We transferred the government saddle to the real horse and by eight were clattering away over the cobblestones of the City of the Incas, the soldier on his sorrowful black mule bringing up a funereal rear. This was doing very well indeed. To get off on the same day planned, at any hour whatever, is no slight feat in the Andes. Such of Cuzco as had already lifted its frowsy head from the pillow gazed hazy-eyed out upon us as we wound and clashed our stony way up out of the city by that breakneck stairway down which I had descended from my trans-Peruvian journey. The morning sunlight fell weirdly upon the City of the Sun below when we reached the notch in the hills where all Indians pause before the last view of the sacred capital of their ancestors to murmur, with bared heads, “O Cuzco, Great City, I bid thee adieu!”
As we jogged on in the sunny October morning across the bare, colorful, cool hills of Cuzco toward the lofty pampa beyond, I turned to ask the soldier behind:
“Cómo te llamas?”
“Tomás,” he replied, with a military salute, “Tomás Cobino, sargento de la Gendarmería Nacional.”
“Can you be that same Tomás who was with the Americans in Machu Picchu?”
“Sí, señor, I attended los yanquis three months in their treasure-hunts.”
The means has not yet been found of convincing the people of the Sierra that digging about old ruins can have any motive other than that of seeking the traditional treasures of the Incas.
A few miles out, the road was in the throes of “repair” by a large gang of Indians, under command of the alguaciles of the neighboring hamlets, who stood haughtily by, firmly grasping their silver-mounted staffs of office. They looked not at all like worldlings, but like men from Mars commanded by sixteenth-century pirates. At first we met many mule-trains, Cuzco-bound, the leaders wearing about their necks long jangling bells with wooden clappers. The Cuzco Indian, of the color of old brass, with his bare legs, scanty knee-breeches, and flat, black-and-red montera, sneaked noiselessly by with the air of a whipped cur, fawningly removing his pancake hat and murmuring an abject “Amripusma.” The greeting sounded like Quichua, but is merely what becomes of the Spanish “Ave María Purísima” in the mouth of the aboriginal. The professor showed great astonishment to find even the women raising their hats in salutation, but Martinelli and I had long since grown to expect it. In his democracy he touched his own hat and repeated “Buenos días, señor” to each Indian’s greeting, instead of acknowledging it with a surly grunt or haughty silence, in the Peruvian fashion. He would have been astonished to know how the startled native cudgeled his primitive brain all the way home, there to roll about his mud hut telling his fellows how he had met a “kara” so roaring drunk that he called him “señor,” as if he were a white man.
Within an hour the trail swung to the right. Away over our left shoulders lay that splendid Plain of Anta, rich with cattle and historical memories of the Conquistadores. The distant bleat of sheep now and then drew our eyes to a bedraggled little Indian shepherdess, armed with a sling, and spinning incessantly, automatically, the crude native yarn on her cruder spindle of a quinoa-stalk run through a potato as whirl-bob, as she edged cautiously away. These lonely guardians of the flocks are not infrequently pursued with impunity by native travelers, and are even known to resort to mechanical means to frustrate attack. In this treeless region the doors of the Indians’ dismal mud hovels were of stiff, sun-dried, hairy cowhides. As the bare world rose still higher, even these miserable dwellings died out, and only the bleak, brown uplands of the Andes spread about us on every hand.
In mid-morning we topped a great bare puna, from the chilly summit of which the white-crested Central Cordillera stretched like some mighty wall across the entire horizon, the snow-peaks and glaciers thrusting their hoary heads through the less-white banks of clouds. Then a vast Andean valley, like those that had long since grown so familiar to me, yet were always beautiful, opened out before us, in its lap the town of Maras, tinted the pale red of its aged tile roofs. The great rolling, red-brown basin was surrounded by age-wrinkled mountainsides speckled with little shadowed valleys and perpendicular chacras, or tiny Indian farms, hung on their flanks like small paintings on slightly inclined walls. We halted for dinner with the gobernador, and for chala, as the Incas called dried cornstalks with half-matured ears; and to admire the far-reaching view and the cut-stone doorways of mud houses sculptured with bastard Inca-Christian designs.