snowclad to the south that lends its contrast to the picture.

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

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

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

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

  The striking headdress of the women of Ayacucho—in this case purple
    embroidered with red. The _dicella_ about the shoulders is blue]

  The friendly and ingratiating waiters of our hotel in Ayacucho. They
    had two shoes, three eyes, and not a crumb of soap between them. One
    wears a bright pink shirt, the other one of brilliant maroon]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A religious procession in the main square of Ayacucho. When the
    leading figure reached certain points, an old Indian set off
    elaborate pieces of fireworks, and as the smoke cleared away scores
    of urchins dashed in to fight with the Indian and one another for
    the framework]

  A gala Sunday in the improvised “bullring” of Ayacucho, in the patio
    of the _Colegio_, or high school, for the benefit of which the
    _corrida_ was given. The chief toreros are Spanish, and the mountain
    bulls are at best somewhat lacking in ferocity]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Manam cancha,” came the expected reply.

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

“Manam cancha.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A familiar sight in the Andes,—a recently butchered beef hung in
    sheets along the clothes-line to sun-dry into _charqui_, the
    soleleather-like imitation of food on which the Andean traveler is
    often forced to subsist]

  A typical “bed” in the guest-room provided for travelers by many
    Peruvian _hacendados_,—to wit: a stone or adobe divan on which the
    traveler may spread whatever bedding he brings with him. Note my
    _alforjas_, kitchenette, and bottle of fuel. An auto-picture taken
    by pinning a flash sheet on the opposite wall]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The fatherless urchin who fell in with me beyond Andahuaylas; the only
    native wearing shoes I met on the road in the Andes]

  My body-servant in Andahuaylas, and the sickle with which he was
    supposed to cut all the alfalfa “Chusquito” could eat]

                              CHAPTER XVI
                          THE CITY OF THE SUN

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

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

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

“Going somewhere?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

“Teófilo Fulano,” replied our new companion.

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

“Yes; Don Faustino is my father.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A view of Quito, capital of Ecuador, from the summit of the Panecillo]

  View of Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital, from the summit of the
    Sacsahuaman]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Building a house in Peru. Mud and chopped straw are trampled together
    with the bare feet, loaded into a hod that is really a sun-dried
    ox-hide, and fashioned into such a wall as that in the background]

  The patio of the “Hotel Progreso” of Abancay. The cook is peering
    through the hole in the wall by which she thrusts out to the
    servants at meal-time her nefarious concoctions]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A religious procession in Abancay. Note the group of urchins in the
    church-tower vying with each other in beating the bells into an
    uproar]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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