The Indians and gente del pueblo of Cajamarca have nearly as much color of dress as those of Quito, and are even more ragged and abjectly poverty-ridden. Filthy, maimed beggars adorn the façades of churches, and the aboriginals speak a mushy, mouthful, dialect of Quichua, though all know Spanish. None of the Chinese residents have families; yet every now and then one passes a child with quaintly shaped eyes that testify to the ingratiating manners of the Celestials. The “upper” classes struggle to keep the theoretically white collars and the dandified shoes that mark their caste, and dawdle through life as shopkeepers, lawyers without clients, doctors whose degrees furnish them little but the title, or at any makeshift occupation that will spare them from soiling their tapering fingers with vulgar labor. Opportunity is a rare visitor, yet in a century, perhaps, there has not been born in Cajamarca a boy with the initiative and energy to tramp three days over the western range and stow away for somewhere that he could make a man of himself. As to personal habits: a drug clerk graduated in Lima pours out of their bottles the pills he recommends, and plays them idly back and forth from one unwashed hand to the other before returning them to the shelf. Yet it was a relief to loll away several days in civilization, even Peruvianly speaking. If the passing stranger was not entirely free from the open mouth and vacant eye, he could pass a corner group without all falling silent and craning their necks after him, and might even sit down at the fonda table without all interrupting their noisy eating to mumble over their mouthful, “Where do you come from and where are you going?” But even a Peruvian department capital has not yet reached that stage which makes photography easy, or the coarsest sarcasm effective. As often as I opened my kodak, some “educated” member of society was sure to crowd close to me, keeping persistently in front of the lens; and when I had at length manoeuvered and tricked him out of the view, more or less, I was seeking, he was certain to bleat with his blandest smile, “Sacando una plancha, no, señor?” If I made answer, “No, my esteemed friend of ancient and noble blood, I am building an aeroplane on sleigh-runners to cross the icy stretches of the Amazon,” the half-baked son of the wilderness might reflect solemnly a moment or two before making some such inane reply as, “Yes, it is a long way to the Amazon.” Almost at the hour of my arrival an enamored youth of Cajamarca committed suicide, leaving a letter in which he declared life was a farce. Had he been with me through the Province of Jaen, he would have found it more nearly a melodrama. Only those who have endured the hardships of a long trail can know the compensating pleasure of a return to even comparative comfort, like the burgeoning of spring after a hard winter. But, after all, the joys of the trail in the Andes are chiefly those of anticipation, and the sense of accomplishment, of exclusiveness in tramping where few men have tramped before. For there can be slight pleasure of intercourse in towns where the youths of the “best families” follow the foreigner with cries of “Goot neeght. Awe right,” broken by snickers of silly laughter; and where dreams of long hours in something resembling a bed are rudely dispelled by the din of church-bells, the whistles of lonesome policemen, and all the thousand and one noises with which the Latin-American can make life hideous. In the matter of libraries and book-shops Peru is even less advanced than the countries to the north. There was, to be sure, a department library in Cajamarca, but “for the present” it was closed. In despair I canvassed the town for a book. A clerk whom I asked why no printed matter was to be had, replied:
“No hay aficionados á la lectura en estas partes, señor.”
“Amateurs of reading,” indeed! As one might say, aficionados of billiards, “fans” of cock-fighting; merely an amusing game to pass the time.
“But what on earth do people do with their minds?” I gasped.
“They go to church, señor,” replied the clerk.
But the best of Cajamarca is her wonderful green and checkered valley, as seen from the rocky hillock ten minutes above the main plaza, now serving as a quarry of soft, whitish stone, but on which, if anywhere, must have been the fortress historians tell us overlooked the Inca city. There is, indeed, to-day the remnants of a cobble-stone and adobe building on the summit, and cajamarquinos who climb there to enjoy the widespread view asserted that Atahuallpa used to watch from this height the rising and setting of the sun. Prescott might almost have sat on the rocky hillock in person when he wrote:
“The valley of Cajamarca, enamelled with all the beauties of cultivation, lay unrolled like a rich and variegated carpet of verdure, in strong contrast with the dark forms of the Andes that rose up everywhere about it. The vale is of oval shape, extending about five leagues in length by three in breadth, and was inhabited by a superior population to any the Spaniards had yet seen; with ten thousand houses of clay hardened in the sun and some ambitious dwellings of hewn stone.” The valley, stretching away south-southeast, is not so extensive as the reading of Prescott leads the imagination to picture. Except in one place, where it spreads out like the arms of a cross, it is surely not more than a league in width. But the suave spring view across it, green with the deep green of the cactus, and clumped now by the Australian eucalyptus in contrast to the treeless days of the Incas, is in certain moods and aspects the most beautiful of the Andes, though lacking the surrounding snowclads that add so much to the vale of Quito. Here I came often to sit above the murmur of the town, until the God of the Incas, after his daily journey around the earth to see that all was well, sank behind the broad páramo of Yanacancha, blotting out the valley stretching away to the southward where the trail following the old Inca highway down the backbone of the continent, was already beckoning me on.
CHAPTER XI
DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL
Tramping down the Andes is like walking on the ridge of a steep roof; there is a constant tendency to slip off on one side or the other and slide down to the Pacific or the Amazon. The Latin-American is only too prone to follow the line of least resistance, and that line is not along the crest of the Andes where the more manly Incas traveled. The villager obliged to journey to another town of the Sierra a hundred miles north or south will ride muleback something more than that to the nearest port, take ship to another harbor, and ride another hundred miles up into the interior to his destination. Hence the excellent highway that might have been built down all the backbone of the continent, or at least the Inca one that might have been kept up, does not exist. Each community is confined to its own valley and cut off from the rest by almost untrodden mountain ranges, or by trackless bare ridges where only sheep and their hardy shepherds can live. Under the beneficent rule of the Incas means of intercommunication were infinitely better than to-day; then, roads and bridges were kept in constant repair, and in all exposed parts, at intervals along the cold punas and among the mountain gorges, were government tambos with shelter and food for both man and llamas.
To journey from Cajamarca to Lima would have been easy; I had only to hire a mule to Pacasmayo and catch a passing steamer. But to reach there by the route I had proposed to myself was another matter. Even Raimondi’s famous map of Peru, in 25 folios, over which I spent a morning in the prefect’s parlor, offered scanty information, a few faint lines representing trails leading almost anywhere except where I would go. The only route at all suited to my purpose seemed to be one through Huamachuco and Huraraz, and along the valley of the Santa river. Near the source of this it looked as if I must turn back almost due north and climb over the uninhabited, snowclad Cordillera Central, whence it might be possible to reach Cerro de Pasco. Local information was not even equal to the assertion of Prescott—who had never been nearer South America than the southern coast of Massachusetts—that “the messengers of Pizarro from Caxamalca to Cuzco followed the elevated regions of the Cordillera through many populous towns, of which the chief were Guamachuco, Guánuco, and Xauxa.” At best I had to leave the scene of Atahuallpa’s undoing with little knowledge of where I was going, except southward.