South America Observations and Impressions

Illampu consists of two peaks and is the mountain which European travellers and maps call Sorata, from the town of that name near its northern base. It consists of two peaks, the higher of snow, called by the natives, Hanko Uma,30 and the slightly lower one, of rock, Illampu proper. This, which is the loftiest of the range, and was sixty or seventy years ago believed to be the loftiest in the western hemisphere, was climbed by Sir Martin Conway, who has described his ascent and his other adventures in Bolivia, in a very interesting book,31 but he found the last slope just below the top so unstable, owing to the powdery condition of the snow, that he was obliged to turn back. So far as I know, no other summit of the range, unless Illimani is to be accounted a part of it, has ever been ascended. At the end of the chain the splendid pyramid of Kaka Aka, also called Huayna Potosi, seems to approach 21,000. After it the range sinks a little till it rises again fifty miles farther south to over 21,000 feet in the snowy summit of Illimani. The Aymarás seem to have no special names for most of these peaks, and when asked for one answer that it is Kunu Kollu (a snow height).32 That is the case in many other mountainous countries. Neither in the White Mountains of North America nor in the Rockies and Cascades do the aborigines seem to have had names for more than a few separate peaks. Names were not needed, for they seldom approached the great heights. On the other hand, in Scotland and Ireland every hill has its Gaelic name because the herdsmen had occasion to traverse them. In the Tatra Mountains of Northern Hungary almost the only names of peaks are those taken from villages near their foot. Here the tract at the foot of the range is desert; nobody, unless possibly a hunter now and then pursuing a vicuña, has any reason for approaching it.

The Cordillera Real is not of volcanic origin, though there may be recent eruptive rocks here and there in it. None of the great summits shew the forms characteristic of the volcano, and my friend Sir M. Conway tells me that all the rocks he saw seemed to be granite and gneiss or mica schist, or perhaps very old palæozoic strata. The region has been very little explored. There must be some superb glacier passes across it.

The scenery of this lake of Vinamarca, which we were now traversing, has a grand background in the Snowy Range, but the foreground is unlike that of Titicaca, for the shores are mostly low, shallow bays covered with water plants, over which flocks of lake fowl flutter, with the hills softer in outline than those of the great lake, though stranger and more varied in colour, for black masses of volcanic rock rise on the north and bare hills of a deep red on the southwest. Here is the point where the river Desaguadero flows out and a little to the east is the port of Guaqui whence runs the railway to La Paz. Here we halted for the night, a very cold one, and set off in a cold morning for the Bolivian capital. An open valley runs south between flat-topped stony ridges affording thin pasturage, past clusters of Indian huts; and after some few miles, we see huge blocks of stone scattered over a wide space of almost level ground. These are the last ruins I have to mention, and in some respects they form the most remarkable group of prehistoric structures not only in the Andean countries, but in the Western Hemisphere. I will not attempt to describe them, for they are too numerous and too chaotic, but only to convey some impression of the more significant objects. The place is Tiahuanaco, or Tihuamacu, as the Indians of the neighbourhood call it.

The configuration of the ground, and the remains of what seems to have been an ancient mole for the landing of boats, suggest that in remote ages the waters of the lake came close up to this spot, though it is now five miles distant. I have already remarked that the character of the western and northern shores of Titicaca, as well as Indian traditions that places now far from the shore were once approachable by water, seem to indicate that the lake has receded within historical times and may be still receding. The ruins are scattered over a very large area, but those of most interest are to be found within a space of about half a square mile, the rest being mostly detached and scattered blocks to which it is hard to assign any definite plan or purpose. Within this space three deserve special notice. One is a huge, oblong mound of earth, about fifty feet high, with steep sides supported by stone walls. It has been called the Fortress, but there are now no traces of defensive ramparts, and it may have been raised for a palace or, more probably, for some religious purpose. That it was a natural hill seems unlikely. There are no remains on it of any large and solid building and in the middle there is now a hollow, its bottom filled with water, which is said to have been dug out by those who have excavated here, in old days for treasure, and more recently for archæological purposes. Its vast proportions and the fine cutting of the stones which are placed along the edges are evidences of the great amount of labour employed upon it.

A little below the mound are the remains of a broad staircase of long, low steps of sandstone, well cut, standing between two pillars of hard diorite rock. These led up to a platform, on which a temple may have stood. The proportions of the staircase and the pillars are good, and the effect is not without stateliness. No fragments of the supposed temple remain, but on the platform there are many stone figures, some found on it, some brought from the ground beneath and placed here, heads of animals, condors and other birds, pumas and fishes, all forcibly, though rudely, carved. Still more notable is a human head surmounting a square pillar or pedestal. It is much damaged, and no wonder, for the Bolivian soldiers used it as a mark to shoot at; but though the execution is stiff, the head has a certain dignity. Two other human figures, sadly defaced, stand at the gate of the village churchyard, a mile away. The style of all these is said to bear some resemblance to the remarkable colossal figures found on Easter Island, which lies out in the Pacific, two thousand miles west of Chile, and which are evidently the work of some race that inhabited that isle in ages of which no record remains.

The most striking object, however, is the monolithic sculptured gateway, which now stands alone, the building of which it formed a part having perished. It is hewn out of one block of dark grey trachytic rock, is ten feet high, the doorway or aperture four and a half feet high from the ground and two feet nine inches wide. Its top has been broken, whether by lightning, as the Indians say, or by its fall, or by the Spanish extirpators of idolatry, is not known. Thirty years ago it was lying prostrate. The front is covered with elaborate carvings in low relief, executed with admirable exactness and delicacy, and owing their almost perfect preservation to the extreme hardness of the stone. They represent what may be either a divine or a royal head, surrounded by many small kneeling figures with animal heads, some human, some of the puma, some of the condor, these being the largest quadruped and the largest bird of prey in the Andes. The treatment is conventional and the symbolism obscure, for we have no clue to the religion of the people who built these monuments. The association of animal forms with deities is a familiar thing in many ancient mythologies, – human figures had animal heads in Egypt, and bulls and lions had human heads in Assyria, – so one may guess at something of the kind in Peruvian mythology. But these sculptures are unlike anything else in South America, or in the Old World, and bear only a faint resemblance to some of the figures in Central American temples.33 This sculptured portal, the unique record of a long-vanished art and worship, perhaps of a long-vanished race, makes an impression which remains fresh and clear in memory, because it appeals to one's imagination as the single and solitary voice from the darkness of a lost past.

All over the flat valley bottom there lie scattered huge hewn blocks, some of the sandstone which is here the underlying rock, some of andesite apparently brought on balsas from quarries many miles away (when perhaps the lake water came up this far). I measured one massive prostrate stone lying near the staircase and found it to be thirty-four feet long by five feet wide with one and one-half feet out of the ground. How much there was below ground could not be ascertained. Yet the stones that remain to-day scattered over a space more than a mile long are few compared to those which have during centuries past been carried away. The church and many of the houses in the village are built of them. The Cathedral and other edifices in La Paz have been built of them, and within the last ten years five hundred train-loads of them were carried off by the constructors of the railway to build bridges, station houses, and what not, along the line. It is pitiable to think that this destruction of the most remarkable prehistoric monument in the western world should have been consummated in our own days.

Whether there was ever a city at Tiahuanaco there is nothing to shew. The place may have been merely a sanctuary or, perhaps, a royal fortress and place of worship combined. If there was ever a population of the humble class, they lived in mud huts which would quickly disappear and leave no trace. The modern village is composed of such huts, with some of the stones of the ruins used as foundations. Nevertheless the size of the church and its unusually rich decoration, and its handsome silver altar, suggest that the place was formerly more important than it is to-day. Pottery and small ornaments are still found in the earth, though the treasures, if ever there were any, have been carried off long ago. An arrow point of obsidian, which an Indian shewed me, was interesting as evidence that the ancient inhabitants used bows and were not, as apparently were the Peruvians of Cuzco, content with slings as missile weapons.34

The valley is fertile, and much of it cultivated, but at this season, before the crops had begun to pierce the earth, it was very dreary. The brown hills all around are themselves bare and featureless, and they cut off the view of the snowy Cordillera and of the lake. The sight of this mass of ruins, where hardly one stone is left upon another in a place where thousands of men must have toiled and many thousands have worshipped, makes its melancholy landscape all the more doleful. It recalls the descriptions in the Hebrew prophets of the desolation coming upon Nineveh.

Aymará tradition, with its vague tales of giants who reared the mound and walls and of a deity who in displeasure turned the builders into stones and for a while darkened the world, has nothing more to tell us than the aspect of the place suggests, viz., that here dwelt a people possessed of great skill in stonework and obeying rulers who had a great command of labour, and that this race has vanished, leaving no other trace behind. Upon one point all observers and all students are agreed. When the first Spanish conquerors came hither, they were at once struck by the difference between these works and those of the Incas which they had seen at Cuzco and elsewhere in Peru. The Indians whom they questioned told them that the men who built these things had lived long, long before their own forefathers. Who the builders were, whence they came, how and when and whither they disappeared – of all this the Indians knew no more than the Spaniards themselves knew, or than we know now. The width of the interval between the greatness of Tiahuanaco and the Conquest appears also by the fact that the Inca sovereigns had not treated it as a sacred spot in the way they did the shrine at Copacavana or the islands in Titicaca, nor has it to-day any special sanctity to the Indians of the neighbourhood. To them it is only what the Pyramids are to a wandering Arab or Stonehenge to a Wiltshire peasant. The one thing which the walls have in common with those in and around Cuzco is the excellence of the stonework. The style of building is different, but the cutting itself is equally exact and regular. This art would seem to have arisen early among the races of the plateau, doubtless because the absence of wood turned artistic effort towards excellence in stone.

One receives the impression here, as in some other parts of Peru, that the semi-civilization, if we may call it so, of these regions is extremely ancient. We seem to look back upon a vista whose length it is impossible to conjecture, a vista of many ages, during which this has been the home of peoples already emerged from such mere savagery as that in which the natives of the Amazonian forests still lie. But how many ages the process of emergence occupied, and how many more followed down to the Spanish Conquest we may never come to know.

It is possible that immigrants may at some time, long subsequent to the colonization of America by way of Behring's Sea, have found their way hither across the waters of the Pacific. The similarity of the figures on Easter Island to the figures at Tiahuanaco has been thought to suggest such a possibility. Those figures are, I believe, unlike anything in any other Pacific island.

Archæological research, however, does not suggest, any more than does historical enquiry, the existence of any external influence affecting the South American races. We may reasonably assume that among them, as in Europe, the contact and intermixture of different stocks and types of character and culture made for advancement. But this great factor in the progress of mankind, which did so much for western Asia and Europe, and to the comparative absence of which the arrested civilization of China may be largely due, was far less conspicuously present in South America than on the Mediterranean coasts. Think what Europe owed not only to the mixture of stocks whence the Italo-Hellenic peoples sprang, but also to influences radiating out from Egypt and the West Asiatic nations. Think what Italy owed to Greece and afterwards to the East and of what modern European nations owe to the contact of racial types in literature, art, and ideas, such as the Celtic, the Iberian, the Teutonic, and the Slavonic. How different was the lot of the Peruvians, shut in between an impassable ocean on the west, a desert on the south, and the savage tribes of a forest wilderness on the east! No ideas came to them from without, nor from any of the inventions which Old World peoples had been making could they profit. They were out of contact even with the most advanced of the other American peoples, such as those of Bogotá and Yucatan, for there was a vast space between, many shadowy mountains and a resounding sea.

As after these ruins I saw no others in South America, for neither southern Bolivia nor Chile nor Argentina, nor Uruguay has any to shew, this seems the fittest place for such few thoughts on the ancient civilization of South America as are suggested to the traveller's mind by the remains of it which he sees and by what he reads in the books of historians and archæologists. A large part of the interest which Peru and Bolivia have for the modern world is the interest which this ancient civilization awakens. It is a unique chapter in the history of mankind.

The most distinct and constantly recurring impressions made by the remains is this: that the time when man began to rise out of mere savagery must, in these countries, be carried very far into the past. Our data for any estimate either of the duration of the process by which he attained a sort of civilization or of the several steps in it, are extremely scanty. In the Old World the early use of writing by a few of its peoples enables us to go a long way back. The records which Egypt and Babylon and China have been made to yield are of some service for perhaps three or even four thousand years – some would say more – before the Christian era, and from those of Egypt and Babylon we get at least glimpses of the races that lived in Asia Minor and along the Mediterranean coast. But none of the American peoples advanced as far as the invention of even the rudest form of writing, though in Mexico and Yucatan pictures were to some slight extent used to preserve the memory of events. Here, in South America, where neither writing nor pictures aid us, our only data for what may be called prehistoric history, are first, the remains of buildings, whether fortresses or palaces or temples, and, secondly, works of art, such as carvings, ornaments, or religious objects, utensils of wood or earthenware and paintings on them, weapons of war, woollen or cotton fabrics, such as ponchos or mummy-cloths. All such relics are more abundant in Peru than anywhere else in the Western world, except that in Yucatan and some parts of Central America the ruined temples have been preserved better than here. The Peruvian relics are found not only in the Andean plateau, but also in those parts near the coast of northern Peru where cultivation was rendered possible by rivers. There, at the ruins of the Chimu city, near Truxillo, and farther south at Pachacamac, near Lima, a great deal has been obtained by excavation in ancient cemeteries and temples; and much more would have been obtained but for the damage wrought by generations of treasure seekers who melted down all the gold they found and destroyed nearly everything else.

The objects found on the coast differ in style from those found on the high Andean regions, and among these latter there are also marked differences between things found at Cuzco, and generally in northern Peru, and things found in the tombs and graves in the Titicaca regions. All, however, have a certain family resemblance and form a distinct archæological group somewhat nearer to Mexican and Central American art than to anything in the Old World. Specimens of all can be just as well studied in the museums of Europe and North America as here on the spot, where the collections are neither numerous nor well arranged. There is, perhaps, more fertility of invention, more freedom of treatment and more humour in the objects found on the coast at Chimu and Pachacamac than in any others; but the most impressive of all are the sculptures of Tiahuanaco.

Considerable skill had been attained in weaving. Handsome woollen ponchos, apparently designed for use as religious vestments, have been found, the colour patterns harmonious and the wool exquisitely fine. The Chimu tapestries and embroideries shew taste as well as technical skill. Copper, the metal chiefly used in Peru, was mined and smelted in large quantities; and the reduction of silver ores was also understood, yet the age of stone implements was not past, either for peaceful or for warlike purposes. As no cementing material had been discovered, walls were rendered exceptionally strong either by carefully fitting their stones into one another or fly clamping them together by metal. Of this latter method there are examples at Tiahuanaco.

Taking Peruvian art as a whole, as it appears in pottery and pictures and carvings, it is inferior in grace of form and refinement of execution both to Egyptian and to early Greek work, such as that of the Mycenæan period. Neither is there anything that shews such a power of drawing the human figure and of designing ornament as the ruined temples of Yucatan display.

The most signal excellence the Peruvians attained seems to have been in building. The absence of wood turned their efforts towards stone, and gave birth to works which deserve to be compared with those of Egypt, and far surpass in solidity any to be found in North America. Of the temples, too little remains to enable a judgment to be formed, either of their general design or of their adornment. But the stonework is wonderful, indicating not only a high degree of manual expertness, but the maintenance of a severe standard of efficiency through every part, while the skill shewn in the planning of fortifications so as to strengthen every defensive line and turn to account the natural features of the ground would have done credit to the military engineering of fifteenth-century Europeans.

But the race was also in some ways strangely inept. Both the Quichua tribes and the subjects of the Chimu sovereign on the Pacific coast seem to have shewn no higher invention than the Aymarás, who launched their rush balsas on Lake Titicaca, for the Spaniards found them using nothing but small canoes on the rivers and clumsy rafts for creeping along the shore with the help of a rude sail, though the Caribs of Venezuela, otherwise far less advanced, carried on a brisk trade in large sea-going canoes all the way along the line of the Antilles from the mouth of the Orinoco to the peninsula of Yucatan.

The few songs that have been preserved do not commemorate events or achievements like the ballads of Europe, but are mostly simple ditties, connected with nature and agriculture. There were, however, dramas which used to be acted, and among them one considerable work which, long preserved by oral recitations, was written down in the seventeenth century by Dr. Valdez, a Spaniard, the priest of Sicuani, and generally held to be in the main of native authorship, though perhaps touched up by Spanish taste. This is the so-called drama of Ollantay. It has a fresh simplicity and a sort of romantic flavour which suggest that there was something more than prosaic industry in this people.

In the absence of literature, one seeks in the mythology of a race a test of its imaginative quality; and in its religion, an indication of its power of abstract thinking. In both respects, the Peruvians seem to have stood as much below the primitive Celts and Teutons, as they stood above the negro races, with their naïve animism and childish though often humorous fables. Whether the Spanish ecclesiastics were right in finding in the worship of the earth god Pachacamac a belief in a supreme deity, creator of the world, may be doubted. But that the worship of Sun, Moon, and Stars should have coexisted with ancestor worship, and with a sort of fetichism which revered and feared spirits in all objects, need excite no surprise. Such a mixture, or rather such a coexistence without real intermixture, of different strata of religious ideas, finds plenty of analogies in the ancient Helleno-Italic world as it does to-day in China and other parts of the East. There was a worship of the ghosts of the progenitors of the family and the tribe, a worship of various more or less remarkable natural objects, or rather of the spirits that dwelt in them, a worship of animals such as the strongest beast and largest bird of prey, the puma and the condor, and of the supremely useful llama (a devotion which was compatible with the sacrificing of the animal), a worship of plants, and especially of the maize and of the power which bade it grow, the Maize Mother. Above all these forms, congenial to the humbler classes, rose the worship of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (especially the Pleiades), representing a higher range of ideas, yet connected with the more primitive nature superstitions by the sense that the Sun evoked life from the earth and by the finding, in the constellations, the shapes of the animals that were sacred on the earth. Nor were these the only points in which we discover resemblances to Old World religions. Peru rivalled Egypt in the care taken to preserve the bodies of the dead as mummies,35 and these, so skilfully dried as not to offend the senses, were sometimes placed in their dwellings. The Quichuas practised divination by the flight of birds (like the Dyaks of Borneo), and by the inspection of the entrails of victims, as the Romans did down to the end of the Republic. They had oracles delivered from rocks or rivers, like the Greeks, and the Huillca through whom the spirit spoke could, like the Delphic Pythia, sometimes be guided towards the answer desired. Men, and especially children, were sacrificed (though to a far smaller extent than in Mexico or among the Phœnicians). If cannibalism existed on the Plateau, it was rare, though it still remains among some of the wildest of the Amazonian tribes.

That there is nothing of which men are so tenacious as their superstitions may perhaps be ascribed to the fact that life is ruled more by emotion and habit than by reason. The Peruvians made no fight for their religion, which, to be sure, was not necessarily inconsistent with such Christian rites as the friars demanded. They submitted to baptism with that singular passivity which marks nearly all the South American races. They threw into the lakes or hid in the ground all the temple gold that could be got away before the Spanish plunderers fell upon them, but made little attempt to defend their sacred places or images. Nevertheless under a nominal, not to say a debased, Christianity, they long continued to practise the ancient rites, and to this day wizardry and the devotion to the local huacas (sacred places or objects) are strong among the people. These primeval superstitions, which existed long before the Inca Sun worship had been established, have long survived it. If all the people who now speak Spanish were to depart from Peru and Bolivia, and these regions were to be cut off from the world and left to themselves, pagan worship, mixed with some few Christian words and usages, might probably again become, within some twenty generations, the religion of the Andean countries, just as tribes in the Caucasus which were converted to Christianity in the days when the Roman Empire reached as far east as Tiflis were found to have retained of it, after twelve centuries, nothing but the practice of fasting in Lent and the use of the sign of the cross. Nature worship still holds its ground, though no doubt in a highly extenuated form, in every country of Europe.36 Habit and emotion are the most universal and the deepest-down things in human nature, present where reason is feeble, and gripping the soul tighter than do any intellectual convictions. Religious sentiment may hold men to old beliefs and practices long after the origin and grounds of the belief have been forgotten.