They sat about the dinner table—a delightful, stammering, scientific gentleman, who advised my carrying home some live camarones (crayfish); a young English curate, here to sketch all the caterpillars of all the butterflies he could find, and their cocoons; the grandson of a former president of Peru, who spoke of his grandfather’s battles; and a cousin of the actual president, who told tales of ostrich-hunting in the pampas of Argentina, a cosmopolitan club man, whose chief interests in Lima were cricket and polo. There was a man who was collecting everything from pearls to reduced heads and whose gold watch-fob was a Peruvian tongue-weight for the dead. A Chilean lady with the grace of an older generation spoke of the islands of Juan Fernandez and their prehistoric monuments, which have a nose and chin, face the sun, and are too big to enter the British Museum. That led toward the archeologist.
We were eating cuculis—desert doves—and alligator-pear salad, while we listened to stories of pre-Inca civilizations from the man who has done most to unravel their mysteries. In Peru the alligator-pear is called palta, a shiny, dark-green, leather-covered shell concealing its soft, nutty flesh. It hangs at the end of a fine twig, which is dragged down by its weight. A stiff mayonnaise so disguises the palta that it is almost impossible to tell where fruit ends and sauce begins.
A lady of mixed races wore twice about her neck a heavily-carved chain, on her breast the large cross at its end. She spoke of a friend who had searched for years until he should find a gift exactly suited to her; at last he beheld this chain about the neck of a pope of the Greek church. The pope parted with it reluctantly, for in a cavity in the back of the cross he kept his sacred relics.
She twirled the great cross between her fingers.
“Très chic, n’est-ce pas?” she said. “And you see,” touching the clasp to loosen a little lid, “it’s just the size for a powder-puff!”
A folk-lore-specialist-explorer was discussing swinging bridges in the Andes with a lady whose husband had left her in Lima while he took a distant journey in the interior to make a census of savage tribes.
“What have you been doing to-day?” she asked.
“Bless my soul, I don’t remember,” he replied. “Oh, yes! buying slaves in the jungle.”
Two young English people at the remote end of the table had just arrived in Lima from a honeymoon adventure up the Amazon. They had sailed as far as Iquitos; then they had paddled, they had ridden mule-back, they had tramped over the mountains, and, fording streams to their waists, had lain down in their wet clothes to sleep in the cold wind. We all inquired about fever.
“Oh, yes,” said the red-cheeked little lady, “my husband got the fever one day in Iquitos; it turned his eyes red and his face blue, and the whole house shook with his chills.”