It is the extraordinary interest of the subject,—a religion and a polity resembling in so many points those of Old World countries, yet itself altogether independently developed—that has drawn me into this digression, for all that I had intended was to describe the impression which the existing ruins make, and what it is that they seem to tell us about the capacities of the race that has left them as its monument. They are far scantier than are the remains of the Egyptian and Assyrian civilizations, and they are as inferior in material grandeur and artistic quality to those remains as the race was intellectually inferior not only to the Greeks, but also to our own early Celtic and Teutonic ancestors of the first five Christian centuries who produced few buildings and had not advanced in settled order and in wealth so far as the subjects of the Incas. Nevertheless, the Peruvian remains do bear witness to two elements of strength in the American race. One of these is a capacity for the concentration of effort upon any aim proposed and for a scrupulously exact and careful execution of any work undertaken. The other is a certain largeness and boldness of conception, finding expression not only in the plan of great buildings, but also in an administrative system which secured obedience over a vast area, which diffused its language over many diverse tribes, and impressed upon them one worship and (to some extent at least) one type of society. That a people who wanted so many advantages possessed by the peoples of the Old World should have effected these things shews the high natural quality inherent in some at least of the aboriginal races of the Western Hemisphere.
Was this semicivilization of Peru—and one may ask the same question regarding that of Mexico—still advancing when it was suddenly and irretrievably swept away by the Spanish Conquest? Did it possess such further possibilities of development as might have enabled it, had it been spared, to have made some substantial contribution, whether in art, or in industry, or in the way of intellectual creation, to the general progress of mankind? Or had it already reached the full measure of its stature, as the civilization of Egypt seems to have done some time before the Persians conquered that country, or as that of China did many centuries ago? This is a question which the knowledge so far attained regarding the pre-Conquest ages of Peru does not enable us to answer.[40] Could the voyage of Columbus have been postponed for four or five hundred years, Peruvians and Mexicans might have risen nearer to an equality of intelligence with the European peoples, however inferior they had remained for the purposes of war. But America once discovered, the invasion of Mexico and Peru was certain to follow; and so soon as the Old-World races with their enormous superiority poured in among those of the New World, the weaker civilization could not but be submerged, submerged so utterly that little or nothing of it remained to be taken up into and incorporated with that of the invaders.
It is this complete submersion that strikes one so forcibly in Peru and Mexico; perhaps even more forcibly in the former than in the latter. The aborigines went under at once. In Peru and Bolivia they constitute the majority of the population. But to the moral, intellectual, and political life of Peru and Bolivia they have made no contribution. Even to its art and its industries they supplied nothing except painstaking artificers, retaining the old talent for stonework, which they did at the bidding of Spanish masters. Negatively and harmfully, they have affected politics by preventing the growth of a white agricultural class and by furnishing recruits to the armies raised by military adventurers. The break between the old Peru of the Incas and the newer Peru of colonial times was as complete as it was sudden. The earlier has passed on nothing to the later, because the spirit of the race was too hopelessly broken to enable it to give anything. There remains only the submissiveness of a downtrodden peasantry and its pathetic fidelity to its primitive superstitions. Some old evils passed away, some new evils appeared. Human sacrifices ended, and the burning of heretics began.
[CHAPTER V]
LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT
Bolivia was for two centuries after the Spanish Conquest a part of Peru and has neither natural boundaries nor any distinctive physical character to mark it off from its neighbours, Peru on the northwest and Argentina on the southeast. It is an artificial creation, whose separate national existence is due to two events. After the Jesuits had, by the king of Spain's decree in 1769, been forced out of Paraguay, which they had ruled with considerable success for many years, the Spanish government found that it was more and more difficult to administer from Lima their vast southeastern dominions lying to the east of the Andes, since these were then becoming more and more exposed to contact with European nations, reaching them across the Atlantic. Accordingly, they created, in 1776, the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires and assigned to it all the River Plate countries, while for the southeastern parts of what had hitherto been upper Peru they set up a separate administrative authority with the seat of its audiencia at Chuquisaca. Then came the War of Independence. When that struggle ended with the decisive battle of Ayacucho, in 1824, and the surrender of Lima and Callao, the triumphant revolutionary leaders determined to maintain the political separation from Peru of this southern region, which had been under the audiencia of Chuquisaca, and to constitute a distinct republic lying between Peru and Argentina. To this new creation the name of Bolivia was given in honour of Simon Bolivar, the "Liberator," himself a Venezuelan. Independent it has since then remained, having, however, lost in an unfortunate war with Chile a large slice of territory adjoining the Pacific. It is now, except Paraguay, the only entirely inland state in South America. And just as on no side has it anything that can be called a natural frontier, neither have its inhabitants any distinctive quality or character to distinguish them sharply from other peoples. They differ but little from the Andean Peruvians, being of similarly mixed Spanish and Indian blood and living under similar physical conditions.
Bolivia includes several regions quite different in their character. Nearly all the western part is a desert, with a few mining towns scattered here and there, a desert enclosed by the two great almost parallel Cordilleras of the Andes. The southeastern part is a plateau, or rather succession of plateaux, lying on the eastern side of the Eastern Cordillera, and gradually sinking into those vast levels on the borders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, from which rivers flow northward into the Amazon and southward to form the Paraná and Rio de la Plata. Much of this region is too dry or too rugged for cultivation or even for ranching. Yet much is also valuable for one or other purpose, and capable of supporting an agricultural population as well as that which lives off the mines. The third or northeastern region is a part of the great Amazonian low forest-covered country,—the so-called Selvas (woodlands),—which stretches out to the east from the declivities of the Eastern Cordillera, and is still, save for a few white settlements, inhabited only by wild Indians. Thus in the enormous total area of Bolivia, 605,000 square miles, there are only 2,000,000 people, and the large majority of these are Indians, uncivilized in the forests, semicivilized in the other regions. The white population, estimated at 200,000, most of whom, however, have some Indian blood, is virtually confined to a few towns, only one of which, La Paz, has more than 25,000 people. Santa Cruz (de la Sierra), far out in the eastern lowlands, and Chuquisaca, now called Sucre, Cochabamba, and Potosi, with its wonderful mountain of silver, have some families of Spanish blood. Oruro and Uyuni in the desert are mining towns with the mixed population that gathers in such places. La Paz, the largest city, and virtually, though not officially, the capital, has 50,000 inhabitants, the bulk of whom are Indians. These six towns are far apart, there are few inhabitants between them, and these are nearly all Indians. Till the railroad from Uyuni by Oruro to La Paz was made, communication was very slow and difficult. Anyone can see what obstacles to economic and political progress such conditions create.
The traveller who approaches La Paz from Lake Titicaca—and this has been the usual route from the coast—rises slowly through the bare hills amidst which Tiahuanaco stands till he emerges on an immense level, stretching south to a distant horizon, and bounded on the west by bare rolling mountains and on the east by the still loftier Eastern Cordillera. Here in the bleakest spot imaginable, about 13,000 feet above sea-level, the railway from Guaqui, the port on Titicaca, meets the railway from Antofagasta, the Chilean port on the Pacific, four hundred miles away to the south, and this is the point to which a third railway is now converging, that which is being built to connect La Paz with Arica on the Pacific, one hundred miles to the west. From this point, called Viacha, the route turns eastward towards the Cordillera, the line climbing slowly in wide sweeps over the dusty and shrubless plateau on whose thin grass sheep are browsing. There is not a house visible and the smooth slope seems to run right up against the mountain wall beyond. Where can La Paz be? asks the traveller. Presently, however, he perceives strings of llamas and donkeys and wayfarers on foot moving along the slope towards a point where they all suddenly vanish and are no more seen. Then a spot is reached where the railway itself seems to end between a few sheds. He gets out and walks a few yards to the east and then suddenly pulls up with a start on the edge of a yawning abyss. Right beneath him, fifteen hundred feet below, a grey, red-roofed city fills the bottom of a gorge and climbs up its sides on both banks of the torrent that foams through it. Every street and square, every yard and garden, is laid out under the eye as if on a map, and one almost seems to hear the rattle of vehicles over stony pavements coming faintly up through the thin air.
I had often heard La Paz described as lying in a deep rift of volcanic origin, due to a sudden subsidence in the course of an eruption, or perhaps to an earthquake. Such a hypothesis seemed natural in a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. But there is no trace here of any volcanic action, whether eruption or disruption. This barranca—it is the Spanish name for such a hollow—has evidently been scooped out by the action of water. The sloping plateau up which the railway rises from Viacha is an immensely thick alluvial or lacustrine deposit of earth and gravel, doubtless formed in the days when the whole region between the Eastern and Western Cordilleras formed part of a far larger Lake Titicaca. The torrent which comes down from the snows of the Cordillera Real to the north has cut its way down through this deposit and thus formed the "gulch," to use the word which, in western North America, is appropriated to gorges hollowed out by streams. The sides of the hollow are all of earth, extremely hard, and in many places almost precipitous, but there is no rock, certainly no igneous rock, visible anywhere.