But the director persisted in the unhistorical relationship, in which he was confirmed by an assistant, in spite of the fact that the figure in question represented a man some fifteen years younger than the chief Conquistador.
“Why is the back of Almagro’s head missing?”
“Ah, señor,” sighed the director, with a shrug of the shoulders, “What would you? The Chilians cut out this picture and carried it home. It used to be several feet longer, and there were many other caballeros in the group.”
Among whom was the real Almagro, no doubt. I made the circuit of the gallery, then turned an inquiring eye on my companion.
“Ah—er—you are looking for the picture that used to be here?” he stammered, quick to catch my expression.
“Yes, the famous portrait of Pizarro.”
“Well, it used to hang right here,” said the director, pointing to a blank space on the wall, as at some object of extraordinary interest. “But a few weeks ago the Señor Presidente de la República sent for it, because he wants it in his own house.”
On my return I dropped in at the University of San Marcos, oldest in America and antedating our most ancient by nearly a century. It was pitifully like other Latin-American schools. The rector, having led me through a dozen empty school-rooms grouped about several patios, and having given the history in detail of a collection of silver cups “graciously awarded the University” by the king of this and the emperor of that, expressed unbounded surprise that I should wish to see a class at work. When it became evident that he could not shake me off with babbling courtesies, he pointed out the door of a class in law and disappeared, as if he would not have it known who was responsible for the unusual intrusion. Some twenty-five young men, not so young either, being almost all adorned with mustaches, were lounging on benches of the amphitheater. The professor, comfortably seated in a sort of pulpit, was reading in a languid and utterly dispassionate voice—not a lecture he had himself prepared, but from a book purchasable at a dollar or two, and readable, I trust, by the students themselves. Meanwhile the students napped, wrote letters, exchanged jokes, and discussed with their neighbors the extraordinary advent of a stranger in their midst. No doubt they had some other means and place of acquiring the knowledge indispensable even to a South American lawyer; but what they gained by attending classes was hard to guess. I had been the object of curiosity for some time before the professor caught sight of me. He left off reading at once, and sparred for time with a string of stale pedagogical jokes until I saw fit to remove my annoying presence. Other class-rooms demonstrated that famous old San Marcos is still in the world of long ago, its methods of instruction as antiquated as its text-books, heritages of a Jesuitical past, unavoidably so because of the rarity of Spanish translations of modern works.
During all July my ambition remained at a low ebb, and my most extended acquaintance was with the medical profession. “Yu Sui, Herbolario de Pekin, physician extraordinary to his Excellency, the Chinese Minister,” assured me I had dysentery, but no fever, and concocted the daily bottle of herbs accordingly. The chief Italian specialist based his treatment on the fact that I had fever, but no dysentery. Fortunately Lima has not yet been invaded by that sect that would have robbed me of the gloomy pleasure of having anything. Every gringo who had ever ventured a hundred miles into the interior had his own individual “sure cure”; and I had reached the point where I would have worn a tin charm about my neck, had anyone asserted it efficacious. Yet when once I had discovered a real physician, Anglo-Saxon in blood and of tropical experience, the remedy—intermuscular injections of emetine—was quickly effective.
A no less potent factor in the recovery, however, was the hospitality of mine own people in Bellavista (“Beyabi’ta,” locally) on the outskirts of Callao. Genuine electric-cars sped across the cool, flat country in a brief half-hour, from the capital to the edge of the Pacific I had not seen since landing in Cartagena thirteen months before. Here it was often brilliant summer, and from the housetop promenade spread out all Callao harbor, jutting La Punta, and the island of San Lorenzo in their intense blue setting, and perhaps even the snow-white line of the Sierra, while over the capital, a bare eight miles away, hung the opaque, mid-winter blanket of haze and gloom. The beach was near at hand, the sea-breeze constant, and the soporific roar of the surf never silent. The landscape, flat and arid, had a charm of its own, and a network of mud fences, on the broad tops of which one might promenade for miles.