Building a house in Peru. Mud and chopped straw are trampled together with the bare feet, loaded into a hod that is really a sun-dried ox-hide, and fashioned into such a wall as that in the background
The patio of the “Hotel Progreso” of Abancay. The cook is peering through the hole in the wall by which she thrusts out to the servants at meal-time her nefarious concoctions
Birds were singing merrily in the molle trees when we descended a semi-desert bristling with cactus, then through precipitous stony quebradas at the bottoms of which excited streams rushed headlong down from the mountain heights in their haste to join the unseen river below on its journey to the Atlantic. We were approaching the famous Apurímac, the roar of whose waters already came up to us, and the crossing of which travelers have always looked forward to with misgiving. Yet it was only a very moderate river we came in sight of in mid-morning, exceedingly far down in the precipitous gorge it has cut for itself during the centuries. The leg-straining descent seemed endless; the road wound incessantly round the mountain, far up each profound ravine and back again, so that a two-mile walk was barely a 500-yard gain. Travelers now were numerous. Mule-trains with goods from the outside world by way of Cuzco appeared as dots on the sky-line crest of the range beyond, and crawled slowly down its barren face; Indians, bearing on their backs chickens, pigs, or the scanty produce of their chacras, climbed past us into the hot, cactus-grown world above.
The blazing sun stood sheer overhead when we reached the river, or more exactly Tablachaca, the “board-bridge” high above it. Since long before the Conquest, simpichacas, the swaying Inca bridges of braided withes, have been thrown across this mighty gorge at various points, so that the passing of the Apurímac has long been synonymous with taking one’s life in one’s hands. But the tameness of modern times has intruded even here. To-day a solid bridge, built by a Philadelphian and maintained, not by the government, but by the neighboring hacendados, carries the traveler across without a tremor. In an openwork, gnat-bitten hut beside it live the bridge-tender, a curiously old youth, and his mother, boasting themselves the grandson and daughter respectively of the builder, yet so purely Peruvian that they cannot even pronounce the name of their illustrious ancestor.
Finding it possible to descend to the river by a series of natural stone steps, I determined to enjoy the distinction of a dip into the famous stream. The astonished bridge-tenders wished to know if I was a great swimmer, as their father and grandfather from Philadelphia had been, and could I even out-gringo him by swimming clear across the river. I admitted that I could come near to making it, if there were a sheriff’s posse at my heels and no bridge; but neither of those contingencies staring me in the face, I saw no reason to risk coming home by way of the Amazon in the garb of Adam by attempting a gratuitous “stunt” worthy of a genuine andarín. As I stood soaping my gnat-bitten frame, however, I fell to wondering why Pedro de la Gasca should have lost most of his horses and mules here on the way to his famous pussy-wants-a-corner game with Gonzalo Pizarro on the field of Xaquixaguana. For though it snarled and fretted against its rocky barriers with considerable force and speed, to any but a Spanish-speaking people the stream lapping at my knees would not exactly seem a great river. I came to the conclusion that his misfortune must have been due to the fact that Pedro was a priest, and to test the theory, swam across, sat a moment against the sheer rock wall that bounds the resounding gorge on the further side, and swam back again. True the stream moved with something more than Peruvian energy, and not far below there was a fall with a threatening hollow roar where the man so foolish as to let himself be carried over might have sustained a few bumps and gashes. But there was nothing in the escapade to get excited over, much less to lose one’s horses.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, as I gripped my prehensile toes once more on the hither bank, to discover, just in time to save myself from shattering the proprieties to fragments, that all the surrounding countryside, large and small, male and female, Indian, half-breed and ¾-breed, was hanging over the precipice and bridge above, watching with open mouths my marvelous and unprecedented feat. As I climbed the bank, reclad, the vigilante del puente and his mother fell upon me, insisting that such unrivalled prowess should not pass unrecorded, and getting possession of my note-book, they spent most of the afternoon in concocting a certificate of my epoch-making adventure, with all the signatures, rúbricas, and seals thereunto appertaining.
Beyond the river, now in the great department of Cuzco, we climbed a sheer mountain face, and descended with sunset to a mass of buildings on a bluff, among immense stretches of yellow-green canefields. This was the hacienda “La Estrella” of Senator Montes, whom official duties held in Lima, but whose son, once he had overcome his racial prejudice against a man who came on foot and without a servant, appointed an Indian valet to Chusquito and took upon himself my entertainment. His newly constructed mansion boasted all modern improvements, from electric lights to paintings on the walls of corredor and rooms “by a famous imported artist.” In the well-appointed sugar-mill the cane of the surrounding fields was turned into white, cone-shaped sugar-loaves and concentrated merriment, the latter selling at $9 a hundred liters, of which something more than half went to the government. Two salt-inspectors joined us at the formal dinner in the overdecorated mansion. Salt being a government monopoly, Peru swarms with salt-inspectors, salt-police, salt-detectives, official salt-weighers, and so on to national bankruptcy. The reddish rocks mined on the Montes estate were bought by the government at ten cents a hundred-weight—and sold in official estancos at $2.50!
As we sat,—Montes the younger, his half-dozen white overseers, and the salt-inspectors—before the door of the cabin that had been assigned me, the tropical full moon casting over the scene a brightness almost equal to that of a sunny day, a hundred picturesquely clad Indian peons, carrying medieval hoes and axes, lined up before us for roll-call, then scattered to their huts. The hacienda’s vast army of laborers refuse for the most part to live in the tenement-like houses, in long, identical rows, of which my own lodging was one, but insisted, with the conservatism so deeply engrained in their race, on building their own huts, of far poorer accommodations. Each peon was given a piece of land on which to erect his dwelling and plant his garden, free pasturage for a few animals, and a wage of 20 cents a day, when he worked for the hacienda. This he did only every other month, and thanks to church festivals and the concentrated cane-juice with which they are enlivened, by no means all the days of that. The women had no obligations to the hacienda, but lived on it merely as appendices to their husbands—old maids, of course, are unknown among South American Indians—doing only such work about the estate-house as they could be coaxed to do, or “what they were ordered by their husbands.” Under the silver-flooding moon the gathering of gente grew reminiscent, and on every hand floated stories of Peru, ending with one by the son which explained why Montes the elder had become wealthy and a Senator and had had such extraordinary all-around luck—because he had picked up at the Chicago Exposition twenty years before a horseshoe, which was still carefully guarded.