Our next difficulty, after landing on Peruvian soil,
was in finding some one who would relieve us of our Chilean money and give us coin of the realm in exchange. At first the local bank flatly refused to oblige us, saying that so few people ever went from Peru to Chile that there was no demand for Chilean money, and that they could not realize anything on our Chilean currency without sending it by mail to Valparaiso or Antofagasta, an expensive and risky undertaking which they did not care to assume. In a word it was “against the rules.” So it was necessary to say “delegado” again. As was to be expected, the obliging cashier was now only too glad to relieve us of all our Chilean money. How many bank cashiers in the States, after laying down a rule of the bank to a foreigner, would be willing to break it because the stranger was able to prove that he was an official delegate to a Scientific Congress? I fear we are behind our southern neighbors in realizing what is due to “science”!
The only thing we could find of interest in Mollendo, was a cock-fight in one of the side streets. An audience of fifty or sixty boatmen and their friends, relieved from their duties at the end of the day, were hazarding their silver soles on whichever bird they judged would last the longest in the tiresome and bloody battle that was being fought out on the cobble-stones. The excitement grew fast and furious as the fight neared its close, and one poor bleeding rooster, nearly totally blind, and almost dying, received a few final pecks from his victorious opponent, himself dripping with blood. I have occasionally watched these Spanish-American cock-fights in an effort to understand why the spectator with Spanish blood in his veins gets so excited over them. Apart from a realization that at present cock-fighting is the national sport of South America, and as such, takes the place that baseball does in the United States, and cricket does in England, I must admit that I have failed to work out any reason to account for the frenzied interest.
Probably the Peruvians would have been just as bored if they had been sandwiched into a crowd of “fans” at a baseball game.
We had not expected to stay over night in Mollendo, which has the usual reputation of West Coast ports for harboring persons afflicted with contagious diseases. But the daily train for Arequipa had gone and there would not be another until the following noon, so we were obliged to make ourselves as comfortable as possible in the Hotel Ferro Carril which was not at all bad. The worst feature of it was the partitions, which were extremely thin. The room next to ours was occupied by an English-speaking individual who received a call in the course of the evening from a fellow countryman, resident here, who tried to frighten him out of his senses by vivid details as to the number of cases of “yellow fever, bubonic plague, and smallpox” now raging in the town. “More deaths occurring every day than the undertakers could possibly attend to!” “Scarcely a house without its sick folk!!” “Not a family still intact!!!” etc., etc. What effect these remarks may have had on the person for whom they were intended, I am unable to say. I do know they caused no little uneasiness among those delegados who had landed here on their way to the interior. We did not stop to make personal investigations as to the truth of the rumors but were promptly on hand the next day to take the train for Arequipa.
As there was not nearly enough space for all the people who desired to leave Mollendo that morning, we were very much crowded for the first hour or so. This exodus from town was not due to any fear of the prevailing pest, but rather to the fact that January is the season for leaving town and enjoying a short stay in the country. The train followed the coast for eight miles to the south until it reached the bay and beach of Mejia, a summer resort where many of the families of Mollendo have built little villas. From here the road turns inland, east and then north, climbing slowly and affording one a view of the pleasant green valley of the Tambo River with its little country houses and its plantations of sugarcane. Still climbing, the train continued almost due north across the sandy plain known as the Pampa de Islay, or the desert of Arequipa. For miles on either side of the track as far as the eye could reach, there was not a green thing to be seen. Although there was no animal or vegetable life, it is not exactly correct to say there was not a living thing, for this is the home of the medanos, those extraordinary crescent-shaped sand-dunes that travel across the hard ground of the desert floor, driven by the prevailing southwesterly winds. Each hill is a perfect crescent exquisitely drawn, the delicate horns tapering off toward the north, away from the wind. They cause the railroad no end of trouble, for when a medano approaches the track, it must get across some way or other. It is of no use to shovel back the horns of the crescent as they encroach on the rails, for the main body of the mound, twenty feet high and sixty feet or more wide, will advance just the same and must be helped along.
Although we had started from Mollendo immediately after lunch and the journey is only one hundred miles in length, it took us seven hours to ascend the 7500 feet, and it was dark when we left the train at Arequipa. We found on the other side of the station a long line of mule-trams, one of which was reserved for intending guests of the Gran Hotel Marone. After some delay incident to transferring a train-load of passengers and their hand luggage to this caravan of tram-cars, we started off and jingled our way through poorly-lit streets of one-story houses where attractively carved stone doorways, dimly visible in the semi-darkness, told of well-built mansions of former Spanish grandees, whose walls had withstood Arequipa’s earthquakes.
To a person who has experienced a great earthquake, the mere mention of the word is terrifying, and yet we were told by one of the astronomers at the local Harvard Observatory that their seismograph recorded three earthquakes during the four days of our stay here. In fact, scarcely a week goes by without one or more disturbances. Fortunately for us, and for Arequipa, these daily earthquakes that are so faithfully recorded by the delicate instruments of the observatory are not usually perceptible