But the ladies seemed merely to be mildly amused, and the native policeman saw nothing in the sight worthy of comment. Children now and then roam the streets of Arequipa in their birthday clothes, and the old fellow had long since been in his second childhood. My outraged fellow-countryman went across town to make complaint to his friend, the prefect. The latter did not see what he could do about it.
“Why don’t you send him to the hospital?” grumbled the alpaca-expert.
“They wouldn’t receive him, with no one to pay for his keep.”
“Well, sir, I couldn’t stand it no longer having that ol’ feller paradin’ around before my house, with my wife inside an’ all of them women folks goin’ to mass, as naked as the day he was born. So next mornin’ I borrowed a stretcher an’ got four Indians, an’ I says, ‘Now you git that ol’ feller on that stretcher an’ tie him down an’ carry him over to the hospital an’ leave him inside, or dump him in the river or anything you like, only so’s you git him out of here. An’ I’ve got a phone an’ when I hear he’s inside the hospital I’ll give you each a sol.’ Well, sir, them Indians just dumped him in the hospital payteeo before the Sisters of Mercy could shut the gates, an’ they had to keep him.
“I’ve got a lot of friends amongst them priests across the road, even if I ain’t a Catholic,” he went on, “an’ they’re a pretty nice lot o’ fellers, take ’em all in all. They’s three kinds of ’em: the brown priests, the black priests, an’ the white priests” (Franciscans, Dominicans, and Mercedarias). One especial, by the name of Jayzoóse, has been over here in my house off an’ on for fifteen years to ask for a chicken or some eggs, or a few dollars to build a new altar, or to have a few drinks—Oh, they’re a pretty decent lot o’ fellers, an’ of course they’ve got to live somehow. Well, Jayzoóse—he’s livin’ with a woman over there behind the monastery wall an’ got four or five kids; but then of course they all do that in Peru, though I suppose the Catholics up in the States wouldn’t believe you if you told ’em, but of course you ’n me or anybody that’s been down here—well, Jayzoóse come over the other day an’ says he wants me to come an’ hear him preach. So I went out to a church over here on the edge of town an’ I tell you he preached a mighty strong sermon, too. Only it was All Saints’ Day an’ of course everybody was drunk. So I was layin’ here readin’ along in the afternoon, when I heard somebody knock at the street door—or if I happened to be asleep an’ didn’t, Theodore Roosevelt” (pointing to a cross between a Dachshund and a pug curled up at his feet) “here, or Woody Wilson” (an Irish terrier) “there did, for they always hear anybody that knocks, no matter if it’s midnight—an’ I went to the door an’ there was Jayzoóse, an’ he was pickled to the eyes. So I invited him in, an’ he says, ‘Why don’t you give me something to drink?’ An’ I says, ‘Well, Jayzoóse, I ain’t got anything in the house just now, but I’ll send out an’ get something. An’ I sent out an’ got two bottles of beer. But Jayzoóse was that drunk he couldn’t sit up, say nothin’ of stand up, an’ when the beer come he got to rollin’ around an’ out of his pocket drops a big loaded revolver. I picked it up an’ says, ‘Here, I’m goin’ to keep this gun fer you. What are you goin’ to do with a gun anyway?’ An’ Jayzoóse says, ‘I’m goin’ to kill that there Chilian blacksmith down the street, because he don’t go to mass an’ says he don’t believe in the Holy Church an’ its miracles; an’ if I’d a had a couple of drinks more, I’d a killed him las’ night.’ An’ I says, ‘No, you don’t want to kill that feller, Jayzoóse, an’ I’ll keep this gun fer you until to-morrow,’—an’ I got up to help him home, an’ when I opened the street door, in tumbles a woman that had been leanin’ up against it—being All Saints’ Day—an’ just fell down into the parlor here; an’ by the time I rolled her out again an’ got Jayzoóse home I was sweatin’ some, I can tell you.”
I strolled out one afternoon in a leisurely hour from the central plaza by a street growing ever rougher and less cobbled to the Harvard Observatory on the flank of Misti, with a splendid view of the snow-capped cone towering into the sky close beside it and a marvelous outlook over all the oasis of Arequipa. Here, in a household where it was easy to fancy myself suddenly set back in the heart of my own land, American scientists photograph the heavens on large dry-plates, with exposures of from one to eight hours, through telescopes automatically regulated to the speed of the earth, but requiring also constant hand adjustment. Arequipa, however, is growing less ideal for the purpose, since the number of its cloudy days has more than doubled. The blood-red sun was sinking behind the Sahara hills when I turned homeward through the caressing air of evening, the desert flanks of Misti and Chachani and Pichapichu glowing a velvety red from the reflection of the opposite horizon, the white oriental city growing dimmer and dimmer, then suddenly bursting out in a spray of electric lights above which the two white spires of the cathedral more than ever resembled minarets.
Next day I returned to the highlands in the private car of the railway superintendent, a fellow-countryman. The day was brilliant, the leprous desert flashing in the sun even after it had given way to the ichu-brown tablelands of the great plateau, Misti bulking as large a hundred kilometers away as out at the observatory on her flanks, and snow-caps springing up into the luminous sky about us to all points of the compass. All the afternoon we loafed in cushioned armchairs facing the back platform, on which sat our host shooting with automatic gun-pistol at vicuñas, a pastime strictly against the law, but Peruvian statutes scarcely reach the altitude of a railway superintendent. Fortunately the animals were scarce and far away, and the nearest he came to breaking the law was to raise the desert dust about them and send them scampering across the rolling pampa at a lope between that of jack-rabbit and a deer, sparing us the necessity of halting the train and sending out the crew to bring in the game. From Juliaca we turned south along a flat once-lake-bottom. Arms and branches of Titicaca, full of shivering reeds, broke in upon the dusk that thickened into night just as we pulled into Puno, cold, dreary, and monotonously like all other towns of the high Sierra.
I had timed my arrival to take, instead of the regular steamer directly across the lake, the semi-monthly “Yapura” that makes the round of its shore, with many stops. We were off at ten and out upon the “open sea” by midnight, a huge distorted moon rising off the starboard bow, into the prismatic wake of which we wheezed slowly but steadily, until it crawled up under the black skirts of the clouds that covered the edges of an otherwise starlit sky. A wind as penetrating as that off Cape Race caused our diminutive craft to roll and plunge merrily, to the distress of the priest, lawyer, and home-made Ph.D., with whom I shared the six-by-eight dining-room-cabin. Titicaca by daylight has the identical color of the sea itself, and we awoke to find ourselves wheezing along in mid-ocean, so to speak, at eighteen knots—every two or three hours. We cast anchor first before the red town of Juli, in a lap of bare hills sloping up from the steel-blue lake. I dropped on top of the first boatload of cargo and went ashore, the captain, having orders not to start without me, promising to blow a special signal. The Jesuits claim to have set up in Juli the first printing-press in America, and here Quichua was first reduced to writing. To-day it is a mere dawdling village, distinguished by the voluminous Dutchman breeches of its Indians. At noon Pomata held us long enough to unload the priest and a few boxes and bales at the usual cobblestone wharf. This same good padre had assured me that it was a well-known fact that Saint Thomas had visited America before the Conquest and had brought the Indians their civilization, being known to them as “Tomi”—a bit familiar, to say the least. How persistently mankind seeks to rob poor old Columbus of his glory!
In the afternoon we churned into a wide, semicircular bay as far as shallow water and rustling reeds permitted, and I was soon climbing the easy slope to Yunguyo. Here and there was much freight to discharge. When I expressed my surprise at the consumptive powers of so small a town, the captain winked an Irish-Peruvian eye and breathed, rather than murmured, “contrabando.” I had come at last to the end of endless Peru, with the unexpected privilege of walking out of it, as I had entered it eight months before. Yunguyo lies on the neck of a little peninsula, part of which, by the arbitrariness of international frontiers, is Bolivian. The steamer had orders to pick me up in the morning, and slipping on kodak and revolver, I struck out for the sacred city of Copacabana. A league from the landing the road mounted a stony ridge, passed through the two arches of an uninhabited rural chapel, and left the historical, if sometimes profanity-provoking, land of Peru forever behind.
To that day I had never, to my knowledge, met a Bolivian. Those born beyond the boundary evidently kept the fact a profound secret, and in Peru the silence about the adjoining land was as if it were on the opposite side of the earth. Once in Bolivia it was as rare to hear anything of Peru. It was a stony country, in fact there were more stones than country. Everywhere they lay piled up in high massive fences with half-tillable patches between them. The wide road was well-peopled with Indians afoot, Indians darker and of more independent mien than those of Cuzco. This was the route by which, according to tradition, Manco Ccápac set out from the island of Titicaca to found the Inca Empire. The countrymen were engaged in a sort of planting and plowing bee, a half-drunken festival, their hatbands decorated with newly picked flowers. The instant I passed the boundary the head-dress of the women changed to an ugly, round, narrow-brimmed felt hat hitherto unknown. On the Peruvian side the shores of the lake had been reedy and shallow, lisping with water-birds and a melancholy wind from off Titicaca, as if the sea were thinking sadly of its lost glory. But as I topped the ridge of the peninsula, there opened suddenly before me the vast steely-blue lake, as clear-cut against the base of the reddish-brown hills as if dug with some gigantic spade, rolling away in one direction over the horizon like an Atlantic, the velvet-brown island of Titicaca standing forth in the middle distance sharp as an etching. Rocks, which the superstitious Indians fancy are impious men turned to stone, stood forth on every hand. Children along the way addressed me as “tata,” the Aymará version of the Quichua “tayta” (father).