It is due, I suppose, to some error in my make-up that my interest in any given corner of the earth fades in proportion as it approaches modern civilization and easy accessibility. To your incurable vagabond may come a momentary thrill, if not of pleasure, at least of contentment, with the feel of city pavements once more under his feet after long hand to hand combat with the wilderness, and the knowledge that to go a journey he has only to signal an electric street-car on the nearest corner. But the attraction quickly palls. Visions of the winding trail soon begin again to torture him with their solicitations, the placid ways of urban man take on a drab and colorless artificiality, and once more the realization comes that to him life offers genuine satisfaction only when he is struggling onward toward some distant and possibly unattainable goal.

Such a place is Lima. The former capital of Spanish America has, to be sure, its points of interest; old colonial palaces where the shades of cloaked viceroys seem still to linger, cloistered walls inclosing the tonsured and cowled atmosphere of the Middle Ages, narrow streets with long vistas of overhanging Moorish balconies wherein still lurks the charm of other days. But these things are all but buried under the stereotyped conveniences and commonplace manners of the modern world. Upon the romance and air of antiquity of a Spanish city of long ago, transplanted to this sandy coast, has intruded the aggressive urge of commerce; from between the carved mahogany bars of quaint miradores peers the face of trade; in and out of massive old wooden street-doors studded with brass come bales of merchandise, often stacked high in the beautiful patios and secluded retreats of former generations. Here, for the first time in South America, were rumors of strikes and complaints of the “servant problem.” Workmen and domestics, advanced already to a scale of wages about half that of our own land, were coming more and more to a knowledge of their worth and power, their striving unfortunately taking that ultra-modern form of careless workmanship and insolence. Here, for the first time, the militant “cost of living” weighed down on the mass of mankind like a leaden blanket. Lima’s thousand and one restaurants—why do none of them seek a virgin field in the highlands?—serve their clients with the mechanical impersonality of world capitals. Like the population, these show that absence of a “middle class” characteristic of Latin-American society, the marked contrast of the great bulk of sandaled poor rubbing shoulders with faultless Parisian attire; either they are repulsive workingmen’s “dumps,” or outwardly regal in manner and inwardly of purse-flattening properties, where nothing national and unique is to be found, unless it be some rare local delicacy, such as asado de chivito,—roast leg of young goat. Whatever exclusive and characteristic remains on the surface is grouped in and about the great covered market-place, where long rows of strange indigenous and familiar foreign wares stretch in many-hued and quaint juxtaposition, or hovers about a few surviving customs of bygone days, such as the milkman—who is more often a woman—making his morning round astride horse or mule, with his cans hanging like saddle-bags from between his legs.

He who comes down upon them from above will find the people of the coast more vivacious than those of the chilly upper Andes, where the perennial gauntness of nature inclines to perpetual gloom. The limeÑo has been likened to the Andalusian in his fondness for dress, variety, and dissipation, in his gaiety and quickness of wit, his open frankness and tendency to extravagance. Certainly his speech has the lisp of Andalusia—“Do’ copita’ de pi’co, seÑore’”—and his Castilian has not the purity of that of BogotÁ. Yet his gaiety is only comparative. There is an innate gloominess and passive pessimism everywhere in South American society that cannot but strike the visitor who comes direct from more favored lands. The morose Indian of the uplands forms a scarcely noticeable part of the population of Lima. On those rare occasions when he comes down, or more often is brought as a conscript to serve his time as soldier in the capital, he often falls quick victim to the white plague, which finds easy breeding-place in the disused cells of his overdeveloped lungs, built for the scant, thin air of the Sierra. The cholo or mestizo, commonly of a lesser percentage of aboriginal than of Spanish blood, makes up the bulk of the population. Then there is the zambo, bred of the intermingling of the Indian and negro, a robust, stubborn, and revengeful fellow. Merchants from all the varying nationalities of Europe keep shop side by side, with an intermingling of “Turks” and even more distant races, and American engineers stride through the streets at all hours of the day. Yet Lima is essentially a Spanish-American city, for all that; where the pallid, waxy complexion of the gente decente is much in evidence. The women of this caste are often beautiful; so, for that matter, are the men. In a population that may almost be termed cosmopolitan, the Chinaman holds a considerable place. After the abolition of slavery in 1855, large numbers of coolies were imported for the plantations of the Peruvian coast, and Celestials of higher caste have since taken advantage of Peru’s open-door policy and the Japanese steamship lines. So that to-day there are temples and joss-houses and opium dens in Lima, and men in “European” dress, who are not Europeans, lean in the doorways of old colonial mansions transformed into Oriental shops. The Chinese of Lima occupy a wider field of activity than almost anywhere else in the Western hemisphere. Not only is a large percentage of the retail and restaurant business in their hands, but scores of herbolarios, “herbists,” we might say, have stretched their signs across the old-time faÇades and blinded miradores of what were in viceregal days the residences of haughty families. Only the old men still cling to the national dress, and the pigtail has entirely disappeared. Here, too, the Chinaman sinks to depths not familiar to us of the north, and not only does the race furnish many of the street-sweepers of the capital, but it is no rare sight to see an oval-eyed personification of poverty hobbling along the main thoroughfares “shooting snipes” in the gutters.

The “masses” of Lima dwell in vecindades, which are none the less tenements for being packed together on the ground floor along either side of narrow callejones, blind alleys in which all the activities of the household from baby’s bath to the worship of a tin Virgin intermingle, instead of being piled one above the other. The better houses are spacious and airy within, though outwardly monotonous, built of mud and cane and plaster, their faÇades here resembling marble at a distance, there painted pale blue, or pink, or yellow. In the mud-and-bamboo Cathedral, the most imposing in appearance in Spanish America, the mummified skeleton of Pizarro, the jaws wired like those of some prehistoric creature in a museum, is made a peep-show, after the crude Spanish fashion. The “Cine” has all but driven out the theater and whatever of national or racial the latter brought with it. The visitor who knows no Spanish could easily guess the business of a shop announcing itself a “PlomerÍa y GasfiterÍa.” The Lima barber, calling his establishment a “PeluquerÍa y PerfumerÍa,” leaves no doubt as to what effeminate fate may befall one who ventures into his den.

This mid-winter season of July and August, they say, is no time to see Lima at its best. The traveler who has been a thousand times assured that rain never falls on the coast of Peru will be astonished to find the streets often slimy and soaking wet with garÚa, the Scotch mist that turns everything clammy and chill, yet never reaches the point where the shops find it worth while to include umbrellas among their stock. For days, and even weeks, the sun is invisible, and the capital lies heavy under leaden skies and a muggy blanket of mist, cold, dank, and gloomy. That is a rare day in this season when a brilliant sun makes it worth while to climb San Cristobal hill, a bare, peaked, rock-and-shale pyramid rising close above Lima on the north, from which he who has chosen his time well may catch a view not only of Callao and its island framed by the intense blue of the Pacific, but of the snowclads of the Sierra. The city with its 160,000 inhabitants lies flat in its arid setting, the disk of the bull-ring in the foreground, an irregular triangle with its base resting on the babbling Rimac, without chimneys, almost without smoke-stacks; for its industries are still chiefly confined to handicraft. The red tiles that give the prevailing color to the cities of the Andes are here unknown. The roofs, made of sticks and mud, are flat, like those of Palestine, and are the family promenades and garbage-grounds, and the abode of smaller live stock, especially of roosters, whose raucous saluting of each new day is not to be escaped by the most fortunate resident. Cock-fighting is still the most popular sport of the cholo classes. It is impossible to appear in public without being pestered by a constant procession of suerteros—offering suerte, or luck—vendors of lottery-tickets who fill the streets with their bawling from morning—late morning, for Lima is no early riser—to midnight.

For all its modern aspect, Lima is still Latin-American in temperament. Dawn brings to light personal habits little less reprehensible than those of Quito. A package of films mailed from the United States cost me two days of red-tape at the post-office, and the charges exceeded the original cost. A dozen bags of mail from the north were lost in Callao harbor through the inexcusable carelessness of the bargemen; the government refused to make reparation to the addressees on the ground that the law relieved it of responsibility for “unavoidable losses by shipwreck!” An abortive revolution enlivened the last days of July. Strolling into the plaza one evening, I was jostled by a group of youthful roughs firing revolvers into the air as they went. That night the mob assaulted the home of a former president, with casualties of three killed and a dozen wounded, and the executive of a year before was lodged in a cell at the penitentiary. Yet the films at a “Cine” a block away ran on without a tremor, and but for the fact that the shops took down their shutters somewhat later than usual, there was nothing left next morning to recall the occurrence. A few days later the principal newspaper announced solemnly that the ex-president had gone to Panama “for motives of health.”

The national museum was officially open, though unofficially closed, on the day of my visit. But the experienced traveler can always win his point with the doorkeeper of a South American institution, and I was soon treading the resounding halls between lines of a dead world’s relics. Mummies from prehistoric days, their knees drawn up to their chins, a look half of disgust, half of pain on their osseous features, squatted along a wall. Some were still covered with many-colored wrappings, enclosing in clumsy bundles not merely their bodies, but all their possessions, their protruding heads still in fantastic masks and wigs, just as they had been found in the burial caves of the Sierra. Others, reputed Incas, were contained in huge bales in which they stood erect, as befitted their high caste, their heads unmasked, the whole covered with a well-preserved linen-like cloth. The floor of one large room was completely covered with hundreds of skulls in careful rows. Some showed prehistoric trepanning, irregular holes sawed out of them, and the subsequent growth of the bone proving that the warrior had lived long after his overthrow in battle. A drowsy cholo was breaking up skeletons and clawing earth out of skulls with the expressionless placidity with which he might have sorted potatoes.

The director deigned to show me in person through the gallery of paintings. We paused first before an immense canvas depicting the funeral of Atahuallpa.

“A modern work?” I remarked, merely to make conversation.

“No, no, seÑor,” replied the director vehemently, “that is antigua. It was painted nearly forty years ago.”

“The fat priest is Valverde, I suppose, and this man with a beard must be Pizarro?”

“Just so, seÑor, and the man behind is Pizarro’s brother, Almagro.”

“His brother?”

But the director persisted in the unhistorical relationship, in which he was confirmed by an assistant, in spite of the fact that the figure in question represented a man some fifteen years younger than the chief Conquistador.

“Why is the back of Almagro’s head missing?”

“Ah, seÑor,” sighed the director, with a shrug of the shoulders, “What would you? The Chilians cut out this picture and carried it home. It used to be several feet longer, and there were many other caballeros in the group.”

Among whom was the real Almagro, no doubt. I made the circuit of the gallery, then turned an inquiring eye on my companion.

“Ah—er—you are looking for the picture that used to be here?” he stammered, quick to catch my expression.

“Yes, the famous portrait of Pizarro.”

“Well, it used to hang right here,” said the director, pointing to a blank space on the wall, as at some object of extraordinary interest. “But a few weeks ago the SeÑor Presidente de la RepÚblica sent for it, because he wants it in his own house.”

On my return I dropped in at the University of San Marcos, oldest in America and antedating our most ancient by nearly a century. It was pitifully like other Latin-American schools. The rector, having led me through a dozen empty school-rooms grouped about several patios, and having given the history in detail of a collection of silver cups “graciously awarded the University” by the king of this and the emperor of that, expressed unbounded surprise that I should wish to see a class at work. When it became evident that he could not shake me off with babbling courtesies, he pointed out the door of a class in law and disappeared, as if he would not have it known who was responsible for the unusual intrusion. Some twenty-five young men, not so young either, being almost all adorned with mustaches, were lounging on benches of the amphitheater. The professor, comfortably seated in a sort of pulpit, was reading in a languid and utterly dispassionate voice—not a lecture he had himself prepared, but from a book purchasable at a dollar or two, and readable, I trust, by the students themselves. Meanwhile the students napped, wrote letters, exchanged jokes, and discussed with their neighbors the extraordinary advent of a stranger in their midst. No doubt they had some other means and place of acquiring the knowledge indispensable even to a South American lawyer; but what they gained by attending classes was hard to guess. I had been the object of curiosity for some time before the professor caught sight of me. He left off reading at once, and sparred for time with a string of stale pedagogical jokes until I saw fit to remove my annoying presence. Other class-rooms demonstrated that famous old San Marcos is still in the world of long ago, its methods of instruction as antiquated as its text-books, heritages of a Jesuitical past, unavoidably so because of the rarity of Spanish translations of modern works.

During all July my ambition remained at a low ebb, and my most extended acquaintance was with the medical profession. “Yu Sui, Herbolario de Pekin, physician extraordinary to his Excellency, the Chinese Minister,” assured me I had dysentery, but no fever, and concocted the daily bottle of herbs accordingly. The chief Italian specialist based his treatment on the fact that I had fever, but no dysentery. Fortunately Lima has not yet been invaded by that sect that would have robbed me of the gloomy pleasure of having anything. Every gringo who had ever ventured a hundred miles into the interior had his own individual “sure cure”; and I had reached the point where I would have worn a tin charm about my neck, had anyone asserted it efficacious. Yet when once I had discovered a real physician, Anglo-Saxon in blood and of tropical experience, the remedy—intermuscular injections of emetine—was quickly effective.

A no less potent factor in the recovery, however, was the hospitality of mine own people in Bellavista (“Beyabi’ta,” locally) on the outskirts of Callao. Genuine electric-cars sped across the cool, flat country in a brief half-hour, from the capital to the edge of the Pacific I had not seen since landing in Cartagena thirteen months before. Here it was often brilliant summer, and from the housetop promenade spread out all Callao harbor, jutting La Punta, and the island of San Lorenzo in their intense blue setting, and perhaps even the snow-white line of the Sierra, while over the capital, a bare eight miles away, hung the opaque, mid-winter blanket of haze and gloom. The beach was near at hand, the sea-breeze constant, and the soporific roar of the surf never silent. The landscape, flat and arid, had a charm of its own, and a network of mud fences, on the broad tops of which one might promenade for miles.

One Sunday during convalescence I visited ancient PachacÁmac. Swift interurban cars bore us through morning-misty Miraflores and Barranco to Chorillos, proudest watering-place of the rainless Peruvian coast, where we mounted horses and rode away into the desert by a broad trail that paralleled the shore within hearing of the dull roll of the surf. It was a veritable Sahara, in which the sand, everywhere ankle-deep, lay in wind-blown ridges. The horizon rose before us as at sea, and the mirage of heat-waves seemed rivers flowing landward. The uncorrected imagination is wont to picture the coast of Peru as utterly flat, as well as sandy. It is so only in part. Hills of sand that were almost mountains stretched down to the sea, like buttresses fashioned to support the mammoth wall of the Andes that bounded the horizon on the left. The summits of many were hidden in mists, the garÚa from which had given life to the brilliant green lomas and patches where flocks feed in certain seasons; and the smiling valley of LurÍn, watered by a stream smaller than the Rimac and still cold from the snows above, was as inviting in its contrast to the repulsive, naked hills as any desert oasis. Down on the floor of the valley this, too, seemed sandy and dry, but the acequias that still water it, as in the days of the Incas, sustain a wilderness of scrubby trees, among which a chiefly negro population lolls in open-work huts. Nature seems to have arranged her seasons with foresight here; for when the garÚa gives way to blazing summer, the rainy season and the melting snows above swell the rivers to a volume that affords widespread irrigation.

PachacÁmac, the Animator of the Universe, not to be confused with the Sun-god of the Incas, had his temple on the edge of this forbidding waste of sand, overlooking the sea that chafes incessantly at its feet. It was the Benares of the ancient Peruvians, not merely because it drew pilgrims from all the surrounding world, but because here those who could brought and disposed of their dead. Conquered by the Incas nearly two centuries before the coming of the Spaniards, a Temple of the Sun was added; but the sun-worshippers, like their conquerors in turn, were too politic to suppress the earlier religion entirely, and merely merged it with their own. “In a room closely shut and stinking,” says Estete, the Spanish chronicler, “was an idol made of wood, very dirty, which they called god, who creates and sustains us. It was held in great veneration and at its feet were offerings.” Different, indeed, from many an Andean place of worship to-day! It is a place of death in a double sense. Scuttling lizards and sand-vipers are the only forms of life that accentuate its silent, repulsive sterility. Human skulls kick about underfoot through all the extent of the ruins, and disintegrated skeletons lie everywhere. Only the earthen pots and huacos are of financial value to the looters; the heads of the men who made them are not worth the gathering. The ruins are extensive, a few of the great terraced temples still moderately well preserved. But being of clay or adobe, dreary, yellow-brown, they offer no contrast in color to the surrounding desert hills, and nothing to compare with the splendid wrought-stone monuments of those wonderful architects, the ancient Peruvians of the highlands.

The year had run over into September before I turned my face upward again toward the Sierra, to pick up the broken thread of my journey. Beyond Chosica the naked hills closed in, and the train climbed all day between barren, echoing walls of rock, the exhilarating mountain air cutting ever deeper into my lungs, as the glorious Italian skies of the cloudless upper plateau spread their ever-broadening canopy above. Snow appeared on far-off peaks, descended to meet us, and spread in patches about and below us. As the air thinned, our faces flushed and tingled; a tendency to sleepiness was succeeded by a feeling of exhilaration and an inclination to grow talkative. My fellow-passengers began to show signs of distress at the altitude, growing more and more red-faced, with bloodshot eyes; then one by one they frankly succumbed to mountain sickness as the train continued inexorably upward. As the experienced sailor struts about among his seasick fellows, so I caught myself gazing with haughty scorn upon the weaklings about me. Obviously a man who had tramped the lofty pÁramos from far-off BogotÁ, often under a heavy pack, was immune to any effects of altitude.

But there is imbedded in ancient literature something to the effect that pride is often closely attended by a downfall. At Ticlio, in the crisp, cold afternoon, I noted that the mere exertion of lifting my baggage from the main to the branch-line train set my heart in a strange flutter. A more cautious person, too, would not have drunk three cups of black coffee in the miserable little station lunch-room so soon after weeks of rigid diet. Laboriously we climbed to the highest railroad point in the world, flanked by an immense blue glacier, up again on the bare, treeless, silent pampas, among cobble-stone hovels and ichu, the stolid, expressionless Indians of the highlands, and drew up at dusk in Morococha. The cheerless mining-camp, more than three miles above the sea, lay scattered along a dreary, bowl-shaped valley, with a vista of three cold, steel-blue lagoons, across which the enclosing snowclads threw their violet evening shadows. In this breathless region my pulse started savagely at every exertion, but being already arrived, I supposed myself as safe from mountain sickness as a disembarking passenger from mal de mer. In the manager’s cozy, stone-walled quarters the blazing fireplace, with its unaccustomed artificial heat and its clouds of tobacco-smoke, threatened suffocation and forced me to step out frequently into the crisp, night air to catch my breath. But no Indian of the highland could have boasted himself in finer physical spirits when we wandered away toward ten, panting considerably, to be sure, even at a very moderate pace, up the slope to the superintendent’s dwelling.

Barely had I turned in, however, when I began gasping for breath. Within an hour my host found that I had a respiration of 52 and a pulse of 125. All night long I struggled open-mouthed, with the sound of an accelerated steam-pump in bad repair, my heart engaged in what promised to be a successful attempt to pound its way out through my back, until my very shoulder-blades ached, and all the valley of Morococha seemed to echo with its thumping. It was too much! To be scarcely recovered from one long, laborious, Andean ailment, only to blow up of my own steam in this absurd land!

In the morning the mine-doctor came with his stethescope, mumbled “soroche” in a weary, unsympathetic voice, left some pills and instructions, and was gone. All day long I lay fasting, the snowclads gazing down upon me with icy, Andean indifference. Gradually the pounding of my heart ceased to drown out all other sounds, and my lungs resumed their accustomed action. On the following morning, though still weak and wobbly-legged, aching from crown to toe, I was able to be about, the day after, I strode slowly about the camp with something of the old-time vigor. In the end the experience seemed to be advantageous, for with every day thereafter I advanced to a faultless physical condition that was to accompany me on all the rest of the journey.

There are a score of theories concerning this mountain-sickness, known throughout Peru by the Quichua word soroche and in the basin of the Titicaca as puna. Who may be subject to it, what will prevent it, whether or not previous experience will or will not give immunity, are even greater mysteries than those surrounding its prototype, the bugbear of ocean travel. No two persons are ever affected alike by it. Commonly it is accompanied by a raging headache. All foreigners contracted for mine employment in this region are subjected to a rigid physical examination before they ascend “the Hill,” yet it is not unusual to make up a special train and rush a victim down to the coast. Among horses, with which it takes the form of blind-staggers and often renders the animal unfit for further service, it is known as veta, from the aboriginal superstition that it is caused by veins of ore (vetas) in the earth.

Morococha, like its rival, Cerro de Pasco, is a little world of its own, exclusively mining in its raison d’Être and considerably marked by Anglo-Saxon influence. Though many of the natives still huddle in dismal huts, without windows and with dirt floors, the civilizing effect of the gringo is in some evidence, at least in those superficial matters of small habits, amusements, and clothing. American hob-nailed boots are almost as frequently worn by the Indian men as the llanqui, or hairy cowhide sandal. Bitter cold though it is, even at noonday, the Indians of female persuasion go scantily clad and almost universally barefoot.

The miners work nine hours a day, seven days a week, and receive an average of something more than a dollar a day—a high wage from the Andean Indian point of view. The considerable efficiency of both Indian and cholo workmen is curtailed by much coca-chewing and hard drinking. Following each pay-day, and during the many fiestas, a majority of the native miners go on an extended debauch, leaving the mines often so short-handed that operations virtually cease. The effect of the celebration does not wear off for several days, so that enterprise is commonly paralyzed a week or more in every month. The company is powerless to remedy this drawback, and the government—that scapegoat of all imperfections throughout South America—shows no disposition to better conditions, even were it possible. An Indian injured in the mine is more apt to run away than to report at the hospital, and to appear later as a litigant against the company, demanding—and with government aid frequently winning—a sinecure for life. Even when the injured man is attended by the mine-doctor, and his broken leg bound with splints or his wound properly treated with antiseptic care, he is likely to be found next morning with the bandages torn off, and with coca leaves, or a chicken leg, or something as efficacious substituted.

It must be admitted that his gringo superiors do not set the native miner a perfect example in his chief vice, the excessive consumption of alcohol. In the social vacuum that must necessarily exist in such a community, drinking and gambling are the favorite methods of putting to rout dull care. The altitude soon gets on the nerves, seeming to call for some such stimulant; at least, it is the custom to “lay to the altitude” any species of misdemeanor, or the formation of habits unknown to the subject before his arrival. Somehow it strikes the passing observer as wicked to send these small-lunged, sea-level men of other climes up here to gasp through life at a height fitted only to the barrel-chested Indian and his fellow-beast of burden, the llama. Both physically and temperamentally the effect of the altitude is curious. Water boils at so low a temperature that a finger can almost be thrust into it with impunity. Fireplaces are set in action by nonchalantly throwing two or three beer-bottlesful of kerosene into the blaze. Those accustomed to the heights for generations are far sturdier and less vivacious than those of lower levels. Newcomers, on the other hand, are easily excited and rattle-brained, dashing about like the proverbial “hen with its head cut off,” futile in proportion to their striving. In the gringo community it is a standing jest that the American or Englishman most phlegmatic at sea-level will spend an hour trying to shave, and grow so hen-minded over that simple task that he often gives up in despair. The exhilaration is physical as well as mental. Baseball players, far from losing their customary prowess in this thin air, are given to running their legs off in their excitement, and must often be restrained lest they burst their lungs.

It is half-jokingly asserted that after a few months in the mines it is not safe to open a bottle or a “jack-pot” in the presence of a minister’s son. Unfortunately the jest seems to have serious basis in fact. The tighter the lines that bound their youth, the more completely do the newcomers cast them off when removed from the influence of home ties and neighborly opinion. Small wonder the Latin races accuse the Anglo-Saxon of hypocrisy. The Americans who live and mine up and down the Sierra have convinced Peruvians that every living American drinks quarts of whiskey neat every day, and squanders his substance in gambling, or if luck runs his way, in the “stews” of Lima. This is not to say that all gringos in Morococha and Cerro de Pasco fall into an evil manner of life, or that there are not many more who perform their tasks fully and efficiently, in spite of an occasional debauch. Those who bring with them very strong wills, or some equivalent for them, retain the tautness of their moral fiber, for all the altitude. The percentage of men who go astray is such, however, that it becomes almost a subject for congratulation to see a well-kept frame and a wholesome, unlined face in these Andean communities, where dissipated countenances are rather the rule than the exception. Then, too, often arriving as youths, with little experience of life except the half-cloistered one of our colleges, the younger seem to feel it necessary to prove themselves “men,” and to keep up the local reputation for what a missionary referred to as “those rough mining fellows” by assuming a bold, gruff, even vulgar exterior. All question of “morality” aside, the mere materialistic problem of keeping up the efficiency of their force would seem to make some curtailment of the prevailing customs worth the trouble of the mine-owners. But even those sent down to assume charge too often fall victims to that false philosophy of “a short life and a merry one.”

Gringo employees of higher rank command generous salaries and are well housed, with all the comforts that can conveniently be transported to this lofty region. Coming, for the most part, directly from England or the United States, they take naturally to the artificial heat which the natives rarely adopt. Before the fireplace at the club the conversation jumps from “bridge” to tetrahydrite ore, and back again to poker with, to the layman, a vertiginous speed, amid the rattle of glasses and bottles and the strains of a tireless phonograph. A considerable portion of the talk might frankly be called gossip; for South America has this in common with small towns, that every gringo up and down the continent knows every other, at least by hearsay, his private character and his domestic difficulties.

The traveler through South America is frequently struck by the fact that large enterprises, even British in ownership, are more often than not actually and practically in charge of Americans. The manager and most of the office force may be English, but the actual motive power, the man who makes the ore fly or sets the trains to running, is apt to be a youthful superintendent or engineer but a few years out of one of our technical colleges. This is no argument for or against the mentality or ability of either nationality. These are their natural spheres of action, purely the result of environment. The American, coming from a land where precedent is given short shrift, and accustomed to furnish his own initiative, is best fitted for pushing the pioneer work, for attacking unprecedented problems and carrying the enterprise on to the point where it is established and running smoothly. The Englishman, product of an older and more settled society, is more easily content to continue an established undertaking, to “stick on the job,” while the American moves on to attack new and unfamiliar problems.

I visited the chief mines of Morococha with the youthful American superintendent. They presented nothing unusual to one acquainted with those of Mexico, than which they were slightly more crude and undeveloped in their methods. Some details of life were different; the peons wore plenty of clothing, ragged and extremely bedraggled, hats, and even footwear, for it was little less cold down in the mine galleries than in the crisp, wintry mountain air and the brilliant yet chill sunshine that flooded the glacier-draped valley and the indigo-blue lakes above. We climbed and crawled and dragged ourselves by elbows, knees, shoulders, hands and feet through ancient and modern “stopes,” by slippery ladders, crude stairways, or slimy ropes, in an eternal darkness made barely visible by our torches. The Indian miners, some of them but half-grown boys, each and all had a cheek puffed out by a quid of coca. They took a half-hour “coca-time” each afternoon, as religiously as an Englishman does for his tea. Those who shoveled away the mountain of ore in the sunshine outside earned seventy cents a day; in the Natividad mine, where water poured incessantly and required oilskins, the workmen nearly doubled this wage. The practical gringo miners of to-day had somewhat different views of the ancient Peruvian civilization than its historians, and considered the stories of Inca wealth vastly exaggerated. Many a time, to be sure, a vein that promised rich reward was soon found to have been “stoped out” by the Incas or colonial Spaniards; but these neither knew enough about effective mining, nor went deep enough to get any such quantity of gold as tradition ascribes to them. Moreover, copper is the chief ore of Peru, and even silver owes its importance here almost entirely to the fact that the copper is highly argentiferous.

Beyond Oroya the railways of central Peru spread out in a Y, at the right-hand end of which is Huancayo, something more than two hundred miles from Lima, as is Cerro de Pasco on the other branch. Some time after the hour set, an engine was found somewhere in or about the junction, and toward noon we drifted away down a gorge into which portly, dry hills thrust themselves alternately from either side. Country women were washing their clothes in the scanty river; here and there, at the base of amphitheatrical bluffs, wheat was being threshed under the hoofs of circling horses. There were several dust-blown stations, but no signs of towns, nor, indeed, a patch on which one might have existed, except the one mud village of Llocllapampa in mid-afternoon, familiar with its old Andean red-tile roofs. In the first-class car was a crowd almost exclusively Peruvian, huge scarfs and shawls about their throats, and many in overcoats; for not only had Americans in their leather leggings disappeared, but even the outward evidence of gringo influence; and I was once more swallowed up in the purely native life of the Sierra. At length the gorge closed in, squeezed us through three tunnels, and there opened out an interandean valley, spreading far away north and south, cloud-shadows flecking its surface, two snowclad peaks contemplating us with a lofty disdain from over the crest of the enclosing wall. The train turned crab-wise toward the nearer end of the valley, and set us down within walking distance of Jauja.

The famous “Xauxa” of Prescott is rather colorless in its personality and barren in its setting. The bells of llama trains, followed by their as soft-footed, coca-chewing drivers, jangled by my window and died away down the street. A considerable proportion of the population was constantly struggling about the hydrant in the center of the plaza; the rest were either simple Indians with coca- and pisco-brutalized faces, or the haughty keepers of glorified peanut-stands. Smoke there was none, of course, neither of industry nor of domestic comfort, and in contrast to the bitter cold nights and the ice-box frigidity of every shade and shadow, the uncovered sun was burning. Not even the murmur of open sewers broke the languorous Andean silence, and in nothing but a few slight details was the monotony of all towns of the Sierra broken. I was back once more in the kingdom of candles, with its dreary, interminable, read-less evenings.

The ancient Inca highway passed through “Sausa,” on the heights above the present town, the beginnings of which Pizarro laid on his way to Cuzco. The ruins were far more easily accessible than those of Huamachuco, and neither so important nor so throttled with vegetation. The surviving walls are chiefly of broken stone, some of lines of square, some of round, rooms. The chief ruins appeared to have been a double line of fortresses, which hung on the brow of the hill with a truly Incaic view over the surrounding world. Strictly speaking, these were not Inca monuments, but constructions of the Huancas, improved by the Emperors of Cuzco. The tribe that once inhabited this broad valley were conquered by the militant Incas, and forced to give tribute and adopt the tongue of their conquerors, a dialect of which still persists in the region. The plain was once a lake-bottom, stretching from beyond Jauja to distant Huancayo. An hour’s walk from the town still brings one to a cool and placid lagoon, surrounded by all but impenetrable marshes and reeds, with numerous wild ducks winging their V-shaped course across it. To-day the Mantaro river, like an unravelled cord, swings southward past a few pueblocitos, among green groves that give relieving touches of color to a scene at best bald and barren in aspect.

Long before train-time most of the population of Jauja, having no better means of whiling away the afternoon, wandered out along the dusty road to the station, isolated as some house of pestilence. That American habit of racing breathlessly across the platform at the last moment is not prevalent in Peru. For one thing, the boleterÍa ceases to “function” long before the scheduled hour of departure, and he who embarks without a ticket subjects himself to a fifty percent. increase in fare—unless he has the fortune to be a compadre of some member of the train-crew. In the second-class coach the travelers ranged from broad-faced Indians to cholos in “civilized” garb and rubber collars, the corresponding females wrapped from head to foot in crow-black mantos. With the human deluge came corpulently stuffed alforjas, crude implements of husbandry, distorted bundles of household effects, and, on the backs of the Indian women, bulky in their heavy skirts unevenly gathered about their draught-horse hips, loads of varying size from which, with few exceptions, peered the face of a wide-eyed baby. All these—the infants only excepted—my fellow-passengers proceeded to stuff under the four lengthwise benches, into the racks above, or to hang from the roof supports, until the car took on the aspect of an overstocked pawnshop in which a multitude of tenement dwellers had taken sudden refuge.

Above the door was the information, “96 ASIENTOS,” all of which were all more than fully occupied when the engineer embraced the station-master for the last time and the massed population of Jauja began to recede into the distance. Within the car the prevailing tongue was Quichua. The native conductor “grafted” with a fetching frankness here and there in his struggle through the welter of humanity; the brakemen spent most of the journey drinking the health of a group of cholos in a corner of the coach. Chicha flowed like water. At every station old women crowded through the car selling that nectar of the Incas, all purchasers drinking from the same cup, and generally several from the same filling, while the scrawny hags, waiting for its return, idly rubbed their bony talons about the spout of the cÁntaro under their arms. Almost every traveler had his own supply of a more potent native beverage. The pisco bottle with its licorice smell passed constantly from hand to hand, eyes grew more and more bloodshot, tongues thicker, yet more talkative—for the Andean Indian is taciturn in exact proportion to his sobriety—eyelids heavy, and limbs clumsy. The tippling knew no limits either of sex or age. Infants barely two years old frequently took a long drink at the fiery bottle, and cooed with delight at the taste. The railway company not only permitted, but abetted Peru’s national vice. If the universal pastime threatened to flag for a moment, it was resuscitated by the fifty-year old dwarf of a train-boy, who waded incessantly through our legs with a bottle under each arm and a single opaque glass in hand, urging all, from the aged Indian dreaming over the cud of coca in his cheek to the best-dressed chola, to drink and be merry, for to-morrow—he would be bound in the other direction.

Not a few of the Indian and cholo girls were robustly pretty, their cheeks rosy in spite of their coppery tint. At one station there entered the car a white Peruvian baby, richly dressed as some little princess, fingerless white gloves on her tiny hands, borne on the back of an unbelievably dirty Indian girl of twelve, whose filthy felt hat the regally clad infant alternately picked and thrust its fingers into its mouth. Its parents were enjoying babyless freedom with their friends in the first-class car, and incidentally saving the difference in the servant’s fare. Thus the unwashed Indian intrudes everywhere, always, from altar to kitchen, from nursemaid to grave-digger, and the fact never strikes the most haughty Andean as incongruous. Had the old Spanish chroniclers been of the realistic school, we should no doubt have learned that the Inca’s bread was also dropped on a mud floor, and picked up with unwashed fingers before it was presented to him on a golden platter. In all the pages of Prescott there is no suggestion of uncleanliness. His Indians are as spotless as if they had been scrubbed and scoured with New England zeal before they were admitted to the muslin-shaded twilight of his study. Yet he who has physically traveled through what was once the Empire of the Incas cannot but suspect that the Puritan-bred historian, for all his marvelously living and breathing masterpiece, inadvertently—or puritanically—gave in this respect a false picture of the ancient kingdom.

It was nearing sunset when groves of eucalypti began to ride close by the train-windows, then rows of mud huts alternating with little farms of alfalfa, then larger adobe houses, and at length we drew up at Huancayo, the end of railroading in central Peru. For many years there have been plans to carry the railway on to Ayacucho, and even a wild project of some day pushing it across to Cuzco, and of linking it up with the railways of the south. Fortunately, nothing had yet come of the scheme, and what lay before me depended thereafter on my own exertions, with whatever of charm that remained to the ancient but now slightly traveled route through the heart of Peru, as the reward.

Huancayo, boasting—as towns of the Sierra will—10,000 inhabitants, in a rich and, in better seasons, well-watered valley, consists chiefly of one long, broad street, perhaps the broadest in Peru, paved with small, round stones, a ditch of water stagnating through its center. On either side it is lined by wrought-iron rejas and open shop-doors; at either end it dies out in sand and cactus-bordered paths between mud-huts. As the main plaza of Riobamba is to Ecuador, this street forms the center of what is reputed the greatest native market in Peru. Each Sunday it offers a pulsating vista of Indians from a hundred miles around, in every color known to an artist’s palette—and some which the boldest of painters would not venture to use—an unbroken stretch of humanity, shimmering in the glaring sunshine. An expert stenographer might wander all day through the surging throng without being able to set down the mere names of the wares displayed, to say nothing of the endless variety of garments, types, faces, and customs. So packed with details is the far-famed market, that only a cinematograph ribbon could give even a faint notion of its activities; mere words are as powerless to paint its motley variety as to catch the subtle charm of Huancayo itself, with its perfect climate and crystalline sunshine.