To-day, when we leave our comfortable steamer and follow those same paths, we find little alteration, in many respects, after the lapse of four centuries. We must journey in the saddle over the roughest and often most dangerous of mountain trails. At night it may be that an indifferent fonda, or inn, in the poor Indian villages on the road will afford some hospitality, but this will be of the meanest description. Railways are few and far between along this immense and little-travelled seaboard; food is scarce and life primitive.
But the stamp of Spain is over all, and there is an atmosphere—attenuated it may be—of the times of Don Quijote de la Mancha in its social regimen. We cannot withhold a tribute to Spain, in remarking how she stamped, for all time, her own characteristic culture throughout thousands of miles, east, north and south, of tropic seaboard and rugged Cordillera, upon this great continent.
But "Spanish gentlemen should not soil their hands in trade" ran a decree of the old "Laws of the Indies," and the Spaniards, except for their exploitation of the rich gold, silver and quicksilver mines (at a terrible toll of Indian lives), did not reap much commercial profit from their possessions. This great mineral wealth was poured for centuries into the needy coffers of Spain—poured as into a sieve, for it was largely squandered. Under the viceroys the mines were worked with feverish activity. In one instance an urgent mandate for increased production so worked upon the official in charge of one of the huge mines, those of Huancavelica, in yonder mountains—a veritable labyrinth of underground galleries and chambers, among which was a chapel, deep below the surface, with candles ever burning before its shrines—that he ordered the supporting columns of ore to be taken out, with a result that the mine fell in, entombing five hundred miners, whose bones remain in the ruin to this day, it is said.
As for commerce, the British are the great Phœnicians on this coast; transporting cargo hither and bearing it hence. The German activity became marked before the war, but the Kosmos line of steamers stopped, and the Teutonic bagsman ceased his assiduous traverse of the interior villages with his wares.
Mining in Peru is not what it was in the time of Spain. A wealthy company of United States capitalists, it is true, ships great quantities of copper from the wonderful deposits of Cerro de Pasco, 15,000 feet above sea-level, and there are many smaller concerns of varied nationalities. But thousands of irregular subterranean workings all over the vast Cordillera remain waterlogged and abandoned—mines where the visitor is told of fabulous wealth extracted, and which still contain untold riches, awaiting the time when they shall be called upon to surrender their hidden stocks of gold and silver, of copper and a host of other minerals. The glories of Potosi have in large measure departed, but the tin mines of Bolivia yield annually a large proportion of the world's supply of that metal.
Enormous coalfields—notwithstanding that South America has been regarded as a coal-less continent—exist in the Andes, their upturned strata outcropping in the bleakest regions, in some cases amid the perpetual snow.
To-day the cultivators of sugar and cotton in the irrigated valleys of this vast littoral have come into their kingdom, reaping, during the war, fortunes from the shipment of these commodities to Britain; their only plaint that of the restriction of carriage. The merchant and the shopkeeper made the same lament, and the fashionable and simpatica dames of Latin American Society bewailed the impossibility of their enjoyment of the latest Parisian modes.
Away on the slopes and tablelands of the grim Cordillera the ancient palaces and temples of the bygone Incas look down, unknown, unvisited, save by those whom interest or chance may take that way. Once washed by the waves of Lake Titicaca—that most remarkable of lakes, 12,500 feet above the sea, yet whereon we may journey out of sight of land—lie the ruins of that strange temple of Tiahuanako, of unknown age, the most ancient handiwork of man in the New World.
To-day, all that remains of that epoch are these old stone structures, save that the Indian, as evening falls, preserving some sentiment of an ancient state, climbs the lonely hills, and there, alone, makes mournful music with his flute of reeds: notes which fall weirdly upon the ear as we pass beneath, across the wide plateau.