“The high Peruvian solitudes among.”
HEMANS.
NOW did Fray Fernando and his young companion behold in all their glory “the works of the Lord, and the wonders of His hand." For their way to Cuzco led them across the mighty Andes. Of these Cerro Blanco, though in any other land it would have taken rank as a monarch mountain, was only a kind of sentinel, or advanced guard. It looked down protectively on the valleys beneath, but it looked up reverently to the white and shadowy peaks of snow which rose, one above the other, far as the eye could reach. Fray Fernando had been wont to think of the Andes as a "cordillera," or chain; now he knew them as a vast gigantic army—God's great army—at His creative word arising from the earth, and ranging themselves in what to the eye of man seemed magnificent confusion, but was majestic order in His sight, who saw the whole. "In His hand," said Fray Fernando, "are the high places of the earth, and the strength of the hills is His also. He, and He alone, telleth their number, and calleth them all by name; even as He doth the stars, which their ice-crowned pinnacles almost seem to touch.”
As, in compliance with the advice of Jose, the travelers began their journey by descending to the vale of Nasca, in order to avail themselves of an Inca road from thence to Cuzco, they had occasion to traverse, and that more than once, each of the zones into which different gradations of altitude divide that wonderful region. They passed through valleys where tropical vegetation displayed all its gorgeous magnificence. There rose the giant palms, slender, tall, and graceful; there flourished many a wondrous flowering tree; there bloomed the magnolia, the cactus, the balsam, spreading out purple, white, or scarlet petals to the hot, heavily perfumed air; while "strange bright birds, on their starry wings," glittering with clear hard metallic luster, flitted from bough to bough, from blossom to blossom.
Jose, who took upon himself almost entirely the direction of the journey, gathered for his patron sweet dates, or luscious chirimoyas, looking like large green oranges. But he warned him that they must not linger in these valleys. "They are the abodes of fever," he said. And indeed Fray Fernando himself was willing enough to pass on to a purer and cooler atmosphere.
Marvelous was the beauty of their next stage. It brought them to the region of the Peruvian-bark tree, which Jose called quina-quina, with its light-green leaves and its little clustered flowers, rose-colored or white, filling the air with their delicious fragrance. But the cypress and the palm were the monarch trees of those primeval forests, and they gave shelter to an almost incredible undergrowth of vegetation. Their long slender stems were climbed to the very top by tangled lianas, with luxuriant leaves and gorgeous flowers. It was the land of flowers. There hung the large violet blossoms of the melastoma, there gigantic fuchsias drooped their graceful crimson bells; whilst beneath them blossoms of every hue enameled the living green of the turf. Fray Fernando could not help asking, "Is not this Paradise?”
Just then Jose stooped down, and from the sweet tangle of flower-covered bushes selected and gathered a single spray. It was a cluster of curious slipper-shaped blossoms, bright yellow spotted with crimson—the calceolaria of our modern conservatories. "Amongst us," he said, "this flower means pity and kindness. With garlands of it, mingled with the can-tut and the evergreen, our fathers used to crown the heads of the noble youths at the great belting festival, to teach them that as the sun brings forth flowers from the earth for the joy of man, their hearts should bring forth pity and kindness. But pity and kindness are gone now; the Spaniards have driven them away.”
And then Fray Fernando knew that this was not Paradise.
Soon afterward they came to a land of giant trees. Many of them raised their mighty stems, like the pillars of a wonderful cathedral, a hundred feet in the air before they sent forth a single branch. Here a strange fit of home-sickness surprised Fray Fernando in the midst of Nature's richest glories. In the lower levels there was no perceptible change of season; eternal summer reigned supreme. But here it was autumn, and these giant trees were shedding on his pathway withered leaves, like those that used to rustle round his footsteps in the cork-groves of his native land. He began to feel an affection for them such as he never could have felt for the wonderful trees of the valley, whose great spreading branches kept their green the whole year round.
Yet another day's journey, and the travelers entered the region of mist and rain. Here were no great trees, but the perpetual moisture nourished a luxuriant growth of evergreens, of arbutus, and other flowering shrubs, in whose blossoms a bright yellow seemed the prevailing hue. Jose called this district the Puna, and hastened through it as rapidly as he might, un-consoled for the absence of Ynty by its numerous flowers, its verdant mosses, and its creeping mimosas.
At length they came to colder and more rugged regions, where the vegetation, at first abundant and pleasant to the eye, like that of our temperate zone, grew gradually poor and scanty. But Fray Fernando said reverently, that God had given the mountain to the beasts to dwell in. Here graceful fawn-colored vicuñas, and guanucos with long shaggy fleeces and mild camel-like faces, roamed at large, feeding on the ychu and alfalfa, that still grew in abundance. Pretty little piscaches, with bushy tails, startled by the footsteps of the travelers, ran to hide in the ychu; and here and there a plover flew screaming into the air above their heads. Once they saw a huge condor perched on an elevated rocky peak.
Thus for many days they journeyed onwards, now ascending, now in turn descending again. By-and-by they came to grassy table-lands, where herds of llamas or alpacas roamed about, either wild, or more often under the care of Indian shepherds. Where the nature of the ground permitted cultivation, the soil was well and carefully cultivated. Even on the steep sides of mountains terraces were constructed with ingenious industry. By means of these andenaria, as the Spaniards called them, many a hill, that in another country would have been a brown and sterile mass, was transformed into a beautiful hanging-garden, displaying every variety of production, from the rich tropical splendors that adorned the broad belts around the base, to the few rows of maize which were all that even the industrious Indian could persuade to take root on the narrow strip at the top.
The long journey was a very safe and easy one. For nearly all the way our travelers had only to use the excellent roads provided by the care of the Incas. Fray Fernando was not the first Spaniard who grew enthusiastic in his admiration of these wonderful works, executed without machinery, and even without iron tools. Passages leagues in length were cut through the living rock, precipices were scaled by long flights of steps, ravines were filled up with masonry, and rivers crossed by means of suspension bridges made of maguey—the native osier. At convenient distances all along the road tampus, or post-houses, were erected, where the wayfarers found shelter. Jose explained that, in the old times, they would have found entertainment also in many of these tampus; but since, to use his mournful and oft-repeated expression, "the Spaniards have changed all," they had usually to throw themselves on the hospitality of the Indians; and sometimes, in lonely places, to rely on the little store of roasted maize or of frozen potatoes (called chun͂u), which Jose never failed to bring as provision for the way. The Indians were always kind and generous to wayfarers; but they had only to recognize Jose as a Child of the Sun, to induce them to lay the best their huts contained at his feet.
The hardihood and agility displayed by Jose during the journey surprised Fray Fernando. He made very little of the wound he had received from Pepe, though it was severe enough to have laid a European aside for weeks. But this was thoroughly Indian. No amount of walking or running seemed to fatigue him. Fray Fernando was by no means a match for him, and was always the first to propose a halt. Jose, compassionating his weakness, would frequently offer him some of his favorite coca, but this the monk always declined, from an unaccountable idea taken up by the Spaniards, that the use of the harmless stimulant was in some way connected with the superstition of the Indians.
From the extreme of supposing his pupil a child, whose simple thoughts he could read like an open book, Fray Fernando passed into the opposite one, of considering him a hopeless enigma. And, indeed, Jose, or rather, as the Spaniards would have called him—for they conceded the honors of nobility to the Children of the Sun—Don Jose Viracocha Inca, was a compound of so many heterogeneous elements, that his character might well be a perplexity. He was an American Indian, with nearly all the peculiarities that distinguish the aborigines of the New World from the natives of the Old fully and clearly developed. But races flower as well as plants. The flower of the American race—and a strange, rare flower it was—was surely that mysterious family, the self-styled Children of the Sun. Their origin continues wrapped in obscurity, but their moral and intellectual ascendancy has been written on the page of history, in the peace, the order, and the prosperity they secured to millions of their fellow-men. Jose was an Inca, and heir not only to the very peculiar character, but to the traditions of the sons of Manco Capac. But upon these had been grafted seven years of careful training in the white man's thoughts and habits, as well as in the white man's learning and religion. And, moreover, there was that within him for which neither race, education, nor training could fully account. Had he lived fifty years earlier, he would have been the foremost "haravec" at the court of his great kinsman, Huayna Capac. He would have made sweet “yaravis " for the Indian girls to sing, and more ambitious dramas to be acted before the Inca and his court. But the faculties which would then have found expression in song had now no exercise, save in the ever-recurring wail over those former days, which indeed were better than these.
This preponderance of imagination in his character was the real cause of his temporary repudiation of Christianity (or rather Catholicism), and return to the faith of his fathers. But such a return could be only temporary, if indeed it was more than fancied. What Huayna Capac, on whom no gleam of the light of revelation ever shone, had been taught by the light of reason to abandon, could scarcely be held seriously by a youth instructed as Jose had been.
Fray Fernando saw with pleasure that his prejudices against Christianity were melting away, and that he was anxious to resume his studies. Often when they halted for the night he would eagerly take up the Breviary, and try to translate the Latin psalms and prayers it contained. He would frequently ask questions suggested by what he read; sometimes startling ones enough, betraying an acquaintance with facts; or rumors of facts, about the Old World, assuredly not learned from Fray Fernando. One day he asked: "Patre, do not the Jews also build great ships, and sail over the Mother Sea, even as far as this country?”
“Truly they are wanderers over the face of the earth, according to the just judgments of God," returned the monk; "but that they have come hither have I never heard. Who told you of them?”
“No one," answered Jose, who was caution itself in speaking of any rumors current amongst his own people. "But is it not true that they hate the Spaniards and the Catholic faith?”
“It is," Fray Fernando responded briefly. "They are an accursed race.”
He did not know, until long years afterward, that Jose was confounding the Jews with the English!
During the past six months, Jose had found means to supplement the well-remembered lessons of his childhood, and to complete his acquaintance with the history, the customs, and the social polity of his forefathers. He failed not to improve the various circumstances of their journey into occasions for enlarging upon these topics to Fray Fernando. One day, for instance, an Indian chasqui, or messenger, shot past them like an arrow, his body bent forward, his burden on his shoulder, and his staff in his hand. "See the speed of that fellow!" cried the monk.
“That's nothing," said Jose, smiling. "In the old times, the Inca supped at sundown in Cuzco upon fish taken from the Mother Sea at Lurin the same hour the day before.”
Fray Fernando knew the distance between Lurin and Cuzco—more than a hundred leagues. He said, "That is too much even for my faith, José.”
“The Children of the Sun speak truth," returned Jose, a little offended. "Our chasquis," he continued,” were trained to the work from their earliest childhood; and each had but a short way to run until he should be relieved by another. He had plenty of rest, and plenty of good food and chica; and he was stirred to do his utmost by the hope of reward, and of praise—that was better than reward. Was not that chasqui a happy man ever after, to whom the Inca once said with his own lips, Sit down, huanucu'?—The patre knows the huanucu is the swiftest of all creatures.—But this I say," added Jose with a sorrowful smile, "the Spaniards will find no man to run so fast for them, even for fear of the lash.”
On another occasion they passed a melancholy troop of Indians who were being driven to their forced labor on a Spanish farm. Jose divided his little store of coca amongst them, and then complained bitterly to Fray Fernando of the hardship of their condition.
But the monk said it seemed not unfair that they should pay tribute in the form of personal labor. "I thought they did so," he added, "even under your Incas.”
“True," replied Jose, " they tilled the lands of the Sun and of the Inca. But after this fashion: First, the lands of the Sun, as was meet and right. Next, the lands of the widow and the orphan, of the sick man, and the soldier who was fighting the battles of his country. Then each man tilled his own tupu. These tupus were given them according to their need. If a man had a child born to him, he had a little piece added to his share of land. And they were all taught to help each other in their labor. Lastly, and not until all else was done, they tilled the Inca's land; such was the Inca's law. The work was a happy festival: men, women, and children, in their holiday dresses, thronged to the fields together; and as they drew the plow, or sowed the maize and quinoa, they chanted merry songs, or yaravis about the great deeds of the Incas. Always they had abundance of good food and chica. Neither in the field, nor in the workshop, nor yet in the mine, was any man's health ever known to suffer from the labor he did for his lords. And in all Tahuantin Suyu there was no man that had not food enough, and clothing suited to the climate in which he dwelt. The Spaniards know this. Ask them, when you go to Cuzco, and they—even they themselves—will bear witness that never were a people more happy, more peaceful, more content with their lot, more loyal to their lords, than were we when they came to us. Why God, who governs all, let them come, He knows—I do not.”
Nor did Fray Fernando. Long did he ponder over the problem thus set before him. For the first time in his life, a great grief and wrong, with which he had personally no concern, was sinking into his heart. He used to satisfy himself that the natives of the New World received a full indemnity for their injuries and sufferings in the introduction of Christianity, with its creed and its sacraments, by which their souls might be saved from everlasting perdition. But this thought was losing its power to content him. He was beginning to learn that wrong remains wrong forever, and cannot be changed into right by virtue of any benefits, real or supposed, which may eventually accrue from it.
That night, as they rested together in a deserted tampu, he said to Jose, “My son, it is not fit that I should conceal from you what I truly think. I think my people are verily guilty concerning yours. May God forgive us, and in His own time turn our evil into good.”
Jose made no answer, and almost immediately went out to gather sticks for a fire. Yet never had Fray Fernando been so dear to him as at that moment. Nor had any single act or speech ever done so much to bring their hearts together as that one free and generous acknowledgment. So great is the power of truth between man and man.