Birdseye Views of Far Lands

by James T. Nichols

The city of Callao has had its ups and downs. Some one has said that the chief product of Peru is revolutions and Callao has had its share of them. Also, nearly every earthquake along the coast gives this city a shaking up. At one time many years ago when the city had a population of some six thousand people there came an earthquake followed by a mighty tidal wave that only left two persons alive. The very site of the city sunk beneath the waves of the ocean and never came up, the present city being built upon a new site entirely.

The short ride from Callao to Lima, the capital city, is interesting. Here one is introduced to the famous "mud fence," as the fences are all made of mud. Little patches of ground are tilled and bananas, pears, oranges, and all kinds of fruit and vegetables as well as corn and other grain grow in abundance. Everything looks ancient. The ground is plowed by oxen hitched to a wooden stick. The mud huts and houses of the farmers are almost as bare of furniture as a hen coop and almost as dirty. It hardly seems possible that people so near the port as well as the capital city could be so far behind the times.

The railroad runs along the Rimac river, but this is nearly dry much of the time, the water being used for irrigating purposes. Everything smells bad and the people are even dirtier than in Chile. Of course, there are some beautiful spots in the country and plazas in the cities, but all this gush about the beauty and loveliness of things in general makes one tired.

I saw more turkey buzzards and vultures in ten minutes in the city of Lima than I ever saw before all put together. At the slaughter house one can see a stream of blood running in the open soil and I suppose the offals are dumped out for the vultures to devour. The Rockefeller Foundation has set apart twenty-five million dollars, so I understand, to be spent in twenty-five Peruvian cities for the purpose of cleaning them up and providing sanitary systems for them. The leaders of this foundation have certainly found an appropriate place to spend money. I have seen four or five of the cities that are to benefit by this appropriation and they all sure do need cleaning up.

In Lima, of course, I went to the great cathedral. Everybody does this for it is about the most outstanding thing to be seen. It is said to be the largest cathedral in South America. The corner stone was laid by the great Pizarro himself in 1535. His bones are in the cathedral now. I saw them. They are in a coffin the side of which is made of glass. The very holes that were made in the bones when they tortured him can be seen. The guide declared that such is the case and of course he would not yarn to a stranger in a sacred church.

The houses in Lima are, as a rule, only one story high. The tops are flat and many of them are almost covered with chicken coops. They say that many a rooster is hatched, grows up to old age and enters the ministry without ever having set foot upon the ground.

The small plaza in front of the cathedral is really beautiful and there are some good substantial buildings around it. The large depot is a modern, well built stately building. The streets are narrow and the shop doors are open to the street. The doors of these shops are corrugated iron and are raised up like the cover of a roll-top desk. Above the shops are the residences of the more well-to-do class. Little balconies are built out over the sidewalk and here the "idle rich" ladies sit and watch the crowds below.

To me a very interesting place was a building that used to be a sort of a place of refuge something like the cities of refuge we read about in the Bible. In the wide door, so they say, there used to be a chain stretched across and any man who could reach this was safe regardless of the crime he had committed. No officers or law could touch him. Of course, he was in the power of the keepers of the refuge. They could enslave him for life or kill him and no law could touch them. At least this is the story told me by a resident of the city.

But the briefest article about Peru should not leave out at least a mention of the wonderful mountain railways of the country. The Central Peruvian railway tracks reach the dizzy height of 15,865 feet above sea level, which is almost a mile higher than the famous Marshall Pass in the Rockies. This railroad too is a standard gauge. To reach this altitude the train passes over forty-one bridges, one of which is two hundred and fifty feet high. It passes through sixty tunnels, the highest one of which is the Galeria tunnel, which is 15,665 feet above the sea.