The only wheeled vehicle I saw in Peru during my first three months in that country
The only wheeled vehicle I saw in Peru during my first three months in that country
The only wheeled vehicle I saw in Peru during my first three months in that country
One of the many unfinished churches of Cajamarca
One of the many unfinished churches of Cajamarca
One of the many unfinished churches of Cajamarca
I had been duly warned that the table-manners would be on a parwith those of Colombia and Ecuador. Before I left Quito, Hays had written, “In Peru soup is eaten with brilliancy, the high notes being sustained with great verve.” The same table utensils reached both the shod minority and the Indians under their hats; the table de luxe was supplied, after that democratic South American manner, with one drinking-glass, the only washing of which was what it inadvertently received during its varied service.
Cajamarca, as everyone whose historical education was not criminally neglected knows, was not founded; it was found; and like anything else picked up by the Spaniards of those days, was never returned. It lay already—but unprepared—spread out in the extreme northwest corner of its long, fertile valley when Pizarro and his merry men came riding down upon it across the same broadpáramo, and they caught much the same view of it as I, though in those days it was not half-hidden by the adorning eucalyptus trees of to-day, nor distantly musical with church-bells. The famous town, now capital of a department, which is to Peru what a state is with us, is more or less oval in shape, some ten by twenty blocks at its widest and longest, not counting the huts that straggle out at both ends along its principal “highway” and dot the outskirts and the widening plain. It is seven degrees below the equator and somewhat warmer than Quito. It stands 2814 meters above the sea, with some half-dozen inhabitants for every meter. In all but its history it is tiresomely like any other city of the Andes. The streets, monotonously right-angled, are rudely cobbled, with open sewers down the center, the sidewalks narrow, smooth-worn flagstones on which he who would walk must jostle Indians, donkeys, and stagnant groups of less useful residents. The adobe houses, often two-story and always toeing the street-line, are red-tile roofed and anciently whitewashed. Dingy little shops of odds and ends below, the flower-decked patios of even the best-provided families are surrounded on the ground floor by the dens of servants and the ragged and more numerous population, as in Quito. It was the first place in Peru where I had seen window-glass. By night its streets are “lighted” withfaroles, miniature kerosene lamps inside square, glass-sided lanterns that are given to succumbing to the first strong puff of breeze, even if those whose duty it is to light them do not have more pressing engagements. The central plaza is enormous, square in form, but coinciding more or less with the triangular one in which Pizarro and the Inca collided on that dusty Saturday evening of an earlier century. Flower-plots, tended with less monotonousformality than those of Quito, bloom chiefly with geraniums, and among them the historically informed inhabitants point out the stone on which Atahuallpa succumbed to thegarroteamid the heaven-opening ministrations of good old Father Greenvale. As in Quito, there remain almost no monuments of pre-Conquest days, for the Incas seem to have built here chiefly of adobe. The most intelligent of Cajamarca’s monks doubted whether there was even a Temple of the Sun or a House of the Virgins to transform into monastery or convent. Not far off the main plaza, however, set cornerwise in the center of a modern block, is the room that was to be filled with gold for Atahuallpa’s ransom, said to be of massive dressed stone, like the palaces of Cuzco. Stevenson, who was in Cajamarca just a hundred years before me, found still visible around the wall the mark that was to measure the height of the treasure, and the room, the residence of a cacique. To-day it is an orphanage, where a German nun was teaching a score of female “orphans” to earn a livelihood on American sewing-machines, and the treasure-mark, as well as all evidence of stone structure, had been whitewashed out of existence, as something of “los Gentiles” not worth preserving.
The unique characteristic of Cajamarca, and almost her only stone buildings, are her half-dozen splendid old churches, soft-browned by time as those of Salamanca, and having the appearance of being half-ruined by earthquakes. The natives asserted, however, that they were left incomplete because in colonial days every finished building must pay tribute to the King of Spain. Whatever the cause, their condition gives an unusual architectural effect that could not have been equalled by any design of man, and all who find pleasure in the “picturesque” must hope that Cajamarca will never grow wealthy enough to finish them—a misfortune that is not imminent. The Chilians came in August, 1882, and, taking a note from Pizarro’s note-book—or, more exactly, from that of his secretary, since the swine-herder of Estremadura was not fitted to keep his own—stole all the gold and jewels of the churches, even the laboratory equipment of the schools, and anything else that chanced to be lying around; though they found no one worth holding for ransom. One of the principal churches bears an inscription, now all but effaced by the ubiquitous whitewash, announcing that “This santa eglesia was erected at the cost of one million pesos and fifteen centavos,” the extra seven cents being the cost of bell-ropes. In the great monastery of San Francisco, facing the main plaza, some forty amiable but ignorant friars loll through life, chieflyin the breezy “retiring kiosk,” carpeted, like that of Quito, with burnt matches and cigarette butts. They knew nothing of the tomb of Atahuallpa, but the Spanish organist, who looked like a ninth-inning baseball “fan” on a hot day, led me to the church and played in my honor on “the largest and best pipe-organ in Peru” not only our national air, but several Spanish fandangos and a recent Broadway favorite that is seldom admitted to ecclesiastical circles.
The Indians and gente del pueblo of Cajamarca have nearly as much color of dress as those of Quito, and are even more ragged and abjectly poverty-ridden. Filthy, maimed beggars adorn thefaçadesof churches, and the aboriginals speak a mushy, mouthful, dialect of Quichua, though all know Spanish. None of the Chinese residents have families; yet every now and then one passes a child with quaintly shaped eyes that testify to the ingratiating manners of the Celestials. The “upper” classes struggle to keep the theoretically white collars and the dandified shoes that mark their caste, and dawdle through life as shopkeepers, lawyers without clients, doctors whose degrees furnish them little but the title, or at any makeshift occupation that will spare them from soiling their tapering fingers with vulgar labor. Opportunity is a rare visitor, yet in a century, perhaps, there has not been born in Cajamarca a boy with the initiative and energy to tramp three days over the western range and stow away for somewhere that he could make a man of himself. As to personal habits: a drug clerk graduated in Lima pours out of their bottles the pills he recommends, and plays them idly back and forth from one unwashed hand to the other before returning them to the shelf. Yet it was a relief to loll away several days in civilization, even Peruvianly speaking. If the passing stranger was not entirely free from the open mouth and vacant eye, he could pass a corner group without all falling silent and craning their necks after him, and might even sit down at the fonda table without all interrupting their noisy eating to mumble over their mouthful, “Where do you come from and where are you going?” But even a Peruvian department capital has not yet reached that stage which makes photography easy, or the coarsest sarcasm effective. As often as I opened my kodak, some “educated” member of society was sure to crowd close to me, keeping persistently in front of the lens; and when I had at length manoeuvered and tricked him out of the view, more or less, I was seeking, he was certain to bleat with his blandest smile, “Sacando una plancha, no, señor?” If I made answer, “No, my esteemed friend of ancient and noble blood, I am building an aeroplaneon sleigh-runners to cross the icy stretches of the Amazon,” the half-baked son of the wilderness might reflect solemnly a moment or two before making some such inane reply as, “Yes, itisa long way to the Amazon.” Almost at the hour of my arrival an enamored youth of Cajamarca committed suicide, leaving a letter in which he declared life was a farce. Had he been with me through the Province of Jaen, he would have found it more nearly a melodrama. Only those who have endured the hardships of a long trail can know the compensating pleasure of a return to even comparative comfort, like the burgeoning of spring after a hard winter. But, after all, the joys of the trail in the Andes are chiefly those of anticipation, and the sense of accomplishment, ofexclusivenessin tramping where few men have tramped before. For there can be slight pleasure of intercourse in towns where the youths of the “best families” follow the foreigner with cries of “Goot neeght. Awe right,” broken by snickers of silly laughter; and where dreams of long hours in something resembling a bed are rudely dispelled by the din of church-bells, the whistles of lonesome policemen, and all the thousand and one noises with which the Latin-American can make life hideous. In the matter of libraries and book-shops Peru is even less advanced than the countries to the north. There was, to be sure, a department library in Cajamarca, but “for the present” it was closed. In despair I canvassed the town for a book. A clerk whom I asked why no printed matter was to be had, replied:
“No hay aficionados á la lectura en estas partes, señor.”
“Amateurs of reading,” indeed! As one might say, aficionados of billiards, “fans” of cock-fighting; merely an amusing game to pass the time.
“But what on earth do people do with their minds?” I gasped.
“They go to church,señor,” replied the clerk.
But the best of Cajamarca is her wonderful green and checkered valley, as seen from the rocky hillock ten minutes above the main plaza, now serving as a quarry of soft, whitish stone, but on which, if anywhere, must have been the fortress historians tell us overlooked the Inca city. There is, indeed, to-day the remnants of a cobble-stone and adobe building on the summit, and cajamarquinos who climb there to enjoy the widespread view asserted that Atahuallpa used to watch from this height the rising and setting of the sun. Prescott might almost have sat on the rocky hillock in person when he wrote:
“The valley of Cajamarca, enamelled with all the beauties of cultivation, lay unrolled like a rich and variegated carpet of verdure, in strongcontrast with the dark forms of the Andes that rose up everywhere about it. The vale is of oval shape, extending about five leagues in length by three in breadth, and was inhabited by a superior population to any the Spaniards had yet seen; with ten thousand houses of clay hardened in the sun and some ambitious dwellings of hewn stone.” The valley, stretching away south-southeast, is not so extensive as the reading of Prescott leads the imagination to picture. Except in one place, where it spreads out like the arms of a cross, it is surely not more than a league in width. But the suave spring view across it, green with the deep green of the cactus, and clumped now by the Australian eucalyptus in contrast to the treeless days of the Incas, is in certain moods and aspects the most beautiful of the Andes, though lacking the surrounding snowclads that add so much to the vale of Quito. Here I came often to sit above the murmur of the town, until the God of the Incas, after his daily journey around the earth to see that all was well, sank behind the broadpáramoof Yanacancha, blotting out the valley stretching away to the southward where the trail following the old Inca highway down the backbone of the continent, was already beckoning me on.