“Not over ninety days in there.”
“Is any one in here now?”
“Yes, two,” he said.
V
Certainly nowhere in Peru are contrasts more marked than in Lima of to-day, with its splendidly carved balconies of former times, its scavenger birds, and mud roofs strewn with ashes; its dim, candle-lit, incense-filled churches with their leper windows, and its international horse-racing; its collections of ancient, battered, gold idols, silver llamas, dishes and spoons, and its aeroplane called The Inca!
Lima is a city where bull-fights are not only an amusement of the people, but of the finest and best intellects which the country has produced as well. Bull-fighters with queues, gold and silver embroidery, lace fronts, and red silk stockings are seen in the streets. Formerly the archbishop, religious orders, and monks all came to the bull-fights. The viceroy, shouting “Long live the King,” threw a golden key into the bull cage, and the fight under most august patronage began.
The market of Lima is a picturesque place: Chilean peppers (aji), orange and red, pats of goat’s-milk cheese in palm leaves, unsalted butter in green corn husks, piles of ripe olives of various maroon hues, strawberries in hand-woven baskets. Fighting cocks glisten in the intense sunlight. Ladies in mantillas float by, closely followed by boy servants, their arms full of bundles. Here and there Franciscans with “sandaled feet and clattering crucifixes” are amassing tribute. There are said to be about six thousand ecclesiastics now in the city.
Lima—with its botanical gardens, condors and llamas in cages, long allées of royal palms, and its cement tennis courts where English people are drinking tea; its venerable university, the oldest in America, and its aimless daily driving around and around the Paséo Colón; its proverbial milk-women in hand-woven shawls among shining cans perched high on ponies, and its craze for art-nouveau; its treasuring of Pizarro’s bony remnant (which a guide explains is “completamente momificato”) and its earthquake-rooms of solid masonry! Lima—where one discusses at some time or another everything from men-of-war to tapir-skin muffs! Lima—with its mediaeval festivals, when priests’ chanting fills the streets, incense rises, blossoms fall, and candles twinkle in a ray of sunlight! As the old saying goes: “It were possible to die of hunger in Lima, but not to leave it.”
PART II
IN THE MOUNTAINS
“And daily how through hardy enterprise
Many great regions are discoverèd,
Which to late age were never mentionèd,
Who ever heard of th’ Indian Peru?
Or who in venturous vessels measurèd
The Amazon huge river, now found true?
. . . . . . .
Why then should witless man so much misween
That nothing is, but that which he hath seen?”