Across the Andes / A Tale of Wandering Days Among the Mountains of Bolivia and the Jungles of the Upper Amazon

CHAPTER V AREQUIPA THE CITY OF CHURCHES

The baking heat of the desert boiled in through the open doors of the freight car, the blazing sun beat down upon the roof, and, inside, a thousand essences from its variegated life simmered and blended. Together with some half dozen of assorted native passengers we had jammed ourselves in among a jumble of food-stuffs and mining hardware in transit. The box car banged and groaned and occasionally halted on the desert at the hail of some wayfarer whom we helped cordially up and stirred into the odoriferous oven. Sociably we rode in this freight car up from the desert oasis of San JosÉ because this freight car constituted the whole of the train. Farther on at Vitor there was hope of a real train.

In the scant space left by the cargo I had wedged myself against a stack of dried fish while my feet reposed easily on the body of a newly dead pig on his way to the market in Arequipa joggling in time to the uncertain swaying of the car; Agamemnon fitted his saddle-stiff joints into a niche in the freight and went peacefully to sleep, indifferent to the broken barrel of lime that sifted its contents over him. And so it was that we pulled in to Vitor, a town that hung on the edge of the desert from which rose the foothills of the first Andean range to the eastward. Stiffly we climbed down and out into the heated, but untainted air and idled in the station shadow until the train should signify its readiness to receive us.

I was passing through the patio of the station when I was briefly conscious of a rush, a choked snarl, and in the same instant my whole right leg seemed to have stepped into a vise clamped to a jig-saw; the impact spun me half around and I found myself helpless in the grip of a huge, flea-bitten mongrel that just lacked, by what appeared to be a mere shadow of a margin, sufficient power to shake me rat fashion. I judged that it was about eight years afterward when an Indian leisurely appeared and clattered at the brute. Adroitly it let go and disappeared before I could get a sufficiently able-bodied rock out of the pavement for I was unarmed, having packed my gun when preparing to leave San JosÉ.

AN AREQUIPA CARRIER

But it turned out to have been purely illusion after all, as was apparent on the assurances of the lean buccaneer who had the restaurant privilege and acted as station master. There was not a dog about the place no, seÑor! I pointed to the dorsal facade of my battle-scarred person. Caramba—investigation, prontissimo! The lean buccaneer called and an Indian responded. It was the same Indian who had driven off the dog. He listened to the buccaneer. Then he replied at length and with gestures. I listened, but it was in Quechua they spoke, a dialect that sounds not unlike German interspersed with an occasional vocal imitation of a brass band. The buccaneer again turned to me:

“SeÑor, it is as I said. There is no dog,—there has been no dog,—I have no dog—it is a very great pity,—I sympathize!”

It revealed to me a power of imagination I had not suspected myself of possessing, though Agamemnon who was pinning up the rents and counting the punctures still regarded it as an actual occurrence.

The blistering hours on the trail across the desert had left us as parched as a dried sponge, crackly and dusty and with brittle, peeling skins ravenous for moisture. Outside the newly made-up train on either side straggled a collection of grimy, sand-blown Indians—mainly women—peddling queer, uncertain foods from earthen pots or battered tin cans that were in great demand among the sophisticated natives while, on a higher plane of dignity, a fat, placid Cholo sent the first native urchin on whom his eye fell into the station presently to deliver to you a bottle of unripe, bilious beer as warm as the hot shadow in which it had been kept. Its color, foam, and the characteristic shape of the bottles were means of identification, but, with the eyes closed, it did not differ materially from catnip tea or any of the old home remedy stand-bys. And never did an orange look more nobly luscious, for the round, unripe, green skin of the native product enfolds a heart of nectar.

From Vitor on we wound through twisting gorges or steep valleys, barren of all save cactus and the desert shale and boulders. Steadily the train climbed. Always on one side or the other were the traces of the old Inca empire and its industrious dominion; here a fragmentary stretch of road and a ruined gateway, now and again the almost obliterated ruins of some old town or village, but always, running along the sides of the steep hills or through the valleys, the dusty remains of a tremendous system of irrigation ditches. Where once has been a busy land, soft with the green of growing things, there are the cactus and the badger and the occasional baked-mud hut of an Indian wringing a dull living from the desert, Heaven knows how, where his ancestors once farmed and throve in multitudes.

In Arequipa the City of Churches

The contrast stirs the dullest fancy. And on the side of the spoilers for their gains? Only the dessicated remains of a treacherous old pirate that may be viewed—for a very moderate tip—through the side of a marble aquarium back in Lima as a cathedral curio and, in Europe, an asthmatic and toothless Spain drained to decrepitude by her own remorseless greed and predaceous piety.

In the long rays of the sunset the train rolled across the level stretches of the high valley in which lies the city of Arequipa. The low, flat houses—more or less earthquake proof—and the red tile roofs were radiant in the mellow glow. Beyond rose the dull, volcanic slopes of Misti in an immense cone, while best of all, in the one story hotel of rambling patios in that city of earthquakes we were once more able to collect sufficient water at one time to accomplish a bath. In Arequipa the first train stops exhausted; maÑana, or at the worst only a few days later, a second train leaves to climb the first high pass and leave its passengers on the shores of Lake Titicaca.

Throughout the city there is scarcely a building that cannot show patched cracks or gaping cornices that are the scars of earthquakes; here and there a heap of rock and plaster or fragmentary walls abandoned to the Indian beggars mark the years of great temblors. Rarely does a private house attempt a second story and the marvel is how the churches or the cathedral, with their high walls and towers, have been able to survive at all! Though often cracked and battered, yet in some way they have weathered the subterranean gales.

And what a city for churches! On every street, on all but every turn, there rises an ecclesiastical edifice with its grim walls of faded, peeling kalsomine and its porticos, perhaps ornamented with odd stone carvings that preserve a strong Indian flavor in spite of the old monkish guidance. Whole blocks in the heart of the city are bounded by enormous walls enclosing the sacred precincts of a convent or monastery. I was informed that out of every twelve inhabitants, men, women, and children, one was in some of the many orders behind the high walls. Each day in some part of the city is a fiesta in honor of some particular saint who is heralded and honored by a vast popping of firecrackers, squibs, and rockets and a grand procession through the neighborhood. Often several saints’ fiestas fall on the same day and from all directions come the rattle of firecrackers and the plop of the daylight bombs or rockets and any casual stroll will bring one against a procession heavy with the smoke of incense or uncanny with the thin, wailing chanting of the celebrants.

HARDLY A DAY WITHOUT ITS SAINT’S FIESTA.

The whole city centers around an extraordinarily large central plaza on one side of which is the ancient cathedral with its tiers of bells in the bell tower still lashed to the massive beams by rawhide thongs. The remaining three sides are business arcades of small shops, the pastries, and cafÉs; the bullet chipped arches still confirming the earnestness with which many a civil election has been contested between the liberal and the clerical elements after the returns were counted—or, quite as often, during that process.

The chief industry is in a few machine shops and central supply houses for the mines of the interior. Outside of this there is nothing. A few small shops with the cheapest and shabbiest of stocks cluster around the plaza; on Sunday that same plaza is scantily filled with the select of Arequipa while the stocky police keep it cleared of the tattered urchins and Indians of the weekdays. There is the dull, oppressive sense of wretched poverty or genteel destitution. It is in the sharpest contrast with the general run of other and typical Latin cities; the whole city seems to have become encysted in a hopeless poverty in which any form of local energy is permitted to find expression only in ecclesiastical fireworks or mystical parades of wailing and incense.

The start from Arequipa up to Lake Titicaca is made in the early morning. The huge cone of Misti—looking for all the world like a vast slag dump—stands forth with telescopic detail in the high, rare air mellowed in the cool morning sun. Prickling and glistening on the even slopes or in the purple shadows, the frost still clings like a lichen to the barren rocks and there is a thin touch of briskness in the air like the taste of fall on a September morning back home.

AN ANDEAN TOURING CAR

Down at the station the departure of the train is in the nature of an event like the sailing of a steamer. Already the train—one first-class and two second-class coaches—is filled, aisles and seats, with a shuffling crowd already in the ecstacy of a noisy and mournful, but interminable leave taking. Their view of the hazards of a journey by rail may not be so far out of the way for on the steep grades of these Andean roads a train has been known to break in half and go scuttling back down hill until the hand-brakes take effect; also, and later, on the ancient engine I observed with interest the native engineer screw down his throttle and then, in starting, bang it open with a monkey wrench.

Presently, as the hour of departure drew near, the conductor appeared and began sorting out the passengers. Rebozo-muffled ladies and Peruvian gentlemen who failed to show tickets and who had been picnicking in the seats burst into one final explosion of embracings and goodbyes before descending to the tracks where they took up a position alongside the car windows. The second-class were not admitted to their hard benches except on proof of actually possessing a ticket, but the stubby trainmen had their hands full in keeping the car door clear for they were continually choked with Cholo or Indian groups committing last messages to memory. Their windows were jammed with heads and clawing arms exchanging or accepting dripping foods wrapped in platano leaves, bottles of checha, or earthen pots containing Heaven knows what.

At last the whistle screamed from the engine, a bell tinkled, and the train moved out in state to the demonstrations of the populace. The car was but moderately filled; a couple of padres from Ecuador—one a political refugee—a tonsured monk, a couple of black-robed nuns, and three engineers, together with an assortment of Peruvians—the women in the shrouding, tightly drawn rebozo of funeral black against which the heavy face-powdering showed in ghastly contrast—and a couple of small children who turned up at intervals from under the seats, grimed with train cinders and ecstatically sticky with chancaca, a raw sugar sort of candy. And in every vacant seat was baggage, native, hairy rawhide boxes shapeless from the many pack-mule lashings, paper bags, and pasteboard hat boxes and bandanna bundles and somewhere in the collection each Peruvian seemed to be able to draw on an inexhaustible supply of the Arequipa brewed, bilious, green beer.

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