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.)
CHAPTER IV
LAKE TITICACA AND THE CENTRAL ANDES
From Cuzco, the oldest of South American cities, with its mingled memories of an Indian and a Spanish past, I will ask the reader to follow me to a land of ancient silence where an aboriginal people, under the pressure of a stern nature, and almost untouched by all that modern civilization has brought, still lead the lives and cling to the beliefs that their ancestors led and held many centuries ago. This is the heart of the Andean plateau, where, in a country almost as purely Indian as it was when it submitted to Pizarro, lies Lake Titicaca.
Ever since as a boy I had read of a great inland sea lying between the two ranges of the Cordillera almost as high above the ocean as is the top of the Jungfrau, I had wondered what the scenery of such mountains and such a sea might be like, and had searched books and questioned travellers without getting from them what I sought. There are no other bodies of fresh water on the earth's surface nearly so lofty, except on the plateaux of Central Asia, and none of these, such as the Manasarowar lakes in Tibet25 and Lake Sir-i-kul in the Pamirs is nearly so extensive as this lake in Peru. It fills the lower part of an immense shallow depression between the eastern and western Cordilleras; and the land both to the north and to the south of it is for a great distance so level that we may believe the area covered by its waters to have been at one time far greater. Its present length is about one hundred and twenty miles, its greatest width forty-one miles, and its area nearly equal to that of Lake Erie. The shape is extremely irregular, for there are many deep bays, and many far projecting promontories. There are also many islands, two of which, famous in Peruvian mythology, I shall presently describe.
This central plateau of Peru is a singular region. As its height is from twelve thousand to thirteen thousand feet above sea level, the climate is always cold, except when one is actually exposed to the direct rays of the sun, but it varies comparatively little from the summer to the winter months; and though snow often falls, it soon disappears. In so inclement an air, and with a rather scanty rainfall, only a few hardy crops can ripen, such as potatoes (the plant is a native of South America, and there are many other species of Solanum), barley, the Oca (Oxalis tuberosa, a sort of wood sorrel), and the Quinoa (a kind of edible Chenopodium)26 as well as maize, but this last only in the warmer and more sheltered places. There are few trees, and these stunted; nowhere a wood. Even the shrubs are mere scrub, so fuel is scarce and the people use for cooking purposes in the mountains the tufts of a large woody-rooted plant called Yareta, growing in the high mountains which, like the peat of Ireland, burns fiercely, but is soon burnt out, and, on the lower grounds, taquia (the droppings of the llama), as the droppings of the yak are similarly used in Tibet. Nobody thinks of lighting a fire for warmth: for while the natives seem not to feel the cold, white people shiver and put on more clothes. One is surprised that man should have continued to dwell in a land so ungenial when not far off to the east, on the other side of the eastern Cordillera, hot valleys and an abundant rainfall promise easier conditions of life.
This lofty tract, stretching from the snowy peaks of the Vilcanota as far as La Paz in Bolivia, a distance of more than two hundred miles, the northern and western parts of it in Peru, the eastern and southern in Bolivia, is really a pure Indian country, and is named the Collao. In ancient days it was one of the four divisions of the Inca Empire. The inhabitants speak a language called Aymará, allied to the Quichua spoken farther north. In Inca days there were apparently many small tribes, each with its own tongue, but their names and memories have perished with their languages, and with the trifling exception of a small and very primitive race called the Urus (to be mentioned later) all the aborigines of the High Andes are now classified as Quichuas and Aymarás. The modern distinction between Peru and Bolivia is purely arbitrary and political. Aymarás dwelling west of the lake in Peru are the same people as Aymarás dwelling east of it in Bolivia.
Like Tibet, which it most resembles in height and cold and dryness, this strange country produces no more than what its inhabitants consume and has nothing to export except alpaca wool and minerals, nor, at present, very much of these latter, for only few mines are now being worked. The population does not increase, but it holds its ground, and wherever the soil is fit for cultivation, that is to say, wherever it is not too stony or too swampy, it is cultivated by the Indians, who live here in the same rude fashion as their forefathers before the Conquest. Nor is it only on the flat bottoms of the valleys that one sees their little patches of potatoes and barley. The steep slopes of the hills that rise from the lake have also been terraced to make ground level for cultivation, and each strip of soil is supported by a wall of loose stones well fitted together. These andenes, as they are called, which are common all over the hilly grounds of Peru, remind one of the vine-bearing terraces of the Rhineland, and like them witness to centuries of patient toil. As there is no manure nor other fertilizer, the soil is allowed to rest by lying fallow from time to time, so the area under cultivation in any one year is less than the number of the terraces might suggest. Though all the tillers are Indians, most of the land belongs to large proprietors who seldom come to it for more than a couple of months in the year, the peasants paying them either in a share of the crops, or a certain number of days' labour on the proprietor's own special hacienda or finca (farm) which his steward manages, or perhaps in personal service for some weeks rendered to him in the town he inhabits. Rude and harsh is the life of these peasants, though well above the fear of starvation and no more squalid than that of the agricultural peasantry in some parts of Europe. Their houses are of mud baked hard in the sun – the usual adobe of Spanish America – or perhaps of large stones roughly set in the mud as a cement; animals often share the family bedroom, and the sleeping places are a sort of platform or divan of earth raised a little from the floor along the walls of the hut. Furniture there is virtually none, for wood is scarce and costly so far from the coast on one side and the forests on the other, but some of them have scraped together a good deal of property, including rich dresses and ornaments fit to be displayed at festivals. For clothing they have a shirt and drawers of coarse cotton, with a poncho of heavy woollen cloth; for food, potatoes frozen and squeezed dry, to enable them to be stored, and barley; their only luxury is chicha beer, or alcohol when they can get it; their diversions, church festivals with processions in the morning and orgiastic dances afterwards; or a fight with the inhabitants of the neighbouring village. Yet with all this apparent poverty and squalor, they are in this region, and have been for many ages, more advanced in the arts of life than their neighbours, those half nomad tribes of the trans-Andean forests, who subsist on what their arrows or blow-pipes can kill, and live in terror of the jaguar and the anaconda and the still more dangerous packs of wild dogs and peccaries. Agriculture and settled life are always factors of material progress, and the Aymarás would probably have risen out of the sort of practical serfdom in which they lie and from which scarcely any of them emerge, if they had not fallen under the dominion of an alien and stronger race who had no sympathy with them and did nothing to help them upwards.
I return to the lake itself which fills the centre of this singular plateau. Its northern and northwestern coasts, lying in Peruvian territory, are low and the water shallow, while the eastern and southern, in Bolivia, are generally high and bold with many rocky promontories and isles lying off them. The greatest depth is about six hundred feet. Storms are frequent, and the short, heavy waves make navigation dangerous, all the more so because the water is so cold that, as is the case in Lake Superior also, a swimmer is so soon benumbed that his chance of reaching land is slight. Ice sometimes forms in the shallower bays, but seldom lasts. Many are the water birds, gulls and divers, and flamingoes, and a kind of heron, besides eagles and hawks, though the big so-called turkey buzzard of the lower country does not seem to come so high, and the huge condor is no longer frequent. There are plenty of fish, but apparently of two genera only, the species (eight are enumerated) being most of them known only in this lake and in Lake Poopo, into which it discharges. The scantiness both of fauna and flora is natural when the unfavourable climatic conditions are considered. Among the water plants the commonest is a sort of rush, apparently a species of, or allied to, the British and North American genus Scirpus, and called Totora. It grows in water two to six feet deep, rising several feet above the surface, and is the material out of which the Indians, having no wood, construct their vessels, plaiting it and tying bunches of it together, for it is tough as well as buoyant. In these apparently frail craft, propelled by sails of the same material, they traverse the lake, carrying in each two or three men and sometimes a pretty heavy load. These vessels which, having neither prow nor stern, though the ends are raised, resemble rafts rather than boats, are steered and, when wind fails, are moved forward by paddles. Their merit is that of being unsinkable, so that when a storm knocks them to pieces the mariner may support himself on any one of the rush bundles and drift to shore if he does not succumb to the cold. They soon become waterlogged and useless, but this does not matter, for the totora can be had for the gathering, and the supply exceeds the demand. This primitive kind of craft was known on the coast of Peru also: the first Spanish explorers met rafts of wood there carrying merchandise.
Nowadays four small steamers ply on the lake, one of them making a regular tri-weekly service from Puno, in Peru, the terminus of the Peruvian Southern railway, to Guaqui in Bolivia, whence a railway runs to La Paz. This is at present the quickest way from Panama and the coast of Peru to Central Bolivia.
The water of Titicaca is pure and exquisitely clear. Some have described it as brackish, but I could discover no saline taste whatever. Many streams enter it from the surrounding snow-clad mountains; and it discharges southward by a river called the Desaguadero, which flows with a gentle current across the Bolivian plateau for one hundred and twenty miles into the large, shallow lagoon of Poopo or Aullagas, itself once part of that great inland sea of which Titicaca is now the largest remnant. This lake of Poopo has no outlet to the sea. Part of its water is licked up by the fiery sun of the desert: the rest sinks into the sands and is lost.
We spent two days sailing on the lake, visiting the famous modern shrine of the Virgin of the Light at Copacavana on the mainland and the famous ancient shrine of the Rock of the Sun and the Wild Cat on the island of Titicaca which has given its name to the lake. When the grey clouds brood low upon the hills, stern and gloomy indeed must be the landscape in this bleak land. But our visit fell in the end of September, the spring of Peru, when such rains as there are had begun to refresh the land after the arid winter. The sun was bright. Only a few white clouds were hanging high in air or clinging to the slopes of the distant mountains; and the watery plain over which we moved was a sheet of dazzling blue. The blue of Titicaca is peculiar, not deep and dark, as that of the tropical ocean, nor opaque, like the blue-green of Lake Leman nor like that warm purple of the Ægean which Homer compares to dark red wine, but a clear, cold, crystalline blue, even as is that of the cold sky vaulted over it. Even in this blazing sunlight it had that sort of chilly glitter one sees in the crevasses of a glacier; and the wavelets sparkled like diamonds.
The Peruvian shore along which we were sailing was steep and bold, with promontories jutting out and rocky islets fringing them. Far away to the east across the shining waters the Bolivian coast rose in successive brown terraces, flat-topped hills where the land was tilled, and higher up bluish grey ridges passing into a soft lilac as they receded, and farther still, faint yet clear in the northeast, the serrated lines of the snowy Cordillera which divides the lake basin from the valleys that run down to the east and the Amazonian forests. There was something of mystery and romance in these far distant peaks, which few Europeans have ever approached, for they lie in a dry region almost uninhabited because hardly worth inhabiting, —
"a waste land where no man goes
Or hath gone, since the making of this world."
The nearer and higher range to the southeast of the lake, which the natives call the Cordillera Real, and geographers the range of Sorata, was almost hidden by the thick clouds which were by this time – for it was now ten o'clock, and the sun was raising vapours from the valleys – gathering on its snows, and not till the evening did its grand proportions stand disclosed. There were all sorts of colours in the landscape, bright green rushes filling the shallow bays, deep black lava flows from a volcanic peak on the west, and a wonderful variety of yellows, pinks, and violets melting into each other on the distant hills. But the predominant tone, which seems to embrace all the rest was a grey-blue of that peculiar pearly quality which the presence of a large body of smooth water gives. Views on a great lake can be more impressive than almost any ocean views, because on the ocean one sees only a little way around, whereas, where distant heights are visible beyond the expanse of a lake, the vastness of the landscape in all its parts is realized. Here we could see in two different directions mountain ranges a hundred miles away: and the immensity was solemn.
The village of Copacavana, to which we first turned our course, stands a little above the lake at the foot of rocky heights, beyond which rises a lofty volcano, said to have been active only a century ago. Traces of antiquity are found in the polished stone seats, two on each side of a higher one, called the Judgment Seat of the Inca, and in steps cut here and there, all in the hard rock, their form resembling that of those near Cuzco, described in the last chapter, and their purpose no less obscure.27 Other ruins and abundant traditions prove that the place was a noted seat of worship in Inca days. There stood on it, say the early Spanish chroniclers, not only gilded and silvered figures of the Sun and Moon, but also older idols, belonging to some older local religion, one in particular which is described as having a head like an egg with a limbless body, wreathed with snakes. When these figures and their shrines were demolished, a church was erected on the same spot, which presently became famous by the setting up in it of a sacred image of Our Lady. It is the Santissima Virgen de la Candelaria, carved by a scion of the Incas, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, in A.D. 1583. This image had been seen by a pious friar to send out rays of light around it: miracles followed, and an Augustinian monastery was founded and placed in charge of the sanctuary, which soon became the most frequented place of pilgrimage through all South America. Even from Mexico and from Europe pilgrims come hoping for the cure of their diseases. The figure is about a yard high, and represents a face of the Indian type in features and colour, though less dark than the equally sacred figure of the Virgin of the Pillar at Saragosa in Spain. It wears a crown of gold, with a gold halo outside the crown, has a half moon under its feet, and is adorned with many superb gems. The church is spacious and stately. The Camarin or sacred chamber in which the image stands is behind the great altar and approached by two staircases, the stone steps much worn by the knees of the ascending worshippers. The Augustinian monks were turned out in 1826, after the revolutionary war, but recently a few Franciscans have been settled in a home too large for them, so the wide cloisters are melancholy, and echo to few footfalls. Nevertheless great crowds of Indians still resort hither twice a year, on February 2, the feast of the Candelaria (Candlemas), and on August 5 and 6. Within the sacred enclosure which surrounds the church is a lofty cupola supported by columns, open at its sides so that the three tall crosses within it are visible, and roofed in a sort of Moorish style with bright green and yellow tiles, of the kind which North Africa has borrowed from the East. Round it are the accustomed pilgrimage "stations," and at the corners of the court, which is entered by a lofty gateway and planted with trees, are square brick buildings, wherein lie the bones of pilgrims. The shining tiles of this cupola, with the similarly decorated dome and tower of the church behind, make a striking group, whose half Moorish character looks strange in this far western land. The scene at the great festivals when the excited Indian crowd makes church and court resound with hymns in Aymará and when, after the Christian services of the day, the dances of primitive heathendom are kept up all through the darkness with wild shoutings and jumpings, till they end in a sort of jig, is described as strange and revolting. These dances come down from a time when this was a seat of Indian nature worship, and when images of the Sun and Moon were taken in pomp from the shrine here to the shrines upon the Sacred Isles.
To those isles we now bent our course. Delightful was the voyage along the southern shore of the lake, past shallow bays where the green water lapped softly in the rushes, across the openings of inlets that ran far in between walls of rock, with new islands coming into view and glimpses of new snowpeaks in the distance rising behind the nearer ranges, all flooded by a sunlight that had the brilliance without the sultry power of the tropics.
Koati or Koyata, the Island of the Moon, is said to take its name from Koya, the Quichua word for queen, the Moon being the wife of the Sun, whose worship the Incas established wherever their power extended. The isle is about two miles long, a steep ridge, covered in parts with low shrubs and grass; the rest cultivated, the slopes being carefully terraced to the top. The most interesting group of ruins stands in a beautiful situation some sixty feet above the shore, on the uppermost of four broad terraces, supported by walls. One of these walls is of the finished Cuzco style of stonework, the rectangular blocks well cut and neatly fitted to one another. It is probably of Inca date. That the large ruined edifice above has the same origin may be concluded from the niches which occur in the walls of its chambers. The purpose of such niches, frequent in the Cuzco walls, and indeed all over Peru, has never been explained. They are often too shallow for cupboards or wardrobes, and too high for images, yet it is hard to suppose them meant merely for ornament. This edifice, originally in two stories, is a mass of chambers, mostly small, which are connected by narrow passages. The large walled court which adjoins it is adorned by stuccoed niches. The walls are well preserved, but all the ceilings and roofs have gone. There are so few apertures for light that it is hard, as in most of the ancient Peruvian houses to understand how light was admitted. Probably light was sacrificed for the sake of warmth, for the nights are extremely cold, even in summer. Doorways are covered sometimes by a single slab, sometimes by flat stones projecting each beyond the other, so as to have the effect of an arch, but no true arch ever seems to have been found in Peru or anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. Sacrificial objects, dug up in front of the building, confirm the legend that the place was a shrine of the Moon Mother, but the name by which it has been known is the Palace of the Virgins of the Sun. There may, therefore, have been in conjunction with the shrine one of the numerous establishments in which the Incas kept the women who were sent up to them as a tribute from the provinces, and who, among other things, wove fine fabrics and made various articles needed for worship. The early Spanish writers, with their heads full of Christian nuns and Roman Vestals, called them Virgins of the Sun, but the name was altogether inappropriate, for many of them were kept as concubines for the reigning Inca.
Four miles from Koati and two from the mainland, lies the larger and more sacred Island of the Sun. It is ten miles long, nowhere more than a mile wide, and very irregular in shape, being deeply indented by bays. A ridge of hills, rising in places to one thousand feet or more, traverses it from end to end, and much of the surface is too steep and rocky for tillage. There are many groups of ruins on it, the origin and character of some among which have given rise to controversies into which I need not enter, proposing to describe two only. One of these is the so-called Fountain, or Bath and Garden of the Inca. Two buildings stand on the shore, evidently of a date anterior to the Conquest, and one was probably a royal residence. The most recent and most competent investigators divide them into two classes: those which the Indians call Chulpas, and are the work of an earlier race or races, and those which they ascribe to the Incas, the latter being larger and better built, and accompanied by pottery, weapons, and other relics, indicating a more advanced culture. Hard by a flight of low steps, rising from the water through a grove of trees, leads up to a spot where a rivulet, led in a channel from the hill above, pours itself into a receptacle hewed out of one piece of stone, whence it pursues its course in a murmuring rill to the lake below. The terraced garden on each side is planted with flowers, most of which are the same as those in European or North American gardens; but the brilliant red blossoms of the shrub called the Flor del Inca give a true local colour, and the view over the lake to the distant snows is unlike anything else in the world. How much of the beauty we now see was planned by the unknown monarch, who first made these terraces, and did the spot commend itself to him by the wonderful prospect it commands? Most of the so-called palaces of these isles occupy sites that look across the lake to the great snowy range, but a learned archæologist suggests that this was due not to admiration of their grandeur, but to veneration for them as potent deities so that they might be more readily and frequently adored.