessly lost during that day, I have never been able to fathom. Across the utterly uninhabited and almost untraveled mountain-top the trail was at best faintly marked, and finally, beyond the cold, blue lake of Lauracocha, reputed the real source of the Amazon, it disappeared altogether. For hours I prodded my wretched imitation of a horse forward by compass over hill and dale, and by some stroke of luck fell upon the trail again beyond. Soon the pampa gave way to green and tremulous sod, and a swamp in which I all but mired the animal beyond recovery. Nor did the route hold to the same direction, but frequently sidestepped unexpectedly for no apparent reason, and it was only by the general lay of the hills and the instinct of long practice that I picked it up again. Once it split evenly, and the branch I chose led far up the face of a thousand-foot cliff, the path hewn in the sheer wall growing ever narrower, until the animal thumped my knee against the stone precipice and all but pitched us headlong into the appalling ravine below. To dismount was no simple task, and had the horse been a foot longer I should not have succeeded in turning him around and leading the way back to the fork. On the other side of the peak was a great natural stone stairway, down which the animal slipped and dropped with a painful succession of jolts. The gorge narrowed and deepened; then suddenly, close at hand on the steep flank of the mountain, appeared the first llamas I had seen in Peru, a whole flock of them. From then on they were so frequent that within the next half-hour I had seen far more llamas than in all the rest of my life. A new costume for men, at first sight ludicrous, came into evidence almost at the same time. Instead of trousers they wore very roomy, dark-colored breeches, cut off exactly at the knee, so that the first glimpse of their wearers at a distance was little short of startling, suggesting for a moment the astounding incongruity of an Indian woman sporting the skirt of a ballet-dancer. Below these garments they wore the long, knitted wool stockings, gray or black, and the hairy cowhide moccasins that had first appeared a few days before, and as they passed me they snatched off their heavy, brown felt hats with some mumbled greeting in Quichua.

While enjoying a racking fever in the comparatively comfortable home of the gobernador of Yanahuanca, I learned that there were two ways of reaching Cerro de Pasco. One was to ride nine bitter-cold leagues across a trackless puna, on which a lone gringo was sure to get lost and die of exposure; the other was to travel about half that distance by a well-marked road to Goyllarisquisca, where los americanos have their coal mines and whence there ran a daily train. I could not believe that fate would be so crude a practical joker as to let a man who had found his way clear from Bogotá go astray on the last day of his journey, but I could easily conceive of the wreck of a horse wilting between my leaden legs somewhere out on the unmarked pampa; moreover, the sight of a railroad would be a comparatively new experience. I decided on the shorter route.

It necessitated the gobernador calling me at two in the morning, before a raging fever had entirely burned itself out. An Indian in flowing breeches, leading a “horse” that was to bring back some arrival by train, and another astride a pitifully small pony, led the way out into the luminous starlit night. A good road tacked gradually upward through a sleeping village, hanging like some prehensile creature on the swift hillside, where the dogs sang us a rousing chorus, and lifted us in some three hours to the razor-backed summit of a ridge, down the further slope of which sprawled headlong a still larger town, fantastic of profile in the morning starlight. We labyrinthed through it, meeting scores of panty-clad and moccasined Indians and barefoot women and girls toiling marketward under atrocious burdens; for the day was Sunday. Below the town we came out on a road paralleling a stupendous gorge; and across it, so high above that I could scarcely believe it possible a cluster of electric lights, suspended in the night between earth and heaven, mingled with the stars and half blotted out at intervals by the smoke of American industry, marked Goyllarisquisca, a city of the sky, to see which we must crane our necks like countrymen at the foot of man’s mightiest monument. The stars went out one by one, like gas-jets turned off by hurrying street-lighters; the luminous night turned to colorless opaque dawn, in which the jagged Sierra stood out flat and featureless as if cut out of cardboard. We went down and ever down into an unconscionable gorge, to cross—such is the ghastly futility of Latin-America—an insignificant stream; then quickly began to climb again. There was a path straight up the mountain-side to Goyllarisquisca, a path which a man unsusceptible to dizziness, and capable of climbing a steep stairway of a hundred thousand steps without guard-rails or a landing on which to pause for breath, might cover in a half-hour. Instead, we wound corkscrew-wise around the entire mountain, through another town, fantastic in its perpendicular setting as the last, yet reduced in the disillusioning light of day to its drab, mud-built reality; and uncovering others pitched at queer places on unattainable noses and gouged-out hollows of the range in which the shadows still lurked like skulking bandits. The mountains beyond were garbed from head to foot in white robes, and in the valleys lay seas of mist from which emerged crags and peaks like uninhabited, rocky islands. Less beautiful, perhaps, in its aspect than the more colorful Alps, the scene vastly outdid these in its rugged, masculine grandeur. Little by little we fell in with an almost unbroken procession of Indians; here and there one clad in exotic overalls whispered the approach of American influence, and at length our breathless animals staggered over the last ridge into the village of the tongue-loosening name.

Before me lay a small Pittsburgh, not so small at that, with great cranes swinging across the gorges, unsentimental stone buildings roaring and matter-of-fact chimneys belching forth the sooty smoke of industry. Long rows of decent living-quarters were interspersed with longer ones of box and flat cars, and sprawling about the higher levels were native shacks so tinged with the foreign influence that even a stove-pipe protruded here and there from their roofs of wavy sheet-iron. Across the scene floated the sweet music of a deep-voiced American train whistle, and on every hand was the evidence of diligence, masculine toil, and effective doing that quickened my northern pulse like a deep draft of wine. It was like coming back to my native world after a long absence. Scores of half-forgotten things I had never before seen in South America surged up about me, and upon me came drowsy contentment that my struggles were behind me and that I had already virtually set foot in the central plaza of Lima.

I slipped clumsily off the miserable chusco and turned him over, trappings and all, to the Indian who was to deliver him to Valenzuela when he passed through Yanahuanca. My legs obeyed me sullenly, as if weighted with ball and chain, and my physical condition gave to my movements a hesitating, deliberate dignity. At the station was a restaurant run by a Chinaman with Peruvian assistance, where the American influence by no means ceased at bacon and eggs, but had reached the height of butter and sliced bread, and rosy bottles of catsup! In a corner of the room a coal-stove blazed merrily, the first artificial heat I had felt in a long two years. I wandered out upon the platform. At the far end stood a man fondling a dog, a real dog, not an Andean cur, and as I approached he protested affectionately and ineffectually:

“Now you get down; you’re dirtying my pants.”

There was no mistaking that vocabulary, even if the strangely nasal accent that struck my unaccustomed ear rudely had not sufficed to betray the speaker’s nationality. Peruvians do not fondle dogs; nor do they refer to their nether garments in that abrupt and familiar fashion. I was soon seated in a comfortable office-chair, a stack of New York papers beside me. But I gave up in despair explaining how I had come to Goyll—well, pronounce it yourself—without having ever been either in Lima or “the Cerro”; and I fancy I had convinced my host of nothing, except that I was a clumsy and unconscionable liar, before the giant Baldwin rolled in, dragging behind it a half-dozen full-sized American freight-cars, as if some branch of the railways of my own land had pierced this lofty nook of the Andes.

The official business of the line is to transport coal to the mines at Cerro de Pasco, and passengers are accepted only on suffrance. The “first-class” coach was the familiar old American caboose, with a line of leather cushions along the walls and a coal stove in the center. It was empty when I entered, but had I not almost forgotten the ways of Latin-American travelers, I should not have been so surprised when it at length filled to overflowing with noisy, over-dressed native women, a few men of the white-collar class, drummers for the most part, hideous with rings, and every species of bundle and cumbersome baggage. Then two robust American trainmen, genuine as if they had that moment been picked off the top of a transcontinental freight-car, stamped in, climbed into their cupola, and we were off.

It was the reaction, no doubt, from the straining months behind me that brought on a paludismo that set me shaking even under my poncho. But the unaccustomed artificial heat all but choked me, and when I had accepted an orange, and gravely refused the whiskey, brandy, and black coffee my sympathetic fellow-passengers would have forced upon me as sure cures, I climbed into the cupola. The landscape would not have been joyful under the best of conditions. A bare mountain-top, faintly rolling, its frosty soil cherishing no vegetation except the dreary yellow-brown ichu of the uplands, stretched monotonously away on every hand, its surface flooded with the brilliant, thin sunshine of Andean plateaux and mottled here and there with fleecy cloud shadows. Now and then a flock of llamas lifted their absurd heads to gaze after us as we sped past. Once or twice we stopped at a wind-threshed mud-town, standing out pitifully unsheltered on the treeless waste, halted an hour at grimy, smoke-belching La Fundición with its smelters, and drew up at dusk in bare and dreary Cerro de Pasco. It was June 22, three months from the Peruvian frontier and 2269 miles from Bogotá, of which I had covered 243 on horseback and twenty-five by rail.

On the train I had been the storm-center of a heated difference of opinion. The Peruvian passengers contended that I should descend by the morning express to Lima, where I would quickly recover under the care of famous physicians of the capital; the train-crew that I should enter the hospital of the American mining company on “the Hill.” There could be no debate between entrusting myself again to the careless inefficiency of native practitioners, and the happy opportunity of entering an institution conducted by men of my own race. When I had found a boy to carry my baggage, I set out with high hopes, if slow steps, for the American hospital.

It was an imposing, one-story building, covering a space equal to a city block and forming a hollow square around an extensive cement-floored patio, on the far edge of the drear and colorless American mining town, well removed from its smoke and swirling dust and disturbing noises. My welcome was not, to be sure, exactly what a morbid imagination had led me to picture, but that was no doubt due to the fact that both doctors were at the moment absent. The head-nurse overcame in time her inclination to refuse me admittance, and sent an Indian boy, closely related in personal habits to the occupants of mountain-top chozas, to show me into a ward. In appearance it was all that a hospital ward should be, its ten imported cots all unoccupied. The boy jerked his head sidewise toward a chair and disappeared. Two empty hours dragged funereally by. Then another Indian youth, startlingly like a personification of squalor and uncleanliness in a masque gotten up by some stern disciple of the Zola school of realism, burst in upon my feverish dreams, and before I could raise a hand in protest thrust a thermometer into my mouth. Evidently it was his assigned duty to take the temperature of anyone caught on the premises. Had I come into the ward to recane the chairs, no doubt he would have forced a thermometer down my throat, like some automatic machine worked by springs, removed and shaken it, wiped it on the seat of his trousers, and pattered away on his bare feet.

Long after dark the fresh and rosy assistant-doctor dashed into the room. But he had no time to give attention to my symptoms and explanations, for dinner was about to be served, and ordering me to get into a bed, he dashed for the door again. I protested that I had brought with me the unpleasant evidence of long Andean travel, and he jerked a thumb over his shoulder with a parting mumble of “bathroom.” There was one, even as he had indicated, with all modern appliances; but like most new-fangled inventions transplanted to the Andes, it did not “function.” Another example of the Peruvian abhorrence of soap was ordered to bring a half-dozen pails of hot water, which in his haste to be done with the task he translated into the Castilian for luke-warm; and I crawled at last into one of the cots. Soon afterward the Indian boy came to climb into another, in the same identical rags he wore by day. The dinner was evidently a prolonged and engaging function, for neither the doctor nor any other sign of human interest appeared again during a night in which I tossed incessantly with fever, while the ward blazed with electric lights and the ineffectual steam-pipes thumped and pounded like an adjacent boiler-factory.

I am happy to be able to say that neither the two physicians, whom we will disguise under the pseudonyms of Dr. F and Dr. D, nor the head-nurse, of the American hospital were my fellow-countrymen; they came from further north. Materially an establishment to boast of, its condition in anything touched by the personal equation was incredible. Homeopathic in creed, it put its trust in pills, and left the rest to eight immature Indians, as devoid of human instincts as of supervision. In a second cheerless, bare ward adjoining the one I occupied were a score of injured or ailing Indian workmen; yet no precaution whatever was taken to keep infection from passing from one room to the other. A single thermometer served all alike. Twice a day the automatic youth of the bare feet went the rounds in quest of temperatures, carrying a bottle of antiseptic so low in stock that it did not reach a third as far up the instrument as did the lips of patients; and too indolent to go to the dispensary for cotton, he wiped it after each use on whatever came within reach,—his sleeve, his trousers, or the noisome rag each servant carried over a shoulder in guise of napkin. If the ten cots had been full, instead of the four that represented the maximum of occupancy during my stay, I do not know what habits we might have adopted; for there were only three cups, three tablespoons, and one teaspoon attached to the ward. The printed rules announced that meal-hours were 7; 10; and 5:30. In practice they averaged: Breakfast, 8:40 to 9, Dinner, 1 to 1:30, and Supper, about 8. The same stern placard called attention to the fact that visitors were admitted only on Sunday afternoons. Yet scarcely a night passed without a mob of Indians or cholos, male and female, friends of the internes or of some inmate, stamping into the ward as soon as darkness had settled down, and often keeping up an uproar until long after midnight. Then it was the unexplainable custom, on those days set for that ceremony, to drag out a fire-hose at four in the morning and “wash down” the ward like the deck of a ship, flooding the floor an inch or more deep in icy highland water, through which patients put to that necessity might wade to and from their cots.

In the sumptuous quarters of physicians and nurses, occupying all the front half of the building, the formal repasts were provided with every obtainable delicacy, and enlivened with music and gaiety. In the wards the ostensibly well-regulated diet monotonously reduced itself in practice to the leathery “green” beefsteaks of the Andes and two or three other articles sanctioned by prehistoric Andean costumbre. The Latin-American racial lack of initiative is nowhere more in evidence than in the kitchen. If doctor or nurse prescribed some special dish for a patient, there came back in answer—after authority had disappeared from the scene—that threadbare Peruvian prevarication, “No hay”; which meant that the cook was giving vent to his temperamental grouchiness, was too lazy to set another pot on the fire, or was keeping the delicacy for himself or some “compadre.” The youthful assistant-physician, trained in the far north, was supremely ignorant of tropical diseases, and, what was worse, had no inclination to add to his professional knowledge. His interests were confined to the contents of a row of unhomeopathic bottles and the manipulation of fifty-two small cardboards at the club-rooms a few blocks away, where he might be found—though not easily called—at almost any hour, ensconced in one of the leather-upholstered lounges before the blazing fireplace. The “gringa” head-nurse chose to do duty by day, and arising every forenoon, came in to smile at each of us about ten, and sometimes again in the early afternoon, before it was time to dress for her daily “bridge” and tea. In a loquacious moment she confided to me that she “just loved” to travel and, having always longed to see “strange foreign countries like Peru,” had been delighted to get an appointment to spend a year or two in it. The assistant-nurse was the most disturbingly beautiful Peruvian it had so far been my fortune to set eyes upon,—and she took the customary advantage of that fact by making no effort to be anything else. Being a subordinate, she was obliged to take the night-shift; but being also a Peruvian, she did not often permit that misfortune to break her night’s rest.

Five days I had studied its ceiling when the morning brought Dr. F, physician in chief, who had been absent on a round of the company’s hospitals, hurrying into the ward. He was a far more successful practitioner than his youthful assistant—in that he made the daily round in about five minutes less than the ten which Dr. D squandered. Two or three mornings later he paused at my cot to grumble querulously:

“It’s —— funny you don’t get better. It must be you are not making up your mind to. Mental attitude, you know. As soon as you had that purge, these pills should have taken hold at once.”

“That what?” I murmured.

“Oh, don’t be stupid! The castor-oil Dr. D gave you a day after you turned up here; the basis of our system of treatment.”

“I have had only pills.”

“Nonsense! Dr. D, what day did this man have his purge?”

“I prescribed it last Monday,” yawned the assistant.

“Of course. Now....”

“But I assure you I have yet to know the taste of castor-oil.”

“Who gave him the oil?” the doctor flung over a shoulder.

“Señorita ——,” replied the subordinate, naming the Peruvian nurse.

She chanced to pass the door in fetching street-garb a moment later, and was called in to confirm the statement.

“Ah, es verdad!” she lisped, in her beautiful nonchalance, “Me olvidé—I forgot,” and with a bewitching smile at the physicians she hurried away to her daytime engagements.

Determined not to celebrate my nation’s birthday as I had my own, I forced my leaden legs to carry me on an afternoon stroll through the famous mining town. The steel-blue skies of Cerro de Pasco, three miles aloft and boasting itself the highest city in the world, are clear beyond any description in mere words. Not once during my sojourn there was the penetrating brilliancy flecked by the slightest whiff of cloud. The sun blazed down with an intensity that burned the cheeks as at the open mouth of a puddling-furnace; yet even at blinding noon-time the cold had a power of penetration unknown to a northern mid-winter day on which the mercury falls far lower. Those who ascend “the Hill” from Lima complain of a leaden inertia and pains varying in intensity and duration, brought on by an altitude that is fatal to weak hearts and to victims of pneumonia. Inured to the heights and scantiness of air almost unbrokenly from far-off Bogotá, I had no consciousness of any such effects.

Nearly a mile from the hospital, the American town, of stone buildings and even less attractive structures, such as the “Tin Can,” an ugly, red, sheet-iron barracks that houses the garden variety of gringo employees, scattered among bare, protruding rocks of a landscape dreary beyond conception, gives way to the old familiar Peruvian huts and hovels. These, in turn, develop further on into two-story dwellings above and shops below, often quaint and striking in architecture. If any city of Peru may be called “unique” in appearance, it is “el Cerro.” Even in the center of the town, roofs of ancient, weather-faded straw alternate with those of wavy sheet-iron; instead of the monotonously square blocks of other Andean cities, its older section is a tangle of narrow streets and misshapen buildings, like a change from our Middle West to Boston. Perched on the summit of the world, with scarcely a knoll overtopping it, or the suggestion of a shrub to shelter it, “the Cerro” is the unhampered playground of icy mountain winds laden with coal-dust, stinging sand, and the soot and smoke and powdered ore from its mines. Bronzed foreigners and miners in leather leggings and hob-nailed boots, squeaking through the streets afoot, or astride Texas-saddled mules, lend the place an air of modernity, for all its swarms of bovine-mannered Indians. In contrast, droves of llamas, with gaily colored ribbons in their ears, slip past in noiseless dignity, or stand in patient groups before a chichería, awaiting their drivers. The hardware and similar trades offer stocks unknown to those sections of the Andes where the imports depend on transportation “en lomo de mula.” Even the pulperías are well-supplied with foodstuffs, testifying to the American influence. From a dust-swirling knoll rising a bit above the rest the eye is gladdened by the glimpse of a cold-blue lake of considerable size, strangely beautiful in its drear and dismal setting. From this point of vantage, too, the stranger becomes aware that “el Cerro” is much more of a city than he suspected, filling the great lap of a repulsive, barren range, and stretching away in several directions under belching smoke-stacks.

Twelve days I had tarried in Cerro de Pasco, and had advanced from my original ailment to one distinctly more serious, when I concluded to descend to Lima while I still had strength to do so. The company physician-in-chief collected a fee that more than doubled my expenditures since leaving Quito, and spared himself the annoyance of penning a receipt, or of any other formality beyond that of dropping the handful of gold sovereigns into his pocket on his breathless morning round. The night sky was turning slightly more transparent along the cold eastern horizon when I tottered out of the hospitable Cerro de Pasco hospital on my way to the station. The second-class car was a stoveless ice-box, densely packed with Indians and all the bath-fearing aboriginal is accustomed to carry with him. A glance at it sufficed to dissipate my resolution to save a sovereign from the wreck of my fortune. The first-class coach was an American car scantily filled with white-collar Peruvians and weather-, experience-, and liquor-marked Americans under forty, “husky” in build and untrammelled in manners. The wintry July dawn climbed up over the far edge of the bleak, treeless world, and at Smelter, cheerless beyond words in the new-born daylight, we were joined by more cold-faced Americans, wrapped, as were also many of the natives, in huge neck-roll sweaters. Dressed even in all the clothing I possessed, I kept my poncho close about me, for the coal-stove in the front end of the car was no match for the frigidity of the vast ichu-brown pampa de Junín across which we were soon speeding. Only by frequently scratching a peep-hole in the frosted window could I gaze out upon the drear yellow world, with its snow peaks rising slightly above it in the distance and its great flocks of cold-impervious llamas feeding along the way between ice-coated streams and pools. Off in both directions stood scattered, stone huts with pampa-grass roofs, before which barefoot (brr!) Indian women stood or squatted, and scantily clad children gazed after the train with the stolidity and indifference to the bitter cold of the adobe images they somehow suggested. Here was the scene of the great battle of Junín in which the soldiers of Bolívar defeated the Spanish host; but it is not likely that either pursued or pursuers dripped with perspiration. A dreary walk, indeed, this would have been across the icy, endless, yellow pampa.

A brilliant sun popped up instantly in a faultless sky, like some jack-in-the-box suddenly released; but though it flooded all the visible world with golden light, it brought slight warmth. Beside each seat of our car was an electric button, and beneath it a list of possibilities, in English and Spanish. One had only to press it and presto! a big black negro—no, my memories of other days deceive me; no big black negro would get this high in the world, unless he were dragged there by main force—a little, dapper, noiseless, inscrutable, white-jacketed Chinaman slipped down upon one and lent an attentive, yet haughty ear into which one whispered the desires of the inner man, tempered by a subconscious regard for one’s purse; calling modestly for toast and coffee, if one were a mere American vagabond who had recently fallen among thiev—beg pardon, physicians; or for the “whole damn works,” which meant the same coffee and toast plus a plate of bacon and eggs, if one were an American miner homeward bound, to whom money is as water to the man whose pocket holdeth a quart bottle of concentrated joyfulness. Across the aisle were two such, from whom sounded now and then some pleasant anticipation of homecoming:

“An’ when I get back to Pittsburgh I’m goin’ into the —— House bar and tell Joe to mix me a real, honest-to-God gin-ricky. An’ when he says ‘Where t’ell you been these two years, Hank?’ I’ll jus’ say ‘Diggin’ coal down in Goyllaris—hic—quisca, Joe,’ an’ he’ll call the bouncer to throw me out.”

A big, blue lake, Chinchaycocha, on the distant right drew the eyes toward it; then came a brief halt at the town of Junín, an extensive collection of cobble-stone huts and fences, with a two-tower church in their midst and steam rising on the wintry air from the nostrils of every living being. Then at last, after an extended, wandering search, the train found the rocky bed of a small river, and wound and squirmed with it through half-hidden openings in the hills until a long-drawn masculine whistle caused us to scratch a new peep-hole in the frosted window, to find Oroya rising up to meet us.

Here the American train and roadbed abandoned us to the tender mercies of the Ferrocarril Central, theoretically under English management, but in practice dismally Latin-American from cow-catcher to trailing draw-bar. Packed into the far corner of a seat upholstered only in name, I had frozen from toes to the bottom of my poncho for two mortal hours before the Peruvian engineer came to an understanding with the Peruvian conductor and station-master, and dragged us slowly out of town. From a spot on the earth—and nothing more—called Ticlio, summit of the line, we began the long coast down to the Pacific, through all the customary 65 tunnels, 67 bridges and 16 switchbacks, where for the brakes to lose control would have been to land us in Hades instead of Lima. Hour after hour the arid, savage scenery slid upward. Here the train glided serenely along on the bottomless edge of things; now and again we came out directly above, a thousand feet above, a dusty, rock-scattered town, with rows of stones laid on the sheet-iron roofs to keep them from escaping such dreary surroundings, and zigzagged an hour, often on six tracks one above the other, down to it, only to continue the descent as swiftly beyond. A score of places recalled the story of the young graduate engineer who protested to the American whose name is forever linked with this engineering feat, “Why, Meiggs, we can’t run a railroad along there in that sliding shale!” “Can’t, eh?” the anecdote continues, “Well, young man, that’s just where she’s got to go, and if you can’t find room for her on the ground, we’ll hang her from balloons.”

Bit by bit the Andes began to take on slight touches of green. The Rimac, chattering downward toward the sea, gave us more and more elbow-room, the well-dressed town of Chosica flashed past us like an oasis of civilization, and we sped in truly metropolitan fashion on down the darkening valley, surrounded by whole mountains of broken rock, tufts of cactus and a few hardy willows drinking their life from the widening stream, on toward the glowing sunset and into the black night. Electric lights, real lights in their full candle-power, began to dot the darkness, then flashed past us, throwing their insolent glare into our dust-veiled faces; the roar of a real city, with clanging street-cars and rumbling wagons rose about us; a long station-platform crowded with an urban throng came to a halt beside us, and I descended in the thickness of the summer night in the City of Kings, three miles below where I had stepped forth that morning into the wintry dawn.

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XIII. ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL

It is due, I suppose, to some error in my make-up that my interest in any given corner of the earth fades in proportion as it approaches modern civilization and easy accessibility. To your incurable vagabond may come a momentary thrill, if not of pleasure, at least of contentment, with the feel of city pavements once more under his feet after long hand to hand combat with the wilderness, and the knowledge that to go a journey he has only to signal an electric street-car on the nearest corner. But the attraction quickly palls. Visions of the winding trail soon begin again to torture him with their solicitations, the placid ways of urban man take on a drab and colorless artificiality, and once more the realization comes that to him life offers genuine satisfaction only when he is struggling onward toward some distant and possibly unattainable goal.

Such a place is Lima. The former capital of Spanish America has, to be sure, its points of interest; old colonial palaces where the shades of cloaked viceroys seem still to linger, cloistered walls inclosing the tonsured and cowled atmosphere of the Middle Ages, narrow streets with long vistas of overhanging Moorish balconies wherein still lurks the charm of other days. But these things are all but buried under the stereotyped conveniences and commonplace manners of the modern world. Upon the romance and air of antiquity of a Spanish city of long ago, transplanted to this sandy coast, has intruded the aggressive urge of commerce; from between the carved mahogany bars of quaint miradores peers the face of trade; in and out of massive old wooden street-doors studded with brass come bales of merchandise, often stacked high in the beautiful patios and secluded retreats of former generations. Here, for the first time in South America, were rumors of strikes and complaints of the “servant problem.” Workmen and domestics, advanced already to a scale of wages about half that of our own land, were coming more and more to a knowledge of their worth and power, their striving unfortunately taking that ultra-modern form of careless workmanship and insolence. Here, for the first time, the militant “cost of living” weighed down on the mass of mankind like a leaden blanket. Lima’s thousand and one restaurants—why do none of them seek a virgin field in the highlands?—serve their clients with the mechanical impersonality of world capitals. Like the population, these show that absence of a “middle class” characteristic of Latin-American society, the marked contrast of the great bulk of sandaled poor rubbing shoulders with faultless Parisian attire; either they are repulsive workingmen’s “dumps,” or outwardly regal in manner and inwardly of purse-flattening properties, where nothing national and unique is to be found, unless it be some rare local delicacy, such as asado de chivito,—roast leg of young goat. Whatever exclusive and characteristic remains on the surface is grouped in and about the great covered market-place, where long rows of strange indigenous and familiar foreign wares stretch in many-hued and quaint juxtaposition, or hovers about a few surviving customs of bygone days, such as the milkman—who is more often a woman—making his morning round astride horse or mule, with his cans hanging like saddle-bags from between his legs.

He who comes down upon them from above will find the people of the coast more vivacious than those of the chilly upper Andes, where the perennial gauntness of nature inclines to perpetual gloom. The limeño has been likened to the Andalusian in his fondness for dress, variety, and dissipation, in his gaiety and quickness of wit, his open frankness and tendency to extravagance. Certainly his speech has the lisp of Andalusia—“Do’ copita’ de pi’co, señore’”—and his Castilian has not the purity of that of Bogotá. Yet his gaiety is only comparative. There is an innate gloominess and passive pessimism everywhere in South American society that cannot but strike the visitor who comes direct from more favored lands. The morose Indian of the uplands forms a scarcely noticeable part of the population of Lima. On those rare occasions when he comes down, or more often is brought as a conscript to serve his time as soldier in the capital, he often falls quick victim to the white plague, which finds easy breeding-place in the disused cells of his overdeveloped lungs, built for the scant, thin air of the Sierra. The cholo or mestizo, commonly of a lesser percentage of aboriginal than of Spanish blood, makes up the bulk of the population. Then there is the zambo, bred of the intermingling of the Indian and negro, a robust, stubborn, and revengeful fellow. Merchants from all the varying nationalities of Europe keep shop side by side, with an intermingling of “Turks” and even more distant races, and American engineers stride through the streets at all hours of the day. Yet Lima is essentially a Spanish-American city, for all that; where the pallid, waxy complexion of the gente decente is much in evidence. The women of this caste are often beautiful; so, for that matter, are the men. In a population that may almost be termed cosmopolitan, the Chinaman holds a considerable place. After the abolition of slavery in 1855, large numbers of coolies were imported for the plantations of the Peruvian coast, and Celestials of higher caste have since taken advantage of Peru’s open-door policy and the Japanese steamship lines. So that to-day there are temples and joss-houses and opium dens in Lima, and men in “European” dress, who are not Europeans, lean in the doorways of old colonial mansions transformed into Oriental shops. The Chinese of Lima occupy a wider field of activity than almost anywhere else in the Western hemisphere. Not only is a large percentage of the retail and restaurant business in their hands, but scores of herbolarios, “herbists,” we might say, have stretched their signs across the old-time façades and blinded miradores of what were in viceregal days the residences of haughty families. Only the old men still cling to the national dress, and the pigtail has entirely disappeared. Here, too, the Chinaman sinks to depths not familiar to us of the north, and not only does the race furnish many of the street-sweepers of the capital, but it is no rare sight to see an oval-eyed personification of poverty hobbling along the main thoroughfares “shooting snipes” in the gutters.

The “masses” of Lima dwell in vecindades, which are none the less tenements for being packed together on the ground floor along either side of narrow callejones, blind alleys in which all the activities of the household from baby’s bath to the worship of a tin Virgin intermingle, instead of being piled one above the other. The better houses are spacious and airy within, though outwardly monotonous, built of mud and cane and plaster, their façades here resembling marble at a distance, there painted pale blue, or pink, or yellow. In the mud-and-bamboo Cathedral, the most imposing in appearance in Spanish America, the mummified skeleton of Pizarro, the jaws wired like those of some prehistoric creature in a museum, is made a peep-show, after the crude Spanish fashion. The “Cine” has all but driven out the theater and whatever of national or racial the latter brought with it. The visitor who knows no Spanish could easily guess the business of a shop announcing itself a “Plomería y Gasfitería.” The Lima barber, calling his establishment a “Peluquería y Perfumería,” leaves no doubt as to what effeminate fate may befall one who ventures into his den.

This mid-winter season of July and August, they say, is no time to see Lima at its best. The traveler who has been a thousand times assured that rain never falls on the coast of Peru will be astonished to find the streets often slimy and soaking wet with garúa, the Scotch mist that turns everything clammy and chill, yet never reaches the point where the shops find it worth while to include umbrellas among their stock. For days, and even weeks, the sun is invisible, and the capital lies heavy under leaden skies and a muggy blanket of mist, cold, dank, and gloomy. That is a rare day in this season when a brilliant sun makes it worth while to climb San Cristobal hill, a bare, peaked, rock-and-shale pyramid rising close above Lima on the north, from which he who has chosen his time well may catch a view not only of Callao and its island framed by the intense blue of the Pacific, but of the snowclads of the Sierra. The city with its 160,000 inhabitants lies flat in its arid setting, the disk of the bull-ring in the foreground, an irregular triangle with its base resting on the babbling Rimac, without chimneys, almost without smoke-stacks; for its industries are still chiefly confined to handicraft. The red tiles that give the prevailing color to the cities of the Andes are here unknown. The roofs, made of sticks and mud, are flat, like those of Palestine, and are the family promenades and garbage-grounds, and the abode of smaller live stock, especially of roosters, whose raucous saluting of each new day is not to be escaped by the most fortunate resident. Cock-fighting is still the most popular sport of the cholo classes. It is impossible to appear in public without being pestered by a constant procession of suerteros—offering suerte, or luck—vendors of lottery-tickets who fill the streets with their bawling from morning—late morning, for Lima is no early riser—to midnight.

For all its modern aspect, Lima is still Latin-American in temperament. Dawn brings to light personal habits little less reprehensible than those of Quito. A package of films mailed from the United States cost me two days of red-tape at the post-office, and the charges exceeded the original cost. A dozen bags of mail from the north were lost in Callao harbor through the inexcusable carelessness of the bargemen; the government refused to make reparation to the addressees on the ground that the law relieved it of responsibility for “unavoidable losses by shipwreck!” An abortive revolution enlivened the last days of July. Strolling into the plaza one evening, I was jostled by a group of youthful roughs firing revolvers into the air as they went. That night the mob assaulted the home of a former president, with casualties of three killed and a dozen wounded, and the executive of a year before was lodged in a cell at the penitentiary. Yet the films at a “Cine” a block away ran on without a tremor, and but for the fact that the shops took down their shutters somewhat later than usual, there was nothing left next morning to recall the occurrence. A few days later the principal newspaper announced solemnly that the ex-president had gone to Panama “for motives of health.”

The national museum was officially open, though unofficially closed, on the day of my visit. But the experienced traveler can always win his point with the doorkeeper of a South American institution, and I was soon treading the resounding halls between lines of a dead world’s relics. Mummies from prehistoric days, their knees drawn up to their chins, a look half of disgust, half of pain on their osseous features, squatted along a wall. Some were still covered with many-colored wrappings, enclosing in clumsy bundles not merely their bodies, but all their possessions, their protruding heads still in fantastic masks and wigs, just as they had been found in the burial caves of the Sierra. Others, reputed Incas, were contained in huge bales in which they stood erect, as befitted their high caste, their heads unmasked, the whole covered with a well-preserved linen-like cloth. The floor of one large room was completely covered with hundreds of skulls in careful rows. Some showed prehistoric trepanning, irregular holes sawed out of them, and the subsequent growth of the bone proving that the warrior had lived long after his overthrow in battle. A drowsy cholo was breaking up skeletons and clawing earth out of skulls with the expressionless placidity with which he might have sorted potatoes.

The director deigned to show me in person through the gallery of paintings. We paused first before an immense canvas depicting the funeral of Atahuallpa.

“A modern work?” I remarked, merely to make conversation.

“No, no, señor,” replied the director vehemently, “that is antigua. It was painted nearly forty years ago.”

“The fat priest is Valverde, I suppose, and this man with a beard must be Pizarro?”

“Just so, señor, and the man behind is Pizarro’s brother, Almagro.”

“His brother?”

But the director persisted in the unhistorical relationship, in which he was confirmed by an assistant, in spite of the fact that the figure in question represented a man some fifteen years younger than the chief Conquistador.

“Why is the back of Almagro’s head missing?”

“Ah, señor,” sighed the director, with a shrug of the shoulders, “What would you? The Chilians cut out this picture and carried it home. It used to be several feet longer, and there were many other caballeros in the group.”

Among whom was the real Almagro, no doubt. I made the circuit of the gallery, then turned an inquiring eye on my companion.

“Ah—er—you are looking for the picture that used to be here?” he stammered, quick to catch my expression.

“Yes, the famous portrait of Pizarro.”

“Well, it used to hang right here,” said the director, pointing to a blank space on the wall, as at some object of extraordinary interest. “But a few weeks ago the Señor Presidente de la República sent for it, because he wants it in his own house.”

On my return I dropped in at the University of San Marcos, oldest in America and antedating our most ancient by nearly a century. It was pitifully like other Latin-American schools. The rector, having led me through a dozen empty school-rooms grouped about several patios, and having given the history in detail of a collection of silver cups “graciously awarded the University” by the king of this and the emperor of that, expressed unbounded surprise that I should wish to see a class at work. When it became evident that he could not shake me off with babbling courtesies, he pointed out the door of a class in law and disappeared, as if he would not have it known who was responsible for the unusual intrusion. Some twenty-five young men, not so young either, being almost all adorned with mustaches, were lounging on benches of the amphitheater. The professor, comfortably seated in a sort of pulpit, was reading in a languid and utterly dispassionate voice—not a lecture he had himself prepared, but from a book purchasable at a dollar or two, and readable, I trust, by the students themselves. Meanwhile the students napped, wrote letters, exchanged jokes, and discussed with their neighbors the extraordinary advent of a stranger in their midst. No doubt they had some other means and place of acquiring the knowledge indispensable even to a South American lawyer; but what they gained by attending classes was hard to guess. I had been the object of curiosity for some time before the professor caught sight of me. He left off reading at once, and sparred for time with a string of stale pedagogical jokes until I saw fit to remove my annoying presence. Other class-rooms demonstrated that famous old San Marcos is still in the world of long ago, its methods of instruction as antiquated as its text-books, heritages of a Jesuitical past, unavoidably so because of the rarity of Spanish translations of modern works.

During all July my ambition remained at a low ebb, and my most extended acquaintance was with the medical profession. “Yu Sui, Herbolario de Pekin, physician extraordinary to his Excellency, the Chinese Minister,” assured me I had dysentery, but no fever, and concocted the daily bottle of herbs accordingly. The chief Italian specialist based his treatment on the fact that I had fever, but no dysentery. Fortunately Lima has not yet been invaded by that sect that would have robbed me of the gloomy pleasure of having anything. Every gringo who had ever ventured a hundred miles into the interior had his own individual “sure cure”; and I had reached the point where I would have worn a tin charm about my neck, had anyone asserted it efficacious. Yet when once I had discovered a real physician, Anglo-Saxon in blood and of tropical experience, the remedy—intermuscular injections of emetine—was quickly effective.

A no less potent factor in the recovery, however, was the hospitality of mine own people in Bellavista (“Beyabi’ta,” locally) on the outskirts of Callao. Genuine electric-cars sped across the cool, flat country in a brief half-hour, from the capital to the edge of the Pacific I had not seen since landing in Cartagena thirteen months before. Here it was often brilliant summer, and from the housetop promenade spread out all Callao harbor, jutting La Punta, and the island of San Lorenzo in their intense blue setting, and perhaps even the snow-white line of the Sierra, while over the capital, a bare eight miles away, hung the opaque, mid-winter blanket of haze and gloom. The beach was near at hand, the sea-breeze constant, and the soporific roar of the surf never silent. The landscape, flat and arid, had a charm of its own, and a network of mud fences, on the broad tops of which one might promenade for miles.

One Sunday during convalescence I visited ancient Pachacámac. Swift interurban cars bore us through morning-misty Miraflores and Barranco to Chorillos, proudest watering-place of the rainless Peruvian coast, where we mounted horses and rode away into the desert by a broad trail that paralleled the shore within hearing of the dull roll of the surf. It was a veritable Sahara, in which the sand, everywhere ankle-deep, lay in wind-blown ridges. The horizon rose before us as at sea, and the mirage of heat-waves seemed rivers flowing landward. The uncorrected imagination is wont to picture the coast of Peru as utterly flat, as well as sandy. It is so only in part. Hills of sand that were almost mountains stretched down to the sea, like buttresses fashioned to support the mammoth wall of the Andes that bounded the horizon on the left. The summits of many were hidden in mists, the garúa from which had given life to the brilliant green lomas and patches where flocks feed in certain seasons; and the smiling valley of Lurín, watered by a stream smaller than the Rimac and still cold from the snows above, was as inviting in its contrast to the repulsive, naked hills as any desert oasis. Down on the floor of the valley this, too, seemed sandy and dry, but the acequias that still water it, as in the days of the Incas, sustain a wilderness of scrubby trees, among which a chiefly negro population lolls in open-work huts. Nature seems to have arranged her seasons with foresight here; for when the garúa gives way to blazing summer, the rainy season and the melting snows above swell the rivers to a volume that affords widespread irrigation.

Pachacámac, the Animator of the Universe, not to be confused with the Sun-god of the Incas, had his temple on the edge of this forbidding waste of sand, overlooking the sea that chafes incessantly at its feet. It was the Benares of the ancient Peruvians, not merely because it drew pilgrims from all the surrounding world, but because here those who could brought and disposed of their dead. Conquered by the Incas nearly two centuries before the coming of the Spaniards, a Temple of the Sun was added; but the sun-worshippers, like their conquerors in turn, were too politic to suppress the earlier religion entirely, and merely merged it with their own. “In a room closely shut and stinking,” says Estete, the Spanish chronicler, “was an idol made of wood, very dirty, which they called god, who creates and sustains us. It was held in great veneration and at its feet were offerings.” Different, indeed, from many an Andean place of worship to-day! It is a place of death in a double sense. Scuttling lizards and sand-vipers are the only forms of life that accentuate its silent, repulsive sterility. Human skulls kick about underfoot through all the extent of the ruins, and disintegrated skeletons lie everywhere. Only the earthen pots and huacos are of financial value to the looters; the heads of the men who made them are not worth the gathering. The ruins are extensive, a few of the great terraced temples still moderately well preserved. But being of clay or adobe, dreary, yellow-brown, they offer no contrast in color to the surrounding desert hills, and nothing to compare with the splendid wrought-stone monuments of those wonderful architects, the ancient Peruvians of the highlands.

The year had run over into September before I turned my face upward again toward the Sierra, to pick up the broken thread of my journey. Beyond Chosica the naked hills closed in, and the train climbed all day between barren, echoing walls of rock, the exhilarating mountain air cutting ever deeper into my lungs, as the glorious Italian skies of the cloudless upper plateau spread their ever-broadening canopy above. Snow appeared on far-off peaks, descended to meet us, and spread in patches about and below us. As the air thinned, our faces flushed and tingled; a tendency to sleepiness was succeeded by a feeling of exhilaration and an inclination to grow talkative. My fellow-passengers began to show signs of distress at the altitude, growing more and more red-faced, with bloodshot eyes; then one by one they frankly succumbed to mountain sickness as the train continued inexorably upward. As the experienced sailor struts about among his seasick fellows, so I caught myself gazing with haughty scorn upon the weaklings about me. Obviously a man who had tramped the lofty páramos from far-off Bogotá, often under a heavy pack, was immune to any effects of altitude.

But there is imbedded in ancient literature something to the effect that pride is often closely attended by a downfall. At Ticlio, in the crisp, cold afternoon, I noted that the mere exertion of lifting my baggage from the main to the branch-line train set my heart in a strange flutter. A more cautious person, too, would not have drunk three cups of black coffee in the miserable little station lunch-room so soon after weeks of rigid diet. Laboriously we climbed to the highest railroad point in the world, flanked by an immense blue glacier, up again on the bare, treeless, silent pampas, among cobble-stone hovels and ichu, the stolid, expressionless Indians of the highlands, and drew up at dusk in Morococha. The cheerless mining-camp, more than three miles above the sea, lay scattered along a dreary, bowl-shaped valley, with a vista of three cold, steel-blue lagoons, across which the enclosing snowclads threw their violet evening shadows. In this breathless region my pulse started savagely at every exertion, but being already arrived, I supposed myself as safe from mountain sickness as a disembarking passenger from mal de mer. In the manager’s cozy, stone-walled quarters the blazing fireplace, with its unaccustomed artificial heat and its clouds of tobacco-smoke, threatened suffocation and forced me to step out frequently into the crisp, night air to catch my breath. But no Indian of the highland could have boasted himself in finer physical spirits when we wandered away toward ten, panting considerably, to be sure, even at a very moderate pace, up the slope to the superintendent’s dwelling.

Barely had I turned in, however, when I began gasping for breath. Within an hour my host found that I had a respiration of 52 and a pulse of 125. All night long I struggled open-mouthed, with the sound of an accelerated steam-pump in bad repair, my heart engaged in what promised to be a successful attempt to pound its way out through my back, until my very shoulder-blades ached, and all the valley of Morococha seemed to echo with its thumping. It was too much! To be scarcely recovered from one long, laborious, Andean ailment, only to blow up of my own steam in this absurd land!

In the morning the mine-doctor came with his stethescope, mumbled “soroche” in a weary, unsympathetic voice, left some pills and instructions, and was gone. All day long I lay fasting, the snowclads gazing down upon me with icy, Andean indifference. Gradually the pounding of my heart ceased to drown out all other sounds, and my lungs resumed their accustomed action. On the following morning, though still weak and wobbly-legged, aching from crown to toe, I was able to be about, the day after, I strode slowly about the camp with something of the old-time vigor. In the end the experience seemed to be advantageous, for with every day thereafter I advanced to a faultless physical condition that was to accompany me on all the rest of the journey.

There are a score of theories concerning this mountain-sickness, known throughout Peru by the Quichua word soroche and in the basin of the Titicaca as puna. Who may be subject to it, what will prevent it, whether or not previous experience will or will not give immunity, are even greater mysteries than those surrounding its prototype, the bugbear of ocean travel. No two persons are ever affected alike by it. Commonly it is accompanied by a raging headache. All foreigners contracted for mine employment in this region are subjected to a rigid physical examination before they ascend “the Hill,” yet it is not unusual to make up a special train and rush a victim down to the coast. Among horses, with which it takes the form of blind-staggers and often renders the animal unfit for further service, it is known as veta, from the aboriginal superstition that it is caused by veins of ore (vetas) in the earth.

Morococha, like its rival, Cerro de Pasco, is a little world of its own, exclusively mining in its raison d’être and considerably marked by Anglo-Saxon influence. Though many of the natives still huddle in dismal huts, without windows and with dirt floors, the civilizing effect of the gringo is in some evidence, at least in those superficial matters of small habits, amusements, and clothing. American hob-nailed boots are almost as frequently worn by the Indian men as the llanqui, or hairy cowhide sandal. Bitter cold though it is, even at noonday, the Indians of female persuasion go scantily clad and almost universally barefoot.

The miners work nine hours a day, seven days a week, and receive an average of something more than a dollar a day—a high wage from the Andean Indian point of view. The considerable efficiency of both Indian and cholo workmen is curtailed by much coca-chewing and hard drinking. Following each pay-day, and during the many fiestas, a majority of the native miners go on an extended debauch, leaving the mines often so short-handed that operations virtually cease. The effect of the celebration does not wear off for several days, so that enterprise is commonly paralyzed a week or more in every month. The company is powerless to remedy this drawback, and the government—that scapegoat of all imperfections throughout South America—shows no disposition to better conditions, even were it possible. An Indian injured in the mine is more apt to run away than to report at the hospital, and to appear later as a litigant against the company, demanding—and with government aid frequently winning—a sinecure for life. Even when the injured man is attended by the mine-doctor, and his broken leg bound with splints or his wound properly treated with antiseptic care, he is likely to be found next morning with the bandages torn off, and with coca leaves, or a chicken leg, or something as efficacious substituted.

It must be admitted that his gringo superiors do not set the native miner a perfect example in his chief vice, the excessive consumption of alcohol. In the social vacuum that must necessarily exist in such a community, drinking and gambling are the favorite methods of putting to rout dull care. The altitude soon gets on the nerves, seeming to call for some such stimulant; at least, it is the custom to “lay to the altitude” any species of misdemeanor, or the formation of habits unknown to the subject before his arrival. Somehow it strikes the passing observer as wicked to send these small-lunged, sea-level men of other climes up here to gasp through life at a height fitted only to the barrel-chested Indian and his fellow-beast of burden, the llama. Both physically and temperamentally the effect of the altitude is curious. Water boils at so low a temperature that a finger can almost be thrust into it with impunity. Fireplaces are set in action by nonchalantly throwing two or three beer-bottlesful of kerosene into the blaze. Those accustomed to the heights for generations are far sturdier and less vivacious than those of lower levels. Newcomers, on the other hand, are easily excited and rattle-brained, dashing about like the proverbial “hen with its head cut off,” futile in proportion to their striving. In the gringo community it is a standing jest that the American or Englishman most phlegmatic at sea-level will spend an hour trying to shave, and grow so hen-minded over that simple task that he often gives up in despair. The exhilaration is physical as well as mental. Baseball players, far from losing their customary prowess in this thin air, are given to running their legs off in their excitement, and must often be restrained lest they burst their lungs.

It is half-jokingly asserted that after a few months in the mines it is not safe to open a bottle or a “jack-pot” in the presence of a minister’s son. Unfortunately the jest seems to have serious basis in fact. The tighter the lines that bound their youth, the more completely do the newcomers cast them off when removed from the influence of home ties and neighborly opinion. Small wonder the Latin races accuse the Anglo-Saxon of hypocrisy. The Americans who live and mine up and down the Sierra have convinced Peruvians that every living American drinks quarts of whiskey neat every day, and squanders his substance in gambling, or if luck runs his way, in the “stews” of Lima. This is not to say that all gringos in Morococha and Cerro de Pasco fall into an evil manner of life, or that there are not many more who perform their tasks fully and efficiently, in spite of an occasional debauch. Those who bring with them very strong wills, or some equivalent for them, retain the tautness of their moral fiber, for all the altitude. The percentage of men who go astray is such, however, that it becomes almost a subject for congratulation to see a well-kept frame and a wholesome, unlined face in these Andean communities, where dissipated countenances are rather the rule than the exception. Then, too, often arriving as youths, with little experience of life except the half-cloistered one of our colleges, the younger seem to feel it necessary to prove themselves “men,” and to keep up the local reputation for what a missionary referred to as “those rough mining fellows” by assuming a bold, gruff, even vulgar exterior. All question of “morality” aside, the mere materialistic problem of keeping up the efficiency of their force would seem to make some curtailment of the prevailing customs worth the trouble of the mine-owners. But even those sent down to assume charge too often fall victims to that false philosophy of “a short life and a merry one.”

Gringo employees of higher rank command generous salaries and are well housed, with all the comforts that can conveniently be transported to this lofty region. Coming, for the most part, directly from England or the United States, they take naturally to the artificial heat which the natives rarely adopt. Before the fireplace at the club the conversation jumps from “bridge” to tetrahydrite ore, and back again to poker with, to the layman, a vertiginous speed, amid the rattle of glasses and bottles and the strains of a tireless phonograph. A considerable portion of the talk might frankly be called gossip; for South America has this in common with small towns, that every gringo up and down the continent knows every other, at least by hearsay, his private character and his domestic difficulties.

The traveler through South America is frequently struck by the fact that large enterprises, even British in ownership, are more often than not actually and practically in charge of Americans. The manager and most of the office force may be English, but the actual motive power, the man who makes the ore fly or sets the trains to running, is apt to be a youthful superintendent or engineer but a few years out of one of our technical colleges. This is no argument for or against the mentality or ability of either nationality. These are their natural spheres of action, purely the result of environment. The American, coming from a land where precedent is given short shrift, and accustomed to furnish his own initiative, is best fitted for pushing the pioneer work, for attacking unprecedented problems and carrying the enterprise on to the point where it is established and running smoothly. The Englishman, product of an older and more settled society, is more easily content to continue an established undertaking, to “stick on the job,” while the American moves on to attack new and unfamiliar problems.

I visited the chief mines of Morococha with the youthful American superintendent. They presented nothing unusual to one acquainted with those of Mexico, than which they were slightly more crude and undeveloped in their methods. Some details of life were different; the peons wore plenty of clothing, ragged and extremely bedraggled, hats, and even footwear, for it was little less cold down in the mine galleries than in the crisp, wintry mountain air and the brilliant yet chill sunshine that flooded the glacier-draped valley and the indigo-blue lakes above. We climbed and crawled and dragged ourselves by elbows, knees, shoulders, hands and feet through ancient and modern “stopes,” by slippery ladders, crude stairways, or slimy ropes, in an eternal darkness made barely visible by our torches. The Indian miners, some of them but half-grown boys, each and all had a cheek puffed out by a quid of coca. They took a half-hour “coca-time” each afternoon, as religiously as an Englishman does for his tea. Those who shoveled away the mountain of ore in the sunshine outside earned seventy cents a day; in the Natividad mine, where water poured incessantly and required oilskins, the workmen nearly doubled this wage. The practical gringo miners of to-day had somewhat different views of the ancient Peruvian civilization than its historians, and considered the stories of Inca wealth vastly exaggerated. Many a time, to be sure, a vein that promised rich reward was soon found to have been “stoped out” by the Incas or colonial Spaniards; but these neither knew enough about effective mining, nor went deep enough to get any such quantity of gold as tradition ascribes to them. Moreover, copper is the chief ore of Peru, and even silver owes its importance here almost entirely to the fact that the copper is highly argentiferous.

Beyond Oroya the railways of central Peru spread out in a Y, at the right-hand end of which is Huancayo, something more than two hundred miles from Lima, as is Cerro de Pasco on the other branch. Some time after the hour set, an engine was found somewhere in or about the junction, and toward noon we drifted away down a gorge into which portly, dry hills thrust themselves alternately from either side. Country women were washing their clothes in the scanty river; here and there, at the base of amphitheatrical bluffs, wheat was being threshed under the hoofs of circling horses. There were several dust-blown stations, but no signs of towns, nor, indeed, a patch on which one might have existed, except the one mud village of Llocllapampa in mid-afternoon, familiar with its old Andean red-tile roofs. In the first-class car was a crowd almost exclusively Peruvian, huge scarfs and shawls about their throats, and many in overcoats; for not only had Americans in their leather leggings disappeared, but even the outward evidence of gringo influence; and I was once more swallowed up in the purely native life of the Sierra. At length the gorge closed in, squeezed us through three tunnels, and there opened out an interandean valley, spreading far away north and south, cloud-shadows flecking its surface, two snowclad peaks contemplating us with a lofty disdain from over the crest of the enclosing wall. The train turned crab-wise toward the nearer end of the valley, and set us down within walking distance of Jauja.

The famous “Xauxa” of Prescott is rather colorless in its personality and barren in its setting. The bells of llama trains, followed by their as soft-footed, coca-chewing drivers, jangled by my window and died away down the street. A considerable proportion of the population was constantly struggling about the hydrant in the center of the plaza; the rest were either simple Indians with coca- and pisco-brutalized faces, or the haughty keepers of glorified peanut-stands. Smoke there was none, of course, neither of industry nor of domestic comfort, and in contrast to the bitter cold nights and the ice-box frigidity of every shade and shadow, the uncovered sun was burning. Not even the murmur of open sewers broke the languorous Andean silence, and in nothing but a few slight details was the monotony of all towns of the Sierra broken. I was back once more in the kingdom of candles, with its dreary, interminable, read-less evenings.

The ancient Inca highway passed through “Sausa,” on the heights above the present town, the beginnings of which Pizarro laid on his way to Cuzco. The ruins were far more easily accessible than those of Huamachuco, and neither so important nor so throttled with vegetation. The surviving walls are chiefly of broken stone, some of lines of square, some of round, rooms. The chief ruins appeared to have been a double line of fortresses, which hung on the brow of the hill with a truly Incaic view over the surrounding world. Strictly speaking, these were not Inca monuments, but constructions of the Huancas, improved by the Emperors of Cuzco. The tribe that once inhabited this broad valley were conquered by the militant Incas, and forced to give tribute and adopt the tongue of their conquerors, a dialect of which still persists in the region. The plain was once a lake-bottom, stretching from beyond Jauja to distant Huancayo. An hour’s walk from the town still brings one to a cool and placid lagoon, surrounded by all but impenetrable marshes and reeds, with numerous wild ducks winging their V-shaped course across it. To-day the Mantaro river, like an unravelled cord, swings southward past a few pueblocitos, among green groves that give relieving touches of color to a scene at best bald and barren in aspect.

Long before train-time most of the population of Jauja, having no better means of whiling away the afternoon, wandered out along the dusty road to the station, isolated as some house of pestilence. That American habit of racing breathlessly across the platform at the last moment is not prevalent in Peru. For one thing, the boletería ceases to “function” long before the scheduled hour of departure, and he who embarks without a ticket subjects himself to a fifty percent. increase in fare—unless he has the fortune to be a compadre of some member of the train-crew. In the second-class coach the travelers ranged from broad-faced Indians to cholos in “civilized” garb and rubber collars, the corresponding females wrapped from head to foot in crow-black mantos. With the human deluge came corpulently stuffed alforjas, crude implements of husbandry, distorted bundles of household effects, and, on the backs of the Indian women, bulky in their heavy skirts unevenly gathered about their draught-horse hips, loads of varying size from which, with few exceptions, peered the face of a wide-eyed baby. All these—the infants only excepted—my fellow-passengers proceeded to stuff under the four lengthwise benches, into the racks above, or to hang from the roof supports, until the car took on the aspect of an overstocked pawnshop in which a multitude of tenement dwellers had taken sudden refuge.

Above the door was the information, “96 ASIENTOS,” all of which were all more than fully occupied when the engineer embraced the station-master for the last time and the massed population of Jauja began to recede into the distance. Within the car the prevailing tongue was Quichua. The native conductor “grafted” with a fetching frankness here and there in his struggle through the welter of humanity; the brakemen spent most of the journey drinking the health of a group of cholos in a corner of the coach. Chicha flowed like water. At every station old women crowded through the car selling that nectar of the Incas, all purchasers drinking from the same cup, and generally several from the same filling, while the scrawny hags, waiting for its return, idly rubbed their bony talons about the spout of the cántaro under their arms. Almost every traveler had his own supply of a more potent native beverage. The pisco bottle with its licorice smell passed constantly from hand to hand, eyes grew more and more bloodshot, tongues thicker, yet more talkative—for the Andean Indian is taciturn in exact proportion to his sobriety—eyelids heavy, and limbs clumsy. The tippling knew no limits either of sex or age. Infants barely two years old frequently took a long drink at the fiery bottle, and cooed with delight at the taste. The railway company not only permitted, but abetted Peru’s national vice. If the universal pastime threatened to flag for a moment, it was resuscitated by the fifty-year old dwarf of a train-boy, who waded incessantly through our legs with a bottle under each arm and a single opaque glass in hand, urging all, from the aged Indian dreaming over the cud of coca in his cheek to the best-dressed chola, to drink and be merry, for to-morrow—he would be bound in the other direction.

Not a few of the Indian and cholo girls were robustly pretty, their cheeks rosy in spite of their coppery tint. At one station there entered the car a white Peruvian baby, richly dressed as some little princess, fingerless white gloves on her tiny hands, borne on the back of an unbelievably dirty Indian girl of twelve, whose filthy felt hat the regally clad infant alternately picked and thrust its fingers into its mouth. Its parents were enjoying babyless freedom with their friends in the first-class car, and incidentally saving the difference in the servant’s fare. Thus the unwashed Indian intrudes everywhere, always, from altar to kitchen, from nursemaid to grave-digger, and the fact never strikes the most haughty Andean as incongruous. Had the old Spanish chroniclers been of the realistic school, we should no doubt have learned that the Inca’s bread was also dropped on a mud floor, and picked up with unwashed fingers before it was presented to him on a golden platter. In all the pages of Prescott there is no suggestion of uncleanliness. His Indians are as spotless as if they had been scrubbed and scoured with New England zeal before they were admitted to the muslin-shaded twilight of his study. Yet he who has physically traveled through what was once the Empire of the Incas cannot but suspect that the Puritan-bred historian, for all his marvelously living and breathing masterpiece, inadvertently—or puritanically—gave in this respect a false picture of the ancient kingdom.

It was nearing sunset when groves of eucalypti began to ride close by the train-windows, then rows of mud huts alternating with little farms of alfalfa, then larger adobe houses, and at length we drew up at Huancayo, the end of railroading in central Peru. For many years there have been plans to carry the railway on to Ayacucho, and even a wild project of some day pushing it across to Cuzco, and of linking it up with the railways of the south. Fortunately, nothing had yet come of the scheme, and what lay before me depended thereafter on my own exertions, with whatever of charm that remained to the ancient but now slightly traveled route through the heart of Peru, as the reward.

Huancayo, boasting—as towns of the Sierra will—10,000 inhabitants, in a rich and, in better seasons, well-watered valley, consists chiefly of one long, broad street, perhaps the broadest in Peru, paved with small, round stones, a ditch of water stagnating through its center. On either side it is lined by wrought-iron rejas and open shop-doors; at either end it dies out in sand and cactus-bordered paths between mud-huts. As the main plaza of Riobamba is to Ecuador, this street forms the center of what is reputed the greatest native market in Peru. Each Sunday it offers a pulsating vista of Indians from a hundred miles around, in every color known to an artist’s palette—and some which the boldest of painters would not venture to use—an unbroken stretch of humanity, shimmering in the glaring sunshine. An expert stenographer might wander all day through the surging throng without being able to set down the mere names of the wares displayed, to say nothing of the endless variety of garments, types, faces, and customs. So packed with details is the far-famed market, that only a cinematograph ribbon could give even a faint notion of its activities; mere words are as powerless to paint its motley variety as to catch the subtle charm of Huancayo itself, with its perfect climate and crystalline sunshine.

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XIV. OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO

The truly romantic thing, of course, would have been to buy a llama to bear my burdens to the capital of the ancient Inca Empire. But however in keeping with the local color that prehistoric denizen of the Andes might have been, there were at least a score of cold, practical, modern reasons why he was not suited to my purpose. A few of them, such as pace, disposition, slight powers of sustained endurance, and uncompanionable temperament, experience had demonstrated native to a donkey, also. A horse, as a famous traveler has remarked, is a delicate and uncertain ally. A mule, in addition to several traits inherited from his paternal forebear, had the drawback of unattainability; for the house of Rothchild and I have this in common—that our wealth is not unlimited. There remained, however, an animal unknown to mankind at large that fitted my requirements exactly, as exactly at least as is possible in this imperfect world,—the Peruvian imitation of a horse. In a bare three centuries this descendent of our “fine lady among animals” has adapted himself to Andean conditions. His small, compact hoofs are almost as sure on precarious mountain-trails as those of the mule; he is gifted with an uncomplaining endurance far beyond what his appearance suggests; and he possesses an even, peaceful temper, and an absence of ambition and personal initiative equal to his fellow-countryman, the Indian. Moreover, he is capable of sustaining life and strength for an indefinite period on the sparse and hardy vegetation of the uplands, and is, at certain seasons, within reach of a modest purse.

“Foxy’s” mozo owned such a chusco and, the feast of his patron saint being near at hand, was induced to sell. I took to the animal at first sight. Not that he was a thing of beauty, in his shaggy coat of shedding reddish-brown; but it was this very air of unpretentious modesty and unAndean sense of duty over mere personal appearance that won my instant regard. Here, surely, was a companion who would keep his own counsel under the most trying circumstances. Being no larger than a large donkey, he was nicely fitted to the modest load of some sixty pounds that was destined to represent his share of the world’s labor. Not merely was he newly shod, but he had been enjoying the unbroken freedom of a potrero for several days, and should therefore be in condition to hold his own for an indefinite period, provided I did not set too swift a pace. The masculine gender was an asset not to be overlooked. Not merely did my sense of chivalry forbid sentencing any member of the other sex to the hardships that rumor insisted lay before us, but once they had been surmounted, I would not have my glory smudged by the possibility of a mere female boasting that she had also accomplished the feat. Again, the animal had never been fifty miles east of Huancayo; and I am of those who find no pleasure in a trip with a companion who has already been over the route. The mere nine dollars at which we finally came to terms seemed a slight equivalent for all these virtues, though I took care not to hint that impression to the erstwhile owner. The matter of a name was no problem at all. Even the Peruvians unconsciously tacked on the diminutive ito as often as they referred to my new fellow-adventurer, and it was natural that I should have instantly dubbed him Chusquito.

Relieved of the necessity of being my own packhorse, I could somewhat increase my outfit. In Lima I had acquired a rum-burner, with coffee-pot, frying-pan, and soup-boiling attachments that closed up into a compact kitchenette about six inches in diameter. With this went a bottle of alcohol, that could be filled at any town “muy provisto de todo” along the way. “Foxy” himself, whose faults, as every gringo up and down the Andes knows, do not include a lack of generosity, insisted that he would be forced to throw away a somewhat worn, but still very serviceable, rubber poncho, unless I carried it off; and this, with my llama-hair poncho from Quito, was destined to shield me from many a bitter night on lofty mountain-ranges. The clothing requisite for every possible variation of altitude, and photographic supplies sufficient to avoid the ill-will of local “authorities,” made up the bulk of my alforjas. Then there was room for a native and a foreign book, for a half-liter of pisco, with which to win the esteem of isolated Indians, a bag of cocoa leaves and the accompanying burnt-banana lime, to sustain such estimation, a candle for the endless Andean evenings, and a sufficient supply of imperishable foodstuffs to relieve my mind of the harassing daily preoccupation of finding hospitality before dark. Even my coat and kodak could be hung on the pack, leaving me free to stride lazily along, dressed in my shirt-sleeves and a cynical smile.

It was the tenth day of September when I creaked my hobnailed way out of Huancayo’s interminable street, my only load the end of a clothes-line that tempered Chusquito’s pace to my own. At the principal pulpería his former owner drank my health in pisco, and, though he shed no tear, it might easily have made a clean mark down his cheek. Of the road to Cuzco I knew nothing, except that it led through four “cities,” and that I should never reach, much less bring my four-footed companion to, the end of a journey on which not even a “son of the country” would “venture himself” without a guide and a tropilla of mules and arrieros. For myself I had no misgivings; as to Chusquito, I trusted to frequent halts and a militant attitude that should win him an unaccustomed wealth of fodder to confound the pessimists. All Huancayo gazed after me from their doorways with a mixture of astonishment and incredulity as I set out. Now is it not strange, when walking is the first and, indeed, the only natural means of locomotion, that people who look with complacency upon men on horseback, and upon trains, men who have heard of automobiles and aëroplanes, should gasp with wonder to see a man journeying afoot; and that andarines may go about living on the country and gathering certificates from every possible source to prove they do walk; as if there were any virtue in that action, except the purely personal pleasure of it, or nothing?

Even the burden of the tow-rope did not last long. Chusquito, being an experienced pack-animal, I soon found could be left to his own devices. In his own country, he knew fully as well as I how to climb up and down rocky, mountain trails, and if he showed a tendency now and then to wander off across the pampa, especially at sight of some of his own kindred, it was natural that he should have been somewhat bored at merely human companionship. Within two days we were strolling along like lifelong friends, at an even gait that never called for cudgel acceleration, and I journeyed as serenely as if I had found at last that automatic baggage of which I had so long dreamed, only subconsciously aware that my possessions were marching peacefully before me. The mind ran unbidden over the many improvements that might be added,—a tent and more supplies; or I might even become an itinerant photographer or peddler, and earn my way as I went, instead of greeting with disdainful silence the frequent question, “Qué lleva de venta?” But on one point I was quickly disillusioned. Somehow I had pictured a pack-animal as simply a perambulating chest of drawers, fancying that I had merely to hang my possessions on the animal’s back, snatching up anything as I chanced to need it. Whereas in real life I found that everything must be made snug and tight, and secured by the intricate “diamond-hitch” that made it as inaccessible on the march as if it had been left behind.

At Pucará, where the great valley of the Huancas narrows and begins to squeeze the trail upward, the inhabitants were killing a cow and stringing it up between two trees in the center of the grass-grown plaza. All the beef that could not be disposed of on the spot was cut into sheets a half-inch thick, and left to dry in the sun. By reason of this treatment all meat in the Andes is hopelessly tough; either it is “green,” direct from the hand of the butcher, or charqui of soleleather properties. Veal is unknown, for who would slaughter a calf that would grow up into several times its weight in beef? Mutton is scarce, or treated to the same charqui-ing process; and pork is of Hebraic rarity. Besides, the traveler who longs for a rasher of crisp bacon is more easily content to assuage his appetite in beef when experience has taught him what the pigs of the Andes feed on.

There was no public eating-house in Pucará. A party of a dozen men and women, however, all more or less gay with pisco, were glad of assistance in making away with their share in the weekly killing. I tied Chusquito before a bundle of wheat straw at a corner of the plaza, and we crowded around a wabbly-legged table in a neighboring mud room, and dined amid an uproar of maudlin hilarity and a series of stories often of a distinctly “raw” nature, in which the females easily held their own. Here cancha, or toasted, ripe, shelled corn did duty as bread, and each helping of beef was flanked by boiled chuño, or small, frozen potatoes. Then there were camotes de la sierra, one of the several species of the potato family unknown in other lands, a soft, sweetish, mushy tuber of the shape of a large peanut, which it was à la mode to pick from the plate with the fingers, and dip before each bite into the general bowl of ají, the Incaic peppers so beloved of the ancient Peruvians. As in all Peru, it was the custom here to drink the health of a companion and expect him to round the circle ad infinitum et intoxicatum. Luckily, my companions were so far gone in liquor, even before my arrival, that I managed to avoid most of the fiery “copitas” without giving offense.

In the group was the cholo school-master of the baked-mud Escuela Fiscal de Varones across the plaza. He was a native of Carhuáz, and grew so excited over the extraordinary fact that I had not only been in his birthplace but had traveled thence “by land” that, irrespective of the pisco, he was unable to begin the afternoon session when the boys gathered at one o’clock. It didn’t matter anyway, he confided, since he spoke no Quichua and the pupils almost no Spanish, and he would get his salary—whenever the government had the money—whether he pretended to teach or not. The school system of Peru being centralized, like that of France, orders from Lima sometimes transfer a maestro from one province to another without any notion as to whether or not he is fitted to his new assignment. The boys, all but one of whom were at least half Indian, could mispronounce a few sentences from the “Lives of the Saints,” but few could recognize one letter from another. Though he had nothing to show in the way of teaching, the maestro pointed with pride to the school-name in huge red letters, all but covering the adobe façade, as an example of his handiwork and “culture.” We spent an hour or more in posing the school for a group in the act of saluting the national flag, the “teacher” insisting on changing his brilliant red poncho for a khaki coat before he would face the kodak, and of course he grew enraged because I was so miserly as to refuse to deliver a dozen copies of the picture on the spot. Another round of “copitas” restored his amiability, however, and he insisted on giving me “something not to forget him by,” and forced upon me one of the unvarnished lead-pencils which the government supplied his pupils.

Travelers were frequent on the vast, rising world beyond, where the great valley of the Huantas shrivelled and disappeared into the past. Indian women trotted by, not only with a load and a baby on their backs, but often suckling the infant as they went. Ccoto, as the Incas called goitre, was common. Llama-trains, driven by fishy-eyed, noiseless Indians with colored rags around their heads under their thick, gray felt hats, passed frequently. There are few more interesting sights than that afforded by two of these trains shuttling through each other on a narrow mountain trail, each animal keeping its course as unerringly as a homing-pigeon. At a rocky turn of the road one of the frail beasts lay dying, an Indian boy slashing the gay ribbons out of its still quivering ears with a crude cutlass. Chusquito strongly objected to passing a scene so fraught with the dangers and cruelties of the trail. It was our first real difference of opinion. From Inca days it seems to have been the custom to decorate the ears of llamas with these bits of bright cloth, less from artistic notions than as a means of designating the ownership. To-day even the cows, bulls, goats, and sheep of certain regions are thus embellished—often with ludicrous results. When, as here, the matter is carried so far as to beribbon the donkeys, it seems time to call a halt; for what can look more absurdly incongruous than a plodding ass solemnly waving with the monotonous rhythm of his gait his gaily bedecked ears.

Beyond Marcavalle, on the second day, the stony road was for a time even more densely populated by llama, donkey, and mule-trains, by haughty, white-collared gentry ahorse, and villagers afoot, all,—“gente,” arrieros, Indians of both sexes, and, one could almost believe, the very llamas—silly or stupid with drink. Even the women chewed coca, each bulging cheek suggesting a cud of tobacco. Indian women, that is, for in a land where every man rides it is the rarest sight to see a woman on horseback; and even the chola who drags her skirts through the accumulations of years in her native hamlet, would sooner break the seventh commandment than ride astride. Then bit by bit the travel died out; the single telegraph wire strode knock-kneed away over an uninhabited world, and for an unbroken half day we tramped across a vast brown pampa, with only an occasional flock of sheep, the stone and straw kennels of shepherds at so great a distance off that I must trust as usual to luck in guessing aright among many faint paths, and at times even total absence thereof.

The adobe-and-thatch Indian hamlet of Nahuinpuquio was en fiesta, celebrating some church holiday. The air pulsated with the harsh and discordant noise of fife and drum, in the melancholy rhythm of all music of the aboriginals, and the drear landscape was brightened here and there by groups of dancers, Indians in fantastic costumes and ludicrous masks, who danced in fixed spots without moving a yard an hour in any direction. Over the valleyed and rocky face of the mountain beyond, a bit of the road consisted of rough-stone steps that may have been part of the old Inca highway. Then the trail pitched down into an ever warmer valley, the enclosing hillsides and rocky ranges marked off in hundreds of little stone-fenced patches, most of them newly plowed and waiting for rain. Toward sunset we came out suddenly above a river brilliant green with the patches of verdure stretching along it as far as the eye could command,—the Mantaro, racing Amazonward through its rock-hewn gorge, with villages tucked away here and there up the face of the great cliffs that rose ever higher as we wound forever downward round and round the headlands.

In the parlor of the “Hacienda Casma,” where shake-downs were prepared for three travelers whom chance had brought together in the half-tropical throat of the valley, lay piled the Huancayo-Huancavelica mail,—in virtually new American mail-sacks. The unusually noiseless sincerity of our host and the extraordinary order of his establishment surprised me not a little, until I learned that he was Argentine born. These rural haciendas take life easily. It was nearly eight next morning before we drifted together for coffee, bread, and cheese, and some time later that the mayordomo prevailed upon his Indian assistants to drive from the hacienda pasture a score of mules and horses, from which we each chose our animals. While I sat reading in the fresh, bird-singing, June morning, awaiting my four-footed companion, a travel-stained Indian slipped noiselessly into the yard with a letter which the wife of the hacendado opened and began to read. Her suppressed laughter soon drew the attention of her husband, who, having taken possession of the epistle, began in his turn to shake with mirth. When he had finished, he sent out of ear-shot the Indians who flocked in and about the corredor, and read the note to his guests. It was from the parish priest high up on the mighty range that shut in the river, and ran in part, all in a solemn, almost sanctimonious tone:

“Yesterday, dear compadre, while on a round of confession among my scattered flock, to whom God grant all blessings, I found in the house of the widow —— a poor little orphan, newly born. Now I beg of you in the name of charity and the Holy Church to do me the inestimable service of acting as godfather to this unfortunate little innocent, that it may not be in danger of dying in mortal sin for want of baptism. We will ride there on Thursday.... Now I beg and pray you, dear compadre, to grant me this favor, and above all to say nothing whatever of this matter to anyone, since it is of no importance to any but ourselves, not even to mention it to your good and pious wife, whom God....”

“But—” I began, somewhat at a loss to account for the roars of laughter that increased with each phrase.

“Why, it’s—you see it’s—well, the padre knows the widow well, very well indeed,” explained my host, wiping his eyes with a corner of his poncho, “and this is the fourth time since I became owner of Casma that he has asked me to be godfather to some poor little orphan he has found in different parts of his scattered parish. He is a man of force, is the padre. But of course he doesn’t want the good and pious señoras of his flock to know about his little amusements. We Argentinos, however—well, who knows the secret of keeping a secret from a woman,” he concluded, gazing after his wife as she hurried away, her shoulders still shaking.

At the ancient and graceful arched bridge across the Mantaro, a half-day further down, I came to the parting of the ways. The direct trail to Ayacucho continued along the stony, winding river-bank to Tablachaca (Plank-bridge), but Huancavelica promised interest in proportion to its isolation, and I prevailed upon Chusquito to undertake the long, stiff climb up the face of the range under the vertical blazing sunshine. Little patches, inhabited since time immemorial, stood out here and there, their green trees, flowers, and fruit-odors, in as sharp contrast to the grim mountain flanks as any oasis, of the Sahara. Somewhat above the ancient town of Izcochaca, spilled up the hillside, rocks of a faint red or purple hue are dug out of the mountainside and tied in pairs on the backs of donkeys or llamas, scores of which we passed on their way to the great market of Huancayo. Even the inexperienced Andean traveler might easily have guessed what these stones were, from the habit of the donkeys of licking the burdens of their fellows at every halt. Salt is a government monopoly in Peru, and truly Peruvian in its condition. In the rural districts he who asks for salt is handed a stone—and a hammer with which to break it. Or in lieu of the latter he may beat two slabs of this mountainside rock together, and sprinkle, the resultant gravel on his food. It behooves the wise traveler to carry his own kodak-tin of civilized salt, for even in the larger towns this is often unattainable.

All the afternoon we undulated across a lofty mountain-top, with a few human kennels of shepherds stuck on rock-ledges along the way, passing through one straw hamlet bright new in outward appearance, since threshing-time had but recently passed. In Huando, one of those dismal, rocky, comfortless, cold Indian towns that abound in the Sierra, I made my first acquaintance with alcaldes carrying silver-mounted staffs of office. His bedraggled wife, who was much more at home in Quichua than in Spanish, sent a messenger to announce my arrival to the gobernador. The latter was a quaint little man in side-burns, wearing the only even theoretically white collar in town, and a not too successful imitation of “European” garb that did not exactly set off to advantage his bashful rural dignity. There ensued that long, diplomatic parley by means of which the traveler at length wins hospitality—in rural Peru the word must be taken with a scanty meaning, since it commonly consists of permission to spread one’s own trappings on the earth floor of the corredor. He who would be successful even in this must never state his wants abruptly, but only gradually drift toward them, without appearing to care particularly whether he be granted the permission or not. Ramón Lagos, however, for all his childlike simplicity, knew the duty of a gobernador toward a distinguished traveler, even though he could not fathom my reason for coming on foot. By the time cold night was settling down he had sent an Indian to pile my possessions in the corredor, and in due season the most soapless of Indian girls arrived with a puchero, the Irish-stew of the Andes, containing the wing and drumstick of a guinea-pig, and carrying carefully on the end of a fork—no doubt after having stuck it there with her unmentionable fingers—another fat leg of the same squeaky rodent. Then there was ancient bread and weak willow-leaf tea, and á la postre my hostess came to share with me a delicacy she called “chicharrón,”—strips of hard-fried pork.

Meanwhile, I had diplomatically put the gobernador in possession of ten cents, with which to buy fodder for Chusquito. A messenger went forth, and in due time an Indian alguacil on the down-grade of life appeared, bearing his barajo with all the dignity of an English beadle. Behind him came several youthful assistants, with less pretentious staffs of office. Though they are appointed by compulsion, these aids to the ruler of an Andean town are proud in their undemonstrative way of being thus raised above the common rabble. None of them would permit even the wife of the gobernador to take the black cane with silver bands out of his hands, and I could only admire them at a distance. Not one of the alguaciles spoke a word of Spanish. The gobernador in a Napoleonic voice gave the old man an order for two nickel’s worth of straw. Apparently it was not etiquette for the younger aids of government to understand the command direct from the lips of the great gobernador himself. The chief alcalde bowed faintly and turned to stride away with an authoritative, if soft-footed tread. To carry out the order himself? No, indeed! Instead, he passed it on to one of the youths, whose badge of office was a much shorter staff, tied to his wrist, that it might not interfere with the actual and physical carrying out of the command. Somewhat later one of these returned, struggling under a great bundle of straw, the old Indian strutting behind him, in all the dignity of his high authority still firmly grasping his barajo. After them came a girl, evidently the inferior of another of the authoritative youths, carrying at least a peck of cebada, or barley. I sat late superintending the repast of my companion, for only the inexperienced Andean traveler will trust to native supervision of his animal’s requirements.

Not only do the Indian alcaldes and alguaciles hold office for the mere “honor” of the position, but the gobernadores themselves are appointed on compulsion and receive no reward, except from the traveler who, with great care not to give offense, chooses to make up for this governmental oversight. The news of my arrival had spread through the town, and in the morning the alguaciles had increased to a half-dozen, who sat motionless about the yard, staring like ruminating oxen and accepting with leisurely avidity the crusts of my desayuno, handed them by the gobernador. That official, certain I could not find my way alone, had ordered a youth to accompany me. But as he was not overjoyed at the appointment, it was no hard matter to lose him in the bleak and gloomy labyrinthian town.

An all-day tramp across an often laborious upland, brilliant for all its yellow-brown waste under the broad blue lift of the sky, raised a glacier-topped range, at the foot of which lies Huancavelica. The rolling uplands were alive now with llamas, alpacas, and sheep, grazing together as one family. Here was the “home” of the llama—which, by the way, is the Quichua term for domesticated animal—the only beast of burden known to the inhabitants of Peru before the coming of the Conquistadores, their only domestic animal, in fact, except the guinea-pig, unless we count the now exterminated allcu. Relics of an ancient civilization in which they held chief place, the llama and the Indian of the Andes have much in common; they seem two branches of the same race who have fallen on evil days together, to plod through modern life like ghosts of a far-off past. Both endure only the high altitudes; both are firmly wedded to their ancestral home; both suffer uncomplainingly; both are temperamentally incapable of haste. The llama will not travel alone, but only in company with its fellows; the Indian is a moderately effective workman in “bees” or bands, but lacks the self-reliance requisite to individual accomplishment. As the Indian squanders half his time in fiestas and celebrations, and breaks his labors frequently for a “coca-time,” so the llama can work but twelve or fifteen days a month, spending the rest in feeding. The drivers—and only an Indian can drive them—are as soft-footed as the animals themselves, never shouting or urging them on with those cries common to all other arrieros.

The llama, however, is more cleanly in his instincts than the Indian; does not rival him as a drunkard; and, above all, retains a manly air, even under adversity, in striking contrast to the slinking manner of his human companion. He is the aristocrat among animals. Ever silent—if he has a bleat or cry, I have never heard it—his gentle, liquid eyes seem to look unseeing clear through one; he gazes upon the world about him with an expression of timorous disdain and the indifference of convinced superiority. His dignified attitude suggests a proud Inca set to carrying fire-wood, or a “decayed gentlewoman” refusing to be outwardly cast down by her misfortunes; his air is dreamy, as if he were looking back to the time when he and the Incas reigned supreme over all the Andean plateau. Like an aristocratic prisoner on parole, all the security he requires is a rope laid across his neck, or a corral bordered round with stones a foot high. If the figure may be carried still further, there is yet another suggestion of the aristocrat in the fact that, beneath his haughty exterior, he is apt to be stupid, assuming his impressive dignity of manner to cover this interior paucity of matter.

Had the llama been found in North America, he would have been exterminated even more completely than was the Indian. He is far too slow and ineffective a beast of burden to endure long against our national impatience. He carries barely a hundred pounds, and covers at best ten miles a day, grazing along the way, since he cannot feed by night. But in the leisurely southern continent he still survives on the high, cold plateaux that are his natural home, as the thin, hardy vegetation of páramos and punas is his natural food; and in this day of trains and automobiles, caravans of these frail, graceful creatures, their ears gaily decorated with bright ribbons, still glide across the frigid heights, as in the centuries when they represented the only freighters of an immense empire.

Graceful when he walks, the llama runs with much the same awkward gait as the kangaroo, throwing his neck, and looking at a distance like an ostrich on four legs. In the region round about us were grazing, also, many alpacas—here called pacos—a far uglier animal in its thick wool of many colors, from black to gray, than the gracefully formed and generally white llama. He is suggestive of a shaggy, spring bear, and though he, too, occasionally serves as a beast of burden, his chief value is in his wool. Two other members of the same Andean family, the guanaco and the vicuña, found chiefly in the wilder regions further south, are never domesticated. The latter, graceful and delicate as a fawn, produces the most valuable wool to be found in the Western Hemisphere.

A native horseman, or, more exactly, muleman, had fallen in with us, after striving for hours to overtake us. We rose and fell two or three times more over rocky ridges, then came out suddenly on the brow of a tremendous ravine above Huancavelica, in a situation extraordinary even in comparison with the many striking ones throughout the Andes. Grim, almost perpendicular mountains, their jagged summits of rock like decaying fangs, lay piled into the sky on every hand, and completely boxed in a vega, or little, flat plain, in the center of which, close at hand, yet far below us, every patio of the city lay as plainly in sight as the unroofed houses of Paris under the gaze of “Diable Boiteu.” The trail pitched so steeply downward that the native was forced to dismount and lead his mule.

“You see,” he boasted, pointing to several iron crosses on almost inaccessible crags high above the city, “this is a Christian” (by which he meant Catholic) “country.”

The retort suggested itself that there were other and even less pleasant proofs of that fact, but there would have been no gain in talking plainly to one of his low mental caliber. The Latin-American can always build crosses along his roads, even if he cannot build the roads themselves. Our thighs ached from the swift descent long before we passed through the suburb of San Cristobal, separated from the town proper by the crystal-clear little mountain river, Ichu, and we had all but encircled the department capital before an ancient bridge of mampostería, a mixture of mud, stones, and plaster, at last gave us admittance.

Rare is the traveler of to-day who passes through Huancavelica. As I climbed the slippery, squeaky, small-cobbled streets toward the central plaza, I was quickly reminded that I was far from the haunts of civilized man, in an isolated world where even the sight of a strange face is a rare treat, to say nothing of a foreigner in shirt-sleeves, armed with a revolver and a sheath-knife, struggling to drag with him a diminutive, shaggy mountain pony laden with miscellaneous junk. For Chusquito, bewildered by the surroundings of an unknown city, displayed an excitement and a waywardness of which I had not suspected him capable. As I entered the cobbled and grassy plaza, across which the towering western mountain-wall was already throwing its cold evening shadow, the chiefly Indian soldiers on guard before the Prefectura stared with bulging eyes, and rubbed their hands across their brows, as if wondering whether they saw aright and whether they should do anything about it. The adjoining streets were long lines of gaping faces, each new group falling suddenly silent as they caught sight of the unexpected apparition that had descended unheralded upon them, and the at best slight industry and energy of Huancavelica came completely to a standstill.

I was supplied with no fewer than six letters of introduction. The Prefectura was officially closed, which made one useless. I dragged Chusquito into the patio of Dr. Durán next door, and announced myself possessor of a recommendation to the lawyer from his best friend in Lima. He acted like a Peruvian. Not merely did he decline to step out of his office, but sent an Indian boy to demand the letter. When I presented myself in the doorway instead, he read it with fear plainly depicted on his features that he might be obliged to offer hospitality to a man who could not be a caballero, since he came on foot, and as plainly sought some loophole to avoid that necessity. He found one, too, when he turned again to the envelope. The writer had carelessly written the first name and, though he had explained the error, had not taken the trouble to change it.

“Ah, but this letter is not for me,” cried the lawyer triumphantly, “it is addressed to Felipe, and I am Enrique”—though he knew as well as I that there was not another Dr. Durán in all Huancavelica.

The open-mouthed throng that had massed about the zaguán led me en masse to a building that had once been a hotel on the further corner of the plaza. It was too much to expect the inhabitants to know already that it had ceased its ministrations to transients—the proprietor had been barely four years dead. The whispering chorus about me swelled gradually to the audible assertion that there was another establishment a few squares away which “sometimes had given accommodations to estranjeros.” At that moment a soldier, bearing a naked sword in one hand and a musket in the other, came running to say that the ayudante wished to know who I was, why, where, whence, and all the rest of it,—and that I was to report to him at once. I commandeered the messenger to lead me to the rumored hostelry. Before we reached it, however, a boy shouted to a shopkeeper, leaning out over his half-door to watch the unwonted excitement, that—a fact I had chanced to mention to some one, whereupon it instantly became general knowledge—I had a letter for Solomón Atala. The “Turk,” for such he was, dashed into the crowd and announced himself the addressee.

“Very well; you will come and live at my house,” he cried, when he had perused the note.

I protested that a public hostelry in the Andes was too rare a luxury to be lightly given up, and that it was bad enough to intrude upon private families when there was no other alternative. The “Turk” would not hear any such argument. I had been recommended by his good friend, and I belonged to him as long as I chose to remain in Huancavelica. Memories of Palestine reminded me that to men of his race hospitality has none of the hollow nothingness common to Peru. While we stood talking, a boy surreptitiously led Chusquito off down a gaping side-street to the “Turk’s” home, and I had perforce to follow. My possessions disappeared through a narrow door within a door, once through which I found myself in the littered patio of an ancient house of ample, rambling proportions. A female voice bade me mount a century-worn stairway to a sagging second-story balcony completely surrounding the yard. Barely had I dubiously set foot upon it than there popped out several slatternly women and the mightiest swarm of unassorted children I had ever yet seen in captivity. My imagination began to picture what sleeping, and writing notes, and getting the few days’ rest to which I was entitled, would be in that swarming household, and unable to think of any ceremonial excuse, I slipped down the aged stairs, untied Chusquito, and dragged him away up the slippery cobbled street.

The worst of it was that I had to pass the “Turk’s” shop again to reach the hotel. The good fellow was just locking up to come home and entertain me, and he pounced upon me at once, quite literally, throwing his arms about me and attempting to drag me off bodily, while Huancavelica stared open-mouthed upon us from every doorway. But I had set my heart on the repose of a room of my own. Beating off the affectionate “Turk” with one hand, and struggling in vain to keep Chusquito off the sidewalk and out of each succeeding shop with the other, I gradually worked my way forward, leaving my would-be host on the verge of tears, and gained at last the “Saenz-Peña Hotel.” It was a dislocated little building of long, long, ago, wrapped like a carelessly flung garment around a tiny patio, its most conspicuous feature the city billiard-room in which a half-dozen youths of sporting proclivities were gathered—at least, until they caught sight of us. Summoned from the mysterious interior, the respectful and astonished poncho-clad proprietor went in quest of a key, and unlocked the padlock of one of three small doors tucked away in as many corners of the patio—doors made of battered drygoods boxes with the lettering still upon them, so precious is lumber in these treeless heights—explaining that the other two rooms were “ocupados”—perhaps with empty bottles or guinea-pigs, certainly not with guests.

The chamber assigned me awoke my gratitude. It was, to be sure, so small that I could touch both walls at once, windowless and doorless, except for the narrow opening by which I squeezed in, gloomy and chill, after the fashion of adobe mountain rooms long closed; but it was furnished, even to a bed with real springs. Barely had I carried my traps inside, when there burst into the patio another “Turk,” who asserted in gestureful Spanish that he was the real Solomón Atala to whom I belonged during my stay in Huancavelica, the other being merely his brother, who had opened the letter in the brotherly way of Palestinians. He, too, was a believer in forcible hospitality, and the hotel proprietor looked on in helpless dismay at what promised to be a successful attempt to carry off his only guest in—the patron saint of hoteleros knows how long. A bed with springs, in a room by myself, however, was not a luxury to be given up for the mere danger of making a few Turkish enemies, and in the end the engaging Syrian, seeing no way out of it, admitted with bad grace that, as I already had my possessions scattered about the hotel room, it would be unfair to the proprietor not to retain it. I should remain where I was until morning, when we would talk the matter over. He agreed under protest, and at length gloomily took his departure.

This “friend in town” is the bugbear of hotel-keepers, or would-be keepers, in the Andes. The Arabian notion of hospitality, inherited from the Moors and mixed perhaps with the traditions of Inca days, with their free and public tambos along all the highways of the empire, still holds sway, at least superficially. The Peruvian will all his life put up with begging lodging, food, and fodder on his travels, often going without them entirely, rather than help support a hotel, considering it a sign of high rank to be housed by an outwardly delighted acquaintance, and thus cheat the struggling hotelero out of a livelihood.

Having led Chusquito to the river to drink and heaped before him half of a five-cent bundle of alcazer—green barley, for grain does not ripen at this altitude—and locked the rest inside my chamber, I stalked in solitary grandeur through the gaping billiard-players to the dining-room, and sat down at the end of a long oil-clothed table near a small opening in the wall that looked like an enlarged rat-hole. The poncho-clad proprietor proceeded with fitting gravity to serve me a thoroughly Peruvian meal, of which the chief ingredient was a churrasco, or steak, not of beef, as I at first fancied, but of llama, a favorite Huancavelican dish which would not exactly win the unstinted praise of an epicure. Between each course he repaired to the kitchen in a corner of the barnyard to poke the various dishes through the hole in the wall, and then reappeared within to serve them. It may have been a long time since he had been honored with a guest, but he had not forgotten the proper form of service. After each trip he balanced on alternate legs, staring at me silently, until at last his tongue refused longer to obey his will, when he burst out tremulously:

“Usté’—ah—señor, es andarín, no?”

“Not at all,” I replied, to his patent disappointment. “You see I haven’t a single medal on my chest.”

“Ah, then you travel to sell something; jewelry perhaps, like all franceses?”

Squier, traveling through the Andes a half-century ago, found that “in the Sierra all foreigners are supposed to be French in nationality and peddlers of jewelry by profession,” and conditions have changed little to this day. The landlord-waiter was openly incredulous of my second denial, but once the sluice-gates of his curiosity had been opened, the flow of words swamped even the service, and the soup had long since become a memory of the dim past before he poked the pastre of melted panela through to himself. I made my escape at last, and went to sit on the wooden sofa in the billiard-room, as the only place in town with light enough to see oneself by; but my distinguished presence was so evidently the cause of bad shots that gradually turned the players bitterly resentful, and the atmosphere was so decidedly wintry, that I soon “hit the hay”—quite literally, for such proved to be the filling of the outwardly luxurious-looking mattress.

I had barely ventured into the street next morning when I was dragged into the shop of the two Palestinians. After a bitter and noisy struggle we patched up a truce as follows: Since I was already enstalled there, I was to keep my room at the hotel, but it was at their house that I must take breakfast and dinner....

“And desayuno!” cried the “Turks” as one man, “You must also come and take breakfast with us. If you like eggs, or steak, or pickled pigs’ feet, or.... Very well, even if you take only coffee and bread, like a Peruvian....”

Though it was barely ten of a brilliant Sunday morning, the Andean merchant’s richest hour, they shut up shop, in spite of the mild protests of a dozen ponchoed shoppers, and led the way to their rambling residence. A meal heavy with meat was enlivened with an excellent wine that could have cost little less than a small fortune at this altitude. The manners of the household recalled Palestine. We three men sat at table with our hats on, in Arabic as well as Andean fashion, while the women hovered more or less inconspicuously in the background. A dozen small children of both sexes crawled and climbed and sprawled and displayed their plump, unwashed nakedness on, around, and under the table, drinking wine and swearing like arrieros in both Spanish and Quichua. They were being brought up in the Palestinian, which is to some extent the Latin-American, fashion that forbade coercion, and were heartily laughed at and dubbed “cute” whenever they did anything particularly naughty or disobedient.

The two Syrians, as we would call them, or “Turks,” as their fellow-countrymen are known through all South America, had left Bethlehem some eight years before. They announced themselves “Christians,” which meant merely that they were not Mohammedans; though, as behooves ambitious merchants, they diplomatically avoided any religious controversy with their clients. For several years they had peddled on foot over all the accessible portion of central Peru, descending even into the montaña, or great hot lands to the east, the abode of rubber, fever, and “wild” Indians. Bit by bit they had established shops in various towns, until they had come to be among the most important merchants of the region, with headquarters in Huancavelica and branches in charge of more youthful fellow-countrymen in the chief centers of population of the department. Their success was typical of thousands of men of their race throughout the southern continent. For the native, equally scanty of initiative, industry, and the inclination to risk his capital, is at best an ineffective competitor of this tireless race of born shopkeepers. Of productive labor, great as is the call for it in this backward Andean land, the “Turk” brings nothing. Nor is his example likely to better the personal habits of the native population, though it may breed more effective “business methods,” and even a higher grade of commercial honesty—to say nothing of hospitality. It is not by such immigration, however, that the dormant continent will be rejuvenated.

My irrepressible hosts cherished a hazy dream of some day returning to Palestine with their fortune. Yet their children spoke not a word of the Arabic that still served for most of the intercourse between the men and their slatternly wives. The brothers themselves were fluent, not only in Spanish, but in Quichua. The throaty dialect of the aboriginals has much in common with the no less guttural Arabic; as the similarity of customs and point of view makes the race particularly adaptable to Peruvian surroundings. No other foreigner fits better into the life of the Andes, and it is not strange that the Syrian has most effectively invaded Andean commerce. Even the Chinaman, who quickly disappears as the traveler turns his back on Lima, has found it impossible to compete with these more western Orientals.

It is unfortunate that the traveler given to reporting his wanderings cannot have his mind erased every little while, like a slate; for so quickly do the sights and sounds of a strange country sink to the commonplace that many things that might delight the stay-at-home pass unnoticed. Thus an American untouched with the contempt of familiarity, suddenly set down in Huancavelica, would no doubt find it abounding with “local color.” Hays, who journeyed overland to Cuzco some months before me, enthusiastically proclaimed it “the most picturesque town in South America.” But to one who had followed the Andes step by step it was rather monotonously like any other town of the Sierra, its customs varying only in a few minor details from those that had long since grown familiar. By night it lies silent and dead under its cold stars. Dawn finds the fountain in its central “Plaza de la Independencia” bearded with icicles, and no clock or sun-dial could give the hour more exactly than the regularity with which these drip away to nothing in the late morning. For the sun falls tardily on Huancavelica, having first to climb the mountain rampart that shuts it in on the east. The town wisely remains in bed until the god of the Incas has asserted his brilliant, undisputed sway, and my road-habit of rising at daybreak gave me the sensation of strolling through a city from which the entire populace had fled. Indeed, the only really comfortable place in town was in bed. All day long one shivered in the shade or burned in the sun. In my dank, dungeon cell it was distinctly too dark, cold, and gloomy to read or write; on the red benches of the plaza the glare of the molten disk above was too brilliant to endure, even when some unsophisticated old native did not join me and remain deaf to all hints that even a traveler has his work to do. I soon formed the habit of taking daily possession of the ancient band-stand facing the white “cathedral.” Here was a bench on which I could, by constant manipulation, keep myself in the sun and my note-book in the shade; and as it was apparently against the rules or contrary to costumbre for a native to occupy the structure, I sat here hour after hour in solitary glory, flanked by the four staring sides of the plaza. The activity of an Andean town can generally be gaged by its plaza, and by that token Huancavelica was inactive indeed. Evidently no industry more important than a soup-kettle could be run by natives, and foreigners were rare. Charcoal braziers, or the three-stone, fagot-fires at the backs of huts, where crouched old women almost too feeble to drive off the curs that swarmed around the steaming earthen calabashes, represented the ordinary cooking processes, the fires being now and then given new life with a bamboo, or woven-weed fan. So bucolic was the populace that every stroll through the streets brought a score of inquiries as to what I was selling, many regarding even my kodak as a sale-kit and inviting me to enter, while children and grown-ups alike hastened to summon the rest of the family as often as I hove in sight.

In common with all Latins, the people are lovers of perpetual noise, and have no conception of our Anglo-Saxon desire to be occasionally let alone. Though the annoyances were always innocent, rather than intentional, I could not pause for a moment that I did not have a surrounding mob, and there was almost constantly a procession of boys, and even those old enough to know better, at my heels. If I paused to look at an old carved corner-stone or an ancient balcony, necks were craned in wonder as to what on earth an estranjero from the great outside world could find of interest in the lifelong sights of their drowsy capital. Yet there was a peculiar repose and quiet about the place, as if it were literally shut off by its grim mountain-walls from all the troubles of the great world. Shopkeepers locked up and went home to play or sleep whenever the whim struck them. Though a department capital, there was not a physician in town, nor any open evidence of a drug-store; and while there was no doubt some advantage in this state of affairs, the death-rate from dysentery and pneumonia was high. An awkward, slow-minded, mountain people, they had not even the usual mountaineer virtue of shyness, being as forward in their manner as Hebrews. I was never out of sight of at least one “authority,” a ragged Indian from some neighboring hamlet up among the higher ranges, clinging jealously to his black silver-mounted cane of office. Pacos and llamas could be made out, tiny as mice, feeding on the perpendicular crags sheer above the town, among the abrupt splintered masses of rock that cut all the surrounding sky-line sharply with their jagged crests.

As I was strolling about town the day after my arrival, a soldier again came running after me to say that the prefect himself desired me to report and explain myself. I handed the menial my card, and heard no more of the matter. The printed name on a bit of cardboard is proof sufficient of aristocracy in most of South America. Burglars and highwaymen contemplating entrance into that field of activities would do well to provide themselves with a plentiful supply of visiting cards, the larger and more imposing the better. Later on, when I called on the department ruler at my own volition and with the dignity befitting an envoy from the outside world, a man was assigned to attend me on any excursions I chose to make in or about the town.

The origin of the name of Huancavelica is curious. There was, it seems, no town here at the time of the Conquest. To the Incas this flat enclosed plain with its clear little river offered too fine an opportunity for their enemies to roll rocks down upon them from the towering heights above. Centuries ago there settled on the spot an Indian of the Huanca tribe, inhabiting the great valley between Jauja and Huancayo. He died young, and for long years his wife dwelt alone in the only hut in this capacious mountain-pocket. Her name was Isabel, which in South America becomes familiarly or affectionately, “Velica.” Her hut was a sort of tambo, where a bit of corn or eggs might occasionally be had, or at least pasture for pack-animals and shelter from the páramo winds. Hence travelers through the region, asked where they would spend the night, announced: “Voy llegar donde la Huanca Velica.”

Then it was discovered that the grim, treeless mountains piled into the sky about the little valley were rich in quicksilver, and a mining town built itself up about the hut of Isabel, the Huanca. For centuries the great Santa Barbara mine high above the town, and several smaller workings in the vicinity, yielded the mercury used in Potosi and in all the mines of Peru, High or Low, which was brought from Huancavelica on the backs of llamas. Then, as more scientific methods came into vogue, the miners turned to California for their supply, until to-day the Mercury Queen is but an echo of her former greatness, and the open shafts of her cinnabar mines, which rumor has it left several of the surrounding ranges great hollow caverns, stand silent and deserted. It is this failure to keep up with modern times that has left Huancavelica one of the most “picturesque” department capitals, with poverty her chief handmaid. Lack of transportation is her principal drawback. The very town itself is said to sit on top of great deposits of quicksilver. Workmen, digging for the foundation of a new building on a corner of the plaza during my sojourn, found pure-liquid mercury bubbling up out of the ground. Modern miners, however, refuse to operate where only the slow and unreliable llama must be depended on for transportation, and only when the long-promised railroad arrives, will Huancavelica come into her own again.

The chief point of interest was the famous old mercury mine of Santa Barbara. Strangely enough, the cicerone appeared within an hour of the daylight time set, though without breakfast, and shared with me the results of my own rum-burning handicraft. A roundabout, but exceedingly steep road, on which we panted audibly in spite of frequent halts for breath, brought us to our goal far above the town. Near a silent, cold, Indian hamlet, with an aged Spanish church facing its dreary plaza, was the ruin of a cut-stone smelting-works of colonial days, and behind it the imposing arched entrance to the enormous caverns said to undermine all the neighboring range. Above this was a large Spanish coat-of-arms cut in stone, with the information that the arch had been constructed by General Fulano in 1707; and the weather-defaced relief of a saint holding a child. The silence of long abandonment brooded over all the scene. We lighted the medieval oil-lamp borrowed from the hotel, and disappeared within. The tunnel that led straight into the mountainside was large enough, if not for a railway train, at least for a horseman to have ridden in comfortably, its floor easily as good a road as the average Peruvian one outside. Here and there we crawled over a heap of stones and earth where a part of the wall had fallen, and at 382 paces from the mouth were halted by a cave-in that had choked up the entire tunnel. My companion had assured me that the spirits of ancient Spaniards and their Indian victims, lying in wait for unwary moderns, made our entrance perilous in the extreme, and, once permission was given, lost no time in retreating.

From the exit we went faldeando (skirting) the mountain to the ancient mining village of Chaclatacana, about which, and scattered over all the vicinity, were the evidences of little mines the Indians had dug on their own account. The cinebrio deposits of the region were first disclosed to the Spaniards in 1566, by the custom of the aboriginals of painting their faces with it. My guide asserted that condors were numerous, and often dangerous to the eyes of men wandering over these lofty heights; but it was my luck not to catch sight of one of those giant birds of the Andes. I was rewarded, however, for taking the “short-cut” that proved longer and more laborious than the road, by a bird’s eye view of Huancavelica, so directly below us that we could have tossed our hats into the central plaza. Here, too, among the split and jagged rock-crags we stumbled upon a colony of viscachas,—“biscachos” my companion called them—almost the only quadruped, besides the guinea-pig and the llama family, indigenous to the Peruvian highlands. The creature is sometimes dubbed the “squirrel of the Andes,” but its size was more nearly that of the rabbit, its prominent tail and means of locomotion suggestive of some diminutive species of the kangaroo, its color not unlike that of our prairie dog, which it resembled somewhat also in its manner of dodging in and out among the rocks and crags, as if inviting us to a game of “hide and seek.” According to my attendant, the meat of the animal is even more succulent than llama-flesh, providing the tail is cut off at the moment of killing.

But for the unkindness of fate there would have been a gala bull-fight in Huancavelica on the Sunday of my stay. The one negro I had seen shivering about town turned out to be a torero, imported—chiefly at his own expense—from Lima for the occasion. The corral behind the rambling dwelling of my hosts had been turned into a “ring,” a square one, to be sure, laboriously fenced with poles tied with bark and cords to upright stakes. But on Saturday afternoon, just as the town was rubbing its hands together at the prospect of a half-forgotten entertainment, the one bull that was to have furnished it sprang through the barrier and over the low wall to the sunken street below, fifteen feet if it was an inch, and instead of dying on the spot, was last seen making record time for his mountain pasture.

The irrepressible “Turks” were wellnigh obnoxious in their hospitality. The most baggage-abhorring of travelers acquires gradually and unconsciously a new point of view with respect to his pack when he is no longer forced to burden his own shoulders with it, and articles that have hitherto seemed only useless weight take on the aspect of necessities. But after they had “sold” me an enamel cup and a roll of cotton-flannel for “Fusslappen,” the Syrians refused vociferously to accept payment. When I caught sight of a mouth-organ that might have served to while away the tramp across the lonely uninhabited world ahead, my mere glance at it caused José to drop it into my pocket when I was off my guard. A wordy battle ended with his acceptance of a sol, which he swore was the wholesale price of an instrument marked to retail for five times that amount; but it cost me eternal vigilance to keep now one, now the other brother from surreptitiously returning the coin. There was nothing left but to curtail my purchases. To choose from their stock was to have charity thrust upon me; to buy off their rivals would have been the height of insults, and would quickly have published to all the town their lack of hospitality, or my ingratitude. My last day with them the firm of Atala Hermanos spent in writing me letters of introduction to all their countrymen from Huancavelica to Cape Horn, and when I sneaked into their patio at dawn next morning, bent on abducting Chusquito unseen, the entire household was already waiting to drag me in to an extraordinary breakfast. Not satisfied with that, they forced upon me a boiled leg-of-mutton and several other delicacies, among them a dozen raw eggs which, tied in a handkerchief on Chusquito’s back, broke one by one with his jolting gait and ran in yellow streams down the rubber poncho that covered the pack.

All Huancavelica united in attempting to force a guide upon me, asserting that even “hijos del lugar” frequently lost themselves on the trackless puna beyond. I smiled indulgently at what had long since become a threadbare prophesy, but had occasion to recall it before the day was done. The way mounted steadily all the morning, uncovering a vast yellow-brown world that stretched forever before me. In the early hours it was scantily inhabited by wild, weather-faded shepherds watching over flocks of llamas, pacos, or sheep, and leisurely busy turning wool into yarn on their crude spindles, an occupation that gave the men a curiously effeminate air, out of all keeping with their rough exterior. These chary fellows took good care that we should not come within shouting distance of them, and even the rare travelers and llama drivers made wide circuits to avoid us, as if fearful of their defenselessness on this bleak, shelterless top of the world. If taken unaware in some fold of the earth, they muttered some stupidity in the Quichua slang dialect of the region, and sped away like startled hares. Unable to make inquiries, I could only trust to chance, compass, and the instinct that develops with long Andean travel. For on these broad mountain-tops the traveler is by no means master of the situation, and to guess wrong between several at best faintly marked paths may be to go hopelessly astray, and come out on the opposite side of the Andes from that toward which one is headed. For long stretches the dreary páramo showed no sign whatever of travel, though here and there the droppings of llamas gave the route a more or less fixed direction. A jolly, coca-chewing old Indian, whom I came upon in the afternoon plodding patiently behind his haughty train, had seen enough of the world to have lost some of his fear of white men and assured me I was still on the right road. But he must have been mistaken, or else I guessed wrong at the next opportunity, for the bit of trail that had grown up under my feet split irreconcilably and left, at the hour when I should have come upon an hacienda reputed hospitable to travelers, only the rolling, trackless, yellow puna stretching away on every hand.

A raging thunder-storm of rain and hail, under which the vast land and skyscape turned dark as night, soon broke upon us. I had struggled a long distance through the storm, when I faintly made out a little cluster of huts some distance to the right in a wrinkle of the pampa. After I had overcome my own disinclination to go out of my way to seek lodging, there was needed a laborious argument to bring my companion to my way of thinking. For Chusquito would have none of your side trips. The truth is I had been somewhat deceived and disappointed in the disposition of my chosen fellow-adventurer. As long as the road lay straight and undoubtedly before us, he was an ideal companion, never breaking the thread of my reflections by calling attention to the scenery, nor otherwise making himself humanly obnoxious. But in temperament he might best be likened to a cat, accepting all favors and friendly overtures with a complacent aloofness and matter-of-course manner that resembled ingratitude, refusing to be won over, even by caresses, to the faintest expression of a reciprocal affection. Moreover, he had a will, not to say a wilfulness, of his own that is inimical to all genuine companionship on the road, and a respect for costumbre that betrayed his Latin-American training. I felt no compunction in having recourse to brute force in a dispute under such circumstances as then faced us, however, and we soon gained the only visible shelter.

On a cold, cheerless spot, almost devoid of even the vegetation of high pampas, I found five miserable human kennels of loosely laid stones and ichu grass, in charge of several gaunt, savage, yet cowardly curs, and an Indian boy speaking only monosyllabic Quichua. All the huts, except a beehive-shaped structure that served as kitchen, had huge native padlocks on the doors. Choked with thirst, in tantalizing contrast to my dripping garments and the raging storm, I called for water.

“Manam cancha,” murmured the boy dully, using the Quichua version of that stereotyped Andean falsehood, “There is none.”

“Yacu!” I shouted, jokingly laying a hand on my revolver.

He slunk away, and picked up a battered cup behind one of the huts. Wiping this on his lifelong sleeve, he scraped the bottom of a huge earthen jar that leaned awry, in what would have needed only a fence to be a barnyard, at an angle that enabled the dogs to help themselves at the same source, and presented the half-filled vessel to me. There was no second choice in the matter, for this region, untold miles above sea-level, had no other supply of water than the rain that chanced to drop into the leaning cántaros. Fortunately the taste bore little evidence of what the appearance suggested. I made a round of the huts, resolved to spend the night there, even if I had to break into one of the buildings.

“Huasi-muñuy!” I cried, patching my Quichua together after my own fashion, and pointing to one of the padlocks.

“Manam cancha,” repeated the huarma in the same dull monotone. I held out what would have seemed a fortune of small coins to a country boy of other lands, but he shook his head doggedly, without a gleam of interest, casting a half-frightened glance at my weapon. An older youth, who had appeared noiselessly from somewhere, treated the offer of money with the same indifference and settled down to a silent attempt to drive me off, in spite of the storm and the night that was closing in. It was then that I thought of the sack I had filled in the market of Huancayo. At the magic word “coca” the pair awoke to a new interest in life. Each snatched off his hat to receive a handful of leaves, mumbling a “Gracias, tayta-tayta,” and the older youth ordered the other to clear away a miscellaneous assortment of junk, bundles of old sheepskins, and a heap of llama-droppings gathered for fuel, from one end of the hut “porch” under the edge of which I was seated. As he worked, there fell from somewhere under the projecting eaves the corpse of a tiny, black pig that had quite evidently died a natural death, but which the family just as evidently proposed to eat, for the boy carried it off to a safer spot, plainly doubting my honesty. In a corner lay two bundles of ichu grass. I tossed one to Chusquito, standing dejected and disgusted beside me, and spread out the other as a mattress. The youth made no protest, but shook his head at the real I offered in payment. A howling wind that even the stone hut failed to break made it useless to attempt to set up my cooking outfit. As I drew cold food from my pack, the Indians sat motionless as stone statues, but watched with keen eyes, monkey-like, my every move. I shared the lunch with them, though I should much have preferred paying them in money for their dubious hospitality. It is one of the drawbacks of Andean journeying that the traveler is expected to share his scanty supplies, not merely with his human companions of the moment, but is invariably surrounded under such circumstances by a ravenous swarm of begging and thieving dogs, pigs, and fowls. Except for a score of llamas lying in patrician aloofness beyond the huts, every living creature crowded round to appeal to my generosity or to catch me off my guard. The Indians accepted each morsel with a murmured “Gracias” that plainly proceeded from custom rather than from any real thankfulness. Innumerable experiments, from the Rio Grande southward, had demonstrated that the American aboriginal has not a trace of gratitude in his make-up; indeed, the use of the Spanish term suggests that the native language did not even include a word for thanks.

The thirst that follows an all-day tramp outlived the available supply of water, and even the bottle of pisco I dared not bring to light until darkness had concealed my movements from the Indians could not be shared with Chusquito, no doubt choking within, in spite of his bedraggled, dripping flanks. As the storm died down, the evening spread wonderful colors across this bleak upper world, bringing out in lilac tints, shading to purple and then to black, the saw-toothed range bounding the horizon on the far south. The night would have been bitter cold even inside one of the huts, to say nothing of lying on the earth floor of the open, mud corredor. Yet the cold which my rubber poncho kept out was no less surprising than the heat which the wooly llama-hair one kept in, and my sleep might easily have been much more broken than it was.

During my first doze there arrived an old Indian, evidently the head of the household that had hitherto kept itself successfully concealed. He was somewhat the worse for fiery waters and, being apprized of his visitor, set up a deal of howling and shouting in Quichua. Receiving no answer, he ventured to take a mild poke at me with his stick. It would have been heroic indeed to have gotten out of “bed.” Instead, I turned loose a string of American and Spanish words of high voltage which experience had shown to have a withering effect on his race. Though he did not understand them individually, he evidently grasped their general import, for he subsided at once, and retired to the beehive kitchen, where for a long time he howled and yelped, as brave men will in the midst of their trembling and admiring families. Bit by bit his women pacified him, in the way women have, perhaps with more pisco and coca, for I heard him laugh several times thereafter, with a sound like that of a choking cow, before anything resembling silence settled down over the lofty mountain-top world. Real silence is rare in these Indian huts at night. Either the lack of comfort they are too lazy or uninitiative to remedy, or the chewing of coca keeps the miserable inhabitants half-awake, and periods of growling and grumbling are seldom far apart from dark to dawn.

I fancy it was midnight, more or less, when I became drowsily aware that Chusquito, tied within a foot of my head, was munching some fodder I knew he did not possess; but I was too nearly asleep to rise and investigate. The moon testified that it was some two hours later when I was awakened to find the head of the household standing beside me, his hand on a damaged roof and bellowing a guttural stream in which I caught several times the words “Huasi micuni—eating my house.” This would be an impoliteness in any land, and I bravely forced myself to slip into my brogans and out into the icy moonlight. Chusquito had scalloped out the bangs of the grass roof in a new style that, to my notion, was more fetching than the original. If only the Indians of the Andes were not so stonily conservative, my host would have thanked me for the improvement, instead of sputtering with rage. I tied the innocent culprit to a stone-wall nearby, which was also an unfortunate choice, for I heard him knock down most of that in the hours that remained before daylight. During the long uproar that ensued in the kitchen, no doubt the old Indian told his family many times over that had he been at home when I arrived, I should not have remained; but in that he was mistaken, for it would have taken a considerable band of South American Indians to have denied me hospitality. I lay down again with my revolver and cartridge-belt handy under the edge of the ponchos; not that there was any danger, but because I do not care to be numbered among those who take foolish chances.

The next I knew distinctly, it was dawning. I fed my mattress to Chusquito and set up my kitchenette in the most sheltered corner of the corredor, bent on concocting a hot broth with a lump of ice from the bottom of a leaning cántaro. The directions on my magic can of concentrated soup asserted that “one cube with hot water makes a delicious bouillon.” But this, experience had demonstrated, should be taken with a grain of salt—also four other cubes. Even under the lee of my alforjas the rum-burner went out at the faintest breath of wind, but by constant coaxing, and at the imminent risk of setting fire to my possessions, I managed even to boil the two eggs that remained whole, though so great was the altitude that with eight minutes of boiling they were still soft. Gravelly bread of Huancavelica, and a native “chocolate” that was really a pebbly brown sugar, topped off a meal I might have longed for in vain at that hour in the best hotel of Peru. Many an hour on the road, during the best part of the day for walking, that simple little contrivance gave me, when I should otherwise have been waiting on the sleepy natives for breakfast.

By the time I had eaten, the householder appeared in his slit panties with white buttons down the sides, and a fancy upper garment evidently intended to impress me with his importance. But when he noted by daylight with whom he had to do, he gradually shrivelled up to a half-friendly smile, and accepted with a pretence of gratitude a coin for his forced hospitality and newly decorated roof. A silver-ringed, black cane, leaning against what Chusquito had seen fit to leave of the stone wall, proved him one of the “authorities” of the region. Above it stood a crude cross decorated with dry grass, designed to keep evil spirits—except those in bottles—away from the cluster of huts. Either my host’s knowledge of the trail ahead, or his manner of imparting it, was extremely hazy, and I dragged Chusquito away across the pampa in the cutting cold, but invigorating mountain air, burdened with the task of finding ourselves once more.

Within an hour we were so fortunate as to fall again upon a trail, where I could relinquish the tiller and drift into those day-dreams that come upon the solitary traveler across these vast Andean punas. Snow had fallen during the night, and a great white immensity, slightly undulating, spread out to infinity before us. We shared an all-night thirst that set us both to munching snow at frequent intervals. By ten the sun had burned away the whiteness and restored to the scene its accustomed monk’s robe of faded yellow-brown. All morning I continued to guess the way across a steadily rising world, in the utter silence that makes more impressive the dreariness of these lofty regions, until at noon we panted over a jagged rock-ridge from which all the kingdoms of the earth lay spread out below us, tumbled, broken, and velvety brown as far as the eye could command even in this transparent air. As we started gradually downward, shepherds and their flocks appeared once more, then little fenced patches and stone-heap hovels; then we dropped almost suddenly into the blazing hot valley of a little river, along which tiled huts and travelers were numerous. Several times I went astray and waged pitched battle with Chusquito cross-country, past hovels swarming like disturbed beehives with barking dogs, before I once more got securely under our feet the trail that was to lead us upward again over the next páramo. It is not merely that the stupid inhabitants of these regions speak only Quichua, but they are incapable of giving intelligent directions, even in that tongue. There is something exhilarating in the air of Andean heights that breeds reflection and a peaceful serenity of mind; but it is nature, rather than humanity, that awakens the marked optimism of spirits. The traveler grows “inspired,” lifted up out of himself by the magnificence of the scene, realizing for a moment how marvelous is this world we inhabit; then suddenly an Indian, a human being, intrudes, and snatches him back to earth again. Time after time I caught sight of an approaching figure which the mind, from youthful force of habit, imbued with human intelligence—and as many times it turned out to be a shuffling Indian, stupid and glassy-eyed from the quid of coca in his cheek and the chicha and pisco of the last hamlet in his belly, who cringed like some degenerate animal as he passed, mumbling some Quichua monosyllable. Incapable of intelligent reply, even when they are not in a half-drunken stupor, these plodding creatures have a very hazy notion of distance. The acco, or time of duration of a quid of coca, which they throw on the achepetas, or symbolical stone-heaps along the way, is at best but an uncertain term of length, and their besotted intellects seldom retain the memory of any number above three or four. So that, in spite of the frequent appearance of fellow-travelers, I had perforce to be satisfied with the half-certainty that I was on the right road, without any notion of whether the nearest shelter was one, or ten leagues distant.

Clouds crawled into the evening sky again, where the daytime sunshine had swept it clean; the purple shadows of the mountains, across the tops of which the setting sun cast a crimson glow, spread and darkened, and I had visions of shivering out another night in the corredor of an Indian hut, or out on the bare, freezing pampa. I had suffered so many dreary nights, twelve hours long, in South America, that it had become a habit to lose my cheerful mood in the late afternoon and succumb to apprehension, as of some impending misfortune. Under this I developed unconsciously a pace so swift that Chusquito, like a small boy trying to keep up with an inconsiderate father, took to trotting every little while some distance ahead. We were now far up again on a cold puna across which the bitter mountain wind swept unchecked, and even my companion seemed to cast apprehensive glances at the angry, black clouds overspreading the sky, and at the cold dusk descending upon us. We hurried unbrokenly on, without a sign of town or hamlet, though the last Indian stragglers still bore sufficient evidences of intoxication that proved it could be no great distance off. Then, in the last rays of daylight, we turned a wind-whipped boulder and caught sight of the place, far off in the lap of a stony valley, well aware from long Andean experience that the intervening distance was much greater than appearance suggested.

Black night had long since settled down when I found myself surrounded by indistinct, low structures that turned out to be Acobamba, home of one Zambrano, for whom I bore a letter from the “Turks.” As often as I inquired for him, however, there came back that Spanish-American-Indian mumble of indifference and distrust, “Más arriba,”—higher up, until I felt like a District Attorney on the trail of “graft.” When a half-civilized youth in “store” clothes gave me the same identical, lackadaisical answer for the tenth or twentieth time, I caught him by the slack of the garments and jerked him into the street, with a polite ultimatum to conduct me in person to that elusive upper region.

He led the interminable, cobbled way down one street and up another, equally unlighted, and finally stopped before a zaguán with an “Aquí, señor.” I cut off his proposed escape, and drove him into the patio to summon the man of the house. He returned with the Indian mayordomo, and the information that the Zambrano who lived there was not the one I sought, and was, moreover, out of town. The youth proposed that he “go look for” the right Zambrano.

“No, indeed, my friend,” I countered. “You will stay right with me while we look for him.”

“Sí, señor,” said the youth in a shivering voice. Then he turned back across town and plaza by another route, and pointed out the Zambrano household exactly two doors from the one out of which I had originally snatched him. The flock of women who surged out upon me greeted me with the threadbare “No ’stá ’cá!” He never was—when I bore a letter to him. The wife spelled it out laboriously under the blinking light of a home-made tallow candle, then invited me into the earth-floored “parlor,” separated by a calico curtain from the little shop she kept.

“There is no one in Acobamba who prepares food for strangers,” she replied to my roundabout hint, “but we shall serve you such as we can here in our poor house.”

While the mystery to come was cooking, I managed to get inoffensively into her possession the price of a peck of grain for Chusquito—and some time later found the poor, misused animal munching about two cents’ worth of old, dry corn-husks in the corral.

“It is,” murmured the wife, in reply to my questioning gesture, “that there is no grain in town—at these hours.” But though she would have considered an insult any direct offer of a traveler consigned to her husband by letter to pay for his accommodation, she carefully avoided any further reference to the grain-money.

It would have been in the highest degree scandalous to have lodged a stranger in her own dwelling during the absence of the head of the household. But the delegation of females, having discovered, by dint of turning the house wrong-side out, the massive key of a mud-flanked door across the street, let me into an abandoned shop lumbered with the accumulated odds and ends of many years, an immense, woven-straw hogshead full of shelled corn bulking above the rest. A creaking board counter, barely five feet long, was the only available sleeping space. The only means of avoiding asphyxiation was to leave the door open to any passing sneak-thief or congenital hater of gringos. But even had the risk been great, the key would have proved an effective weapon. Unfortunately it would have been anti-simpático to have felled with it the solicitous night-hawks who called my frequent attention to the perils of night air, not merely by rapping on the door, but by prodding me in the ribs with their sticks.

It was butchering day in Acobamba when I awoke, and at the suggestion of my hostess I sent a servant to buy ten cents’ worth of meat. She returned with an entire basketful,—eight slabs of raw, red beef, each as large as an honest sirloin steak “for two.” Virtually every shop in town being a pulpería, it was easy to lay in supplies for the road ahead. But though competition was brisk in all other wares, for some reason I was never able to fathom, in all the region of the central Andes my favorite food was always hedged round with refusals. As often as I stepped into a shop where a basket of eggs was displayed, I was sure to be informed in a dull, uninviting monotone, “No están de venta.” “Of course they are not for sale,” the experienced Peruvian wayfarer soon learns to reply, “No Andean lady who considers herself a lady would think of selling eggs. But—er”—meanwhile picking out the largest specimens of the fruit in question—“I have taken a dozen. How much?”

The answer was sure to be a meek, “Dos reales—ten cents, señor.”

Over the lofty, tumbled world ahead the way was often so steep and stony and contorted that Chusquito more than once fell on his neck, and threatened to twist himself permanently out of shape. It was a land so dry and barren that only the half-liter of pisco kept my thirst endurable. Whenever I paused for a sip, my companion glanced furtively and anxiously back at me, as if he remembered other masters who had got bad tempers out of bottles along the way. But his was none of your meek and canine dispositions that permit abuse unprotestingly. On the level, high pampas, with all the world spread out in full view about us, the exhilaration of scene and air caused me unconsciously to set so swift a pace that I was obliged frequently to kick the brute out from under my feet—until he retaliated by suddenly projecting one small, shod hoof against a shin that I was distinctly aware of for days afterward.

One afternoon, not fifty miles beyond Acobamba, I was threatened with violence for the first time during my fifteen months in South America. I sat beside a mountain pool, coaxing my cooking-outfit under shelter of my alforjas, when two half-Indians, bleary-eyed with drink, appeared on stout mules. They had nearly passed when they caught sight of me, and charged forward in drunken insolence, all but trampling my possessions under the hoofs of their animals. In the haste of the moment I made the error of showing aggressiveness to the point of drawing my revolver—and came perilously near having to use it for my mistake. When reflection caused me to change my tactics and humor them like the witless children they were, the danger was dissipated like a puff of smoke. Within ten minutes the pair grew so maudlinly affectionate that they insisted on shaking hands alternately a dozen times each, and at length rode slowly away, casting frequent besotted, loving glances behind them.

Across a barren páramo ahead the mood struck me to cheer the long hours with my mouth-organ. Even the Indian carries one of these, or a reed flute on his journeys, and whiles away the sky-gazing solitudes with monotonous ditties. But I was soon forced to forgo the pleasure. Not merely did that plebian instrument in the hands of a gringo bring glances of unconcealed contempt from the rare horsemen who passed, but I could no sooner strike up than Chusquito, unhumanly frank and honest in his criticisms, would lay back his ears and trot ahead well out of hearing, with some peril to my pack, before he would consent to fall again into a walk.

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