The city covered the northern and more elevated end of a half-green plain, enclosed by velvety-brown mountain flanks and dying away in hazy, labyrinthian distance. On the edge of the ridge on which we stood, Sacsahuaman, a mere knoll from this height, with its fortress, frowned down upon the city. A hulking, two-tower cathedral faced an immense plaza, faded red roofs giving the scene its chief color, until this broke into the velvet green of the plain, which in turn shaded into the soft brown of the surrounding ranges. But neither words nor photographs can give more than a faint hint of the charm and fascination of what is in many respects the most interesting spot in the Western Hemisphere, a charm enhanced by the anticipation of a long overland journey. There came upon me pity for the tourist who comes sneaking into the famous city by train along the valley below. This in its turn was succeeded by a regret that the hands of time could not be set back 400 years, to the day when Balboa first peered out upon the Pacific, that I might sit here and watch the activities of a world totally different from that we know; a regret that what men call the Conquest of Peru ever happened. What days were those, when there were really new worlds to discover! What would I not have given to have preceded Pizarro a bit—and been provided with the magic cap of invisibility to save me from being served up as an exotic delicacy on the Inca’s table.
A swift, stony descent that soon became a regular cobbled stairway, once topped by the Huancapuncu, or West Gate, led through none too pleasantly scented suburbs, the population staring agape at sight of a white man in shirt-sleeves and belligerently armed descending afoot into the famous city. The chusco and Indian followed at my heels across a great market square, past a prettily flowered little rectangle, and I marched at last out upon the broad central plaza, so densely populated with the shades of history. I had loafed away thirty-eight days since leaving Huancayo, though only twenty-two of them had been even partly spent on the road. The distance had proved almost exactly 400 miles, making a total of 2380 miles that I had covered on foot since Hays and I walked out of the central plaza of Bogotá nearly fourteen months before.
The City of the Sun, ancient capital of the Inca Empire, which Garsilaso called Cozco and Stevenson Couzcou, is to-day but a shadow of its once imperial grandeur. The famous Inca historian states that the name corresponded to the Spanish ombligo, and from his day to this writers have referred to it as the Navel of the Inca Empire. Educated cuzqueños of to-day deny this derivation, asserting that the Quichua word for navel is, and always has been, pupu. The talkative old successor of Valverde chanced, when I called upon him, to have just been reading an ancient manuscript in which the words ccori ccoscco (crumbs or shavings of gold), occurred frequently in the description of the city, and he held this to be the real origin of the name.
Whatever of truth or exaggeration there may have been in the statements of old chroniclers that the city gleamed with gold at the time of the Conquest, little of that royal aspect remains. The chief and almost only material reminders of the days of the Incas are long walls of beautiful cut stone in the central portion of the modern city. Indeed, in all Peru the mementoes of the ancient race are almost wholly confined to walls. Some of these are “dressed down” so smoothly that the joints seem mere pencil-marks. Most of them are cyclopean, rough-hewn boulders of irregular size and shape, similar to the Pitti Palace in Florence, which is by no means so perfect in workmanship. There are almost no curved or circular walls, the chief exception to this being the former Temple of the Sun, now the Dominican monastery, where, like mud huts superimposed on the ruins of a mighty race, contented old friars lounge among the glories of long ago. The remnants are chiefly street after street in which the old walls have been left standing from six to twenty feet high, the whitewashed adobe of the ambitionless modern descendants above them. For the most part these form only one side of each street, for the elbow-rubbing passageways of the Incas, of which one still remains intact, were too narrow even for Spanish notions. But the city of to-day is still defined by these long reaches of elaborately cut stones, which, legend has it, divided the ancient capital into regular squares. They are Egyptian in aspect, these massive walls, shrinking toward the top, as do the rare doors and openings of Inca construction that have survived. Here and there they have been rudely torn open to give entrance to a blacksmith-shop, a bakery, a chicharia, or, it would seem, for no other reason than the mere lust for destruction. Everywhere old walls stare out upon the passerby with Indian stolidity, as if refusing to tell the stories they might so easily if they chose. Even where the walls themselves have disappeared to furnish building material for the churches and monasteries of the conquerors, the magnificent doorways have sometimes been preserved as the entrance to some modern hovel, and give a suggestion of what this imperial city, so ruthlessly destroyed, might have been.
It is only these walls and the historical memories with which they are saturated that distinguish Cuzco from any other city of the Sierra. The life of the place is drab and uninspiring, wellnigh as colorless as the most monotonous village of the Andes. The metropolis, no doubt, of the Western Hemisphere in the fifteenth century, in the twentieth it seems a little backwater almost wholly cut off from the main stream of life. For a long time after the Conquest it was queen of the Andes, greater even than Lima. Then as the Inca highway fell into decay under the squabbling and incompetent successors of the provident Incas, it shrunk away into its mountain-girdled isolation, until to-day it is less known to Peru itself than is London or Berlin. For one limeño who has visited Cuzco, the historical gem of the continent, a hundred have journeyed to Paris.
The Conquistadores, fond of exaggerating their prowess by multiplying the numbers of their defeated enemies, ascribed to Cuzco 200,000 inhabitants. This is inconceivable. To-day a trustworthy census, taken by the American rector of the university a few weeks before my arrival, shows the population to be slightly under 20,000. It may, this authority fancies, have numbered 100,000 at the time of the Conquest. The percentage of marriages was found to be extremely low, though the birth-rate holds its own. A few white officials and comerciantes, what would be called petty shopkeepers elsewhere, are in evidence; otherwise Cuzco has chiefly the aspect of an Indian town, its plazas too vast for its shrunken population.
An ancient chronicler tells us that “through the heart of the capital ran a river of pure water, its sides faced with stone for a distance of twenty leagues.” Granting that he carelessly wrote leagues when he would have said cuadras, none but a Spaniard would call the stream a river, and the purity of its water, if it ever existed, has long since departed. To-day this “stone-faced” Huatenay at the bottom of its deep-gashed gorge becomes a trickling sewer as it enters the town, passing directly beneath the principal buildings and carrying off such refuse as its sluggishness makes possible. The vast central plaza, far from level and once even larger than to-day, is faced as usual by the cathedral, second only to that of Lima, or, being of stone rather than of reeds and plaster, perhaps to be rated the first in Peru. There is something of the soft velvet-brown of Salamanca about the churches of Cuzco, that calls, not for a kodak, but for an artist. The blue-black plaster interior, pretending to be also of cut stone, is divided, after the Spanish custom, by the choir, with splendid carved stalls. In the sacristy are ranged the dusky portraits of all the Bishops of Cuzco, from sophistical old Valverde to him of the gold-leaf theory. In the scented twilight of the nave gather all the motley population, the male gente only excepted, after the free-for-all manner of Andean churches. Dogs are not permitted to enter. But it is a strange Latin-American rule that cannot be circumvented. I have seen a chola pause at the door, sling her puppy in the manto on her back, as she would have carried a baby, and enter to kneel before a tinselled image, the puppy licking her face affectionately from time to time as she prayed.
In the center of the plaza stands a fountain topped by a life-size bronze Indian. A figure of some great Inca? No, indeed; but a North American “redskin,” feathers, in buckskins, unAndean haughtiness and all, armed with such a bow and arrows as no Inca ever beheld. The exotic is ever more pleasing than the local. The ornate façade of “La Compañía,” testimonial to Jesuit wealth in colonial days, stares awry at the cathedral. Around the other sides of the square are the usual arched and pillared arcades, gaudy with everything that appeals to the eye and purse of the Peruvian muleteer. Here are gay leather knapsacks in which to carry his coca and less valuable possessions, richly decorated trappings for his animals, quenas, or fifes, to while away the weary hours across the unpeopled páramos, and the many-colored “skating-caps” with earlaps which are worn not only by babies, but by many of the Indians of surrounding hamlets. The clashing of shod hoofs sounds now and then over the cobbles, but the absence of vehicles, which is so curious a feature of the interior cities of the Andes, would be striking to a newcomer. A “ferrocarril de sangre,” what we might call a street-car of flesh and blood—a roofed platform on wheels behind phlegmatic mules—rambles down to the station on train-days. Memories of viceregal times hover about the rare sedan-chair that serves the same purpose. Cuzco had no electric lights as yet, though she continued to hope, and my friend Martinelli had enstalled a dynamo to operate his cinema in the patio of the “Hotel Central.”
Cuzco was the first place in South America with any hint of a tourist resort about it. Visitors have become almost familiar sights, and there was already developing that pest of European show-places, unwashed and officious urchins offering their services as “guides,” an occupation undreamed of elsewhere on the continent. A wily Catalan resident pays any street Arab twenty cents for bringing him first news of the arrival of a foreigner—by train; those who tramp in from the north are, of course, overlooked—taking a sporting chance on recovering the dos reales from the possible victim. But the business is still in embryo, though there are those who prophesy that Cuzco will some day become the Rome of South America—not entirely to its own advantage.
There are many points of similarity between Cuzco and Quito, located at opposite ends of what is left of the ancient Inca highway. In climate they are much alike. Being 11,380 feet above the sea and on the thirteenth parallel south, surrounded by high and snowy mountains, even though at some distance, one would expect the former capital of Tavantinsuyo to be colder. But even in this rainy season, though the atmosphere was often lead-heavy from the almost constant downpour, it was only more dreary, not lower in temperature. Neither of the two cities has a river worthy the name; the Machángara and the Huatenay, with their slight branches, serve alike as dumping-grounds, and equally break the soil with deep quebradas. Splendid views of both cities may be had from the mountains that shut them in, though in this respect Quito surpasses. The soft evening air, the singing of birds, the rows of tall, maidenly-slender eucalyptus trees behind massive mud walls, the long roads to the railway stations, are alike characteristic of the two towns. In both an atrocious din of church-bells tortures the hours before dawn, though here again the Ecuadorian capital wins the palm; nor can the cuzqueño policeman rival his fellow of the equator in shrilling away the monotonous hours of darkness. To nearly as great an extent as in Quito the patios and lower stories are given over to Indians and servants, with the “gente decente” holding the upper floor. Both towns are colorful in garb; both are peerless when the sun shines, and gloomy under clouds; both have the drowsy air of places far removed from the real world, with many times the number of shops needed droning through a precarious existence. On the other hand, whereas the Indians of Quito speak Spanish also, here one must know Quichua to carry on any extended intercourse. There are a few beautiful women in Quito, too; I never saw one in Cuzco, though this may be merely another instance of my abominable luck. Some Indian girls between five and fifteen are pretty, but they are so often veiled by the grime of years that the virtue must be chiefly accepted on faith. Nor has Cuzco anything approaching that unrivalled circle of hoar-headed peaks that ennobles the vista of its rival to the north. The two cities would probably be about equal in population were Cuzco also the national capital—as it should and hopes some day to be. “We want to free ourselves from those degenerate negroes of Lima and establish an independent government under an American protectorate,” a self-styled lineal descendant of the Incas by way of Tupac Amaru confided to me. As it is, Quito is more than three times the larger.