Chapter XVI: The City of the Sun (2)

The city covered the northern and more elevated end of a half-green plain, enclosed by velvety-brown mountain flanks and dying away in hazy, labyrinthian distance. On the edge of the ridge on which we stood, Sacsahuaman, a mere knoll from this height, with its fortress, frowned down upon the city. A hulking, two-tower cathedral faced an immense plaza, faded red roofs giving the scene its chief color, until this broke into the velvet green of the plain, which in turn shaded into the soft brown of the surrounding ranges. But neither words nor photographs can give more than a faint hint of the charm and fascination of what is in many respects the most interesting spot in the Western Hemisphere, a charm enhanced by the anticipation of a long overland journey. There came upon me pity for the tourist who comes sneaking into the famous city by train along the valley below. This in its turn was succeeded by a regret that the hands of time could not be set back 400 years, to the day when Balboa first peered out upon the Pacific, that I might sit here and watch the activities of a world totally different from that we know; a regret that what men call the Conquest of Peru ever happened. What days were those, when there were really new worlds to discover! What would I not have given to have preceded Pizarro a bit—and been provided with the magic cap of invisibility to save me from being served up as an exotic delicacy on the Inca’s table.

A swift, stony descent that soon became a regular cobbled stairway, once topped by the Huancapuncu, or West Gate, led through none too pleasantly scented suburbs, the population staring agape at sight of a white man in shirt-sleeves and belligerently armed descending afoot into the famous city. The chusco and Indian followed at my heels across a great market square, past a prettily flowered little rectangle, and I marched at last out upon the broad central plaza, so densely populated with the shades of history. I had loafed away thirty-eight days since leaving Huancayo, though only twenty-two of them had been even partly spent on the road. The distance had proved almost exactly 400 miles, making a total of 2380 miles that I had covered on foot since Hays and I walked out of the central plaza of Bogotá nearly fourteen months before.

The City of the Sun, ancient capital of the Inca Empire, which Garsilaso called Cozco and Stevenson Couzcou, is to-day but a shadow of its once imperial grandeur. The famous Inca historian states that the name corresponded to the Spanish _ombligo_, and from his day to this writers have referred to it as the Navel of the Inca Empire. Educated cuzqueños of to-day deny this derivation, asserting that the Quichua word for navel is, and always has been, _pupu_. The talkative old successor of Valverde chanced, when I called upon him, to have just been reading an ancient manuscript in which the words _ccori ccoscco_ (crumbs or shavings of gold), occurred frequently in the description of the city, and he held this to be the real origin of the name.

Whatever of truth or exaggeration there may have been in the statements of old chroniclers that the city gleamed with gold at the time of the Conquest, little of that royal aspect remains. The chief and almost only material reminders of the days of the Incas are long walls of beautiful cut stone in the central portion of the modern city. Indeed, in all Peru the mementoes of the ancient race are almost wholly confined to walls. Some of these are “dressed down” so smoothly that the joints seem mere pencil-marks. Most of them are cyclopean, rough-hewn boulders of irregular size and shape, similar to the Pitti Palace in Florence, which is by no means so perfect in workmanship. There are almost no curved or circular walls, the chief exception to this being the former Temple of the Sun, now the Dominican monastery, where, like mud huts superimposed on the ruins of a mighty race, contented old friars lounge among the glories of long ago. The remnants are chiefly street after street in which the old walls have been left standing from six to twenty feet high, the whitewashed adobe of the ambitionless modern descendants above them. For the most part these form only one side of each street, for the elbow-rubbing passageways of the Incas, of which one still remains intact, were too narrow even for Spanish notions. But the city of to-day is still defined by these long reaches of elaborately cut stones, which, legend has it, divided the ancient capital into regular squares. They are Egyptian in aspect, these massive walls, shrinking toward the top, as do the rare doors and openings of Inca construction that have survived. Here and there they have been rudely torn open to give entrance to a blacksmith-shop, a bakery, a chicharia, or, it would seem, for no other reason than the mere lust for destruction. Everywhere old walls stare out upon the passerby with Indian stolidity, as if refusing to tell the stories they might so easily if they chose. Even where the walls themselves have disappeared to furnish building material for the churches and monasteries of the conquerors, the magnificent doorways have sometimes been preserved as the entrance to some modern hovel, and give a suggestion of what this imperial city, so ruthlessly destroyed, might have been.

It is only these walls and the historical memories with which they are saturated that distinguish Cuzco from any other city of the Sierra. The life of the place is drab and uninspiring, wellnigh as colorless as the most monotonous village of the Andes. The metropolis, no doubt, of the Western Hemisphere in the fifteenth century, in the twentieth it seems a little backwater almost wholly cut off from the main stream of life. For a long time after the Conquest it was queen of the Andes, greater even than Lima. Then as the Inca highway fell into decay under the squabbling and incompetent successors of the provident Incas, it shrunk away into its mountain-girdled isolation, until to-day it is less known to Peru itself than is London or Berlin. For one limeño who has visited Cuzco, the historical gem of the continent, a hundred have journeyed to Paris.

The Conquistadores, fond of exaggerating their prowess by multiplying the numbers of their defeated enemies, ascribed to Cuzco 200,000 inhabitants. This is inconceivable. To-day a trustworthy census, taken by the American rector of the university a few weeks before my arrival, shows the population to be slightly under 20,000. It may, this authority fancies, have numbered 100,000 at the time of the Conquest. The percentage of marriages was found to be extremely low, though the birth-rate holds its own. A few white officials and _comerciantes_, what would be called petty shopkeepers elsewhere, are in evidence; otherwise Cuzco has chiefly the aspect of an Indian town, its plazas too vast for its shrunken population.

An ancient chronicler tells us that “through the heart of the capital ran a river of pure water, its sides faced with stone for a distance of twenty leagues.” Granting that he carelessly wrote leagues when he would have said _cuadras_, none but a Spaniard would call the stream a river, and the purity of its water, if it ever existed, has long since departed. To-day this “stone-faced” Huatenay at the bottom of its deep-gashed gorge becomes a trickling sewer as it enters the town, passing directly beneath the principal buildings and carrying off such refuse as its sluggishness makes possible. The vast central plaza, far from level and once even larger than to-day, is faced as usual by the cathedral, second only to that of Lima, or, being of stone rather than of reeds and plaster, perhaps to be rated the first in Peru. There is something of the soft velvet-brown of Salamanca about the churches of Cuzco, that calls, not for a kodak, but for an artist. The blue-black plaster interior, pretending to be also of cut stone, is divided, after the Spanish custom, by the choir, with splendid carved stalls. In the sacristy are ranged the dusky portraits of all the Bishops of Cuzco, from sophistical old Valverde to him of the gold-leaf theory. In the scented twilight of the nave gather all the motley population, the male _gente_ only excepted, after the free-for-all manner of Andean churches. Dogs are not permitted to enter. But it is a strange Latin-American rule that cannot be circumvented. I have seen a chola pause at the door, sling her puppy in the manto on her back, as she would have carried a baby, and enter to kneel before a tinselled image, the puppy licking her face affectionately from time to time as she prayed.

In the center of the plaza stands a fountain topped by a life-size bronze Indian. A figure of some great Inca? No, indeed; but a North American “redskin,” feathers, in buckskins, unAndean haughtiness and all, armed with such a bow and arrows as no Inca ever beheld. The exotic is ever more pleasing than the local. The ornate façade of “La Compañía,” testimonial to Jesuit wealth in colonial days, stares awry at the cathedral. Around the other sides of the square are the usual arched and pillared arcades, gaudy with everything that appeals to the eye and purse of the Peruvian muleteer. Here are gay leather knapsacks in which to carry his coca and less valuable possessions, richly decorated trappings for his animals, _quenas_, or fifes, to while away the weary hours across the unpeopled páramos, and the many-colored “skating-caps” with earlaps which are worn not only by babies, but by many of the Indians of surrounding hamlets. The clashing of shod hoofs sounds now and then over the cobbles, but the absence of vehicles, which is so curious a feature of the interior cities of the Andes, would be striking to a newcomer. A “ferrocarril de sangre,” what we might call a street-car of flesh and blood—a roofed platform on wheels behind phlegmatic mules—rambles down to the station on train-days. Memories of viceregal times hover about the rare sedan-chair that serves the same purpose. Cuzco had no electric lights as yet, though she continued to hope, and my friend Martinelli had enstalled a dynamo to operate his cinema in the patio of the “Hotel Central.”

Cuzco was the first place in South America with any hint of a tourist resort about it. Visitors have become almost familiar sights, and there was already developing that pest of European show-places, unwashed and officious urchins offering their services as “guides,” an occupation undreamed of elsewhere on the continent. A wily Catalan resident pays any street Arab twenty cents for bringing him first news of the arrival of a foreigner—by train; those who tramp in from the north are, of course, overlooked—taking a sporting chance on recovering the _dos reales_ from the possible victim. But the business is still in embryo, though there are those who prophesy that Cuzco will some day become the Rome of South America—not entirely to its own advantage.

There are many points of similarity between Cuzco and Quito, located at opposite ends of what is left of the ancient Inca highway. In climate they are much alike. Being 11,380 feet above the sea and on the thirteenth parallel south, surrounded by high and snowy mountains, even though at some distance, one would expect the former capital of Tavantinsuyo to be colder. But even in this rainy season, though the atmosphere was often lead-heavy from the almost constant downpour, it was only more dreary, not lower in temperature. Neither of the two cities has a river worthy the name; the Machángara and the Huatenay, with their slight branches, serve alike as dumping-grounds, and equally break the soil with deep quebradas. Splendid views of both cities may be had from the mountains that shut them in, though in this respect Quito surpasses. The soft evening air, the singing of birds, the rows of tall, maidenly-slender eucalyptus trees behind massive mud walls, the long roads to the railway stations, are alike characteristic of the two towns. In both an atrocious din of church-bells tortures the hours before dawn, though here again the Ecuadorian capital wins the palm; nor can the cuzqueño policeman rival his fellow of the equator in shrilling away the monotonous hours of darkness. To nearly as great an extent as in Quito the patios and lower stories are given over to Indians and servants, with the “gente decente” holding the upper floor. Both towns are colorful in garb; both are peerless when the sun shines, and gloomy under clouds; both have the drowsy air of places far removed from the real world, with many times the number of shops needed droning through a precarious existence. On the other hand, whereas the Indians of Quito speak Spanish also, here one must know Quichua to carry on any extended intercourse. There are a few beautiful women in Quito, too; I never saw one in Cuzco, though this may be merely another instance of my abominable luck. Some Indian girls between five and fifteen are pretty, but they are so often veiled by the grime of years that the virtue must be chiefly accepted on faith. Nor has Cuzco anything approaching that unrivalled circle of hoar-headed peaks that ennobles the vista of its rival to the north. The two cities would probably be about equal in population were Cuzco also the national capital—as it should and hopes some day to be. “We want to free ourselves from those degenerate negroes of Lima and establish an independent government under an American protectorate,” a self-styled lineal descendant of the Incas by way of Tupac Amaru confided to me. As it is, Quito is more than three times the larger.

Cuzco has been called the dirtiest city on earth. I am not sure it merits the title. The Andean town that aspires to that proud and haughty position will have to exert itself constantly—no cuzqueño characteristic—keeping always on the alert for new and hitherto uninvented styles of uncleanliness; for it will have dogged, unrelenting competition, vastly more determined and energetic than any other form of industry. Quito, for instance, is a formidable rival in this also, especially as Cuzco has the handicap of a much smaller population—and in a contest of this kind every little one helps. But though it is too early to prophesy the final rating, there is little doubt that the former Inca capital will at least win honorable mention—unless she continues to import American alcaldes.

Which brings me to the chief influence in modern Cuzco. Among the legends of the origin of the Inca Empire is the tradition of a tall, imperious man of white skin, with blond hair on both head and cheeks, who arose from the sea and took up the task of teaching the Children of the Sun more proper ways of living. He was called Ingasman, whence some have held that he was a castaway Briton from some ship blown to these distant shores long before the days of Columbus. A fantastic yarn; yet is it impossible? The imagination likes to dwell on the possibility of the improbable story. Such an origin might account for the stolid British temperament of the Indians of the Andes; as to complexion, leave an Englishman in the tropics for generations and the result would be no darker than the self-styled lineal descendant of Tupac Amaru above mentioned. Whatever the truth of the legend, the modern teacher of the Children of the Sun came from the sea also,—an enthusiastic, hopeful young American who is officially rector of the university, but who, as town councilor and even mayor, has been responsible for most of the local improvements of recent years. For all the labors of Ingasman, the town was probably not noted for its immaculateness before the Conquest; to-day it is of that stagnant, Latin-American temperament that can be set in motion only by some external force. Thus we have the anomaly of seeing that “picturesqueness,” so often closely allied to uncleanliness, which Americans travel to Cuzco to see, being constantly reduced by one of their own race. Yet the influence of a single individual, however energetic, is limited; hence one must still be circumspect in inspecting old walls and Inca ruins, and the wise man always boils his water on the banks of the stinking Huatenay.

Of the old Inca race there remain few traces. The vast majority of the 20,000 cuzqueños are “descendants of the Incas” only in the loose acceptance of that phrase. For want of a proper name the people of Tavantinsuyo, the Four Corners of the Earth, have come to be called Incas, as the inhabitants of the United States are called Americans for lack of a national adjective. As a matter of fact, an _inca_ was a member of the royal family, of which the _Inca Ccápa_c was the ruling chief. It is easy to imagine other peoples quarreling with the race over their name—to their supreme indifference protesting that they, too, inhabited the Four Corners of the Earth, with the same right to the term as the tribes of Cuzco; and referring to the latter privately by something corresponding to “yanqui” or “gringo.”

The thick upper lip, wide nostrils, and broad face of the aboriginal race shows in some degree in all but a few cuzqueños; those of full Indian blood still make up a large percentage of the population. The Cuzco Indian is a type by himself. His skin is darker, his manner more cringing, his gait more slinking, than his fellows elsewhere; the faces of both males and females have a brutalized expression that seems to mark them as the most degenerate of all the Andean tribes. Rumor has it that they retain some slight and sadly mixed traditions of Huayna Ccápac and of the days when the native Empire occupied this vast plateau; but they are extremely chary of sharing any information they may possess. The Inca rule of having distinguishing costumes for each community still holds, especially in the matter of head-dress, and it is as easy for the initiated to recognize the birthplace of an Indian by his garments as to know a Hindu’s caste from his turban. Many from the towns surrounding Cuzco wear knitted, tasseled caps of gay colors, with earlaps. Those of the city are noted for their “pancake” hats, common to both sexes. These are round disks of straw, covered with flannel or an imitation of velveteen, one side of faded black with spoke-like stripes of color or gilt braid, the other brilliant or dull red, according to its age, which is generally advanced. In fine weather this is worn black side up; in wet it is reversed. The women are invariably barefoot, the men usually so, or with at most a strip of leather to protect their soles; except that old men who have once wielded the silver-mounted cane of authority over their section of the community uphold their dignity by wearing on Sundays and feast-days heavy, native shoes often with large buckles and always without socks. The women wear carelessly fastened blouses of coarse material, heavy skirts bunched about their waists, and a shawl fastened with one pin of large, fanciful head. The men dress in tight, ragged knee-breeches or loose, shoddy trousers of varying lengths, and ponchos which prove that full use is made of the little packages of crude aniline dyes sold in the market-square.

The quiet of this chief gathering-place is unusual. It has no clatter, but only a suppressed hum; for the Indian of Cuzco is as silent as he is inoffensive. Here huge strawberries are sold at twenty-five cents a hundred, the primitive-minded female vendors counting them out by tens in hissing Quichua sibilants. The hot country is only a day’s tramp from Cuzco; hence tropical as well as temperate fruits, are displayed, though often sadly crushed and maltreated by their transportation in sacks or nets on human backs. The Indians are here the same beasts of burden as elsewhere in the Andes. It is no uncommon thing to see a rather small man trot the mile from market to railway station with half a beef on his back. The wooden-headedness of the aboriginal, as well as his lack of strength for any labor except carrying, is often in evidence. I saw one ordered to take an iron wheelbarrow to another part of town. He removed the wheel and bound it on his wife’s back with a llama-hair rope, slung the rest on his own shoulders in the same manner, and away they trotted one behind the other.

When all is said and done the Andean Indian remains an enigma to the foreigner. At the end of a year of constant intercourse with him the traveler can quickly sum up his real knowledge of a race whose internal workings he has only guessed, confessing an inability to see from the aboriginal’s point of view, to be aware with his consciousness. There is an enormous difference between the South American Indian and the bearers of the same misnomer in our own country. The majority of our tribes were warriors, with an obstinate courage that took little account of odds. They could be killed; they could never be enslaved to a degree that made them profitable servants. From Tehuantepec southward, on the other hand, the aboriginals are noted for a subservience, not to say timidity, that made it possible for the Spaniards to exploit them ruthlessly, as do their descendants to this day. Was this characteristic the result or the cause of the government under which the Conquistadores found them? Ruled by the Incas in a far more autocratic form of imperialism than the worst known to-day, carrying authority into the very depths of their cabins and the most personal conduct of their lives, the Indians of the Andes were robbed of all initiative—granting that they ever possessed any—and became the most passive of human creatures. Having imbued their subjects with a sort of fatalism, a non-resistance to anything they conceived as authority, above all by convincing them of their own divine origin, the Incas made their conquest by the Spaniards easy; for the credulous masses readily accepted these bearded strangers as Children of the Sun also, to whom any resistance would be absurd. Thus must all false doctrines prove in time a boomerang to those who foster them.

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

A _chola_ of Abancay, wearing the _dicclla_ which all put on at the
age of puberty, and in which the baby is carried when one arrives]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is this Mr. ——?” I asked in English.

“It is.”

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

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

Naturally I grasped so urgent an invitation with both hands.

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

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

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

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

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