The son of the Cacique Astorpilco, a pleasing and friendly youth of seventeen, who accompanied me over the ruins of the palace of his ancestor, while living in extreme poverty, had filled his imagination with images of buried splendour and golden treasures hidden beneath the masses of rubbish upon which we trod. He related to me that one of his more immediate forefathers had bound his wife’s eyes, and then conducted her through many labyrinths cut in the rock into the subterranean garden of the Incas. There she saw, skilfully and elaborately imitated, and formed of the purest gold, artificial trees, with leaves and fruit, and birds sitting on the branches; and there too was the much sought for golden travelling chair (una de las andas) of Atahuallpa. The man commanded his wife not to touch any of these enchanted riches, because the long foretold period of the restoration of the empire had not yet arrived, and that whoever should attempt before that time to appropriate aught of them would die that very night. These golden dreams and fancies of the youth were founded on recollections and traditions of former days. These artificial “golden gardens” (Jardines o Huertas de oro) were often described by actual eye-witnesses, Cieza de Leon Sarmiento, Garcilaso, and other early historians of the Conquest. They were found beneath the temple of the sun at Cuzco, in Caxamarca, and in the pleasant valley of Yucay, a favourite residence of the monarch’s family. Where the golden Huertas were not below ground, living plants grew by the side of the artificial ones: among the latter, tall plants and ears of maize (mazorcas) are mentioned as particularly well executed.
The morbid confidence with which the young Astorpilco assured me that below our feet, a little to the right of the spot on which I stood at the moment, there was an artificial large-flowered Datura tree (Guanto), formed of gold wire and gold plates, which spread its branches over the Inca’s chair, impressed me deeply but painfully, for it seemed as if these illusive and baseless visions were cherished as consolations in present sufferings. I asked the lad—“Since you and your parents believe so firmly in the existence of this garden, are not you sometimes tempted in your necessities to dig in search of treasures so close at hand?” The boy’s answer was so simple, and expressed so fully the quiet resignation characteristic of the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, that I noted it in Spanish in my journal. “Such a desire (tal antojo) does not come to us; father says it would be sinful (que fuese pecado). If we had the golden branches with all their golden fruits our white neighbours would hate and injure us. We have a small field and good wheat (buen trigo).” Few of my readers, I think, will blame me for recalling here the words of the young Astorpilco and his golden visions.
The belief, so widely current among the natives, that to take possession of buried treasures which belonged to the Incas would be wrong, and would incur punishment and bring misfortune on the entire race, is connected with another belief which prevailed, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, i. e. the future restoration of a kingdom of the Incas. Every suppressed nationality looks forward to a day of change, and to a renewal of the old government. The flight of Manco Inca, the brother of Atahuallpa, into the forests of Vilcapampa on the declivity of the eastern Cordillera, and the sojourn of Sayri Tupac and Inca Tupac Amaru in those wildernesses, have left permanent recollections. It was believed that the dethroned dynasty had settled between the rivers Apurimac and Beni, or still farther to the east in Guiana. The myth of el Dorado and the golden city of Manoa, travelling from the west to the east, increased these dreams, and Raleigh’s imagination was so inflamed by them, that he founded an expedition on the hope of “conquering ‘the imperial and golden city,’ placing in it a garrison of three or four thousand English, and levying from the ‘Emperor of Guiana,’ a descendant of Huayna Capac, and who holds his court with the same magnificence, an annual tribute of £300,000 sterling, as the price of his promised restoration to the throne in Cuzco and Caxamarca.” Wherever the Peruvian Quichua language has extended, some traces of such expectations of the return of the Inca’s sovereignty continue[57] to exist in the minds of many among those of the natives who are possessed of some knowledge of the history of their country.
We remained for five days in the town of the Inca Atahuallpa, which at that time scarcely reckoned seven or eight thousand inhabitants. Our departure was delayed by the number of mules which were required for the conveyance of our collections, and by the necessity of making a careful choice of the guides who were to conduct us across the chain of the Andes to the entrance of the long but narrow Peruvian sandy desert (Desierto de Sechura). The passage over the Cordillera is from north-east to south-west. Immediately after quitting the plain of Caxamarca, on ascending a height of scarcely 9600 (10230 English) feet, the traveller is struck with the sight of two grotesquely shaped porphyritic summits, Aroma and Cunturcaga (a favourite haunt of the powerful vulture which we commonly call Condor; kacca in the Quichua language signifies “the rock.”) These summits consisted of five, six, or seven-sided columns, 37 to 42 English feet high, and some of them jointed. The Cerro Aroma is particularly picturesque. By the distribution of its often converging series of columns placed one above another, it resembles a two-storied building, which, moreover, is surmounted by a dome or cupola of non-columnar rock. Such outbursts of porphyry and trachyte are, as I have before remarked, characteristic of the high crests of the Cordilleras, to which they impart a physiognomy quite distinct from that presented by the Swiss Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Siberian Altai.
From Cunturcaga and Aroma we descended by a zig-zag course a steep rocky declivity of 6400 English feet into the deep cleft valley of the Magdalena, the bottom of which is still 4260 English feet above the level of the sea. A few wretched huts, surrounded by the same wool or cotton-trees (Bombax discolor) which we had first seen on the banks of the Amazons, were called an Indian village. The scanty vegetation of the valley bears some resemblance to that of the province of Jaen de Bracamoros, but we missed the red groves of Bougainvillæa. This valley is one of the deepest with which I am acquainted in the chain of the Andes: it is a true transverse valley directed from east to west, deeply cleft, and hemmed in on the two sides by the Altos de Aroma and Guangamarca. In this valley recommences the same quartz formation which we had observed in the Paramo de Yanaguanga, between Micuipampa and Caxamarca, at an elevation of 11720 English feet, and which, on the western declivity of the Cordillera, attains a thickness of several thousand feet, and was long an enigma to me. Since von Buch has shown us that the cretaceous group is also widely extended in the highest chains of the Andes, on either side of the Isthmus of Panama, the quartz formation which we are now considering, which has perhaps been altered in its texture by the action of volcanic forces, may be considered to belong to the Quadersandstein, intermediate between the upper part of the chalk series, and the Gault and Greensand. On quitting the mild temperature of the Magdalena valley we had to ascend again for three hours the mountain wall of 5120 English feet, opposite to the porphyritic group of the Alto de Aroma. The change of climate in so doing was the more sensible, as we were often enveloped in the course of the ascent in a cold fog.
The longing desire which we felt to enjoy once more the open view of the sea after eighteen months’ constant sojourn in the ever restricted range of the interior of the mountains, had been heightened by repeated disappointments. In looking from the summit of the volcano of Pichincha, over the dense forests of the Provincia de las Esmeraldas, no sea horizon can be clearly distinguished, by reason of the too great distance of the coast and height of the station: it is like looking down from an air-balloon into vacancy. One divines, but one does not distinguish. Subsequently, when between Loxa and Guancabamba we reached the Paramo de Guamini, where there are several ruined buildings of the times of the Incas, and from whence the mule-drivers had confidently assured us that we should see beyond the plain, beyond the low districts of Piura and Lambajeque, the sea itself which we so much desired to behold, a thick mist covered both the plain and the distant sea shore. We saw only variously shaped masses of rock alternately rise like islands above the waving sea of mist, and again disappear, as had been the case in our view from the Peak of Teneriffe. We were exposed to almost the same disappointment in our subsequent transit over the pass of Guangamarca, at the time of which I am now speaking. As we toiled up the mighty mountain side, with our expectations continually on the stretch, our guides, who were not perfectly acquainted with the road, repeatedly promised us that at the end of the hour’s march which was nearly concluded, our hopes would be realised. The stratum of mist which enveloped us appeared occasionally to be about to disperse, but at such moments our field of view was again restricted by intervening heights.
The desire which we feel to behold certain objects does not depend solely on their grandeur, their beauty, or their importance; it is interwoven in each individual with many accidental impressions of his youth, with early predilection for particular occupations, with an attachment to the remote and distant, and with the love of an active and varied life. The previous improbability of the fulfilment of a wish gives besides to its realisation a peculiar kind of charm. The traveller enjoys by anticipation the first sight of the constellation of the cross, and of the Magellanic clouds circling round the Southern Pole,—of the snow of the Chimborazo, and the column of smoke ascending from the volcano of Quito,—of the first grove of tree-ferns, and of the Pacific Ocean. The days on which such wishes are realised form epochs in life, and produce ineffaceable impressions; exciting feelings of which the vividness seeks not justification by processes of reasoning. With the longing which I felt for the first view of the Pacific from the crests of the Andes, there mingled the interest with which I had listened as a boy to the narrative of the adventurous expedition of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa,[58] the fortunate man who (followed by Francisco Pizarro) first among Europeans beheld from the heights of Quarequa, on the Isthmus of Panama, the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean,—the “South Sea.” The reedy shores of the Caspian, at the place where I first saw them, i. e. from the Delta formed by the mouths of the Volga, cannot certainly be called picturesque; yet I viewed them with a gratification heightened almost into delight by the particular interest and pleasure with which, in early childhood, I had looked at the shape of this Asiatic inland sea on maps. That which is thus excited in us[59] by childish impressions, or by accidental circumstances in life, takes at a later period a graver direction, and often becomes a motive for scientific labours and distant enterprises.
When after many undulations of the ground, on the summit of the steep mountain ridge, we finally reached the highest point, the Alto de Guangamarca, the heavens which had long been veiled became suddenly clear: a sharp west wind dispersed the mist, and the deep blue of the sky in the thin mountain air appeared between narrow lines of the highest cirrous clouds. The whole of the western declivity of the Cordillera by Chorillos and Cascas, covered with large blocks of quartz 13 to 15 English feet long, and the plains of Chala and Molinos as far as the sea shore near Truxillo, lay beneath our eyes in astonishing apparent proximity. We now saw for the first time the Pacific Ocean itself; and we saw it clearly: forming along the line of the shore a large mass from which the light shone reflected, and rising in its immensity to the well-defined, no longer merely conjectured horizon. The joy it inspired, and which was vividly shared by my companions Bonpland and Carlos Montufar, made us forget to open the barometer until we had quitted the Alto de Guangamarca. From our measurement taken soon after, but somewhat lower down, at an isolated cattle-farm called the Hato de Guangamarca, the point from which we first saw the sea would be only somewhere between 9380 and 9600 English feet above the level of the sea.
The view of the Pacific was peculiarly impressive to one who like myself owed a part of the formation of his mind and character, and many of the directions which his wishes had assumed, to intercourse with one of the companions of Cook. My schemes of travel were early made known, in their leading outlines at least, to George Forster, when I enjoyed the advantage of making my first visit to England under his guidance, more than half a century ago. Forster’s charming descriptions of Otaheite had awakened throughout Northern Europe a general interest (mixed, I might almost say, with romantic longings) for the Islands of the Pacific which had at that time been seen by very few Europeans. I too cherished at the time of which I am speaking the hope of soon landing on them; for the object of my visit to Lima was twofold,—to observe the transit of Mercury over the solar disk, and to fulfil an engagement made with Captain Baudin before I left Paris, to join him in a voyage of circumnavigation which was to take place as soon as the Government of the French Republic could furnish the requisite funds.
Whilst we were in the Antilles, North American newspapers announced that the two Corvettes, Le Géographe and Le Naturaliste, would sail round Cape Horn and touch at Callao de Lima. On receiving this intelligence at Havana, where I then was, after having completed my Orinoco journey, I relinquished my original plan of going through Mexico to the Philippines, and hastened to engage a vessel to convey me from the Island of Cuba to Cartagena de Indias. Baudin’s Expedition, however, took quite a different route from that which was announced and expected; instead of sailing round Cape Horn, as had been designed when it had been intended that Bonpland and myself should form part of it, it sailed round the Cape of Good Hope. One of the two objects of my Peruvian journey and of our last passage over the Chain of the Andes failed; but on the other hand I had, at the critical moment, the rare good fortune of a perfectly clear day, during a very unfavourable season of the year, on the misty coast of Low Peru. I observed the passage of Mercury over the Sun at Callao, an observation which has become of some importance towards the exact determination of the longitude of Lima[60], and of all the south-western part of the New Continent. Thus in the intricate relations and graver circumstances of life, there may often be found, associated with disappointment, a germ of compensation.