“Caramba, it is true! In Ann Arbor life is calm and quiet; but you ought to see what some of the betados who are sent to Paris and Rome bring back with them! Válgame Diós!”
The valley of Cajabamba leans decidedly to the west, whence the next day was largely one of mounting. But the region is so high that climbing was not laborious in the invigorating mountain air that cuts into the lungs like strong wine; and even a man inclined to that frailty could not have felt lonely with so much of the world spread out in plain sight about him. There were few long spaces without houses or pack-trains. Once I fell in with a government chasqui driving a horse and an ass laden with sacks of mail, among which stood out one marked conspicuously: “U. S. Mail
Foreign.” The correspondence, he assured me, was not bound for the “exterior,” but was merely local matter between towns of the route that had been farmed out to him, a statement that was confirmed at the next post-office.
A mighty crack in the earth, into and out of which the trail zigzagged like some badly wounded creature, marked my exit at last from the department of Cajamarca into that of Libertad. The ancient Inca highway is said to have followed this same route over these high, undulating plains, but there were no certain vestiges of it. In the late afternoon I burst suddenly out upon a broad view of the famous old city of Huamachuco, much like Quito in setting, though more dreary, backed by a ragged, black range, half cut off by a nearer slope, that might have been Pichincha itself, the two peaks streaked with the first snow I had seen since leaving central Ecuador.
Traverso had given me a note of introduction to his compadre, Dr. Alva, the médico titular of Huamachuco. As government doctor, the only physician, indeed, within two hard days’ ride in any direction, he drew—theoretically, at least—a salary of $150 a month, exceeding even that of the haughty subprefect. The “son” of a hamlet far up in the hills, he was a plain, earnest, little man with a heart several times larger than the average of his fellow-countrymen. From his lips the stereotyped “Here you are in your own house” had real meaning. His library included Spanish editions of Taine, Nietzsche, Emerson—and Roosevelt; his phonograph was of high grade and his records well chosen. Edison was his ideal of manhood—indeed, a straw vote in the Andes would certainly show the “wizard of Orange” the most popular American—and he was wont to boast jokingly that his own name was the same as one of those of the inventor, “showing that some of our ancestors were the same.” Toward the end of my stay I discovered that the doctor, having installed me in his well-furnished “guest-room,” was himself huddling out the cold nights on a bag of straw and a wooden table in the mud den behind his “office.”
It was not until we had grown rather well acquainted that Dr. Alva confided to me the fact that he had “worked his way” through the medical school of Lima, “even acting as waiter, señor, in a fonda, and working in the summer like any peon. But don’t whisper a word of this to anyone in Peru,” he implored, as if he suddenly regretted having taken me into his confidence.
“Up in my country those of us who did that are inclined to boast of it,” I laughed.
“Ah, sí, señor, I know,” he answered in an undertone, glancing cautiously about him, “I know; even Tomás Alva Edison was a newsboy. But if Huamachuco ever hears of it I shall be a social outcast, ranked with the Indians of the market-place.”
Huamachuco derives its name, if local authority is trustworthy, from the Quichua words huama (snow) and chuco (cap), the peak behind the town having in earlier centuries been completely snow-topped. It is the “Guamachuco” of Prescott, to which Hernando Pizarro was sent soon after the capture of Atahuallpa, to investigate the rumor that an army was being raised to rescue the imperial prisoner. Even to-day its population is largely Indian, among whom the chewing of coca leaves is general—the first place south of Almaguer in Colombia of which this could be said.
But the Huamachuco of to-day does not exactly coincide with that of Pizarro’s time. The effete descendants of a more hardy race have crawled down into a sheltering valley, leaving uninhabited the ancient “city of the Gentiles” on the mountain above. A local editor, apparently for no better reason than the pleasure of basking in a gringo smile, offered to serve me as guide. A stony road flanked ever higher along a perpendicular rock-wall, then rose and fell over lofty undulations, and at some six miles from the modern town brought us to the first ruins. Far below, across a deep quebrada, lay, like a relief map, the great rectangle of a ruined city, in perfect squares, the roofless stone gables standing forth in fantastic array above a forest of low trees. This was Viracochapampa, or “Plain of the Nobles,” the resident city at the time of the Conquest. Through its broad central street passed the great Inca highway from Quito to Cuzco.
But that was the least important part of ancient Huamachuco. Here on the barren mountain-top stood in olden times Marca-Huamachuco, protecting the dwelling-place on the stony plain below. Above the modern town are still to be found remnants of the cuchilla, or stone trough by which the ancient race brought water to this lofty summit by some system that has been lost in the haze of time. About us, as we advanced, rose ruin after stone ruin of what had evidently been an elaborate series of fortresses. These spread mile upon mile across the rugged, undulating tableland, some densely interwoven with brambles and impenetrable thickets, all surrounded by the utter silence of a world long since abandoned by man and brute. Indeed, the place was less remarkable for its construction than for the vast extent of the ruins. Several large edifices, square or triangular in shape, were built of huge blocks of stone, still in the same form in which they might have been found as mountain boulders, and, unlike the fortress of Ingapirca, nowhere nicely fitted together. On the contrary, nearly every joint was filled in with chips of stone, and in the thick interior walls had been used a sort of crude concrete, now mere gravelly mud that could be picked out with the fingers. Whether Marca-Huamachuco was built by an earlier people, or by a more careless tribe of the race that left behind the cut-stone palaces of Cuzco, their method of construction did not make for durability. The ruins were all serrated and tooth-shaped, with only here and there a jagged point suggesting the original height, the whole cutting the far-off horizon with a fantastic, broken sky-line. An enormous wall had evidently once surrounded the entire peak, and beyond, set close together, was a series of almost round fortresses, each of three stone walls, one inside the other. One more carefully constructed edifice gave evidence of having been the chief palace, and from it stretched an unobstructed view of all the surrounding landscape, in which an advancing enemy might have been sighted league upon league away in any direction.