SACHACHA, A TYPICAL VILLAGE OF PERU.
SACHACHA, A TYPICAL VILLAGE OF PERU.
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 ofhaciendasamong 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, stillundeniable 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.
Therewas once a mine of gold in Peru. Later it became a copper mine, and now they sell the water that collects in the bottom.
TheIncas 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 thatthe 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 nailsto 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.
PAMPA DE LOS HUESOS—THE FIELD OF BONES.
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 ofthe 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 ofchicha(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 skeletonswithin 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 ofreeds 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.
Oneother 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 whichtheir 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 onlybecause 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 alwaysin 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 belowworked 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 theircotton 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.”
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 achirimoyatree. The three narrow, fleshy lobes of thechirimoyaflower 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 preludeto 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 windswepttamarugotree. 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 thatthere 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 asit 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 slenderpaltas, tallchirimoyasandpacays, 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 inponchoswhirled 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 hoveredabove 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 acueca(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
A CHARACTERISTIC PERUVIAN CHURCH
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 passedpicanteand 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 calledescandalosa.
“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 aciruelatree, a little owl-of-the-desert, just a few inches high.
Pica, the Flower of the Sand! With whatgolden 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.
Whilethe 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, theirheads 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 hadforeshadowed 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.
Luredby 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 thetall, 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 drankchichafrom 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 theirquipus(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 immeasurabletreasure 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.
Sothey 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, theproper 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,CIRCA1529.Courtesy of Dr. E. L. Stevenson.One of the first maps to show Pizarro’s discoveries along the Peruvian coast.
WOLFENBÜTTEL-SPANISH MAP,CIRCA1529.Courtesy of Dr. E. L. Stevenson.One of the first maps to show Pizarro’s discoveries along the Peruvian coast.
WOLFENBÜTTEL-SPANISH MAP,CIRCA1529.
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 stonehuaco(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.
Picturesqueare 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 tothe 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.’”
“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