Chapter XVI: The City of the Sun (1)

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

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

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

“Going somewhere?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

“Teófilo Fulano,” replied our new companion.

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

“Yes; Don Faustino is my father.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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