It was in the scattered caserÍo of Marcas that I overtook a traveling piano. I had barely installed myself by force and strategy in a mud den, and tied Chusquito to a molle tree before a heap of straw in which he alternately rolled and ate, when a party of gente arrived, among them an old woman of the well-to-do chola class, carried astride the shoulders of an Indian. Their chief spokesman was a lawyer named Anchorena, a white man of some education and even a slight inkling of geography, who was importing an upright piano for his mansion in Ayacucho. With the descending night came a score of Indians carrying a large, crude harp, several fifes and guitars, and a drum, to install themselves along the mud benches of the corredor of the building inside which the more or less drink-maudlin gente had spread themselves. It is never the Peruvian’s way to interfere with the celebrations of his underlings, however disturbing these may be, and far into the night the “musicians” kept up an unbroken, dismal, tuneless, indigenous wail that forced whoever would be heard to shout. Anchorena, professionally inclined to like the sound of his own voice best, bellowed the evening through in an endless account of a fellow-townsman’s visit to New York a bare ten years before. Of all the marvelous experience, what seemed to astonish both the teller and his hearers most, all but choking the Indian-riding old woman with incredulity as often as he repeated it, was the alleged fact that in the best New York hotels guests were not permitted to spit on the floor. Come to think of it, that probably would astonish a Peruvian.

To my surprise the natives were off ahead of us in the morning, and Chusquito had picked his way many hundred feet down a stair-like trail before we sighted the boxed piano, lying on its back on a bit of level ground far below, with some twenty-five motley-arrayed Indians squatted about it. The lawyer shook hands effusively and, putting Chusquito in charge of the barefoot squire who was leading his own cream-colored coast horse, invited me to listen to his endless chatter while we continued the swift descent together.

The piano, made in Germany, had been set down in Lima for $500. Freight to Huancayo had added ten percent. to the cost. From the end of the railway to Ayacucho, a scant two hundred miles, the exotic plaything must be transported on men’s backs, as the Incas imported a thousand things—if not pianos—in the days of their power. This stage of the journey would, under ordinary circumstances, have nearly doubled the cost of the instrument. But Anchorena had the advantage of owning a large hacienda in the great hot valley toward which we were descending, and was able to cut the expense in two by drawing upon his own peons for the labor of transportation. Three distinct gangs had been sent from his estate, each to bear the burden a third of the distance. They were paid the extraordinary wage of twenty cents a day, and supplied food, chicha, and coca. Each gang carried the piano for a week, and it was the second party celebrating the arrival of the third that had made noisy the night at Marcas.

Each morning, shortly after midnight, the Indians rose to munch mote, or boiled corn, for an hour or more, after which a heavy soup of corn, potatoes, beans, and charqui, was served. Then for another hour the men poked coca leaves one by one into their cheeks, mixing them with lime from their little gourds, and by dawn, the effect of the chewing having made itself felt, they rose to their feet and were off. Some forty peons set their shoulders to the several poles attached to the boxed piano, a picket-line with shovels, axes, and ropes was thrown out in advance to widen the trail and lend assistance in the steeper places, and an army of servants, cooks, squires, and the numerous capatazes, or bosses, required for any effective Indian labor, brought up the rear of the expedition.

From the punas of the day before, totally barren but for the dreary, yellow ichu, we had descended through a zone of scrub bushes, lower still through thirstless, sand-loving cactus, and were now dropping swiftly through a dead, desert landscape by zigzag trails as painfully steep and unpeopled as those of the Ecuador-Peruvian boundary. Architecture changed with the altitude, so that the openwork huts became little more than thatch roofs on poles, shading the languid, loafing inhabitants of a place called Huarpo, hot as Panama, on the edge of a river cutting off a broad, sandy valley I had seen from the sky the day before. The surrounding region was a cofardÍa, that is, it belonged to some wooden saint to whom it had been bequeathed by a beata, one of the many pious old women who have thus left great tracts of the Andes perpetually in morte main. For the desire of these sanctimonious matrons is to provide a permanent income for the masses requisite to the repose of their souls, and as their piety is commonly tempered with experience of the ways of this world, they usually reject the suggestion of the Church to sell the property and give the money directly to the priest, lest he grow forgetful, in a way even priests have, and neglect his duty toward the dwellers in purgatory. Huarpo is also paludic, or raging with intermittent fevers, and no wise man drinks water within sight of it. The appearance of a gringo in their midst aroused even these languid, fever-hued, desert people to an unusual concentration of attention, one bedraggled female bursting out at last with a remark in Quichua too rapid for my ears, but which the lawyer translated: “Caramba! Si yo estaba preÑada de seguro saldrÍa la cara gringuita!” It is a common superstition in the Andes that a child will closely resemble the person the mother has looked most fixedly upon during the months before its birth.

In spite of the fact that everything I owned in South America, not only my letter of credit and the papers necessary to prove my identity, but even my money, had been left in my alforjas under the tender care of an Indian boy miles behind, I did little worrying. The Andean traveler soon grows accustomed to trusting his possessions to penniless peons, for losses are astonishingly rare. For all that, I caught myself glancing anxiously now and then up the wall of shale and loose rock that piled into the sky above us. The piano-movers made good time, in spite of many a zigzag and desert precipice, where rope and home-made tackle and the widening of the trail were often necessary. We had not enjoyed the shade of the huts an hour before the vanguard appeared, and shortly afterward the lawyer’s bulky toy was laid in the baking sand beside us, and the sweating, dust-covered carriers swarmed about the huge jar of chicha de molle that had been purchased for them. Progress would have been much less rapid but for the fact that the third gang, knowing theirs was the last shift, realized the advantage of finishing the journey to Ayacucho as soon as possible. Yet their conception of hurrying was not exactly vertiginous. They halted a long hour, not to eat, which they did only morning and evening, but to prepare new quids of coca. From a large grain-sack the lawyer dealt out to each of the peons with his own fair hand a small handful of the narcotic leaves. They slunk forward one by one, with outstretched hats, and a hint of eagerness on their besotted, expressionless faces, with the air of men who would have sold their souls for this few cents’ worth of brutalizing leaves.

Chusquito, who had appeared at last, all intact but as covered with fine sand as from a trip across the Sahara, was too tiny to have crossed the river without wetting my baggage. It was the cream-colored coast horse that saved me a detour of several miles to a bridge downstream. Except for the lawyer and his mayordomos, the expedition stripped to the waist and forded the stream inch by inch under the piano, slipping individually, but fortunately not in unison, on the stones at the bottom, and spending a half-hour in a precarious task that would have been impossible in any but the dry season. In the shade of a molle grove beyond, Anchorena, who had recently been won to up-to-date methods, dealt out a quinine pill to each of the Indians. Few were able to swallow them without chewing, and made wry faces and animal noises in consequence. Several surreptitiously got rid of the detested white man’s remedy while their master’s eyes were not upon them. Though the day was still young, the cavalcade was to camp on the edge of the drowsy, sand-carpeted town of Izcutaco, a bare mile above the river, and when I left them the cooks were already heating over a blazing fire of molle berries the enormous iron kettle, six feet in diameter, under which an Indian had plodded, bent double, all day. When I took leave of the lawyer, he hoped to reach Ayacucho in four days, making the journey from Huancayo three weeks in duration, at a total cost of about $250, without reckoning the labor lost on his hacienda while the three gangs were going and coming and recuperating from their unwonted toil.

The molle tree covered all the great, tilted plain before me, lending it an inviting green tinge in spite of its semi-desert character. Its leaves are not unlike those of the willow, and it produces in clusters great quantities of a peppery red berry somewhat resembling the currant in appearance, and those of our red cedar in taste. These are well supplied with saccharine and ferment readily, constituting the chief curse of the region, in the form of an intoxicant so cheap and plentiful that the inhabitants are more often drunk than working.

In Huanta the addressee of my Turkish letter was Don Emilio, ——, a hearty countryman pleasantly free from the tiresome “polish” of the Latin-American city-dweller. Early in our conversation he took pains to inform me that he never permitted a priest to cross his threshold. A fellow-townsman later confided to me that the prohibition dated from the day that the oldest daughter of my host had been betrayed through the ministrations of the confessional. There was something pleasantly reminiscent of old patriarchial days in the way we all sat at meat together around the long table in the back corredor, surrounded by a flock of servants, the older, shy-mannered girls rising now and then during the meal to tend shop. Yet it is not easy to make oneself agreeable to such a family, for lack of intellectual interests cuts down the conversation to the simplest matters. The women of the household preferred the guttural Quichua, but Don Emilio found that tongue more difficult than his accustomed Spanish. My host was one of the “city fathers,” and perhaps the best-read man in the community, yet he referred to the United States and Europe as “a place somewhere up the coast,” and desired to know whether Italy was in New York, or New York in Italy. I attempted, in my struggle to make conversation, to give the family some conception of our northern midwinters.

“Brr! Nearly as cold as Huancavelica, it must be,” shivered the wife.

“How high is the highest Andes in your United States?” asked Don Emilio, with a hint of suspicion in his voice.

I told him.

“Then it is impossible for it to be cold there,” he cried, conclusively, “for that is scarcely higher than Huanta itself.”

Huanta lies close to the great montaÑa, or Amazonian hot-lands, and the “chocolate de Huanta” is famous throughout Peru. But the trails to that fruitful region are so nearly impassable that the interchange of products is only a fraction of what it might be. Set in one of the dry belts that are so frequent in the Andes, the great, tilted plain depends on irrigation for most of its fruits. Molle, fig, and willow trees abound, yet the ground beneath them is barren of grass. Eighty percent. of the valley is said to be chiefly Indian in blood. Peons are paid an average of twelve cents a day, and judging from what I saw of them, they are grossly overpaid. Nearly a half-century ago Squier found “drunkenness universal throughout the Sierra, and nothing neglected that could be turned into intoxicating beverages.” To this day there is slight improvement in this respect. Thanks to the molle berry, intemperance is high, even for Peru, and laziness reaches its culmination during the season when the tunas, ripening on the cactus hedges, feed alike birds and Indians. In the town almost every hut is a little drunkery, with an inviting display of bottles of all shapes and sizes. The life of the place was typified by a soft-muscled lump of a man sitting in the shade of his shop, drowsily switching flies off himself with a horse’s tail mounted on a wooden handle. To have seen him reading a book, or even whittling a stick, would have been entirely out of keeping with the local color.

House-flies, unknown in the upper altitudes, were more than numerous. Cats, too, were in evidence for almost the first time in the Sierra. The assertion of scientists that these cannot endure high regions was denied by the natives, who attributed their absence elsewhere to the lack of rats to feed on. Dogs, unfortunately, are indifferent to either drawback, and the Andean town has yet to be discovered that does not swarm with them. Llamas avoid Huanta, and the climate is more fitted to donkeys than to mountain ponies. An Indian trotted in from one of the irrigated alfalfares on the edge of town with a poncho-load of fresh, green alfalfa, gay with purple and red flowers, soon after our arrival. But at the first taste of this new species of fodder Chusquito showed keen disappointment. Like myself, he preferred regions of ten thousand feet and upward. During most of our stay he hung sad and dejected, as if homesick for the cold, penetrating air and the wiry grass of his native mountains, and it was here that I saw him lie down for the first time since we had joined forces.

We pushed on to Ayacucho under no very auspicious circumstances, for the department capital was reported to be raging with an epidemic of typhoid and smallpox that had forced it to ask aid of the central government. The day’s tramp varied from a blazing, semi-tropical gorge to a barren, waterless range so lofty that I found it necessary to stretch out on my back at the summit to catch my breath. A contrary mood, or too long a rest, made Chusquito choose to be obstreperous beyond all custom, and twice he set his heart wilfully on branch trails, and came perilously near escaping with all my possessions. Thereafter I kept him tied to my belt, and for once he set a pace more swift than I would have had it. Early in the afternoon the blazing desert landscape was broken by the sight of a city that could have been no other than Ayacucho, filling the hollow of a green bowl, several hut-lined streets radiating upward from it, like the legs of some great tarantula stretched on its back. A perfectly level road seemed to promise a quick entrance; but almost at the edge of the town the world fell suddenly away into a bottomless earthquake crack, where we sweated for an hour in a headlong descent far out of sight of human habitation, and toiled upward again to the crest of the horizon, all to advance a bare five hundred yards. Raging with thirst, we strode swiftly down upon the town, only to be blocked at the edge of it by a religious procession of hundreds of girls in snow-white dress. As if to show off before his fellow-countrymen, Chusquito redoubled his cussedness, and persisted, in spite of all my efforts, in taking advantage of the smooth, flagstone sidewalks, forcing two-legged pedestrians into the rough-cobbled street. It did not occur to me that he, too, might be footsore. At the first open door through which I spied bottles, he attempted to enter with me, and watched me disgustedly while I opened a bottle of native soda-water, a second, then a third, until the proprietress all but fainted with astonishment at sight of a man who came on foot drinking up a whole fifteen cents’ worth at once—and actually paying for it.

Both the hotels of Ayacucho were the usual low buildings, extending around a large court one entered beneath a topheavy archway, where guests appeared to be considered a nuisance, to be avoided by both host and servants as long as possible. I was finally awarded a dungeon opening directly on all the assorted activities, misdemeanors, and indecencies indigenous to the cobbled patios of Andean hotels, but which had the unusual feature of a window—with wooden bars, for glass is a luxury, even in an important department capital. The chamber was cool to the point of sogginess and had, of course, to be cleared out and furnished to my order. It was apparent that here was a city that would reward several days’ stay, and I set about finding more fitting accommodations for Chusquito than the circle about a post to which he had been confined at every halt since he had come into my possession. Long search and persistent inquiry brought me to a professional inverna, a term supposed to designate a green pasture in which an animal accepted as guest can wallow and gorge to his heart’s content. Fortunately I am nothing if not sceptical in such Peruvian matters and, sure enough, investigation proved the place to be only a bare field in which the owner promised to give “plenty of food and water” at ten cents a day. Promises and starvation are too closely allied in the Andes, where he who will know his animal well fed must see to the feeding in person. I had all but resigned myself and the maltreated beast to the inevitable, and had ordered a load of alfalfa brought to the hotel patio, when I ran across the piano importer, who begged me to do him the honor of letting him send the animal to his farm a few miles out of town. When at last I got to bed, my sleep was full of feverish dreams in which I was dragged to destruction times without number over bottomless precipices by a rope tied to my belt, while I gazed about me in vain for a patch of green in a bald and blistered landscape.

At first sight this half-green hole in the ground, surrounded by cactus-grown stretches of loose stones and bare, repulsive mountains, seemed a queer place for a city. But the situation improves somewhat upon closer acquaintance. Under the scanty trees that lend the hollow its color the soil is fertile when favored by the rains, and those who can avoid going out in the middle of the day will find the climate little short of perfect. The main drawbacks to what might be a not unpleasant dwelling-place are the absence of even the rudiments of hygiene, and the whirlwinds that spring up often with sudden, unexpected violence and envelop the town in clouds of dust and evidence of the absence of street-sweepers, or bring down a wintry wave from the snowclad to the south that lends its contrast to the picture.

At the time of the Conquest the only gathering of mankind corresponding to the present city was what Prescott calls “Huamanga, midway between Lima and Cuzco.” The story runs that an Inca, passing through the region, was sitting at meat out-of-doors when he saw, circling above him, a magnificent huaman, Quichua for falcon. Struck with admiration, he held up a choice morsel crying, “Huaman ca!—Take it, falcon!” Whatever the truth of the legend, the department of which Ayacucho is the capital is still known as Huamanga. The city itself takes its name from the Quichua terms aya (corpse), and ccucho (corner), in other words, “Dead Man’s Corner.” Long before the arrival of the Spaniards all this region was thus known because of a great battle between the fierce local tribes and those of Cuzco, in which the latter were routed. But the tables were turned under Huayna CcÁpac, the Great, who colonized the territory by the customary Inca method of settling it with mitimaes, or “transplanted people” from another province. The great military highway passed close to the present site, but the only town of any size between Huancayo and Cuzco in early colonial days was Huari, now an insignificant Indian village lost among the stony hills. Manco, the revolted Inca, and his followers formed the chronic habit of falling upon travelers between the ancient and the new capital of Peru, and in 1548 Pizarro ordered a city founded for their protection, usually known as Huamanga. Not until after what is known to history as the Battle of Ayacucho, in which Sucre defeated the Spanish veterans who had fled before BolÍvar from the icy pampa of JunÍn, and brought to an end the struggle of the new world for political freedom begun in New England a half-century before, was the older and more appropriate name revived.

In colonial times it was a far more important city. A census taken by a German in 1736 showed a population of more than 40,000. To-day it has barely two inhabitants for each of its 8000 feet elevation above sea-level. Even Squier found it “laid out on a grand scale, but with unmistakable signs of a great decline in wealth and population.” Epidemics of smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever, the advance of machinery and foreign importation over the local handicraft manufacture of tocuyo (cloth from the cactus fiber), frazadas, or hand-woven blankets, and native shoes, with the corresponding decrease in the growing of cotton in the region, were the chief causes of this decline. Then, too, the building of railroads left the ancient route from Lima to Cuzco stranded, and only a rare gringo andarÍn, driving a shaggy and sun-faded chusquito, comes now to visit the once proud city. Should the long-threatened railway across Peru ever come to pass, Ayacucho, like Huancavelica, may come more or less into her own again.

The cities of our own land are not without their faults, but he who would fully realize the advantages of even the most backward of them should come and dwell for a time in one of these shipwrecked “capitals” of the Andes. By night Ayacucho is “lighted” by dim kerosene contrivances, mildly resembling a miner’s torch, inside square, glass-sided lanterns of medieval origin, each house-owner paying from five to twenty cents a month for his share of the illumination. Gradually, however, electric lights were being installed—those pale, ought-to-be-sixteen-candle-power bulbs indigenous to Andean towns—against which a considerable opposition had developed because of the threatened cost of nearly a dollar monthly to each householder. In view of the fact that the average shop rents for $3 a month, it was natural that so decided an increase in expenses should be resented. The huge main plaza is garnished only with a central fountain surrounded by the customary iron fence, “due to the untold patriotism of Juan Fulano, ex-alcalde, etc.,” and a few ancient, backless, rough-stone benches. The favorite loafers’ gathering-place is under the portales, or arcades, that surround the square on three sides. These are lined with shops into the blue-black shadows of which the plaza-stroller’s eyes peer gratefully, but wellnigh blindly, from the blazing sunshine outside. Compared even with Spain, Ayacucho harbors an unbelievable number of non-producers. Hundreds of little shops, endlessly duplicated, stretch away along its every street, tended by lounging men and women with no other desire in life than to sell a few cents’ worth of something, particularly strong drink, and not even desiring that very decidedly. Their business methods are crude in the extreme. The town, for example, is noted for its native chocolate. The cacao beans grown in the montaÑa on the east are hulled and roasted, mixed with crude sugar and vanilla, and crushed and rolled again and again by hand under stone rollers, producing a gravelly, but not untoothsome product. Yet, though every merchant in town is ready to sell these individually at 2½ cents a cake, not one of them can be induced to sell by weight. “No es costumbre,” answers every man, woman, and child tending shop, and though all hover on the verge of poverty, not a man among them will overstep fixed custom, even to this extent, to win a less precarious livelihood. For a country where “trusts” are unknown the entire town is rather staunchly agreed on prices. The money in use is almost exclusively silver, which is lugged back and forth through the streets in cotton bags. Many of the coins, having at some time served as female adornment, have holes in them, and though these are perfectly acceptable to Ayacucho, they are worthless elsewhere in the country, so that to my usual task of gathering small change for the road ahead was added that of carefully weeding out all holed pieces. The average ayacuchano has a kind of crude insolence and an arrogance bred in isolated places which, added to his mountaineer uncouthness, makes him not over pleasant. Toward me they assumed a suspicious air that suggested some foreigner had once long ago cheated some one among them out of ten cents. Even for Peruvians, the plighted word of every grade of inhabitant is peculiarly worthless. Of a dozen or more promises of larger or smaller importance made me during my stay, not one ever reached even the point of attempted fulfilment. The population is very largely Indian—often in diluted form—and genuinely white persons are decidedly rare, certainly not ten percent., though there are many more than that, strutting about in what Ayacucho fancies faultless dress, who consider themselves such, and who would be astonished at the set-back their pretentions would receive in more exacting communities. The town swarms with tailors, chiefly boys and youths with slight ability at their trade, who sit, like the craftsmen of Damascus, in little shops the entire front of which is open door, and work steadily but languidly on miserable materials that barely last long enough for purchaser and seller to part, their attention chiefly on whatever passes in the street. The Indians of the region still weave a heavy wool frazada of astounding combinations of color, and the town is somewhat noted for the filigree work and wood-carving for which it was once famous. But for the most part it is silent, smokeless, and industry-lacking as any village of the Andes, without a single wheeled vehicle to rumble over its cobbles. Its water is so bad that even the natives admitted I should not drink it. Indeed, I did not even dare develop films in it. Not that its source is ill-chosen, but in the several miles of open conduit to the city, the Indians make free use of it for any of their lavatory processes. The local Quichua dialect varies much from that of Cuzco, the Florence of the Inca tongue, so that Indians from the two towns understand each other with difficulty.

Ayacucho is about as badly overdone in churches as any town in church-boasting South America. In colonial days a religious edifice was built on the slightest provocation, of cut-stone if possible, of cobbles or adobe if necessary, until to-day the entire population might be housed five times over in those that are left. Not a few are things of beauty in their time-mellowed delapidation. The cathedral, centuries old, is surpassed in all Peru only by those of Lima and Cuzco. Externally, and at some distance, like so many things of Spanish origin, it has an imposing and not inartistic appearance. But the interior is disappointing. Here is the usual Latin-American garish gaudiness of wooden, tin, and porcelain saints, with no suggestion of art, except in the intricately carved wooden pulpit and the choir stalls flanking the altar. Behind each of the latter a boy stands during services, holding a candle above the chanting friar whose bulk amply fills the niche. A spittoon is provided for each of the singers. Ash-trays had evidently not yet come into style. An unusual feature was seats for the congregation, which in most churches of the Andes is left to kneel on the bare floor, or to bring a servant carrying a prie-dieu. It was the first place in Peru where the beating of church-bells reached anything like the hubbub of Ecuador or Colombia, for Ayacucho is so fanatical that the law against this is openly disobeyed. Sleek, well-fed, cigarette-smoking priests are everywhere in evidence, scores of “barefoot” friars in their stout leather sandals waddle about town with the self-complacency of the sacred bulls of India, and the public appearance of the bishop brings all activity to a standstill, and all beholders except the upper-class men to their knees.

As in most centers of religious fanaticism, the town reeks with poverty. Even for South America, the overwhelming display of rags is striking, and ignorance and debauch is in constant evidence. Yet the children, the babies particularly, sometimes have a brightness and an innocence about them that suggests what might be made of them could they be caught young, very, very young, and taken away from this environment of dirt and ignorance and immorality and priests. Yet who knows? The more one travels, the more one’s opinion wavers between the effects of ancestry and environment.

It has been said of Ayacucho that her chief occupations are drinking, cock-fighting, love-making, and religious processions. The last is most in public evidence. The first fiesta to break out after my arrival was that of the “Virgen de las Mercedes.” All shops closed for the occasion, and the entire region boomed and clanged with the exertions of gangs of boys filling every belfry and vying with each other in adding to the uproar. At four of the afternoon, when the sun had lost some of its glare, the cathedral disgorged a solemn throng escorting three huge floats that began a snail-paced circuit of the broad plaza, halting before every building of importance while the choir sang some Latin anthem. Before the Virgin and her two accompanying saints, all flashing with rich and many-colored silks, marched teams of sanctimonious-faced beatas with ribbons over their shoulders, feigning to supply the motive power which was, in reality, furnished by toiling and sweating Indians half-concealed beneath the massive floats. As the head of the procession reached certain points, an aged Indian acolyte set off home-made fireworks of intricate and long-enduring design, that filled the air as with a sudden bombardment. The instant these fell silent, swarms of boys raced into the smoke from every side to fight with the low-caste functionary for possession of the charred framework. Every male, as well as the Indian women, uncovered as the figures passed—except myself, too busy with photography to honor the local customs. Yet, where a century ago such sign of the heretic would have caused homicidal riot, I heard only one audible protest—from some one of the newsboy order.

Of course few inhabitants of the town had any notion of its history back of their own lifetime, nor any real interest in abetting my investigations, though all pretended to bubble over with enthusiasm for them. A blank indifference hangs like moss over the records of the past throughout all the Andes, and the curious traveler will find more by wandering around until he stumbles upon them, than by making inquiries. Not only are the natives ignorant of all points of historical interest, but utterly incapable of distinguishing any such from so much junk. It is just as useless to call upon the “representative men,” for the minds of these differ only in slight degree from the gente del pueblo. Ayacucho has more than the usual excuse for this ignorance of her past, however, for in 1883 the Chilians marched into the region, took possession of the town, its houses, goods, and attractive women, and, camping in the city hall and the prefect’s office, boiled their soup over the archives. For a few brief months before their arrival, Ayacucho was the proud capital of Peru. Congress held its sessions in the old church of San AugustÍn cornering on the plaza, and for a while money was coined there.

Local information might have ended with that, but for the fact that an ayacuchano who eked out an existence, Santiago knows how, in one of the little shops under the portales, was “aficionado” to the history of the region. I spent long hours with him, for clients were of scant importance compared to his hobby. He was unshakable in his conviction that the Indian was just as ambitionless and animal-like in his habits before the Conquest, as to-day. Ayacucho has a local heroine in one MarÍa Parado de Bellido about whom already strange legends have gathered. A chola woman of the middle-class, who could neither read nor write, she took a leading part in the revolution against Spanish rule. Having undertaken the delivery of a treasonable letter, written at her instigation, she was captured by the Spaniards and, swallowing the missive, refused to betray the writer, for which hardheadedness she was shot before the broad, central pillar of the Municipalidad. This was the scene of many an execution in colonial times. Those condemned to die were kept three days in the arched dungeon that forms a corner of the building, “gorged with all spiritual and material blessings—peaches and beefsteaks and the like,” as my informant put it, and then shot. He asserted that in Ayacucho none were burned nor otherwise executed by the Inquisition. But the statement has not all the earmarks of veracity. Not only is the century-faded edifice on the adjoining corner still known as the “Church of the Inquisition,” but a city whose population never exceeded 40,000 that could build the twenty-four large churches and countless chapels still existent, to say nothing of the many that have disappeared, “just because the priest of each ward cried, ‘Come, let us build a church!’ and they came and built it,” was not likely to be contented without seeing an occasional heretic roasted in the central plaza on a gala Sunday afternoon.

There was one sight which the “authorities” were so bent on my visiting and “picturing to the world” that the prefect detailed a soldier to accompany me to it. The so-called “Battle of Ayacucho” really took place at La Quinua, on the sloping brown mountain-flanks some twelve miles to the northeast of the city. From any high place in town the village, backed by its white monument and the dark face of Cundurcunca, the “Condor’s Nest,” is plainly visible. One can even make out the highway on which the Spanish veterans zigzagged up to the deep quebrada in which La Serna capitulated, almost at the very hour that Phillip V in far-off Spain was making him “Duke of the Andes” as a reward for his victorious campaign. There was no cable in those days. But I knew no way of telling the prefect, without insult, that I did not choose to tramp twenty-four thirsty, earthquake-cracked miles to gaze upon a plaster monument that I could study to my heart’s content from where I sat, and I was reduced to the customary strategy of Latin-American intercourse. The soldier came to wake me at six—it is the South American way to fulfill only those promises one hopes will be forgotten. I greeted him with the announcement that I had decided to put off the trip until the following week. He showed distinct signs of relief at not having to drive his legs, with heavy, unaccustomed shoes on the ends of them, all day, and as everything always is postponed in Ayacucho, the decision caused no surprise.

“Is there a public library in town?” I asked a native son.

“CÓmo no!” he cried, as if the question were an insult to the “culture and progress” for which Ayacucho fancies itself famed.

Following his directions, I hurried over to the Municipalidad, cheerful with the prospect of spending a few quiet hours unstared-at among its books. For some time I wandered through several refuse-strewn patios and deep-shaded corredors of the rambling, one-story building, peering into many a room with uneven earth floor, without finding anything even mildly resembling a library. At length I stumbled upon a chamber marked “SecretarÍa,” in which six men of varying shades of color were discussing the coming bull-fight, rolling cigarettes, sleeping, and otherwise earning their salaries. A long search brought to light a ten-inch key, and a procession of the full municipal force of Ayacucho escorted me through several more empty, earth-floored rooms to a door at the rear of the building.

“You see,” explained the official with the most nearly white collar and the longest right to keep his hat on, “we have only just begun to form the library, so the catalogue is not yet available nor any of the books arranged. However....”

As the time-eaten sign over the door announced that this evidence of culture and progress had only been founded in 1877, it was natural that it should not yet be set in order. One cannot expect things to be done in a minute in Latin America. The walls of the stoop-shouldered mud room were almost hidden by books, however, nearly all of them bound in ancient parchment or imitations of the same. I ran my eyes along them, the six municipal employees grouped in a staring semicircle about me. Row after row stretched books in Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French, with such titles as, “The Infallibility of the Church,” by Padre So-and-So, “The Life of Saint QuiÉn Sabe,” by “A Brother of the Order”; but nowhere was there one with a suggestion of modern utility.

“This looks much like a priest’s library,” I remarked, when I had read most of the titles.

“Cabalmente, seÑor,” said the front-rank official. “Exactly; it was given by the holy bishop who died a few years ago. Where are those friars who were arranging the books?” he demanded querulously, glaring at his inferiors grouped about us.

“I think they have not come back from lunch yet,” tremulously suggested one of the five.

As the dust lay at least an eighth of an inch thick on every book in sight, the good friars must have been called to a sumptuous repast indeed.

“Isn’t there some book in the collection that will give me something of interest about Ayacucho?” I asked.

“Ah—er—well, as to that—ah—cÓmo no, seÑor—yes, indeed! Here you have the five volumes of Bossuet, and—and here is the ‘ImitaciÓn de Cristo’—very excellent—old parchment, as you see—and....”

My slightest finger movement was followed by six pairs of eyes, as closely as an “aficionado” of the bull-ring watches those of his favorite matador. Had I found anything worth reading, I should not have been left in peace to read it. First, because of the excitement which the sight of a stranger arouses in Ayacucho, trebled by unbounded wonder that any man should be interested in books and libraries; second, because every Latin-American knows that any person left alone for a moment in a library is sure to carry off as many books as he can conceal about his person. The most modern volumes brought to light by a more careful scrutiny were Racine’s works and a Spanish edition of Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe”; but this last I am sure some practical joker had given the good bishop so late in life that he had not found time to read and destroy it before he was called to whatever reward awaited him. We tiptoed out into the earth-carpeted hallway again, and carefully locked up the dust and parchments, as they will no doubt remain until the worthy friars come back from lunch.

Around the corner the cobbled street was blocked by a horseshoeing contest. This is always considered a very serious business in the Andes, though the average horse is so small that a real blacksmith could toss him about at will. A barefoot, half-Indian herrero had emerged from his mud dungeon shop, containing a forge from Vulcan’s time, but by no means the space necessary to admit the animal, and stood watching the preparations for his feat with the anxious and critical eye of an aviator about to attack the world’s record. One of the three attendant Indians threw his poncho over the head of the chusco and bound its eyes. Then a rope was drawn tightly around its neck, with a choking slip-noose about its nose, an Indian clinging desperately to the end of it as long as the contest lasted. Next, a llama-hair lassoo was bound to the animal’s nigh front fetlock and the foot hoisted by another attendant on the off side, who used the back of the trussed-up brute as a pulley. A third Indian held the foot by hand. When all was ready, the valorous blacksmith sneaked up and pared the hoof a bit with an instrument much like a small, sharp, shovel with a long handle—pared it very imperfectly, as is the way of Andean blacksmiths, leaving so much of the toe that the animal was in constant danger of having an ankle broken on some rough-and-tumble trail. Then he hunted up a cold horseshoe, without caulk, just as it came from the hardware store that had imported it from the United States—for the Andean blacksmith never heats a shoe, much less alters it—and laid it gingerly on the hoof. Evidently, to the inexact eye of the herrero, it fitted. He clawed around among the cobbles and refuse of the street, where his tools lay strewn and scattered, until he found several hand-forged horseshoe nails of the style in vogue in our own land before the Civil War, and standing afar off, like a man willing to risk his life to do his duty, yet not to risk it beyond reason, started one of the nails with a Stone-Age hammer. Suddenly the foot twitched. The blacksmith sprang backward a long yard, with blanched countenance, the foot-holder fled, and the two remaining Indians cried out in startled Quichua, while clinging to the far ends of their ropes. Bit by bit the herrero crept up again and took to driving the nails at long range, as if he were mashing the head of a venomous snake, poised on his toes, ready to spring away at the slightest sign of life in the blindfolded animal. Gradually the eight nails were driven, not without several repetitions of the blanching fright, and the operation repeated with the other hoofs. Finally the blacksmith maneuvered to positions in which he could twist off and crudely clinch the protruding nail-points, rubbed a rasp once or twice over them, and the perilous job was done. The fiery steed was relieved of the blinding poncho, the Indians went to restore their nerves with a copita of pisco, and the blacksmith, collecting fifteen cents a shoe from the owner of the animal, shut up shop forthwith, as if he had risked his life enough for one day.

The milking of a cow is a no less serious business in the Andes, and requires as large a force. First the cow must be captured and confined in a corral overnight. Calves are never weaned, but are kept away from the mothers until the hour of milking. As each cow’s turn comes, its calf is freed for a moment, then dragged away by main force, and either tied to the mother’s front leg, or held by a boy close enough to deceive the animal into fancying she is feeding her own offspring. Another youth, after tying her hind legs together at the ankles, clings to a rope about her neck, a third assistant holds a socobe, or shallow gourd-bowl, under the udder, and a woman—why it must always be a woman I know not, but the fact remains—squats on her heels at arm’s length on the opposite side of the animal, and falls to milking with much the same attentive regard for her welfare as the blacksmith. As often as the pint-measure is filled, the milk is poured into a vessel outside the fence or one in the hands of a waiting purchaser. The woman or one of the boys laps up the few drops left in the socobe, and the task continues until two teats are stripped. The two remaining belong by ancient custom to the calf. In view of the fact that cows are milked at most once a day, and often at irregular or broken intervals, it is not strange that milk is rare, and butter unknown, even on large haciendas well stocked with cattle.

Saturday is beggar’s day in Ayacucho, as in most towns of South America. From morning till night a constant procession of disease and decrepitude comes whining by the shops, so endless in its appeals that the town has adopted a custom similar to the merchants of India with their bowls of cowries, or sea-shells. On Saturday morning each shopkeeper opens a package of large needles, three to four inches long, one of which he bestows upon each beggar who presents himself. The mendicant mumbles a “DiÓs pagarasunqui,” and shuffles on to the next doorway. When he has collected ten or twelve needles, if he be so lucky, he sells them to certain dealers for a medio (2½ cents), on which, apparently, he lives until the next Saturday. In some parts of Peru the Indians wear a large needle in their hatbands, evidently as a weapon of defense, but those of Ayacucho seem to have no practical use, except as legal tender. Some time during the ensuing week the purchasers sell them back to the shopkeepers, Saturday sees them again distributed, and so they go on indefinitely around the circle.

Among other things of long ago Ayacucho used to have a university. To-day her highest institution of learning is the Colegio Nacional de San RomÁn, corresponding to our high schools—chiefly in the impudence of its pupils. It was for the purpose of supplying this institution with an athletic field—incongruous possession it seemed in this community—that a “benefit” bull-fight was perpetrated on the Sunday of my stay. The cuadrilla, headed by “Currito” and “Ramito” of Sevilla, my fellow-sufferers at the hotel, were the same simple-hearted, modest fellows, with a noisy joy in life, that I had found most of their fellows in Spain. Both the principals had come over with Posadas, one of the friends of my Spanish journey, who had returned a year later only to be killed by a “Miura,” while these his companions remained to eke out a livelihood in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia.

All the gente decente of Ayacucho and their wives, in full powder, were on hand when the gala corrida began. We of the Élite occupied the “palcos,” or boxes—several rows of chairs shaded by a faded strip of canvas, up on the roof of the ancient colegio, the aged red tiles of which were trodden to powder underfoot. The “ring” in the patio below, fenced by poles tied to uprights and other rustic makeshifts, was surrounded by the excited gente del pueblo. The scene was backed by a massive, old, crumbling church—it would have been hard to avoid such a backing in Ayacucho—and a view of most of the town sprinkled away through its half-green valley, Rasuillca, the snowclad and the black range of Cundurcunca, with its white battle monument and its highway zigzagging away over into the great Amazonian montaÑa beyond as plainly visible as if they stood a bare mile away. The exciting national sport of Spain degenerates at best to a dismal pastime in the new world. The imported toreros were well enough, but the bulls of the Andes leave much to be desired. Even dogs lose their aggressiveness in high altitudes, it is said. At any rate, the animals gathered for the occasion on the broad pampas at the foot of Cundurcunca could seldom be roused to face the toreros, and spent their efforts chiefly in racing around the “ring” in vain efforts to escape, until they were at length tortured out of existence. In fact, about all the gala corrida amounted to was the substitution of these heroes from across the seas for the native butchers accustomed to prepare Ayachucho’s weekly meat supply. As they fell, the animals were dragged out and cut up within full sight of the crowd, the meat in some cases being raffled off to the ticket-holders of the sol. It was the dragging-out that the gathering hooted most vociferously. Picadores and horses are rarely in evidence in the bull-fights of Spanish-America, but the program had featured the promise of removing the carcasses from the ring “al estilo de EspaÑa,” that is, by gaily caparisoned mules. It was this new evidence of culture and progress that much of Ayacucho had come to see. But when the first victim sprawled in the dust, the mules were missing, and the customary gang of Indians crawled through the barrier and, tugging at its tail and legs, and raising clouds of dust that half-concealed their activities, gradually removed the fallen brute in the time-honored Andean manner.

As the supply of meat promised to exceed the demand, the fifth and sixth bulls were merely decorated with banderillas and sent back to the corral. Then a pair of two-year-old novillos were turned over to the “aficionados.” A dozen youths of the “best families” descended into the “ring,” in their most impressive Sunday garb and with capotes borrowed from the toreros, and demonstrated their own skill as bull-fighters. A Dr. Fulano, in private life a civil engineer, at least on his visiting-card, killed the first of the frightened animals in admirable style, and was hailed by his delighted fellow-townsmen the king of matadores. But dusk had fallen before the amateurs had effectively wounded the other, and the massed population gradually radiated homeward and subsided into its humdrum weekly existence.

A religious procession in the main square of Ayacucho. When the leading figure reached certain points, an old Indian set off elaborate pieces of fireworks, and as the smoke cleared away scores of urchins dashed in to fight with the Indian and one another for the framework