Peru: a land of contrast

Sometimes the flash comes from throat or back or brow of iridescence, sometimes from a body sheathed in little gold scales; sometimes from the very tips of long white feathers frilling the neck about. The colors come and go, shift and change with every motion, “embers flung about by in visible hands.” The wing feathers are gray. No eye could discern anything but a dusky film, so a bright display would be lost!

And all this is within a thimble’s compass, for the smallest of all humming-birds grows in Peru. It is hardly larger than a bumblebee, and the giant of the race measures less than a swallow. Doctor Brehm says the Dwarf Humming-bird is the only one that has a song.

There is as much diversity in the names of the humming-bird as in everything else pertaining to it: Tresses-of-the-day-star, Rays-of-the-sun, Sun-gems, Sun-stars, Flame-bearers, Frou-frou, Pecker-of-flowers, Flower-sipper, Honey-sucker, Sipper-of-roses, Fly-bird, and the sweet Colibri. It has, besides, many local names, as Tominejo, tomin being the smallest weight.

Birds migrate south from the tropics as well as north. The humming-bird whirls through the jungle and luxuriant valleys of the Andes, out to islands in the Pacific, and follows the fuchsia down to the very boundaries of barrenness in the tail of South America. A mere dab of brain can engineer this infinitesimal motor from Patagonia to Canada. One minute Flame-bearer lives only inside the crater of an extinct volcano in Veragua, marked with red like the fire-stealer wren of Brittany, and many battle with storms of the high Andes and can be seen mingling their vivid flashes with snow. They who live by means of flowers! One called Sappho, a blend of red and green, lives upon the bleak heights of Bolivia, frequenting the haunts of the condor.

It has been thought that the humming-bird has no wish-bone, its frame being more compact than such construction would allow, in order to withstand the immense strain of its wings—immense, yes, measured by millimeters. At any rate the largest organ is the breast muscle, and the heart is three times as large as the stomach. Its senses are alert, and a well developed skull could prove the excellence of the brain beneath did not its habits do so.

The humming-bird always trusts itself to the air for however brief a distance, and flings its supple body about from one flower to another in vibrating flight. Now it hovers near without disordering a petal, now it hangs from tall grasses by the tip of its thornlike bill, a sparkling of wings with spurts of precious stones in a setting of petals, lost in another instant in wide air.

Never smutted by earth, because never touching it, the humming-bird juggles among the flowers. It never follows all the flowers of a single bush nor even exhausts all the sweetness of a single flower—“a dart, a glance, a sip, and away;” butterflies, a symbol of caprice, are not more fickle. This utterly erratic creature performing its aerial gambols holds within itself the reason for its being unmolested by any enemy—the chase not being worth the morsel!

Ineffable is the whole field of its labor. The coarsest materials of its nests are the finest straws it can pick up. Inside they are lined with down and spiders’ webs. Consistently they are attached to a pendent branch or long-swinging vine. Thither the humming-bird flies to supply a family’s microscopic wants.

To a giant looking through a microscope, what a revelation of the infinite industry of nature in worlds beyond the grasp of any sense of his, the humming-bird would be!

CHAPTER IV

ANIMALS OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT

“So fast do the flowers expand that an actual heat, which may be tested by the thermometer, is given off during fructification.” The tepid water forces all growing things to prodigious size. Exuberance seems to have no boundaries. The length of the young shoots is only less amazing than their growth in a single day. Leaves expand until they are twenty feet long, and ferns tangle their own fronds in haste to push out to the utmost limit of their nature. One sees things growing in the damp heat as one hears a yucca palm grow.

But where growth is on a stupendous scale, there decay is exuberant, for “the powers that build are the powers that putrefy.” Above are light, warmth, and moisture: such are conditions of growth. Below are darkness, warmth, and moisture: such are conditions of decay. Which is more effectual, that mighty power of evolution elaborating “the rain-water hurrying aloft” into tissue of leaf and flower, or those great forces of dissolution which can so soon transmute the fallen trunk of iron-wood into a pregnant, humid mound? It merely lapses into those elements composing it, and is instantly absorbed by fresh leaves culminating to-night.

The noble heat blends the smell of laboring sap and that of aromatic mosses with the pungent odor of decay, the damp smell of death with those sweet poisons which drip off the trees and envelop like a caress. The incense tree was described by Martin Fernandez de Enciza in the early sixteenth century. “Incense doth hang at its boughs,” he said, “as the ice doth at the tiles of a house in the winter season.” Over-ripe fruit drops smashing on the ground with scent of strawberries. A musky humming-bird leaves behind a thin trail of heady perfume. The air is filled with vegetable breath, weird, far-off blossoms, mere ghosts of fragrance mingling in a wave of sweetness. Smell is indeed man’s most emotional sense. It gives a poignancy to a remembered scene which no detailed picture can, and sharpens the whole sight perception. An entire chapter should be written about jungle-perfume.

The silence of day is succeeded by the “soundless tune” that fills the night. It surges up from below and shuts down from above. Pervasive as the murmuring of water, it spreads out through the night, pierced by a sudden brilliant squeak near at hand. With darkness settles a humming, booming, drumming, croaking, deafening uproar from thousands of diversified insect throats filling up every chink of space, each one crowding out the other. Insects here are not a miniature, far-off chorus, one ingredient of a summer night, but overwhelming, terrifying, absorbing the dark atmosphere.

Mysterious animals live in the depths of the ocean where no ray of light has ever pierced. They light the way for their own fishing, as the glow-worm is struck by its own brightness before seeing any other. Fire-beetles and phosphorescent caterpillars and flickering fireflies—little stitches of a shining thread in the soft, verdured blackness of the tepid night—make the primeval forest discernible.

The true life of the jungle begins with darkness and ends with light. As if the habitual gloom were not deep enough, jungle animals wait until night has enclosed them further to carry on their life activities, those weird creatures which lurk in the shade, primeval instincts always alert, living on suffrance in this land of vegetation. They have persisted since early geologic ages, the only remnants of their kind, haunting the nights from then until now. Dwarfs of a former age, growing constantly smaller and fewer and less important, they will dwindle through coming ages until zoölogical gardens can no longer be supplied, and their toothless skulls in glass cases will be the only evidence that they ever existed.

The antediluvian ant-eater hunches along on his stiff, curved claws, stopping now and then to rake out a crowded ant-hill, whose compact, crawling interior he cleans out with an efficient slash of his spiral tongue.

The giant armadillo, the glyptodon of former ages, developed a complete coat-of-mail by which his small descendant is still protected. He can open and shut the scales at will, hiding himself inside them. He trundles to and fro, burrowing out well-flavored roots. His voice is dull, without ring or expression. But his little shell is used as the bowl of a curious, three-stringed guitar from which natives can coax sweet sounds.

The tapir is another twilight animal, protected by his enormously thick hide. He snuffs about with his long snout, follows paths made by himself to the water, and sounds his queer whistle as alarm.

The cavernous croak of the violet-colored throat-bladder matches the twilight. The goat-sucker, with softly flapping wings, rises to greet the night, and from deep within the forest resounds the drawling cry of the sloth. His small, ghoulish face peers into the oncoming darkness.

Night settles. Bloodthirsty bats emerge, bright eyes flashing eagerly. Leaf-nosed vampires, whose empire is gloom, are prepared for their nightly bacchanale.

When utter blackness has obliterated the jungle, the carbunculo slinks slowly out of the thickets. “If followed, he opens a flap in his forehead from under which an extraordinary brilliant and dazzling light issues, proceeding from a precious stone; any foolhardy person who ventures to grasp at it is blinded, the flap is let down under the long black hair and the animal disappears into darkness. The Incas believed in him. The viceroys in their official instructions to the missionaries, placed the carbunculo in the first order of desiderata.”

II

With great broad strokes the tropical butterfly descends at sunset time to the jungle pool. The soft color of its wings is hardly distinguishable from the mold. It sips the water quietly.

A small bird, ready for a feast, swoops down with a whir of wings ... but where is the butterfly? In its place is a fierce owl, bulging eyes flashing, and every feather on his head bristling in eagerness for his prey. The little bird of supper-intentions has precipitately departed, never to return, a permanent lesson learned in the terror of an instant; yet it was learned from the under side of a butterfly.

Who so much as a butterfly is a child of the sun? Evoked by his warmth, it comes forth with all facilities developed for the fullest enjoyment of a new life, in which it seeks out the sun-spaces in the damp forest. What a direct response to warmth in the up and down motion of a butterfly’s wings, wide-spread on a sunny mass of leaves! How quickly it folds its lustrous wings and sinks, drooping, upon a flower when the sun goes in, as rainbows disappear at the sun’s withdrawal!

Nor does its sun-worship end here; for Iris, symbol of the sun, is imprisoned upon its wings. Those magic wings! Nature writes upon them all the changes which the organism undergoes, the patterns of the minute feathers, the direction of the fine veins, their shapes, their pencillings varying with the slightest external change. Each can be distinguished from all the rest by what is written on these evanescent tablets, the most delicate on which laws have ever been inscribed.

The Peruvian butterflies have a world-wide reputation, from the triple-tailed theclas making up in elegance of form for their diminutive size, to the azure morphos, those noble insects as large as two hands laid side by side, the desideratum of collectors who press their burnished wings between glass walls. Abnormal tails reach in abnormal directions like ingrowing horns, sharply pointed and oddly curved. An imp-like dot of silver near by calls attention to them. Bold, uneven blotches of gold and black are surrounded by demure, parallel lines. A spot of crimson pulsates in the midst of a whole wing of iridescence. The extravagant creature carries his black velvet body about on yellow legs. Some are as finely mottled as partridge feathers. In others the design just glimmers through mother-of-pearl. Some are transparent in color, a stained glass window leaded in design with living veins. The spaces between veins, however small, are exquisitely fashioned, and always the corresponding patterns of the two sides are perfectly aligned. Some are transparent like dragon-flies’ wings. Some are almost veinless, visible only by a dip of color on the tip of the wing—phantom butterflies. From others, apparently colorless, certain lights can flash the segment of a rainbow.

What fine fitness in a French expression for the blues—papillons noirs!

Many of the most brilliant butterflies are so colored because they are unpalatable, even uneatable, flaunting their warnings in the face of the lizard, which might eat them unawares were they not so conspicuous. They can flutter lazily about, with no attempt at concealment, preserved by their own poison. In making the injurious butterfly resplendent, nature saves both the butterfly and the bird which might have gulped it down.

Others are preserved by having adopted bark-designs or leaf-color or twig-shapes. Some even float about mimicking each other, if advantageous to do so. Some gain protection by imitating the brilliantly colored but uneatable butterflies for which they are mistaken. Mimicry or warning, each protects as is most beneficial, by concealing or making conspicuous. Seen and recognized, they are not molested; or, hidden, they escape notice.

How varied are their habits! Poisonous ones fly slowly. Others merely frisk about, toying with life, air, and sunlight; skirt-dancers they are called (megaluras), “sown and carried away again by the light air.” Some heavy-bodied butterflies gain protection by flight so rapid as to make them mistaken for humming-birds. The broad, strong strokes of the wide-winged morphos float them across wide rivers. The flight of butterflies is a biologist’s problem, as well as their colored juices and seasonal forms.

Some, flying low, have their greatest brilliancy on the under side of the wings; others, flying high, are dull underneath to protect them from enemies below, as the bell-bird, whose home is in the dazzling sunshine above the tree-tops, is made invisible to any eyes looking upward by its snow-white plumage and transparent wings.

“Crepuscular” butterflies emerge at sunset. Such are the caligos, amazing creatures equipped on the under side with an owl’s head, which can terrify their pursuers by merely turning wrong side out. All animals are suspicious of a strange-looking eye; and at dusk, when the butterfly descends to the jungle pool to drink, the owl-eyes are particularly effective. The harmless butterfly spreads the one view of itself to the enemy which could save its life, and continues slowly to sip the dark water.

Some butterflies stop in the gloomiest shades of the forest in darkness of noon. They all love the damp, and quantities of them surround puddles. Some settle with wings erect, some expand them and rest head downward, pressed closely against the supporting surface. The “swallow-tails” never allow their long tails to touch anything. Some alight upon the end of a stick, others rest upon dead leaves, others upon rocks or sand, some on the under surface of leaves, entirely disappearing when they alight. While some are protected for motion, others are protected for rest. Flickering noiselessly into the deep, wet shade in the network of vines and succulent leaves, they flash out into the clear sunlight. The glow of colors pulsates on their shining blue wings, intense as the fathomless blaze of a fragment of copper-saturated driftwood. Creatures of the sky they are, indeed, touched with the celestial hue. It was not without reason that the Greeks gave the same name to this wondrous insect and to the soul.

CHAPTER V

THE JUNGLE IN PARADOX

he lives upon cecropia buds and dew, as Doctor Brehm declares, or upon armies of ants swarming in the hollow stems of the cecropia tree, it is certain that he haunts only that tree, which spreads out broad leaves whose white, lower sides reflect light into the sepulchral shade. It furnishes him with more food than he needs, and food is his only necessity.

The rain pours, he listlessly hugs his branch, a sorry spectacle, emitting from time to time a deep sigh. His eye is dull, he knows no joy, no sorrow. He needs no sleep, no relief from a life which is nothing but respite. The odds seem too great against him to perform the simplest acts of life.

The climax of activity is reached when, like a wad, he falls to the ground, apparently devoid of life.

After a while he unrolls and progresses with circumspection upon closed claws to the next cecropia tree. Then he climbs to the very top, where he begins to eat, supplied with food on the down journey. Hunger compelling, he unbends from a position of unusual discomfort and pushes himself along his branch upside down. Over-cautious in every motion, he never loosens his rigid hold from one limb until securely clamped to the next one. Each movement causes a long, sad yowl of pain. It is amazing that so cutting a sound can issue from his soft mouth.

His weird cry is a jungle symbol—mysterious hint of antediluvian days when the elephantine sloth lifted up a mammoth wail to be taken up by the glyptodon and the dodo.

In the desert man exclaims: “If only there were water! The soil is fertile. There is sunlight and warmth enough to make a tropical paradise. If only there were water!” And so, although he does not exactly worship water as the Yuncas of antiquity did, this man sings secretly in his heart a hymn to the god of water.

Up on the icy highlands man exclaims: “If only there were warmth! The soil is fertile, there is plenty of water, only warmth is lacking to make a paradise. If only there were warmth!” And he sympathizes with the Incas, whose god was the Sun, and waits through the long night-watches until, with his rising, life is renewed.

In the jungle, water brings fertility to a soil bathed in the light and warmth of a tropical sun. It pours down from melting snows of the mountain-tops and gushes from the ground to meet the rain. Here, where man might live with least effort, he squats on the lowest rung of the human ladder, his savage desires satisfied as soon as realized. The sun needs no propitiatory offerings, water needs no exhortation. Invisible powers have conferred all gifts which his mind could imagine or his heart desire.

But in the midst of luxuriant plenty, like the Indian above the mine, poverty-struck for want of the very riches he sits upon, he is merely dying out for lack of everything with which he is surrounded. With a remedy at his command for every ill, he hangs about his neck a string of tapirs’ claws in case of need. As there is lack of nothing to supply his wants, so there are few wants to be supplied. A whole tribe lives on a single species of tree, like insects depending on one fruit or leaf for subsistence, or the sloth hanging on the cecropia tree, which has senses sufficient to appreciate sights and sounds and smells, but remains insensible. The jungle people seem to recognize the likeness and call one another “beast of the cecropia tree.”

As there is surplus of everything here, evil gifts have been bestowed as well. Poisonous insects sting for life; the fierce jaguar and fatal vampire, whose velvet kisses are a death-brand, bite for life; so do snakes; and the huge boa crushes the bones of its victim. The strong attack the weak, the cunning inveigle the unwary. Injurious or beneficent, all must fight for life, joining in the great struggle. Each variety contends with every other, vegetation fights to keep out animals, animals with birds, insects with one another, and all against the water, whose level silently rises over its foes. So man must struggle against nature. The jungle is his only teacher. He takes from it what it offers. He is the mere imitator of the vegetable world, a product of it in modified form. He sees strife in air, earth, and water. His religion can conceive only strife of two extremes, dying and living, evil and good, one injurious, the other beneficial. Evil spirits inhabit birds and beasts and whirlpools of the mighty rivers. The dim forest is filled with powers of destruction. They lurk in the black lizard and less dangerous ones in the parroquets. Since all sickness is brought by evil spirits, it is they to whom prayers are made. Some jungle savages believe in a transformation into animals and name their children for them. If there are any thoughts of a future life, they are in jungle terms. After death these people wish to be turned into animals, which sometimes happens. “On the eighth day a red deer jumped from the grave and ran away into the forest. They did not see the soul enter the deer, but they saw the deer rise from the grave”! Some worship sun and moon, an Inca custom. But the moon with its phases and its weird shadows in the jungle is involved in special mystery. These savages understand the jungle, but facts plain to us compose their mystery.

If a man is sick, something grows near by to set him all right again. They use nature’s remedies against her poisons, as they have learned from birds and beasts to do. They collect various sympathetic medicines, such as teeth of poisonous snakes, and carefully fix them in leaves and tubes of rushes—powerful specifics against headache and blindness. They fill flask-gourds with balsams, and collect odorous gum for incense.

War is their only object lesson, so quite naturally their only preëminence is in the art of killing. The chief cause of war is stealing of women; some are worth as much as a hatchet, some only the price of a knife. In times of fighting the savages howl through a giant reed in blood-curdling discord. They shoot with parrot-feathered cactus-arrows dipped in famous poisons, or thrust through an enemy with a macana—a wooden sword as sharp as steel—or fell him with a club of wood like iron. Then they make drums of his skin to serve as warning to his friends. They protect themselves with a shield of creeping plants interwoven, covered with a tapir skin and edged with the feathers of parrots.

The only amicable exchanges between tribes are the poisons done up in reeds into which they will dip the arrows used each against the other. Some poisons, made by women and old men, can kill an animal without injuring his flesh for the use of man. Some make him merely wither away. Some do not take effect until three days after the wound is inflicted.

The whole history of man, beginning with the Stone Age, could be studied among the wild tribes of Amazonian Peru. The largest tribe numbers nearly twenty-five thousand, many but a few families, and one tribe has now not a single member left. Differing each from the other, they are similar only in that they all represent the first steps of human development.

A savage of the jungle perforates his face to insert feathers and shells; he gouges it with sharp flints and rubs in indelible color. He slashes his lips both within and without and stretches his ear-lobes as far as the shoulder. Then he inserts knobs of chonta-palm wood. He paints his face yellow and suspends a red bean from his nose. Or he paints his face in the four quarters, blue, yellow, red, and black, and dyes his hair red with achote, his body orange with armatto, staining it in design with dark juices. The Prios color their teeth; others leave their teeth unstained and wear a long, yellow mantle. The Conibo flattens his head, or that of his child, between boards into fantastic shapes, leaving holes through which the cranium can develop. He leaves single locks of hair on conspicuous promontories. Toucans’ feathers are stuck to them with wax. On days of celebration he dances in ropes of iridescent birds strung through the bills, his bead girdles of barbaric design hung with humming-birds as tassels. He knows no fashion but personal caprice. There is no limit to the vagaries of the world about him, neither are any suggested for his own decoration. Cross-wise over his shoulders he slings long scarfs of brilliantly colored birds hung at the end of chains made of their little leg-bones, along with boxes of poison for his arrow-heads. His necklaces are of the teeth of jaguars, wildcats, and monkeys, or of the curling teeth of the white-lipped peccary. From his anklets and wristlets of heavy, wooden beans he shakes a jungle call, wielding a feather scepter in savage rhythm about the stiff feather halo upon his head.

As might be expected, the jungle savage adores music, if so it may be called. He imitates the cries of forest animals. Some tribes have war songs; then they use a bone flute or a reed. The Aguarunas have a violin with three strings. This is the most intelligent tribe, but they use their superior intelligence in reducing the heads of their enemies. One is often compelled to wonder whether greater brain-development means greater usefulness.

These seem to be the facts: The head of an enemy being cut off, poisons are poured into it, softening the bones so that they can be drawn out through the neck. They are then replaced by red-hot stones to which the head, reduced to one-fifth its original size, adjusts itself in the steam of a bonfire made of roots of certain palms.

A jungle story runs that a scientist from Germany tried to investigate these sinister processes. But his head, in miniature form, was soon stuck upon a pole. It could be recognized by the long, reddish beard, which had retained its original proportions.

To qualify as a warrior a youth must possess at least one reduced head of his own making. As time goes on, he adorns himself with more and more such trophies.

Some similar custom existed on the coast in ancient times, for these little masks have been found in the huacas (grave mounds). The first reduced heads were exhibited in Lima in 1862 under the rare title, “Heads of the Incas”!

The Macas and Jivaros are believed to have this practice as well, and a tribe exists near the Cusicuari, the Rio Negro, and the Orinoco, reported as able to reduce entire bodies in the same manner.

Some tribes preserve their enemies’ hands, others keep their teeth, and some eat their enemies whole. A man speaking a different dialect is eaten like an animal of a different species. The Amahuacas pulverize the bones and eat the ashes in their food, in order to absorb the physical strength as well as the moral virtues of the person gone before. Although they are never eaten, the women of cannibal tribes are said to be more cannibalistic than the men. Prior to such feasts they fatten the prisoners of war, who “rather enjoy the prospect, and gorge themselves to accommodate their keepers. They occupy themselves tranquilly with their duties as slaves without attempting to escape.”

Another practice of the Aguarunas is making the tundoy, or tunduli, their jungle signal-service. They hollow a tree-trunk and make three holes in it with red-hot stones, then hang it aloft on a high tree, fastening the lower end securely to the ground. Blows upon it with a wooden mallet reverberate as far as ten miles, and form a code, by their swiftness or slowness and their pitch above, between, or below the holes. As a hundred words suffice for a language, so would three tones for a drum of war. Primitive man in the primeval jungle sending blood-curdling signals to reduce the heads of his enemies! Reverberations whose wave-lengths are intercepted on their echoing passage through the forest by the flight of royal butterflies and challenged by the chatter of antediluvian apes!

The weaker tribes are actually, not in name merely, pushed back into the woods. Many traits in us find a literal, physical parallel in them. We speak of “licking the dust;” in the jungle there are tribes of earth-eating savages. A civilized man in the jungle learns their literal ways. He puts gunpowder on the bite of a serpent and cauterizes by igniting it. Having no language adequately to express the venomous thoughts they may feel, they use poisoned arrows. They literally reduce an enemy’s head, and are more humane than we, doing it after death!

The Inje-inje represent the Stone Age, both in their tools and language. They come out of inaccessible hiding-places to perform their primeval rites by full moon and are the least known of all the savage tribes. This small tribe of the Inje-inje, whose name is the sum of their language, need only a word to steer their craft through life. As has been said, the development of language from the primitive Inje-inje to the somewhat developed Aguaruna can be studied in this mysterious place. No tribe can count further than ten; most of them use only a movement of the fingers. Though there are hundreds of “languages,” not one Amazonian tribe can write.

In temperate zones nature is to be relied upon. Roots grow in the ground, branches and leaves in the air, flowers come forth at certain seasons, and fruit follows. Trees give us shade in which no fever lurks. Vegetables do not relieve agony and want, as insects and plants do not cause it. No animals lie in wait to seize us, no snakes to uncurl and engulf us. Rain comes in measurable quantities. We live on a tempered, miniature scale. We can afford to neglect reckoning with nature, for we understand her laws, and we direct her by that understanding.

But what can be said of the jungle? Had we thought of gardens as suitably placed in tree-tops? Or of an edge of wood as sharp as an edge of steel? Here accustomed flowers grow as shrubs, and shrubs as trees. It is a region where insects are mistaken for birds, where animals imitate a flower on the branch where they like to rest; where plants have fragrance, and blossoms burst forth from roots or rough bark; where birds gain protection by assuming the dazzling colors of tropical sunlight, and butterflies by the warning colors of their neighbors. It is a region where roots grow in the air; oils, wax, and honey are secreted by leaves; where the death of anything gives new, vital impulse to something else, and parasites are as significant as their supporters. Curious region, where there are night-flying butterflies and softly-feathered moths to fly in the daytime; where everything is reversed: animals, whose normal is upside down, prefer tree-tops to the ground, birds of prey are frightened by the painting on a butterfly’s wings, caterpillars sting, spiders kill birds, and water is the principal element of the land.

Dramatic indeed is the silent jungle. The insect is imprisoned in the throat of the orchid, whose honey it had been unwarily seeking. Trees distil venom. Plants have fangs. Perfumes affect the brain. Cold, green creepers blister like fire. From vampires which suck your blood as you sleep, to the touch of a vine which paralyzes your entire body, the jungle knows all modes of attack and furnishes the cure for every ill it has created.

What can be taken as the symbol of the jungle? The snake, mysterious, deadly, bound together in savage traditions with lightning, wind, fire-streams of lava, and river-whirlpools, those emblems of serpent treachery? Or butterflies, with their symbolism of life-recurrent? Or the orchid, emblem of wayward unwholesomeness? In the troops of monkeys which skip, swing, bounce from tree to tree, throwing themselves to be caught by prehensile tails, is its exuberance. In the honey dripping from hollow trees and running off unused, is typified its surplus. Iridescence darting from insects and from birds, rainbows glinting over cataracts or caught by the equatorial sunshine from misty hillsides, might be its symbol; or the beneficence of jungle trees and bushes.

Not one would be more or less typical than any other. All are equally emblematic. If we think of caprice, there is law; of life, there is death; of beauty, there is horror. When each seems most dominant, then its opposite is most uncontrolled.

The seed dies that the plant may live; the blossom withers that the fruit may set; the worm vanishes that the butterfly may spread its wide wings and fly. Plus and minus signs are never far apart indeed.

CONCLUSION

But the sun, the god of Peru, controls the water. It can combine with its opposing element. It is able to transfigure even the rain, which, like human hopes, becomes iridescent because the sun shines. The rainbow is a willing Ariel, the servant of each, retreating from the sun only as far as the rain allows and illumining the rain only as far as the sun permits.

The rainbow is visible nature’s alphabet. In terms of it are spelled sky and sea, trees, birds, and flowers. It shoots the desert-mists and twinkles along the streams which intersect it. It fearlessly embraces the austere crags of the mountain-peaks and shimmers in the craters of volcanoes.

Entire it flings itself from the heart of a shower, follows the waves of the sea along, or glints on a butterfly’s wings or from a humming-bird’s throat.

It reveals the elements of the stars, it lists the ingredients of the sun, and sets down upon its ephemeral tablet the red-hot vapors rising from the desert. Even the breath of the volcano has a place in the rainbow alphabet.

It is hard to avoid so fundamental a thing. Close your eyes in the sunlight, and its whole scale is thrown in glistening repetition across your own eyelashes.

Even the ultra-violet—the unknown, the unperceived—must be discussed in rainbow terms, the only letters the eye’s alphabet knows.

The Incas chose it for an empire’s emblem and dedicated to it a temple close to that of the Sun.

It symbolized to the Spaniards the astounding country which had fallen as by miracle into their grasp, the land of mystery, whose romantic wealth and dazzling promises encircled them as with the rainbow arch, and, like it, receded as they advanced.

Peru still keeps the rainbow symbol. Many-colored mysteries hover about the man who leans over its glittering jewel-casket. And wherever the ends of its bright bow touch the desert, flit over the mountain-tops, or sweep across the jungle, nature’s unexplored secrets lie concealed.

There is, however, a difference. For the rainbow-arch which mingles sunlight and water is only an evanescent promise, vanishing almost as quickly as it can flash a new gleam of hope into a human heart. But Peru, with its changing beauties and its mysterious allurements, is a fact. The pot of gold which it promises is real.

THE END

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reliable observations on ruins are those made by E. G. Squier in his Peru: Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas, by Mariano Rivero y Juan de Tschudi in Antiguedades Peruanas, and by Charles Wiener in Pérou et Bolivie. Studies of ruins in particular localities have been made by many archaeologists; for example, on Tiahuanacu, L. Angrand, in Antiquités Américaines, though his book is now out of date, Adolph F. Bandelier in his Islands of Titicaca and Koati, Max Uhle, with whom I visited some of the ruins, on Tiahuanacu and Pachacamac, and Hiram Bingham in recent explorations.

Sir Clements Markham has spent more than fifty years studying every stage of Peru’s history from the time when it was a land of myth to the Chilian war. His researches as well as his careful translations have been published in a series of volumes. Authorities on various periods of the history are legion. Relating to pre-Inca times, in which studies of myths and theories of ruins are intermingled, original sources are the Memorias Historiales of Montesinos, first published in French in 1840, and Cieza de Leon, the soldier, whose Crónica del Perú (1553) is authority on the Incas. Some modern scientists who have written about the pre-Inca period are Ernest Desjardins in his Pérou avant la Conquête Espagnole, Tylor’s Primitive Culture, Meyen’s Uber die Ureinwohner von Peru, and Brinton in his Myths of the New World and other works. Many persons are studying the legends, as, for instance, Professor Liborio Zerda of the University at Bogotá. The Miscelaneas Australes of Miguel Cavello Balboa, a soldier, is an original source for knowledge of the remote Chimus. Das Reich der Chimus by Otto von Buchwald, and especially Das Muchik oder die Chimu Sprache by Doctor Middendorf, who quotes largely from Calancha and Carrera, are modern authorities.

In regard to the Incas: As a background there are the old, picturesque chronicles which read like romances, but on which reposes most of the knowledge that modern authorities have corroborated in regard to the earlier inhabitants of Peru. These contemporary accounts have to be carefully studied in order to distinguish fact from fiction. Next to the Crónica of Cieza de Leon are the Comentarios Reales of Garcilasso de la Vega, in whose own veins the turbulent blood of the Conquistador mingled with the blood of the Sun. During his lifetime the imperial race of his mother was exterminated by the fierce adventurers becoming grandees, of whom his father was one. His book has the value of personal reminiscence. His enthusiasm adds a certain glamor; but even if his unique work has been spurned as an Utopian romance, it has been reluctantly accredited as the foundation of facts set forth by its critics. De las Antiguas Gentes del Perú by Bartolomé de las Casas, works by Diego Fernandez, Betanzos, Oviedo, Sarmiento, Cobo, Ondegardo, Molina’s Fables and Rites of the Incas, and the great Miscelaneas of Balboa must be consulted. Many of them have been translated by Sir Clements Markham and published by the Hakluyt Society of London.

It is bewildering to try to single out one or two modern works upon the Incas, for their name is legion. The definitive authority in English is of course Sir Clements Markham, whose Incas of Peru (1910) has followed numberless more detailed works of his own upon the subject.

Der Belus oder Sonnendienst auf den Anden oder Kelten in America by Frenzel, presents one field of theory which observations on the remains of the Incas’ walls suggest. The temptation to interpret by means of analogies to other remote civilizations is withstood with difficulty. From John Ranking and his Historical Researches on the Conquest of Peru by the Mongols, to Ignatius Donnelly and his evidence in favor of its conquest by the Egyptians via Atlantis, Peru has given an unlimited field for speculation. Lord Bacon believed, by the way, that Peru was a proud kingdom in the time of Atlantis. A striking example of immense erudition expended on a futile, though technically well-supported, fancy, is Rudolph Falb’s Das Land der Inca. Painstaking scholars are tracing out similarities between the Peruvian language and the Semitic and Phoenician tongues—“astounding affinities,” of which common stems are purest in Quichua, so that the human race seems to have emanated from the tops of the Andes; similarities, too, between Peruvians and the long-bearded Druids whose rites were chiefly sun-worship; they also kept memoranda with strings tied in different knots, like the quipus, and built vast structures of stone without tools. There are analogies between Peruvians and Hindus, who worshipped the Sun as Rama and called their first legislator Vaivasaonta, the Son of the Sun, and between Peru and Farther India. The Seccos have been called the Malays of Bolivia. There are analogies between Peruvians and Chinese, whose royal color was also yellow, whose peculiar god from earliest times was the Sun, who used quipus, who had terrace-cultivation and irrigation-systems like those of the Incas, who used foot-messengers for royal emissaries, and brought all the gold and silver of the realm for the beautifying of royal temples. “The buildings, religious institutions, division of time, and mystic notions,” which “seem in Asia to indicate the very dawn of civilization,” are found here upon the Andes. Whether there was intercommunication, or whether such facts merely suggest the instinctive discovery of all peoples, their origin is wrapped only in mystery—a veil whose lightest corner is only just lifting.

But to continue with the succeeding periods of history. Spanish vice-regal days and the civil wars of the conquerors, the fleets of treasure, the Inquisition, have been the subject of romantic histories. Besides Prescott’s well-loved Conquest of Peru, William Robertson’s History of America, published more than a century ago, gives a concise, general survey since the Conquest. Drake’s Worlde Encompassed and Southey’s account of Drake’s voyage in his English Seamen, as well as Froude’s, together with various Hakluyt publications, are authorities for freebooter days. Also there are such cold authorities as the Calendars of State Papers of many countries, E. Armstrong’s The Emperor Charles V, and for the Inquisition, H. C. Lea, Vicuna Mackenna, and Ricardo Palma. The reports to the Royal Council of the Indies of the sixteenth century enter into minute details. Father Acosta was the historian of the third council. His Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, first published in 1590, is an indispensable book, although it has borne the reproach of being superficial.

The French Academicians came to Quito in 1735 to measure an arc of meridian, an enterprise which d’Alembert considered the greatest ever attempted by science. One of these scientists, La Condamine, made extensive studies in quinine, named cinchona for the Countess of Chinchón, vice-queen, and one of the first to feel its beneficent power. His Voyage fait dans l’Intérieur de l’Amérique Méridionale (1745), and the Voyage Historique de l’Amérique Méridionale by Antonio y Jorje Juan de Ulloa (Spanish edition in 1748, French in 1752), who accompanied the French expedition, both aim at truthfulness. Another delightful as well as dependable work of the eighteenth century is the Voyage dans la Mer du Sud by Amédée François Frézier (1716). In particular must be mentioned Lozano’s Histoire des Tremblements de Terre arrivés à Lima. Hales of the Royal Society of London has added to this French edition of 1752 accounts of Lima in his day, trustworthy as his observations on the geology and meteorology of the coast.

Such facts as I have stated in regard to the natural history of the coast are vouched for by Ferdinand von Hochstetter, Die Erdbebenfluth im Pazifischen Ocean, Friedrich Goll, Die Erdbeben Chiles, a remote work on El Desierto de Atacama, Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères, Darwin’s Journal of Researches, and the Voyage of the Beagle, the three latter describing the natural history of the mountains as well. One or two of Sir Martin Conway’s books, Alfons Stübel, Die Vulkanberge von Ecuador, and Neveu-Lemaire, Les Lacs des Hauts Plateaux de l’Amérique du Sud, may also be added. In describing the animals of Peru I have as authority Brehm’s Thierleben.

Ricardo Palma’s Revista de Lima and Carlos Romero’s Revista Histórica de Lima, Manuel A. Fuentes’ Estadística General de Lima, published in Paris in English as Lima in 1866, give interesting information in regard to that city.

When it comes to the Amazonian wonderland no exaggeration could compete with fact. But I have not withstood the temptation wholly on that account! There is Louis Agassiz’ A Journey in Brazil, H. W. Bates’ A Naturalist on the River Amazon, two books by Alfred Russel Wallace, Tropical Nature and Life on the Amazon, Raimondi’s El Departemento de Loreto as well as his El Peru, Robert Southey’s History of Brazil, and the publications of the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima.

I am happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Wilberforce Eames of the New York Public Library for access to its Americana; to Dr. Martin and to Dr. Stevenson of the Hispanic Society of America; to Mr. C. L. Chester for many of my pictures; to Dr. F. S. Archenhold, Director of the Treptow Sternwarte at Berlin for the freedom of his library, where I found most of the German works consulted, and to Don Ricardo Palma, former Librarian of the Biblioteca Nacional de Lima, for permission to inspect many of his rare books and manuscripts.

INDEX

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, Y, Z