There are also many cuestas or rapid steeps, with here and there flights of steps, roughly cut in the hard rock. By the way-side, in tedious cuestas of several leagues in extent, recesses are, in numerous instances, worked out on the higher side of the road, which serve for the passengers to draw up while those from an opposite direction are allowed to pass on, or where muleteers stop their cattle to adjust their cargoes and tighten their lazos. But when a rock or shoulder of a cliff juts out from the road towards the lower or precipice side, leaving more or less room for a resting-place, then the little flat space is coarsely walled in with large fragments of rock and such smaller stones as may be at hand, giving the idea of a rude but commanding fortress.
The famous Cuesta of San Mateo, on the Tarma road from Lima, we passed in the year 1834, and could not but wonder how, without any very serious accident, an army of cavalry, destined to celebrate the “fraternal embrace of Maquenguaio,”[19] had been able to pass the same route a few months before, when the path and staircases were yet wet and slippery from occasional showers; and when the lower or proper post-road was unfortunately impassable, from the destruction of one of the ordinary rustic bridges on the river or torrent, that runs at the bottom of the rock-locked ravine through which the regular mule-way has been opened, and by which the waters rush foaming and raging in time of heavy inland rains. This stream, like all such impetuous torrents, during the force of the rainy season on the high mountains and table-lands, carries in its course a vast number of rolling stones, the thundering noise of which rises far above the roar of the white waters as these are thrown back, and resisted incessantly, by large blocks of rocky fragments that half-choke the narrow channel, which at this remarkable place is bordered by immense rocks looking as if they had been separated by violence, or rent to give descent to the concentrated and united body of rivulets that come from many a snowy peak, mountain lake, and marsh.
The hill along which runs the Cuesta road, rising on the face of the steep that overhangs this part of the stream, is of itself a grand object; but that which is seen opposite to it has the greatest elevation of any single mountain in these narrow glens: and nothing of the kind can be more strikingly magnificent than to behold it, girdled in verdure and capped in snow, from the summit of the Cuesta, where the traveller, tired with climbing, is invited to draw breath, and look around him from the cross planted here, as in almost every similar situation, by the pious among the natives, who love to decorate this emblem of their faith with wreaths of fresh and fragrant flowers. But from the better route, which winds by the river underneath, nothing of this sort is to be seen; for here the hills on each side shelve in towards their rugged foundations, until they come so close as completely to overshadow the stream. Here, too, the rider may strain his neck in looking overhead; but his eye only meets, besides a strip of the sky, pendulous succulents and tangling plants on the face of the incumbent ledge, with now and then a flower-enamoured “pica-flor,” (humming-bird,) as he fans, with a gracefully tremulous wing, the expanding blossoms that yield him delicate food and pastime.
These wilds of San Mateo reminded us forcibly of the miniature wilds of Glencoe, remarkable in Scottish history; and we thought, as we passed them, of the bard of Cona (Ossian), who, in honour of the orb which the Peruvians once adored, sung with sublimity and touching pathos,
“O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers, whence are thy beams, O Sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave; but thou thyself movest alone. Who can be a companion of thy course?”
The Indian’s eyrie on the summit of some steep and lofty mountain, (seldom visited by a white man, save the curate,) may be easily passed many times unnoticed by a stranger, who has occasion to go over the usual routes in any of the principal ravines and valleys of the Sierra, and who may never be led to suspect its existence till he one day meets a swift-footed Indian, closely followed by a person on a well-accoutred and elegant mule, whose gear is all laden with silver ornaments; and the rider, who sits at his ease in a saddle of the country with a rich pellon, wears a large-brimmed hat, with a black silk cap emerging to view at the ears and temples. He has on at least a couple of ponchos (mantles) well-decorated and fringed; his black or brown stockings are of warm Vicuña wool; and the heel of a small shoe, half-concealed in a clumsy and costly, though wooden stirrup, is armed with a prodigiously disproportioned silver spur, with a large tinkling roller, used to keep his noble animal in mind that she is but the harbinger of death, and carries on her back the keeper of the sinner’s conscience.
This minister of peace to the miserable, hurries to save the soul of a dying Christian, whose abode, like the falcon’s, overlooks the ordinary path of wayfaring men; and which, when descried, seems, to the sight of an observer underneath, to be indeed the loftiest earthly point between the ground he himself stands upon and that heaven for which, it is believed, the anxious and fluttering spirit of the gasping Indian, only waits the curate’s absolution and blessing to wing its immortal flight. It occurs to us here to remark, that in the remote curacies of the hills no friars are to be seen, as on the coast or more genial climates; an important part of whose duty it is, wherever they locate themselves, to aid the Christian to die well, and to watch by his pillow, and exhort and comfort him, while the crucifix and taper are ever before his eyes, and the breath of life about to leave his animal frame. But, destitute of these helps, the curate or curate-substitute, whose calling renders him the most influential person and only spiritual comforter in an Indian village, makes, in the appearance we have offered to describe, his rapid way over hill and cliff, broken ravine and dangerous path, on a chosen traveller, whose movements are so gentle that she never wearies the rider. This mule seems not to make any trying exertion, while she leaves all ordinary beasts of her kind behind her on a day’s journey, and ascends a cuesta of three or four leagues without stopping once to draw breath, and again descends the same without missing a foot or slackening the “paso llano,” the best of all travelling paces; while, to her no small recommendation, where horse-shoers are not to be found, whether on hard ground or soft, in summer or in winter, she needs not a shoe on her massy and well-rounded hoof. The Sierra curates of a dreary pastoral district, or secluded Indian residence in the wheat-land temperatures, are men, at the age of forty, commonly much worn out in constitution. One of these gentlemen, to whom his home is irksome, is seen to read for weeks together on a stretch, merely to kill time; or he longs for the more refined “tertulia,” to which at one period he was no stranger; or he starts off, swayed by some sudden impulse, to the nearest town of white inhabitants, where he enjoys a finer climate and more gratifying company. He not unfrequently resorts to a mineral “pueblo” (village), under pretext perhaps of selling his “primicia” or first-fruits in grain, &c. which, to be sure, he does to some purpose; for ten to one he will gamble with the extravagant miners, day and night, till the product of the primicia is all swallowed up; and the poor residentiary returns to his cheerless manse involved in a debt which he cannot pay for the next six months, even should his curacy be worth four or five thousand dollars a year, though it oftener happens that the income is much less. In his mountain curacy, wherein he endures sad periods of ennui and long and frequent fasts,[20] that debilitate and break down the best constitution, (for before he can reach a distant church, and say mass, the day is often far advanced,) the curate complains of feeling himself an exile; and is easily led to seek refuge from his self-weariness in various indulgences that far overstep the barriers of self-denial, and plunge him into the outskirts of that moral darkness which he is sent to enlighten.
Here, if anywhere on earth, the drawbacks of involuntary celibacy are felt by the priest. For such canonical privations he usually searches compensation in the less amiable society of a favourite “sobrina,” or reputed niece, whose kindness hinges on a precarious friendship, and whose artful complacency
“hardens a’ within,
And petrifies the feeling!”