CHURCH OF LA MERCED, LIMA—TYPE OF RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE OF SPANISH COLONIAL PERIOD.
Of course, like La Paz, Quito, Bogotá and many of the other old mountain cities, which until very recently were isolated so far as the outside world was concerned because of their inaccessible locations, Cuzco is still behind the times in sanitary arrangements. Since there is surface drainage, there are odors, but one need have little fear of any ill effects in such a climate as theirs. Thanks to it, the cities are as healthful as most; and to the archæologist and the lover of art and the beauties of nature in her sublimest aspect, there is no more fascinating city in South America than Cuzco.
IX
ECUADOR
Ecuador, “the Switzerland of America,” is one of the smallest of our sister republics in the South, yet her area, of 116,000 square miles, is equal to that of our States of Missouri and Arkansas combined, and, if certain pending boundary disputes should be determined in her favor, her territory would be more than doubled. Her population is now about 1,500,000, an average of a little over twelve to the square mile.
Politically, the republic is divided into sixteen provinces, not including the Galápagos Islands. Five are maritime, occupying the strip of coast between the Western Cordillera and the sea, ten are interandine, and then there is the Oriente, so called, which consists of all the country embraced in the slope between the Eastern Cordillera and the Brazilian frontier, in the valley of the Amazon. There are two fluvial systems, both rising in the mountains; one flowing west to the sea and the other down the eastern slope. In all they are composed of ninety-one rivers. Those tributary to the Guayas, flowing westward to the sea, and many of which are of considerable size, are now of the greater commercial importance because the country of the Oriente, through which those tributary to the Amazon flow, is still a wilderness, only sparsely inhabited even by what are left of the aborigines—and this although it is the richest of all in vegetation and fertility of soil, like the adjoining Montaña district of Peru.
Thus, ranging as it does from the sea-level of the coast on one side and the valley of the Amazon on the other to the high interandine plateau, and from thence to the great cloud-piercing peaks of the cordilleras, crowned with perpetual snow, this country directly beneath the Equator, from which it derives its very name, is possessed, as are Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, of every variety of climate within the sphere of a few hours’ journey—in the lowlands, the eternal summer of the tropics; on the high table-lands, eternal spring, and, in the glacial regions of the mountain summits, winter without end. As the late Professor Orton so aptly put it: “As the Ecuadorian sees all the constellations of the firmament, so nature surrounds him with representatives of every family of plants. Tropical, temperate and arctic fruits and flowers are here found in profusion, or could be successfully cultivated. There are places where the eye can embrace an entire zone, for it may look up to a wheat or barley field or potato patch and down to the sugar cane and pineapple.”
And, in addition to the familiar products, in many places the slopes of the mountains between twelve and fifteen thousand feet are clothed with a shrub peculiar to the high altitudes of the Andes, called chuquiragua, the twigs of which are used for fuel and the yellow buds as a febrifuge. In the valleys between the cordilleras a very useful and valuable, as well as the most ordinary, plant is the American aloe, or century plant, which under cultivation, however, blooms oftener than once in a hundred years. It is the largest of all the herbs, and, with its tall stem rising from a cluster of long, thick, gracefully curved leaves, looks like a great chandelier. Most of the roads are fenced with hedges of them. Nearly every part is said to serve some practical purpose. The broad leaves are used for thatching huts and by the poorer classes as a substitute for paper in writing; a sirup flows from them when tapped; as they contain much alkali, a soap that lathers in salt water as well as fresh is manufactured from them; the fiber of the leaves and roots is woven into sandals and sacks; the flowers make excellent pickles, the stock is used in building, the pith of the stem is used by barbers for sharpening razors and the spines as needles. A species of yucca, resembling the aloe, yields the hemp of Ecuador.
In the lowlands, cacao and sugar cane, coffee, tobacco, rice, cotton, and bananas and other tropical fruits are grown. The forests contain rubber and numerous species of useful trees, among them the tree that yields what is known as the taque nut, or vegetable ivory, from which buttons are made, the grasses and toquilla palm used in the manufacture of the coarser grades of Panamá hats, the chincona from the bark of which quinine is obtained, the mangrove cultivated for tanning purposes as well as its fruit, and the silk-cotton tree that yields the valuable commercial product known as kapok. A considerable portion of the Oriente is verdured with a part of that immense forest which extends in an unbroken mass from the grassy llanos of Venezuela to the pampas of Argentina. In other sections of the country are gold, silver, copper, iron, coal, petroleum, asphalt and other minerals, though since the colonial régime there has been little activity in mining. Only a few years ago work was resumed in the famous mines of Zaruma, formerly the source of much revenue to the Spaniards.