One Sunday during convalescence I visited ancient Pachacámac. Swift interurban cars bore us through morning-misty Miraflores and Barranco to Chorillos, proudest watering-place of the rainless Peruvian coast, where we mounted horses and rode away into the desert by a broad trail that paralleled the shore within hearing of the dull roll of the surf. It was a veritable Sahara, in which the sand, everywhere ankle-deep, lay in wind-blown ridges. The horizon rose before us as at sea, and the mirage of heat-waves seemed rivers flowing landward. The uncorrected imagination is wont to picture the coast of Peru as utterly flat, as well as sandy. It is so only in part. Hills of sand that were almost mountains stretched down to the sea, like buttresses fashioned to support the mammoth wall of the Andes that bounded the horizon on the left. The summits of many were hidden in mists, the garúa from which had given life to the brilliant green lomas and patches where flocks feed in certain seasons; and the smiling valley of Lurín, watered by a stream smaller than the Rimac and still cold from the snows above, was as inviting in its contrast to the repulsive, naked hills as any desert oasis. Down on the floor of the valley this, too, seemed sandy and dry, but the acequias that still water it, as in the days of the Incas, sustain a wilderness of scrubby trees, among which a chiefly negro population lolls in open-work huts. Nature seems to have arranged her seasons with foresight here; for when the garúa gives way to blazing summer, the rainy season and the melting snows above swell the rivers to a volume that affords widespread irrigation.
Pachacámac, the Animator of the Universe, not to be confused with the Sun-god of the Incas, had his temple on the edge of this forbidding waste of sand, overlooking the sea that chafes incessantly at its feet. It was the Benares of the ancient Peruvians, not merely because it drew pilgrims from all the surrounding world, but because here those who could brought and disposed of their dead. Conquered by the Incas nearly two centuries before the coming of the Spaniards, a Temple of the Sun was added; but the sun-worshippers, like their conquerors in turn, were too politic to suppress the earlier religion entirely, and merely merged it with their own. “In a room closely shut and stinking,” says Estete, the Spanish chronicler, “was an idol made of wood, very dirty, which they called god, who creates and sustains us. It was held in great veneration and at its feet were offerings.” Different, indeed, from many an Andean place of worship to-day! It is a place of death in a double sense. Scuttling lizards and sand-vipers are the only forms of life that accentuate its silent, repulsive sterility. Human skulls kick about underfoot through all the extent of the ruins, and disintegrated skeletons lie everywhere. Only the earthen pots and huacos are of financial value to the looters; the heads of the men who made them are not worth the gathering. The ruins are extensive, a few of the great terraced temples still moderately well preserved. But being of clay or adobe, dreary, yellow-brown, they offer no contrast in color to the surrounding desert hills, and nothing to compare with the splendid wrought-stone monuments of those wonderful architects, the ancient Peruvians of the highlands.
The year had run over into September before I turned my face upward again toward the Sierra, to pick up the broken thread of my journey. Beyond Chosica the naked hills closed in, and the train climbed all day between barren, echoing walls of rock, the exhilarating mountain air cutting ever deeper into my lungs, as the glorious Italian skies of the cloudless upper plateau spread their ever-broadening canopy above. Snow appeared on far-off peaks, descended to meet us, and spread in patches about and below us. As the air thinned, our faces flushed and tingled; a tendency to sleepiness was succeeded by a feeling of exhilaration and an inclination to grow talkative. My fellow-passengers began to show signs of distress at the altitude, growing more and more red-faced, with bloodshot eyes; then one by one they frankly succumbed to mountain sickness as the train continued inexorably upward. As the experienced sailor struts about among his seasick fellows, so I caught myself gazing with haughty scorn upon the weaklings about me. Obviously a man who had tramped the lofty páramos from far-off Bogotá, often under a heavy pack, was immune to any effects of altitude.
But there is imbedded in ancient literature something to the effect that pride is often closely attended by a downfall. At Ticlio, in the crisp, cold afternoon, I noted that the mere exertion of lifting my baggage from the main to the branch-line train set my heart in a strange flutter. A more cautious person, too, would not have drunk three cups of black coffee in the miserable little station lunch-room so soon after weeks of rigid diet. Laboriously we climbed to the highest railroad point in the world, flanked by an immense blue glacier, up again on the bare, treeless, silent pampas, among cobble-stone hovels and ichu, the stolid, expressionless Indians of the highlands, and drew up at dusk in Morococha. The cheerless mining-camp, more than three miles above the sea, lay scattered along a dreary, bowl-shaped valley, with a vista of three cold, steel-blue lagoons, across which the enclosing snowclads threw their violet evening shadows. In this breathless region my pulse started savagely at every exertion, but being already arrived, I supposed myself as safe from mountain sickness as a disembarking passenger from mal de mer. In the manager’s cozy, stone-walled quarters the blazing fireplace, with its unaccustomed artificial heat and its clouds of tobacco-smoke, threatened suffocation and forced me to step out frequently into the crisp, night air to catch my breath. But no Indian of the highland could have boasted himself in finer physical spirits when we wandered away toward ten, panting considerably, to be sure, even at a very moderate pace, up the slope to the superintendent’s dwelling.
Barely had I turned in, however, when I began gasping for breath. Within an hour my host found that I had a respiration of 52 and a pulse of 125. All night long I struggled open-mouthed, with the sound of an accelerated steam-pump in bad repair, my heart engaged in what promised to be a successful attempt to pound its way out through my back, until my very shoulder-blades ached, and all the valley of Morococha seemed to echo with its thumping. It was too much! To be scarcely recovered from one long, laborious, Andean ailment, only to blow up of my own steam in this absurd land!
In the morning the mine-doctor came with his stethescope, mumbled “soroche” in a weary, unsympathetic voice, left some pills and instructions, and was gone. All day long I lay fasting, the snowclads gazing down upon me with icy, Andean indifference. Gradually the pounding of my heart ceased to drown out all other sounds, and my lungs resumed their accustomed action. On the following morning, though still weak and wobbly-legged, aching from crown to toe, I was able to be about, the day after, I strode slowly about the camp with something of the old-time vigor. In the end the experience seemed to be advantageous, for with every day thereafter I advanced to a faultless physical condition that was to accompany me on all the rest of the journey.
There are a score of theories concerning this mountain-sickness, known throughout Peru by the Quichua word soroche and in the basin of the Titicaca as puna. Who may be subject to it, what will prevent it, whether or not previous experience will or will not give immunity, are even greater mysteries than those surrounding its prototype, the bugbear of ocean travel. No two persons are ever affected alike by it. Commonly it is accompanied by a raging headache. All foreigners contracted for mine employment in this region are subjected to a rigid physical examination before they ascend “the Hill,” yet it is not unusual to make up a special train and rush a victim down to the coast. Among horses, with which it takes the form of blind-staggers and often renders the animal unfit for further service, it is known as veta, from the aboriginal superstition that it is caused by veins of ore (vetas) in the earth.
Morococha, like its rival, Cerro de Pasco, is a little world of its own, exclusively mining in its raison d’être and considerably marked by Anglo-Saxon influence. Though many of the natives still huddle in dismal huts, without windows and with dirt floors, the civilizing effect of the gringo is in some evidence, at least in those superficial matters of small habits, amusements, and clothing. American hob-nailed boots are almost as frequently worn by the Indian men as the llanqui, or hairy cowhide sandal. Bitter cold though it is, even at noonday, the Indians of female persuasion go scantily clad and almost universally barefoot.
The miners work nine hours a day, seven days a week, and receive an average of something more than a dollar a day—a high wage from the Andean Indian point of view. The considerable efficiency of both Indian and cholo workmen is curtailed by much coca-chewing and hard drinking. Following each pay-day, and during the many fiestas, a majority of the native miners go on an extended debauch, leaving the mines often so short-handed that operations virtually cease. The effect of the celebration does not wear off for several days, so that enterprise is commonly paralyzed a week or more in every month. The company is powerless to remedy this drawback, and the government—that scapegoat of all imperfections throughout South America—shows no disposition to better conditions, even were it possible. An Indian injured in the mine is more apt to run away than to report at the hospital, and to appear later as a litigant against the company, demanding—and with government aid frequently winning—a sinecure for life. Even when the injured man is attended by the mine-doctor, and his broken leg bound with splints or his wound properly treated with antiseptic care, he is likely to be found next morning with the bandages torn off, and with coca leaves, or a chicken leg, or something as efficacious substituted.
It must be admitted that his gringo superiors do not set the native miner a perfect example in his chief vice, the excessive consumption of alcohol. In the social vacuum that must necessarily exist in such a community, drinking and gambling are the favorite methods of putting to rout dull care. The altitude soon gets on the nerves, seeming to call for some such stimulant; at least, it is the custom to “lay to the altitude” any species of misdemeanor, or the formation of habits unknown to the subject before his arrival. Somehow it strikes the passing observer as wicked to send these small-lunged, sea-level men of other climes up here to gasp through life at a height fitted only to the barrel-chested Indian and his fellow-beast of burden, the llama. Both physically and temperamentally the effect of the altitude is curious. Water boils at so low a temperature that a finger can almost be thrust into it with impunity. Fireplaces are set in action by nonchalantly throwing two or three beer-bottlesful of kerosene into the blaze. Those accustomed to the heights for generations are far sturdier and less vivacious than those of lower levels. Newcomers, on the other hand, are easily excited and rattle-brained, dashing about like the proverbial “hen with its head cut off,” futile in proportion to their striving. In the gringo community it is a standing jest that the American or Englishman most phlegmatic at sea-level will spend an hour trying to shave, and grow so hen-minded over that simple task that he often gives up in despair. The exhilaration is physical as well as mental. Baseball players, far from losing their customary prowess in this thin air, are given to running their legs off in their excitement, and must often be restrained lest they burst their lungs.