Chapter 36

A chiefly-Indian woman of Abancay, who refused to run the risk of having the infant face the “magic box with one eye” until assured that it was the best-looking baby in town

Acholaof Abancay, wearing thediccllawhich all put on at the age of puberty, and in which the baby is carried when one arrives

To-day the domination once held by the Incas has been taken over by the priests, public functionaries, and thepatrón, whose wills are obeyed without question. In the eyes of the Indian the priest is the representative of God on earth, to whom he must show absolute submission and obedience, as to one who holds the key to that place of primitive joys and freedom from the sorrows and hardships of this world to which he conceives death to lead. That the priest may be harsh and unkindly, or worse, has nothing to do with the case. Even the God of his conception is cruel and vengeful, taking pleasure in bringing down misfortunes on his head, and to be placated by any means in his power. Were priest and authorities true to their missions, their domination over the Indian might be advantageous. Too often they are quite the contrary. The authorities are disdainful, looking upon their positions merely as opportunities for personal gain; the priest is less often a shepherd than a wolf preying upon his flock with impunity. Too often priest and authorities join together to exploit the aboriginal with liquor and church festivals, his only recreations, at times even inventing the latter to make an excuse for exploitation. Whatever he may once have been, the Indian of the Cordillera is achild, to be governed by a kindly father, as the Incas seem to some extent to have been. The civilization which the Spaniard is reputed to have brought him is nothing of the sort. Garsilaso assures us that the masses were little better than domestic animals, even at the time of the Conquest. They were certainly in no worse state than to-day. That he should have remained or fallen so low is difficult for us of the hopeful United States to understand; it would be more easily understood in India with its fixed castes, or even in England, where certain boys are born with the necessity of lifting their caps to certain other boys. His stolidity passes all conception. He is native to, and of a piece with, the pampa, the bare, treeless upland world where the dreary expanse of brown earth and cold blue sky incites neither ambition nor friendliness, neither hopes nor aspirations. Hence his flat, joyless face with its furtive eyes suggests a soul contracted upon itself, an aridity of sentiments, an absolute lack of aesthetic affections. Passively sullen, morose, and uncommunicative, he neither desires nor aspires, and loves or abhors with moderation. The native language is scanty and cold in terms of endearment; I have never seen the faintest demonstration of affection between Indians of the two sexes, though plenty of evidence of bestial lust. Even his music is a monotonous wailing, an interminable sob on a minor key. He lacks will-power, perseverance, confidence, either in himself or others, and has a profound abhorrence of any ways that are not his ways. He works best in “bees,” with the beating of a drum, the wail of a quena, and frequent libations of chicha to cheer him on, as, no doubt, in the days of the Incas. He is noted for long-distance endurance; yet this is not so great as is commonly fancied. Like an animal, he cannot go “on his nerve,” or will not, which amounts to the same thing. Try to hurry him and it will be found that he needs fifteen days rest each month, like the llama.

From his earliest years the Andean Indian forms a conception of life as something sinister and painful. As a baby, as soon as another uncomplaining little creature usurps his place on the maternal back, he is shut up in some noisome patio or hut, along with chickens, guinea-pigs, and new-born sheep, with which he fights for his scanty fare of a handful of toasted corn. Rolling about in his own filth and that of the animals, who now and again all but outdo him in combat, he reaches the age of four or five, and then begins his life-long struggle with hostile nature. In the country he takes to shepherding the family pigs, then a flock of sheep of thepatrón, learning theuse of the sling and to wail mournful ditties on his reed fife. Here, with no other covering than a coarse homespun garment open to the waist and barely reaching the knees, he sits day after day contemplating the dreary expanse of puna, until its very nothingness turns to melancholy in his soul. In town he is “farmed out,” or virtually sold into slavery to some family, learning a few ways of the whites, some Castilian, which he commonly refuses to talk later in life, and also the injustice of man, or the habit of considering himself too low to be reached by justice. When he is older, and grown superstitious with listening to the tales of theyatiris, his labor is still heavier. He guides the clumsy wooden plow that is his notion of the last word in mechanical inventions, or carries donkey-loads on his back. Nature yields only to hard struggle and great perseverance in tilling the sterile soil; the sun is parsimonious with its warmth; the very fuel of dung costs hard labor to gather on these treeless heights. Or perhaps the authorities come to carry him off to serve as a soldier of a country he hardly knows the existence of, probably to die of the diseases engendered in his overdeveloped lungs in the dreaded lowlands of coast ormontaña. People of scanty, inclement soil, mountaineers in general, are canny and lacking in generosity by nature; add to this that he was forbidden the use of money under the Incas, and it is small wonder the Indian will give or sell his meager produce only by force. Tight-fisted and frugal, he lives for days on a handful of parched corn and his beloved coca, of the depressing effect of which he has no notion. To sleep he needs only the hard ground, be it in his own hut or out under the shivering stars, using perhaps a stone as pillow, if there be one within easy reach. He is a tireless pedestrian; his corneous hoofs are impervious to the roughest going; he sets out on whatever journey fate or his masters assign him, knowing that if he lives he will some day come back to the point of departure. For he has an irrepressible love for his native spot, the mud den where he was born, however miserable or inclement, and will not abandon his home permanently under any circumstances. If he does not return, it is because some misfortune has overtaken him on the trail.

The woman lives the same life from babyhood; and in some ways her duties are still more onerous. Rude and torpid as the male, she neither conceives nor possesses any of those softer qualities peculiar to her sex. When trouble overtakes her she does not complain, but suffers and weeps—if at all—alone, an utter stranger to pity ineither its passive or active form. Strong as a draft-horse, she knows none of the infirmities to which modern civilized woman is subject. She gives birth to a child virtually every year, often from the age of fifteen on, without any species of preparation or precaution, washes it in the nearest brook, slings it on her back, and goes on about her business.

The husbandman of the puna plants a few potatoes, a little quinoa, perhaps some barley, clinging to the primitive ways of his ancestors to remote generations. A good harvest does not depend upon proper planting or fertilization, but on the changes of the moon and stars, and the propitiation of the fetishes to which he still secretly gives his adherence in spite of his ostensible conversion to Christianity. He considers himself a being apart from the governing class, referring to himself as “gente natural” and to his superiors as “gente blanca,” as our southern negroes distinguish between “white folks” and “colored folks.” He takes no part whatever in political matters, rarely indeed having any conception of the country to which he belongs. Anything which does not touch him personally he looks upon with profound indifference and disdain. He is submissive as a brute, lives without enthusiasms, without ambitions, in a purely animal passivity that is the despair of those who are moved to an attempt to better his lot.

Some knowledge of Quichua is essential to intercourse with the mass of the population of Cuzco, as it is to the convenience of the lone traveler down the Andes. Even in the city a large number of the “gente del pueblo” cannot, or will not, speak Spanish; in the villages round about it is a rare man who has a suggestion of Castilian. All classes, on the other hand, speak the aboriginal tongue, by necessity if not by choice. The majority, indeed, imbibe it with their nurse’s milk, learning Spanish as an alien language later in life. A professor of the local university, boasting a Ph.D., assured me that he did not know a word of Castilian when he first entered school at the age of seven. After the revolt of Tupac Amaru an edict was promulgated prohibiting the use of Quichua, as it did the native costume, and even commanded that all musical instruments of the aboriginals be destroyed; but like many a Spanish-American law this was never strictly enforced. To-day Cuzco is the Florence of Quichua, where it has retained its purest form, least influenced by the Spanish, and there are many persons of high social standing, the women especially, who speak it by preference.

It is typical of the Latin-American that those things which are of the soil, and have been familiar since childhood, are treated with contempt, are considered inferior to anything possessing the glamor of distance. Thus Quichua, like all survivals of “los Géntiles,” is looked down upon by the “cultured” caste throughout the Andes as something appertaining to the lower classes, to be avoided as diligently as manual labor. “Vulgarly speaking” is the expression with which the cane-carrying Peruvian apologetically prefaces any use of the native tongue. “No se diceallco, se diceperro,” a mother reproves the child that points to a dog with a lisp of the aboriginal word. But as usual, environment is more powerful than maternal desires, and the child grows more fluent in the speech of the Indians than in the aristocratic Spanish. The tendency to scorn it seems a pity to the traveler, for the ancient tongue is certainly worth preserving, and its preservation depends chiefly on Cuzco. The American Rector of the University has done much to reassure the town on the importance of its mission in this respect. Already much has been lost. The best quichuaist in town did not know the words for boat or island, though these are familiar enough wherever any body of water exists in the Andes. Shortly before my arrival the ancient drama “Ollantay” had been performed, and was found to contain many words which even those whose mother-tongue is Quichua did not understand. As thequipus, or knotted strings, was the only form of writing known to the Incas, authoritative interpretation has been lost with thequipumayoswho were trained to read them. The tongue of to-day has suffered much admixture, many Spanish words having been “quichuaized” when there was no necessity for it, until there remains a language as bastardized as the “German” of rural Pennsylvania. Not a few have a distinctly hazy notion of the line between the two tongues. “Medio,” said Alejandro, my one-eyed hotel servant, “is Quichua, and ‘cinco centavos’ is Spanish.” How should he know which was which of the two languages he had spoken from childhood, neither of which he could read nor write? There is less excuse for the assurance of persons of some education that “asno” is Quichua and “burro” Spanish, completely overlooking the fact that the Conquistadores brought not only the donkey, but both names, with them. Now and again some expression from the lips of an Indian quaintly recalls the history of the Peruvians and their two-branch ancestry to remote generations. “Ojalá, Diós pagarasunqui!” for instance is a mixture of Arabic, Spanish, and Quichua in as many words.

The first view of Cuzco, at the point where all Indians, male or female, going or coming, pause and uncover and, looking down upon the City of the Sun below, murmur, “Oh, Cuzco, Great City, I salute thee!”

It requires at least three persons to shoe a horse or mule, as it does to milk a cow, in the Andes. Ordinarily the blacksmith is not so bold as this one, but stands at arm’s-length from the hoof. In the background is one of the many old Inca walls on which the modern dwellings of Cuzco are superimposed

Yet after all, the ancient tongue of the Incas, variously called Quichua, Quechua, and Keshua (with the most guttural of sounds), has survived to a greater extent than any other American dialect. Some have called it “Runa Simi,” or general language of the common people; but the quichuaists of Cuzco insist that it is rather the Inca or court language that has remained. Garsilaso complained that even in the time of the Incas there was a “confusion and multitude of tongues,” with a new dialect almost every league. He who has attempted to make his way down the Andes on a fixed vocabulary will recognize the justice of this plaint. Before we left Panama, Hays and I had made up a lexicon, only to find that all but the commonest words changed so often that it was of little value. What is called Quichua is spoken more or less continuously from Quito to southern Bolivia, with scatterings through northern Argentine. But the dialects of Ayacucho, Huancayo, the valley of Ancachs, and especially of Cajamaca and further north, include many terms which the purists of Cuzco will not grant an honest pedigree. Only in the ancient capital has it retained anything like the original pronunciation, with those “sounds harsh and disagreeable to our ears” which Garsilaso sought to soften with editorial license. Philologists assure us that the language rose in the north and moved southward, citing the use of more archaic terms in the more southern dialects; for exampleyacu, which is water in the north, is flowing water, or river, in the south, whereunudesignates the liquid. The spread of Quichua has been attributed to culture rather than conquest, that is, it was adopted by new tribes coming under the Inca influence, not because it was forced upon them, but because it afforded a more perfect means of communication than their primitive dialects.

It is a real language, with complete grammar and all the flexibility and shades of expression of our classical tongues. Philologists have attempted in vain to represent its sounds by Roman letters or combinations thereof, even by inventing new characters. But these are makeshifts at best, and the pronunciation can only be learned by practice in its native land. Roughly speaking, it includes all the letters of the Spanish alphabet except b, d, f, g, j, v, x, and z. But many of those remaining must be doubled or otherwise modified to represent sounds unknown to European tongues. L is rare, while the sound represented by the Spanish ll is frequent; there is no rr, but r is much used. Harsh in its phonetics, it has a suggestion of the Chinese in that three pronunciations of the same word, labial, palatal, or throaty,give it quite different meanings. The traveler who pauses in the trail to call out “Cancha acca?” to an Indian hut displaying the white flag that announces chicha for sale, would say something quite different than he intended if he gave the cc the sound represented by the single c. The accent is nearly always on the penult, lending the speech a fixed and almost monotonous rhythm. Technically speaking, Quichua is agglutinative, that is, formed by the tacking on of suffix after suffix, until in some cases an entire sentence consists of a single word, making it possible to express fine shades of meaning fully equal to the Spanish with its diminutives and affixes. It has no articles, no genders (at least expressed), no individual prepositions, and has virtually only one verb conjugation. The plural is formed by addingcuna; the six cases, corresponding to the Latin, by suffixes. Thushuarmais boy,huarmacuna, boys;huarmacunactais the accusative,huarmacunamanta, of the boys. In like manner the genitive is formed by combination;accais chicha,huasi, house, andaccahuasi, tavern. The doubling of words gives a collective and often quite different meaning; thusrumiis stone,rumirumi, a stony place;runais man,runaruna, a crowd;quinais bark,quinaquina, the medicinal bark from which we get quinine, as well as the name thereof. Its system of counting is built up on the fingers, as in all languages, but is somewhat cumbersome in larger combinations—which none of the ignorant Indians of to-day are capable of using. Thus 299 isiscaypachacchuncaiscconniyoc!

As in the case of all more or less primitive languages, Quichua is often onomatopoetic,—its words formed from sounds connected with the object expressed. Why the animal we miscall guinea-pig should becui(kwee) to the natives of the Andes no one who has shivered through a night in an Indian hut listening to the falsetto, grunting squeak of those irrepressible little creatures will wonder; why a baby is aguagua(wawa) none need ask. As in most languages,mamais mother; on the other hand, father istata, ortayta; the newcomer findspapaalready in use to designate potato, as it has come to in all Spanish-America, as well as in Andalusia. The primitive origin of the Inca tongue is further demonstrated by many crudities of expression, and an indelicacy in the use of certain terms that have been banished from polite intercourse among European nations.Nustahispana, orpenccacuy(shame) are cases in point. Marriage-time isHuarmihapiypacha, literally, “the time to chase a woman.” It is natural that many more aboriginal words should have survivedand become a part of the general language in a land where the Indians have survived themselves, than in one where the race has been virtually wiped out, or at least set apart, as with us. Hence the language of Spanish-America is much richer than our own in terms from the aboriginal tongue. The ignorant Spanish Conquistadores, as devoid of “language sense” as the most uncouth American “drummer,” gave many of the native words queer twists; to their untrained earsAntisounded like Andes,tampulike tambo,pampalike bamba, andBirulike Peru. Yet Quichua has enriched even the languages of the world at large with many words, such as llama, pampa, condor, and alpaca.

A brief sample of the ancient tongue might not be amiss. Few works except the Bible have been printed in the vernacular; and this was done not that the Indians might read it, since there probably exists no man able to read Quichua who cannot also read Spanish, but for the use of missionaries and priests among the Andean tribes. Many words for which there existed no equivalent have, of course, been “quichuaized,” and the letters retain their Spanish values. The parable of the man who built his house on sand instead of rock (St. Luke, VI, 48) runs:

Ricchacun uc huasihacluc ccaryman; pi yallicta allpata allpisca ccaccahuan tecsirkan. Inas paractin unu llocllapi yaicumurkan mayutac caparispa saccay huasiman choccacurkan mana cuyurichiyta atispa huasi ccaccapatapi tiactin.

Cuzco, the last foothold of Spanish power on the American continent, bids fair to be the last of popery also. Even Quito is little more fanatical. With the exception of Ayacucho, I found the former City of the Sun the only place in Peru where the priests were still permitted to advertise their spurious wares by an incessant thumping and hammering of all the discordant noise-producers of whatever tone or caliber or lack thereof, in her church towers, at any hour of day or night. There is a law against “unnecessary” ringing of church-bells in Peru; but in this hotbed of fanaticism the prefect does not interpret his duties too severely. With a din that awoke the echoes of the distant mountain-flanks that shut her in, Cuzco sallied frequently forth in a long religious procession, not a single white man gracing it, except the priests. These latter did not permit the most solemn formalities to weigh heavily upon them. Even within the cathedral itself I have seen the chief padre, carrying the host or whatever it is, and marching with sanctimonious tread under hisembroidered canopy, wrinkle up his lascivious countenance and half-surreptitiously make unbelievably scurrilous jokes with the priests close around him about the attractive girls of the pious, downcast audience.

Peru has long been one of the most intolerant of nations, at least theoretically. Since the adoption of her constitution public worship by non-Catholics has been forbidden, its fourth article reading: “The nation professes the Catholic religion, Apostolic and Roman; the state protects it, and does not permit the public exercise of any other.” An attempt had recently been made to amend this to the extent of striking out the last clause. There has long been violation of the law. Lima has an Episcopal church of long standing and considerable congregation, and as the membership is largely English and American, Peru has not risked a controversy with those countries by enforcing the constitution. In fact the strongest and chief argument of the senators supporting the proposed amendment was not that liberty of cult is just, but that “the law is not being enforced anyway, so let’s change it.” A very few grasped the fact that this is one of the many reforms needed to draw to Peru the immigration indispensable to her modern advancement. The fourteenth-century arguments of the hidebound clerical senators against the proposed change afforded reading compared to which the efforts of the world’s chief humorists are staid and funereal.

Great excitement broke out in the more “conservative” cities of the interior when the news came up from Lima. Headed by the archbishop, ecclesiastics of every grade issued orders to allfielesto combat “por cualquier medio—by any means whatever, this vile attack on the Holy Mother Church, the morality of the family, and the honor of Peru by themasonesandateistasof the Senate.” From all thealtiplanicietelegrams poured in, calling upon the senators to suppress “this absurd resolution on the liberty of cults, unnatural to Peru and abhorred by all the faithful.” Every scurrilous little Catholic organ—and the most outspoken “sage-bush” journal of our Southwest cannot approach these in vituperation and positive indecency of language in attacking their enemies—frothed with raging editorials. In Cuzco it was planned to parade the patron saint through the streets, ostensibly as a mere protest. A few years ago the bishop would have met the issue by calling together a few hundred of the most fanatical, filling them with concentrated courage, and preaching a careful sermon that would really have been an order to sack and kill the hated “liberals,” though with a clever wording to clear hisown skirts of the matter. Such things have often happened in Cuzco. This time a rumor that the procession was to be merely an excuse for the priests to incite their followers of dull complexion and understanding to riot reached the students of the university. Though all are Catholics, these fiery “liberals” are ardent haters of priests; only a few years before they had bodily flung the “clerical” faculty out of the institution. Now they secretly gathered revolvers and planned to lay in wait for some of the more fanatical priests when the procession started. Wind of this reached some one of higher authority and intelligence, the news was wired to Lima, and in the nick of time orders came to the prefect to forbid the parade.

An amendment to the constitution in Peru requires the consent of two consecutive congresses and the signature of the president after each passage. A year later the amendment on the liberty of cult was carried and became law amid a scene of riot in the senate, during which a fanatical representative snatched the bill from the hands of a clerk and tore it to bits.

It occurred to me one day that it might be unpatriotic to leave Cuzco without calling on the only American missionaries—except a lone preacher in Bogotá—I had so far heard of in South America. On the edge of town I found my way at length into a mud-walled compound of some fifteen acres, with fat green alfalfa, an exotic windmill, and a two-story mansion surrounded by flower-plots. I had paused near what seemed to be the main door, and stood gazing admiringly at the wall that shut out all the troubles of this rude world, when a window opened and a lean man of forty, his mission plainly imprinted on his gaunt features, a finger between the leaves of a hymn-book, put out his head and murmured, “Buenas tardes.”

“Is this Mr. ——?” I asked in English.

“It is.”

“Well, I just happened to be in town and thought I’d.... But no doubt you are very busy....”

“Yes, I am busy,” came the reply, in a bona fide missionary voice, “but don’t let that keep you from coming in—if you want to.”

Naturally I grasped so urgent an invitation with both hands.

“Oh, no,” I protested, “I wouldn’t think of disturbing you. I’ll stay out here and look at the scenery.”

“Yes, look at the scenery,” replied the urgent gentleman, as he and the hymn-book disappeared behind the closed window.

Inside arose sounds not unlike a Methodist meeting, and I hadbegun to wander stealthily away when the door opened and the missionary’s more cordial better half informed me that they were not “holding services.” Reassured, I entered the cozy parlor. Two women and a man were gathered about a diminutive melodeon, singing mournful hymns. Naturally, at sight of me the musicians lost their nerve, and the cheerful pastime came to a standstill. In due time I discovered that the youthful organist had just been shipped down fresh and untarnished from a Canadian theological seminary, to “bring the poor Peruvians to Christ.” His qualifications for that feat were that he had not, up to his arrival, seen a printed page of Spanish, had never heard of Quichua or Pizarro, and though he did remember the name Prescott, he “didn’t know he had written about foreign countries.” I found that Peyrounel, he of the maidenly hair, chestful of medals, and andarín reputation, had lived a month at the mission the year before, having posed as a poor persecuted Huguenot among bloodthirsty Catholics. He had filled the scanty imaginations of the group with so many wild tales of the road that I could not refrain from giving my own inventiveness vent, and at the end of a dozen bloodcurdling episodes the fresh young product of the seminary remarked in a ladylike voice, “That must have been quite interesting.” Looked at from that point of view, perhaps he was right. In the early days of their mission the ladies had been received and called on socially by the haughtiest of their sex in Cuzco. But they had soon been ostracized, not because of their religion—or, from the Cuzco point of view, lack thereof—but because, having been detected in the act of sweeping out their own parlor, it was concluded that they werecholasin their own country and not fit to associate with gente decente.

Unless the time of my stay there was exceptional, suicide isà la modein Cuzco. Almost on the day of my arrival one bold youth of twenty-five decided to die becauseSeñoritaFulana scorned his attentions. He wrote a long poem explaining to the disdainful damsel, and the world at large, why he was leaving life so early—it afterward graced the contribution page of one of the local journals—and fired four revolver shots. One grazed his chest, a second tore a hole in the tail of his frock-coat, the third smashed a lamp on the mantelpiece, and the fourth scared the family cat off the divan. The date of the wedding was soon to be announced when I left Cuzco. Among the host of disciples of this heroic and enviable deed among the excitablejuventudof Cuzco were several youth of like age, who attemptedto imitate it from equally absurd motives. All carried the act to a more or less successful conclusion, except one who, either because he took the matter too seriously, or neglected to practice beforehand, or because he was not a nativecuzqueño, or had been reading Ibsen, shot himself through the temple.

The subject of suicide leads us naturally to the cemetery. That of Cuzco celebrated a sort of “Decoration Day” during my stay. Placards announced that “for reasons of hygiene” thealcaldepermitted no one but actual mourners to visit it; but it is always easy to find something to mourn over in Peru. An endless stream of humanity was pouring in through the gate by which I entered, while a score of soldiers on guard stood drinking chicha, gambling, and making love. As in all Spanish countries, the corpses were pigeon-holed away, bricked in, and marked with the date on which the rent would fall due. With unlimited space about the city, it is hard to understand why the dead must be tucked away in this expensive fashion, except that the priests refuse to sprinkle with holy water those planted elsewhere. At the gate was posted a long list of corpses whose rent had run out, with the information that unless it was paid by the end of the month the contents would be dumped in the boneyard.

A visit to any Latin-American cemetery is equal to sitting through a well-played comedy, so lacking is the native sense of propriety. Between the padlocked iron reja and the bulkhead of each grave is a narrow space which it isà la modeto fill with flowers. But as flowerpots are rare and expensive in Cuzco, there were substituted cans that had once held “Horiman’s Tea,” or “Smith’s Mixed Pickles,” many with gay labels adorned with the portraits of scantily clad actresses of international notoriety still upon them. Here and there a family with a praiseworthy sense of economy had caused the grave-head to be marked with the brass name-plate that formerly graced the place of business of the deceased; others had “Renewed to 1918” crudely scratched in the cement, bearing witness to an unusually tenacious grief on the part of the survivors—or to a well-drawn will. Many tombs were decorated with atrocious photographs of the occupant; others had verses—no doubt the author would call them poems—some printed, some laboriously hand-written, pasted against them and glassed over, like the photographs. Here and there the bulkhead of a well-to-do member of society was entirely covered by a painting depicting the untold grief of those left behind,—in most cases a picture of the coffin of the deceased, with a string ofhis male relatives and friends on one side and the female mourners opposite, all dressed in their most correct attire—or the best the painter could furnish them from his palette—and standing exact distances apart in exactly the same attitude of weeping copiously into a large handkerchiefá dos realesin any shop. Only, as the painter, who is seldom a direct descendant of Murillo, always paints in the eyesabovethe handkerchief, the impression conveyed is that the entire group is suffering from a bad cold, that the funeral was inadvertently put off too long, or that each is keeping a worldly eye out for any suspicious move on the part of the others.

The hospital of Cuzco is a part of the same structure as the cemetery, with a door between—a very foresighted and convenient arrangement for such a hospital. The building is roomy, but not much else can be said for it. Indians and half-Indians, male and female, lie closely packed together in long rows of aged cots along ill-ventilated halls. Hardy as seem these mountain Indians, once they are subjected to the changed life of the barracks, with food, clothing, and shoes to which they are not accustomed, they succumb with surprising ease to a long list of ailments. From kitchen to drug-shop, from nurses to Indian servants, stalked that ubiquitous uncleanliness of the Andes. Several idiots and insane persons were confined in noisome dens unworthy of animal occupancy. In a dismal, half-underground corner a handsome, powerfully built young cholo lay on a heap of rags that constituted absolutely the only furnishings. He had beencapellanof the cathedral, and whenever a church-bell rang—which was most of the time—he sprang up from the uneven earth floor and began to sing Latin hymns at the top of his voice, shaking and gnawing the heavy wooden bars that confined him. The four most deadly diseases of Cuzco, in their order, are typhoid, dysentery, tuberculosis, and smallpox. The doctors, physicians of the town who drop in casually and hurriedly each morning, are paid $27.50 a month. La Superiora draws $10, the first cook and the grave-diggers $5, general male servants $3.50, and female servants $2 a month, with food and a spot to lay their “beds” on. What they do with all that money I cannot say. The hospital cannot afford disinfectants, and when a surgical operation is to be performed the instruments are washed in hot water—if there happens to be fuel. Patients are allowed 13 cents a day for food, employees, 15, and the woman in charge, 20.

Indian women of the market-place, wearing the “pancake” hat of Cuzco

An Indian of Cuzco, speaking only Quichua

I visited most of the institutions of learning in Cuzco. The German head of the Colegio, or high school for boys, wore his cap and overcoateven in the class-rooms; and no one could have blamed him for it in this dismal rainy season. An army officer had been detailed as gymnasium instructor, the national government requiring a certain amount of physical training of all students. He led the way to an earth-floored building in the rear, where the pupils took turns in falling over the crude apparatus without removing even their coats. To appear in shirt-sleeves, even in a gymnasium, would be an inexcusable breach of etiquette in South America. School ran from 8 to 11, and from 1 to 5, with a ten-minute recess between each fifty-minute class, that must be spent in the corredor and not used in study. Among the students was one Juan Inca, of pure Indian type, and the great majority showed more or less aboriginal blood. The chemistry class, in a laboratory with a floor of unlevelled, trodden earth, had a peon to arrange the experiments for the professor, who performed most of them in person. Few of the students could be coaxed to soil their own never-washed hands in the interests of science, and those who broke or spilled anything were sure to cry out, “He, muchacho!”—or more likely, “Yau, huarma,” since in their excitement their native tongue came first to their lips—and in trotted an Indian boy to clean up the mess. The newly arrivedlimeñoteacher, who had tried to get them to do their own experiments, was informed that they were not peons. Yet nine tenths of them would have been run out of the least exacting American workshop for their evidences of avoiding the bath. It may be that the poor, proud fellows had no servants at home to take it for them. Upon his arrival the teacher had established the rule that, as his class began at 1:10, any boy not in his seat by 1:11 would be reported tardy. The students sent a telegram of protest to the government in Lima, and word came back from the Minister of Education:

“Professor ——, Colegio, Cuzco: Do not put too much stress on small and unimportant matters.”

As if there were any matter on which the Latin-American is more sadly in need of education!

The class miscalled “English” was in charge of a native youth who had spent a year in a well-known but not particularly famous institution in our Middle West, unfortunately favored by most Cuzco youths permitted to top off their education in the United States. When I entered some sixty boys, of about the age at which the Latin-American begins precociously to turn rake, were floundering through some “I want a dog” sentences. The teacher’s knowledge of his subject wassuch as might be gathered in the dormitories of that seat of jesuitical learning above mentioned, but was not exactly what he might have learned had he been permitted to mingle with the profane outside world. It would not have been so bad had he been content to stick to his Cortina grammar, though his pronunciation was at best mirth-provoking. But like so many half-learned persons, he regarded himself as the source of all wisdom and insisted on using his own judgment, when he possessed none. He was dictating dialogues between two American boys, and forcing his students to learn to mis-mumble them; just such expressions as we have all, no doubt, heard American boys use to each other daily. Here are a few of the gems I copied from the blackboard:

“Mys cheek it is pinkes”—which had not even the doubtful virtue of being true.

“By Gosh, Huzle up!” The Jesuited instructor had no doubt often heard this hasty, unLatin-American word in the dormitories, but having never chanced to see it in print, he had chosen his own spelling, with this happy result.

“We now shall go to the exam.” The longer word for that distressing experience he seemed never to have heard.

“My watch it goes too fast.”

“At your service, John, thank you. What are the news?” Several students made the error of using a singular verb in this sentence, but they were quickly and sarcastically reminded that the nounnewsends in an s, which any fool knows is a sign of the plural in English, as in Spanish.

“I shall long for you after you are gone away”; the blackboard continued, and so on, always with a distinctly home-made pronunciation. The traveler can scarcely blame himself if he does not understand his native tongue when it is shouted after him in the streets of Cuzco by the proud students of the Colegio.

The higher institution is the ancient University of Cuzco, founded nearly a half-century before our oldest, and occupying the great stone cloisters of the former Jesuit monastery. A young and enthusiastic American rector has done much to give it new impulse; but one man single-handed cannot reform the Latin-American character. Its 160 students from the four surrounding departments have increased both in numbers and diligence since the “conservative” professors were thrown out, but their point of view is still not exactly that of our own college men. Among others I attended a class on “Special Literature.”It was a third-year course, of seven students; the hour, from three to four. I arrived at 3:15 and found the professor, a Ph.D. (Cuzco) whose wide nostrils, broad face, and prominent cheek bones proved him chiefly of aboriginal blood, pacing up and down the second-story corredor smoking a cigarette. At 3:20 a white youth of about twenty-three, with a mustache, drifted languidly across the patio swinging his cane. He and the professor bowed low, shook hands, exchanged the unavoidable “Buenas tardes, señor. Cómo está usted? Cómo está la familia?” lifted their hats, and at length broke the clinch. The professor produced from his pocket a massive key and opened a cubical, whitewashed room, having installed himself in which, he began to “lecture” on Calderón de la Barca. At 3:28 a half-Indian student stamped into the room and interrupted the proceedings with a loud “Buenas tardes, señor,” causing the professor to lose the thread of his discourse for a minute or more. When the interruption had subsided, he continued to lecture, pausing now and then to look at his outline notes, more often to inhale the smoke of the cigarette he still held backward between his fingers. The white youth soon fell asleep, woke as his head dropped, spat on the floor, and then frankly and openly laid his head back against the wall and slept. The other half of the class sat with the filmy, half-closed eyes of a man who is dreaming of his cholita of not too unobliging morals in some hut on the outskirts of town. It would have been ill-bred of the professor, and galling to the “pride” of his class, to have waked them. He finished his cigarette and droned unbrokenly on. At 3:46 another haughty half-Indian, his silver-headed cane held at the approved Parisian angle, broke in upon the lecture with a greeting, which the professor interrupted his remarks to acknowledge. At 3:50 he took advantage of the awakening caused by the new arrival to begin a quiz, asking the white student something about the subject of his discourse. The usual long preliminary sparring for wind in the form of “Ah-oh-ah,SeñorDon Pedro Calderón de la Garca, one of the most important authors of his epoch in Spain,” and so through a long list of stock phrases, was followed by a mumbling of some vague and general rubbish he could easily have framed up had he not known whetherSeñorDon Pedro was man, woman, or priest. When he had said nothing for about two minutes, one of the others was given the floor—no doubt the professor apologized later for being obliged to call upon them because of the presence of a distinguished foreign visitor—and launched forth in another set of phrases. Like the other, he did not know the title of anyof Calderón’s dramas, who left only a hundred or two to choose from, though the class had “studied” several of those works during the year’s course. After each question the professor broke in upon the meaningless mumble to answer his query himself, and as he named the works one by one, the student cried out each time with a great display of wisdom, “Ah, sí, señor!” “Es verdad, señor!” as he would have done had the former inadvertently included “Quo Vadis” or “Evangeline.” At 3:56 the professor carefully called the roll to find out how many of the seven were present, entered that important fact on an official blank to be left with the rector at the end of the day, and with much bowing and ceremonious formality the class took leave of themselves, lighted their cigarettes, tucked their canes under their arms, and faded away.

Having long wished to attend a trial, I carried a note of introduction to a judge of the supreme court of the department of Cuzco.

“Trial? Certainly,señor. When do you wish to see one?”

“Any time there happens to be one.”

“Choose for yourself.”

“Well, shall we say Wednesday, at one?”

“It shall be done. I shall have something of importance arranged for you. How would this new burglary case do? Or the recent suicide? The burglary? Very good, then,señor; Wednesday at one.Su servidor, adiós, caballero.”

Luckily there were cases pending, thus sparing the judge the trouble of having to arrange to have the crime committed.

An Indian required to pay for the day’s mass proudly clings to his staff of office

Youths from a village near Cuzco, each with a coca cud in his cheek

Jury trial is unknown in Peru, as in most, if not all Spanish-America. In the first place, if the uncle of the accused is a compadre, or his nephew a padrino or a nineteenth cousin of the father-in-law of the judge or anyone else high in authority, the chances are that the matter will be dropped. Favored with none of these advantages, he must let the law take its rigorous, snail-like course. The trial is entirely on paper, back in the recesses of some dingy office. The one I entered at the hour and day set reminded me of some scene from the pages of Dickens. I was bowed to an ancient couch at one side of the dismal adobe room, the secretary, in an aged overcoat of various degrees of fadedness and an enormous neck muffler, sitting at a medieval table. My friend, the “Judge of the First Instance,” in sartorial splendor, sat at another, his silk hat upside down before him. He had “arranged” the case of an Italian shopkeeper who had been robbed the Saturday before. The Italian, being summoned, entered, bowed, remainedstanding, gave his name, age,religion, and other personal details, took the oath. Then he told his story in his own words to the judge, who asked questions but made no attempt at cross-examination, rather helping the witness in his answers when he stumbled or paused for want of a Spanish word. Meanwhile the secretary busied himself with rolling and consuming innumerable cigarettes. When he had finished his tale, the Italian was shown for the purpose of identification some articles sent over from the Intendencia as taken from the prisoner’s pocket, after which they still remained “in the hands of justice.” Then the witness sat down and the judge himself dictated the story in his own words to the secretary. The latter armed himself with a steel pen, dipped it incessantly into a viceregal inkwell, and peering over the top of his glasses, laboriously wrote in a copybook hand three words at a time, repeating them aloud. Shorthand is unknown in the government offices of the Andes. It would be too much to ask a political henchman to learn stenography, or anything else, for the mere purpose of holding a government position; typewriters are expensive; moreover, typewritten documents are not legal in most governmental formalities; so ultra-modern a system would be lacking in dignity for such solemn purposes, and its introduction would require new effort on the part of secretaries whose only asset is the medieval art of penmanship. The endless task over and the Italian dismissed, one of the prisoners, a half-breed boy of eighteen, of degenerate type, was brought in by an Indian soldier and “testified” in the same manner as the plaintiff had done. He was not required to take the oath, but was warned to tell the truth. Again it was his own story, just as he chose to tell it, with no attempt to trip him up, and even occasional assistance. This the judge redictated in his own more cultured language, that the archives of Cuzco should not be marred by the undignified speech of the masses; and the “trial” was over. A deaf-mute wished to testify in the case, but as there are no schools in Peru for those so afflicted, there was no one who could understand him.

In short, a trial in Spanish-America consists of nothing but the making of affidavits, there calleddeclaraciones. These are seen only by the judge, not even the prisoner’s lawyer being permitted—legally—access to them. Later, if there is found time for it, comes thesumarioin which the judge reads in his private study the various declarations and passes judgment and sentence, likewise in privacy, which sentence must be reviewed by the Superior Court of the Department. The curious may ask where the lawyer for the prisonercomes in. I was informed that “he sees the prisoner first and tells him what to say in his declaration.” Thus is the secret, mysterious “justice” of Latin-America, “a joke at so much a word,” as they call it in Ecuador, administered. If one has a man arrested, one must hire a lawyer to find out what happened to him.

I next went with the judge, in his gleaming stove-pipe hat and surrounded by his suite of courtiers, to the prison on the banks of the noisome Huatenay. The departmental place of confinement consisted of an old-fashioned Spanish dwelling built around a large courtyard, a dismal patio in which were gathered prisoners from all parts of Peru’s largest department, from white men of the capital to half-wild Indians of themontaña, who know so little of the ways of government that they thought they were being held by their tribal enemies. Everyone was doing whatever he chose, with a freedom from restraint that recalled the debtors’ prisons of England a century ago. As in most Latin-American penal institutions, there was no evidence of cruelty or unkindness to inmates, except the passive cruelty of neglect, most of the outward forms of courtesy being kept up between officials and prisoners. By night the latter slept in mud cells of the rambling adobe building, on earth floors as bare as those of an Indian hut unless, like the traveler in the Sierra, they brought their own “beds” with them. No food worthy the name was furnished. Outside the patio, separated from it by a massive iron wicket, were the wives, temporary or otherwise, of the prisoners, who had brought them dinner in baskets, pots, or knotted cloths. This custom of having the judge visit the place of confinement is not without its advantages; at least, it gives him a personal knowledge of what a sentence means. As long as we remained, a constant line of prisoners crowded around my companion to tell their grievances. Those who wore hats carried them in their hands, but the cringing Indians, who mumbled their complaints in Quichua, did not remove their earlap “skating” caps. The petitioners ranged all the way from four “wildmen” from the hot-lands to the east, to a white and well-educated youth who began:

“Your Honor excuses me, but I have now been here seven months, and if you could be pleased to arrange that they have my trial some day before long....”

It is a short but rather breathless climb in this altitude from the level of the town to the ancient fortress of Sacsahuaman, frowning down upon Cuzco from 700 feet above. On the city side the hill hangs almost precipitous, the town piled part way up it; but a flanking roadsoon brings one out beside the most massive monument of aboriginal art on the American continent. The cyclopean ruins are, as Garsilaso put it, “rather cliffs than walls,” and how these enormous boulders, of which mathematicians compute the largest to weigh a little matter of 360 tons, were set in position on this lofty headland by a race that knew neither horses nor oxen will ever remain as great a mystery as the building of the pyramids. Only one thing is certain; that the builders had unlimited labor at their command and that time was no object. Prescott’s “so finely wrought it was impossible to detect the line of junction between the rocks” is scarcely true; the detection is more than easy. But it is hard to believe these monster walls were constructed by the ancestors of the stolid and ambitionless Indians one sees to-day peddling their wares in the market-place of Cuzco. These downtrodden descendants take the amazing works of their forebears for granted, as we accept the constructions of nature, and never dream of attempting to imitate them. Indeed, many contend that they were not built, but grew up by enchantment. Nations, like individuals, have enthusiasm and initiative for great enterprises in their youth, and are apt to settle down to contentment with the mediocre in middle age, which there are hints that the race we roughly call Inca had reached at the time of the Conquest. The massive triple walls of the fortress were built in zigzag form, with salient angles from which the defenders within could fall upon their enemies, making it sufficient protection to the Imperial city without the necessity of surrounding that with walls. Even after the effete modern inhabitants have tumbled all the stones they could move down into the city to build their own temples and dwellings—the efforts of Lilliputians among giants—and despite the damage wrought by ruthless treasure-hunters, the main portion of the great fortress of Sacsahuaman still remains intact, to bring upon the beholder a rage that Pizarro and his fellow-tramps should have destroyed, like bulls in a china-shop, the Empire that wrought such marvels, a wonder at what might have been had the Conquest of Peru never taken place.

In ancient days, whenever the son of an Inca put a bent pin of champi in the Imperial chair the resulting box on the ear must have been accompanied with a “Here, you aslla supay, go out and carve another step in that boulder!” There is no other rational explanation of the mutilation which every rock and ground-stone for a circuit of many miles around the City of the Sun suffered before the Conquest. Everywhere huge, house-large rocks, dull-gray in color, are fantasticallycarved in every imaginable form, with seats, crannies, grottoes, and stairways, as if for mere whim or amusement. There was no “scamping” of work in those days, no “good enough” to the straw bosses of the Incas, only one grade,—the perfect. The hardest rock is cut with exquisite care and finish, the angles perfectly sharp, the flat parts smooth as if cast in a mould. To the modern inhabitants every such carved seat is a “throne of the Incas”—as if the Inca had nothing to do but sit around admiring the widespread view from those aërial points of vantage of which his dynasty was so fond. The imagination likes to picture him watching athletic games on the little plain before Sacsahuaman, and chuckling behind his Imperial mask at the antics of children sliding down the Rodadero, or toboggan-stone, as do still those youths of Cuzco who are low enough in caste not to jeopardize their dignity by such antics.

Over behind the ruins and carved rocks I found all the provincial “authorities” gathered one Sunday to uncover another of the many immense boulders that had lain for centuries disguised as a mound of earth. The gobernadores and tenientes, in more or less “European” garb, confined their labor to bossing; the actual work was done by the alguaciles, jealously clinging to their silver-mounted staffs of office, even as they toiled. The digging brought to light not only another huge, fantastically carved ground-rock, but a hint of how Sacsahuaman might have been built. The Incas had but to call in men from all the district roundabout, under their commanders of tens, and if a thousand did not suffice to move a stone, nothing was easier than to summon two, or five, or ten thousand. Thus the government of to-day has continued many of the ancient ways, as the Church has grafted its own forms on the religion of the Children of the Sun.

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