Читать книгу South America Observations and Impressions - James Bryce Viscount Bryce, Viscount James Bryce - Страница 5

None of the countries of South America, except Chile, has been demarcated by Nature from its neighbour; it is to historical events that they owe their present boundaries. This is eminently true of Peru, which is, save on her ocean side, marked off from the adjoining countries neither by river line nor by mountain line nor by desert. Her territory includes regions naturally very dissimilar, about each of which it is proper to say a few words here.

The western strip, bordering on the Andes and the Pacific, is nearly all pure desert, sterile and uninhabited, except where those river-valleys referred to in the last chapter descend to the sea. The eastern part, lying on the farther side of the Andes, and called by the people the Montaña, subsides from the mountains into an immense alluvial plain and is covered by a tropical forest, thick and trackless, unhealthy for Europeans, and inhabited, except where a few trading towns have been built on the rivers, only by Indian tribes, none of them much above savagery, and many still heathen. It is a region most of which was until lately virtually unexplored and thought not worth exploring. Within recent years, however, the demand for india rubber has brought in the agents of various trading companies, who have established camps and stations wherever the rivers give access to the forests and send the rubber down the Amazon to be shipped to Europe and North America. The harmless and timid Indians have in some places been seized and forced to work as slaves by ruffians supplying rubber to these companies, wretches apparently of mixed Spanish and native blood, who have been emboldened by the impunity which remoteness from regular governmental control promises to perpetrate hideous cruelties upon their helpless victims. It is a country of amazing natural wealth, for the spurs of the Andean range are full of minerals; there are superb timber trees in the forests, and the soil, wherever the trees and luxuriant undergrowths have been cleared off from it, has proved extremely fertile, fit for the growth of nearly every tropical product. Eastern Peru is physically a part, and not the largest part, of an immense region which includes the easternmost districts of Colombia and Ecuador upon the north and of Bolivia on the south, as well as a still larger area in western Brazil over which the same climatic conditions prevail – great heat and great humidity producing a vegetation so prolific that it is hard for man to hold his own against the forces of nature. This is indeed the reason why these tracts have been left until now a wilderness, suffering from the superabundance of that moisture, the want of which has made a wilderness of the lands along the Pacific coast. To this region, however, and to its future I shall return in a later chapter,14 and mention it here only because it is politically a part, and may hereafter become the most productive part, of the Peruvian Republic. The real Peru, the Peru of the ancient Indian civilization and of the Spanish colonial Empire, is the central region which lies along the Andes between these thinly settled, far eastern forests and the barren deserts of the Pacific coast.

Central Peru is altogether a mountain land, and is accordingly called by the people "the Sierra." It is traversed by two (more or less parallel) ranges of the Andes, the eastern and the western Cordilleras, which with their spurs and their branching ridges cover a large part of its area. It includes what is called the Puno, a comparatively level plateau, some seventy to one hundred miles wide and enclosed by these two main lines of the Cordilleras. Between the main ranges and their branches, there lie deep valleys formed by the courses of the four or five great rivers which, flowing in a northwesterly or northeasterly direction and ultimately turning eastward, unite to form the mighty Amazon. This Sierra region is, roughly speaking, about three hundred miles long (from northwest to southeast) and one to two hundred miles wide; but of this area only a small part is fit for settled human habitation. The average height of the plateau is from ten thousand to thirteen thousand feet above sea level, and that of the region fit for pasture on the slopes and tops of the ridges from ten thousand to fourteen thousand feet – the snow line varying from fifteen to nineteen thousand. As these slopes give pasture to llamas and alpacas and sheep, and in some favoured places to cattle, so in the less arid and less sandy tracts of the plateau there is some tillage. But the parts best suited for agriculture are to be found in the valleys, especially in so much of them as lies between ten thousand and four thousand feet above sea-level, for below five thousand feet their conditions become tropical and resemble those of the Amazonian forests. In these valleys the soil, especially where it is volcanic, is extremely fertile, but many of them are so narrow and their declivities so steep that cultivation is scarcely possible. No one accordingly who has studied the physical features of this country need be surprised to find that while the total area of Peru is about seven hundred thousand square miles, its population is estimated at only four million six hundred thousand. He may indeed be more surprised at the accounts which Spanish historians almost contemporary with the Conquest give of the far larger population, perhaps ten millions, that existed in the days of the Incas. The great falling off, if those accounts be correct, is explicable partly by the slaughter perpetrated by the first Spaniards and the oppressions practised by their successors during nearly three centuries, partly by the fact that districts near the coast which the remains of irrigation works shew to have been formerly cultivated are now sterile for want of water.

It was in the central highlands, at an altitude of from eight thousand feet and upwards that there arose such civilization as the ancient Peruvians developed: and its origin here rather than elsewhere in South America may be mainly due to favourable climatic conditions. There was enough rain to provide grass for animals and make tillage possible, and enough warmth to enable men to live in health, yet not enough either of rain or of heat to make nature too strong for man and to enfeeble man's capacities for work.

Temperature and rainfall resembled generally those of the plateau of Mexico, a region somewhat lower, but farther from the Equator: and it was under similarly fortunate conditions of climate and agricultural possibilities that the races inhabiting those highlands had made, when Europeans arrived, some considerable advances in the arts of life. This central Peruvian area is to-day, with the exception of the irrigated banks of a few streams reaching the Pacific, the only part of the country where either an agricultural or a pastoral population can support itself. The rest of Peru depends upon its mines, chiefly of silver and copper, – a source of wealth uncertain at best. It is only in a few valleys, the most productive of which I am going to describe, that the agricultural population occupies any large continuous area. As a rule each community is confined to its own valley and cut off from the others either by mountains or by high, bare ridges on which only sheep can be kept, most of them too high and bleak even for pasture.15

There is no better way of conveying some notion of the character of this central region, the true Peru, than by describing the country through which I passed by railway from Arequipa eastward to Lake Titicaca and thence northward to Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital. This railroad follows the line of the most important through route which war and commerce took in pre-Conquest times. It is the Southern Railroad of Peru, the main highway of the country. The section from Mollendo to the plateau at Juliaca was built many years ago, but the extension to Cuzco had been completed and opened less than a year before our visit. Both sections have been constructed by engineers from the United States, and the way in which the difficulties of extremely steep ascents and cuttings along precipitous slopes have been overcome reflects great credit on their skill. The gauge is the normal one. The line is owned by the Peruvian Corporation, a company registered in London, and under the energetic management of North American engineers it is doing a great deal to open up regions in which till some ten years ago there was not even a road fit for wheels. The passenger traffic is of course very small, and passenger trains run only once a day to Arequipa and thrice a week to Juliaca and Cuzco.

Quitting Arequipa on the southwestern side, the line winds up to the north and then to the east across a rugged and dreary region of rocky hill slopes, pierced by deep gorges through some of which brooks come down, fed by snow beds far above. It follows the line of a canyon, and wherever there is level ground at the bottom, some bright green strips of cultivation appear on the margin of the stream, with a few Indian huts; so even these upper regions, cold and desolate as they are, are not so wholly desolate as the Pampa below. The view looking back over the city lying in its green oasis, with a stony desert all round, is superb. As we climb higher, the mass of Ampato and other giants of the western Cordillera deep with snow, rise in the northwest, while westward one sees beyond the reddish grey mountains through which we had mounted to Arequipa from the desert Pampa, the gleaming sands of that desert, and behind them again, just on the horizon, the long, low bank of clouds that covers the Coast Range. Here at nine or ten thousand feet, one looks over the white upper surface of these clouds. Resting on the western edge of the Pampa, they stretch far out over the Pacific and veil it from sight. Thus steadily mounting, and seeing below in a ravine the hamlet of Yura, where is a mineral spring whose pleasantly effervescent water is drunk all over Peru, the train winds round the northern flank of Chachani under its huge black precipices. Behind it and behind El Misti, which shews as a symmetrical cone on this side as well as on that turned towards Arequipa, we entered at a height of about eleven thousand feet a region typical of the Peruvian uplands. There was plenty of coarse grass, studded with alpine flowers, a few belonging to European genera. Llamas and alpacas were grazing on the slopes, herded by Indians: there were sheep, and a few cattle, and in one place we thought we caught sight among low bushes of a group of vicuñas. This is a creature like the llama, but smaller, and useless as a beast of burden, because untameable. It roams over the hills between eleven thousand and fifteen thousand feet, and produces the finest of all the South American wools, of a delicate light brown tint, silky and soft as the fur of a chinchilla.

The scenery was strange and wild, not without a certain sombre grandeur. Below was the Chile River, the same which passes Arequipa, and to which we had returned after our circuit round Chachani. It was flowing in a deep channel which it had cut out for itself between walls of black lava: and the wide bare hollows beyond were filled with old lava streams and scattered ridges and piles of rock. To the southwest El Misti and his two mighty neighbours shut in the valley, and away to the south huge mountains, among them one conspicuous volcanic cone, were dimly seen, snowy summits mingled with the gathering clouds, for at this height rain and snow showers are frequent. The cone was probably Ubinas, the only active volcano in this neighbourhood, about sixteen thousand feet high.

Still mounting to the eastward, the line rose over gentler slopes to a broad, bleak, and wind-swept ridge where tiny rivulets welling up out of pools in the yellowish grass were flowing west to the Pacific and eastward to the inland basin of Lake Titicaca. Large white birds like wild geese were fluttering over us. Here were a few huts of the Indian shepherds near the buildings of the station; and here a cross marked the Cumbre or top of the pass, which is called the Crucero Alto, 14,666 feet above sea level. Higher ground cut off the view to the north and clouds obscured the view to the east, but to the south we could discern some of the lofty summits of the western Cordillera on the watershed of which we stood. Thunderstorms were growling on both sides, and out of black clouds far in the northwest towards Coropuna came bright flashes of chain lightning. At this height the country is comparatively open and the valleys shallow, and this, along with the wonderful clearness of the air, enables the eye to range to a vast distance. This northwestern thunderstorm which we were watching was possibly a hundred miles away. We were awed by the mere vastness of the landscape, in which we looked over tracts it would take many days' journeys to traverse, and saw mountains eighteen thousand feet high separated by nameless valleys no one ever enters, with hills and rocks tumbled about in chaotic confusion, as though the work of world-shaping had here just begun. Stepping out into the bitter wind, we walked about awaiting signs of the Soroche or mountain sickness so much dreaded by Andean travellers, especially when they come straight up from the coast to this vast height, as high as the Matterhorn or the highest peaks of the Rocky Mountains. The air was very cold and very thin, seeming not to fill the lungs. But nothing happened.

From the Crucero Alto the railway descends rapidly for two thousand feet past two large lakes, embosomed in steep green hills – they reminded me of Loch Garve in Ross-shire – till it reaches a wide, bare, desolate flat, evidently part of the former bed of Lake Titicaca, which was once far larger than it is to-day. Here we were in that central plateau which the people call the Puno and which surrounds the lake, its lower part cultivated and peopled. At the large village of Juliaca, whence a branch line runs to the port of Puno on the lake farther to the southeast, the main line turns off to the north, still over the flat land which, where not too marshy, is under tillage. The inhabitants were all Indians, and only at Tirapata, which is a point of supply for the mines on the eastern slope of the mountains, were white people to be seen. Far to the northeast, perhaps one hundred miles away, could be discerned a serrated line of snowy mountains, part of the eastern Cordillera which divides the Titicaca basin from the Amazonian valleys. At last the hills begin to close in and the plain becomes a valley, narrowing as we travel farther north till, at a sharp bend in the valley which opens out a new landscape, we pass under a rock tower sixteen thousand feet high, like one of the aiguilles of Mont Blanc immensely magnified, and see in front of us a magnificent mountain mass streaming with glaciers. Two great peaks of from eighteen thousand to nineteen thousand feet are visible on this side, the easternmost one a long snow ridge resembling the Lyskamm above Zermatt; and behind it there appears a still loftier one which may approach or exceed twenty thousand feet. This is the Sierra of Vilcanota, the central knot of the mountain system of Peru, as in it branches of the western inosculate with those of the eastern Cordillera. Though very steep, the highest peaks seemed to me, surveying them from a distance of fifteen or twenty miles, to offer no great difficulties to an active and experienced climber, apart of course from the rarity of the air at this immense height, a difficulty which, while negligible by many, is serious to some otherwise excellent mountaineers. The fact that the railroad passes close to these splendid summits gives unusual facilities for an assault on them, since the transportation of warm night coverings and of food is one of the chief difficulties in a cold and thinly peopled region. As none of the tops seems to have been yet scaled, they deserve the attention of aspiring alpinists.

Above the village of Santa Rosa the valley is uninhabited, a deep, grassy hollow between the Vilcanota group of peaks on the east and a lower though lofty range on the west, with piles of stones at intervals, and now and then we met or passed a string of llamas carrying their loads, for the railway has not wholly superseded the ancient modes of transportation.

Just at the very highest point of the col or pass of La Raya 14,518 feet above sea-level, in which the valley ends, the westernmost of these Vilcanota peaks is visible on the east behind a deep gorge, the upper part of which is filled by a glacier. From this glacier there descends a torrent which on the level top of the pass spreads out into a small shallow marsh or lake which the Peruvians held sacred as the source of the sacred river Vilcamayu: and from this lake the water flows partly south into Lake Titicaca, partly north into the Amazon and the Atlantic. Here indeed we were looking upon one of the chief sources of that gigantic stream, for of all the rivers that join to make the Amazon this is among the longest. During its course till it meets the river Marañon, it is called first Vilcamayu, then Urubamba, and finally Ucayali. The pass itself, a broad smooth saddle not unlike, if one may compare great things with small, the glen and watershed between Dalnaspidal and Dalwhinnie which marks the summit level of the Highland Railway in Scotland, has no small historic interest, for it has been a highway for armies as well as for commerce from the remotest times. The ancient track from Cuzco to the southern boundary of the Inca empire in Chile passed over it. By it the Spanish Conquistadores went backward and forward in their campaign of subjugation and in the fierce struggles among themselves which followed, nor was it less important in the War of Independence a century ago. Till the railway was recently opened, thousands of llamas bearing goods traversed it every year. What one now sees is nothing more than a fairly well-beaten mule track, and I could neither discern any traces nor learn that traces have been discovered either of the wall which the Inca rulers are said to have built across it as a defence from the Collao tribes to the south, or of the paved road which, as the old writers say, they constructed to connect Cuzco with the southern provinces.

Were such a spot in Switzerland or Tyrol, its lonely beauty would be broken by a summer hotel for health-seeking tourists; nor could one imagine a keener and more delicious air than this, though people with weak hearts might find it trying. As soon as we had got a little way down from the top, the lungs began to feel easier, for the denser and warmer air of its lower levels comes up on the northerly wind which we met in descending. The valley, still smooth and grassy, sinks rapidly and in an hour or two we had entered a climate quite different from that of the Titicaca plateau to the south. After some six or eight miles a place is reached called Aguas Calientes (Hot Waters), from the numerous mineral springs which bubble up close together from the ground, most of them too hot to taste, and all impregnated with iron and sulphur. They are said to be valuable in various maladies, and in France or Switzerland an Établissement des Bains would doubtless have arisen to enclose and exploit them. As it is, the only sign that they are used is a wooden hut erected over one of the springs in which the station master cures himself of rheumatism. There are only two houses besides the station, but on the hill above mines of copper and antimony are worked by Indian labour.

Below this point the floor of the valley falls again. It is still narrow, but the now warmer climate permits tillage, and the patient toil of the Indians, turning every bit of ground to account, cultivates fields of grain and potatoes sloping at an angle so steep that ploughing or hoeing seems almost impossible. When one asks how this happens, the answer is that the rapacity of lawyers, ousting the Indian from the better lands below, drives him to these less productive slopes. The hillsides are extraordinarily bare, but as fruit trees appear round the cottages, this may be due not to the altitude, but to the cutting down during many centuries of all other trees for fuel. Never have I seen an inhabited region – and in the case of this particular valley, a thickly inhabited region – so absolutely devoid of wood as is Peru. Even in Inca days, timber seems to have been very scarce. There is plenty to be had from the tropical forests lower down, but the cost of carrying logs up from them upon mule-back is practically prohibitive. A good, solid plank would be a load too heavy for a llama.

Twenty miles below the pass of La Raya is the town of Sicuani, which we were fortunate enough to see on the market day – Sunday – when the Indians from many miles round come to sell and buy and enjoy themselves. It is a good type of the well-to-do Peruvian village, the surrounding country being fertile and populous. The better houses, a few of them two storied, are of stone, the rest of sun-dried mud – that adobe which one finds all over Spanish America from the pueblos of New Mexico down to Patagonia. Their fronts are covered with a wash of white or light blue, and this, with the red-tiled roofs, gives a pleasant freshness and warmth of tone. The two plazas whose joint area is about equal to half of the whole town, are thronged with Indians, all the men and many of the women wearing the characteristic poncho, a rough woollen or, less often, cotton cloak which comes below the waist, and is usually of some bright hue. To this the women add gaudy petticoats, red or purplish, blue or green or violet, so that there is even more colour in the crowd than on the houses. The greatest variety is in the hats. The women wear round felts or cloth-covered straws, some almost as wide as a cardinal's; many are square, set off by gilt or silvered bands like the academic cap of the English Universities, though the brim is larger. The man's hat is smaller; it is mostly of stiff white felt, and underneath it is a tight fitting cloth cap of some bright colour, usually red, with flaps at each side to protect the ear and cheek from the piercing winds. Strings of glittering beads complete the Sunday dress of the women, and we saw only a few with silver ornaments. Most of the trading seemed to be done by barter, country folk exchanging farm or garden produce with the town dealers for groceries or cloth. The cotton cloths were largely made from the Peruvian plant cultivated in the warm coast valleys, while some of the woollen goods, such as blankets or stuff for petticoats, had come from England, as I saw on them the names of Yorkshire firms. Besides maize and nuts and peppers, together with oranges carried up from the hot valley of Urubamba seventy miles to the north, the most noticeable articles of commerce were a sort of edible seaweed brought from the coast, and dried marine star-fishes, and, above all, small bags of coca leaves, the article which is the one indispensable stimulant of the Indian, more for him than tea or coffee or alcoholic drinks are for the Asiatic or the European. It is a subtropical shrub or low tree which grows on the lower slopes of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes and is sold to the Indians in small quantities, as indeed all the sales and purchases seemed to be on a small scale, there being among the peasants very little money though very little downright poverty. South American countries are, for the traveller at least, a land of high prices, but here we saw savoury messes of hot stewed meat with chopped onions and potatoes and a small glass of chicha (the common drink of the country brewed from maize), thrown in, offered at the price of five centavos, less than two English pence or a United States five cent piece. It was surprising that in so thick and busy a crowd there should be, instead of the chattering and clattering that one would have heard in Europe, only a steady hum. The Quichua Indians are a comparatively silent race, quiet and well mannered, and inoffensive except when they are drunk. These Sicuani people were small in stature, few exceeding five feet six inches, their faces a reddish brown, the features regular though seldom handsome, for while the nose is often well formed, the mouth is ugly, with no fineness of line in the lips, although these are far less thick than a negro's. Some have a slight moustache, but beards are seen only on the mestizos (half breeds). Among the many diversities of feature which suggest that there has been an intermixture of races, perhaps long ago, there are two prevailing types – the broad, round, short face with full cheeks, and the longer face with an aquiline nose. All have dark brown or black eyes, and long, straight, black, rather coarse, hair, and in all there is a curiously stolid and impassive look as of men accustomed to centuries of monotony and submission. Impassiveness is the characteristic note of the Indian. The Kafir is like a grown-up child; the Chinese have a curious quiet alertness and keenness of observation; the Hindus (and most Orientals) are submissive though watchful as if trying to take the white man's measure: but the Indian is none of these things. In his obedience there is no servility: he is reserved, aloof, seemingly indifferent to the Viracocha16 and to things in general. The most noticeable in the throng were the Indian village alcaldes, each carrying as the badge of his office a long, heavy staff or cane, with a spike at the bottom and a large round head, bound with silver bands and covered at the top with a silver casing. This dignitary, appointed by the local authority annually, exerts in his little community an undisputed sway, enforced by his power of imprisonment. The post is eagerly sought, so that the wealthier sort will offer money to obtain it. We saw them moving through the crowd, all making way for them. There were, however, no disturbances to quell: the bright sun shone on an orderly and good-humoured crowd. Some groups, drawn a little apart, were enjoying the strains of a guitar or an accordion or those of the true national instrument, the Pandean pipe made of hollow reeds unequal in length, while above, on the hillside, the donkeys on which the wealthier peasants had ridden in and the llamas that had carried their produce stood patiently awaiting the declining light that should turn them homeward.

The only point of interest in Sicuani is the church and the arched gateway beside it. It is like any other village church, the architecture dull, the interior gloomy. But it was in this church that in 1782 Andres the nephew of Tupac Amaru, half of Spanish Biscayan, half of Inca blood, received episcopal absolution for his share in the great insurrection of the Indians under that chieftain, an absolution to be shortly followed by his murder at the hands of perfidious Spaniards; and it was on this arch (if the story we heard be true) that some of the limbs of the unfortunate Tupac Amaru himself were exposed after he had been torn in pieces by four horses in the great square of Cuzco.

The valley of the Vilcamayu River below Sicuani unfolds scene after scene of varied beauty. It is indeed even more bare of wood than those valleys of the central Apennines, of which, allowing for the difference of scale, it sometimes reminds one. The only tall tree is the Australian Eucalyptus, which though only recently introduced, is now common in the subtropical parts of South America, and already makes a figure in the landscape, for it is a fast grower. These Australian gum trees have now overspread the world. They are all over South Africa and on the Mediterranean coasts, as well as in Mexico and on the Nilghiri hills of southern India, where they have replaced the more beautiful native groves.

In the wider and more level stretches of the valley, populous villages lie near together, for the irrigated flats of the valley floor flourish with abundant crops, and the rich red soil makes the hillsides worth cultivating even without irrigation. Although stained by the blood of battles more than is any other part of Peru, the land has an air of peace and comfort. The mountains on each side seemed to be composed of igneous rocks, but only in one place could I discover evidences of recent volcanic action. About fifteen miles below Sicuani six or seven small craters are seen near together, most of them on the northeast side of the valley, the highest some twelve hundred feet above it; and the lava flows which have issued from two or three of these are so fresh, the surface still so rugged and of so deep a black, that one may conclude that not many centuries have elapsed since the last eruption. The higher ranges that enclose the valley, crags above and curving lines of singular beauty below, evidently belong to a more remote geological age. Their contrasts of dark rock and red soil, with the flat smiling valley between and the noble snowpeaks of the Vilcanota group filling the southern distance, make landscapes comparable in their warmth of colour and variety of form to those of the Italian Alps. They are doubly delightful to the traveller who has been passing through the savage solitudes that lie between this and the Pacific coast. Here at last he seems to get a notion of what Peru may have been like before the invaders came, and when a peaceful and industrious people laboured in the service of the Inca and the Sun God. Now, to be sure, there is a railway, and the station houses are roofed with corrugated iron. Yet the aspect of the land can have changed but little. The inhabitants are almost all Indian, and live and cultivate much as they did four centuries ago; their villages are of the same mud-built, grass-roofed cottages. They walk behind their llamas along the track, playing a rustic pipe as they go; and the women wash clothes in the brook swollen by last night's rain; and up the side glens which descend from the untrodden snowy range behind, one catches glimpses of high, steep pastures, where perhaps hardly even a plundering Spaniard ever set his foot and where no extortionate curate preyed upon his flock.

Swinging down the long canyon of the Vilcamayu – it is long, indeed, for there are four hundred miles more of it before it opens on the great Amazonian plain – and rattling through deep rock cuttings and round sharp curves above the foaming torrent, the line at last turns suddenly to the northwest towards Cuzco, and we bid farewell to the river. Gladly would we have followed it down the valley into scenery even more beautiful than that of its upper levels, where luxuriant forests along the stream contrast with the snowy summits of the Eastern Cordillera towering above. But from this point on there are only mule paths, and travel is so slow that a week would have been needed to reach the finest part of this scenery.17 Renunciation is the hardest part of travelling.

Our way to Cuzco lay up a wide lateral valley, enclosed by green hills, well cultivated and studded with populous villages, near one of which can be descried the ruins of a large ancient building which tradition attributes to the Inca Viracocha. The vale has an air of peace and primitive quiet, secluded and remote, as of a peaceful land where nothing had ever happened. At last, as the mountains begin to close in, the end of the journey comes in sight; and here, under steep hills enclosing a basin-shaped hollow – what in Peru is called a Bolson– lies Cuzco, the sacred City of the Sun.

Cuzco belongs to that class of historic cities which have once been capitals of kingdoms and retain traces of their ancient glory, a class which includes Moscow and Krakau, Throndhjem and Upsala, Dublin and Edinburgh and Winchester, Aix la Chapelle and Bagdad and Toledo and Granada, a class from which imperial Delhi has now just emerged to recover its former rank. And Cuzco was the capital of an empire vaster than was ruled from any of those famous seats of power, the centre of a religion and a dominion which stretched southward from the Equator for two thousand miles and embraced nearly all that there was of whatever approached civilization in the South American Continent.

Every traveller is familiar with the experience of finding that the reality of some spot on which his imagination has dwelt is unlike what it had pictured. I had fancied a walled city visible from afar on a high plain, with a solitary citadel hill towering above it. But Cuzco lies inconspicuous, with its houses huddled close in its bolson at a point where three narrow glens descend from the tableland above, their torrents meeting in it or just below it; and no buildings are seen, except a few square church towers, till you are at its gates. It stands on a gentle slope, the streets straight, except where the course of a torrent forces them to curve, and many of them too narrow for vehicles to pass one another, but vehicles are so few that this does not matter. They are paved with cobblestones so large and rough that the bed of many a mountain brook is smoother, and in the middle there is an open gutter into which every kind of filth is thrown, so that the city from end to end is filled with smells too horrible for description. Cologne, as Coleridge described it a century ago, and the most fetid cities of Southern Italy are fragrant in comparison. The houses, solidly built of stone, are enclosed in small, square court yards surrounded by rude wooden galleries. Many have two stories, with balconies also of wood in front, and a few shew handsome gateways, with the arms of some Spanish family carved on the lintel stone. One such bears the effigies of the four Pizarro brothers, and is supposed to have been inhabited by the terrible Francisco himself when he lived here. But the impressive features of the city are its squares. The great Plaza, a part of the immense open space which occupied the centre of the ancient Inca town, wants the trees and flower beds of the squares of Lima and Arequipa. But its ample proportions, with three remarkable churches occupying two sides of it, and the fortress hill of Sacsahuaman frowning over it, give it an air of dignity. The two smaller plazas, that called Cusipata and that of San Francisco, are less regular, but rudely picturesque, with arcades on two sides of them, and quaint old houses of varying heights, painted in blue, and bearing in front balconies frail with age. The older Spanish colonial towns, inferior as they are in refinements of architectural detail to the ancient cities of Italy and Spain, have nevertheless for us a certain charm of strangeness, intensified, in the case of Cuzco, by the sense of all the changes they have witnessed.

The cathedral, if not beautiful, is stately, with its two solid towers and its spacious and solemn interior. One is shewn a picture attributed to Van Dyck – be it his or not it is a good picture – and an altar at which Pizarro communicated, and a curious painting representing ceremonies observed on the admission of monks and nuns in the seventeenth century. But what interested me most was a portrait in the sacristy, among those of other bishops of Cuzco, of the first bishop, Fray Vicente de Valverde. It may be merely a "stock" picture, made to order at a later time like those of the early Popes in the basilica of St. Paul at Rome. But one willingly supposed it taken from the life, because the hard, square face with pitiless eyes answered to the character of the man, one of the most remarkable persons in the history of the Spanish Conquest, because he is as perfect an illustration as history presents of a minister of Christ in whom every lineament of Christian character, except devotion to his faith, had been effaced.18 He was the friar who accompanied Pizarro on his expedition and stood by the leader's side in the square at Caxamarca when he was welcoming as a friend the Inca Atahuallpa. When Atahuallpa declined the summons of Valverde to accept baptism and recognize Charles the Fifth as sovereign, Pizarro, whose men were fully armed, and had already been instructed to seize the unsuspecting Inca and massacre his followers, hesitated or affected for a moment to hesitate, and turned to Valverde for advice. "I absolve you," answered the friar. "Fall on, Castilians, I absolve you." With this the slaughter of the astonished crowd began: and thousands perished in the city square before night descended on the butchery.

When Cuzco was taken, Valverde was made bishop of the new see, the first bishopric of Peru. Verily he had his reward. He did not long enjoy it. A few years later he was shipwrecked, while voyaging to Panama, on the coast near Tumbez, captured by the wild Indians of those parts, and (according to the story) devoured.

Of the other churches, the most externally handsome is that of the Compañia (the Jesuits), with its florid north façade of red sandstone, a piece of cunningly conceived and finely executed ornamentation superior even to that of the church of the same Order at Arequipa. Internally there is most to admire in the church of Merced (Our Lady of Mercy, the patroness of Peru), for it has richly decorated ceilings on both stories of its charming cloisters, and a fine staircase leading up to the choir. All the larger churches have silver altars, some of them very well chiselled. But by far the most remarkable piece of work in the city is the pulpit of the old and now scarcely used church of San Blas. It is said to be all of one piece, the glory of an Indian craftsman, and is a marvel of delicate carving, worthy of the best executive skill of Italy or Spain. My scanty knowledge does not qualify me to express an opinion, but it was hard not to fancy that in this pulpit and in the fine ornamentation of the façades of the Jesuit churches I have described, there may be discovered marks of a distinctive type of artistic invention which was not Spanish, but rather Peruvian, and gave evidence of a gift which might, if cultivated, have reflected credit upon the Indian race.

It has seemed worth while to dwell upon the ecclesiastical buildings of these three Peruvian cities just because there is so very little to attract the student of art in South America, less even than in Mexico. Though the two greatest Spanish painters lived after the days of Pizarro, one may say, broadly speaking, that the best days of Spanish architecture and of taste in works of art were passing away before these American countries were settled, and it was seldom that anything of high excellence was either brought from Europe or produced in South America, produced even in Peru, the wealthiest of all the colonial dominions of Spain.

Before I turn from Spanish Cuzco to the ancient city a word may be said as to its merits as a place of residence. Its height (11,100 feet) and its latitude give it a climate free from extremes of heat or cold, and, for those who have capacious lungs and sound hearts, pretty healthful throughout the year. We found the air cool and bracing in the end of September. Disgusting as are the dirt and the smells, they do not seem to breed much disease; foul gases are probably less noxious when discharged into the open air than when they ooze out into houses from closed drains.19 The country round is beautiful, bold heights surrounding a green and fertile vale, though there are so few trees that shade is wanting. Many places of great antiquarian interest are within reach, of course accessible by riding only, for there is only one tolerable road, that which leads down the valley to the Vilcamayu. Society, though small and old-fashioned, unfriendly to new ideas and tinged with ecclesiasticism, is simple mannered and kindly. No people can be more polite and agreeable than the Peruvians, whether of pure Spanish extraction, or mixed, as the great majority here are, with Indian blood. Though Cuzco is deemed, not less than Arequipa, a stronghold of conservatism and clericalism, modern tendencies can make themselves felt. Shortly before my visit there had been a revolt of the students of the University against a rector deemed "unprogressive": and there had been chosen as his successor a young North American professor who had been living in Peru for a few years only, employed in some government work when he was appointed here. He seemed to be on good terms with both officials and pupils.

The university is an old one, founded in 1598, but its revenues and the attendance of students are not worthy of its antiquity. Those who come seek instruction in professional subjects, especially law and medicine. Nearly everywhere in South America the demand for teaching in philosophy, letters, or science is scanty indeed. The clergy, it need hardly be said, are not educated in these lay institutions.

Though essentially a Spanish city in its edifices, Cuzco is predominantly Indian in its people. The Quichua language is that commonly spoken, and it is the Indian aborigines who give to the aspect of its streets and squares the picturesqueness which half atones for squalor. They set up their little booths, sometimes covered with canvas, along the arcades and in the plazas, and loaf about in their bright-coloured ponchos and broad, flat, straw hats, the dry-weather side of the straw covered with a sort of velveteen adorned with tinsel, and the wet-weather side with red flannel. Women lean over the rough wooden balconies on the first floors of the houses, and talk to the loungers in the plaza below. Strings of llamas bearing their burdens pass along, the only creatures, besides the tiny mules, who do any work. There are scarcely any wheeled vehicles, for those not forced by poverty to walk, ride mostly on donkeys; and the only events are saints' days, with their processions, occurring so frequently that the habit of laziness has unequalled opportunities for confirming itself. Though the Quichuas were under the Incas a most industrious race, and still give assiduous labour to their fields, the atmosphere of the city is one of easy idleness, nothing to do, and plenty of time to do it. The only manufactory we came across was a German brewery, – there is no place, however remote, where one does not find the enterprising German. Neither is there any trade, except that of supplying a few cheap goods to the surrounding country folk. By far the best general warehouse is kept by an Italian gentleman who has got together an interesting collection of antiquities.

Now let us turn from the Cuzco of the last three and a half centuries back to the olden time and see what remains of the ancient city of the Sun and of the Incas, his children. It is worth while to do so, for here, more than anywhere else in South America, there is something that helps the traveller to recall a society and a religion so unlike the present that it seems half mythic. Whoever has read, as most of us did in our boyhood, of the marvels of the Peruvian Empire which Pizarro destroyed, brings an ardent curiosity to the central seat of that Empire, and expects to find many a monument of its glories.

The reality is disappointing, yet it is impressive. One learns more from a little seeing than from reading many books. As our expectations had been unduly raised, it is right to give this reality with some little exactness of detail. The interest of the remains lies entirely in what they tell us about their builders, for there is nothing beautiful, nothing truly artistic to describe. The traces of the Incas20 to be seen in Cuzco, and, indeed, anywhere in Peru, are all of one kind only. They are Walls. No statue, no painting. No remains of a complete roofed building, either temple or palace; nothing but ruins, and mostly fragmentary ruins. The besom of Spanish destruction swept clean. Everything connected with the old religion had to perish: priests and friars took care of that. As for other buildings, it did not occur to anybody to spare them. Even in Italy, not long before Pizarro's day, a man so cultivated as Pope Julius the Second knocked about the incomparably more beautiful and remarkable buildings of ancient Rome when they interfered with his plans of building.

But the walls at Cuzco are remarkable. They are unique memorials, not only of power and persistence, but in a certain way of skill also, not in decorative art, for of that there is scarcely a trace left, but of a high degree of expertness in the cutting and fitting together of enormous blocks. Most of the streets of the modern city follow the lines of ancient pre-Conquest streets, and in many of these there are long stretches of wall from six or eight to sixteen or eighteen feet in height so entirely unlike Spanish buildings that their Inca origin is unquestionable. They are of various types, each of which probably belongs to an epoch of its own. The most frequent, and apparently the latest type, shews very large blocks of a dark grey rock, a syenite or trachyte, cut to a uniform rectangular oblong form, the outer faces, which are nearly smooth and slightly convex, being cut in towards the joinings of the other stones. The blocks are fitted together with the utmost care, so close to one another that it is no exaggeration to say that a knife can seldom be inserted between them. The walls which they make slope very slightly backward, and, in most cases, the stones are smaller in the upper layers than in the lower. Two such walls enclose a long and narrow street which runs southeastward from the great Plaza. They are in perfect preservation, and sustain in some places the weight of modern houses built upon them. There are very few apertures for doors or windows, but one high gateway furnishes a good specimen of the Inca door and is surmounted by a long slab on which are carved in relief, quite rudely, the figures of two serpents. In other places one finds walls of the same character, but with smaller blocks and less perfect workmanship. Of a third type the wall of the so-called Palace of the Inca Roca is the best instance. It is what we call in Europe a Cyclopean building, the blocks enormous and of various shapes, but each carefully cut and adjusted to the inequalities of outline in the adjoining blocks, so that all fit perfectly together. One famous stone shews twelve angles into which the stones above, below, and at each side of it have been made to fit. This type seems older, perhaps by centuries, than that first described. In none of the walls is any mortar or any other kind of cementing material used: their strength consists in their weight and in the exactness with which they are compacted together. The most beautifully finished piece of all is to be seen in the remains of the great Temple of the Sun on whose site and out of whose ruins have been built the church and convent of St. Dominick. Here, at the west end of the church, there is what was evidently the external wall of the end of the temple. It is rounded, and each of the large squared stones is so cut as to conform perfectly to the curve of the whole. None of the single stones has the convexity which appears in the walls first described, because the surfaces of all have been levelled and polished so that they form one uniformly smooth and uniformly curved surface, as if they were all one block. A more exquisitely finished piece of work cannot be imagined. It is at least as good as anything of the same kind in Egypt, and stands as perfect now as it was when the Spaniards destroyed the superstructure of the temple.

The city is full of these fragments of wall. I discovered in out-of-the-way corners some that were supporting little terraced garden beds, others in backyards, or even in pigsties, and it seemed to me that there were four or five distinct styles or types of stone cutting and stone fitting, belonging to different ages.21 If all the buildings erected since 1540 could be removed without disturbing the older buildings beneath them, that which was left would be sufficient to give a fairly complete ground plan of the Inca city and enable us to form some idea of its character. But we should not then be much nearer to knowing what was the actual aspect of the great palaces and temples before the work of destruction began. The Incas built immense covered halls, we are told of one two hundred paces long by fifty wide, but it does not appear how they were roofed over, for the arch was, of course, unknown. Apparently there was little or nothing of that advanced form of art in pattern ornamentation and in figures of men and animals which we admire in the ruins of Copan (in Honduras) or Palenque (in Mexico) and other places in Central America. Perhaps the intractable nature of the volcanic and other hard igneous stone used by the Incas compared with the comparatively soft limestones of Palenque and Mitla discouraged attempts at elaborate mural decoration. Perhaps the artistic talent of the Peruvians did not go far. Their pottery, whether plain or made to represent the forms of living creatures, is generally rude, and the paintings on wooden vessels shew only mediocre power of drawing, though they do shew that fine sense of colour which is present in most of the art work of the aboriginal Americans.

Cuzco has no public museum, but there are two or three small private collections. In one of these the most interesting objects shewn us were the pictures on wood representing combats between Peruvian warriors and their enemies, the savage tribes of the eastern forests. The former fight with the spear and have the sling for their missile weapon, the latter use the bow, as do their descendants to this day. In this collection there were also bows taller than a man, with arrows of corresponding size, formidable weapons, which some of the natives of the forest, placing them flat on the ground, draw with their feet and with which they are said to kill fish in the rivers as well as land game. These, and the beautiful feather plumes, and the rude heads of pumas, wild cats, and birds of prey, had all a flavour of barbarism, and were far inferior to the remains of Egyptian or Assyrian art.22 The Peruvian mummies, specimens of which we also saw, are not laid out at full length, like those of Egypt, but have the knees pressed to the chin.

Grand as are the walls inside Cuzco, they seem insignificant when one examines the more stupendous ramparts of the prehistoric fortress on Sacsahuaman Hill, which rises immediately above the city to a height of about six hundred and fifty feet. I describe them the more fully because much study has been of late years bestowed upon the (so-called) Cyclopean and other ancient walls of Europe, such as those of Tarragona in Spain, of Greek cities, like Tiryns and Naxos (near Taormina), and of the Volscian and Latin cities round Rome, so that an account of the more imposing Peruvian structures may be of interest to some readers. The hill, nearly halfway up which, on a terrace, are the remains of its palace attributed to the Inca Manco Capac, is in its upper part extremely steep, in places even precipitous, and commands a wonderful view over the mass of red-roofed houses, the long, straight streets in some of which the dark lines of Inca wall can just be discerned, the three broad plazas with Indians and their llamas creeping about like ants, the sunny vale below, and the snow-clad summits of the Nevado (snow mountain) of Ausungate, piercing the sky in the far distance. Stone ramparts ran all round the upper part of the hill, and parts of them still remain on this southern face. What with their height and solidity and with the natural strength of the ground, the fortress must have been on this side impregnable before the invention of gunpowder. But on the other, or northerly side, that turned away from Cuzco, the hill is not only less steep, but has also much less rise, for it is less than a hundred feet above the ground behind it. Here, therefore, since nature had done less, there was more for art to do; and here we find fortress walls on a scale of incomparable grandeur.

They are built in three parallel lines, one behind the other, and both their length, nearly one third of a mile, and the massiveness of their construction, and the enormous size of many of the individual stones make this fortress one of the most impressive monuments of prehistoric times that the world contains.23 It shews that those who raised it had a boldness of conception and a persistent energy in carrying out that conception amazing in a primitive people, for the work seems to belong to a very early time, long anterior to those historic Incas whom the Spaniards overthrew.

Hardly less wonderful than the gigantic proportions of these fortifications is the military skill shewn in their construction. Their line is not straight, as in most of the walls of ancient Greek and Italian and early mediæval cities, but consists of a series of salient and re-entering angles, so that from each salient angle and each inner angle the whole space outside and below the wall as far as the next projecting angle could be commanded by the garrison. This arrangement, which, while it increased the length of the work and required more labour to complete it, increased immensely its defensive efficiency, indicates a skill hardly to be expected in a race comparatively pacific, and more eminent in the arts of government than in those of war. Yet perhaps it was just because they were not first-class fighting men like the Aztecs or the Iroquois that the Quichuas were successful in devising expedients for defence. Sparta was the only considerable Greek city that did not surround herself with walls, because the valour of her people was deemed sufficient protection.

On the top of the hill behind these lines of ramparts there are remains of ancient buildings, though none with such enormous stones. It is hard to make out what these edifices were, for every bit of ground built upon has been ransacked over and over again for hidden treasure. Peru is full of stories about fabulous quantities of Inca gold hidden away to save it from the rapacity of the conquerors, and some of the tales may be true, though hardly any such treasures have been found for more than a century past. But the story that there is a secret passage cut in the rock from the Inca castle at the top of the hill down through it and into Cuzco where it opens to the Temple of the Sun is too much for any but native credulity. These beliefs in long subterranean passages recur everywhere in the world. It was – perhaps still is – believed in Oxford that there is such an one from the church of St. Peter in the city to the ruined nunnery on the river at Godstow (Fair Rosamond's place of confinement) two miles distant. It is believed in Kerwan (in Tunisia) that the most sacred of the wells in that most sacred of all African cities communicates underground with the well Zem Zem in Mecca two thousand miles away and on the other side of the Red Sea. The most persistent treasure hunt carried on by the Peruvians has been that for the golden chain made by the Inca Huayna Capac, which was long enough to be stretched all round the great square of Cuzco, and was thrown into the lake of Urcos lest it should fall into the hands of the Spaniards. Everybody believes it to be still at the bottom of the lake, which is very deep.

Opposite the great walls and about a third of a mile away is a rocky eminence called, from a curious convex mass of extremely hard igneous rock upon it, the Rodadero. The rock is polished smooth and has two projecting ridges on its surface. How much of this peculiar slope down which many generations of Peruvian boys have rejoiced to slide – they were doing so in the days of Garcilaso, soon after the Conquest – is due to nature, how much to art improving nature, has been matter for controversy. But far more curious are the seats carved in the hard rock all over the top and slopes of the hill, the cutting done with exquisite care and finish, the angles perfectly sharp, the flat parts perfectly smooth. The most remarkable is a set of thirteen seats, one in the centre and highest, nine others declining from it on the left and three on the right. This is called the Seat of the Inca, but there is no record, nor any authentic tradition, of the purpose for which, or the persons by whom, it was constructed, nor of the purpose of the many other seats, and small staircases, and niches, and basins similarly chiselled out of the rock which are scattered here and there all round. In one place two great and finely cut blocks look like fragments of a doorway shattered by an earthquake, and not far off there are singular passages hewn through the rock, and now in parts closed, which have the appearance of a sort of labyrinth. Looking at the Inca's Seat, one's first conjecture would be that it was a bench for judges to sit upon. Other seats look more like shrines meant for images; but no fragments of images are found. All these strange cuttings and polishings seem so inexplicable that one would conjecture the mere caprice of a whimsical ruler, but for the immense pains that must have been taken in doing such perfect work in such hard material. No Spanish writer of Conquest days gives us any light. It is a riddle, the key to which is lost, and lost irrecoverably, because there are no inscriptions and no traditions.

Reverting to the fortress of Sacsahuaman, there is a current view that it was erected as an outwork to defend Cuzco from the attacks of the fierce tribes of the eastern and northern valleys whose raids the Incas frequently had to repel. It seems, however, superfluously huge as a defence against such enemies, not to add that they could easily have descended upon Cuzco from the other sides of the two ravines between which the fortress stands. More probably, therefore Sacsahuaman is a very ancient stronghold, probably much older than Cuzco, or at any rate than Cuzco's greatness. It may have been the earliest seat of some very early king or dynasty, and have been, in the flourishing days of the Inca monarchy, a citadel where the reigning sovereign kept his treasures and to which he could retire for safety in case of need.

I am not attempting to describe all the relics of antiquity that are to be seen in or near Cuzco. There are striking ruins not far off, such as those at Ollantaytambo and Pisac, and lower down the Vilcamayu Valley at Machu Picchu and Rosas Pata, as well as others still more distant in the high country between here and Lima.24 But what is true at Cuzco is true everywhere. The only ruins are of walls and gates of fortresses and palaces; in a few spots of temples, also. In these there are evidences of enormous labour and considerable mechanical skill, but only slight evidences of artistic talent. The walls, perfectly cut and polished, have seldom the smallest ornament, except niches. There are no domes, for the art of vaulting was unknown, and hardly ever columns. So far as we can tell, the great Sun Temple at Cuzco consisted only of lofty walls enclosing courts, with no decoration but plates of gold attached to the walls. True it is that the Spaniards destroyed all the religious and many of the secular edifices, yet if there had been temples covered with ornaments like those found in Southern Mexico and Central America, some traces must surely have remained.

Notwithstanding this want of decorative art, the Cuzco ruins leave upon the beholder a strong impression, the impression of immense energy and will in those who planned these works, of patient and highly trained labour in those who executed them. Only despotic rulers commanding like the Egyptian kings a host of obedient subjects, could have reared such a structure as the fortress of Sacsahuaman. The race that could erect such buildings and gather such treasures as the Temple of the Sun possessed, and could conquer and rule a dominion of fifty days' journey from north to south, must have been a strong and in its way a gifted race. It is hard to believe that it was the ancestor of those stolid and downtrodden Indians whom one sees to-day, peddling their rude wares in the market place of Cuzco. It is their old imperial town, but there is scarcely one among them above the rank of a labourer; and during the last three centuries few indeed have emerged from the abject condition to which the Conquest reduced them.

The sudden fall of a whole race is an event so rare in history that one seeks for explanations. It may be that not only the royal Inca family, but nearly the whole ruling class was destroyed in war, leaving only the peasants who had already been serfs under their native sovereigns. But one is disposed to believe that the tremendous catastrophe which befell them in the destruction at once of their dynasty, their empire, and their religion by fierce conquerors, incomparably superior in energy and knowledge, completely broke not only the spirit of the nation, but the self-respect of the individuals who composed it. They were already a docile and submissive people, and now under a new tyranny, far harsher than that of rulers of their own blood, they sank into hopeless apathy, and ceased even to remember what their forefathers had been. The intensity of their devotion to their sovereign and their deity made them helpless when both were overthrown, leaving them nothing to turn to, nothing to strive for. The Conquistadores were wise in their hateful way, when they put forth the resources of cruelty to outrage the feelings of the people and stamp terror in their hearts. One cannot stand in the great Plaza of Cuzco without recalling the scene of A.D. 1571, when one of the last of the Inca line, an innocent youth, seized and accused of rebellion by the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo, was executed in the presence of a vast Indian crowd that filled it. When the executioner raised the sword of death, there rose such a wail of horror that he paused, and the leading Spanish churchmen hastened to the viceroy and begged him for mercy. Determined to make an example, Toledo was inexorable. The young Inca, Tupac Amaru, was beheaded and his head stuck on a pike, and placed beside the scaffold. At midnight a Spaniard, looking out of a window that commanded the Plaza was amazed to see it again filled with Indians, all silent and motionless, kneeling in veneration before the head of the last representative of the sacred line.

More than two hundred years later another more remote scion of the Incas, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who had taken the same name of Tupac Amaru, – I have already referred to him on p. 92, – had been stirred to indignation by what he saw of the Indian population suffering from the exactions as well of the Spanish landowners who held them in serfdom as of the rapacious Spanish officials. After many vain complaints, he headed a movement to obtain redress by force, not rejecting the authority of the Spanish Crown, but trying to rouse the Indians by appeals to the faint memories of Inca greatness. The hope of relief from their miseries drew thousands of the aborigines to his standard. But they were ill armed and worse organized; the race had no longer any strength in it for a fight, and in some months the rising was quelled, after frightful slaughter, its leader betrayed to the Spaniards, his family seized, and all brought prisoners to Cuzco. There, by the sentence of the Spanish judge, a monster named Areche, the uncle and son-in-law and wife of Tupac Amaru, had their tongues cut out and were executed before his eyes, that death might be made more horrible to him by the sight of their agonies. He was then, after his own tongue had been cut out, torn in pieces by four horses attached to his four limbs. All this happened in 1781, within the memory of the grandfathers of men now living. Such atrocities were at once the evidence of what Spanish rule in Peru had been and a presage of its fall. Within twenty years thereafter began those first conspiracies against the authority of Spain which ushered in the War of Independence.

Many another scene of horror and strife has Cuzco seen. Wandering through its streets, one is possessed every moment by the sense of how much has happened in a place where nowadays nothing seems to happen. Perhaps it is because its annals are so tragic that this sense is so strong; but there are certainly few places where the very stones seem more saturated with history. More than three centuries ago the historian Garcilaso de la Vega compared Cuzco to ancient Rome. The two cities have little more in common than the fact that both were capitals of dominions long since departed, and the seats of faiths long since extinct. But in both this feeling of a vista stretching far back and filled with many spectres of the past is overpowering. The long, grey, mouldering streets and houses of Spanish Cuzco, the ancient walls of primitive Peruvian Cuzco, defying time better than the convents and the churches, each calling up contrasted races and civilizations, the plazas too vast for the shrunken population, the curious sense of two peoples living side by side in a place from which the old life has vanished and into which no new life has come, the sense of utter remoteness from the modern world, all these things give to Cuzco a strange and dreamy melancholy, a melancholy all the deeper because there was little in its past that one could wish restored. There were dark sides to the ancient civilization. But was it worth destroying in order to erect on its ruins what the Conquerors brought to Peru?

NOTE ON THE FORTRESS OF SACSAHUAMAN

The walls of Sacsahuaman are built in three parallel lines, the lowest of which stands on level ground, at the very base of the hill; the second about six yards behind the first, and therefore on the slope; the third still higher on the slope, three yards behind the second. The space behind each wall has been filled in and levelled, so as to be a nearly flat terrace, supported by the wall in front of it. These three lines of wall extend along and protect the whole northern face of the hill, nearly six hundred yards long, between the points where it falls abruptly into deep ravines to the east and the west, which give a natural defence. The outermost wall at the base of the hill is the highest, about twenty-six feet; the second is from eighteen to twenty feet; the third, the least perfectly preserved, is a little less high, perhaps fifteen feet. The stones in the outermost row are the largest. One is over twenty-five feet high, fourteen wide, and twelve thick. Not a few exceed fifteen feet in height and twelve in width. There were three openings or gateways in each wall, the largest of which is twelve feet high, and over each of these was laid a long flat slab. The blocks, which are of a hard, greyish limestone, are all or nearly all rudely square or oblong, though sometimes where the shape of one is irregular, the irregularity is cut into an entering angle and the next stone is made to fit into this with its projecting angle, thus knitting the structure together. The surface of each is slightly convex and bevelled down towards the outer lines, where it meets the blocks laid next. All are so carefully adjusted that even now there are virtually no interstices, though the fitting together may probably have been even more exact before earthquakes and time had begun to tell upon the fabric. Its strength, as there is no mortar, depends upon the massiveness of the stones and their cohesion. Each wall rises a little, perhaps a foot and a half, above the terrace immediately behind it, but the level of the terrace may probably have been originally somewhat lower, so that the bodies of those defending the fortress would be better covered by the wall in front of them against missiles from the enemy.

The stones of Sacsahuaman have been brought from a hill about three-quarters of a mile distant, where a huge mound of chips cut from them has been discovered by Mr. Bingham since the date of my visit. (Edition of 1913.)