XV. THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES…

XV. THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES

It was in the scattered caserío of Marcas that I overtook a traveling piano. I had barely installed myself by force and strategy in a mud den, and tied Chusquito to a molle tree before a heap of straw in which he alternately rolled and ate, when a party of gente arrived, among them an old woman of the well-to-do chola class, carried astride the shoulders of an Indian. Their chief spokesman was a lawyer named Anchorena, a white man of some education and even a slight inkling of geography, who was importing an upright piano for his mansion in Ayacucho. With the descending night came a score of Indians carrying a large, crude harp, several fifes and guitars, and a drum, to install themselves along the mud benches of the corredor of the building inside which the more or less drink-maudlin gente had spread themselves. It is never the Peruvian’s way to interfere with the celebrations of his underlings, however disturbing these may be, and far into the night the “musicians” kept up an unbroken, dismal, tuneless, indigenous wail that forced whoever would be heard to shout. Anchorena, professionally inclined to like the sound of his own voice best, bellowed the evening through in an endless account of a fellow-townsman’s visit to New York a bare ten years before. Of all the marvelous experience, what seemed to astonish both the teller and his hearers most, all but choking the Indian-riding old woman with incredulity as often as he repeated it, was the alleged fact that in the best New York hotels guests were not permitted to spit on the floor. Come to think of it, that probably would astonish a Peruvian.

To my surprise the natives were off ahead of us in the morning, and Chusquito had picked his way many hundred feet down a stair-like trail before we sighted the boxed piano, lying on its back on a bit of level ground far below, with some twenty-five motley-arrayed Indians squatted about it. The lawyer shook hands effusively and, putting Chusquito in charge of the barefoot squire who was leading his own cream-colored coast horse, invited me to listen to his endless chatter while we continued the swift descent together.

The piano, made in Germany, had been set down in Lima for $500. Freight to Huancayo had added ten percent. to the cost. From the end of the railway to Ayacucho, a scant two hundred miles, the exotic plaything must be transported on men’s backs, as the Incas imported a thousand things—if not pianos—in the days of their power. This stage of the journey would, under ordinary circumstances, have nearly doubled the cost of the instrument. But Anchorena had the advantage of owning a large hacienda in the great hot valley toward which we were descending, and was able to cut the expense in two by drawing upon his own peons for the labor of transportation. Three distinct gangs had been sent from his estate, each to bear the burden a third of the distance. They were paid the extraordinary wage of twenty cents a day, and supplied food, chicha, and coca. Each gang carried the piano for a week, and it was the second party celebrating the arrival of the third that had made noisy the night at Marcas.

Each morning, shortly after midnight, the Indians rose to munch mote, or boiled corn, for an hour or more, after which a heavy soup of corn, potatoes, beans, and charqui, was served. Then for another hour the men poked coca leaves one by one into their cheeks, mixing them with lime from their little gourds, and by dawn, the effect of the chewing having made itself felt, they rose to their feet and were off. Some forty peons set their shoulders to the several poles attached to the boxed piano, a picket-line with shovels, axes, and ropes was thrown out in advance to widen the trail and lend assistance in the steeper places, and an army of servants, cooks, squires, and the numerous capatazes, or bosses, required for any effective Indian labor, brought up the rear of the expedition.

From the punas of the day before, totally barren but for the dreary, yellow ichu, we had descended through a zone of scrub bushes, lower still through thirstless, sand-loving cactus, and were now dropping swiftly through a dead, desert landscape by zigzag trails as painfully steep and unpeopled as those of the Ecuador-Peruvian boundary. Architecture changed with the altitude, so that the openwork huts became little more than thatch roofs on poles, shading the languid, loafing inhabitants of a place called Huarpo, hot as Panama, on the edge of a river cutting off a broad, sandy valley I had seen from the sky the day before. The surrounding region was a cofardía, that is, it belonged to some wooden saint to whom it had been bequeathed by a beata, one of the many pious old women who have thus left great tracts of the Andes perpetually in morte main. For the desire of these sanctimonious matrons is to provide a permanent income for the masses requisite to the repose of their souls, and as their piety is commonly tempered with experience of the ways of this world, they usually reject the suggestion of the Church to sell the property and give the money directly to the priest, lest he grow forgetful, in a way even priests have, and neglect his duty toward the dwellers in purgatory. Huarpo is also paludic, or raging with intermittent fevers, and no wise man drinks water within sight of it. The appearance of a gringo in their midst aroused even these languid, fever-hued, desert people to an unusual concentration of attention, one bedraggled female bursting out at last with a remark in Quichua too rapid for my ears, but which the lawyer translated: “Caramba! Si yo estaba preñada de seguro saldría la cara gringuita!” It is a common superstition in the Andes that a child will closely resemble the person the mother has looked most fixedly upon during the months before its birth.

In spite of the fact that everything I owned in South America, not only my letter of credit and the papers necessary to prove my identity, but even my money, had been left in my alforjas under the tender care of an Indian boy miles behind, I did little worrying. The Andean traveler soon grows accustomed to trusting his possessions to penniless peons, for losses are astonishingly rare. For all that, I caught myself glancing anxiously now and then up the wall of shale and loose rock that piled into the sky above us. The piano-movers made good time, in spite of many a zigzag and desert precipice, where rope and home-made tackle and the widening of the trail were often necessary. We had not enjoyed the shade of the huts an hour before the vanguard appeared, and shortly afterward the lawyer’s bulky toy was laid in the baking sand beside us, and the sweating, dust-covered carriers swarmed about the huge jar of chicha de molle that had been purchased for them. Progress would have been much less rapid but for the fact that the third gang, knowing theirs was the last shift, realized the advantage of finishing the journey to Ayacucho as soon as possible. Yet their conception of hurrying was not exactly vertiginous. They halted a long hour, not to eat, which they did only morning and evening, but to prepare new quids of coca. From a large grain-sack the lawyer dealt out to each of the peons with his own fair hand a small handful of the narcotic leaves. They slunk forward one by one, with outstretched hats, and a hint of eagerness on their besotted, expressionless faces, with the air of men who would have sold their souls for this few cents’ worth of brutalizing leaves.

Chusquito, who had appeared at last, all intact but as covered with fine sand as from a trip across the Sahara, was too tiny to have crossed the river without wetting my baggage. It was the cream-colored coast horse that saved me a detour of several miles to a bridge downstream. Except for the lawyer and his mayordomos, the expedition stripped to the waist and forded the stream inch by inch under the piano, slipping individually, but fortunately not in unison, on the stones at the bottom, and spending a half-hour in a precarious task that would have been impossible in any but the dry season. In the shade of a molle grove beyond, Anchorena, who had recently been won to up-to-date methods, dealt out a quinine pill to each of the Indians. Few were able to swallow them without chewing, and made wry faces and animal noises in consequence. Several surreptitiously got rid of the detested white man’s remedy while their master’s eyes were not upon them. Though the day was still young, the cavalcade was to camp on the edge of the drowsy, sand-carpeted town of Izcutaco, a bare mile above the river, and when I left them the cooks were already heating over a blazing fire of molle berries the enormous iron kettle, six feet in diameter, under which an Indian had plodded, bent double, all day. When I took leave of the lawyer, he hoped to reach Ayacucho in four days, making the journey from Huancayo three weeks in duration, at a total cost of about $250, without reckoning the labor lost on his hacienda while the three gangs were going and coming and recuperating from their unwonted toil.

The molle tree covered all the great, tilted plain before me, lending it an inviting green tinge in spite of its semi-desert character. Its leaves are not unlike those of the willow, and it produces in clusters great quantities of a peppery red berry somewhat resembling the currant in appearance, and those of our red cedar in taste. These are well supplied with saccharine and ferment readily, constituting the chief curse of the region, in the form of an intoxicant so cheap and plentiful that the inhabitants are more often drunk than working.

In Huanta the addressee of my Turkish letter was Don Emilio, ——, a hearty countryman pleasantly free from the tiresome “polish” of the Latin-American city-dweller. Early in our conversation he took pains to inform me that he never permitted a priest to cross his threshold. A fellow-townsman later confided to me that the prohibition dated from the day that the oldest daughter of my host had been betrayed through the ministrations of the confessional. There was something pleasantly reminiscent of old patriarchial days in the way we all sat at meat together around the long table in the back corredor, surrounded by a flock of servants, the older, shy-mannered girls rising now and then during the meal to tend shop. Yet it is not easy to make oneself agreeable to such a family, for lack of intellectual interests cuts down the conversation to the simplest matters. The women of the household preferred the guttural Quichua, but Don Emilio found that tongue more difficult than his accustomed Spanish. My host was one of the “city fathers,” and perhaps the best-read man in the community, yet he referred to the United States and Europe as “a place somewhere up the coast,” and desired to know whether Italy was in New York, or New York in Italy. I attempted, in my struggle to make conversation, to give the family some conception of our northern midwinters.

“Brr! Nearly as cold as Huancavelica, it must be,” shivered the wife.

“How high is the highest Andes in your United States?” asked Don Emilio, with a hint of suspicion in his voice.

I told him.

“Then it is impossible for it to be cold there,” he cried, conclusively, “for that is scarcely higher than Huanta itself.”

Huanta lies close to the great montaña, or Amazonian hot-lands, and the “chocolate de Huanta” is famous throughout Peru. But the trails to that fruitful region are so nearly impassable that the interchange of products is only a fraction of what it might be. Set in one of the dry belts that are so frequent in the Andes, the great, tilted plain depends on irrigation for most of its fruits. Molle, fig, and willow trees abound, yet the ground beneath them is barren of grass. Eighty percent. of the valley is said to be chiefly Indian in blood. Peons are paid an average of twelve cents a day, and judging from what I saw of them, they are grossly overpaid. Nearly a half-century ago Squier found “drunkenness universal throughout the Sierra, and nothing neglected that could be turned into intoxicating beverages.” To this day there is slight improvement in this respect. Thanks to the molle berry, intemperance is high, even for Peru, and laziness reaches its culmination during the season when the tunas, ripening on the cactus hedges, feed alike birds and Indians. In the town almost every hut is a little drunkery, with an inviting display of bottles of all shapes and sizes. The life of the place was typified by a soft-muscled lump of a man sitting in the shade of his shop, drowsily switching flies off himself with a horse’s tail mounted on a wooden handle. To have seen him reading a book, or even whittling a stick, would have been entirely out of keeping with the local color.

House-flies, unknown in the upper altitudes, were more than numerous. Cats, too, were in evidence for almost the first time in the Sierra. The assertion of scientists that these cannot endure high regions was denied by the natives, who attributed their absence elsewhere to the lack of rats to feed on. Dogs, unfortunately, are indifferent to either drawback, and the Andean town has yet to be discovered that does not swarm with them. Llamas avoid Huanta, and the climate is more fitted to donkeys than to mountain ponies. An Indian trotted in from one of the irrigated alfalfares on the edge of town with a poncho-load of fresh, green alfalfa, gay with purple and red flowers, soon after our arrival. But at the first taste of this new species of fodder Chusquito showed keen disappointment. Like myself, he preferred regions of ten thousand feet and upward. During most of our stay he hung sad and dejected, as if homesick for the cold, penetrating air and the wiry grass of his native mountains, and it was here that I saw him lie down for the first time since we had joined forces.

We pushed on to Ayacucho under no very auspicious circumstances, for the department capital was reported to be raging with an epidemic of typhoid and smallpox that had forced it to ask aid of the central government. The day’s tramp varied from a blazing, semi-tropical gorge to a barren, waterless range so lofty that I found it necessary to stretch out on my back at the summit to catch my breath. A contrary mood, or too long a rest, made Chusquito choose to be obstreperous beyond all custom, and twice he set his heart wilfully on branch trails, and came perilously near escaping with all my possessions. Thereafter I kept him tied to my belt, and for once he set a pace more swift than I would have had it. Early in the afternoon the blazing desert landscape was broken by the sight of a city that could have been no other than Ayacucho, filling the hollow of a green bowl, several hut-lined streets radiating upward from it, like the legs of some great tarantula stretched on its back. A perfectly level road seemed to promise a quick entrance; but almost at the edge of the town the world fell suddenly away into a bottomless earthquake crack, where we sweated for an hour in a headlong descent far out of sight of human habitation, and toiled upward again to the crest of the horizon, all to advance a bare five hundred yards. Raging with thirst, we strode swiftly down upon the town, only to be blocked at the edge of it by a religious procession of hundreds of girls in snow-white dress. As if to show off before his fellow-countrymen, Chusquito redoubled his cussedness, and persisted, in spite of all my efforts, in taking advantage of the smooth, flagstone sidewalks, forcing two-legged pedestrians into the rough-cobbled street. It did not occur to me that he, too, might be footsore. At the first open door through which I spied bottles, he attempted to enter with me, and watched me disgustedly while I opened a bottle of native soda-water, a second, then a third, until the proprietress all but fainted with astonishment at sight of a man who came on foot drinking up a whole fifteen cents’ worth at once—and actually paying for it.

Both the hotels of Ayacucho were the usual low buildings, extending around a large court one entered beneath a topheavy archway, where guests appeared to be considered a nuisance, to be avoided by both host and servants as long as possible. I was finally awarded a dungeon opening directly on all the assorted activities, misdemeanors, and indecencies indigenous to the cobbled patios of Andean hotels, but which had the unusual feature of a window—with wooden bars, for glass is a luxury, even in an important department capital. The chamber was cool to the point of sogginess and had, of course, to be cleared out and furnished to my order. It was apparent that here was a city that would reward several days’ stay, and I set about finding more fitting accommodations for Chusquito than the circle about a post to which he had been confined at every halt since he had come into my possession. Long search and persistent inquiry brought me to a professional inverna, a term supposed to designate a green pasture in which an animal accepted as guest can wallow and gorge to his heart’s content. Fortunately I am nothing if not sceptical in such Peruvian matters and, sure enough, investigation proved the place to be only a bare field in which the owner promised to give “plenty of food and water” at ten cents a day. Promises and starvation are too closely allied in the Andes, where he who will know his animal well fed must see to the feeding in person. I had all but resigned myself and the maltreated beast to the inevitable, and had ordered a load of alfalfa brought to the hotel patio, when I ran across the piano importer, who begged me to do him the honor of letting him send the animal to his farm a few miles out of town. When at last I got to bed, my sleep was full of feverish dreams in which I was dragged to destruction times without number over bottomless precipices by a rope tied to my belt, while I gazed about me in vain for a patch of green in a bald and blistered landscape.

At first sight this half-green hole in the ground, surrounded by cactus-grown stretches of loose stones and bare, repulsive mountains, seemed a queer place for a city. But the situation improves somewhat upon closer acquaintance. Under the scanty trees that lend the hollow its color the soil is fertile when favored by the rains, and those who can avoid going out in the middle of the day will find the climate little short of perfect. The main drawbacks to what might be a not unpleasant dwelling-place are the absence of even the rudiments of hygiene, and the whirlwinds that spring up often with sudden, unexpected violence and envelop the town in clouds of dust and evidence of the absence of street-sweepers, or bring down a wintry wave from the snowclad to the south that lends its contrast to the picture.

At the time of the Conquest the only gathering of mankind corresponding to the present city was what Prescott calls “Huamanga, midway between Lima and Cuzco.” The story runs that an Inca, passing through the region, was sitting at meat out-of-doors when he saw, circling above him, a magnificent huaman, Quichua for falcon. Struck with admiration, he held up a choice morsel crying, “Huaman ca!—Take it, falcon!” Whatever the truth of the legend, the department of which Ayacucho is the capital is still known as Huamanga. The city itself takes its name from the Quichua terms aya (corpse), and ccucho (corner), in other words, “Dead Man’s Corner.” Long before the arrival of the Spaniards all this region was thus known because of a great battle between the fierce local tribes and those of Cuzco, in which the latter were routed. But the tables were turned under Huayna Ccápac, the Great, who colonized the territory by the customary Inca method of settling it with mitimaes, or “transplanted people” from another province. The great military highway passed close to the present site, but the only town of any size between Huancayo and Cuzco in early colonial days was Huari, now an insignificant Indian village lost among the stony hills. Manco, the revolted Inca, and his followers formed the chronic habit of falling upon travelers between the ancient and the new capital of Peru, and in 1548 Pizarro ordered a city founded for their protection, usually known as Huamanga. Not until after what is known to history as the Battle of Ayacucho, in which Sucre defeated the Spanish veterans who had fled before Bolívar from the icy pampa of Junín, and brought to an end the struggle of the new world for political freedom begun in New England a half-century before, was the older and more appropriate name revived.

In colonial times it was a far more important city. A census taken by a German in 1736 showed a population of more than 40,000. To-day it has barely two inhabitants for each of its 8000 feet elevation above sea-level. Even Squier found it “laid out on a grand scale, but with unmistakable signs of a great decline in wealth and population.” Epidemics of smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever, the advance of machinery and foreign importation over the local handicraft manufacture of tocuyo (cloth from the cactus fiber), frazadas, or hand-woven blankets, and native shoes, with the corresponding decrease in the growing of cotton in the region, were the chief causes of this decline. Then, too, the building of railroads left the ancient route from Lima to Cuzco stranded, and only a rare gringo andarín, driving a shaggy and sun-faded chusquito, comes now to visit the once proud city. Should the long-threatened railway across Peru ever come to pass, Ayacucho, like Huancavelica, may come more or less into her own again.

The cities of our own land are not without their faults, but he who would fully realize the advantages of even the most backward of them should come and dwell for a time in one of these shipwrecked “capitals” of the Andes. By night Ayacucho is “lighted” by dim kerosene contrivances, mildly resembling a miner’s torch, inside square, glass-sided lanterns of medieval origin, each house-owner paying from five to twenty cents a month for his share of the illumination. Gradually, however, electric lights were being installed—those pale, ought-to-be-sixteen-candle-power bulbs indigenous to Andean towns—against which a considerable opposition had developed because of the threatened cost of nearly a dollar monthly to each householder. In view of the fact that the average shop rents for $3 a month, it was natural that so decided an increase in expenses should be resented. The huge main plaza is garnished only with a central fountain surrounded by the customary iron fence, “due to the untold patriotism of Juan Fulano, ex-alcalde, etc.,” and a few ancient, backless, rough-stone benches. The favorite loafers’ gathering-place is under the portales, or arcades, that surround the square on three sides. These are lined with shops into the blue-black shadows of which the plaza-stroller’s eyes peer gratefully, but wellnigh blindly, from the blazing sunshine outside. Compared even with Spain, Ayacucho harbors an unbelievable number of non-producers. Hundreds of little shops, endlessly duplicated, stretch away along its every street, tended by lounging men and women with no other desire in life than to sell a few cents’ worth of something, particularly strong drink, and not even desiring that very decidedly. Their business methods are crude in the extreme. The town, for example, is noted for its native chocolate. The cacao beans grown in the montaña on the east are hulled and roasted, mixed with crude sugar and vanilla, and crushed and rolled again and again by hand under stone rollers, producing a gravelly, but not untoothsome product. Yet, though every merchant in town is ready to sell these individually at 2½ cents a cake, not one of them can be induced to sell by weight. “No es costumbre,” answers every man, woman, and child tending shop, and though all hover on the verge of poverty, not a man among them will overstep fixed custom, even to this extent, to win a less precarious livelihood. For a country where “trusts” are unknown the entire town is rather staunchly agreed on prices. The money in use is almost exclusively silver, which is lugged back and forth through the streets in cotton bags. Many of the coins, having at some time served as female adornment, have holes in them, and though these are perfectly acceptable to Ayacucho, they are worthless elsewhere in the country, so that to my usual task of gathering small change for the road ahead was added that of carefully weeding out all holed pieces. The average ayacuchano has a kind of crude insolence and an arrogance bred in isolated places which, added to his mountaineer uncouthness, makes him not over pleasant. Toward me they assumed a suspicious air that suggested some foreigner had once long ago cheated some one among them out of ten cents. Even for Peruvians, the plighted word of every grade of inhabitant is peculiarly worthless. Of a dozen or more promises of larger or smaller importance made me during my stay, not one ever reached even the point of attempted fulfilment. The population is very largely Indian—often in diluted form—and genuinely white persons are decidedly rare, certainly not ten percent., though there are many more than that, strutting about in what Ayacucho fancies faultless dress, who consider themselves such, and who would be astonished at the set-back their pretentions would receive in more exacting communities. The town swarms with tailors, chiefly boys and youths with slight ability at their trade, who sit, like the craftsmen of Damascus, in little shops the entire front of which is open door, and work steadily but languidly on miserable materials that barely last long enough for purchaser and seller to part, their attention chiefly on whatever passes in the street. The Indians of the region still weave a heavy wool frazada of astounding combinations of color, and the town is somewhat noted for the filigree work and wood-carving for which it was once famous. But for the most part it is silent, smokeless, and industry-lacking as any village of the Andes, without a single wheeled vehicle to rumble over its cobbles. Its water is so bad that even the natives admitted I should not drink it. Indeed, I did not even dare develop films in it. Not that its source is ill-chosen, but in the several miles of open conduit to the city, the Indians make free use of it for any of their lavatory processes. The local Quichua dialect varies much from that of Cuzco, the Florence of the Inca tongue, so that Indians from the two towns understand each other with difficulty.

Ayacucho is about as badly overdone in churches as any town in church-boasting South America. In colonial days a religious edifice was built on the slightest provocation, of cut-stone if possible, of cobbles or adobe if necessary, until to-day the entire population might be housed five times over in those that are left. Not a few are things of beauty in their time-mellowed delapidation. The cathedral, centuries old, is surpassed in all Peru only by those of Lima and Cuzco. Externally, and at some distance, like so many things of Spanish origin, it has an imposing and not inartistic appearance. But the interior is disappointing. Here is the usual Latin-American garish gaudiness of wooden, tin, and porcelain saints, with no suggestion of art, except in the intricately carved wooden pulpit and the choir stalls flanking the altar. Behind each of the latter a boy stands during services, holding a candle above the chanting friar whose bulk amply fills the niche. A spittoon is provided for each of the singers. Ash-trays had evidently not yet come into style. An unusual feature was seats for the congregation, which in most churches of the Andes is left to kneel on the bare floor, or to bring a servant carrying a prie-dieu. It was the first place in Peru where the beating of church-bells reached anything like the hubbub of Ecuador or Colombia, for Ayacucho is so fanatical that the law against this is openly disobeyed. Sleek, well-fed, cigarette-smoking priests are everywhere in evidence, scores of “barefoot” friars in their stout leather sandals waddle about town with the self-complacency of the sacred bulls of India, and the public appearance of the bishop brings all activity to a standstill, and all beholders except the upper-class men to their knees.

As in most centers of religious fanaticism, the town reeks with poverty. Even for South America, the overwhelming display of rags is striking, and ignorance and debauch is in constant evidence. Yet the children, the babies particularly, sometimes have a brightness and an innocence about them that suggests what might be made of them could they be caught young, very, very young, and taken away from this environment of dirt and ignorance and immorality and priests. Yet who knows? The more one travels, the more one’s opinion wavers between the effects of ancestry and environment.

It has been said of Ayacucho that her chief occupations are drinking, cock-fighting, love-making, and religious processions. The last is most in public evidence. The first fiesta to break out after my arrival was that of the “Virgen de las Mercedes.” All shops closed for the occasion, and the entire region boomed and clanged with the exertions of gangs of boys filling every belfry and vying with each other in adding to the uproar. At four of the afternoon, when the sun had lost some of its glare, the cathedral disgorged a solemn throng escorting three huge floats that began a snail-paced circuit of the broad plaza, halting before every building of importance while the choir sang some Latin anthem. Before the Virgin and her two accompanying saints, all flashing with rich and many-colored silks, marched teams of sanctimonious-faced beatas with ribbons over their shoulders, feigning to supply the motive power which was, in reality, furnished by toiling and sweating Indians half-concealed beneath the massive floats. As the head of the procession reached certain points, an aged Indian acolyte set off home-made fireworks of intricate and long-enduring design, that filled the air as with a sudden bombardment. The instant these fell silent, swarms of boys raced into the smoke from every side to fight with the low-caste functionary for possession of the charred framework. Every male, as well as the Indian women, uncovered as the figures passed—except myself, too busy with photography to honor the local customs. Yet, where a century ago such sign of the heretic would have caused homicidal riot, I heard only one audible protest—from some one of the newsboy order.

Of course few inhabitants of the town had any notion of its history back of their own lifetime, nor any real interest in abetting my investigations, though all pretended to bubble over with enthusiasm for them. A blank indifference hangs like moss over the records of the past throughout all the Andes, and the curious traveler will find more by wandering around until he stumbles upon them, than by making inquiries. Not only are the natives ignorant of all points of historical interest, but utterly incapable of distinguishing any such from so much junk. It is just as useless to call upon the “representative men,” for the minds of these differ only in slight degree from the gente del pueblo. Ayacucho has more than the usual excuse for this ignorance of her past, however, for in 1883 the Chilians marched into the region, took possession of the town, its houses, goods, and attractive women, and, camping in the city hall and the prefect’s office, boiled their soup over the archives. For a few brief months before their arrival, Ayacucho was the proud capital of Peru. Congress held its sessions in the old church of San Augustín cornering on the plaza, and for a while money was coined there.

Local information might have ended with that, but for the fact that an ayacuchano who eked out an existence, Santiago knows how, in one of the little shops under the portales, was “aficionado” to the history of the region. I spent long hours with him, for clients were of scant importance compared to his hobby. He was unshakable in his conviction that the Indian was just as ambitionless and animal-like in his habits before the Conquest, as to-day. Ayacucho has a local heroine in one María Parado de Bellido about whom already strange legends have gathered. A chola woman of the middle-class, who could neither read nor write, she took a leading part in the revolution against Spanish rule. Having undertaken the delivery of a treasonable letter, written at her instigation, she was captured by the Spaniards and, swallowing the missive, refused to betray the writer, for which hardheadedness she was shot before the broad, central pillar of the Municipalidad. This was the scene of many an execution in colonial times. Those condemned to die were kept three days in the arched dungeon that forms a corner of the building, “gorged with all spiritual and material blessings—peaches and beefsteaks and the like,” as my informant put it, and then shot. He asserted that in Ayacucho none were burned nor otherwise executed by the Inquisition. But the statement has not all the earmarks of veracity. Not only is the century-faded edifice on the adjoining corner still known as the “Church of the Inquisition,” but a city whose population never exceeded 40,000 that could build the twenty-four large churches and countless chapels still existent, to say nothing of the many that have disappeared, “just because the priest of each ward cried, ‘Come, let us build a church!’ and they came and built it,” was not likely to be contented without seeing an occasional heretic roasted in the central plaza on a gala Sunday afternoon.

There was one sight which the “authorities” were so bent on my visiting and “picturing to the world” that the prefect detailed a soldier to accompany me to it. The so-called “Battle of Ayacucho” really took place at La Quinua, on the sloping brown mountain-flanks some twelve miles to the northeast of the city. From any high place in town the village, backed by its white monument and the dark face of Cundurcunca, the “Condor’s Nest,” is plainly visible. One can even make out the highway on which the Spanish veterans zigzagged up to the deep quebrada in which La Serna capitulated, almost at the very hour that Phillip V in far-off Spain was making him “Duke of the Andes” as a reward for his victorious campaign. There was no cable in those days. But I knew no way of telling the prefect, without insult, that I did not choose to tramp twenty-four thirsty, earthquake-cracked miles to gaze upon a plaster monument that I could study to my heart’s content from where I sat, and I was reduced to the customary strategy of Latin-American intercourse. The soldier came to wake me at six—it is the South American way to fulfill only those promises one hopes will be forgotten. I greeted him with the announcement that I had decided to put off the trip until the following week. He showed distinct signs of relief at not having to drive his legs, with heavy, unaccustomed shoes on the ends of them, all day, and as everything always is postponed in Ayacucho, the decision caused no surprise.

“Is there a public library in town?” I asked a native son.

“Cómo no!” he cried, as if the question were an insult to the “culture and progress” for which Ayacucho fancies itself famed.

Following his directions, I hurried over to the Municipalidad, cheerful with the prospect of spending a few quiet hours unstared-at among its books. For some time I wandered through several refuse-strewn patios and deep-shaded corredors of the rambling, one-story building, peering into many a room with uneven earth floor, without finding anything even mildly resembling a library. At length I stumbled upon a chamber marked “Secretaría,” in which six men of varying shades of color were discussing the coming bull-fight, rolling cigarettes, sleeping, and otherwise earning their salaries. A long search brought to light a ten-inch key, and a procession of the full municipal force of Ayacucho escorted me through several more empty, earth-floored rooms to a door at the rear of the building.

“You see,” explained the official with the most nearly white collar and the longest right to keep his hat on, “we have only just begun to form the library, so the catalogue is not yet available nor any of the books arranged. However....”

As the time-eaten sign over the door announced that this evidence of culture and progress had only been founded in 1877, it was natural that it should not yet be set in order. One cannot expect things to be done in a minute in Latin America. The walls of the stoop-shouldered mud room were almost hidden by books, however, nearly all of them bound in ancient parchment or imitations of the same. I ran my eyes along them, the six municipal employees grouped in a staring semicircle about me. Row after row stretched books in Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French, with such titles as, “The Infallibility of the Church,” by Padre So-and-So, “The Life of Saint Quién Sabe,” by “A Brother of the Order”; but nowhere was there one with a suggestion of modern utility.

“This looks much like a priest’s library,” I remarked, when I had read most of the titles.

“Cabalmente, señor,” said the front-rank official. “Exactly; it was given by the holy bishop who died a few years ago. Where are those friars who were arranging the books?” he demanded querulously, glaring at his inferiors grouped about us.

“I think they have not come back from lunch yet,” tremulously suggested one of the five.

As the dust lay at least an eighth of an inch thick on every book in sight, the good friars must have been called to a sumptuous repast indeed.

“Isn’t there some book in the collection that will give me something of interest about Ayacucho?” I asked.

“Ah—er—well, as to that—ah—cómo no, señor—yes, indeed! Here you have the five volumes of Bossuet, and—and here is the ‘Imitación de Cristo’—very excellent—old parchment, as you see—and....”

My slightest finger movement was followed by six pairs of eyes, as closely as an “aficionado” of the bull-ring watches those of his favorite matador. Had I found anything worth reading, I should not have been left in peace to read it. First, because of the excitement which the sight of a stranger arouses in Ayacucho, trebled by unbounded wonder that any man should be interested in books and libraries; second, because every Latin-American knows that any person left alone for a moment in a library is sure to carry off as many books as he can conceal about his person. The most modern volumes brought to light by a more careful scrutiny were Racine’s works and a Spanish edition of Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe”; but this last I am sure some practical joker had given the good bishop so late in life that he had not found time to read and destroy it before he was called to whatever reward awaited him. We tiptoed out into the earth-carpeted hallway again, and carefully locked up the dust and parchments, as they will no doubt remain until the worthy friars come back from lunch.

Around the corner the cobbled street was blocked by a horseshoeing contest. This is always considered a very serious business in the Andes, though the average horse is so small that a real blacksmith could toss him about at will. A barefoot, half-Indian herrero had emerged from his mud dungeon shop, containing a forge from Vulcan’s time, but by no means the space necessary to admit the animal, and stood watching the preparations for his feat with the anxious and critical eye of an aviator about to attack the world’s record. One of the three attendant Indians threw his poncho over the head of the chusco and bound its eyes. Then a rope was drawn tightly around its neck, with a choking slip-noose about its nose, an Indian clinging desperately to the end of it as long as the contest lasted. Next, a llama-hair lassoo was bound to the animal’s nigh front fetlock and the foot hoisted by another attendant on the off side, who used the back of the trussed-up brute as a pulley. A third Indian held the foot by hand. When all was ready, the valorous blacksmith sneaked up and pared the hoof a bit with an instrument much like a small, sharp, shovel with a long handle—pared it very imperfectly, as is the way of Andean blacksmiths, leaving so much of the toe that the animal was in constant danger of having an ankle broken on some rough-and-tumble trail. Then he hunted up a cold horseshoe, without caulk, just as it came from the hardware store that had imported it from the United States—for the Andean blacksmith never heats a shoe, much less alters it—and laid it gingerly on the hoof. Evidently, to the inexact eye of the herrero, it fitted. He clawed around among the cobbles and refuse of the street, where his tools lay strewn and scattered, until he found several hand-forged horseshoe nails of the style in vogue in our own land before the Civil War, and standing afar off, like a man willing to risk his life to do his duty, yet not to risk it beyond reason, started one of the nails with a Stone-Age hammer. Suddenly the foot twitched. The blacksmith sprang backward a long yard, with blanched countenance, the foot-holder fled, and the two remaining Indians cried out in startled Quichua, while clinging to the far ends of their ropes. Bit by bit the herrero crept up again and took to driving the nails at long range, as if he were mashing the head of a venomous snake, poised on his toes, ready to spring away at the slightest sign of life in the blindfolded animal. Gradually the eight nails were driven, not without several repetitions of the blanching fright, and the operation repeated with the other hoofs. Finally the blacksmith maneuvered to positions in which he could twist off and crudely clinch the protruding nail-points, rubbed a rasp once or twice over them, and the perilous job was done. The fiery steed was relieved of the blinding poncho, the Indians went to restore their nerves with a copita of pisco, and the blacksmith, collecting fifteen cents a shoe from the owner of the animal, shut up shop forthwith, as if he had risked his life enough for one day.

The milking of a cow is a no less serious business in the Andes, and requires as large a force. First the cow must be captured and confined in a corral overnight. Calves are never weaned, but are kept away from the mothers until the hour of milking. As each cow’s turn comes, its calf is freed for a moment, then dragged away by main force, and either tied to the mother’s front leg, or held by a boy close enough to deceive the animal into fancying she is feeding her own offspring. Another youth, after tying her hind legs together at the ankles, clings to a rope about her neck, a third assistant holds a socobe, or shallow gourd-bowl, under the udder, and a woman—why it must always be a woman I know not, but the fact remains—squats on her heels at arm’s length on the opposite side of the animal, and falls to milking with much the same attentive regard for her welfare as the blacksmith. As often as the pint-measure is filled, the milk is poured into a vessel outside the fence or one in the hands of a waiting purchaser. The woman or one of the boys laps up the few drops left in the socobe, and the task continues until two teats are stripped. The two remaining belong by ancient custom to the calf. In view of the fact that cows are milked at most once a day, and often at irregular or broken intervals, it is not strange that milk is rare, and butter unknown, even on large haciendas well stocked with cattle.

Saturday is beggar’s day in Ayacucho, as in most towns of South America. From morning till night a constant procession of disease and decrepitude comes whining by the shops, so endless in its appeals that the town has adopted a custom similar to the merchants of India with their bowls of cowries, or sea-shells. On Saturday morning each shopkeeper opens a package of large needles, three to four inches long, one of which he bestows upon each beggar who presents himself. The mendicant mumbles a “Diós pagarasunqui,” and shuffles on to the next doorway. When he has collected ten or twelve needles, if he be so lucky, he sells them to certain dealers for a medio (2½ cents), on which, apparently, he lives until the next Saturday. In some parts of Peru the Indians wear a large needle in their hatbands, evidently as a weapon of defense, but those of Ayacucho seem to have no practical use, except as legal tender. Some time during the ensuing week the purchasers sell them back to the shopkeepers, Saturday sees them again distributed, and so they go on indefinitely around the circle.

Among other things of long ago Ayacucho used to have a university. To-day her highest institution of learning is the Colegio Nacional de San Román, corresponding to our high schools—chiefly in the impudence of its pupils. It was for the purpose of supplying this institution with an athletic field—incongruous possession it seemed in this community—that a “benefit” bull-fight was perpetrated on the Sunday of my stay. The cuadrilla, headed by “Currito” and “Ramito” of Sevilla, my fellow-sufferers at the hotel, were the same simple-hearted, modest fellows, with a noisy joy in life, that I had found most of their fellows in Spain. Both the principals had come over with Posadas, one of the friends of my Spanish journey, who had returned a year later only to be killed by a “Miura,” while these his companions remained to eke out a livelihood in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia.

All the gente decente of Ayacucho and their wives, in full powder, were on hand when the gala corrida began. We of the élite occupied the “palcos,” or boxes—several rows of chairs shaded by a faded strip of canvas, up on the roof of the ancient colegio, the aged red tiles of which were trodden to powder underfoot. The “ring” in the patio below, fenced by poles tied to uprights and other rustic makeshifts, was surrounded by the excited gente del pueblo. The scene was backed by a massive, old, crumbling church—it would have been hard to avoid such a backing in Ayacucho—and a view of most of the town sprinkled away through its half-green valley, Rasuillca, the snowclad and the black range of Cundurcunca, with its white battle monument and its highway zigzagging away over into the great Amazonian montaña beyond as plainly visible as if they stood a bare mile away. The exciting national sport of Spain degenerates at best to a dismal pastime in the new world. The imported toreros were well enough, but the bulls of the Andes leave much to be desired. Even dogs lose their aggressiveness in high altitudes, it is said. At any rate, the animals gathered for the occasion on the broad pampas at the foot of Cundurcunca could seldom be roused to face the toreros, and spent their efforts chiefly in racing around the “ring” in vain efforts to escape, until they were at length tortured out of existence. In fact, about all the gala corrida amounted to was the substitution of these heroes from across the seas for the native butchers accustomed to prepare Ayachucho’s weekly meat supply. As they fell, the animals were dragged out and cut up within full sight of the crowd, the meat in some cases being raffled off to the ticket-holders of the sol. It was the dragging-out that the gathering hooted most vociferously. Picadores and horses are rarely in evidence in the bull-fights of Spanish-America, but the program had featured the promise of removing the carcasses from the ring “al estilo de España,” that is, by gaily caparisoned mules. It was this new evidence of culture and progress that much of Ayacucho had come to see. But when the first victim sprawled in the dust, the mules were missing, and the customary gang of Indians crawled through the barrier and, tugging at its tail and legs, and raising clouds of dust that half-concealed their activities, gradually removed the fallen brute in the time-honored Andean manner.

As the supply of meat promised to exceed the demand, the fifth and sixth bulls were merely decorated with banderillas and sent back to the corral. Then a pair of two-year-old novillos were turned over to the “aficionados.” A dozen youths of the “best families” descended into the “ring,” in their most impressive Sunday garb and with capotes borrowed from the toreros, and demonstrated their own skill as bull-fighters. A Dr. Fulano, in private life a civil engineer, at least on his visiting-card, killed the first of the frightened animals in admirable style, and was hailed by his delighted fellow-townsmen the king of matadores. But dusk had fallen before the amateurs had effectively wounded the other, and the massed population gradually radiated homeward and subsided into its humdrum weekly existence.

I have come near overlooking the most striking thing in Ayacucho,—the head-dress of its women. In the Andes fashions change not with time, but with place. In Inca days each district had its own distinctive garb, or at least head-gear, a custom which was strictly enforced in colonial times, in order that Indians belonging to one province might not escape compulsory labor by going to another. What a convenience it would be in our own land if we could recognize each man’s place of birth by the shape or color of his derby! The bonnets of Ayacucho are hard to believe. Though I had been duly warned in advance, the first glimpse of an ayacuchana caught me unawares. I fancied she was carrying home some purchase on her head. When others like her began to appear from all directions, however, I recalled to what lengths fair woman will go to keep in fashion. The wildest nightmares perpetrated by the milliners of more familiar lands by no means come so perilously near reducing the mere male beholder to hysterics as this, which at first sight gives a suggestion of that thrill the traveler to Mars might experience at coming suddenly face to face with something totally new and unprecedented. The rank and file of Ayacucho women wear on their heads a blanket, gay in hue and large enough to serve as a bedspread, nicely folded in triangular form, with one sharp corner protruding over the face. Each one is distinct in color, with an embroidered border, and is usually lined with silk. Even the half-Indian women from the suburbs, driving to market donkeys all but hidden under loads of alfalfa—each burden protected from its hungry carrier by a large wooden gag in the animal’s mouth—balance this contraption on their heads through all their labors. No one in Ayacucho could tell me the origin of so absurd a fashion, though all were agreed it had been in vogue a very long time; nor had any of them ever developed enough curiosity to enquire, except the prefect, a newcomer in this region, who had investigated in vain.

Anchorena, the piano importer, had promised on his caballero honor to have Chusquito back in the hotel patio on Sunday night, that I might continue my journey at dawn. Knowing only too well the nebulous stuff of which Latin-American promises are made, I set out on Saturday to jog his memory. The houses of Ayacucho are not numbered, but the thumping of a piano in the throes of amateur tuning easily guided me to the lawyer’s dwelling. Surrounded by the gaudily overdecorated magnificence of his parlor, he laughed at my absurd misgivings and repeated his “palabra de caballero.” Yet when night fell on Sunday, no horse had appeared. I hurried back to the Anchorena residence. The lawyer received me with that complacent indifference to his plighted word, without even an attempt to excuse himself, which is common to his race. As in the days of the Conquest, when betrayal was an everyday affair, the word of the most important resident of the Andes is not worth the breath required to utter it. Most annoying of all, they treat any protest against their devotion to mañana as a gringo weakness they must put up with, but to which they hope never to fall victims themselves. Even as they listen, a sneaking smile lurks just behind their solemn countenances, as if they were hearing the plaints of a querulous child. Were we in this world merely to see how easily we could drift through it, the Andean point of view would be superb; to those of us burdened with the notion that we are here to get some little thing done, it is maddening.

“Team ess mo-nay, eh?” squeaked the lawyer, with a condescending smirk. “If the horse does not arrive to-night, perhaps it will come to-morrow; or if not, what is the difference whether you go to-morrow, or the day after?”

“The difference, my friend, between an American and a Latin-American,” I could not refrain from replying, “and may it ever grow wider.”

Thus, when I would gladly have added Ayacucho to my past, I found myself helpless to advance, for the lawyer would not even direct me to his estate, that I might bring the animal myself. The next afternoon an Indian arrived from the hacienda—with the wrong horse. I joined the bull-fighters, strolling about town with the Monday languor customary to their profession, and whiled away several more funereal hours. Then at dusk I returned to the hotel, to find Chusquito lounging against a pillar in front of my door, looking not an inch rounder for all the “very rich feed” with which the hacienda was reputed to abound. The way he fell upon a bundle of alfalfa, bought off the Indian woman and girl who sleep on the cobble-stones of Santo Domingo plaza beside a heap of it, suggested that he had spent the week grazing on bare ground. Yet the Indian who brought him had presented an exorbitant bill for his accommodation from the sister of the man who had implored the honor of giving him free pasture on his own hacienda.

I was awake at four—for religious reasons—and by the time the birds in the trees began to twitter we had left the acknowledged cemetery of Dead Man’s Corner behind, and were climbing away toward the sunrise. The road, true to its Latin-American environment, left town with great enthusiasm, but soon petered out to a wearisome trail. Of several villages of Indians noted for their passive resistance to all the demands of the traveler, the most typical was Ocros. We came out far above it one morning, on the lofty crest of a range from which the trail pitched for a time blindly down into a vast sea of mist hiding all the unknown world before us. Bit by bit vast rocks loomed up out of the fog, like black, misshapen giants; then huts appeared once more, with here and there an Indian plowing a bit of hillside with a wooden stick and a pair of oxen he seemed in constant peril of suddenly losing down the sheer mountain-side. Then at last the mist cleared and disclosed, cramped in its narrow vale far below among dwarf trees, a town which rose gradually up to us, and at noon, after all but losing Chusquito and my other worldly belongings through a dirt-and-branch bridge that showed no sign of having been condemned until we were upon it, I halted at the hut of the gobernador. He was out—which probably meant that he was hiding in one of the half-dozen ancient mud structures that surrounded his corral—and his females were taciturn. I displayed my government order and asked to have food prepared.

“Manam cancha,” mumbled one of the women, all of whom kept silently and impassively at work with their primitive spindles.

“I must have fodder for the animalito,” I protested.

“Manam cancha,” came the monotonous answer again, with that inflection peculiar to the Andean Indian, which seems to say, “There isn’t any; but there might be if I felt like going to get it.” I should have preferred hunger to a scene, but I declined to allow anyone out of mere apathy to starve Chusquito.

“Manam cancha, eh?” I cried, snatching the grass roof off a chicken-coop and tossing it before the animal. Sentimentalists to the contrary notwithstanding, the surest way to impress an Andean Indian is to appeal to force. Gradually the most democratic traveler learns to adopt the native habit of addressing him as “tu,” and to treat him like the balky domestic animal he so closely resembles. I picked up a boy from behind the mud wall surrounding the females, and thrusting a coin upon him, ordered him to go and buy eggs. Once the traveler can force money into an Indian’s possession, his prospects of provisions brighten, for it is as easy for the latter to produce them as to come and return the coin. The eggs were soon forthcoming and, taking possession of a table under the projecting roof and marching into the kitchen for water, I lighted my rum-burner and fell to preparing a meal. By the time I had effectively demonstrated my importance, the same woman who had “manam cancha-ed” me in the beginning came to say that if I would give her a medio she would buy fodder; and a few moments later she returned, carrying in her own arms a huge bundle of chala, or dry cornstalks, over which Chusquito struggled during the rest of our stay in competition with the family calf, pigs, and chickens.

It was probably as much out of a desire to inspect my cooking outfit as fear for her chicken-coops that had won me attendance. Behind the mask that hides his emotions the Indian of the Andes is filled with curiosity. There runs an Andean anecdote that well illustrates this characteristic. One of their own race, who had served in the army and learned other things without forgetting the ways of his own people, came at night to an Indian hut and requested lodging. When this was granted in the customary manner—merely by not being refused—he asked for food.

“Manam cancha,” came the expected reply.

“Well, sell me something and I will cook for myself.”

“Manam cancha.”

The soldier was well aware that there were plenty of supplies hidden away in the hut. He knew, also, the Indian temperament.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to get along on a chupe de guijarros,” he sighed, using Spanish to make his speech more impressive.

“A stone soup!” murmured the household, betrayed by astonishment into understanding a tongue they pretended not to know.

“Yes, it is what we use in the army when there is nothing better.”

He wandered down to the mountain stream below the hut and, returning with a dozen large smooth pebbles, washed them carefully, and laid them out on his bundle.

“You won’t mind lending me an olla?” he murmured to the wall of expressionless faces about him.

A woman brought the kettle in silence. The soldier, humming a barrack-room ballad, half-filled the pot with water, set it over the fire, dropped in the stones one by one, and squatted on his heels with a sigh of contentment. By and by he borrowed a wooden spoon and tasted the concoction from time to time, throwing the residue back into the kettle in approved Andean fashion.

“You don’t happen to have a bit of salt?” he murmured, after a time, to the family now gathered close around him watching this possible miracle silently but intently.

“Cachi? That we have,” said the woman, handing him a piece of purple rock, which he beat up and sprinkled into the now steaming pot.

“Too bad I haven’t a few potatoes to put in,” he droned, as if to himself, “it would help the flavor.”

The old woman shambled away into the darkness of a far corner, and came back some time later to thrust silently toward him a handful of small potatoes, her eyes glued on the miraculous pot. When these were about half-boiled the soldier again broke off his song to murmur:

“This is going to be one of the finest chupes de guijarros I’ve ever made. All it lacks now is a bit of ají to give it life.”

The old woman muttered something to one of the ragged girls beside her, and the latter went to dig two red peppers out of the thatch.

“A piece of cabbage would make it perfect,” sighed the soldier.

The Indians, too engrossed in the production of a stone soup, and too slow of mind to have caught up yet with the course of events, brought to light a small cabbage. By this time they were so consumed with curiosity that the old man asked innocently:

“But do you make a stone soup without meat?”

“Ah, to be sure, a strip of charqui always improves it,” replied the soldier indifferently, “but....”

A girl was sent to fetch a sheet of sun-dried beef, which the former conscript cut up slowly and dropped bit by bit into the now savory-smelling chupe. A half-hour later he lifted the kettle off the fire, the old woman handed him a gourd plate, and some cold boiled yuca as bread, and having given half of it to the family, he ate the stone soup with great relish—all except the dozen smooth, round stones at the bottom of the olla.

All that afternoon we slipped and slid down a half-perpendicular stone-quarry, that bruised my toes if not Chusquito’s, into a repulsive molle- and cactus-grown desert in which a tropical sun blazed with homicidal intensity. No wonder its blistering rays faded the made-in-Germany cloth of my Ayacucho-tailored breeches, when it bleached even Chusquito’s coat to a pale, reddish yellow. Had I not come upon an isolated hut and a gourdful of chicha de jora just when I did, it is by no means certain that I should not have perished of thirst before the day was done. The “Hacienda Pajo nal,” in the valley of the Pampas river where sunset overtook us, was in charge of a white and cultured woman engaged in the inviting occupation of dealing out to half-drunken Indians the concentrated sugar-cane juice of a large hogshead in the liquor room. The husband, who loomed up through the tropical twilight, was the graduate of an American agricultural college; but the hacienda, under charge of his Quichua-speaking mayordomo, was farmed in the same backward manner as in the times of the Incas, without even their energy, and his foreign training had given him no inkling of the proper occupation for wives. Nor did he give any evidence of ability to speak English. After the patriarchial supper around a long, rough-hewn table, he set in motion a large phonograph, and we heard not only the best opera stars of the day, but such exotic selections as “The Old Gray Bonnet,” and a tale of love and moonlight along the Wabash. A veritable crowd of arrieros and low-caste native travelers, who had made this their night’s stopping place, and the uncouth Indian laborers of the hacienda, gathered on the edge of the darkness and stood like statues as long as the entertainment lasted. Evidently they were amused, or they would not have remained; but the absolute stoniness of their expression, without the faintest outward evidence of pleasure, would have brought dismay to a living entertainer. We had dropped again into a genuine tierra caliente, warm as the Cauca valley, where tiny gnats decorated my skin with an annoyance that was to last for days to come; and though I was favored with the guest-room all important Peruvian haciendas provide for travelers, the corredor outside my door, and all the neighboring patios and corrals was strewn with Indians of both sexes, stretched out among their bales and trappings.

An hour or more next morning along the flat river-bottom planted with sugar-cane brought us to one of those swaying bridges over a roaring stream compressed between precipitous rock-walls, so numerous in the time of the Incas. But instead of woven willow withes, it was supported by cables and, as if to recall the provident Incas by contrast, was sadly in need of the repair that had just begun. Chusquito crossed the precarious contraption only under protest, after the application of more than moral suasion, and on the slanting and broken cross-slats I kept my own footing with difficulty. Had he been more than a boy’s size horse, we should have been held up at the edge of the gorge for days, until the languid workmen finished their task. We were now in the department of Apurímac. Some miles further along the river, through a sandy wilderness of organ-cactus noisy with flocks of screaming green parrots, the trail struck upward on the famous ascent of Bombón. It was another of those infernally stony, endless, blazing, absolutely waterless climbs that must be endured wherever a river has cut its way deep into the Andes, requiring a day of laborious toil to advance a few miles across a chasm that might almost be bridged. Even Chusquito seemed ready to stretch out on his back when at last we reached the summit, the lofty plateau again spreading away cool and inviting before us.

In Chincheros the gobernador attempted at first to deny the honor, but being caught in the act, as it were, accepted the situation with good grace, as became a caballero of considerable Spanish ancestry. In the black shale of his back corredor all the local “authorities” were gathered about a long table that groaned as with the gout each time any of its legs was subjected to undue weight, their state papers, seals, and ink-horns, and a goodly array of large ill-scented bottles spread out before them. When he had spelled out my papers, the gobernador invited me to make the veranda my home as long as I chose to grace Chincheros with my gnat-bitten countenance, and I spent what remained of the day amid a mixture of chicha, pisco, and justice. A fully sober person was not to be expected at that hour in Peru, but the “authorities” were still sufficiently aware of the dignity of their position to whisk the bottles out of sight when I prepared to photograph the group. That an andarín should not present a book for their seals and signatures they took as a slight, and I was forced to submit several pages of my note-book to their official decoration. During all the rest of the afternoon Indians and half-Indians came slinking in before the authoritative crowd, one of whom was a notary public, to mumble their petitions or complaints with many a cringing “tayta-tayta,” and the air of slaves before ill-tempered masters. The otherwise subservient proceedings were broken once by a wordy passage-at-arms between the gobernador and an aged caballero dressed in rags and pride, who bade a formal farewell to the women of the family and other officials, but left without the customary handshake with the gobernador, marking this as the most serious quarrel I had yet witnessed in South America. When the business of the day was over, the mellow-conditioned “authorities” all joined in a game of “quoits,” with silver soles in place of horseshoes, to determine which of them should supply the wine that topped off the festivities. The family supper was served on the table so recently occupied by the affairs of justice, and I spread my bed on two of the benches that had sustained the weight of the august judges. Here and there on the mud floor of the court-room an Indian slept, curled up like a contented yellow dog on a bundle of rags or corn-stalks.

I had assigned to the long, hard day across the great range beyond Chincheros the experience of chewing coca, said to sustain the Andean Indian on his laborious journeyings. As we undulated across the barren, brown top of the world, I began feeding myself leaf by leaf, adhering strictly to the accepted rules of this indigenous sport, until I had formed a bulging cud in my right cheek—the left is also permitted by the rules. The taste was not unlike that of dry hay. Then I bit off several nibbles of lime from the burnt stone I had bought in the market of Huancayo and, mixing it with the leaves, began to chew. The only sensation I was clearly aware of was that the lime burned my gums atrociously, as it would have done had the coca leaf never been discovered. I am not sure that I did not feel a slight increase in exhilaration that caused me to lift my feet a trifle faster; but this may easily have been due to the beauty of the scene that stretched to infinity on every hand, for even Chusquito seemed inspired to bestir his dainty hoofs with more than his accustomed sprightliness.

The hazy valley of the Pampas river with its biting gnats had disappeared into the past, and only the bare, brown world spread before us to a far distant horizon that seemed to move forward as we advanced. Small wonder the natives were astonished that I kept the road. I could not but be surprised myself that instinct and the slight assistance of my pocket-compass guided me aright across this deathly-still, unpeopled mountain-top, where the traveler must constantly watch the faintly marked path, lest it take advantage of the briefest inattention to dodge from under his feet and leave him hopelessly stranded high up on a dreary puna trackless as the sea itself. On these shelterless heights it was easy to understand why each succeeding town had watched my departure with gaping mouths, and that the boldest inhabitants had cried out: “Nosotros, aunque hijos del país, no nos aventuremos hasta el Cuzco sin guía!—Even we, sons of the country, would not adventure ourselves to Cuzco without a guide!”

But luck was with me. The dull-yellow world began to subside at last, and we came out far above a long, winding valley, in the dim end of which I could make out a green speck that was evidently that very Andahuaylas toward which we were headed. Far away, in the same direction which I must follow to reach the Navel of the Inca Empire, were tooth-shaped peaks, slightly snowclad, hung high in the sky, and below, and about, and beyond them to the ends of the earth, the suggestion, rather than the actual sight, of such a labyrinth of ranges as only the disordered imagination seemed capable of creating. We began to go down and forever down, so swiftly that we could have kicked each other in our disgust, now slipping and stumbling along toboggans of loose stones, now picking our way step by step down natural rock stairs, then descending across steep meadows of mountain grass on which Chusquito, with his caulk-less shoes, gave a ludicrous suggestion of some silly fellow attempting to skate on all fours. At length the slope moderated its pace and took on a thin garb of trees and vegetation, the mountain-tops on which we had been walking a bare two hours before now towering into the sky above. Below the village of Moyabamba, so renowned for its horse-stealing that we lost no time in leaving it behind us, the valley narrowed to a gorge, in which our progress was blocked by a mule-train of Ica wine. I fell in with the chief arriero at the rear, and plodded with him in the cloud of dust rising behind the shuffling mules like the mists of the morning from some seaside valley. Each of the animals bore two kegs of wine nicely balanced on his sawbuck-shaped pack-saddle, a total weight of 250 pounds. The journey from Ica to Andahuaylas averaged from three weeks to a month, the entire cost of transportation about $7.50 for each animal. In the morning, horsemen and pedestrians formed an almost unbroken procession along the rich and thickly inhabited valley of the little Chumbau river, for all the league from Talavera to the straggling town of Andahuaylas.

Manuel Richter, addressee of my letter, kept a little general-store on a corner of the plaza. Chusquito and I waited in the streak of shade before his shop until he had spelled out the missive with Teutonic deliberation, in marked contrast to the Latin-American quickness of welcome, which almost as quickly explodes into thin air. Our new host had first emigrated forty years before from Poland to New York, where he had lived several months in “Ghe-r-reen Schtreet,” a fact he never lost an opportunity to mention, evidently under the impression that it was still the aristocratic center of the city. During that time he had worked in a store “way uptown in Oonion Sqvare.” He still boasted a brother in the kosher district of Harlem, but for some reason that does not apply to most of his race he had drifted on to Peru and become a true Peruvian, even to taking off his hat when a tin Virgin passed in the street. Yet we spoke German together. He seemed to prefer it to Spanish, even after half a lifetime in the Andes and despite a Peruvian wife and half a dozen children entirely ignorant of the former tongue.

The Richter meals were more than substantial, and his family bubbled over with kind-heartedness. But he was forced to share the honor of a guest from far-off América del Norte with one Da Pozzo, who dwelt in solitary, topsy-turvy state in an ancient, two-story ruin on a knoll across the prattling Chumbau. He was a Venetian on the sadder side of forty, once an architect of high standing, who had laid out more than one Plaza de Armas in Peru and Bolivia. Several turns of the wheel of fate in the wrong direction, among them a Peruvian wife, the confessional, and the fiery waters that partly drown such memories, had reduced his ambition to a low level and his income to what may be picked up by the building of mud houses in these drowsy towns of the interior. In his customary condition he was maudlinly affectionate, to the point of making even my cheeks the target of his bewhiskered kisses, and vociferous in his assertion that he was a “masón” and a hater of priests in all lands and languages. But what mattered all this, or the fact that his junk-strewn ruin boasted only one wooden-floored bed, and that the rotting old balcony seemed always on the point of dropping from under one? For it overlooked splendid groves and rows of the slender, blue-black eucalyptus where birds sang merrily, as well as the brown flanks of the Andes rolling up out of both sides and ends of a valley enlivened by a constant going and coming of Indians along its broad roadway. Then, too, there was rich alfalfa on which Chusquito might gorge himself at no other expense than an occasional medio to the Indian boy assigned the task of cutting it—“that he have affection for you and your horse.”

Andahuaylas is really nothing but an example of how life may be made a perennial pastime, scattered almost thickly along the entire two leagues from Talavera to San Jerónimo. Yet its situation and climate give it a charm peculiarly its own, and it would be hard to imagine a better place in which to drift through life—as its inhabitants seem to recognize. Though the long valley is extremely fertile, it produces little. The Indians of more or less full blood that make up the bulk of the population will not work; the “white” man cannot, lest he forever lose his precious caste. The laziest American laborer known to charity bureaus will do more and better work in an hour, unwatched, than the liveliest Indian of Andahuaylas in a day, with a boss standing over him. Without in the least hurrying I could descend from the upper story of our ruin to the river, return with a pail of water, complete my toilet and throw out the water, before the Indian boy whose only duty in life was to attend me would, if called, appear from his seat directly below my balcony to get the pail—which he would smash before he got back, if there was any possible way of doing so, and into which he would certainly manage to get some sort of filth, if he had to pick it up and throw it in. The gente lay the blame of this condition on the escuelas fiscales, the free government-schools, complaining that “there is no longer service, for as soon as the cholo has been to school, he wants to be a person.” “Faltan brazos—arms are lacking,” they wail, gazing across the all but uncultivated valley; yet not one of them notices the two hanging idly at his own sides. A shower of medios failed to win from the Indian boy an affection sufficient to keep Chusquito from starvation. I obtained permission to tie the animal in a corner of the fat alfalfa field that would not come to him, and all day long I could see him across the little river, a contented dot of red against the deep green background of the field from which he never raised his head the whole day through.

Yet the products of the valley are cheap enough, when they exist. Eggs were five cents a dozen; one morning an Indian who needed the money came to the ruin to offer me eight for a medio (2 cents). Four liters of milk might be had for 7 cents. But let the harassed American householder pause a moment and reflect, before he sells his chattels and hurries down to Andahuaylas. To obtain those four liters one must take a pail and wander several miles along the valley at about nine in the morning, wait around some hacienda corral where the Indians have concluded not to abandon the daily milking, and never get home before noon. The “best families” have a special milk-servant who does nothing else—and frequently not even that—than go milk hunting; and on an average he is robbed on his way home of the contents of his pail about every third morning, by some group of Indians who come upon him out of sight of any member of the gente class.

There is a type of “white” Indian in the Andahuaylas valley, apparently without admixture of European blood, yet with a very light skin and delicate pink cheeks. In the color of their garments they nearly rival those of Quito. The heavy woolen socks and hairy sandals of more lofty regions are unknown, and the barefoot patter again reigns supreme. In manner the aboriginal is cringing and timorous, yet if the word of the shod minority was trustworthy, he has more than once been known to sneak up on a sleeping gringo and mash his head with a rock. Nor will he “squeal” on one of his own race, even when put to the torture.

In the wilderness of weeds that passed for the local cemetery I came upon three Indians digging a child’s grave. One muscular loafer stood less than waist-deep in the hole, scratching into a blanket spread out at his feet a bit of dust, with a hoe Adam might have thrown away in disgust during the first week of his existence, before he invented a better one. To corners of the blanket were tied ropes, by which a pair of equally muscular Indians standing on the ground above hauled up every ten minutes or so nearly a shovelful of earth. Of course, at “coca time,” or a dog-fight, or the passing of a drunken man, a foreigner, a bird, or a milk-pail, they paused from their strenuous labors a half-hour or so to stare after the attraction. At least half the time left they spent in bandying a skull and a pair of thigh bones back and forth between themselves and a pair of Indian women lounging in the grass nearby.

In the church forming one side of the plaza the chief among many absurdities testifying to the local absence of a sense of humor were the figures in the main side-chapel. These were life-size statues of Christ and the Virgin, the former in a sort of “precieux” gown and a broad-brimmed red hat with a pink band, the latter in a still broader blue one, giving the pair a ludicrous resemblance to the “shepherds” into which the nobles of the French court of two centuries ago used to disguise themselves, an impression increased by the cross between a golf-stick and a back-of-the-scenes hook carried by the Cristo. Yet the simple Indians pattered in all through the day to kneel and gaze with a beatified expression, in which there was not the shadow of a smile, at these absurd figures, no doubt considering them the last word in beauty.

When all is said and done, there is a subtle, lazy charm about the valley of Andahuaylas that holds the traveler long after he should have moved on. Sometimes, as the placid days drifted smoothly by, one caught the native point of view, and regretted the intrusion of strenuous gringo activity in the midst of nature’s and man’s repose; a realization that we of the North do much which is not much even when we get it done. Here one could lie in perfect contentment and watch the road looping away out of the valley over a sunlit hill, without feeling too strong for resistance the itch to be off. Yet in the end the only sure means of enjoying an Andean range is to know that some day one is going to tramp away into it, to follow the trail that shoulders its way mysteriously off through those shaded valleys and rugged quebradas, beckoning one toward another and a new world beyond.

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XVI. THE CITY OF THE SUN

I grew suddenly tired of Andahuaylas one afternoon, and sunrise next morning found me driving Chusquito over the neighboring divide. We had turned aside from the direct route to Abancay, following the valley of the Chumbau, for the least we could do for our recent hosts was to carry their greetings to an isolated compadre. His “civilized hacienda” sloped up from the shore of a beautiful mountain lake some twenty miles in circumference, deep-blue as some immense emerald, with half-cultivated mountain-flanks rising all about it, and a village tucked away in one corner. But, as so often in the high Andes, its entire shore was bordered with slime and reeds that made access almost impossible. Mine host shouldered his fowling-piece and easily provided a brace of ducks for the evening meal; but he refused vociferously to swim, and watched my preparations with patent misgiving. I succeeded in finding an entrance, and took a header into the dense-blue, seemingly bottomless immensity of icy water, to the vast astonishment of all the Indian shepherds, male and female, who live out their lives among their flocks on the edge of this magnificent body of water without ever washing a foot in it, to say nothing of contriving a boat. The lake is said to be famous for its floating islands, that blow back and forth across it with cattle grazing serenely upon them; but it was my luck to find even this Andean invention out of order and no longer “functioning.”

My lake-side host was of rare adaptability for a Latin-American, and of no slight mechanical ability. He not only had a real flour-mill, but washed his wheat before grinding it! This removes him at once and forever from the “Spig” class. His own electric plant furnished the most satisfactory light I had read by since leaving Lima; a telephone connected him with the outside world—though this ultra-modern contrivance was not yet considered a fitting messenger for the greetings of his compadres in Andahuaylas. With the advertisement of a $200 “Singola” as a model, he had fitted his small phonograph into a home-made cedar box, making it an instrument quite equal both in tone and appearance to that in the catalogue. Only he who knows how devoid of mechanical ability is the average Latin-American can realize how vastly this feat lifted the lake-side hacendado above his fellows.

I had half-skirted the lake and crossed a stony range next day when, near noon, in a collection of huts called Pincos, at the bottom of a mighty quebrada, I caught sight of something I had never before seen in South America. It was a white boy, perhaps twelve years old, wearing shoes, yet in spite of that carrying a bundle over one shoulder, like one bound on a journey.

“Going somewhere?” I asked.

“Al Cuzco,” was the astonishing reply. A Peruvian boy actually leaving home to go somewhere else, just like a live American!

“Then we’d better go together,” I answered, as soon as I had recovered my breath.

The child rose without a word and turned his face with me toward the trail looping upward across the chasm.

“What’s your name?” I began lamely, as we strained along at the heels of Chusquito, who had seemed little less surprised than I at this extraordinary apparition.

“Teófilo Fulano,” replied our new companion.

“Fulano! Relative, perhaps, of the Señor Fulano at whose hacienda I spent last night?”

“Yes; Don Faustino is my father.”

“Impossible!” I cried. “He is only recently married and has no children.”

“Not since he is married,” replied the child, innocently, “and he won’t recognize me.”

“And your mother?” I continued after a time.

“She keeps a chicha-shop in Andahuaylas,” answered the boy. “She used to love Don Faustino.”

For hours we rose steadily, the valley of Pincos and the little river, frothing over the stones at its bottom, sinking lower and lower beneath us, a damp mountain-top coolness tempering our toil and somewhat offsetting the absence of drinkingwater. Our shadows crawled from under our feet and grew to erectness before us, and still the rather well-kept roadway looped upward.

“Why do you go to Cuzco?” I asked, breaking in upon the story of some boyish prank; for, once I had won his confidence, the child was garrulous, after the manner of his race.

“One of my relatives lives there,” he muttered. The answer was too exactly in the tone of the same reply in another tongue I had so often heard from the lips of “hoboing” youngsters in my own land to be taken for more than a subterfuge. I hold it any man’s privilege to keep his own counsel, however, even though he has not yet reached the four-foot mark, and he was soon prattling on again as unbrokenly as if the steep slopes of his native mountains were level plain.

A crude cross, surrounded by an irregular heap of stones tossed there one by one by passing Indians, marked the wind-blown summit. On the bit of pampa that preceded another stony descent stood the ruin of what may have been an Inca fortress or lookout, with another crazy cross atop. From it spread a vast view, with the morrow’s road plainly in sight, squirming out of a half-concealed valley and panting away over another of the countless Andean ridges that divide this region as with a series of mighty walls. But it was long afterward that we came in sight of Huancarama, wedged in the throat of the gorge and extremely inviting, at a distance, to three famished and choking roadsters.

Our reception there was so typical that I am minded to describe it, for all its similarity to other experiences. We had explored the place rather thoroughly before we located the dwelling of Ezequiel Palomino, the gobernador. It is a common ruse of the rural “authorities” of Peru not only to hide from an arriving stranger, but to swear the rest of the town to secrecy. Small wonder, since they hold their positions on compulsion and without emoluments. Moreover, their inability to visualize that which is absent gives these isolated rural officials a contempt for the government and its orders, unless it is actually there in person, and well armed. The doors of Don Ezequiel’s shop, facing the grazing-ground plaza, were closed, and his Indian women in the patio as stupid in their indifference, and as clumsy as usual at covering up their lies. The set answer to any inquiry for the head of such a household is a mumbled, “No ’stá ’cá,” or its Quichua equivalent. Yet if one answer, “I did not ask where he was not, you wooden-headed daughter of a father without understanding; I asked, where is he?” one is considered rude and unsimpático. A long struggle brought only the information that the gobernador was in some indefinite place somewhere far-away or near at hand, and that he might or might not return in the natural course of events.

But this time there was a loophole in the defenses of the besieged. A shopkeeper—keeping it, as well as all its accumulated stock, seemed to be the extent of his activities—across the plaza turned out to be the alcalde, who evidently was privately disgruntled with his fellow-official. For when my questions grew pressing, he swore me to secrecy and whispered:

“The gobernador is at home asleep in his own house, because he is seasick to-day”; and he winked ever so faintly at the generous display of bottles on the shelves beside us.

Far be it from me to blame any man for whiling away an Andean existence in the only available fashion. But poor, uncomplaining Chusquito had already stood a long hour unfed and unwatered, his burden still upon him and twenty-five steep and stony miles in his slender legs. I lost no time in returning to the patio. The Indian women, seeing no way out of it, admitted that their lord and master was “sick in bed, but ya no más ha de venir”—which may mean, “he is coming at once,” or that he may come the day after to-morrow. I strode up the outside stairs to the second-story veranda and, throwing open the several doors, discovered at last the elusive official, a bleary-eyed half-breed of the most disgusting type. I slapped him in the face, figuratively at least, with my government order, and with a savage leer and an unhuman growl he ordered a servant to open for us a mud den facing the street. As to alfalfa, that, he mumbled, was “far away.” I thrust a coin upon him, piled our junk in the bare dungeon with the little fatherless one to watch over it, and set out to forage food for ourselves. When I returned, the gobernador had carried out the legal requirements of his office by causing an Indian to toss before Chusquito a small handful of last year’s corn-stalks. This time he had hidden himself effectually. I began a systematic search of the premises. In a back-yard, behind the patio wall, I found a half-dozen of the gobernador’s fat horses stuffing themselves to bursting from an enormous heap of fresh, green alfalfa! The Indian whom I caught by the slack of the garment and drove before me under all the load he could carry, pocketed a real with a promise to watch over the fodder, and to repeat the dose at dawn. But I also hovered for some time in the shadow near at hand, in the hope of catching some one attempting to snatch away Chusquito’s hard-won meal, that I might fittingly express my feelings with the toe of a boot. No victim offered himself, however, and the little love-token and I rolled up together in my ponchos on the dirt floor, to spend a night during which the rain poured as it seldom does in the upper Andes.

We were off at daylight, as travelers should be, along a fertile, V-shaped valley. The rain had given the morning a scent of fresh lushness rare in the dry Andes; birds sang gaily in the willows along the stream; and great masses of snow-white clouds lay banked in the hollows of the mountains. Then came another mighty climb to a stagnant, mountain-top lagoon, and the usual hundred yards or so of level going before we pitched down another of the stony bajadas that seem to shake all the bolts of the anatomy loose, like a runaway railway train bumping over the ties. Suddenly there disclosed itself to view one of those Andean vistas so tantalizing to the photographer, since any attempt to reproduce them on a film results only in a waste of effort and material. The earth had been scolloped out into an enormous valley, with a very green, thread-like river racing Amazonward far down in its rocky gorge; hundreds of little stone-fenced patches newly plowed to await the rain, were scattered far and near on all the fertile, enclosing mountainsides that rose higher and higher as we descended. Each Indian chacra showed two tiny white houses connected by a high wall, which, no doubt, enclosed the corral, enticing—at least at a distance—in their specklessness. Then, far, far off across a vast expanse of gashed and tumbled valley, at the back of a great tilted field broken into squares of the yellow-green of sugar-cane, alternating with the deeper line of alfalfares, with a ribbon of road winding to, and swallowed up within it, could be plainly made out the little city of Abancay, backed by mountains capped with snow-white clouds.

The brilliant sun had reduced things again to the old, familiar dry-as-dust condition, making a torture the long perpetual zigzag down to the river Pachachaca, flowing north through a deep cleft in the mountains to the hot Amazonian montaña and the Atlantic, the gleam of its blue waters tantalizing to our choking, desert thirst. I reached at last the stone and cement bridge of graceful arch straddling the gorge, only to find, to my dismay, that this passed high out of reach of the water. But we would not be choked thus in plain sight of the inviting stream. I turned Chusquito up along the bank and tramped a long distance through cactus and chaparral, dust and tropical heat, without finding a break in the jungle-clad, precipitous bank. At last, unable to endure the tantalizing sight longer, I took chance by the forelock and dragged the animal down through the clutching trees and undergrowth as far as he could possibly go, then unloaded him, standing on a huge rock as on a pedestal, and carried my junk the rest of the way to a shady spot beside the racing stream. There I cooked, ate, read, wrote, bathed, washed all my available clothing, and napped, and it was mid-afternoon before I had loaded again. The little son of the chicha-shop had fallen behind in the long descent. As I ate, he crossed the bridge above, but though I fired my revolver several times to attract his attention, he went on unheeding. All the four hours had been burdened with the worry of perhaps finding it impossible to get Chusquito back again up that jungled precipice and rock-spill; but the little beast climbed it like a chamois in his native mountains, though a real horse would have refused to attempt it.

Abancay is one of the most insignificant of department capitals, the lowest and most nearly tropical city of all this trans-Peruvian trip. Hot as it is, there are snowclads close behind and seeming hardly a rifle-shot away from the town, and back along the valley through which we had come the double Indian houses stood out as clear white specks far up the perpendicular mountain walls, fifteen and even twenty miles away. The place has probably fewer than 2000 inhabitants, of whom easily ninety percent. are more or less Indian, the few whites being chiefly importations in the form of government officials. The town is not old, and is somewhat built to order. Yet it has not only electric lights, but a good water-supply—when this is not polluted on its journey as an open brook through the town. There is a simple monument, designed by my former host, Da Pozzo, to a local hero who rose to the lofty heights of a department prefectship; one of the few artistic things in Peru, because of its absence of over-ornamentation. Bread was again worth nearly its weight in gold, the town being well below the wheat-line. A disease known as “obero” is common among the Indians, turning the face a sooty black. There is also a white “obero,” which gives its victims the appearance of those negroes who seek to attain white skins by acid treatment. Some of the chola women are decidedly pretty, in spite of their habits; but, as so often with their sex the world over, once they begin to suspect that fact they are prone to attempt to improve on nature, with distressing results. Every woman wears the dicclla, a square of cloth richly embroidered and worked with flowers, about her shoulders. In it a baby is carried when the wearer attains one, apparently not a difficult feat in Abancay. But none go without this article of attire, and he who does not look closely will scarcely notice whether the dicclla is full of baby, or is empty.

In my first stroll about town I came upon the boy of Andahuaylas in one of the huts on the outskirts, where he was evidently avoiding me because he had eaten—raw—the five eggs I had given him to carry. He had fallen in with friends, and demonstrated his Latin-American temperament by giving up his plan to walk to Cuzco.

The “Hotel Progreso” of Yacarias Trujillo is, like Abancay, more easily imagined than described. A stone-paved rectangle full of clothes-lines, flapping with garments of both sexes, of Indian and chola women and children of all degrees of ignorance of soap, of parrots, turkeys, a belligerent goose, chickens without number, countless yellow curs, a dozen fat and self-assertive pigs, and an occasional drunken man, formed its center. A wall half-separated it from the barnyard general-convenience and kitchen, beneath which flowed an open sewer and water-supply. My “room” was an ancient, lopsided, scarfaced, airless den opening directly off this, with the dust of ages on its battered and medieval furniture. The longer of the two maltreated wooden platforms on legs that posed as bedsteads was at least a foot shorter than I, though I make no great requirements in that respect, and I had either to hang my legs over the razor-edge of the footboard, or thrust one out at each corner. In these Andean hostelries the landlord may hover around the guest on the day of his arrival, chiefly out of curiosity, commanding the servants who furnish the room to order. But he never does so on the succeeding days, as his attention is fully taken up with the little grocery, drunkery, and billiard-room on which his real income depends, and one is lucky indeed to lay hands once a day on a servant to bring a pitcher of water and empty the basura. As to a clean towel or a change of sheets, the only way to obtain them, whatever the length of stay, is to move to another hotel—in the unlikely event that one exists. But the accomplished bachelor prefers, on the whole, to be his own chambermaid, rather than admit to his room the average variety of Andean hotel servant. The service was genuinely table d’hôte, in that we gathered around the table with the entire family of our host, his children, dogs, and chickens, some local government officials, and the ubiquitous four-eyed German with his stale jokes and flat-footed attempts to make himself “simpático.” On Sunday we had to dinner a dried-up but still bright old lady who claimed to remember the battle of Ayacucho, 88 years before, and to have seen as a small girl the beaten Spaniards racing pell-mell through “Dead Man’s Corner.”

Yacarias had learned none of those tricks of his tribe that are the burden of the traveler almost the world over. Though his rates were ninety cents a day, he refused to collect for the meal or two I ran over and when I left he forced upon me a roast chicken for my fiambre, or road lunch, as “a little remembrance.” Moreover, to my astonishment he actually had Chusquito back from his pasture and tied in the patio with a juicy bundle of alfalfa before him, by the time the religious fiesta had sunk into its drunken sleep and quiet had settled down over the Andes. To have a Latin-American promise to do a thing and then to do it the same day was a breath-taking experience, indeed.

We were off at the crack of dawn on the last stage of my march to the ancient capital of the Inca Empire. That eagerness the traveler always feels in nearing the scene of boyhood dreams caused me to scold Chusquito more than usual for not keeping out from underfoot on the famous climb to the next mountain notch, with its achapeta, or stone-heap, on which Indians are said to have tossed their coca-cuds since long before the Conquest. The descent was even swifter, and by three we had ended the nine leagues to Curahuasi, a scattered collection of huts on a high shelf of mountain. Chusquito had brought with him his own dinner wrapped in my rubber poncho, in the form of a wad of alfalfa he had not been able to finish in Abancay. But, though he managed to make away with it, he seemed to prefer the short, dry mountain-grass of the central plaza, consisting of a large, open space adorned by one lone eucalyptus. I was soon possessor of the Stone-age key and padlock of the cabildo, an empty mud cave furnished by the municipalidad, to which the traveler is as legally entitled as to lodging in a French asile de nuit. The same building included the jail, full of the aftermath of the religious fiesta in the persons of bleary-eyed Indians thrusting their faces through the wooden bars of the single window, imploring liquor and tobacco. But though I had wine, chicha, and pisco, and Peruvian prisoners are permitted anything they can lay hands on, it seemed wiser to let them reflect on the error of their ways. The ragged lieutenant-governor came to inquire if he should send a “cholita” to keep me company, and seemed to consider my negative reply a personal affront. Now and then an Indian, all but hidden under a load of green alfalfa, loped across the plaza, pursued by several asses taking a bite at every jump. It is the custom in this region for all aboriginals, men, women, or children, to snatch off their hats and murmur “Buenas tardes”—whatever the time of day—to every white man. If I failed to answer, they repeated that inane, redundant, and not always truthful remark in a loud, distressed voice until I replied, as if they feared some punishment unless their greeting was returned. When it came to every passerby thus insisting on recognition as often as he passed the cabildo doorway in which I sat writing my notes, it was hard to refrain from replying with the adobe brick nearest at hand.

Birds were singing merrily in the molle trees when we descended a semi-desert bristling with cactus, then through precipitous stony quebradas at the bottoms of which excited streams rushed headlong down from the mountain heights in their haste to join the unseen river below on its journey to the Atlantic. We were approaching the famous Apurímac, the roar of whose waters already came up to us, and the crossing of which travelers have always looked forward to with misgiving. Yet it was only a very moderate river we came in sight of in mid-morning, exceedingly far down in the precipitous gorge it has cut for itself during the centuries. The leg-straining descent seemed endless; the road wound incessantly round the mountain, far up each profound ravine and back again, so that a two-mile walk was barely a 500-yard gain. Travelers now were numerous. Mule-trains with goods from the outside world by way of Cuzco appeared as dots on the sky-line crest of the range beyond, and crawled slowly down its barren face; Indians, bearing on their backs chickens, pigs, or the scanty produce of their chacras, climbed past us into the hot, cactus-grown world above.

The blazing sun stood sheer overhead when we reached the river, or more exactly Tablachaca, the “board-bridge” high above it. Since long before the Conquest, simpichacas, the swaying Inca bridges of braided withes, have been thrown across this mighty gorge at various points, so that the passing of the Apurímac has long been synonymous with taking one’s life in one’s hands. But the tameness of modern times has intruded even here. To-day a solid bridge, built by a Philadelphian and maintained, not by the government, but by the neighboring hacendados, carries the traveler across without a tremor. In an openwork, gnat-bitten hut beside it live the bridge-tender, a curiously old youth, and his mother, boasting themselves the grandson and daughter respectively of the builder, yet so purely Peruvian that they cannot even pronounce the name of their illustrious ancestor.

Finding it possible to descend to the river by a series of natural stone steps, I determined to enjoy the distinction of a dip into the famous stream. The astonished bridge-tenders wished to know if I was a great swimmer, as their father and grandfather from Philadelphia had been, and could I even out-gringo him by swimming clear across the river. I admitted that I could come near to making it, if there were a sheriff’s posse at my heels and no bridge; but neither of those contingencies staring me in the face, I saw no reason to risk coming home by way of the Amazon in the garb of Adam by attempting a gratuitous “stunt” worthy of a genuine andarín. As I stood soaping my gnat-bitten frame, however, I fell to wondering why Pedro de la Gasca should have lost most of his horses and mules here on the way to his famous pussy-wants-a-corner game with Gonzalo Pizarro on the field of Xaquixaguana. For though it snarled and fretted against its rocky barriers with considerable force and speed, to any but a Spanish-speaking people the stream lapping at my knees would not exactly seem a great river. I came to the conclusion that his misfortune must have been due to the fact that Pedro was a priest, and to test the theory, swam across, sat a moment against the sheer rock wall that bounds the resounding gorge on the further side, and swam back again. True the stream moved with something more than Peruvian energy, and not far below there was a fall with a threatening hollow roar where the man so foolish as to let himself be carried over might have sustained a few bumps and gashes. But there was nothing in the escapade to get excited over, much less to lose one’s horses.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, as I gripped my prehensile toes once more on the hither bank, to discover, just in time to save myself from shattering the proprieties to fragments, that all the surrounding countryside, large and small, male and female, Indian, half-breed and ¾-breed, was hanging over the precipice and bridge above, watching with open mouths my marvelous and unprecedented feat. As I climbed the bank, reclad, the vigilante del puente and his mother fell upon me, insisting that such unrivalled prowess should not pass unrecorded, and getting possession of my note-book, they spent most of the afternoon in concocting a certificate of my epoch-making adventure, with all the signatures, rúbricas, and seals thereunto appertaining.

Beyond the river, now in the great department of Cuzco, we climbed a sheer mountain face, and descended with sunset to a mass of buildings on a bluff, among immense stretches of yellow-green canefields. This was the hacienda “La Estrella” of Senator Montes, whom official duties held in Lima, but whose son, once he had overcome his racial prejudice against a man who came on foot and without a servant, appointed an Indian valet to Chusquito and took upon himself my entertainment. His newly constructed mansion boasted all modern improvements, from electric lights to paintings on the walls of corredor and rooms “by a famous imported artist.” In the well-appointed sugar-mill the cane of the surrounding fields was turned into white, cone-shaped sugar-loaves and concentrated merriment, the latter selling at $9 a hundred liters, of which something more than half went to the government. Two salt-inspectors joined us at the formal dinner in the overdecorated mansion. Salt being a government monopoly, Peru swarms with salt-inspectors, salt-police, salt-detectives, official salt-weighers, and so on to national bankruptcy. The reddish rocks mined on the Montes estate were bought by the government at ten cents a hundred-weight—and sold in official estancos at $2.50!

As we sat,—Montes the younger, his half-dozen white overseers, and the salt-inspectors—before the door of the cabin that had been assigned me, the tropical full moon casting over the scene a brightness almost equal to that of a sunny day, a hundred picturesquely clad Indian peons, carrying medieval hoes and axes, lined up before us for roll-call, then scattered to their huts. The hacienda’s vast army of laborers refuse for the most part to live in the tenement-like houses, in long, identical rows, of which my own lodging was one, but insisted, with the conservatism so deeply engrained in their race, on building their own huts, of far poorer accommodations. Each peon was given a piece of land on which to erect his dwelling and plant his garden, free pasturage for a few animals, and a wage of 20 cents a day, when he worked for the hacienda. This he did only every other month, and thanks to church festivals and the concentrated cane-juice with which they are enlivened, by no means all the days of that. The women had no obligations to the hacienda, but lived on it merely as appendices to their husbands—old maids, of course, are unknown among South American Indians—doing only such work about the estate-house as they could be coaxed to do, or “what they were ordered by their husbands.” Under the silver-flooding moon the gathering of gente grew reminiscent, and on every hand floated stories of Peru, ending with one by the son which explained why Montes the elder had become wealthy and a Senator and had had such extraordinary all-around luck—because he had picked up at the Chicago Exposition twenty years before a horseshoe, which was still carefully guarded.

The moon had set, though the forerunner of day had not yet appeared, when, after trying in vain to punch awake the peon Montes had ordered to attend me, I entered the immense hacienda corral to pescar, or “fish out,” as the Peruvians say, my horselet from the army of mules and horses munching the dry pulp of crushed sugarcane that constitutes the fodder of these near-tropical regions. I had no difficulty in recognizing my own animal in the dark, not only by his diminutiveness, but by his picturesquely docked tail. Looking back on that day, however, I am sorry I did not pescar another animal by mistake.

As I prepared to load him before my cabin door, I was startled to find that Chusquito seemed to have turned zebra during the night. Several dark lines ran from his spine down either side to his shaggy belly. The sense of smell astonished me with the information that these were of blood. I got water and washed him off, meanwhile cursing the savage mules that had evidently spent most of the night biting the helpless little brute. As a former Zone Policeman, trained to arrest every Panamanian coachman who dared enter the Canal Zone with a horse matado, I had taken extreme care to keep my own animal free from those back-sores so atrociously frequent and unattended in the Andes. But the soft alforjas could not add to his injuries. I, too, had been bitten, until my frame was one single expanse of tattooing; and Chusquito must bear his share of troubles unavoidable in the tropics. I arranged the load as carefully as possible, and we were off.

It was not long, however, before I realized that something, perhaps the impossibility of eating during the night, had decidedly sapped my companion’s strength. He did not tramp with his old-time vim; the joy of life seemed to have departed from him. I moderated my pace, thinking my haste to reach the climax of my South American journey was unconsciously causing me to outdo the pace we had long since agreed upon. Still he would not keep out from under my feet. For almost the first time in our acquaintance I found it necessary to touch him up with a stick. We were moving along a semi-tropical hollow, amid the deafening scream of parrakeets, with an occasional sharp dip into and climb out of a stony quebrada, from which I had almost to carry him by main force. He moved like a clock that was running down, and for the life of me I could not contrive the means of winding him up again. Then, all at once, I realized what had befallen him. The poor, misused brute had been bitten, not by mules, but by those loathsome vampire bats of tropical valleys that sometimes find even human victims for their blood-sucking propensities.

We crawled at last into the mud village of Limatambo, only to be informed that there was no alfalfa in town, and that we must push on at least to the “Hacienda Challabamba,” half a league up the valley. As we turned toward it, I was startled to find the way bordered by a splendid wall of cut stone, about which the effete modern inhabitants had pitched their miserable mud huts. For here, commanding the narrow entrance to the valley, stood one of those four fortresses with which the ancient emperors of Tavantinsuyo had defended, at some twelve leagues from the capital, the highways radiating to the Four Corners of the Earth. Chusquito had lost all response to any species of outside influence. Push as I would, putting my shoulder to the wheel—I would say rump—and digging my toes into the trail, we could not advance a mile an hour. The drooping animal took a half minute to lift each separate foot, a pebble caused him to stumble, a six-inch rock step made him groan audibly. He did not look particularly worn-out; he was fatter if anything than the day I had bought him; and surely even a man could have gone the mile or two more “on his nerve.” Instead, he came to a complete standstill. This would never do. At least we must reach the hacienda and its alfalfa-fields. Much as it grieved me to raise a hand against a faithful companion, I rapped him soundly across the quarters with my stick. He uttered a sudden pathetic groan, and dropped in the middle of the road as suddenly as a well-killed bull in a Spanish bull-ring; his legs quivered a moment, his eyes opened wide, closed, then opened again in a glassy stare.

Despite all my blustering before soulless gobernadores who would have starved him in the midst of plenty, despite all my struggles to find him food when even I had gone without, the patient little brute had come to this sad end. Never had I felt the loss of a traveling companion more keenly. For six weeks we had toiled together over lofty Andean ranges, across vast páramos with nothing in sight but their dreary nothingness. How often had we not listened to each other contentedly dining in our adjacent chambers at the end of a laborious day? If we had had differences, they had been only those which arise between all beings with wills of their own, joined together on a long journey. And the end of that journey had been so near at hand. I had long looked forward to our triumphal entry into Cuzco together, to having our pictures proudly taken side by side in the main plaza, and to the pleasure of presenting him as a pet to the children of the one American I knew dwelt in the ancient capital—should it turn out that the latter had any such appendages—that he might toil no more and end his days in the beloved mountain air of his native heights. Instead of which, here I sat on the edge of a Peruvian trail, gazing at a shattered dream stiffening in the blazing sunshine before me.

But the experienced traveler will not let misfortune long interfere with the regular flow of his existence. Behind the bristling cactus hedges lining the road were several Indian hovels. I risked leaving alone what was left of my possessions to walk to the nearest, some fifty yards away. Two arrieros, a boy, and a woman, were lounging within it. The muleteers spoke a Quichua somewhat different from that I had picked up; moreover they were half drunk. I offered them a good reward to toss my stuff on one of their grazing mules and carry it to “Challabamba.” But they were bound for “La Estrella”—probably five or six hours later—and could not turn back. Perhaps it brings bad luck. The woman would not be compromised, even to the extent of admitting my existence. As a final straw the boy refused a “peseta” to carry a note to the hacienda.

I returned to the scene of the disaster and sat down hopelessly in the shrinking shadow of the hedge. The connecting link between a sahib and his baggage kept running like a refrain through my head. Indian travelers and mule-trains passed to and fro, staring curiously and seeming, in so far as the impassive Indian face shows anything, to smirk with satisfaction at my plight. At least I could pull my belongings off the corpse; though not easily, with the “diamond-hitch” and the ropes wound round and round the body. Luckily the animal had fallen on the side carrying my “city” clothing, and had spared the developing-tank. I disentangled my still existent possessions and piled them beside me in the shade. An hour crawled by; another was crawling. Something must be done. I could neither leave my baggage unprotected here beside one of the four royal highways leading into, or out of the City of the Sun—depending on which way one was going, were one going at all—nor could I carry it myself, such was the bulk to which it had accumulated. I drew out a visiting-card, that proof of the caballero caste in South America, and wrote upon it:

“Vengo recomendado por los señores de La Laguna, pero á ’tres cuadras de su hacienda me ha muerto de repente el caballo. Puede V. mandarme un indio para que me ayude con el equipaje?”

The owners of “Challabamba” were relatives of my host of the first night out of Andahuaylas, and he had implored me to stop with them. As to the horse, it was best not to try to explain offhand that it was not one I had been riding. Awaiting my chance, I picked out an old Indian woman stubbing along the stony, rising trail, twirling her ubiquitous yarning-spindle, and explained to her in my most fluent and Incaic, not to say archaic, Quichua, that she was to give the note to Don Francisco when she passed his hacienda.

But like most of her race sent on errands, she probably forgot it, or concluded I didn’t mean what I had said, or thought of some other incomprehensible reason for not delivering it, such as not having the consent of her yaya, or father confessor, or she decided to keep it as fuel, or Don Francisco was “No ’stá ’cá” as usual, or he didn’t care to have travelers recomendado by his relatives, or qué sé yo. The empty, blazing minutes expanded into half hours; these in turn into hours, and still life drifted eventlessly on. I dug out a battered copy of Marcus Aurelius, and strove to pass the time as pleasantly as possible until fate saw fit to make a suggestion. Limping old Epictetus would have been far more to the point under the circumstances. The sun drew relentlessly away on its westward journey, the handful of shade crawled on all fours under the cactus hedge and spread into the uninviting field beyond. I transferred my sundry, not to say sun-dried, chattels to the other side of the road and continued my reading. An old, near-white fellow hobbled past and desired to know what I was doing there. I replied that the densest of human beings could see that I was installing an electric light-and-power plant, and could he, as quite evidently the oldest resident of these parts and a man of extraordinary intelligence, suggest any means of starting the dynamo. His brilliant, but not wholly unexpected reply was, “Where do you come from where are you going?” If one dragged a Peruvian out of bed at midnight to say that his wife had just hanged herself in the patio and should be cut down as soon as convenient, he would certainly cry, “Y á ’onde vueno?” I finally stirred up his drivelling intellect to the point where he announced himself the owner of a small hacienda not far away, and he promised that as soon as he returned from a social call up the road he would see whether he had an animal that could carry my stuff to his house, and an Indian that cared to fetch it. I picked up my book once more—and just then Chusquito raised his head and gazed listlessly about him, like one of the opposite sex coming out of a faint, or one of our own regaining the first consciousness of the cold gray dawn of a morning after. Then getting unsteadily to his feet, that deceitful, ungrateful, possum-playing rascal stood up, staggered through the cactus hedge, and fell to nibbling the stubble of the field beyond!

The octogenarian had not mentioned the date of his proposed return and, whatever it was, it had not arrived when there appeared along the road I would have traveled a near-Indian in some cast-off clothing and the same kind of Spanish, leading a stout, “empty” mule. Don Francisco, as I had suspected, was not at home, and la señora had evidently slept the siesta on the note before acting upon it. Chusquito, though on his feet again, was of course too weak to be reloaded, and even in the clothes he stood in I could only drag him along a few feet to the minute by pulling like a Dutchman—or more exactly, a Dutch woman—on a canal tow-path, the inscrutable near-Indian, with the mule bearing my baggage, bringing up the funereal rear. A score of times I was on the point of abandoning the derelict far from port and alfalfa, but contained myself in patience, recalling the former virtues of the deceiving creature, and sweated at last with him into the hacienda corral. The estate was just then in supreme command of a woman of such cold indifference to my sad tale that she might as well have spoken only Quichua, instead of being so versed in Spanish that she was performing the extraordinary feat, for a South American country-woman, of reading a novel of Dumas in that tongue. The “parlor” of the low adobe building was papered with the pages of illustrated weeklies from many lands and in many languages, and there the illustrious and the notorious of all countries rubbed shoulders,—the latest champion of the fistic world beside the ivory-like dome of an experienced American presidential candidate, the Pope in the act of blessing a group of Mexican bandits, the American rector of the University of Cuzco arm in arm, as it were, with a famous Spanish bull-fighter.

In a corner of the corral Chusquito had fallen upon a heap of alfalfa in a way to show that, whatever his appearance, he was far from dead. But the hacienda people assured me the animal could not possibly carry my stuff to Cuzco; that, like a nervous breakdown, his ailment called for long rest and weeks of good feeding. I might perder cuidado, however, as they would lend me a chusco and an Indian for the rest of the journey. From their careful avoidance of any suggestions on the subject, it was evident that they fancied I would leave Chusquito where he was, and that they would automatically fall heir to him. I may look like that in my pictures, but photography is at best deceiving. Moreover, I had not forgotten that it is a common human failing to take far less care of that which is given than of that which is bought. A wily old compadre of the family, smelling how the wind blew, said he would buy the animal himself were it not that he had only that week finished and a won a 27-year lawsuit against some Franciscan friars for the possession of an hacienda, and was penniless in consequence. The brother of the absent Don Francisco, who chanced to ride over from his neighboring hacienda, assured me the eighteen soles I had paid in Huancayo was an “atrocious” price, and after the rest of the usual prelude to a bargain in Peru, offered me eight. I forgot myself and accepted too quickly; whereupon he walked slowly around the animal until, finding a discolored fetlock or some other fatal blemish, he lightly broke his word and offered six. After a sharp and scintillating exchange of gypsying, I pocketed seven, and sadly watched the constant companion of my most pleasant six weeks on the road in Peru led slowly away to a large green spot up the valley, the order of his new master, to give him all the alfalfa he could eat, ringing in his ears. Yet I knew only too well his preference for the tough páramo grasses of his native upper heights.

La señora had promised that I should start by six, whence it was unusually good luck that I actually dashed out through the hacienda gate at seven, my possessions behind me on a little gray chusco in charge of one of the wooden-headed Indians of the region, sent to lead the animal to Cuzco and back. The first half of his task did not last long. After I had paused to wait for him a dozen times or more in the first furlong, I came back to kick him off the end of the tow-rope and take personal charge of the expedition. Gradually the great, semi-tropical valley where Chusquito had found the end of his journeyings shrunk to a hollow in the earth, then to a mere hole, wavy blue with distance, that finally disappeared forever from my eyes. The brown pampa and exhilarating air of upper heights appeared once more, with magnificent views of the Andes on every hand as far as the eye could range. The wooden Indian disappeared for hours, and I fancied I was rid of him for the rest of the journey. But he caught up, and dropped at the roadside with an almost audible sigh of relief, the coca quid still in his cheek, the bag of eggs I had entrusted to him still intact, where I paused for dinner on the edge of a floor-flat plain that had evidently once been a lake-bottom. The mood came upon me to treat him as an equal, to see what the effect might be. I shared with him such a meal as he had certainly never before enjoyed; but his outward expression showed neither gratitude nor any other emotion, though he mumbled the customary “Gracias, tayta-tayta” in the tone one would expect from a wooden Indian. A more passive human being it would be hard to imagine. He ate boiled oatmeal without a murmur, though it was plain he neither recognized nor liked it. When I pointed to the approaching storm and murmured, “Para—it rains,” he muttered, “Para, señor.” “Munanquichu cocata?” I asked. “Ari, señor,” he mumbled, and waited like a stone image until I had handed him a pinch of coca leaves. “Munanquichu copita?” “Ari, señor,” and he drank the pisco as impassively as he had eaten the oatmeal. Had I announced that it was snowing, or asked him to take poison, I should have expected the same passive acquiescence.

The plain broadened to the immense Pampa de Anta, the “plain of Xaquixaguana” of Prescott, stretching to far-off mountain-walls on either hand. Along the base of these, to the left, hung some splendid examples of ancient Inca andenes, or terraced fields. Thousands of cattle speckled the plain in every direction, dim villages stood forth on projecting headlands, while several snow-clads peered over the bordering range to the north. The ground was half-marshy, but a broad, partly paved, raised highway stretched straight ahead as far as the eye could see. It began to rain. It always does on the Pampa de Anta, if local information is trustworthy. It was such a rain as one rarely encounters in the high Andes, mixed with hail and punctuated by roaring crashes of thunder. Lightning is so frequent on the Pampa de Anta that natives always fee their favorite saint before crossing it, and the government, a bit more materialistic in its superstitions, has provided each pole of the two-wide telegraph line with lightning-rods. A well-meaning Peruvian had advised me, if, as was certain, I should be overtaken by a thunder-storm on the pampa, to take refuge at once under a telegraph-pole and remain there until the storm was over.

Instead I splashed on, wet to the thighs, singing between the crashes of thunder, so great was my joy at approaching Cuzco. As the storm slackened, the world about me became musical with the chorus of frogs. All day the costume of Indians had been gradually changing. The pancake hat of Cuzco was now in the majority; the knee breeches and skirts were shorter; the faces were distinctly darker—or was it dirtier?—and even more stupid than the type with which I had grown so familiar. Greetings were more obsequious than ever. Even the women raised their hats to me as they duck-trotted by, and more than one carried my thoughts back to Inca days by a respectful “Buenas tardes, Viracocha.”

It became evident we could not reach Cuzco by daylight. We halted at Izcochaca, the Indian curling up in a far corner of the mud corredor assigned us, with only his thin semi-tropical garb upon him, too passive to find himself the ragged old poncho I discovered in a corner and threw over him. It rained most of the night, making much of the twelve miles left a quagmire broken by patches of atrocious cobbling. No conquistador of old looked forward more eagerly than I to the first glimpse of the Navel of the Inca Empire; yet as always at the end of a long journey the last miles seemed trebly drawn out. The road that had been perfectly level since the preceding noonday began to clamber over bumps and rises, from the tops of each of which I strained my eyes in vain for the long-anticipated sight. Towns grew up along the way, birds sang in clumps of eucalypti, the peon slapped sluggishly along behind me, apparently seeing no further than his coca-cud; broad vistas of a tumbled and shadow-patched mountain world, with an occasional flash of the long snow and glacier-clad cordillera, spread and contracted as I hurried onward. The road passed through deep-rutted hollows and under the graceful old arch of an aqueduct ranging away with giant strides across the rolling uplands; but still no city. Again and again I topped a ridge, only to be newly disappointed, until I came almost to fancy this was only some dream city of the imagination toward which we were headed.

Then all at once, without warning, the road dived downward, turned a sharp angle, and there, below and before me, in mid-morning of October 17, lay spread out in all its extent the City of the Sun. Like the passing Indians, I, too, paused on the edge of the rocky shelf, and was almost moved to follow their lead in snatching off my hat and murmuring reverently, “O Ccoscco, Hatun Llacta, Napai cuiqui—Oh, Cuzco, Great City, I salute thee!” For to the aboriginals Cuzco is still a sanctified spot, venerated not only as the abode of the Incas, but of all those deities that still, in spite of its outward Christianity, preside over the ancient Empire of Tavantinsuyo. My peon showed not a hint of surprise when I knelt to make a tripod of stones for my kodak, no doubt fancying it some instrument of worship it was quite natural any human being should set up at first sight of what to all mankind must be the noblest scene in all the world.

In a way his veneration was justified. Some have it that Cuzco is superior in situation to even Bogotá and Quito. In physical beauty alone this is not quite true. But what with that, combined with its historical memories, there are few such fascinating moments in the traveler’s experience as this first glimpse of the ancient Inca capital. I, for one at least, looked down upon it with a thrill exceeding even that awakened by Rome or Jerusalem.

The city covered the northern and more elevated end of a half-green plain, enclosed by velvety-brown mountain flanks and dying away in hazy, labyrinthian distance. On the edge of the ridge on which we stood, Sacsahuaman, a mere knoll from this height, with its fortress, frowned down upon the city. A hulking, two-tower cathedral faced an immense plaza, faded red roofs giving the scene its chief color, until this broke into the velvet green of the plain, which in turn shaded into the soft brown of the surrounding ranges. But neither words nor photographs can give more than a faint hint of the charm and fascination of what is in many respects the most interesting spot in the Western Hemisphere, a charm enhanced by the anticipation of a long overland journey. There came upon me pity for the tourist who comes sneaking into the famous city by train along the valley below. This in its turn was succeeded by a regret that the hands of time could not be set back 400 years, to the day when Balboa first peered out upon the Pacific, that I might sit here and watch the activities of a world totally different from that we know; a regret that what men call the Conquest of Peru ever happened. What days were those, when there were really new worlds to discover! What would I not have given to have preceded Pizarro a bit—and been provided with the magic cap of invisibility to save me from being served up as an exotic delicacy on the Inca’s table.

A swift, stony descent that soon became a regular cobbled stairway, once topped by the Huancapuncu, or West Gate, led through none too pleasantly scented suburbs, the population staring agape at sight of a white man in shirt-sleeves and belligerently armed descending afoot into the famous city. The chusco and Indian followed at my heels across a great market square, past a prettily flowered little rectangle, and I marched at last out upon the broad central plaza, so densely populated with the shades of history. I had loafed away thirty-eight days since leaving Huancayo, though only twenty-two of them had been even partly spent on the road. The distance had proved almost exactly 400 miles, making a total of 2380 miles that I had covered on foot since Hays and I walked out of the central plaza of Bogotá nearly fourteen months before.

The City of the Sun, ancient capital of the Inca Empire, which Garsilaso called Cozco and Stevenson Couzcou, is to-day but a shadow of its once imperial grandeur. The famous Inca historian states that the name corresponded to the Spanish ombligo, and from his day to this writers have referred to it as the Navel of the Inca Empire. Educated cuzqueños of to-day deny this derivation, asserting that the Quichua word for navel is, and always has been, pupu. The talkative old successor of Valverde chanced, when I called upon him, to have just been reading an ancient manuscript in which the words ccori ccoscco (crumbs or shavings of gold), occurred frequently in the description of the city, and he held this to be the real origin of the name.

Whatever of truth or exaggeration there may have been in the statements of old chroniclers that the city gleamed with gold at the time of the Conquest, little of that royal aspect remains. The chief and almost only material reminders of the days of the Incas are long walls of beautiful cut stone in the central portion of the modern city. Indeed, in all Peru the mementoes of the ancient race are almost wholly confined to walls. Some of these are “dressed down” so smoothly that the joints seem mere pencil-marks. Most of them are cyclopean, rough-hewn boulders of irregular size and shape, similar to the Pitti Palace in Florence, which is by no means so perfect in workmanship. There are almost no curved or circular walls, the chief exception to this being the former Temple of the Sun, now the Dominican monastery, where, like mud huts superimposed on the ruins of a mighty race, contented old friars lounge among the glories of long ago. The remnants are chiefly street after street in which the old walls have been left standing from six to twenty feet high, the whitewashed adobe of the ambitionless modern descendants above them. For the most part these form only one side of each street, for the elbow-rubbing passageways of the Incas, of which one still remains intact, were too narrow even for Spanish notions. But the city of to-day is still defined by these long reaches of elaborately cut stones, which, legend has it, divided the ancient capital into regular squares. They are Egyptian in aspect, these massive walls, shrinking toward the top, as do the rare doors and openings of Inca construction that have survived. Here and there they have been rudely torn open to give entrance to a blacksmith-shop, a bakery, a chicharia, or, it would seem, for no other reason than the mere lust for destruction. Everywhere old walls stare out upon the passerby with Indian stolidity, as if refusing to tell the stories they might so easily if they chose. Even where the walls themselves have disappeared to furnish building material for the churches and monasteries of the conquerors, the magnificent doorways have sometimes been preserved as the entrance to some modern hovel, and give a suggestion of what this imperial city, so ruthlessly destroyed, might have been.

It is only these walls and the historical memories with which they are saturated that distinguish Cuzco from any other city of the Sierra. The life of the place is drab and uninspiring, wellnigh as colorless as the most monotonous village of the Andes. The metropolis, no doubt, of the Western Hemisphere in the fifteenth century, in the twentieth it seems a little backwater almost wholly cut off from the main stream of life. For a long time after the Conquest it was queen of the Andes, greater even than Lima. Then as the Inca highway fell into decay under the squabbling and incompetent successors of the provident Incas, it shrunk away into its mountain-girdled isolation, until to-day it is less known to Peru itself than is London or Berlin. For one limeño who has visited Cuzco, the historical gem of the continent, a hundred have journeyed to Paris.

The Conquistadores, fond of exaggerating their prowess by multiplying the numbers of their defeated enemies, ascribed to Cuzco 200,000 inhabitants. This is inconceivable. To-day a trustworthy census, taken by the American rector of the university a few weeks before my arrival, shows the population to be slightly under 20,000. It may, this authority fancies, have numbered 100,000 at the time of the Conquest. The percentage of marriages was found to be extremely low, though the birth-rate holds its own. A few white officials and comerciantes, what would be called petty shopkeepers elsewhere, are in evidence; otherwise Cuzco has chiefly the aspect of an Indian town, its plazas too vast for its shrunken population.

An ancient chronicler tells us that “through the heart of the capital ran a river of pure water, its sides faced with stone for a distance of twenty leagues.” Granting that he carelessly wrote leagues when he would have said cuadras, none but a Spaniard would call the stream a river, and the purity of its water, if it ever existed, has long since departed. To-day this “stone-faced” Huatenay at the bottom of its deep-gashed gorge becomes a trickling sewer as it enters the town, passing directly beneath the principal buildings and carrying off such refuse as its sluggishness makes possible. The vast central plaza, far from level and once even larger than to-day, is faced as usual by the cathedral, second only to that of Lima, or, being of stone rather than of reeds and plaster, perhaps to be rated the first in Peru. There is something of the soft velvet-brown of Salamanca about the churches of Cuzco, that calls, not for a kodak, but for an artist. The blue-black plaster interior, pretending to be also of cut stone, is divided, after the Spanish custom, by the choir, with splendid carved stalls. In the sacristy are ranged the dusky portraits of all the Bishops of Cuzco, from sophistical old Valverde to him of the gold-leaf theory. In the scented twilight of the nave gather all the motley population, the male gente only excepted, after the free-for-all manner of Andean churches. Dogs are not permitted to enter. But it is a strange Latin-American rule that cannot be circumvented. I have seen a chola pause at the door, sling her puppy in the manto on her back, as she would have carried a baby, and enter to kneel before a tinselled image, the puppy licking her face affectionately from time to time as she prayed.

In the center of the plaza stands a fountain topped by a life-size bronze Indian. A figure of some great Inca? No, indeed; but a North American “redskin,” feathers, in buckskins, unAndean haughtiness and all, armed with such a bow and arrows as no Inca ever beheld. The exotic is ever more pleasing than the local. The ornate façade of “La Compañía,” testimonial to Jesuit wealth in colonial days, stares awry at the cathedral. Around the other sides of the square are the usual arched and pillared arcades, gaudy with everything that appeals to the eye and purse of the Peruvian muleteer. Here are gay leather knapsacks in which to carry his coca and less valuable possessions, richly decorated trappings for his animals, quenas, or fifes, to while away the weary hours across the unpeopled páramos, and the many-colored “skating-caps” with earlaps which are worn not only by babies, but by many of the Indians of surrounding hamlets. The clashing of shod hoofs sounds now and then over the cobbles, but the absence of vehicles, which is so curious a feature of the interior cities of the Andes, would be striking to a newcomer. A “ferrocarril de sangre,” what we might call a street-car of flesh and blood—a roofed platform on wheels behind phlegmatic mules—rambles down to the station on train-days. Memories of viceregal times hover about the rare sedan-chair that serves the same purpose. Cuzco had no electric lights as yet, though she continued to hope, and my friend Martinelli had enstalled a dynamo to operate his cinema in the patio of the “Hotel Central.”

Cuzco was the first place in South America with any hint of a tourist resort about it. Visitors have become almost familiar sights, and there was already developing that pest of European show-places, unwashed and officious urchins offering their services as “guides,” an occupation undreamed of elsewhere on the continent. A wily Catalan resident pays any street Arab twenty cents for bringing him first news of the arrival of a foreigner—by train; those who tramp in from the north are, of course, overlooked—taking a sporting chance on recovering the dos reales from the possible victim. But the business is still in embryo, though there are those who prophesy that Cuzco will some day become the Rome of South America—not entirely to its own advantage.

There are many points of similarity between Cuzco and Quito, located at opposite ends of what is left of the ancient Inca highway. In climate they are much alike. Being 11,380 feet above the sea and on the thirteenth parallel south, surrounded by high and snowy mountains, even though at some distance, one would expect the former capital of Tavantinsuyo to be colder. But even in this rainy season, though the atmosphere was often lead-heavy from the almost constant downpour, it was only more dreary, not lower in temperature. Neither of the two cities has a river worthy the name; the Machángara and the Huatenay, with their slight branches, serve alike as dumping-grounds, and equally break the soil with deep quebradas. Splendid views of both cities may be had from the mountains that shut them in, though in this respect Quito surpasses. The soft evening air, the singing of birds, the rows of tall, maidenly-slender eucalyptus trees behind massive mud walls, the long roads to the railway stations, are alike characteristic of the two towns. In both an atrocious din of church-bells tortures the hours before dawn, though here again the Ecuadorian capital wins the palm; nor can the cuzqueño policeman rival his fellow of the equator in shrilling away the monotonous hours of darkness. To nearly as great an extent as in Quito the patios and lower stories are given over to Indians and servants, with the “gente decente” holding the upper floor. Both towns are colorful in garb; both are peerless when the sun shines, and gloomy under clouds; both have the drowsy air of places far removed from the real world, with many times the number of shops needed droning through a precarious existence. On the other hand, whereas the Indians of Quito speak Spanish also, here one must know Quichua to carry on any extended intercourse. There are a few beautiful women in Quito, too; I never saw one in Cuzco, though this may be merely another instance of my abominable luck. Some Indian girls between five and fifteen are pretty, but they are so often veiled by the grime of years that the virtue must be chiefly accepted on faith. Nor has Cuzco anything approaching that unrivalled circle of hoar-headed peaks that ennobles the vista of its rival to the north. The two cities would probably be about equal in population were Cuzco also the national capital—as it should and hopes some day to be. “We want to free ourselves from those degenerate negroes of Lima and establish an independent government under an American protectorate,” a self-styled lineal descendant of the Incas by way of Tupac Amaru confided to me. As it is, Quito is more than three times the larger.

Cuzco has been called the dirtiest city on earth. I am not sure it merits the title. The Andean town that aspires to that proud and haughty position will have to exert itself constantly—no cuzqueño characteristic—keeping always on the alert for new and hitherto uninvented styles of uncleanliness; for it will have dogged, unrelenting competition, vastly more determined and energetic than any other form of industry. Quito, for instance, is a formidable rival in this also, especially as Cuzco has the handicap of a much smaller population—and in a contest of this kind every little one helps. But though it is too early to prophesy the final rating, there is little doubt that the former Inca capital will at least win honorable mention—unless she continues to import American alcaldes.

Which brings me to the chief influence in modern Cuzco. Among the legends of the origin of the Inca Empire is the tradition of a tall, imperious man of white skin, with blond hair on both head and cheeks, who arose from the sea and took up the task of teaching the Children of the Sun more proper ways of living. He was called Ingasman, whence some have held that he was a castaway Briton from some ship blown to these distant shores long before the days of Columbus. A fantastic yarn; yet is it impossible? The imagination likes to dwell on the possibility of the improbable story. Such an origin might account for the stolid British temperament of the Indians of the Andes; as to complexion, leave an Englishman in the tropics for generations and the result would be no darker than the self-styled lineal descendant of Tupac Amaru above mentioned. Whatever the truth of the legend, the modern teacher of the Children of the Sun came from the sea also,—an enthusiastic, hopeful young American who is officially rector of the university, but who, as town councilor and even mayor, has been responsible for most of the local improvements of recent years. For all the labors of Ingasman, the town was probably not noted for its immaculateness before the Conquest; to-day it is of that stagnant, Latin-American temperament that can be set in motion only by some external force. Thus we have the anomaly of seeing that “picturesqueness,” so often closely allied to uncleanliness, which Americans travel to Cuzco to see, being constantly reduced by one of their own race. Yet the influence of a single individual, however energetic, is limited; hence one must still be circumspect in inspecting old walls and Inca ruins, and the wise man always boils his water on the banks of the stinking Huatenay.

Of the old Inca race there remain few traces. The vast majority of the 20,000 cuzqueños are “descendants of the Incas” only in the loose acceptance of that phrase. For want of a proper name the people of Tavantinsuyo, the Four Corners of the Earth, have come to be called Incas, as the inhabitants of the United States are called Americans for lack of a national adjective. As a matter of fact, an inca was a member of the royal family, of which the _Inca Ccápa_c was the ruling chief. It is easy to imagine other peoples quarreling with the race over their name—to their supreme indifference protesting that they, too, inhabited the Four Corners of the Earth, with the same right to the term as the tribes of Cuzco; and referring to the latter privately by something corresponding to “yanqui” or “gringo.”

The thick upper lip, wide nostrils, and broad face of the aboriginal race shows in some degree in all but a few cuzqueños; those of full Indian blood still make up a large percentage of the population. The Cuzco Indian is a type by himself. His skin is darker, his manner more cringing, his gait more slinking, than his fellows elsewhere; the faces of both males and females have a brutalized expression that seems to mark them as the most degenerate of all the Andean tribes. Rumor has it that they retain some slight and sadly mixed traditions of Huayna Ccápac and of the days when the native Empire occupied this vast plateau; but they are extremely chary of sharing any information they may possess. The Inca rule of having distinguishing costumes for each community still holds, especially in the matter of head-dress, and it is as easy for the initiated to recognize the birthplace of an Indian by his garments as to know a Hindu’s caste from his turban. Many from the towns surrounding Cuzco wear knitted, tasseled caps of gay colors, with earlaps. Those of the city are noted for their “pancake” hats, common to both sexes. These are round disks of straw, covered with flannel or an imitation of velveteen, one side of faded black with spoke-like stripes of color or gilt braid, the other brilliant or dull red, according to its age, which is generally advanced. In fine weather this is worn black side up; in wet it is reversed. The women are invariably barefoot, the men usually so, or with at most a strip of leather to protect their soles; except that old men who have once wielded the silver-mounted cane of authority over their section of the community uphold their dignity by wearing on Sundays and feast-days heavy, native shoes often with large buckles and always without socks. The women wear carelessly fastened blouses of coarse material, heavy skirts bunched about their waists, and a shawl fastened with one pin of large, fanciful head. The men dress in tight, ragged knee-breeches or loose, shoddy trousers of varying lengths, and ponchos which prove that full use is made of the little packages of crude aniline dyes sold in the market-square.

The quiet of this chief gathering-place is unusual. It has no clatter, but only a suppressed hum; for the Indian of Cuzco is as silent as he is inoffensive. Here huge strawberries are sold at twenty-five cents a hundred, the primitive-minded female vendors counting them out by tens in hissing Quichua sibilants. The hot country is only a day’s tramp from Cuzco; hence tropical as well as temperate fruits, are displayed, though often sadly crushed and maltreated by their transportation in sacks or nets on human backs. The Indians are here the same beasts of burden as elsewhere in the Andes. It is no uncommon thing to see a rather small man trot the mile from market to railway station with half a beef on his back. The wooden-headedness of the aboriginal, as well as his lack of strength for any labor except carrying, is often in evidence. I saw one ordered to take an iron wheelbarrow to another part of town. He removed the wheel and bound it on his wife’s back with a llama-hair rope, slung the rest on his own shoulders in the same manner, and away they trotted one behind the other.

When all is said and done the Andean Indian remains an enigma to the foreigner. At the end of a year of constant intercourse with him the traveler can quickly sum up his real knowledge of a race whose internal workings he has only guessed, confessing an inability to see from the aboriginal’s point of view, to be aware with his consciousness. There is an enormous difference between the South American Indian and the bearers of the same misnomer in our own country. The majority of our tribes were warriors, with an obstinate courage that took little account of odds. They could be killed; they could never be enslaved to a degree that made them profitable servants. From Tehuantepec southward, on the other hand, the aboriginals are noted for a subservience, not to say timidity, that made it possible for the Spaniards to exploit them ruthlessly, as do their descendants to this day. Was this characteristic the result or the cause of the government under which the Conquistadores found them? Ruled by the Incas in a far more autocratic form of imperialism than the worst known to-day, carrying authority into the very depths of their cabins and the most personal conduct of their lives, the Indians of the Andes were robbed of all initiative—granting that they ever possessed any—and became the most passive of human creatures. Having imbued their subjects with a sort of fatalism, a non-resistance to anything they conceived as authority, above all by convincing them of their own divine origin, the Incas made their conquest by the Spaniards easy; for the credulous masses readily accepted these bearded strangers as Children of the Sun also, to whom any resistance would be absurd. Thus must all false doctrines prove in time a boomerang to those who foster them.

To-day the domination once held by the Incas has been taken over by the priests, public functionaries, and the patrón, whose wills are obeyed without question. In the eyes of the Indian the priest is the representative of God on earth, to whom he must show absolute submission and obedience, as to one who holds the key to that place of primitive joys and freedom from the sorrows and hardships of this world to which he conceives death to lead. That the priest may be harsh and unkindly, or worse, has nothing to do with the case. Even the God of his conception is cruel and vengeful, taking pleasure in bringing down misfortunes on his head, and to be placated by any means in his power. Were priest and authorities true to their missions, their domination over the Indian might be advantageous. Too often they are quite the contrary. The authorities are disdainful, looking upon their positions merely as opportunities for personal gain; the priest is less often a shepherd than a wolf preying upon his flock with impunity. Too often priest and authorities join together to exploit the aboriginal with liquor and church festivals, his only recreations, at times even inventing the latter to make an excuse for exploitation. Whatever he may once have been, the Indian of the Cordillera is a child, to be governed by a kindly father, as the Incas seem to some extent to have been. The civilization which the Spaniard is reputed to have brought him is nothing of the sort. Garsilaso assures us that the masses were little better than domestic animals, even at the time of the Conquest. They were certainly in no worse state than to-day. That he should have remained or fallen so low is difficult for us of the hopeful United States to understand; it would be more easily understood in India with its fixed castes, or even in England, where certain boys are born with the necessity of lifting their caps to certain other boys. His stolidity passes all conception. He is native to, and of a piece with, the pampa, the bare, treeless upland world where the dreary expanse of brown earth and cold blue sky incites neither ambition nor friendliness, neither hopes nor aspirations. Hence his flat, joyless face with its furtive eyes suggests a soul contracted upon itself, an aridity of sentiments, an absolute lack of aesthetic affections. Passively sullen, morose, and uncommunicative, he neither desires nor aspires, and loves or abhors with moderation. The native language is scanty and cold in terms of endearment; I have never seen the faintest demonstration of affection between Indians of the two sexes, though plenty of evidence of bestial lust. Even his music is a monotonous wailing, an interminable sob on a minor key. He lacks will-power, perseverance, confidence, either in himself or others, and has a profound abhorrence of any ways that are not his ways. He works best in “bees,” with the beating of a drum, the wail of a quena, and frequent libations of chicha to cheer him on, as, no doubt, in the days of the Incas. He is noted for long-distance endurance; yet this is not so great as is commonly fancied. Like an animal, he cannot go “on his nerve,” or will not, which amounts to the same thing. Try to hurry him and it will be found that he needs fifteen days rest each month, like the llama.

From his earliest years the Andean Indian forms a conception of life as something sinister and painful. As a baby, as soon as another uncomplaining little creature usurps his place on the maternal back, he is shut up in some noisome patio or hut, along with chickens, guinea-pigs, and new-born sheep, with which he fights for his scanty fare of a handful of toasted corn. Rolling about in his own filth and that of the animals, who now and again all but outdo him in combat, he reaches the age of four or five, and then begins his life-long struggle with hostile nature. In the country he takes to shepherding the family pigs, then a flock of sheep of the patrón, learning the use of the sling and to wail mournful ditties on his reed fife. Here, with no other covering than a coarse homespun garment open to the waist and barely reaching the knees, he sits day after day contemplating the dreary expanse of puna, until its very nothingness turns to melancholy in his soul. In town he is “farmed out,” or virtually sold into slavery to some family, learning a few ways of the whites, some Castilian, which he commonly refuses to talk later in life, and also the injustice of man, or the habit of considering himself too low to be reached by justice. When he is older, and grown superstitious with listening to the tales of the yatiris, his labor is still heavier. He guides the clumsy wooden plow that is his notion of the last word in mechanical inventions, or carries donkey-loads on his back. Nature yields only to hard struggle and great perseverance in tilling the sterile soil; the sun is parsimonious with its warmth; the very fuel of dung costs hard labor to gather on these treeless heights. Or perhaps the authorities come to carry him off to serve as a soldier of a country he hardly knows the existence of, probably to die of the diseases engendered in his overdeveloped lungs in the dreaded lowlands of coast or montaña. People of scanty, inclement soil, mountaineers in general, are canny and lacking in generosity by nature; add to this that he was forbidden the use of money under the Incas, and it is small wonder the Indian will give or sell his meager produce only by force. Tight-fisted and frugal, he lives for days on a handful of parched corn and his beloved coca, of the depressing effect of which he has no notion. To sleep he needs only the hard ground, be it in his own hut or out under the shivering stars, using perhaps a stone as pillow, if there be one within easy reach. He is a tireless pedestrian; his corneous hoofs are impervious to the roughest going; he sets out on whatever journey fate or his masters assign him, knowing that if he lives he will some day come back to the point of departure. For he has an irrepressible love for his native spot, the mud den where he was born, however miserable or inclement, and will not abandon his home permanently under any circumstances. If he does not return, it is because some misfortune has overtaken him on the trail.

The woman lives the same life from babyhood; and in some ways her duties are still more onerous. Rude and torpid as the male, she neither conceives nor possesses any of those softer qualities peculiar to her sex. When trouble overtakes her she does not complain, but suffers and weeps—if at all—alone, an utter stranger to pity in either its passive or active form. Strong as a draft-horse, she knows none of the infirmities to which modern civilized woman is subject. She gives birth to a child virtually every year, often from the age of fifteen on, without any species of preparation or precaution, washes it in the nearest brook, slings it on her back, and goes on about her business.

The husbandman of the puna plants a few potatoes, a little quinoa, perhaps some barley, clinging to the primitive ways of his ancestors to remote generations. A good harvest does not depend upon proper planting or fertilization, but on the changes of the moon and stars, and the propitiation of the fetishes to which he still secretly gives his adherence in spite of his ostensible conversion to Christianity. He considers himself a being apart from the governing class, referring to himself as “gente natural” and to his superiors as “gente blanca,” as our southern negroes distinguish between “white folks” and “colored folks.” He takes no part whatever in political matters, rarely indeed having any conception of the country to which he belongs. Anything which does not touch him personally he looks upon with profound indifference and disdain. He is submissive as a brute, lives without enthusiasms, without ambitions, in a purely animal passivity that is the despair of those who are moved to an attempt to better his lot.

Some knowledge of Quichua is essential to intercourse with the mass of the population of Cuzco, as it is to the convenience of the lone traveler down the Andes. Even in the city a large number of the “gente del pueblo” cannot, or will not, speak Spanish; in the villages round about it is a rare man who has a suggestion of Castilian. All classes, on the other hand, speak the aboriginal tongue, by necessity if not by choice. The majority, indeed, imbibe it with their nurse’s milk, learning Spanish as an alien language later in life. A professor of the local university, boasting a Ph.D., assured me that he did not know a word of Castilian when he first entered school at the age of seven. After the revolt of Tupac Amaru an edict was promulgated prohibiting the use of Quichua, as it did the native costume, and even commanded that all musical instruments of the aboriginals be destroyed; but like many a Spanish-American law this was never strictly enforced. To-day Cuzco is the Florence of Quichua, where it has retained its purest form, least influenced by the Spanish, and there are many persons of high social standing, the women especially, who speak it by preference.

It is typical of the Latin-American that those things which are of the soil, and have been familiar since childhood, are treated with contempt, are considered inferior to anything possessing the glamor of distance. Thus Quichua, like all survivals of “los Géntiles,” is looked down upon by the “cultured” caste throughout the Andes as something appertaining to the lower classes, to be avoided as diligently as manual labor. “Vulgarly speaking” is the expression with which the cane-carrying Peruvian apologetically prefaces any use of the native tongue. “No se dice allco, se dice perro,” a mother reproves the child that points to a dog with a lisp of the aboriginal word. But as usual, environment is more powerful than maternal desires, and the child grows more fluent in the speech of the Indians than in the aristocratic Spanish. The tendency to scorn it seems a pity to the traveler, for the ancient tongue is certainly worth preserving, and its preservation depends chiefly on Cuzco. The American Rector of the University has done much to reassure the town on the importance of its mission in this respect. Already much has been lost. The best quichuaist in town did not know the words for boat or island, though these are familiar enough wherever any body of water exists in the Andes. Shortly before my arrival the ancient drama “Ollantay” had been performed, and was found to contain many words which even those whose mother-tongue is Quichua did not understand. As the quipus, or knotted strings, was the only form of writing known to the Incas, authoritative interpretation has been lost with the quipumayos who were trained to read them. The tongue of to-day has suffered much admixture, many Spanish words having been “quichuaized” when there was no necessity for it, until there remains a language as bastardized as the “German” of rural Pennsylvania. Not a few have a distinctly hazy notion of the line between the two tongues. “Medio,” said Alejandro, my one-eyed hotel servant, “is Quichua, and ‘cinco centavos’ is Spanish.” How should he know which was which of the two languages he had spoken from childhood, neither of which he could read nor write? There is less excuse for the assurance of persons of some education that “asno” is Quichua and “burro” Spanish, completely overlooking the fact that the Conquistadores brought not only the donkey, but both names, with them. Now and again some expression from the lips of an Indian quaintly recalls the history of the Peruvians and their two-branch ancestry to remote generations. “Ojalá, Diós pagarasunqui!” for instance is a mixture of Arabic, Spanish, and Quichua in as many words.

Yet after all, the ancient tongue of the Incas, variously called Quichua, Quechua, and Keshua (with the most guttural of sounds), has survived to a greater extent than any other American dialect. Some have called it “Runa Simi,” or general language of the common people; but the quichuaists of Cuzco insist that it is rather the Inca or court language that has remained. Garsilaso complained that even in the time of the Incas there was a “confusion and multitude of tongues,” with a new dialect almost every league. He who has attempted to make his way down the Andes on a fixed vocabulary will recognize the justice of this plaint. Before we left Panama, Hays and I had made up a lexicon, only to find that all but the commonest words changed so often that it was of little value. What is called Quichua is spoken more or less continuously from Quito to southern Bolivia, with scatterings through northern Argentine. But the dialects of Ayacucho, Huancayo, the valley of Ancachs, and especially of Cajamaca and further north, include many terms which the purists of Cuzco will not grant an honest pedigree. Only in the ancient capital has it retained anything like the original pronunciation, with those “sounds harsh and disagreeable to our ears” which Garsilaso sought to soften with editorial license. Philologists assure us that the language rose in the north and moved southward, citing the use of more archaic terms in the more southern dialects; for example yacu, which is water in the north, is flowing water, or river, in the south, where unu designates the liquid. The spread of Quichua has been attributed to culture rather than conquest, that is, it was adopted by new tribes coming under the Inca influence, not because it was forced upon them, but because it afforded a more perfect means of communication than their primitive dialects.

It is a real language, with complete grammar and all the flexibility and shades of expression of our classical tongues. Philologists have attempted in vain to represent its sounds by Roman letters or combinations thereof, even by inventing new characters. But these are makeshifts at best, and the pronunciation can only be learned by practice in its native land. Roughly speaking, it includes all the letters of the Spanish alphabet except b, d, f, g, j, v, x, and z. But many of those remaining must be doubled or otherwise modified to represent sounds unknown to European tongues. L is rare, while the sound represented by the Spanish ll is frequent; there is no rr, but r is much used. Harsh in its phonetics, it has a suggestion of the Chinese in that three pronunciations of the same word, labial, palatal, or throaty, give it quite different meanings. The traveler who pauses in the trail to call out “Cancha acca?” to an Indian hut displaying the white flag that announces chicha for sale, would say something quite different than he intended if he gave the cc the sound represented by the single c. The accent is nearly always on the penult, lending the speech a fixed and almost monotonous rhythm. Technically speaking, Quichua is agglutinative, that is, formed by the tacking on of suffix after suffix, until in some cases an entire sentence consists of a single word, making it possible to express fine shades of meaning fully equal to the Spanish with its diminutives and affixes. It has no articles, no genders (at least expressed), no individual prepositions, and has virtually only one verb conjugation. The plural is formed by adding cuna; the six cases, corresponding to the Latin, by suffixes. Thus huarma is boy, huarmacuna, boys; huarmacunacta is the accusative, huarmacunamanta, of the boys. In like manner the genitive is formed by combination; acca is chicha, huasi, house, and accahuasi, tavern. The doubling of words gives a collective and often quite different meaning; thus rumi is stone, rumirumi, a stony place; runa is man, runaruna, a crowd; quina is bark, quinaquina, the medicinal bark from which we get quinine, as well as the name thereof. Its system of counting is built up on the fingers, as in all languages, but is somewhat cumbersome in larger combinations—which none of the ignorant Indians of to-day are capable of using. Thus 299 is iscaypachacchuncaiscconniyoc!

As in the case of all more or less primitive languages, Quichua is often onomatopoetic,—its words formed from sounds connected with the object expressed. Why the animal we miscall guinea-pig should be cui (kwee) to the natives of the Andes no one who has shivered through a night in an Indian hut listening to the falsetto, grunting squeak of those irrepressible little creatures will wonder; why a baby is a guagua (wawa) none need ask. As in most languages, mama is mother; on the other hand, father is tata, or tayta; the newcomer finds papa already in use to designate potato, as it has come to in all Spanish-America, as well as in Andalusia. The primitive origin of the Inca tongue is further demonstrated by many crudities of expression, and an indelicacy in the use of certain terms that have been banished from polite intercourse among European nations. Nustahispana, or penccacuy (shame) are cases in point. Marriage-time is Huarmihapiypacha, literally, “the time to chase a woman.” It is natural that many more aboriginal words should have survived and become a part of the general language in a land where the Indians have survived themselves, than in one where the race has been virtually wiped out, or at least set apart, as with us. Hence the language of Spanish-America is much richer than our own in terms from the aboriginal tongue. The ignorant Spanish Conquistadores, as devoid of “language sense” as the most uncouth American “drummer,” gave many of the native words queer twists; to their untrained ears Anti sounded like Andes, tampu like tambo, pampa like bamba, and Biru like Peru. Yet Quichua has enriched even the languages of the world at large with many words, such as llama, pampa, condor, and alpaca.

A brief sample of the ancient tongue might not be amiss. Few works except the Bible have been printed in the vernacular; and this was done not that the Indians might read it, since there probably exists no man able to read Quichua who cannot also read Spanish, but for the use of missionaries and priests among the Andean tribes. Many words for which there existed no equivalent have, of course, been “quichuaized,” and the letters retain their Spanish values. The parable of the man who built his house on sand instead of rock (St. Luke, VI, 48) runs:

Ricchacun uc huasihacluc ccaryman; pi yallicta allpata allpisca ccaccahuan tecsirkan. Inas paractin unu llocllapi yaicumurkan mayutac caparispa saccay huasiman choccacurkan mana cuyurichiyta atispa huasi ccaccapatapi tiactin.

Cuzco, the last foothold of Spanish power on the American continent, bids fair to be the last of popery also. Even Quito is little more fanatical. With the exception of Ayacucho, I found the former City of the Sun the only place in Peru where the priests were still permitted to advertise their spurious wares by an incessant thumping and hammering of all the discordant noise-producers of whatever tone or caliber or lack thereof, in her church towers, at any hour of day or night. There is a law against “unnecessary” ringing of church-bells in Peru; but in this hotbed of fanaticism the prefect does not interpret his duties too severely. With a din that awoke the echoes of the distant mountain-flanks that shut her in, Cuzco sallied frequently forth in a long religious procession, not a single white man gracing it, except the priests. These latter did not permit the most solemn formalities to weigh heavily upon them. Even within the cathedral itself I have seen the chief padre, carrying the host or whatever it is, and marching with sanctimonious tread under his embroidered canopy, wrinkle up his lascivious countenance and half-surreptitiously make unbelievably scurrilous jokes with the priests close around him about the attractive girls of the pious, downcast audience.

Peru has long been one of the most intolerant of nations, at least theoretically. Since the adoption of her constitution public worship by non-Catholics has been forbidden, its fourth article reading: “The nation professes the Catholic religion, Apostolic and Roman; the state protects it, and does not permit the public exercise of any other.” An attempt had recently been made to amend this to the extent of striking out the last clause. There has long been violation of the law. Lima has an Episcopal church of long standing and considerable congregation, and as the membership is largely English and American, Peru has not risked a controversy with those countries by enforcing the constitution. In fact the strongest and chief argument of the senators supporting the proposed amendment was not that liberty of cult is just, but that “the law is not being enforced anyway, so let’s change it.” A very few grasped the fact that this is one of the many reforms needed to draw to Peru the immigration indispensable to her modern advancement. The fourteenth-century arguments of the hidebound clerical senators against the proposed change afforded reading compared to which the efforts of the world’s chief humorists are staid and funereal.

Great excitement broke out in the more “conservative” cities of the interior when the news came up from Lima. Headed by the archbishop, ecclesiastics of every grade issued orders to all fieles to combat “por cualquier medio—by any means whatever, this vile attack on the Holy Mother Church, the morality of the family, and the honor of Peru by the masones and ateistas of the Senate.” From all the altiplanicie telegrams poured in, calling upon the senators to suppress “this absurd resolution on the liberty of cults, unnatural to Peru and abhorred by all the faithful.” Every scurrilous little Catholic organ—and the most outspoken “sage-bush” journal of our Southwest cannot approach these in vituperation and positive indecency of language in attacking their enemies—frothed with raging editorials. In Cuzco it was planned to parade the patron saint through the streets, ostensibly as a mere protest. A few years ago the bishop would have met the issue by calling together a few hundred of the most fanatical, filling them with concentrated courage, and preaching a careful sermon that would really have been an order to sack and kill the hated “liberals,” though with a clever wording to clear his own skirts of the matter. Such things have often happened in Cuzco. This time a rumor that the procession was to be merely an excuse for the priests to incite their followers of dull complexion and understanding to riot reached the students of the university. Though all are Catholics, these fiery “liberals” are ardent haters of priests; only a few years before they had bodily flung the “clerical” faculty out of the institution. Now they secretly gathered revolvers and planned to lay in wait for some of the more fanatical priests when the procession started. Wind of this reached some one of higher authority and intelligence, the news was wired to Lima, and in the nick of time orders came to the prefect to forbid the parade.

An amendment to the constitution in Peru requires the consent of two consecutive congresses and the signature of the president after each passage. A year later the amendment on the liberty of cult was carried and became law amid a scene of riot in the senate, during which a fanatical representative snatched the bill from the hands of a clerk and tore it to bits.

It occurred to me one day that it might be unpatriotic to leave Cuzco without calling on the only American missionaries—except a lone preacher in Bogotá—I had so far heard of in South America. On the edge of town I found my way at length into a mud-walled compound of some fifteen acres, with fat green alfalfa, an exotic windmill, and a two-story mansion surrounded by flower-plots. I had paused near what seemed to be the main door, and stood gazing admiringly at the wall that shut out all the troubles of this rude world, when a window opened and a lean man of forty, his mission plainly imprinted on his gaunt features, a finger between the leaves of a hymn-book, put out his head and murmured, “Buenas tardes.”

“Is this Mr. ——?” I asked in English.

“It is.”

“Well, I just happened to be in town and thought I’d.... But no doubt you are very busy....”

“Yes, I am busy,” came the reply, in a bona fide missionary voice, “but don’t let that keep you from coming in—if you want to.”

Naturally I grasped so urgent an invitation with both hands.

“Oh, no,” I protested, “I wouldn’t think of disturbing you. I’ll stay out here and look at the scenery.”

“Yes, look at the scenery,” replied the urgent gentleman, as he and the hymn-book disappeared behind the closed window.

Inside arose sounds not unlike a Methodist meeting, and I had begun to wander stealthily away when the door opened and the missionary’s more cordial better half informed me that they were not “holding services.” Reassured, I entered the cozy parlor. Two women and a man were gathered about a diminutive melodeon, singing mournful hymns. Naturally, at sight of me the musicians lost their nerve, and the cheerful pastime came to a standstill. In due time I discovered that the youthful organist had just been shipped down fresh and untarnished from a Canadian theological seminary, to “bring the poor Peruvians to Christ.” His qualifications for that feat were that he had not, up to his arrival, seen a printed page of Spanish, had never heard of Quichua or Pizarro, and though he did remember the name Prescott, he “didn’t know he had written about foreign countries.” I found that Peyrounel, he of the maidenly hair, chestful of medals, and andarín reputation, had lived a month at the mission the year before, having posed as a poor persecuted Huguenot among bloodthirsty Catholics. He had filled the scanty imaginations of the group with so many wild tales of the road that I could not refrain from giving my own inventiveness vent, and at the end of a dozen bloodcurdling episodes the fresh young product of the seminary remarked in a ladylike voice, “That must have been quite interesting.” Looked at from that point of view, perhaps he was right. In the early days of their mission the ladies had been received and called on socially by the haughtiest of their sex in Cuzco. But they had soon been ostracized, not because of their religion—or, from the Cuzco point of view, lack thereof—but because, having been detected in the act of sweeping out their own parlor, it was concluded that they were cholas in their own country and not fit to associate with gente decente.

Unless the time of my stay there was exceptional, suicide is à la mode in Cuzco. Almost on the day of my arrival one bold youth of twenty-five decided to die because Señorita Fulana scorned his attentions. He wrote a long poem explaining to the disdainful damsel, and the world at large, why he was leaving life so early—it afterward graced the contribution page of one of the local journals—and fired four revolver shots. One grazed his chest, a second tore a hole in the tail of his frock-coat, the third smashed a lamp on the mantelpiece, and the fourth scared the family cat off the divan. The date of the wedding was soon to be announced when I left Cuzco. Among the host of disciples of this heroic and enviable deed among the excitable juventud of Cuzco were several youth of like age, who attempted to imitate it from equally absurd motives. All carried the act to a more or less successful conclusion, except one who, either because he took the matter too seriously, or neglected to practice beforehand, or because he was not a native cuzqueño, or had been reading Ibsen, shot himself through the temple.

The subject of suicide leads us naturally to the cemetery. That of Cuzco celebrated a sort of “Decoration Day” during my stay. Placards announced that “for reasons of hygiene” the alcalde permitted no one but actual mourners to visit it; but it is always easy to find something to mourn over in Peru. An endless stream of humanity was pouring in through the gate by which I entered, while a score of soldiers on guard stood drinking chicha, gambling, and making love. As in all Spanish countries, the corpses were pigeon-holed away, bricked in, and marked with the date on which the rent would fall due. With unlimited space about the city, it is hard to understand why the dead must be tucked away in this expensive fashion, except that the priests refuse to sprinkle with holy water those planted elsewhere. At the gate was posted a long list of corpses whose rent had run out, with the information that unless it was paid by the end of the month the contents would be dumped in the boneyard.

A visit to any Latin-American cemetery is equal to sitting through a well-played comedy, so lacking is the native sense of propriety. Between the padlocked iron reja and the bulkhead of each grave is a narrow space which it is à la mode to fill with flowers. But as flowerpots are rare and expensive in Cuzco, there were substituted cans that had once held “Horiman’s Tea,” or “Smith’s Mixed Pickles,” many with gay labels adorned with the portraits of scantily clad actresses of international notoriety still upon them. Here and there a family with a praiseworthy sense of economy had caused the grave-head to be marked with the brass name-plate that formerly graced the place of business of the deceased; others had “Renewed to 1918” crudely scratched in the cement, bearing witness to an unusually tenacious grief on the part of the survivors—or to a well-drawn will. Many tombs were decorated with atrocious photographs of the occupant; others had verses—no doubt the author would call them poems—some printed, some laboriously hand-written, pasted against them and glassed over, like the photographs. Here and there the bulkhead of a well-to-do member of society was entirely covered by a painting depicting the untold grief of those left behind,—in most cases a picture of the coffin of the deceased, with a string of his male relatives and friends on one side and the female mourners opposite, all dressed in their most correct attire—or the best the painter could furnish them from his palette—and standing exact distances apart in exactly the same attitude of weeping copiously into a large handkerchief á dos reales in any shop. Only, as the painter, who is seldom a direct descendant of Murillo, always paints in the eyes above the handkerchief, the impression conveyed is that the entire group is suffering from a bad cold, that the funeral was inadvertently put off too long, or that each is keeping a worldly eye out for any suspicious move on the part of the others.

The hospital of Cuzco is a part of the same structure as the cemetery, with a door between—a very foresighted and convenient arrangement for such a hospital. The building is roomy, but not much else can be said for it. Indians and half-Indians, male and female, lie closely packed together in long rows of aged cots along ill-ventilated halls. Hardy as seem these mountain Indians, once they are subjected to the changed life of the barracks, with food, clothing, and shoes to which they are not accustomed, they succumb with surprising ease to a long list of ailments. From kitchen to drug-shop, from nurses to Indian servants, stalked that ubiquitous uncleanliness of the Andes. Several idiots and insane persons were confined in noisome dens unworthy of animal occupancy. In a dismal, half-underground corner a handsome, powerfully built young cholo lay on a heap of rags that constituted absolutely the only furnishings. He had been capellan of the cathedral, and whenever a church-bell rang—which was most of the time—he sprang up from the uneven earth floor and began to sing Latin hymns at the top of his voice, shaking and gnawing the heavy wooden bars that confined him. The four most deadly diseases of Cuzco, in their order, are typhoid, dysentery, tuberculosis, and smallpox. The doctors, physicians of the town who drop in casually and hurriedly each morning, are paid $27.50 a month. La Superiora draws $10, the first cook and the grave-diggers $5, general male servants $3.50, and female servants $2 a month, with food and a spot to lay their “beds” on. What they do with all that money I cannot say. The hospital cannot afford disinfectants, and when a surgical operation is to be performed the instruments are washed in hot water—if there happens to be fuel. Patients are allowed 13 cents a day for food, employees, 15, and the woman in charge, 20.

I visited most of the institutions of learning in Cuzco. The German head of the Colegio, or high school for boys, wore his cap and overcoat even in the class-rooms; and no one could have blamed him for it in this dismal rainy season. An army officer had been detailed as gymnasium instructor, the national government requiring a certain amount of physical training of all students. He led the way to an earth-floored building in the rear, where the pupils took turns in falling over the crude apparatus without removing even their coats. To appear in shirt-sleeves, even in a gymnasium, would be an inexcusable breach of etiquette in South America. School ran from 8 to 11, and from 1 to 5, with a ten-minute recess between each fifty-minute class, that must be spent in the corredor and not used in study. Among the students was one Juan Inca, of pure Indian type, and the great majority showed more or less aboriginal blood. The chemistry class, in a laboratory with a floor of unlevelled, trodden earth, had a peon to arrange the experiments for the professor, who performed most of them in person. Few of the students could be coaxed to soil their own never-washed hands in the interests of science, and those who broke or spilled anything were sure to cry out, “He, muchacho!”—or more likely, “Yau, huarma,” since in their excitement their native tongue came first to their lips—and in trotted an Indian boy to clean up the mess. The newly arrived limeño teacher, who had tried to get them to do their own experiments, was informed that they were not peons. Yet nine tenths of them would have been run out of the least exacting American workshop for their evidences of avoiding the bath. It may be that the poor, proud fellows had no servants at home to take it for them. Upon his arrival the teacher had established the rule that, as his class began at 1:10, any boy not in his seat by 1:11 would be reported tardy. The students sent a telegram of protest to the government in Lima, and word came back from the Minister of Education:

“Professor ——, Colegio, Cuzco: Do not put too much stress on small and unimportant matters.”

As if there were any matter on which the Latin-American is more sadly in need of education!

The class miscalled “English” was in charge of a native youth who had spent a year in a well-known but not particularly famous institution in our Middle West, unfortunately favored by most Cuzco youths permitted to top off their education in the United States. When I entered some sixty boys, of about the age at which the Latin-American begins precociously to turn rake, were floundering through some “I want a dog” sentences. The teacher’s knowledge of his subject was such as might be gathered in the dormitories of that seat of jesuitical learning above mentioned, but was not exactly what he might have learned had he been permitted to mingle with the profane outside world. It would not have been so bad had he been content to stick to his Cortina grammar, though his pronunciation was at best mirth-provoking. But like so many half-learned persons, he regarded himself as the source of all wisdom and insisted on using his own judgment, when he possessed none. He was dictating dialogues between two American boys, and forcing his students to learn to mis-mumble them; just such expressions as we have all, no doubt, heard American boys use to each other daily. Here are a few of the gems I copied from the blackboard:

“Mys cheek it is pinkes”—which had not even the doubtful virtue of being true.

“By Gosh, Huzle up!” The Jesuited instructor had no doubt often heard this hasty, unLatin-American word in the dormitories, but having never chanced to see it in print, he had chosen his own spelling, with this happy result.

“We now shall go to the exam.” The longer word for that distressing experience he seemed never to have heard.

“My watch it goes too fast.”

“At your service, John, thank you. What are the news?” Several students made the error of using a singular verb in this sentence, but they were quickly and sarcastically reminded that the noun news ends in an s, which any fool knows is a sign of the plural in English, as in Spanish.

“I shall long for you after you are gone away”; the blackboard continued, and so on, always with a distinctly home-made pronunciation. The traveler can scarcely blame himself if he does not understand his native tongue when it is shouted after him in the streets of Cuzco by the proud students of the Colegio.

The higher institution is the ancient University of Cuzco, founded nearly a half-century before our oldest, and occupying the great stone cloisters of the former Jesuit monastery. A young and enthusiastic American rector has done much to give it new impulse; but one man single-handed cannot reform the Latin-American character. Its 160 students from the four surrounding departments have increased both in numbers and diligence since the “conservative” professors were thrown out, but their point of view is still not exactly that of our own college men. Among others I attended a class on “Special Literature.” It was a third-year course, of seven students; the hour, from three to four. I arrived at 3:15 and found the professor, a Ph.D. (Cuzco) whose wide nostrils, broad face, and prominent cheek bones proved him chiefly of aboriginal blood, pacing up and down the second-story corredor smoking a cigarette. At 3:20 a white youth of about twenty-three, with a mustache, drifted languidly across the patio swinging his cane. He and the professor bowed low, shook hands, exchanged the unavoidable “Buenas tardes, señor. Cómo está usted? Cómo está la familia?” lifted their hats, and at length broke the clinch. The professor produced from his pocket a massive key and opened a cubical, whitewashed room, having installed himself in which, he began to “lecture” on Calderón de la Barca. At 3:28 a half-Indian student stamped into the room and interrupted the proceedings with a loud “Buenas tardes, señor,” causing the professor to lose the thread of his discourse for a minute or more. When the interruption had subsided, he continued to lecture, pausing now and then to look at his outline notes, more often to inhale the smoke of the cigarette he still held backward between his fingers. The white youth soon fell asleep, woke as his head dropped, spat on the floor, and then frankly and openly laid his head back against the wall and slept. The other half of the class sat with the filmy, half-closed eyes of a man who is dreaming of his cholita of not too unobliging morals in some hut on the outskirts of town. It would have been ill-bred of the professor, and galling to the “pride” of his class, to have waked them. He finished his cigarette and droned unbrokenly on. At 3:46 another haughty half-Indian, his silver-headed cane held at the approved Parisian angle, broke in upon the lecture with a greeting, which the professor interrupted his remarks to acknowledge. At 3:50 he took advantage of the awakening caused by the new arrival to begin a quiz, asking the white student something about the subject of his discourse. The usual long preliminary sparring for wind in the form of “Ah-oh-ah, Señor Don Pedro Calderón de la Garca, one of the most important authors of his epoch in Spain,” and so through a long list of stock phrases, was followed by a mumbling of some vague and general rubbish he could easily have framed up had he not known whether Señor Don Pedro was man, woman, or priest. When he had said nothing for about two minutes, one of the others was given the floor—no doubt the professor apologized later for being obliged to call upon them because of the presence of a distinguished foreign visitor—and launched forth in another set of phrases. Like the other, he did not know the title of any of Calderón’s dramas, who left only a hundred or two to choose from, though the class had “studied” several of those works during the year’s course. After each question the professor broke in upon the meaningless mumble to answer his query himself, and as he named the works one by one, the student cried out each time with a great display of wisdom, “Ah, sí, señor!” “Es verdad, señor!” as he would have done had the former inadvertently included “Quo Vadis” or “Evangeline.” At 3:56 the professor carefully called the roll to find out how many of the seven were present, entered that important fact on an official blank to be left with the rector at the end of the day, and with much bowing and ceremonious formality the class took leave of themselves, lighted their cigarettes, tucked their canes under their arms, and faded away.

Having long wished to attend a trial, I carried a note of introduction to a judge of the supreme court of the department of Cuzco.

“Trial? Certainly, señor. When do you wish to see one?”

“Any time there happens to be one.”

“Choose for yourself.”

“Well, shall we say Wednesday, at one?”

“It shall be done. I shall have something of importance arranged for you. How would this new burglary case do? Or the recent suicide? The burglary? Very good, then, señor; Wednesday at one. Su servidor, adiós, caballero.”

Luckily there were cases pending, thus sparing the judge the trouble of having to arrange to have the crime committed.

Jury trial is unknown in Peru, as in most, if not all Spanish-America. In the first place, if the uncle of the accused is a compadre, or his nephew a padrino or a nineteenth cousin of the father-in-law of the judge or anyone else high in authority, the chances are that the matter will be dropped. Favored with none of these advantages, he must let the law take its rigorous, snail-like course. The trial is entirely on paper, back in the recesses of some dingy office. The one I entered at the hour and day set reminded me of some scene from the pages of Dickens. I was bowed to an ancient couch at one side of the dismal adobe room, the secretary, in an aged overcoat of various degrees of fadedness and an enormous neck muffler, sitting at a medieval table. My friend, the “Judge of the First Instance,” in sartorial splendor, sat at another, his silk hat upside down before him. He had “arranged” the case of an Italian shopkeeper who had been robbed the Saturday before. The Italian, being summoned, entered, bowed, remained standing, gave his name, age, religion, and other personal details, took the oath. Then he told his story in his own words to the judge, who asked questions but made no attempt at cross-examination, rather helping the witness in his answers when he stumbled or paused for want of a Spanish word. Meanwhile the secretary busied himself with rolling and consuming innumerable cigarettes. When he had finished his tale, the Italian was shown for the purpose of identification some articles sent over from the Intendencia as taken from the prisoner’s pocket, after which they still remained “in the hands of justice.” Then the witness sat down and the judge himself dictated the story in his own words to the secretary. The latter armed himself with a steel pen, dipped it incessantly into a viceregal inkwell, and peering over the top of his glasses, laboriously wrote in a copybook hand three words at a time, repeating them aloud. Shorthand is unknown in the government offices of the Andes. It would be too much to ask a political henchman to learn stenography, or anything else, for the mere purpose of holding a government position; typewriters are expensive; moreover, typewritten documents are not legal in most governmental formalities; so ultra-modern a system would be lacking in dignity for such solemn purposes, and its introduction would require new effort on the part of secretaries whose only asset is the medieval art of penmanship. The endless task over and the Italian dismissed, one of the prisoners, a half-breed boy of eighteen, of degenerate type, was brought in by an Indian soldier and “testified” in the same manner as the plaintiff had done. He was not required to take the oath, but was warned to tell the truth. Again it was his own story, just as he chose to tell it, with no attempt to trip him up, and even occasional assistance. This the judge redictated in his own more cultured language, that the archives of Cuzco should not be marred by the undignified speech of the masses; and the “trial” was over. A deaf-mute wished to testify in the case, but as there are no schools in Peru for those so afflicted, there was no one who could understand him.

In short, a trial in Spanish-America consists of nothing but the making of affidavits, there called declaraciones. These are seen only by the judge, not even the prisoner’s lawyer being permitted—legally—access to them. Later, if there is found time for it, comes the sumario in which the judge reads in his private study the various declarations and passes judgment and sentence, likewise in privacy, which sentence must be reviewed by the Superior Court of the Department. The curious may ask where the lawyer for the prisoner comes in. I was informed that “he sees the prisoner first and tells him what to say in his declaration.” Thus is the secret, mysterious “justice” of Latin-America, “a joke at so much a word,” as they call it in Ecuador, administered. If one has a man arrested, one must hire a lawyer to find out what happened to him.

I next went with the judge, in his gleaming stove-pipe hat and surrounded by his suite of courtiers, to the prison on the banks of the noisome Huatenay. The departmental place of confinement consisted of an old-fashioned Spanish dwelling built around a large courtyard, a dismal patio in which were gathered prisoners from all parts of Peru’s largest department, from white men of the capital to half-wild Indians of the montaña, who know so little of the ways of government that they thought they were being held by their tribal enemies. Everyone was doing whatever he chose, with a freedom from restraint that recalled the debtors’ prisons of England a century ago. As in most Latin-American penal institutions, there was no evidence of cruelty or unkindness to inmates, except the passive cruelty of neglect, most of the outward forms of courtesy being kept up between officials and prisoners. By night the latter slept in mud cells of the rambling adobe building, on earth floors as bare as those of an Indian hut unless, like the traveler in the Sierra, they brought their own “beds” with them. No food worthy the name was furnished. Outside the patio, separated from it by a massive iron wicket, were the wives, temporary or otherwise, of the prisoners, who had brought them dinner in baskets, pots, or knotted cloths. This custom of having the judge visit the place of confinement is not without its advantages; at least, it gives him a personal knowledge of what a sentence means. As long as we remained, a constant line of prisoners crowded around my companion to tell their grievances. Those who wore hats carried them in their hands, but the cringing Indians, who mumbled their complaints in Quichua, did not remove their earlap “skating” caps. The petitioners ranged all the way from four “wildmen” from the hot-lands to the east, to a white and well-educated youth who began:

“Your Honor excuses me, but I have now been here seven months, and if you could be pleased to arrange that they have my trial some day before long....”

It is a short but rather breathless climb in this altitude from the level of the town to the ancient fortress of Sacsahuaman, frowning down upon Cuzco from 700 feet above. On the city side the hill hangs almost precipitous, the town piled part way up it; but a flanking road soon brings one out beside the most massive monument of aboriginal art on the American continent. The cyclopean ruins are, as Garsilaso put it, “rather cliffs than walls,” and how these enormous boulders, of which mathematicians compute the largest to weigh a little matter of 360 tons, were set in position on this lofty headland by a race that knew neither horses nor oxen will ever remain as great a mystery as the building of the pyramids. Only one thing is certain; that the builders had unlimited labor at their command and that time was no object. Prescott’s “so finely wrought it was impossible to detect the line of junction between the rocks” is scarcely true; the detection is more than easy. But it is hard to believe these monster walls were constructed by the ancestors of the stolid and ambitionless Indians one sees to-day peddling their wares in the market-place of Cuzco. These downtrodden descendants take the amazing works of their forebears for granted, as we accept the constructions of nature, and never dream of attempting to imitate them. Indeed, many contend that they were not built, but grew up by enchantment. Nations, like individuals, have enthusiasm and initiative for great enterprises in their youth, and are apt to settle down to contentment with the mediocre in middle age, which there are hints that the race we roughly call Inca had reached at the time of the Conquest. The massive triple walls of the fortress were built in zigzag form, with salient angles from which the defenders within could fall upon their enemies, making it sufficient protection to the Imperial city without the necessity of surrounding that with walls. Even after the effete modern inhabitants have tumbled all the stones they could move down into the city to build their own temples and dwellings—the efforts of Lilliputians among giants—and despite the damage wrought by ruthless treasure-hunters, the main portion of the great fortress of Sacsahuaman still remains intact, to bring upon the beholder a rage that Pizarro and his fellow-tramps should have destroyed, like bulls in a china-shop, the Empire that wrought such marvels, a wonder at what might have been had the Conquest of Peru never taken place.

In ancient days, whenever the son of an Inca put a bent pin of champi in the Imperial chair the resulting box on the ear must have been accompanied with a “Here, you aslla supay, go out and carve another step in that boulder!” There is no other rational explanation of the mutilation which every rock and ground-stone for a circuit of many miles around the City of the Sun suffered before the Conquest. Everywhere huge, house-large rocks, dull-gray in color, are fantastically carved in every imaginable form, with seats, crannies, grottoes, and stairways, as if for mere whim or amusement. There was no “scamping” of work in those days, no “good enough” to the straw bosses of the Incas, only one grade,—the perfect. The hardest rock is cut with exquisite care and finish, the angles perfectly sharp, the flat parts smooth as if cast in a mould. To the modern inhabitants every such carved seat is a “throne of the Incas”—as if the Inca had nothing to do but sit around admiring the widespread view from those aërial points of vantage of which his dynasty was so fond. The imagination likes to picture him watching athletic games on the little plain before Sacsahuaman, and chuckling behind his Imperial mask at the antics of children sliding down the Rodadero, or toboggan-stone, as do still those youths of Cuzco who are low enough in caste not to jeopardize their dignity by such antics.

Over behind the ruins and carved rocks I found all the provincial “authorities” gathered one Sunday to uncover another of the many immense boulders that had lain for centuries disguised as a mound of earth. The gobernadores and tenientes, in more or less “European” garb, confined their labor to bossing; the actual work was done by the alguaciles, jealously clinging to their silver-mounted staffs of office, even as they toiled. The digging brought to light not only another huge, fantastically carved ground-rock, but a hint of how Sacsahuaman might have been built. The Incas had but to call in men from all the district roundabout, under their commanders of tens, and if a thousand did not suffice to move a stone, nothing was easier than to summon two, or five, or ten thousand. Thus the government of to-day has continued many of the ancient ways, as the Church has grafted its own forms on the religion of the Children of the Sun.

But more striking even than prehistoric ruins is the view of Cuzco from the foot of the inevitable wooden cross at the summit of Sacsahuaman. So steep is the hill on this side, and so close to the town, that it seems almost to bulge out over it, and all the Imperial city lies spread out beneath, as from an aeroplane, its every plaza and patio in full view to its very depths, the activities of every family as plainly visible as if some magic wand had lifted away the concealing roofs. Here and there, even on a Sunday, an Indian in crude-colored garments and his pancake hat crawls along the fortress hill behind his oxen and wooden plow, with the Imperial city of his forefathers as a background. Beyond, the greenish valley of the Huatenay stretches away southward between velvety-brown, wrinkled hills, the four royal highways diverging from the main plaza as principal streets and sallying forth to the “Four Corners of the Earth” as directly as the configurations of the Andes permit. But always the eye drifts back to the city below, spread out in every slightest detail. Under the Incas it may have been “bright and shining with gold and gay with color, its long and narrow streets, crossing each other at right angles with perfect regularity, adorned with beautiful palaces and temples”; even to-day, under the rays of the unclouded Andean sun, it is a scene no mere words can bring to him who has not looked down upon it in person. The soft red of its aged tile roofs and the rich brown of its bulking churches leaves no need for golden adornment. The Sunday-morning noises come up distinctly,—school-boys playing in the patios of monasteries, fighting-cocks haughtily challenging the world to combat, a weary bell booming a belated summons, the half-barbarous, half-inspiring screech of trumpets rising as a regiment of the garrison that keeps Cuzco loyal to “those degenerate negroes of Lima” sets out on a march; yet all blending together into a sort of pagan music that carries the imagination bodily back to the pre-Conquest days of long ago.

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