The ancient Inca highway passed through “Sausa,” on the heights above the present town, the beginnings of which Pizarro laid on his way to Cuzco. The ruins were far more easily accessible than those of Huamachuco, and neither so important nor so throttled with vegetation. The surviving walls are chiefly of broken stone, some of lines of square, some of round, rooms. The chief ruins appeared to have been a double line of fortresses, which hung on the brow of the hill with a truly Incaic view over the surrounding world. Strictly speaking, these were not Inca monuments, but constructions of the Huancas, improved by the Emperors of Cuzco. The tribe that once inhabited this broad valley were conquered by the militant Incas, and forced to give tribute and adopt the tongue of their conquerors, a dialect of which still persists in the region. The plain was once a lake-bottom, stretching from beyond Jauja to distant Huancayo. An hour’s walk from the town still brings one to a cool and placid lagoon, surrounded by all but impenetrable marshes and reeds, with numerous wild ducks winging their V-shaped course across it. To-day the Mantaro river, like an unravelled cord, swings southward past a few pueblocitos, among green groves that give relieving touches of color to a scene at best bald and barren in aspect.
Long before train-time most of the population of Jauja, having no better means of whiling away the afternoon, wandered out along the dusty road to the station, isolated as some house of pestilence. That American habit of racing breathlessly across the platform at the last moment is not prevalent in Peru. For one thing, the boletería ceases to “function” long before the scheduled hour of departure, and he who embarks without a ticket subjects himself to a fifty percent. increase in fare—unless he has the fortune to be a compadre of some member of the train-crew. In the second-class coach the travelers ranged from broad-faced Indians to cholos in “civilized” garb and rubber collars, the corresponding females wrapped from head to foot in crow-black mantos. With the human deluge came corpulently stuffed alforjas, crude implements of husbandry, distorted bundles of household effects, and, on the backs of the Indian women, bulky in their heavy skirts unevenly gathered about their draught-horse hips, loads of varying size from which, with few exceptions, peered the face of a wide-eyed baby. All these—the infants only excepted—my fellow-passengers proceeded to stuff under the four lengthwise benches, into the racks above, or to hang from the roof supports, until the car took on the aspect of an overstocked pawnshop in which a multitude of tenement dwellers had taken sudden refuge.
Above the door was the information, “96 ASIENTOS,” all of which were all more than fully occupied when the engineer embraced the station-master for the last time and the massed population of Jauja began to recede into the distance. Within the car the prevailing tongue was Quichua. The native conductor “grafted” with a fetching frankness here and there in his struggle through the welter of humanity; the brakemen spent most of the journey drinking the health of a group of cholos in a corner of the coach. Chicha flowed like water. At every station old women crowded through the car selling that nectar of the Incas, all purchasers drinking from the same cup, and generally several from the same filling, while the scrawny hags, waiting for its return, idly rubbed their bony talons about the spout of the cántaro under their arms. Almost every traveler had his own supply of a more potent native beverage. The pisco bottle with its licorice smell passed constantly from hand to hand, eyes grew more and more bloodshot, tongues thicker, yet more talkative—for the Andean Indian is taciturn in exact proportion to his sobriety—eyelids heavy, and limbs clumsy. The tippling knew no limits either of sex or age. Infants barely two years old frequently took a long drink at the fiery bottle, and cooed with delight at the taste. The railway company not only permitted, but abetted Peru’s national vice. If the universal pastime threatened to flag for a moment, it was resuscitated by the fifty-year old dwarf of a train-boy, who waded incessantly through our legs with a bottle under each arm and a single opaque glass in hand, urging all, from the aged Indian dreaming over the cud of coca in his cheek to the best-dressed chola, to drink and be merry, for to-morrow—he would be bound in the other direction.
Not a few of the Indian and cholo girls were robustly pretty, their cheeks rosy in spite of their coppery tint. At one station there entered the car a white Peruvian baby, richly dressed as some little princess, fingerless white gloves on her tiny hands, borne on the back of an unbelievably dirty Indian girl of twelve, whose filthy felt hat the regally clad infant alternately picked and thrust its fingers into its mouth. Its parents were enjoying babyless freedom with their friends in the first-class car, and incidentally saving the difference in the servant’s fare. Thus the unwashed Indian intrudes everywhere, always, from altar to kitchen, from nursemaid to grave-digger, and the fact never strikes the most haughty Andean as incongruous. Had the old Spanish chroniclers been of the realistic school, we should no doubt have learned that the Inca’s bread was also dropped on a mud floor, and picked up with unwashed fingers before it was presented to him on a golden platter. In all the pages of Prescott there is no suggestion of uncleanliness. His Indians are as spotless as if they had been scrubbed and scoured with New England zeal before they were admitted to the muslin-shaded twilight of his study. Yet he who has physically traveled through what was once the Empire of the Incas cannot but suspect that the Puritan-bred historian, for all his marvelously living and breathing masterpiece, inadvertently—or puritanically—gave in this respect a false picture of the ancient kingdom.
Miners of Morococha,—a Welch foreman and two of his gang, whom I had brought to the surface from some 2000 feet underground. Note the mine lamps. This particular “Natividad” mine is so wet that oilskins are required
A typical miner of the high Peruvian Andes. The cloth around his head under his hat is pink; his poncho, red and black; his feet are covered with the hairy buskins worn by the men only
It was nearing sunset when groves of eucalypti began to ride close by the train-windows, then rows of mud huts alternating with little farms of alfalfa, then larger adobe houses, and at length we drew up at Huancayo, the end of railroading in central Peru. For many years there have been plans to carry the railway on to Ayacucho, and even a wild project of some day pushing it across to Cuzco, and of linking it up with the railways of the south. Fortunately, nothing had yet come of the scheme, and what lay before me depended thereafter on my own exertions, with whatever of charm that remained to the ancient but now slightly traveled route through the heart of Peru, as the reward.
Huancayo, boasting—as towns of the Sierra will—10,000 inhabitants, in a rich and, in better seasons, well-watered valley, consists chiefly of one long, broad street, perhaps the broadest in Peru, paved with small, round stones, a ditch of water stagnating through its center. On either side it is lined by wrought-iron rejas and open shop-doors; at either end it dies out in sand and cactus-bordered paths between mud-huts. As the main plaza of Riobamba is to Ecuador, this street forms the center of what is reputed the greatest native market in Peru. Each Sunday it offers a pulsating vista of Indians from a hundred miles around, in every color known to an artist’s palette—and some which the boldest of painters would not venture to use—an unbroken stretch of humanity, shimmering in the glaring sunshine. An expert stenographer might wander all day through the surging throng without being able to set down the mere names of the wares displayed, to say nothing of the endless variety of garments, types, faces, and customs. So packed with details is the far-famed market, that only a cinematograph ribbon could give even a faint notion of its activities; mere words are as powerless to paint its motley variety as to catch the subtle charm of Huancayo itself, with its perfect climate and crystalline sunshine.