On November 11th I took train southward. Though my original plan of following the Inca highway from Quito to Cuzco had been accomplished, the thought of turning homeward with half the continent still unexplored had become an absurdity. But the scattered life of that dreary region to the south of the Imperial City promised too little of new interest to be worth covering on foot. If I did walk down to the station, behind my belongings on jogging Indian legs, it was because to have waited for the nine o’clock mule-car would probably have been to miss the nine-thirty train.

Cuzco, like its rival to the north, has been connected by rail with the outside world since 1908. The train leaves on Tuesdays and Saturdays, spending a night at Sicuani and another at Juliaca, whence a branch descends to Arequipa. Every Friday there is a vertiginous “express” that makes Puno in one day.

A fertile valley, the great bolson, or mountain pocket, that stretches from the pampa of Anta in the north to Urcos on the south, with many grazing cattle, frequent villages, and strings of laden Indians and asses, rolled slowly past. Before noon we caught the gorge of the muddy Vilcañota, the same stream that under the name of Urubamba encircles Machu Picchu, with little patch-farms far up the face of the enclosing ranges and here and there steep, narrow side valleys rich with cultivation. Yet cultivatable ground was scarce, so scarce that it was easy to understand why the ancient population spared as much of it as possible by walling up their dead in caves and planting all but perpendicular slopes.

Next day the valley rose gradually, until cultivation gave way completely to cattle and sheep, then to llama and alpaca herds grazing on the tough ichu of broad punas stretching to arid foothills that, in turn, rolled up into a great snow-clad range on our left. An aggressive, despairing aridity, rarely touched with a cheering note of green, spread in every direction. A dreary land indeed would this have been to journey through afoot. Small wonder the race accustomed always to this desolate landscape is of melancholy temperament, given to personifying nature as a host of evil spirits inimical to man.

The drear and barren land across which lay the branch line of the third day rolled ever higher to the Crucero Alto at 14,666 feet. Two large lakes, cold, steely-blue in tint, with a few barren islands, broke upon the scene and sank slowly as we panted upward; patches of snow lay above, around, and then below us; the glare of the arid, sun-flooded landscape grew painful to the eyes, recalling that many an Andean traveler holds colored glasses an indispensable part of his equipment. Towns there were none; and the stations consisted of one or two wind-threshed buildings of stone or sheet-iron, dismal beyond conception.

Then we descended gradually. Here and there in the edge of reedy lagoons stood parihuanas,—long-legged, rose-tinted birds the feathers of which in olden days formed the Inca’s head-dress, when capital punishment was meted out to anyone of lesser rank who dared decorate himself with them. Equally sacred were the vicuñas, the undomesticated species of the llama family that furnished the imperial ermine. Ordinarily the traveler is fortunate to catch sight from the train of one or two of those timid animals. To-day a group of fourteen appeared not five hundred yards away across the pampa; then within an hour we passed close by flocks of nine, twelve, seven, and eight respectively, a total of fifty, more than my Peruvian seat-companion, who crossed this line several times a year, had seen in all his life. Unlike the three domesticated species, llama, alpaca, and guanaco, the vicuñas are uniform in color, a reddish-brown with whitish belly, legs, and tail, not unlike a fawn in general appearance. A more delicate animal could scarcely be imagined; the neck seemed hardly larger than a man’s wrist, the legs fragile in their slender daintiness. They were graceful, as well as swift, even in their running, which resembled the gait of the jack-rabbit in the way they brought front and hind legs together. The flocks still belong to the government as in the days of the Incas, when they were protected by royal edict, under penalty of death. For some ten years past Peruvian law, too, has forbidden killing them, but the valuable wool and skins are still to be had in the larger cities, for game-wardens are conspicuous by their absence.

What seemed a hopeless desert thinly covered with dry, wiry bunch-grass, now spread in all directions. We were crossing the vast “Pampa de Arguelles,” so named from the family that has leased hundreds of square miles of it from the government. They in turn grant the Indians permission to graze their cattle,—at 25 cents a year for larger animals, twice that for each flock of small ones; yet “los Arguelles” derive income sufficient to permit the family to live on the fat of Paris. Mirages, as of rivers flowing landward, appeared now and then across the arid immensity. At stations lay piled great heaps of yarlta, a fuel resembling a cross between peat and giant mushrooms. Further down, a scraggly bush was cut for the same purpose and carried in bundles on donkeys’ backs. Soon that dreary Sahara of the West Coast lay on every hand, massive rocks piled up fantastically, monotonous to the last degree, yet not without a certain striking beauty under some moods. The landscape was what the Germans call eintönig, of a rich yellow-brown, dusted by the winds and bleached by the suns of centuries, and spreading away to infinity with a hint of the vastness of the earth which even the sea does not give.

Suddenly a deep-green patch of alfalfa burst out among the glaring rocks, trebling their barrenness by contrast. It was the little oasis of Yura, fed by a small stream, the water of which, reputed efficacious to disordered livers, is bottled and sold—less widely to-day than before the priests, whose rival establishment produces the “Water of Jesus,” threatened to blackball out of heaven anyone who drank the other. Then far away across the Egypt-tinted world the eye made out well below, at first dimly, a green oasis with a great, or at least a widespread, city covering about half of it. “Ari, quepay!” (“Yes, let us stay a while!”) the first settlers are said to have cried when they caught sight of this garden spot; and the train seemed like-minded, setting us down at last in Arequipa, second city of Peru. Three dawdling days had been required to cover 412 miles.

The only place of importance between the Pacific and Titicaca is strikingly oriental in atmosphere, with a suggestion of Cairo, thanks to its shuffling donkeys—a hole is slit in their nostrils that they may more easily breathe this highland air—and its encircling desert, yet exceeding the latter in beauty by reason of the snowclads hovering about it. To the north lies Chachani, fantastic with its peaks and pinnacles and jagged ice-fields; nearer at hand stands hoar-headed Misti, rivalled in symmetry of form only by Fujiyama and Cotapaxi. From any second-story roof the arid, yellow sand stretches away as from the summit of the pyramids to a horizon far more broken and tumbled than that of the Sahara. The hills are streaked with what looks like snow, but is really fine sand, the same sand that lies in waves monotonously multiplied in the form of wandering, crescent-shaped médanos nearer the coast, whence quantities of it are shipped to Europe to make a cheap glass. Down below and round about the city are fat cattle knee-deep in green pastures, in an oasis where irrigation produces alfalfa, as well as many fruits, in abundance. The desert air is clear beyond words, bringing the newcomer from the bleak highlands above the impression that summer, an unoppressive midsummer of the North, has suddenly come again. Every evening wonderful sunsets, ranging from lurid pink through purple and blue-gray to a velvety fading slate, play a veritable symphony of color across the surrounding desert world.

The city itself is flat, of one, or at most two stories, always with the bulking mass of Misti or its neighbors behind it. Earthquakes have been frequent in Arequipa. Because of these visitations, perhaps, the town has everywhere an unfinished appearance, most buildings ceasing abruptly just above the first story and looking as if the rest had been shaken off or suddenly abandoned. A few have ventured to crawl up again to two stories, and here and there a bold adventurer to three, these latter, commonly of sheet-iron, seeming constantly to tremble at their own temerity. As in Lima and the lands of the Arab, the roofs are flat, places of promenade and evening tertulias; for rain falls, if at all, only in brief afternoon showers. The town is built largely of a soft white stone, almost chalk in composition, and light in weight as terra-cotta, which is chopped or sawed out of a desert quarry not far away and which, though it hardens in the air, can still be carved with a knife. Two arched bridges with massive piers, mildly suggesting those by which one enters Toledo in Spain, span the little cliff-sided Chili. The eucalyptus seems less at home here than in the higher cities of the Sierra, but drooping willows abound. As everywhere on the West Coast of Peru, massive mud fences afford places of promenade in the outskirts.

I was treading close on the heels of civilization of a material sort. Electric street-cars had appeared in Arequipa a bare three months before; with motormen imported from Lima they afforded an efficient service to nearly every corner of the oasis. The innovation had not been without its difficulties. Strolling one morning, I met three cholos driving a dozen donkeys marketward. Suddenly they began to shout and dance about the animals as if some danger were imminent. A block away sounded the gong of a bright new tramcar, but as I had never known one, least of all in South America, deliberately to run down an animal, I wondered at the uproar. To my surprise the car came on without slackening speed. The shrieking cholos succeeded in hauling, pushing, or coaxing most of the stubborn brutes off the line, but one pair refused to vary their set course. At the last moment one of these lost courage and sidestepped, but his sturdy black companion kept serenely on, with stubborn down-hung ears and a “to-hell-with-you” flip of the tail—and just then a corner of the swiftly moving car caught him on the starboard beam. He turned a complete somersault on the cobbles, rolled on to his feet, and gazed after the still speeding car with a scowl not unmixed with a ludicrous expression of astonishment. Later I learned from the American manager of the line that a number of donkeys, burritos, and dogs had been killed during the first month of operation. Decrees and warnings had been utterly wasted, and Arequipa’s donkeys would have stagnated the lines and again taken possession of the gait of life without this resort to the teaching of experience.

Cuzco and Arequipa are reputed the Peruvian strongholds of conservatism. Of the two, the latter is probably more deeply under the spell of the ancient church. The din of bells was almost constant; during my week in the city I saw no fewer than five images of the Virgin paraded through the streets to the usual accompaniment of kneeling cholos, bareheaded whites, and scores of sanctimonious-faced old beatas following with funereal step. Several of Arequipa’s fiestas are noted for the dancing of wooden saints to barbaric music in the public squares. Others have fixed periods of calling on their fellows, sallying forth from their home churches to the plaza where, manipulated by the cholo bearers beneath, they bow to and finally “kiss” each other, to the fanatical applause of the multitude. The town boasts also several crucified figures operated by wires that cause the eyes to roll, the limbs to quiver, and the head finally to droop as in death, after which a gang of workmen, carrying towels over their arms to wipe away the “blood,” climb up to remove the nails and lay the “body of Jesus” away in a glass coffin until the next holy day.

From a score of stories typical of Arequipa with which I was favored by a fellow-countryman, who had spent many years as the alpaca expert of the chief local warehouse, I pass on two. For months he and his wife had been annoyed by the throngs of beggars who gathered for a bowl of soup each noon at the monastery just across the narrow street from his residence, and then slept out the day in the sandy hollows nearby, like the dogs of Constantinople. What particularly aroused his ire were the habits of an old fellow of ninety or so, whom he had known for years. A few weeks before, finding him in the all too scanty remnants of what had once been shirt and trousers, the American had smuggled him into his workshop and given him a complete new outfit from his own wardrobe. The mendicant returned to his customary hollow a hundred yards up the street, which he was accustomed to share with several curs and a donkey or two, and during the night his fellow-beggars robbed him of the new garments. What, then, was the donor’s surprise and American disgust when he set out on his early stroll next morning to find the old fellow parading up and down the street, begging of the women bound for mass in the monastery church “without a lickin’ stitch on him, as naked as the day he was born. If you’d tell it in the States, they’d say you was lyin’ and that he must have had a shirt an’ britches on anyway. But, no, sir, just as I’m telling you, without a lickin’ stitch, an’ parading his wrinkled old ninety-year carcass up an’ down amongst all them women goin’ to mass.”

But the ladies seemed merely to be mildly amused, and the native policeman saw nothing in the sight worthy of comment. Children now and then roam the streets of Arequipa in their birthday clothes, and the old fellow had long since been in his second childhood. My outraged fellow-countryman went across town to make complaint to his friend, the prefect. The latter did not see what he could do about it.

“Why don’t you send him to the hospital?” grumbled the alpaca-expert.

“They wouldn’t receive him, with no one to pay for his keep.”

“Well, sir, I couldn’t stand it no longer having that ol’ feller paradin’ around before my house, with my wife inside an’ all of them women folks goin’ to mass, as naked as the day he was born. So next mornin’ I borrowed a stretcher an’ got four Indians, an’ I says, ‘Now you git that ol’ feller on that stretcher an’ tie him down an’ carry him over to the hospital an’ leave him inside, or dump him in the river or anything you like, only so’s you git him out of here. An’ I’ve got a phone an’ when I hear he’s inside the hospital I’ll give you each a sol.’ Well, sir, them Indians just dumped him in the hospital payteeo before the Sisters of Mercy could shut the gates, an’ they had to keep him.

“I’ve got a lot of friends amongst them priests across the road, even if I ain’t a Catholic,” he went on, “an’ they’re a pretty nice lot o’ fellers, take ’em all in all. They’s three kinds of ’em: the brown priests, the black priests, an’ the white priests” (Franciscans, Dominicans, and Mercedarias). One especial, by the name of Jayzoóse, has been over here in my house off an’ on for fifteen years to ask for a chicken or some eggs, or a few dollars to build a new altar, or to have a few drinks—Oh, they’re a pretty decent lot o’ fellers, an’ of course they’ve got to live somehow. Well, Jayzoóse—he’s livin’ with a woman over there behind the monastery wall an’ got four or five kids; but then of course they all do that in Peru, though I suppose the Catholics up in the States wouldn’t believe you if you told ’em, but of course you ’n me or anybody that’s been down here—well, Jayzoóse come over the other day an’ says he wants me to come an’ hear him preach. So I went out to a church over here on the edge of town an’ I tell you he preached a mighty strong sermon, too. Only it was All Saints’ Day an’ of course everybody was drunk. So I was layin’ here readin’ along in the afternoon, when I heard somebody knock at the street door—or if I happened to be asleep an’ didn’t, Theodore Roosevelt” (pointing to a cross between a Dachshund and a pug curled up at his feet) “here, or Woody Wilson” (an Irish terrier) “there did, for they always hear anybody that knocks, no matter if it’s midnight—an’ I went to the door an’ there was Jayzoóse, an’ he was pickled to the eyes. So I invited him in, an’ he says, ‘Why don’t you give me something to drink?’ An’ I says, ‘Well, Jayzoóse, I ain’t got anything in the house just now, but I’ll send out an’ get something. An’ I sent out an’ got two bottles of beer. But Jayzoóse was that drunk he couldn’t sit up, say nothin’ of stand up, an’ when the beer come he got to rollin’ around an’ out of his pocket drops a big loaded revolver. I picked it up an’ says, ‘Here, I’m goin’ to keep this gun fer you. What are you goin’ to do with a gun anyway?’ An’ Jayzoóse says, ‘I’m goin’ to kill that there Chilian blacksmith down the street, because he don’t go to mass an’ says he don’t believe in the Holy Church an’ its miracles; an’ if I’d a had a couple of drinks more, I’d a killed him las’ night.’ An’ I says, ‘No, you don’t want to kill that feller, Jayzoóse, an’ I’ll keep this gun fer you until to-morrow,’—an’ I got up to help him home, an’ when I opened the street door, in tumbles a woman that had been leanin’ up against it—being All Saints’ Day—an’ just fell down into the parlor here; an’ by the time I rolled her out again an’ got Jayzoóse home I was sweatin’ some, I can tell you.”

I strolled out one afternoon in a leisurely hour from the central plaza by a street growing ever rougher and less cobbled to the Harvard Observatory on the flank of Misti, with a splendid view of the snow-capped cone towering into the sky close beside it and a marvelous outlook over all the oasis of Arequipa. Here, in a household where it was easy to fancy myself suddenly set back in the heart of my own land, American scientists photograph the heavens on large dry-plates, with exposures of from one to eight hours, through telescopes automatically regulated to the speed of the earth, but requiring also constant hand adjustment. Arequipa, however, is growing less ideal for the purpose, since the number of its cloudy days has more than doubled. The blood-red sun was sinking behind the Sahara hills when I turned homeward through the caressing air of evening, the desert flanks of Misti and Chachani and Pichapichu glowing a velvety red from the reflection of the opposite horizon, the white oriental city growing dimmer and dimmer, then suddenly bursting out in a spray of electric lights above which the two white spires of the cathedral more than ever resembled minarets.

Next day I returned to the highlands in the private car of the railway superintendent, a fellow-countryman. The day was brilliant, the leprous desert flashing in the sun even after it had given way to the ichu-brown tablelands of the great plateau, Misti bulking as large a hundred kilometers away as out at the observatory on her flanks, and snow-caps springing up into the luminous sky about us to all points of the compass. All the afternoon we loafed in cushioned armchairs facing the back platform, on which sat our host shooting with automatic gun-pistol at vicuñas, a pastime strictly against the law, but Peruvian statutes scarcely reach the altitude of a railway superintendent. Fortunately the animals were scarce and far away, and the nearest he came to breaking the law was to raise the desert dust about them and send them scampering across the rolling pampa at a lope between that of jack-rabbit and a deer, sparing us the necessity of halting the train and sending out the crew to bring in the game. From Juliaca we turned south along a flat once-lake-bottom. Arms and branches of Titicaca, full of shivering reeds, broke in upon the dusk that thickened into night just as we pulled into Puno, cold, dreary, and monotonously like all other towns of the high Sierra.

I had timed my arrival to take, instead of the regular steamer directly across the lake, the semi-monthly “Yapura” that makes the round of its shore, with many stops. We were off at ten and out upon the “open sea” by midnight, a huge distorted moon rising off the starboard bow, into the prismatic wake of which we wheezed slowly but steadily, until it crawled up under the black skirts of the clouds that covered the edges of an otherwise starlit sky. A wind as penetrating as that off Cape Race caused our diminutive craft to roll and plunge merrily, to the distress of the priest, lawyer, and home-made Ph.D., with whom I shared the six-by-eight dining-room-cabin. Titicaca by daylight has the identical color of the sea itself, and we awoke to find ourselves wheezing along in mid-ocean, so to speak, at eighteen knots—every two or three hours. We cast anchor first before the red town of Juli, in a lap of bare hills sloping up from the steel-blue lake. I dropped on top of the first boatload of cargo and went ashore, the captain, having orders not to start without me, promising to blow a special signal. The Jesuits claim to have set up in Juli the first printing-press in America, and here Quichua was first reduced to writing. To-day it is a mere dawdling village, distinguished by the voluminous Dutchman breeches of its Indians. At noon Pomata held us long enough to unload the priest and a few boxes and bales at the usual cobblestone wharf. This same good padre had assured me that it was a well-known fact that Saint Thomas had visited America before the Conquest and had brought the Indians their civilization, being known to them as “Tomi”—a bit familiar, to say the least. How persistently mankind seeks to rob poor old Columbus of his glory!

In the afternoon we churned into a wide, semicircular bay as far as shallow water and rustling reeds permitted, and I was soon climbing the easy slope to Yunguyo. Here and there was much freight to discharge. When I expressed my surprise at the consumptive powers of so small a town, the captain winked an Irish-Peruvian eye and breathed, rather than murmured, “contrabando.” I had come at last to the end of endless Peru, with the unexpected privilege of walking out of it, as I had entered it eight months before. Yunguyo lies on the neck of a little peninsula, part of which, by the arbitrariness of international frontiers, is Bolivian. The steamer had orders to pick me up in the morning, and slipping on kodak and revolver, I struck out for the sacred city of Copacabana. A league from the landing the road mounted a stony ridge, passed through the two arches of an uninhabited rural chapel, and left the historical, if sometimes profanity-provoking, land of Peru forever behind.

To that day I had never, to my knowledge, met a Bolivian. Those born beyond the boundary evidently kept the fact a profound secret, and in Peru the silence about the adjoining land was as if it were on the opposite side of the earth. Once in Bolivia it was as rare to hear anything of Peru. It was a stony country, in fact there were more stones than country. Everywhere they lay piled up in high massive fences with half-tillable patches between them. The wide road was well-peopled with Indians afoot, Indians darker and of more independent mien than those of Cuzco. This was the route by which, according to tradition, Manco Ccápac set out from the island of Titicaca to found the Inca Empire. The countrymen were engaged in a sort of planting and plowing bee, a half-drunken festival, their hatbands decorated with newly picked flowers. The instant I passed the boundary the head-dress of the women changed to an ugly, round, narrow-brimmed felt hat hitherto unknown. On the Peruvian side the shores of the lake had been reedy and shallow, lisping with water-birds and a melancholy wind from off Titicaca, as if the sea were thinking sadly of its lost glory. But as I topped the ridge of the peninsula, there opened suddenly before me the vast steely-blue lake, as clear-cut against the base of the reddish-brown hills as if dug with some gigantic spade, rolling away in one direction over the horizon like an Atlantic, the velvet-brown island of Titicaca standing forth in the middle distance sharp as an etching. Rocks, which the superstitious Indians fancy are impious men turned to stone, stood forth on every hand. Children along the way addressed me as “tata,” the Aymará version of the Quichua “tayta” (father).

At the end of a five-mile stroll the stony highway broke forth into a little lake-side town. The church and monastery sacred to Our Lady of Copacabana, roofed with glistening green and yellow tiles, in a square surrounded by heavy walls brilliant with the crimson flor del Inca, nestles in a lap of rocky hills a bit back from the lake and bulks high above the haunts of mere men at its feet. In the days of the Incas this was a holy city, with a certain “idol of vast renown among the Gentiles,” a place of purification whence pilgrims embarked for the ultra-sacred island of Titicaca. The church militant would not have been itself had it lost this opportunity of grafting its own superstitions on those of the aboriginals, and some three centuries ago the present “Virgen de Copacabana” was set up, with the usual marvelous tale of her miraculous appearance in this spot. Her servants have been realizing richly on their foresight ever since. A steady stream of pilgrims pours into the holy city from Peru, as well as Bolivia, and even from further off, the year round, though August 5 and February 2 are the days of chief festival and mightiest crowds. Near the monastery is a large hospicio, a two-story lodging-house for pilgrims, with a great rectangular patio opening through an archway. In the town roundabout is that curious atmosphere of a mixture of piety and commercial advantage common to Rome, Jerusalem, Benares, and Puree, an air of something hard to believe, yet highly advantageous to accept, at least outwardly. The costumes of the populace had grown frankly Bolivian. In several of the shops stocked with sacred baubles, facing the immense grass-grown plaza, women were rolling cigarettes, new proof that I was in Bolivia, for to roll a cigarette in Peru is the exclusive privilege of the government.

The priest of Pomata had given me a note to the superior of the monastery. A doorkeeper led me into pillared cloisters opening on a flower-grown patio and softly into the sanctum of Father Basoberri, deep in conversation with a parish priest who had brought a flock of pilgrims from a neighboring town. Being a European, he created a better impression than the average native churchman. To celebrate my arrival he ordered a servant to uncork a bottle of imported beer and, after the first formalities, had him set me down in the monastery dining-room, where an excellent meal stopped abruptly short of dessert and coffee. The superior conducted me in person to the large brick-and-tile room reserved for distinguished guests, opening on the now bitter-cold expanse of Titicaca, and advised me to fasten the padlock and put the key in my pocket, “for though we are here in a monastery, there are people passing back and forth, and it is safer. Now,” he went on, “if you wish to see the customs of the pilgrims, you have only to mount that stairway.”

I climbed two stone flights in semi-darkness and found myself in a narrow wooden gallery at the back of a large, high chamber suffused with a “dim religious light.” It was painted blue, with a sprinkling of golden stars, as nearly the painter’s visualization of heaven, no doubt, as the crudity of his workmanship permitted him to express. Confession and a contribution to the attendant priests are requirements for admittance to the floor of the church below. At the further end stood the gaudy altar, in its center a glass-faced alcove containing the far-famed Virgin of Copacabana. The figure, scarcely three feet high, was cumbered with several rich silk gowns, laden with gold and jewels, and with a blazing golden crown many sizes too large. Round-about her were expanses of golden-starred heavens, and half a hundred of what looked to a layman like large daggers threatened her from all sides. The original blue-stone idol had been destroyed by the Spaniards, the present incumbent having been fashioned in 1582 by Tito-Yupanqui, lineal descendant of the Incas. He was no artist, but was said to have been inspired by the Virgin herself.

The place was unusually immaculate for the Andes, as becomes a famous shrine where money pours in the year around, and was in striking contrast to the squalor of the surrounding region. The entire floor below was crowded with kneeling pilgrims, weirdly half-lighted by candles, except around the altar, where there was light enough to make priests, acolytes, and the Virgin stand out brilliantly. A week is the customary length of stay for pilgrims, with a ceremony of welcome and one of dismissal, separated by a long series of masses, confessions and purifications—not to mention the ubiquitous fees. It is perfectly well-known throughout the length and breadth of the Andes, as the priest from the neighboring town, having taken me in hand as soon as I appeared in the gallery, whispered above the rumble of the services, that Nuestra Señora de Copacabana is an all-round champion in the miracle line. For instance: Hardly a year back she had picked up a ship about to be wrecked on the coast of Chile and set it out a thousand miles or so into the mill-pond Pacific, merely because one of the sailors had had the presence of mind to call upon her at the height of the storm. The newspapers of the time seem to have covered the service poorly. Or there was the case of the Indian in my cicerone’s own parish who, working in his field far up the side of a mountain sloping swiftly toward Titicaca, suddenly fell headlong down the precipice. He would infallibly have been dashed to pieces on the rocks below, had he not suddenly, halfway down, uttered the name of the Virgin—personally I never knew the mind of an Andean Indian to work with such rapidity—and instantly found himself comfortably seated back in his own field again. The fact should not be lost sight of, however, in rating this marvel that the Aymará husbandman cheers on his labors with an even stronger chicha than that of his Quichua cousins to the north.

The ceremony we were now witnessing was that of dismissing the departing pilgrims. At about two-minute intervals there knelt on the steps of the altar one person, a man and wife, or sometimes a man, wife, and child, always of the same family. An Indian acolyte in red thrust a lighted candle into a hand of each, the chief priest bowed down before the image, while back beside us in the gallery an Indian in a poncho pumped a wheezing melodeon and the choir, consisting of several boys, four old half-Indian women wrapped to the ends of their noses in black mantos, and three merry little girls who managed to keep up a constant gossip and game through it all, knelt on the floor about the instrument and moaned weird hymns. If the pilgrim was of the “gente decente” class, the hymn was in Spanish; if an Indian, it was in Aymará. During the singing, and the chanting of the priest, another acolyte in a still more striking robe stepped forth and covered the kneeling person or persons at the altar with what looked like a richly embroidered blanket. This the priest beside me asserted was the Virgin’s cloak, capable of protecting from all evil, for a certain length of time—varying, perhaps, with the fee.

Then suddenly the cloak was snatched away, the candles were jerked out of the hands of the worshippers, the latter were all but bodily pushed aside, and a priest on the side-lines called out the next name from the list in his hands. This field-manager was startlingly unBolivian in efficiency, keeping things moving with a rush, and calling the next group almost before the acolyte reached for the blue blanket. The attitude of all those professionally connected with the ceremony, was scornful, careless, and hurried—like a New York barber who is convinced there is no “tip” coming. The fifth group to appear, however, was less cavalierly treated. A tall, well-dressed man stepped forward, and an acolyte quickly slipped in front of him a prie-dieu, or prayer-stool with high back, of the style used in church by well-to-do South American women. Then, to my surprise, two young men in riding breeches and leggings, who had been standing near us in the gallery, stumbled over each other in their haste to get down to the floor below and kneel on either side of the older man. “Ese caballero,” whispered the priest beside me, with a distinct tone of pride in his voice, “is a famous lawyer and ex-senator from La Paz, and those are his two sons. They are great devotees of the Blessed Virgin of Copacabana.”

When the cloak had been laid away for the night, the chief priest mounted a pulpit projecting from the side-wall, and in the same drawl in which he had chanted at the altar, compared with which the notorious American nasal twang is soft and songful, either preached a sermon, or recited a bit from the Bible, or imparted some stern orders from the Pope—which, neither I nor, I am certain, any other hearer not previously informed ever guessed. For the monotonous drone in which he hurried through the thing, like a man with an appointed tryst, was such that during the full twenty minutes it lasted I had not the faintest notion whether it was in Latin, Spanish, or Aymará. The only intelligible word I caught was an often-repeated, slovenly “Copavan.” Then the acolytes hastily snuffed the candles, and we filed out. At the foot of the stairway my companion was fallen upon by an old Indian and his son who, imprinting a rapid-fire of kisses on his by no means lily-white hands, begged him to hear them confess. He waved them aside as one might an importunate cur, until the Indian, redoubling his osculations, assured him he had real coin to pay for the service, whereupon the good padre took courteous leave of me and led the pair to his room in the monastery.

I was hurrying into my clothes in the bitter cold Titicaca dawn, when the faint long-drawn whistle of the “Yapura” was borne to my ears. To my astonishment it was barely five, so great is the difference in the hour of sunrise in the few degrees I had moved southward since leaving Cuzco. Copacabana in its lap of terraced hills shrunk into the past as we slipped away around the peninsula of the same name. Before us rose the Island of the Sun, traditional cradle of the Inca race, yellow-brown and mountainous, with terraces far up some of its rugged valleys, one red-roofed village housing the workmen of General Pando, chief owner of the island. It produces potatoes, maize, and quinoa. On the mainland, too, all the shores were terraced and cultivated from the water’s edge to the tops of the ridges and hills, in long, square, rectangular, or such fantastic shapes of fields as the lay of the land required. To the east the great glacier mass of Sorata, by some reputed the highest peak in America, lay piled into the sky, half-hidden and cut off from the solid earth by vast banks of white clouds. Before long we passed, a bit further off, Coati, the Island of the Moon, a low ridge terraced from end to end, constituting a single hacienda noted for its fertility. Mere words give but a faint notion of the beauty of Titicaca on a brilliant morning, with its striking combinations of soft colors,—the dense blue-green of the lake, curtained by tumbled banks of snow-white clouds, the velvety yellow-brown islands and mainland, with the faint-purple cloud-shadows playing across them. The mighty glacier bulk of Sorata piercing the sky seemed to move forward also, as the steamer slipped lazily on, frequently bringing into view new and more delicately beautiful combinations of the same elements.

The Bolivian mainland we drew near in the early afternoon was of a reddish soil, with many patches of bright green and pretty little tilted fields checkering the ridges clear down to the water’s edge. At Guaqui, the landing-place, no train was to leave for twenty-four hours, and I set out afoot across the exhilarating plains of Bolivia for Tiahuanaco, twelve miles away. It was a fertile, well-plowed land, where the remaining stubble suggested wheat as the chief product. The sun dropped behind a dense, blue-black bank of clouds hanging like a pall over Titicaca behind, and there was no sunset when the time for it came, but only a gradual, steady fading of light to a faint gleam in which the eyes could barely make out the ground underfoot. The evening stillness was broken only by the rare lowing of a cow afar off; a shower that was half hail and all cold beat stingingly into my face. But for the storm and wind, an absolute silence lay like a solid wall on every hand, with nowhere the suggestion of a light, the many clusters of Indian huts that had speckled the plain by day seeming to keep disconfidently out of reach of highway and railroad.

At eight I stumbled into the station building of Tiahuanaco. The telegraph operator was sufficiently impressed by my familiarity with the name of the gringo superintendent to induce the woman across the track to serve me stale bread and native cheese, and tea made of the water of Titicaca, brought here in locomotive tanks. On the table were several of the dailies of La Paz—it was difficult to think of that city as “the capital” after eight months of considering Lima the center of the universe—in which the world’s news all at once jumped up to date. But it was like reading a serial story of which one has lost several chapters and finds it impossible to pick up all the threads again.

Tiahuanaco, 12,900 feet above the sea, in a broad, open, unprotected plain, frigid by night, and not over warm by day under the chill blue of its highland sky, is the chief archeological enigma of “Alto-Peru.” The most important ruins lie a few hundred yards north of the station, and an equal distance from the modern adobe town with its bulking stone church. From a slight rise of ground the flat plain, sprinkled with many clusters of mud huts, stretches away to a gouged and broken ridge, here reddish, there green with vegetation, that fences it in. Huge blocks of stone lie tumbled and scattered over a vaster extent than at Luxor and Karnak, in a disarray at once suggesting earthquake; for they seem too immense to have been overthrown by a merely human destroying vengeance. In the region roughly known as Peru there were several detached and separate civilizations, some of which clearly antedated the Incas; and Tiahuanaco has little in common with the ruins further north. There the relics consist almost exclusively of stone walls; here there are virtually none, though excavations might uncover a few remnants. What is left looks, in contrast to the stem practicability of “Inca” ruins, like the caprice of some childish sovereign. But it is not certain how justly we may judge of the whole original plan, since not only the neighboring hamlet, as well as La Paz, has helped itself freely to the materials for its own chief buildings, but the railroad has carried off vast quantities of it for the construction of bridges and culverts. The still existing monuments are chiefly immense stone blocks too great to be moved by puny modern man, some still upright, some fallen. Bas-reliefs, of which Machu Picchu offers none, are numerous; sculptured figures are unknown among the ruins of Peru, while here there are several. Some resemble totem poles of stone. The most striking is a sturdy rock god, his features defaced by the revolver shots of the enlightened youths of La Paz on their Sunday excursions, which, like the twin figures of Thebes, sits abandoned out on the plain. The monolithic gateway, a single block of dark gray stone on which the intricate carving and bas-reliefs still stand forth clear yet inscrutable, has been set together again since Squier’s day.

As I sat gazing across the disordered mystery of long ago, an Indian woman, the ubiquitous bundle and second generation on her back, a crude sling in one hand, drove her pigs out into what seems once to have been the main square of the ruined city. As the animals fell to rooting about among the ruins, the woman walked across to the inscrutable stone god and bowed down before it with a strange, heathenish courtesy. I attempted to work my way around to leeward in the hope of catching a photograph of the aboriginal rite. But while I was still some distance off, she either spied or scented me, and raced away toward the town at a greater speed than I had ever before witnessed in one of her race.

In the modern town dwells an indolent, not to say insolent, population of cholos and Indians, ignorant as the Arabs of the Nile of the motive that brings strange beings from far off to view the disdained remnants of long ago, yet ready to take all possible advantage of that absurd custom. The place bids fair to become as overrun with the pests of tourist centers as the show-places of Europe. Already the stranger is greeted by a rabble of unsoaped urchins, offering for sale as “antigüedades” all manner of worthless pebbles. Aware that visitors, for some strange reason, are interested only in things of great age, these children vociferously proclaim everything in sight “muy antigua,” even to the loaves and meat displayed in the shops, a statement for which there is some basis. The bulking church of the town, as well as portions of the rudest edifices, is constructed of splendid cut-stone. On either side of the entrance are the weather-worn torsos of a man and a woman, crudely carved from reddish sandstone, sadly defaced, and having an even greater air of antiquity than the chief monuments out on the plain. They would be more properly in their setting out among the other ruins; here they are startling as one bursts unexpectedly upon them facing the empty grass-grown plaza of the dawdling village.

The train snorted in soon after noon. Across the bleak Collao spring plowing was at its height, amid much ceremony. Many of the sleek oxen were half-hidden by the red and yellow flags of Bolivia, set upright on the yoke across their horns. Gay streamers and banners decorated animals and plow, while the Indian family that in each case had come in full force to see the propitiation of the spirits that rule over the fields, was garbed in its gayest. For not only must the moon be in a particular phase, but all gods must be won over, all demons exorcised, and all signs promising, before it is worth while to begin the year’s sowing. What a fertile plateau it was, compared to stony Peru, the plowing unchecked over hill and dale of the slightly rolling plain as far as the eye could see!

An official passing through the train to examine the bundles for contraband was the only formality that had marked the passing of the frontier. In the second-class car I began to gather the impression that the Aymará Indian, if morose and even less given to smiling, was on the whole a more promising type of humanity than the Quichuas. For though he was more inclined to insolence, he was far less obsequious, more manly than the slinking race to the north, less passive and obedient, more bellicose and jealous of his rights; and as long as there is any fight left in a man, there is still hope for him.

The day waned. A plowman driving his oxen homeward and carrying the plow on his own shoulder is a touch Gray did not catch. The plain grew less fertile, and was dotted now with countless stone-heaps; Illimani and a long, half-clouded snow-range grew up before us; we climbed somewhat, though the world roundabout seemed level as before. The railroad swung to the left. The scores of mule, donkey, and llama pack-trains, however, kept straight on across the bleak, stone-heaped plain, till suddenly at a white pillar a few miles away they seemed to drop all at once into the unknown over the edge of the near horizon.

Where the train halted I scorned the electric trolley and, walking a few yards, saw suddenly burst upon me a scene for once superior to the anticipation,—La Paz, America’s most lofty capital, in its hole in the ground. Up there at the “Alto,” 13,600 feet above the sea, all was brown, cold, barren, unenticing; all about, behind, and around me the bleak, uninhabited Andean plateau, stony and drear, cherishing nothing but bunches of tough ichu, stretched away like a faded brown sea to the hazy distance. Then at my very feet this gave way, and all the nearby world pitched headlong down into a gashed and broken chasm 1200 feet down, measuring perhaps two miles across from where I stood to an equal height on the tumbled and ramified foothills opposite. These, breaking and splitting and falling away into unseen valleys, and climbing out again to become more rugged and higher ridges, finally culminated in a vast and jagged mass of snow and ice, cut off from the solid earth by banks of clouds, above which the reflection of the descending sun streamed in brilliant rose color upon the glaciered pinnacle of giant Illimani, 24,500 feet above the sea. Across the broad puna a cold, fitful wind whistled lugubriously; down below, though barely a sound of life except the blood-stirring snort of a regimental band came up this sheer quarter-mile from the city, all seemed pleasantly cozy and warm.

The lower flanks of the great cuenca were checkered with little Indian farms, now mostly light-brown from being newly plowed, some still the brownish-green of old crops, and all hanging at a decided angle. Further down, on the floor of the valley itself, were similar irregular patches, chiefly of the brilliant green of alfalfa, of every conceivable shape,—round, triangular, horseshoe, veritable “Gerrymanders” in the strange forms given them by the configurations of the ground; for, once down below it, this proves by no means so floor-flat as it seems from above. In the very bottom of the valley, rather on the further side and stretching a bit up the opposite slope, lay La Paz itself. It was a compact city, so compact that it seemed one conglomerate mass into which the eye broke only once,—at the tree-roofed central plaza, tiny from here as a green paster on a vast wall-painting. From this height one saw little but the roofs, the dull-red of the tiles greatly predominating—almost too much red, as in the garments of an Indian gathering; next came the white and colored house-walls, then the sober gray of old churches, and finally here and there the edge of a blue, green, or even an orange wall peering above the mass.

All about the city proper, imperceptibly joining it and stretching away on nearly all sides over vastly more space than the town itself, were perhaps half as many buildings, scattered singly or in small clusters, forming an almost unbroken row down the valley to the southeastward. Here and there one of these ostentated itself in brilliant red; most of them were cream-color or the gray of sheet-iron; and everywhere between them were the irregular green of plowed patches, with now and then a grove of blue-green eucalyptus, or a patch of willows, enticing from this treeless height where, once the eye rose a bit from the floor of the valley, there was not the suggestion of a shrub. Not the least striking feature of the scene was the glassy clearness of the atmosphere, with nowhere a puff of smoke, and absolutely nothing to dim the view; if the clock in the all-too-slender tower of the congress building had been larger, it would have been easy to tell the time by it.

Brown ribbons of roads, all starting at a pillar on the plateau above, strung like drippings of syrup down all sides of the cuenca, except on the rugged, uninhabited flank opposite; and along all of them on this Saturday afternoon crawled at what seemed a snail’s pace files of Indians with their laden donkeys and llamas, the cargoes generally covered with straw, the drivers chiefly in red ponchos, though so like tiny crawling ants were they from this height that the colors were barely noted. Seldom broken, these strings of pack-trains stretched from the edge of the plateau to where the head of each procession to the morrow’s market was swallowed up in the compact, silent city.

I walked on around the yawning chasm, the wind that howled across the puna reaching the very marrow of my bones, a raging hail-storm beating upon me for a brief moment and making the city below seem doubly snug and serene by contrast. The little “Great River” of La Paz one did not see at all, so tiny is it and worn so far down into the clay soil of the valley in a half-seen gorge descending through tumbled ranges of gnarled hills toward the yungas, as the Bolivian calls the tropical montaña, below. Mere words give but a faint notion of this lower end of the cuenca of La Paz. For so broken and pitched and tumbled, so fantastically gashed by the rains is it, that it would be an indescribably beautiful thing, even if there were not added the wonderful colors and half-tones, a rich dark-red predominating, over the countless split and torn and every-shape hollows and needles and pinnacles of earth across which the cloud-shadows play incessantly. The mournful notes of a quena, or rude Indian flute, floated sadly by on the wind. Then sunset crept relentlessly across the valley to the town that seemed to crouch motionless with fear of the darkness descending upon it, paused a moment to do its work well, swallowing up all before it in the purple twilight of tropical altitudes, then climbed slowly again out of the hollow on the further side and spread at last across all the world. The city’s bright colors had faded to an indistinct sameness, the brown hills and deeply eroded clay cliffs were blotched red by the departing sun, though the snow peaks above were still ablaze with light; the purple bases of the range receded into black, then into nothing, leaving Illimani standing forth white and cold, stone-dead as a once ardent hope, utterly alone in the luminous sky of the Andean night.

I descended afoot behind the last pack-train, a stony, thigh-aching half-hour from the pillar to the central plaza. The first information to reach me was that La Paz outdid in cost of living even Lima, which is criminal. The boliviano having but four fifths the value of the sol, I had fancied prices would be correspondingly lower; but here two units were often required where one had sufficed before, and the great majority scorned to do business in smaller coins. The hotels which my sadly mutilated letter of credit permitted me to enter were not only unsavory and atrociously managed, but had the barbarous custom of several beds in a room. Each in turn attempted to thrust me into a rumpled nest, with four or five others of unknown nationality or antecedents close beside it, within a battered door to which there was neither lock nor bolt. Whatever else I may be, I am distinctly not a gregarious being in that sense; whereupon they offered me a room with only one companion, as if there were any particular virtue in numbers! I brought up at last in the “Tambo Quirquincha,” facing the Plaza Alonzo de Mendoza, an inn favored almost entirely by natives arriving on horseback.

The constitution of Bolivia asserts that Sucre is the real capital, but permits congress to choose its place of meeting, and “because of the constant danger from our two chief enemies” (Peru and Chile) “at the northern end of the Republic, the Government really resides in La Paz.” How much the choice is governed by the fact that there is no railroad, but only a mule trail, to the “real capital,” is a matter of conjecture. At any rate, the president has not been in Sucre in more than a dozen years, congress has its seat in La Paz, and the head of the army resides there—conditions which will no doubt continue, at least until the railroad reaches Sucre. On the other hand the former “Chuquisaca” is honored with the presence of the supreme court and the archbishop of Bolivia, who do not have to move often enough to make mule trails burdensome. But Sucre will not be comforted. Her chief newspaper is named “La Capital,” each of its editorials ends with the argument “La Capital!” and it always refers to La Paz as “the present seat of Government.”

This “seat of Government,” perhaps the most Indian capital of all South America, has the most purely Spanish name. It should still be called Chuquiyapu, as the aboriginals refer to it to-day, rather than by the trite Castilian designation that is duplicated a score of times throughout Spanish-America. The census of 1909 discovered 76,559 persons in the entire hole in the ground. Of these, 20,007 were rated “white,” but as usual in Latin-America the enumerators got the color sadly mixed with the social position of the enumerated. Indeed, the chief of the census goes on to explain “white” as “descendants, more or less pure, of Spaniards, Europeans, or North Americans”—in other words, anyone with a distinct trace of European blood. There may be a third that many of strictly Caucasian race. Of the 3458 foreign residents, 86 were Americans; of 696 non-Catholics, 562 were foreign men, 40, foreign women, 193, Bolivian men (“chiefly atheists”), and one Bolivian woman. Bold woman, indeed, to admit it! The census rated 30% of the population as Indians; but here again the social status must have played its part, or else there are many non-resident country Indians often in the city. African blood is extremely rare, though slavery was not abolished until 1851. It is no climate for negroes. “The unmarried American women are nearly all teachers,” the report continues, then takes a rap at the country’s chief enemy for stealing her seaport and bottling her up within South America by remarking, “Las chilenas living in La Paz are almost without exception prostitutes.” Most striking of all the data, perhaps, is the fact that of the 60,445 inhabitants over nineteen years of age, only 13,047 are married. But this does not mean that race suicide is imminent; rather that the priests have made the cost of marriage all but prohibitive to the lower classes, and that many others are thereby influenced to consider the ceremony of minor importance. In the entire republic 16% are “alfabéticos,” that is, “know their letters,” a much more handy expression in Latin-American statistics than “read and write.” Only Honduras, in all America, is so low in this respect.