Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

The day before, off Huanchazo, where a storm far out had piled up a heavy, oily groundswell, that even put the racks on the tables, a wealthy old Peruvian lady had been hoisted abroad in a cask clinging to her son. She was a garrulous old soul, powdered like a marshmallow, with three chins and a little moustache, and her son was the very apple of her eye. Therefore, son was what one might expect. His adolescent and mature ambition was to be the amorous cut-up of the coast and so far he had succeeded generously in making a smug, self-satisfied nuisance of himself. He counted doting mother’s allowance publicly, drank warm champagne noisily when thrifty mother was not around, and dressed in the Huanchazo idea of French fashions for men. In the morning he did not appear. Mother explained fondly—but not the truth. She did not know it.

Passengers are warned not to go between decks after dark, the steerage hutches and the crew have the freedom of that deck. Son prowled down on some shifty little romantic project of his own. In the darkness he suddenly felt two sharp little pricks in the skin of his back and one sharp little prod in front; they felt very, very much like the points of knives. Up went son’s hands promptly and in the blackness he felt heavy hands pulling out his maternal allowance—the beautiful money with which he was to flaunt his fascinations in Lima. Hence no Limanean gay life—mother it seemed was a thrifty Spartan in money matters—and son was in his berth, weeping. A steward told us the latter, confidentially of course.

Samancho, Chimbote, Salivari, Suppe, and then at last, in the daybreak of the morning after the last named and in the midst of a soft, clouded day, Callao. There was the usual customs search of the baggage—a maddening process to an Englishman, mildly irritating to a Frenchman, and accepted meekly and placidly by Americans as a matter of course from a thorough training in our own home ports. I have never passed through any country that could give as close an imitation of our own thorough methods of dock robbery and tariff brigandage as Peru. A quarter of an hour by train through a rich soil that can be worked only by irrigation and Lima, the first halt on the continent, has been attained.

For two weeks there was nothing to do but to idle in Lima. A delightful city full of the old contrasts of highly civilized, sybaritic pleasures alongside of the squalid, aimless poverty of the survivors of a devastated empire. There is the Bois where fashionable equipages with cockaded, copper-colored lackeys—possibly in bare or sandaled feet—on the box, silver-mounted harness and heavy, Chilean bred coach horses jingle past in procession on Sunday afternoons while some gallant Peruano lopes alongside with huge silver stirrups and a saddle almost solid with bullion; the sodden side streets where the buzzard and the scavenger pig are man’s best friend; the cathedral where lies the dessicated body of Pizarro in a marble casket like an aquarium, the one open side covered with glass through which may be seen the remains of that treacherous old buccaneer, with his head re-fastened by a silver wire to guard against a repetition of the theft; the cathedral itself with its murky interior smoked by the votive candles of millions of conscript converts; its queer carvings where the ecclesiastical memories of architecture have been freely rendered by the Indian stone-cutters; the clubs, the cafés—and the ambrosial coffee—chapels with the bullion covered walls, the wretched tobacco at high tariff—extorted prices—all these and then the Hotel Maury.

Lima, a Delightful City of Contrasts

Peace be to Savarin, to Delmonico, and to Chamberlain. They did well in their way. But they never served a squid, or cuttlefish, floating like a small hot-water bottle, tender and delicious in an inky sauce of their own founding; nor a starfish sprawled in a five-pointed dream of savory, lobster-like succulence; nor “señoritas”—a delicate species of scallop—each with its tiny scarlet tongue draped across the pearl-white bivalve bosom and that, steamed or not, melted in one supreme ecstatic flavor; nor five inch langostin fresh from the cold waters of the Andean hills, nor compounded or invented a strawberry gin cocktail of surpassing allurement—cooled by a piece of ice kept in a flannel-lined drawer and returned thereto after stirring. None of these things had they and so by just that much they fell short.

In the Hotel Maury there was a written bill of fare for those who could merely read. But for the expert, the fastidious—or the adventurous—there was a redoubt in the main room whose flanking bastions and crest were a solid array of great joints and little joints, steaks, chops, unnamed fish in platoons and señoritas in brigades, fruits, vegetables and all of the foregoing—and more—laid out in tiers and terraces whose foundations were of cool, inviting seaweeds and mosses, and still further seductively embellished with a variety of paper ribbons and crests and cockades until one almost lost sight of the pagodas of gaudy, many-storied cakes and confections that rose like watch towers at judicious intervals along the battlements. It was a salon.

To the shuffling, woolen-capped, sandaled, or bare-footed Indian at one’s heels the directions were given, you chose what you would as they thus reposed in the altogether and then repaired to await in a sawdust-floored cavern at one side and in a state of serene and expectant bliss the certain pleasures of the very immediate future. You waited, it is true, at a warped table with a stained cloth on which a bent cruet supplied the only note of elegance. And, lest any of the precious viands be lost in transit or breakage, you knew that you would be served with a substantial, hard-shell crockery only slightly more vulnerable than reinforced concrete. Presently your Indian reappeared in a shuffling trot scattering sawdust from the prow of each sandal like a harbor pile-driver under full speed—the hard-shell crockery is white hot, but he has the hands of a salamander—and then with a flourish he drops an assorted collection of tableware somewhere within reach—you are served. And what a repast! Peace be to Savarin, Delmonico and—enough. Comparisons are invidious and the Maury can stand alone in the continent of his choosing.

Very shortly the sailing day came for, since it was not possible to land in Mollendo owing to that port being afflicted with a quarantine, it had been necessary to catch a steamer that would put us through the surf at Quilca, a hole in a cliff that has its only function in these times of quarantine. A farewell inspection of the redoubt and bastions, a recharging of the bottle of salicylic acid and alcohol, which while it had in no way abated the fleas of the Hotel Maury, yet had mitigated their consequences, and Lima and Callao drifted into the background with the closing day. From Quilca in some way we would connect by muleback and packtrain across the desert to the desert station of La Joya with the railroad to Arequipa and thence to Lake Titicaca and across to La Paz.