Determined not to celebrate my nation’s birthday as I had my own, I forced my leaden legs to carry me on an afternoon stroll through the famous mining town. The steel-blue skies of Cerro de Pasco, three miles aloft and boasting itself the highest city in the world, are clear beyond any description in mere words. Not once during my sojourn there was the penetrating brilliancy flecked by the slightest whiff of cloud. The sun blazed down with an intensity that burned the cheeks as at the open mouth of a puddling-furnace; yet even at blinding noon-time the cold had a power of penetration unknown to a northern mid-winter day on which the mercury falls far lower. Those who ascend “the Hill” from Lima complain of a leaden inertia and pains varying in intensity and duration, brought on by an altitude that is fatal to weak hearts and to victims of pneumonia. Inured to the heights and scantiness of air almost unbrokenly from far-off Bogotá, I had no consciousness of any such effects.
Nearly a mile from the hospital, the American town, of stone buildings and even less attractive structures, such as the “Tin Can,” an ugly, red, sheet-iron barracks that houses the garden variety of gringo employees, scattered among bare, protruding rocks of a landscape dreary beyond conception, gives way to the old familiar Peruvian huts and hovels. These, in turn, develop further on into two-story dwellings above and shops below, often quaint and striking in architecture. If any city of Peru may be called “unique” in appearance, it is “el Cerro.” Even in the center of the town, roofs of ancient, weather-faded straw alternate with those of wavy sheet-iron; instead of the monotonously square blocks of other Andean cities, its older section is a tangle of narrow streets and misshapen buildings, like a change from our Middle West to Boston. Perched on the summit of the world, with scarcely a knoll overtopping it, or the suggestion of a shrub to shelter it, “the Cerro” is the unhampered playground of icy mountain winds laden with coal-dust, stinging sand, and the soot and smoke and powdered ore from its mines. Bronzed foreigners and miners in leather leggings and hob-nailed boots, squeaking through the streets afoot, or astride Texas-saddled mules, lend the place an air of modernity, for all its swarms of bovine-mannered Indians. In contrast, droves of llamas, with gaily colored ribbons in their ears, slip past in noiseless dignity, or stand in patient groups before a chichería, awaiting their drivers. The hardware and similar trades offer stocks unknown to those sections of the Andes where the imports depend on transportation “en lomo de mula.” Even the pulperías are well-supplied with foodstuffs, testifying to the American influence. From a dust-swirling knoll rising a bit above the rest the eye is gladdened by the glimpse of a cold-blue lake of considerable size, strangely beautiful in its drear and dismal setting. From this point of vantage, too, the stranger becomes aware that “el Cerro” is much more of a city than he suspected, filling the great lap of a repulsive, barren range, and stretching away in several directions under belching smoke-stacks.
The arrieros with whom I left Huallanga, and the family inhabiting the hut shown in the preceding picture
The immaculate staff of the Cerro de Pasco hospital
Twelve days I had tarried in Cerro de Pasco, and had advanced from my original ailment to one distinctly more serious, when I concluded to descend to Lima while I still had strength to do so. The company physician-in-chief collected a fee that more than doubled my expenditures since leaving Quito, and spared himself the annoyance of penning a receipt, or of any other formality beyond that of dropping the handful of gold sovereigns into his pocket on his breathless morning round. The night sky was turning slightly more transparent along the cold eastern horizon when I tottered out of the hospitable Cerro de Pasco hospital on my way to the station. The second-class car was a stoveless ice-box, densely packed with Indians and all the bath-fearing aboriginal is accustomed to carry with him. A glance at it sufficed to dissipate my resolution to save a sovereign from the wreck of my fortune. The first-class coach was an American car scantily filled with white-collar Peruvians and weather-, experience-, and liquor-marked Americans under forty, “husky” in build and untrammelled in manners. The wintry July dawn climbed up over the far edge of the bleak, treeless world, and at Smelter, cheerless beyond words in the new-born daylight, we were joined by more cold-faced Americans, wrapped, as were also many of the natives, in huge neck-roll sweaters. Dressed even in all the clothing I possessed, I kept my poncho close about me, for the coal-stove in the front end of the car was no match for the frigidity of the vast ichu-brown pampa de Junín across which we were soon speeding. Only by frequently scratching a peep-hole in the frosted window could I gaze out upon the drear yellow world, with its snow peaks rising slightly above it in the distance and its great flocks of cold-impervious llamas feeding along the way between ice-coated streams and pools. Off in both directions stood scattered, stone huts with pampa-grass roofs, before which barefoot (brr!) Indian women stood or squatted, and scantily clad children gazed after the train with the stolidity and indifference to the bitter cold of the adobe images they somehow suggested. Here was the scene of the great battle of Junín in which the soldiers of Bolívar defeated the Spanish host; but it is not likely that either pursued or pursuers dripped with perspiration. A dreary walk, indeed, this would have been across the icy, endless, yellow pampa.
A brilliant sun popped up instantly in a faultless sky, like some jack-in-the-box suddenly released; but though it flooded all the visible world with golden light, it brought slight warmth. Beside each seat of our car was an electric button, and beneath it a list of possibilities, in English and Spanish. One had only to press it and presto! a big black negro—no, my memories of other days deceive me; no big black negro would get this high in the world, unless he were dragged there by main force—a little, dapper, noiseless, inscrutable, white-jacketed Chinaman slipped down upon one and lent an attentive, yet haughty ear into which one whispered the desires of the inner man, tempered by a subconscious regard for one’s purse; calling modestly for toast and coffee, if one were a mere American vagabond who had recently fallen among thiev—beg pardon, physicians; or for the “whole damn works,” which meant the same coffee and toast plus a plate of bacon and eggs, if one were an American miner homeward bound, to whom money is as water to the man whose pocket holdeth a quart bottle of concentrated joyfulness. Across the aisle were two such, from whom sounded now and then some pleasant anticipation of homecoming:
“An’ when I get back to Pittsburgh I’m goin’ into the —— House bar and tell Joe to mix me a real, honest-to-God gin-ricky. An’ when he says ‘Where t’ell you been these two years, Hank?’ I’ll jus’ say ‘Diggin’ coal down in Goyllaris—hic—quisca, Joe,’ an’ he’ll call the bouncer to throw me out.”
A big, blue lake, Chinchaycocha, on the distant right drew the eyes toward it; then came a brief halt at the town of Junín, an extensive collection of cobble-stone huts and fences, with a two-tower church in their midst and steam rising on the wintry air from the nostrils of every living being. Then at last, after an extended, wandering search, the train found the rocky bed of a small river, and wound and squirmed with it through half-hidden openings in the hills until a long-drawn masculine whistle caused us to scratch a new peep-hole in the frosted window, to find Oroya rising up to meet us.