To-day the domination once held by the Incas has been taken over by the priests, public functionaries, and the patrón, whose wills are obeyed without question. In the eyes of the Indian the priest is the representative of God on earth, to whom he must show absolute submission and obedience, as to one who holds the key to that place of primitive joys and freedom from the sorrows and hardships of this world to which he conceives death to lead. That the priest may be harsh and unkindly, or worse, has nothing to do with the case. Even the God of his conception is cruel and vengeful, taking pleasure in bringing down misfortunes on his head, and to be placated by any means in his power. Were priest and authorities true to their missions, their domination over the Indian might be advantageous. Too often they are quite the contrary. The authorities are disdainful, looking upon their positions merely as opportunities for personal gain; the priest is less often a shepherd than a wolf preying upon his flock with impunity. Too often priest and authorities join together to exploit the aboriginal with liquor and church festivals, his only recreations, at times even inventing the latter to make an excuse for exploitation. Whatever he may once have been, the Indian of the Cordillera is a child, to be governed by a kindly father, as the Incas seem to some extent to have been. The civilization which the Spaniard is reputed to have brought him is nothing of the sort. Garsilaso assures us that the masses were little better than domestic animals, even at the time of the Conquest. They were certainly in no worse state than to-day. That he should have remained or fallen so low is difficult for us of the hopeful United States to understand; it would be more easily understood in India with its fixed castes, or even in England, where certain boys are born with the necessity of lifting their caps to certain other boys. His stolidity passes all conception. He is native to, and of a piece with, the pampa, the bare, treeless upland world where the dreary expanse of brown earth and cold blue sky incites neither ambition nor friendliness, neither hopes nor aspirations. Hence his flat, joyless face with its furtive eyes suggests a soul contracted upon itself, an aridity of sentiments, an absolute lack of aesthetic affections. Passively sullen, morose, and uncommunicative, he neither desires nor aspires, and loves or abhors with moderation. The native language is scanty and cold in terms of endearment; I have never seen the faintest demonstration of affection between Indians of the two sexes, though plenty of evidence of bestial lust. Even his music is a monotonous wailing, an interminable sob on a minor key. He lacks will-power, perseverance, confidence, either in himself or others, and has a profound abhorrence of any ways that are not his ways. He works best in “bees,” with the beating of a drum, the wail of a quena, and frequent libations of chicha to cheer him on, as, no doubt, in the days of the Incas. He is noted for long-distance endurance; yet this is not so great as is commonly fancied. Like an animal, he cannot go “on his nerve,” or will not, which amounts to the same thing. Try to hurry him and it will be found that he needs fifteen days rest each month, like the llama.
From his earliest years the Andean Indian forms a conception of life as something sinister and painful. As a baby, as soon as another uncomplaining little creature usurps his place on the maternal back, he is shut up in some noisome patio or hut, along with chickens, guinea-pigs, and new-born sheep, with which he fights for his scanty fare of a handful of toasted corn. Rolling about in his own filth and that of the animals, who now and again all but outdo him in combat, he reaches the age of four or five, and then begins his life-long struggle with hostile nature. In the country he takes to shepherding the family pigs, then a flock of sheep of the patrón, learning the use of the sling and to wail mournful ditties on his reed fife. Here, with no other covering than a coarse homespun garment open to the waist and barely reaching the knees, he sits day after day contemplating the dreary expanse of puna, until its very nothingness turns to melancholy in his soul. In town he is “farmed out,” or virtually sold into slavery to some family, learning a few ways of the whites, some Castilian, which he commonly refuses to talk later in life, and also the injustice of man, or the habit of considering himself too low to be reached by justice. When he is older, and grown superstitious with listening to the tales of the yatiris, his labor is still heavier. He guides the clumsy wooden plow that is his notion of the last word in mechanical inventions, or carries donkey-loads on his back. Nature yields only to hard struggle and great perseverance in tilling the sterile soil; the sun is parsimonious with its warmth; the very fuel of dung costs hard labor to gather on these treeless heights. Or perhaps the authorities come to carry him off to serve as a soldier of a country he hardly knows the existence of, probably to die of the diseases engendered in his overdeveloped lungs in the dreaded lowlands of coast or montaña. People of scanty, inclement soil, mountaineers in general, are canny and lacking in generosity by nature; add to this that he was forbidden the use of money under the Incas, and it is small wonder the Indian will give or sell his meager produce only by force. Tight-fisted and frugal, he lives for days on a handful of parched corn and his beloved coca, of the depressing effect of which he has no notion. To sleep he needs only the hard ground, be it in his own hut or out under the shivering stars, using perhaps a stone as pillow, if there be one within easy reach. He is a tireless pedestrian; his corneous hoofs are impervious to the roughest going; he sets out on whatever journey fate or his masters assign him, knowing that if he lives he will some day come back to the point of departure. For he has an irrepressible love for his native spot, the mud den where he was born, however miserable or inclement, and will not abandon his home permanently under any circumstances. If he does not return, it is because some misfortune has overtaken him on the trail.
The woman lives the same life from babyhood; and in some ways her duties are still more onerous. Rude and torpid as the male, she neither conceives nor possesses any of those softer qualities peculiar to her sex. When trouble overtakes her she does not complain, but suffers and weeps—if at all—alone, an utter stranger to pity in either its passive or active form. Strong as a draft-horse, she knows none of the infirmities to which modern civilized woman is subject. She gives birth to a child virtually every year, often from the age of fifteen on, without any species of preparation or precaution, washes it in the nearest brook, slings it on her back, and goes on about her business.
The husbandman of the puna plants a few potatoes, a little quinoa, perhaps some barley, clinging to the primitive ways of his ancestors to remote generations. A good harvest does not depend upon proper planting or fertilization, but on the changes of the moon and stars, and the propitiation of the fetishes to which he still secretly gives his adherence in spite of his ostensible conversion to Christianity. He considers himself a being apart from the governing class, referring to himself as “gente natural” and to his superiors as “gente blanca,” as our southern negroes distinguish between “white folks” and “colored folks.” He takes no part whatever in political matters, rarely indeed having any conception of the country to which he belongs. Anything which does not touch him personally he looks upon with profound indifference and disdain. He is submissive as a brute, lives without enthusiasms, without ambitions, in a purely animal passivity that is the despair of those who are moved to an attempt to better his lot.
Some knowledge of Quichua is essential to intercourse with the mass of the population of Cuzco, as it is to the convenience of the lone traveler down the Andes. Even in the city a large number of the “gente del pueblo” cannot, or will not, speak Spanish; in the villages round about it is a rare man who has a suggestion of Castilian. All classes, on the other hand, speak the aboriginal tongue, by necessity if not by choice. The majority, indeed, imbibe it with their nurse’s milk, learning Spanish as an alien language later in life. A professor of the local university, boasting a Ph.D., assured me that he did not know a word of Castilian when he first entered school at the age of seven. After the revolt of Tupac Amaru an edict was promulgated prohibiting the use of Quichua, as it did the native costume, and even commanded that all musical instruments of the aboriginals be destroyed; but like many a Spanish-American law this was never strictly enforced. To-day Cuzco is the Florence of Quichua, where it has retained its purest form, least influenced by the Spanish, and there are many persons of high social standing, the women especially, who speak it by preference.
It is typical of the Latin-American that those things which are of the soil, and have been familiar since childhood, are treated with contempt, are considered inferior to anything possessing the glamor of distance. Thus Quichua, like all survivals of “los Géntiles,” is looked down upon by the “cultured” caste throughout the Andes as something appertaining to the lower classes, to be avoided as diligently as manual labor. “Vulgarly speaking” is the expression with which the cane-carrying Peruvian apologetically prefaces any use of the native tongue. “No se dice allco, se dice perro,” a mother reproves the child that points to a dog with a lisp of the aboriginal word. But as usual, environment is more powerful than maternal desires, and the child grows more fluent in the speech of the Indians than in the aristocratic Spanish. The tendency to scorn it seems a pity to the traveler, for the ancient tongue is certainly worth preserving, and its preservation depends chiefly on Cuzco. The American Rector of the University has done much to reassure the town on the importance of its mission in this respect. Already much has been lost. The best quichuaist in town did not know the words for boat or island, though these are familiar enough wherever any body of water exists in the Andes. Shortly before my arrival the ancient drama “Ollantay” had been performed, and was found to contain many words which even those whose mother-tongue is Quichua did not understand. As the quipus, or knotted strings, was the only form of writing known to the Incas, authoritative interpretation has been lost with the quipumayos who were trained to read them. The tongue of to-day has suffered much admixture, many Spanish words having been “quichuaized” when there was no necessity for it, until there remains a language as bastardized as the “German” of rural Pennsylvania. Not a few have a distinctly hazy notion of the line between the two tongues. “Medio,” said Alejandro, my one-eyed hotel servant, “is Quichua, and ‘cinco centavos’ is Spanish.” How should he know which was which of the two languages he had spoken from childhood, neither of which he could read nor write? There is less excuse for the assurance of persons of some education that “asno” is Quichua and “burro” Spanish, completely overlooking the fact that the Conquistadores brought not only the donkey, but both names, with them. Now and again some expression from the lips of an Indian quaintly recalls the history of the Peruvians and their two-branch ancestry to remote generations. “Ojalá, Diós pagarasunqui!” for instance is a mixture of Arabic, Spanish, and Quichua in as many words.
The first view of Cuzco, at the point where all Indians, male or female, going or coming, pause and uncover and, looking down upon the City of the Sun below, murmur, “Oh, Cuzco, Great City, I salute thee!”
It requires at least three persons to shoe a horse or mule, as it does to milk a cow, in the Andes. Ordinarily the blacksmith is not so bold as this one, but stands at arm’s-length from the hoof. In the background is one of the many old Inca walls on which the modern dwellings of Cuzco are superimposed