Clocks stopped. Bells in the towers clashed with limp bell ropes, till towers following in turn stifled the din under smoking débris. Everything was reversed; that which stood still was set in violent motion, and moving things were brought to rest. Shrieks for help and agonized prayers mingled, until they, too, ceased.
The sea retreated half a league from Callao, gathered strength from unknown, hidden places, and with a cosmic roar rushed over the entire city, engulfing it and carrying all the ships of the harbor across its walls and towers to be stranded in inland gardens. All of its five thousand inhabitants perished in the deluge, and there was nothing left to give the least idea of what Callao had been.
“To be preserved from its fury could only be attributed to a particular and extraordinary help of Providence.” Yet thousands in Lima who had escaped destruction or death from fright died of fevers which came after. Those who remained were occupied with burying the dead in trenches. Famine as well as fever followed, for the grain magazines of Callao had been buried under water, ovens had fallen in, aqueducts bringing water for turning the mills had been destroyed.
Nor was this all. Loath to give up its fiendish hold, not yet glutted with destruction, the underground fury visited the helpless ruins it had created with five hundred and sixty-eight earthquakes during the next year!
Processions of priests barefoot, with crowns of thorns on their heads, cords about their necks, and heavy chains on their ankles, taught the people that the destruction was of God, the roaring of the subterranean powers a warning against luxury. The prior of one society went about covered with ashes; a heavy bridle cut his mouth, iron nails fastened his eyelids, his back was bare. “This is the punishment that God in heaven executes,” said a lay brother, walking behind him, as he let fall an iron lash so heavily that the blood spurted.
The bones of Santo Toribio and Santa Rosa were carried about; the viceroy and great persons followed in mourning, with ropes about their necks. Distinguished ladies, barefoot, their hair shaved, walked in coarse clothes. The dense stillness was broken by a monk’s voice: “Holy God, Holy God, be merciful to us.”
CHAPTER VIII
LIMA OF TWO ASPECTS
The valley of the Rimac, where glisten the towers of Lima, is only one of the river-ways which cross the desert. The river of the ancient oracle Rimac, “he who speaks,” has given its name in perverted form to Lima—the Spanish city. The temple of the speaker was in ruins long before Spanish days.
Like other streams of the west coast, the great river Rimac has run through the gamut of all zones. Hurrying down from the cordillera, it spreads fertility far and wide over the dry shore-valley. As far away as Chorillos, “little water jets,” the water of the Rimac filters through, led astray for irrigation. But its own journey to the sea is vain. The mountain water is so precious to the desert that by the time the stream has reached the shore, it has not force enough left to make an outlet across the beach into the ocean.
Irrigating ditches and crumbling mud walls divide gardens and vineyards and orchards of wind-blown olive trees. Ruins of mud accumulate dust. Luxuriant nasturtiums drape every dusty bank. Vestiges of fortresses, temples, and grave-mounds of the three ancient cities of the Rimac valley still terrify owners of the sugar-fields, for the inhabitants of the sepulchers sometimes return at night to sit beneath the grape-arbors and listen to the murmur of irrigation streams which they made. Cajamarquilla, Armatambo, and Huadca were the names of these cities, and the whirlwind was their most distinguished god. His white-robed priests ate neither salt nor pepper, and tore out the hearts of men and of animals to offer them to the gods on the platforms of temples.