South America Observations and Impressions

Nowadays four small steamers ply on the lake, one of them making a regular tri-weekly service from Puno, in Peru, the terminus of the Peruvian Southern railway, to Guaqui in Bolivia, whence a railway runs to La Paz. This is at present the quickest way from Panama and the coast of Peru to Central Bolivia.

The water of Titicaca is pure and exquisitely clear. Some have described it as brackish, but I could discover no saline taste whatever. Many streams enter it from the surrounding snow-clad mountains; and it discharges southward by a river called the Desaguadero, which flows with a gentle current across the Bolivian plateau for one hundred and twenty miles into the large, shallow lagoon of Poopo or Aullagas, itself once part of that great inland sea of which Titicaca is now the largest remnant. This lake of Poopo has no outlet to the sea. Part of its water is licked up by the fiery sun of the desert: the rest sinks into the sands and is lost.

We spent two days sailing on the lake, visiting the famous modern shrine of the Virgin of the Light at Copacavana on the mainland and the famous ancient shrine of the Rock of the Sun and the Wild Cat on the island of Titicaca which has given its name to the lake. When the grey clouds brood low upon the hills, stern and gloomy indeed must be the landscape in this bleak land. But our visit fell in the end of September, the spring of Peru, when such rains as there are had begun to refresh the land after the arid winter. The sun was bright. Only a few white clouds were hanging high in air or clinging to the slopes of the distant mountains; and the watery plain over which we moved was a sheet of dazzling blue. The blue of Titicaca is peculiar, not deep and dark, as that of the tropical ocean, nor opaque, like the blue-green of Lake Leman nor like that warm purple of the Ægean which Homer compares to dark red wine, but a clear, cold, crystalline blue, even as is that of the cold sky vaulted over it. Even in this blazing sunlight it had that sort of chilly glitter one sees in the crevasses of a glacier; and the wavelets sparkled like diamonds.

The Peruvian shore along which we were sailing was steep and bold, with promontories jutting out and rocky islets fringing them. Far away to the east across the shining waters the Bolivian coast rose in successive brown terraces, flat-topped hills where the land was tilled, and higher up bluish grey ridges passing into a soft lilac as they receded, and farther still, faint yet clear in the northeast, the serrated lines of the snowy Cordillera which divides the lake basin from the valleys that run down to the east and the Amazonian forests. There was something of mystery and romance in these far distant peaks, which few Europeans have ever approached, for they lie in a dry region almost uninhabited because hardly worth inhabiting, —

"a waste land where no man goes

Or hath gone, since the making of this world."

The nearer and higher range to the southeast of the lake, which the natives call the Cordillera Real, and geographers the range of Sorata, was almost hidden by the thick clouds which were by this time – for it was now ten o'clock, and the sun was raising vapours from the valleys – gathering on its snows, and not till the evening did its grand proportions stand disclosed. There were all sorts of colours in the landscape, bright green rushes filling the shallow bays, deep black lava flows from a volcanic peak on the west, and a wonderful variety of yellows, pinks, and violets melting into each other on the distant hills. But the predominant tone, which seems to embrace all the rest was a grey-blue of that peculiar pearly quality which the presence of a large body of smooth water gives. Views on a great lake can be more impressive than almost any ocean views, because on the ocean one sees only a little way around, whereas, where distant heights are visible beyond the expanse of a lake, the vastness of the landscape in all its parts is realized. Here we could see in two different directions mountain ranges a hundred miles away: and the immensity was solemn.

The village of Copacavana, to which we first turned our course, stands a little above the lake at the foot of rocky heights, beyond which rises a lofty volcano, said to have been active only a century ago. Traces of antiquity are found in the polished stone seats, two on each side of a higher one, called the Judgment Seat of the Inca, and in steps cut here and there, all in the hard rock, their form resembling that of those near Cuzco, described in the last chapter, and their purpose no less obscure.27 Other ruins and abundant traditions prove that the place was a noted seat of worship in Inca days. There stood on it, say the early Spanish chroniclers, not only gilded and silvered figures of the Sun and Moon, but also older idols, belonging to some older local religion, one in particular which is described as having a head like an egg with a limbless body, wreathed with snakes. When these figures and their shrines were demolished, a church was erected on the same spot, which presently became famous by the setting up in it of a sacred image of Our Lady. It is the Santissima Virgen de la Candelaria, carved by a scion of the Incas, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, in A.D. 1583. This image had been seen by a pious friar to send out rays of light around it: miracles followed, and an Augustinian monastery was founded and placed in charge of the sanctuary, which soon became the most frequented place of pilgrimage through all South America. Even from Mexico and from Europe pilgrims come hoping for the cure of their diseases. The figure is about a yard high, and represents a face of the Indian type in features and colour, though less dark than the equally sacred figure of the Virgin of the Pillar at Saragosa in Spain. It wears a crown of gold, with a gold halo outside the crown, has a half moon under its feet, and is adorned with many superb gems. The church is spacious and stately. The Camarin or sacred chamber in which the image stands is behind the great altar and approached by two staircases, the stone steps much worn by the knees of the ascending worshippers. The Augustinian monks were turned out in 1826, after the revolutionary war, but recently a few Franciscans have been settled in a home too large for them, so the wide cloisters are melancholy, and echo to few footfalls. Nevertheless great crowds of Indians still resort hither twice a year, on February 2, the feast of the Candelaria (Candlemas), and on August 5 and 6. Within the sacred enclosure which surrounds the church is a lofty cupola supported by columns, open at its sides so that the three tall crosses within it are visible, and roofed in a sort of Moorish style with bright green and yellow tiles, of the kind which North Africa has borrowed from the East. Round it are the accustomed pilgrimage "stations," and at the corners of the court, which is entered by a lofty gateway and planted with trees, are square brick buildings, wherein lie the bones of pilgrims. The shining tiles of this cupola, with the similarly decorated dome and tower of the church behind, make a striking group, whose half Moorish character looks strange in this far western land. The scene at the great festivals when the excited Indian crowd makes church and court resound with hymns in Aymará and when, after the Christian services of the day, the dances of primitive heathendom are kept up all through the darkness with wild shoutings and jumpings, till they end in a sort of jig, is described as strange and revolting. These dances come down from a time when this was a seat of Indian nature worship, and when images of the Sun and Moon were taken in pomp from the shrine here to the shrines upon the Sacred Isles.

To those isles we now bent our course. Delightful was the voyage along the southern shore of the lake, past shallow bays where the green water lapped softly in the rushes, across the openings of inlets that ran far in between walls of rock, with new islands coming into view and glimpses of new snowpeaks in the distance rising behind the nearer ranges, all flooded by a sunlight that had the brilliance without the sultry power of the tropics.

Koati or Koyata, the Island of the Moon, is said to take its name from Koya, the Quichua word for queen, the Moon being the wife of the Sun, whose worship the Incas established wherever their power extended. The isle is about two miles long, a steep ridge, covered in parts with low shrubs and grass; the rest cultivated, the slopes being carefully terraced to the top. The most interesting group of ruins stands in a beautiful situation some sixty feet above the shore, on the uppermost of four broad terraces, supported by walls. One of these walls is of the finished Cuzco style of stonework, the rectangular blocks well cut and neatly fitted to one another. It is probably of Inca date. That the large ruined edifice above has the same origin may be concluded from the niches which occur in the walls of its chambers. The purpose of such niches, frequent in the Cuzco walls, and indeed all over Peru, has never been explained. They are often too shallow for cupboards or wardrobes, and too high for images, yet it is hard to suppose them meant merely for ornament. This edifice, originally in two stories, is a mass of chambers, mostly small, which are connected by narrow passages. The large walled court which adjoins it is adorned by stuccoed niches. The walls are well preserved, but all the ceilings and roofs have gone. There are so few apertures for light that it is hard, as in most of the ancient Peruvian houses to understand how light was admitted. Probably light was sacrificed for the sake of warmth, for the nights are extremely cold, even in summer. Doorways are covered sometimes by a single slab, sometimes by flat stones projecting each beyond the other, so as to have the effect of an arch, but no true arch ever seems to have been found in Peru or anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. Sacrificial objects, dug up in front of the building, confirm the legend that the place was a shrine of the Moon Mother, but the name by which it has been known is the Palace of the Virgins of the Sun. There may, therefore, have been in conjunction with the shrine one of the numerous establishments in which the Incas kept the women who were sent up to them as a tribute from the provinces, and who, among other things, wove fine fabrics and made various articles needed for worship. The early Spanish writers, with their heads full of Christian nuns and Roman Vestals, called them Virgins of the Sun, but the name was altogether inappropriate, for many of them were kept as concubines for the reigning Inca.

Four miles from Koati and two from the mainland, lies the larger and more sacred Island of the Sun. It is ten miles long, nowhere more than a mile wide, and very irregular in shape, being deeply indented by bays. A ridge of hills, rising in places to one thousand feet or more, traverses it from end to end, and much of the surface is too steep and rocky for tillage. There are many groups of ruins on it, the origin and character of some among which have given rise to controversies into which I need not enter, proposing to describe two only. One of these is the so-called Fountain, or Bath and Garden of the Inca. Two buildings stand on the shore, evidently of a date anterior to the Conquest, and one was probably a royal residence. The most recent and most competent investigators divide them into two classes: those which the Indians call Chulpas, and are the work of an earlier race or races, and those which they ascribe to the Incas, the latter being larger and better built, and accompanied by pottery, weapons, and other relics, indicating a more advanced culture. Hard by a flight of low steps, rising from the water through a grove of trees, leads up to a spot where a rivulet, led in a channel from the hill above, pours itself into a receptacle hewed out of one piece of stone, whence it pursues its course in a murmuring rill to the lake below. The terraced garden on each side is planted with flowers, most of which are the same as those in European or North American gardens; but the brilliant red blossoms of the shrub called the Flor del Inca give a true local colour, and the view over the lake to the distant snows is unlike anything else in the world. How much of the beauty we now see was planned by the unknown monarch, who first made these terraces, and did the spot commend itself to him by the wonderful prospect it commands? Most of the so-called palaces of these isles occupy sites that look across the lake to the great snowy range, but a learned archæologist suggests that this was due not to admiration of their grandeur, but to veneration for them as potent deities so that they might be more readily and frequently adored.

On this majestic range our eyes had been fixed all day long. Its northernmost summit, Illampu, stands more than twenty miles back from the eastern shore of the lake, and more than thirty miles from the Island of the Sun. Thence the chain trends southward, ending one hundred miles away in the gigantic Illimani, which looks down upon La Paz. All day long we had watched the white clouds rise and gather, and swathe the great peaks and rest in the glacier hollows between them, and seem to dissolve or move away, leaving some top clear for a moment, and then settle down again, just as one sees the vapours that rise from the Lombard plain form into clouds that float round and enwrap Monte Rosa during the heats of a summer day. Evening was beginning to fall when our vessel, after coasting along the island, anchored in the secluded bay of Challa, where, behind a rocky cape, there is an Indian hamlet and a garden and stone tank like that at the Bath of the Inca. We landed and rambled through it, finding its thick trees and rustling shade specially charming in this bare land. Just as we emerged from them and regained the lake shore, the sun was setting, and as the air cooled, the clouds that draped the mountains thinned and scattered and suddenly vanished, and the majestic line of pinnacles stood out, glowing rosy red in the level sunlight, and then turned in a few moments to a ghostly white, doubly ghostly against a deep blue-grey sky, as swift black night began to descend.

Early next morning we set off on foot along the track, well beaten by the feet of many generations of worshippers, which leads along the rocky slopes from Challa to the Sanctuary of the Rock. Here are no houses, for this end of the isle is rough and bare, giving only scanty pasture and a few aromatic flowers, but the little bays where the green water ripples on the sands, and the picturesque cliffs, and the vast stretch of lake beyond, made every step delightful. To our surprise we passed a spot where some enterprising stranger had bored for coal and found a bed, but not worth working. One could hardly be sorry, for though fuel is badly needed here, a colliery and its chimney would fit neither the landscape nor the associations. Less than three miles' walking brought us to a place where the remains of a wall cross the island, here scarcely a mile wide, and seem to mark off the sacred part which in Inca days was entered only for the purposes of worship. A little farther, two marks in the rock, resembling giant footprints, are, according to Indian tradition, the footprints of the Sun God and the Moon Goddess, when they appeared here. The marks are obviously natural and due to the form in which a softer bit of the sandstone rock has scaled off and left a whitish surface, while the harder part, probably containing a little more iron, as it is browner in hue, has been less affected by the elements. Then, after ascending a few low steps which seem to be ancient, we came out on a level space of grass in front of a ridge of rock about twenty-five feet high. This is Titi Kala, the Sacred Rock, the centre of the most ancient mythology of South America. Its face, which looks southwest over this space of grass, apparently artificially levelled, is on that side precipitous, presenting a not quite smooth face in which veins of slightly different colours of brown and yellowish grey are seen. At one point these veins so run as to present something like the head of a wild cat or puma; and as Titi means a wild cat in Aymará, and Kala, or Kaka a rock, this is supposed to be the origin of the name Titi Kala, which has been extended from the rock to the island and from the island to the lake.28

The rock is composed of a light yellowish brown rather hard sandstone of carboniferous age, with a slaty cleavage. The back of the ridge is convex, and is easily climbed. From it the ground falls rapidly to the lake, about three hundred feet below. Except for what may possibly be an artificial incision at the top, the rock appears to be entirely in its natural state, the cave-like hollow at its base shewing no sign of man's handiwork. Neither does any existing building touch it. There are, however, traces of walls enclosing the space in front of it, especially on the north side, where there seems to have been a walled-in enclosure; and there are other ancient remains hard by. The only one of these sufficiently preserved to enable us to conjecture its purpose is a somewhat perplexing two-storied edifice, resembling, though less large and handsome, that which I have described as existing on the island of Koati. It is called the Chingana, or Labyrinth, and doubtless dates from Inca times, as it contains niches and other features characteristic of the architecture of that period. The numerous rooms are small, scantily lighted, and connected by narrow passages. A few flowers had rooted on the top of the walls, and I found tufts of maidenhair fern nestling in the moist, dark corners within. All the roofs have perished. There is nothing to suggest a place of worship, so probably the building contained the quarters provided for the various attendants on the religious rites performed here, and perhaps also for the women who were kept near many sanctuaries and palaces for the service of the Sun and the Incas. None of the other ruins is identifiable as a temple, so we are left in doubt whether any temple that may have existed was destroyed by the zeal of the Spanish Conquerors, or whether the worship of the Sun and the local spirits was conducted in the open air in front of the Rock, whose surface was, according to some rather doubtful authorities, covered with plates of gold and silver. In front of the Rock there lies a flat stone which it has been conjectured may have been used for sacrifices. All our authorities agree that the place was most sacred. Some say no one was allowed to touch it; and at it oracles were delivered, which the Spaniards accepted as real, while attributing them to devils who dwelt inside the rock. Of the many legends relating to the place only two need be mentioned. One is that here the Sun, pitying the barbarous and wretched condition of men, took his two children, Manco Capac and Mama (mother) Occlo, and giving them a short staff or wand of gold, directed them to go forward, till they should find a place where the staff on being struck against the ground entered and stuck fast. They travelled to the north for many days, and the wand finally entered the earth at Cuzco, where they accordingly built a city and founded their dominion, Manco being the first of the Inca dynasty. The other tale is that for a long, long time there was darkness over the earth and great sorrow among men till at last the Sun suddenly rose out of the Rock on Titicaca, which was thenceforward sacred and a place of sacrifice and oracles. Other traditions, more or less differing from these in details, agree in making Titicaca the original home of the Incas, and one of them curiously recalls a Mexican story by placing on it a great foreign Teacher whom the Spaniards identified with St. Thomas the Apostle.29 In these stories, some written down by Spanish explorers or treasure seekers at the time of the Conquest or collected subsequently by learned ecclesiastics, some still surviving, with grotesque variations, in the minds of the peasantry, we may distinguish three salient points, – first, the veneration for the Rock as an object; secondly, its close relation to Sun worship; and thirdly, its connection with the Inca rulers of Cuzco. It is a plausible view that from ancient pre-Inca times the Rock was a Huaca or sacred object (in fact a fetish, i. e. an object inhabited by a spirit) to the primitive tribes of the island and lake coasts, as the cleft rock of Delphi was to the Greeks, even as the Black Stone which they called the Mother of the gods was to the Phrygian worshippers of Cybele, as perhaps the Stone of Tara – perhaps even the Lia Fail or Coronation Stone of Scone and now of Westminster Abbey – was to our Celtic ancestors. When the Incas established their dominion over the region round the lake they made this spot a sanctuary of the sun, following their settled policy of superadding the imperial religion of Sun worship – the Sun being their celestial progenitor – to the primitive veneration and propitiation of local spirits which their subjects practised. It was thus that the Roman Emperors added the worship of the goddess of Rome to that of the local deities of Western Asia and Africa and set up to her great temples, like that at Pergamos, among and above the older shrines. If there be truth in the legend that the Incas were themselves originally a tribe of the Collas of the plateau who quitted their former seats to go northward to the conquest of Cuzco, it would be all the more natural for them to honour this sanctuary as an ancient home of their race.

The isle seems to have been abandoned and the worship forbidden soon after the Conquest. No Christian church was ever placed near it, as might have been done if it were deemed necessary to wean the people from rites still practised there. What the early Spanish chroniclers tell us of the devotion paid to it is amply confirmed by the religious ornaments and the numerous objects connected with worship which have been dug up near the Rock, including woollen ponchos of extraordinary fineness of workmanship and colour, and golden figures of men (or deities) and of llamas, the llama being a sacred animal like the bull in Egypt. The native Indians still approach the Rock with awe. Lightning and Thunder, as well as the Sun and the local spirits were worshipped, and human sacrifices, frequently of children, were offered. Standing on this lonely spot one thinks of what it may have witnessed in old days. What weird dances and wild uproar of drums and pipes before the Rock, and still wilder songs and cries of frenzied worshippers! What shrieks of victims from the Stone of Sacrifice! Now all is silence, and nothing, except the crumbling ruins of the Chingana, speaks of the past. No sound except the sighing of the breeze round the cliff and the splash of the wavelets as they break on the pebbly beach beneath. There is no habitation near. The green outlying islets, one of which is said to have run with the blood of human sacrifices, are all desolate. The villages on the Bolivian shore to the east and the Peruvian shore to the west are too distant to be visible, while to the north the vast expanse of glittering blue stretches out till the blue depths of heaven bend to meet it.

Bidding farewell to the Island of the Sun, we sailed southward through the Straits of Tiquina, only half a mile wide, which connect the principal lake with the shallower gulf at its southeastern end, called the Lake of Vinamarca. On each side of the channel between heights whose igneous rocks seemed to indicate volcanic action are picturesque little Indian villages, St. Paul on the southwestern, St. Peter on the northeastern shore. It was market day, and the balsas were carrying the peasants homeward. I have already referred to these raft-like boats, formed of bundles of Totora tied together, and equipped with a small mast carrying a sail also of the same kind of rush. There were only passengers upon these, but the rushes are so much lighter than water that they can support a considerable weight. Large blocks of building stone are often carried on them. The Indians were kneeling on them and paddling, one on each side. Progress was slow, but in this country time is no object; it is almost the only thing of which there is more than enough in Bolivia.

We had now got nearer to the great Cordillera Real, the range of unbroken snow and ice which runs southward from the village of Sorata nearly to the city of La Paz, and could better make out the several peaks and the passes which separate them and the splendid glaciers which stream down their hollows far below the line of perpetual snow. Eight or nine great masses can be distinguished, the loftiest and northernmost of which, Illampu, is nearly 22,000 feet high, the rest ranging from 19,000 to 21,000.