In the long rays of the sunset the train rolled across the level stretches of the high valley in which lies the city of Arequipa. The low, flat houses—more or less earthquake proof—and the red tile roofs were radiant in the mellow glow. Beyond rose the dull, volcanic slopes of Misti in an immense cone, while best of all, in the one story hotel of rambling patios in that city of earthquakes we were once more able to collect sufficient water at one time to accomplish a bath. In Arequipa the first train stops exhausted; mañana, or at the worst only a few days later, a second train leaves to climb the first high pass and leave its passengers on the shores of Lake Titicaca.
Throughout the city there is scarcely a building that cannot show patched cracks or gaping cornices that are the scars of earthquakes; here and there a heap of rock and plaster or fragmentary walls abandoned to the Indian beggars mark the years of great temblors. Rarely does a private house attempt a second story and the marvel is how the churches or the cathedral, with their high walls and towers, have been able to survive at all! Though often cracked and battered, yet in some way they have weathered the subterranean gales.
And what a city for churches! On every street, on all but every turn, there rises an ecclesiastical edifice with its grim walls of faded, peeling kalsomine and its porticos, perhaps ornamented with odd stone carvings that preserve a strong Indian flavor in spite of the old monkish guidance. Whole blocks in the heart of the city are bounded by enormous walls enclosing the sacred precincts of a convent or monastery. I was informed that out of every twelve inhabitants, men, women, and children, one was in some of the many orders behind the high walls. Each day in some part of the city is a fiesta in honor of some particular saint who is heralded and honored by a vast popping of firecrackers, squibs, and rockets and a grand procession through the neighborhood. Often several saints’ fiestas fall on the same day and from all directions come the rattle of firecrackers and the plop of the daylight bombs or rockets and any casual stroll will bring one against a procession heavy with the smoke of incense or uncanny with the thin, wailing chanting of the celebrants.
HARDLY A DAY WITHOUT ITS SAINT’S FIESTA.
The whole city centers around an extraordinarily large central plaza on one side of which is the ancient cathedral with its tiers of bells in the bell tower still lashed to the massive beams by rawhide thongs. The remaining three sides are business arcades of small shops, the pastries, and cafés; the bullet chipped arches still confirming the earnestness with which many a civil election has been contested between the liberal and the clerical elements after the returns were counted—or, quite as often, during that process.
The chief industry is in a few machine shops and central supply houses for the mines of the interior. Outside of this there is nothing. A few small shops with the cheapest and shabbiest of stocks cluster around the plaza; on Sunday that same plaza is scantily filled with the select of Arequipa while the stocky police keep it cleared of the tattered urchins and Indians of the weekdays. There is the dull, oppressive sense of wretched poverty or genteel destitution. It is in the sharpest contrast with the general run of other and typical Latin cities; the whole city seems to have become encysted in a hopeless poverty in which any form of local energy is permitted to find expression only in ecclesiastical fireworks or mystical parades of wailing and incense.
The start from Arequipa up to Lake Titicaca is made in the early morning. The huge cone of Misti—looking for all the world like a vast slag dump—stands forth with telescopic detail in the high, rare air mellowed in the cool morning sun. Prickling and glistening on the even slopes or in the purple shadows, the frost still clings like a lichen to the barren rocks and there is a thin touch of briskness in the air like the taste of fall on a September morning back home.
AN ANDEAN TOURING CAR