A CHARACTERISTIC PERUVIAN CHURCH
This pool in a shadowed vale of the western Andes, a shady, sweet-smelling spot, lost in an immensity of desert, is a little solitude in the midst of a great solitude, hospitable by sweet contrast. It takes very little water to make a perfect pool for a tiny fish, where it will find its world and paradise all in one, with never an intimation of the dry bank.
A large butterfly poised gently on the water’s surface. It was sunset time, the butterflies’ drinking hour. A copper bell tolled slowly. The reverberation pierced far into the silence and was “prolonged by the whole surrounding desert.” A boy perched on an overhanging rock was playing a flute. The frail sounds echoed through the quiet air, “hesitating within a silence almost too large.” What can give such an impression of space as a flute? Or, in ceasing, leave such utter stillness? A gorgeous peacock preened itself against the crimson bougainvillea in the sunset, then folded its fan for the night.
It is curious how the atmosphere of a dream cannot be conveyed in words.
Sitting beneath the mango tree by a lily-edged brook, I watched the low bonfire roasting desert quail and smelled the scent of heliotrope hedges, while I listened to an old man’s plaintive song, mingling with a quiet desert waterfall. A wild youth with a bullet gash across one cheek told me of reckless escapades in the valleys above. He twisted off oranges with a stick of bamboo and dropped them into my lap, as the moon, poised on the crest of the mauve-colored Andes like a discus thrown by a mighty arm from beyond, disengaged herself and traveled upward. Moonlight, he said, is brighter in the mountain defiles. The moon sometimes drops a rainbow up there, a faint, round, dream rainbow, made of thin far-diluted sunlight. Pushed by a little breeze, it divides the cloud and disappears.
He pointed out the false Cross preceding the true Cross, preparing its way into the sky.
“Some violets have got in here,” he said suddenly, tweaking one out by the roots. Intrusive violets!
A man with spurs passed picante and young kid and trays of fruit, their crevices filled with flowers.