Fig. 39—Huichihua, near Chuquibambilla, a typical mountain village, in the valleys of the Central Ranges, Peruvian Andes.
Fig. 40—Potato fluid above Vilcabamba at 12,000 feet (3,660 m.). The natural sod is broken by a steel-shod stick and the seed potato dropped into a mere puncture. It receives no attention thereafter until harvest time.
Topography is not always so intimately related to the life of the people as here. In our own country the distribution of available water is a far greater factor. The Peruvian Andes therefore occupy a distinctive place in geography, since, more nearly than in most mountains, their physical conditions have typical human relations that enable one clearly to distinguish the limits of control of each feature of climate or relief.
CHAPTER VI
THE BORDER VALLEYS OF THE EASTERN ANDES
Fig. 41—Regional diagram of the eastern aspect of the Cordillera Vilcapampa. See also [17] of which this is an enlarged section.
On the northeastern border of the Peruvian Andes long mountain spurs trail down from the regions of snow to the forested plains of the Amazon. Here are the greatest contrasts in the physical and human geography of the Andean Cordillera. So striking is the fact that every serious student of Peru finds himself compelled to cross and recross this natural frontier. The thread of an investigation runs irregularly now into one border zone, now into another. Out of the forest came the fierce marauders who in the early period drove back the Inca pioneers. Down into the forest to escape from the Spaniards fled the last Inca and his fugitive court. Here the Jesuit fathers sowed their missions along the forest margin, and watched over them for two hundred years. From the mountain border one rubber project after another has been launched into the vast swampy lowlands threaded by great rivers. As an ethnic boundary the eastern mountain border of Peru and Bolivia has no equal elsewhere in South America. From the earliest antiquity the tribes of the grass-covered mountains and the hordes of the forested plains have had strongly divergent customs and speech, that bred enduring hatred and led to frequent and bloody strife.