“Then it is impossible for it to be cold there,” he cried, conclusively, “for that is scarcely higher than Huanta itself.”
Huanta lies close to the great montaña, or Amazonian hot-lands, and the “chocolate de Huanta” is famous throughout Peru. But the trails to that fruitful region are so nearly impassable that the interchange of products is only a fraction of what it might be. Set in one of the dry belts that are so frequent in the Andes, the great, tilted plain depends on irrigation for most of its fruits. Molle, fig, and willow trees abound, yet the ground beneath them is barren of grass. Eighty percent. of the valley is said to be chiefly Indian in blood. Peons are paid an average of twelve cents a day, and judging from what I saw of them, they are grossly overpaid. Nearly a half-century ago Squier found “drunkenness universal throughout the Sierra, and nothing neglected that could be turned into intoxicating beverages.” To this day there is slight improvement in this respect. Thanks to the molle berry, intemperance is high, even for Peru, and laziness reaches its culmination during the season when the tunas, ripening on the cactus hedges, feed alike birds and Indians. In the town almost every hut is a little drunkery, with an inviting display of bottles of all shapes and sizes. The life of the place was typified by a soft-muscled lump of a man sitting in the shade of his shop, drowsily switching flies off himself with a horse’s tail mounted on a wooden handle. To have seen him reading a book, or even whittling a stick, would have been entirely out of keeping with the local color.
House-flies, unknown in the upper altitudes, were more than numerous. Cats, too, were in evidence for almost the first time in the Sierra. The assertion of scientists that these cannot endure high regions was denied by the natives, who attributed their absence elsewhere to the lack of rats to feed on. Dogs, unfortunately, are indifferent to either drawback, and the Andean town has yet to be discovered that does not swarm with them. Llamas avoid Huanta, and the climate is more fitted to donkeys than to mountain ponies. An Indian trotted in from one of the irrigated alfalfares on the edge of town with a poncho-load of fresh, green alfalfa, gay with purple and red flowers, soon after our arrival. But at the first taste of this new species of fodder Chusquito showed keen disappointment. Like myself, he preferred regions of ten thousand feet and upward. During most of our stay he hung sad and dejected, as if homesick for the cold, penetrating air and the wiry grass of his native mountains, and it was here that I saw him lie down for the first time since we had joined forces.
We pushed on to Ayacucho under no very auspicious circumstances, for the department capital was reported to be raging with an epidemic of typhoid and smallpox that had forced it to ask aid of the central government. The day’s tramp varied from a blazing, semi-tropical gorge to a barren, waterless range so lofty that I found it necessary to stretch out on my back at the summit to catch my breath. A contrary mood, or too long a rest, made Chusquito choose to be obstreperous beyond all custom, and twice he set his heart wilfully on branch trails, and came perilously near escaping with all my possessions. Thereafter I kept him tied to my belt, and for once he set a pace more swift than I would have had it. Early in the afternoon the blazing desert landscape was broken by the sight of a city that could have been no other than Ayacucho, filling the hollow of a green bowl, several hut-lined streets radiating upward from it, like the legs of some great tarantula stretched on its back. A perfectly level road seemed to promise a quick entrance; but almost at the edge of the town the world fell suddenly away into a bottomless earthquake crack, where we sweated for an hour in a headlong descent far out of sight of human habitation, and toiled upward again to the crest of the horizon, all to advance a bare five hundred yards. Raging with thirst, we strode swiftly down upon the town, only to be blocked at the edge of it by a religious procession of hundreds of girls in snow-white dress. As if to show off before his fellow-countrymen, Chusquito redoubled his cussedness, and persisted, in spite of all my efforts, in taking advantage of the smooth, flagstone sidewalks, forcing two-legged pedestrians into the rough-cobbled street. It did not occur to me that he, too, might be footsore. At the first open door through which I spied bottles, he attempted to enter with me, and watched me disgustedly while I opened a bottle of native soda-water, a second, then a third, until the proprietress all but fainted with astonishment at sight of a man who came on foot drinking up a whole fifteen cents’ worth at once—and actually paying for it.
Both the hotels of Ayacucho were the usual low buildings, extending around a large court one entered beneath a topheavy archway, where guests appeared to be considered a nuisance, to be avoided by both host and servants as long as possible. I was finally awarded a dungeon opening directly on all the assorted activities, misdemeanors, and indecencies indigenous to the cobbled patios of Andean hotels, but which had the unusual feature of a window—with wooden bars, for glass is a luxury, even in an important department capital. The chamber was cool to the point of sogginess and had, of course, to be cleared out and furnished to my order. It was apparent that here was a city that would reward several days’ stay, and I set about finding more fitting accommodations for Chusquito than the circle about a post to which he had been confined at every halt since he had come into my possession. Long search and persistent inquiry brought me to a professional inverna, a term supposed to designate a green pasture in which an animal accepted as guest can wallow and gorge to his heart’s content. Fortunately I am nothing if not sceptical in such Peruvian matters and, sure enough, investigation proved the place to be only a bare field in which the owner promised to give “plenty of food and water” at ten cents a day. Promises and starvation are too closely allied in the Andes, where he who will know his animal well fed must see to the feeding in person. I had all but resigned myself and the maltreated beast to the inevitable, and had ordered a load of alfalfa brought to the hotel patio, when I ran across the piano importer, who begged me to do him the honor of letting him send the animal to his farm a few miles out of town. When at last I got to bed, my sleep was full of feverish dreams in which I was dragged to destruction times without number over bottomless precipices by a rope tied to my belt, while I gazed about me in vain for a patch of green in a bald and blistered landscape.
At first sight this half-green hole in the ground, surrounded by cactus-grown stretches of loose stones and bare, repulsive mountains, seemed a queer place for a city. But the situation improves somewhat upon closer acquaintance. Under the scanty trees that lend the hollow its color the soil is fertile when favored by the rains, and those who can avoid going out in the middle of the day will find the climate little short of perfect. The main drawbacks to what might be a not unpleasant dwelling-place are the absence of even the rudiments of hygiene, and the whirlwinds that spring up often with sudden, unexpected violence and envelop the town in clouds of dust and evidence of the absence of street-sweepers, or bring down a wintry wave from the snowclad to the south that lends its contrast to the picture.
At the time of the Conquest the only gathering of mankind corresponding to the present city was what Prescott calls “Huamanga, midway between Lima and Cuzco.” The story runs that an Inca, passing through the region, was sitting at meat out-of-doors when he saw, circling above him, a magnificent huaman, Quichua for falcon. Struck with admiration, he held up a choice morsel crying, “Huaman ca!—Take it, falcon!” Whatever the truth of the legend, the department of which Ayacucho is the capital is still known as Huamanga. The city itself takes its name from the Quichua terms aya (corpse), and ccucho (corner), in other words, “Dead Man’s Corner.” Long before the arrival of the Spaniards all this region was thus known because of a great battle between the fierce local tribes and those of Cuzco, in which the latter were routed. But the tables were turned under Huayna Ccápac, the Great, who colonized the territory by the customary Inca method of settling it with mitimaes, or “transplanted people” from another province. The great military highway passed close to the present site, but the only town of any size between Huancayo and Cuzco in early colonial days was Huari, now an insignificant Indian village lost among the stony hills. Manco, the revolted Inca, and his followers formed the chronic habit of falling upon travelers between the ancient and the new capital of Peru, and in 1548 Pizarro ordered a city founded for their protection, usually known as Huamanga. Not until after what is known to history as the Battle of Ayacucho, in which Sucre defeated the Spanish veterans who had fled before Bolívar from the icy pampa of Junín, and brought to an end the struggle of the new world for political freedom begun in New England a half-century before, was the older and more appropriate name revived.
In colonial times it was a far more important city. A census taken by a German in 1736 showed a population of more than 40,000. To-day it has barely two inhabitants for each of its 8000 feet elevation above sea-level. Even Squier found it “laid out on a grand scale, but with unmistakable signs of a great decline in wealth and population.” Epidemics of smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever, the advance of machinery and foreign importation over the local handicraft manufacture of tocuyo (cloth from the cactus fiber), frazadas, or hand-woven blankets, and native shoes, with the corresponding decrease in the growing of cotton in the region, were the chief causes of this decline. Then, too, the building of railroads left the ancient route from Lima to Cuzco stranded, and only a rare gringo andarín, driving a shaggy and sun-faded chusquito, comes now to visit the once proud city. Should the long-threatened railway across Peru ever come to pass, Ayacucho, like Huancavelica, may come more or less into her own again.
The cities of our own land are not without their faults, but he who would fully realize the advantages of even the most backward of them should come and dwell for a time in one of these shipwrecked “capitals” of the Andes. By night Ayacucho is “lighted” by dim kerosene contrivances, mildly resembling a miner’s torch, inside square, glass-sided lanterns of medieval origin, each house-owner paying from five to twenty cents a month for his share of the illumination. Gradually, however, electric lights were being installed—those pale, ought-to-be-sixteen-candle-power bulbs indigenous to Andean towns—against which a considerable opposition had developed because of the threatened cost of nearly a dollar monthly to each householder. In view of the fact that the average shop rents for $3 a month, it was natural that so decided an increase in expenses should be resented. The huge main plaza is garnished only with a central fountain surrounded by the customary iron fence, “due to the untold patriotism of Juan Fulano, ex-alcalde, etc.,” and a few ancient, backless, rough-stone benches. The favorite loafers’ gathering-place is under the portales, or arcades, that surround the square on three sides. These are lined with shops into the blue-black shadows of which the plaza-stroller’s eyes peer gratefully, but wellnigh blindly, from the blazing sunshine outside. Compared even with Spain, Ayacucho harbors an unbelievable number of non-producers. Hundreds of little shops, endlessly duplicated, stretch away along its every street, tended by lounging men and women with no other desire in life than to sell a few cents’ worth of something, particularly strong drink, and not even desiring that very decidedly. Their business methods are crude in the extreme. The town, for example, is noted for its native chocolate. The cacao beans grown in the montaña on the east are hulled and roasted, mixed with crude sugar and vanilla, and crushed and rolled again and again by hand under stone rollers, producing a gravelly, but not untoothsome product. Yet, though every merchant in town is ready to sell these individually at 2½ cents a cake, not one of them can be induced to sell by weight. “No es costumbre,” answers every man, woman, and child tending shop, and though all hover on the verge of poverty, not a man among them will overstep fixed custom, even to this extent, to win a less precarious livelihood. For a country where “trusts” are unknown the entire town is rather staunchly agreed on prices. The money in use is almost exclusively silver, which is lugged back and forth through the streets in cotton bags. Many of the coins, having at some time served as female adornment, have holes in them, and though these are perfectly acceptable to Ayacucho, they are worthless elsewhere in the country, so that to my usual task of gathering small change for the road ahead was added that of carefully weeding out all holed pieces. The average ayacuchano has a kind of crude insolence and an arrogance bred in isolated places which, added to his mountaineer uncouthness, makes him not over pleasant. Toward me they assumed a suspicious air that suggested some foreigner had once long ago cheated some one among them out of ten cents. Even for Peruvians, the plighted word of every grade of inhabitant is peculiarly worthless. Of a dozen or more promises of larger or smaller importance made me during my stay, not one ever reached even the point of attempted fulfilment. The population is very largely Indian—often in diluted form—and genuinely white persons are decidedly rare, certainly not ten percent., though there are many more than that, strutting about in what Ayacucho fancies faultless dress, who consider themselves such, and who would be astonished at the set-back their pretentions would receive in more exacting communities. The town swarms with tailors, chiefly boys and youths with slight ability at their trade, who sit, like the craftsmen of Damascus, in little shops the entire front of which is open door, and work steadily but languidly on miserable materials that barely last long enough for purchaser and seller to part, their attention chiefly on whatever passes in the street. The Indians of the region still weave a heavy wool frazada of astounding combinations of color, and the town is somewhat noted for the filigree work and wood-carving for which it was once famous. But for the most part it is silent, smokeless, and industry-lacking as any village of the Andes, without a single wheeled vehicle to rumble over its cobbles. Its water is so bad that even the natives admitted I should not drink it. Indeed, I did not even dare develop films in it. Not that its source is ill-chosen, but in the several miles of open conduit to the city, the Indians make free use of it for any of their lavatory processes. The local Quichua dialect varies much from that of Cuzco, the Florence of the Inca tongue, so that Indians from the two towns understand each other with difficulty.
Ayacucho is about as badly overdone in churches as any town in church-boasting South America. In colonial days a religious edifice was built on the slightest provocation, of cut-stone if possible, of cobbles or adobe if necessary, until to-day the entire population might be housed five times over in those that are left. Not a few are things of beauty in their time-mellowed delapidation. The cathedral, centuries old, is surpassed in all Peru only by those of Lima and Cuzco. Externally, and at some distance, like so many things of Spanish origin, it has an imposing and not inartistic appearance. But the interior is disappointing. Here is the usual Latin-American garish gaudiness of wooden, tin, and porcelain saints, with no suggestion of art, except in the intricately carved wooden pulpit and the choir stalls flanking the altar. Behind each of the latter a boy stands during services, holding a candle above the chanting friar whose bulk amply fills the niche. A spittoon is provided for each of the singers. Ash-trays had evidently not yet come into style. An unusual feature was seats for the congregation, which in most churches of the Andes is left to kneel on the bare floor, or to bring a servant carrying a prie-dieu. It was the first place in Peru where the beating of church-bells reached anything like the hubbub of Ecuador or Colombia, for Ayacucho is so fanatical that the law against this is openly disobeyed. Sleek, well-fed, cigarette-smoking priests are everywhere in evidence, scores of “barefoot” friars in their stout leather sandals waddle about town with the self-complacency of the sacred bulls of India, and the public appearance of the bishop brings all activity to a standstill, and all beholders except the upper-class men to their knees.