HAPPY ENDING

                           By HENRY KUTTNER

                Out of the Future emerge the Robot and
                 Tharn—while James Kelvin fights them
                 blindly, knowing not friend from foe!

                Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1948.

[Illustration: The android uttered a protesting cry as Kelvin sent a
wave of mental energy at him]

This is the way the story ended:

James Kelvin concentrated very hard on the thought of the chemist with
the red mustache who had promised him a million dollars. It was simply a
matter of tuning in on the man’s brain, establishing a rapport. He had
done it before. Now it was more important than ever that he do it this
one last time. He pressed the button on the gadget the robot had given
him, and thought hard.

Far off, across limitless distances, he found the rapport.

He clamped on the mental tight beam.

He rode it....

The red-mustached man looked up, gaped, and grinned delightedly.

“So there you are!” he said. “I didn’t hear you come in. Good grief,
I’ve been trying to find you for two weeks.”

“Tell me one thing quick,” Kelvin said. “What’s your name?”

“George Bailey. Incidentally, what’s yours?”

But Kelvin didn’t answer. He had suddenly remembered the other thing the
robot had told him about that gadget which established rapport when he
pressed the button. He pressed it now—and nothing happened. The gadget
had gone dead. Its task was finished, which obviously meant he had at
last achieved health, fame and fortune. The robot had warned him, of
course. The thing was set to do one specialized job. Once he got what he
wanted, it would work no more.

So Kelvin got the million dollars.

And he lived happily ever after....

This is the middle of the story:

As he pushed aside the canvas curtain something—a carelessly hung
rope—swung down at his face, knocking the horn-rimmed glasses askew.
Simultaneously a vivid bluish light blazed into his unprotected eyes. He
felt a curious, sharp sense of disorientation, a shifting motion that
was almost instantly gone.

Things steadied before him. He let the curtain fall back into place,
making legible again the painted inscription: horoscopes—learn
your future—and he stood staring at the remarkable horomancer.

It was a—oh, impossible!

The robot said in a flat, precise voice, “You are James Kelvin. You are
a reporter. You are thirty years old, unmarried, and you came to Los
Angeles from Chicago today on the advice of your physician. Is that
correct?”

In his astonishment Kelvin called on the Deity. Then he settled his
glasses more firmly and tried to remember an exposé of charlatans he had
once written. There was some obvious way they worked things like this,
miraculous as it sounded.

The robot looked at him impassively out of its faceted eye.

“On reading your mind,” it continued in the pedantic voice, “I find this
is the year Nineteen Forty-nine. My plans will have to be revised. I had
meant to arrive in the year Nineteen Seventy. I will ask you to assist
me.”

Kelvin put his hands in his pockets and grinned.

“With money, naturally,” he said. “You had me going for a minute. How do
you do it, anyhow? Mirrors? Or like Maelzel’s chess player?”

“I am not a machine operated by a dwarf, nor am I an optical illusion,”
the robot assured him. “I am an artificially created living organism,
originating at a period far in your future.”

“And I’m not the sucker you take me for,” Kelvin remarked pleasantly. “I
came in here to—”

“You lost your baggage checks,” the robot said. “While wondering what to
do about it, you had a few drinks and took the Wilshire bus at
exactly—exactly eight-thirty-five post meridian.”

“Lay off the mind-reading,” Kelvin said. “And don’t tell me you’ve been
running this joint very long with a line like that. The cops would be
after you. _If_ you’re a real robot, ha, ha.”

“I have been running this joint,” the robot said, “for approximately
five minutes. My predecessor is unconscious behind that chest in the
corner. Your arrival here was sheer coincidence.” It paused very
briefly, and Kelvin had the curious impression that it was watching to
see if the story so far had gone over well.

The impression was curious because Kelvin had no feeling at all that
there was a man in the large, jointed figure before him. If such a thing
as a robot were possible, he would have believed implicitly that he
confronted a genuine specimen. Such things being impossible, he waited
to see what the gimmick would be.

“My arrival here was also accidental,” the robot informed him. “This
being the case, my equipment will have to be altered slightly. I will
require certain substitute mechanisms. For that, I gather as I read your
mind, I will have to engage in your peculiar barter system of economics.
In a word, coinage or gold or silver certificates will be necessary.
Thus I am—temporarily—a horomancer.”

“Sure, sure,” Kelvin said. “Why not a simple mugging? If you’re a robot,
you could do a super-mugging job with a quick twist of the gears.”

“It would attract attention. Above all, I require secrecy. As a matter
of fact, I am—” The robot paused, searched Kelvin’s brain for the right
phrase, and said, “—on the lam. In my era, time-traveling is strictly
forbidden, even by accident, unless government-sponsored.”

There was a fallacy there somewhere, Kelvin thought, but he couldn’t
quite spot it. He blinked at the robot intently. It looked pretty
unconvincing.

“What proof do you need?” the creature asked. “I read your brain the
minute you came in, didn’t I? You must have felt the temporary amnesia
as I drew out the knowledge and then replaced it.”

“So that’s what happened,” Kelvin said. He took a cautious step
backward. “Well, I think I’ll be getting along.”

“Wait,” the robot commanded. “I see you have begun to distrust me.
Apparently you now regret having suggested a mugging job. You fear I may
act on the suggestion. Allow me to reassure you. It is true that I could
take your money and assure secrecy by killing you, but I am not
permitted to kill humans. The alternative is to engage in the barter
system. I can offer you something valuable in return for a small amount
of gold. Let me see.” The faceted gaze swept around the tent, dwelt
piercingly for a moment on Kelvin. “A horoscope,” the robot said. “It is
supposed to help you achieve health, fame and fortune. Astrology,
however, is out of my line. I can merely offer a logical scientific
method of attaining the same results.”

“Uh-huh,” Kelvin said skeptically. “How much? And why haven’t _you_ used
that method?”

“I have other ambitions,” the robot said in a cryptic manner. “Take
this.” There was a brief clicking. A panel opened in the metallic chest.
The robot extracted a small, flat case and handed it to Kelvin, who
automatically closed his fingers on the cold metal.

“Be careful. Don’t push that button until—”

But Kelvin had pushed it....

He was driving a figurative car that had got out of control. There was
somebody else inside his head. There was a schizophrenic, double-tracked
locomotive that was running wild and his hand on the throttle couldn’t
slow it down an instant. His mental steering-wheel had snapped.

Somebody else was thinking for him!

Not quite a human being. Not quite sane, probably, from Kelvin’s
standards. But awfully sane from his own. Sane enough to have mastered
the most intricate principles of non-Euclidean geometry in the nursery.

The senses get synthesized in the brain into a sort of common language,
a master-tongue. Part of it was auditory, part pictorial, and there were
smells and tastes and tactile sensations that were sometimes familiar
and sometimes spiced with the absolutely alien. And it was chaotic.

Something like this, perhaps....

“—Big Lizards getting too numerous this season—tame threvvars have the
same eyes not on Callisto though—vacation soon—preferably
galactic—solar system claustrophobic—byanding tomorrow if square
rootola and upsliding three—”

But that was merely the word-symbolism. Subjectively, it was far more
detailed and very frightening. Luckily, reflex had lifted Kelvin’s
finger from the button almost instantly, and he stood there motionless,
shivering slightly.

He was afraid now.

The robot said, “You should not have begun the rapport until I
instructed you. Now there will be danger. Wait.” His eye changed color.
“Yes ... there is ... Tharn, yes. Beware of Tharn.”

“I don’t want any part of it,” Kelvin said quickly. “Here, take this
thing back.”

“Then you will be unprotected against Tharn. Keep the device. It will,
as I promised, ensure your health, fame and fortune, far more
effectively than a—a horoscope.”

“No, thanks. I don’t know how you managed that trick—sub-sonics, maybe,
but I don’t—”

“Wait,” the robot said. “When you pressed that button, you were in the
mind of someone who exists very far in the future. It created a temporal
rapport. You can bring about that rapport any time you press the
button.”

“Heaven forfend,” Kelvin said, still sweating a little.

“Consider the opportunities. Suppose a troglodyte of the far past had
access to your brain? He could achieve anything he wanted.”

It had become important, somehow, to find a logical rebuttal to the
robot’s arguments. “Like St. Anthony—or was it Luther?—arguing with
the devil?” Kelvin thought dizzily. His headache was worse, and he
suspected he had drunk more than was good for him. But he merely said:

“How could a troglodyte understand what’s in my brain? He couldn’t apply
the knowledge without the same conditioning I’ve had.”

“Have you ever had sudden and apparently illogical ideas? Compulsions?
So that you seem forced to think of certain things, count up to certain
numbers, work out particular problems? Well, the man in the future on
whom my device is focused doesn’t know he’s en rapport with you, Kelvin.
But he’s vulnerable to compulsions. All you have to do is concentrate on
a problem and then press the button. Your rapport will be
compelled—illogically, from his viewpoint—to solve that problem. And
you’ll be reading his brain. You’ll find out how it works. There are
limitations, you’ll learn those too. And the device will ensure health,
wealth and fame for you.”

“It would ensure anything, if it really worked that way. I could do
anything. That’s why I’m not buying!”

“I said there were limitations. As soon as you’ve successfully achieved
health, fame, and fortune, the device will become useless. I’ve taken
care of that. But meanwhile you can use it to solve all your problems by
tapping the brain of the more intelligent specimen in the future. The
important point is to concentrate on your problems _before_ you press
the button. Otherwise you may get more than Tharn on your track.”

“Tharn? What—”

“I think an—an android,” the robot said, looking at nothing. “An
artificial human ... However, let us consider my own problem. I need a
small amount of gold.”

“So that’s the kicker,” Kelvin said, feeling oddly relieved. He said, “I
haven’t got any.”

“Your watch.”

Kelvin jerked his arm so that his wrist-watch showed. “Oh, no. That
watch cost plenty.”

“All I need is the gold-plating,” the robot said, shooting out a reddish
ray from its eye. “Thank you.” The watch was now dull gray metal.

“Hey!” Kelvin cried.

“If you use the rapport device, your health, fame and fortune will be
assured,” the robot said rapidly. “You will be as happy as any man of
this era can be. It will solve all your problems—including Tharn. Wait
a minute.” The creature took a backward step and disappeared behind a
hanging Oriental rug that had never been east of Peoria.

There was silence.

Kelvin looked from his altered watch to the flat, enigmatic object in
his palm. It was about two inches by two inches, and no thicker than a
woman’s vanity-case, and there was a sunken push-button on its side.

He dropped it into his pocket and took a few steps forward. He looked
behind the pseudo-Oriental rug, to find nothing except emptiness and a
flapping slit cut in the canvas wall of the booth. The robot, it seemed,
had taken a powder. Kelvin peered out through the slit. There was the
light and sound of Ocean Park amusement pier, that was all. And the
silvered, moving blackness of the Pacific Ocean, stretching to where
small lights showed Malibu far up the invisible curve of the coastal
cliffs.

So he came back inside the booth and looked around. A fat man in a
swami’s costume was unconscious behind the carved chest the robot had
indicated. His breath, plus a process of deduction, told Kelvin that the
man had been drinking.

Not knowing what else to do, Kelvin called on the Deity again. He found
suddenly that he was thinking about someone or something called Tharn,
who was an android.

Horomancy ... time ... rapport ... _no!_ Protective disbelief slid
like plate armor around his mind. A practical robot couldn’t be made. He
knew that. He’d have heard—he was a reporter, wasn’t he?

Sure he was.

Desiring noise and company, he went along to the shooting gallery and
knocked down a few ducks. The flat case burned in his pocket. The dully
burnished metal of his wrist-watch burned in his memory. The remembrance
of that drainage from his brain, and the immediate replacement burned in
his mind. Presently bar whiskey burned in his stomach.

He’d left Chicago because of sinusitis, recurrent and annoying. Ordinary
sinusitis. Not schizophrenia or hallucinations or accusing voices coming
from the walls. Not because he had been seeing bats or robots. That
thing hadn’t really been a robot. It all had a perfectly natural
explanation. Oh, sure.

Health, fame and fortune. And if—

_THARN!_

The thought crashed with thunderbolt impact into his head.

And then another thought: I _am_ going nuts!

A silent voice began to mutter insistently, over and over.
“Tharn—Tharn—Tharn—Tharn—”

And another voice, the voice of sanity and safety, answered it and
drowned it out. Half aloud, Kelvin muttered:

“I’m James Noel Kelvin. I’m a reporter—special features, leg work,
rewrite. I’m thirty years old, unmarried, and I came to Los Angeles
today and lost my baggage checks and—and I’m going to have another
drink and find a hotel. Anyhow, the climate seems to be curing my
sinusitis.”

_Tharn_, the muffled drum-beat said almost below the threshold of
realization. _Tharn, Tharn._

_Tharn._

He ordered another drink and reached in his pocket for a coin. His hand
touched the metal case. And simultaneously he felt a light pressure on
his shoulder.

Instinctively he glanced around. It was a seven-fingered, spidery hand
tightening—hairless, without nails—and white as smooth ivory.

The one, overwhelming necessity that sprang into Kelvin’s mind was a
simple longing to place as much space as possible between himself and
the owner of that disgusting hand. It was a vital requirement, but one
difficult of fulfilment, a problem that excluded everything else from
Kelvin’s thoughts. He knew, vaguely, that he was gripping the flat case
in his pocket as though that could save him, but all he was thinking
was:

I’ve got to get away from here.

The monstrous, alien thoughts of someone in the future spun him insanely
along their current. It could not have taken a moment while that
skilled, competent, trained mind, wise in the lore of an unthinkable
future, solved the random problem that had come so suddenly, with such
curious compulsion.

Three methods of transportation were simultaneously clear to Kelvin. Two
he discarded; motorplats were obviously inventions yet to come, and
quirling—involving, as it did, a sensory coil-helmet—was beyond him.
But the third method—

Already the memory was fading. And that hand was still tightening on his
shoulder. He clutched at the vanishing ideas and desperately made his
brain and his muscles move along the unlikely direction the future-man
had visualized.

And he was out in the open, a cold night wind blowing on him, still in a
sitting position, but with nothing but empty air between his spine and
the sidewalk.

He sat down suddenly.

Passersby on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga were not
much surprised at the sight of a dark, lanky man sitting by the curb.
Only one woman had noticed Kelvin’s actual arrival, and she knew when
she was well off. She went right on home.

Kelvin got up laughing with soft hysteria. “Teleportation,” he said.
“How did I work it? It’s gone ... Hard to remember afterward, eh? I’ll
have to start carrying a notebook again.”

And then—“But what about Tharn?”

He looked around, frightened. Reassurance came only after half an hour
had passed without additional miracles. Kelvin walked along the
Boulevard, keeping a sharp lookout. No Tharn, though.

Occasionally he slid a hand into his pocket and touched the cold metal
of the case. Health, wealth and fortune. Why, he could—

But he did not press the button. Too vivid was the memory of that
shocking, alien disorientation he had felt. The mind, the experiences,
the habit-patterns of the far future were uncomfortably strong.

He would use the little case again—oh, yes. But there was no hurry.
First, he’d have to work out a few angles.

His disbelief was completely gone....

Tharn showed up the next night and scared the daylights out of Kelvin
again. Prior to that, the reporter had failed to find his baggage
tickets, and was only consoled by the two hundred bucks in his wallet.
He took a room—paying in advance—at a medium-good hotel, and began
wondering how he might apply his pipe-line to the future. Very sensibly,
he decided to continue a normal life until something developed. At any
rate, he’d have to make a few connections. He tried the _Times_, the
_Examiner_, the _News_, and some others. But these things develop
slowly, except in the movies. That night Kelvin was in his hotel room
when his unwelcome guest appeared.

It was, of course, Tharn.

He wore a very large white turban, approximately twice the size of his
head. He had a dapper black mustache, waxed downward at the tips like
the mustache of a mandarin, or a catfish. He stared urgently at Kelvin
out of the bathroom mirror.

Kelvin had been wondering whether or not he needed a shave before going
out to dinner. He was rubbing his chin thoughtfully at the moment Tharn
put in an appearance, and there was a perceptible mental lag between
occurrence and perception, so that to Kelvin it seemed that he himself
had mysteriously sprouted a long moustache. He reached for his upper
lip. It was smooth. But in the glass the black waxed hairs quivered as
Tharn pushed his face up against the surface of the mirror.

It was so shockingly disorienting, somehow, that Kelvin was quite unable
to think at all. He took a quick step backward. The edge of the bathtub
caught him behind the knees and distracted him momentarily, fortunately
for his sanity. When he looked again there was only his own appalled
face reflected above the wash-bowl. But after a second or two the face
seemed to develop a cloud of white turban, and mandarin-like whiskers
began to form sketchily.

Kelvin clapped a hand to his eyes and spun away. In about fifteen
seconds he spread his fingers enough to peep through them at the glass.
He kept his palm pressed desperately to his upper lip, in some wild hope
of inhibiting the sudden sprouting of a moustache. What peeped back at
him from the mirror looked like himself. At least, it had no turban, and
it did not wear horn-rimmed glasses. He risked snatching his hand away
for a quick look, and clapped it in place again just in time to prevent
Tharn from taking shape in the glass.

Still shielding his face, he went unsteadily into the bedroom and took
the flat case out of his coat pocket. But he didn’t press the button
that would close a mental synapse between two incongruous eras. He
didn’t want to do that again, he realized. More horrible, somehow, than
what was happening now was the thought of reentering that _alien_ brain.

He was standing before the bureau, and in the mirror one eye looked out
at him between reflected fingers. It was a wild eye behind the gleaming
spectacle-lens, but it seemed to be his own. Tentatively he took his
hand away....

This mirror showed more of Tharn. Kelvin wished it hadn’t. Tharn was
wearing white knee-boots of some glittering plastic. Between them and
the turban he wore nothing whatever except a minimum of loin-cloth, also
glittering plastic. Tharn was very thin, but he looked active. He looked
quite active enough to spring right into the hotel room. His skin was
whiter than his turban, and his hands had seven fingers each, all right.

Kelvin abruptly turned away, but Tharn was resourceful. The dark window
made enough of a reflecting surface to show a lean, loin-clothed figure.
The feet showed bare, and they were less normal than Tharn’s hands. And
the polished brass of a lamp-base gave back the picture of a small,
distorted face not Kelvin’s own.

Kelvin found a corner without reflecting surfaces and pushed into it,
his hands shielding his face. He was still holding the flat case.

Oh, fine, he thought bitterly. Everything’s got a string on it. What
good will this rapport gadget do me if Tharn’s going to show up every
day? Maybe I’m only crazy. I hope so.

Something would have to be done unless Kelvin was prepared to go through
life with his face buried in his hands. The worst of it was that Tharn
had a haunting look of familiarity. Kelvin discarded a dozen
possibilities, from reincarnation to the _déjà vu_ phenomenon, but—

He peeped through his hands, in time to see Tharn raising a cylindrical
gadget of some sort and leveling it like a gun. That gesture formed
Kelvin’s decision. He’d _have_ to do something, and fast. So,
concentrating on the problem—_I want out!_—he pressed the button in
the surface of the flat case.

And instantly the teleportation method he had forgotten was perfectly
clear to him. Other matters, however, were obscure. The smells—someone
was thinking—were adding up to a—there was no word for that, only a
shocking visio-auditory ideation that was simply dizzying. Someone named
Three Million and Ninety Pink had written a new flatch. And there was
the physical sensation of licking a twenty-four-dollar stamp and
sticking it on a postcard.

But, most important, the man in the future had had—or would have—a
compulsion to think about the teleportation method, and as Kelvin
snapped back into his own mind and time, he instantly used that
method....

He was falling.

Icy water smacked him hard. Miraculously he kept his grip on the flat
case. He had a whirling vision of stars in a night sky, and the
phosphorescent sheen of silvery light on a dark sea. Then brine stung
his nostrils.

Kelvin had never learned how to swim.

As he went down for the last time, bubbling a scream, he literally
clutched at the proverbial straw he was holding. His finger pushed the
button down again. There was no need to concentrate on the problem; he
couldn’t think of anything else.

Mental chaos, fantastic images—and the answer.

It took concentration, and there wasn’t much time left. Bubbles streamed
up past his face. He felt them, but he couldn’t see them. All around,
pressing in avidly, was the horrible coldness of the salt water....

But he did know the method now, and he knew how it worked. He thought
along the lines the future mind had indicated. Something happened.
Radiation—that was the nearest familiar term—poured out of his brain
and did peculiar things to his lung-tissue. His blood cells adapted
themselves....

He was breathing water, and it was no longer strangling him.

But Kelvin had also learned that this emergency adaptation could not be
maintained for very long. Teleportation was the answer to that. And
surely he could remember the method now. He had actually used it to
escape from Tharn only a few minutes ago.

Yet he could not remember. The memory was expunged cleanly from his
mind. So there was nothing else to do but press the button again, and
Kelvin did that, most reluctantly.

Dripping wet, he was standing on an unfamiliar street. It was no street
he knew, but apparently it was in his own time and on his own planet.
Luckily, teleportation seemed to have limitations. The wind was cold.
Kelvin stood in a puddle that grew rapidly around his feet. He stared
around.

He picked out a sign up the street that offered Turkish Baths, and
headed moistly in that direction. His thoughts were mostly
profane....

He was in New Orleans, of all places. Presently he was drunk in New
Orleans. His thoughts kept going around in circles, and Scotch was a
fine palliative, an excellent brake. He needed to get control again. He
had an almost miraculous power, and he wanted to be able to use it
effectively before the unexpected happened again. Tharn....

He sat in a hotel room and swigged Scotch. Gotta be logical!

He sneezed.

The trouble was, of course, that there were so few points of contact
between his own mind and that of the future-man. Moreover, he’d got the
rapport only in times of crisis. Like having access to the Alexandrian
Library, five seconds a day. In five seconds you couldn’t even start
translating....

Health, fame and fortune. He sneezed again. The robot had been a liar.
His health seemed to be going fast. What about that robot? How had he
got involved, anyway? He said he’d fallen into this era from the future,
but robots are notorious liars. Gotta be logical....

Apparently the future was peopled by creatures not unlike the cast of a
Frankenstein picture. Androids, robots, so-called men whose minds were
shockingly different.... _Sneeze._ Another drink.

The robot had said that the case would lose its power after Kelvin had
achieved health, fame and fortune. Which was a distressing thought.
Suppose he attained those enviable goals, found the little push-button
useless, and _then_ Tharn showed up? Oh, no. That called for another
shot.

Sobriety was the wrong condition in which to approach a matter that in
itself was as wild as delirium tremens, even though, Kelvin knew, the
science he had stumbled on was all theoretically quite possible. But not
in this day and age. Sneeze.

The trick would be to pose the right problem and use the case at some
time when you weren’t drowning or being menaced by that bewhiskered
android with his seven-fingered hands and his ominous rod-like weapon.
Find the problem.

But that future-mind was hideous.

And suddenly, with drunken clarity, Kelvin realized that he was
profoundly drawn to that dim, shadowy world of the future.

He could not see its complete pattern, but he sensed it somehow. He knew
that it was _right_, a far better world and time than this. If he could
be that unknown man who dwelt there, all would go well.

Man must needs love the highest, he thought wryly. Oh, well. He shook
the bottle. How much had he absorbed? He felt fine.

Gotta be logical.

Outside the window street-lights blinked off and on. Neons traced goblin
languages against the night. It seemed rather alien, too, but so did
Kelvin’s own body. He started to laugh, but a sneeze choked that off.

All I want, he thought, is health, fame and fortune. Then I’ll settle
down and live happily ever after, without a care or worry. I won’t need
this enchanted case after that. Happy ending.

On impulse he took out the box and examined it. He tried to pry it open
and failed. His finger hovered over the button.

“How can I—” he thought, and his finger moved half an inch....

It wasn’t so alien now that he was drunk. The future man’s name was
Quarra Vee. Odd he had never realized that before, but how often does a
man think of his own name? Quarra Vee was playing some sort of game
vaguely reminiscent of chess, but his opponent was on a planet of
Sirius, some distance away. The chessmen were all unfamiliar.
Complicated, dizzying space-time gambits flashed through Quarra Vee’s
mind as Kelvin listened in. Then Kelvin’s problem thrust through, the
compulsion hit Quarra Vee, and—

It was all mixed up. There were two problems, really. How to cure a
cold—coryza. And how to become healthy, rich and famous in a
practically prehistoric era—for Quarra Vee.

A small problem, however, to Quarra Vee. He solved it and went back to
his game with the Sirian.

Kelvin was back in the hotel room in New Orleans.

He was very drunk or he wouldn’t have risked it. The method involved
using his brain to tune in on another brain in this present twentieth
century that had exactly the wave-length he required. All sorts of
factors would build up to the sum total of that wave-length—experience,
opportunity, position, knowledge, imagination, honesty—but he found it
at last, after hesitating among three totals that were all nearly right.
Still, one was righter, to three decimal points. Still drunk as a lord,
Kelvin clamped on a mental tight beam, turned on the teleportation, and
rode the beam across America to a well-equipped laboratory where a man
sat reading.

The man was bald and had a bristling red moustache. He looked up sharply
at some sound Kelvin made.

“Hey!” he said. “How did you get in here?”

“Ask Quarra Vee,” Kelvin said.

“Who? _What?_” The man put down his book.

Kelvin called on his memory. It seemed to be slipping. He used the
rapport case for an instant, and refreshed his mind. Not so unpleasant
this time, either. He was beginning to understand Quarra Vee’s world a
little. He liked it. However, he supposed he’d forget that too.

“An improvement on Woodward’s protein analogues,” he told the
red-moustached man. “Simple synthesis will do it.”

“Who the devil are you?”

“Call me Jim,” Kelvin said simply. “And shut up and listen.” He began to
explain, as to a small, stupid child. (The man before him was one of
America’s foremost chemists.) “Proteins are made of amino acids. There
are about thirty-three amino acids—”

“There aren’t.”

“There are. Shut up. Their molecules can be arranged in lots of ways. So
we get an almost infinite variety of proteins. And all living things are
forms of protein. The absolute synthesis involves a chain of amino acids
long enough to recognize clearly as a protein molecule. That’s been the
trouble.”

The man with the red moustache seemed quite interested. “Fischer
assembled a chain of eighteen,” he said, blinking. “Abderhalden got up
to nineteen, and Woodward, of course, has made chains ten thousand units
long. But as for testing—”

“The complete protein molecule consists of complete sets of sequences.
But if you can test only one or two sections of an analogue you can’t be
sure of the others. Wait a minute.” Kelvin used the rapport case again.
“Now I know. Well, you can make almost anything out of synthesized
protein. Silk, wool, hair—but the main thing, of course,” he said,
sneezing, “is a cure for coryza.”

“Now look—” said the red-moustached man.

“Some of the viruses are chains of amino acids, aren’t they? Well,
modify their structure. Make ’em harmless. Bacteria too. And synthesize
antibiotics.”

“I wish I could. However, Mr.—”

“Just call me Jim.”

“Yes. However, all this is old stuff.”

“Grab your pencil,” Kelvin said. “From now on it’ll be solid, with
riffs. The method of synthesizing and testing is as follows—”

He explained, very thoroughly and clearly. He had to use the rapport
case only twice. And when he had finished, the man with the red
moustache laid down his pencil and stared.

“This is incredible,” he said. “If it works—”

“I want health, fame and fortune,” Kelvin said stubbornly. “It’ll work.”

“Yes, but—my good man—”

However, Kelvin insisted. Luckily for himself, the mental testing of the
red-moustached man had included briefing for honesty and opportunity,
and it ended with the chemist agreeing to sign partnership papers with
Kelvin. The commercial possibilities of the process were unbounded.
Dupont or GM would be glad to buy it.

“I want lots of money. A fortune.”

“You’ll make a million dollars,” the red-moustached man said patiently.

“Then I want a receipt. Have to have this in black and white. Unless you
want to give me my million now.”

Frowning, the chemist shook his head. “I can’t do that. I’ll have to run
tests, open negotiations—but don’t worry about that. Your discovery is
certainly worth a million. You’ll be famous, too.”

“And healthy?”

“There won’t be any more disease, after a while,” the chemist said
quietly. “That’s the real miracle.”

“Write it down,” Kelvin clamored.

“All right. We can have partnership papers drawn up tomorrow. This will
do temporarily. Understand, the actual credit belongs to you.”

“It’s got to be in ink. A pencil won’t do.”

“Just a minute, then,” the red-moustached man said, and went away in
search of ink. Kelvin looked around the laboratory, beaming happily.

Tharn materialized three feet away. Tharn was holding the rod-weapon. He
lifted it.

Kelvin instantly used the rapport case. Then he thumbed his nose at
Tharn and teleported himself far away.

He was immediately in a cornfield, somewhere, but undistilled corn was
not what Kelvin wanted. He tried again. This time he reached Seattle.

That was the beginning of Kelvin’s monumental two-week combination binge
and chase.

His thoughts weren’t pleasant.

He had a frightful hangover, ten cents in his pocket, and an overdue
hotel bill. A fortnight of keeping one jump ahead of Tharn, via
teleportation, had frazzled his nerves so unendurably that only liquor
had kept him going. Now even that stimulus was failing. The drink died
in him and left what felt like a corpse.

Kelvin groaned and blinked miserably. He took off his glasses and
cleaned them, but that didn’t help.

What a fool.

He didn’t even know the name of that chemist!

There was health, wealth and fame waiting for him just around the
corner, but what corner? Some day he’d find out, probably, when the news
of the new protein synthesis was publicized, but when would that be? In
the meantime, what about Tharn?

Moreover, the chemist couldn’t locate him, either. The man knew Kelvin
only as Jim. Which had somehow seemed a good idea at the time, but not
now.

Kelvin took out the rapport case and stared at it with red eyes. Quarra
Vee, eh? He rather liked Quarra Vee now. Trouble was, a half hour after
his rapport, at most, he would forget all the details.

This time he used the push-button almost as Tharn snapped into bodily
existence a few feet away.

The teleportation angle again. He was sitting in the middle of a desert.
Cactus and Joshua trees were all the scenery. There was a purple range
of mountains far away.

No Tharn, though.

Kelvin began to be thirsty. Suppose the case stopped working now? Oh,
this couldn’t go on. A decision hanging fire for a week finally
crystallized into a conclusion so obvious he felt like kicking himself.
Perfectly obvious!

Why hadn’t he thought of it at the very beginning?

He concentrated on the problem: How can I get rid of Tharn? He pushed
the button....

And, a moment later, he knew the answer. It would be simple, really.

The pressing urgency was gone suddenly. That seemed to release a fresh
flow of thought. Everything became quite clear.

He waited for Tharn.

He did not have to wait long. There was a tremor in the shimmering air,
and the turbaned, pallid figure sprang into tangible reality.

The rod-weapon was poised.

Taking no chances, Kelvin posed his problem again, pressed the button,
and instantly reassured himself as to the method. He simply thought in a
very special and peculiar way—the way Quarra Vee had indicated.

Tharn was flung back a few feet. The moustached mouth gaped open as he
uttered a cry.

“Don’t!” the android cried. “I’ve been trying to—”

Kelvin focused harder on his thought. Mental energy, he felt, was
pouring out toward the android.

Tharn croaked, “Trying—you didn’t—give me—chance—”

And then Tharn was lying motionless on the hot sand, staring blindly up.
The seven-fingered hands twitched once and were still. The artificial
life that had animated the android was gone. It would not return.

Kelvin turned his back and drew a long, shuddering breath. He was safe.
He closed his mind to all thoughts but one, all problems but one.

How can I find the red-moustached man?

He pressed the button.

This is the way the story starts:

Quarra Vee sat in the temporal warp with his android Tharn, and made
sure everything was under control.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“You’ll pass,” Tharn said. “Nobody will be suspicious in the era you’re
going to. It didn’t take long to synthesize the equipment.”

“Not long. Clothes—they look enough like real wool and linen, I
suppose. Wrist watch, money—everything in order. Wrist watch—that’s
odd, isn’t it? Imagine people who need machinery to tell time!”

“Don’t forget the spectacles,” Tharn said.

Quarra Vee put them on. “Ugh. But I suppose—”

“It’ll be safer. The optical properties in the lenses are a guard you
may need against dangerous mental radiations. Don’t take them off, or
the robot may try some tricks.”

“He’d better not,” Quarra Vee said. “That so-and-so runaway robot!
What’s he up to, anyway, I wonder? He always was a malcontent, but at
least he knew his place. I’m sorry I ever had him made. No telling what
he’ll do, loose in a semi-prehistoric world, if we don’t catch him and
bring him home.”

“He’s in that horomancy booth,” Tharn said, leaning out of the
time-warp. “Just arrived. You’ll have to catch him by surprise. And
you’ll need your wits about you, too. Try not to go off into any more of
those deep-thought compulsions you’ve been having. They could be
dangerous. That robot will use some of his tricks if he gets the chance.
I don’t know what powers he’s developed by himself, but I do know he’s
an expert at hypnosis and memory erasure already. If you aren’t careful
he’ll snap your memory-track and substitute a false brain-pattern. Keep
those glasses on. If anything should go wrong, I’ll use the
rehabilitation ray on you, eh?” And he held up a small rod-like
projector.

Quarra Vee nodded.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be back before you know it. I have an appointment
with that Sirian to finish our game this evening.”

It was an appointment he never kept.

Quarra Vee stepped out of the temporal warp and strolled along the
boardwalk toward the booth. The clothing he wore felt tight,
uncomfortable, rough. He wriggled a little in it. The booth stood before
him now, with its painted sign.

He pushed aside the canvas curtain and something—a carelessly hung
rope—swung down at his face, knocking the horn-rimmed glasses askew.
Simultaneously a vivid bluish light blazed into his unprotected eyes. He
felt a curious, sharp sensation of disorientation, a shifting motion
that almost instantly was gone.

The robot said, “You are James Kelvin.”


insists on the undoubted source of wealth the Government possesses
in the deposits of nitrate, that it was unaware of the actual amount
of guano still remaining in the deposits of the north and the south.
We may also safely believe that the Peruvian Government did not
at the time of the publication of the despatch, dream of asking
the bondholders to sacrifice any of their rights; and further, in
its anxiety to save its credit with England, it was hurried into a
confession which it now regrets.

What spirit of evil suggested to President Pardo the idea of appealing
to the charity of his creditors, immediately after allowing his finance
minister to announce to all the world that the Republic was able to
continue meeting its obligations to its foreign creditors even though
the guano should give out, it does not much concern us to enquire. The
effect of such an appeal cannot fail to be prejudicial to the credit of
Peru; and men or dealers in other people's money will not be wanting
who will call in question the good faith of the finance minister
when he declared that the deposits of nitrate could continue what the
deposits of guano had begun but failed to carry on.

Other considerations press themselves upon us. In the midst of the
crisis, the President published a decree, announcing that he would
avail himself of the resolution of Congress which enabled him to
acquire the nitrate works in the province of Tarapaca. A commission
of lawyers was at once despatched to the province to examine titles,
and to fix upon the price to be paid to each manufacturer for his
plant and his nitrate lands. In an incredibly short time no less than
fifty-one nitrate makers had given in their consent to sell their works
to the Government, and the price was fixed upon each, and each was
measured, inventoried, and closed. The total sum to be paid for these
establishments was 18,000,000 dols. But they remained to be conveyed.
The civil power had displayed considerable activity; now that the
law had to be applied things became as dull as lead, and as heavy as
if they had all been made of that well-known metal. Negotiations had
also to be entered into with the Lima Banks, which is an operation as
delicate and as dangerous as negotiating with so many volcanoes, or any
other uncertain and baseless institutions of which either nature or a
civilisation supported by bits of paper can boast.

Still the world was comforted by the promise that next week all would
be well, or the week after, or say the end of the month, in order
to be sure. In the midst of this, General Prado, the possible future
President of Peru, is despatched to Europe on a mission, the nature of
which was kept a profound secret for three weeks.

Simple men, who believed in the despatch of the finance minister, knew
for certain that General Prado had gone to England to raise more money
on nitrate, in order that the Oroya Railway might be finished, and a
station-house built somewhere in the Milky Way, which it is destined
probably this marvellous line shall ultimately reach. And if London
would only lend Peru, say another £10,000,000, then Lima would rejoice,
and the whole earth be glad; the mountains would break out into psalms,
and the valleys would laugh and sing, for would not Don Enrique Meiggs,
the Messiah[5] of the Andes, once more return to reign?

At any rate it is quite certain that General Prado was announced to
sail on the 14th of March, when the last stroke of the pen was to be
put to the conveyance of the nitrate properties. Alas! the law's delay
continued, and General Prado did not sail. It is natural to suppose at
all events that Prado never meant to go to London without the nitrate
contracts in his pocket--which will supply a larger income to Peru
than the guano in all its glory ever did,--for the purpose of asking
the bondholders to be merciful. The General finally left Callao for
Europe on the 21st, amidst the forebodings of his friends, and the
ill-concealed joy of his foes, but without the nitrate documents being
signed. Still, before he could reach London the thing would be done,
and the result could be telegraphed. In the meantime the new minister
to Paris and London, Rivaguero, telegraphed to Lima some favourable
news, the precise terms of which, of course, were not allowed to
transpire, to the effect that an arrangement had been made satisfactory
to all parties.

On this, further delay takes place in the important nitrate
negotiations, and that in the face of a semi-official communication to
the effect that next week merchants might rely upon it that all would
be well and truly finished. In the stead of this, President Pardo
'reminds the Banks of an item which up to that period had never been
dreamed or thought of, except by the President himself, namely, that
they, the Banks, on the security of the nitrate bonds, would have to
supply to the Government so many hundred thousand dollars per month!

All at once the whole fabric of the nitrate business fell down.

Two things may be inferred from this: President Pardo hoped, believed,
perhaps knew, that the bondholders would give way, and he had become
convinced that he had made a mistake in buying the nitrate properties;
it is also likely that he knew for certain at this time that there
was guano enough for all purposes, without meddling with the important
nitrate matters, and thereby destroying a great and important national
industry. He may also have been desirous to bury, in an oblivion of his
own making, the honest compromise contained in the despatch of Don Juan
Ignacio Elguera. A further light may have dawned on the Presidential
mind, namely, that it will be perfectly easy for the Government to
treble the export duty on nitrate, without in the least damaging
the trade or dangerously interfering with the profits of the makers,
by which means the Peruvian Government would reap an annual income
without trouble, or any of the thousand vexations to which it has been
subjected in the export and sale of its guano.

That it was the original intention of the Government to raise a loan
on the 'purchase' of the nitrate properties, is evident from the terms
of the tenth article of President Pardo's decree, which may be thus
translated:--

'The establishments sold to the State shall be paid for within two
years, or as soon after as possible, that funds for the purpose have
been raised in Europe; payment shall be by bills on London, at not more
than ninety days, and at the rate of exchange of forty-four pence to
the _sol_,' etc.

Whatever value these particulars may possess or have given to them
by future events[6], they will serve to show some of the peculiar
features of the Peruvian Government, and to what shifts it can resort,
or is compelled to make under adverse circumstances, or circumstances
into which it may be brought by its enemies, or its own weakness, its
inherent lack of stout-hearted honesty, and its inaptitude for what is
known as business.

The nitrate deposits are well enough known. It is absolutely certain
that in the year 1863 there were sold 1,508,000 cwts.; and in 1873
5,830,000 cwts. In that year the Government acknowledged to have
received from the export of this article the sum of 2,250,000 dols.
Should the permanent sale of nitrate reach 5,000,000 quintals per
annum, there is no reason why the Government should not realise from
this source at least 10,000,000 dols. a year: should it only double its
present duties the amount would reach 12,000,000 dols.

The annual amount of nitrate which the fifty-one establishments
proposed to be bought by the Government are capable of producing, may
be set down at 14,000,000 cwts.

These establishments do not exhaust the whole of the nitrate deposits.
There are several large 'Oficinas,' as they are called, which have, for
their own reasons, refused to sell their properties to the State.

The region of these deposits is a wild, barren pampa, 3000 feet above
the level of the sea, and contains not less than 150 square miles of
land, which will yield on the safest calculation more than 70,000,000
tons of nitrate.

Why these establishments for the manufacture of this important
substance are called 'oficinas' it may not be difficult to say: it
is doubtless for the same reason that a cottage _orné_ at Chorrillos,
the Brighton of Lima, is called a rancho. Twenty years ago Chorrillos
was to Lima what the Clyde and its neighbouring waters were to the
manufacturing capital of Scotland. What Dunoon and its competitors on
the Scotch coast now are, such has Chorrillos become,--the fashionable
resort of rich people who have robbed nature of her simplicity and
beauty by embellishing her, as they call it, with art. All that remains
of the straw-thatched rancho of Chorrillos, with its unglazed windows,
its mud floors, its hammocks, and its freedom, is its name. An oficina
twenty or thirty years ago, was no doubt a mere office made of wood,
hammered together hastily, as an extemporary protection from the sun by
day, and the cold dews and airs of the night: in appearance resembling
nothing else but an Australian outhouse. An oficina of to-day is a very
different thing. Its appearance, and all that pertains to it, is as
difficult to describe as a great ironworks, or chemical works, or any
other works where the ramifications are not only numerous, but novel.
The first oficina whose acquaintance I had the honour and trouble
to make, was that of the Tarapaca Nitrate Company, situated near the
terminus of the Iquique and La Noria Railway, in the midst of a windy
plain 3000 feet above the sea, and beneath a far hotter sun than that
which beats on the pyramids of Egypt.

If you take a seat in the wide balcony of the house, where the manager
and the clerks of the establishment reside, and live not uncomfortably,
you look down almost at your feet on what appears to be an uncountable
number of vast iron tanks containing coloured liquids, a tall chimney,
a chemical laboratory, an iodine extracting house, a steam-pump,
innumerable connecting pipes, stretching and twisting about the vast
premises as if they were the bowels of some scientifically formed
stomach of vast proportions for the purpose of digesting poisons and
producing the elements of gunpowder, a blacksmith's forge, an iron
foundry, a lathe shop, complicated scaffolding, tramways, men making
boilers, men attending on waggons, bending iron plates, stoking fires,
breaking up _caliche_, wheeling out refuse, putting nitrate into
sacks, and other miscellaneous labour, requiring great intelligence
to direct and great endurance to carry on; and all beneath the fierce
heat of a sun, unscreened by trees or clouds, the glare of which on
the white substance which is in process of being turned over, broken,
and carried from one point to another, is as painful as looking
into a blast furnace. Beyond the great and busy area where all these
varied operations are carried on the eye stretches across a desert of
brown earth, which is terminated by soft rolling hills of the same
fast colour. The appearance of this desert is that of a vast number
of ant-hills in shape; and in size of the heaps of refuse which give
character to the Black Country in Mid Staffordshire. Perhaps the first
impression which this repulsive desert makes on the mind of a man
who has seen and observed much is that of a battlefield of barbarian
armies, where the slain still lie in the heaps in which they were
clubbed down by their foes; or it may be likened to an illimitable
number of dust-hills jumbled together by an earthquake. All this is the
result of digging for _caliche_, and blasting it out of the sandy bed
in which it has lain God only knows how long.

As the breeze springs up, and clouds of fine white dust follow the mule
carts and rise under the hoofs of galloping horses, the idea of the
battlefield with the use of gunpowder comes back on the memory, and is
perhaps the nearest simile that can be used. And this is an oficina!
one of the silliest and most inadequate of words ever used to denote
what is one of the newest, and may be the largest, as it is certainly
the most novel, of all modern industrial establishments.

The manufacture of caliche into nitrate of soda is not without its
dangers to human life, though these are fewer than they were when men
frequently fell into vats of boiling liquors, or broke their limbs
in falling from high scaffolding: the latter form of danger still
exists, and is almost impossible to guard against. I am free to say,
however, that if the guard were possible I do not believe it would be
used. There are some trades and processes which not only brutalise the
labourers on whom rests the toil of carrying them on, but which no less
degrade the mind of those who direct them; and the nitrate manufacture
is one of these. 'Joe,' one of the house dogs, fell into one of the
heated tanks of the oficina where I was staying, and his quick but
dreadful death made more impression on some than did the untimely death
of a man who was killed the day before at the same place. Another item
in the agitated landscape which stretches from the balcony where I
sat is a spacious burying-ground, walled in as a protection from dogs
and carts; but these are not its only or its chief desecrators. The
sky furnishes many more. This great oficina contains 1682 estacas;
can produce 900,000 quintals of nitrate a year, and was 'sold' to the
Government for 1,250,000 dols.

An estaca is a certain amount of ground 'staked out,' as we might say,
and contains about one hundred square yards of available land.

There are other oficinas of still greater value than the one mentioned
above; as, for instance, those of Gildemeister and Co., and which the
Government acquired on the same terms for the same sum.

The markets for this new substance are England, Germany, the United
States, California, Chile, and other countries. It is as a cultivator
a formidable competitor of the guano, and is esteemed by scientific
men to be much more valuable. Its price is set down at £19 the
ton, although £12 and £12 10_s._ is its present market value. The
acquisition by the Peruvian Government of this industry was patriotic,
even if it were not wise. It was done with the intention of paying the
foreign creditors of the Republic. Since then Peruvian patriotism has
assumed another form and complexion, and what was done in an honest
enthusiasm of haste is already being repented of in a leisure largely
occupied with the contemplation of a patriotic repudiation of national
duty and debt.

The arguments by which 'prominent' Peruvians are fortifying themselves
for a step which at any moment may be taken, are neither moral nor
convincing, except to themselves. 'Peru must live,' they say, which
does not mean a noble form of poverty, but an altogether ignoble form
of extravagance, and even wasteful magnificence. We must have our army,
our navy, our President, his ministers, our judges, our priests, our
ambassadors, our newspapers, stationery, bunting, gas for the plaza
on feast days, wax candles for our churches by night and by day, a
national police, gunpowder, jails for foreign delinquents, and railways
to the Milky Way, to show to neighbouring republics and all the world
that Peru is a fine nation.

There is not one of all these splendid items which, so far as the
people are concerned, could not be dispensed with.

But to live, they reiterate, is the primary object and purpose of all
nations, and especially republican nations, forgetting, or, what is
much more likely, never having known, that death is preferable to a
shamed life, and that there are times when it is clearly a duty to die.

The next argument now rapidly gaining ground in Lima is that although
the guano has been hypothecated, this was contrary to Peruvian law,
which distinctly lays down that nothing movable _can_ be hypothecated;
and as guano is clearly movable stuff, which can be proved to the
meanest capacity--the capacity, namely, of a holder of Peruvian
bonds--the Government has been breaking its own laws for a generation
past, and it is now time that this illegal conduct should cease. This
is backed up by reminding all men, and especially Peruvians, who
will derive great comfort from it, that England having recognised
the primary fact that it is the first duty of a man to live, has
abolished imprisonment for debt in her own dominions, and therefore
she could not exert her power to make Peru pay what she owes, if Peru
officially declares that she is unable to do so. These and other like
arguments are being openly discussed in the Peruvian capital. Another,
and perhaps the most formidable of all these specious pleas is, that
England has recently let off Turkey, and therefore there is no reason
why she should not let off Peru.

It is only fair to say that there are a few thoughtful men in the
City of Kings who, ambitious for their country's honour, would fain
see some arrangement made that will enable Peru to pursue her present
policy of internal improvement, and help these men, who for the most
part are very wealthy, to remain peaceably in office for say ten years
longer--or say six--but at least, for God's sake as well as your own,
they appealingly persist, let it not be less than four years (in the
which there shall be no hearing or harvest for bondholders and dupes of
that stamp).

There is no doubt that, in the words of 'a Daniel say I,' if the
bondholders would not lose all, 'then must the Jew be merciful,' let
them insist on their pound of flesh, and everything denominated in
their bond, they will share the fate of Shylock. The only part of that
cruel rascal's fate which they need have no apprehension of sharing is,
being made into Christians.

It is unquestionably to be feared that if the present Government,
and the one that succeeded it in August last under the presidency of
General Prado, cannot defend the country from revolt, great disaster
will follow not only to the republic, but most certainly to the
bondholders.

Revolt is not only possible, it is expected. An armed force led by
determined men from without, aided by traitors within, and backed by
unscrupulous persons who would be willing to risk one million pounds
sterling on the chance of making two millions, might easily--or if
not easily, yet with pains--bring back the corrupt days of Balta and
Castilla, and, with shame be it said, such people can find a precedent
for their proposed scheme in houses of high standing, the heads
of which are doubtless looked upon as irreproachable ensamples of
cultivated respectability.

[Since writing the above, General Prado has once more assumed supreme
power in peace, but there have followed two attempts at revolution
within the space of three little months.]

FOOTNOTES:

     [5] 'Haber aparecido en el Peru el hombre que sin
     profanacion de la palabra se puede llamar el _Mesias_ de los
     ferrocarriles para la salvacion de la Republica Peruana.'--El
     Ferrocarril de Arequipa, Historia, &c., Lima, 1871, p. lxxxi.

     [6] Written off Alta Villa, April 25, 1876.

CHAPTER V.

Having set forth two principal sources of Peruvian income, let us
now proceed to a third. When los Señores Althaus and Rosas appeared
in Paris last autumn as the representatives of the Government of
Peru, among other national securities which those gentlemen offered
for a further loan of money, were the railways of Peru. They are six
in number, only one of which is finished according to the original
contracts. The amount of mileage however is considerable, so also may
be said to be their cost, for the Government has paid to one contractor
alone no less a sum than one hundred and thirty millions of dollars.
There are other railways whose united lengths amount to about 150
miles; with one exception they cost little, and without an exception
they all bring in much.

These do not belong to the Government. The Government railways cost
enormous sums and bring in nothing; and it may safely be said that
they will never figure, honestly, in the national accounts, except
as items of expenditure. The Government of the day would only be too
glad to become cheap carriers of the national produce, if there were
any produce ready to carry. But the Government built their railways
without considering what are the primary and elementary use of
railways. It is incredible, but none the less true, that the Peruvians
believing the mercantile 'progress' of the United States to spring
from railways, thought that nothing more was needed to raise their
country to the pinnacle of commercial magnificence than to build a
few of these iron ways, and have magic horses fed with fire to caper
along them; especially if they could get an American--a real go-a-head
American--for their builder. And they did so.

The railway fever has had its virulent type in all parts of the
world where railways have appeared. In Peru from 1868 to 1871-2
this fever was perhaps more active and deadly than anywhere; than
in Canada, even, which is saying much, for there it took the form of
a religious delirium. The Peruvians believed that if they offered a
great and wonderful railway to the deities of industry, great and happy
commercial times would follow. Just as they believe that give a priest
a pyx, a spoon, some wine, and wheaten bread, he can make the body and
blood of God; so they believed that give a great American the required
elements, he could by some equally mysterious power make Peru one of
the great nations of the earth.

Mr. Henry Meiggs[7], of Catskill 'city' in New York State, was on
this occasion selected as the great high-priest who was to perform
the required wonders. Give this magician a few thousand miles of iron
rails to form two parallel lines, and a steam engine to run along them,
and the vile body of the Peruvian Republic should be changed into a
glorious body[8] with a mighty palpitating soul inside of it; the body
to be of the true John Bull type for fatness, and the Yankee breed for
speed.

This new meaning of the doctrine of transubstantiation was preached
to willing and enchanted ears. Ten thousand labourers of all colours
and kinds were introduced into the country. 'By God, Sir, there was
not a steamboat on the broad waters of the Pacific that did not pour
into Peru as many peones as potatoes from Chile.' These ten thousand
men all went up the Andes bearing shovels in their hands, and singing
the name of Meiggs as they went. Millions of nails, and hammers
innumerable, rails and barrows, sleepers and picks, chains, and double
patent layers, wheels and pistons, with many thousand kegs of blasting
powder 'let in duty free,' with all the other infernal implements and
apparatus for making the most notable railway of this age[9], poured
into Peru marked with the name of Meiggs. You could no more breathe
without Meiggs, than you could eat your dinner without swallowing dust,
sleep without the sting of fleas or the soothing trumpet of musquitoes.
Meiggs everywhere; in sunshine and in storm, on the sea and on the
heights of the world, now called Mount Meiggs; in the earthquake[10],
and in the peaceful atmosphere of the most elegant society in the
world. The wonderful activity on the Mollendo and Arequipa railway,
carried on without ceasing, produced an ecstasy of hope, and also an
eruption of blasphemy. Every valley was to be exalted; every Peruvian
mountain, hitherto sacred to snow and the traditions of the Incas,
should be laid low by the wand of Meiggs; the desert of course should
blossom as the rose: no more iron should be sharpened into swords;
ploughshares and pruning-hooks should be in such demand, that every
blade and dagger or weapon of war in the old world would be required to
make them. And a highway should be there, in which should be no lion,
even a highway for our GOD. All this mixture of trumpery metaphors were
poured into the ears of the enchanted Peruvians for the space of three
years and more. The railway as far as Arequipa was at length finished,
the Oroya railway was begun.

It will probably never be finished.

Robert Stephenson is reported to have said once before a Railway
Committee: 'My Lords and Gentlemen, you can carry a railway to the
Antipodes if you wish; it is only a matter of expense.' The Peruvians,
aided by the archpriest Meiggs, 'the Messiah of railways, who was to
bring salvation to the Peruvian Republic,' and steadfastly believing in
the Meiggs' method of transubstantiation, commenced building a railway,
not to Calcutta, but to the moon[11].

As early as 1859 the Oroya Railway began to be thought of seriously,
and the late President of Peru, with two other gentlemen of character,
were appointed a commission to collect data and make calculations for a
railway between Lima and Jauja. Nothing, however, was done until 1864,
when Congress authorised the Government, Castilla then being President,
to construct a railway to Caxamarca, with an annual guarantee of 7 per
cent. for twenty-five years.

The railway fever now began to increase in force and virulence, and
in 1868 the President of the Republic was authorised to construct
railways from Mollendo to Arequipa, Puno and Cuzco; from Chimbote to
Santa or Huaraz; from Trujillo to Pacasmayo and to Caxamarca; from Lima
to Jauja; and others which the Republic might need--a very respectable
order to be given in one day. The Oroya Railway was to be 145 miles
in length, and to cost 27,600,000 dols. To Puno the length was to be
232 miles from Arequipa, and the cost 35,000,000 dols. From Mollendo
to Arequipa, 12,000,000 dols., the length being 107 miles[12]. Ilo
to Moquiqua, 63 miles, 6,700,000 dols. Pacasmayo to Caxamarca, or
Guadalupe, or Magdalena, 83 miles, 7,700,000 dols. Payto to Piura, 63
miles. Chimbote to Huaraz, 172 miles, 40,000,000 dols.

Immediately after this small order was given, and Meiggs began to
fill the world with the sound of his name, the Lima editors commenced
their fulsome and disgusting eloquence, which day by day held all
people in suspense. 'As puissant as colossal are the labours of the
administration of Col. Don José Balta, who, without offence be it said,
has a monomania for the construction of railways and public works--the
infirmity of a divine inspiration in a head of the State.'

What the infirmity of a divine inspiration may be we will not stay to
enquire. Goldsmith was called an inspired idiot: and perhaps this was
what the learned editor meant to say of Col. Balta.

He goes on: 'The administration of Balta has converted the nation into
a workshop. We say it in his honour that he has constructed rather than
governed; but he has constructed well and firmly. He has done more
than this, he has created and conserved the habit of work in all the
nation, demonstrating by the argument of deeds that revolutions spring
principally from idleness.' 'Balta has cast a net of railways over
the country which has taken anarchy captive. Without any difficulty
might it be argued that the time of Balta will be the Octavian Era of
Peru[13].'

Enough of this. Suffice it to say that among all these oratorical
colonels, generals, lawyers, ministers of state, and accomplished
editors, there was not one who had the honesty or the pluck to stand
up and declare that it was all false which had so eloquently been said
of the Oroya and the Arequipa Railways. They are neither the railways
of the age nor of the day. There is one short railway in South America,
the construction of which called forth more skill, pluck, and endurance
than all the Meiggs railways put together, and this one railway has
already earned in the first quarter of the century of its existence
more money than all the government railways will ever earn during the
next age. Hundreds of these inflated colonels and generals, judges,
ministers of state, and accomplished editors, must have passed over the
railway, which, running through a tropical forest, connects the Pacific
with the Atlantic Ocean. Meiggs himself must have known it well; but
neither he nor any of the inspired idiots who drowned him in butter had
the valour to make mention of it by one poor word. The bridge over the
Chagres river is of more utility, as it will win more enduring fame,
than all the bridges on the Oroya, including those which 'are sixteen
thousand feet above the level of the sea.' The Oroya bridges bear the
same relation to those on the Panama Railway as the feat of the man who
walked across the Falls of Niagara bears to the economy of walking. As
Blondin was the only man who made any profit out of that performance,
so Meiggs, the Messiah of railways, will be the only person who will
for some time to come profit by the building of the Oroya and Lima line
of railway. It is surely impossible that all the reports one has been
compelled to give ear to of great silver mines and mines of copper
existing on this line can be false. Yet mining, especially in Peru,
is not free from danger; it is also not a little mixed up with lying
and cheating, and it has a historical reputation for exaggeration. The
copper mines on the Chimbote line, however, are quite another matter.
If those on the Oroya can be demonstrated to be equally good, and the
silver mines only half as good and as great, Peru may yet lift up her
head. But he will be a bold man that shall apply to English capitalists
for the first loan to Peruvian miners or to be invested in Peruvian
mines, and the days of faith and trust will not have passed away when
the money shall have been subscribed.

Although it was a poet who said that

     'Borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,'

yet it is as true as if it had emanated from the Stock Exchange, the
_Times_ monetary article, or any other recognised fountain of practical
knowledge; and as for the native edge of Peruvian industry, it is about
as dull as that of a razor not made to shave but to sell--as dull, in
fact, as the edge of a hatchet made of lead.

FOOTNOTES:

     [7] For the biography of this estimable gentleman see 'El
     Ferrocarril de Arequipa Historia, documentada de su origen
     construcion é inauguracion.'--Lima, p. 96. 'Ese hombre
     era ENRIQUE MEIGGS, cuyo nombre va unido inseparable é
     imperecederamente á los trabajos mas colosales de las
     republicas del mar Pacifico.'

     [8] For these and similar ebullitions of profanity I am
     indebted to the Lima newspapers of the period, and one or two
     anonymous pamphlets.

     [9] Paz-Soldan.

     [10] With a liberality on a scale equal to all his
     achievements, Mr. Meiggs subscribed $50,000 for the sufferers
     in the terrible earthquake which desolated Arequipa and
     destroyed Arica in 1868.

     [11] It is difficult to be original in this age of metaphor.
     Only this morning, April 26, and quite by accident, I came
     on a little print which is published, I believe, in Callao,
     where I found the following:

                       'RAILROADS IN THE CLOUDS.

     'Looking over our exchanges we found the following. It is
     from the New York _Sun_ of January 16, and gives an account
     of Mr. John G. Meiggs being "interviewed" in that city.

     'Mr. John Meiggs, brother of Henry Meiggs, the "King of
     Peru," as the millionaire contractor is called in South
     America, is lodging in the Clarendon Hotel. He is a tall,
     large man, past middle age, and with a clear penetrating
     hazel eye. He has an important share in the management of
     his brother's affairs. "Peru," he said, "is richer in the
     precious metals than any other country in the world. Our
     engineers in building the railroad from the coast to Puno
     have come across a hundred silver mines, any one of which
     might be profitably worked, if in the United States. If
     these mines are worked, the railroads we have built will be
     a blessing to the country."

     'Reporter--"I understand that there are marvels of
     engineering on some of your railroads?"

     'Mr. Meiggs--"Yes. One of our roads crosses the mountains at
     16,000 feet above the level of the sea. Some of the bridges,
     too, are very lofty, and built with a skill that would do
     credit to any part of the world."

     'Reporter--"Your brother is said to be worth several millions
     of dollars?"

     'Mr. Meiggs--"Whatever he obtained in Peru he has fully
     earned, and whatever he owed there or elsewhere he has paid.
     He has not been a seeker of contracts. On the contrary, he
     has rejected contracts that the Government wished him to
     take."'

     [12] To which may be added $2,000,000 more for the conveyance
     of water along the line nearly from Arequipa to Mollendo.

     [13] Ferrocarril de Arequipa, pp. lxxxi-ii.

CHAPTER VI.

Guano, Nitrate, and Railways being recognised as the prime sources
of Peruvian greatness, and these having been noticed with no scant
justice, another matter remains for examination, which may be said
to surpass all the others in importance, albeit it is not so easy to
estimate or understand.

Granted that Peru has all the physical elements of a great
nation,--such as gold and silver, copper and iron, and coal, oil and
wine, a vast line of sea-coast with numerous safe bays and ports,
rivers for internal navigation, as well as railroads,--has she the
moral qualities to develop these riches and make the best use of them?
In plain words, has Peru ceased to be a hotbed of revolution? is there
any hope that the ruling classes of the Peruvian people will become
sober, industrious, thrifty, honest, just and right in all their
dealings, and cease to be a source of anxiety and disgust to their
present and future creditors?

These may be said to be momentous questions, and not to be lightly
answered. Any answer not founded on well-ascertained facts and
indisputable knowledge should be set aside as vexatious and frivolous.
A hasty answer, or one founded on aught else, could only be conceived
in malice or prompted by motives of self-interest. It has, for example,
during the past few months been comparatively easy to a portion of
the London press to defame the character of Peru; to find reasons why
its bonds should be held only as waste paper, and even to prove to the
satisfaction of its fond and eager readers that she is in an utterly
bankrupt state. The same accomplished writers, if it suited their
purpose, could as easily prove, with their eloquent persuasiveness,
that Peru after all is, in commercial phraseology, sound; she had
never yet failed in keeping faith with her English friends, and is too
enlightened to think of doing so now. True, she is in debt; but she
can pay handsomely, and, in the powerful rhetoric of Bassanio, would
encourage money-lenders and her private friends thus:--

     'In my school days, when I had lost one shaft,
     I shot his fellow of the self-same flight
     The self-same way with more advised watch,
     To find the other forth, and by adventuring both
     I oft found both. I urge this childhood proof,
     Because what follows is pure innocence.
     I owe you much, and, like a wilful youth,
     That which I owe is lost; but if you please
     To shoot another arrow that self way
     Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt
     As I will watch the aim, or to find both
     Or bring your latter hazard back again
     And thankfully rest debtor for the first.'

But not thus will our serious questions meet with satisfactory answers.

The first thing to be noted in the enquiry, perhaps, is that it is
altogether a misnomer to call Peru a Republic. Whatever else it be,
a Republic it certainly is not, and never has been a Republic. Its
political constitution and its laws have nothing whatever to do with
the people, nor have the people aught to do with them; and they care
for them as they care for the theory of gravitation, or any other
portion of demonstrable knowledge, from which they may indeed derive
some animal comfort in its application, but the application of which
will probably never enlighten their souls. The people of Peru know as
much of liberty as they know of the Virgin Mary. The priests once or
twice a year dress the image of the Jewish maiden in tawdry attire,
put a tinsel crown on her head, and call her the Mother of God and the
Queen of Heaven, and the people fall down and worship; which they are
perfectly at liberty to do, as the impostors who lead them to do so may
get their living in that way, as all other impostors obtain theirs who
possess the people's grace. In like fashion, all that the people know
of liberty they know thus. They know as much of it as an aristocrat
cares to teach them--as a quack can tell his patient of medicine,
or the showy proprietress of a showy school can teach an intelligent
girl the use of the globes. All native-born Peruvians of full age have
votes, at least all such as can read and write, or possess a certain
amount of real property. But reading and writing are not by any means
universal accomplishments in the Peruvian Republic, and there are fewer
holders of real estate among the working classes than maybe found in
Barbados among the coloured labourers of that beautiful but misgoverned
island.

Don Juan Espinosa, an old Peruvian soldier, and one of the few South
American writers whose literary works have been translated into
French, if not also into English, wrote some twenty years ago a
republican, democratic, moral, political, and philosophical dictionary
for the people. Strange to say, he has given us no definition of a
Republic in his highly-entertaining and instructive book. Two of his
longest articles, however, are devoted, the first to the subject of
'Independence,' and the second to 'Revolution.' The manner in which the
author concludes the first is suggestive: 'On one day,' he says, 'we
were all brothers and countrymen; brothers by blood, and countrymen of
a land which we had just irrigated with our blood. O day immortal for
humanity! On this day the Saviour of the world beheld the consummation
of his work; he saw the spectacle which years before had led the way
for 1824. He without doubt designed the camp of AYACUCHO as the first
embrace of all the races, and the signal also for the suppression of
all human rivalries. Afterwards'
     ______________________________________________________

A long, broad black line stretches across the page as if to put it in
mourning.

'A revolution in substance,' he says, 'is nothing more than the
organisation of a people's discontent.'

If that be so, there has never been a revolution in Peru; a statement
which will be doubted by nearly all who hear it for the first time. We
may perhaps make an exception in the revolution which made Col. Prado
dictator of Peru in November, 1865. No doubt the enthusiasm of the
Peruvian people for going to war with Spain was genuine, and Prado,
not at all a man of revolutionary tastes, easily overthrew Canseco,
because of his Spanish tendencies. Prado was subsequently elected
President in 1867, but was overthrown by Balta and Canseco the year
following, and Colonel (now General) Prado fled to Chile for his life.
Still, let us be thankful that we can find one authentic instance of
Peruvian patriotism in the course of fifty years, and that out of the
hundreds of revolutions which have occurred, one was for the good of
the country--and most certainly to its honour.

The anniversary of the 2nd of May, 1866, is kept with pride by every
loyal Peruvian in all parts of the world, wherever one may find
himself. Had there been among the Peruvian soldiers on that day as much
knowledge of gunnery as there was of personal valour, not more than one
or two ships of the Spanish fleet which bombarded Callao had escaped
destruction.

It has been contended by a few anxious Peruvians that the revolution
made by General Castilla, in 1854, against General Echenique was also
a popular revolution. Perhaps it was. Echenique was notoriously very
fond of money, and it is said that so freely did he help himself to
the proceeds of the public guano that the people rose against him,
flocked to the standard of Castilla, whom they kept in power for twelve
years, and sent Echenique into ignoble exile. If that could be proved
in favour of the Peruvian people, it should be done at once. But no one
from sheer laughter can discuss the question. Castilla was as fond of
money as Echenique; Castilla, however, did one or two liberal things;
he liberated the slaves, and abolished the poll-tax, and in that sense
the revolution of 1854 may be said to have been a popular one.

No Peruvian who supported those two famous acts of General Castilla's
Government looks back upon them with anything but bitter regret. The
negro slaves were well off--they were, moreover, a people with much
affection for their masters, and slavery existed only in name. When
the blacks, however, were 'liberated,' they became like a mob of mules
without burdens, without guide or master, and they wandered about the
earth and died miserably. Those who survived were certainly very little
credit to their friends, for many of them became the terror of the
highways which converge on the capital of the Republic.

The Indians who paid the poll-tax did then do some work, and they were
made to feel some of the responsibilities of being republicans--they
were kept under rule--they could be induced to labour in 'some of the
richest silver mines in the world.' Now they will do nothing of the
kind, and the Government has not only lost an income of 2,000,000
dols. a year, they have lost the services of the entire indigenous
population, which may be called, in classical language, a pretty kettle
of fish, especially for a country whose riches depend upon the industry
of a free and happy people.

One immediate consequence of Castilla's emancipation policy was that it
speedily became a profitable business for a few adventurous persons in
Lima to proceed to China, where they kidnapped some of the superfluous
Chinese population. This traffic prospered for a while, but as it is
the property of murder to make itself known--somehow or anyhow--the
profits fell off, owing to the interference of one or two civilised
Governments. When the Celestial Empire no longer offered a safe field
for the Peruvian men-snatchers, attempts were made on the inoffensive
people of the diocese of modern evangelisation, and in the course of
time the rich people of Lima had the opportunity of buying a few men,
women, and girls, who had been stolen from some of the islands of the
Pacific. But these for some mysterious reasons died off, after having
cost the Peruvian Government a serious sum of money, and some people
their reputation. It was, however, imperatively necessary, owing to
the demands of the British farmer for guano, and the exigences of the
Government of Peru to obtain men from China somehow for the important
work of shovelling Peruvian dung into European ships; and there may
be reckoned to-day among the motley population of the Republic not
less than 60,000 men who cultivate sugar and pig-tails, and indulge in
opium. This, therefore, might be called a popular revolution, and the
friends of General Castilla can claim for him the honour and glory of
having brought it about.

General Castilla deserves to be better known; but this is not the
place to speak of him at any length. He introduced a new era into
Peruvian politics--he was the first native Peruvian with no Spanish
blood in his veins who assumed supreme power. If there had been no
guano to demoralise everybody, himself included, Castilla might have
become a great man, and the Peruvian people been lifted up by him in
the scale of humanity. As it is, Castilla and everybody else fulfilled
the prediction of the Hebrew prophet in a manner that might be stated
in Spanish, but which no gentleman can write in English. It should
be stated that although Castilla had nothing of Spanish blood in his
veins, yet his father was an Italian, and his mother one of the pure
Indian women of Moquegua.

All this, however, does not help us to answer the momentous questions
with which this chapter opens.--If Peru is not a Republic, and there
have not been more than two revolutions in the whole of its wild and
chequered history, what is it?

Peru is a Republic in name, 'governed' or rather farmed by groups or
families of despots, who frequently quarrel among themselves, cut each
other's throats, and alternately embrace and kiss each other, in a
manner that is sickening to any one who is not a moral eunuch[14]. Only
those who are rich enough to escape to Chile are saved from the above
gentle process. General Prado is one of these favoured Peruvians. Had
not Don Manuel Pardo, the late President, fled from Lima during the
revolting days of the Gutierrez terror, he too would have gone the way
of all flesh and Peruvian political farmers.

The people of Peru, those who are to be distinguished from the
families who farm them, are hard-working, industrious, sober, ignorant,
excitable and superstitious. They are fond of serving their masters,
they like to be called 'children' by the great Colonels, the great
sugar-boilers, and all who ride on horses and live, even though it be
at other people's expense, in great houses.

The Peruvian dictionary already quoted from, though it does not contain
the word Republic, does contain the history of Peru. Let us turn to the
article 'Liberty.'

'LA LIBERTAD,' says our brave soldier author, 'does not consist,
civilly or socially speaking, in each one doing what he likes. By thus
understanding liberty some governments have fallen, and some people
have lost what they had gained.

'Liberty consists in each one having the power to do, at all events,
that which the law has not forbidden, in not damaging another in his
rights, or property, or in his moral and material well-being.

'That society is not free while any of its members are unable to
express their thoughts without hinderance.

'That society is not free when one or more of its industries are
prohibited under the pretext of monopoly or privilege.

'It is not free when it cares not, or is unable to arraign a lying
magistrate.

'That society is not free which does not possess political morality.
This consists in--

'I. Keeping the treaties and covenants made with other nations.

'II. In submitting to the law without its ever supposing itself
entitled to falsify it by cunning arts, or paltry subterfuge.

'III. In holding up to scorn whatever crime affects the national
honour.

'IV. In not corrupting its institutions for personal considerations.
A people will find it very difficult to maintain its freedom, which is
without sufficient spirit to provide itself with good institutions, and
afterwards ready to put so much faith in them, that it will become a
religious duty rigorously to support them.

'By what right does Spanish-America call itself republican, if it has
not renounced the custom of a despotic monarchical absolutism?

'These unhappy people have given themselves very liberal laws, and
have afterwards abandoned them at the caprice of men without having the
least faith in their own institutions.

'How can they thus hope to be free?

'It costs nothing, nor is it of any value to shout LIBERTY, LIBERTY.
But that which is of great price, and can never be too costly, is to
acquire liberty by means of good manners, by the custom of respecting
the law and making it respected, by respecting the rights of others,
and making them respected by all; to be just with all the world, and
ashamed of every evil act. Behold, how liberty is to be acquired. In
fine, liberty is the health of the soul, and he cannot be free who has
not a healthy conscience.'

'The greater number of our liberals,' he adds in another place, with
one of his happiest flashes of poetic truth, of which the book is full,
'the greater number of our liberals are like musical instruments which
do not retain the sound they give when played upon,' i. e. they are
cracked.

Let it be added, that this soldier of the sword and of the pen who
fought and bled on the field of battle for Peruvian civil liberty,
and sighed, and cried in peaceful days for a freedom still greater
and better, died poor and neglected. The present Peruvian Government
sought all over Lima for complete copies of his works to send to
Philadelphia, but it allows those whom he has left behind him, and who
bear his name, to languish in obscurity and in want; and Don Manuel
Pardo and his ministers, good in many things though they may be, are in
others nothing better than cracked musical instruments. Peru is only
a Republic in name, liberty does not exist, its people are not free,
and the country remains at the mercy of men who at any moment, and in
the most unexpected manner, can turn it into a hotbed of what is called
revolution.

A revolution is expected now. The man whose administration designed and
carried through one of the 'railways of the age,' the personal friend
of Meiggs, who had taken anarchy captive in an iron net, was shortly
afterwards in the most cowardly, brutal, and unexpected way first made
prisoner, while he was yet President, and then murdered in his jail.

Great as is the love of the common people for their superiors, they are
not to be relied upon in days of great excitement, and when there is
abundance of loose change flying about. How could it be otherwise?

How often do ministers and public men meet the people in common? Never,
except in a religious procession carrying an enormous wax candle a yard
long, and as thick as a rolling-pin, or at the Theatre on el dos de
Mayo, and not then unless there has been some pleasant news announced
the day before.

How often are the people enlightened by a clear and straightforward
statement of the public accounts? Never. Does not the free press of
Lima support the Government, or now and then criticise its acts in the
interest of the people? The answer is that there is no free press in
Lima.

No plan of the Government is ever made known until it has been
accomplished. Everything is done in secret and underground. Rumour
is the great agent of the Government and mystery its chief force.
So mysterious are the ways of the Executive that itself is not
unfrequently a mystery to itself. No Peruvian Government has ever had
the courage to take the people into its confidence, and the people
are too busy with their own personal affairs to think of, much less to
resent, the slight.

In other matters the press is busy enough. Some of the most biting
criticisms on priests, on auricular confession, on the infallibility
of the Pope and the Immaculate Conception have appeared in the Lima
press. Their teachers, in brief, have ridiculed the gods of the people
and given them none to adore. No intellectual society in Lima associate
with priests. No priest is ever seen in the houses of the rich, or the
respectable poor.

Freemasonry is the fashionable religion of men, and men who never go
to mass will frequent a lodge twice a week. Only the other day one of
these lodges published an advertisement in the leading journal to the
effect that a gold medal would be conferred on any brother mason who
would adopt the orphan child of any who had died fighting against any
form of tyranny, and the medal is to be worn as a badge of honour on
the person of the owner. Freemasonry in Peru is an open menace of the
Church, which with all deference to the craft, may be called a gross
mistake. But Peruvian Freemasonry is like Peruvian Republicanism,
chiefly a thing of show, and something to talk about by men who can
talk of nothing else.

After all this it should not be difficult to answer the questions with
which this chapter opens.

But lest it should be thought that the greater part of these statements
is pure rhetoric, or mere private opinion, and not stubborn facts, let
us now ask two questions more.

What use has Peru made of the great income it has derived during the
past generation, from the national guano? What is there to show for the
many million pounds sterling it has derived from this source, and from
money lent by English bondholders?

Let us hasten at once to acknowledge that it has spent 150,000,000
dols. in railways. But let us also add that the greatest authority in
Peru has stigmatised these railways as _locuras_, or follies. This is
not an encouraging beginning. But alas it is not only the beginning, it
is also the end of the account.

There is nothing else to be seen. There is not a single lighthouse or
light on any dangerous rock, or at any port difficult to make along the
whole of its coast. All the fructifying rivers of the hills still steal
into the sea. Had half the money which has been spent on the Oroya
railway been expended on works of irrigation, the Government of Peru
would now be in the possession of a respectable revenue.

A morning visit to the market-place in Lima on any day of the week, is
enough to convince even a Peruvian President who knows something else
besides how to play rocambor, of the truth of this statement.

Internal roads, excepting these 'railways of the age,' there are none;
but there are several ironclads and men-of-war in the Bay of Callao,
for what use or of what service the First Lord of the Admiralty himself
could not tell explicitly.

It might be thought by some ordinary people, of business habits and a
little reflection, that a country like Peru, which can boast of as many
seaports as it can of first-class towns and cities, would provide those
ports with convenient landing-places, moles, or piers.

There is one good pier on the whole coast, which in its useless
grandeur stretches out nearly a mile into the sea; as the Oroya
railway, like a mighty python, creeps up the precipitous slopes of the
Andes 'sixteen thousand feet above the level of the sea.'

As every one knows, the Pacific is a peaceful sea, as quiet as a saucer
of milk. But like almost all the things that every one knows, this
piece of knowledge will hardly bear the test of experience. Twenty
miles or less from its shore, the Pacific on the Peruvian coast, may
be said to be as calm and placid as a man's unresisted vices. Put a
restraint upon, or raise a barrier against the most modest of the man's
wishes, and these suddenly show their strength, even the strength, as
some have found to their cost, of resistless passion. It is thus with
this Pacific sea. When it comes against a rocky shore, or the miserable
wooden barriers which the Peruvian Government have put up for the
convenience and comfort of passengers, and the despatch of business,
it becomes more like a wild beast, or a watery volcano, or any other
fierce and angry force which cannot by ordinary means be restrained. It
is not unlikely that a Government fond of providing cheap distraction
for the people has purposely neglected this useful work of building
piers, with the benevolent design of providing a cheap amusement to
those inhabitants of the ports who do not travel by sea.

It is such fun to see a lady dressed in pink satin and blue silk
boots get a sudden ducking in salt water, or to watch in safety from
the shore a boat full of anxious and highly dressed colonels and
sugar-boilers, editors and lawyers, get drenched to the skin, and
almost robbed of their breath, in trying to effect a landing at Islay,
or Mollendo, Iquique, or Chala, or even Callao.

If any of the readers of this brief but eventful history would desire
to see the Peruvian Republic as in a microcosm, let them arrive at
the latter chief port of the nation in a steamer, or a cattle ship,
as a passenger steamer may now be called. They will see an exhibition
of confusion, extortion, bullying, insolence, cruelty, and official
imbecility, which cannot be equalled in any other part of the civilised
or uncivilised world, including New Guinea or Eragomanga. And as it
is now, so it was twenty years ago. A steamer, the European mail for
example, drops its anchor about two miles from the shore. It is then
surrounded by a hundred small boats, each containing two, sometimes
more, coloured men. The screaming, gesticulating, and brutal language
of these creatures defy description. The authorities have no control
over them, the captain of the steamer is powerless against the invasion
of his ship, and all passengers who have no friends, who know nothing
of the country and cannot speak Spanish, are placed at the mercy of
this swarm of harpies.

Here you have an epitome of Peru. Gentlemen and rogues jostling one
another in painful contiguity. Gentlewomen and their opposite, men who
work and scoundrels who prey upon other people's labour, priests and
colonels, knowledge and ignorance, in some form or other brought in
violent collision: the utmost freedom of opinion and nobody to keep the
peace!

FOOTNOTE:

     [14] _Estratocracia_ I find is the technical term by
     which Espinosa would designate the Government of Peru or
     a government by the military. This would seem to be true,
     seeing that since Peru became a Republic all its Presidents
     with only one exception have been Colonels, Generals, and

End of Project Gutenberg's Peru in the Guano Age, by Alexander James Duffield