Suddenly a deep-green patch of alfalfa burst out among the glaring rocks, trebling their barrenness by contrast. It was the little oasis of Yura, fed by a small stream, the water of which, reputed efficacious to disordered livers, is bottled and sold—less widely to-day than before the priests, whose rival establishment produces the “Water of Jesus,” threatened to blackball out of heaven anyone who drank the other. Then far away across the Egypt-tinted world the eye made out well below, at first dimly, a green oasis with a great, or at least a widespread, city covering about half of it. “Ari, quepay!” (“Yes, let us stay a while!”) the first settlers are said to have cried when they caught sight of this garden spot; and the train seemed like-minded, setting us down at last in Arequipa, second city of Peru. Three dawdling days had been required to cover 412 miles.
The only place of importance between the Pacific and Titicaca is strikingly oriental in atmosphere, with a suggestion of Cairo, thanks to its shuffling donkeys—a hole is slit in their nostrils that they may more easily breathe this highland air—and its encircling desert, yet exceeding the latter in beauty by reason of the snowclads hovering about it. To the north lies Chachani, fantastic with its peaks and pinnacles and jagged ice-fields; nearer at hand stands hoar-headed Misti, rivalled in symmetry of form only by Fujiyama and Cotapaxi. From any second-story roof the arid, yellow sand stretches away as from the summit of the pyramids to a horizon far more broken and tumbled than that of the Sahara. The hills are streaked with what looks like snow, but is really fine sand, the same sand that lies in waves monotonously multiplied in the form of wandering, crescent-shaped médanos nearer the coast, whence quantities of it are shipped to Europe to make a cheap glass. Down below and round about the city are fat cattle knee-deep in green pastures, in an oasis where irrigation produces alfalfa, as well as many fruits, in abundance. The desert air is clear beyond words, bringing the newcomer from the bleak highlands above the impression that summer, an unoppressive midsummer of the North, has suddenly come again. Every evening wonderful sunsets, ranging from lurid pink through purple and blue-gray to a velvety fading slate, play a veritable symphony of color across the surrounding desert world.
The city itself is flat, of one, or at most two stories, always with the bulking mass of Misti or its neighbors behind it. Earthquakes have been frequent in Arequipa. Because of these visitations, perhaps, the town has everywhere an unfinished appearance, most buildings ceasing abruptly just above the first story and looking as if the rest had been shaken off or suddenly abandoned. A few have ventured to crawl up again to two stories, and here and there a bold adventurer to three, these latter, commonly of sheet-iron, seeming constantly to tremble at their own temerity. As in Lima and the lands of the Arab, the roofs are flat, places of promenade and evening tertulias; for rain falls, if at all, only in brief afternoon showers. The town is built largely of a soft white stone, almost chalk in composition, and light in weight as terra-cotta, which is chopped or sawed out of a desert quarry not far away and which, though it hardens in the air, can still be carved with a knife. Two arched bridges with massive piers, mildly suggesting those by which one enters Toledo in Spain, span the little cliff-sided Chili. The eucalyptus seems less at home here than in the higher cities of the Sierra, but drooping willows abound. As everywhere on the West Coast of Peru, massive mud fences afford places of promenade in the outskirts.
I was treading close on the heels of civilization of a material sort. Electric street-cars had appeared in Arequipa a bare three months before; with motormen imported from Lima they afforded an efficient service to nearly every corner of the oasis. The innovation had not been without its difficulties. Strolling one morning, I met three cholos driving a dozen donkeys marketward. Suddenly they began to shout and dance about the animals as if some danger were imminent. A block away sounded the gong of a bright new tramcar, but as I had never known one, least of all in South America, deliberately to run down an animal, I wondered at the uproar. To my surprise the car came on without slackening speed. The shrieking cholos succeeded in hauling, pushing, or coaxing most of the stubborn brutes off the line, but one pair refused to vary their set course. At the last moment one of these lost courage and sidestepped, but his sturdy black companion kept serenely on, with stubborn down-hung ears and a “to-hell-with-you” flip of the tail—and just then a corner of the swiftly moving car caught him on the starboard beam. He turned a complete somersault on the cobbles, rolled on to his feet, and gazed after the still speeding car with a scowl not unmixed with a ludicrous expression of astonishment. Later I learned from the American manager of the line that a number of donkeys, burritos, and dogs had been killed during the first month of operation. Decrees and warnings had been utterly wasted, and Arequipa’s donkeys would have stagnated the lines and again taken possession of the gait of life without this resort to the teaching of experience.
Cuzco and Arequipa are reputed the Peruvian strongholds of conservatism. Of the two, the latter is probably more deeply under the spell of the ancient church. The din of bells was almost constant; during my week in the city I saw no fewer than five images of the Virgin paraded through the streets to the usual accompaniment of kneeling cholos, bareheaded whites, and scores of sanctimonious-faced old beatas following with funereal step. Several of Arequipa’s fiestas are noted for the dancing of wooden saints to barbaric music in the public squares. Others have fixed periods of calling on their fellows, sallying forth from their home churches to the plaza where, manipulated by the cholo bearers beneath, they bow to and finally “kiss” each other, to the fanatical applause of the multitude. The town boasts also several crucified figures operated by wires that cause the eyes to roll, the limbs to quiver, and the head finally to droop as in death, after which a gang of workmen, carrying towels over their arms to wipe away the “blood,” climb up to remove the nails and lay the “body of Jesus” away in a glass coffin until the next holy day.
The babies of Bolivia sit in a whole nest of finery on nurse’s back
Arequipa is built of stones light as wood, cut from a neighboring quarry. They harden when exposed to the air
From a score of stories typical of Arequipa with which I was favored by a fellow-countryman, who had spent many years as the alpaca expert of the chief local warehouse, I pass on two. For months he and his wife had been annoyed by the throngs of beggars who gathered for a bowl of soup each noon at the monastery just across the narrow street from his residence, and then slept out the day in the sandy hollows nearby, like the dogs of Constantinople. What particularly aroused his ire were the habits of an old fellow of ninety or so, whom he had known for years. A few weeks before, finding him in the all too scanty remnants of what had once been shirt and trousers, the American had smuggled him into his workshop and given him a complete new outfit from his own wardrobe. The mendicant returned to his customary hollow a hundred yards up the street, which he was accustomed to share with several curs and a donkey or two, and during the night his fellow-beggars robbed him of the new garments. What, then, was the donor’s surprise and American disgust when he set out on his early stroll next morning to find the old fellow parading up and down the street, begging of the women bound for mass in the monastery church “without a lickin’ stitch on him, as naked as the day he was born. If you’d tell it in the States, they’d say you was lyin’ and that he must have had a shirt an’ britches on anyway. But, no, sir, just as I’m telling you, without a lickin’ stitch, an’ parading his wrinkled old ninety-year carcass up an’ down amongst all them women goin’ to mass.”