Yet after all, the ancient tongue of the Incas, variously called Quichua, Quechua, and Keshua (with the most guttural of sounds), has survived to a greater extent than any other American dialect. Some have called it “Runa Simi,” or general language of the common people; but the quichuaists of Cuzco insist that it is rather the Inca or court language that has remained. Garsilaso complained that even in the time of the Incas there was a “confusion and multitude of tongues,” with a new dialect almost every league. He who has attempted to make his way down the Andes on a fixed vocabulary will recognize the justice of this plaint. Before we left Panama, Hays and I had made up a lexicon, only to find that all but the commonest words changed so often that it was of little value. What is called Quichua is spoken more or less continuously from Quito to southern Bolivia, with scatterings through northern Argentine. But the dialects of Ayacucho, Huancayo, the valley of Ancachs, and especially of Cajamaca and further north, include many terms which the purists of Cuzco will not grant an honest pedigree. Only in the ancient capital has it retained anything like the original pronunciation, with those “sounds harsh and disagreeable to our ears” which Garsilaso sought to soften with editorial license. Philologists assure us that the language rose in the north and moved southward, citing the use of more archaic terms in the more southern dialects; for example yacu, which is water in the north, is flowing water, or river, in the south, where unu designates the liquid. The spread of Quichua has been attributed to culture rather than conquest, that is, it was adopted by new tribes coming under the Inca influence, not because it was forced upon them, but because it afforded a more perfect means of communication than their primitive dialects.
It is a real language, with complete grammar and all the flexibility and shades of expression of our classical tongues. Philologists have attempted in vain to represent its sounds by Roman letters or combinations thereof, even by inventing new characters. But these are makeshifts at best, and the pronunciation can only be learned by practice in its native land. Roughly speaking, it includes all the letters of the Spanish alphabet except b, d, f, g, j, v, x, and z. But many of those remaining must be doubled or otherwise modified to represent sounds unknown to European tongues. L is rare, while the sound represented by the Spanish ll is frequent; there is no rr, but r is much used. Harsh in its phonetics, it has a suggestion of the Chinese in that three pronunciations of the same word, labial, palatal, or throaty, give it quite different meanings. The traveler who pauses in the trail to call out “Cancha acca?” to an Indian hut displaying the white flag that announces chicha for sale, would say something quite different than he intended if he gave the cc the sound represented by the single c. The accent is nearly always on the penult, lending the speech a fixed and almost monotonous rhythm. Technically speaking, Quichua is agglutinative, that is, formed by the tacking on of suffix after suffix, until in some cases an entire sentence consists of a single word, making it possible to express fine shades of meaning fully equal to the Spanish with its diminutives and affixes. It has no articles, no genders (at least expressed), no individual prepositions, and has virtually only one verb conjugation. The plural is formed by adding cuna; the six cases, corresponding to the Latin, by suffixes. Thus huarma is boy, huarmacuna, boys; huarmacunacta is the accusative, huarmacunamanta, of the boys. In like manner the genitive is formed by combination; acca is chicha, huasi, house, and accahuasi, tavern. The doubling of words gives a collective and often quite different meaning; thus rumi is stone, rumirumi, a stony place; runa is man, runaruna, a crowd; quina is bark, quinaquina, the medicinal bark from which we get quinine, as well as the name thereof. Its system of counting is built up on the fingers, as in all languages, but is somewhat cumbersome in larger combinations—which none of the ignorant Indians of to-day are capable of using. Thus 299 is iscaypachacchuncaiscconniyoc!
As in the case of all more or less primitive languages, Quichua is often onomatopoetic,—its words formed from sounds connected with the object expressed. Why the animal we miscall guinea-pig should be cui (kwee) to the natives of the Andes no one who has shivered through a night in an Indian hut listening to the falsetto, grunting squeak of those irrepressible little creatures will wonder; why a baby is a guagua (wawa) none need ask. As in most languages, mama is mother; on the other hand, father is tata, or tayta; the newcomer finds papa already in use to designate potato, as it has come to in all Spanish-America, as well as in Andalusia. The primitive origin of the Inca tongue is further demonstrated by many crudities of expression, and an indelicacy in the use of certain terms that have been banished from polite intercourse among European nations. Nustahispana, or penccacuy (shame) are cases in point. Marriage-time is Huarmihapiypacha, literally, “the time to chase a woman.” It is natural that many more aboriginal words should have survived and become a part of the general language in a land where the Indians have survived themselves, than in one where the race has been virtually wiped out, or at least set apart, as with us. Hence the language of Spanish-America is much richer than our own in terms from the aboriginal tongue. The ignorant Spanish Conquistadores, as devoid of “language sense” as the most uncouth American “drummer,” gave many of the native words queer twists; to their untrained ears Anti sounded like Andes, tampu like tambo, pampa like bamba, and Biru like Peru. Yet Quichua has enriched even the languages of the world at large with many words, such as llama, pampa, condor, and alpaca.
A brief sample of the ancient tongue might not be amiss. Few works except the Bible have been printed in the vernacular; and this was done not that the Indians might read it, since there probably exists no man able to read Quichua who cannot also read Spanish, but for the use of missionaries and priests among the Andean tribes. Many words for which there existed no equivalent have, of course, been “quichuaized,” and the letters retain their Spanish values. The parable of the man who built his house on sand instead of rock (St. Luke, VI, 48) runs:
Ricchacun uc huasihacluc ccaryman; pi yallicta allpata allpisca ccaccahuan tecsirkan. Inas paractin unu llocllapi yaicumurkan mayutac caparispa saccay huasiman choccacurkan mana cuyurichiyta atispa huasi ccaccapatapi tiactin.
Cuzco, the last foothold of Spanish power on the American continent, bids fair to be the last of popery also. Even Quito is little more fanatical. With the exception of Ayacucho, I found the former City of the Sun the only place in Peru where the priests were still permitted to advertise their spurious wares by an incessant thumping and hammering of all the discordant noise-producers of whatever tone or caliber or lack thereof, in her church towers, at any hour of day or night. There is a law against “unnecessary” ringing of church-bells in Peru; but in this hotbed of fanaticism the prefect does not interpret his duties too severely. With a din that awoke the echoes of the distant mountain-flanks that shut her in, Cuzco sallied frequently forth in a long religious procession, not a single white man gracing it, except the priests. These latter did not permit the most solemn formalities to weigh heavily upon them. Even within the cathedral itself I have seen the chief padre, carrying the host or whatever it is, and marching with sanctimonious tread under his embroidered canopy, wrinkle up his lascivious countenance and half-surreptitiously make unbelievably scurrilous jokes with the priests close around him about the attractive girls of the pious, downcast audience.
Peru has long been one of the most intolerant of nations, at least theoretically. Since the adoption of her constitution public worship by non-Catholics has been forbidden, its fourth article reading: “The nation professes the Catholic religion, Apostolic and Roman; the state protects it, and does not permit the public exercise of any other.” An attempt had recently been made to amend this to the extent of striking out the last clause. There has long been violation of the law. Lima has an Episcopal church of long standing and considerable congregation, and as the membership is largely English and American, Peru has not risked a controversy with those countries by enforcing the constitution. In fact the strongest and chief argument of the senators supporting the proposed amendment was not that liberty of cult is just, but that “the law is not being enforced anyway, so let’s change it.” A very few grasped the fact that this is one of the many reforms needed to draw to Peru the immigration indispensable to her modern advancement. The fourteenth-century arguments of the hidebound clerical senators against the proposed change afforded reading compared to which the efforts of the world’s chief humorists are staid and funereal.
Great excitement broke out in the more “conservative” cities of the interior when the news came up from Lima. Headed by the archbishop, ecclesiastics of every grade issued orders to all fieles to combat “por cualquier medio—by any means whatever, this vile attack on the Holy Mother Church, the morality of the family, and the honor of Peru by the masones and ateistas of the Senate.” From all the altiplanicie telegrams poured in, calling upon the senators to suppress “this absurd resolution on the liberty of cults, unnatural to Peru and abhorred by all the faithful.” Every scurrilous little Catholic organ—and the most outspoken “sage-bush” journal of our Southwest cannot approach these in vituperation and positive indecency of language in attacking their enemies—frothed with raging editorials. In Cuzco it was planned to parade the patron saint through the streets, ostensibly as a mere protest. A few years ago the bishop would have met the issue by calling together a few hundred of the most fanatical, filling them with concentrated courage, and preaching a careful sermon that would really have been an order to sack and kill the hated “liberals,” though with a clever wording to clear his own skirts of the matter. Such things have often happened in Cuzco. This time a rumor that the procession was to be merely an excuse for the priests to incite their followers of dull complexion and understanding to riot reached the students of the university. Though all are Catholics, these fiery “liberals” are ardent haters of priests; only a few years before they had bodily flung the “clerical” faculty out of the institution. Now they secretly gathered revolvers and planned to lay in wait for some of the more fanatical priests when the procession started. Wind of this reached some one of higher authority and intelligence, the news was wired to Lima, and in the nick of time orders came to the prefect to forbid the parade.
An amendment to the constitution in Peru requires the consent of two consecutive congresses and the signature of the president after each passage. A year later the amendment on the liberty of cult was carried and became law amid a scene of riot in the senate, during which a fanatical representative snatched the bill from the hands of a clerk and tore it to bits.
It occurred to me one day that it might be unpatriotic to leave Cuzco without calling on the only American missionaries—except a lone preacher in Bogotá—I had so far heard of in South America. On the edge of town I found my way at length into a mud-walled compound of some fifteen acres, with fat green alfalfa, an exotic windmill, and a two-story mansion surrounded by flower-plots. I had paused near what seemed to be the main door, and stood gazing admiringly at the wall that shut out all the troubles of this rude world, when a window opened and a lean man of forty, his mission plainly imprinted on his gaunt features, a finger between the leaves of a hymn-book, put out his head and murmured, “Buenas tardes.”