Here the American train and roadbed abandoned us to the tender mercies of the Ferrocarril Central, theoretically under English management, but in practice dismally Latin-American from cow-catcher to trailing draw-bar. Packed into the far corner of a seat upholstered only in name, I had frozen from toes to the bottom of my poncho for two mortal hours before the Peruvian engineer came to an understanding with the Peruvian conductor and station-master, and dragged us slowly out of town. From a spot on the earth—and nothing more—called Ticlio, summit of the line, we began the long coast down to the Pacific, through all the customary 65 tunnels, 67 bridges and 16 switchbacks, where for the brakes to lose control would have been to land us in Hades instead of Lima. Hour after hour the arid, savage scenery slid upward. Here the train glided serenely along on the bottomless edge of things; now and again we came out directly above, a thousand feet above, a dusty, rock-scattered town, with rows of stones laid on the sheet-iron roofs to keep them from escaping such dreary surroundings, and zigzagged an hour, often on six tracks one above the other, down to it, only to continue the descent as swiftly beyond. A score of places recalled the story of the young graduate engineer who protested to the American whose name is forever linked with this engineering feat, “Why, Meiggs, we can’t run a railroad along there in that sliding shale!” “Can’t, eh?” the anecdote continues, “Well, young man, that’s just where she’s got to go, and if you can’t find room for her on the ground, we’ll hang her from balloons.”
Bit by bit the Andes began to take on slight touches of green. The Rimac, chattering downward toward the sea, gave us more and more elbow-room, the well-dressed town of Chosica flashed past us like an oasis of civilization, and we sped in truly metropolitan fashion on down the darkening valley, surrounded by whole mountains of broken rock, tufts of cactus and a few hardy willows drinking their life from the widening stream, on toward the glowing sunset and into the black night. Electric lights, real lights in their full candle-power, began to dot the darkness, then flashed past us, throwing their insolent glare into our dust-veiled faces; the roar of a real city, with clanging street-cars and rumbling wagons rose about us; a long station-platform crowded with an urban throng came to a halt beside us, and I descended in the thickness of the summer night in the City of Kings, three miles below where I had stepped forth that morning into the wintry dawn.
CHAPTER XIII
ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL
It is due, I suppose, to some error in my make-up that my interest in any given corner of the earth fades in proportion as it approaches modern civilization and easy accessibility. To your incurable vagabond may come a momentary thrill, if not of pleasure, at least of contentment, with the feel of city pavements once more under his feet after long hand to hand combat with the wilderness, and the knowledge that to go a journey he has only to signal an electric street-car on the nearest corner. But the attraction quickly palls. Visions of the winding trail soon begin again to torture him with their solicitations, the placid ways of urban man take on a drab and colorless artificiality, and once more the realization comes that to him life offers genuine satisfaction only when he is struggling onward toward some distant and possibly unattainable goal.
Such a place is Lima. The former capital of Spanish America has, to be sure, its points of interest; old colonial palaces where the shades of cloaked viceroys seem still to linger, cloistered walls inclosing the tonsured and cowled atmosphere of the Middle Ages, narrow streets with long vistas of overhanging Moorish balconies wherein still lurks the charm of other days. But these things are all but buried under the stereotyped conveniences and commonplace manners of the modern world. Upon the romance and air of antiquity of a Spanish city of long ago, transplanted to this sandy coast, has intruded the aggressive urge of commerce; from between the carved mahogany bars of quaint miradores peers the face of trade; in and out of massive old wooden street-doors studded with brass come bales of merchandise, often stacked high in the beautiful patios and secluded retreats of former generations. Here, for the first time in South America, were rumors of strikes and complaints of the “servant problem.” Workmen and domestics, advanced already to a scale of wages about half that of our own land, were coming more and more to a knowledge of their worth and power, their striving unfortunately taking that ultra-modern form of careless workmanship and insolence. Here, for the first time, the militant “cost of living” weighed down on the mass of mankind like a leaden blanket. Lima’s thousand and one restaurants—why do none of them seek a virgin field in the highlands?—serve their clients with the mechanical impersonality of world capitals. Like the population, these show that absence of a “middle class” characteristic of Latin-American society, the marked contrast of the great bulk of sandaled poor rubbing shoulders with faultless Parisian attire; either they are repulsive workingmen’s “dumps,” or outwardly regal in manner and inwardly of purse-flattening properties, where nothing national and unique is to be found, unless it be some rare local delicacy, such as asado de chivito,—roast leg of young goat. Whatever exclusive and characteristic remains on the surface is grouped in and about the great covered market-place, where long rows of strange indigenous and familiar foreign wares stretch in many-hued and quaint juxtaposition, or hovers about a few surviving customs of bygone days, such as the milkman—who is more often a woman—making his morning round astride horse or mule, with his cans hanging like saddle-bags from between his legs.
He who comes down upon them from above will find the people of the coast more vivacious than those of the chilly upper Andes, where the perennial gauntness of nature inclines to perpetual gloom. The limeño has been likened to the Andalusian in his fondness for dress, variety, and dissipation, in his gaiety and quickness of wit, his open frankness and tendency to extravagance. Certainly his speech has the lisp of Andalusia—“Do’ copita’ de pi’co, señore’”—and his Castilian has not the purity of that of Bogotá. Yet his gaiety is only comparative. There is an innate gloominess and passive pessimism everywhere in South American society that cannot but strike the visitor who comes direct from more favored lands. The morose Indian of the uplands forms a scarcely noticeable part of the population of Lima. On those rare occasions when he comes down, or more often is brought as a conscript to serve his time as soldier in the capital, he often falls quick victim to the white plague, which finds easy breeding-place in the disused cells of his overdeveloped lungs, built for the scant, thin air of the Sierra. The cholo or mestizo, commonly of a lesser percentage of aboriginal than of Spanish blood, makes up the bulk of the population. Then there is the zambo, bred of the intermingling of the Indian and negro, a robust, stubborn, and revengeful fellow. Merchants from all the varying nationalities of Europe keep shop side by side, with an intermingling of “Turks” and even more distant races, and American engineers stride through the streets at all hours of the day. Yet Lima is essentially a Spanish-American city, for all that; where the pallid, waxy complexion of the gente decente is much in evidence. The women of this caste are often beautiful; so, for that matter, are the men. In a population that may almost be termed cosmopolitan, the Chinaman holds a considerable place. After the abolition of slavery in 1855, large numbers of coolies were imported for the plantations of the Peruvian coast, and Celestials of higher caste have since taken advantage of Peru’s open-door policy and the Japanese steamship lines. So that to-day there are temples and joss-houses and opium dens in Lima, and men in “European” dress, who are not Europeans, lean in the doorways of old colonial mansions transformed into Oriental shops. The Chinese of Lima occupy a wider field of activity than almost anywhere else in the Western hemisphere. Not only is a large percentage of the retail and restaurant business in their hands, but scores of herbolarios, “herbists,” we might say, have stretched their signs across the old-time façades and blinded miradores of what were in viceregal days the residences of haughty families. Only the old men still cling to the national dress, and the pigtail has entirely disappeared. Here, too, the Chinaman sinks to depths not familiar to us of the north, and not only does the race furnish many of the street-sweepers of the capital, but it is no rare sight to see an oval-eyed personification of poverty hobbling along the main thoroughfares “shooting snipes” in the gutters.
The “masses” of Lima dwell in vecindades, which are none the less tenements for being packed together on the ground floor along either side of narrow callejones, blind alleys in which all the activities of the household from baby’s bath to the worship of a tin Virgin intermingle, instead of being piled one above the other. The better houses are spacious and airy within, though outwardly monotonous, built of mud and cane and plaster, their façades here resembling marble at a distance, there painted pale blue, or pink, or yellow. In the mud-and-bamboo Cathedral, the most imposing in appearance in Spanish America, the mummified skeleton of Pizarro, the jaws wired like those of some prehistoric creature in a museum, is made a peep-show, after the crude Spanish fashion. The “Cine” has all but driven out the theater and whatever of national or racial the latter brought with it. The visitor who knows no Spanish could easily guess the business of a shop announcing itself a “Plomería y Gasfitería.” The Lima barber, calling his establishment a “Peluquería y Perfumería,” leaves no doubt as to what effeminate fate may befall one who ventures into his den.
This mid-winter season of July and August, they say, is no time to see Lima at its best. The traveler who has been a thousand times assured that rain never falls on the coast of Peru will be astonished to find the streets often slimy and soaking wet with garúa, the Scotch mist that turns everything clammy and chill, yet never reaches the point where the shops find it worth while to include umbrellas among their stock. For days, and even weeks, the sun is invisible, and the capital lies heavy under leaden skies and a muggy blanket of mist, cold, dank, and gloomy. That is a rare day in this season when a brilliant sun makes it worth while to climb San Cristobal hill, a bare, peaked, rock-and-shale pyramid rising close above Lima on the north, from which he who has chosen his time well may catch a view not only of Callao and its island framed by the intense blue of the Pacific, but of the snowclads of the Sierra. The city with its 160,000 inhabitants lies flat in its arid setting, the disk of the bull-ring in the foreground, an irregular triangle with its base resting on the babbling Rimac, without chimneys, almost without smoke-stacks; for its industries are still chiefly confined to handicraft. The red tiles that give the prevailing color to the cities of the Andes are here unknown. The roofs, made of sticks and mud, are flat, like those of Palestine, and are the family promenades and garbage-grounds, and the abode of smaller live stock, especially of roosters, whose raucous saluting of each new day is not to be escaped by the most fortunate resident. Cock-fighting is still the most popular sport of the cholo classes. It is impossible to appear in public without being pestered by a constant procession of suerteros—offering suerte, or luck—vendors of lottery-tickets who fill the streets with their bawling from morning—late morning, for Lima is no early riser—to midnight.
For all its modern aspect, Lima is still Latin-American in temperament. Dawn brings to light personal habits little less reprehensible than those of Quito. A package of films mailed from the United States cost me two days of red-tape at the post-office, and the charges exceeded the original cost. A dozen bags of mail from the north were lost in Callao harbor through the inexcusable carelessness of the bargemen; the government refused to make reparation to the addressees on the ground that the law relieved it of responsibility for “unavoidable losses by shipwreck!” An abortive revolution enlivened the last days of July. Strolling into the plaza one evening, I was jostled by a group of youthful roughs firing revolvers into the air as they went. That night the mob assaulted the home of a former president, with casualties of three killed and a dozen wounded, and the executive of a year before was lodged in a cell at the penitentiary. Yet the films at a “Cine” a block away ran on without a tremor, and but for the fact that the shops took down their shutters somewhat later than usual, there was nothing left next morning to recall the occurrence. A few days later the principal newspaper announced solemnly that the ex-president had gone to Panama “for motives of health.”
The national museum was officially open, though unofficially closed, on the day of my visit. But the experienced traveler can always win his point with the doorkeeper of a South American institution, and I was soon treading the resounding halls between lines of a dead world’s relics. Mummies from prehistoric days, their knees drawn up to their chins, a look half of disgust, half of pain on their osseous features, squatted along a wall. Some were still covered with many-colored wrappings, enclosing in clumsy bundles not merely their bodies, but all their possessions, their protruding heads still in fantastic masks and wigs, just as they had been found in the burial caves of the Sierra. Others, reputed Incas, were contained in huge bales in which they stood erect, as befitted their high caste, their heads unmasked, the whole covered with a well-preserved linen-like cloth. The floor of one large room was completely covered with hundreds of skulls in careful rows. Some showed prehistoric trepanning, irregular holes sawed out of them, and the subsequent growth of the bone proving that the warrior had lived long after his overthrow in battle. A drowsy cholo was breaking up skeletons and clawing earth out of skulls with the expressionless placidity with which he might have sorted potatoes.