Though within a few degrees of the equators, Huaráz, capital of the most populous department of Peru, has a veritable Swiss setting of snow-clad peaks and glaciers
Threshing wheat with the aid of the wind. In the few regions of the Andes that are neither too high nor too low for this grain, the methods of cultivation are the most primitive
Fortunately the wife of an Indian of Recuay celebrated that Sunday so effectually that she brought to bed her companions in a drunken brawl. The gobernador fined her twenty soles. Her husband possessed only ten, and her wails from the adobe cárcel were interfering with the bargaining in the market-place. Summoned by the walking scarecrow who boasted himself the lieutenant-governor, the head of the disrupted household admitted, after a wealth of subterfuges, that he owned two mules in condition for a journey, and the gobernador, pocketing “in the name of justice” the sovereign I handed him, ordered the abject husband to be ready at six in the morning to accompany me to Huallanga.
Some two leagues further up the contracted valley we crossed the now tiny Santa by a bridge of sticks and, catching the gorge of a little stream fed by the glaciers above, plunged due east into the mountains. The sun had burned our faces in the river valley; an hour afterward it was cold as late November. Rain began, but quickly turned to a mixture of hail and snow. Dusk overtook us at the foot of a mighty glacier, though not until we had sighted one of the rare shepherd’s huts that huddled in an occasional stony hollow. These miserable Indian chozas of the upper heights are built of cobble-stones heaped up to the height of a dog-kennel and covered with brown ichu grass, hardly as large and quite as crude as those the beaver fashions, defending their miserable inmates neither from wind nor rain. A single room, which can only be entered on hands and knees, houses the whole family, whom a sheepskin or two serves as bed, and two or three earthen pots as utensils in which to cook their scanty fare over an ichu or dried-dung fire in the center of the windowless hovel. Totally indifferent to wealth or comfort, with hardly fuel enough for cooking purposes, the stolid inhabitants slink into their squalid dens as soon as the sun has withdrawn his genial rays, and shiver through a night during which they get almost no unbroken sleep. With scarcely enough food to keep themselves from starvation, the house swarms of mangy curs that curl up among them by night, and which, being never fed, dash greedily at any offal, like the pigs of Central America. Here there was a second kennel, oval in shape, which the woman permitted us to occupy, because she was asked in her own tongue by one of her own people. Both she and her half-dozen children were barefoot and in scanty garb, yet appeared completely indifferent to the icy cold which, if less in degrees than in a Canadian mid-winter, was more penetrating. We carried blankets sufficient to pass the night comfortably, huddled close together, but as often as I stepped out into the brilliant moonlight in which the ice-fields above us stood forth like fissured and fantastic ghost-castles, the very marrow in my bones seemed to congeal.
Hoar-frost covered the earth, and ice a half-inch thick lay on the stagnant puddles when we set out in the bitter cold dawn across a region drear in the extreme. Stiff, stony climbs carried us up to the very edges of immense blue-white glaciers, and through patches of snow that threw the sharp rays of the highland sun into our eyes and faces like a spray of needles. The day was as laborious as any I had ever spent afoot,—thirty-six miles over the wintry, rock-pitched double crest of the Central Cordillera on a mule who jolted my unaccustomed frame to a loose-jointed wreck before I finally slid gratefully to the ground in the bleak mining-town of Huallanga. This was a slight oasis of imported life in a wild, almost uninhabited region, the Peruvian mine-manager of which was extraordinary from at least two points of view,—he was blond as a Norseman, and so advanced in his customs that I dared even address his wife directly at table.
Next day I joined—for a decided consideration—the caravan of a local merchant whose arrieros were bound for Cerro de Pasco with a troop of cargo-animals. A “civilized” Indian, that is, one who wore shoes and spoke Spanish, called for me with a half-size horse, the crude native saddle covered with a pellón, the hairy saddle-rug all high-caste horsemen use in this region, and soon after noon we jogged away down a stony little river. The merchant had duly and honestly warned me that, being only pack-animals, his chuscos were gifted with no gentle pace. But he had not warned me that I was joining a way-freight. I drew on ahead in spite of myself, and when, barely eight miles from Huallanga, the shrieks and whistles of the drivers died out behind, I waited a half-hour in vain, then went back some distance to find them lassoing the animals one by one, piling their loads or pack-saddles in a hollow square, and turning them loose with their front feet crudely hobbled. There were nineteen animals, mostly in ballast, attended by four arrieros. Too lazy apparently to unsling their pots and cook supper, the patched and weather-faded quartet munched a bit of parched corn and a sheet of sun-dried beef, and sat all night drinking and wailing maudlin ballads. The “tent” stretched over the packs was so low that I had to lie down on the ground and roll under it, and so thin that the rain dripped in upon me almost in streams.
It was still black night when the water-soaked canvas was pulled off me, and I found the arrieros already engaged in a riotous effort to round up the animals. This was no simple task, in spite of the hobbles, and the morning was well advanced before the last of the troop had been lassoed and loaded. During the operation I suggested that we prepare at least a pot of tea, but Valenzuela, the chief arriero, dismissed the matter with a grimace and a “neither wood nor grass will burn after the rain,” and I could only choke my hunger with a rock-hard lump of bread and shiver under my poncho until I mounted, this time a mule, to spare the animal of the day before.
We followed the river-gorge so long that it turned almost uncomfortably warm. Then suddenly abandoning the highway to modern Huánuco and the roundabout, but warm and well-populated, route to Cerro de Pasco, the arrieros drove the animals pell-mell up a steep gorge between towering mountain walls, by what looked like a spillway from a stone-crusher. This was the very route I should have chosen, for while the longer one would have been more comfortable, this followed very closely the ancient Inca highway. Topping the horizon, we trotted on across an enormous, brown-yellow plain of scanty ichu vegetation that stretched away to the hazy foot of what looked from this height like low hills. Here was just such a place as the Incas, requiring an unbroken outlook over the surrounding world and grazing land for their llamas, chose for their cities. I was not surprised, therefore, to find a long expanse of the páramo covered with hundreds of stone ruins, only the walls still standing, from one to eight feet high, in broken, fantastic disarray. This was “Huánuco el Viejo,” which the Spaniards found an important city at the time of the Conquest, but which the less hardy half-breed descendants abandoned, as in so many cases, for a warmer valley, eighteen leagues to the east. History does not reach back to the origin of old Huánuco, the ruins of which still occupy almost a square mile of the silent, utterly uninhabited plain. The road—a mere interweaving of faint paths across the Andean prairie—passed within five hundreds yards of the ruins, but the caravan pushed on without a halt, as if these monuments of their ancestors were mere stone-heaps, unworthy a glance of attention. I turned and trotted away across the plain, bathed in the cold, glaring sunshine of the Andean plateau, toward the site. Valenzuela, after a shout of protest, stuck close on my heels, whether out of fear that I would decamp with the mule, or lay hands on some old Inca treasure, or from some superstition connected with the “Gentiles,” I do not know. There was really little to be seen. Every one of the countless ruins of large and small buildings, arranged more or less in squares, were sections of cobble-stone walls, mere stone-heaps without sign of mortar, as crude as the chozas of shepherds, now fallen until, in many places, only their symmetrical arrangement suggested the hand of man. To this there was only one exception. Some three hundred yards from the rest of the ruins was a rectangular fortress of carefully cut and nicely fitted stone blocks, with suggestions of cement, now mere walls, some fifteen feet high, filled level full of earth on which the drear ichu grew as thickly as on the surrounding plain. Except in extent, the ruins were not to be compared with those of Marca-Huamachuco, though the “castillo” closely resembled in construction and stone-fitting the single monument of Ingapirca in southern Ecuador.