CHAPTER VIINDIANS AND LLAMAS

A MARKET IN HUANCAYO.

In Acllahuasi, near by, lived a thousand virgins, the most beautiful of all the pure blood of the Sun, destined as his wives, and watched over by theirmamacunas. Visited only by thecoya, they spun the fine vicuña garments for the Inca’s use and sewed upon them little plates of gold and emeralds. They wove and embroidered the royal coca bags which the Inca hung upon his left shoulder. They made the sacredllautuwith the colored fringe, and the straw-colored twist for the head of the prince royal. They gathered bones of white llamas and burned them with linen they had spun. Then they collected the ashes, and looking toward the east, threw them into the air, an offering to the Sun. They made bread for the festivals of the Sun and thechichadrunk by the Inca and his kindred, in kettles of gold and silver. For recreation they went out to walk in their garden of silver and gold.

Nearly half the year in the Empire of the Sun was given to celebrating—everything from the first day of the moon to the day of marriage of the royal brides,coyaraymi. The beginnings of the four seasons were festivals. At the vernal equinox degrees of chivalry were taken by young nobles who, having gone through all possible tests, fasting, and temptation, received at last the kiss upon the shoulder and the jab through the ear-lobe given by the Inca with a nail of gold.

At the autumnal equinox all subjects were cleansed of whatever troubled them, when, purified with children’s blood, they asked the midday Sun to protect them from outward calamities and inward diseases. A messenger of the Sun with a gold-studded lance, fluttering feathers of many colors along its length, ran down from Sachsahuaman to the center of the city, where four sons of the Sun waited with lances to be touched by him, and scatter to the four quarters of the earth at the Sun’s command, all evils which beset mankind. Each ran six leagues in his separate direction to spread the good news. People shook their clothes. The evils of night were driven out by lighted torches, which were then thrown into a stream and extinguished before being borne away. Confession of sins followed.

The greatest feast was Intiraymi, the Bindingof the Sun, when his southern shadow grew no longer, when the Sun-god by some unknown power was hindered from progressing farther. This was always a mystery. Tupac Yupanqui had said: “Many say that the Sun lives, and that he is the maker of all things.... Now we know that many things receive their beings during the absence of the Sun and therefore he is not the maker of all things; and that the Sun hath not life is evident for that it always moves in its circle and yet is never weary, for if it had life it would require rest as we do and were it free it would visit other parts of the heavens unto which it never inclines out of its own sphere. But as a thing obliged to a particular station, moves always in the same circle and is like an arrow which is directed by the hand of the archer.”

Later, Huayna Ccapac said: “There must be some other whom our father, the Sun, takes for a more supreme and more powerful lord than himself; by whose commands he every day measures the compass of the heavens without any intermission or hour of repose; for if he were absolute and at his own disposal he wouldcertainly allot himself some time of cessation though it were only to please his own humor and fancy without other consideration than that of liberty and change.”

But to continue with the festival of the summer solstice. At peep of day the Inca and all the nobles of the blood of the Sun went in procession under canopies of feathers to await his arrival. Foreign princes and distinguished vassals, in garments plated with gold and silver, skins of jaguars, and condors’ wings, assembled at a little distance, the whole people filling the streets of Cuzco. All barefoot, crouching, they waited, looking toward the east. Hardly had the first rays touched the snowy mountain-tops when a loud shout of joy, songs of triumph, and deafening music on rude instruments broke from the multitude. It grew louder and louder as the god, in rising, shed more and more light upon the people. They raised their arms, opened their hands, and kissed the air so filled with light.

The Inca, rising, greeted the pomp of dawn. He held two great bowls of gold filled withchichain his hands; the contents of one hepoured into a golden channel leading to the temple, and the vapor rising in the heat, it seemed as if the Sun himself were drinking. The contents of the other he shared with all his kindred, pouring it into little golden goblets.

Then they all proceeded to the temple. Outside, thecuracas, or governors, offered to the priests images of many different animals of gold, while the Inca and all the legitimate children of the Sun went in and presented the goblets he had consecrated to the image of the Sun. There were sacrifices of flocks of black llamas, the particular property of the Sun, from which prognostications were made. The animal to be sacrificed was held fast, and with a sliver of black obsidian its breast was opened and the heart torn out. Sometimes as many as two hundred thousand llamas were sacrificed during a year.

It is a horrid chapter from the Incas’ story that they made human sacrifices along with everything else which they valued. Von Tschudi says that they offered to the Sun as many as two hundred children at one time. “The children were strangled and buried with the silverfigures of sheep, having first walked around the statues of the Creator, the Sun, the Thunder, and the Moon. Sometimes they were crushed between two stones, sometimes their mouths were stuffed with ground coca.”

The fire for sacrifice was a direct gift of the Sun, kindled from a great polished bracelet upon the left arm of the high priest. The Virgins of the Sun bore away some of it to care for during the following year. No more unhappy omen could occur than its extinction.

The Inca sat within view of all, mounted upon his gold seat, drinking to his kindred and to thecuracasin order. The cups his lips had touched were kept as idols.

The Sun had drunk of their offerings; he had kindled their sacrificial fire; he now entertained his subjects with a banquet prepared by the hands of his own Virgin-wives. As three days of universal fasting had preceded the feast of the Sun, so for nine days reveling followed. They ate the bread of the Sun Virgins, and drank theirchicha, they shouted and danced and masqueraded, each tribe of the empire with differing head-dresses of feathers and grotesque

IN A FERTILE VALLEY OF THE UPLANDS.

masks according to the fashion of their country. “They cast flowers in the highways, ... and their noblemen had small plates of gold upon their beards, and all did sing.”

Hadthe Indians of the sixteenth century not known that their overthrow was the will of Pachacamac, the miracles constantly favoring the Spaniards would have forced them to recognize the fact. Pious chroniclers tell of Saint James on a white horse, who came with glistening sword to turn the tide of battle, and of the Virgin Mary, whose appearance in the clouds blinded the hostile Indians.

The Incas could but succumb to the sovereign will. Some retreated beyond the mountains, leaving indelible traces upon the people of the jungle. Some were thrown into fortresses, which “their ancestors had built for ostentation of their glory.” On the authority of Garcilasso, thirty-six males of the blood of the Sun, who had been condemned to live in Lima, the Spanish City of the Kings, had in three years’ time all died. Sayri Tupac, a nephew of Atahualpa, had come to Lima for the privilege of renouncing his sovereignty. Theamautashad consulted the flight of birds as to whether he should surrender himself to the Spaniards, but as Garcilasso says: “They made no inquiries of the devil because all the oracles of that country became dumb so soon as the sacraments of our holy mother, the church of Rome, entered into those dominions.”

“Ah!” said Sayri Tupac, as he lifted the gold fringe of the table-cloth, “all this cloth and its fringe were mine, and now they give me a thread of it for my sustenance and that of all my house.” He was allowed to withdraw to the beautiful valley of Yucay, “rather to enjoy the air and delights of the pleasant garden formerly belonging to his ancestors than in regard to any claim or propriety he had therein.” But he sank into a deep melancholy and died within two years.

The Spaniards were occupied with duels and assassinations of friends, bloody civil wars and religious disputes, usually about the Immaculate Conception. One can read volumes of such proceedings. Indian revolts were a constantinterruption. The Spaniards gradually discovered that it was impossible to keep the Indians quiet while an Inca remained alive; so in 1571, less than forty years after their arrival, Tupac Amaru, the last of the Incas, was put to death by the Spaniards in the following manner, as described by Garcilasso de la Vega in the words of his first English translation (1688).

“His crimes were published by the common crier, namely, that he intended to rebel, that he had drawn into the plot with him several Indians who were his creatures, ... designing thereby to deprive and dispossess his Catholic majesty, King Philip the Second, who was emperor of the new world, of his crown and dignity within the kingdom of Peru. This sentence to have his head cut off was signified to the poor Inca without telling him the reasons or causes of it, to which he innocently made answer that he knew no fault he was guilty of which could merit death, but in case the vice-king had any jealousy of him or his people he might easily secure himself from those fears by sending him under a secure guard into Spain, where he should be very glad to kiss the handsof Don Philip, his lord and master. He farther argued that ... if his father with two hundred thousand soldiers could not overcome two hundred Spaniards whom they had besieged within the city of Cuzco, how then could it be imagined that he could think to rebel with the small number against such multitudes of Christians who were now disbursed over all parts of the Empire.” How little effect the words of Tupac Amaru produced upon the Spaniards can be judged by the following:

“Accordingly the poor Prince was brought out of the prison and mounted on a mule with his hands tied and a halter about his neck with a crier before him declaring that he was a rebel and a traitor against the crown of his Catholic majesty. The Prince not understanding the Spanish language asked of one of the friars who went with him what it was that the crier said, and when it was told him that he proclaimed him a traitor against the king, his lord, he caused the crier to be called to him and desired him to forbear to publish such horrible lies, which he knew to be so, for that he never committed any act of treason nor ever had it in hisimaginations, as the world very well knew. ‘But,’ said he, ‘tell them that they kill me without other cause, that only the vice-king will have it so, and I call God the Pachacamac of all to witness that what I say is nothing but the truth.’ After which the officers of justice proceeded to the place of execution.... The crowds cried out with loud exclamation accompanied with a flood of tears, saying, ‘Wherefore, Inca, do they carry thee to have thy head cut off?... Desire the executioner to put us to death together with thee who are thine by blood and nature and should be much more contented and happy to accompany thee into the other world than to live here slaves and servants to thy murderers.’

“The noise and outcry was so great that it was feared lest some insurrection and outrage should ensue amongst such a multitude of people gathered together, which could not be counted for less than three hundred thousand souls. This combustion caused the officers to hasten their way unto the scaffold, where being come the Prince walked up the stairs with the friars who assisted at his death and followed by the

AN INDIAN PASTORAL.

executioner with his broad sword drawn in his hand. And now the Indians feeling their Prince just upon the brink of death lamented with such groans and outcries as rent the air.... Wherefore the priests who were discoursing with the Prince desired him that he would command the people to be silent, whereupon the Inca, lifting up his right hand with the palm of his hand open, pointed it towards the place whence the noise came and then lowered it by little and little until it came to rest upon his right thigh, which, when the Indians observed, their murmur calmed and so great a silence ensued as if there had not been one soul alive within the whole city. The Spaniards and the vice-king who were then at a window ... wondered much to see the obedience which the Indians in all their passion showed to their dying Inca, who received the stroke of death with that undaunted courage as the Incas and the Indian nobles did usually show when they fell into the hands of their enemy and were cruelly treated and unhumanly butchered.”

When they first stepped upon the shores of Peru, a Spaniard or two could travel hundredsof leagues alone through this foreign country on the shoulders of men and be adored as gods in passing. Before long, an army was not secure. A Spanish governor and his escort of thirty men were resting one day upon a high plain. The Indians, whistling to each other with bird calls and barking like wolves in the night, “went softly to the Spaniards’ tents, where, finding them asleep, they cut the throats of every one of them.”

Such deeds were being done in the Empire of the Lover of the Poor, the Deliverer of the Distressed, where formerly each individual had been forbidden to injure even himself.

The spirit of rebellion spread among the Indians. They tried to poison the water-supply of the City of the Kings. They tried to burn Cuzco, imagining they could burn the Spaniards with it. Their revolts culminated in that great rebellion of 1780 under José Gabriel Condorcanqui, called Tupac Amaru, whose descendant, through a daughter, he was. His followers swore their hatred of the white race and vowed not to leave a white dog, not even a white fowl alive. They even scraped the whitewash fromthe walls of their houses. They did succeed in strangling a governor. In return, Tupac Amaru’s tongue was cut out, and after seeing his wife, son, and brother tortured to death before his eyes, was himself sentenced to be torn apart by wild horses.

The men were slaughtered in such numbers that the women went out to help each other sow the fields. At sunset they returned, hand in hand, singing a melancholy lament, until this too was prohibited by Spanish law. All musical instruments were to be destroyed; the use of the Quichua language was forbidden; women were ordered not to spin as they walked; distinctive customs were to be laid aside. All lapsed into spiritless dullness. The air of desolation spread.

The Indians of Peru are a silent people trained by cold and cutting winds. They bite the end of theirponchosto show anger and live to an immense age. Their thoughts turn backwards. They grind their teeth on the same hard corn kernels as formerly and drink the same corn-brandy; they carry about as talismans littleeffigies of llamas found in the graves of their ancestors and throw their criminals over the same lofty precipices. The juice of the red thorn-apple leads them into ecstasy, the only high light of their existence, for by means of it they communicate with the spirits of their ancestors. The only passion they have brought with them through the centuries is remembrance of the past. The thorn-apple is calledhuaca cachu, the plant of the grave.

The Indians squat about in groups with their little gourds ofchicha. There is no laughing. The mummy-like babies do not cry. The lake on whose banks they live contains no fish. No worm, no insect, inhabits its banks. But there is a spirit which broods from the mountain above. He will lighten the burden of the traveler who seeks the mountain-top and presents him offerings in the depths of night. Theachachibasor piles of stones are witness to his gracious power.

Between two mountain-tops lies a steel-colored lake shimmering in its stone basin. The Indians come here to beg for fire-water. They pour in brandy, standing on a peak while making their libation to the rain-god, and then leave without a word. Immediately the rain pours.

Only their religious festivals recall Inca feast days. Christianity has never been able to abolish the bacchanales of former times; it has merely changed their names. The call of triumph,haylli, has been changed to Hallelujah, Christian anthems are set to Indian tunes, IHS has been engraved on the stone doorways of antiquity. Over the shrines outside the churches are effigies of sun and moon. Above the megalithic fortress of Sachsahuaman three crosses preside where the banners once indicated the dwelling of the Children of the Sun. Indians still salute the Sun temple on first entering Cuzco, though the nave of the Dominican church stands upon the spot where the Sun was worshipped in golden chambers, its Christian walls built of mammoth stones rolled together for the glory of the Sun. This superstructure typifies the methods of the missionary priests.

A wooden llama filled with fire-crackers is exploded on Good Friday. By the roadside, anIndian in a grotesque mask, with a feather crown and bells on his arms and legs, leaps in fantastic bounds to celebrate the day of the Holy Cross. A picture of the Virgin is carried about on her Ascension Day. The Indians, dressed in the masks of wild animals and multi-colored feathers with bits of savage embroidery on their loose garments, dance about her to fifes and drum-beats and rattles of beans and snail-shells. Wild dances, horn-blowing, ugly voices screaming, and rattling tin—these heathen orgies swarm at the feet of effigies of Christ.

The Indian has to be content with the scanty earnings he can get from the transport of heavy burdens and from the wool of his llamas. By chewing coca he is able to run all day before the rider. His world is the valley where he lives. His occupation does not lead him to the mountain-top above, nor does his thought soar as far. His gloom sulks in his dress and manner of life, even in his songs and dances. When he reaches his little smoky hut, he eats his frozen and pressed potato, plays a wee tune on hisquenaand goes to sleep.

Self-sufficient because in need of nothing, the llama is the interpretation of the Indian. Both are products of the soil, like theyaretamoss and the birds which swim in the icy water.

The dark-eyed llamas, with red-woolen tassels in their ears, move slowly across the icy plateau.

Could anything equal the dignity of a llama, his serenity, his hauteur? Why not? He knows he is indispensable. There is no one to take his place. His wool furnishes clothing, his skin leather, his flesh food, his dung fuel, and he is a beast of burden where no other can live on the bare, breathless heights.

In return, he asks no shelter, warm beneath his shaggy coat. He asks no food, for he grazes on the stiffychugrass as he journeys along. He needs no shoes, no harness, and even provides, himself, the wool for the homespun bags lying upon his back. When there is no water, he carries in bags made of his own skin what is necessary for man. Nor do his benefactions end here. The llama furnished the mystery-loving Spaniards with that strange bezoar stone which, on account of its miraculous endowments, theyplaced in the list with emeralds, pearls, turquoises, and other precious stones from Peru.

Is it astonishing that the llama makes his own rules of conduct and exacts entire consideration of them? Disobedience he indicates in a way not to be forgotten! And yet such is his docility that dozens are often kept within bounds by a single thread stretched around them breast high,—rugged little mountain beasts herded with worsted! Usually so gentle, if a llama is annoyed he becomes revengeful and useless. He never will hurry, for supplying his own food he must graze when opportunity offers. He will not be overloaded. One hundred pounds he will cheerfully carry, but with more than that he sits down like a camel, dreamily chewing his cud, and can be neither forced nor persuaded to rise. In speaking of the alpaca, cousin of the llama, Father Acosta said that “the only remedy is to stay and sit down by thepaco, making much on him, until the fit be passed, and that he rise; and sometimes they are forced to stay two or three hours.”

The little variegated herd, with expressions of mild surprise, step daintily along as if walking

LLAMAS AT THE FALLS OF MOROCOCHA.

on eggs, following at even distances, each moving with authority of a whole procession. If frightened, they huddle into a compact group, craning their long necks toward the center. Then they look you wistfully in the face for minutes at a time without moving. The halter of the leader is embroidered, and small streamers flutter from it. Most of the llamas have tassels in their ears, or little pendants or bells. Thus they file across the snow-covered cordillera.

At night when they sink on to thepunaat their journey’s end, a faint murmur like many æolian harps is wafted into the perfect stillness of the frosty night. It is the llamas’ appreciation of rest.

The land lying between Peru and Brazil is a mystery “although the bounds be known of all sides.... Some say it is a drowned land, full of lakes and watery places; others affirm there are great and flourishing kingdoms, ... where they say are wonderful things.”Father Acosta

Father Acosta

Whata “hereditary spell” the jungle has had upon men! How smilingly its beauty allures—and how graciously it repels! Yet its beauty is not merely beauty. It flashes suggestions of wondrous lands beyond, bringing to the imagination a pleasure in its own vision like the joy of nature in her own loveliness. The jungle is a region which men have always peopled with strange forms pleasing to their fancies, yet a region of dread, beyond human loneliness. It has sheltered in turn the desideratum of each age, while surrounding it with fearful mysteries. But though men have looked upon the jungle with awe, magic possibilities were still within and beyond.A chacun son infini.

Both Inca Rocca and Yupanqui attempted to conquer the jungle. Between Paucartampu and the Madre de Díos are vestiges of an Inca road.But downpours and floods made roads give way to watercourses. The Incas called them “doorways” to the woods, which mountain rapids had opened by irresistible force; but no one could pass through. Even the executive Incas were obliged to turn back with only a fringe of jungle conquest, great campaigns resulting only in loss of life then as now. They retreated, submissive before nature’s impregnable stronghold. There are tribes of strange, shy little people still showing traces of contact with the Incas. Although so long ago, they made a profounder impression than all subsequent invaders. Even if the conquered savages remained in the jungle after submitting to the Incas, they were obliged to pay tribute to them, observing the habits of their conquerors when they emerged. Those Incas, also, who withdrew into the woods to escape Spanish persecution, carried their customs with them. No matter how their influence was perpetuated, tribes still show the “footprints of Incas” in the surface of rocks, and even as far as the Mishagua are found legends of Incas’ hidden treasure. With them in mind, the “big ears” of some of the savages assume a strange significance.

Where the Madera and the Amazon meet there is a great island, a river island hundreds of miles in extent. Its name is Tumpinambaranas, and upon it are remains of gigantic buildings. Was this the fabulous country, Paytiti of mystery, powerful in riches, a legendary home of Manco Ccapac? Georg M. von Hassel is now investigating this hazy subject. The people of Tumpinambaranas had legends of a race, the Mutayces, who lived toward the south, “whose feet grew backwards so that any one who attempted to follow them by their track, would, if he were ignorant of this malformation, go farther from them.”

Columbus breathed the sweet air which blew across from the forests near the mouth of the Orinoco and faithfully imagined it one of the four great rivers flowing from paradise. Had he only dared, he said, he would have liked to push forward to where he might hope to find the celestial boundaries of the world, and a little farther, to have bathed his eyes with profound humility in the light of the flaming swordswhich were wielded by two seraphim before the gate of Eden.

The cavaliers in search of gold believed that El Dorado lived within the mysterious jungle. Their expeditions were imbued with awe. Adolph F. Bandelier has transcribed the source of the legend. It is the ceremonial of choosing theuzaqueof Guatavitá:

“In front walked wailing men, nude, their bodies painted with red ochre, the sign of deep mourning.... Groups followed of men richly decorated with gold and emeralds, their heads adorned with feathers, and braves clothed in jaguars’ skins. The greater number of them went uttering joyful shouts, others blew on horns, pipes and conchs.... The rear of the procession was composed of the nobles and the chief priests, bearing the newly elected chieftain upon a barrow hung with discs of gold. His naked body was anointed with resinous gums and covered all over with gold dust. This was the gilded man,el hombre dorado, whose fame had reached the sea coast. Arrived at the shore, the gilded chief and his companions stepped upon abalsaand proceeded upon it to themiddle of the lake. There the chief plunged into the water and washed off his metallic covering, while the assembled company, with shouts and the sound of instruments, threw in the gold and the jewels they had brought with them.”

Treasures have been found in this lake, among others a group of golden figures. The chronicler Don Rafael Zerda says: “Undoubtedly this piece represents the ...caciqueof Guatavitá surrounded by Indian priests on the raft, which was taken on the day of the ceremony to the middle of the lake” for sacrifice to its goddess.

“Humboldt saw the staircase down which the gilded man and his train in jaguars’ skins descended to the waters of the lake of Guatavitá. He also found the remains of the tunnels by which the Spaniards had tried to drain the lake.”

A joint stock company in 1903 did drain the lake of Guatavitá. But its mud turned to cement before they could dig in it.

The “vision of the Dorado appeared like a mirage, enticing, deceiving, leading men to destruction.” It became the name of a mythicalcountry, where rivers ran over sands of gold, and palaces stood on golden pillars shining with emeralds. Infamous adventurers, brave as the knights of the Round Table, confronted and stormed the great jungle.

Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro tried to find the glittering capital of Manoa, which El Dorado had gradually become. For these buccaneers who set out with an arrogant army to conquer the Cinnamon Country, nature became the supreme fact of existence. Famine, perpetual rain, fevers, strange insects, and reptiles attacked them. Their expeditions could but end in the murder of each other. They followed the example of all life in the jungle.

Doctor Middendorf says that the Amazon was named for the Coniapuyara, a race of big women leaders, whom the Spaniards found. Condamine assures us that light-skinned Amazons lived there. Raleigh, while searching for Manoa, is said to have first reported them, though he found them by going up the Orinoco. The distinguished scientist Ulloa, who went to South America in 1758, says it is “an undoubted truth that there had been formerlyseveral communities of women who formed a kind of republic, without admitting any men into the government.” Well, at least there is nothing either to prove or disprove it. A recent report of the Geographical Society of Lima gives a far less picturesque explanation of the naming of the Amazon, to the effect that “the tribe of the Nahumedes were thought to be Amazons on account of their long hair and thecushma, a long, sleeveless garment which they wore.”

Close upon the adventurers came the Jesuit missionaries, who burned to save from hell-fire the strange human beings they might find lurking in the forest depths. One Jesuit father, Fritz, spent fifty years (1680-1730) on the Amazon, trying to connect the aborigines by the introduction of a common language. These missionaries left no ruins like those in Paraguay, the Jesuit State, but their teachings are visible in savage traditions. They transformed Bible stories to fit jungle needs.

“A Murato was fishing in a lake of Pastasa, when a little lizard swallowed his hook. The fisherman killed it, the mother of the lizards was much angered and with her tail slashed thewater in such a way that it overflowed the entire vicinity. All were drowned except one, who climbed into a smallpivaipalm, and hung there several days under a perpetual darkness. From time to time a fruit of thepivaipalm fell, but always upon the water, until one day he heard the plump of the fruit upon dry ground. He got down from the tree, made a house and farm, and with a little piece of his flesh, which he planted in the earth, made for himself a wife, by whom he had many children.”

The commercial age is now having its fling. It is attempting to subdue the jungle. The rubber hunters are not seeking paradise. They are not looking for legendary kingdoms, nor are they wishing to save the souls of beings of whose existence they are not even persuaded. Rubber is a valuable product. So are other things concealed in jungle depths. Dark crimes can also be hidden in the half-light, covered close under the thick veil which shrouds the land of mystery.

This Peru, approachable from the Atlantic, the “monstrous thicke wood” of the early travelers, still remains undisturbed. Illimitableit is as you gaze down upon it, stretching away one unbroken forest to the faint blue horizon, without a single natural approach except the waterways. Lying close below the austere mountain-tops is a luxuriant world of vegetation; wide stretches of unpreëmpted soil, sparseness characteristic of polar regions hangs just above a tropical phantasmagoria of growth. Shifting cloud-shadows and wandering rainbows flit and interchange over the jungle like the play of colors on a peacock’s neck.

Though we know that there are no mighty civilizations of human making, there are no streets of gold with ruby walls, yet within the imperturbable recesses are strange races and wonders of plant and animal life which may interpret whole domains of knowledge. Nature’s secrets are still locked up in this prolific laboratory. Though we know that no great race of kings holds sway, yet it is certain that here is a chance to study in the wild tribes the growth of human language—beginning with the poor Inje-inje, who has not more than a bird’s speech, and whose needs are no greater than his speech would suggest.

Fromthe mountain-tops the stream leads toward the east over the Eyebrows of the Jungle, La Ceja de la Montaña, letting loose a deluge from its black clouds. Caught between walls of red and black striped rock, the valley grows deeper and hotter and filled with mist. The water accumulates brightly colored pebbles. It rolls over ungathered bits of gold in its sand and rushes them along with slivers of glistening mica. All about is the sound of springs “whose waters moss has turned aside.” Buried in luxuriant vegetation, it slides on beneath thickets of guava, golden cassia, and red-leavedtilandsiabushes, hung with rank passion vines, whose ripened fruit, the cracklygranadilla, lies everywhere upon the ground. A mammoth iguana, munching the flesh-colored bignonias, falls occasionally from the tree-tops.

Small, richly plumed parrots nest in the rockwalls. A whole book might be written about the parrots, various as vegetation itself, flashing multi-colored light as they scream through the air-spaces. There is the toucan, turning his bill with its accessory head around to gloss his splendid plumage in a ray of sunlight. At the other end of the scale are the meek little green parroquets with perpendicular bills, hardly larger than sparrows, which go in pairs and move in parallel lines. Every variety keeps together, each to its kind.

There are other large, fruit-eating birds; birds with curiously shaped tail feathers; birds with crests and ornamental plumage. As variegated as their forms are their curious cries. The black ox-bird bellows like a bull, the black and redtunquigrunts like a pig, and wood-pigeons cry like children. Occasionally “jets of brilliant melody” sparkle among the trees, but more often the notes have a mysterious, aerial quality “like the tinkling of a far-off bell suspended in the air.”

Here hangs the wonderful nest, four feet long, of the pouched starling, bound together with spiders’ webs as strong as silk. Such is junglelavishness that plants and animals are given endowments useless to them in their struggle for existence. The bird which builds such a palatial nest has no advantage over any other. Its wondrous, unplantlike power gives to the sensitive plant no superiority. Struck with paralysis, it can recoil at a touch, but that forms no link with its fellow plants. Such a feat is not an attribute nor in any way a necessity of vegetable life. It can hardly compensate the sensitive plant for its lack of perfume and bright flower, the right of every growing thing.

Chatter of monkeys mingles with roar of falling water, hairy manikins, shrieking and gamboling, “very gentle and delightful apes,” Father Acosta called them. Tiny, blear-eyed monkeys scream in disapproval of all they can see, hear, or smell. Scarlet-faced monkeys, owl-faced monkeys, swing from branch to branch with crazy gestures, “taking one turn of the tail at least around anything in passing, just provisionally.”

Thick masses ofquinartrees are draped in luxuriant parasites, andagavebushes are filled with red flowers. The wonderfulmagueygrows

IN THE VALLEY OF THE PERENÉ.

here, yielding water, oil, and vinegar, honey, thread, needles, and soap. Its juice boiled in rain-water takes away weariness.

Clear water drips over blocks of granite, covering the stone with moss in falling. The terrible jaguar lies curled up asleep in some far-off notch, gently purring. Ferns and palms, forerunners of the great empire of vegetation below, cluster along the brooks swelled with snow. “Tall and whispering crowds of tree ferns” droop their filmy fronds from lofty, slender stems. Ferns of every conceivable size and texture smother rocks and decaying trees. Some are as small as mosses, others appear monstrous, like those of a moonlight night. Humming-birds flit above the pomegranates or lose themselves in a banana blossom. “The rose-colored plumage of the silky cuckoo peeps out like a flower from the thick foliage.”

It is an earthly paradise, where bloodsucking bats emerge at night and lightning rages uncontrolled, destroying trees and cracking open precipices. Pumas live in these clefts hewn through the mountains, and they spring on to the shoulders of a victim, drawing back thehead until the neck snaps.Pumayacuis the stream of the puma, with its tumultuous torrent whose very stones are treacherous.

Such are the rain-soaked slopes of the Andes, a tangled mass of jungle. The woods are all enchanted. Thousands of fairies dance in the sunbeams, and during the rain myriads of them hide in the flowers. If disturbed, they disappear underground. One can never be sure that “what one surveys is what it purports to be, nor even, that in surveying nothing, one is not gazing through an invisible being,” as Guenelette observed so long ago.

The half-Indian guide began to speak, taking a coca-leaf from his fawn-skin pouch.

“Pigmies live in the undergrowth. They are not more than so tall, ... and very, very wild. No, they’re not monkeys. They have a language, although we cannot understand it. How do I know they live here? Why! I know! Have I ever seen them? No. But—I’ve seen their shadows.

“And then there are jaguars near here, jaguars with the hoofs of bullocks. At night I can hear them springing upon the thatch of my thinroof. They roar and roar and one might call them the devil himself if one did not know that they were jaguars with the feet of bullocks. Have I ever seen them?... No, but then—I’ve seen the prints of their hoofs.

“Here in the bottom of the river, lying full length, lives the great Mother of Waters. She is so long that she could stretch from bank to bank and lie sleeping on either side at the same time. That is why she lies lengthwise in the river bed. Sometimes there is an awful, rumbling noise, like an approaching earthquake. Then the waters of the river are churned like the smallest mountain torrent tumbling over a rock in mid-stream. The great snake lifts her head, then her heavy body from the stream bed, and crashes off through the jungle. The track she leaves behind her is a desert waste; no growing thing is left, and the wake is as broad, why, as broad as this stream, under which she is now lying,” and he pointed with wide eyes to the water, rushing headlong to join the Amazon.

All the snakes of that particular locality did miracles, so I was told by a wise man who could himself turn men into beasts at will.

“This river,” the guide concluded, “used to flow up on one side and down on the other, until white men sailed upon it. Then one half turned about, and the river now flows in but one direction, as you can see.”

As the gloomy, bottomless ravines descend, the forest becomes more dense, with murmurs of flowing water everywhere. Mists hang from above, barely concealing the jagged, black peaks. Sheets of continuous foam veil the side of a polished cliff. Water drips over every precipice. Cascades tumble from one mossed basin to another or let fall a clear column into a rock-pool deeply buried in tropical vegetation.

Finally mountains and ravines subside, and with the energy of one final, mighty leap, the rushing water plunges into the heart of the jungle, comes to rest, then glides out with the flush of a flood-tide across the Land of Water.

“As the serpents of this basin exceed all other serpents in size, so does the Amazon exceed all other rivers.” As the whirl of branches is to the trunk of a tree, as everything in nature is tributary to something else, so are streamletsin the mountains of the snowy desert to this mighty river. Collecting itself upon the frozenpunafar up among the clouds, it gets an impetus which makes fresh, wide stretches of ocean thousands of miles away.

So vast is the Amazon that, like the Andes which form a barrier to separate two worlds, different species of animals inhabit its opposite banks. It swarms with fish that will fight for a right to live, and some of them, thepaichi, for instance, reach the length of ten feet and must be caught by harpooning. The water is full of swimming animals. There are river-cows like sea-lions, and oceanic fauna such as frigate birds and flying-fish. In the mud along the banks are tracks of crocodiles and tortoises.

The Amazon has gained mastery over the land and has turned it into a sposhy ocean, interspersed with flats of jungle flowers. A watery labyrinth, “an aquatic not a terrestrial basin,” it is the Mediterranean of South America. The greatest river in the world twists and turns about, makes short cuts across its own bends and leaves behind a delicious lagoon here, or a little, land-locked inlet there. TheVictoria Regia spreads its great, leathery leaves, and scarlet ibises tilt about upon them.

This land beyond the Andes is known as the “rain-shadow.” The already overflowing rivers are constantly swelling, since it rains so violently that a stream of the Amazon valley can rise fifteen feet in a single night. A passing and re-passing is continually going on, for, as the water flows back toward the ocean, the winds above it are returning from the Atlantic, bringing rain to moisten the jungle and to be stopped only by the wall of the Andes.

Rain discloses the resources of the jungle. Plants push, burst upward in astonishing growth. Flowers paint themselves with ineffable new colors distilled from the rain, and those whose day has come and gone lie in heaps of yellow, pink, and white petals on the ground, fallen from beyond the tree-tops.

A single, heavy tapir,anta, the somber-colored wood-cow, roused by the rain and encouraged by the added gloom, wanders forth to tear off new sprouts within its reach. Peccaries rustle by in little droves—wild pigs which, it is said, will bite around a tree if theirobject of attack has climbed beyond reach. The minute, silky marmoset, filled with perennial terror and shivering at the rain, has crept into shelter, and just daring to show its wrinkled little face, howls dismally.

It is after a rain, too, when the wondrous notes of theorganista, the sweet flute-bird, drip through the trees, mellow, melancholy, yet with a musical accuracy of pitch as clear-cut as the circle of a drop of water fallen on a slab of alabaster. These notes share the mystery of the vast silence itself. Even savages rest on their paddles to listen. Would you capture the magician and carry the jungle-silence home? You can take the little gray bird—but it always dies in captivity.

Sincethe earth was first moistened by rain, and plants first grew, no limit has been set to the rights of vegetation in the jungle. Its sway is uncontested. It has known no master. Its insatiable desire to reach up and out and down has been uncurbed and undirected. And heaven seems to wish it well. Intensest heat, light, and moisture are showered upon it. Under such conditions, life would spring spontaneously into being, were there not myriads of progenitors to be responsible for whatever form it chose to take.

All the creative force of nature is behind the infinitely varying forms, and the frightful luxuriance of reproduction. Vegetation has the extravagance of first geologic ages, bursting withlife, rejoicing in weird, vegetable arabesques and green out-thrusts of leaves.

Amazing trees yield coloring matter of yellow, red, and blue. Trees cure bites of snakes, the malignantmanzanilloinfects any one who sleeps beneath it. Then there is the cow-tree of milky sap, the red-wooded blood tree, and those furnishing food for curious animals, which transform it into curious shapes. Beneath the iron-wood, whose sharp edges are hard as steel, crawls the sensitive plant. There are whole forests ofcinchona, whose beautiful flowers are forgotten because of the value of the bark. The dead man’s tree grows here, whose stems are sucked by witch-doctors to produce a trance; also the wonderful tree of rain, which Boussingault referred to when he said: “By the light of the moon we could distinctly see drops of water dripping from the branches.” The drier the night the more water it condenses, letting it fall upon the ground beneath. Ponderous leafage overarches great trunks, columns of a giant’s castle, each with its peculiar color. While some are smooth, others are deeply fissured or armed with long spikes. Most of the tree-trunks areindistinguishable for the mass of vines “sculptured” upon them. They cleave to the smooth bark, darting out roots as they ascend. “The green eaves of foliage seem supported by pillars of leaves.”

Tapering ribbons sway to and fro, tangling themselves in the long moss-beards. “Green, fleshy chains” festoon themselves upon the branches, and hang heavily on slender stems. They stretch taut from one tree to another, or rigid, fasten tree-tops to the ground. The whole jungle is knit together. If a supporting tree falls, the confused masses oflianasadhering to it snatch at whatever is nearest for a fresh start. They twist about each other tighter and tighter, gaining always a firmer and firmer hold as they ascend. Far up above, they will weave back and forth a close fabric, spreading out wide roofs of flowers.

Indistinguishable tree from creeper, parasite from supporter, all are clamoring for space and light and air. Those which have struggled through to the top reach toward the scalding sun or alternate cooling deluge, riotous, irrepressible in vigor, radiant with color, distillingintense perfume, drooping with the succulence of their own leaves and stems, breaking with the weight of their over-developed fruit.

Vegetation invades everything. It even shoots out over the water, covering it with lovely forms. Hardly a growing thing can get its impulse directly from the soil. That was long ago preëmpted. There must be other things to grow upon or in. Wherever there is a suspicion of foothold, a new form of life springs up spontaneously, gleaning nourishment from whatever it touches, exuberantly prolific from the start, parasites one and all, living at the expense of some earlier comer.

Even parasites have their own parasitic growth. Parasites flourish as trees self-grafted upon trees. Draperies and tapestries and motionless cascades, this inundation of parasitic life falls back again to the ground in great growing clumps. What indeed is a parasite?

Little rifts of color have collected here and there, concentrated deep in the nooks and crevices of trees, moulded into orchid form. Some are tiny as mosses and grow upon the ground,dewy-looking, little violet-colored flowers. Some lie upon the water, some droop over the edge of precipices, their great mass of fleshy, aerial roots sucking damp nourishment from the air. Certain trees seem destined by nature as orchid gardens. Numberless varieties, each with its peculiar bearing, perch upon the limbs, night-scented blossoms with a spongy texture fringed and fluted in a thousand ways; beautiful monsters of crimson and black, whose queer little phantom faces, with beards of fine hairs, make mouths at you. Hot and moist, the imperceptible odor of each mingles with the mass of other imperceptible odors, oppressive at last by sheer force of numbers.

The habits of orchids, if so they may be called, are amazing; for example: their attraction of insects and means of scattering their pollen about on a moth’s body; their bright color luring day-flyers and their strong odor night-flyers to the same flower; the elastic flaps, a resource of others for a similar end. As Darwin said: “With parts capable of movement and other parts endowed with something so like, though no doubt really different from sensibility, they seem to us in our ignorance as if modeled by the wildest caprice.”

Whimsical and wayward, restrained by no precedent, an orchid dares defiance in all the properties it possesses, odor, form, and color, so that the line of its descent is sometimes impossible to distinguish. This anarchist of flowers throws out an unexpected leaf or petal wherever it chooses, and if interfered with, refuses even to produce its own blossoms, veering off in independence. The most elegant flower that grows, able to conventionalize even nature herself by lusciously designed leaves—patterns whose suitable background would be courts of kings—riots here alone in “languid magnificence,” merely glanced at by a passing humming-bird.

If a tree or a vine has a little less succulence than its neighbor or a little less vital impulse, nature calmly watches it pounced upon and extinguished. No one “compassionately tries to save the unfit from the consequences of their unfitness.” Having endowed this prolific land, the lavish elements can withdraw and survey unmoved the scattering showers of seeds, thatprodigal industry of plants in busily perfecting seeds which will never be given an opportunity to grow. So little chance has a seed that new attempts at life are more secure if supplied by the energy of the parent stem. The elements are not responsible for the death-struggle of vegetation which results. As far as they are concerned, each seed that falls and each little shoot that springs upward would be given an equal chance. But every form being equally favored, its neighbors contest its right to live. Coöperation to make life possible at all, only begins when united force is needed to conquer a common foe. Life here is for viper and vampire as well as for butterfly, and the parasite has an equal chance with the benevolent vine. It is a battlefield where militant nature fights in civil warfare through the ages. Plants once given birth demand the right to make the most of their own particular form of life, fighting for sun, fighting for air, fighting for the right to live. Ironically enough, warfare is fiercest between forms most closely allied. “They interlace, strangle, and devour each other.” Parasitic alliances are possible only between very divergent forms, each benefiting by the use of what the other does not need. Parasites are leapt upon by other parasites; there is strife even among them. Forever fighting with each other, they all suffer equally from hereditary enemies descending from above or creeping up from below, capturing by attack or poisoning by stealth.

Plants not only crowd their neighbors out of the soil, they seem to dispute the air as well. Each begrudges the other a breathing space. The ingenuity of nature is taxed to invent compensations to each for lack of what it has a right to expect as its due. An impenetrable disguise of buttresses is substituted for roots and want of underground space. Air-roots drop from branches. Smaller trees, adapted to the dimness, live in the shade of larger ones. Nature uses every subterfuge, restrained by nothing known as customary. Plants maintain a life whose pertinacity we have no scale for measuring. Each asserts its own individuality and insists upon it with inexhaustible energy. Each is convinced of its own desirability, convinced it was intended to live, proclaiming that intention to the death of its neighbor.

Out of the remains of the dead arises a new generation with an increase of vital impulse. The instant a plant has reached a sense of completeness, it is sprung upon, twitched from decay into the vitality of some lovely form whose time has come. Whatever lapses into the past is at once metamorphosed. Whatever should look forward for opportunity would be snuffed out by some exuberant growth determined on immediate perfection.

There can be no seasons in the jungle, no general periods of growth, maturity, or rest. All stages of development are flaunting from independent plants in a single locality. Each is appropriating whatever it can use in the elements or in its neighbor to weave into its own perfecting tissue. Each is as little influenced by the other as are two trees rubbing against each other with the wind, mingling their branches and blending their foliage. Though forced during a lifetime to closest proximity, they are members of remote families, and the nature of neither is modified in the slightest degree.

Indeed, all seasons concentrate on a single tree; for some of the massive fruits requiremore than a year to ripen, so that fruit is maturing and flowers are budding on the same tree.

Only heat can penetrate. Light is almost excluded by the unbroken canopy of interlaced branches. It is left up above, absorbed into whirls of vivid flower or expanding the luscious leaves. Heat and moisture are imprisoned. Plants flourish in “the boundless, deep immensity of shade.” Left in wan half-light they push up into the “green gloaming,” adapted to the dimness yet straining upward to the light which would kill them if they could reach it. Even bats sometimes make mistakes and emerge at noonday, unhooking themselves from branches on which the sun has never shone. All forms are confused, and the strange shapes but half-seen are concealed by others no less vague.

Deep within the wilderness, more silent than the noiseless solitude itself, lies a mysterious lagoon sacred to the giant Mother of Waters. All about, coiled in the half-putrescent, vegetable mould, are myriads of venomous creatures, gliding, writhing, crawling in and out. Minute snakes, whose bite is death, curl in tendrils or lie like coral necklaces upon the leaves. Largerones drape in vinelike garlands overhead, to be distinguished from a blossoming festoon only by a sudden, loose-swinging end.

But the pool! What wet blackness and horrid mystery! The surface of the water is never ruffled by a breeze. It has no moods. Unperturbed in perpetual gloom it lies in quivering stagnation, oozing nauseous odors under the twilight of a full, tropical noon. No roseate spoonbill, no delicate white heron tilts about upon its banks. The black, stagnant water can barely cover the solid, seething mass of “hairy, scaly, spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters, without name ... wallowing, interwriggling, and devouring each other.”

Here sleeps the Mother of Waters, congenially imbedded, her shining coils slipping about over each other—the greatyacumama—the mighty boa-constrictor, who can swallow almost any creature whole, and whose breath withers any beast lured within reach by her fascinating poison. Humanely she intoxicates before squeezing the unyielding bones to pulp of digestible consistency.

Sometimes she unfolds her darkly iridescentcoils out into the hospitable closeness of the jungle. Laboriously she winds upward in over-arching trees; but, as if too languid, leaves part of her frightful weight dragging below. She looks moss-grown, like the stem of an old tree, and treelike, remains motionless for days at a time. When she does wander forth in search of prey, a track follows through the lush, yielding vegetation—her huge weight lingering heavily upon succulent stems.

Theatmosphere is full of color—weird, miasmic exhalations. Next to the shade lingering under the dark velvet foliage on the edges of streams, the glossy leaves toss off sheets of silver light or reflect a “russet glamour” from their under sides. Beds of yellow butterflies settle along river banks and concentrate the sunlight with blinding intensity. Every leaf seems to blaze like a gem; even the black shadows pulsate with inner light. It is part of jungle mystery that even the light comes in iridescence.

Legions of beautifully colored spiders silently spin their geometric webs. Insects all dipped in silver, with waving antennae laid back along their heads, red beetles with golden heads and wings of chintz, buzz to and fro. Moss-grown leaf-insects—ossified, living scarabs—walk about on tree-trunks. Stinging bees and wasps fill chinks of jungle trees with wild honey. Myriads of ants swarm: driver ants; parasol ants carrying a bit of leaf about over their heads; fever-bearing ants, and ants that live in the hollow, white stems of the cecropia tree and furnish the sloth’s food. Centipedes hurry by, legs moving with “invisible rapidity like a vibration,” and numerous flies, ticks, mosquitoes, cicadas, dragon-flies. Some of these strange beings need two or three years of larval life to prepare for a flight of a single hour, possibly after sunset. What a limited idea of the world must they have who never see the light of day!

We are assured that the unseen world is a very substantial place; so is the microscopic. And an ear-trumpet reveals a new universe of sound. What a region of ultra-violet murmurings must lie beyond that we never catch at all! If only an elemental apperception can grasp the vastness of the jungle, what can be said of the delicacy of its silver-point drawing? For here is greatness on the invisible scale, “a creation at the same time immense and imperceptible.”

Side by side with sloths, ant-eaters, and armadillos, dwarf descendants of mastodon days, still lumbering about undeveloped in spite of their ancient lineage, humming-birds have flashed through the ages. They have profited by cycles of centuries to elaborate their little bodies beyond imagination with pendent beards, crests, waving ear-tufts, and ornaments colored in fantastic manner. Their tails, fashioned in queer shapes, always consist of ten feathers. Even the tiny, sharp feet, minute as they are, differ greatly in form and are sometimes covered with a delicate, white down. There are feathers on a humming-bird’s eyelids. The little saw-edged tongues for extracting insects from flower-honey all differ. Their bills are as long as their bodies, and their tails are twice as long.

What can be said of their color, brighter than any other in nature? The hue of every precious stone, the luster of every metal sparkles from some part of the diminutive body. Often only a twinkling of emerald-gold-green or ruby-colored light reveals their passing—

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