After breakfast we again mounted, and the rain having ceased, our ride to the farm-house was very agreeable. On our arrival, the lady of the house came into the corridor to receive us, with her two daughters. Doña Casimira and Doña Rosaria, each upwards of thirty years old: we alighted, and after the first ceremonious salutations were over, we retired to two rooms prepared for us, and changed part of our dress, having taken the precaution of bringing linen with us from Caxamarca. When we returned to the drawing-room, our host had changed his dress also: he now wore a very old-fashioned green velvet full-dress, almost covered with embroidery and spangles. Doña Casimira sat down to a harpsichord, and played several pretty airs, and her sister afterwards sung some tristes to her guitar. As the ground was wet. Don Manuel proposed a dance before dinner and a walk afterwards; this was assented to, and I danced a minuet with Doña Rosaria; Alvites excused himself; but our host and hostess walked a minuet, to my no small diversion.
We had a very sumptuous dinner, walked out during the afternoon, and in the evening were joined by a party of about twenty persons; after which we continued dancing, singing, and feasting till daylight, when my companion and I returned to Caxamarca, Don Manuel accompanying us to the lodge, where he most ceremoniously thanked us for favouring him with our company, and then wished us a pleasant ride.
The market of Caxamarca is well supplied with flesh meat, poultry, bread, grain, vegetables, fruit, and every necessary, all of which are cheap: cheese and butter are plentiful; of the latter a fresh supply is brought from the country every day. Some very fine fruits are also obtained from the valleys, such as paltas, the vegetable marrow, chirimoyas, and pine-apples, particularly from that part called de las Balsas, where the road to Chachapoyas crosses the Marañon.
This city carries on a considerable trade with Lambayeque and other places on the coast, furnishing them with the different home manufactured articles; such as baizes, bayetones, pañetes, a kind of coarse cloth, blankets, flannels, tocuyos, &c., and receiving in return European manufactures, soap, sugar, cocoa, brandy, wine, indigo, hierba de Paraguay, salted fish, iron, steel, &c. The inhabitants of the interior resort to Caxamarca as a kind of mart, for the purpose of selling their own produce and manufactures, and for purchasing others which they may require; hence, a considerable trade is carried on, and some of the shops are well stored with European goods, similar to those which I mentioned when speaking of Huaras. Articles of a superior quality are in demand here, for the poorer classes wear their own manufactures; but the richer dress in European goods of the best quality.
At the distance of a league from Caxamarca are the baths of the Inca: two comfortable dwelling houses are built of stone on the two sides of a large patio, each having an extensive bath: that on the right hand is five yards square, and two deep. The sides and bottom are formed of roughly hewn stone, having steps at two of the corners, leading down from two doors, which open to different parts of the house; and others in the centre of the opposite side, communicating by a door with a large room. On the left is another bath, smaller than this; it is called de los pobres, and it has convenient rooms also attached to it. At the entrance to the patio is a corridor to the right and left, which serves as a stable; and in the front there are two kitchens, and a passage that leads through the building. It was at these baths that the unfortunate Atahualpa resided when Pizarro arrived at Caxamarca.
The spring of hot water, called el tragadero, is at the back of the building, and is at the distance of two hundred and thirty yards from it; it is circular, of five yards in diameter; I sounded it with fifty yards of rope, but found no bottom; the land all round it to the distance of more than a mile is almost level, declining a very little towards the river, which runs at the distance of four hundred yards from the tragadero. The water appears to boil, but having only one thermometer with me, and being fearful of damaging it where its place could not easily be supplied with another, I did not measure its heat. The natives scald their pigs here when they kill them, and as I have observed that boiling water rather fastens the bristles on the skin, I concluded that the heat of the water is below the temperature at which it generally boils when heated in the ordinary way. I filled two tin coffee pots, the one with water from the tragadero, the other with water from a cold spring; I placed them together on the same fire, and observed that the cold and the hot water began to boil precisely at the same time. I placed an egg in the tragadero, secured in a small net, and allowed it to remain eight minutes; it was then quite hard and the yolk dry. I allowed another to remain three minutes, which when broken was soft; I placed another in the hot water, allowed it to remain three minutes, and put it immediately into boiling water on a fire with a cold raw egg; after boiling five minutes they were both equally hard, and when cut no difference could be observed except in the taste;—the one which had been placed in the tragadero had a slight clayey taste, somewhat similar to that of water which has passed over a bed of clay.
The water of the tragadero empties itself into a channel three feet wide, and on an average six inches deep, which from several experiments I observed to run at the rate of three feet in a second. By this experiment it appears, that about thirty hogsheads of water are discharged in a minute. Along the sides of the channel the grass and other vegetables, particularly the ichu, grow to the very margin of the stream; and the fields of lucern which are irrigated with this water, at the distance of five hundred yards from the tragadero, are the finest in the valley. The fruit trees also that grow in the gardens belonging to the baths, apples, pears and peaches, are never subject to the blight from the frosty air so common in the neighbourhood; being apparently protected by the steam which continually rises from the hot water. The principal stream contains many small fishes of a black colour, very much in shape like small shrimps; if these be put into cold water they immediately die. They appear to be continually swimming up the stream, as if to avoid being carried by it to the confluence of the cold stream from the Santa Rosa springs with that of the tragadero, where they would most certainly perish.
The water which flows from the spring called de Santa Rosa, which is only seventy-two yards from the tragadero, is always at 41° of Fahrenheit at the mouth of the spring, where it bursts from a rock. The baths are supplied with water of any temperature, by mixing the hot from the tragadero with the cold from Santa Rosa; and as there is an outlet at the bottom as well as at the top of each bath, a constant supply of fresh water is maintained.