CHAPTER XANOMALIES OF LIMA

SANTA ROSA DE LIMA, FROMHET WONDER LEVEN VAN DE H. ROSA,BRUSSEL, 1668.

“No, protestante.”

“Oh!...”

Her voice ran down the gamut of the scale.

“You will not then believe my book?” The voice addressed me.

I replied that I should value the book more than any one else to whom she could have given it.

“Ah,” she sighed, “then that is why I wanted to give it to you.”

A little pause.

“Good-by-ie,” she said. A glint beyond the netting.

“Good-by-ie,mía amíga,” and Rosa Mercédes and I stood alone outside.

Following is a Salutation to Santa Rosa preceding her novena, published in Lima in 1902:

“God keep thee, O admirable virgin and patron of ours, Rose of Saint Mary!

“God save thee, joy of the world, glory of the city, star of Lima, crown of the fatherland, most rich gold of Peru, treasure of the Indies!

“God save thee, flower of the church, rose of humility, white lily of purity, olive of peace,fire of charity, most precious pearl, most beautiful dove!

“We salute thee, O most loved spouse of the Heart of Jesus! Much cherished daughter of most Holy Mary, living image of thy mistress Catherine.

“We praise thee, O example of penitence! Chosen from thousands, patron of a new world.

“We bless thee, O Most Fragrant Rose, Most Precious Rose, Most Innocent Rose, Most Pure Rose, Most Illustrious Rose, Most Holy Rose, Most Glorious Rose!

“Rosa fragrantísima, Rosa inocentísima, Rosa purísima, Rosa ilustrísima, Rosa santísima, Rosa gloriosísima!”

Theysat about the dinner table—a delightful, stammering, scientific gentleman, who advised my carrying home some livecamarones(crayfish); a young English curate, here to sketch all the caterpillars of all the butterflies he could find, and their cocoons; the grandson of a former president of Peru, who spoke of his grandfather’s battles; and a cousin of the actual president, who told tales of ostrich-hunting in the pampas of Argentina, a cosmopolitan club man, whose chief interests in Lima were cricket and polo. There was a man who was collecting everything from pearls to reduced heads and whose gold watch-fob was a Peruvian tongue-weight for the dead. A Chilean lady with the grace of an older generation spoke of the islands of Juan Fernandez and their prehistoric monuments, which have a nose andchin, face the sun, and are too big to enter the British Museum. That led toward the archeologist.

We were eatingcuculis—desert doves—and alligator-pear salad, while we listened to stories of pre-Inca civilizations from the man who has done most to unravel their mysteries. In Peru the alligator-pear is calledpalta, a shiny, dark-green, leather-covered shell concealing its soft, nutty flesh. It hangs at the end of a fine twig, which is dragged down by its weight. A stiff mayonnaise so disguises thepaltathat it is almost impossible to tell where fruit ends and sauce begins.

A lady of mixed races wore twice about her neck a heavily-carved chain, on her breast the large cross at its end. She spoke of a friend who had searched for years until he should find a gift exactly suited to her; at last he beheld this chain about the neck of a pope of the Greek church. The pope parted with it reluctantly, for in a cavity in the back of the cross he kept his sacred relics.

She twirled the great cross between her fingers.

“Très chic, n’est-ce pas?” she said. “And you see,” touching the clasp to loosen a little lid, “it’s just the size for a powder-puff!”

A folk-lore-specialist-explorer was discussing swinging bridges in the Andes with a lady whose husband had left her in Lima while he took a distant journey in the interior to make a census of savage tribes.

“What have you been doing to-day?” she asked.

“Bless my soul, I don’t remember,” he replied. “Oh, yes! buying slaves in the jungle.”

Two young English people at the remote end of the table had just arrived in Lima from a honeymoon adventure up the Amazon. They had sailed as far as Iquitos; then they had paddled, they had ridden mule-back, they had tramped over the mountains, and, fording streams to their waists, had lain down in their wet clothes to sleep in the cold wind. We all inquired about fever.

“Oh, yes,” said the red-cheeked little lady, “my husband got the fever one day in Iquitos; it turned his eyes red and his face blue, and the whole house shook with his chills.”

He seemed to like to talk about their adventures. They had been paddling all one day, he said, and were paddling still, as night settled down upon the Amazon. Suddenly there was a whirring sound like a great cataract.

“Paddle for your life,” shrieked the guide, and swinging the canoe about, they fled down-stream.

The whirlpool! Its encounter the greatest calamity that can befall a traveler upon the Amazon! No craft, however strong, once caught by the outermost edge of a whirlpool, can escape. Whether it is caused by a sudden squall brushing through the forest or a piece of the bank falling in, is not known. It is certain only that a whirlpool never occurs twice in the same place.

“Death in that region,” he went on, “is commoner than life. There is a horrible beast which the natives call a flying snake, with a blue head and a long prong upon it. It flies sting foremost. You are sauntering from your hammock to your cabin door. The thing flies against you, and presto! you fall with the poison of his contact, and another grave must be dug on the sposhy banks of the Amazon.

“In Iquitos a woman bears a friend a grudge. She pays the police a small sum, and the next time her friend emerges, she is bound by the guardian of the peace, beaten until she falls, and is carried home to die. Prisoners there are allowed to order their own meals,” he added.

Then came stewed guavas, served with whirls of white of egg and pink and white pellets.

Nearlyeverybody makes collections in Lima. In the ancient house of a marquis, with its court fountain, bougainvillea, and tall Norfolk Island pine, were benches of ebony with lower rounds worn into hollows by the feet of nuns; embroidered muslin stoles; queer manuscripts; tortoise-shell combs tall enough to be filled in with flowers; silver porringers; and a point lace parasol with a carved ivory handle—all relics of vice-regal days.

One room was musty as seventeen mummies could make it. Fifteensoles, they told us, was the price of a mummy. There were ancient, inlaid chests filled with cases of butterflies frombeyond the mountains, huge snake-skins, overgrown orioles’ nests, necklaces of mummies’ teeth, and carved cases ofhuacosdug from Yunca grave-mounds—the pottery of mummies. Partly filled with water and rocked back and forth, the quaint things gave forth the same little half-whistle, half-sigh which notified their owners a thousand years ago that the precious water was being stolen. A soft bubbling, somewhere within the clay form, was supposed to imitate the voice of the animal painted on the outside. The liquids were meant to refresh a thirsty mummy on his death journey. He still holds his aching head. But the varnished lips were never parted, and the gurgling liquid of smoky flavor has never been sipped.

These jars were the ephemeral tablets on which a whole people chose to leave records of itself. The work of their hands can be held in ours. We can look into the staring Indian faces or upon the weird animals which pleased them, shining under a glaze which is the forgotten accomplishment of those remote tribes.

There are finely drawn portraits of the dead man’s friends, whom he may have wished as fellow pilgrims, heads of men and women singing or smiling, some distorted with pain. The human face twisted to the same lines then as now.

Wonderful fish glide among aquatic plants, the fox enamored of the moon languishes along her thin crescent. “The sneaking cat, the sleepy pelican, the supercilious, impudent parrot,” in softest yellow, white, red-brown, or black, glance all the iris shades under a purple glaze.

It was not enough to paint the manners and customs of the people, the fauna and flora of their country; they chose also to represent what they thought and believed as well as the adjustment of their sandals. We can peer into their monstrous, often loathsome, mythology and into their intangible land of fancy. Cats fight with griffins. A lizard with the face of an owl wears a jacket and bracelets. A chieftain in full regalia has a girdle ending in a fringe of almond-eyed, many-footed scorpions, each with a different number of feet. With snakes’ heads as earrings, a warrior with canine teeth smaller than the snail with forked tongue beside him is fishing for an octopus with a snake-line, whosehead, as bait, has caught a man. Crab-hands grasp from ears at a fleeing figure with a snake-like body, numerous feet intermingle with a human leg, two arms with nippers, and a fantastic head with waving antennae. A cactus forms the background.

The sun looks forth from the heart of a starfish. A fanciful eye, all alone, with unknown appendages and impossible proboscis, glitters under its dark, lustrous sheen. A ghastly face with wings presides at a dance of stags. And here is a vessel completely covered by a pair of elaborated nippers! In it are placed some passion-flowers, a whirl of purple and black.

Every uncanny suggestion in an animal is worked out to complete development. We may do the Yuncas the honor to call it allegorical. It recalls the Mexican legend that “the present order of things will be swept away, perhaps by hideous beings with the faces of serpents, who walk with one foot, whose heads are in their breasts, whose huge hands serve as sunshades, and who can fold themselves in their immense ears.”

It is primarily this portrait pottery whichproves the great antiquity of races in Peru. And the deeper one digs, the finer the designs.

Sitting on the ebony bench with the skin of a jaguar across its back, we atedulces(sweets) made of eggs, and drank tea out of ancient porcelain against a background of embroidered Spanish shawls. A yellow bird, acheireoque, who knows everything, sat upon a perch but did not sing.

Ricardo Palma, Peru’s delightfullittérateur, has collected the national library since its destruction by Chilean soldiers in the late war. Storekeepers in those days wrapped up their goods in pages of “fathers of the church.” The Chileans destroyed the annals of the Inquisition. They also killed the golden oriole which had sung in the trenches early one morning before the battle had begun.

The distinguished writer of Peruvian traditions sat in his long gown, reading parchment tomes of bygone centuries, his silk cap pulled down to his eyes. I sat near him at a tablesurrounded by books under a far-away skylight. There happened to be open a volume of historical sketches of Limaneans done in color by Pancho Fierro: a man dressed for the gallows riding beneath balconies of interested ladies; monks and nuns in every garb; Indian dances with whirls of color; the Lord Mayor’s procession with his big mace of silver, and black servants in green velvet holding a red umbrella over his head; every known variety of eatable-seller; women with bright green trousers, whose veils covered them all but one eye, and uniforms of every profession and occupation.

About the time when the Puritans were landing in Massachusetts Bay, a law was passed prohibiting ladies of Lima from covering the face. The animals of the coachman in whose carriage rode ladies violating this law would be confiscated, and any man who spoke to such a lady must pay a hundredpesos. But enforcement of the law was too difficult, and the custom of the veil persisted until a few years since.

Don Ricardo turned and put into my hands a book of his own. The sun streamed through the distant skylight. I began to read: “Odoray is the most beautiful blossom of the flower garden of America, a white lily scented with the breath of seraphim. Her soul is an aeolian harp which the sentiment of love causes to vibrate, and the sounds which it exhales are soft as the complaint of a lark.

“Odoray is fifteen years old, and her heart cannot leave off throbbing before the image of the beloved of her soul. Fifteen and not love—impossible! At that age love is for the soul what the ray of spring sun is to the meadows. Her lips have the red of the coral, the aroma of the violet. They are a scarlet line above the velvet of a marguerite.

“The faint tint of innocence and modesty colors her face as twilight the snow of our cordillera. The locks of hair which fall in graceful disorder over the ermine of her shoulders, imitate the gold filaments which the Father of the Incas scattered through space on a spring morning.

“Her voice is loving and feeling as the echo of thequena(flute). Her smile has all the charm of the wife in the Song of Solomon, all the modesty of prayer.Svelteas the sugar-caneof our valleys, if the place where it has passed can be recognized, it is not on account of the trace which its short plant leaves in the sand, but by the perfume of angelic purity which lingers behind.

“It is an afternoon of April, 1534. Twilight sheds its undivided gleam above the plains. The sun taking off its crown of topazes is about to retire on the bed of foam to which the ocean entices it. Creation is at this instant a lyre letting fall soft sounds. The desirous breeze that passes giving a kiss to the jasmine, the petal that falls jostled by the wings of the painted humming-bird, theturpialthat sings a song of agony in the aspen foliage, the sun that sets, firing the horizon ... all is beautiful. The last hours of the afternoon and all things elevate the created toward the Creator.

“To hear in the distance the soft murmur of the brook slipping along, to feel that our temples are brushed by the zephyr filled with the perfume which is exhaled by the flower of the lemon-tree and the rushy ground, and in the midst of this concert of nature” ... such is the imagery of the literature of Peru.

A GLIMPSE OF OLD-FASHIONED LIMA.

A womanin lilac called Dolores, a pretty woman with a vapid face, was absent-mindedly turning a green glass globe between her fingers and selling guavas. Young soldiers whose swords trailed along the pavement were eating the guavas.

We got out of the carriage and rattled at a door until a keeper with jangling keys came to open it. The walls were spiked and covered with broken glass. The door banged together behind us.

A thin, delicately featured man in a black silk cap and stock came forward in welcome. “The composer ofOllanta, the national opera,” some one introduced. He led us toward a bare room scattered with manuscript music as fine as copper-plate. I looked at the iron bars across the windows. Over the piano hung three dusty laurel wreaths, the people’s tribute to a genius they could not understand. After a three weeks’ presentation by an uncomprehending Italian troupe, Lima demandedMignon, and the manuscript opera was returned tothe upper, right-hand drawer from which its composer now drew it.

“I am transcribing the melodies of the Indians of the highlands, some of them survivals of Inca days,” he explained.

He played the weird, syncopated music of the Andes, bringing the indefinable “shiver of unknown rhythm,” the wheedling love-songs and the sadyaravíswhich suggested those deep valleys lost among the mountain-tops.

“You know theyaravíof the Indians? It is a peculiar music, a melancholy idyl reflecting the somber Indian character—a music of extremes, for no other is so dismal and so sweet. It wails in a minor key through strange Quichua words, the language of the Indians.

“Many of these melodies I have used unchanged. Nothing so speaks to the spirit as they.... A secret music like that of falling water—one cannot hear it without thinking of the riddle of the world. It has a full, pent-up significance, as when a bird puts all the fervor of its song into pianissimo. It moves like the music of birds, and like it does not admit of criticism.”

I asked if the Indians sang unaccompanied.

“There is sometimes a reed-flute accompaniment,” he said, “as simple as the song. The flute is called aquena. Then, too, they play upon a pipe-of-Pan, supposed to have persisted since Inca days. But melody suggests to them things far lovelier than they can conceive by words. What they wish to say is made intelligible by the sadness or cheerfulness of the tune.”

There is a legend that a priest in early Spanish days loved a beautiful Indian girl who died. In desolation he mourned for years, until he dug up her skeleton and made a flute out of the big leg-bone. Then upon it he played weird, sad tunes and was comforted. This is the origin of the human-bone flute so widely used.

“Have you ever heard of the ‘Jug of Mourning?’”he suddenly asked. “Sometimes at evening the Indians play on flutes inserted in a large earthenware jar to make their tragic tones more resonant, and, sitting grouped around it at a little distance, they cry aloud and shed tears for the downfall of the race. The Indians’ misfortune is infinite indeed, but a misfortuneterribly uniform; and so is their music. Yes, even their suffering is consistently monotonous.”

I asked about the libretto ofOllanta.

“It is the only one of the great dramas dealing with exploits of kings, acted before the Inca by young nobles, still told by the people. Ollanta was a provincial governor who dared to love a daughter of the Sun and was commanded not to raise his eyes.”

“Have you had anything published?” I ventured.

“This,” he said, handing me anElégiebearing a Paris publisher’s mark.

“Could I find it?”

“Oh, no. It was out of print long ago.... Now I am working atAtahualpa, an opera. I consider it by far my greatest work; let me show you,” and he took some loose leaves from a portfolio.

He began to play again. His whole body swayed to the spectacular rhythm. There are occasions when rhythm is music, when melody is a refinement hardly necessary. Everything in nature keeps time to such a rhythm. Nothing can be indifferent. It turns a whole landscape theatrical. We were whirled up into the midst of the frenzied feather-dance, and beyond into a lofty sky where condors scarce can breathe. In the distance glittered the ice-coldpunacities. There is nothing I could not do if that thrilling moment could have been indefinitely prolonged!

“But you are interested in seeing the boys at work, I feel sure,” he broke in.

The composer ofOllanta—sub-manager of a school of correction!

“The boys are either bad or abandoned by their families at an early age. They are brought here and taught trades. They do all the work of the school.

“Here is their swimming pool and their dormitory. In their schoolroom you will see object-lessons upon the walls, pictures of what will befall them if they are bad.

“The worst thing they can do is to run away. They are put into prison when they return—here,” and he unlocked a big door. There were four little doors on each side of a dark room. Those on the right opened into closets two feetwide and six long, with bars overhead, all painted black, “to keep them from writing on the walls,” he explained. When the padlock was removed, the cubby-holes on the left were opened; two feet square, black.

“Here they must stand.”

I gasped.

“Oh, yes.”

“How long do you keep them in such a place? Surely not over night?”

“Not more than eight days.”

“And in the other side?”

“Not over ninety days in there.”

“Is any one in here now?”

“Yes, two,” he said.

Certainlynowhere in Peru are contrasts more marked than in Lima of to-day, with its splendidly carved balconies of former times, its scavenger birds, and mud roofs strewn with ashes; its dim, candle-lit, incense-filled churches with their leper windows, and its international horse-racing; its collections of ancient, battered, goldidols, silver llamas, dishes and spoons, and its aeroplane calledThe Inca!

Lima is a city where bull-fights are not only an amusement of the people, but of the finest and best intellects which the country has produced as well. Bull-fighters with queues, gold and silver embroidery, lace fronts, and red silk stockings are seen in the streets. Formerly the archbishop, religious orders, and monks all came to the bull-fights. The viceroy, shouting “Long live the King,” threw a golden key into the bull cage, and the fight under most august patronage began.

The market of Lima is a picturesque place: Chilean peppers (aji), orange and red, pats of goat’s-milk cheese in palm leaves, unsalted butter in green corn husks, piles of ripe olives of various maroon hues, strawberries in hand-woven baskets. Fighting cocks glisten in the intense sunlight. Ladies in mantillas float by, closely followed by boy servants, their arms full of bundles. Here and there Franciscans with “sandaled feet and clattering crucifixes” are amassing tribute. There are said to be about six thousand ecclesiastics now in the city.

Lima—with its botanical gardens, condors and llamas in cages, longalléesof royal palms, and its cement tennis courts where English people are drinking tea; its venerable university, the oldest in America, and its aimless daily driving around and around the Paséo Colón; its proverbial milk-women in hand-woven shawls among shining cans perched high on ponies, and its craze forart-nouveau; its treasuring of Pizarro’s bony remnant (which a guide explains is “completamente momificato”) and its earthquake-rooms of solid masonry! Lima—where one discusses at some time or another everything from men-of-war to tapir-skin muffs! Lima—with its mediaeval festivals, when priests’ chanting fills the streets, incense rises, blossoms fall, and candles twinkle in a ray of sunlight! As the old saying goes: “It were possible to die of hunger in Lima, but not to leave it.”

“And daily how through hardy enterpriseMany great regions are discoverèd,Which to late age were never mentionèd,Who ever heard of th’ Indian Peru?Or who in venturous vessels measurèdThe Amazon huge river, now found true?. . . . . . .Why then should witless man so much misweenThat nothing is, but that which he hath seen?”Spenser

Spenser

NoPeruvian thinks of zones differing from his own as being remote geographical localities. Peru contains them all. He does not have to travel over the face of the earth for a change of climate, but makes short, domestic, vertical journeys instead. Living under his banana groves among his sugar-fields in the lush coast valley, if he feels need of fresher air, he takes a trip up to the temperate zone, where apple orchards and wheat-fields lie spread out in a recess of the mountains, and strawberries redden to perfection. Has he curiosity to see an arctic storm, he goes a little higher, coming out upon the bitter table-land where crests of glaciers cut the sky.

The Andes, youngest of mountains—whata weirdly tossed world! All the most obscure and harsh substances of the planet have been heaped up here. The rough places of earth have turned over and reached up where they brush against the firmament.

Volcanic power has its domain in these high regions of earth, where nature is in anarchy, possessed of unnatural powers. It is a great, uneasy wilderness, where torrents rattle through daring gorges, only to fall a thousand feet, scattering into a dust of foam. Icicles hang from every joint between the stones.

It is a colossal, brutal land, fresh from the cataclysm, whose ponderous masses of rock are all sterile from cold, all silent under perpetual snow. In its clearness of atmosphere sparkles a new conception of the night-time sky. It is a land where thin layers of lichens are the only trace of plant life, where condors wheel about the highest pinnacles, and silver lies buried deep in the ground. It is the lair of mercury-mines which paralyze those working in them, where hot and cold fountains mingle to make one river, where springs of tar and rivers of peat ooze from suffocation within.

A TRESTLE OF THE HIGHEST RAILWAY IN THE WORLD, ACROSS THEINFIERNILLO.

Hot from their passage through the glowing veins of the mountains, springs bubble into life, sour, turbid, saturated with gases, possessed of weird powers, capable of giving life as well as of taking it away. Their waters turn to stone as they spread over the plain. In this frozen waste of glaciers, sheltering fire and magnetic iron within, all forces and elements are seething, though shrouded with snow. As the noise of water fills the desert, so the roar of fire can be heard among the frozen mountain-tops.

Long, long ago, a volcano was puffing out asphyxiating fumes. It melted the metal on the edge of its crater, and turned rocks burst from its own black mouth-pit to red and yellow and green. Fire boiled over the edge and advanced in a tide of flame down the mountainside and into the valleys. The favorites of the Sun who lived beside it complained to him of the ruin caused by the volcano. Somewhat irritated himself, he “smothered the genius of devastation in his lair,” covering the top of the mountain with an impenetrable cap of snow, leaving little, seraphic blue lakes here and there upon it as a hostage. This frozen giant,whose entrails the fire is devouring, still lies sleeping with his granite dreams.

When all the beneficent qualities inherent in a world have been wrested from it, and life has disappeared toward experiences elsewhere, or when a comet’s tail has swished life suddenly away, a wilderness like that of the high Andes would result—a place where chaos and disorder is the only rule. Yet the law of chaos we must believe is no law at all.

Stretched among these mountains is the vast table-land calledpuna, on which flourished the Indian civilizations so famous in history. Abundant rain falls, but cold prevents it from covering the ground with flowers. Reveling in the high pressure of the mountain-tops, humming-birds flit about in the snow. The finest morning begets the heaviest afternoon clouds, and warm atmospheric currents, quite definitely confined in the cold air, travel through the desolation.

The wind, seeming to tear up the ground and pulverize the summits, is unable to dissipate a mist which magnifies the rocks and presents the traveler’s giant shadow with a whole system of concentric rainbow halos—his apotheosis inthe clouds. The wind brings with it cold clouds of dust laid only by a fresh fall of snow. It mummifies the beasts of burden which fall by the way. Mirages, too, the escort of tropical heat, shimmer upon these arctic plains.

With all the paraphernalia of the torrid zone, limitless vagaries of torrid force which knows no law of custom, thepunahas no enjoyment of it. For the cold seems also to have taken on the exuberance of tropical nature.

You may lose your way in a snow-storm; or in the hot and stifling valleys, where the tropical sun can concentrate, you may die of the bite of a venomous serpent. Parched by fever-thirst, you may not drink the water, for it brings varieties of diseases, bounded by their valleys’ walls.

Your mule may sink into a morass or break his leg in aviscachaburrow. He may eat a poisonousmala yerbaorgarbanzillos. Broadly laden, he may be scraped off a bridle-path clinging to the sheer precipice. He may be carried away by the swift current of a glacier stream in attempting to ford it. He may collapse from lack of air and leave you stranded in a lifeless desert.Soroche-sick and burned to a crisp by the relentless cold, you urge on the staggering mule as he stops constantly to gulp the thin air. He cannot be satisfied, although he has a second set of nostrils cut through to ease his breathing and avertsoroche.

Still the glaciers crawl down from brooding peaks above. The sun, magician of the bleak mountain regions, comes out and glints green on broken strata of the red mountains. It discovers all the bright colors in the hills of porphyry and clothes them with fresh shadows. It runs along a vein of shining mica to accuse it. It plunges into the middle of a lake of polished jet settled in the snow, “making a great, golden hole.”

A single hill in sunlight glows with streaks of iris-color, matching the rainbow forms as they appear above and fade again. Little cloud islets surround far-off peaks, sunk beneath the horizon. Pyramids of ice twinkle, and fantastic stone needles stand in rows too precipitous for snow to cling to their bare sides. They are called early inhabitants, which Pachacamac inhis anger turned to stone. The air, though thin almost to disappearance, cuts like a razor-edge.

With eyelashes frozen together, you can yet be sunstruck. Teeth to teeth, cold and heat meet upon “the waste, chaotic battlefield of Frost and Fire.” Cold is besieged in vain by the sun at its hottest. This land of silent chaos takes on the cold of outer space so near by, which, shot through by the fierce heat of the sun, is incapable of absorbing any warmth.

The magical sun, dispelling somewhat the mountain-sickness, only brings with it another, even worse. For blazing across the snow-fields in its tropical fury,surumpefollows, snow-blindness, cured only by fresh vicuña flesh laid upon the eyes, so the Indians say.

The over-arching vault is indigo. Desolation is brightened by a radiant light, infinitely attenuated, “diaphanous as the starry void.” It caresses the bristling scenery. It penetrates caverns and fills them with a gold and purple mist. In the world of light and shade which it creates, even the shade gives light. Uponwater, the light, startled by its own reflection, sparkles and dances and leaps.

Words give no idea of the brilliancy of the snow on the crests of the Andes, because there are no words made of sunlight and crystals: luminous, empyreal snowshine, shattered by the sun now and then into rainbow colors. As silence is perfect only because it has the possibility of being broken at any instant by a gigantic crash, so whiteness is the emblem of perfect purity only because the possibility of all color lies within.

He who has not galloped across an Andeanpunachased by a tempest, has not known the full, wild force of the elements. Lost in a whirl of lightning, wind, and snow, his mule, maddened by electricity snapping off the ends of his ears, dashes from the thunder chasing at arms’ length. Red lightning zigzags between the summits. Blood-red cataracts tumble over the volcanic crags. Huge pieces of rock break loose and crash from the cliffs. Deep furrows are ripped up, following the lightning as it runs along close to the ground.

Lack of air and bitter cold are forgotten.Each flash acts like a fresh whip-sting to the mule. The compass snaps against its box. Magnetic sand leaps into the air and flies about in sheets. The rocks seem ablaze, the whole sky is on fire. The atmosphere quivers with uninterrupted peals, smothered in the gorges of granite, buffeted by the mountainsides, torn apart by the high peaks, till, finally overtaking each other, they are confounded in a mighty burst of thunder that breaks loose in the sky, and in a cosmic roar reverberates against the nothingness of outer space.

Then the sun slowly settles in calm. The striped walls flare in the sunset light, flamboyant as the bang of brass mortars in pagan idolatry. The mountains shine from base to summit, while “the night, grazing the soil and step by step raising its wide flight,—the dying light, fleeing from crest to crest, makes the most sublime summit resplendent, until the shadow covers all with its wing.”

All vague sounds subside into an “excess of silence.”

The last incandescent peak shines, and goes out.

Howappropriate it is that quicksilver, a liquid heaviest of metals, should come from this land of contrast. The most elusive product of a mysterious country, imperceptibly by fumes it enters the nostrils of those who seek it, either destroying their teeth or disintegrating their limbs; a metal which, becoming mere vapor, is again transformed by a sudden chill to metal; though it rises as steam, it falls as quicksilver. Pliny calls it the poison of all things, the “eternal sweat,” since nothing can consume it. To the Incas it remained a mystery, for although its “quick and lively motions” were admired, its search, being harmful to the seeker, was forbidden. They did, however, use the vermilion found with it: handsome women streaked their temples with vermilion.

Silver also is born in certain cold and solitary deserts of the mountain-tops, melted by subterranean fires within its deep veins. Silver being the only produce of the soil, the necessities of life have to be brought from afar. Itseems as if the vigor that vegetation would absorb goes into the silver.

The mountain-tops are full of legends of mine discoveries usually intertwined with romance. Greedy lovers have sacrificed their love for a mine, and many are the mines filled with revengeful floods. Huira Capcha, a shepherd who had been guarding his flocks near Cerro de Pasco, awoke one day to find the stone beneath the ashes of his fire turned to silver.

It is told in connection with the mine of Huancayo that an Indian friend gave a Franciscan monk a bag of silver ore. The eager friar wished to know where more could be found. The Indian consented to show him, but blindfolded the friar, who took the precaution to drop a bead of his rosary here and there as he went along. When at last the monk stood marveling at the bright masses of silver, his Indian friend gave him a handful of unstrung beads. “Father,” he said, “you dropped your rosary on the way!”

In 1545, an Indian called Hualpa was pursuing a vicuña up the mountainside. He grasped at the bushes as he scrambled up asteep cliff. One came up by the roots, which were hung with globules of silver. That particular vicuña hunt took place on a mountain called Potosí. The discoverer of the mine of Potosí was murdered by a Spaniard named Villarroel, who became its proprietor. The murder was an unnecessary precaution, however, since a mysterious voice had commanded the Indians to take no silver from this hill, which was destined for other owners. From that romantic mountain has flowed far “more silver than from all the mines of Mexico.” “Prior to 1593 the royal fifth had been paid on three hundred and ninety-six millions of silver.” The only difficulty the Spaniards encountered was in finding water enough to wash the silver. The hills about Potosí gleamed with as many as six thousand little fires, smelting furnaces belching horrid odors, scattering liquid silver pellets. They had to be carried where the wind blew, sometimes higher up and sometimes lower down.

So this splendid Imperial City grew up in the subtle air, varied by icy winds and storm. The extraction of its prodigious wealth was ameans of torture to those who worked in continual darkness without knowledge of day or night.

Yet, even among the tops of the Andes, living things are adjusted to their environment, queer little animals of the heights giving the only human atmosphere there is. Leapingviscachas, with cat-like tails, carve through the frozen ground village burrows made to last forever, treacherous pitfalls for a traveler’s mule. With the finest, silkiest fur, valued by even the Incas, chinchillas sit in the shadows, never in the sun. They appear suddenly on the steep cliffs at dusk and nibble stiff grasses; then disappear like magic, leaving little chains of footprints in the snow. A small toad inhabits the boundaries of perpetual snow, and a nice little plant calledmacahas its best flavor only above an altitude of thirteen thousand feet, where all flavoring ingredients have long been left behind.

The wild gazelle of the Andes, with fur the color of dried roses, the graceful vicuña, creature of quickness and flight, lives upon the coldest heaths and in the most secluded fastnesses of the mighty Andes and seldom descends below the limit of perpetual snow. His back, burned tawny by the tropical sun, is covered with snow.

Far in the distance a flock is grazing. The single male stands near by upon a rock. A foreign sight or sound, a quick movement of his foot, a short, shrill whistle vibrating through the clear,punaair, a flash of golden brown, and the whole flock is lost in the wilderness of rocks, fleeing miles without stopping. It is said that if the male is wounded, the females surround him, allowing themselves to be shot down rather than leave.

The vicuña defies pursuit or capture and disappears at the first glimpse of intruders, driving the young before him. He is no less wild than in the days when he was royal purveyor of softest fabric to the Incas’ wardrobes. His habits are as elusive now as then, when Indians thirty thousand strong entrapped the wild animals among the mountain-tops. These solemn huntings took place every fourth year. Meanwhile the wise men kept account of the flocks with colored threads, so-calledquipus, their method of enumeration.

ALPACAS ON THE ANDEAN PUNA.

Cousins of the vicuña are the awkwardhuanacus, which drink brackish water as gladly as fresh and seek a favorite valley where they may breathe their last and pile up their accumulated bones—as sea-lions go to particular islands to die, the wounded being helped thither by companions. The Incas worshipped the llama, alpaca, and these wild relatives of theirs; they carved their grotesque forms in stone and fashioned their likeness in gold and silver for household gods.

Far above the limit of human life, even beyond the haunts of vicuñas, there is still one living creature. His shadow sweeps over the wilderness as he passes between it and the sun—a shadow the only appearance of life. It is the condor, who lays her white eggs on the bare rock of the loftiest mountain peaks and knows where the heart of each animal lies.

The mighty condor, who can kill an ox with his beak of steel, who can swallow a sheep or exist a month without food.

The majestic condor, who swims in the highest air or sweeps down upon his prey with a deafening whir of wings.

The condor, a symbol of light, who circles up to the ether of outer space on an almost imperceptible, tremulous motion, or proceeds undisturbed, without effort or flutter of wings, in the icy teeth of a tempest, a symbol of storm.

He watches the sun rise over a continent-jungle, glimmering with heat and dampness, and long after the sunset glow has faded from the highest snowy peak, he sees its fiery ball drop beyond the farthest edge of the Pacific.

The fabulous condor, known in Europe when Peru was a myth, a hostage from a fairyland of gold and silver; a griffin which revels in solitude and in evidences of things gone by.

Loneliness is the condor’s only friend.

The wind howls through his broadened wings.

Thereis something more mysterious than the sea, and that is the desert; something more mysterious than the desert, and that is the mountains; something more mysterious than the mountains, and that is the jungle. Yet there is something with a deeper mystery than all—the tradition of a great race that has struggled to a climax and subsided.

Where is there a more unbridled ocean? Where a more pitiless desert? Where other Andes? Where so limitless a jungle? And where, in the history of the whole world, so picturesque a dynasty—whose god was the Sun, whose insignia the rainbow, who dwelt in houses lined with gold, who tamed the earth’s resources so that their aqueducts in a rainlessland are still ministering to the descendants of a people who destroyed them, and who left not one written word to testify that they had ever been created at all.

What can be said of the Incas, the theme of romance ever since the greed of the Spaniard reduced them to a legend—romances pale indeed beside facts recorded by sober historians? A people who used copper for iron,quipusfor writing, llamas for horses; who sacrificed condors and humming-birds to their gods on the frozen plains; whose accumulations of precious metals exceeded stories of Ophir’s wealth; whose ears were enlarged that they might better hear the complaints of the oppressed, and who were brought to destruction by a handful of adventurers whom the whole training of the people had led them to worship as gods.

Yet the Incas were only the final stage in a series of races that flourished on the heights of Peru back through the ages. They were but the last flicker of a guttering civilization without a name, which has left only a few silent ruins built by unknown peoples, of whom these“symptoms of architecture” reveal to us the forgotten existence. The mystery that fires our imagination in contemplating the Incas had shrouded their predecessors from them with an impenetrable veil.

Humboldt once remarked that the problem of the first population of America is no more the province of history than questions on the origin of plants and animals are part of natural science. In considering this megalithic age, we have to do with pure speculation, not with any legitimate domain of knowledge. Learned treatises end only with a question. Dr. Bingham has recently discovered among these mountains glacial human bones, possibly twenty thousand to forty thousand years old. They may shed new light upon the identity of the makers of those mysterious terraces which appear coeval with the creation of the world.

Vestiges of past civilizations are everywhere about, “monuments which themselves memorials need;” terraces hollowed out of the mountains to the very summits, bits of stone walls, roads, aqueducts, or an occasional stone idol with a shallow vessel for the blood of victims,perhaps a staring face on a pillar with projecting tusks and snakes intertwined on its cheeks.

Tiahuanacu was made by a race which as far antedates the Incas as they the dominant race to come. Everything to do with it is remote and forgotten. Of necessity even its name is modern, having been given by the Inca Yupanqui to his “resting-place.” The great pillars of the City of the Phoenix rise from the roof of the world, “as strong and as freshly new as the day when they were raised upon these frozen heights by means which are a mystery.” Single stones measure thirty feet in length. Heads of huge statues lie about and hard black stones difficult to hew, the corners as sharp as when chiseled before the memory of man. Niches and doorways are cut from the middle of single blocks, whose corners are perfect right angles.

Many finely sculptured stones are now used for grinding chocolate, some of the larger ones for making railroads. Prehistoric idols lean as doorkeepers against flimsy, modern walls in the almost deserted modern town, and one weirdface has found its way as far as the Alameda in La Paz. Beyond the protecting opening of a still perfect monolith lies the burial-place for still-born Christian children.

A monolithic doorway, beautifully sculptured, lies broken in two by lightning. A square-headed, legless, impenetrable god, speaking from right-angled lips, still stares from behind his square eyelids. Weeping three square tears from each eye, he surveys the waste and desolation about him, just as he looked unmoved upon the golden pageants of Inca days that did him honor as a superhuman deity who had sprung into being in one night with a whole city about him. His hands wield snaky-necked scepters, each the head of a condor, the lightning bird; and rows of square little worshippers in wings and condor-fringes kneel beneath crowns of rays fading off into the heads of birds with reversed combs.

No one yet knows the meaning of the sculptured deity which confused Incaamautas(wise men) a thousand years ago. Though the Creator is supposed to have lived in Tiahuanacu, an eminent German, Rudolph Falb, says theweeping god is a hero of the flood, his tears the symbol of the deluge.

A tradition of the sixteenth century ascribes these monuments to an age before the appearance of the sun in the heavens. Their builders were destroyed by a flood sent by the wrathful god, Con Tici Uiracocha, who came from the south, converting “heights into plains and plains into tall heights, causing springs to flow out of bare rocks.” Half in regret that he had destroyed his race of men, he created sun and moon to render visible the waste he had made.

This information is as accurate and authentic as any which a long line of distinguished explorers and archeologists have been able to substitute for it. Men of sane judgment agree in admitting that there is nothing to justify any conclusion. But they also agree that the significance of Tiahuanacu exceeds everything hitherto discovered in Peru. It recalls Carnac and Philae. It stands with the dolmens of Brittany, Stonehenge, and the cyclopean terraces of the South Sea Islands, as a great riddle of human history.

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