Down at the station the departure of the train is in the nature of an event like the sailing of a steamer. Already the train—one first-class and two second-class coaches—is filled, aisles and seats, with a shuffling crowd already in the ecstacy of a noisy and mournful, but interminable leave taking. Their view of the hazards of a journey by rail may not be so far out of the way for on the steep grades of these Andean roads a train has been known to break in half and go scuttling back down hill until the hand-brakes take effect; also, and later, on the ancient engine I observed with interest the native engineer screw down his throttle and then, in starting, bang it open with a monkey wrench.
Presently, as the hour of departure drew near, the conductor appeared and began sorting out the passengers. Rebozo-muffled ladies and Peruvian gentlemen who failed to show tickets and who had been picnicking in the seats burst into one final explosion of embracings and goodbyes before descending to the tracks where they took up a position alongside the car windows. The second-class were not admitted to their hard benches except on proof of actually possessing a ticket, but the stubby trainmen had their hands full in keeping the car door clear for they were continually choked with Cholo or Indian groups committing last messages to memory. Their windows were jammed with heads and clawing arms exchanging or accepting dripping foods wrapped in platano leaves, bottles of checha, or earthen pots containing Heaven knows what.
At last the whistle screamed from the engine, a bell tinkled, and the train moved out in state to the demonstrations of the populace. The car was but moderately filled; a couple of padres from Ecuador—one a political refugee—a tonsured monk, a couple of black-robed nuns, and three engineers, together with an assortment of Peruvians—the women in the shrouding, tightly drawn rebozo of funeral black against which the heavy face-powdering showed in ghastly contrast—and a couple of small children who turned up at intervals from under the seats, grimed with train cinders and ecstatically sticky with chancaca, a raw sugar sort of candy. And in every vacant seat was baggage, native, hairy rawhide boxes shapeless from the many pack-mule lashings, paper bags, and pasteboard hat boxes and bandanna bundles and somewhere in the collection each Peruvian seemed to be able to draw on an inexhaustible supply of the Arequipa brewed, bilious, green beer.
CHAPTER VI
THROUGH THE INCA COUNTRY
Slowly at first we rose, skirting the great foothills or gently ascending valleys and always crossing some dismantled relic of the dead Inca empire. Then we plunged boldly into the mountain chain teetering over spidery bridges across gorges whose bottom was a ribbon of foam or where the rails followed a winding shelf cut in the face of the mountain, where an empty beer bottle flung from the car window broke on the tracks below over which the train had been crawling a quarter of an hour before. With the increasing altitude—the summit of the pass was still ahead and something over fifteen thousand feet above sea level—the soroche, mountain sickness, began to be manifest in the car in deathly, nauseating dizziness until it closely resembled the woebegone cabin of a sightseeing steamer at a yacht race. The engineers had been discussing the traces of the old Inca works with special reference to their irrigation systems, of which there was generally a ruin visible out of one window or the other. Special emphasis had been laid on the total lack of survival of any instruments or methods by which this hydraulic engineering had been calculated or performed. There is a trace of one irrigation ditch something like one hundred and twenty-five miles in length—a set of levels for such a project even to-day would be a matter for nice calculation. The Incas simply went ahead and did it, some way. Their engineering had been turned over and over and compared with the great engineering works of antiquity.
“Cut and try,” said one engineer in conclusion; “that was the way these old Inca people made their irrigation systems. Put a gang of Indians to digging a ditch from where the water supply was to come; then let in the water as they dug—in a little ditch—and dig deeper or dike it up to the water level as it showed in the trench. When they had that little ditch finished there was their level; all they had to do was to dig it as big and deep and wide as they wanted.”
It looked reasonable; there was no dissent. We swung around a curve and a vista opened out of a ragged valley, broken by gorges and cañons with sheer walls of soft rock.
One of the other engineers chuckled. “Look at that!” He pointed up the valley and his finger followed one of the cañons. “How did they cut and try on that proposition?”
There, for as far as the eye could follow the turnings of the cañon way was the line of a ditch, an aqueduct, that hung some twenty to fifty feet below the edge of the cliff. It had been cut into the wall of rock, leaving a lip along the outer edge to hold in the current. Here and there, where the ragged trace of the cañon made projecting, buttressing angles, the aqueduct had been driven as a short-cut tunnel straight through. Here and there great sections of the cañon walls had fallen, while occasionally it appeared as though the outer lip had been destroyed by man-made efforts—one of the old Spanish methods of hurrying up a little ready tribute—but never had there been a possibility of using any “cut and try” method of its construction.
“Well,” remarked the first, “there goes that theory—and it isn’t original with me either—for I reckon they had to run that level first and chalk it up on the rock to cut by in some kind of a way.”