Omnipresent, the earthquake is a mystery which no laws can govern, beyond man’s comprehension or control. One never gets accustomed to it. Horror at a first shock only increases with further experience. Earthquake is linked with freaks of nature; it lifts up a ridge across the bed of a stream; it alters the face of the earth so that lawsuits spring up over changed boundaries. It vitiates the soil. Blooming fields wither, crops are lost, and cattle die from eating the scorched grass. The fiery core of earth is nearer the cooled surface than we imagine. But here at least there are no “torments from heaven.” In Peru it is said that lightning is worse than earthquake, emanating as it does from God’s own realm.
Even the climate of the coast partakes of mystery. The clouds hurrying from the Atlantic have drenched a whole continent of jungle in tropical downpour, and before they reach the desert, their last drop of moisture has been wrested from them as snow—drained dry by the Andes. The tropical sun heats, and the Antarctic current bringing its icy winds, cools. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other. For the red-hot desert can also be cold! The low-hanging garuas, the ocean mists of half a year, chill the desert and cling to the base of the mountains, fading lighter and lighter up and away from the black rocks where white surf is breaking. Such are the facts of the case, but it has been thought that the original god, Con, was responsible, for once in anger he deprived this desert coast of rain.
The desert is majestically empty, a great “vision of nothing without perspective.” Yet its mere emptiness suggests breadth, backward and forward, up and down, both in time and space. An unheard silence lies between the empty horizons, perfect except for the “great, faint sound of breakers,” the tumble of an unused ocean of water, which destroys without moistening the desert shores.
It seems lifeless. Harmless and peaceful at least, it presents nothing to be destroyed by sun-blight. It remains, as it apparently always has been, the realm of death—though even death presupposes life before it. But disturb the desert, and a thousand forces spring into action, furiously attacking the intruder. The heat of the sun assumes a ghoulish love of destruction, and at night the stars look down upon a creature shivering with fever, reeking with wet in this desert place. Possessing all fruitful ingredients within and kindly elements without, the desert sleeps. It needs only one thing to burst into life.
A mysterious river springs forth full-grown. From what glacier or clear, icy fountain up on the frozen puna may it not have issued? And then, after a mysterious incubation, it returns to sparkle here in the light, and in the leaves and flowers which the dampened earth is ready to produce.
There are traditions that sometimes a vagrant shower escapes from the magnetism of the mountain-tops. The flowers waiting just beneath the surface spring up like bloom over the June earth. The water was a shower of bluebells! A fugitive vegetation greedily spreads, quickly as it disappears with the passing of the water. In some places cotton grows to the height of a horse’s head, a luxuriant crop, too unexpected for harvest. This brilliant life lasts a week, perhaps more, and then lapses. Where do the slumbering flowers conceal themselves? Where, indeed, does the pansy get its coloring matter?
The desert of Peru is varied: toward the south the coast is strewn with borax, white upon the cliffs; toward the north petroleum gushes from beneath it. Upon the red plains of Huacho are the salt lakes of Pampa Pelada, reflecting the sun in a thousand colors. “White dust-whirlpools dance on its white floor.” Its banks are scattered with the bones of animals which have come there for salt, and its perpendicular cliffs are haunted by flesh-eating birds. There, gnarled gray shrubs “loom as if carved out of clay.” Beyond, the desert is coated with nitrate; yet here it seems but pulverized bones, beneath acres of white skeletons bleached by a thousand years—gaunt testimony to its desertdom since prehistoric Indian races struggled to make it blossom.
In the Pampa of Islay the desert takes on a terra-cotta hue. Whirlwinds progress from hollow to hollow. Above the purple mountains, shading away from the red desert, bright blue peaks are snow-covered to set them off from the sky. Fog shadows drop darkness here and there over their barrenness. Even the mist has a poetry of contrast.
Across the plain a constant ocean wind sweeps fine white beach-sand along with waves of color, no less real because impalpable. Its pilgrimage of a thousand years toward the mountains is uninterrupted, for the wind blows always from the southwest. It causes the rippled waves of sand which it brings along to assume in traveling a crescent shape—the wandering médanos.
Sometimes larger dunes overtake smaller ones, which, so absorbed, become firmer in shape as they journey toward the mountains. Should two collide, they are shivered, then blend in a new crescent, usually to separate again.