When the cloak had been laid away for the night, the chief priest mounted a pulpit projecting from the side-wall, and in the same drawl in which he had chanted at the altar, compared with which the notorious American nasal twang is soft and songful, either preached a sermon, or recited a bit from the Bible, or imparted some stern orders from the Pope—which, neither I nor, I am certain, any other hearer not previously informed ever guessed. For the monotonous drone in which he hurried through the thing, like a man with an appointed tryst, was such that during the full twenty minutes it lasted I had not the faintest notion whether it was in Latin, Spanish, or Aymará. The only intelligible word I caught was an often-repeated, slovenly “Copavan.” Then the acolytes hastily snuffed the candles, and we filed out. At the foot of the stairway my companion was fallen upon by an old Indian and his son who, imprinting a rapid-fire of kisses on his by no means lily-white hands, begged him to hear them confess. He waved them aside as one might an importunate cur, until the Indian, redoubling his osculations, assured him he had real coin to pay for the service, whereupon the good padre took courteous leave of me and led the pair to his room in the monastery.
I was hurrying into my clothes in the bitter cold Titicaca dawn, when the faint long-drawn whistle of the “Yapura” was borne to my ears. To my astonishment it was barely five, so great is the difference in the hour of sunrise in the few degrees I had moved southward since leaving Cuzco. Copacabana in its lap of terraced hills shrunk into the past as we slipped away around the peninsula of the same name. Before us rose the Island of the Sun, traditional cradle of the Inca race, yellow-brown and mountainous, with terraces far up some of its rugged valleys, one red-roofed village housing the workmen of General Pando, chief owner of the island. It produces potatoes, maize, and quinoa. On the mainland, too, all the shores were terraced and cultivated from the water’s edge to the tops of the ridges and hills, in long, square, rectangular, or such fantastic shapes of fields as the lay of the land required. To the east the great glacier mass of Sorata, by some reputed the highest peak in America, lay piled into the sky, half-hidden and cut off from the solid earth by vast banks of white clouds. Before long we passed, a bit further off, Coati, the Island of the Moon, a low ridge terraced from end to end, constituting a single hacienda noted for its fertility. Mere words give but a faint notion of the beauty of Titicaca on a brilliant morning, with its striking combinations of soft colors,—the dense blue-green of the lake, curtained by tumbled banks of snow-white clouds, the velvety yellow-brown islands and mainland, with the faint-purple cloud-shadows playing across them. The mighty glacier bulk of Sorata piercing the sky seemed to move forward also, as the steamer slipped lazily on, frequently bringing into view new and more delicately beautiful combinations of the same elements.
The Bolivian mainland we drew near in the early afternoon was of a reddish soil, with many patches of bright green and pretty little tilted fields checkering the ridges clear down to the water’s edge. At Guaqui, the landing-place, no train was to leave for twenty-four hours, and I set out afoot across the exhilarating plains of Bolivia for Tiahuanaco, twelve miles away. It was a fertile, well-plowed land, where the remaining stubble suggested wheat as the chief product. The sun dropped behind a dense, blue-black bank of clouds hanging like a pall over Titicaca behind, and there was no sunset when the time for it came, but only a gradual, steady fading of light to a faint gleam in which the eyes could barely make out the ground underfoot. The evening stillness was broken only by the rare lowing of a cow afar off; a shower that was half hail and all cold beat stingingly into my face. But for the storm and wind, an absolute silence lay like a solid wall on every hand, with nowhere the suggestion of a light, the many clusters of Indian huts that had speckled the plain by day seeming to keep disconfidently out of reach of highway and railroad.
At eight I stumbled into the station building of Tiahuanaco. The telegraph operator was sufficiently impressed by my familiarity with the name of the gringo superintendent to induce the woman across the track to serve me stale bread and native cheese, and tea made of the water of Titicaca, brought here in locomotive tanks. On the table were several of the dailies of La Paz—it was difficult to think of that city as “the capital” after eight months of considering Lima the center of the universe—in which the world’s news all at once jumped up to date. But it was like reading a serial story of which one has lost several chapters and finds it impossible to pick up all the threads again.
Tiahuanaco, 12,900 feet above the sea, in a broad, open, unprotected plain, frigid by night, and not over warm by day under the chill blue of its highland sky, is the chief archeological enigma of “Alto-Peru.” The most important ruins lie a few hundred yards north of the station, and an equal distance from the modern adobe town with its bulking stone church. From a slight rise of ground the flat plain, sprinkled with many clusters of mud huts, stretches away to a gouged and broken ridge, here reddish, there green with vegetation, that fences it in. Huge blocks of stone lie tumbled and scattered over a vaster extent than at Luxor and Karnak, in a disarray at once suggesting earthquake; for they seem too immense to have been overthrown by a merely human destroying vengeance. In the region roughly known as Peru there were several detached and separate civilizations, some of which clearly antedated the Incas; and Tiahuanaco has little in common with the ruins further north. There the relics consist almost exclusively of stone walls; here there are virtually none, though excavations might uncover a few remnants. What is left looks, in contrast to the stem practicability of “Inca” ruins, like the caprice of some childish sovereign. But it is not certain how justly we may judge of the whole original plan, since not only the neighboring hamlet, as well as La Paz, has helped itself freely to the materials for its own chief buildings, but the railroad has carried off vast quantities of it for the construction of bridges and culverts. The still existing monuments are chiefly immense stone blocks too great to be moved by puny modern man, some still upright, some fallen. Bas-reliefs, of which Machu Picchu offers none, are numerous; sculptured figures are unknown among the ruins of Peru, while here there are several. Some resemble totem poles of stone. The most striking is a sturdy rock god, his features defaced by the revolver shots of the enlightened youths of La Paz on their Sunday excursions, which, like the twin figures of Thebes, sits abandoned out on the plain. The monolithic gateway, a single block of dark gray stone on which the intricate carving and bas-reliefs still stand forth clear yet inscrutable, has been set together again since Squier’s day.
As I sat gazing across the disordered mystery of long ago, an Indian woman, the ubiquitous bundle and second generation on her back, a crude sling in one hand, drove her pigs out into what seems once to have been the main square of the ruined city. As the animals fell to rooting about among the ruins, the woman walked across to the inscrutable stone god and bowed down before it with a strange, heathenish courtesy. I attempted to work my way around to leeward in the hope of catching a photograph of the aboriginal rite. But while I was still some distance off, she either spied or scented me, and raced away toward the town at a greater speed than I had ever before witnessed in one of her race.
In the modern town dwells an indolent, not to say insolent, population of cholos and Indians, ignorant as the Arabs of the Nile of the motive that brings strange beings from far off to view the disdained remnants of long ago, yet ready to take all possible advantage of that absurd custom. The place bids fair to become as overrun with the pests of tourist centers as the show-places of Europe. Already the stranger is greeted by a rabble of unsoaped urchins, offering for sale as “antigüedades” all manner of worthless pebbles. Aware that visitors, for some strange reason, are interested only in things of great age, these children vociferously proclaim everything in sight “muy antigua,” even to the loaves and meat displayed in the shops, a statement for which there is some basis. The bulking church of the town, as well as portions of the rudest edifices, is constructed of splendid cut-stone. On either side of the entrance are the weather-worn torsos of a man and a woman, crudely carved from reddish sandstone, sadly defaced, and having an even greater air of antiquity than the chief monuments out on the plain. They would be more properly in their setting out among the other ruins; here they are startling as one bursts unexpectedly upon them facing the empty grass-grown plaza of the dawdling village.
The train snorted in soon after noon. Across the bleak Collao spring plowing was at its height, amid much ceremony. Many of the sleek oxen were half-hidden by the red and yellow flags of Bolivia, set upright on the yoke across their horns. Gay streamers and banners decorated animals and plow, while the Indian family that in each case had come in full force to see the propitiation of the spirits that rule over the fields, was garbed in its gayest. For not only must the moon be in a particular phase, but all gods must be won over, all demons exorcised, and all signs promising, before it is worth while to begin the year’s sowing. What a fertile plateau it was, compared to stony Peru, the plowing unchecked over hill and dale of the slightly rolling plain as far as the eye could see!
An official passing through the train to examine the bundles for contraband was the only formality that had marked the passing of the frontier. In the second-class car I began to gather the impression that the Aymará Indian, if morose and even less given to smiling, was on the whole a more promising type of humanity than the Quichuas. For though he was more inclined to insolence, he was far less obsequious, more manly than the slinking race to the north, less passive and obedient, more bellicose and jealous of his rights; and as long as there is any fight left in a man, there is still hope for him.
The day waned. A plowman driving his oxen homeward and carrying the plow on his own shoulder is a touch Gray did not catch. The plain grew less fertile, and was dotted now with countless stone-heaps; Illimani and a long, half-clouded snow-range grew up before us; we climbed somewhat, though the world roundabout seemed level as before. The railroad swung to the left. The scores of mule, donkey, and llama pack-trains, however, kept straight on across the bleak, stone-heaped plain, till suddenly at a white pillar a few miles away they seemed to drop all at once into the unknown over the edge of the near horizon.