“And desayuno!” cried the “Turks” as one man, “You must also come and take breakfast with us. If you like eggs, or steak, or pickled pigs’ feet, or.... Very well, even if you take only coffee and bread, like a Peruvian....”
Though it was barely ten of a brilliant Sunday morning, the Andean merchant’s richest hour, they shut up shop, in spite of the mild protests of a dozen ponchoed shoppers, and led the way to their rambling residence. A meal heavy with meat was enlivened with an excellent wine that could have cost little less than a small fortune at this altitude. The manners of the household recalled Palestine. We three men sat at table with our hats on, in Arabic as well as Andean fashion, while the women hovered more or less inconspicuously in the background. A dozen small children of both sexes crawled and climbed and sprawled and displayed their plump, unwashed nakedness on, around, and under the table, drinking wine and swearing like arrieros in both Spanish and Quichua. They were being brought up in the Palestinian, which is to some extent the Latin-American, fashion that forbade coercion, and were heartily laughed at and dubbed “cute” whenever they did anything particularly naughty or disobedient.
The two Syrians, as we would call them, or “Turks,” as their fellow-countrymen are known through all South America, had left Bethlehem some eight years before. They announced themselves “Christians,” which meant merely that they were not Mohammedans; though, as behooves ambitious merchants, they diplomatically avoided any religious controversy with their clients. For several years they had peddled on foot over all the accessible portion of central Peru, descending even into the montaña, or great hot lands to the east, the abode of rubber, fever, and “wild” Indians. Bit by bit they had established shops in various towns, until they had come to be among the most important merchants of the region, with headquarters in Huancavelica and branches in charge of more youthful fellow-countrymen in the chief centers of population of the department. Their success was typical of thousands of men of their race throughout the southern continent. For the native, equally scanty of initiative, industry, and the inclination to risk his capital, is at best an ineffective competitor of this tireless race of born shopkeepers. Of productive labor, great as is the call for it in this backward Andean land, the “Turk” brings nothing. Nor is his example likely to better the personal habits of the native population, though it may breed more effective “business methods,” and even a higher grade of commercial honesty—to say nothing of hospitality. It is not by such immigration, however, that the dormant continent will be rejuvenated.
My irrepressible hosts cherished a hazy dream of some day returning to Palestine with their fortune. Yet their children spoke not a word of the Arabic that still served for most of the intercourse between the men and their slatternly wives. The brothers themselves were fluent, not only in Spanish, but in Quichua. The throaty dialect of the aboriginals has much in common with the no less guttural Arabic; as the similarity of customs and point of view makes the race particularly adaptable to Peruvian surroundings. No other foreigner fits better into the life of the Andes, and it is not strange that the Syrian has most effectively invaded Andean commerce. Even the Chinaman, who quickly disappears as the traveler turns his back on Lima, has found it impossible to compete with these more western Orientals.
It is unfortunate that the traveler given to reporting his wanderings cannot have his mind erased every little while, like a slate; for so quickly do the sights and sounds of a strange country sink to the commonplace that many things that might delight the stay-at-home pass unnoticed. Thus an American untouched with the contempt of familiarity, suddenly set down in Huancavelica, would no doubt find it abounding with “local color.” Hays, who journeyed overland to Cuzco some months before me, enthusiastically proclaimed it “the most picturesque town in South America.” But to one who had followed the Andes step by step it was rather monotonously like any other town of the Sierra, its customs varying only in a few minor details from those that had long since grown familiar. By night it lies silent and dead under its cold stars. Dawn finds the fountain in its central “Plaza de la Independencia” bearded with icicles, and no clock or sun-dial could give the hour more exactly than the regularity with which these drip away to nothing in the late morning. For the sun falls tardily on Huancavelica, having first to climb the mountain rampart that shuts it in on the east. The town wisely remains in bed until the god of the Incas has asserted his brilliant, undisputed sway, and my road-habit of rising at daybreak gave me the sensation of strolling through a city from which the entire populace had fled. Indeed, the only really comfortable place in town was in bed. All day long one shivered in the shade or burned in the sun. In my dank, dungeon cell it was distinctly too dark, cold, and gloomy to read or write; on the red benches of the plaza the glare of the molten disk above was too brilliant to endure, even when some unsophisticated old native did not join me and remain deaf to all hints that even a traveler has his work to do. I soon formed the habit of taking daily possession of the ancient band-stand facing the white “cathedral.” Here was a bench on which I could, by constant manipulation, keep myself in the sun and my note-book in the shade; and as it was apparently against the rules or contrary to costumbre for a native to occupy the structure, I sat here hour after hour in solitary glory, flanked by the four staring sides of the plaza. The activity of an Andean town can generally be gaged by its plaza, and by that token Huancavelica was inactive indeed. Evidently no industry more important than a soup-kettle could be run by natives, and foreigners were rare. Charcoal braziers, or the three-stone, fagot-fires at the backs of huts, where crouched old women almost too feeble to drive off the curs that swarmed around the steaming earthen calabashes, represented the ordinary cooking processes, the fires being now and then given new life with a bamboo, or woven-weed fan. So bucolic was the populace that every stroll through the streets brought a score of inquiries as to what I was selling, many regarding even my kodak as a sale-kit and inviting me to enter, while children and grown-ups alike hastened to summon the rest of the family as often as I hove in sight.
In common with all Latins, the people are lovers of perpetual noise, and have no conception of our Anglo-Saxon desire to be occasionally let alone. Though the annoyances were always innocent, rather than intentional, I could not pause for a moment that I did not have a surrounding mob, and there was almost constantly a procession of boys, and even those old enough to know better, at my heels. If I paused to look at an old carved corner-stone or an ancient balcony, necks were craned in wonder as to what on earth an estranjero from the great outside world could find of interest in the lifelong sights of their drowsy capital. Yet there was a peculiar repose and quiet about the place, as if it were literally shut off by its grim mountain-walls from all the troubles of the great world. Shopkeepers locked up and went home to play or sleep whenever the whim struck them. Though a department capital, there was not a physician in town, nor any open evidence of a drug-store; and while there was no doubt some advantage in this state of affairs, the death-rate from dysentery and pneumonia was high. An awkward, slow-minded, mountain people, they had not even the usual mountaineer virtue of shyness, being as forward in their manner as Hebrews. I was never out of sight of at least one “authority,” a ragged Indian from some neighboring hamlet up among the higher ranges, clinging jealously to his black silver-mounted cane of office. Pacos and llamas could be made out, tiny as mice, feeding on the perpendicular crags sheer above the town, among the abrupt splintered masses of rock that cut all the surrounding sky-line sharply with their jagged crests.
As I was strolling about town the day after my arrival, a soldier again came running after me to say that the prefect himself desired me to report and explain myself. I handed the menial my card, and heard no more of the matter. The printed name on a bit of cardboard is proof sufficient of aristocracy in most of South America. Burglars and highwaymen contemplating entrance into that field of activities would do well to provide themselves with a plentiful supply of visiting cards, the larger and more imposing the better. Later on, when I called on the department ruler at my own volition and with the dignity befitting an envoy from the outside world, a man was assigned to attend me on any excursions I chose to make in or about the town.
The origin of the name of Huancavelica is curious. There was, it seems, no town here at the time of the Conquest. To the Incas this flat enclosed plain with its clear little river offered too fine an opportunity for their enemies to roll rocks down upon them from the towering heights above. Centuries ago there settled on the spot an Indian of the Huanca tribe, inhabiting the great valley between Jauja and Huancayo. He died young, and for long years his wife dwelt alone in the only hut in this capacious mountain-pocket. Her name was Isabel, which in South America becomes familiarly or affectionately, “Velica.” Her hut was a sort of tambo, where a bit of corn or eggs might occasionally be had, or at least pasture for pack-animals and shelter from the páramo winds. Hence travelers through the region, asked where they would spend the night, announced: “Voy llegar donde la Huanca Velica.”
Then it was discovered that the grim, treeless mountains piled into the sky about the little valley were rich in quicksilver, and a mining town built itself up about the hut of Isabel, the Huanca. For centuries the great Santa Barbara mine high above the town, and several smaller workings in the vicinity, yielded the mercury used in Potosi and in all the mines of Peru, High or Low, which was brought from Huancavelica on the backs of llamas. Then, as more scientific methods came into vogue, the miners turned to California for their supply, until to-day the Mercury Queen is but an echo of her former greatness, and the open shafts of her cinnabar mines, which rumor has it left several of the surrounding ranges great hollow caverns, stand silent and deserted. It is this failure to keep up with modern times that has left Huancavelica one of the most “picturesque” department capitals, with poverty her chief handmaid. Lack of transportation is her principal drawback. The very town itself is said to sit on top of great deposits of quicksilver. Workmen, digging for the foundation of a new building on a corner of the plaza during my sojourn, found pure-liquid mercury bubbling up out of the ground. Modern miners, however, refuse to operate where only the slow and unreliable llama must be depended on for transportation, and only when the long-promised railroad arrives, will Huancavelica come into her own again.
The chief point of interest was the famous old mercury mine of Santa Barbara. Strangely enough, the cicerone appeared within an hour of the daylight time set, though without breakfast, and shared with me the results of my own rum-burning handicraft. A roundabout, but exceedingly steep road, on which we panted audibly in spite of frequent halts for breath, brought us to our goal far above the town. Near a silent, cold, Indian hamlet, with an aged Spanish church facing its dreary plaza, was the ruin of a cut-stone smelting-works of colonial days, and behind it the imposing arched entrance to the enormous caverns said to undermine all the neighboring range. Above this was a large Spanish coat-of-arms cut in stone, with the information that the arch had been constructed by General Fulano in 1707; and the weather-defaced relief of a saint holding a child. The silence of long abandonment brooded over all the scene. We lighted the medieval oil-lamp borrowed from the hotel, and disappeared within. The tunnel that led straight into the mountainside was large enough, if not for a railway train, at least for a horseman to have ridden in comfortably, its floor easily as good a road as the average Peruvian one outside. Here and there we crawled over a heap of stones and earth where a part of the wall had fallen, and at 382 paces from the mouth were halted by a cave-in that had choked up the entire tunnel. My companion had assured me that the spirits of ancient Spaniards and their Indian victims, lying in wait for unwary moderns, made our entrance perilous in the extreme, and, once permission was given, lost no time in retreating.