executioner with his broad sword drawn in his hand. And now the Indians feeling their Prince just upon the brink of death lamented with such groans and outcries as rent the air.... Wherefore the priests who were discoursing with the Prince desired him that he would command the people to be silent, whereupon the Inca, lifting up his right hand with the palm of his hand open, pointed it towards the place whence the noise came and then lowered it by little and little until it came to rest upon his right thigh, which, when the Indians observed, their murmur calmed and so great a silence ensued as if there had not been one soul alive within the whole city. The Spaniards and the vice-king who were then at a window ... wondered much to see the obedience which the Indians in all their passion showed to their dying Inca, who received the stroke of death with that undaunted courage as the Incas and the Indian nobles did usually show when they fell into the hands of their enemy and were cruelly treated and unhumanly butchered.”
When they first stepped upon the shores of Peru, a Spaniard or two could travel hundreds of leagues alone through this foreign country on the shoulders of men and be adored as gods in passing. Before long, an army was not secure. A Spanish governor and his escort of thirty men were resting one day upon a high plain. The Indians, whistling to each other with bird calls and barking like wolves in the night, “went softly to the Spaniards’ tents, where, finding them asleep, they cut the throats of every one of them.”
Such deeds were being done in the Empire of the Lover of the Poor, the Deliverer of the Distressed, where formerly each individual had been forbidden to injure even himself.
The spirit of rebellion spread among the Indians. They tried to poison the water-supply of the City of the Kings. They tried to burn Cuzco, imagining they could burn the Spaniards with it. Their revolts culminated in that great rebellion of 1780 under José Gabriel Condorcanqui, called Tupac Amaru, whose descendant, through a daughter, he was. His followers swore their hatred of the white race and vowed not to leave a white dog, not even a white fowl alive. They even scraped the whitewash from the walls of their houses. They did succeed in strangling a governor. In return, Tupac Amaru’s tongue was cut out, and after seeing his wife, son, and brother tortured to death before his eyes, was himself sentenced to be torn apart by wild horses.
The men were slaughtered in such numbers that the women went out to help each other sow the fields. At sunset they returned, hand in hand, singing a melancholy lament, until this too was prohibited by Spanish law. All musical instruments were to be destroyed; the use of the Quichua language was forbidden; women were ordered not to spin as they walked; distinctive customs were to be laid aside. All lapsed into spiritless dullness. The air of desolation spread.
The Indians of Peru are a silent people trained by cold and cutting winds. They bite the end of their ponchos to show anger and live to an immense age. Their thoughts turn backwards. They grind their teeth on the same hard corn kernels as formerly and drink the same corn-brandy; they carry about as talismans little effigies of llamas found in the graves of their ancestors and throw their criminals over the same lofty precipices. The juice of the red thorn-apple leads them into ecstasy, the only high light of their existence, for by means of it they communicate with the spirits of their ancestors. The only passion they have brought with them through the centuries is remembrance of the past. The thorn-apple is called huaca cachu, the plant of the grave.
The Indians squat about in groups with their little gourds of chicha. There is no laughing. The mummy-like babies do not cry. The lake on whose banks they live contains no fish. No worm, no insect, inhabits its banks. But there is a spirit which broods from the mountain above. He will lighten the burden of the traveler who seeks the mountain-top and presents him offerings in the depths of night. The achachibas or piles of stones are witness to his gracious power.
Between two mountain-tops lies a steel-colored lake shimmering in its stone basin. The Indians come here to beg for fire-water. They pour in brandy, standing on a peak while making their libation to the rain-god, and then leave without a word. Immediately the rain pours.
Only their religious festivals recall Inca feast days. Christianity has never been able to abolish the bacchanales of former times; it has merely changed their names. The call of triumph, haylli, has been changed to Hallelujah, Christian anthems are set to Indian tunes, IHS has been engraved on the stone doorways of antiquity. Over the shrines outside the churches are effigies of sun and moon. Above the megalithic fortress of Sachsahuaman three crosses preside where the banners once indicated the dwelling of the Children of the Sun. Indians still salute the Sun temple on first entering Cuzco, though the nave of the Dominican church stands upon the spot where the Sun was worshipped in golden chambers, its Christian walls built of mammoth stones rolled together for the glory of the Sun. This superstructure typifies the methods of the missionary priests.
A wooden llama filled with fire-crackers is exploded on Good Friday. By the roadside, an Indian in a grotesque mask, with a feather crown and bells on his arms and legs, leaps in fantastic bounds to celebrate the day of the Holy Cross. A picture of the Virgin is carried about on her Ascension Day. The Indians, dressed in the masks of wild animals and multi-colored feathers with bits of savage embroidery on their loose garments, dance about her to fifes and drum-beats and rattles of beans and snail-shells. Wild dances, horn-blowing, ugly voices screaming, and rattling tin—these heathen orgies swarm at the feet of effigies of Christ.