PERU
A LAND OF CONTRASTS

IN THE MONASTERY OF SAN FRANCISCO, LIMA.

PERU
A LAND OF CONTRASTS

BY
MILLICENT TODD
With Illustrations
from Photographs

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1918
Copyright, 1914,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
———
All rights reserved

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

“Qui peut dire où réside le charme
d’un pays? Qui trouvera ce quelque
chose d’intime et d’insaisissable que rien
n’exprime dans les langues humaines?”

Pierre Loti

Peru, A Land of Contrasts

INTRODUCTION

Any statement regarding Peru implies a contrary statement equally valid. Contrast is its characteristic quality, true as to the general aspects of the country and ramifying through remote details. It is the obvious point of view from which to study Peru.

The three parts of this book—the desert, the mountains, the jungle—are the three natural divisions of the country. The shore is a long, narrow desert, much diversified. In a fertile valley intersecting it lies Lima, The City of the Kings. The river has come from the Andes, on whose lofty tablelands, called jalca in the north and puna in the south, flourished remote civilizations filled with mystery. Beyond the mountain barrier lies the jungle, geographically the largest portion of Peru, and like all other jungles a region of dread and fascination.

Peru is a low country lying under a mild sky; but above are the mighty Andes freezing under arctic blizzards. The desert is barren for lack of rain; beyond the mountains, the over-productive jungle is saturated with tropical downpours. Along the shore thunder-storms are unknown; up on the icy tablelands of the cordillera, whose volcanoes are sealed with snow, lightning rips open the mountainsides. Fire splits, and water smooths. Mists are strong enough to magnify and the sky is clear enough to do so. The puna is a land of brutal elements, yet there is found the little chinchilla, protected with softest fur.

On the coast, overhead calm is counterbalanced by subterranean fury. “All geological phenomena are still in active operation,” the shore rising, earthquakes changing the face of the earth, and underground rivers dodging beneath a desert sterile for want of the water which they are hurrying off. The people who live in this country of volcanoes and earthquakes feed on red peppers.

If lack of water prevents the heat of the sun from making the desert productive, so cold prevents water upon the mountain plains from encouraging vegetation. In the jungle luxuriance of all growth conceals any single benefit. Nature erects barriers everywhere. She has surrounded her richest gifts with almost insurmountable difficulties. Fertilizers come from the desert, a realm of death. Mines of the Andes coldly hoard their riches under a life-sucking atmosphere. Agassiz said: “An empire might esteem itself rich in any one of the sources of industry which abound in the Amazon valley.” But these are inaccessible from their very quantity, and they shut in beneath them a fever-laden air. Where there is most fertilizer, the land is most barren; where there are most precious metals, it is most incapable of supporting human life; where richest, it is most difficult to cultivate.

Such is Peru. Elements and forces contrast; each combats each, and all attack man. Nature wars against herself: tropic heat, arctic cold; heavy, poisonous jungle mists, thin air of the mountain-tops; scorching dryness, reeking wet. Even obstacles contrast in Peru. Man is threatened everywhere by elements, by insects. He drowns here or dies of thirst there. He can even be overcome by cold or sunstroke in the same place.

Peru is a land of violent extremes. It has a range of mountains as great as any in the world. The towering peaks are too high to climb. Far above circles the condor, the largest bird in the world. Peru is the source of the world’s greatest river system, whose luxuriant forests are too thick to penetrate. The only representatives of a lost geological age inhabit them, as well as the biggest snakes and the smallest birds. Peru has great mineral deposits in the mountains; it also has rubber in the forests. Wool is produced on the frozen plains, and chocolate in the deep gorges lost among them. And from the valleys intersecting the desert come cotton and sugar-cane.

All kinds of obscure substances are found in this versatile country, ipecac and cochineal, cocaine and vanadium. Not unlike the rest of the world, chill here produces fever, but quinine, the best remedy for the disease of contrast, comes also from the forests of Peru.

Although nature is a supreme fact, its natural history is not the whole of Peru. And contrast as a method of interpretation does not fail for its other aspects. Though man seems to play so small a part, he has lived here since antediluvian animals wandered among coal forests on the Andes. To the charm of limitless nature is added the mystery of great peoples destroyed before they were known. The riches of the Incas and of the glittering, vice-regal Spanish days, when continents were found, taken, and explored, contrast with present poverty. Consistently throughout, the riches of Peru have impoverished it. Its gifts have caused its ruin over and over again.

Wars and rebellions have riddled the country, and bull-fights have filled leisure hours. Though audacity of action has fascinated historians of Peru, its periods of peace have in them even more of romance: a nation of slaves ruled by a monarch-god; oriental splendor of Lima shining because of forced labor in the dark, suffocating mines; Arab blood in the conquerors’ veins penetrating the quiet Indian people, adding a keener edge to their sufferings. The poverty of the present-day Indians contrasts with lavish nature, “beggars sitting on a pile of gold.” Contrasts of nature, of people to country, of antiquity to the present—these diverse elements are insistent wherever one turns.

The charm of contrasting facts is puissant. Almost any one of them might be the text for an allegory. To guard against rhapsody, I have documented every statement made. Conservative authority can be given for every fact, however fantastic, however trivial. The few legends are in a sense also facts: “Une légende ment parfois moins qu’un document.”

The tellers of Peru’s story deserve a history themselves. First came the falcon-eyed missionaries of Spain, sword and rosary clattering beneath priestly robes, to subject the Indians to salvation, or mercifully to condemn them to death by torture. Had they been less conscientious in describing all those quaint beliefs and idolatrous practices which they came to stamp out, we should perhaps have missed the chief source of information in regard to the Children of the Sun and their dependent peoples. Military writers and official chroniclers followed in close order. It took them some time to recover from their amazement at this land of “gold, silver and pleasant monkeys.” They wrote with convincing emphasis, “Wee that live now at Peru ... finde not ourselves to bee hanging in the aire, our heades downward and our feete on high.” On the contrary, they discovered that they were even “as near unto heaven at Peru as in Spain.”

Explorers and adventurers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were in the forefront of writers of romance. Such authors have always found inspiration here. From Marmontel to the Peruvian Tales of Guenelette, from Frank Stockton to José-Maria de Heredia, chiseler of faultless cameos, who himself came from a dramatic land of Spanish conquest, Peru has been a word to conjure with. But invention has added no glamour to history. It cannot keep pace with fact.

Accounts by various travelers of past centuries, voyages of discovery and reports of treasure fleets are followed by the students of to-day. Scientists write of Peru, each authority finding his specialty accented. The geologist sees cosmic forces in active operation still. The anthropologist studies untouched savages in the morasses of the Amazon, the naturalist’s wonderland. Archeology now has an exciting preëminence. Cool authorities admit the amazing antiquity of Peruvian ruins. The historian finds a great barbaric civilization; the economist ancient systems of state policy; the prospector an extensive system of navigable waterways. The mining engineer discovers inexhaustible mines, and the agriculturist unique opportunity, where the uplands of a farm lie among snows, its lowlands under rubber groves and orange trees. All write of Peru, and an increasing bibliography affords easy access to every sort of statistics. I have referred to a wide range of authorities, many of them cited in an appendix, to supplement my own observations, made as member of an astronomical expedition, during a stay of several months in Peru.

A painstaking person while in Peru wrote a journal containing all he saw. Not an event or an observation escaped chronicle. But on reaching home he discovered that his really poignant memories were not in his journal. His entries, though conscientious, “were but the ingredients. They were not the secret of the philtre.”

Facts make their own appeal. But direct assault is not the only means of approach. Sometimes subtleties are best observed by looking at something else. It is often easier to see the beauty, the full glitter and glance of a thing in another object, as the play of colors in the aurora borealis is better perceived by turning the eyes aside. Sometimes one or two minor points chosen from an embarrassment of interesting details are all the imagination needs, as a plant selects only those elements from air and soil which can be used in perfecting its tissue of stem and leaf and flower.

It can only be hoped that this book about Peru may succeed in even suggesting its unique appeal.

PART I
IN THE DESERT

“I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be;
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows.”

Shelley

CHAPTER I
ALONG SHORE

The surface of the ocean is unruffled. Only the heaving of its great body suggests the power beneath. But when it confronts the desert cliffs, backed by the world-weight of the Andes, the force which has been gathering all the way from Australia, so mighty that it can be compared to nothing but itself, snarls into uncontrolled fury, rebellious, but acknowledging the limit of its power.

The “Peaceful Ocean” lies next to a land of geological unrest; the coast rising, subterranean torment breaking out in earthquakes, hurling cliffs into the sea. Even the busy modern port of Callao partakes of the mystery of this elemental land. The white ships anchored in the clear water of its harbor gradually turn dull brown. Might it be the crater of an extinct volcano?

No wonder the people on such a shore build bamboo cages plastered with refuse and mud to live in, temporary for them as the present stage is transient in the history of the land on which they live. Their object-lessons are warring natural forces. No wonder they are brutal, slinging cattle on board steamers by the horns, casting a stone between the eyes of a bullock to make him turn around. Even their little children play at bull-fights with horns of defunct cattle. The soil of this “sea-gnawn” shore affords not one necessity for human existence, not even a drop of water. There are no real harbors, only niches in the jagged coast. But few lighthouses indicate danger, and the desert is chilled by winds from the Antarctic pole.

Far out, a low cloud is skimming the surface of the gray water, advancing in waves of blackness. From one end a shower falls; at the other, a column rises from the water to meet the on-rushing mass, “a great oval, rolling forwards over the sea.” It comes nearer and nearer, till the shore shimmers as through heat waves. The quiet is complete except for the noise of millions of laboring wings.

SEALS OF THE PALOMINOS ISLANDS.

A cloud of birds! Now they fall to the water with close-clapped wings, hundreds at a time, each a tiny splashing fountain. Their hunger is insatiable, but not because food is lacking, for the swarms of pilchards beneath the waves are vaster than the armies of birds which pursue them. Ancient Indian races enriched their irrigated fields with these little fish. A curious, tawny jewel is found upon this shore, known as “fishes’ eyes.” Might they be fossilized eyes of those fertilizer-fishes?

The appearance of this coast could not have been different in antediluvian days, with the screeching birds and the mammoth terrapin off-shore, those associates of the dodo.

The birds fly out at sunrise and spend the day in fishing, resting upon the waves when they are tired, and at sunset return to their giant stone islands for the night. Alone, the call of a sea-bird would be lost in the fury of the meeting of cliff and sea. But as a mass of white gulls can assume blackness by mere quantity, so their mingled voices can take on an overwhelming poignancy of sound. Louder than the crash of breakers, louder than the barking and snorting of the bald, fat seals loping over them in droves, surges the great cry of the birds, as, in a shower of wild calls diverse as themselves, they settle upon the rocks: pelicans, cormorants, mollyhawks, gannets, sea-mews, gulls, osprey, occasional tropical flamingoes lost among ice-birds and stormy petrels, wild ducks, Inca terns, and the weird, amphibious “bird-child,” which tries to stand erect, fluttering its cartilaginous wings, braced by its indistinguishable tail. All the birds of the ocean gather here, from sandpeeps to albatrosses, a surfeit of life to accentuate the barrenness of the shore. They are multiplying every year their already limitless myriads, useless to man as the savages of the interior, without commercial value now of any kind, yet not annihilated on that account. It is said that all are souls of sailors lost at sea. In each stormy petrel a lost apprentice lives again, in each pelican a boatswain, in each mollyhawk a chief officer, in each albatross a sturdy old captain.

One is tempted to write of the romance of the sea-birds of Peru, if romance has in it any of the fascination of waste on a large scale, for like barrenness, waste must be on a large scale to be picturesque. Where is the impertinence of it so overwhelming as in nature—her spendthrift production of unused powers, and the daring of her destruction?

A German scientist, investigating the guano interests, reported eleven million birds on one of the Chincha Islands, for these are the guano birds, and these wild, craggy islands the Guano Islands, a jewel-casket of Peru, which now abandoned, emptied of its contents, stands wide open, staring vacant in the sunlight, that its owners may not forget its former fullness.

Under the stimulus of pure guano a plant will spring to mammoth dimensions, lavishing blossoms and fruit. Ancient races, even the foreign Incas, realized its magical endowments and made laws governing its use. But land enriched by guano into immense fertility lapses after a while, barer than before.

A few sailing ships, hoping to glean poor remnants of this accumulation of the centuries, still huddle as close as possible to the black rocks, which, because of the quantity of that very fertilizer which has distinguished them, are made repellent to life of any kind. In this laboratory of the strongest fertilizer, there is not the slightest trace of vegetation—Peru in paradox.

The sunset blazes through the fissures and shoots shafts of opalescent light under the great stone bridges toward the mountainside of the candelabrum, veiled in a hazy shimmer. Defiantly gorgeous it is, all but the young moon which nestles among rushing scarlet and black clouds.

A giant candelabrum, at least four hundred feet long, is hollowed deep in the rock of the sheer volcanic headland above the sea. Its trenches do not fill with drifting sand, though the natives of Pisco make periodic pilgrimages across the bay, just to be sure. Some think it is a sign of royalty, a flaunt of the Incas, or the boundary-mark of a conquered kingdom. Some say it was a warning made by the Spaniards after Pisco was sacked by English freebooters in the seventeenth century, for though now over a mile inland, it was then a coast town. Such is the equilibrium of the Peruvian coast! Others call it “the three crosses,” the life-penance many years ago of a Franciscan friar named Guatemala.

But a symbol does not for mere inquiry give up the secret of its hidden mystery. Doubtless the origin and purpose of the Candelabrum of Pisco will never be known.

A few small, square, purple shadows mark a town, put down at random in the desert beside the sea. Some houses are made of the ribs and jaws of whales. A conspicuous white building, a little removed, is for sufferers with bubonic plague. Crosses surmount hummocks round about the town. People are making pilgrimages to and fro. And over all, white-headed vultures are wheeling. They spread their wings and cry in the silence.

Dust covers the little city, clustering about a market-place of sand. A fountain without water mutely occupies its center. Lamp-posts without lamps surround it, and the mud houses are without windows. The cathedral towers have no bells. Strange plaster figures are sculptured upon the façade, and infants with hands put on backwards hold up the portico. Beyond the door with a two-inch keyhole are Virgins in pink silk and gold tinsel, saints with rows of parallel ribs, angels with gauze wings, towering altars of gingerbread work, artificial flowers, and silver-paper fringe.

Glossy-haired women, their black mantas (head-shawls) thrown back, drag stiff skirts through the dirty sand. Half-naked children gnaw at the inside of long bean-pods. Mangy dogs with dusty skin and a sparse sprinkling of yellow hair slink into the shadows. Black goats and their attenuated kids search about in the sand for something to eat. Men and women file out of black interiors, carrying gourds full of brilliant edibles. Meal braizes over a low fire on the sand; a woman crouching over it whips the flame with the end of her long hair. From time to time, to make a brighter blaze, she picks up pieces of wood with her strong toes. Near by struts a blue-eyed bird. It is a huerequeque, the household scavenger. Bits of cloth hang about his tall knees. The woman explains that they are trousers intended to keep him warm. She is sorry I could not have come a few days later, for she is about to make him some new ones for summer, of lighter quality, with lace edges.

The market is held in the bed of a “river,” no less dry than the surrounding desert. Old women behind piles of tropical fruits, guayabas, pacays, ciruelas, gossip to a whir of small mandolins. Heavy-browed men in flapping sombreros drink thick liquids and purchase pats of red and yellow picante (a highly seasoned dish). Groups of pack-horses with silver bridles are tied round about the market.

But surprises are lurking in these coast towns. Behind heavy, unexpected doors, the single affluent family of the town receives in a peacock-blue salon. There is a lady in brown, with trimmings of blue velvet and cotton lace, and a perpendicular yellow hat. Another is in purple velvet, with swan’s-down hat and photograph brooch of her sister. A third, wearing green velvet, a salmon colored hat with red roses, and holding a pink silk handkerchief embroidered in lavender, sits purring beside her red-faced German fiancé. The carpet is red, the furniture covered with brown brocade; there are statues of carved alabaster with gilt edges and pink cuspidors. Gold mirrors, chromos of Venetian court life, and pasteboard calendars of bygone years hang upon the walls. The Spanish tiles of long ago are painted over.

Farther up the street a door may open upon a wilderness of vicuña rugs as tawny as a lion and softer than moleskin. Shawls of tan-colored wool, silkier than Liberty fabrics, lie about. One is not surprised that vicuña wool was reserved for royal use in Inca days, nor that blankets of it were sent by the conquerors as offerings to Philip II. There are little foot-warmers made of vicuña fur and chinchilla skins, wiry penguin skins and a deafening noise of singing birds in cages. A black-eyed girl with hair like tarred rope stands making cazuela (a thick soup) and paring guavas. She claps her hands, and many doves fly in to peck the crumbs from her lips.

CHAPTER II
DESERT QUALITY

A certain herb lives for years underground in the desert; it feels no necessity for a leaf-existence. Yet if the parched roots are reached by water, they expand toward the sun in lovely bloom.

Up from the shore stretches the bare immensity of desert, ending in one tremulous horizon with the ocean, and with the wilderness of mountains against the pulsating sky at the other. It is the Land of Light. All sensation of color is lost in this great sensation of light, an ardent light “shining through things, not on them.” Even the clouds expire from excess of light. It reduces all colors to mere hot vibration. The translucent mountains swim in a sea of light, reflecting from it as from wide stretches of water. Though sensation of color is lost in light, their huge forms are distinct in the radiant atmosphere, but unreal as if half-veiled.—One attribute of mirage is absolute clearness of outline.—Insignificant details emerge, but they rouse admiration only because of the light investing them.

The whole wide desert culminates in illusion and mystery of distant outlines. Everything floats in it, as it sweeps over from the opalescent mountains. A cross in the midst of the shelly sand, “protruding through thin layers of mirage,” marks the spot where a greatly feared bandit was killed. Skulls are heaped beneath it, with matches and half-burned candles.

Water being denied, the desert is soaked with sun. It is the Land of Heat. No plant grows in the scorching soil, no animal can endure it. No bird, no insect flies through the burning atmosphere. Each object shimmers until it seems but the reflection of itself. Fire descends from the burnished sky and vibrates in the air and scalds the sand. Yet concentrating a tropical sun, this hot solitude lies between the cold ocean and the mountains, a region of ice.

This desert is the abode of weird phenomena. Sometimes a globe of fire springs to the size of the sun, illuminating the sky for a quarter of an hour; then it dissipates into an infinitude of stars, which wriggle off into bright little tails and disappear.

A slowly moving company, muffled to the eyes, with heads done up like Tuaregs of the Sahara, mincing across the desert on donkeys, suddenly see themselves swinging along over their own heads, as if magnified by a gigantic mirror in the sky. The clouds give back strange pictures of one’s self enlarged and surrounded by a halo or a circular iris, summoning a saint or revealing a fairy. This quality is inherent in Peru, making ordinary moments ornamental.

Near Casma is a hill called “Dreadful,” whose continuous sandslides when the heat is greatest give off a sound of mystery, suggesting heat, like the roar of a distant volcano.

No matter how much the political status of Peru may change from century to century, it remains always the lair of earthquakes. Mines of gold and silver, islands of guano, deserts of nitrate, may be in turn discovered, exploited, exhausted. Earthquakes destroy those who have been enriched as those who have lived beside them in want. Even now earthquakes are almost daily recurrent along the coast. In laying your ear to the ground you can hear subterranean rumblings. Only in the frequency of slight shocks do people feel secure; otherwise they know the underground world is hoarding strength for a fury of destruction. As a traveler of the old time expressed it: “The inhabitants are subject to being buried in the ruins of their own houses at any time.”

The Indians say that when God rises from His throne to review the human race, each step as He progresses is an earthquake. As soon as they feel the pressure of His foot upon the earth, they rush from their huts to show themselves to Him. When the rumbling becomes loud enough to be noticeable, dogs howl, beasts of burden stop and spread their legs to secure themselves from falling, people rush to doorways, and churches are emptied in an instant. Reddish mists steam from the sea, bad odors from the earth; distant thunder—complete wind-stillness. The clouds of sea-birds rise from the earth and fly high, watching an agony in which they have no part. Then a frightful crash, rocks are torn asunder, great masses fall off as islands into the sea, which is still. But soon it turns black, boiling with a smell of sulphur, and many dead fish float about.

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.

Growing from a network of roots within the moving dune, the snowy heads of a small plant maintain themselves just above the sand as it drifts over the hard plateau.

The médanos are scattered as thickly as the crescent shadows of some vast eclipse, a labyrinth of nature. They are as mysterious as “mushrooms growing in rings, marsh-fires which cannot warm, or the shrinking of the sensitive plant.”

The sand drops constantly over the acute crest. From all about come soft sounds, an overwhelming minor music, almost inaudible. Were you in a forest, you might think it was the soughing of the wind through the branches or the shuffle of locusts devouring a tree.

These playthings of the wind have been called symbols of the Moon in the land of the Sun, since nothing in Inca days could dissociate itself from either; a crescent Moon humbled by the Sun’s anger, allowed to possess her former fullness but a day at a time, doomed to be obliterated over and over again.

The worth of anything consists in the fact that through it can be seen something more beautiful than itself, something to which it forms the setting. Words are mere points of departure. What limitless excursions can even one word suggest, into countries more wonderful

SACHACHA, A TYPICAL VILLAGE OF PERU.

than any created by a remote if consummate artist! And what an intimate happiness is found there, which no one else has felt nor could describe if he had!

Wherever rivers descend from the mountains, green garlands are slung across the desert. No wonder the river was a god to the desert-dweller, bringing with it meadows and gardens. Where only dust has been, acres of cotton, bright-green sugar-fields, and dark orchards lie between mud walls and willow-shaded lanes. Herds graze upon alfalfa steaming in the sun. The yellow plaster terraces and balconies of haciendas among their banana groves are shaded by cascades of glowing bougainvillea. But wherever water is, fever follows. Disease clings to the green spaces. Even sickness cannot abide in the desert alone.

Huge, pyramid-like mud structures spring crumbling from the soil whose modified form they seem to be, temples and palaces of former days, each with its legend. The ruins are inhabited by weird iguanas and “haunted by those birds of ill omen that only nest in ruins.” Mounds of treasure, too, linger along the desert, and fragments of the paved road of the Incas.

A gold bell was once buried in Tambo de Mora. Older people have heard it tolling on quiet nights. Some say it rings from the top of a hill, some, from beneath the ground. To be sure, bells were not known to ancient Peruvians, yet a company was properly financed to hunt for this bell of gold.

Submerged or enchanted cities exist on every hand. A mystic race of dwarfs live in the Andes. They guard a vault of buried treasure. An Indian who declared he had seen it became so terrified at the extent of the riches that he fled, not forgetting to mark his path. Yet frequently as he had followed the trail to the very spot, he could never again find the cavern of glittering jewels: it had sunk completely out of sight—“You can see for yourself, Señorita, that it has, if I take you there!”

Legends of prehistoric days take on the garb of myth, when giants came over the sea to Peru long before the memory of man. Wishing to provide themselves with water in the desert, they excavated enormously deep wells, still undeniable evidence of their dominion. Moreover, their bones of incredible size have been found. Garcilasso says a piece of one hollow tooth weighs more than half a pound. Their footprints have been traced as far as Patagonia. For their sin they were destroyed by a rain of fire.

Maui, too,—the Polynesian god who caught the sun with cords of cocoanut fiber, who lifted the sky and smoothed its arched surface with his stone adze, who made the earth habitable for man and then created him, and who now divides his time between fishing for islands with a hook which is called the Plume of Beauty, and resting in the form of a small day-fly upon the under side of a flower,—Maui, who belongs to the length and breadth of the Pacific, once visited Peru.

Upon this coast lived aborigines with flat noses, fishing from boats of inflated sealskins, and sleeping pell-mell in sealskin huts on heaps of seaweed, “tall, cannibalistic fishermen ... who used bone utensils, made primitive pottery, nets, and fabrics of osier.”

Here lived the contemporaries of the Incas, Yuncas they were called, “dwellers in the hot lowlands,” distinct from those of the highlands, with their hideous thoughts painted on earthenware jars, and their hazy conception of a single god, their pragmatic worship of him by means of anything which he had made for their support and comfort, and their sacrifice to him of his greatest gift, human beings.

Fancy is free to play along geologic or human history. Bones of mastodons as well as sea-bottom shells are found in the desert. Vanished races have embellished it in passing. Man has but added to the mystery of nature. Yet after such lapses of time the two are mingled indistinguishably.

CHAPTER III
DESERT PERSPECTIVE

There was once a mine of gold in Peru. Later it became a copper mine, and now they sell the water that collects in the bottom.

I

The Incas found a rainless desert intersected by fruitful valleys as to-day, each independent, with its own gods, its own king, its own manners and customs, even its own diseases! Each valley chieftain lived upon a platform among the fields, but his villagers lived in the desert, not to encroach upon land capable of cultivation. These Yuncas excelled in the arts of weaving, fashioning metals, and in making pottery.

In the name of the Sun the Incas descended from regions of snow to conquer the desert-dweller, with lofty disregard of the fact that the benign source of all blessings among the high table-lands was the scourge of the lowlands, where water-gods were worshipped. These religious wars changed the face of the country. Valleys were connected by a great highway. Sun temples and convents for the Virgins of the Sun supplanted the shrine of each valley’s chief god. Only one remained inviolate on the whole coast, that of the awful, intangible Pachacamac, who, being a fish-god in his great red temple by the sea, was not an idol, but the Invisible, Unknown, Omnipotent God, who had existed before either the sea or the sun; Pachacamac, he who formed the world out of nothing, the Creator whose image they dared not conceive. His name was mentioned with shrugging of shoulders and lifting up of hands, and he was served with fasting. Unlike Sun-ritual, his cult was a personal one, the inner worship of a people who paid tribute to golden fishes. The Maker of all Things had been conceived by those ancient peoples who, Balboa says, came from the north on a fleet of rafts, when the mountains had the climate of the valleys, and the whole actual coast was under the ocean.

The aura of the Unknown God invested the fish-idol, and the temple was held in such awe that it was not only spared by the Incas, but they even made pilgrimages to the shrine. Shy in the thought of offending the Maker of the World, Inca Yupanqui allowed his golden seaside temple to remain, but erected a temple to the Sun a little above its level. To honor the conqueror, the priests of Pachacamac “appointed a solemn fishing of many thousand Indians, who went to sea in their vessels of reeds.”

Though the fish-idols were ejected, and a convent for the Virgins of the Sun was founded, worship of Pachacamac went on as before. The Incas joined in it, identifying him with Uiracocha of the mountains, but they extorted Sun adoration as well, a fair barter of faith.

Then the priests of the Sun made an idol of Pachacamac, and so it presided until, drenched with sacrificial blood, it was chopped to pieces by Hernando Pizarro and twenty soldiers in January, 1533. A terrible earthquake followed, which Pizarro called the devil’s rage, and triumphant he planted a cross above the looted temple. Pizarro gave the golden nails to his pilot, as a reward for his entire venture. But much of the temple’s treasure is said to be concealed underground, undiscovered to this day.

The temple pile glows against the blue sea in the midst of shimmering sand. Pachacamac lies in its magnificent ruin surrounded by acres of skeletons. For more than two thousand years it was the most famous burial place of the coast. Even mummies were brought from great distances to lie in the sacred ground.

Layers upon layers of succeeding generations have all yielded their excavated secrets, each throwing light on others. Time and treasure-seekers have laid bare the most recent. Histories of great peoples told by their graves!

I stood upon the summit of the broad mound, the temple to Inti, the Sun, built by the Incas above that of Pachacamac, the fish-god. Its crumbling walls, with traces of their brilliant coloring, ended abruptly in mid-air. The headless skeletons of forty-six young girls had recently been found upon the terrace where I stood, the braided cords hanging loosely about their skeleton necks.

PAMPA DE LOS HUESOS—THE FIELD OF BONES.

Far below stretched the vast field of the dead. I looked out over a desert of round white skulls, with eye-cavities staring at the sun—Sun-worship continued in death. Little flurries of dust rose here and there, as men with shovels turned over the sand, hoping for treasure. Gallinazos, hideous vultures of the desert, paced up and down. Below the convent of the Virgins of the Sun, whose niches only remain, was a small blue lagoon under palm trees. On its reed-edges a white heron tilted about—a curious, gnarled creature, giving an impression of majestic grace.

Between me and the sand-hills rolling up to the Andes lay the silent courts, the great, roofless houses of the city of the dead caving in over its streets of sand. The desert-river separated this sepulchral spot from the valley of Lurin, where cotton-fields and yellowish expanses of sugar-cane were divided by willow hedgerows, with glimpses of water beneath tall mud gateways. The breeze was as sweet as heliotrope hedges could make it and filled with tinkling bird notes.

On the other side was the whole reach of the sparkling Pacific, with its far-off sound of breakers. There is a tradition that the two rocky islands are a goddess, Cavillaca, who cast herself and her child into the sea a thousand years ago. But scientists assure us that the islands were torn away by an earthquake since Spanish occupation. The Incas, they say, had a temple on the islands, then a promontory.

He has not beheld the quintessence of all human suffering who has not seen the face of a hunchback child-mummy. Upon such bodies, doubled up and tied securely into the smallest possible space, whose varnished skin is stretched over their unbending bones, even the tattoo marks still show in designs of their owners’ choosing. They are clothed in finely-woven garments, with sandals, pouches, shell and bead ornaments, embroidered bands, and hair not yet unbraided. Sometimes brilliant eyes stare from empty sockets in the withered mummy-faces, eyes of prehistoric cuttlefish, a symbol of fish worship. In some of the skulls are dents made by blunted points of stone weapons.

One mummy sits in the attitude of a toper about to drink, with a monkey on his shoulder—for pets of the dead man accompanied him on his journey, his dog or parrot sometimes mummified at his feet. The men have their slings and fish nets, the women their spindles, needles of cactus thorns, and every implement of household use, the children their earthenware dolls. All have their little gods and talismans. There are pots of provisions, too, with lids to keep out the thin finger of time, jugs of chicha (a beverage distilled from maize), and ears of corn in nets from which they have never been removed since they were put in by hands turned to dust a thousand years ago.

From the grave of an apparently great official with his treasure-jars, was taken only the mummy of a puma, yellow feathers on its head, a gold plate in its mouth, gold and silver bangles on its legs. It had a necklace of emeralds from the north, and its tail was full of golden feathers from the mystic jungle beyond the mountains.

Recently X-rays have been applied to mummy-bundles, which show other skeletons within as well as the one who had died, skeletons of those who, when those winding-sheets were adjusted, were still alive. Gruesome sacrifice!

Pachacamac has furnished museums all over the world and is still one of the most inexhaustible of mummy supplies.

My horse descended carefully to this field of the dead. He picked his way across stepping-stones on which pilgrims approached the lower court of the temple where their year of penance before entering was to be spent. A step, and there was the sound of crunching human bones. Sand filled the skull cavities. They shattered like fragile glass as the horse’s hoofs clattered across them toward the ruined city. The sand was pulverized bones. Bits of cloth and pottery attracted the collector’s eye, or a deformed or trephined skull.

The city walls are twenty feet thick. Their ends and their beginnings are lost in sand. Marks of fire show here and there, and traces of forgotten industries. Flights of stairs lead down from the tops of walls, over which was the only entrance. The roofs were made of reeds to let through necessary air and light; none were needed against rain.

Swallows, “dovelets of Santa Rosa,” flew over from the green valley of Lurin. Bats and little owls, always in pairs, inhabited the ruins, and lizards basked in the blinding light and enjoyed the quiet. Under the cactus lying loose upon the ground there is sometimes a small black spider whose bite takes months to cure. Its inhabitants emphasize still further the uninhabitability of this scorching desert.

II

One other center of power confronted the Incas in the coast valleys, the city of Chanchan, belonging to the Chimus.

In the kingdom of the Grand Chimu, Si, the Moon, was worshipped. It appeared both by day and by night, which the sun was not able to do. The Moon raised the tides; did such power not demand sacrifice? On special occasions the Chimus offered to it small children wrapped in brilliant cloths.

The ocean was the medium through which their Moon-god chose to demonstrate its power. As it nourished them with its fish, scattered by the fish-god Pachacamac through its waves, they strewed white meal upon its surface as a form of worship; incidentally to attract a large catch of fish. Ni, the Ocean, symbolized water, the greatest need of a desert land. It was also their only means of communication between the desert valleys, as they plied up and down upon the “silent highway” to collect tribute. Their boats were made of reeds tied together, and they sat upon them as on “horseback, cutting the waves of the sea, and rowing with small reeds on either side,” as Father Acosta explains. Sometimes they had square sails of grass. One may see these boats of bulrushes upon the shore, for they are still in use, their long, curved beaks leaning against each other like stacks of mammoths’ tusks.

The water cult of the Chimu included worship of fountains, flowing streams, and of their goddess, “She of the Emerald Skirts.” The worst criminal was a water thief, he who turned the stream aside from his neighbor’s field; and the Grand Chimu was overcome at last only because the Inca was able to cut off his water supply. Mild Tupac Inca Yupanqui, who ruled the mountains as the Grand Chimu controlled the coast, preferred victory without bloodshed, since his were religious wars to spread the worship of the Sun.

Sun-worshippers and Moon-worshippers, living side by side, struggled in mortal conflict, but the Sun-worshippers prevailed; and when, after a few generations, the Spaniards, eager for bloodshed, came to conquer the Sun-worshippers in the name of Christianity, the great city of the worshippers of Moon and Sea was gone. They could glut their desire only on hidden treasure in sepulchral mounds.

Mochica, the language of the Chimus, was so difficult that no grown person could learn it. Here and there it was spoken as late as the seventeenth century, and to-day near Eten, “where the sun halted at his rising,” there are elements of it left in a curious dialect, spoken by a little community of Indians whom no one can understand. They braid Panama hats of finest straw. Their huts are almost without furniture, they wear no shoes, and dress always in mourning; but they wear flowers in their hair.

An Augustinian prior, Calancha, collected traditions of Chanchan, that great city of the Chimus which covered twenty square miles. He tells of the processions to the Moon temple, when the Grand Chimu, wearing the jeweled diadem, in robes of feather-mosaic as fine as warp and woof, was carried in his litter by courtiers, surrounded by musicians, minstrels, priests, and warriors with lances and long waving plumes.

The mounds scattered in fragments through the desert were terraced pyramids in those days, the walls upholding them brilliantly painted and richly embossed. Traces can still be seen of their paintings of wild birds and animals, and step-patterns like the pyramids themselves. Vines of the passion-flower drooped their fruit over the garden walls upon the terraces, for water ran to the very top. Even the avenues of trees had individual nourishment from the distant mountains through a lofty aqueduct, the most amazing accomplishment of an amazing people. In the labyrinth below worked the designers, dyers, potters, weavers, and the gold-and silver-smiths, expressing the florid taste of the Chimus.

These sea-worshippers, fish-worshippers, made fish-gods of gold. In Chanchan their small fish-god has been found, worth three million dollars. With it were gold bowls, little figures of fish, lizards, serpents, and birds, neck and arm bands, scepters and diadems, and emeralds from the north. The larger fish-god is yet to be discovered. Manuscripts describe conscientious attempts to unearth it.

The race has vanished; vast Chanchan is gone. We are not even sure what this great people called themselves. Their gold and silver ornaments have long ago been melted into European coin. Traditions of their wealth and magnificence came only through their conquerors, who themselves had no written language. Were we to believe only Inca tradition, all the Yuncas of the coast were savages, given up to unnatural sin. Fortunately there are vestiges of their pyramids and labyrinthine interiors of their temples and palaces, bits of their pottery, and patterns of their cotton fabrics. There are, too, fragments of their marvelous irrigation system, a dumb reminder to Peru that present needs were once supplied by the intelligence and industry of an Indian civilization.

A bush with many-colored clusters of flowers joined together like a bunch of grapes grows not far from the site of Chanchan. It is said that each flower has a different shape as well as a different color. The name of the bush is the “Flower of Paradise.”

CHAPTER IV
PICA, THE FLOWER OF THE SAND

A towering, scoop-topped wagon, fruit-filled, dragged by nine mules, lurched through the desert. Far in the distance, on the first low swelling of the mighty chain of the Andes, there was a faint dark line whence it came.

The driver of the wagon handed me a small branch of a chirimoya tree. The three narrow, fleshy lobes of the chirimoya flower lie close together among the pale green foliage and send forth a perfume as poignant, though faint, as if there were rain-drops for conductors. The aromatic, gently acid flesh of its fruit lies in rays, the exquisite scent of the flower tasted in the fruit. Warmed by the sun on its journey from the valley oasis, the whole freshness of the desert was condensed in this single flavor, like the crystallization of a perfect moment. Strange imaginings sprang from tasting it.

A gallop across the desert is a good prelude to anywhere, especially if one has silver bridle and stirrups and a long lariat with silver knobs. The muleteers sat upon high black saddles of alpaca hair. The colors of their mufflers must have been brilliant underneath the dust. Their trappings were embroidered in red with a red-worsted fringe, Inca-fashion, over the mules’ temples. Our little unshod ponies picked their way between the stones, up hill and down, over the roadless road to Pica.

The desert of Tarapacá, now belonging to Chile, is called the Plain of the Eagle. A fit arena for gaunt battles in former days, a road across it is now distinguishable by the bones of beasts of burden which have dropped on their way.

There are valleys of nitrate to explore, hills of nitrate to be climbed, plains of nitrate to gallop across, and the only break is one windswept tamarugo tree. Does it exist upon the morning mist which the sun disperses? Or does its tough life go on underground, like some uncouth monster in the depth of the sea? Or does its tap-root bore down into a deeply buried flow of water? Every one believes that there is a honeycomb of tunnels from water-giving strata in the mountain-sides, far antedating the days when Uiracocha went to Tarapacá.

No convulsion of nature is unknown to this pitiless land. Volcanic bombs lie about, and fantastic heaps of lava from molten mountains mingle with corals from the sea-bottom. Streams come to the surface, ripple for a short distance, and disappear. Their water tastes of sulphate of soda. Sometimes it springs suddenly from a cave, suggesting a system of underground rivers. Sometimes it is brought by water-works of prehistoric days, whose exact position is not known, making life possible for their would-be destroyers. Whether freaks of nature or remnants of the vast system of irrigation, importance enough has been given to the underground waterways of Peru to bring a scientist from the United States to chart them all.

Curious symbols and conventionalized llamas are cut into the hills of pink trachite and black slate rock whose strata have been jostled and overturned by earthquake. Pictures of serpents, foxes, and birds endure through ages of merciless sun. Were they the work of a megalithic people of a megalithic age, when cyclopean stones were transported to build cyclopean edifices, and gigantic ant-eaters and other jungle-dwellers swarmed in this desert of Tarapacá? Their irrefutable bones are found here, but so are shells of the sea-bottom and water-worn stones of green jasper with red spots. Moreover, the nitrate is filled with the petrified eggs and bones, even the feathers of sea-birds, suggesting that the nitrate was originally guano. Why should it not be true? For this desert was once beside the sea, as it was once beneath the sea.

But the law of compensation works even here. It has always been common opinion that the desert of Tarapacá shelters fabulous riches. Lured by the glisten of a fallen meteor, men have squandered their fortunes and risked their lives searching for gold, while they trod the nitrate under foot.

The large dark cave was gently steaming. The water filling it gurgled out from sunless twilight, hot from the hold of the earth, cool as it spread over the desert valley from the mouth of the cave. A brown man and his little daughter, lying in it, were being waved to and fro by the water as it issued, just their heads visible. Saturating the bamboo tangle, it left a wake of gardens, orange and guava trees, citrons, figs, and slender paltas, tall chirimoyas and pacays, grown to fruit-bearing size in six months. Trees of the jungle bathing in incandescent desert light! There were thick mimosas, geranium trees, and darts of poinsettia, grape-vines a foot across at the root, and spikes of heavy-smelling tuberoses. Jasmine trailed on the trellis above my head, and bougainvillea made a roof of purple flowers.

The slope of the sand-hills was crossed in the foreground by shadows of orange groves, “indefinitely elongated.” Domestic constellations glowed in their black foliage. Men in ponchos whirled up on mule-back, unbuckled their three-inch spurs, and flapped their saddles down. This time the mirage was real.

Old Dorothea came down from her bright green veranda, where the sunshine glistened from a humming-bird’s wings as it hovered above a passion flower, a whirl of black fringe with yellow deeps, the favored blossom which the Incas carried in their hands as a sign of greatness. She held a dove in the crotch of her arm and offered me a bunch of narcissus and white fleurs-de-lis, unthinkably sweet. She was dressed in yellow ocher and an old straw hat which she removed on being introduced to ladies. Her little earless dancing dog did a cueca (native dance) for us, while she clapped queer aboriginal time, and the gold hands danced in her ears.

Birds sang in the thorn hedgerows, and frogs croaked in the warm pool, frogs which die in cold water.

Dorothea said that some day the desert will again be covered with forests and gardens, as it was before it became a desert.

In a cloud of dust made luminous by the sun, a drove of llamas galloped down over the desert hillside to drink, soft eyes wonderingly looking out from tall fuzzy heads, legs bungling with heavy wool. An old Indian woman in Panama hat and brilliant blankets followed slowly, puffing at a pipe.

A CHARACTERISTIC PERUVIAN CHURCH

This pool in a shadowed vale of the western Andes, a shady, sweet-smelling spot, lost in an immensity of desert, is a little solitude in the midst of a great solitude, hospitable by sweet contrast. It takes very little water to make a perfect pool for a tiny fish, where it will find its world and paradise all in one, with never an intimation of the dry bank.

A large butterfly poised gently on the water’s surface. It was sunset time, the butterflies’ drinking hour. A copper bell tolled slowly. The reverberation pierced far into the silence and was “prolonged by the whole surrounding desert.” A boy perched on an overhanging rock was playing a flute. The frail sounds echoed through the quiet air, “hesitating within a silence almost too large.” What can give such an impression of space as a flute? Or, in ceasing, leave such utter stillness? A gorgeous peacock preened itself against the crimson bougainvillea in the sunset, then folded its fan for the night.

It is curious how the atmosphere of a dream cannot be conveyed in words.

Sitting beneath the mango tree by a lily-edged brook, I watched the low bonfire roasting desert quail and smelled the scent of heliotrope hedges, while I listened to an old man’s plaintive song, mingling with a quiet desert waterfall. A wild youth with a bullet gash across one cheek told me of reckless escapades in the valleys above. He twisted off oranges with a stick of bamboo and dropped them into my lap, as the moon, poised on the crest of the mauve-colored Andes like a discus thrown by a mighty arm from beyond, disengaged herself and traveled upward. Moonlight, he said, is brighter in the mountain defiles. The moon sometimes drops a rainbow up there, a faint, round, dream rainbow, made of thin far-diluted sunlight. Pushed by a little breeze, it divides the cloud and disappears.

He pointed out the false Cross preceding the true Cross, preparing its way into the sky.

“Some violets have got in here,” he said suddenly, tweaking one out by the roots. Intrusive violets!

A man with spurs passed picante and young kid and trays of fruit, their crevices filled with flowers.

Was not Amiel right when he said that “Un paysage est un état d’âme?”

It was an “ambrosial night,” in a place to attach affection, except that affection is not for places, either actually or in retrospect. One heart-beat faster, and the nitrate desert has fairy illusions. Why is it that merely seeing foreign sights leaves only craving, while a whiff of feeling in a distant, lonely spot fills one with the meaning and the mystery of everything and brings tears to the eyes of memory? The purple of the bare mountains is significant in the afterglow. Dripping water is significant. The moon sheds a different light. The heat of the desert sand just below the surface becomes suggestive. The air is filled with indefinable odors never perceived elsewhere, and the sight of a sand-colored bird explains all the secrets of the universe.

The beauty which alone would have woven a spell about the place merely lapsed into a background. In itself the voice was not faultless, nor the moon different from other windless, immaculate nights; but the air was sweeter, and the guavas were at the season’s climax, their one day of perfection. They tell you that if you eat guavas in Pica, you become either ill or enchanted; in either case you cannot leave.

He must have been talking for a long time. It was as if his voice had been beneath my range of sound, or too soft—though I heard well enough. All at once I began to understand.

“Perhaps you have heard of the bush which grows in Patagonia. It is covered with pale yellow flowers. When a match is placed beneath it, the bush blazes forth and is reduced to immediate ashes, all its strength exhausted in a single dazzling effort. It is called escandalosa.

“Had you let me know two weeks ago that you would come, I would have put a bit of nitrate on the roots of my rose-tree, and it would have blossomed viciously for you!”

“Yes,” I said, “but afterwards?”

“Oh, to be sure. Then it would have died.”

An owl screamed from the top of a ciruela tree, a little owl-of-the-desert, just a few inches high.

Pica, the Flower of the Sand! With what golden words borrowed from Hindoo poets might not its charm be told? By what enchantment its suave breezes be recalled? Everybody knows it is a magic spot. Its quiet existence is a sort of self-expression of inmost thoughts without technique.

Doctor Stübel, the earthquake specialist, says Pica is an eruption center.

CHAPTER V
A CLASH OF CONTRASTS

I

While the mysticism of the Middle Ages was expanding in delicate spires of Gothic architecture, the Inca’s empire was exposing its heart of gold to the blaze of a tropical sun. Their only similarity is that a shadowy veil, half history, half legend, floats between us and them both. But the gold shines through, and the veil cannot conceal its brilliancy.

Once upon a time there was a garden of pleasure where flowers of gold opened from silver stalks, some full blown, others in close golden bud. Upon the walls crept strange insects and snails, so perfectly counterfeited in gold “that they wanted nothing but motion.” Even the trees and the paths were of gold. Birds of gold perched upon golden boughs, their heads thrown back in silent song, and upon silver leaves gold butterflies poised in the sunlight upon their little golden feet. Humming-birds of gold sipped imaginary honey from long, golden flower-bells. The old chronicler, Cieza de Leon, says that one garden “was artificially sown with golden maize, the stalks, as well as the leaves and cobs being of that metal; ... they were so well planted that even in a high wind they were not torn up; and besides all this they had more than twenty golden sheep with their lambs, and the shepherds with their slings and hooks to watch them, all made of the same metal.” Near by were vast heaps of gold and silver, waiting to be wrought into wonderful shapes.

The Inca ate within gold-lined walls, sitting “commonly on a stool of massive gold set on a large, square plate of gold which served for a pedestal.” He ate from gold dishes rare viands from distant provinces, prepared in gold pots and kettles in a kitchen supplied with piles of golden fagots! He bathed in cisterns of gold in water conducted through golden pipes from distant springs. Francisco Lopez says: “Nay, there was nothing in all that empire (the most flourishing of the whole world) whereof there was not a counterfeit in pure gold.”

As hunger could not be satisfied with gold, it was valued only for its shining beauty, esteemed by the Incas’ subjects only as a symbol of the Sun, those “tears which the Sun has wept.” They naturally belonged to him. His worshippers even cast them into lakes, mirrors in which he looks upon his own reflected glory, and “sinks at last still gazing on it.”

The greatest of all Sun-Temples was Coricancha—the Ingot of Gold—where every implement in use, even to spades and rakes of the garden, was made of gold.

Huayna Ccapac had learned from the god Uiracocha that a superior people would conquer the Incas and introduce a new religion. They would come after the reign of twelve kings; and “In me,” he said, “the number of twelve kings is completed.”

Oracles had predicted their coming. And what was more significant, the great oracle of Rimac, “notwithstanding its former readiness of speech, was become silent!” Omens had foreshadowed them. A brilliant comet “struck Atahualpa with such a dump of melancholy in his spirits that he remained almost insensible.” A royal eagle pursued by hawks fell into the market-place of Cuzco and died. Great earthquakes shattered the shore, and tides did not keep their usual course. A thunderbolt fell in the Inca’s own palace. Strange apparitions faltered in the air, terrible to behold. The Moon, mother of Incas, had three halos; the first blood-red, the second blackish, inclining to green, the third like mist or smoke.

Atahualpa’s atrocities had come to pass. For the first time civil war had decimated the empire of the Lover of the Poor, the Deliverer of the Oppressed. Such conduct had earned its reward. Was it not to be expected that the dawn-heroes of fair complexion, absent for a season, should reappear? Their vengeance was commissioned by the Light-god.

What greater dramatic climax ever focused? What authority was ever more solidly founded? What identity of hero-gods more tangibly proven? A first appearance which further facts continued to corroborate.

II

Lured by rumors of a descendant of the Sun in a city of gold, the first lean, poor adventurer, worn with uncertainty and suffering, stepped upon the shore of Peru. Pedro de Candia was his name, who, having burned ten cities, had dedicated in expiation ten lamps to the Virgin. His “coat of mail reached to his knees, his helmet of the best and bravest sort, his sword girt by his side. He took a target of steel in his left hand, and in his right a wooden cross a yard and a half long,” advancing toward the Indians. Two fierce jaguars, “beholding the cross,” fawned upon him and cast themselves at his feet. Taking courage at the sight, he laid it upon their backs and dared to stroke their heads. By virtue of that symbol a miracle had happened. Pedro de Candia and the Indians were equally dumbfounded.

They followed him to the temples and palaces furnished and plated with gold and silver, all awed to silence, he at such magnificence in an undiscovered country, they at the sight of the tall, fair man, whose long beard hung down over his iron dress; all were convinced by this first encounter, the Indians of the divinity of the Spaniards, the Spaniards of God’s patronage. “Being abundantly satisfied with what he had seen, he returned with all joy imaginable to his companions, taking much larger steps back than his gravity allowed him in his march toward the people.”

Eye-witnesses have described the Spaniards’ first glimpse of Atahualpa, the red fringe shining on his forehead, when Hernando de Soto, the most daring of all Pizarro’s followers, caracoled upon his miraculous beast into the very lap of the dignified monarch. They feasted and drank chicha from goblets of gold which young girls presented to them, sitting upon seats of gold like the emperor’s own. Two historians were present “who with their quipus (knots) made certain ciphers describing ... all the passages of that audience.”

In Cajamarca, the Country of Frost, Atahualpa returned the visit. He came in full regalia, facing the pomp of a gorgeous sunset, and the Spaniards, “brandishing their pennants toward the flaring west, saluted with a great shout the Setting of the Sun!”

First came multitudes of people clearing the way of stones and sweeping the road, then singers and dancers in three divisions, many richly dressed courtiers, and the guards, divided into four squadrons of eight thousand men, one before, one on each side of the Inca, and one in the rear. High on the shoulders of distinguished chiefs he rode upon a golden litter lined with brilliant feathers. His proud head, too large for his body, was encircled by the red fringe hanging above his wild and bloodshot eyes. Atahualpa, that courageous fiend who bragged that no bird flew in the air, no leaf fluttered on a tree without his permission, who though ransomed with a roomful of gold was taken prisoner in the midst of his own army by a handful of insolent adventurers, baptized in the Christian faith “Don Juan,” bound to a post, and throttled like a common criminal! Pizarro put himself into mourning.

The legend which had lured the Spaniards was proven true: that the land of a powerful king lay toward the south, where immeasurable treasure was amassed. It took a month to melt up the gold plaques and plates, brackets and moldings, statues of men, animals and plants, drinking and eating utensils, jars and jewelry of all sorts that filled Atahualpa’s room of ransom.

A huge quantity of gold, carried by eleven thousand llamas and intended for the ransom, never arrived. It is said to lie buried near Jauja, and is only one of the countless masses of hidden treasure, both along the coast and in the mountains, even into Ecuador. The Spanish messengers who were carried in hammocks to inspect that caravan on its journey toward Cajamarca were almost blinded by a mountain seeming to shine from base to crest with gold. The eleven thousand llamas had laid themselves down to rest.

III

So they had come at last, the very image of the god himself, strange little Uiracochas in beards and ruffs; worthy of worship indeed, for they let loose thunder and lightning, the proper arms of the Sun, from instruments held in their hands, and rode about on amazing beasts. (The Indians’ fear of horses persisting to this day, they are used only as infantry.) Were the Uiracochas insensible of hunger and thirst; did they need sleep after toil and repose after labor? Were they made of flesh and bones, or had they incorruptible bodies like those of the Sun and the Moon?

So the grisly conquerors came, half heroes, half wild beasts, who did not grow exhausted by fighting, nor discouraged by wounds and the horrors of mountain-sickness.

So they came, these few poor adventurers who fell upon a roomful of gold given them by a people in ransom for the sovereign-deity whom this handful of men had imprisoned. Miracles in their favor seemed to spring up at each step; and madly stimulated, the peaks of the cordillera blazing above them, their imaginations limitless, they strode through the empire in the guise of gods and scraped the sacred gold from the City of the Sun. They ripped the plate from the walls of its temples. They destroyed the idols. It is said that the Jesuits

WOLFENBÜTTEL-SPANISH MAP, CIRCA 1529.

Courtesy of Dr. E. L. Stevenson.

One of the first maps to show Pizarro’s discoveries along the Peruvian coast.

had to employ thirty persons for three days to break up a single carved stone huaco (idol). They dug up the treasures buried with the dead and pillaged the towns, and they brought back to greedy European sovereigns news of a land of gold. Having, as it seemed to them, found infinitely, they hoped infinitely and infinitely dared.

The glittering career of the Indies had begun. No empire was ever won in so grandiose a way; no empire ever so monstrously destroyed.

IV

Picturesque are the figures of the two great conquerors, Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, lean and tireless soldiers, “either of whom, single, could break through a body of a hundred Indians,” who amassed a fortune, the greatest that had been known in many ages, wasted it in wars with each other, and died so poor that they were “buried of mere charity.”

They dressed in the costume of their youth. The marquis “never wore other than a jerkin of black cloth with skirts down to his ankles, with a short waist a little below his breast. His shoes were made of a white cordivant, his hat white, with sword and dagger after the old fashion. Sometimes upon high days, at the instance and request of his servants, he wore a cassock lined with martins’ furs which had been sent him from Spain,” but his coat of mail was underneath, as appropriate to his body as its steely sheath to his heart. Illiterate, greedy, fearless, and proud, wading through blood to establish the Christian faith, he was murdered at last; and as he fell, traced in his own blood a cross upon the stone floor, kissed it, and died.

Then there was the able monster, Carvajal, who went about accompanied by three or four negroes to strangle people. He jeered as they did so, “showing himself very pleasant and facetious at that unseasonable time.” He left behind him a wake of spiked heads of “traitors” to the king. He wore a Moorish burnous and hens’ feathers twined together in the form of a cross on his hat, bought masses with emeralds for his soul’s repose, and at the age of eighty-four went to his execution in a basket, saying his prayers in Latin. “Being come to the place of execution, the people crowded so to see him that the hangman had not room to do his duty. And thereupon he called to them and said: ‘Gentlemen, pray give the officer room to do justice.’”

CHAPTER VI
PIRATES AND TREASURE FLEETS

“Gold,” said Columbus, “constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from purgatory and restoring them to the enjoyment of paradise.” Raleigh remarked that: “Where there is store of gold, it is needless to remember other commodities for trade.”

Gold—the evil spell overshadowing Peru, pouring out her immeasurable riches to impoverish Spain. Gold—the most incorruptible of all metals, itself the cause of most corruption!

Peru has always been cursed by wealth. The gold of the Incas was the cause of their destruction, the wealth of the Spanish conquerors, theirs; it brought about wars among themselves and ravages of foreign pirates upon the sea. When the era of precious metals seemed to wane, islands of guano were discovered, apparently an endless source of wealth. But it was greedily exhausted by foreigners. Then came the discovery of nitrate fields, where fortunes are merely scraped off the top of the ground. But that particular territory has been annexed by a prosperous neighbor.

One wonders what undiscovered wealth may still be threatening this lavish country.

The days when fleets of treasure sailed from the distant cordilleras of the Spanish Main had begun. The tall, enchanted galleons of Lima spread sail, with their

“Escutcheoned pavisades, emblazoned poops,
Banners and painted shields and close-fights hung
With scarlet broideries. Every polished gun
Grinned through the jaws of some heraldic beast,
Gilded and carven and gleaming with all hues.”

At first the argosies bore off the ransom of Atahualpa, the golden ornaments belonging to the Sun.

Albrecht Dürer, in his Tagebuch, wrote of having seen a boatload of such booty from the Indies. “And, moreover, have I seen the things which were brought from the new golden land to the king—an entire sun of gold, a full fathom wide, likewise a silver moon of the same size, also two rooms full of armor, all manner of weapons, harness, war-trappings, and strange accoutrements, curious raiment, bed-draperies and many kinds of wondrous things for divers uses, fairer to behold than marvels. They are all so precious that they are held to be worth a hundred thousand gulden.

“Nor have I in all the days of my life seen aught that did so fill me with delight. For I saw there fine-wrought things of cunning design, and marveled at the subtle skill of men in far countries. Nor know I how to tell of all the things which I saw there.”

Loot of golden treasure gave way to mountains of silver, which poured forth their wealth in such profusion that it staggers even oriental imagination. Loading at Arica, ships brought silver direct from the mines of Potosí. Then there was plunder of Peruvian churches, jeweled chalices, and gold shrines. There were emeralds from the north—a land where they were sacred, small emeralds being sacrificed to larger ones.

These glittering cargoes were carried home to Seville, the “Queen of the Ocean.” Its wonderful Casa de Contratación dealt with the wealth of the Indies and, to quote Alonzo Morgado, “the riches which flowed into its offices would have been sufficient to pave the streets of Seville with gold and silver slabs.”

Like most stories of Peru, the gold and silver it exported seem mere extravaganza. Contemporary accounts, mostly in cipher, may be quoted.

In 1538, G. Loveday wrote to Lord Lisle: “Spanish ships have returned from Peru so laden that the emperor’s part amounts to two million ducats.... The emperor has borrowed the whole from the owners.” Being “occasionally pinched for money,” he found it most convenient to seize the ships laden with private treasure from his “Indyac of Perrow.”

In July, 1555, the Venetian ambassador in England wrote to the Doge and Senate of a fleet of caravels, “all very richly freighted according to the usual parlance of these Spaniards, who invariably reckon by millions.”

Federico Badoer Venetian ambassador with the emperor, wrote (1556) that the king would obtain so considerable a sum of money that he would be able to defend himself not only against the Pope but also against France and any other power, if necessary. By this time Peru was raining gold and silver.

Father Acosta returned to Spain with the fleet of 1587. In his boat were twelve chests of gold, each weighing a hundred pounds; eleven million pieces of silver, and two chests of emeralds, each weighing one hundred pounds. “The reason why there is so great an abundance of metals at the Indies,” he wrote, “is the will of the Creator, who hath imparted His gifts as it pleased Him.”

Von Tschudi says that in the first twenty-five years the Spaniards got four hundred millions of ducats of gold and silver, which was, however, only a small part of the vast amount buried or thrown into the mountain lakes whose deep waters concealed it in underground caves. “The Indians, taking a handful of grain from a whole measure, said: ‘Thus much the Christians have gained and the remainder is lodged where neither we nor any one else is able to assign.’”

Humboldt says that from the discovery of Peru until 1800, the Old World received £516,471,344 worth of treasure from the New World. No wonder Europe felt that gold lay about in this land of gold, and that it was only necessary to go and pick it up. No wonder Europe still has an idea of America little changed through four hundred years. And yet only one fifth of the treasure of mines and grave-mounds was supposed to be sent to Spain, whose galleons came to the far-away West Indies to receive it.

It was not long before pirates descended upon Peru. Brittany was the first to fit out fleets for the Indies “on pretense of carrying merchandise thither,” in fact, to molest vessels coming from Peru.

Next, English buccaneers intercepted the Spanish vessels, slow-sailing under weight of gold.

“With the fruit of Aladdin’s garden clustering thick in her hold,
With rubies a-wash in her scuppers, and her bilge a-blaze with gold,
A world in arms behind her to sever her heart from home,
The Golden Hynde drove onward, over the glittering foam.”

Sir Francis Drake, with sixty armed ships, looted the Pacific in the Golden Hynde. His ballast was silver, his cargo gold and emeralds. He dined alone with music.

In 1578 he took from the Spanish galleon Cacafuego “twenty tons of silver bullion, thirteen chests of silver coins, a hundred-weight of gold, gold nuggets in indefinite quantity, a great store of pearls, emeralds, and diamonds, ... and many, many other things.” Only Queen Elizabeth and Drake knew the exact amount that was taken.

For three centuries pirates and freebooters harried the treasure-fleets of Spain. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the English Calendar of State Papers compassionately remarks that foreign gluttony “keeps the poor Spaniards in arms all along the coast of Peru and puts them into strange apprehension, all mankind seeming to conspire the murdering and destroying them as common enemies, not because they do worse, but have more than ordinary.”

Much of the twice-looted treasure never reached Europe, for, following the example of

A VIEW OF PAITA FROM THE MIROIR OOST & WEST INDICAL, 1621.

the Indians, the sea-rovers buried large amounts of gorgeous plunder in the mysterious islands of the Pacific. Even to this day, syndicates with steam-dredges and suction-pumps are following up the faded charts on which are indicated the spots where piles of doubloons and ducats and pieces-of-eight are stowed away.

CHAPTER VII
BACKGROUNDS

I

Here lay Lima under a tropical sun, sparkling with treasure, a wilderness of rich carvings and paintings, whose piles of gold and silver shone through the thick perfume of exotic blossoms. Long caravans, loaded with the wealth of the provinces as well as the produce of sales in the remote interior, filed into Lima, where countless gold-and silver-smiths were awaiting their arrival. Weavers of silks, velvets, and brocades, embroiderers, leather and metal workers, sculptors, artists, makers of glass and porcelain bells—all the most skilled workmen flocked to the capital of New Andalusia, the continent’s center, for there they found no lack of rich materials. Their fancy might fashion uncontrolled, with assurance of eager purchasers.

In Lima voyages of discovery to the Isles of Solomon were planned. From Lima pilgrimages were made in search of El Dorado, that luxurious ruler who bathed himself in sweet-smelling gums and then rolled in gold dust. There is no more romantic chapter in the history of Peru than these pilgrimages in search of El Dorado. Southey says they cost Spain more than all the treasure received from her South American possessions.

In Lima lived the viceroys who ruled all of South America from Guayaquil to Buenos Aires, “as by the divine right of kings.” The viceroy was served only by titled Spaniards. He was drawn about by six horses, with sounding of trumpets, and a personal guard of two hundred Spaniards, “for the safety of his person and to support the dignity of his office.” The royal seal, his insignia, rode under a royal flag upon a horse saddled with black velvet and a gold tissue foot-cloth, and was received with deep bows. The viceroy was allowed three thousand pesos to go to Callao, five miles away, and sixty thousand ducats a year for personal expenses.

Greeted with a jewel sent to meet him half-way, the viceroy reaches the bay of Callao. Throughout Lima, the City of the Kings,—founded “with God, for God, and in His name,"—the streets are hung with rugs and tapestry and adorned with green boughs and triumphal arches. (On the arrival of the Duque de la Plata, in 1682, eighty million piasters were spent to pave the streets with bars of silver.)

“First comes a host of Indian warriors in feather pomp. The city militia with pikes and weapons glittering, the stocks of their guns embossed with gold, the noble guard on horseback, ... university professors in brilliant gowns, the royal council and officials, the magistracy in crimson velvet lined with brocade of the same color ... the chamber of accounts, the audience on horses with trappings, the scepter-carrier, heralds in armor with uncovered heads, the master of the horse with drawn sword, accompanied by four servants in livery, pages with the captain of the watch, and lastly, on a throne of red velvet whose silver staffs are carried by the members of the corporation, while the alcaldes hold the cords, all in velvet caps and gowns of incarnation color, rides the viceroy under the royal banner and a canopy of cloth of gold. Officers of the royal household, the royal guard in full armor with spear and shield, bring up the rear on horseback.”

The procession moves between companies of halberdiers in a blaze of trumpets, bells, and drums, under showers of flowers thrown from carved balconies.

“When they reach the plaza the whole company faces the cathedral and is received by the archbishop and by the superiors of the religious orders; trumpets cease, knights dismount, and the multitude sings a Te Deum.

“The procession again mounts and accompanies the viceroy to the palace gates.”

“Five days of bull-fights follow, and prizes are bestowed upon those who make the most ingenious compositions in praise of the viceroy. The rector of the university prepares a poetical contest, at which the viceroy presides, seated upon the rectoral chair, which for this occasion glitters with the magnificence of an Eastern throne. The nunneries entertain him with music and present him with curiosities.”

The churches of Lima were hung with velvet and tapestry, with fringes of gold and silver and plates of gold hung in design, so that the walls were nowhere to be seen. Spanish and Flemish paintings surrounded altars of wrought silver. The sacred vessels were of gold, covered with pearls and precious stones. Santo Domingo, the oldest of the brotherhood, possessed a set of thirty candelabra of massive silver, man-high, placed in a double row along the nave of the church. The cloister contained a famous orange garden with wrought-iron waterways and life-sized paintings of Dominicus. In its center was a fountain, whose delicious drip belied its hidden presence under feathery vines. Indeed, why should the church not claim vast riches? One sixth of the population was in the monasteries, and those who were not of the number bought the dress of a religious order in which to be buried. The whole city took part in the sacred feast days, as many in the procession as looking on: legions of monks and thousands of nuns, priests, orders, religious societies, and brotherhoods with their standards, holy pictures, silver crosses, scepters, and biers.

II

But what was happening to the silent people among the mountain-tops who had stripped the Sun Temples of their offerings to enrich the adventurers from the Isles of Pearls?

Their irrigating canals had been destroyed, the roads and the whole system of government broken up, the people killed in chronic fighting or by hardship in distant campaigns. Ten thousand of the fifteen thousand in Almagro’s Chilean army had died of cold in the mountains, or of heat and thirst in the desert. The people were starved, villages at a time, by the destruction of their crops. Moreover, the villages were given as fiefs to the Spaniards, who received all the tribute. Many were exhausted by dragging heavy artillery over the precipitous mountains. Garcilasso describes the immense beams that crushed the Indians staggering beneath their weight, who were relieved, only on account of necessity, at every two hundred paces. When Gonzalo Pizarro in coat of mail covered with cloth of gold made his triumphal entry as governor into the City of the Kings, the twenty-two pieces of cannon which saluted as the procession advanced through the streets, were carried on the shoulders of six thousand Indians. All these Indians were well trained in morality and sound doctrine by the clergy of Spain.

And worst of all, deep within the mountains of Peru, hollowed by the gold and silver which they had removed to enrich a country of whose existence they would never be aware in any other way, the Indians were dying, thousands at a time. Skeletons concealed in old mines are now found, covered with fibers of silver melted by subterranean fires just beneath the cold desert. Mines now abandoned can be traced by piles of human bones.

A pair of bright green arms, petitioning, stretched forth from the body which has disappeared, were discovered in the bottom of an ancient copper mine. The copper water had filtered through and covered them with a green sheen. Every finger is tense with supplication, every fiber as in the moment of death; not an eager tendon or nerve quivering to the surface failed of preservation. All are petrified in a bronze of nature’s molding.

Stories are still told that the Spaniards drove ten thousand Indians at once to work in a Peruvian mine. When their strength was exhausted or they died from lack of food, the Spaniards drove up ten thousand more—an extravaganza of destruction matched only by the scale of nature’s waste. It must be said, however, that cruelty to the Indians was due not to Spanish law, but to the abuse of it.

“In twenty-five years more than eight million Indians were worked to death in the mines of Peru.”

“In a century, nine tenths of the people had been destroyed by overwork and cruelty.”

No wonder Spain was able to equip an Armada!

III

Against such a dark background flamed the lurid Inquisition.

The working out of the encomienda, or system of slavery, and the mita, or forced work in the mines, was more horrible than the tortures going on in Lima only because of the scale on which the destruction took place. In 1570 the Blessing of the Inquisition had been conferred upon Peru by Philip II. “At first heresy, then blasphemy, sorcery, polygamy, insulting servants, opposition to jurisdiction, were punished by whipping, banishment, prison, and death by fire. In all cases the goods were confiscated.” The disgrace of an executed man did not end even with his death. “The sons and daughters and grandchildren of the male line lost their rights of citizenship. They might not carry gold, silver, pearls, costly stones, corals, silk, velvet, or fine cloth. They might not ride on horses, carry weapons, or use any of the things of which they were unworthy.”

One star-spangled night, a man looking at the sky remarked that the multitude of stars was superfluous, thus assuming that God had erred in creation, which was heretical blasphemy. Juan de Arianza appeared in the auto of 1631 because, when reading the Scriptures, he exclaimed: “Ea! There is nothing but living and dying!” which sounded ill to those who heard it. One man bragged that he had a horse that could go sixty leagues in one day: for that he had two hundred strokes of the lash. Another had said he knew an herb which made wives invisible before their husbands: he received five years’ imprisonment. A young priest said he had seen the little Saviour in his dreams: his punishment was two hundred lashes and five years’ work in the galleys. Another, who wished to found a new sect, had called the Indians the children of Israel and had declared that priests should marry, that there should be no confessional, and that the Bishop of Lima ought to be Pope. He thought the Bible ought to be translated into the language of the people and that he was holy as Gabriel and patient as Job. This unfortunate was burned alive; the proceedings of the suit against him filled three thousand pages.

Throughout the seventeenth century Peru was filled with mystic impostors, like the far-famed Angela Carranza, most of whom were dealt with by autos de fe. The use of coca was considered a part of this sorcery and was punished severely.

The confession of a real or an accused crime was drawn out by torture and compelled by a repetition of the torture. From the final judgment there was no appeal. All was enacted under seal of deepest secrecy. The torture chamber was somewhat removed, so that the screams of the victims could not be heard in the street.

Three kinds of torture were used in Lima. There was the compound pulley. A man’s hands were bound to his back, and he was raised by a pulley to the ceiling by his hands; heavy iron weights were attached to his feet. Sometimes, instead of this, the victim was strapped on a table, an iron collar about his neck, and stretched in both directions without risk of choking; but every bone in his body was dislocated. The second method was smothering. The man’s hands and feet were tied above a bench, and on his upper arms, thighs, and calves, lacing machines were adjusted. Then a funnel was put in his mouth and water was slowly poured in. The third method was the worst of all. The feet were made fast, the soles were covered with fat, then live coals were brought gradually nearer and nearer—a process of roasting. When the pain was keenest, a board was shoved between coals and feet, and the sinner was asked if he would now confess his crime.

By a bull of Paul III torture could not last over an hour. After that the victim usually had convulsions or lost his mind. A doctor came, whenever such was the case, to authorize further torture.

Thumbscrews were still used in 1813.

Dr. Lea says punishments in Lima were inflicted with greater rigor than in Spain. If it were lashing, the penitents, without distinction as to sex, were marched in procession through the streets, naked from the waist up, with inscriptions denoting their offenses, while the executioner plied the lash. The mob stoned them as an act of especial piety.

The Inquisition had command of the press. The tribunal of Inquisitors, judging all, were judged by none and wielded absolute power. The Holy Tribunal did not wish to shed blood, so the accused were either strangled or burned. The death-warrant began with the words Christi nomine invocato, and officials of the law were asked to treat the condemned with pity and moderation.

The auto de fe, the Act of Faith, was intended as a demonstration of authority, a representation of the day of judgment, and it was the highest exhibition of piety.

Following is a description of an auto de fe in Lima, on the sixteenth of November, 1625, quoted from Middendorf.

A procession went at daybreak on horseback through the city, with trumpets, fifes, and drums, to announce the execution. A platform was built on the plaza, forty ells high, and a stadium was erected for eight thousand people. “Between eight and nine in the morning the sinners were called for. A cross covered with black crape belonging to the cathedral was carried before them by four priests, all singing miserere in a wailing tone. Each penitent walked between two soldiers and other honorable persons. Silver boxes at the rear contained the judgments.

“The viceroy came out of his palace accompanied by a guard of honor, musketeers, and two trumpeters. Doctors, lawyers, and university professors preceded the monks and the priests, standard bearers in coats of mail with clubs, the captain of the watch, and judges, the oldest of whom walked by the viceroy, cavalry, generals, and pages. The Inquisitors had hats on top of their caps, worn only at that time, decorated with the insignia of the Pope’s legates. The militia had formed in line, and at the appearance of the black and gold banner of the Inquisition they lowered their flags in salute. An altar was raised, a chair for the viceroy and the high officials.

“The eldest one rose and addressed the viceroy. ‘Your Excellency swears and promises upon his faith and word as a true Catholic Viceroy appointed by His Catholic Highness, to defend with all his might the Catholic faith, which the Holy Apostolic Church in Rome recognizes, to further its well being and growth, to follow up the heretics and dissenters and enemies, to give necessary help and aid to the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition and its servants, so that the heretics and disturbers of our Christian religion shall be taken and punished according to the law of the Holy Church, without your Excellency making any exception in favor of anybody no matter what his station in life be.’

“The viceroy replied: ‘I swear it and promise by my faith and word.’

“‘If your Excellency does so, as we expect from your piety and Christianity you will, the Lord God will bless all the works undertaken by your Excellency in His holy service and will give you health and long life as this kingdom and the service of His Majesty needs.’

“A mass was read for the viceroy, and a priest extolled from the chancel the glory which comes to religion through the sacrifice of heretics. After the sermon, all pledged themselves to tell any act contrary to religion which they knew of, and not to give protection to any heretic who was under the ban of the church.

“The denunciation was read as soon as the culprit was named, led up out of his secret cell and put into a cage from which he had to hear his final judgment. He was dressed in the San Benito, in itself a lasting shame. It reached to the knees of the sinner and had his portrait painted upon it surrounded by flames, devils, and dragons. On his head he wore a bag-like, high and pointed cap, on which were devils’ faces in flames. Gags were ready in case blasphemers should break out against the judges.”

The burning is said to have taken place where the bull-ring now is.

IV

In 1746 the city of Lima,—the gorgeous City of the Kings,—at the climax of its luxury, was utterly destroyed. Seventy-four churches, fourteen monasteries with their paintings, lamps of gold, vessels of silver, precious stones, tapestries, and mirrors, their beautiful fountains, arches, cloisters, and stairways in rare designs, were laid waste. The building material was as rich as the work upon it; as a contemporary traveler expressed it: “If it did not exceed in beauty, it at least equaled anything in the world.” In four minutes there was complete desolation. Out of the whole city only twenty buildings remained standing. Bridges broke, palaces fell, the sick in the hospitals were buried alive; nuns in their cloisters, monks in their cells, were suffocated in clouds of sulphurous dust. Churches collapsed, crushing those who were praying within. Even the Holy Inquisition was obliged to suspend torture for the time being.

The earth was like an animal shaking the dust from its back. It swept forward in great waves; walls were reeds on its shores, bending to the tempest. Between the waves, clouds of poisonous dust rose from the chasms.

Clocks stopped. Bells in the towers clashed with limp bell ropes, till towers following in turn stifled the din under smoking débris. Everything was reversed; that which stood still was set in violent motion, and moving things were brought to rest. Shrieks for help and agonized prayers mingled, until they, too, ceased.

The sea retreated half a league from Callao, gathered strength from unknown, hidden places, and with a cosmic roar rushed over the entire city, engulfing it and carrying all the ships of the harbor across its walls and towers to be stranded in inland gardens. All of its five thousand inhabitants perished in the deluge, and there was nothing left to give the least idea of what Callao had been.

“To be preserved from its fury could only be attributed to a particular and extraordinary help of Providence.” Yet thousands in Lima who had escaped destruction or death from fright died of fevers which came after. Those who remained were occupied with burying the dead in trenches. Famine as well as fever followed, for the grain magazines of Callao had been buried under water, ovens had fallen in, aqueducts bringing water for turning the mills had been destroyed.

Nor was this all. Loath to give up its fiendish hold, not yet glutted with destruction, the underground fury visited the helpless ruins it had created with five hundred and sixty-eight earthquakes during the next year!

Processions of priests barefoot, with crowns of thorns on their heads, cords about their necks, and heavy chains on their ankles, taught the people that the destruction was of God, the roaring of the subterranean powers a warning against luxury. The prior of one society went about covered with ashes; a heavy bridle cut his mouth, iron nails fastened his eyelids, his back was bare. “This is the punishment that God in heaven executes,” said a lay brother, walking behind him, as he let fall an iron lash so heavily that the blood spurted.

The bones of Santo Toribio and Santa Rosa were carried about; the viceroy and great persons followed in mourning, with ropes about their necks. Distinguished ladies, barefoot, their hair shaved, walked in coarse clothes. The dense stillness was broken by a monk’s voice: “Holy God, Holy God, be merciful to us.”

CHAPTER VIII
LIMA OF TWO ASPECTS

The valley of the Rimac, where glisten the towers of Lima, is only one of the river-ways which cross the desert. The river of the ancient oracle Rimac, “he who speaks,” has given its name in perverted form to Lima—the Spanish city. The temple of the speaker was in ruins long before Spanish days.

Like other streams of the west coast, the great river Rimac has run through the gamut of all zones. Hurrying down from the cordillera, it spreads fertility far and wide over the dry shore-valley. As far away as Chorillos, “little water jets,” the water of the Rimac filters through, led astray for irrigation. But its own journey to the sea is vain. The mountain water is so precious to the desert that by the time the stream has reached the shore, it has not force enough left to make an outlet across the beach into the ocean.

Irrigating ditches and crumbling mud walls divide gardens and vineyards and orchards of wind-blown olive trees. Ruins of mud accumulate dust. Luxuriant nasturtiums drape every dusty bank. Vestiges of fortresses, temples, and grave-mounds of the three ancient cities of the Rimac valley still terrify owners of the sugar-fields, for the inhabitants of the sepulchers sometimes return at night to sit beneath the grape-arbors and listen to the murmur of irrigation streams which they made. Cajamarquilla, Armatambo, and Huadca were the names of these cities, and the whirlwind was their most distinguished god. His white-robed priests ate neither salt nor pepper, and tore out the hearts of men and of animals to offer them to the gods on the platforms of temples.