| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: Peru: a land of contrast
Author: Todd, Millicent
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Peru: a land of contrast" ***
PERU
A LAND OF CONTRASTS
[Illustration: IN THE MONASTERY OF SAN FRANCISCO, LIMA.
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.]
PERU
_A LAND OF CONTRASTS_
BY
MILLICENT TODD
_With Illustrations
from Photographs_
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1918
_Copyright, 1914_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 3
PART I. IN THE DESERT
CHAPTER
I. ALONG SHORE 15
II. DESERT QUALITY 25
III. DESERT PERSPECTIVE 39
IV. PICA, THE FLOWER OF THE SAND 53
V. A CLASH OF CONTRASTS 64
VI. PIRATES AND TREASURE FLEETS 76
VII. BACKGROUNDS 84
VIII. LIMA OF TWO ASPECTS 103
IX. CONVENTS OPEN AND CLOSED 110
X. ANOMALIES OF LIMA 121
PART II. IN THE MOUNTAINS
I. THE HIGH REGIONS 143
II. A MEGALITHIC CITY AND A SACRED LAKE 159
III. MYTHS AND MONUMENTS 174
IV. THE INCA AND HIS EMPIRE 188
V. SERVICE OF THE SUN-GOD 202
VI. INDIANS AND LLAMAS 214
PART III. IN THE JUNGLE
I. A LAND OF ADVENTURE 231
II. TOWARD THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY 240
III. JUNGLE GLOOM AND JUNGLE SHEEN 250
IV. ANIMALS OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT 268
V. THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX 280
CONCLUSION 296
BIBLIOGRAPHY 299
INDEX 305
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
In the Monastery of San Francisco, Lima _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Seals of the Palominos Islands 16
Sachacha, a Typical Village of Peru 34
Pampa de los Huesos--the Field of Bones 42
A Characteristic Peruvian Church 58
Wolfenbüttel-Spanish Map, _circa_ 1529 72
One of the first maps to show Pizarro’s discoveries along the
Peruvian coast.
A View of Paita from the _Miroir Oost & West Indical_,
1621 82
Grapes raised by the Barefoot Friars (_los Descalzos_),
Lima 106
A Franciscan Friar at Home, Lima 112
Santa Rosa de Lima, from _Het Wonder Leven van de H.
Rosa, Brussel_, 1668 118
A Glimpse of Old-Fashioned Lima 132
A Trestle of the Highest Railway in the World, across
the _Infiernillo_ 144
Alpacas on the Andean Puna 156
A God of Tiahuanacu 164
A Swinging Bridge near Jauja 174
An Heir of the “Makers of Ruins” 186
Indian Water Carrier, Sicuani 192
In the Market, _Plaza Principal_, Cuzco 200
A Market in Huancayo 206
In a Fertile Valley of the Uplands 212
An Indian Pastoral 218
Llamas at the Falls of Morococha 226
In the Valley of the Perené 242
A Sloth, from the _Historiae Rerum Naturalium Brasiliae_,
Amsterdam, 1648 280
INTRODUCTION
“Qui peut dire où réside le charme
d’un pays? Qui trouvera ce quelque
chose d’intime et d’insaisissable que rien
n’exprime dans les langues humaines?”
PIERRE LOTI
Peru, A Land of Contrasts
INTRODUCTION
Any statement regarding Peru implies a contrary statement equally
valid. Contrast is its characteristic quality, true as to the general
aspects of the country and ramifying through remote details. It is the
obvious point of view from which to study Peru.
The three parts of this book--the desert, the mountains, the
jungle--are the three natural divisions of the country. The shore is a
long, narrow desert, much diversified. In a fertile valley intersecting
it lies Lima, The City of the Kings. The river has come from the Andes,
on whose lofty tablelands, called _jalca_ in the north and _puna_ in
the south, flourished remote civilizations filled with mystery. Beyond
the mountain barrier lies the jungle, geographically the largest
portion of Peru, and like all other jungles a region of dread and
fascination.
Peru is a low country lying under a mild sky; but above are the mighty
Andes freezing under arctic blizzards. The desert is barren for lack
of rain; beyond the mountains, the over-productive jungle is saturated
with tropical downpours. Along the shore thunder-storms are unknown;
up on the icy tablelands of the cordillera, whose volcanoes are sealed
with snow, lightning rips open the mountainsides. Fire splits, and
water smooths. Mists are strong enough to magnify and the sky is clear
enough to do so. The _puna_ is a land of brutal elements, yet there is
found the little chinchilla, protected with softest fur.
On the coast, overhead calm is counterbalanced by subterranean fury.
“All geological phenomena are still in active operation,” the shore
rising, earthquakes changing the face of the earth, and underground
rivers dodging beneath a desert sterile for want of the water which
they are hurrying off. The people who live in this country of volcanoes
and earthquakes feed on red peppers.
If lack of water prevents the heat of the sun from making the desert
productive, so cold prevents water upon the mountain plains from
encouraging vegetation. In the jungle luxuriance of all growth conceals
any single benefit. Nature erects barriers everywhere. She has
surrounded her richest gifts with almost insurmountable difficulties.
Fertilizers come from the desert, a realm of death. Mines of the Andes
coldly hoard their riches under a life-sucking atmosphere. Agassiz
said: “An empire might esteem itself rich in any one of the sources of
industry which abound in the Amazon valley.” But these are inaccessible
from their very quantity, and they shut in beneath them a fever-laden
air. Where there is most fertilizer, the land is most barren; where
there are most precious metals, it is most incapable of supporting
human life; where richest, it is most difficult to cultivate.
Such is Peru. Elements and forces contrast; each combats each, and
all attack man. Nature wars against herself: tropic heat, arctic
cold; heavy, poisonous jungle mists, thin air of the mountain-tops;
scorching dryness, reeking wet. Even obstacles contrast in Peru. Man
is threatened everywhere by elements, by insects. He drowns here or
dies of thirst there. He can even be overcome by cold or sunstroke in
the same place.
Peru is a land of violent extremes. It has a range of mountains as
great as any in the world. The towering peaks are too high to climb.
Far above circles the condor, the largest bird in the world. Peru
is the source of the world’s greatest river system, whose luxuriant
forests are too thick to penetrate. The only representatives of a lost
geological age inhabit them, as well as the biggest snakes and the
smallest birds. Peru has great mineral deposits in the mountains; it
also has rubber in the forests. Wool is produced on the frozen plains,
and chocolate in the deep gorges lost among them. And from the valleys
intersecting the desert come cotton and sugar-cane.
All kinds of obscure substances are found in this versatile country,
ipecac and cochineal, cocaine and vanadium. Not unlike the rest of the
world, chill here produces fever, but quinine, the best remedy for the
disease of contrast, comes also from the forests of Peru.
Although nature is a supreme fact, its natural history is not the whole
of Peru. And contrast as a method of interpretation does not fail for
its other aspects. Though man seems to play so small a part, he has
lived here since antediluvian animals wandered among coal forests on
the Andes. To the charm of limitless nature is added the mystery of
great peoples destroyed before they were known. The riches of the Incas
and of the glittering, vice-regal Spanish days, when continents were
found, taken, and explored, contrast with present poverty. Consistently
throughout, the riches of Peru have impoverished it. Its gifts have
caused its ruin over and over again.
Wars and rebellions have riddled the country, and bull-fights have
filled leisure hours. Though audacity of action has fascinated
historians of Peru, its periods of peace have in them even more of
romance: a nation of slaves ruled by a monarch-god; oriental splendor
of Lima shining because of forced labor in the dark, suffocating mines;
Arab blood in the conquerors’ veins penetrating the quiet Indian
people, adding a keener edge to their sufferings. The poverty of the
present-day Indians contrasts with lavish nature, “beggars sitting on a
pile of gold.” Contrasts of nature, of people to country, of antiquity
to the present--these diverse elements are insistent wherever one turns.
The charm of contrasting facts is puissant. Almost any one of them
might be the text for an allegory. To guard against rhapsody, I have
documented every statement made. Conservative authority can be given
for every fact, however fantastic, however trivial. The few legends
are in a sense also facts: “_Une légende ment parfois moins qu’un
document._”
The tellers of Peru’s story deserve a history themselves. First came
the falcon-eyed missionaries of Spain, sword and rosary clattering
beneath priestly robes, to subject the Indians to salvation, or
mercifully to condemn them to death by torture. Had they been less
conscientious in describing all those quaint beliefs and idolatrous
practices which they came to stamp out, we should perhaps have missed
the chief source of information in regard to the Children of the Sun
and their dependent peoples. Military writers and official chroniclers
followed in close order. It took them some time to recover from their
amazement at this land of “gold, silver and pleasant monkeys.” They
wrote with convincing emphasis, “Wee that live now at Peru ... finde
not ourselves to bee hanging in the aire, our heades downward and our
feete on high.” On the contrary, they discovered that they were even
“as near unto heaven at Peru as in Spain.”
Explorers and adventurers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
were in the forefront of writers of romance. Such authors have always
found inspiration here. From Marmontel to the _Peruvian Tales_ of
Guenelette, from Frank Stockton to José-Maria de Heredia, chiseler of
faultless cameos, who himself came from a dramatic land of Spanish
conquest, Peru has been a word to conjure with. But invention has added
no glamour to history. It cannot keep pace with fact.
Accounts by various travelers of past centuries, voyages of discovery
and reports of treasure fleets are followed by the students of to-day.
Scientists write of Peru, each authority finding his specialty
accented. The geologist sees cosmic forces in active operation still.
The anthropologist studies untouched savages in the morasses of the
Amazon, the naturalist’s wonderland. Archeology now has an exciting
preëminence. Cool authorities admit the amazing antiquity of Peruvian
ruins. The historian finds a great barbaric civilization; the economist
ancient systems of state policy; the prospector an extensive system
of navigable waterways. The mining engineer discovers inexhaustible
mines, and the agriculturist unique opportunity, where the uplands of
a farm lie among snows, its lowlands under rubber groves and orange
trees. All write of Peru, and an increasing bibliography affords easy
access to every sort of statistics. I have referred to a wide range of
authorities, many of them cited in an appendix, to supplement my own
observations, made as member of an astronomical expedition, during a
stay of several months in Peru.
* * * * *
A painstaking person while in Peru wrote a journal containing all he
saw. Not an event or an observation escaped chronicle. But on reaching
home he discovered that his really poignant memories were not in his
journal. His entries, though conscientious, “were but the ingredients.
They were not the secret of the philtre.”
Facts make their own appeal. But direct assault is not the only means
of approach. Sometimes subtleties are best observed by looking at
something else. It is often easier to see the beauty, the full glitter
and glance of a thing in another object, as the play of colors in
the aurora borealis is better perceived by turning the eyes aside.
Sometimes one or two minor points chosen from an embarrassment of
interesting details are all the imagination needs, as a plant selects
only those elements from air and soil which can be used in perfecting
its tissue of stem and leaf and flower.
It can only be hoped that this book about Peru may succeed in even
suggesting its unique appeal.
PART I
IN THE DESERT
“I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be;
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows.”
SHELLEY
CHAPTER I
ALONG SHORE
The surface of the ocean is unruffled. Only the heaving of its great
body suggests the power beneath. But when it confronts the desert
cliffs, backed by the world-weight of the Andes, the force which has
been gathering all the way from Australia, so mighty that it can
be compared to nothing but itself, snarls into uncontrolled fury,
rebellious, but acknowledging the limit of its power.
The “Peaceful Ocean” lies next to a land of geological unrest; the
coast rising, subterranean torment breaking out in earthquakes, hurling
cliffs into the sea. Even the busy modern port of Callao partakes of
the mystery of this elemental land. The white ships anchored in the
clear water of its harbor gradually turn dull brown. Might it be the
crater of an extinct volcano?
No wonder the people on such a shore build bamboo cages plastered with
refuse and mud to live in, temporary for them as the present stage
is transient in the history of the land on which they live. Their
object-lessons are warring natural forces. No wonder they are brutal,
slinging cattle on board steamers by the horns, casting a stone between
the eyes of a bullock to make him turn around. Even their little
children play at bull-fights with horns of defunct cattle. The soil of
this “sea-gnawn” shore affords not one necessity for human existence,
not even a drop of water. There are no real harbors, only niches in the
jagged coast. But few lighthouses indicate danger, and the desert is
chilled by winds from the Antarctic pole.
Far out, a low cloud is skimming the surface of the gray water,
advancing in waves of blackness. From one end a shower falls; at the
other, a column rises from the water to meet the on-rushing mass, “a
great oval, rolling forwards over the sea.” It comes nearer and nearer,
till the shore shimmers as through heat waves. The quiet is complete
except for the noise of millions of laboring wings.
[Illustration: SEALS OF THE PALOMINOS ISLANDS.]
A cloud of birds! Now they fall to the water with close-clapped wings,
hundreds at a time, each a tiny splashing fountain. Their hunger
is insatiable, but not because food is lacking, for the swarms of
pilchards beneath the waves are vaster than the armies of birds which
pursue them. Ancient Indian races enriched their irrigated fields
with these little fish. A curious, tawny jewel is found upon this
shore, known as “fishes’ eyes.” Might they be fossilized eyes of those
fertilizer-fishes?
The appearance of this coast could not have been different in
antediluvian days, with the screeching birds and the mammoth terrapin
off-shore, those associates of the dodo.
The birds fly out at sunrise and spend the day in fishing, resting upon
the waves when they are tired, and at sunset return to their giant
stone islands for the night. Alone, the call of a sea-bird would be
lost in the fury of the meeting of cliff and sea. But as a mass of
white gulls can assume blackness by mere quantity, so their mingled
voices can take on an overwhelming poignancy of sound. Louder than the
crash of breakers, louder than the barking and snorting of the bald,
fat seals loping over them in droves, surges the great cry of the
birds, as, in a shower of wild calls diverse as themselves, they settle
upon the rocks: pelicans, cormorants, mollyhawks, gannets, sea-mews,
gulls, osprey, occasional tropical flamingoes lost among ice-birds
and stormy petrels, wild ducks, Inca terns, and the weird, amphibious
“bird-child,” which tries to stand erect, fluttering its cartilaginous
wings, braced by its indistinguishable tail. All the birds of the
ocean gather here, from sandpeeps to albatrosses, a surfeit of life to
accentuate the barrenness of the shore. They are multiplying every year
their already limitless myriads, useless to man as the savages of the
interior, without commercial value now of any kind, yet not annihilated
on that account. It is said that all are souls of sailors lost at sea.
In each stormy petrel a lost apprentice lives again, in each pelican
a boatswain, in each mollyhawk a chief officer, in each albatross a
sturdy old captain.
One is tempted to write of the romance of the sea-birds of Peru, if
romance has in it any of the fascination of waste on a large scale,
for like barrenness, waste must be on a large scale to be picturesque.
Where is the impertinence of it so overwhelming as in nature--her
spendthrift production of unused powers, and the daring of her
destruction?
A German scientist, investigating the guano interests, reported eleven
million birds on one of the Chincha Islands, for these are the guano
birds, and these wild, craggy islands the Guano Islands, a jewel-casket
of Peru, which now abandoned, emptied of its contents, stands wide
open, staring vacant in the sunlight, that its owners may not forget
its former fullness.
Under the stimulus of pure guano a plant will spring to mammoth
dimensions, lavishing blossoms and fruit. Ancient races, even the
foreign Incas, realized its magical endowments and made laws governing
its use. But land enriched by guano into immense fertility lapses after
a while, barer than before.
A few sailing ships, hoping to glean poor remnants of this accumulation
of the centuries, still huddle as close as possible to the black
rocks, which, because of the quantity of that very fertilizer which
has distinguished them, are made repellent to life of any kind. In
this laboratory of the strongest fertilizer, there is not the slightest
trace of vegetation--Peru in paradox.
The sunset blazes through the fissures and shoots shafts of opalescent
light under the great stone bridges toward the mountainside of the
candelabrum, veiled in a hazy shimmer. Defiantly gorgeous it is, all
but the young moon which nestles among rushing scarlet and black clouds.
A giant candelabrum, at least four hundred feet long, is hollowed
deep in the rock of the sheer volcanic headland above the sea. Its
trenches do not fill with drifting sand, though the natives of Pisco
make periodic pilgrimages across the bay, just to be sure. Some think
it is a sign of royalty, a flaunt of the Incas, or the boundary-mark of
a conquered kingdom. Some say it was a warning made by the Spaniards
after Pisco was sacked by English freebooters in the seventeenth
century, for though now over a mile inland, it was then a coast town.
Such is the equilibrium of the Peruvian coast! Others call it “the
three crosses,” the life-penance many years ago of a Franciscan friar
named Guatemala.
But a symbol does not for mere inquiry give up the secret of its hidden
mystery. Doubtless the origin and purpose of the Candelabrum of Pisco
will never be known.
* * * * *
A few small, square, purple shadows mark a town, put down at random
in the desert beside the sea. Some houses are made of the ribs and
jaws of whales. A conspicuous white building, a little removed, is for
sufferers with bubonic plague. Crosses surmount hummocks round about
the town. People are making pilgrimages to and fro. And over all,
white-headed vultures are wheeling. They spread their wings and cry in
the silence.
Dust covers the little city, clustering about a market-place of sand.
A fountain without water mutely occupies its center. Lamp-posts
without lamps surround it, and the mud houses are without windows. The
cathedral towers have no bells. Strange plaster figures are sculptured
upon the façade, and infants with hands put on backwards hold up the
portico. Beyond the door with a two-inch keyhole are Virgins in pink
silk and gold tinsel, saints with rows of parallel ribs, angels with
gauze wings, towering altars of gingerbread work, artificial flowers,
and silver-paper fringe.
Glossy-haired women, their black _mantas_ (head-shawls) thrown back,
drag stiff skirts through the dirty sand. Half-naked children gnaw at
the inside of long bean-pods. Mangy dogs with dusty skin and a sparse
sprinkling of yellow hair slink into the shadows. Black goats and their
attenuated kids search about in the sand for something to eat. Men and
women file out of black interiors, carrying gourds full of brilliant
edibles. Meal braizes over a low fire on the sand; a woman crouching
over it whips the flame with the end of her long hair. From time to
time, to make a brighter blaze, she picks up pieces of wood with her
strong toes. Near by struts a blue-eyed bird. It is a _huerequeque_,
the household scavenger. Bits of cloth hang about his tall knees. The
woman explains that they are trousers intended to keep him warm. She is
sorry I could not have come a few days later, for she is about to make
him some new ones for summer, of lighter quality, with lace edges.
The market is held in the bed of a “river,” no less dry than the
surrounding desert. Old women behind piles of tropical fruits,
_guayabas_, _pacays_, _ciruelas_, gossip to a whir of small mandolins.
Heavy-browed men in flapping sombreros drink thick liquids and purchase
pats of red and yellow _picante_ (a highly seasoned dish). Groups of
pack-horses with silver bridles are tied round about the market.
But surprises are lurking in these coast towns. Behind heavy,
unexpected doors, the single affluent family of the town receives in a
peacock-blue salon. There is a lady in brown, with trimmings of blue
velvet and cotton lace, and a perpendicular yellow hat. Another is
in purple velvet, with swan’s-down hat and photograph brooch of her
sister. A third, wearing green velvet, a salmon colored hat with red
roses, and holding a pink silk handkerchief embroidered in lavender,
sits purring beside her red-faced German fiancé. The carpet is red,
the furniture covered with brown brocade; there are statues of carved
alabaster with gilt edges and pink cuspidors. Gold mirrors, chromos of
Venetian court life, and pasteboard calendars of bygone years hang upon
the walls. The Spanish tiles of long ago are painted over.
Farther up the street a door may open upon a wilderness of vicuña rugs
as tawny as a lion and softer than moleskin. Shawls of tan-colored
wool, silkier than Liberty fabrics, lie about. One is not surprised
that vicuña wool was reserved for royal use in Inca days, nor that
blankets of it were sent by the conquerors as offerings to Philip II.
There are little foot-warmers made of vicuña fur and chinchilla skins,
wiry penguin skins and a deafening noise of singing birds in cages. A
black-eyed girl with hair like tarred rope stands making _cazuela_ (a
thick soup) and paring guavas. She claps her hands, and many doves fly
in to peck the crumbs from her lips.
CHAPTER II
DESERT QUALITY
A certain herb lives for years underground in the desert; it feels no
necessity for a leaf-existence. Yet if the parched roots are reached by
water, they expand toward the sun in lovely bloom.
Up from the shore stretches the bare immensity of desert, ending in one
tremulous horizon with the ocean, and with the wilderness of mountains
against the pulsating sky at the other. It is the Land of Light. All
sensation of color is lost in this great sensation of light, an ardent
light “shining through things, not on them.” Even the clouds expire
from excess of light. It reduces all colors to mere hot vibration.
The translucent mountains swim in a sea of light, reflecting from it
as from wide stretches of water. Though sensation of color is lost
in light, their huge forms are distinct in the radiant atmosphere,
but unreal as if half-veiled.--One attribute of mirage is absolute
clearness of outline.--Insignificant details emerge, but they rouse
admiration only because of the light investing them.
The whole wide desert culminates in illusion and mystery of distant
outlines. Everything floats in it, as it sweeps over from the
opalescent mountains. A cross in the midst of the shelly sand,
“protruding through thin layers of mirage,” marks the spot where a
greatly feared bandit was killed. Skulls are heaped beneath it, with
matches and half-burned candles.
Water being denied, the desert is soaked with sun. It is the Land of
Heat. No plant grows in the scorching soil, no animal can endure it.
No bird, no insect flies through the burning atmosphere. Each object
shimmers until it seems but the reflection of itself. Fire descends
from the burnished sky and vibrates in the air and scalds the sand. Yet
concentrating a tropical sun, this hot solitude lies between the cold
ocean and the mountains, a region of ice.
This desert is the abode of weird phenomena. Sometimes a globe of fire
springs to the size of the sun, illuminating the sky for a quarter of
an hour; then it dissipates into an infinitude of stars, which wriggle
off into bright little tails and disappear.
A slowly moving company, muffled to the eyes, with heads done up like
Tuaregs of the Sahara, mincing across the desert on donkeys, suddenly
see themselves swinging along over their own heads, as if magnified by
a gigantic mirror in the sky. The clouds give back strange pictures
of one’s self enlarged and surrounded by a halo or a circular iris,
summoning a saint or revealing a fairy. This quality is inherent in
Peru, making ordinary moments ornamental.
Near Casma is a hill called “Dreadful,” whose continuous sandslides
when the heat is greatest give off a sound of mystery, suggesting heat,
like the roar of a distant volcano.
No matter how much the political status of Peru may change from century
to century, it remains always the lair of earthquakes. Mines of gold
and silver, islands of guano, deserts of nitrate, may be in turn
discovered, exploited, exhausted. Earthquakes destroy those who have
been enriched as those who have lived beside them in want. Even now
earthquakes are almost daily recurrent along the coast. In laying your
ear to the ground you can hear subterranean rumblings. Only in the
frequency of slight shocks do people feel secure; otherwise they know
the underground world is hoarding strength for a fury of destruction.
As a traveler of the old time expressed it: “The inhabitants are
subject to being buried in the ruins of their own houses at any time.”
The Indians say that when God rises from His throne to review the human
race, each step as He progresses is an earthquake. As soon as they feel
the pressure of His foot upon the earth, they rush from their huts to
show themselves to Him. When the rumbling becomes loud enough to be
noticeable, dogs howl, beasts of burden stop and spread their legs to
secure themselves from falling, people rush to doorways, and churches
are emptied in an instant. Reddish mists steam from the sea, bad odors
from the earth; distant thunder--complete wind-stillness. The clouds of
sea-birds rise from the earth and fly high, watching an agony in which
they have no part. Then a frightful crash, rocks are torn asunder,
great masses fall off as islands into the sea, which is still. But soon
it turns black, boiling with a smell of sulphur, and many dead fish
float about.
Omnipresent, the earthquake is a mystery which no laws can govern,
beyond man’s comprehension or control. One never gets accustomed to
it. Horror at a first shock only increases with further experience.
Earthquake is linked with freaks of nature; it lifts up a ridge across
the bed of a stream; it alters the face of the earth so that lawsuits
spring up over changed boundaries. It vitiates the soil. Blooming
fields wither, crops are lost, and cattle die from eating the scorched
grass. The fiery core of earth is nearer the cooled surface than we
imagine. But here at least there are no “torments from heaven.” In Peru
it is said that lightning is worse than earthquake, emanating as it
does from God’s own realm.
Even the climate of the coast partakes of mystery. The clouds hurrying
from the Atlantic have drenched a whole continent of jungle in tropical
downpour, and before they reach the desert, their last drop of moisture
has been wrested from them as snow--drained dry by the Andes. The
tropical sun heats, and the Antarctic current bringing its icy winds,
cools. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other. For the red-hot
desert can also be cold! The low-hanging _garuas_, the ocean mists of
half a year, chill the desert and cling to the base of the mountains,
fading lighter and lighter up and away from the black rocks where white
surf is breaking. Such are the facts of the case, but it has been
thought that the original god, Con, was responsible, for once in anger
he deprived this desert coast of rain.
The desert is majestically empty, a great “vision of nothing without
perspective.” Yet its mere emptiness suggests breadth, backward and
forward, up and down, both in time and space. An unheard silence lies
between the empty horizons, perfect except for the “great, faint sound
of breakers,” the tumble of an unused ocean of water, which destroys
without moistening the desert shores.
It seems lifeless. Harmless and peaceful at least, it presents nothing
to be destroyed by sun-blight. It remains, as it apparently always
has been, the realm of death--though even death presupposes life
before it. But disturb the desert, and a thousand forces spring into
action, furiously attacking the intruder. The heat of the sun assumes a
ghoulish love of destruction, and at night the stars look down upon a
creature shivering with fever, reeking with wet in this desert place.
Possessing all fruitful ingredients within and kindly elements without,
the desert sleeps. It needs only one thing to burst into life.
A mysterious river springs forth full-grown. From what glacier or
clear, icy fountain up on the frozen _puna_ may it not have issued? And
then, after a mysterious incubation, it returns to sparkle here in the
light, and in the leaves and flowers which the dampened earth is ready
to produce.
There are traditions that sometimes a vagrant shower escapes from the
magnetism of the mountain-tops. The flowers waiting just beneath the
surface spring up like bloom over the June earth. The water was a
shower of bluebells! A fugitive vegetation greedily spreads, quickly
as it disappears with the passing of the water. In some places cotton
grows to the height of a horse’s head, a luxuriant crop, too unexpected
for harvest. This brilliant life lasts a week, perhaps more, and then
lapses. Where do the slumbering flowers conceal themselves? Where,
indeed, does the pansy get its coloring matter?
The desert of Peru is varied: toward the south the coast is strewn with
borax, white upon the cliffs; toward the north petroleum gushes from
beneath it. Upon the red plains of Huacho are the salt lakes of Pampa
Pelada, reflecting the sun in a thousand colors. “White dust-whirlpools
dance on its white floor.” Its banks are scattered with the bones of
animals which have come there for salt, and its perpendicular cliffs
are haunted by flesh-eating birds. There, gnarled gray shrubs “loom as
if carved out of clay.” Beyond, the desert is coated with nitrate; yet
here it seems but pulverized bones, beneath acres of white skeletons
bleached by a thousand years--gaunt testimony to its desertdom since
prehistoric Indian races struggled to make it blossom.
In the Pampa of Islay the desert takes on a terra-cotta hue.
Whirlwinds progress from hollow to hollow. Above the purple mountains,
shading away from the red desert, bright blue peaks are snow-covered
to set them off from the sky. Fog shadows drop darkness here and there
over their barrenness. Even the mist has a poetry of contrast.
Across the plain a constant ocean wind sweeps fine white beach-sand
along with waves of color, no less real because impalpable. Its
pilgrimage of a thousand years toward the mountains is uninterrupted,
for the wind blows always from the southwest. It causes the rippled
waves of sand which it brings along to assume in traveling a crescent
shape--the wandering _médanos_.
Sometimes larger dunes overtake smaller ones, which, so absorbed,
become firmer in shape as they journey toward the mountains. Should two
collide, they are shivered, then blend in a new crescent, usually to
separate again.
Growing from a network of roots within the moving dune, the snowy heads
of a small plant maintain themselves just above the sand as it drifts
over the hard plateau.
The _médanos_ are scattered as thickly as the crescent shadows of
some vast eclipse, a labyrinth of nature. They are as mysterious as
“mushrooms growing in rings, marsh-fires which cannot warm, or the
shrinking of the sensitive plant.”
The sand drops constantly over the acute crest. From all about come
soft sounds, an overwhelming minor music, almost inaudible. Were you in
a forest, you might think it was the soughing of the wind through the
branches or the shuffle of locusts devouring a tree.
These playthings of the wind have been called symbols of the Moon
in the land of the Sun, since nothing in Inca days could dissociate
itself from either; a crescent Moon humbled by the Sun’s anger, allowed
to possess her former fullness but a day at a time, doomed to be
obliterated over and over again.
The worth of anything consists in the fact that through it can be seen
something more beautiful than itself, something to which it forms the
setting. Words are mere points of departure. What limitless excursions
can even one word suggest, into countries more wonderful
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
SACHACHA, A TYPICAL VILLAGE OF PERU.]
than any created by a remote if consummate artist! And what an intimate
happiness is found there, which no one else has felt nor could describe
if he had!
* * * * *
Wherever rivers descend from the mountains, green garlands are slung
across the desert. No wonder the river was a god to the desert-dweller,
bringing with it meadows and gardens. Where only dust has been, acres
of cotton, bright-green sugar-fields, and dark orchards lie between mud
walls and willow-shaded lanes. Herds graze upon alfalfa steaming in the
sun. The yellow plaster terraces and balconies of _haciendas_ among
their banana groves are shaded by cascades of glowing bougainvillea.
But wherever water is, fever follows. Disease clings to the green
spaces. Even sickness cannot abide in the desert alone.
Huge, pyramid-like mud structures spring crumbling from the soil whose
modified form they seem to be, temples and palaces of former days,
each with its legend. The ruins are inhabited by weird iguanas and
“haunted by those birds of ill omen that only nest in ruins.” Mounds
of treasure, too, linger along the desert, and fragments of the paved
road of the Incas.
A gold bell was once buried in Tambo de Mora. Older people have heard
it tolling on quiet nights. Some say it rings from the top of a hill,
some, from beneath the ground. To be sure, bells were not known to
ancient Peruvians, yet a company was properly financed to hunt for this
bell of gold.
Submerged or enchanted cities exist on every hand. A mystic race of
dwarfs live in the Andes. They guard a vault of buried treasure.
An Indian who declared he had seen it became so terrified at the
extent of the riches that he fled, not forgetting to mark his path.
Yet frequently as he had followed the trail to the very spot, he
could never again find the cavern of glittering jewels: it had sunk
completely out of sight--“You can see for yourself, Señorita, that it
has, if I take you there!”
Legends of prehistoric days take on the garb of myth, when giants came
over the sea to Peru long before the memory of man. Wishing to provide
themselves with water in the desert, they excavated enormously deep
wells, still undeniable evidence of their dominion. Moreover, their
bones of incredible size have been found. Garcilasso says a piece of
one hollow tooth weighs more than half a pound. Their footprints have
been traced as far as Patagonia. For their sin they were destroyed by a
rain of fire.
Maui, too,--the Polynesian god who caught the sun with cords of
cocoanut fiber, who lifted the sky and smoothed its arched surface with
his stone adze, who made the earth habitable for man and then created
him, and who now divides his time between fishing for islands with a
hook which is called the Plume of Beauty, and resting in the form of a
small day-fly upon the under side of a flower,--Maui, who belongs to
the length and breadth of the Pacific, once visited Peru.
Upon this coast lived aborigines with flat noses, fishing from boats of
inflated sealskins, and sleeping pell-mell in sealskin huts on heaps
of seaweed, “tall, cannibalistic fishermen ... who used bone utensils,
made primitive pottery, nets, and fabrics of osier.”
Here lived the contemporaries of the Incas, Yuncas they were called,
“dwellers in the hot lowlands,” distinct from those of the highlands,
with their hideous thoughts painted on earthenware jars, and their hazy
conception of a single god, their pragmatic worship of him by means of
anything which he had made for their support and comfort, and their
sacrifice to him of his greatest gift, human beings.
Fancy is free to play along geologic or human history. Bones of
mastodons as well as sea-bottom shells are found in the desert.
Vanished races have embellished it in passing. Man has but added to the
mystery of nature. Yet after such lapses of time the two are mingled
indistinguishably.
CHAPTER III
DESERT PERSPECTIVE
There was once a mine of gold in Peru. Later it became a copper mine,
and now they sell the water that collects in the bottom.
I
The Incas found a rainless desert intersected by fruitful valleys as
to-day, each independent, with its own gods, its own king, its own
manners and customs, even its own diseases! Each valley chieftain
lived upon a platform among the fields, but his villagers lived in the
desert, not to encroach upon land capable of cultivation. These Yuncas
excelled in the arts of weaving, fashioning metals, and in making
pottery.
In the name of the Sun the Incas descended from regions of snow to
conquer the desert-dweller, with lofty disregard of the fact that
the benign source of all blessings among the high table-lands was
the scourge of the lowlands, where water-gods were worshipped. These
religious wars changed the face of the country. Valleys were connected
by a great highway. Sun temples and convents for the Virgins of the Sun
supplanted the shrine of each valley’s chief god. Only one remained
inviolate on the whole coast, that of the awful, intangible Pachacamac,
who, being a fish-god in his great red temple by the sea, was not an
idol, but the Invisible, Unknown, Omnipotent God, who had existed
before either the sea or the sun; Pachacamac, he who formed the world
out of nothing, the Creator whose image they dared not conceive. His
name was mentioned with shrugging of shoulders and lifting up of hands,
and he was served with fasting. Unlike Sun-ritual, his cult was a
personal one, the inner worship of a people who paid tribute to golden
fishes. The Maker of all Things had been conceived by those ancient
peoples who, Balboa says, came from the north on a fleet of rafts, when
the mountains had the climate of the valleys, and the whole actual
coast was under the ocean.
The aura of the Unknown God invested the fish-idol, and the temple was
held in such awe that it was not only spared by the Incas, but they
even made pilgrimages to the shrine. Shy in the thought of offending
the Maker of the World, Inca Yupanqui allowed his golden seaside temple
to remain, but erected a temple to the Sun a little above its level.
To honor the conqueror, the priests of Pachacamac “appointed a solemn
fishing of many thousand Indians, who went to sea in their vessels of
reeds.”
Though the fish-idols were ejected, and a convent for the Virgins of
the Sun was founded, worship of Pachacamac went on as before. The Incas
joined in it, identifying him with Uiracocha of the mountains, but they
extorted Sun adoration as well, a fair barter of faith.
Then the priests of the Sun made an idol of Pachacamac, and so it
presided until, drenched with sacrificial blood, it was chopped to
pieces by Hernando Pizarro and twenty soldiers in January, 1533. A
terrible earthquake followed, which Pizarro called the devil’s rage,
and triumphant he planted a cross above the looted temple. Pizarro gave
the golden nails to his pilot, as a reward for his entire venture.
But much of the temple’s treasure is said to be concealed underground,
undiscovered to this day.
* * * * *
The temple pile glows against the blue sea in the midst of shimmering
sand. Pachacamac lies in its magnificent ruin surrounded by acres of
skeletons. For more than two thousand years it was the most famous
burial place of the coast. Even mummies were brought from great
distances to lie in the sacred ground.
Layers upon layers of succeeding generations have all yielded
their excavated secrets, each throwing light on others. Time and
treasure-seekers have laid bare the most recent. Histories of great
peoples told by their graves!
I stood upon the summit of the broad mound, the temple to Inti, the
Sun, built by the Incas above that of Pachacamac, the fish-god. Its
crumbling walls, with traces of their brilliant coloring, ended
abruptly in mid-air. The headless skeletons of forty-six young girls
had recently been found upon the terrace where I stood, the braided
cords hanging loosely about their skeleton necks.
[Illustration: PAMPA DE LOS HUESOS--THE FIELD OF BONES.]
Far below stretched the vast field of the dead. I looked out over
a desert of round white skulls, with eye-cavities staring at the
sun--Sun-worship continued in death. Little flurries of dust rose
here and there, as men with shovels turned over the sand, hoping for
treasure. _Gallinazos_, hideous vultures of the desert, paced up and
down. Below the convent of the Virgins of the Sun, whose niches only
remain, was a small blue lagoon under palm trees. On its reed-edges
a white heron tilted about--a curious, gnarled creature, giving an
impression of majestic grace.
Between me and the sand-hills rolling up to the Andes lay the silent
courts, the great, roofless houses of the city of the dead caving in
over its streets of sand. The desert-river separated this sepulchral
spot from the valley of Lurin, where cotton-fields and yellowish
expanses of sugar-cane were divided by willow hedgerows, with glimpses
of water beneath tall mud gateways. The breeze was as sweet as
heliotrope hedges could make it and filled with tinkling bird notes.
On the other side was the whole reach of the sparkling Pacific, with
its far-off sound of breakers. There is a tradition that the two rocky
islands are a goddess, Cavillaca, who cast herself and her child into
the sea a thousand years ago. But scientists assure us that the islands
were torn away by an earthquake since Spanish occupation. The Incas,
they say, had a temple on the islands, then a promontory.
* * * * *
He has not beheld the quintessence of all human suffering who has not
seen the face of a hunchback child-mummy. Upon such bodies, doubled up
and tied securely into the smallest possible space, whose varnished
skin is stretched over their unbending bones, even the tattoo marks
still show in designs of their owners’ choosing. They are clothed in
finely-woven garments, with sandals, pouches, shell and bead ornaments,
embroidered bands, and hair not yet unbraided. Sometimes brilliant
eyes stare from empty sockets in the withered mummy-faces, eyes of
prehistoric cuttlefish, a symbol of fish worship. In some of the skulls
are dents made by blunted points of stone weapons.
One mummy sits in the attitude of a toper about to drink, with a monkey
on his shoulder--for pets of the dead man accompanied him on his
journey, his dog or parrot sometimes mummified at his feet. The men
have their slings and fish nets, the women their spindles, needles of
cactus thorns, and every implement of household use, the children their
earthenware dolls. All have their little gods and talismans. There are
pots of provisions, too, with lids to keep out the thin finger of time,
jugs of _chicha_ (a beverage distilled from maize), and ears of corn in
nets from which they have never been removed since they were put in by
hands turned to dust a thousand years ago.
From the grave of an apparently great official with his treasure-jars,
was taken only the mummy of a puma, yellow feathers on its head, a
gold plate in its mouth, gold and silver bangles on its legs. It had a
necklace of emeralds from the north, and its tail was full of golden
feathers from the mystic jungle beyond the mountains.
Recently X-rays have been applied to mummy-bundles, which show other
skeletons within as well as the one who had died, skeletons of those
who, when those winding-sheets were adjusted, were still alive.
Gruesome sacrifice!
Pachacamac has furnished museums all over the world and is still one of
the most inexhaustible of mummy supplies.
* * * * *
My horse descended carefully to this field of the dead. He picked his
way across stepping-stones on which pilgrims approached the lower
court of the temple where their year of penance before entering was to
be spent. A step, and there was the sound of crunching human bones.
Sand filled the skull cavities. They shattered like fragile glass as
the horse’s hoofs clattered across them toward the ruined city. The
sand was pulverized bones. Bits of cloth and pottery attracted the
collector’s eye, or a deformed or trephined skull.
The city walls are twenty feet thick. Their ends and their beginnings
are lost in sand. Marks of fire show here and there, and traces of
forgotten industries. Flights of stairs lead down from the tops of
walls, over which was the only entrance. The roofs were made of reeds
to let through necessary air and light; none were needed against rain.
Swallows, “dovelets of Santa Rosa,” flew over from the green valley of
Lurin. Bats and little owls, always in pairs, inhabited the ruins, and
lizards basked in the blinding light and enjoyed the quiet. Under the
cactus lying loose upon the ground there is sometimes a small black
spider whose bite takes months to cure. Its inhabitants emphasize still
further the uninhabitability of this scorching desert.
II
One other center of power confronted the Incas in the coast valleys,
the city of Chanchan, belonging to the Chimus.
In the kingdom of the Grand Chimu, Si, the Moon, was worshipped. It
appeared both by day and by night, which the sun was not able to do.
The Moon raised the tides; did such power not demand sacrifice? On
special occasions the Chimus offered to it small children wrapped in
brilliant cloths.
The ocean was the medium through which their Moon-god chose to
demonstrate its power. As it nourished them with its fish, scattered by
the fish-god Pachacamac through its waves, they strewed white meal upon
its surface as a form of worship; incidentally to attract a large catch
of fish. Ni, the Ocean, symbolized water, the greatest need of a desert
land. It was also their only means of communication between the desert
valleys, as they plied up and down upon the “silent highway” to collect
tribute. Their boats were made of reeds tied together, and they sat
upon them as on “horseback, cutting the waves of the sea, and rowing
with small reeds on either side,” as Father Acosta explains. Sometimes
they had square sails of grass. One may see these boats of bulrushes
upon the shore, for they are still in use, their long, curved beaks
leaning against each other like stacks of mammoths’ tusks.
The water cult of the Chimu included worship of fountains, flowing
streams, and of their goddess, “She of the Emerald Skirts.” The worst
criminal was a water thief, he who turned the stream aside from his
neighbor’s field; and the Grand Chimu was overcome at last only
because the Inca was able to cut off his water supply. Mild Tupac Inca
Yupanqui, who ruled the mountains as the Grand Chimu controlled the
coast, preferred victory without bloodshed, since his were religious
wars to spread the worship of the Sun.
Sun-worshippers and Moon-worshippers, living side by side, struggled
in mortal conflict, but the Sun-worshippers prevailed; and when, after
a few generations, the Spaniards, eager for bloodshed, came to conquer
the Sun-worshippers in the name of Christianity, the great city of the
worshippers of Moon and Sea was gone. They could glut their desire only
on hidden treasure in sepulchral mounds.
Mochica, the language of the Chimus, was so difficult that no grown
person could learn it. Here and there it was spoken as late as the
seventeenth century, and to-day near Eten, “where the sun halted at his
rising,” there are elements of it left in a curious dialect, spoken by
a little community of Indians whom no one can understand. They braid
Panama hats of finest straw. Their huts are almost without furniture,
they wear no shoes, and dress always in mourning; but they wear
flowers in their hair.
An Augustinian prior, Calancha, collected traditions of Chanchan, that
great city of the Chimus which covered twenty square miles. He tells
of the processions to the Moon temple, when the Grand Chimu, wearing
the jeweled diadem, in robes of feather-mosaic as fine as warp and
woof, was carried in his litter by courtiers, surrounded by musicians,
minstrels, priests, and warriors with lances and long waving plumes.
The mounds scattered in fragments through the desert were terraced
pyramids in those days, the walls upholding them brilliantly painted
and richly embossed. Traces can still be seen of their paintings of
wild birds and animals, and step-patterns like the pyramids themselves.
Vines of the passion-flower drooped their fruit over the garden walls
upon the terraces, for water ran to the very top. Even the avenues of
trees had individual nourishment from the distant mountains through a
lofty aqueduct, the most amazing accomplishment of an amazing people.
In the labyrinth below worked the designers, dyers, potters, weavers,
and the gold-and silver-smiths, expressing the florid taste of the
Chimus.
These sea-worshippers, fish-worshippers, made fish-gods of gold. In
Chanchan their small fish-god has been found, worth three million
dollars. With it were gold bowls, little figures of fish, lizards,
serpents, and birds, neck and arm bands, scepters and diadems, and
emeralds from the north. The larger fish-god is yet to be discovered.
Manuscripts describe conscientious attempts to unearth it.
The race has vanished; vast Chanchan is gone. We are not even sure
what this great people called themselves. Their gold and silver
ornaments have long ago been melted into European coin. Traditions
of their wealth and magnificence came only through their conquerors,
who themselves had no written language. Were we to believe only Inca
tradition, all the Yuncas of the coast were savages, given up to
unnatural sin. Fortunately there are vestiges of their pyramids and
labyrinthine interiors of their temples and palaces, bits of their
pottery, and patterns of their cotton fabrics. There are, too,
fragments of their marvelous irrigation system, a dumb reminder to Peru
that present needs were once supplied by the intelligence and industry
of an Indian civilization.
A bush with many-colored clusters of flowers joined together like a
bunch of grapes grows not far from the site of Chanchan. It is said
that each flower has a different shape as well as a different color.
The name of the bush is the “Flower of Paradise.”
CHAPTER IV
PICA, THE FLOWER OF THE SAND
A towering, scoop-topped wagon, fruit-filled, dragged by nine mules,
lurched through the desert. Far in the distance, on the first low
swelling of the mighty chain of the Andes, there was a faint dark line
whence it came.
The driver of the wagon handed me a small branch of a _chirimoya_ tree.
The three narrow, fleshy lobes of the _chirimoya_ flower lie close
together among the pale green foliage and send forth a perfume as
poignant, though faint, as if there were rain-drops for conductors. The
aromatic, gently acid flesh of its fruit lies in rays, the exquisite
scent of the flower tasted in the fruit. Warmed by the sun on its
journey from the valley oasis, the whole freshness of the desert was
condensed in this single flavor, like the crystallization of a perfect
moment. Strange imaginings sprang from tasting it.
A gallop across the desert is a good prelude to anywhere, especially
if one has silver bridle and stirrups and a long lariat with silver
knobs. The muleteers sat upon high black saddles of alpaca hair. The
colors of their mufflers must have been brilliant underneath the dust.
Their trappings were embroidered in red with a red-worsted fringe,
Inca-fashion, over the mules’ temples. Our little unshod ponies picked
their way between the stones, up hill and down, over the roadless road
to Pica.
The desert of Tarapacá, now belonging to Chile, is called the Plain of
the Eagle. A fit arena for gaunt battles in former days, a road across
it is now distinguishable by the bones of beasts of burden which have
dropped on their way.
There are valleys of nitrate to explore, hills of nitrate to be
climbed, plains of nitrate to gallop across, and the only break is one
windswept _tamarugo_ tree. Does it exist upon the morning mist which
the sun disperses? Or does its tough life go on underground, like some
uncouth monster in the depth of the sea? Or does its tap-root bore down
into a deeply buried flow of water? Every one believes that there is
a honeycomb of tunnels from water-giving strata in the mountain-sides,
far antedating the days when Uiracocha went to Tarapacá.
No convulsion of nature is unknown to this pitiless land. Volcanic
bombs lie about, and fantastic heaps of lava from molten mountains
mingle with corals from the sea-bottom. Streams come to the surface,
ripple for a short distance, and disappear. Their water tastes of
sulphate of soda. Sometimes it springs suddenly from a cave, suggesting
a system of underground rivers. Sometimes it is brought by water-works
of prehistoric days, whose exact position is not known, making life
possible for their would-be destroyers. Whether freaks of nature or
remnants of the vast system of irrigation, importance enough has been
given to the underground waterways of Peru to bring a scientist from
the United States to chart them all.
Curious symbols and conventionalized llamas are cut into the hills
of pink trachite and black slate rock whose strata have been jostled
and overturned by earthquake. Pictures of serpents, foxes, and
birds endure through ages of merciless sun. Were they the work of a
megalithic people of a megalithic age, when cyclopean stones were
transported to build cyclopean edifices, and gigantic ant-eaters
and other jungle-dwellers swarmed in this desert of Tarapacá? Their
irrefutable bones are found here, but so are shells of the sea-bottom
and water-worn stones of green jasper with red spots. Moreover, the
nitrate is filled with the petrified eggs and bones, even the feathers
of sea-birds, suggesting that the nitrate was originally guano. Why
should it not be true? For this desert was once beside the sea, as it
was once beneath the sea.
But the law of compensation works even here. It has always been common
opinion that the desert of Tarapacá shelters fabulous riches. Lured
by the glisten of a fallen meteor, men have squandered their fortunes
and risked their lives searching for gold, while they trod the nitrate
under foot.
* * * * *
The large dark cave was gently steaming. The water filling it gurgled
out from sunless twilight, hot from the hold of the earth, cool as it
spread over the desert valley from the mouth of the cave. A brown man
and his little daughter, lying in it, were being waved to and fro by
the water as it issued, just their heads visible. Saturating the bamboo
tangle, it left a wake of gardens, orange and guava trees, citrons,
figs, and slender _paltas_, tall _chirimoyas_ and _pacays_, grown
to fruit-bearing size in six months. Trees of the jungle bathing in
incandescent desert light! There were thick mimosas, geranium trees,
and darts of poinsettia, grape-vines a foot across at the root, and
spikes of heavy-smelling tuberoses. Jasmine trailed on the trellis
above my head, and bougainvillea made a roof of purple flowers.
The slope of the sand-hills was crossed in the foreground by shadows of
orange groves, “indefinitely elongated.” Domestic constellations glowed
in their black foliage. Men in _ponchos_ whirled up on mule-back,
unbuckled their three-inch spurs, and flapped their saddles down. This
time the mirage was real.
Old Dorothea came down from her bright green veranda, where the
sunshine glistened from a humming-bird’s wings as it hovered above
a passion flower, a whirl of black fringe with yellow deeps, the
favored blossom which the Incas carried in their hands as a sign of
greatness. She held a dove in the crotch of her arm and offered me a
bunch of narcissus and white fleurs-de-lis, unthinkably sweet. She was
dressed in yellow ocher and an old straw hat which she removed on being
introduced to ladies. Her little earless dancing dog did a _cueca_
(native dance) for us, while she clapped queer aboriginal time, and the
gold hands danced in her ears.
Birds sang in the thorn hedgerows, and frogs croaked in the warm pool,
frogs which die in cold water.
Dorothea said that some day the desert will again be covered with
forests and gardens, as it was before it became a desert.
In a cloud of dust made luminous by the sun, a drove of llamas galloped
down over the desert hillside to drink, soft eyes wonderingly looking
out from tall fuzzy heads, legs bungling with heavy wool. An old Indian
woman in Panama hat and brilliant blankets followed slowly, puffing at
a pipe.
[Illustration: A CHARACTERISTIC PERUVIAN CHURCH]
This pool in a shadowed vale of the western Andes, a shady,
sweet-smelling spot, lost in an immensity of desert, is a little
solitude in the midst of a great solitude, hospitable by sweet
contrast. It takes very little water to make a perfect pool for a tiny
fish, where it will find its world and paradise all in one, with never
an intimation of the dry bank.
A large butterfly poised gently on the water’s surface. It was sunset
time, the butterflies’ drinking hour. A copper bell tolled slowly.
The reverberation pierced far into the silence and was “prolonged by
the whole surrounding desert.” A boy perched on an overhanging rock
was playing a flute. The frail sounds echoed through the quiet air,
“hesitating within a silence almost too large.” What can give such
an impression of space as a flute? Or, in ceasing, leave such utter
stillness? A gorgeous peacock preened itself against the crimson
bougainvillea in the sunset, then folded its fan for the night.
It is curious how the atmosphere of a dream cannot be conveyed in words.
Sitting beneath the mango tree by a lily-edged brook, I watched the
low bonfire roasting desert quail and smelled the scent of heliotrope
hedges, while I listened to an old man’s plaintive song, mingling with
a quiet desert waterfall. A wild youth with a bullet gash across one
cheek told me of reckless escapades in the valleys above. He twisted
off oranges with a stick of bamboo and dropped them into my lap, as
the moon, poised on the crest of the mauve-colored Andes like a discus
thrown by a mighty arm from beyond, disengaged herself and traveled
upward. Moonlight, he said, is brighter in the mountain defiles. The
moon sometimes drops a rainbow up there, a faint, round, dream rainbow,
made of thin far-diluted sunlight. Pushed by a little breeze, it
divides the cloud and disappears.
He pointed out the false Cross preceding the true Cross, preparing its
way into the sky.
“Some violets have got in here,” he said suddenly, tweaking one out by
the roots. Intrusive violets!
A man with spurs passed _picante_ and young kid and trays of fruit,
their crevices filled with flowers.
Was not Amiel right when he said that “_Un paysage est un état d’âme_?”
It was an “ambrosial night,” in a place to attach affection, except
that affection is not for places, either actually or in retrospect. One
heart-beat faster, and the nitrate desert has fairy illusions. Why is
it that merely seeing foreign sights leaves only craving, while a whiff
of feeling in a distant, lonely spot fills one with the meaning and
the mystery of everything and brings tears to the eyes of memory? The
purple of the bare mountains is significant in the afterglow. Dripping
water is significant. The moon sheds a different light. The heat of
the desert sand just below the surface becomes suggestive. The air is
filled with indefinable odors never perceived elsewhere, and the sight
of a sand-colored bird explains all the secrets of the universe.
The beauty which alone would have woven a spell about the place merely
lapsed into a background. In itself the voice was not faultless, nor
the moon different from other windless, immaculate nights; but the air
was sweeter, and the guavas were at the season’s climax, their one day
of perfection. They tell you that if you eat guavas in Pica, you become
either ill or enchanted; in either case you cannot leave.
He must have been talking for a long time. It was as if his voice
had been beneath my range of sound, or too soft--though I heard well
enough. All at once I began to understand.
“Perhaps you have heard of the bush which grows in Patagonia. It is
covered with pale yellow flowers. When a match is placed beneath
it, the bush blazes forth and is reduced to immediate ashes, all
its strength exhausted in a single dazzling effort. It is called
_escandalosa_.
“Had you let me know two weeks ago that you would come, I would have
put a bit of nitrate on the roots of my rose-tree, and it would have
blossomed viciously for you!”
“Yes,” I said, “but afterwards?”
“Oh, to be sure. Then it would have died.”
An owl screamed from the top of a _ciruela_ tree, a little
owl-of-the-desert, just a few inches high.
Pica, the Flower of the Sand! With what golden words borrowed from
Hindoo poets might not its charm be told? By what enchantment its suave
breezes be recalled? Everybody knows it is a magic spot. Its quiet
existence is a sort of self-expression of inmost thoughts without
technique.
Doctor Stübel, the earthquake specialist, says Pica is an eruption
center.
CHAPTER V
A CLASH OF CONTRASTS
I
While the mysticism of the Middle Ages was expanding in delicate spires
of Gothic architecture, the Inca’s empire was exposing its heart of
gold to the blaze of a tropical sun. Their only similarity is that a
shadowy veil, half history, half legend, floats between us and them
both. But the gold shines through, and the veil cannot conceal its
brilliancy.
Once upon a time there was a garden of pleasure where flowers of gold
opened from silver stalks, some full blown, others in close golden
bud. Upon the walls crept strange insects and snails, so perfectly
counterfeited in gold “that they wanted nothing but motion.” Even the
trees and the paths were of gold. Birds of gold perched upon golden
boughs, their heads thrown back in silent song, and upon silver leaves
gold butterflies poised in the sunlight upon their little golden
feet. Humming-birds of gold sipped imaginary honey from long, golden
flower-bells. The old chronicler, Cieza de Leon, says that one garden
“was artificially sown with golden maize, the stalks, as well as the
leaves and cobs being of that metal; ... they were so well planted that
even in a high wind they were not torn up; and besides all this they
had more than twenty golden sheep with their lambs, and the shepherds
with their slings and hooks to watch them, all made of the same metal.”
Near by were vast heaps of gold and silver, waiting to be wrought into
wonderful shapes.
The Inca ate within gold-lined walls, sitting “commonly on a stool of
massive gold set on a large, square plate of gold which served for a
pedestal.” He ate from gold dishes rare viands from distant provinces,
prepared in gold pots and kettles in a kitchen supplied with piles of
golden fagots! He bathed in cisterns of gold in water conducted through
golden pipes from distant springs. Francisco Lopez says: “Nay, there
was nothing in all that empire (the most flourishing of the whole
world) whereof there was not a counterfeit in pure gold.”
As hunger could not be satisfied with gold, it was valued only for its
shining beauty, esteemed by the Incas’ subjects only as a symbol of
the Sun, those “tears which the Sun has wept.” They naturally belonged
to him. His worshippers even cast them into lakes, mirrors in which he
looks upon his own reflected glory, and “sinks at last still gazing on
it.”
The greatest of all Sun-Temples was Coricancha--the Ingot of
Gold--where every implement in use, even to spades and rakes of the
garden, was made of gold.
Huayna Ccapac had learned from the god Uiracocha that a superior people
would conquer the Incas and introduce a new religion. They would come
after the reign of twelve kings; and “In me,” he said, “the number of
twelve kings is completed.”
Oracles had predicted their coming. And what was more significant, the
great oracle of Rimac, “notwithstanding its former readiness of speech,
was become silent!” Omens had foreshadowed them. A brilliant comet
“struck Atahualpa with such a dump of melancholy in his spirits that
he remained almost insensible.” A royal eagle pursued by hawks fell
into the market-place of Cuzco and died. Great earthquakes shattered
the shore, and tides did not keep their usual course. A thunderbolt
fell in the Inca’s own palace. Strange apparitions faltered in the air,
terrible to behold. The Moon, mother of Incas, had three halos; the
first blood-red, the second blackish, inclining to green, the third
like mist or smoke.
Atahualpa’s atrocities had come to pass. For the first time civil war
had decimated the empire of the Lover of the Poor, the Deliverer of
the Oppressed. Such conduct had earned its reward. Was it not to be
expected that the dawn-heroes of fair complexion, absent for a season,
should reappear? Their vengeance was commissioned by the Light-god.
What greater dramatic climax ever focused? What authority was ever more
solidly founded? What identity of hero-gods more tangibly proven? A
first appearance which further facts continued to corroborate.
II
Lured by rumors of a descendant of the Sun in a city of gold, the first
lean, poor adventurer, worn with uncertainty and suffering, stepped
upon the shore of Peru. Pedro de Candia was his name, who, having
burned ten cities, had dedicated in expiation ten lamps to the Virgin.
His “coat of mail reached to his knees, his helmet of the best and
bravest sort, his sword girt by his side. He took a target of steel
in his left hand, and in his right a wooden cross a yard and a half
long,” advancing toward the Indians. Two fierce jaguars, “beholding the
cross,” fawned upon him and cast themselves at his feet. Taking courage
at the sight, he laid it upon their backs and dared to stroke their
heads. By virtue of that symbol a miracle had happened. Pedro de Candia
and the Indians were equally dumbfounded.
They followed him to the temples and palaces furnished and plated with
gold and silver, all awed to silence, he at such magnificence in an
undiscovered country, they at the sight of the tall, fair man, whose
long beard hung down over his iron dress; all were convinced by this
first encounter, the Indians of the divinity of the Spaniards, the
Spaniards of God’s patronage. “Being abundantly satisfied with what he
had seen, he returned with all joy imaginable to his companions, taking
much larger steps back than his gravity allowed him in his march toward
the people.”
Eye-witnesses have described the Spaniards’ first glimpse of Atahualpa,
the red fringe shining on his forehead, when Hernando de Soto, the
most daring of all Pizarro’s followers, caracoled upon his miraculous
beast into the very lap of the dignified monarch. They feasted and
drank _chicha_ from goblets of gold which young girls presented to
them, sitting upon seats of gold like the emperor’s own. Two historians
were present “who with their _quipus_ (knots) made certain ciphers
describing ... all the passages of that audience.”
In Cajamarca, the Country of Frost, Atahualpa returned the visit.
He came in full regalia, facing the pomp of a gorgeous sunset, and
the Spaniards, “brandishing their pennants toward the flaring west,
saluted with a great shout the Setting of the Sun!”
First came multitudes of people clearing the way of stones and sweeping
the road, then singers and dancers in three divisions, many richly
dressed courtiers, and the guards, divided into four squadrons of
eight thousand men, one before, one on each side of the Inca, and one
in the rear. High on the shoulders of distinguished chiefs he rode
upon a golden litter lined with brilliant feathers. His proud head,
too large for his body, was encircled by the red fringe hanging above
his wild and bloodshot eyes. Atahualpa, that courageous fiend who
bragged that no bird flew in the air, no leaf fluttered on a tree
without his permission, who though ransomed with a roomful of gold was
taken prisoner in the midst of his own army by a handful of insolent
adventurers, baptized in the Christian faith “Don Juan,” bound to a
post, and throttled like a common criminal! Pizarro put himself into
mourning.
The legend which had lured the Spaniards was proven true: that the land
of a powerful king lay toward the south, where immeasurable treasure
was amassed. It took a month to melt up the gold plaques and plates,
brackets and moldings, statues of men, animals and plants, drinking and
eating utensils, jars and jewelry of all sorts that filled Atahualpa’s
room of ransom.
A huge quantity of gold, carried by eleven thousand llamas and intended
for the ransom, never arrived. It is said to lie buried near Jauja, and
is only one of the countless masses of hidden treasure, both along the
coast and in the mountains, even into Ecuador. The Spanish messengers
who were carried in hammocks to inspect that caravan on its journey
toward Cajamarca were almost blinded by a mountain seeming to shine
from base to crest with gold. The eleven thousand llamas had laid
themselves down to rest.
III
So they had come at last, the very image of the god himself, strange
little Uiracochas in beards and ruffs; worthy of worship indeed, for
they let loose thunder and lightning, the proper arms of the Sun, from
instruments held in their hands, and rode about on amazing beasts. (The
Indians’ fear of horses persisting to this day, they are used only as
infantry.) Were the Uiracochas insensible of hunger and thirst; did
they need sleep after toil and repose after labor? Were they made of
flesh and bones, or had they incorruptible bodies like those of the Sun
and the Moon?
So the grisly conquerors came, half heroes, half wild beasts, who did
not grow exhausted by fighting, nor discouraged by wounds and the
horrors of mountain-sickness.
So they came, these few poor adventurers who fell upon a roomful of
gold given them by a people in ransom for the sovereign-deity whom this
handful of men had imprisoned. Miracles in their favor seemed to spring
up at each step; and madly stimulated, the peaks of the cordillera
blazing above them, their imaginations limitless, they strode through
the empire in the guise of gods and scraped the sacred gold from the
City of the Sun. They ripped the plate from the walls of its temples.
They destroyed the idols. It is said that the Jesuits
[Illustration: WOLFENBÜTTEL-SPANISH MAP, _CIRCA_ 1529.
Courtesy of Dr. E. L. Stevenson.
One of the first maps to show Pizarro’s discoveries along the Peruvian
coast.]
had to employ thirty persons for three days to break up a single
carved stone _huaco_ (idol). They dug up the treasures buried with the
dead and pillaged the towns, and they brought back to greedy European
sovereigns news of a land of gold. Having, as it seemed to them, found
infinitely, they hoped infinitely and infinitely dared.
The glittering career of the Indies had begun. No empire was ever won
in so grandiose a way; no empire ever so monstrously destroyed.
IV
Picturesque are the figures of the two great conquerors, Francisco
Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, lean and tireless soldiers, “either of
whom, single, could break through a body of a hundred Indians,” who
amassed a fortune, the greatest that had been known in many ages,
wasted it in wars with each other, and died so poor that they were
“buried of mere charity.”
They dressed in the costume of their youth. The marquis “never wore
other than a jerkin of black cloth with skirts down to his ankles,
with a short waist a little below his breast. His shoes were made of
a white cordivant, his hat white, with sword and dagger after the old
fashion. Sometimes upon high days, at the instance and request of
his servants, he wore a cassock lined with martins’ furs which had
been sent him from Spain,” but his coat of mail was underneath, as
appropriate to his body as its steely sheath to his heart. Illiterate,
greedy, fearless, and proud, wading through blood to establish the
Christian faith, he was murdered at last; and as he fell, traced in his
own blood a cross upon the stone floor, kissed it, and died.
Then there was the able monster, Carvajal, who went about accompanied
by three or four negroes to strangle people. He jeered as they did
so, “showing himself very pleasant and facetious at that unseasonable
time.” He left behind him a wake of spiked heads of “traitors” to the
king. He wore a Moorish burnous and hens’ feathers twined together in
the form of a cross on his hat, bought masses with emeralds for his
soul’s repose, and at the age of eighty-four went to his execution
in a basket, saying his prayers in Latin. “Being come to the place
of execution, the people crowded so to see him that the hangman had
not room to do his duty. And thereupon he called to them and said:
‘Gentlemen, pray give the officer room to do justice.’”
CHAPTER VI
PIRATES AND TREASURE FLEETS
“Gold,” said Columbus, “constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it
has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls
from purgatory and restoring them to the enjoyment of paradise.”
Raleigh remarked that: “Where there is store of gold, it is needless to
remember other commodities for trade.”
Gold--the evil spell overshadowing Peru, pouring out her immeasurable
riches to impoverish Spain. Gold--the most incorruptible of all metals,
itself the cause of most corruption!
Peru has always been cursed by wealth. The gold of the Incas was the
cause of their destruction, the wealth of the Spanish conquerors,
theirs; it brought about wars among themselves and ravages of foreign
pirates upon the sea. When the era of precious metals seemed to wane,
islands of guano were discovered, apparently an endless source of
wealth. But it was greedily exhausted by foreigners. Then came the
discovery of nitrate fields, where fortunes are merely scraped off the
top of the ground. But that particular territory has been annexed by a
prosperous neighbor.
One wonders what undiscovered wealth may still be threatening this
lavish country.
The days when fleets of treasure sailed from the distant cordilleras of
the Spanish Main had begun. The tall, enchanted galleons of Lima spread
sail, with their
“Escutcheoned pavisades, emblazoned poops,
Banners and painted shields and close-fights hung
With scarlet broideries. Every polished gun
Grinned through the jaws of some heraldic beast,
Gilded and carven and gleaming with all hues.”
At first the argosies bore off the ransom of Atahualpa, the golden
ornaments belonging to the Sun.
Albrecht Dürer, in his Tagebuch, wrote of having seen a boatload of
such booty from the Indies. “And, moreover, have I seen the things
which were brought from the new golden land to the king--an entire
sun of gold, a full fathom wide, likewise a silver moon of the
same size, also two rooms full of armor, all manner of weapons,
harness, war-trappings, and strange accoutrements, curious raiment,
bed-draperies and many kinds of wondrous things for divers uses, fairer
to behold than marvels. They are all so precious that they are held to
be worth a hundred thousand gulden.
“Nor have I in all the days of my life seen aught that did so fill me
with delight. For I saw there fine-wrought things of cunning design,
and marveled at the subtle skill of men in far countries. Nor know I
how to tell of all the things which I saw there.”
Loot of golden treasure gave way to mountains of silver, which poured
forth their wealth in such profusion that it staggers even oriental
imagination. Loading at Arica, ships brought silver direct from the
mines of Potosí. Then there was plunder of Peruvian churches, jeweled
chalices, and gold shrines. There were emeralds from the north--a land
where they were sacred, small emeralds being sacrificed to larger ones.
These glittering cargoes were carried home to Seville, the “Queen of
the Ocean.” Its wonderful Casa de Contratación dealt with the wealth of
the Indies and, to quote Alonzo Morgado, “the riches which flowed into
its offices would have been sufficient to pave the streets of Seville
with gold and silver slabs.”
Like most stories of Peru, the gold and silver it exported seem mere
extravaganza. Contemporary accounts, mostly in cipher, may be quoted.
In 1538, G. Loveday wrote to Lord Lisle: “Spanish ships have returned
from Peru so laden that the emperor’s part amounts to two million
ducats.... The emperor has borrowed the whole from the owners.” Being
“occasionally pinched for money,” he found it most convenient to seize
the ships laden with private treasure from his “Indyac of Perrow.”
In July, 1555, the Venetian ambassador in England wrote to the Doge and
Senate of a fleet of caravels, “all very richly freighted according
to the usual parlance of these Spaniards, who invariably reckon by
millions.”
Federico Badoer Venetian ambassador with the emperor, wrote (1556) that
the king would obtain so considerable a sum of money that he would
be able to defend himself not only against the Pope but also against
France and any other power, if necessary. By this time Peru was raining
gold and silver.
Father Acosta returned to Spain with the fleet of 1587. In his boat
were twelve chests of gold, each weighing a hundred pounds; eleven
million pieces of silver, and two chests of emeralds, each weighing
one hundred pounds. “The reason why there is so great an abundance of
metals at the Indies,” he wrote, “is the will of the Creator, who hath
imparted His gifts as it pleased Him.”
Von Tschudi says that in the first twenty-five years the Spaniards
got four hundred millions of ducats of gold and silver, which was,
however, only a small part of the vast amount buried or thrown into the
mountain lakes whose deep waters concealed it in underground caves.
“The Indians, taking a handful of grain from a whole measure, said:
‘Thus much the Christians have gained and the remainder is lodged where
neither we nor any one else is able to assign.’”
Humboldt says that from the discovery of Peru until 1800, the Old World
received £516,471,344 worth of treasure from the New World. No wonder
Europe felt that gold lay about in this land of gold, and that it was
only necessary to go and pick it up. No wonder Europe still has an idea
of America little changed through four hundred years. And yet only one
fifth of the treasure of mines and grave-mounds was supposed to be sent
to Spain, whose galleons came to the far-away West Indies to receive it.
It was not long before pirates descended upon Peru. Brittany was
the first to fit out fleets for the Indies “on pretense of carrying
merchandise thither,” in fact, to molest vessels coming from Peru.
Next, English buccaneers intercepted the Spanish vessels, slow-sailing
under weight of gold.
“With the fruit of Aladdin’s garden clustering thick in her hold,
With rubies a-wash in her scuppers, and her bilge a-blaze with gold,
A world in arms behind her to sever her heart from home,
The _Golden Hynde_ drove onward, over the glittering foam.”
Sir Francis Drake, with sixty armed ships, looted the Pacific in the
_Golden Hynde_. His ballast was silver, his cargo gold and emeralds. He
dined alone with music.
In 1578 he took from the Spanish galleon _Cacafuego_ “twenty tons of
silver bullion, thirteen chests of silver coins, a hundred-weight of
gold, gold nuggets in indefinite quantity, a great store of pearls,
emeralds, and diamonds, ... and many, many other things.” Only Queen
Elizabeth and Drake knew the exact amount that was taken.
For three centuries pirates and freebooters harried the treasure-fleets
of Spain. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the English
Calendar of State Papers compassionately remarks that foreign gluttony
“keeps the poor Spaniards in arms all along the coast of Peru and puts
them into strange apprehension, all mankind seeming to conspire the
murdering and destroying them as common enemies, not because they do
worse, but have more than ordinary.”
Much of the twice-looted treasure never reached Europe, for, following
the example of
[Illustration: A VIEW OF PAITA FROM THE _MIROIR OOST & WEST INDICAL_,
1621.]
the Indians, the sea-rovers buried large amounts of gorgeous plunder
in the mysterious islands of the Pacific. Even to this day, syndicates
with steam-dredges and suction-pumps are following up the faded charts
on which are indicated the spots where piles of doubloons and ducats
and pieces-of-eight are stowed away.
CHAPTER VII
BACKGROUNDS
I
Here lay Lima under a tropical sun, sparkling with treasure, a
wilderness of rich carvings and paintings, whose piles of gold and
silver shone through the thick perfume of exotic blossoms. Long
caravans, loaded with the wealth of the provinces as well as the
produce of sales in the remote interior, filed into Lima, where
countless gold-and silver-smiths were awaiting their arrival. Weavers
of silks, velvets, and brocades, embroiderers, leather and metal
workers, sculptors, artists, makers of glass and porcelain bells--all
the most skilled workmen flocked to the capital of New Andalusia, the
continent’s center, for there they found no lack of rich materials.
Their fancy might fashion uncontrolled, with assurance of eager
purchasers.
In Lima voyages of discovery to the Isles of Solomon were planned. From
Lima pilgrimages were made in search of El Dorado, that luxurious ruler
who bathed himself in sweet-smelling gums and then rolled in gold dust.
There is no more romantic chapter in the history of Peru than these
pilgrimages in search of El Dorado. Southey says they cost Spain more
than all the treasure received from her South American possessions.
In Lima lived the viceroys who ruled all of South America from
Guayaquil to Buenos Aires, “as by the divine right of kings.” The
viceroy was served only by titled Spaniards. He was drawn about by six
horses, with sounding of trumpets, and a personal guard of two hundred
Spaniards, “for the safety of his person and to support the dignity of
his office.” The royal seal, his insignia, rode under a royal flag upon
a horse saddled with black velvet and a gold tissue foot-cloth, and was
received with deep bows. The viceroy was allowed three thousand _pesos_
to go to Callao, five miles away, and sixty thousand ducats a year for
personal expenses.
Greeted with a jewel sent to meet him half-way, the viceroy reaches
the bay of Callao. Throughout Lima, the City of the Kings,--founded
“with God, for God, and in His name,"--the streets are hung with rugs
and tapestry and adorned with green boughs and triumphal arches.
(On the arrival of the Duque de la Plata, in 1682, eighty million
_piasters_ were spent to pave the streets with bars of silver.)
“First comes a host of Indian warriors in feather pomp. The city
militia with pikes and weapons glittering, the stocks of their guns
embossed with gold, the noble guard on horseback, ... university
professors in brilliant gowns, the royal council and officials, the
magistracy in crimson velvet lined with brocade of the same color
... the chamber of accounts, the audience on horses with trappings,
the scepter-carrier, heralds in armor with uncovered heads, the
master of the horse with drawn sword, accompanied by four servants in
livery, pages with the captain of the watch, and lastly, on a throne
of red velvet whose silver staffs are carried by the members of the
corporation, while the _alcaldes_ hold the cords, all in velvet caps
and gowns of incarnation color, rides the viceroy under the royal
banner and a canopy of cloth of gold. Officers of the royal household,
the royal guard in full armor with spear and shield, bring up the rear
on horseback.”
The procession moves between companies of halberdiers in a blaze of
trumpets, bells, and drums, under showers of flowers thrown from carved
balconies.
“When they reach the plaza the whole company faces the cathedral and
is received by the archbishop and by the superiors of the religious
orders; trumpets cease, knights dismount, and the multitude sings a Te
Deum.
“The procession again mounts and accompanies the viceroy to the palace
gates.”
“Five days of bull-fights follow, and prizes are bestowed upon those
who make the most ingenious compositions in praise of the viceroy.
The rector of the university prepares a poetical contest, at which
the viceroy presides, seated upon the rectoral chair, which for this
occasion glitters with the magnificence of an Eastern throne. The
nunneries entertain him with music and present him with curiosities.”
The churches of Lima were hung with velvet and tapestry, with fringes
of gold and silver and plates of gold hung in design, so that the walls
were nowhere to be seen. Spanish and Flemish paintings surrounded
altars of wrought silver. The sacred vessels were of gold, covered
with pearls and precious stones. Santo Domingo, the oldest of the
brotherhood, possessed a set of thirty candelabra of massive silver,
man-high, placed in a double row along the nave of the church. The
cloister contained a famous orange garden with wrought-iron waterways
and life-sized paintings of Dominicus. In its center was a fountain,
whose delicious drip belied its hidden presence under feathery vines.
Indeed, why should the church not claim vast riches? One sixth of the
population was in the monasteries, and those who were not of the number
bought the dress of a religious order in which to be buried. The whole
city took part in the sacred feast days, as many in the procession as
looking on: legions of monks and thousands of nuns, priests, orders,
religious societies, and brotherhoods with their standards, holy
pictures, silver crosses, scepters, and biers.
II
But what was happening to the silent people among the mountain-tops
who had stripped the Sun Temples of their offerings to enrich the
adventurers from the Isles of Pearls?
Their irrigating canals had been destroyed, the roads and the whole
system of government broken up, the people killed in chronic fighting
or by hardship in distant campaigns. Ten thousand of the fifteen
thousand in Almagro’s Chilean army had died of cold in the mountains,
or of heat and thirst in the desert. The people were starved, villages
at a time, by the destruction of their crops. Moreover, the villages
were given as fiefs to the Spaniards, who received all the tribute.
Many were exhausted by dragging heavy artillery over the precipitous
mountains. Garcilasso describes the immense beams that crushed the
Indians staggering beneath their weight, who were relieved, only on
account of necessity, at every two hundred paces. When Gonzalo Pizarro
in coat of mail covered with cloth of gold made his triumphal entry as
governor into the City of the Kings, the twenty-two pieces of cannon
which saluted as the procession advanced through the streets, were
carried on the shoulders of six thousand Indians. All these Indians
were well trained in morality and sound doctrine by the clergy of Spain.
And worst of all, deep within the mountains of Peru, hollowed by the
gold and silver which they had removed to enrich a country of whose
existence they would never be aware in any other way, the Indians were
dying, thousands at a time. Skeletons concealed in old mines are now
found, covered with fibers of silver melted by subterranean fires just
beneath the cold desert. Mines now abandoned can be traced by piles of
human bones.
A pair of bright green arms, petitioning, stretched forth from the body
which has disappeared, were discovered in the bottom of an ancient
copper mine. The copper water had filtered through and covered them
with a green sheen. Every finger is tense with supplication, every
fiber as in the moment of death; not an eager tendon or nerve quivering
to the surface failed of preservation. All are petrified in a bronze
of nature’s molding.
Stories are still told that the Spaniards drove ten thousand Indians
at once to work in a Peruvian mine. When their strength was exhausted
or they died from lack of food, the Spaniards drove up ten thousand
more--an extravaganza of destruction matched only by the scale of
nature’s waste. It must be said, however, that cruelty to the Indians
was due not to Spanish law, but to the abuse of it.
“In twenty-five years more than eight million Indians were worked to
death in the mines of Peru.”
“In a century, nine tenths of the people had been destroyed by overwork
and cruelty.”
No wonder Spain was able to equip an Armada!
III
Against such a dark background flamed the lurid Inquisition.
The working out of the _encomienda_, or system of slavery, and the
_mita_, or forced work in the mines, was more horrible than the
tortures going on in Lima only because of the scale on which the
destruction took place. In 1570 the Blessing of the Inquisition
had been conferred upon Peru by Philip II. “At first heresy, then
blasphemy, sorcery, polygamy, insulting servants, opposition to
jurisdiction, were punished by whipping, banishment, prison, and death
by fire. In all cases the goods were confiscated.” The disgrace of an
executed man did not end even with his death. “The sons and daughters
and grandchildren of the male line lost their rights of citizenship.
They might not carry gold, silver, pearls, costly stones, corals, silk,
velvet, or fine cloth. They might not ride on horses, carry weapons, or
use any of the things of which they were unworthy.”
One star-spangled night, a man looking at the sky remarked that the
multitude of stars was superfluous, thus assuming that God had erred in
creation, which was heretical blasphemy. Juan de Arianza appeared in
the auto of 1631 because, when reading the Scriptures, he exclaimed:
“Ea! There is nothing but living and dying!” which sounded ill to those
who heard it. One man bragged that he had a horse that could go sixty
leagues in one day: for that he had two hundred strokes of the lash.
Another had said he knew an herb which made wives invisible before
their husbands: he received five years’ imprisonment. A young priest
said he had seen the little Saviour in his dreams: his punishment was
two hundred lashes and five years’ work in the galleys. Another, who
wished to found a new sect, had called the Indians the children of
Israel and had declared that priests should marry, that there should
be no confessional, and that the Bishop of Lima ought to be Pope.
He thought the Bible ought to be translated into the language of
the people and that he was holy as Gabriel and patient as Job. This
unfortunate was burned alive; the proceedings of the suit against him
filled three thousand pages.
Throughout the seventeenth century Peru was filled with mystic
impostors, like the far-famed Angela Carranza, most of whom were dealt
with by _autos de fe_. The use of coca was considered a part of this
sorcery and was punished severely.
The confession of a real or an accused crime was drawn out by torture
and compelled by a repetition of the torture. From the final judgment
there was no appeal. All was enacted under seal of deepest secrecy.
The torture chamber was somewhat removed, so that the screams of the
victims could not be heard in the street.
Three kinds of torture were used in Lima. There was the compound
pulley. A man’s hands were bound to his back, and he was raised by a
pulley to the ceiling by his hands; heavy iron weights were attached
to his feet. Sometimes, instead of this, the victim was strapped on a
table, an iron collar about his neck, and stretched in both directions
without risk of choking; but every bone in his body was dislocated. The
second method was smothering. The man’s hands and feet were tied above
a bench, and on his upper arms, thighs, and calves, lacing machines
were adjusted. Then a funnel was put in his mouth and water was slowly
poured in. The third method was the worst of all. The feet were made
fast, the soles were covered with fat, then live coals were brought
gradually nearer and nearer--a process of roasting. When the pain was
keenest, a board was shoved between coals and feet, and the sinner was
asked if he would now confess his crime.
By a bull of Paul III torture could not last over an hour. After that
the victim usually had convulsions or lost his mind. A doctor came,
whenever such was the case, to authorize further torture.
Thumbscrews were still used in 1813.
Dr. Lea says punishments in Lima were inflicted with greater rigor
than in Spain. If it were lashing, the penitents, without distinction
as to sex, were marched in procession through the streets, naked from
the waist up, with inscriptions denoting their offenses, while the
executioner plied the lash. The mob stoned them as an act of especial
piety.
The Inquisition had command of the press. The tribunal of Inquisitors,
judging all, were judged by none and wielded absolute power. The
Holy Tribunal did not wish to shed blood, so the accused were either
strangled or burned. The death-warrant began with the words _Christi
nomine invocato_, and officials of the law were asked to treat the
condemned with pity and moderation.
The _auto de fe_, the Act of Faith, was intended as a demonstration
of authority, a representation of the day of judgment, and it was the
highest exhibition of piety.
Following is a description of an _auto de fe_ in Lima, on the sixteenth
of November, 1625, quoted from Middendorf.
A procession went at daybreak on horseback through the city, with
trumpets, fifes, and drums, to announce the execution. A platform was
built on the plaza, forty ells high, and a stadium was erected for
eight thousand people. “Between eight and nine in the morning the
sinners were called for. A cross covered with black crape belonging
to the cathedral was carried before them by four priests, all singing
_miserere_ in a wailing tone. Each penitent walked between two soldiers
and other honorable persons. Silver boxes at the rear contained the
judgments.
“The viceroy came out of his palace accompanied by a guard of honor,
musketeers, and two trumpeters. Doctors, lawyers, and university
professors preceded the monks and the priests, standard bearers in
coats of mail with clubs, the captain of the watch, and judges, the
oldest of whom walked by the viceroy, cavalry, generals, and pages.
The Inquisitors had hats on top of their caps, worn only at that time,
decorated with the insignia of the Pope’s legates. The militia had
formed in line, and at the appearance of the black and gold banner
of the Inquisition they lowered their flags in salute. An altar was
raised, a chair for the viceroy and the high officials.
“The eldest one rose and addressed the viceroy. ‘Your Excellency
swears and promises upon his faith and word as a true Catholic Viceroy
appointed by His Catholic Highness, to defend with all his might the
Catholic faith, which the Holy Apostolic Church in Rome recognizes,
to further its well being and growth, to follow up the heretics and
dissenters and enemies, to give necessary help and aid to the Holy
Tribunal of the Inquisition and its servants, so that the heretics
and disturbers of our Christian religion shall be taken and punished
according to the law of the Holy Church, without your Excellency
making any exception in favor of anybody no matter what his station in
life be.’
“The viceroy replied: ‘I swear it and promise by my faith and word.’
“‘If your Excellency does so, as we expect from your piety and
Christianity you will, the Lord God will bless all the works undertaken
by your Excellency in His holy service and will give you health and
long life as this kingdom and the service of His Majesty needs.’
“A mass was read for the viceroy, and a priest extolled from the
chancel the glory which comes to religion through the sacrifice of
heretics. After the sermon, all pledged themselves to tell any act
contrary to religion which they knew of, and not to give protection to
any heretic who was under the ban of the church.
“The denunciation was read as soon as the culprit was named, led up out
of his secret cell and put into a cage from which he had to hear his
final judgment. He was dressed in the San Benito, in itself a lasting
shame. It reached to the knees of the sinner and had his portrait
painted upon it surrounded by flames, devils, and dragons. On his head
he wore a bag-like, high and pointed cap, on which were devils’ faces
in flames. Gags were ready in case blasphemers should break out against
the judges.”
The burning is said to have taken place where the bull-ring now is.
IV
In 1746 the city of Lima,--the gorgeous City of the Kings,--at the
climax of its luxury, was utterly destroyed. Seventy-four churches,
fourteen monasteries with their paintings, lamps of gold, vessels of
silver, precious stones, tapestries, and mirrors, their beautiful
fountains, arches, cloisters, and stairways in rare designs, were
laid waste. The building material was as rich as the work upon it;
as a contemporary traveler expressed it: “If it did not exceed in
beauty, it at least equaled anything in the world.” In four minutes
there was complete desolation. Out of the whole city only twenty
buildings remained standing. Bridges broke, palaces fell, the sick in
the hospitals were buried alive; nuns in their cloisters, monks in
their cells, were suffocated in clouds of sulphurous dust. Churches
collapsed, crushing those who were praying within. Even the Holy
Inquisition was obliged to suspend torture for the time being.
The earth was like an animal shaking the dust from its back. It swept
forward in great waves; walls were reeds on its shores, bending to the
tempest. Between the waves, clouds of poisonous dust rose from the
chasms.
Clocks stopped. Bells in the towers clashed with limp bell ropes,
till towers following in turn stifled the din under smoking débris.
Everything was reversed; that which stood still was set in violent
motion, and moving things were brought to rest. Shrieks for help and
agonized prayers mingled, until they, too, ceased.
The sea retreated half a league from Callao, gathered strength from
unknown, hidden places, and with a cosmic roar rushed over the entire
city, engulfing it and carrying all the ships of the harbor across its
walls and towers to be stranded in inland gardens. All of its five
thousand inhabitants perished in the deluge, and there was nothing
left to give the least idea of what Callao had been.
“To be preserved from its fury could only be attributed to a particular
and extraordinary help of Providence.” Yet thousands in Lima who had
escaped destruction or death from fright died of fevers which came
after. Those who remained were occupied with burying the dead in
trenches. Famine as well as fever followed, for the grain magazines
of Callao had been buried under water, ovens had fallen in, aqueducts
bringing water for turning the mills had been destroyed.
Nor was this all. Loath to give up its fiendish hold, not yet glutted
with destruction, the underground fury visited the helpless ruins it
had created with five hundred and sixty-eight earthquakes during the
next year!
Processions of priests barefoot, with crowns of thorns on their heads,
cords about their necks, and heavy chains on their ankles, taught the
people that the destruction was of God, the roaring of the subterranean
powers a warning against luxury. The prior of one society went about
covered with ashes; a heavy bridle cut his mouth, iron nails fastened
his eyelids, his back was bare. “This is the punishment that God in
heaven executes,” said a lay brother, walking behind him, as he let
fall an iron lash so heavily that the blood spurted.
The bones of Santo Toribio and Santa Rosa were carried about; the
viceroy and great persons followed in mourning, with ropes about their
necks. Distinguished ladies, barefoot, their hair shaved, walked in
coarse clothes. The dense stillness was broken by a monk’s voice: “Holy
God, Holy God, be merciful to us.”
CHAPTER VIII
LIMA OF TWO ASPECTS
The valley of the Rimac, where glisten the towers of Lima, is only one
of the river-ways which cross the desert. The river of the ancient
oracle Rimac, “he who speaks,” has given its name in perverted form to
Lima--the Spanish city. The temple of the speaker was in ruins long
before Spanish days.
Like other streams of the west coast, the great river Rimac has run
through the gamut of all zones. Hurrying down from the cordillera,
it spreads fertility far and wide over the dry shore-valley. As far
away as Chorillos, “little water jets,” the water of the Rimac filters
through, led astray for irrigation. But its own journey to the sea is
vain. The mountain water is so precious to the desert that by the time
the stream has reached the shore, it has not force enough left to make
an outlet across the beach into the ocean.
Irrigating ditches and crumbling mud walls divide gardens and
vineyards and orchards of wind-blown olive trees. Ruins of mud
accumulate dust. Luxuriant nasturtiums drape every dusty bank. Vestiges
of fortresses, temples, and grave-mounds of the three ancient cities
of the Rimac valley still terrify owners of the sugar-fields, for
the inhabitants of the sepulchers sometimes return at night to sit
beneath the grape-arbors and listen to the murmur of irrigation streams
which they made. Cajamarquilla, Armatambo, and Huadca were the names
of these cities, and the whirlwind was their most distinguished god.
His white-robed priests ate neither salt nor pepper, and tore out the
hearts of men and of animals to offer them to the gods on the platforms
of temples.
Sometimes, too, the Huguenot hermit who lived near the site of Huadca
and who was burned by the Inquisition returns to his little caves at
nightfall.
Lima is in the tropics. Its fruits and flowers are those of the
tropics. Yet it is neither hot nor cold. There is no rain and not
too much sun, a pleasant monotony interrupted only by earthquakes.
An umbrella merchant once tried to set up business in Lima. His act
brought forth an article in a local paper on rain, and how on one
occasion when it came suddenly people had to get out of bed to find
secure places. Editorials on umbrellas followed.
No, there is little to fear from changes of weather, not even thunder
and lightning. There is an endless summer, with streets under a
continuous awning; yet, after all, only a summer. The rainless desert
is soaked in mist all winter long. It falls suddenly like a veil over
the bare mountains and drenches the sunlight. A glimpse through it
shows a faint sheen, sharp cliffs hazy with hues of light-green velvet,
enameled on closer inspection with multitudes of differing flowers.
_Amancaes_ spring up dew-laden, those queer, greenish-yellow lilies
hanging on smooth, leafless stems, giving their name to whole valleys
which they fill. One such lies beyond the gardens of the Barefoot
Friars. A favorite retreat for Limaneans, it is called the National
Garden. But scorpions lie under the stones.
* * * * *
“A suggestive kind of picture used to hang in many a mediaeval church.
It was painted on both sides of a board. On one side were a pair
of lovers walking hand in hand in a meadow gay with spring. Flowers
blossomed about their feet; birds sang in the trees above their heads.
“On the reverse was the grim figure of Death, hour-glass and scythe in
hand. The thing, pendent from a single cord, hung free in a draughty
place, and the air twisted it about hither and thither, so that one
side and the other was seen in swift interchange.”
The Alameda, flanked with Norfolk Island pines and marble benches, had
in other days rows upon rows of orange trees, stone fountains, and
basins as well. At five in the afternoon gilded carriages streamed from
palace gardens, driving about so that their fair occupants could greet
their friends. Four thousand brocade-lined, gold-trimmed carriages and
innumerable chaises shimmered through the heavy odor of orange blossoms.
A traveler of the seventeenth century has described the lady of Lima,
clad not in linen, but in the most expensive lace of Flanders, slipped
over an underdress of cloth of gold.
[Illustration: GRAPES RAISED BY THE BAREFOOT FRIARS, (_LOS DESCALZOS_),
LIMA.]
She glittered with jewels from head to foot, her shoes were fastened
with diamond buckles, aigrettes of diamonds were in her hair--“a
splendor still the more astonishing as it is so very common,” he said.
Nay, she even scattered perfume through her nosegays. On great fête
days she tiptoed to church, enveloped all but one eye in a silk-lace
shawl. Beneath it glinted a flower-embroidered dress of rarest stuff,
fluttering a multitude of ribbons; under a petticoat of heavy brocade,
miniature golden feet peeped out, or slippers of peach-colored velvet.
The lady of Lima was famed for her wit, entrancing the visitor as she
sipped her Paraguay tea from a silver-mounted gourd.
Little is left of former splendor. The statues, the five rows of orange
trees, the sweet smells are gone. At the end of the long Alameda,
bordered with wind-blown trees and wrecks of marble benches, is a
fountain under palms and Norfolk Island pines. Across a shady space and
above a high, yellow plaster wall, is the monastery tower, where hangs
a clear-toned bell. Rugged hills rise abruptly. This is the home of
the Barefoot Friars. A labyrinth of paths leads to their orchards and
gardens and cells. Going every morning in pairs to the markets to beg
for food, they own nothing. They live entirely on alms.
Just before two o’clock each day, the lame, halt, and blind begin to
gather from all the town wards, each carrying a receptacle. One poor
woman with three or four babies seats herself upon the plaster shelf
skirting the wall, setting down her pottery jar by the brook to wait.
The bell strikes two long, clear tones. The whole space is filled. The
great monastery gate is flung open, and two brown-clad monks, sleeves
rolled up, bring out between them a steaming copper cauldron. The
famished multitude fall to their knees, many with difficulty, and a
prayer is intoned.
Then the procession begins: men, women, and children in various stages
of decrepitude. Beggars with old tin cans totter forward as to the
Mecca of a long, hard journey. Decent-looking women, very haughty,
conceal their pails under black _mantas_. Each receives two ladlefuls
of meat, soup, and vegetables. The kettle is filled again and
refilled, till all are served. After the little groups of people have
finished their _cazuela_, the heavy door clashes together.
Beyond the turn of the wall, far down the avenue of palms, the
Mendicant Friars emerge, four by four, and swing off across country for
their daily walk.
CHAPTER IX
CONVENTS OPEN AND CLOSED
Lima is the city of bells. Exuberant wedding carols blend their
metallic jingle with three solemn peals for the dying. Hoarse, ill-cast
bells mingle with bells whose tones drip like honey upon the monks
beneath, who, with cowls thrown back, are pruning monastery gardens,
bringing water to the fig-tree from the fountain. Bells are pitched
high and bells are pitched low. Bells struck from without shake off the
clear ring circling their edges. There are notes with a dry sonority
like the clash of bones. Sharp bells nag the persistent sinner. Soft,
sweet bells lure him to prayer. Quick strokes near at hand only half
conceal those distant thuds, as if the tone had been struck from the
atmosphere, giving “a solemn, religious shimmer to the day.”
Though they are more used than those elsewhere, the bells of Lima, it
is said, never grow old.
The tones are of every quality, from the tinkle of little convent
bells calling the sisters to midnight prayer, to the great bell of the
Jesuits, whose “clash, throb, and long swoon of sound” strikes your
chest. Silver and gold in this bell cling to the clear, deep notes
struck from it and pulsate more than half a minute in the tone, which
carries far out over city roofs to sugar-fields and vineyards. The left
tower of San Pedro was built about this bell in 1666 and it cannot be
removed.
San Pedro has three portals on the façade, only allowed for a
cathedral. The story goes that when it was building, permission was
asked from Rome for a portal, which was given of course without delay.
When the church with its three bronze-knobbed doors was finished, the
Vatican was outraged.
“What,” word was sent, “you ask for one door and make three?”
“For two doors one has not to have permission,” came the reply, “only
for three. We would have had two, anyway; it was for the extra one we
needed to ask.”
The church was finished and consecrated. What could be done?
Monastery bells waken the monks at five o’clock, masses follow every
half-hour throughout the morning. Burials are tolled very early by two
large, discordant bells, struck simultaneously, “a roaring, sinister,
mournful peal.” At noon a great caroling honors the Holy One to whom
the next day is dedicated. After sunset three slow peals boom from all
churches. Old people stand, men take off their hats. At eight sounds
the prayer to the dead, at nine, nine peals from every bell in the city
are an invitation to pray for those who die to-night. This is the time
when the bell in the left tower of San Pedro rings. The left tower of
the cathedral is the home of many owls, which come out at night to cry
above the houses where the sick are lying to warn them of approaching
death.
Because innocent voices are intercessors most pleasing to God, Indian
mothers in the mountains prod the poor little savage babies, flopping
[Illustration: A FRANCISCAN FRIAR AT HOME, LIMA.]
on their backs, with long, pointed, rat-tail silver spoons, so that
they wail intermittently.
In Lima the voice of the bells is lifted to avert catastrophes and
to beg for mercy in times of earthquake. When the bells cease, the
importance of silence is assumed instantly, as with the dropping of the
wind.
* * * * *
A little jungle of cypress, magnolia, jasmine, pomegranate, and fig
clusters about a fountain which one hears rather than sees. Contralto
bird-notes seem to come from far away, like “the melodious songs of
birds with yellow combs in the blessed land of Aztlan.”
The garden is overgrown with passion-flowers, concealing within
their petals the sacred heart and nails, even the crown of thorns.
Night-blooming cereus hangs darkly above the ground-glass bells of
the floriponda, so ineffably sweet after sundown. Its leaves are
narcotic. (In Lima one is often given a nosegay of jasmine done up in a
floriponda flower.)
I sat waiting on a bench in the cloister garden. Missionary priests
were showing maps to little, fluted nuns. Others in black robes and
furry hats paced up and down the cloister, fondling small missals
and stopping around the corner to gaze at me through the wrought-iron
grill. Mediaeval life in full swing, complete from a glance of the eye
to the jaunty stick cocked under the Don Juan cloak!
One of the priests carried two phosphorescent beetles in a piece of
sugar-cane.
In this convent young girls are taught that a “wife should be loving
and faithful, tolerating the defects of her husband, trying to make
herself esteemed by him, to soften for him the sorrows of life,
cultivating abnegation, evenness of disposition, tolerance, and
sweetness. She ought never to think that the faults of her husband
could excuse her own.”
Very different was the Dominican convent of Santa Rosa.
An illuminated manuscript hung at the portal, an absolution for those
who worship here, sent by the Pope several hundred years ago. The
recess in the wall was paved with cobblestones. Antique paintings of
saints hung frameless above. Beside the huge doorway, heavily barred,
was a turnstile in the wall, with solid partitions between the shelves
to prevent a glimpse within. The staring word _Paciencia_ was written
above it. Utter silence!
Rosa Mercédes and I tiptoed through a narrow doorway, under the word
_Modestia_. We sat on a bench in front of a wooden grill with hexagonal
openings. A vague, distinctive smell drifted through it. On the other
end of the bench a woman was softly sobbing. We waited half an hour or
more.
The week before, the birthday of Santa Rosa had been celebrated in the
cloister where she lived. The week after was now being celebrated here,
where she died. As I listened, there was an explosion of fire-crackers
within.
Beyond a wide space on the other side of the grill was a fine wire
netting, so heavy that only a shade, a brush of a veil, a suggestion of
a smile could penetrate. A soft sound came through the blackness, and
a voice unthinkably sweet said: “_Buenos días, Rosa mía_.” It was the
Sister Margarita, who had been thirty years behind those bars without
a glimpse of friends, buried to the evils of the world, consecrated to
Santa Rosa.
The voice began to speak.
“Our glorious Rosa! Let me tell you that when she was only three years
old the lid of a heavy chest fell upon her thumb. She looked up at her
mother and smiled. She concealed stinging herbs in her gloves, and
when visitors came, she rubbed pepper into her eyes, so that she could
neither see them nor think of what they were saying. _Rosa santísima!_
“When she sang to her garden the canticle: ‘O all ye green things of
the earth, bless ye the Lord,’ the trees clapped their leaves together,
and even the vegetables lifted up murmurs of praise. She invented hymns
to the Virgin and sang them antiphonally with a bird, though she was
often surprised at being able to understand the speech of unbaptized
beings. One day in the garden a black and white butterfly hovered above
her. Thenceforth she understood that it was decreed that she should
enter the order of Saint Dominicus. Her life from that time on was a
series of acts of self-mortification. _Rosa inocentísima!_
“She divided her day into twelve hours of prayer, ten hours of
millinery work, and two hours of sleep. She was constantly aware of
the presence of the angels. _Rosa purísima!_
“At sixteen she entered the sisterhood. She prayed to a picture of
Christ until it broke into a sweat. She prepared clothing for the
infant Jesus by prayer--fifty litanies, nine hundred rosaries, and five
days of fasting made him a little garment; and for toys, she said: ‘I
give my tears, my sighs, my heart, and soul.’
“She wore a belt lined with nails, which she locked about her, and
threw the key down a well. Half the nail belt is in the Santuario of
Santa Rosa, where the well was. It went dry on the day of her death.
“She died here in ecstasy on this very spot at the age of thirty. _Rosa
gloriosísima!_”
I spoke with the voice. I asked about Santa Rosa’s shrine with its
thousands of little silver _ex-votos_ in Santo Domingo.
“Yes, that is where she lies buried, except once a year on the
thirtieth of August, when she journeys to the cathedral and back.
“The daughter of a viceroy once climbed out of a palace window at night
to take the veil of Santa Rosa.
“When the Pope was deliberating her canonization, he was overwhelmed by
a rain of roses; when it was finally celebrated, the streets of Lima
were paved with silver bars.
“In 1720, when they dug to build her convent, a strong odor of roses
emanated from the ground.
“We keep her roses blooming throughout the year; they grow from the
same roots as those she cared for; the rest of the time we spend in
embroidery and prayer.”
Such a wonderful voice!
The Sister Margarita pressed a parchment-covered book close against the
netting.
“Here is a true life of Santa Rosa. It has never left this monastery.
When you read it, you will understand why I have devoted my life to
God through the mediation of our glorious Saint, our Patron, our Rosa
de Lima.... She stood upon these stones in the courtyard where I now
stand. Can you see why a stone has not been changed?... There is no
word in this book which is not true. I know it by heart. I will give it
to you....
“_Es católica?_” The voice was suddenly directed toward Rosa Mercédes.
[Illustration: SANTA ROSA DE LIMA, FROM _HET WONDER LEVEN VAN DE H.
ROSA_, _BRUSSEL_, 1668.]
“_No, protestante._”
“Oh!...”
Her voice ran down the gamut of the scale.
“You will not then believe my book?” The voice addressed me.
I replied that I should value the book more than any one else to whom
she could have given it.
“Ah,” she sighed, “then that is why I wanted to give it to you.”
A little pause.
“Good-by-ie,” she said. A glint beyond the netting.
“Good-by-ie, _mía amíga_,” and Rosa Mercédes and I stood alone outside.
* * * * *
Following is a Salutation to Santa Rosa preceding her novena, published
in Lima in 1902:
“God keep thee, O admirable virgin and patron of ours, Rose of Saint
Mary!
“God save thee, joy of the world, glory of the city, star of Lima,
crown of the fatherland, most rich gold of Peru, treasure of the Indies!
“God save thee, flower of the church, rose of humility, white lily of
purity, olive of peace, fire of charity, most precious pearl, most
beautiful dove!
“We salute thee, O most loved spouse of the Heart of Jesus! Much
cherished daughter of most Holy Mary, living image of thy mistress
Catherine.
“We praise thee, O example of penitence! Chosen from thousands, patron
of a new world.
“We bless thee, O Most Fragrant Rose, Most Precious Rose, Most Innocent
Rose, Most Pure Rose, Most Illustrious Rose, Most Holy Rose, Most
Glorious Rose!
“_Rosa fragrantísima, Rosa inocentísima, Rosa purísima, Rosa
ilustrísima, Rosa santísima, Rosa gloriosísima!_”
CHAPTER X
ANOMALIES OF LIMA
I
They sat about the dinner table--a delightful, stammering, scientific
gentleman, who advised my carrying home some live _camarones_
(crayfish); a young English curate, here to sketch all the caterpillars
of all the butterflies he could find, and their cocoons; the grandson
of a former president of Peru, who spoke of his grandfather’s battles;
and a cousin of the actual president, who told tales of ostrich-hunting
in the pampas of Argentina, a cosmopolitan club man, whose chief
interests in Lima were cricket and polo. There was a man who was
collecting everything from pearls to reduced heads and whose gold
watch-fob was a Peruvian tongue-weight for the dead. A Chilean lady
with the grace of an older generation spoke of the islands of Juan
Fernandez and their prehistoric monuments, which have a nose and chin,
face the sun, and are too big to enter the British Museum. That led
toward the archeologist.
We were eating _cuculis_--desert doves--and alligator-pear salad, while
we listened to stories of pre-Inca civilizations from the man who has
done most to unravel their mysteries. In Peru the alligator-pear is
called _palta_, a shiny, dark-green, leather-covered shell concealing
its soft, nutty flesh. It hangs at the end of a fine twig, which is
dragged down by its weight. A stiff mayonnaise so disguises the _palta_
that it is almost impossible to tell where fruit ends and sauce begins.
A lady of mixed races wore twice about her neck a heavily-carved chain,
on her breast the large cross at its end. She spoke of a friend who
had searched for years until he should find a gift exactly suited to
her; at last he beheld this chain about the neck of a pope of the Greek
church. The pope parted with it reluctantly, for in a cavity in the
back of the cross he kept his sacred relics.
She twirled the great cross between her fingers.
“_Très chic, n’est-ce pas?_” she said. “And you see,” touching the
clasp to loosen a little lid, “it’s just the size for a powder-puff!”
A folk-lore-specialist-explorer was discussing swinging bridges in the
Andes with a lady whose husband had left her in Lima while he took a
distant journey in the interior to make a census of savage tribes.
“What have you been doing to-day?” she asked.
“Bless my soul, I don’t remember,” he replied. “Oh, yes! buying slaves
in the jungle.”
Two young English people at the remote end of the table had just
arrived in Lima from a honeymoon adventure up the Amazon. They had
sailed as far as Iquitos; then they had paddled, they had ridden
mule-back, they had tramped over the mountains, and, fording streams to
their waists, had lain down in their wet clothes to sleep in the cold
wind. We all inquired about fever.
“Oh, yes,” said the red-cheeked little lady, “my husband got the fever
one day in Iquitos; it turned his eyes red and his face blue, and the
whole house shook with his chills.”
He seemed to like to talk about their adventures. They had been
paddling all one day, he said, and were paddling still, as night
settled down upon the Amazon. Suddenly there was a whirring sound like
a great cataract.
“Paddle for your life,” shrieked the guide, and swinging the canoe
about, they fled down-stream.
The whirlpool! Its encounter the greatest calamity that can befall a
traveler upon the Amazon! No craft, however strong, once caught by
the outermost edge of a whirlpool, can escape. Whether it is caused
by a sudden squall brushing through the forest or a piece of the bank
falling in, is not known. It is certain only that a whirlpool never
occurs twice in the same place.
“Death in that region,” he went on, “is commoner than life. There is a
horrible beast which the natives call a flying snake, with a blue head
and a long prong upon it. It flies sting foremost. You are sauntering
from your hammock to your cabin door. The thing flies against you, and
presto! you fall with the poison of his contact, and another grave must
be dug on the sposhy banks of the Amazon.
“In Iquitos a woman bears a friend a grudge. She pays the police a
small sum, and the next time her friend emerges, she is bound by the
guardian of the peace, beaten until she falls, and is carried home to
die. Prisoners there are allowed to order their own meals,” he added.
Then came stewed guavas, served with whirls of white of egg and pink
and white pellets.
II
Nearly everybody makes collections in Lima. In the ancient house of
a marquis, with its court fountain, bougainvillea, and tall Norfolk
Island pine, were benches of ebony with lower rounds worn into hollows
by the feet of nuns; embroidered muslin stoles; queer manuscripts;
tortoise-shell combs tall enough to be filled in with flowers; silver
porringers; and a point lace parasol with a carved ivory handle--all
relics of vice-regal days.
One room was musty as seventeen mummies could make it. Fifteen _soles_,
they told us, was the price of a mummy. There were ancient, inlaid
chests filled with cases of butterflies from beyond the mountains,
huge snake-skins, overgrown orioles’ nests, necklaces of mummies’
teeth, and carved cases of _huacos_ dug from Yunca grave-mounds--the
pottery of mummies. Partly filled with water and rocked back and forth,
the quaint things gave forth the same little half-whistle, half-sigh
which notified their owners a thousand years ago that the precious
water was being stolen. A soft bubbling, somewhere within the clay
form, was supposed to imitate the voice of the animal painted on the
outside. The liquids were meant to refresh a thirsty mummy on his death
journey. He still holds his aching head. But the varnished lips were
never parted, and the gurgling liquid of smoky flavor has never been
sipped.
These jars were the ephemeral tablets on which a whole people chose to
leave records of itself. The work of their hands can be held in ours.
We can look into the staring Indian faces or upon the weird animals
which pleased them, shining under a glaze which is the forgotten
accomplishment of those remote tribes.
There are finely drawn portraits of the dead man’s friends, whom he
may have wished as fellow pilgrims, heads of men and women singing or
smiling, some distorted with pain. The human face twisted to the same
lines then as now.
Wonderful fish glide among aquatic plants, the fox enamored of the
moon languishes along her thin crescent. “The sneaking cat, the sleepy
pelican, the supercilious, impudent parrot,” in softest yellow, white,
red-brown, or black, glance all the iris shades under a purple glaze.
It was not enough to paint the manners and customs of the people, the
fauna and flora of their country; they chose also to represent what
they thought and believed as well as the adjustment of their sandals.
We can peer into their monstrous, often loathsome, mythology and into
their intangible land of fancy. Cats fight with griffins. A lizard with
the face of an owl wears a jacket and bracelets. A chieftain in full
regalia has a girdle ending in a fringe of almond-eyed, many-footed
scorpions, each with a different number of feet. With snakes’ heads
as earrings, a warrior with canine teeth smaller than the snail with
forked tongue beside him is fishing for an octopus with a snake-line,
whose head, as bait, has caught a man. Crab-hands grasp from ears at a
fleeing figure with a snake-like body, numerous feet intermingle with
a human leg, two arms with nippers, and a fantastic head with waving
antennae. A cactus forms the background.
The sun looks forth from the heart of a starfish. A fanciful eye, all
alone, with unknown appendages and impossible proboscis, glitters
under its dark, lustrous sheen. A ghastly face with wings presides at
a dance of stags. And here is a vessel completely covered by a pair of
elaborated nippers! In it are placed some passion-flowers, a whirl of
purple and black.
Every uncanny suggestion in an animal is worked out to complete
development. We may do the Yuncas the honor to call it allegorical. It
recalls the Mexican legend that “the present order of things will be
swept away, perhaps by hideous beings with the faces of serpents, who
walk with one foot, whose heads are in their breasts, whose huge hands
serve as sunshades, and who can fold themselves in their immense ears.”
It is primarily this portrait pottery which proves the great antiquity
of races in Peru. And the deeper one digs, the finer the designs.
Sitting on the ebony bench with the skin of a jaguar across its back,
we ate _dulces_ (sweets) made of eggs, and drank tea out of ancient
porcelain against a background of embroidered Spanish shawls. A yellow
bird, a _cheireoque_, who knows everything, sat upon a perch but did
not sing.
III
Ricardo Palma, Peru’s delightful _littérateur_, has collected the
national library since its destruction by Chilean soldiers in the
late war. Storekeepers in those days wrapped up their goods in pages
of “fathers of the church.” The Chileans destroyed the annals of the
Inquisition. They also killed the golden oriole which had sung in the
trenches early one morning before the battle had begun.
The distinguished writer of Peruvian traditions sat in his long gown,
reading parchment tomes of bygone centuries, his silk cap pulled down
to his eyes. I sat near him at a table surrounded by books under a
far-away skylight. There happened to be open a volume of historical
sketches of Limaneans done in color by Pancho Fierro: a man dressed
for the gallows riding beneath balconies of interested ladies; monks
and nuns in every garb; Indian dances with whirls of color; the Lord
Mayor’s procession with his big mace of silver, and black servants in
green velvet holding a red umbrella over his head; every known variety
of eatable-seller; women with bright green trousers, whose veils
covered them all but one eye, and uniforms of every profession and
occupation.
About the time when the Puritans were landing in Massachusetts Bay, a
law was passed prohibiting ladies of Lima from covering the face. The
animals of the coachman in whose carriage rode ladies violating this
law would be confiscated, and any man who spoke to such a lady must pay
a hundred _pesos_. But enforcement of the law was too difficult, and
the custom of the veil persisted until a few years since.
Don Ricardo turned and put into my hands a book of his own. The sun
streamed through the distant skylight. I began to read: “Odoray is
the most beautiful blossom of the flower garden of America, a white
lily scented with the breath of seraphim. Her soul is an aeolian harp
which the sentiment of love causes to vibrate, and the sounds which it
exhales are soft as the complaint of a lark.
“Odoray is fifteen years old, and her heart cannot leave off
throbbing before the image of the beloved of her soul. Fifteen and
not love--impossible! At that age love is for the soul what the ray
of spring sun is to the meadows. Her lips have the red of the coral,
the aroma of the violet. They are a scarlet line above the velvet of a
marguerite.
“The faint tint of innocence and modesty colors her face as twilight
the snow of our cordillera. The locks of hair which fall in graceful
disorder over the ermine of her shoulders, imitate the gold filaments
which the Father of the Incas scattered through space on a spring
morning.
“Her voice is loving and feeling as the echo of the _quena_ (flute).
Her smile has all the charm of the wife in the Song of Solomon, all the
modesty of prayer. _Svelte_ as the sugar-cane of our valleys, if the
place where it has passed can be recognized, it is not on account of
the trace which its short plant leaves in the sand, but by the perfume
of angelic purity which lingers behind.
“It is an afternoon of April, 1534. Twilight sheds its undivided gleam
above the plains. The sun taking off its crown of topazes is about to
retire on the bed of foam to which the ocean entices it. Creation is at
this instant a lyre letting fall soft sounds. The desirous breeze that
passes giving a kiss to the jasmine, the petal that falls jostled by
the wings of the painted humming-bird, the _turpial_ that sings a song
of agony in the aspen foliage, the sun that sets, firing the horizon
... all is beautiful. The last hours of the afternoon and all things
elevate the created toward the Creator.
“To hear in the distance the soft murmur of the brook slipping along,
to feel that our temples are brushed by the zephyr filled with the
perfume which is exhaled by the flower of the lemon-tree and the rushy
ground, and in the midst of this concert of nature” ... such is the
imagery of the literature of Peru.
[Illustration: A GLIMPSE OF OLD-FASHIONED LIMA.]
IV
A woman in lilac called Dolores, a pretty woman with a vapid face, was
absent-mindedly turning a green glass globe between her fingers and
selling guavas. Young soldiers whose swords trailed along the pavement
were eating the guavas.
We got out of the carriage and rattled at a door until a keeper with
jangling keys came to open it. The walls were spiked and covered with
broken glass. The door banged together behind us.
A thin, delicately featured man in a black silk cap and stock came
forward in welcome. “The composer of _Ollanta_, the national opera,”
some one introduced. He led us toward a bare room scattered with
manuscript music as fine as copper-plate. I looked at the iron bars
across the windows. Over the piano hung three dusty laurel wreaths,
the people’s tribute to a genius they could not understand. After a
three weeks’ presentation by an uncomprehending Italian troupe, Lima
demanded _Mignon_, and the manuscript opera was returned to the upper,
right-hand drawer from which its composer now drew it.
“I am transcribing the melodies of the Indians of the highlands, some
of them survivals of Inca days,” he explained.
He played the weird, syncopated music of the Andes, bringing the
indefinable “shiver of unknown rhythm,” the wheedling love-songs and
the sad _yaravís_ which suggested those deep valleys lost among the
mountain-tops.
“You know the _yaraví_ of the Indians? It is a peculiar music, a
melancholy idyl reflecting the somber Indian character--a music of
extremes, for no other is so dismal and so sweet. It wails in a minor
key through strange Quichua words, the language of the Indians.
“Many of these melodies I have used unchanged. Nothing so speaks to
the spirit as they.... A secret music like that of falling water--one
cannot hear it without thinking of the riddle of the world. It has a
full, pent-up significance, as when a bird puts all the fervor of its
song into pianissimo. It moves like the music of birds, and like it
does not admit of criticism.”
I asked if the Indians sang unaccompanied.
“There is sometimes a reed-flute accompaniment,” he said, “as simple
as the song. The flute is called a _quena_. Then, too, they play
upon a pipe-of-Pan, supposed to have persisted since Inca days. But
melody suggests to them things far lovelier than they can conceive by
words. What they wish to say is made intelligible by the sadness or
cheerfulness of the tune.”
There is a legend that a priest in early Spanish days loved a beautiful
Indian girl who died. In desolation he mourned for years, until he dug
up her skeleton and made a flute out of the big leg-bone. Then upon it
he played weird, sad tunes and was comforted. This is the origin of the
human-bone flute so widely used.
“Have you ever heard of the ‘Jug of Mourning?’” he suddenly asked.
“Sometimes at evening the Indians play on flutes inserted in a large
earthenware jar to make their tragic tones more resonant, and, sitting
grouped around it at a little distance, they cry aloud and shed tears
for the downfall of the race. The Indians’ misfortune is infinite
indeed, but a misfortune terribly uniform; and so is their music. Yes,
even their suffering is consistently monotonous.”
I asked about the libretto of _Ollanta_.
“It is the only one of the great dramas dealing with exploits of kings,
acted before the Inca by young nobles, still told by the people.
Ollanta was a provincial governor who dared to love a daughter of the
Sun and was commanded not to raise his eyes.”
“Have you had anything published?” I ventured.
“This,” he said, handing me an _Elégie_ bearing a Paris publisher’s
mark.
“Could I find it?”
“Oh, no. It was out of print long ago.... Now I am working at
_Atahualpa_, an opera. I consider it by far my greatest work; let me
show you,” and he took some loose leaves from a portfolio.
He began to play again. His whole body swayed to the spectacular
rhythm. There are occasions when rhythm is music, when melody is a
refinement hardly necessary. Everything in nature keeps time to such
a rhythm. Nothing can be indifferent. It turns a whole landscape
theatrical. We were whirled up into the midst of the frenzied
feather-dance, and beyond into a lofty sky where condors scarce can
breathe. In the distance glittered the ice-cold _puna_ cities. There
is nothing I could not do if that thrilling moment could have been
indefinitely prolonged!
“But you are interested in seeing the boys at work, I feel sure,” he
broke in.
The composer of _Ollanta_--sub-manager of a school of correction!
“The boys are either bad or abandoned by their families at an early
age. They are brought here and taught trades. They do all the work of
the school.
“Here is their swimming pool and their dormitory. In their schoolroom
you will see object-lessons upon the walls, pictures of what will
befall them if they are bad.
“The worst thing they can do is to run away. They are put into prison
when they return--here,” and he unlocked a big door. There were four
little doors on each side of a dark room. Those on the right opened
into closets two feet wide and six long, with bars overhead, all
painted black, “to keep them from writing on the walls,” he explained.
When the padlock was removed, the cubby-holes on the left were opened;
two feet square, black.
“Here they must stand.”
I gasped.
“Oh, yes.”
“How long do you keep them in such a place? Surely not over night?”
“Not more than eight days.”
“And in the other side?”
“Not over ninety days in there.”
“Is any one in here now?”
“Yes, two,” he said.
V
Certainly nowhere in Peru are contrasts more marked than in Lima of
to-day, with its splendidly carved balconies of former times, its
scavenger birds, and mud roofs strewn with ashes; its dim, candle-lit,
incense-filled churches with their leper windows, and its international
horse-racing; its collections of ancient, battered, gold idols, silver
llamas, dishes and spoons, and its aeroplane called _The Inca_!
Lima is a city where bull-fights are not only an amusement of the
people, but of the finest and best intellects which the country
has produced as well. Bull-fighters with queues, gold and silver
embroidery, lace fronts, and red silk stockings are seen in the
streets. Formerly the archbishop, religious orders, and monks all
came to the bull-fights. The viceroy, shouting “Long live the King,”
threw a golden key into the bull cage, and the fight under most august
patronage began.
The market of Lima is a picturesque place: Chilean peppers (_aji_),
orange and red, pats of goat’s-milk cheese in palm leaves, unsalted
butter in green corn husks, piles of ripe olives of various maroon
hues, strawberries in hand-woven baskets. Fighting cocks glisten in the
intense sunlight. Ladies in mantillas float by, closely followed by boy
servants, their arms full of bundles. Here and there Franciscans with
“sandaled feet and clattering crucifixes” are amassing tribute. There
are said to be about six thousand ecclesiastics now in the city.
Lima--with its botanical gardens, condors and llamas in cages, long
_allées_ of royal palms, and its cement tennis courts where English
people are drinking tea; its venerable university, the oldest in
America, and its aimless daily driving around and around the Paséo
Colón; its proverbial milk-women in hand-woven shawls among shining
cans perched high on ponies, and its craze for _art-nouveau_; its
treasuring of Pizarro’s bony remnant (which a guide explains is
“_completamente momificato_”) and its earthquake-rooms of solid
masonry! Lima--where one discusses at some time or another everything
from men-of-war to tapir-skin muffs! Lima--with its mediaeval
festivals, when priests’ chanting fills the streets, incense rises,
blossoms fall, and candles twinkle in a ray of sunlight! As the old
saying goes: “It were possible to die of hunger in Lima, but not to
leave it.”
PART II
IN THE MOUNTAINS
“And daily how through hardy enterprise
Many great regions are discoverèd,
Which to late age were never mentionèd,
Who ever heard of th’ Indian Peru?
Or who in venturous vessels measurèd
The Amazon huge river, now found true?
* * * * *
Why then should witless man so much misween
That nothing is, but that which he hath seen?”
SPENSER
CHAPTER I
THE HIGH REGIONS
I
No Peruvian thinks of zones differing from his own as being remote
geographical localities. Peru contains them all. He does not have to
travel over the face of the earth for a change of climate, but makes
short, domestic, vertical journeys instead. Living under his banana
groves among his sugar-fields in the lush coast valley, if he feels
need of fresher air, he takes a trip up to the temperate zone, where
apple orchards and wheat-fields lie spread out in a recess of the
mountains, and strawberries redden to perfection. Has he curiosity
to see an arctic storm, he goes a little higher, coming out upon the
bitter table-land where crests of glaciers cut the sky.
The Andes, youngest of mountains--what a weirdly tossed world! All the
most obscure and harsh substances of the planet have been heaped up
here. The rough places of earth have turned over and reached up where
they brush against the firmament.
Volcanic power has its domain in these high regions of earth, where
nature is in anarchy, possessed of unnatural powers. It is a great,
uneasy wilderness, where torrents rattle through daring gorges, only to
fall a thousand feet, scattering into a dust of foam. Icicles hang from
every joint between the stones.
It is a colossal, brutal land, fresh from the cataclysm, whose
ponderous masses of rock are all sterile from cold, all silent
under perpetual snow. In its clearness of atmosphere sparkles a new
conception of the night-time sky. It is a land where thin layers of
lichens are the only trace of plant life, where condors wheel about the
highest pinnacles, and silver lies buried deep in the ground. It is the
lair of mercury-mines which paralyze those working in them, where hot
and cold fountains mingle to make one river, where springs of tar and
rivers of peat ooze from suffocation within.
[Illustration: A TRESTLE OF THE HIGHEST RAILWAY IN THE WORLD, ACROSS
THE _INFIERNILLO_.]
Hot from their passage through the glowing veins of the mountains,
springs bubble into life, sour, turbid, saturated with gases, possessed
of weird powers, capable of giving life as well as of taking it away.
Their waters turn to stone as they spread over the plain. In this
frozen waste of glaciers, sheltering fire and magnetic iron within, all
forces and elements are seething, though shrouded with snow. As the
noise of water fills the desert, so the roar of fire can be heard among
the frozen mountain-tops.
Long, long ago, a volcano was puffing out asphyxiating fumes. It melted
the metal on the edge of its crater, and turned rocks burst from its
own black mouth-pit to red and yellow and green. Fire boiled over the
edge and advanced in a tide of flame down the mountainside and into the
valleys. The favorites of the Sun who lived beside it complained to
him of the ruin caused by the volcano. Somewhat irritated himself, he
“smothered the genius of devastation in his lair,” covering the top of
the mountain with an impenetrable cap of snow, leaving little, seraphic
blue lakes here and there upon it as a hostage. This frozen giant,
whose entrails the fire is devouring, still lies sleeping with his
granite dreams.
When all the beneficent qualities inherent in a world have been wrested
from it, and life has disappeared toward experiences elsewhere, or when
a comet’s tail has swished life suddenly away, a wilderness like that
of the high Andes would result--a place where chaos and disorder is the
only rule. Yet the law of chaos we must believe is no law at all.
Stretched among these mountains is the vast table-land called _puna_,
on which flourished the Indian civilizations so famous in history.
Abundant rain falls, but cold prevents it from covering the ground
with flowers. Reveling in the high pressure of the mountain-tops,
humming-birds flit about in the snow. The finest morning begets the
heaviest afternoon clouds, and warm atmospheric currents, quite
definitely confined in the cold air, travel through the desolation.
The wind, seeming to tear up the ground and pulverize the summits,
is unable to dissipate a mist which magnifies the rocks and presents
the traveler’s giant shadow with a whole system of concentric rainbow
halos--his apotheosis in the clouds. The wind brings with it cold
clouds of dust laid only by a fresh fall of snow. It mummifies the
beasts of burden which fall by the way. Mirages, too, the escort of
tropical heat, shimmer upon these arctic plains.
With all the paraphernalia of the torrid zone, limitless vagaries of
torrid force which knows no law of custom, the _puna_ has no enjoyment
of it. For the cold seems also to have taken on the exuberance of
tropical nature.
* * * * *
You may lose your way in a snow-storm; or in the hot and stifling
valleys, where the tropical sun can concentrate, you may die of the
bite of a venomous serpent. Parched by fever-thirst, you may not drink
the water, for it brings varieties of diseases, bounded by their
valleys’ walls.
Your mule may sink into a morass or break his leg in a _viscacha_
burrow. He may eat a poisonous _mala yerba_ or _garbanzillos_. Broadly
laden, he may be scraped off a bridle-path clinging to the sheer
precipice. He may be carried away by the swift current of a glacier
stream in attempting to ford it. He may collapse from lack of air and
leave you stranded in a lifeless desert. _Soroche_-sick and burned to
a crisp by the relentless cold, you urge on the staggering mule as he
stops constantly to gulp the thin air. He cannot be satisfied, although
he has a second set of nostrils cut through to ease his breathing and
avert _soroche_.
Still the glaciers crawl down from brooding peaks above. The sun,
magician of the bleak mountain regions, comes out and glints green on
broken strata of the red mountains. It discovers all the bright colors
in the hills of porphyry and clothes them with fresh shadows. It runs
along a vein of shining mica to accuse it. It plunges into the middle
of a lake of polished jet settled in the snow, “making a great, golden
hole.”
A single hill in sunlight glows with streaks of iris-color, matching
the rainbow forms as they appear above and fade again. Little cloud
islets surround far-off peaks, sunk beneath the horizon. Pyramids of
ice twinkle, and fantastic stone needles stand in rows too precipitous
for snow to cling to their bare sides. They are called early
inhabitants, which Pachacamac in his anger turned to stone. The air,
though thin almost to disappearance, cuts like a razor-edge.
With eyelashes frozen together, you can yet be sunstruck. Teeth to
teeth, cold and heat meet upon “the waste, chaotic battlefield of
Frost and Fire.” Cold is besieged in vain by the sun at its hottest.
This land of silent chaos takes on the cold of outer space so near by,
which, shot through by the fierce heat of the sun, is incapable of
absorbing any warmth.
The magical sun, dispelling somewhat the mountain-sickness, only brings
with it another, even worse. For blazing across the snow-fields in its
tropical fury, _surumpe_ follows, snow-blindness, cured only by fresh
vicuña flesh laid upon the eyes, so the Indians say.
The over-arching vault is indigo. Desolation is brightened by a radiant
light, infinitely attenuated, “diaphanous as the starry void.” It
caresses the bristling scenery. It penetrates caverns and fills them
with a gold and purple mist. In the world of light and shade which it
creates, even the shade gives light. Upon water, the light, startled
by its own reflection, sparkles and dances and leaps.
Words give no idea of the brilliancy of the snow on the crests of
the Andes, because there are no words made of sunlight and crystals:
luminous, empyreal snowshine, shattered by the sun now and then
into rainbow colors. As silence is perfect only because it has the
possibility of being broken at any instant by a gigantic crash, so
whiteness is the emblem of perfect purity only because the possibility
of all color lies within.
He who has not galloped across an Andean _puna_ chased by a tempest,
has not known the full, wild force of the elements. Lost in a whirl of
lightning, wind, and snow, his mule, maddened by electricity snapping
off the ends of his ears, dashes from the thunder chasing at arms’
length. Red lightning zigzags between the summits. Blood-red cataracts
tumble over the volcanic crags. Huge pieces of rock break loose and
crash from the cliffs. Deep furrows are ripped up, following the
lightning as it runs along close to the ground.
Lack of air and bitter cold are forgotten. Each flash acts like a
fresh whip-sting to the mule. The compass snaps against its box.
Magnetic sand leaps into the air and flies about in sheets. The rocks
seem ablaze, the whole sky is on fire. The atmosphere quivers with
uninterrupted peals, smothered in the gorges of granite, buffeted
by the mountainsides, torn apart by the high peaks, till, finally
overtaking each other, they are confounded in a mighty burst of thunder
that breaks loose in the sky, and in a cosmic roar reverberates against
the nothingness of outer space.
Then the sun slowly settles in calm. The striped walls flare in
the sunset light, flamboyant as the bang of brass mortars in pagan
idolatry. The mountains shine from base to summit, while “the night,
grazing the soil and step by step raising its wide flight,--the dying
light, fleeing from crest to crest, makes the most sublime summit
resplendent, until the shadow covers all with its wing.”
All vague sounds subside into an “excess of silence.”
The last incandescent peak shines, and goes out.
II
How appropriate it is that quicksilver, a liquid heaviest of metals,
should come from this land of contrast. The most elusive product of
a mysterious country, imperceptibly by fumes it enters the nostrils
of those who seek it, either destroying their teeth or disintegrating
their limbs; a metal which, becoming mere vapor, is again transformed
by a sudden chill to metal; though it rises as steam, it falls as
quicksilver. Pliny calls it the poison of all things, the “eternal
sweat,” since nothing can consume it. To the Incas it remained a
mystery, for although its “quick and lively motions” were admired, its
search, being harmful to the seeker, was forbidden. They did, however,
use the vermilion found with it: handsome women streaked their temples
with vermilion.
Silver also is born in certain cold and solitary deserts of the
mountain-tops, melted by subterranean fires within its deep veins.
Silver being the only produce of the soil, the necessities of life have
to be brought from afar. It seems as if the vigor that vegetation
would absorb goes into the silver.
The mountain-tops are full of legends of mine discoveries usually
intertwined with romance. Greedy lovers have sacrificed their love for
a mine, and many are the mines filled with revengeful floods. Huira
Capcha, a shepherd who had been guarding his flocks near Cerro de
Pasco, awoke one day to find the stone beneath the ashes of his fire
turned to silver.
It is told in connection with the mine of Huancayo that an Indian
friend gave a Franciscan monk a bag of silver ore. The eager friar
wished to know where more could be found. The Indian consented to show
him, but blindfolded the friar, who took the precaution to drop a bead
of his rosary here and there as he went along. When at last the monk
stood marveling at the bright masses of silver, his Indian friend gave
him a handful of unstrung beads. “Father,” he said, “you dropped your
rosary on the way!”
In 1545, an Indian called Hualpa was pursuing a vicuña up the
mountainside. He grasped at the bushes as he scrambled up a steep
cliff. One came up by the roots, which were hung with globules of
silver. That particular vicuña hunt took place on a mountain called
Potosí. The discoverer of the mine of Potosí was murdered by a Spaniard
named Villarroel, who became its proprietor. The murder was an
unnecessary precaution, however, since a mysterious voice had commanded
the Indians to take no silver from this hill, which was destined for
other owners. From that romantic mountain has flowed far “more silver
than from all the mines of Mexico.” “Prior to 1593 the royal fifth had
been paid on three hundred and ninety-six millions of silver.” The
only difficulty the Spaniards encountered was in finding water enough
to wash the silver. The hills about Potosí gleamed with as many as
six thousand little fires, smelting furnaces belching horrid odors,
scattering liquid silver pellets. They had to be carried where the wind
blew, sometimes higher up and sometimes lower down.
So this splendid Imperial City grew up in the subtle air, varied by icy
winds and storm. The extraction of its prodigious wealth was a means
of torture to those who worked in continual darkness without knowledge
of day or night.
Yet, even among the tops of the Andes, living things are adjusted to
their environment, queer little animals of the heights giving the only
human atmosphere there is. Leaping _viscachas_, with cat-like tails,
carve through the frozen ground village burrows made to last forever,
treacherous pitfalls for a traveler’s mule. With the finest, silkiest
fur, valued by even the Incas, chinchillas sit in the shadows, never
in the sun. They appear suddenly on the steep cliffs at dusk and
nibble stiff grasses; then disappear like magic, leaving little chains
of footprints in the snow. A small toad inhabits the boundaries of
perpetual snow, and a nice little plant called _maca_ has its best
flavor only above an altitude of thirteen thousand feet, where all
flavoring ingredients have long been left behind.
The wild gazelle of the Andes, with fur the color of dried roses, the
graceful vicuña, creature of quickness and flight, lives upon the
coldest heaths and in the most secluded fastnesses of the mighty Andes
and seldom descends below the limit of perpetual snow. His back,
burned tawny by the tropical sun, is covered with snow.
Far in the distance a flock is grazing. The single male stands near by
upon a rock. A foreign sight or sound, a quick movement of his foot,
a short, shrill whistle vibrating through the clear, _puna_ air, a
flash of golden brown, and the whole flock is lost in the wilderness of
rocks, fleeing miles without stopping. It is said that if the male is
wounded, the females surround him, allowing themselves to be shot down
rather than leave.
The vicuña defies pursuit or capture and disappears at the first
glimpse of intruders, driving the young before him. He is no less
wild than in the days when he was royal purveyor of softest fabric
to the Incas’ wardrobes. His habits are as elusive now as then, when
Indians thirty thousand strong entrapped the wild animals among the
mountain-tops. These solemn huntings took place every fourth year.
Meanwhile the wise men kept account of the flocks with colored threads,
so-called _quipus_, their method of enumeration.
[Illustration: ALPACAS ON THE ANDEAN PUNA.]
Cousins of the vicuña are the awkward _huanacus_, which drink brackish
water as gladly as fresh and seek a favorite valley where they may
breathe their last and pile up their accumulated bones--as sea-lions
go to particular islands to die, the wounded being helped thither by
companions. The Incas worshipped the llama, alpaca, and these wild
relatives of theirs; they carved their grotesque forms in stone and
fashioned their likeness in gold and silver for household gods.
Far above the limit of human life, even beyond the haunts of vicuñas,
there is still one living creature. His shadow sweeps over the
wilderness as he passes between it and the sun--a shadow the only
appearance of life. It is the condor, who lays her white eggs on the
bare rock of the loftiest mountain peaks and knows where the heart of
each animal lies.
The mighty condor, who can kill an ox with his beak of steel, who can
swallow a sheep or exist a month without food.
The majestic condor, who swims in the highest air or sweeps down upon
his prey with a deafening whir of wings.
The condor, a symbol of light, who circles up to the ether of outer
space on an almost imperceptible, tremulous motion, or proceeds
undisturbed, without effort or flutter of wings, in the icy teeth of a
tempest, a symbol of storm.
He watches the sun rise over a continent-jungle, glimmering with heat
and dampness, and long after the sunset glow has faded from the highest
snowy peak, he sees its fiery ball drop beyond the farthest edge of the
Pacific.
The fabulous condor, known in Europe when Peru was a myth, a hostage
from a fairyland of gold and silver; a griffin which revels in solitude
and in evidences of things gone by.
Loneliness is the condor’s only friend.
The wind howls through his broadened wings.
CHAPTER II
A MEGALITHIC CITY AND A SACRED LAKE
I
There is something more mysterious than the sea, and that is the
desert; something more mysterious than the desert, and that is the
mountains; something more mysterious than the mountains, and that is
the jungle. Yet there is something with a deeper mystery than all--the
tradition of a great race that has struggled to a climax and subsided.
Where is there a more unbridled ocean? Where a more pitiless desert?
Where other Andes? Where so limitless a jungle? And where, in the
history of the whole world, so picturesque a dynasty--whose god was the
Sun, whose insignia the rainbow, who dwelt in houses lined with gold,
who tamed the earth’s resources so that their aqueducts in a rainless
land are still ministering to the descendants of a people who destroyed
them, and who left not one written word to testify that they had ever
been created at all.
What can be said of the Incas, the theme of romance ever since the
greed of the Spaniard reduced them to a legend--romances pale indeed
beside facts recorded by sober historians? A people who used copper
for iron, _quipus_ for writing, llamas for horses; who sacrificed
condors and humming-birds to their gods on the frozen plains; whose
accumulations of precious metals exceeded stories of Ophir’s wealth;
whose ears were enlarged that they might better hear the complaints
of the oppressed, and who were brought to destruction by a handful
of adventurers whom the whole training of the people had led them to
worship as gods.
Yet the Incas were only the final stage in a series of races that
flourished on the heights of Peru back through the ages. They were but
the last flicker of a guttering civilization without a name, which has
left only a few silent ruins built by unknown peoples, of whom these
“symptoms of architecture” reveal to us the forgotten existence. The
mystery that fires our imagination in contemplating the Incas had
shrouded their predecessors from them with an impenetrable veil.
Humboldt once remarked that the problem of the first population of
America is no more the province of history than questions on the origin
of plants and animals are part of natural science. In considering
this megalithic age, we have to do with pure speculation, not with
any legitimate domain of knowledge. Learned treatises end only with a
question. Dr. Bingham has recently discovered among these mountains
glacial human bones, possibly twenty thousand to forty thousand years
old. They may shed new light upon the identity of the makers of those
mysterious terraces which appear coeval with the creation of the world.
Vestiges of past civilizations are everywhere about, “monuments which
themselves memorials need;” terraces hollowed out of the mountains
to the very summits, bits of stone walls, roads, aqueducts, or an
occasional stone idol with a shallow vessel for the blood of victims,
perhaps a staring face on a pillar with projecting tusks and snakes
intertwined on its cheeks.
* * * * *
Tiahuanacu was made by a race which as far antedates the Incas as they
the dominant race to come. Everything to do with it is remote and
forgotten. Of necessity even its name is modern, having been given by
the Inca Yupanqui to his “resting-place.” The great pillars of the
City of the Phoenix rise from the roof of the world, “as strong and as
freshly new as the day when they were raised upon these frozen heights
by means which are a mystery.” Single stones measure thirty feet in
length. Heads of huge statues lie about and hard black stones difficult
to hew, the corners as sharp as when chiseled before the memory of man.
Niches and doorways are cut from the middle of single blocks, whose
corners are perfect right angles.
Many finely sculptured stones are now used for grinding chocolate, some
of the larger ones for making railroads. Prehistoric idols lean as
doorkeepers against flimsy, modern walls in the almost deserted modern
town, and one weird face has found its way as far as the Alameda in La
Paz. Beyond the protecting opening of a still perfect monolith lies the
burial-place for still-born Christian children.
A monolithic doorway, beautifully sculptured, lies broken in two by
lightning. A square-headed, legless, impenetrable god, speaking from
right-angled lips, still stares from behind his square eyelids. Weeping
three square tears from each eye, he surveys the waste and desolation
about him, just as he looked unmoved upon the golden pageants of Inca
days that did him honor as a superhuman deity who had sprung into being
in one night with a whole city about him. His hands wield snaky-necked
scepters, each the head of a condor, the lightning bird; and rows of
square little worshippers in wings and condor-fringes kneel beneath
crowns of rays fading off into the heads of birds with reversed combs.
No one yet knows the meaning of the sculptured deity which confused
Inca _amautas_ (wise men) a thousand years ago. Though the Creator is
supposed to have lived in Tiahuanacu, an eminent German, Rudolph Falb,
says the weeping god is a hero of the flood, his tears the symbol of
the deluge.
A tradition of the sixteenth century ascribes these monuments to an
age before the appearance of the sun in the heavens. Their builders
were destroyed by a flood sent by the wrathful god, Con Tici Uiracocha,
who came from the south, converting “heights into plains and plains
into tall heights, causing springs to flow out of bare rocks.” Half in
regret that he had destroyed his race of men, he created sun and moon
to render visible the waste he had made.
This information is as accurate and authentic as any which a long
line of distinguished explorers and archeologists have been able to
substitute for it. Men of sane judgment agree in admitting that there
is nothing to justify any conclusion. But they also agree that the
significance of Tiahuanacu exceeds everything hitherto discovered in
Peru. It recalls Carnac and Philae. It stands with the dolmens of
Brittany, Stonehenge, and the cyclopean terraces of the South Sea
Islands, as a great riddle of human history.
[Illustration: A GOD OF TIAHUANACU.]
II
Dropped in the bottom of yawning red gulfs, with snow-peaks glistening
overhead, are wild valleys of differing climates, the mighty
_quebradas_ of the Andes. These canyons, which the famous hanging
bridges used to span, intersect the wilderness. They lie in dusk while
the over-arching cliffs are bathed in full sunlight, for sunrise and
sunset are within a few hours of each other. The warm air, steaming
upward, pushes the snow boundary far above. Strata of black sand on the
valley’s walls have been tunneled by cave-dwellers of ancient times.
French sisters of charity move about in cloisters under eucalyptus
trees.
Such a surprise is Yucay, tucked in snugly between two mountains,
wrapped in soft air and scents of unknown flowers, the loveliest spot
in all the empire of the Incas. Streams of clear water descend to it
from above and form the smooth, deep river of Yucay. The Incas sought
it out for their gardens of pleasure and were lulled to rest by bells
of gold tied to the hammocks in which they slept.
Water has a very tranquillizing effect. It sweeps along a valley, and
the jagged remnants of volcanic action are smoothed out into long
undulating lines.
Water collects in all crevices; lakes green as iron vitriol, fed by
subterranean springs, lie in the surly country like jewels in their
setting. When night shadows have settled in the valleys, the alpine
glow is reflected in the quiet surface.
There are no fish in the lake of Chinchaycocha, Laguna de Reyes. Though
their element is water and they die in air, here they die in pure water
for lack of air. The _ingahuallpa_ sings a monotonous note from the
bank at the close of every hour during the night. The outlet of the
lake is narrow and deep, and its clear water flows smoothly and without
noise.
All the lakes have their secrets. The little lake of Orcos still holds
the golden chain with links wrist-thick made by Huayna Ccapac at the
birth of his eldest son. It encompassed the market-place of Cuzco.
It was so weighty that “two hundred Indians having seized the links
of it to the rings in their ears were scarce able to raise it from
the ground.” After the coming of the Spaniards, it was thrown for
safe-keeping into this round, deep pool filled by unknown springs.
Safe indeed it is. Orcos has not given up its charge, though repeated
attempts have been made to reach the bottom. Trying to drain it by a
sluice and trench, the Spaniards “unhappily crossed upon a vein of hard
rock, at which, pecking a long time, they found that they struck more
fire out of it than they drew water"--the opposite element from the one
they expected.
Up against the sky lies a sea where men sail in boats of grass--Lake
Titicaca, where ships are silently struck by lightning without crash
of thunder. On these high seas the navigator has to go by instinct,
because of the loadstone round about--magnetic iron, it is now less
picturesquely called. Saint Elmo’s fire blazes from ships’ masts on
stormy nights. Sometimes a pointed tongue of black clouds swings from
above, “like the trunk of some gigantic elephant searching the ground.”
A similar one raises itself from the surface of the water, slapping
back and forth, seeking the point of the tongue above, and when they
have found each other, they join in a mighty, black column, out of
which burst thunder and lightning. It whirls off everything within
reach and sucks down a passing _balsa_ (boat of reeds) into a depth
never sounded.
The water of Lake Titicaca is ice-cold and brackish. Its strangely
fashioned fishes never come to the surface. It is inhabited by great
animals like sea-cows, occasionally seen resting on a beach of some
remote inlet. The grottoes along the shore are guarded by gray and
black night herons and inhabited by the sea-cow or other monsters!
Queer birds haunt the wide stretches of _totora_ growing along the
shore, reeds whose stems are used for making boats, and whose tips are
used as salad. Here live the stately _puna_ geese, dazzling white, with
green wings shading into violet; black water-hens, white _quinlla_,
dark green _yanahuico_ with long, thin, bent bills, finely etched
ducks, ibises, _licli_, metallically bright, and sea-gulls from the
Atlantic.
Coal is found on the shores of Titicaca, which suggests a mystery. At
what elevation could tropical coal plants grow? The bones of mastodons
are also here. But rocks even higher up are smoothed as if by waves,
and beaches are found like those of the actual sea. Both Humboldt
and Darwin found shells, once crawling on the bottom of the sea, now
embedded fourteen thousand feet above its level.
Small lakes are sources of small rivers, by which they are emptied.
But great Titicaca forms no stream at all. Its outlet has no outlet of
its own. The rush of nauseous water is poured into a shallow lake-twin
not far away--Poopo, through whose mysterious whirlpools the water
drops back again in subterranean escapes. This tumultuous torrent, the
Desaguadero, was spanned in former days by a bridge of reeds.
Recent measurements show that the level of these two lakes is
constantly lowering, and eventually they will disappear. They were once
the source of the greatest river in the world, but some day there will
be only a salty deposit in the hollows they now fill.
_Titi_, the cat, _kaka_, the rock, Lake Titicaca was named for a
little island within it, around which cluster legends of the origins
of things. It was the most revered shrine in the empire of the Incas.
Neither the wide fields of Chita, where the flocks of the Sun gamboled,
nor the valley of Yucay could equal this enchanted isle of Titicaca.
Before the arrival of man, the island was inhabited by a tiger,
carrying on its head a magnificent ruby, whose light illuminated the
whole lake as the afterglow the snow-covered peaks above. The Hawaiians
have an expression for the shifting of colors in a rainbow. The Indians
on Lake Titicaca have special words for the glow of fading sunlight on
the mountain summits and the purple of the glaciers in their hollows.
The Sun had preserved himself from the flood by hiding in the depths
of Lake Titicaca. This was his island, out of whose sacred rock, after
the deluge, he soared like a big flame into the sky. His footsteps are
still to be seen perpetuated in iron ore. The original Incas were let
down by the Sun, their father, on to the small island and commanded to
go forth to teach the savage inhabitants.
But the worship given this spot by the Incas was only absorbed in that
of former times. This “Island of the Wild Cat” is a field of aboriginal
myth and tradition.
The sacred cliff where the Sun had risen was covered by the Incas
with sheets of gold and silver, “so that, in rising, he might see the
whole rock ablaze, a signal to worship.” “Sixteen hundred attendants
manufactured _chicha_ to throw at it, and pilgrims from the entire
empire brought offerings of silver and gold.” Garcilasso says that
“after all the vessels and ornaments of the temple were supplied, there
was enough gold and silver left to raise and complete another temple
without other material whatsoever.” All the treasure was thrown into
Lake Titicaca to save it from the Spaniards. Ten of them were drowned
in 1541, while hunting for it. Titicaca guards its secrets well.
The approach to the temple was a very complicated structure known
as “the place where people lose themselves.” The pilgrims, after
much fasting on the sacred ground of the island, were allowed to
pass barefoot through the first gate above, the “door of the puma,”
_pumapuncu_. After more fasting, they might go down through the second
gate, the “door of the humming-bird,” _kenti-puncu_, so called from
feathers of humming-birds plastered over its inner side. They were
especially honored by the Incas, colored like the rainbow emblem. After
more ceremonies, the pilgrims were allowed to go through the “door of
hope,” _pillco-puncu_, covered with feathers of the bird of hope. Those
who had come so far might now worship the holy cliff, but they were not
allowed to touch the face of the cliff nor to walk upon it. Sacrifices
to it were small children, whose heads the priests cut off with sharp
stones. The sacrificial stone of the Island of Titicaca still remains,
rubbed smooth by the iron tooth of time, split into three pieces by
a thunderbolt. So does the queen’s meadow below the terraces, where
the carmine, yellow, and white _cantut_, _flor-del-Inca_, recalls the
blazing color of other days, when fruit ripened here twelve thousand
feet above the sea, and maize of which Sun-virgins made the bread of
sacrifice.
Beyond, is the island called Coati, consecrated to the Moon, where her
temple used to be. The life-size statue of a woman was found here,
gold in the upper half, silver in the lower.
The Fountain of the Incas still gushes two streams of clear water. “A
stolid Indian sits watching it pour away, never dreaming whence it
comes, as no one, indeed, knows.”
CHAPTER III
MYTHS AND MONUMENTS
I
The Indian worshipped the Inca, his sovereign, because of his divine
origin, being the descendant of Manco Ccapac, founder of his race,
who was the son of the Sun. Thus, religion was the substance of the
empire. But as the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was a pantheon of idols,
sacred each one in the mind of some visiting chieftain, though always
remaining the Sun Temple, so the religion itself was a synthesis of all
the beliefs which those idols represented; blended yet dominated by the
all-searching light of the Sun. This may explain, for instance, the
confusion of Pachacamac, the supreme deity of the ancient coast tribes,
with Uiracocha of the mountains, whom Acosta, among others, declares to
be one and the same. Clear-cut
[Illustration: A SWINGING BRIDGE NEAR JAUJA.]
distinctions are impossible. The stories are all vague, even among
confident writers of legends.
As to the Sun’s descent, the wise men of the Incas learned
from their predecessors that he was made by The Ancient Cause,
The First Beginning, The Maker of All Created Things, The
Supreme Deity, Illa Tici Uira Cocha--the four ultimate,
visible forms of the Infinite, to quote the _Peruvian
Star-chart_ of Salcamayhua. There is in Quichua a word to express
“the-essence-of-being-in-general-as-existent-in-humanity.” Sometimes
the name is given as Con Tici Uiracocha, an identification with the
supreme god, Con, the center of another group of legends of belief.
The mystery surrounding this great, invisible god, generally called
Uiracocha, is as complete now as it was to the Sun-worshipping Incas, a
sort of dim background for the glittering splendor of Sun-ritual.
Uiracocha has many identities: Uiracocha, the Supreme God; Uiracocha,
the hero-god, the white and bearded man in long robes, who with a
strange animal in his hand, appeared to that Inca afterwards called by
his name, tending the flocks of the Sun among the tops of the Andes;
Uiracocha, who raised up an army for the Inca on the Field of Blood
out of stones that he set on fire from a sling of gold; he who changed
the revelers of Tiahuanacu to stone in wrath. (However misty the
connection between Uiracocha, stones, and human beings, it is certain
that Peruvians held stones in great awe. The temple to Uiracocha, the
war-god, is at the foot of an extinct volcano whence a lava stream
had issued. It is paved with black and made of carved and polished
stone. The interior was obscure, with an altar for human sacrifices.)
Uiracocha who, as Betanzos relates, came out of a lake when all was
dark, lord of light and lord of wind, who, as dawn appeared, spread his
mantle over the waves of the lake and was wafted away into the rays of
morning light. The curling waves followed his evanescent passage, and
so he was called Uiracocha, the Foam of the Sea. He gave his wand to
the chief in the House of the Dawn. It afterwards became the golden
staff of Manco Ccapac, his son.
Uiracocha was the universal god of the Quichua-speaking people. The Sun
was peculiar to the Incas.
The hazy red deity Con was the personification of subterranean fire.
“He is light as air, has neither arms nor legs, nor muscles nor bones,
nor joints nor nerves nor flesh, but runs very fast in all directions.”
He came from the sea and flattened the hills and filled up the valleys,
and by his simple word gave life to man. Viciously he converted the
race of men he had created into black cats and other horrible animals,
devastated the earth, deprived it of rain, and--retreated into the sea.
His first temple was a volcano.
This left a free field for his equally omnipotent, equally hazy brother
Pachacamac, who benignly created another race of men. Since Pachacamac
was invisible and beyond their conception, the Incas built him no
temples, but gave him secretly a superstitious worship, bowing their
heads, lifting their eyes, and kissing the air as evidences of the
reverence they felt at the mention of his name.
Here is a prayer reported by Geronimo de Ore: “O Pachacamac, thou who
hast existed from the beginning, and shalt exist unto the end, powerful
and pitiful; who createdst man by saying, ‘Let man be;’ who defendest
us from evil, and preserves! our life and health;--art thou in the
sky or in the earth, in the clouds or in the depths? Hear the voice
of him who implores thee, and grant him his petitions. Give us life
everlasting, preserve us, and accept this our sacrifice.”
The Inca mind could not reconcile the anterior existence of Uiracocha,
Con, and Pachacamac with Sun-supremacy. We find them all called sons of
the Sun, and so their importance could consistently fade away.
The origin of the two first Incas was mystery-veiled. Men discussed
whether they were saved from the primeval waters robed in garments
of light, or whether they came from three shining eggs laid by the
lightning in a mountain cave after the deluge. Did they escape from
the lower world through a giant reed, or were they imprisoned in a
cave, over which Uiracocha appeared with wings of brilliant feathers
to give Manco Ccapac the insignia--the scarlet fillet and the round
gold plates? Some thought they emerged from Paccari-tampu, the Lodgings
of the Dawn, not far from Cuzco. They had been led thither through
caverns of the earth. Sarmiento relates that the Incas came out of
a rich window, by order of Uiracocha, without parentage. The first
Inca had an enchanted bird and a staff of gold, and came conferring
fairy-tale benefits to mankind.
The legend most widely accepted taught that the Incas, who in the
person of Manco Ccapac and his wife and sister Mama Ocllo came out of
the cave of Paccari-tampu, were children of the Sun. He himself placed
them on the Island of Titicaca and told them to wander until they
should reach a place where their wedge of gold would be swallowed up
by the ground at a touch. There they should build the capital of their
empire. At the foot of the fortress of Sachsahuaman it disappeared, and
so the city of Cuzco, the Navel of the World, was founded.
The poetic fiction of all these legends conceals an historic background
of curious details. But with Father Acosta we should consider that
“it is not matter of any great importance to know what the Indians
themselves report of their beginning, being more like unto dreams than
to true histories.” He continued: “They believe confidently they
were created at their first beginning at this new world where they
now dwell. But we have freed them of this error by our faith, which
teacheth us that all men came from the first man.”
Besides all this maze of divinity and a symbolic astronomy, everything
in nature had for them a soul that they might pray to for help. Not
only the sun, moon, stars, thunder, and lightning, the rainbow, the
elements, and rivers, but that deep sea from which they issued had
a mysterious worship. They adored high mountains, homes of majestic
gods whom they never saw, whence streams proceeded to water their
terraces. They sacrificed to distant objects by blowing the ashes of
burnt sacrifices into the air, offering them to the hills and to the
wind. They adored all great stones, the mouths of rivers, all things in
nature different from the rest, and offered to them small stones or a
handful of earth or an eyelash.
Moreover, there was an elaborate fetishism. They had idols with a
personal interest; they carried talismans; they had miniature domestic
altars, where they offered _chicha_ or flowers.
They tried to appease things that might injure them. They drank a
handful of water from a dangerous river before crossing, and ate a bit
of the stone which had harmed them, and offered in sacrifice a leaf of
coca. The mysteries of coca epitomize the country where it grows. It
not only fortifies the teeth, controlling mountain sickness, preventing
fatigue, keeping off disease, strengthening broken bones; it cheers
the spirit and invigorates the mind, and gives courage to perform
impossible tasks.
Its juice softens hard veins of metal. The odor of burning coca
propitiates the deities-of-metals, who would render the mountains
impenetrable without it. Coca-leaves in the mouths of the dead insure a
welcome in lands beyond.
No wonder it was the divine plant of the Incas. A sacrifice at
festivals, its smoke an offering to the gods, whose priests chewed
the solemn herb to gain their favor, it was a benediction for any
enterprise. Mama-coca, its spirit, was worshipped.
Coca, preferred to gold, silver, or precious stones, was dubbed by the
Spaniards “_una elusión del demonio_.”
II
Almost as well known as the stories of silver and gold from Peru are
those relating to its mammoth buildings made of mammoth stones. The
ruins are a better witness to the greatness of the ancient Peruvians
than the wealth looted from them.
It is the first fact mentioned by a homecoming traveler that there is
a twelve-cornered stone in the Street of Triumph in Cuzco, and into
and around each corner other stones are so perfectly fitted that a
knife-blade cannot be inserted between them. That fact is perfectly
true. So also is the fact that ancient Peruvians transported stones
weighing tons with llamas and human beings as their only beasts of
burden. They lifted them to great heights without machinery, cut them
without steel implements, blasted them without gunpowder, and polished
by rubbing them with other stones and bundles of rough grass. They
had no resources in building but their own energy. The vast “stones
were raised by social institutions, supplying want of instruments
by numbers of people.” This world of ruins, comparable to Egypt, “is
isolated in the region of the clouds.”
Stupendous scenes upon these elevated plains were object
lessons--nearness of gigantic peaks, appalling depth of chasms. The
Incas learned much from nature: from salt-strewn deserts to lay waste
their criminals’ property, sowing their fields with salt; from the
sea, maker of terraces. They finished off the mountain-sides with
small _andenes_, or hanging gardens, which received the flow of water
bestowed by the Inca upon his subjects with every patch of ground. They
brought loam from the jungle in baskets and created land upon bare
rocks. Where opportunity offered, the terraces widened, following the
natural excrescences of the mountain.
And when nature failed to point lessons, models were provided by
far-receding civilizations so remote that they almost seemed to have
relapsed into the domain of nature. Each served as the foundation for
the next, like the rhythmic life of the jungle.
Ancient Peruvians hesitated at nothing. They built an artificial
city on a high, cold, almost waterless, plain, with a palace for the
Inca to visit in, a garrison for his protection, and magazines and
granaries for his soldiers’ food. Countless royal palaces, too, their
niches covered with plates of gold, and convents like the House of the
Virgins of the Sun in Cuzco, were duplicated all over the empire for
other wives of the Inca as he chose among them, “storehouses sheltering
his tribute in women.” There were baths and fountains and places of
pleasure and round stone _chulpas_, towers of the dead.
Since no one traveled except by order of the Inca, the highways were
reserved for himself, the armies, and the _chasqui_, or royal runners.
From Zarate to Humboldt, they have been described as fit to rank with
the seven wonders of the world. One highway pierced walls of solid
rock, crossing profound chasms and the treacherous marshes of the
_puna_ on walls of solid masonry. Being a pedestrian road, it slipped
in flights of stone steps over the brow of the mountains. It traversed
the whole empire for two thousand miles among the mountain-tops. The
other, flanked by mud walls, lay along the low deserts of the coast,
“shaded by trees whose branches hung over the road loaded with fruit,
and filled with parrots and other birds,” to quote Cieza de Leon.
Humboldt said that “part of the coast road was macadamized.”
At regular intervals, “every ten thousand paces,” _tambos_ were
scattered along the roads, houses of pleasure for the Inca and
waiting-houses for the relays of messengers of the Sun as they bore
news of royal necessity, or brought fish from the sea or other
delicacies from distant provinces to the Inca’s table. Garcilasso
describes the stone stairs up to these inns “where the chairmen who
carried the sedans did usually rest, where the Incas did sit for some
time taking the air, and surveying in a most pleasant prospect all
the high and lower parts of the mountains, which wore their coverings
of snow, or on which the snow was falling, for from the tops of some
mountains one might see a hundred leagues round.”
The Incas threw a swinging osier-bridge of spider-web construction
across a vicious torrent to lead their armies over. So-called
historians tell of bridges of feathers used in Inca days, but, as
Garcilasso adds, “omit to declare the manner and fashion of them!”
The secrets of the Inca ruins are not yet told. For their industry
moulded underground as well, connecting palaces and convents by hidden
passageways, and chambers and depositories for army supplies like those
made by the great Yupanqui in his campaign against the Chimus.
The subterranean system of water-works was stupendous. Near Cajamarca
is a channel several hundred miles long paved with flagstones
throughout its entire length. It forms the outlet to a little lake.
Another aqueduct traversed the whole province of Cuntisuyu, twelve
feet deep and over one hundred and twenty leagues long, leading
waters of the snows to barren plains. Water was stored in cisterns on
the mountain-tops. “They conducted rivers in straightened channels
through hills of solid rock,” they brought water through pipes of gold
from distant hot and cold springs, whose sources are now unknown. It
trickled into the baths of the Inca through golden jaws of animals,
birds, or snakes, and then welled
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
AN HEIR OF THE “MAKERS OF RUINS.”]
over through properly regulated pathways to the terraces, where growing
things were in want of irrigation.
This civilization had taken ages to evolve, as the development of
certain plants and animals alone would show. It was reduced in a few
years to an empire of ruin. One shivers at the “hideous energy of
destruction evinced by man.” But in spite of all that has been done
to annihilate the achievements of the Incas, benefits accruing from
them still remain. “Makers of ruins” indeed, yet by them the present
flimsy civilization exists. Upon their terraces, climbing to the
mountain-tops, Indians now live in mud huts, little towns clutching at
a far-off slope, apparently deserted but for the cemetery. Irrigating
prospectors stand aghast before their mighty systems. The railway
builder may take lessons in road construction.
There is practical value in ruins, if from them comes inspiration for
modern industry. And there is poetry in ruins, because they speak of
men and things which are gone, never to return, “the shrines of by-gone
ideals, makable when they were made and then only.”
CHAPTER IV
THE INCA AND HIS EMPIRE
No one dared to look upon the Inca, as he radiated the light of his
divine Sun-father. He lived and ruled as a deity, representative of
God, supreme arbiter of all creatures breathing the air or living in
the water. “The very birds will suspend their flight if I command it,”
Atahualpa once said. His person being holy, his body after death,
preserved in its living likeness, was still worshipped. Carried about
on a golden litter, the Prince Powerful in Riches moved from palace to
palace, and his feet never touched any but sacred ground, consecrated
by his contact, if not previously hallowed. To carry his person was
so singular an honor that his weight was not a burden, as cultivating
his fields was a labor performed with hymns of joy. This Sun of
Cheerfulness passed beneath flower-covered arches, while his bearers
crushed out sweet odors from flowers beneath their feet. Indeed, “the
shouts of the multitude as he passed along caused the birds flying over
to fall to the ground!”
If these “facts” seem more like romance than truth, they have at least
masqueraded under the guise of history for more than three hundred
years.
The Inca was clothed in garments made of the silky hair of the vicuña,
which lives above the line of perpetual snow. Woven as they were to
be worn, from threads of invisible fineness, the soft garments were
made by cloistered Virgins of the Sun. They were enriched with bits
of gold, silver, emeralds, a fringe of gorgeous feathers, and with
mother-of-pearl. Pearls were not used, as their “search endangered the
lives of the seekers.” The Inca wore a suit but twice, then conferring
it upon some person of royal blood. These were the garments taken as
sumptuous gifts to the monarchs of Spain.
Many were the Incas’ marks of distinction. Their heads were shorn, all
but one lock, as Manco Ccapac had ordained. The “shearing” was done by
means of a sharp flint. Another distinction was enlarging the velvet
of the ear by inserting ornaments, so that it reached the shoulder,
suggesting the Spanish title, _Orejones_.
The peculiar badge of the Inca was a fringe encircling his brow, called
the _llautu_, “the mark whereby he took possession of the realm, a
red roll of wool more fine than silk, which hung in the midst of his
forehead.” And his chief distinction, worn in his colored wreath and
pointing upward, were the two long pinions of the _corequenque_, that
mysterious pair of birds which, isolated in a snowy desert beside a
little lake, lived at the foot of an inaccessible mountain. Though
there are other snowy deserts and other little lakes and other
inaccessible mountains, no similar pair of birds could ever be found.
In fact, there never were but two alive at the same time--symbol of
the two original parents. They recall the screaming _oo_, a blackbird
of the Hawaiian Islands, famed for concealing under each wing a single
yellow feather, used in making those magical feather cloaks for the
kings on ceremonial occasions.
Each Inca must have new pinions, as each must have his new palace, for
the apartments of a dead sovereign were closed at death; his golden
utensils, jewels, and treasure were buried with him. Men and women,
practised in the art of lamentation, cried for one year after his
death, when his account was closed. Then the heir “bound his head with
the colored wreath” and started forth through his dominions.
With the rainbow as their emblem, even Inca facts had distinctive
colors and were interwoven with facts of other colors, ideas being
expressed directly without the technique of words. Knots in a
parti-colored twist were their hieroglyphics, the famous _quipus_, and
the Officers of the Knots were their historians. They intertwined the
bright filaments of different sizes as well as colors, and tied into
remembrance everything from laws and army supplies to ballads of the
poets, sung on days of triumph.
Such a Sovereign-deity as the Inca could force the equality of all his
people, commanding them to be happy. Here was a whole nation moved
by sameness of will--desire to please their sovereign. Observance of
law was natural to these industrious subjects, who were treated with
absolute justice by an absolute despot. Each was just as well fed,
just as well clothed, just as well housed, just as well amused, as
his neighbor. Emissaries from the king inspected his neighbor to see
that it should remain so. All persons had to allow messengers from the
Inca to inspect what they were doing at any time. Such as were found
commendable were praised in public. Such as were idle and slovenly
were scourged on the arms and legs. One punishment was whipping by a
deformed Indian with a lash of nettles.
“There never could be any scarcity or famine, for, if a man failed to
take his turn at the water for irrigation, he received publicly three
or four thumps on the back with a stone ... shamed with the disgraceful
term of ... _mizqui tullu_, being a word compounded of _mizqui_, which
signifies sweet, and _tullu_, which is bones.”
As labor was the only tribute, the rich were not taxed more than the
poor. The blind were required to cleanse cotton of seeds and rub maize
from the ears. “The old men and women were set to affright away the
birds from the corn, and thereby gained their bread and clothing.” No
one, however impotent, could
[Illustration: INDIAN WATER CARRIER, SICUANI.]
escape tribute. The poorest gave lice, “making themselves clean and not
void of employment in so doing.” Who, indeed, were the poor? Those who
were incapable of work, who had to be fed and clothed out of the king’s
store.
“There were no particular tradesmen ... but every one learned what was
needful for their persons and houses and provided for themselves.”
Laws would hardly seem necessary to control so exemplary a nation.
Here, however, are a few paternal laws, thought necessary by the Lover
of the Poor: against the adornment of clothing with gold and silver
and jewels; against profuseness in banquet and delicacies in diet;
against the ill manners of children; of good husbandry and hospitality;
providing a new division of lands every year, according to the increase
and diminution of families; punishing those who destroyed landmarks or
turned the water aside; devoting the services of all master workmen to
the Inca, and supplying them with gold and silver and other materials
for the exercise of their ingenuity.
Since the Sun-god, or the Inca, had benignly bestowed them for the
people’s good, laws received the same veneration as the precepts of
religion, from which no subject of the Incas could dissociate them. A
breaker of the law was guilty of sacrilege, and no punishment could be
too severe. In fact, most crimes were punishable by death. The sinner
was thrown over a precipice or into a ditch of serpents, jaguars, and
pumas. The worst sin of all, high treason, exacted in expiation not
only the death of the sinner, but that of his family, even of his
neighbors. His very trees were pulled up by the roots, and his fields
sown with salt. “But as there was never any such offense committed, so
there was never any such severity executed,” a mitigating remark of
Garcilasso in connection with a certain crime.
The basis of the Inca government was tribute, personal labor given
to the Sun and to the Inca, a source of continual delight, a supreme
privilege. So the Sun, or his representative the Inca, was furnished
by his people with food, tilled by them from his own ground; clothing
for his soldiers or his needy from the wool of his own flocks; bows
and arrows, lances and clubs, ropes for carrying burdens, helmets
and targets each where most easily procurable. Temples and palaces of
the Inca, his aqueducts, roads, and bridges were built with hymns of
rejoicing. The laborers never got out of breath so as to spoil the
cadence of the hymn of triumph; the chroniclers fail to say whether in
obedience to law or from a sense of good taste.
In addition, all the provinces paid tribute of the most beautiful
women, who were kept in convents as wives of the Inca; and he might
choose any who suited him.
The great maxim of the Incas was increase of empire, their plea being
the best interest of the tribes they were to conquer. The Inca sent
word that he would come “not to take away their lives or estates, but
to confer upon them all those benefits which the Sun, his father, had
commanded him to perform toward the Indians. He (would come) to do them
good, by teaching them to live according to rules of reason and laws of
nature, and that, leaving their idols, they should henceforward adore
the Sun for their only god, by whose gracious command he had received
them to pardon. To which end, and to no other purpose (for he stood in
no need of their service) he traveled from country to country.”
So well did most of the surrounding tribes realize this, that messages
of submission came before the conquerors had even turned in their
direction. If it happened that because of ignorance they held out
against the benefits an indulgent sovereign was waiting to bestow, the
Inca’s messengers informed them of his exact intentions. All good gifts
would be theirs, provided only they would renounce their independence,
their language and religion, and send their chief god as an hostage of
submission to the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco. Honored servants of the
Inca would come to them in return to acquaint them more in particular
with the new benefits they were about to receive. Skilled workmen would
teach them the arts. The sons of their _cacique_ (chieftain) would be
sent to Cuzco to receive instruction. Moreover, the Inca would confer
upon them the garments worn by his own gracious person.
Nearly all perceived the wisdom of such a course at once. But if in
blindness any still rebelled, messengers brought word that “the Inca
pitied their folly which had so unnecessarily betrayed them to the last
extremity of want and famine.” For enlightened they were to be, in
spite of themselves.
Wonderful are the tales of these victorious campaigns, for the Inca’s
army never knew defeat. The soldiers were as plentifully supplied from
vast granaries as if in Cuzco. If the march led through lowlands, the
entire army was relieved every two months. Though the Indians of the
mountain-tops did not object to cold, they succumbed to fevers soon
after descending into the comfortable valleys. When a new province had
been incorporated, the gracious Inca “confirmed the right of possession
to the natives of it.”
The empire extended from the Chibchas and Caras of Ecuador, beyond the
Chilean deserts. Only one region dared defiance; that was the primeval
jungle. The armies might skirmish about upon its edges, and exact
exotic tribute of the savages who ventured forth. But within its grim
interior they were secure.
In the provinces of Antis, people “killed one another as they casually
met,” and worshipped a jaguar, the original lord of the jungle. They
sacrificed hearts and blood of men to huge snakes “thicker than a man’s
thigh.” They made war only to eat the flesh of their enemies. They
were called “nose of iron” because they bored the bridge between the
nostrils to hang in it a jewel or long piece of gold or silver. With
a handful of men, Yupanqui visited these savages below the Andes and
imposed worship of the Sun. With a handful of men, the Spaniards wiped
the great organization of the Empire of the Sun off the face of the
earth and established upon its ruins a Christian civilization.
The people in the Valley of Palta bound tablets upon the head of a
new-born child and tightened them each day for three years, until the
skull was elongated, in order to fit the pointed woolen cap which it
was the fashion to wear.
The Chachapoyas wore a black binder about their heads, stitched with
white flies, and instead of a feather, the tip of a deer’s horn. Their
chief weapons were slings bound about their heads, and they adored the
condor as their principal god.
The Chancas were the most dangerous opponents of Cuzco, a powerful race
owing their origin to a jaguar, who dressed in skins of their god and
carried effigies of jaguars with a man’s head to their sacrifices of
children, by whose eyes they prognosticated.
The _caciques_ of all dependent tribes were obliged to appear once a
year at court, or if they lived very far away, once in two years. They
brought with them gold and silver from their mines, for all such things
were devoted to worship of the Inca. Failing these, they presented
jaguars, droll monkeys, parrots, wondrous condors, and giant toads
and snakes that were very fierce, kept in dens for the grandeur of
the court. People from all climates presented indigenous gifts, the
most beautiful or the most curious of any creature or plant within
their domains. Any known thing preëminent in any way added the name
of its peculiar excellence to the titles of the Inca. His court in
Cuzco consisted of more than eight thousand persons, nobles who traced
descent from the Sun, and representatives of all the fantastic tribes
blest by the Inca’s clemency. Even the greatest lords carried bundles
in his presence.
The noble city of Cuzco, where the children of Inti first stopped with
their wedge of gold, was itself worshipped. Those who lived in Cuzco
had a certain superiority. Divisions of the city were the Terrace of
Flowers, the Lion Picket with the dens of pumas, the Field of Speech,
the Quarter of the Great Serpents, the Scarlet Cantut--the flower of
the Inca--the Holy Gate, the Shoulder Blade, the Seaweed Bridge, and so
on, bounded by small streams and long, somber walls of perfectly fitted
stones.
Up above the city hangs the stupendous fortress of Sachsahuaman,
exceeding all the seven wonders of the world, a cyclopean work of the
primitive age. Squier says: “The largest stone in the fortress has a
computed weight of 361 tons.” Sachsahuaman must indeed have been raised
by enchantment in a night like Tiahuanacu, for it surpasses the art of
man, the labyrinth of passageways contracting here and there so that
a single man could keep back an army, subterranean tunnels leading to
temples
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
IN THE MARKET, _PLAZA PRINCIPAL_, CUZCO.]
and palaces of the city. From the inmost recesses of the fortress, a
fountain of clear water bubbles. Its mysterious murmur fills the secret
passageways.
Even a single stone destined as a part of the fortress partakes of the
enchantment. According to legend, twenty thousand Indians had dragged
it from a distant quarry, up and down over the wild mountains. Once it
fell, killing “three or four thousand of those Indians who were the
guides to direct and support it.” And when, after its painful journey,
the monster finally beheld the lofty fortress of which it was to form a
part, it fell for the last time, shedding bloody tears from the hollow
orbs of its eyes. It still lies on the same spot, receding deeper and
deeper into the ground whenever attempts are made to remove it.
CHAPTER V
SERVICE OF THE SUN-GOD
“In the beginning there arose the golden child. He was the one born
lord of all that is. He established the earth and the sky.
“Who is the god to whom we shall offer sacrifice?
“He who gives life; he who gives strength; whose command all the
bright gods revere; whose light is immortality; whose shadow is
death. He who through his power is the one god of the breathing and
awakening world.... He whose greatness these snowy mountains, whose
greatness the sea proclaims, with the distant river. He through
whom the sky is bright and the earth firm.... He who measured out
the light in the air, ... wherever the mighty water clouds went,
where they placed the seed and lit the fire, thence arose he who is
the sole life of the bright gods.... He to whom heaven and earth,
standing firm by his will, look up, trembling inwardly....
“May he not destroy us! He, the creator of the earth; he, the
righteous, who created heaven."--_Hymn of Indian Sun-worship from
the Rig-Veda._
Primitive peoples usually adore that natural force which is their
greatest good. Gratitude for benefits conferred is the basis of all
pagan religion. Primitive peoples also worship the sky and the bright
objects within it. Sun worshippers combine the two.
Inti, the Sun, child of the Universal Spirit, is his mighty emblem, a
symbol of his uncreated glory, the quickening principle in nature, the
great wizard of Peru, the only source of vitality upon earth, by whose
energy the winds arise, the glaciers slide over the mountains, by whose
energy even the rain descends, the rivers swell, and cascades leap
through the valleys down toward the sea. In how much more real a sense
than the Incas knew is Peru the land of the sun!
The Sun, ruler of the stars, together with Quilla, the Moon, ruler
of winds and waters, his sister, wife, and queen, created beautiful
Chasca, the Dawn, “whose time was the gloaming and twilight, whose
messengers the fleecy clouds which sail through the sky ... and who,
when he shakes his clustering hair, drops noiselessly pearls of dew on
the green grass fields.”
The light-rays emanating from the Sun and the morning star of double
course are his messengers, bringing strength and power. They precede to
announce his coming in the morning, and follow him as, by the force of
his power and heat, the sea parts in the evening to receive him.
The name of Sun-temples in Peru was Intihuatana, the binding of the
Sun, the place where the eternal light or fire was held fast. Though
there were many such throughout the kingdom, the Holy of Holies was
at Cuzco, the Place of Gold, Inti-cancha, oriented to the sunrise,
golden crown gleaming, sheltering walls and cornices lined with gold
plates under its roof of straw. There flamed the great golden image
of the Sun, glistening with emeralds and other precious stones,
completely covering one side of the temple opposite the eastern portal.
The mummies of all former kings, perfect replicas of themselves, sat
staring as in more active days from their thrones of gold along the
walls, the eyes shining with a mixture of gold. “And so light were
these bodies that an Indian could easily carry one of them in his arms
to the houses of Spanish gentlemen who desired to see them.”
Beyond, twinkled the temple of the Moon, the Sun’s _coya_. The queens,
her descendants, were also called _coya_, “not being worthy a title so
truly magnificent as Inca.” This was the Place of Silver, surrounded by
the dark shadow of night, receiving the silent homage of the queens,
the sister-wives of the Incas, reposing on silver thrones. At full moon
the festival of the deities of water was held here.
A white cross of crystalline jasper hung from a silver chain in a
secret place. The white light in it increased and decreased with the
moon. It was beneficent and associated with the morning light, whose
compartment came next, sacred to the Dawn with the Morning Star,
_chasca coyllur_, ragged with earth mist, he of the long curling locks,
the page of the Sun. The royal runners were named for him, messengers
of the Inca as he of the Sun. All the other stars, companions of the
Moon, which vanish at the coming of the Sun, glittered each in its
proper magnitude from a starry ceiling.
The temple belonging to Thunder, Lightning, and the
Thunderbolt--servants of the Sun, but messengers of an angry god--shone
with tiles of gold, but was without symbol. As the arms of the
Inca, the dread liquid fire which darted from heaven like a golden
serpent with quick spring and mortal bite, surrounded the Rainbow,
beautiful _cuychi_, whose image spanned one wall of the room beyond,
a multi-colored ray of the Sun, flickering over the showery hillside,
announcing his gracious reappearance after the tempest and promising
peace. The all-powerful Sun could subdue the dark cloud and draw from
its depths the shining rainbow, whose fragile arch widens as the Sun
sinks. He lives in the clouds, and the rainbow is the hem of his
garment. Is it strange that the Incas should have held it in such
veneration that when they saw it in the air they shut their mouths and
clapped their hands before it? Is it not stranger that they only should
have worshipped the rainbow and placed it on their banners as an emblem
of God?
All the priests of the Sun in Cuzco were of the blood royal, a
privileged class. As many as thirty thousand officiated in Inti-cancha.
They washed the sacrifices in fountains of water which bubbled up
in golden cisterns and celebrated the great festivals in glittering
dresses of feathers with drums of serpents’ skins.
[Illustration: A MARKET IN HUANCAYO.]
In Acllahuasi, near by, lived a thousand virgins, the most beautiful of
all the pure blood of the Sun, destined as his wives, and watched over
by their _mamacunas_. Visited only by the _coya_, they spun the fine
vicuña garments for the Inca’s use and sewed upon them little plates of
gold and emeralds. They wove and embroidered the royal coca bags which
the Inca hung upon his left shoulder. They made the sacred _llautu_
with the colored fringe, and the straw-colored twist for the head of
the prince royal. They gathered bones of white llamas and burned them
with linen they had spun. Then they collected the ashes, and looking
toward the east, threw them into the air, an offering to the Sun. They
made bread for the festivals of the Sun and the _chicha_ drunk by the
Inca and his kindred, in kettles of gold and silver. For recreation
they went out to walk in their garden of silver and gold.
Nearly half the year in the Empire of the Sun was given to
celebrating--everything from the first day of the moon to the day of
marriage of the royal brides, _coyaraymi_. The beginnings of the four
seasons were festivals. At the vernal equinox degrees of chivalry were
taken by young nobles who, having gone through all possible tests,
fasting, and temptation, received at last the kiss upon the shoulder
and the jab through the ear-lobe given by the Inca with a nail of gold.
At the autumnal equinox all subjects were cleansed of whatever troubled
them, when, purified with children’s blood, they asked the midday
Sun to protect them from outward calamities and inward diseases. A
messenger of the Sun with a gold-studded lance, fluttering feathers
of many colors along its length, ran down from Sachsahuaman to the
center of the city, where four sons of the Sun waited with lances to
be touched by him, and scatter to the four quarters of the earth at
the Sun’s command, all evils which beset mankind. Each ran six leagues
in his separate direction to spread the good news. People shook their
clothes. The evils of night were driven out by lighted torches, which
were then thrown into a stream and extinguished before being borne
away. Confession of sins followed.
The greatest feast was Intiraymi, the Binding of the Sun, when his
southern shadow grew no longer, when the Sun-god by some unknown power
was hindered from progressing farther. This was always a mystery. Tupac
Yupanqui had said: “Many say that the Sun lives, and that he is the
maker of all things.... Now we know that many things receive their
beings during the absence of the Sun and therefore he is not the maker
of all things; and that the Sun hath not life is evident for that
it always moves in its circle and yet is never weary, for if it had
life it would require rest as we do and were it free it would visit
other parts of the heavens unto which it never inclines out of its own
sphere. But as a thing obliged to a particular station, moves always in
the same circle and is like an arrow which is directed by the hand of
the archer.”
Later, Huayna Ccapac said: “There must be some other whom our father,
the Sun, takes for a more supreme and more powerful lord than himself;
by whose commands he every day measures the compass of the heavens
without any intermission or hour of repose; for if he were absolute
and at his own disposal he would certainly allot himself some time of
cessation though it were only to please his own humor and fancy without
other consideration than that of liberty and change.”
But to continue with the festival of the summer solstice. At peep
of day the Inca and all the nobles of the blood of the Sun went in
procession under canopies of feathers to await his arrival. Foreign
princes and distinguished vassals, in garments plated with gold and
silver, skins of jaguars, and condors’ wings, assembled at a little
distance, the whole people filling the streets of Cuzco. All barefoot,
crouching, they waited, looking toward the east. Hardly had the first
rays touched the snowy mountain-tops when a loud shout of joy, songs
of triumph, and deafening music on rude instruments broke from the
multitude. It grew louder and louder as the god, in rising, shed more
and more light upon the people. They raised their arms, opened their
hands, and kissed the air so filled with light.
The Inca, rising, greeted the pomp of dawn. He held two great bowls of
gold filled with _chicha_ in his hands; the contents of one he poured
into a golden channel leading to the temple, and the vapor rising in
the heat, it seemed as if the Sun himself were drinking. The contents
of the other he shared with all his kindred, pouring it into little
golden goblets.
Then they all proceeded to the temple. Outside, the _curacas_, or
governors, offered to the priests images of many different animals of
gold, while the Inca and all the legitimate children of the Sun went
in and presented the goblets he had consecrated to the image of the
Sun. There were sacrifices of flocks of black llamas, the particular
property of the Sun, from which prognostications were made. The animal
to be sacrificed was held fast, and with a sliver of black obsidian
its breast was opened and the heart torn out. Sometimes as many as two
hundred thousand llamas were sacrificed during a year.
It is a horrid chapter from the Incas’ story that they made human
sacrifices along with everything else which they valued. Von Tschudi
says that they offered to the Sun as many as two hundred children at
one time. “The children were strangled and buried with the silver
figures of sheep, having first walked around the statues of the
Creator, the Sun, the Thunder, and the Moon. Sometimes they were
crushed between two stones, sometimes their mouths were stuffed with
ground coca.”
The fire for sacrifice was a direct gift of the Sun, kindled from
a great polished bracelet upon the left arm of the high priest.
The Virgins of the Sun bore away some of it to care for during the
following year. No more unhappy omen could occur than its extinction.
The Inca sat within view of all, mounted upon his gold seat, drinking
to his kindred and to the _curacas_ in order. The cups his lips had
touched were kept as idols.
The Sun had drunk of their offerings; he had kindled their sacrificial
fire; he now entertained his subjects with a banquet prepared by the
hands of his own Virgin-wives. As three days of universal fasting had
preceded the feast of the Sun, so for nine days reveling followed.
They ate the bread of the Sun Virgins, and drank their _chicha_, they
shouted and danced and masqueraded, each tribe of the empire with
differing head-dresses of feathers and grotesque
[Illustration: IN A FERTILE VALLEY OF THE UPLANDS.]
masks according to the fashion of their country. “They cast flowers
in the highways, ... and their noblemen had small plates of gold upon
their beards, and all did sing.”
CHAPTER VI
INDIANS AND LLAMAS
Had the Indians of the sixteenth century not known that their
overthrow was the will of Pachacamac, the miracles constantly favoring
the Spaniards would have forced them to recognize the fact. Pious
chroniclers tell of Saint James on a white horse, who came with
glistening sword to turn the tide of battle, and of the Virgin Mary,
whose appearance in the clouds blinded the hostile Indians.
The Incas could but succumb to the sovereign will. Some retreated
beyond the mountains, leaving indelible traces upon the people of the
jungle. Some were thrown into fortresses, which “their ancestors had
built for ostentation of their glory.” On the authority of Garcilasso,
thirty-six males of the blood of the Sun, who had been condemned to
live in Lima, the Spanish City of the Kings, had in three years’ time
all died. Sayri Tupac, a nephew of Atahualpa, had come to Lima for the
privilege of renouncing his sovereignty. The _amautas_ had consulted
the flight of birds as to whether he should surrender himself to the
Spaniards, but as Garcilasso says: “They made no inquiries of the devil
because all the oracles of that country became dumb so soon as the
sacraments of our holy mother, the church of Rome, entered into those
dominions.”
“Ah!” said Sayri Tupac, as he lifted the gold fringe of the
table-cloth, “all this cloth and its fringe were mine, and now they
give me a thread of it for my sustenance and that of all my house.” He
was allowed to withdraw to the beautiful valley of Yucay, “rather to
enjoy the air and delights of the pleasant garden formerly belonging to
his ancestors than in regard to any claim or propriety he had therein.”
But he sank into a deep melancholy and died within two years.
The Spaniards were occupied with duels and assassinations of friends,
bloody civil wars and religious disputes, usually about the Immaculate
Conception. One can read volumes of such proceedings. Indian revolts
were a constant interruption. The Spaniards gradually discovered that
it was impossible to keep the Indians quiet while an Inca remained
alive; so in 1571, less than forty years after their arrival, Tupac
Amaru, the last of the Incas, was put to death by the Spaniards in the
following manner, as described by Garcilasso de la Vega in the words of
his first English translation (1688).
“His crimes were published by the common crier, namely, that he
intended to rebel, that he had drawn into the plot with him several
Indians who were his creatures, ... designing thereby to deprive and
dispossess his Catholic majesty, King Philip the Second, who was
emperor of the new world, of his crown and dignity within the kingdom
of Peru. This sentence to have his head cut off was signified to the
poor Inca without telling him the reasons or causes of it, to which he
innocently made answer that he knew no fault he was guilty of which
could merit death, but in case the vice-king had any jealousy of him or
his people he might easily secure himself from those fears by sending
him under a secure guard into Spain, where he should be very glad to
kiss the hands of Don Philip, his lord and master. He farther argued
that ... if his father with two hundred thousand soldiers could not
overcome two hundred Spaniards whom they had besieged within the city
of Cuzco, how then could it be imagined that he could think to rebel
with the small number against such multitudes of Christians who were
now disbursed over all parts of the Empire.” How little effect the
words of Tupac Amaru produced upon the Spaniards can be judged by the
following:
“Accordingly the poor Prince was brought out of the prison and mounted
on a mule with his hands tied and a halter about his neck with a crier
before him declaring that he was a rebel and a traitor against the
crown of his Catholic majesty. The Prince not understanding the Spanish
language asked of one of the friars who went with him what it was that
the crier said, and when it was told him that he proclaimed him a
traitor against the king, his lord, he caused the crier to be called
to him and desired him to forbear to publish such horrible lies, which
he knew to be so, for that he never committed any act of treason nor
ever had it in his imaginations, as the world very well knew. ‘But,’
said he, ‘tell them that they kill me without other cause, that only
the vice-king will have it so, and I call God the Pachacamac of all
to witness that what I say is nothing but the truth.’ After which the
officers of justice proceeded to the place of execution.... The crowds
cried out with loud exclamation accompanied with a flood of tears,
saying, ‘Wherefore, Inca, do they carry thee to have thy head cut
off?... Desire the executioner to put us to death together with thee
who are thine by blood and nature and should be much more contented and
happy to accompany thee into the other world than to live here slaves
and servants to thy murderers.’
“The noise and outcry was so great that it was feared lest some
insurrection and outrage should ensue amongst such a multitude of
people gathered together, which could not be counted for less than
three hundred thousand souls. This combustion caused the officers to
hasten their way unto the scaffold, where being come the Prince walked
up the stairs with the friars who assisted at his death and followed by
the
[Illustration: AN INDIAN PASTORAL.]
executioner with his broad sword drawn in his hand. And now the Indians
feeling their Prince just upon the brink of death lamented with such
groans and outcries as rent the air.... Wherefore the priests who were
discoursing with the Prince desired him that he would command the
people to be silent, whereupon the Inca, lifting up his right hand
with the palm of his hand open, pointed it towards the place whence
the noise came and then lowered it by little and little until it came
to rest upon his right thigh, which, when the Indians observed, their
murmur calmed and so great a silence ensued as if there had not been
one soul alive within the whole city. The Spaniards and the vice-king
who were then at a window ... wondered much to see the obedience which
the Indians in all their passion showed to their dying Inca, who
received the stroke of death with that undaunted courage as the Incas
and the Indian nobles did usually show when they fell into the hands of
their enemy and were cruelly treated and unhumanly butchered.”
When they first stepped upon the shores of Peru, a Spaniard or two
could travel hundreds of leagues alone through this foreign country
on the shoulders of men and be adored as gods in passing. Before long,
an army was not secure. A Spanish governor and his escort of thirty
men were resting one day upon a high plain. The Indians, whistling to
each other with bird calls and barking like wolves in the night, “went
softly to the Spaniards’ tents, where, finding them asleep, they cut
the throats of every one of them.”
Such deeds were being done in the Empire of the Lover of the Poor, the
Deliverer of the Distressed, where formerly each individual had been
forbidden to injure even himself.
The spirit of rebellion spread among the Indians. They tried to
poison the water-supply of the City of the Kings. They tried to
burn Cuzco, imagining they could burn the Spaniards with it. Their
revolts culminated in that great rebellion of 1780 under José Gabriel
Condorcanqui, called Tupac Amaru, whose descendant, through a daughter,
he was. His followers swore their hatred of the white race and vowed
not to leave a white dog, not even a white fowl alive. They even
scraped the whitewash from the walls of their houses. They did succeed
in strangling a governor. In return, Tupac Amaru’s tongue was cut out,
and after seeing his wife, son, and brother tortured to death before
his eyes, was himself sentenced to be torn apart by wild horses.
The men were slaughtered in such numbers that the women went out to
help each other sow the fields. At sunset they returned, hand in hand,
singing a melancholy lament, until this too was prohibited by Spanish
law. All musical instruments were to be destroyed; the use of the
Quichua language was forbidden; women were ordered not to spin as they
walked; distinctive customs were to be laid aside. All lapsed into
spiritless dullness. The air of desolation spread.
* * * * *
The Indians of Peru are a silent people trained by cold and cutting
winds. They bite the end of their _ponchos_ to show anger and live
to an immense age. Their thoughts turn backwards. They grind their
teeth on the same hard corn kernels as formerly and drink the same
corn-brandy; they carry about as talismans little effigies of llamas
found in the graves of their ancestors and throw their criminals over
the same lofty precipices. The juice of the red thorn-apple leads
them into ecstasy, the only high light of their existence, for by
means of it they communicate with the spirits of their ancestors. The
only passion they have brought with them through the centuries is
remembrance of the past. The thorn-apple is called _huaca cachu_, the
plant of the grave.
The Indians squat about in groups with their little gourds of _chicha_.
There is no laughing. The mummy-like babies do not cry. The lake on
whose banks they live contains no fish. No worm, no insect, inhabits
its banks. But there is a spirit which broods from the mountain above.
He will lighten the burden of the traveler who seeks the mountain-top
and presents him offerings in the depths of night. The _achachibas_ or
piles of stones are witness to his gracious power.
Between two mountain-tops lies a steel-colored lake shimmering in its
stone basin. The Indians come here to beg for fire-water. They pour
in brandy, standing on a peak while making their libation to the
rain-god, and then leave without a word. Immediately the rain pours.
Only their religious festivals recall Inca feast days. Christianity
has never been able to abolish the bacchanales of former times; it has
merely changed their names. The call of triumph, _haylli_, has been
changed to Hallelujah, Christian anthems are set to Indian tunes, IHS
has been engraved on the stone doorways of antiquity. Over the shrines
outside the churches are effigies of sun and moon. Above the megalithic
fortress of Sachsahuaman three crosses preside where the banners once
indicated the dwelling of the Children of the Sun. Indians still
salute the Sun temple on first entering Cuzco, though the nave of the
Dominican church stands upon the spot where the Sun was worshipped in
golden chambers, its Christian walls built of mammoth stones rolled
together for the glory of the Sun. This superstructure typifies the
methods of the missionary priests.
A wooden llama filled with fire-crackers is exploded on Good Friday. By
the roadside, an Indian in a grotesque mask, with a feather crown and
bells on his arms and legs, leaps in fantastic bounds to celebrate the
day of the Holy Cross. A picture of the Virgin is carried about on her
Ascension Day. The Indians, dressed in the masks of wild animals and
multi-colored feathers with bits of savage embroidery on their loose
garments, dance about her to fifes and drum-beats and rattles of beans
and snail-shells. Wild dances, horn-blowing, ugly voices screaming, and
rattling tin--these heathen orgies swarm at the feet of effigies of
Christ.
The Indian has to be content with the scanty earnings he can get from
the transport of heavy burdens and from the wool of his llamas. By
chewing coca he is able to run all day before the rider. His world is
the valley where he lives. His occupation does not lead him to the
mountain-top above, nor does his thought soar as far. His gloom sulks
in his dress and manner of life, even in his songs and dances. When he
reaches his little smoky hut, he eats his frozen and pressed potato,
plays a wee tune on his _quena_ and goes to sleep.
Self-sufficient because in need of nothing, the llama is the
interpretation of the Indian. Both are products of the soil, like the
_yareta_ moss and the birds which swim in the icy water.
The dark-eyed llamas, with red-woolen tassels in their ears, move
slowly across the icy plateau.
Could anything equal the dignity of a llama, his serenity, his hauteur?
Why not? He knows he is indispensable. There is no one to take his
place. His wool furnishes clothing, his skin leather, his flesh food,
his dung fuel, and he is a beast of burden where no other can live on
the bare, breathless heights.
In return, he asks no shelter, warm beneath his shaggy coat. He asks
no food, for he grazes on the stiff _ychu_ grass as he journeys along.
He needs no shoes, no harness, and even provides, himself, the wool
for the homespun bags lying upon his back. When there is no water, he
carries in bags made of his own skin what is necessary for man. Nor
do his benefactions end here. The llama furnished the mystery-loving
Spaniards with that strange bezoar stone which, on account of its
miraculous endowments, they placed in the list with emeralds, pearls,
turquoises, and other precious stones from Peru.
Is it astonishing that the llama makes his own rules of conduct and
exacts entire consideration of them? Disobedience he indicates in a
way not to be forgotten! And yet such is his docility that dozens are
often kept within bounds by a single thread stretched around them
breast high,--rugged little mountain beasts herded with worsted!
Usually so gentle, if a llama is annoyed he becomes revengeful and
useless. He never will hurry, for supplying his own food he must
graze when opportunity offers. He will not be overloaded. One hundred
pounds he will cheerfully carry, but with more than that he sits down
like a camel, dreamily chewing his cud, and can be neither forced nor
persuaded to rise. In speaking of the alpaca, cousin of the llama,
Father Acosta said that “the only remedy is to stay and sit down by the
_paco_, making much on him, until the fit be passed, and that he rise;
and sometimes they are forced to stay two or three hours.”
The little variegated herd, with expressions of mild surprise, step
daintily along as if walking
[Illustration: LLAMAS AT THE FALLS OF MOROCOCHA.]
on eggs, following at even distances, each moving with authority
of a whole procession. If frightened, they huddle into a compact
group, craning their long necks toward the center. Then they look you
wistfully in the face for minutes at a time without moving. The halter
of the leader is embroidered, and small streamers flutter from it. Most
of the llamas have tassels in their ears, or little pendants or bells.
Thus they file across the snow-covered cordillera.
At night when they sink on to the _puna_ at their journey’s end,
a faint murmur like many æolian harps is wafted into the perfect
stillness of the frosty night. It is the llamas’ appreciation of rest.
PART III
IN THE JUNGLE
The land lying between Peru and Brazil is a mystery “although the
bounds be known of all sides.... Some say it is a drowned land,
full of lakes and watery places; others affirm there are great and
flourishing kingdoms, ... where they say are wonderful things.”
FATHER ACOSTA
CHAPTER I
A LAND OF ADVENTURE
What a “hereditary spell” the jungle has had upon men! How smilingly
its beauty allures--and how graciously it repels! Yet its beauty is
not merely beauty. It flashes suggestions of wondrous lands beyond,
bringing to the imagination a pleasure in its own vision like the joy
of nature in her own loveliness. The jungle is a region which men
have always peopled with strange forms pleasing to their fancies,
yet a region of dread, beyond human loneliness. It has sheltered in
turn the desideratum of each age, while surrounding it with fearful
mysteries. But though men have looked upon the jungle with awe, magic
possibilities were still within and beyond. _A chacun son infini._
Both Inca Rocca and Yupanqui attempted to conquer the jungle. Between
Paucartampu and the Madre de Díos are vestiges of an Inca road.
But downpours and floods made roads give way to watercourses. The
Incas called them “doorways” to the woods, which mountain rapids had
opened by irresistible force; but no one could pass through. Even the
executive Incas were obliged to turn back with only a fringe of jungle
conquest, great campaigns resulting only in loss of life then as now.
They retreated, submissive before nature’s impregnable stronghold.
There are tribes of strange, shy little people still showing traces of
contact with the Incas. Although so long ago, they made a profounder
impression than all subsequent invaders. Even if the conquered savages
remained in the jungle after submitting to the Incas, they were obliged
to pay tribute to them, observing the habits of their conquerors when
they emerged. Those Incas, also, who withdrew into the woods to escape
Spanish persecution, carried their customs with them. No matter how
their influence was perpetuated, tribes still show the “footprints of
Incas” in the surface of rocks, and even as far as the Mishagua are
found legends of Incas’ hidden treasure. With them in mind, the “big
ears” of some of the savages assume a strange significance.
Where the Madera and the Amazon meet there is a great island, a river
island hundreds of miles in extent. Its name is Tumpinambaranas, and
upon it are remains of gigantic buildings. Was this the fabulous
country, Paytiti of mystery, powerful in riches, a legendary home
of Manco Ccapac? Georg M. von Hassel is now investigating this hazy
subject. The people of Tumpinambaranas had legends of a race, the
Mutayces, who lived toward the south, “whose feet grew backwards so
that any one who attempted to follow them by their track, would, if he
were ignorant of this malformation, go farther from them.”
Columbus breathed the sweet air which blew across from the forests
near the mouth of the Orinoco and faithfully imagined it one of the
four great rivers flowing from paradise. Had he only dared, he said,
he would have liked to push forward to where he might hope to find the
celestial boundaries of the world, and a little farther, to have bathed
his eyes with profound humility in the light of the flaming swords
which were wielded by two seraphim before the gate of Eden.
The cavaliers in search of gold believed that El Dorado lived within
the mysterious jungle. Their expeditions were imbued with awe. Adolph
F. Bandelier has transcribed the source of the legend. It is the
ceremonial of choosing the _uzaque_ of Guatavitá:
“In front walked wailing men, nude, their bodies painted with red
ochre, the sign of deep mourning.... Groups followed of men richly
decorated with gold and emeralds, their heads adorned with feathers,
and braves clothed in jaguars’ skins. The greater number of them went
uttering joyful shouts, others blew on horns, pipes and conchs....
The rear of the procession was composed of the nobles and the chief
priests, bearing the newly elected chieftain upon a barrow hung
with discs of gold. His naked body was anointed with resinous gums
and covered all over with gold dust. This was the gilded man, _el
hombre dorado_, whose fame had reached the sea coast. Arrived at the
shore, the gilded chief and his companions stepped upon a _balsa_
and proceeded upon it to the middle of the lake. There the chief
plunged into the water and washed off his metallic covering, while the
assembled company, with shouts and the sound of instruments, threw in
the gold and the jewels they had brought with them.”
Treasures have been found in this lake, among others a group of golden
figures. The chronicler Don Rafael Zerda says: “Undoubtedly this piece
represents the ... _cacique_ of Guatavitá surrounded by Indian priests
on the raft, which was taken on the day of the ceremony to the middle
of the lake” for sacrifice to its goddess.
“Humboldt saw the staircase down which the gilded man and his train in
jaguars’ skins descended to the waters of the lake of Guatavitá. He
also found the remains of the tunnels by which the Spaniards had tried
to drain the lake.”
A joint stock company in 1903 did drain the lake of Guatavitá. But its
mud turned to cement before they could dig in it.
The “vision of the Dorado appeared like a mirage, enticing, deceiving,
leading men to destruction.” It became the name of a mythical country,
where rivers ran over sands of gold, and palaces stood on golden
pillars shining with emeralds. Infamous adventurers, brave as the
knights of the Round Table, confronted and stormed the great jungle.
Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro tried to find the glittering capital of
Manoa, which El Dorado had gradually become. For these buccaneers who
set out with an arrogant army to conquer the Cinnamon Country, nature
became the supreme fact of existence. Famine, perpetual rain, fevers,
strange insects, and reptiles attacked them. Their expeditions could
but end in the murder of each other. They followed the example of all
life in the jungle.
Doctor Middendorf says that the Amazon was named for the Coniapuyara, a
race of big women leaders, whom the Spaniards found. Condamine assures
us that light-skinned Amazons lived there. Raleigh, while searching
for Manoa, is said to have first reported them, though he found them
by going up the Orinoco. The distinguished scientist Ulloa, who went
to South America in 1758, says it is “an undoubted truth that there
had been formerly several communities of women who formed a kind of
republic, without admitting any men into the government.” Well, at
least there is nothing either to prove or disprove it. A recent report
of the Geographical Society of Lima gives a far less picturesque
explanation of the naming of the Amazon, to the effect that “the tribe
of the Nahumedes were thought to be Amazons on account of their long
hair and the _cushma_, a long, sleeveless garment which they wore.”
Close upon the adventurers came the Jesuit missionaries, who burned to
save from hell-fire the strange human beings they might find lurking
in the forest depths. One Jesuit father, Fritz, spent fifty years
(1680-1730) on the Amazon, trying to connect the aborigines by the
introduction of a common language. These missionaries left no ruins
like those in Paraguay, the Jesuit State, but their teachings are
visible in savage traditions. They transformed Bible stories to fit
jungle needs.
“A Murato was fishing in a lake of Pastasa, when a little lizard
swallowed his hook. The fisherman killed it, the mother of the lizards
was much angered and with her tail slashed the water in such a way
that it overflowed the entire vicinity. All were drowned except one,
who climbed into a small _pivai_ palm, and hung there several days
under a perpetual darkness. From time to time a fruit of the _pivai_
palm fell, but always upon the water, until one day he heard the plump
of the fruit upon dry ground. He got down from the tree, made a house
and farm, and with a little piece of his flesh, which he planted in the
earth, made for himself a wife, by whom he had many children.”
The commercial age is now having its fling. It is attempting to subdue
the jungle. The rubber hunters are not seeking paradise. They are not
looking for legendary kingdoms, nor are they wishing to save the souls
of beings of whose existence they are not even persuaded. Rubber is a
valuable product. So are other things concealed in jungle depths. Dark
crimes can also be hidden in the half-light, covered close under the
thick veil which shrouds the land of mystery.
This Peru, approachable from the Atlantic, the “monstrous thicke
wood” of the early travelers, still remains undisturbed. Illimitable
it is as you gaze down upon it, stretching away one unbroken forest
to the faint blue horizon, without a single natural approach except
the waterways. Lying close below the austere mountain-tops is a
luxuriant world of vegetation; wide stretches of unpreëmpted soil,
sparseness characteristic of polar regions hangs just above a tropical
phantasmagoria of growth. Shifting cloud-shadows and wandering rainbows
flit and interchange over the jungle like the play of colors on a
peacock’s neck.
Though we know that there are no mighty civilizations of human
making, there are no streets of gold with ruby walls, yet within the
imperturbable recesses are strange races and wonders of plant and
animal life which may interpret whole domains of knowledge. Nature’s
secrets are still locked up in this prolific laboratory. Though we
know that no great race of kings holds sway, yet it is certain that
here is a chance to study in the wild tribes the growth of human
language--beginning with the poor Inje-inje, who has not more than a
bird’s speech, and whose needs are no greater than his speech would
suggest.
CHAPTER II
TOWARD THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
From the mountain-tops the stream leads toward the east over the
Eyebrows of the Jungle, La Ceja de la Montaña, letting loose a deluge
from its black clouds. Caught between walls of red and black striped
rock, the valley grows deeper and hotter and filled with mist. The
water accumulates brightly colored pebbles. It rolls over ungathered
bits of gold in its sand and rushes them along with slivers of
glistening mica. All about is the sound of springs “whose waters
moss has turned aside.” Buried in luxuriant vegetation, it slides on
beneath thickets of guava, golden cassia, and red-leaved _tilandsia_
bushes, hung with rank passion vines, whose ripened fruit, the crackly
_granadilla_, lies everywhere upon the ground. A mammoth iguana,
munching the flesh-colored bignonias, falls occasionally from the
tree-tops.
Small, richly plumed parrots nest in the rock walls. A whole book
might be written about the parrots, various as vegetation itself,
flashing multi-colored light as they scream through the air-spaces.
There is the toucan, turning his bill with its accessory head around
to gloss his splendid plumage in a ray of sunlight. At the other end
of the scale are the meek little green parroquets with perpendicular
bills, hardly larger than sparrows, which go in pairs and move in
parallel lines. Every variety keeps together, each to its kind.
There are other large, fruit-eating birds; birds with curiously shaped
tail feathers; birds with crests and ornamental plumage. As variegated
as their forms are their curious cries. The black ox-bird bellows like
a bull, the black and red _tunqui_ grunts like a pig, and wood-pigeons
cry like children. Occasionally “jets of brilliant melody” sparkle
among the trees, but more often the notes have a mysterious, aerial
quality “like the tinkling of a far-off bell suspended in the air.”
Here hangs the wonderful nest, four feet long, of the pouched starling,
bound together with spiders’ webs as strong as silk. Such is jungle
lavishness that plants and animals are given endowments useless to them
in their struggle for existence. The bird which builds such a palatial
nest has no advantage over any other. Its wondrous, unplantlike power
gives to the sensitive plant no superiority. Struck with paralysis, it
can recoil at a touch, but that forms no link with its fellow plants.
Such a feat is not an attribute nor in any way a necessity of vegetable
life. It can hardly compensate the sensitive plant for its lack of
perfume and bright flower, the right of every growing thing.
Chatter of monkeys mingles with roar of falling water, hairy manikins,
shrieking and gamboling, “very gentle and delightful apes,” Father
Acosta called them. Tiny, blear-eyed monkeys scream in disapproval of
all they can see, hear, or smell. Scarlet-faced monkeys, owl-faced
monkeys, swing from branch to branch with crazy gestures, “taking
one turn of the tail at least around anything in passing, just
provisionally.”
Thick masses of _quinar_ trees are draped in luxuriant parasites, and
_agave_ bushes are filled with red flowers. The wonderful _maguey_
grows
[Illustration: IN THE VALLEY OF THE PERENÉ.]
here, yielding water, oil, and vinegar, honey, thread, needles, and
soap. Its juice boiled in rain-water takes away weariness.
Clear water drips over blocks of granite, covering the stone with moss
in falling. The terrible jaguar lies curled up asleep in some far-off
notch, gently purring. Ferns and palms, forerunners of the great empire
of vegetation below, cluster along the brooks swelled with snow. “Tall
and whispering crowds of tree ferns” droop their filmy fronds from
lofty, slender stems. Ferns of every conceivable size and texture
smother rocks and decaying trees. Some are as small as mosses, others
appear monstrous, like those of a moonlight night. Humming-birds flit
above the pomegranates or lose themselves in a banana blossom. “The
rose-colored plumage of the silky cuckoo peeps out like a flower from
the thick foliage.”
It is an earthly paradise, where bloodsucking bats emerge at night
and lightning rages uncontrolled, destroying trees and cracking open
precipices. Pumas live in these clefts hewn through the mountains, and
they spring on to the shoulders of a victim, drawing back the head
until the neck snaps. _Pumayacu_ is the stream of the puma, with its
tumultuous torrent whose very stones are treacherous.
Such are the rain-soaked slopes of the Andes, a tangled mass of
jungle. The woods are all enchanted. Thousands of fairies dance in the
sunbeams, and during the rain myriads of them hide in the flowers. If
disturbed, they disappear underground. One can never be sure that “what
one surveys is what it purports to be, nor even, that in surveying
nothing, one is not gazing through an invisible being,” as Guenelette
observed so long ago.
The half-Indian guide began to speak, taking a coca-leaf from his
fawn-skin pouch.
“Pigmies live in the undergrowth. They are not more than so tall, ...
and very, very wild. No, they’re not monkeys. They have a language,
although we cannot understand it. How do I know they live here? Why! I
know! Have I ever seen them? No. But--I’ve seen their shadows.
“And then there are jaguars near here, jaguars with the hoofs of
bullocks. At night I can hear them springing upon the thatch of my
thin roof. They roar and roar and one might call them the devil
himself if one did not know that they were jaguars with the feet of
bullocks. Have I ever seen them?... No, but then--I’ve seen the prints
of their hoofs.
“Here in the bottom of the river, lying full length, lives the great
Mother of Waters. She is so long that she could stretch from bank to
bank and lie sleeping on either side at the same time. That is why she
lies lengthwise in the river bed. Sometimes there is an awful, rumbling
noise, like an approaching earthquake. Then the waters of the river
are churned like the smallest mountain torrent tumbling over a rock
in mid-stream. The great snake lifts her head, then her heavy body
from the stream bed, and crashes off through the jungle. The track she
leaves behind her is a desert waste; no growing thing is left, and the
wake is as broad, why, as broad as this stream, under which she is now
lying,” and he pointed with wide eyes to the water, rushing headlong to
join the Amazon.
All the snakes of that particular locality did miracles, so I was told
by a wise man who could himself turn men into beasts at will.
“This river,” the guide concluded, “used to flow up on one side and
down on the other, until white men sailed upon it. Then one half turned
about, and the river now flows in but one direction, as you can see.”
As the gloomy, bottomless ravines descend, the forest becomes more
dense, with murmurs of flowing water everywhere. Mists hang from above,
barely concealing the jagged, black peaks. Sheets of continuous foam
veil the side of a polished cliff. Water drips over every precipice.
Cascades tumble from one mossed basin to another or let fall a clear
column into a rock-pool deeply buried in tropical vegetation.
Finally mountains and ravines subside, and with the energy of one
final, mighty leap, the rushing water plunges into the heart of the
jungle, comes to rest, then glides out with the flush of a flood-tide
across the Land of Water.
“As the serpents of this basin exceed all other serpents in size, so
does the Amazon exceed all other rivers.” As the whirl of branches
is to the trunk of a tree, as everything in nature is tributary to
something else, so are streamlets in the mountains of the snowy desert
to this mighty river. Collecting itself upon the frozen _puna_ far up
among the clouds, it gets an impetus which makes fresh, wide stretches
of ocean thousands of miles away.
So vast is the Amazon that, like the Andes which form a barrier to
separate two worlds, different species of animals inhabit its opposite
banks. It swarms with fish that will fight for a right to live, and
some of them, the _paichi_, for instance, reach the length of ten
feet and must be caught by harpooning. The water is full of swimming
animals. There are river-cows like sea-lions, and oceanic fauna such as
frigate birds and flying-fish. In the mud along the banks are tracks of
crocodiles and tortoises.
The Amazon has gained mastery over the land and has turned it
into a sposhy ocean, interspersed with flats of jungle flowers. A
watery labyrinth, “an aquatic not a terrestrial basin,” it is the
Mediterranean of South America. The greatest river in the world twists
and turns about, makes short cuts across its own bends and leaves
behind a delicious lagoon here, or a little, land-locked inlet there.
The Victoria Regia spreads its great, leathery leaves, and scarlet
ibises tilt about upon them.
This land beyond the Andes is known as the “rain-shadow.” The already
overflowing rivers are constantly swelling, since it rains so violently
that a stream of the Amazon valley can rise fifteen feet in a single
night. A passing and re-passing is continually going on, for, as the
water flows back toward the ocean, the winds above it are returning
from the Atlantic, bringing rain to moisten the jungle and to be
stopped only by the wall of the Andes.
Rain discloses the resources of the jungle. Plants push, burst upward
in astonishing growth. Flowers paint themselves with ineffable new
colors distilled from the rain, and those whose day has come and gone
lie in heaps of yellow, pink, and white petals on the ground, fallen
from beyond the tree-tops.
A single, heavy tapir, _anta_, the somber-colored wood-cow, roused
by the rain and encouraged by the added gloom, wanders forth to tear
off new sprouts within its reach. Peccaries rustle by in little
droves--wild pigs which, it is said, will bite around a tree if their
object of attack has climbed beyond reach. The minute, silky marmoset,
filled with perennial terror and shivering at the rain, has crept
into shelter, and just daring to show its wrinkled little face, howls
dismally.
It is after a rain, too, when the wondrous notes of the _organista_,
the sweet flute-bird, drip through the trees, mellow, melancholy, yet
with a musical accuracy of pitch as clear-cut as the circle of a drop
of water fallen on a slab of alabaster. These notes share the mystery
of the vast silence itself. Even savages rest on their paddles to
listen. Would you capture the magician and carry the jungle-silence
home? You can take the little gray bird--but it always dies in
captivity.
CHAPTER III
JUNGLE GLOOM AND JUNGLE SHEEN
I
Since the earth was first moistened by rain, and plants first grew, no
limit has been set to the rights of vegetation in the jungle. Its sway
is uncontested. It has known no master. Its insatiable desire to reach
up and out and down has been uncurbed and undirected. And heaven seems
to wish it well. Intensest heat, light, and moisture are showered upon
it. Under such conditions, life would spring spontaneously into being,
were there not myriads of progenitors to be responsible for whatever
form it chose to take.
All the creative force of nature is behind the infinitely varying
forms, and the frightful luxuriance of reproduction. Vegetation has the
extravagance of first geologic ages, bursting with life, rejoicing in
weird, vegetable arabesques and green out-thrusts of leaves.
Amazing trees yield coloring matter of yellow, red, and blue. Trees
cure bites of snakes, the malignant _manzanillo_ infects any one
who sleeps beneath it. Then there is the cow-tree of milky sap, the
red-wooded blood tree, and those furnishing food for curious animals,
which transform it into curious shapes. Beneath the iron-wood, whose
sharp edges are hard as steel, crawls the sensitive plant. There are
whole forests of _cinchona_, whose beautiful flowers are forgotten
because of the value of the bark. The dead man’s tree grows here,
whose stems are sucked by witch-doctors to produce a trance; also the
wonderful tree of rain, which Boussingault referred to when he said:
“By the light of the moon we could distinctly see drops of water
dripping from the branches.” The drier the night the more water it
condenses, letting it fall upon the ground beneath. Ponderous leafage
overarches great trunks, columns of a giant’s castle, each with its
peculiar color. While some are smooth, others are deeply fissured or
armed with long spikes. Most of the tree-trunks are indistinguishable
for the mass of vines “sculptured” upon them. They cleave to the smooth
bark, darting out roots as they ascend. “The green eaves of foliage
seem supported by pillars of leaves.”
Tapering ribbons sway to and fro, tangling themselves in the long
moss-beards. “Green, fleshy chains” festoon themselves upon the
branches, and hang heavily on slender stems. They stretch taut from
one tree to another, or rigid, fasten tree-tops to the ground. The
whole jungle is knit together. If a supporting tree falls, the confused
masses of _lianas_ adhering to it snatch at whatever is nearest for a
fresh start. They twist about each other tighter and tighter, gaining
always a firmer and firmer hold as they ascend. Far up above, they
will weave back and forth a close fabric, spreading out wide roofs of
flowers.
Indistinguishable tree from creeper, parasite from supporter, all are
clamoring for space and light and air. Those which have struggled
through to the top reach toward the scalding sun or alternate
cooling deluge, riotous, irrepressible in vigor, radiant with color,
distilling intense perfume, drooping with the succulence of their own
leaves and stems, breaking with the weight of their over-developed
fruit.
Vegetation invades everything. It even shoots out over the water,
covering it with lovely forms. Hardly a growing thing can get its
impulse directly from the soil. That was long ago preëmpted. There
must be other things to grow upon or in. Wherever there is a suspicion
of foothold, a new form of life springs up spontaneously, gleaning
nourishment from whatever it touches, exuberantly prolific from the
start, parasites one and all, living at the expense of some earlier
comer.
Even parasites have their own parasitic growth. Parasites flourish as
trees self-grafted upon trees. Draperies and tapestries and motionless
cascades, this inundation of parasitic life falls back again to the
ground in great growing clumps. What indeed is a parasite?
Little rifts of color have collected here and there, concentrated deep
in the nooks and crevices of trees, moulded into orchid form. Some
are tiny as mosses and grow upon the ground, dewy-looking, little
violet-colored flowers. Some lie upon the water, some droop over the
edge of precipices, their great mass of fleshy, aerial roots sucking
damp nourishment from the air. Certain trees seem destined by nature as
orchid gardens. Numberless varieties, each with its peculiar bearing,
perch upon the limbs, night-scented blossoms with a spongy texture
fringed and fluted in a thousand ways; beautiful monsters of crimson
and black, whose queer little phantom faces, with beards of fine hairs,
make mouths at you. Hot and moist, the imperceptible odor of each
mingles with the mass of other imperceptible odors, oppressive at last
by sheer force of numbers.
The habits of orchids, if so they may be called, are amazing; for
example: their attraction of insects and means of scattering their
pollen about on a moth’s body; their bright color luring day-flyers and
their strong odor night-flyers to the same flower; the elastic flaps,
a resource of others for a similar end. As Darwin said: “With parts
capable of movement and other parts endowed with something so like,
though no doubt really different from sensibility, they seem to us in
our ignorance as if modeled by the wildest caprice.”
Whimsical and wayward, restrained by no precedent, an orchid dares
defiance in all the properties it possesses, odor, form, and color, so
that the line of its descent is sometimes impossible to distinguish.
This anarchist of flowers throws out an unexpected leaf or petal
wherever it chooses, and if interfered with, refuses even to produce
its own blossoms, veering off in independence. The most elegant flower
that grows, able to conventionalize even nature herself by lusciously
designed leaves--patterns whose suitable background would be courts of
kings--riots here alone in “languid magnificence,” merely glanced at by
a passing humming-bird.
If a tree or a vine has a little less succulence than its neighbor or
a little less vital impulse, nature calmly watches it pounced upon and
extinguished. No one “compassionately tries to save the unfit from the
consequences of their unfitness.” Having endowed this prolific land,
the lavish elements can withdraw and survey unmoved the scattering
showers of seeds, that prodigal industry of plants in busily
perfecting seeds which will never be given an opportunity to grow. So
little chance has a seed that new attempts at life are more secure
if supplied by the energy of the parent stem. The elements are not
responsible for the death-struggle of vegetation which results. As far
as they are concerned, each seed that falls and each little shoot that
springs upward would be given an equal chance. But every form being
equally favored, its neighbors contest its right to live. Coöperation
to make life possible at all, only begins when united force is needed
to conquer a common foe. Life here is for viper and vampire as well as
for butterfly, and the parasite has an equal chance with the benevolent
vine. It is a battlefield where militant nature fights in civil warfare
through the ages. Plants once given birth demand the right to make the
most of their own particular form of life, fighting for sun, fighting
for air, fighting for the right to live. Ironically enough, warfare is
fiercest between forms most closely allied. “They interlace, strangle,
and devour each other.” Parasitic alliances are possible only between
very divergent forms, each benefiting by the use of what the other
does not need. Parasites are leapt upon by other parasites; there
is strife even among them. Forever fighting with each other, they
all suffer equally from hereditary enemies descending from above or
creeping up from below, capturing by attack or poisoning by stealth.
Plants not only crowd their neighbors out of the soil, they seem to
dispute the air as well. Each begrudges the other a breathing space.
The ingenuity of nature is taxed to invent compensations to each for
lack of what it has a right to expect as its due. An impenetrable
disguise of buttresses is substituted for roots and want of underground
space. Air-roots drop from branches. Smaller trees, adapted to
the dimness, live in the shade of larger ones. Nature uses every
subterfuge, restrained by nothing known as customary. Plants maintain
a life whose pertinacity we have no scale for measuring. Each asserts
its own individuality and insists upon it with inexhaustible energy.
Each is convinced of its own desirability, convinced it was intended to
live, proclaiming that intention to the death of its neighbor.
Out of the remains of the dead arises a new generation with an
increase of vital impulse. The instant a plant has reached a sense of
completeness, it is sprung upon, twitched from decay into the vitality
of some lovely form whose time has come. Whatever lapses into the past
is at once metamorphosed. Whatever should look forward for opportunity
would be snuffed out by some exuberant growth determined on immediate
perfection.
There can be no seasons in the jungle, no general periods of growth,
maturity, or rest. All stages of development are flaunting from
independent plants in a single locality. Each is appropriating whatever
it can use in the elements or in its neighbor to weave into its own
perfecting tissue. Each is as little influenced by the other as are two
trees rubbing against each other with the wind, mingling their branches
and blending their foliage. Though forced during a lifetime to closest
proximity, they are members of remote families, and the nature of
neither is modified in the slightest degree.
Indeed, all seasons concentrate on a single tree; for some of the
massive fruits require more than a year to ripen, so that fruit is
maturing and flowers are budding on the same tree.
Only heat can penetrate. Light is almost excluded by the unbroken
canopy of interlaced branches. It is left up above, absorbed into
whirls of vivid flower or expanding the luscious leaves. Heat and
moisture are imprisoned. Plants flourish in “the boundless, deep
immensity of shade.” Left in wan half-light they push up into the
“green gloaming,” adapted to the dimness yet straining upward to the
light which would kill them if they could reach it. Even bats sometimes
make mistakes and emerge at noonday, unhooking themselves from branches
on which the sun has never shone. All forms are confused, and the
strange shapes but half-seen are concealed by others no less vague.
Deep within the wilderness, more silent than the noiseless solitude
itself, lies a mysterious lagoon sacred to the giant Mother of Waters.
All about, coiled in the half-putrescent, vegetable mould, are myriads
of venomous creatures, gliding, writhing, crawling in and out. Minute
snakes, whose bite is death, curl in tendrils or lie like coral
necklaces upon the leaves. Larger ones drape in vinelike garlands
overhead, to be distinguished from a blossoming festoon only by a
sudden, loose-swinging end.
But the pool! What wet blackness and horrid mystery! The surface of the
water is never ruffled by a breeze. It has no moods. Unperturbed in
perpetual gloom it lies in quivering stagnation, oozing nauseous odors
under the twilight of a full, tropical noon. No roseate spoonbill, no
delicate white heron tilts about upon its banks. The black, stagnant
water can barely cover the solid, seething mass of “hairy, scaly,
spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters, without name ...
wallowing, interwriggling, and devouring each other.”
Here sleeps the Mother of Waters, congenially imbedded, her shining
coils slipping about over each other--the great _yacumama_--the mighty
boa-constrictor, who can swallow almost any creature whole, and whose
breath withers any beast lured within reach by her fascinating poison.
Humanely she intoxicates before squeezing the unyielding bones to pulp
of digestible consistency.
Sometimes she unfolds her darkly iridescent coils out into the
hospitable closeness of the jungle. Laboriously she winds upward
in over-arching trees; but, as if too languid, leaves part of her
frightful weight dragging below. She looks moss-grown, like the stem
of an old tree, and treelike, remains motionless for days at a time.
When she does wander forth in search of prey, a track follows through
the lush, yielding vegetation--her huge weight lingering heavily upon
succulent stems.
II
The atmosphere is full of color--weird, miasmic exhalations. Next to
the shade lingering under the dark velvet foliage on the edges of
streams, the glossy leaves toss off sheets of silver light or reflect
a “russet glamour” from their under sides. Beds of yellow butterflies
settle along river banks and concentrate the sunlight with blinding
intensity. Every leaf seems to blaze like a gem; even the black shadows
pulsate with inner light. It is part of jungle mystery that even the
light comes in iridescence.
Legions of beautifully colored spiders silently spin their geometric
webs. Insects all dipped in silver, with waving antennae laid back
along their heads, red beetles with golden heads and wings of
chintz, buzz to and fro. Moss-grown leaf-insects--ossified, living
scarabs--walk about on tree-trunks. Stinging bees and wasps fill
chinks of jungle trees with wild honey. Myriads of ants swarm: driver
ants; parasol ants carrying a bit of leaf about over their heads;
fever-bearing ants, and ants that live in the hollow, white stems of
the cecropia tree and furnish the sloth’s food. Centipedes hurry by,
legs moving with “invisible rapidity like a vibration,” and numerous
flies, ticks, mosquitoes, cicadas, dragon-flies. Some of these strange
beings need two or three years of larval life to prepare for a flight
of a single hour, possibly after sunset. What a limited idea of the
world must they have who never see the light of day!
We are assured that the unseen world is a very substantial place; so is
the microscopic. And an ear-trumpet reveals a new universe of sound.
What a region of ultra-violet murmurings must lie beyond that we never
catch at all! If only an elemental apperception can grasp the vastness
of the jungle, what can be said of the delicacy of its silver-point
drawing? For here is greatness on the invisible scale, “a creation at
the same time immense and imperceptible.”
Side by side with sloths, ant-eaters, and armadillos, dwarf descendants
of mastodon days, still lumbering about undeveloped in spite of their
ancient lineage, humming-birds have flashed through the ages. They
have profited by cycles of centuries to elaborate their little bodies
beyond imagination with pendent beards, crests, waving ear-tufts, and
ornaments colored in fantastic manner. Their tails, fashioned in queer
shapes, always consist of ten feathers. Even the tiny, sharp feet,
minute as they are, differ greatly in form and are sometimes covered
with a delicate, white down. There are feathers on a humming-bird’s
eyelids. The little saw-edged tongues for extracting insects from
flower-honey all differ. Their bills are as long as their bodies, and
their tails are twice as long.
What can be said of their color, brighter than any other in nature?
The hue of every precious stone, the luster of every metal sparkles
from some part of the diminutive body. Often only a twinkling of
emerald-gold-green or ruby-colored light reveals their passing--
“A route of evanescence with a revolving wheel!”
Sometimes the flash comes from throat or back or brow of iridescence,
sometimes from a body sheathed in little gold scales; sometimes from
the very tips of long white feathers frilling the neck about. The
colors come and go, shift and change with every motion, “embers flung
about by in visible hands.” The wing feathers are gray. No eye could
discern anything but a dusky film, so a bright display would be lost!
And all this is within a thimble’s compass, for the smallest of all
humming-birds grows in Peru. It is hardly larger than a bumblebee, and
the giant of the race measures less than a swallow. Doctor Brehm says
the Dwarf Humming-bird is the only one that has a song.
There is as much diversity in the names of the humming-bird as
in everything else pertaining to it: Tresses-of-the-day-star,
Rays-of-the-sun, Sun-gems, Sun-stars, Flame-bearers, Frou-frou,
Pecker-of-flowers, Flower-sipper, Honey-sucker, Sipper-of-roses,
Fly-bird, and the sweet Colibri. It has, besides, many local names, as
Tominejo, _tomin_ being the smallest weight.
Birds migrate south from the tropics as well as north. The humming-bird
whirls through the jungle and luxuriant valleys of the Andes, out
to islands in the Pacific, and follows the fuchsia down to the very
boundaries of barrenness in the tail of South America. A mere dab of
brain can engineer this infinitesimal motor from Patagonia to Canada.
One minute Flame-bearer lives only inside the crater of an extinct
volcano in Veragua, marked with red like the fire-stealer wren of
Brittany, and many battle with storms of the high Andes and can be
seen mingling their vivid flashes with snow. They who live by means of
flowers! One called Sappho, a blend of red and green, lives upon the
bleak heights of Bolivia, frequenting the haunts of the condor.
It has been thought that the humming-bird has no wish-bone, its frame
being more compact than such construction would allow, in order to
withstand the immense strain of its wings--immense, yes, measured by
millimeters. At any rate the largest organ is the breast muscle, and
the heart is three times as large as the stomach. Its senses are alert,
and a well developed skull could prove the excellence of the brain
beneath did not its habits do so.
The humming-bird always trusts itself to the air for however brief a
distance, and flings its supple body about from one flower to another
in vibrating flight. Now it hovers near without disordering a petal,
now it hangs from tall grasses by the tip of its thornlike bill, a
sparkling of wings with spurts of precious stones in a setting of
petals, lost in another instant in wide air.
Never smutted by earth, because never touching it, the humming-bird
juggles among the flowers. It never follows all the flowers of a single
bush nor even exhausts all the sweetness of a single flower--“a dart,
a glance, a sip, and away;” butterflies, a symbol of caprice, are
not more fickle. This utterly erratic creature performing its aerial
gambols holds within itself the reason for its being unmolested by any
enemy--the chase not being worth the morsel!
Ineffable is the whole field of its labor. The coarsest materials of
its nests are the finest straws it can pick up. Inside they are lined
with down and spiders’ webs. Consistently they are attached to a
pendent branch or long-swinging vine. Thither the humming-bird flies to
supply a family’s microscopic wants.
To a giant looking through a microscope, what a revelation of the
infinite industry of nature in worlds beyond the grasp of any sense of
his, the humming-bird would be!
CHAPTER IV
ANIMALS OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT
I
What a land of silence! The vast forest seems wholly uninhabited
save for the chatter of a passing train of harlequin parrots or
angry apes. And yet it is not silence. There is the great movement
of lapsing and becoming perpetually going on; both composition and
decomposition rustling on toward completion. They are mere phases of
that “illimitable sun force which destroys as swiftly as it generates
and generates again as swiftly as it destroys.”
“So fast do the flowers expand that an actual heat, which may be tested
by the thermometer, is given off during fructification.” The tepid
water forces all growing things to prodigious size. Exuberance seems to
have no boundaries. The length of the young shoots is only less amazing
than their growth in a single day. Leaves expand until they are twenty
feet long, and ferns tangle their own fronds in haste to push out to
the utmost limit of their nature. One sees things growing in the damp
heat as one hears a yucca palm grow.
But where growth is on a stupendous scale, there decay is exuberant,
for “the powers that build are the powers that putrefy.” Above are
light, warmth, and moisture: such are conditions of growth. Below are
darkness, warmth, and moisture: such are conditions of decay. Which
is more effectual, that mighty power of evolution elaborating “the
rain-water hurrying aloft” into tissue of leaf and flower, or those
great forces of dissolution which can so soon transmute the fallen
trunk of iron-wood into a pregnant, humid mound? It merely lapses into
those elements composing it, and is instantly absorbed by fresh leaves
culminating to-night.
The noble heat blends the smell of laboring sap and that of aromatic
mosses with the pungent odor of decay, the damp smell of death with
those sweet poisons which drip off the trees and envelop like a
caress. The incense tree was described by Martin Fernandez de Enciza
in the early sixteenth century. “Incense doth hang at its boughs,”
he said, “as the ice doth at the tiles of a house in the winter
season.” Over-ripe fruit drops smashing on the ground with scent of
strawberries. A musky humming-bird leaves behind a thin trail of heady
perfume. The air is filled with vegetable breath, weird, far-off
blossoms, mere ghosts of fragrance mingling in a wave of sweetness.
Smell is indeed man’s most emotional sense. It gives a poignancy to
a remembered scene which no detailed picture can, and sharpens the
whole sight perception. An entire chapter should be written about
jungle-perfume.
The silence of day is succeeded by the “soundless tune” that fills the
night. It surges up from below and shuts down from above. Pervasive
as the murmuring of water, it spreads out through the night, pierced
by a sudden brilliant squeak near at hand. With darkness settles a
humming, booming, drumming, croaking, deafening uproar from thousands
of diversified insect throats filling up every chink of space,
each one crowding out the other. Insects here are not a miniature,
far-off chorus, one ingredient of a summer night, but overwhelming,
terrifying, absorbing the dark atmosphere.
Mysterious animals live in the depths of the ocean where no ray of
light has ever pierced. They light the way for their own fishing,
as the glow-worm is struck by its own brightness before seeing any
other. Fire-beetles and phosphorescent caterpillars and flickering
fireflies--little stitches of a shining thread in the soft, verdured
blackness of the tepid night--make the primeval forest discernible.
The true life of the jungle begins with darkness and ends with
light. As if the habitual gloom were not deep enough, jungle animals
wait until night has enclosed them further to carry on their life
activities, those weird creatures which lurk in the shade, primeval
instincts always alert, living on suffrance in this land of vegetation.
They have persisted since early geologic ages, the only remnants of
their kind, haunting the nights from then until now. Dwarfs of a former
age, growing constantly smaller and fewer and less important, they will
dwindle through coming ages until zoölogical gardens can no longer be
supplied, and their toothless skulls in glass cases will be the only
evidence that they ever existed.
The antediluvian ant-eater hunches along on his stiff, curved claws,
stopping now and then to rake out a crowded ant-hill, whose compact,
crawling interior he cleans out with an efficient slash of his spiral
tongue.
The giant armadillo, the glyptodon of former ages, developed a complete
coat-of-mail by which his small descendant is still protected. He
can open and shut the scales at will, hiding himself inside them. He
trundles to and fro, burrowing out well-flavored roots. His voice is
dull, without ring or expression. But his little shell is used as the
bowl of a curious, three-stringed guitar from which natives can coax
sweet sounds.
The tapir is another twilight animal, protected by his enormously
thick hide. He snuffs about with his long snout, follows paths made by
himself to the water, and sounds his queer whistle as alarm.
The cavernous croak of the violet-colored throat-bladder matches the
twilight. The goat-sucker, with softly flapping wings, rises to greet
the night, and from deep within the forest resounds the drawling cry
of the sloth. His small, ghoulish face peers into the oncoming darkness.
Night settles. Bloodthirsty bats emerge, bright eyes flashing eagerly.
Leaf-nosed vampires, whose empire is gloom, are prepared for their
nightly bacchanale.
When utter blackness has obliterated the jungle, the _carbunculo_
slinks slowly out of the thickets. “If followed, he opens a flap in
his forehead from under which an extraordinary brilliant and dazzling
light issues, proceeding from a precious stone; any foolhardy person
who ventures to grasp at it is blinded, the flap is let down under the
long black hair and the animal disappears into darkness. The Incas
believed in him. The viceroys in their official instructions to the
missionaries, placed the _carbunculo_ in the first order of desiderata.”
II
“The velvet nap which on his wings doth lie,
The silken down with which his back is dight,
His broad, outstretchèd horns, his hairy thighs,
His glorious colors, and his glistening eyes!”
SPENSER, _Muiopotmos_
With great broad strokes the tropical butterfly descends at sunset
time to the jungle pool. The soft color of its wings is hardly
distinguishable from the mold. It sips the water quietly.
A small bird, ready for a feast, swoops down with a whir of wings ...
but where is the butterfly? In its place is a fierce owl, bulging
eyes flashing, and every feather on his head bristling in eagerness
for his prey. The little bird of supper-intentions has precipitately
departed, never to return, a permanent lesson learned in the terror of
an instant; yet it was learned from the under side of a butterfly.
Who so much as a butterfly is a child of the sun? Evoked by his warmth,
it comes forth with all facilities developed for the fullest enjoyment
of a new life, in which it seeks out the sun-spaces in the damp forest.
What a direct response to warmth in the up and down motion of a
butterfly’s wings, wide-spread on a sunny mass of leaves! How quickly
it folds its lustrous wings and sinks, drooping, upon a flower when the
sun goes in, as rainbows disappear at the sun’s withdrawal!
Nor does its sun-worship end here; for Iris, symbol of the sun, is
imprisoned upon its wings. Those magic wings! Nature writes upon them
all the changes which the organism undergoes, the patterns of the
minute feathers, the direction of the fine veins, their shapes, their
pencillings varying with the slightest external change. Each can be
distinguished from all the rest by what is written on these evanescent
tablets, the most delicate on which laws have ever been inscribed.
The Peruvian butterflies have a world-wide reputation, from the
triple-tailed _theclas_ making up in elegance of form for their
diminutive size, to the azure _morphos_, those noble insects as large
as two hands laid side by side, the desideratum of collectors who press
their burnished wings between glass walls. Abnormal tails reach in
abnormal directions like ingrowing horns, sharply pointed and oddly
curved. An imp-like dot of silver near by calls attention to them.
Bold, uneven blotches of gold and black are surrounded by demure,
parallel lines. A spot of crimson pulsates in the midst of a whole
wing of iridescence. The extravagant creature carries his black velvet
body about on yellow legs. Some are as finely mottled as partridge
feathers. In others the design just glimmers through mother-of-pearl.
Some are transparent in color, a stained glass window leaded in design
with living veins. The spaces between veins, however small, are
exquisitely fashioned, and always the corresponding patterns of the two
sides are perfectly aligned. Some are transparent like dragon-flies’
wings. Some are almost veinless, visible only by a dip of color on
the tip of the wing--phantom butterflies. From others, apparently
colorless, certain lights can flash the segment of a rainbow.
What fine fitness in a French expression for the blues--_papillons
noirs_!
Many of the most brilliant butterflies are so colored because they are
unpalatable, even uneatable, flaunting their warnings in the face of
the lizard, which might eat them unawares were they not so conspicuous.
They can flutter lazily about, with no attempt at concealment,
preserved by their own poison. In making the injurious butterfly
resplendent, nature saves both the butterfly and the bird which might
have gulped it down.
Others are preserved by having adopted bark-designs or leaf-color
or twig-shapes. Some even float about mimicking each other, if
advantageous to do so. Some gain protection by imitating the
brilliantly colored but uneatable butterflies for which they are
mistaken. Mimicry or warning, each protects as is most beneficial, by
concealing or making conspicuous. Seen and recognized, they are not
molested; or, hidden, they escape notice.
How varied are their habits! Poisonous ones fly slowly. Others merely
frisk about, toying with life, air, and sunlight; skirt-dancers they
are called (_megaluras_), “sown and carried away again by the light
air.” Some heavy-bodied butterflies gain protection by flight so rapid
as to make them mistaken for humming-birds. The broad, strong strokes
of the wide-winged _morphos_ float them across wide rivers. The flight
of butterflies is a biologist’s problem, as well as their colored
juices and seasonal forms.
Some, flying low, have their greatest brilliancy on the under side of
the wings; others, flying high, are dull underneath to protect them
from enemies below, as the bell-bird, whose home is in the dazzling
sunshine above the tree-tops, is made invisible to any eyes looking
upward by its snow-white plumage and transparent wings.
“Crepuscular” butterflies emerge at sunset. Such are the _caligos_,
amazing creatures equipped on the under side with an owl’s head, which
can terrify their pursuers by merely turning wrong side out. All
animals are suspicious of a strange-looking eye; and at dusk, when
the butterfly descends to the jungle pool to drink, the owl-eyes are
particularly effective. The harmless butterfly spreads the one view of
itself to the enemy which could save its life, and continues slowly to
sip the dark water.
Some butterflies stop in the gloomiest shades of the forest in darkness
of noon. They all love the damp, and quantities of them surround
puddles. Some settle with wings erect, some expand them and rest
head downward, pressed closely against the supporting surface. The
“swallow-tails” never allow their long tails to touch anything. Some
alight upon the end of a stick, others rest upon dead leaves, others
upon rocks or sand, some on the under surface of leaves, entirely
disappearing when they alight. While some are protected for motion,
others are protected for rest. Flickering noiselessly into the deep,
wet shade in the network of vines and succulent leaves, they flash
out into the clear sunlight. The glow of colors pulsates on their
shining blue wings, intense as the fathomless blaze of a fragment of
copper-saturated driftwood. Creatures of the sky they are, indeed,
touched with the celestial hue. It was not without reason that the
Greeks gave the same name to this wondrous insect and to the soul.
CHAPTER V
THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX
“There is a strange beast, the which for his great heavinesse,
and slownesse in moving, they call _Perico-ligero_, or the
little-light-dogge; hee hath three nailes to every hand, and mooves
both hand and feete as it were by compasse, and very heavily; it is
in face like to a monkie, and hath a shrill crie; it climeth trees,
and eates ants.”
FATHER ACOSTA
The uncouth sloth! Can any greater emblem of misery be conceived?
He hangs upside down upon a branch like a bundle of rags on a nail.
His hair is like dried grass, stiff, with a greenish tinge, and, as
might be expected, goes the wrong way. His long arms are jointless,
swinging to and fro like the end of a rope. He can turn his head all
about, till his round, simple face meets the wind; then he opens his
toothless mouth to take it in, giving rise to a tradition that he lives
on air. His want of teeth is supplied by long nails--his only means of
attack--with which he scrapes out ants. Whether
[Illustration: A SLOTH, FROM THE _HISTORIAE RERUM NATURALIUM
BRASILIAE_, AMSTERDAM, 1648.]
he lives upon cecropia buds and dew, as Doctor Brehm declares, or upon
armies of ants swarming in the hollow stems of the cecropia tree, it is
certain that he haunts only that tree, which spreads out broad leaves
whose white, lower sides reflect light into the sepulchral shade.
It furnishes him with more food than he needs, and food is his only
necessity.
The rain pours, he listlessly hugs his branch, a sorry spectacle,
emitting from time to time a deep sigh. His eye is dull, he knows no
joy, no sorrow. He needs no sleep, no relief from a life which is
nothing but respite. The odds seem too great against him to perform the
simplest acts of life.
The climax of activity is reached when, like a wad, he falls to the
ground, apparently devoid of life.
After a while he unrolls and progresses with circumspection upon closed
claws to the next cecropia tree. Then he climbs to the very top, where
he begins to eat, supplied with food on the down journey. Hunger
compelling, he unbends from a position of unusual discomfort and pushes
himself along his branch upside down. Over-cautious in every motion,
he never loosens his rigid hold from one limb until securely clamped
to the next one. Each movement causes a long, sad yowl of pain. It is
amazing that so cutting a sound can issue from his soft mouth.
His weird cry is a jungle symbol--mysterious hint of antediluvian days
when the elephantine sloth lifted up a mammoth wail to be taken up by
the glyptodon and the dodo.
* * * * *
In the desert man exclaims: “If only there were water! The soil is
fertile. There is sunlight and warmth enough to make a tropical
paradise. If only there were water!” And so, although he does not
exactly worship water as the Yuncas of antiquity did, this man sings
secretly in his heart a hymn to the god of water.
Up on the icy highlands man exclaims: “If only there were warmth! The
soil is fertile, there is plenty of water, only warmth is lacking
to make a paradise. If only there were warmth!” And he sympathizes
with the Incas, whose god was the Sun, and waits through the long
night-watches until, with his rising, life is renewed.
In the jungle, water brings fertility to a soil bathed in the light
and warmth of a tropical sun. It pours down from melting snows of the
mountain-tops and gushes from the ground to meet the rain. Here, where
man might live with least effort, he squats on the lowest rung of the
human ladder, his savage desires satisfied as soon as realized. The sun
needs no propitiatory offerings, water needs no exhortation. Invisible
powers have conferred all gifts which his mind could imagine or his
heart desire.
But in the midst of luxuriant plenty, like the Indian above the mine,
poverty-struck for want of the very riches he sits upon, he is merely
dying out for lack of everything with which he is surrounded. With a
remedy at his command for every ill, he hangs about his neck a string
of tapirs’ claws in case of need. As there is lack of nothing to supply
his wants, so there are few wants to be supplied. A whole tribe lives
on a single species of tree, like insects depending on one fruit or
leaf for subsistence, or the sloth hanging on the cecropia tree, which
has senses sufficient to appreciate sights and sounds and smells, but
remains insensible. The jungle people seem to recognize the likeness
and call one another “beast of the cecropia tree.”
As there is surplus of everything here, evil gifts have been bestowed
as well. Poisonous insects sting for life; the fierce jaguar and
fatal vampire, whose velvet kisses are a death-brand, bite for life;
so do snakes; and the huge boa crushes the bones of its victim. The
strong attack the weak, the cunning inveigle the unwary. Injurious or
beneficent, all must fight for life, joining in the great struggle.
Each variety contends with every other, vegetation fights to keep
out animals, animals with birds, insects with one another, and all
against the water, whose level silently rises over its foes. So man
must struggle against nature. The jungle is his only teacher. He takes
from it what it offers. He is the mere imitator of the vegetable world,
a product of it in modified form. He sees strife in air, earth, and
water. His religion can conceive only strife of two extremes, dying
and living, evil and good, one injurious, the other beneficial. Evil
spirits inhabit birds and beasts and whirlpools of the mighty rivers.
The dim forest is filled with powers of destruction. They lurk in
the black lizard and less dangerous ones in the parroquets. Since all
sickness is brought by evil spirits, it is they to whom prayers are
made. Some jungle savages believe in a transformation into animals and
name their children for them. If there are any thoughts of a future
life, they are in jungle terms. After death these people wish to be
turned into animals, which sometimes happens. “On the eighth day a
red deer jumped from the grave and ran away into the forest. They did
not see the soul enter the deer, but they saw the deer rise from the
grave”! Some worship sun and moon, an Inca custom. But the moon with
its phases and its weird shadows in the jungle is involved in special
mystery. These savages understand the jungle, but facts plain to us
compose their mystery.
If a man is sick, something grows near by to set him all right
again. They use nature’s remedies against her poisons, as they have
learned from birds and beasts to do. They collect various sympathetic
medicines, such as teeth of poisonous snakes, and carefully fix them in
leaves and tubes of rushes--powerful specifics against headache and
blindness. They fill flask-gourds with balsams, and collect odorous gum
for incense.
War is their only object lesson, so quite naturally their only
preëminence is in the art of killing. The chief cause of war is
stealing of women; some are worth as much as a hatchet, some only the
price of a knife. In times of fighting the savages howl through a
giant reed in blood-curdling discord. They shoot with parrot-feathered
cactus-arrows dipped in famous poisons, or thrust through an enemy
with a _macana_--a wooden sword as sharp as steel--or fell him with
a club of wood like iron. Then they make drums of his skin to serve
as warning to his friends. They protect themselves with a shield of
creeping plants interwoven, covered with a tapir skin and edged with
the feathers of parrots.
The only amicable exchanges between tribes are the poisons done up in
reeds into which they will dip the arrows used each against the other.
Some poisons, made by women and old men, can kill an animal without
injuring his flesh for the use of man. Some make him merely wither
away. Some do not take effect until three days after the wound is
inflicted.
The whole history of man, beginning with the Stone Age, could be
studied among the wild tribes of Amazonian Peru. The largest tribe
numbers nearly twenty-five thousand, many but a few families, and one
tribe has now not a single member left. Differing each from the other,
they are similar only in that they all represent the first steps of
human development.
A savage of the jungle perforates his face to insert feathers and
shells; he gouges it with sharp flints and rubs in indelible color. He
slashes his lips both within and without and stretches his ear-lobes
as far as the shoulder. Then he inserts knobs of _chonta_-palm wood.
He paints his face yellow and suspends a red bean from his nose. Or he
paints his face in the four quarters, blue, yellow, red, and black,
and dyes his hair red with _achote_, his body orange with _armatto_,
staining it in design with dark juices. The Prios color their teeth;
others leave their teeth unstained and wear a long, yellow mantle. The
Conibo flattens his head, or that of his child, between boards into
fantastic shapes, leaving holes through which the cranium can develop.
He leaves single locks of hair on conspicuous promontories. Toucans’
feathers are stuck to them with wax. On days of celebration he dances
in ropes of iridescent birds strung through the bills, his bead girdles
of barbaric design hung with humming-birds as tassels. He knows no
fashion but personal caprice. There is no limit to the vagaries of the
world about him, neither are any suggested for his own decoration.
Cross-wise over his shoulders he slings long scarfs of brilliantly
colored birds hung at the end of chains made of their little leg-bones,
along with boxes of poison for his arrow-heads. His necklaces are of
the teeth of jaguars, wildcats, and monkeys, or of the curling teeth
of the white-lipped peccary. From his anklets and wristlets of heavy,
wooden beans he shakes a jungle call, wielding a feather scepter in
savage rhythm about the stiff feather halo upon his head.
As might be expected, the jungle savage adores music, if so it may be
called. He imitates the cries of forest animals. Some tribes have war
songs; then they use a bone flute or a reed. The Aguarunas have a
violin with three strings. This is the most intelligent tribe, but they
use their superior intelligence in reducing the heads of their enemies.
One is often compelled to wonder whether greater brain-development
means greater usefulness.
These seem to be the facts: The head of an enemy being cut off, poisons
are poured into it, softening the bones so that they can be drawn out
through the neck. They are then replaced by red-hot stones to which the
head, reduced to one-fifth its original size, adjusts itself in the
steam of a bonfire made of roots of certain palms.
A jungle story runs that a scientist from Germany tried to investigate
these sinister processes. But his head, in miniature form, was soon
stuck upon a pole. It could be recognized by the long, reddish beard,
which had retained its original proportions.
To qualify as a warrior a youth must possess at least one reduced head
of his own making. As time goes on, he adorns himself with more and
more such trophies.
Some similar custom existed on the coast in ancient times, for these
little masks have been found in the _huacas_ (grave mounds). The first
reduced heads were exhibited in Lima in 1862 under the rare title,
“Heads of the Incas”!
The Macas and Jivaros are believed to have this practice as well, and
a tribe exists near the Cusicuari, the Rio Negro, and the Orinoco,
reported as able to reduce entire bodies in the same manner.
Some tribes preserve their enemies’ hands, others keep their teeth, and
some eat their enemies whole. A man speaking a different dialect is
eaten like an animal of a different species. The Amahuacas pulverize
the bones and eat the ashes in their food, in order to absorb the
physical strength as well as the moral virtues of the person gone
before. Although they are never eaten, the women of cannibal tribes
are said to be more cannibalistic than the men. Prior to such feasts
they fatten the prisoners of war, who “rather enjoy the prospect, and
gorge themselves to accommodate their keepers. They occupy themselves
tranquilly with their duties as slaves without attempting to escape.”
Another practice of the Aguarunas is making the _tundoy_, or _tunduli_,
their jungle signal-service. They hollow a tree-trunk and make three
holes in it with red-hot stones, then hang it aloft on a high tree,
fastening the lower end securely to the ground. Blows upon it with
a wooden mallet reverberate as far as ten miles, and form a code,
by their swiftness or slowness and their pitch above, between, or
below the holes. As a hundred words suffice for a language, so would
three tones for a drum of war. Primitive man in the primeval jungle
sending blood-curdling signals to reduce the heads of his enemies!
Reverberations whose wave-lengths are intercepted on their echoing
passage through the forest by the flight of royal butterflies and
challenged by the chatter of antediluvian apes!
The weaker tribes are actually, not in name merely, pushed back into
the woods. Many traits in us find a literal, physical parallel in
them. We speak of “licking the dust;” in the jungle there are tribes
of earth-eating savages. A civilized man in the jungle learns their
literal ways. He puts gunpowder on the bite of a serpent and cauterizes
by igniting it. Having no language adequately to express the venomous
thoughts they may feel, they use poisoned arrows. They literally reduce
an enemy’s head, and are more humane than we, doing it after death!
The Inje-inje represent the Stone Age, both in their tools and
language. They come out of inaccessible hiding-places to perform their
primeval rites by full moon and are the least known of all the savage
tribes. This small tribe of the Inje-inje, whose name is the sum of
their language, need only a word to steer their craft through life. As
has been said, the development of language from the primitive Inje-inje
to the somewhat developed Aguaruna can be studied in this mysterious
place. No tribe can count further than ten; most of them use only a
movement of the fingers. Though there are hundreds of “languages,” not
one Amazonian tribe can write.
* * * * *
In temperate zones nature is to be relied upon. Roots grow in the
ground, branches and leaves in the air, flowers come forth at certain
seasons, and fruit follows. Trees give us shade in which no fever
lurks. Vegetables do not relieve agony and want, as insects and plants
do not cause it. No animals lie in wait to seize us, no snakes to
uncurl and engulf us. Rain comes in measurable quantities. We live
on a tempered, miniature scale. We can afford to neglect reckoning
with nature, for we understand her laws, and we direct her by that
understanding.
But what can be said of the jungle? Had we thought of gardens as
suitably placed in tree-tops? Or of an edge of wood as sharp as an edge
of steel? Here accustomed flowers grow as shrubs, and shrubs as trees.
It is a region where insects are mistaken for birds, where animals
imitate a flower on the branch where they like to rest; where plants
have fragrance, and blossoms burst forth from roots or rough bark;
where birds gain protection by assuming the dazzling colors of tropical
sunlight, and butterflies by the warning colors of their neighbors.
It is a region where roots grow in the air; oils, wax, and honey are
secreted by leaves; where the death of anything gives new, vital
impulse to something else, and parasites are as significant as their
supporters. Curious region, where there are night-flying butterflies
and softly-feathered moths to fly in the daytime; where everything is
reversed: animals, whose normal is upside down, prefer tree-tops to the
ground, birds of prey are frightened by the painting on a butterfly’s
wings, caterpillars sting, spiders kill birds, and water is the
principal element of the land.
Dramatic indeed is the silent jungle. The insect is imprisoned in the
throat of the orchid, whose honey it had been unwarily seeking. Trees
distil venom. Plants have fangs. Perfumes affect the brain. Cold, green
creepers blister like fire. From vampires which suck your blood as you
sleep, to the touch of a vine which paralyzes your entire body, the
jungle knows all modes of attack and furnishes the cure for every ill
it has created.
What can be taken as the symbol of the jungle? The snake, mysterious,
deadly, bound together in savage traditions with lightning, wind,
fire-streams of lava, and river-whirlpools, those emblems of serpent
treachery? Or butterflies, with their symbolism of life-recurrent? Or
the orchid, emblem of wayward unwholesomeness? In the troops of monkeys
which skip, swing, bounce from tree to tree, throwing themselves to be
caught by prehensile tails, is its exuberance. In the honey dripping
from hollow trees and running off unused, is typified its surplus.
Iridescence darting from insects and from birds, rainbows glinting over
cataracts or caught by the equatorial sunshine from misty hillsides,
might be its symbol; or the beneficence of jungle trees and bushes.
Not one would be more or less typical than any other. All are equally
emblematic. If we think of caprice, there is law; of life, there is
death; of beauty, there is horror. When each seems most dominant, then
its opposite is most uncontrolled.
The seed dies that the plant may live; the blossom withers that the
fruit may set; the worm vanishes that the butterfly may spread its wide
wings and fly. Plus and minus signs are never far apart indeed.
CONCLUSION
Peru is the Land of the Sun. Its light and heat descend upon the coast
with tropical fury, reducing the desert to a shimmering vibration which
breathes back scorching odors toward the sun. The sun alone makes life
possible upon the arctic heights where, in Inca days, it was worshipped
in name as well as in fact. Yet beyond the mountain-barrier the same
constant sun has no longer undisputed sway. The jungle is “almost
uninhabitable through too great abundance of waters.” Peru is the Land
of Water, without which the desert is barren, because of which the
jungle is luxuriant.
But the sun, the god of Peru, controls the water. It can combine with
its opposing element. It is able to transfigure even the rain, which,
like human hopes, becomes iridescent because the sun shines. The
rainbow is a willing Ariel, the servant of each, retreating from the
sun only as far as the rain allows and illumining the rain only as far
as the sun permits.
The rainbow is visible nature’s alphabet. In terms of it are spelled
sky and sea, trees, birds, and flowers. It shoots the desert-mists and
twinkles along the streams which intersect it. It fearlessly embraces
the austere crags of the mountain-peaks and shimmers in the craters of
volcanoes.
Entire it flings itself from the heart of a shower, follows the
waves of the sea along, or glints on a butterfly’s wings or from a
humming-bird’s throat.
It reveals the elements of the stars, it lists the ingredients of the
sun, and sets down upon its ephemeral tablet the red-hot vapors rising
from the desert. Even the breath of the volcano has a place in the
rainbow alphabet.
It is hard to avoid so fundamental a thing. Close your eyes in the
sunlight, and its whole scale is thrown in glistening repetition across
your own eyelashes.
Even the ultra-violet--the unknown, the unperceived--must be discussed
in rainbow terms, the only letters the eye’s alphabet knows.
The Incas chose it for an empire’s emblem and dedicated to it a temple
close to that of the Sun.
It symbolized to the Spaniards the astounding country which had fallen
as by miracle into their grasp, the land of mystery, whose romantic
wealth and dazzling promises encircled them as with the rainbow arch,
and, like it, receded as they advanced.
Peru still keeps the rainbow symbol. Many-colored mysteries hover about
the man who leans over its glittering jewel-casket. And wherever the
ends of its bright bow touch the desert, flit over the mountain-tops,
or sweep across the jungle, nature’s unexplored secrets lie concealed.
There is, however, a difference. For the rainbow-arch which mingles
sunlight and water is only an evanescent promise, vanishing almost as
quickly as it can flash a new gleam of hope into a human heart. But
Peru, with its changing beauties and its mysterious allurements, is a
fact. The pot of gold which it promises is real.
THE END
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Of all the general works on Peru none has greater weight than _Peru;
Beobachtungen und Studien_ (1893) by E. W. Middendorf. He has exploited
the country in a large, three-volume work with such German thoroughness
that hardly a fact has been left for subsequent writers to disclose.
I have referred to it constantly. Other shorter, general studies of
the country are Von Tschudi’s _Reisen durch Südamerika_, giving much
attention to folk-lore, and _Twenty Years’ Residence in South America_
(1825) by W. B. Stevenson, secretary to Lord Cochrane. He traveled far
and wide in Peru and made observations in regard to remote details.
Typical of descriptive writings is _Two Years in Peru_ (1876) by T. J.
Hutchinson. Various general works by Bernard Moses and his publications
in the _University of California Chronicle_ are valuable, notably his
work on the produce of the mines.
Reliable observations on ruins are those made by E. G. Squier in his
_Peru: Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas_, by Mariano
Rivero y Juan de Tschudi in _Antiguedades Peruanas_, and by Charles
Wiener in _Pérou et Bolivie_. Studies of ruins in particular localities
have been made by many archaeologists; for example, on Tiahuanacu,
L. Angrand, in _Antiquités Américaines_, though his book is now out
of date, Adolph F. Bandelier in his _Islands of Titicaca and Koati_,
Max Uhle, with whom I visited some of the ruins, on Tiahuanacu and
Pachacamac, and Hiram Bingham in recent explorations.
Sir Clements Markham has spent more than fifty years studying every
stage of Peru’s history from the time when it was a land of myth to the
Chilian war. His researches as well as his careful translations have
been published in a series of volumes. Authorities on various periods
of the history are legion. Relating to pre-Inca times, in which studies
of myths and theories of ruins are intermingled, original sources are
the _Memorias Historiales_ of Montesinos, first published in French in
1840, and Cieza de Leon, the soldier, whose _Crónica del Perú_ (1553)
is authority on the Incas. Some modern scientists who have written
about the pre-Inca period are Ernest Desjardins in his _Pérou avant la
Conquête Espagnole_, Tylor’s _Primitive Culture_, Meyen’s _Uber die
Ureinwohner von Peru_, and Brinton in his _Myths of the New World_ and
other works. Many persons are studying the legends, as, for instance,
Professor Liborio Zerda of the University at Bogotá. The _Miscelaneas
Australes_ of Miguel Cavello Balboa, a soldier, is an original source
for knowledge of the remote Chimus. _Das Reich der Chimus_ by Otto von
Buchwald, and especially _Das Muchik oder die Chimu Sprache_ by Doctor
Middendorf, who quotes largely from Calancha and Carrera, are modern
authorities.
In regard to the Incas: As a background there are the old, picturesque
chronicles which read like romances, but on which reposes most of
the knowledge that modern authorities have corroborated in regard to
the earlier inhabitants of Peru. These contemporary accounts have to
be carefully studied in order to distinguish fact from fiction. Next
to the _Crónica_ of Cieza de Leon are the _Comentarios Reales_ of
Garcilasso de la Vega, in whose own veins the turbulent blood of the
Conquistador mingled with the blood of the Sun. During his lifetime the
imperial race of his mother was exterminated by the fierce adventurers
becoming grandees, of whom his father was one. His book has the value
of personal reminiscence. His enthusiasm adds a certain glamor; but
even if his unique work has been spurned as an Utopian romance, it has
been reluctantly accredited as the foundation of facts set forth by its
critics. _De las Antiguas Gentes del Perú_ by Bartolomé de las Casas,
works by Diego Fernandez, Betanzos, Oviedo, Sarmiento, Cobo, Ondegardo,
Molina’s _Fables and Rites of the Incas_, and the great _Miscelaneas_
of Balboa must be consulted. Many of them have been translated by Sir
Clements Markham and published by the Hakluyt Society of London.
It is bewildering to try to single out one or two modern works upon the
Incas, for their name is legion. The definitive authority in English
is of course Sir Clements Markham, whose _Incas of Peru_ (1910) has
followed numberless more detailed works of his own upon the subject.
_Der Belus oder Sonnendienst auf den Anden oder Kelten in America_ by
Frenzel, presents one field of theory which observations on the remains
of the Incas’ walls suggest. The temptation to interpret by means of
analogies to other remote civilizations is withstood with difficulty.
From John Ranking and his _Historical Researches on the Conquest of
Peru by the Mongols_, to Ignatius Donnelly and his evidence in favor of
its conquest by the Egyptians via Atlantis, Peru has given an unlimited
field for speculation. Lord Bacon believed, by the way, that Peru was
a proud kingdom in the time of Atlantis. A striking example of immense
erudition expended on a futile, though technically well-supported,
fancy, is Rudolph Falb’s _Das Land der Inca_. Painstaking scholars are
tracing out similarities between the Peruvian language and the Semitic
and Phoenician tongues--“astounding affinities,” of which common stems
are purest in Quichua, so that the human race seems to have emanated
from the tops of the Andes; similarities, too, between Peruvians and
the long-bearded Druids whose rites were chiefly sun-worship; they
also kept memoranda with strings tied in different knots, like the
_quipus_, and built vast structures of stone without tools. There are
analogies between Peruvians and Hindus, who worshipped the Sun as Rama
and called their first legislator Vaivasaonta, the Son of the Sun,
and between Peru and Farther India. The Seccos have been called the
Malays of Bolivia. There are analogies between Peruvians and Chinese,
whose royal color was also yellow, whose peculiar god from earliest
times was the Sun, who used _quipus_, who had terrace-cultivation and
irrigation-systems like those of the Incas, who used foot-messengers
for royal emissaries, and brought all the gold and silver of the
realm for the beautifying of royal temples. “The buildings, religious
institutions, division of time, and mystic notions,” which “seem in
Asia to indicate the very dawn of civilization,” are found here upon
the Andes. Whether there was intercommunication, or whether such facts
merely suggest the instinctive discovery of all peoples, their origin
is wrapped only in mystery--a veil whose lightest corner is only just
lifting.
But to continue with the succeeding periods of history. Spanish
vice-regal days and the civil wars of the conquerors, the fleets
of treasure, the Inquisition, have been the subject of romantic
histories. Besides Prescott’s well-loved _Conquest of Peru_, William
Robertson’s _History of America_, published more than a century
ago, gives a concise, general survey since the Conquest. Drake’s
_Worlde Encompassed_ and Southey’s account of Drake’s voyage in his
_English Seamen_, as well as Froude’s, together with various Hakluyt
publications, are authorities for freebooter days. Also there are such
cold authorities as the Calendars of State Papers of many countries,
E. Armstrong’s _The Emperor Charles V_, and for the Inquisition, H.
C. Lea, Vicuna Mackenna, and Ricardo Palma. The reports to the Royal
Council of the Indies of the sixteenth century enter into minute
details. Father Acosta was the historian of the third council. His
_Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias_, first published in 1590, is
an indispensable book, although it has borne the reproach of being
superficial.
The French Academicians came to Quito in 1735 to measure an arc of
meridian, an enterprise which d’Alembert considered the greatest
ever attempted by science. One of these scientists, La Condamine,
made extensive studies in quinine, named cinchona for the Countess
of Chinchón, vice-queen, and one of the first to feel its beneficent
power. His _Voyage fait dans l’Intérieur de l’Amérique Méridionale_
(1745), and the _Voyage Historique de l’Amérique Méridionale_ by
Antonio y Jorje Juan de Ulloa (Spanish edition in 1748, French in
1752), who accompanied the French expedition, both aim at truthfulness.
Another delightful as well as dependable work of the eighteenth century
is the _Voyage dans la Mer du Sud_ by Amédée François Frézier (1716).
In particular must be mentioned Lozano’s _Histoire des Tremblements de
Terre arrivés à Lima_. Hales of the Royal Society of London has added
to this French edition of 1752 accounts of Lima in his day, trustworthy
as his observations on the geology and meteorology of the coast.
Such facts as I have stated in regard to the natural history of the
coast are vouched for by Ferdinand von Hochstetter, _Die Erdbebenfluth
im Pazifischen Ocean_, Friedrich Goll, _Die Erdbeben Chiles_, a remote
work on _El Desierto de Atacama_, Humboldt’s _Vues des Cordillères_,
Darwin’s _Journal of Researches_, and the _Voyage of the Beagle_,
the three latter describing the natural history of the mountains as
well. One or two of Sir Martin Conway’s books, Alfons Stübel, _Die
Vulkanberge von Ecuador_, and Neveu-Lemaire, _Les Lacs des Hauts
Plateaux de l’Amérique du Sud_, may also be added. In describing the
animals of Peru I have as authority Brehm’s _Thierleben_.
Ricardo Palma’s _Revista de Lima_ and Carlos Romero’s _Revista
Histórica de Lima_, Manuel A. Fuentes’ _Estadística General de Lima_,
published in Paris in English as _Lima_ in 1866, give interesting
information in regard to that city.
When it comes to the Amazonian wonderland no exaggeration could compete
with fact. But I have not withstood the temptation wholly on that
account! There is Louis Agassiz’ _A Journey in Brazil_, H. W. Bates’ _A
Naturalist on the River Amazon_, two books by Alfred Russel Wallace,
_Tropical Nature_ and _Life on the Amazon_, Raimondi’s _El Departemento
de Loreto_ as well as his _El Peru_, Robert Southey’s _History of
Brazil_, and the publications of the _Sociedad Geográfica de Lima_.
I am happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Wilberforce Eames
of the New York Public Library for access to its _Americana_; to Dr.
Martin and to Dr. Stevenson of the _Hispanic Society of America_; to
Mr. C. L. Chester for many of my pictures; to Dr. F. S. Archenhold,
Director of the Treptow _Sternwarte_ at Berlin for the freedom of his
library, where I found most of the German works consulted, and to Don
Ricardo Palma, former Librarian of the _Biblioteca Nacional de Lima_,
for permission to inspect many of his rare books and manuscripts.
INDEX
_Achachibas_ (piles of stones), 222.
Acllahuasi (convent of Sun-Virgins), 207.
Acosta, 48, 80, 174, 179, 226, 229, 242, 280, 303.
Agassiz, L., 5, 304.
Aguarunas, 289, 291, 292.
Alameda (Lima), 106, 107;
(La Paz), 163.
Almagro, Diego de, 73, 89.
Alpacas, 54, 157, 226.
_See_ llamas, huanacus, vicuñas.
Amahuacas, 290.
_Amautas_ (wise men), _See_ Incas.
Amazon, 5, 6, 10, 123, 124, 141, 233, 236, 237, 245-248, 304.
_See_ jungle.
Amazons, 236-237.
Amiel, 61.
Andalusia, New, 84.
Andes, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 30, 36, 43, 53,
59, 60, 123, 134, 175, 247, 248, 301, 302;
animals of, 155-158;
birds of, 168;
dangers of, 147-149;
description of, 143-148;
lakes of, 166-167;
light in, 149-150;
mines of, 152-154;
storm in, 150-151;
valleys of, 165, 240-246, 265.
_See_ condor, cordillera, Incas, Indians, mines, _puna_, valleys.
_Andenes_ (terraces), 183.
Antarctic, _See_ ocean, Pacific.
Ant-eater, 56, 263, 272.
Antis, 197.
Aqueducts, _See_ irrigation.
Argentina, 121.
Arianza, Juan de, 92.
Arica, 78.
Armada, 91.
Armadillo, 263, 272.
Armatambo, 104.
Atahualpa, 67, 69-71, 77, 136, 188, 215.
Atlantic, _See_ ocean.
_Auto de fe_, _See_ Inquisition.
Aztlan, 113.
Badeor, Federico, 79.
Balboa, 40, 300, 301.
_Balsa_ (boat of reeds), 41, 48, 168, 234.
Bandelier, A. F., 234, 299.
Bats, 47, 243, 273.
Betanzos, 176.
Bezoar stone, 225.
Bingham, Hiram, 161, 299.
Bolivia, 265.
_See_ Tiahuanacu.
Borax, 32.
Bougainvillea, 35, 57, 59, 125.
Boussingault, 251.
Brazil, 229, 304.
Brehm, 264, 281, 304.
Bridges, swinging, 123, 165, 185.
Brittany, 81, 164, 265.
Buccaneers, 81, 236.
_See_ El Dorado, freebooters, pirates.
Buenos Aires, 85.
Bull-fights, 7, 16, 87, 139.
Butterflies, 59, 65, 121, 125, 261, 273-279.
Cacafuego, 82.
_Cacique_ (chieftain), 196, 199, 235.
Cajamarca, 69, 71, 186.
Cajamarquilla, 104.
Calancha, 50, 300.
_See_ Chimus.
Callao, 15, 85, 86, 100, 101.
_Camarones_ (crayfish), 121.
Candia, Pedro de, 68.
_Cantut_ (flower of Incas), 172, 200.
Caras, 197.
_Carbunculo_ (mythical animal), 273.
Carnac, 164.
Carranza, Angela, 93.
Carvajal, 74.
Casma, 27.
Cavillaca, 44.
_Cazuela_ (soup), 24, 109.
Cecropia, 281, 283.
Cerro de Pasco, 153.
Chancas, 199.
Chanchan, _See_ Chimus.
Chachapoyas, 198.
Chasca, _See_ Dawn.
_Chasqui_ (runners), 184.
_See_ Sun, messengers of the.
_Cheireoque_ (bird), 129.
Chibchas, 197.
_Chicha_ (beverage), 45, 69, 171, 180, 207, 210, 212, 222.
Chile, 54, 89, 121, 129, 197.
Chimus, 47-52, 186, 300.
Chincha Islands, _See_ guano.
Chinchaycocha, Lake of, 166.
Chinchilla, 4, 24, 155.
_Chirimoya_ (fruit), 53, 57.
Chorillos, 103.
_Chulpas_ (towers of the dead), 184.
Churches, 21, 78, 87-88, 97, 99, 100, 111, 112, 138, 215.
_See_ convents, Dominicus, Franciscans, Indians, Inquisition,
Jesuits, Lima, Santa Rosa, Spain.
_Cinchona_ (quinine), 6, 251, 303.
_Ciruelas_ (fruit), 23, 62.
Civilizations, ancient, _See_ Indian races.
Coal, 7, 168.
Coast, aborigines of, 37;
birds of, _see_ ocean;
characteristics of, 3, 4, 16-18;
climate of, 29-30;
geology of, 15, 20, 40, _see_ earthquake;
inhabitants of, 15-16;
towns of, 21-24.
_See_ desert.
Coati, 172.
_Coca_ (cocaine), 6, 93, 181, 207, 212, 224.
Columbus, 76, 233.
Con, 30, 175, 177, 178.
Condamine, 236, 303.
Condor, 6, 140, 144, 157-158, 160, 199, 210.
Condorcanqui, _See_ Tupac Amaru.
Coniapuyara, 236.
Combos, 287.
Conquerors, _See_ Spaniards.
Conquest, Spanish, bibliography of, 302-303.
Convents, closed, 114-119;
open, 113-114, _see_ Franciscans;
of Sun-Virgins, _see_ Sun, Virgins of the.
Cordillera, 4, 72, 77, 103, 131, 227, 303.
_See_ Andes.
_Corequenque_ (bird), 190.
Coricancha, _See_ Sun, temples of the.
Cotton, 6, 32, 35, 43, 52.
_Coya_ (wife of Inca), 204, 207.
_Coyaraymi_ (marriage-day), 207.
_Cuculis_ (desert doves), 122.
_Cueca_ (dance), 58.
Cuntisuyu, 186.
_Curacas_ (governors), 211, 212.
_Cushma_ (garment), 237.
Cusicuari, 290.
Cuzco, 67, 166, 174, 178, 179, 182, 184, 196,
197, 199, 200, 204, 206, 210, 217, 220, 223.
Darwin, 169, 254, 303.
Dawn (Chasca), 203, 205;
lodgings of the, 178.
Desert, 3, 4, 5, 25-26;
aborigines of, 37;
climate of, 29-30, _see garuas_;
emptiness of, 30;
legends of, 36;
lifelessness of, 30-31;
phenomena of, 26-29;
character of, 32;
rivers of, _see_ rivers;
ruins of, 35;
showers in, 31;
valleys of, _see_ valleys;
vultures of, _see gallinazos_.
Desaguadero, 169.
Dominicus (Santo Domingo), 88, 116, 117, 223.
Drake, Francis, 82, 302.
Dürer, Albrecht, 77.
Earthquake, 4, 15, 27-29, 41, 44, 55, 63, 67, 99-102.
Ecuador, 71, 197.
El Dorado, 85, 234-236.
Elizabeth, Queen, 82.
Elmo, fire of Saint, 167.
Enciza, 270.
_Encomienda_ (tax), 91.
_Escandalosa_ (bush), 62.
Eten, 49.
Falb, Rudolf, 163, 301.
Fierro, Pancho, 130.
Fish-worship, 40, 41, 44, 51.
_See_ Chimus.
Fishes’ eyes, 17.
Franciscans, 21, 105, 107-109, 139, 153.
Freebooters, 20, 82.
_See_ El Dorado, buccaneers, pirates.
_Gallinazos_ (vultures), 21, 32, 43.
_Garuas_ (mists), 30, 105.
_See_ desert, climate of the.
Gold and silver, 9, 27, 51, 56, 64-66, 68, 71,
76-83, 84, 90, 152-155, 171, 182, 193, 199, 204-207.
_See_ Incas, Spaniards, Sun, Treasure.
Golden Hynde, 81, 82.
_Granadilla_ (fruit of passion-flower), 240.
Guano, 19-20, 27, 56, 76.
Guavas, 24, 57, 61, 62, 125, 133.
_Guayabas_ (fruit), 23.
Guayaquil, 85.
Guatavitá, 234, 235.
Guenelette, 9, 244.
Hassel, Georg von, 233.
Heads, reduced, 289-290.
Heredia, José-Maria de, 9.
_Huaca cachu_ (plant of the grave), 222.
_Huacas_ (grave mounds), 290.
Huacho, salt lakes of, 32.
_Huacos_ (objects in _huacas_), 73, 126-129.
Huadca, 104.
Hualpa, 153.
_Huanacus_ (wild llama), 157.
Huancayo, 153.
Huayna Ccapac, 66, 166, 209.
_See_ Incas.
_Huerequeque_ (bird), 22.
Huguenot hermit, 104.
Huira Capcha, 153.
Humboldt, A. von, 81, 161, 169, 184, 185, 235, 303.
Humming-birds, 57, 65, 132, 146, 160, 172, 243, 263-267, 270.
Iguana, 35, 240.
Incas, aeroplane named for, 139;
_amautas_, 163, 215;
analogies to other races, 301-302;
arms of, 205;
books about, 300-301;
bridges of, 185;
boundaries of, 20;
campaigns of, 40, 49, 195-197;
at Chanchan, 47, 49, 51;
chinchillas valued by, 155;
clothes of, 189, 207;
coca, divine plant of, 181;
conquest of, foretold, 66-67;
contemporaries of, 37;
court of, 199;
description of, 70, 160;
in desert, 39, 47;
distinctive marks of, 189-191;
divinity of, 188-189;
dramas of, 136;
empire of, 197-199;
festivals of, 208, 210-213;
flute of, 135;
gold of, 7, 64-65, 76;
human sacrifices of, 211;
irrigation works of, 186;
in jungle, 231-232, 285;
last of, 214-221;
laws of, 19, 193-194;
llamas worshipped by, 157;
male title, 205;
mercury, a mystery to, 152;
messengers of the, 192;
myths of, 175-179;
Nature, teacher of, 183;
origin of, 178-179;
Pachacamac spared by, 41, 42;
attitude toward Pachacamac, 177;
pageants of, 163;
passion-flower carried by, 58;
pleasure gardens of, 165;
pleasure houses of, 185;
predecessors of, 160-162;
rainbow emblem of, 206, 298;
roads of, 36, 40, 184-185;
subjects of, 66, 191-193;
Sun, god of, 34, 42, 176, 282;
thunderbolt in palace of, 67;
Titicaca, Island of, 170-173;
tribute to, 192-195;
vicuña fur worn by, 24, 156;
worshipped by Indians, 174.
_See_ Atahualpa, Huayna Ccapac, Manco Ccapac, Sayri Tupac, Tupac Amaru,
Uiracocha, Yupanqui, also gold and silver, and Sun.
Inca Rocca, 231.
Indians, characteristics of, 221-224;
called Children of Israel, 93;
Christianity of, 223-224;
near Eten, 49;
saying about God of, 28;
horses terrify, 72;
lift chain of Huayna Ccapac, 166;
Incas’ attitude toward, 195;
Incas’ buildings benefit, 187;
punishment of, 192;
death of Incas witnessed by, 217-219;
Incas worshipped by, 174;
of jungle, 283-292;
language of, _see_ Quichua;
legends of, 36, 174-181, 244;
the llama, an interpretation of, 225-227;
melancholy of, 135;
mines of, 153-154;
mothers of, 112;
music of, _see yaravís_;
poverty of, 8;
prehistoric races of, 3, 17, 19, 32,
36, 38, 42, 52, 55, 122, 146, 160, 161, 187;
reed vessels of, _see balsa_;
revolts of, 215-216, 220-221;
Sachsahuaman built by, 201;
attitude toward Spaniards, 72, 214;
Spaniards copy, 83;
first encounters with Spaniards, 68-71;
Spaniards’ treatment of, 89-91;
cure _surumpe_, 149;
treasure concealed by, 80;
vicuña hunts of, 156;
warriors, 86;
_yaravís_, 134.
_See_ Aguarunas, Chancas, Chachapoyas, Chimus, Incas,
Inje-injes, Muratos, Nahumedes, Yuncas.
Indies, 73, 77, 79, 80, 81.
Inje-injes, 239, 292.
Inquisition, 91-99, 104, 302, 303.
Inti (Sun), 42, 203.
_See_ Sun.
Inti-cancha (Cori-cancha), 66, 204, 206.
_See_ Sun, temples of the.
Iquitos, 123, 125.
Irrigation, ancient systems of, 50, 52, 55, 89,
101, 103, 104, 161, 183, 186-187, 192, 193.
Isles, of Pearls, 89;
of Solomon, 85.
Islay, Pampa of, 32.
Jaguars, 68, 129, 194, 198, 199, 210, 234, 235, 243, 244-245, 284.
_Jalca_ (table-land), 3.
_See puna._
Jauja, 71.
Jesuits, 72, 111, 237.
_See_ San Pedro, churches.
Jivaros, 290.
Juan Fernandez, Islands of, 121.
Jungle, a land of adventure, 231-239;
Amazon basin, 246-249;
animals of, 271-273, 280-282;
appearance of, from above, 239;
approach to, from Andes, 240-246;
birds of, 241;
butterflies of, 273-279;
characteristics of, 3-6, 10;
color of, 261;
Columbus in, 233-234;
present conditions in, 238;
gloom of, 259;
heat in, 259;
humming-birds of, 263-267;
Incas defied by, 197;
Incas in, 231-232;
insects of, 262, 270-271;
legends of, 244-246;
lianas of, 251;
rhythmic life of, 258;
loam from, 183;
Jesuits in, 237-238;
orchids of, 253-255;
paradoxes of, 292-295;
parasites of, 253;
largest part of Peru, 3;
perfume of, 269-270;
rain in, 29, 248-249;
savages of the, 10, 18, 283-292;
no seasons in, 258-259;
silence of day in, 268;
night sounds in, 270-271;
Spaniards in, 234-236;
trees of, 57, 250-251;
vegetation in, 250-259;
warfare of vegetation in, 255-257.
La Paz, 163.
Lea, H. C., 95, 303.
_See_ Inquisition.
Leon, Cieza de, 65, 185, 300.
Lima, 84-140;
Alameda, 107;
bells, city of, 110-113;
bishop of, 93;
books about, 304;
churches of, 87-88;
climate of, 104-105;
City of Kings, 3, 86, 90, 99, 214;
collections in, 125-126;
composer of national opera in, 133-138;
contrasts in, 138-140;
convents of, 107-109, 113-120;
destruction of, in 1746, 99-102;
dinner party in, 121-125;
galleons of, 77;
Geographical Society of, 237, 304;
reduced heads exhibited in, 290;
Incas in, 215;
Inquisition in, 91-99;
lady of seventeenth century in, 106-107;
national librarian in, 129-132;
market of, 139;
milk-women of, 140;
Paséo Colón, 140;
Spanish splendor of, 7, 84, 85, 86, _see_ gold and silver;
surroundings of, 103-105;
university in, 140.
_See_ Spaniards.
Lisle, Lord, 79.
Llamas, prehistoric carvings of, 55;
drove of, 58;
Christian
sacrifice of, 223;
Incas’ sacrifice of, 207, 211;
Incas’ talismans, 222;
Incas’ use of, 160;
Incas’ worship of, 157;
an interpretation of Indians, 224-227;
in Lima, 140;
ransom of Atahualpa, 71.
_See_ vicuñas.
_Llautu_ (fringe of Inca), 190, 207.
_See_ Incas, clothes of.
Lopez, Francisco, 65.
Loti, Pierre, 1.
Loveday, G., 79.
Lurin, 43, 47.
Macas, 290.
_Mamacunas_, _See_ Sun, Virgins of the.
Mama Ocllo, 179.
_Mamayacu_ (mother of waters), 245, 259-261.
Madera, 233.
Madre de Díos, 231.
_Maguey_ (plant), 242-243.
Manco Ccapac, 174, 176, 178, 179, 189, 233.
_See_ Incas, Sun.
Manoa, 236.
_Mantas_ (head-shawls), 22, 108.
Markham, Sir Clements, 300, 301.
Marmontel, 9.
Marmoset, 249.
Mastodon, 38, 169, 263.
Maui, 37.
_Médanos_ (sand-dunes), 33-35.
Megalithic ruins, _See_ Tiahuanacu, Sachsahuaman.
Mercury, 144, 152.
Mexico, 128, 154.
Middendorf, 96, 236, 299, 300.
Mines, 5, 6, 7, 10, 27, 39, 90, 91, 152-155.
_See_ gold and silver.
Mirage, 26, 57, 147.
Mishagua, 232.
_Mita_ (tax), 91.
Mochica, 49.
_See_ Chimus.
Monkeys, 9, 45, 242, 288.
Monuments, _See_ ruins.
Moon, (Si), (Quilla), 34, 47, 49, 50, 67, 72, 172, 203-205, 212.
Morgado, Alonzo, 79.
Mother of Waters, _See mamayacu._
Mountains, _See_ Andes.
Mountain-sickness, _See soroche._
Mummies, 42, 44-46, 125, 204.
Muratos, 237.
Mutayces, 233.
Myths, 36, 174-181.
Nahumedes, 237.
Negro, Rio, 290.
Nitrate, 27, 32, 54, 56, 61, 62, 77.
Ocean, Atlantic, 29, 168, 238, 248.
Pacific, 15, 44, 158;
Antarctic current of, 30;
argosies on, 77-78;
birds of, 16-20, 28, 56, 247;
influence of, on climate, 30, 105;
islands of, 121, 265;
pirates on, 81-83;
maker of terraces, 183;
tidal waves, 29, 100;
winds of, 33;
worship of as Ni, 48.
Ollanta, 133, 136, 137.
Orchids, 253-255.
Orcos, Lake of, 166-167.
Ore, Geronimo de, 177.
Orellana, 236.
_Organista_ (bird), 249.
Orinoco, 233, 236, 290.
_Pacay_ (fruit), 23, 57.
Paccari-tampu, 178, 179.
Pachacamac, 40-47, 48, 148, 174, 177, 178, 214, 218, 299.
_Paichi_ (fish), 247.
Palma, Ricardo, 129-132, 303, 304.
_Palta_ (alligator-pear), 57, 122, 198.
Paraguay, 107, 237.
Parrots, 45, 185, 240-241.
Passion-flower, 50, 58, 113, 128.
_See granadilla._
Pastasa, 237.
Patagonia, 37, 62, 265.
Paucartampu, 231.
Paul III, 95.
Paytiti, 233.
Peccaries, 248, 288.
Pedro, San, 111, 112.
_See_ Jesuits.
Petroleum, 32.
Philae, 164.
Philip II, 24, 92, 216, 217.
Pica, 53-63.
_Picante_ (sauce), 23, 60.
Pirates, 76, 81-83.
_See_ buccaneers, freebooters, El Dorado.
Pisco, Candelabrum of, 20-21.
Pizarro, Francisco, 69, 70, 73, 140.
Gonzalo, 89, 236.
Hernando, 41.
Plague, bubonic, 21.
Plata, Duque de la, 86.
Pliny, 152.
_Poncho_ (cloak), 57, 221.
Poopo, Lake of, 169.
Potosí, 78, 154.
Prescott, 302.
Prios, 287.
Puma, 45, 171, 194, 243.
_Puna_ (table-land), 3, 4, 31, 137, 146-147, 150-151, 156, 184, 227, 247.
_See_ Andes.
_Quebradas_ (gorges), 165.
_Quena_ (flute), 131, 135, 224.
_Quichua_ (language of Indians), 134, 175, 176, 221, 301.
Quick-silver, _See_ mercury.
Quinine, _See cinchona._
_Quipus_ (system of knots), 69, 156, 160, 191, 302.
Quito, 303.
Races, _See_ Indians.
Rainbow, (_cuychi_), 159, 191, 206, 296-298;
lunar, 60.
Raleigh, 76, 236.
Rig-Veda, 202.
Rimac, 66, 103, 104.
Rivers, buried, 4, 31, 54, 55.
_See_ irrigation, valleys.
Rosa, Santa, 47, 102, 114-120.
Rubber, 6, 10, 238.
Ruins, 10, 35, 42, 43, 46, 51, 104, 160, 161, 162-164, 182-187, 299.
_See_ Chanchan, Pachacamac, Sachsahuaman, Tiahuanacu.
Sachsahuaman, 179, 200-201, 208, 223.
Salcamayhua, 175.
_San Benito_, (mantle), 98.
Sayri Tupac, 214, 215.
Seals, 18, 37.
Seville, 79.
Shelley, 13.
Shore, _See_ coast.
Silver and gold, _See_ gold and silver, mines.
Sloth, 263, 273, 280-282.
_Soroche_ (mountain-sickness), 72, 148.
Soto, Hernando de, 69.
South Sea Islands, 164.
Southey, Robert, 85, 302, 304.
Spain, 74;
cost to, of El Dorado, 85;
gold, a curse to, 76-83;
Inquisition in, 95;
missionaries of, 8, 50;
Peru as near unto heaven as, 9;
vicuña garments taken to, 24, 189.
_See_ Andalusia, Seville, viceroys.
Spaniards, Arab blood of, 7-8;
arrival of, 68-73;
conquerors, 24, 49, 72, 76;
coca spoken of by, 181;
coming foreshadowed, 66-67;
greed of, 160;
at Guatavitá, 235;
Incas as treated by, 214-221;
Inca empire destroyed by, 198;
Indians as treated by, 89-91, 220, 221;
in jungle, 236;
mines of, 154, _see_ mines;
pirates harass, 82;
rainbow a symbol to, 298;
treasure sought by, 79, 167, 171;
viceroy served by, 85.
_See_ Almagro, Candia, Carvajal, _cinchona_,
gold and silver, Indians, Orellana,
Philip II, Pisco, Pizarro, Plata, Soto.
Spenser, 141, 273.
Squier, E. G., 200, 299.
State Papers, Calendar of, 82, 302.
Stonehenge, 164.
Stübel, Alfons, 63, 304.
Sugar, 6, 35, 43, 131, 143.
Sun, (Inti), arms of the, 72;
blood of the, 300;
body of the, 72;
Children of the, 9, 145, 179, 200, 211, 223;
City of the, 72;
cliff sacred to, 171;
daughter of the, 136;
empire of the, 198, 207;
Father of Incas, 68, 131, 170, 174, 188, 195;
festivals of the, 207-213;
flocks of the, 170, 175;
gold belonged to, 66, 77;
god of Incas, 34, 39, 42, 159, 176, 193, 203, 282;
Incas doubt divinity of, 209-210;
labor given the, 194;
land of the, 34, 203, 296;
messengers of the, 185, 205, 208;
parentage of the, 175;
priests of the, 41, 206;
ritual, 40;
sacrifices to the, 211-212;
service of the, 202-213;
Setting of the, 70;
temples of the, 40-42, 66, 89, 174, 196, 204-206, 223, 298;
Virgins of the, 40, 41, 43, 172, 184, 189, 207, 212;
worship of the, 41, 43, 49, 175, 178, 198, 223, 285, 301, 302.
_See_ gold and silver.
_Surumpe_ (snow-blindness), 149.
_Tamarugo_ (tree), 54.
_Tambo_ (inn), 185.
Tambo de Mora, 36.
Tapir, 248, 272.
Tarapacá, 54, 55, 56.
Thunder and lightning, 4, 29, 67, 71, 105, 205, 212.
Tiahuanacu, 162-164, 176, 200, 299.
Titicaca, Lake, 167-173, 179.
Toribio, Santo, 102.
Torture, _See_ Inquisition.
Totora (reed), 168.
Treasure, buried, 36, 42, 49, 51, 71, 73, 81, 83;
buried in lakes, 66, 80, 166-167, 171, 235;
of churches, 88, 99;
fleets of, 9, 76-83, 302;
in Luna, 84.
_See_ gold and silver.
Tschudi, Juan de, 80, 211, 299.
Tuaregs, 27.
Tumpinambaranas, 233.
_Tundoy_, or _tunduli_ (drum), 291.
Tupac Amaru, 216, 217;
Condorcanqui, called, 220, 221.
Uiracocha, Con Tici, 164, 175;
god of all Quichua-speaking people, 176;
Huayna Ccapac speaks of, 66;
identified with Pachacamac, 41, 174;
identities of, 175-176;
Incas produced by, 179;
Son of Sun, 178;
Spaniards called after, 71-72, 220;
in Tarapacá, 55.
Ulloa, 236, 303.
_Uzaque_ (chieftain), 234.
Valleys, of desert, 3, 6, 35, 39, 40, 43, 47, 48, 53, 57, 103-105, _see_ Pica;
of mountains, 6, 144, 147, 165, 166, 197, 198, 215, 224;
of jungle, 240-244, 246, _see_ Amazon.
_See_ rivers.
Vega, Garcilasso de la, 37, 89, 171, 185, 186, 194, 214, 215, 216, 300-301.
Veragua, 265.
Viceroys, 85-87, 96-98, 102, 117, 139.
Vicuñas, 24, 149, 153, 155-156, 189, 207.
_See_ llamas.
_Viscachas_ (animal), 147, 155.
_Yaravis_ (music of Indians), 134.
_Yareta_ (moss), 225.
_Ychu_ (grass), 225.
Yucay, 165, 170, 215.
Yuncas, 38, 39, 51, 126, 128, 282.
_See_ Chimus.
Yupanqui, Tupac Inca, 41, 49, 162, 186, 198, 209, 231.
Zarate, 184.
Zerda, 235.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Peru: a land of contrast" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.