Not the elder daughter, whom all the world knows where she sits, white upon her little green patch against the hopeless desert, looking up with now and then a shiver at the white-headed giant, her father. No, the one I mean now is something like three hundred and fifty years younger than the Misti’s first born and favorite, and not white at all, nor over-dignified, nor even given to much thought as to when taita[16] shall shrug again those mighty shoulders and rattle the walls about her ears. In fact, to look at the two—the fat, brown, clumsy cholo girl and the shining city—I dare say you would never take Tránsita and Arequipa[17] for sisters at all. But as both are daughters of the Misti, I see no other way out of it.
What! You don’t know either of them? Hm! Of course it could hardly be expected that you should be acquainted with Tránsita, for she lives on a back street on the other side of the river and comes very seldom to the plaza. And probably you could not talk with her, anyhow, since her speech is only Spanish and Quichua. But not to know Arequipa—why that is to count out the prettiest city in Peru, and one of the oldest in America. And if you do not know the daughter you have missed the father, too, which is an even greater pity—for he is one of the handsomest giants on earth, though a baby in his own family. Well, well—the sooner I give you an introduction the better, then.
The Misti is an inactive but living volcano, a hundred miles from the sea, in southern Peru. As I have said, it ranks small at home, being only 19,300 feet tall, while some of its brother Andes tower to 26,000 feet. But few of them are so handsome. It stands alone and erect, with head up and shoulders squared, while some of them look as if the nurse had dropped them in their babyhood and they had never got their spines straight again. It is a huge and very perfect cone, symmetrical as the sacred peak of Japan, but vastly higher. So steep is it that the thick blanket of volcanic cinders would surely slip down from its shoulders, except for the long brooches of dead lava that pin it up. As for its head, that is old with eternal snow.
For time unknown—since long before history—the Misti has been the best known mountain in Peru; and I do not much wonder. It has a nobility of its own, such as its mightier brethren do not all possess. Just to its right vast Charchani climbs 20,000 feet into the sky, and a most majestic peak it is. Just to its left towers the grand wall of Pichu-pichu, itself taller than the greatest mountain in the United States. But it is always the lone, solemn Misti, to which every one looks, of which every one speaks—with a strange mixture of love and awe. Meeting an Arequipeño abroad, you might very likely fancy there were no other mountains in sight of his home; but you will not be left long in ignorance that there is a Misti. Even before Europeans knew of America, the remarkable Indians of Peru half worshiped the Misti; and so Arequipa gets its name, an Aymará word which means “with the peak behind it.” Far up its deadly sides they toiled to make their sacrifices to Those Above; and even in the elder crater I have counted the ruins of aboriginal shrines. It is so isolated, so individual, so majestic in its awful stature; and above all, while its neighbor brothers are just mountains, it has a soul—the wondrous fire-soul of the volcano.
A stern father is the Misti. His daughter is surely not undutiful, but many a time he has punished her sorely. Many a time he has sent her sprawling in the dust, and turned her smiling whiteness to a generation of mourning. So, even as late as 1868 over half the buildings of Arequipa went down in a mortal chaos of stone, killing as many people as fall in an ordinary battle.
One might fancy that such a parent would get himself disliked; but his severity does not seem to be laid up against him. Arequipa loves the Misti—and as for Tránsita, she loved him even more than she did Arequipa. Their house faced south, but the first thing in the morning Tránsita used to climb to the stone-arched roof to look at the peak black against the rising sun; and the last thing at evening to watch the rosy west-glow upon that venerable head. And always she wondered the more, for now as she grew taller, and the untaught soul had room to swell, she saw more and more in that great dark one with his elephant-wrinkled hide and the lava scars on his white head, and now and then, of a hushed dawn, the ghost of a cloud floating plume-like from his brow. Perhaps it was because he is so incomprehensible a giant that she comprehended him—in that child way which is more at home in some mysteries than we older stupids are. At all events, she turned to him for companionship and confidences, and had a way of talking with him ever so softly, that no one else should hear.
“Now, taita,” she was whispering this morning, “hast thou heard what is to be? For they say that the Tuerto, the cross-eyed, who oppressed us before, is to make new revolution, that he may be president again and rob himself still richer. And it has always been in Arequipa that they begin. Dost thou think it? And would they kill Eugénio? For he is very loyal, and is one of importance, being a corporal. Do not let them hurt my brother—wilt thou, taita?”
To all these questions and the adjuration the giant answered never a word. His face was grave with the morning shadows. To look at him no one but Tránsita would have dreamed he knew anything about it.
Nor do I really know that he did, though he had the best of opportunities. From that lookout in the sky, so overtopping the town, he could see right into the high-walled court of Don Telesfor’s mansion. It was a flat old courtyard, paved with tipsy blocks of stone and framed four-square with long shadowy verandas of the white sillar.[18] In the center was a long-forgotten fountain, and at the middle of each side a quaint staircase of the same white tufa ran up to the cracked and precarious sillar roof. No one was to be seen about the court. Only, along the eastern portal[19] was a long ridge of fresh earth.
Don Telesfor was making repairs. A great many people in Arequipa had long been free to say that he ought to mend his ways, and the old place might certainly count as a way that should be mended. His career as prefect, years before, had been by no means free from charges of extortion and thievery, and it was notorious that he would be glad to see again in the presidential chair the unscrupulous usurper who had grown from pauper soldier to many-times millionaire in one term. For this reason Don Telesfor was as little beloved as his old patron; and poor cholos, with better love than understanding of freedom, took malicious pleasure in laying the scourge to their two backs jointly. “Look at the Cacerist!” they would growl audibly when Don Telesfor thundered down the reeling cobblestones on his silver trapped horse. As for his house, I fancy not one of them ever passed it after nightfall, with a bit of chalk in his pocket (and chalk is the last thing to be without in Peru during a campaign), but he stopped and scrawled in elastic Spanish upon the outer wall: “Death to the tyrant and his leeches! Down with the cross-eyed!”