PERU

A LAND OF CONTRASTS

PERU
A LAND OF CONTRASTS

BY
MILLICENT TODD

With Illustrations
from Photographs


BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1918

Copyright, 1914,
By Little, Brown, and Company.

———
All rights reserved

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Peru, A Land of Contrasts

INTRODUCTION

Any statement regarding Peru implies a contrary statement equally valid. Contrast is its characteristic quality, true as to the general aspects of the country and ramifying through remote details. It is the obvious point of view from which to study Peru.

The three parts of this book—the desert, the mountains, the jungle—are the three natural divisions of the country. The shore is a long, narrow desert, much diversified. In a fertile valley intersecting it lies Lima, The City of the Kings. The river has come from the Andes, on whose lofty tablelands, called jalca in the north and puna in the south, flourished remote civilizations filled with mystery. Beyond the mountain barrier lies the jungle, geographically the largest portion of Peru, and like all other jungles a region of dread and fascination.

Peru is a low country lying under a mild sky; but above are the mighty Andes freezing under arctic blizzards. The desert is barren for lack of rain; beyond the mountains, the over-productive jungle is saturated with tropical downpours. Along the shore thunder-storms are unknown; up on the icy tablelands of the cordillera, whose volcanoes are sealed with snow, lightning rips open the mountainsides. Fire splits, and water smooths. Mists are strong enough to magnify and the sky is clear enough to do so. The puna is a land of brutal elements, yet there is found the little chinchilla, protected with softest fur.

On the coast, overhead calm is counterbalanced by subterranean fury. “All geological phenomena are still in active operation,” the shore rising, earthquakes changing the face of the earth, and underground rivers dodging beneath a desert sterile for want of the water which they are hurrying off. The people who live in this country of volcanoes and earthquakes feed on red peppers.

If lack of water prevents the heat of the sun from making the desert productive, so cold prevents water upon the mountain plains from encouraging vegetation. In the jungle luxuriance of all growth conceals any single benefit. Nature erects barriers everywhere. She has surrounded her richest gifts with almost insurmountable difficulties. Fertilizers come from the desert, a realm of death. Mines of the Andes coldly hoard their riches under a life-sucking atmosphere. Agassiz said: “An empire might esteem itself rich in any one of the sources of industry which abound in the Amazon valley.” But these are inaccessible from their very quantity, and they shut in beneath them a fever-laden air. Where there is most fertilizer, the land is most barren; where there are most precious metals, it is most incapable of supporting human life; where richest, it is most difficult to cultivate.

Such is Peru. Elements and forces contrast; each combats each, and all attack man. Nature wars against herself: tropic heat, arctic cold; heavy, poisonous jungle mists, thin air of the mountain-tops; scorching dryness, reeking wet. Even obstacles contrast in Peru. Man is threatened everywhere by elements, by insects. He drowns here or dies of thirst there. He can even be overcome by cold or sunstroke in the same place.

Peru is a land of violent extremes. It has a range of mountains as great as any in the world. The towering peaks are too high to climb. Far above circles the condor, the largest bird in the world. Peru is the source of the world’s greatest river system, whose luxuriant forests are too thick to penetrate. The only representatives of a lost geological age inhabit them, as well as the biggest snakes and the smallest birds. Peru has great mineral deposits in the mountains; it also has rubber in the forests. Wool is produced on the frozen plains, and chocolate in the deep gorges lost among them. And from the valleys intersecting the desert come cotton and sugar-cane.

All kinds of obscure substances are found in this versatile country, ipecac and cochineal, cocaine and vanadium. Not unlike the rest of the world, chill here produces fever, but quinine, the best remedy for the disease of contrast, comes also from the forests of Peru.

Although nature is a supreme fact, its natural history is not the whole of Peru. And contrast as a method of interpretation does not fail for its other aspects. Though man seems to play so small a part, he has lived here since antediluvian animals wandered among coal forests on the Andes. To the charm of limitless nature is added the mystery of great peoples destroyed before they were known. The riches of the Incas and of the glittering, vice-regal Spanish days, when continents were found, taken, and explored, contrast with present poverty. Consistently throughout, the riches of Peru have impoverished it. Its gifts have caused its ruin over and over again.

Wars and rebellions have riddled the country, and bull-fights have filled leisure hours. Though audacity of action has fascinated historians of Peru, its periods of peace have in them even more of romance: a nation of slaves ruled by a monarch-god; oriental splendor of Lima shining because of forced labor in the dark, suffocating mines; Arab blood in the conquerors’ veins penetrating the quiet Indian people, adding a keener edge to their sufferings. The poverty of the present-day Indians contrasts with lavish nature, “beggars sitting on a pile of gold.” Contrasts of nature, of people to country, of antiquity to the present—these diverse elements are insistent wherever one turns.

The charm of contrasting facts is puissant. Almost any one of them might be the text for an allegory. To guard against rhapsody, I have documented every statement made. Conservative authority can be given for every fact, however fantastic, however trivial. The few legends are in a sense also facts: “Une légende ment parfois moins qu’un document.”

The tellers of Peru’s story deserve a history themselves. First came the falcon-eyed missionaries of Spain, sword and rosary clattering beneath priestly robes, to subject the Indians to salvation, or mercifully to condemn them to death by torture. Had they been less conscientious in describing all those quaint beliefs and idolatrous practices which they came to stamp out, we should perhaps have missed the chief source of information in regard to the Children of the Sun and their dependent peoples. Military writers and official chroniclers followed in close order. It took them some time to recover from their amazement at this land of “gold, silver and pleasant monkeys.” They wrote with convincing emphasis, “Wee that live now at Peru ... finde not ourselves to bee hanging in the aire, our heades downward and our feete on high.” On the contrary, they discovered that they were even “as near unto heaven at Peru as in Spain.”

Explorers and adventurers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were in the forefront of writers of romance. Such authors have always found inspiration here. From Marmontel to the Peruvian Tales of Guenelette, from Frank Stockton to José-Maria de Heredia, chiseler of faultless cameos, who himself came from a dramatic land of Spanish conquest, Peru has been a word to conjure with. But invention has added no glamour to history. It cannot keep pace with fact.

Accounts by various travelers of past centuries, voyages of discovery and reports of treasure fleets are followed by the students of to-day. Scientists write of Peru, each authority finding his specialty accented. The geologist sees cosmic forces in active operation still. The anthropologist studies untouched savages in the morasses of the Amazon, the naturalist’s wonderland. Archeology now has an exciting preëminence. Cool authorities admit the amazing antiquity of Peruvian ruins. The historian finds a great barbaric civilization; the economist ancient systems of state policy; the prospector an extensive system of navigable waterways. The mining engineer discovers inexhaustible mines, and the agriculturist unique opportunity, where the uplands of a farm lie among snows, its lowlands under rubber groves and orange trees. All write of Peru, and an increasing bibliography affords easy access to every sort of statistics. I have referred to a wide range of authorities, many of them cited in an appendix, to supplement my own observations, made as member of an astronomical expedition, during a stay of several months in Peru.

A painstaking person while in Peru wrote a journal containing all he saw. Not an event or an observation escaped chronicle. But on reaching home he discovered that his really poignant memories were not in his journal. His entries, though conscientious, “were but the ingredients. They were not the secret of the philtre.”

Facts make their own appeal. But direct assault is not the only means of approach. Sometimes subtleties are best observed by looking at something else. It is often easier to see the beauty, the full glitter and glance of a thing in another object, as the play of colors in the aurora borealis is better perceived by turning the eyes aside. Sometimes one or two minor points chosen from an embarrassment of interesting details are all the imagination needs, as a plant selects only those elements from air and soil which can be used in perfecting its tissue of stem and leaf and flower.

It can only be hoped that this book about Peru may succeed in even suggesting its unique appeal.

PART I

IN THE DESERT

CHAPTER I

ALONG SHORE

No wonder the people on such a shore build bamboo cages plastered with refuse and mud to live in, temporary for them as the present stage is transient in the history of the land on which they live. Their object-lessons are warring natural forces. No wonder they are brutal, slinging cattle on board steamers by the horns, casting a stone between the eyes of a bullock to make him turn around. Even their little children play at bull-fights with horns of defunct cattle. The soil of this “sea-gnawn” shore affords not one necessity for human existence, not even a drop of water. There are no real harbors, only niches in the jagged coast. But few lighthouses indicate danger, and the desert is chilled by winds from the Antarctic pole.

Far out, a low cloud is skimming the surface of the gray water, advancing in waves of blackness. From one end a shower falls; at the other, a column rises from the water to meet the on-rushing mass, “a great oval, rolling forwards over the sea.” It comes nearer and nearer, till the shore shimmers as through heat waves. The quiet is complete except for the noise of millions of laboring wings.

A cloud of birds! Now they fall to the water with close-clapped wings, hundreds at a time, each a tiny splashing fountain. Their hunger is insatiable, but not because food is lacking, for the swarms of pilchards beneath the waves are vaster than the armies of birds which pursue them. Ancient Indian races enriched their irrigated fields with these little fish. A curious, tawny jewel is found upon this shore, known as “fishes’ eyes.” Might they be fossilized eyes of those fertilizer-fishes?

The appearance of this coast could not have been different in antediluvian days, with the screeching birds and the mammoth terrapin off-shore, those associates of the dodo.

The birds fly out at sunrise and spend the day in fishing, resting upon the waves when they are tired, and at sunset return to their giant stone islands for the night. Alone, the call of a sea-bird would be lost in the fury of the meeting of cliff and sea. But as a mass of white gulls can assume blackness by mere quantity, so their mingled voices can take on an overwhelming poignancy of sound. Louder than the crash of breakers, louder than the barking and snorting of the bald, fat seals loping over them in droves, surges the great cry of the birds, as, in a shower of wild calls diverse as themselves, they settle upon the rocks: pelicans, cormorants, mollyhawks, gannets, sea-mews, gulls, osprey, occasional tropical flamingoes lost among ice-birds and stormy petrels, wild ducks, Inca terns, and the weird, amphibious “bird-child,” which tries to stand erect, fluttering its cartilaginous wings, braced by its indistinguishable tail. All the birds of the ocean gather here, from sandpeeps to albatrosses, a surfeit of life to accentuate the barrenness of the shore. They are multiplying every year their already limitless myriads, useless to man as the savages of the interior, without commercial value now of any kind, yet not annihilated on that account. It is said that all are souls of sailors lost at sea. In each stormy petrel a lost apprentice lives again, in each pelican a boatswain, in each mollyhawk a chief officer, in each albatross a sturdy old captain.

One is tempted to write of the romance of the sea-birds of Peru, if romance has in it any of the fascination of waste on a large scale, for like barrenness, waste must be on a large scale to be picturesque. Where is the impertinence of it so overwhelming as in nature—her spendthrift production of unused powers, and the daring of her destruction?

A German scientist, investigating the guano interests, reported eleven million birds on one of the Chincha Islands, for these are the guano birds, and these wild, craggy islands the Guano Islands, a jewel-casket of Peru, which now abandoned, emptied of its contents, stands wide open, staring vacant in the sunlight, that its owners may not forget its former fullness.

Under the stimulus of pure guano a plant will spring to mammoth dimensions, lavishing blossoms and fruit. Ancient races, even the foreign Incas, realized its magical endowments and made laws governing its use. But land enriched by guano into immense fertility lapses after a while, barer than before.

A few sailing ships, hoping to glean poor remnants of this accumulation of the centuries, still huddle as close as possible to the black rocks, which, because of the quantity of that very fertilizer which has distinguished them, are made repellent to life of any kind. In this laboratory of the strongest fertilizer, there is not the slightest trace of vegetation—Peru in paradox.

The sunset blazes through the fissures and shoots shafts of opalescent light under the great stone bridges toward the mountainside of the candelabrum, veiled in a hazy shimmer. Defiantly gorgeous it is, all but the young moon which nestles among rushing scarlet and black clouds.

A giant candelabrum, at least four hundred feet long, is hollowed deep in the rock of the sheer volcanic headland above the sea. Its trenches do not fill with drifting sand, though the natives of Pisco make periodic pilgrimages across the bay, just to be sure. Some think it is a sign of royalty, a flaunt of the Incas, or the boundary-mark of a conquered kingdom. Some say it was a warning made by the Spaniards after Pisco was sacked by English freebooters in the seventeenth century, for though now over a mile inland, it was then a coast town. Such is the equilibrium of the Peruvian coast! Others call it “the three crosses,” the life-penance many years ago of a Franciscan friar named Guatemala.

But a symbol does not for mere inquiry give up the secret of its hidden mystery. Doubtless the origin and purpose of the Candelabrum of Pisco will never be known.

A few small, square, purple shadows mark a town, put down at random in the desert beside the sea. Some houses are made of the ribs and jaws of whales. A conspicuous white building, a little removed, is for sufferers with bubonic plague. Crosses surmount hummocks round about the town. People are making pilgrimages to and fro. And over all, white-headed vultures are wheeling. They spread their wings and cry in the silence.

Dust covers the little city, clustering about a market-place of sand. A fountain without water mutely occupies its center. Lamp-posts without lamps surround it, and the mud houses are without windows. The cathedral towers have no bells. Strange plaster figures are sculptured upon the façade, and infants with hands put on backwards hold up the portico. Beyond the door with a two-inch keyhole are Virgins in pink silk and gold tinsel, saints with rows of parallel ribs, angels with gauze wings, towering altars of gingerbread work, artificial flowers, and silver-paper fringe.

Glossy-haired women, their black mantas (head-shawls) thrown back, drag stiff skirts through the dirty sand. Half-naked children gnaw at the inside of long bean-pods. Mangy dogs with dusty skin and a sparse sprinkling of yellow hair slink into the shadows. Black goats and their attenuated kids search about in the sand for something to eat. Men and women file out of black interiors, carrying gourds full of brilliant edibles. Meal braizes over a low fire on the sand; a woman crouching over it whips the flame with the end of her long hair. From time to time, to make a brighter blaze, she picks up pieces of wood with her strong toes. Near by struts a blue-eyed bird. It is a huerequeque, the household scavenger. Bits of cloth hang about his tall knees. The woman explains that they are trousers intended to keep him warm. She is sorry I could not have come a few days later, for she is about to make him some new ones for summer, of lighter quality, with lace edges.

The market is held in the bed of a “river,” no less dry than the surrounding desert. Old women behind piles of tropical fruits, guayabas, pacays, ciruelas, gossip to a whir of small mandolins. Heavy-browed men in flapping sombreros drink thick liquids and purchase pats of red and yellow picante (a highly seasoned dish). Groups of pack-horses with silver bridles are tied round about the market.

But surprises are lurking in these coast towns. Behind heavy, unexpected doors, the single affluent family of the town receives in a peacock-blue salon. There is a lady in brown, with trimmings of blue velvet and cotton lace, and a perpendicular yellow hat. Another is in purple velvet, with swan’s-down hat and photograph brooch of her sister. A third, wearing green velvet, a salmon colored hat with red roses, and holding a pink silk handkerchief embroidered in lavender, sits purring beside her red-faced German fiancé. The carpet is red, the furniture covered with brown brocade; there are statues of carved alabaster with gilt edges and pink cuspidors. Gold mirrors, chromos of Venetian court life, and pasteboard calendars of bygone years hang upon the walls. The Spanish tiles of long ago are painted over.

Farther up the street a door may open upon a wilderness of vicuña rugs as tawny as a lion and softer than moleskin. Shawls of tan-colored wool, silkier than Liberty fabrics, lie about. One is not surprised that vicuña wool was reserved for royal use in Inca days, nor that blankets of it were sent by the conquerors as offerings to Philip II. There are little foot-warmers made of vicuña fur and chinchilla skins, wiry penguin skins and a deafening noise of singing birds in cages. A black-eyed girl with hair like tarred rope stands making cazuela (a thick soup) and paring guavas. She claps her hands, and many doves fly in to peck the crumbs from her lips.

CHAPTER II

DESERT QUALITY

Up from the shore stretches the bare immensity of desert, ending in one tremulous horizon with the ocean, and with the wilderness of mountains against the pulsating sky at the other. It is the Land of Light. All sensation of color is lost in this great sensation of light, an ardent light “shining through things, not on them.” Even the clouds expire from excess of light. It reduces all colors to mere hot vibration. The translucent mountains swim in a sea of light, reflecting from it as from wide stretches of water. Though sensation of color is lost in light, their huge forms are distinct in the radiant atmosphere, but unreal as if half-veiled.—One attribute of mirage is absolute clearness of outline.—Insignificant details emerge, but they rouse admiration only because of the light investing them.

The whole wide desert culminates in illusion and mystery of distant outlines. Everything floats in it, as it sweeps over from the opalescent mountains. A cross in the midst of the shelly sand, “protruding through thin layers of mirage,” marks the spot where a greatly feared bandit was killed. Skulls are heaped beneath it, with matches and half-burned candles.

Water being denied, the desert is soaked with sun. It is the Land of Heat. No plant grows in the scorching soil, no animal can endure it. No bird, no insect flies through the burning atmosphere. Each object shimmers until it seems but the reflection of itself. Fire descends from the burnished sky and vibrates in the air and scalds the sand. Yet concentrating a tropical sun, this hot solitude lies between the cold ocean and the mountains, a region of ice.

This desert is the abode of weird phenomena. Sometimes a globe of fire springs to the size of the sun, illuminating the sky for a quarter of an hour; then it dissipates into an infinitude of stars, which wriggle off into bright little tails and disappear.

A slowly moving company, muffled to the eyes, with heads done up like Tuaregs of the Sahara, mincing across the desert on donkeys, suddenly see themselves swinging along over their own heads, as if magnified by a gigantic mirror in the sky. The clouds give back strange pictures of one’s self enlarged and surrounded by a halo or a circular iris, summoning a saint or revealing a fairy. This quality is inherent in Peru, making ordinary moments ornamental.

Near Casma is a hill called “Dreadful,” whose continuous sandslides when the heat is greatest give off a sound of mystery, suggesting heat, like the roar of a distant volcano.

No matter how much the political status of Peru may change from century to century, it remains always the lair of earthquakes. Mines of gold and silver, islands of guano, deserts of nitrate, may be in turn discovered, exploited, exhausted. Earthquakes destroy those who have been enriched as those who have lived beside them in want. Even now earthquakes are almost daily recurrent along the coast. In laying your ear to the ground you can hear subterranean rumblings. Only in the frequency of slight shocks do people feel secure; otherwise they know the underground world is hoarding strength for a fury of destruction. As a traveler of the old time expressed it: “The inhabitants are subject to being buried in the ruins of their own houses at any time.”

The Indians say that when God rises from His throne to review the human race, each step as He progresses is an earthquake. As soon as they feel the pressure of His foot upon the earth, they rush from their huts to show themselves to Him. When the rumbling becomes loud enough to be noticeable, dogs howl, beasts of burden stop and spread their legs to secure themselves from falling, people rush to doorways, and churches are emptied in an instant. Reddish mists steam from the sea, bad odors from the earth; distant thunder—complete wind-stillness. The clouds of sea-birds rise from the earth and fly high, watching an agony in which they have no part. Then a frightful crash, rocks are torn asunder, great masses fall off as islands into the sea, which is still. But soon it turns black, boiling with a smell of sulphur, and many dead fish float about.

Omnipresent, the earthquake is a mystery which no laws can govern, beyond man’s comprehension or control. One never gets accustomed to it. Horror at a first shock only increases with further experience. Earthquake is linked with freaks of nature; it lifts up a ridge across the bed of a stream; it alters the face of the earth so that lawsuits spring up over changed boundaries. It vitiates the soil. Blooming fields wither, crops are lost, and cattle die from eating the scorched grass. The fiery core of earth is nearer the cooled surface than we imagine. But here at least there are no “torments from heaven.” In Peru it is said that lightning is worse than earthquake, emanating as it does from God’s own realm.

Even the climate of the coast partakes of mystery. The clouds hurrying from the Atlantic have drenched a whole continent of jungle in tropical downpour, and before they reach the desert, their last drop of moisture has been wrested from them as snow—drained dry by the Andes. The tropical sun heats, and the Antarctic current bringing its icy winds, cools. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other. For the red-hot desert can also be cold! The low-hanging garuas, the ocean mists of half a year, chill the desert and cling to the base of the mountains, fading lighter and lighter up and away from the black rocks where white surf is breaking. Such are the facts of the case, but it has been thought that the original god, Con, was responsible, for once in anger he deprived this desert coast of rain.

The desert is majestically empty, a great “vision of nothing without perspective.” Yet its mere emptiness suggests breadth, backward and forward, up and down, both in time and space. An unheard silence lies between the empty horizons, perfect except for the “great, faint sound of breakers,” the tumble of an unused ocean of water, which destroys without moistening the desert shores.

It seems lifeless. Harmless and peaceful at least, it presents nothing to be destroyed by sun-blight. It remains, as it apparently always has been, the realm of death—though even death presupposes life before it. But disturb the desert, and a thousand forces spring into action, furiously attacking the intruder. The heat of the sun assumes a ghoulish love of destruction, and at night the stars look down upon a creature shivering with fever, reeking with wet in this desert place. Possessing all fruitful ingredients within and kindly elements without, the desert sleeps. It needs only one thing to burst into life.

A mysterious river springs forth full-grown. From what glacier or clear, icy fountain up on the frozen puna may it not have issued? And then, after a mysterious incubation, it returns to sparkle here in the light, and in the leaves and flowers which the dampened earth is ready to produce.

There are traditions that sometimes a vagrant shower escapes from the magnetism of the mountain-tops. The flowers waiting just beneath the surface spring up like bloom over the June earth. The water was a shower of bluebells! A fugitive vegetation greedily spreads, quickly as it disappears with the passing of the water. In some places cotton grows to the height of a horse’s head, a luxuriant crop, too unexpected for harvest. This brilliant life lasts a week, perhaps more, and then lapses. Where do the slumbering flowers conceal themselves? Where, indeed, does the pansy get its coloring matter?

The desert of Peru is varied: toward the south the coast is strewn with borax, white upon the cliffs; toward the north petroleum gushes from beneath it. Upon the red plains of Huacho are the salt lakes of Pampa Pelada, reflecting the sun in a thousand colors. “White dust-whirlpools dance on its white floor.” Its banks are scattered with the bones of animals which have come there for salt, and its perpendicular cliffs are haunted by flesh-eating birds. There, gnarled gray shrubs “loom as if carved out of clay.” Beyond, the desert is coated with nitrate; yet here it seems but pulverized bones, beneath acres of white skeletons bleached by a thousand years—gaunt testimony to its desertdom since prehistoric Indian races struggled to make it blossom.

In the Pampa of Islay the desert takes on a terra-cotta hue. Whirlwinds progress from hollow to hollow. Above the purple mountains, shading away from the red desert, bright blue peaks are snow-covered to set them off from the sky. Fog shadows drop darkness here and there over their barrenness. Even the mist has a poetry of contrast.

Across the plain a constant ocean wind sweeps fine white beach-sand along with waves of color, no less real because impalpable. Its pilgrimage of a thousand years toward the mountains is uninterrupted, for the wind blows always from the southwest. It causes the rippled waves of sand which it brings along to assume in traveling a crescent shape—the wandering médanos.

Sometimes larger dunes overtake smaller ones, which, so absorbed, become firmer in shape as they journey toward the mountains. Should two collide, they are shivered, then blend in a new crescent, usually to separate again.

Growing from a network of roots within the moving dune, the snowy heads of a small plant maintain themselves just above the sand as it drifts over the hard plateau.

The médanos are scattered as thickly as the crescent shadows of some vast eclipse, a labyrinth of nature. They are as mysterious as “mushrooms growing in rings, marsh-fires which cannot warm, or the shrinking of the sensitive plant.”

The sand drops constantly over the acute crest. From all about come soft sounds, an overwhelming minor music, almost inaudible. Were you in a forest, you might think it was the soughing of the wind through the branches or the shuffle of locusts devouring a tree.

These playthings of the wind have been called symbols of the Moon in the land of the Sun, since nothing in Inca days could dissociate itself from either; a crescent Moon humbled by the Sun’s anger, allowed to possess her former fullness but a day at a time, doomed to be obliterated over and over again.

The worth of anything consists in the fact that through it can be seen something more beautiful than itself, something to which it forms the setting. Words are mere points of departure. What limitless excursions can even one word suggest, into countries more wonderful