Thearrieroswith whom I left Huallanga, and the family inhabiting the hut shown in the preceding picture
Thearrieroswith whom I left Huallanga, and the family inhabiting the hut shown in the preceding picture
Thearrieroswith whom I left Huallanga, and the family inhabiting the hut shown in the preceding picture
The immaculate staff of the Cerro de Pasco hospital
The immaculate staff of the Cerro de Pasco hospital
The immaculate staff of the Cerro de Pasco hospital
Twelve days I had tarried in Cerro de Pasco, and had advanced from my original ailment to one distinctly more serious, when I concluded to descend to Lima while I still had strength to do so. The company physician-in-chief collected a fee that more than doubled my expenditures since leaving Quito, and spared himself the annoyance of penninga receipt, or of any other formality beyond that of dropping the handful of gold sovereigns into his pocket on his breathless morning round. The night sky was turning slightly more transparent along the cold eastern horizon when I tottered out of the hospitable Cerro de Pasco hospital on my way to the station. The second-class car was a stoveless ice-box, densely packed with Indians and all the bath-fearing aboriginal is accustomed to carry with him. A glance at it sufficed to dissipate my resolution to save a sovereign from the wreck of my fortune. The first-class coach was an American car scantily filled with white-collar Peruvians and weather-, experience-, and liquor-marked Americans under forty, “husky” in build and untrammelled in manners. The wintry July dawn climbed up over the far edge of the bleak, treeless world, and at Smelter, cheerless beyond words in the new-born daylight, we were joined by more cold-faced Americans, wrapped, as were also many of the natives, in huge neck-roll sweaters. Dressed even in all the clothing I possessed, I kept my poncho close about me, for the coal-stove in the front end of the car was no match for the frigidity of the vast ichu-brown pampa de Junín across which we were soon speeding. Only by frequently scratching a peep-hole in the frosted window could I gaze out upon the drear yellow world, with its snow peaks rising slightly above it in the distance and its great flocks of cold-impervious llamas feeding along the way between ice-coated streams and pools. Off in both directions stood scattered, stone huts with pampa-grass roofs, before which barefoot (brr!) Indian women stood or squatted, and scantily clad children gazed after the train with the stolidity and indifference to the bitter cold of the adobe images they somehow suggested. Here was the scene of the great battle of Junín in which the soldiers of Bolívar defeated the Spanish host; but it is not likely that either pursued or pursuers dripped with perspiration. A dreary walk, indeed, this would have been across the icy, endless, yellow pampa.
A brilliant sun popped up instantly in a faultless sky, like some jack-in-the-box suddenly released; but though it flooded all the visible world with golden light, it brought slight warmth. Beside each seat of our car was an electric button, and beneath it a list of possibilities, in English and Spanish. One had only to press it and presto! a big black negro—no, my memories of other days deceive me; no big black negro would get this high in the world, unless he were dragged there by main force—a little, dapper, noiseless, inscrutable, white-jacketed Chinaman slipped down upon one and lent an attentive, yethaughty ear into which one whispered the desires of the inner man, tempered by a subconscious regard for one’s purse; calling modestly for toast and coffee, if one were a mere American vagabond who had recently fallen among thiev—beg pardon, physicians; or for the “whole damn works,” which meant the same coffee and toast plus a plate of bacon and eggs, if one were an American miner homeward bound, to whom money is as water to the man whose pocket holdeth a quart bottle of concentrated joyfulness. Across the aisle were two such, from whom sounded now and then some pleasant anticipation of homecoming:
“An’ when I get back to Pittsburgh I’m goin’ into the —— House bar and tell Joe to mix me a real, honest-to-God gin-ricky. An’ when he says ‘Where t’ell you been these two years, Hank?’ I’ll jus’ say ‘Diggin’ coal down in Goyllaris—hic—quisca, Joe,’ an’ he’ll call the bouncer to throw me out.”
A big, blue lake, Chinchaycocha, on the distant right drew the eyes toward it; then came a brief halt at the town of Junín, an extensive collection of cobble-stone huts and fences, with a two-tower church in their midst and steam rising on the wintry air from the nostrils of every living being. Then at last, after an extended, wandering search, the train found the rocky bed of a small river, and wound and squirmed with it through half-hidden openings in the hills until a long-drawn masculine whistle caused us to scratch a new peep-hole in the frosted window, to find Oroya rising up to meet us.
Here the American train and roadbed abandoned us to the tender mercies of the Ferrocarril Central, theoretically under English management, but in practice dismally Latin-American from cow-catcher to trailing draw-bar. Packed into the far corner of a seat upholstered only in name, I had frozen from toes to the bottom of my poncho for two mortal hours before the Peruvian engineer came to an understanding with the Peruvian conductor and station-master, and dragged us slowly out of town. From a spot on the earth—and nothing more—called Ticlio, summit of the line, we began the long coast down to the Pacific, through all the customary 65 tunnels, 67 bridges and 16 switchbacks, where for the brakes to lose control would have been to land us in Hades instead of Lima. Hour after hour the arid, savage scenery slid upward. Here the train glided serenely along on the bottomless edge of things; now and again we came out directly above, a thousand feet above, a dusty, rock-scattered town, with rows of stones laid on the sheet-iron roofs to keep them from escapingsuch dreary surroundings, and zigzagged an hour, often on six tracks one above the other, down to it, only to continue the descent as swiftly beyond. A score of places recalled the story of the young graduate engineer who protested to the American whose name is forever linked with this engineering feat, “Why, Meiggs, we can’t run a railroad along there in that sliding shale!” “Can’t, eh?” the anecdote continues, “Well, young man, that’s just where she’s got to go, and if you can’t find room for her on the ground, we’ll hang her from balloons.”
Bit by bit the Andes began to take on slight touches of green. The Rimac, chattering downward toward the sea, gave us more and more elbow-room, the well-dressed town of Chosica flashed past us like an oasis of civilization, and we sped in truly metropolitan fashion on down the darkening valley, surrounded by whole mountains of broken rock, tufts of cactus and a few hardy willows drinking their life from the widening stream, on toward the glowing sunset and into the black night. Electric lights, real lights in their full candle-power, began to dot the darkness, then flashed past us, throwing their insolent glare into our dust-veiled faces; the roar of a real city, with clanging street-cars and rumbling wagons rose about us; a long station-platform crowded with an urban throng came to a halt beside us, and I descended in the thickness of the summer night in the City of Kings, three miles below where I had stepped forth that morning into the wintry dawn.