The marquis could hardly suppress his astonishment, and, pressing the hand of Father Joachim, pensively took the road to Chorillos.
He had just recognized in Sarah, the pretended Jewess, the young girl whom he had seen praying with such Christian fervor, at the church of Santa Anna.
CHAPTER V.
THE HATRED OF THE INDIANS.
Since the Colombian troops, confided by Bolivar to the orders of General Santa Cruz, had been driven from lower Peru, this country, which had been incessantly agitated by pronunciamentos, military revolts, had recovered some calmness and tranquillity.
In fact, private ambition no longer had any thing to expect; the president Gambarra seemed immovable in his palace of the Plaza-Mayor. In this direction there was nothing to fear; but the true danger, concealed, imminent, was not from these rebellions, as promptly extinguished as kindled, and which seemed to flatter the taste of the Americans for military parades.
This unknown peril escaped the eyes of the Spaniards, too lofty to perceive it, and the attention of the mestizoes, who never wished to look beneath them.
And yet there was an unusual agitation among the Indians of the city; they often mingled with the serranos, the inhabitants of the mountains; these people seemed to have shaken off their natural apathy. Instead of rolling themselves in their ponchos, with their feet turned to the spring sun, they were scattered throughout the country, stopping one another, exchanging private signals, and haunting the least frequented pulperias, in which they could converse without danger.
This movement was principally to be observed on one of the squares remote from the centre of the city. At the corner of a street stood a house, of only one story, whose wretched appearance struck the eye disagreeably.
A tavern of the lowest order, a chingana, kept by an old Indian woman, offered to the lowest zambos the chica, beer of fermented maize, and the quarapo, a beverage made of the sugar-cane.