Where the train halted I scorned the electric trolley and, walking a few yards, saw suddenly burst upon me a scene for once superior to the anticipation,—La Paz, America’s most lofty capital, in its hole in the ground. Up there at the “Alto,” 13,600 feet above the sea, all was brown, cold, barren, unenticing; all about, behind, and around me the bleak, uninhabited Andean plateau, stony and drear, cherishing nothing but bunches of tough ichu, stretched away like a faded brown sea to the hazy distance. Then at my very feet this gave way, and all the nearby world pitched headlong down into a gashed and broken chasm 1200 feet down, measuring perhaps two miles across from where I stood to an equal height on the tumbled and ramified foothills opposite. These, breaking and splitting and falling away into unseen valleys, and climbing out again to become more rugged and higher ridges, finally culminated in a vast and jagged mass of snow and ice, cut off from the solid earth by banks of clouds, above which the reflection of the descending sun streamed in brilliant rose color upon the glaciered pinnacle of giant Illimani, 24,500 feet above the sea. Across the broad puna a cold, fitful wind whistled lugubriously; down below, though barely a sound of life except the blood-stirring snort of a regimental band came up this sheer quarter-mile from the city, all seemed pleasantly cozy and warm.
The lower flanks of the great cuenca were checkered with little Indian farms, now mostly light-brown from being newly plowed, some still the brownish-green of old crops, and all hanging at a decided angle. Further down, on the floor of the valley itself, were similar irregular patches, chiefly of the brilliant green of alfalfa, of every conceivable shape,—round, triangular, horseshoe, veritable “Gerrymanders” in the strange forms given them by the configurations of the ground; for, once down below it, this proves by no means so floor-flat as it seems from above. In the very bottom of the valley, rather on the further side and stretching a bit up the opposite slope, lay La Paz itself. It was a compact city, so compact that it seemed one conglomerate mass into which the eye broke only once,—at the tree-roofed central plaza, tiny from here as a green paster on a vast wall-painting. From this height one saw little but the roofs, the dull-red of the tiles greatly predominating—almost too much red, as in the garments of an Indian gathering; next came the white and colored house-walls, then the sober gray of old churches, and finally here and there the edge of a blue, green, or even an orange wall peering above the mass.
All about the city proper, imperceptibly joining it and stretching away on nearly all sides over vastly more space than the town itself, were perhaps half as many buildings, scattered singly or in small clusters, forming an almost unbroken row down the valley to the southeastward. Here and there one of these ostentated itself in brilliant red; most of them were cream-color or the gray of sheet-iron; and everywhere between them were the irregular green of plowed patches, with now and then a grove of blue-green eucalyptus, or a patch of willows, enticing from this treeless height where, once the eye rose a bit from the floor of the valley, there was not the suggestion of a shrub. Not the least striking feature of the scene was the glassy clearness of the atmosphere, with nowhere a puff of smoke, and absolutely nothing to dim the view; if the clock in the all-too-slender tower of the congress building had been larger, it would have been easy to tell the time by it.
Brown ribbons of roads, all starting at a pillar on the plateau above, strung like drippings of syrup down all sides of the cuenca, except on the rugged, uninhabited flank opposite; and along all of them on this Saturday afternoon crawled at what seemed a snail’s pace files of Indians with their laden donkeys and llamas, the cargoes generally covered with straw, the drivers chiefly in red ponchos, though so like tiny crawling ants were they from this height that the colors were barely noted. Seldom broken, these strings of pack-trains stretched from the edge of the plateau to where the head of each procession to the morrow’s market was swallowed up in the compact, silent city.
I walked on around the yawning chasm, the wind that howled across the puna reaching the very marrow of my bones, a raging hail-storm beating upon me for a brief moment and making the city below seem doubly snug and serene by contrast. The little “Great River” of La Paz one did not see at all, so tiny is it and worn so far down into the clay soil of the valley in a half-seen gorge descending through tumbled ranges of gnarled hills toward the yungas, as the Bolivian calls the tropical montaña, below. Mere words give but a faint notion of this lower end of the cuenca of La Paz. For so broken and pitched and tumbled, so fantastically gashed by the rains is it, that it would be an indescribably beautiful thing, even if there were not added the wonderful colors and half-tones, a rich dark-red predominating, over the countless split and torn and every-shape hollows and needles and pinnacles of earth across which the cloud-shadows play incessantly. The mournful notes of a quena, or rude Indian flute, floated sadly by on the wind. Then sunset crept relentlessly across the valley to the town that seemed to crouch motionless with fear of the darkness descending upon it, paused a moment to do its work well, swallowing up all before it in the purple twilight of tropical altitudes, then climbed slowly again out of the hollow on the further side and spread at last across all the world. The city’s bright colors had faded to an indistinct sameness, the brown hills and deeply eroded clay cliffs were blotched red by the departing sun, though the snow peaks above were still ablaze with light; the purple bases of the range receded into black, then into nothing, leaving Illimani standing forth white and cold, stone-dead as a once ardent hope, utterly alone in the luminous sky of the Andean night.
I descended afoot behind the last pack-train, a stony, thigh-aching half-hour from the pillar to the central plaza. The first information to reach me was that La Paz outdid in cost of living even Lima, which is criminal. The boliviano having but four fifths the value of the sol, I had fancied prices would be correspondingly lower; but here two units were often required where one had sufficed before, and the great majority scorned to do business in smaller coins. The hotels which my sadly mutilated letter of credit permitted me to enter were not only unsavory and atrociously managed, but had the barbarous custom of several beds in a room. Each in turn attempted to thrust me into a rumpled nest, with four or five others of unknown nationality or antecedents close beside it, within a battered door to which there was neither lock nor bolt. Whatever else I may be, I am distinctly not a gregarious being in that sense; whereupon they offered me a room with only one companion, as if there were any particular virtue in numbers! I brought up at last in the “Tambo Quirquincha,” facing the Plaza Alonzo de Mendoza, an inn favored almost entirely by natives arriving on horseback.
The constitution of Bolivia asserts that Sucre is the real capital, but permits congress to choose its place of meeting, and “because of the constant danger from our two chief enemies” (Peru and Chile) “at the northern end of the Republic, the Government really resides in La Paz.” How much the choice is governed by the fact that there is no railroad, but only a mule trail, to the “real capital,” is a matter of conjecture. At any rate, the president has not been in Sucre in more than a dozen years, congress has its seat in La Paz, and the head of the army resides there—conditions which will no doubt continue, at least until the railroad reaches Sucre. On the other hand the former “Chuquisaca” is honored with the presence of the supreme court and the archbishop of Bolivia, who do not have to move often enough to make mule trails burdensome. But Sucre will not be comforted. Her chief newspaper is named “La Capital,” each of its editorials ends with the argument “La Capital!” and it always refers to La Paz as “the present seat of Government.”
This “seat of Government,” perhaps the most Indian capital of all South America, has the most purely Spanish name. It should still be called Chuquiyapu, as the aboriginals refer to it to-day, rather than by the trite Castilian designation that is duplicated a score of times throughout Spanish-America. The census of 1909 discovered 76,559 persons in the entire hole in the ground. Of these, 20,007 were rated “white,” but as usual in Latin-America the enumerators got the color sadly mixed with the social position of the enumerated. Indeed, the chief of the census goes on to explain “white” as “descendants, more or less pure, of Spaniards, Europeans, or North Americans”—in other words, anyone with a distinct trace of European blood. There may be a third that many of strictly Caucasian race. Of the 3458 foreign residents, 86 were Americans; of 696 non-Catholics, 562 were foreign men, 40, foreign women, 193, Bolivian men (“chiefly atheists”), and one Bolivian woman. Bold woman, indeed, to admit it! The census rated 30% of the population as Indians; but here again the social status must have played its part, or else there are many non-resident country Indians often in the city. African blood is extremely rare, though slavery was not abolished until 1851. It is no climate for negroes. “The unmarried American women are nearly all teachers,” the report continues, then takes a rap at the country’s chief enemy for stealing her seaport and bottling her up within South America by remarking, “Las chilenas living in La Paz are almost without exception prostitutes.” Most striking of all the data, perhaps, is the fact that of the 60,445 inhabitants over nineteen years of age, only 13,047 are married. But this does not mean that race suicide is imminent; rather that the priests have made the cost of marriage all but prohibitive to the lower classes, and that many others are thereby influenced to consider the ceremony of minor importance. In the entire republic 16% are “alfabéticos,” that is, “know their letters,” a much more handy expression in Latin-American statistics than “read and write.” Only Honduras, in all America, is so low in this respect.
One of the two huge figures facing the grass-grown plaza of modern Tiahuanaco at the entrance to the church