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Vol. 92

JULY, 1916

No. 3

A Lost City of the Andes

By HARRY A. FRANCK

Author of "A Vagabond Journey around the World," etc.

Photographs by the author

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To the traveler of to-day the pleasure

is seldom vouchsafed of visiting really new territory, and much more rare the joy of being one of the first few of modern men to tread the streets of an entire city unrivaled in location and unknown to history. Such, however, is the privilege of those who come up to Cuzco in these days with the time and disregard of roughing it necessary to visit Machu Picchu.

This mysterious white granite city of the Incas or their predecessors was unknown to civilized man and the world until Professor Hiram Bingham of Yale visited the site in 1911, to come back a year later in charge of an expedition to clear it of the rampant jungle growth and the oblivion of ages. Here was uncovered what are perhaps the most splendid preColumbian ruins in the Western Hemisphere, most splendid because in addition to being the finest besides Cuzco, itself discovered since the conquest, they have not suffered from treasure-hunters or become confused with Spanish building.

I had planned to travel to Machu Picchu alone and afoot. The account of the find had overtaken me in Lima, and the entire four-hundred-mile tramp across Peru to the ancient City of the Sun had been made more attractive by the anticipation of visiting a spot that not only promised extraordinary interest in itself, but had the added attraction of being difficult of access. On the day of my arrival in Cuzco, however, it was my good fortune to meet Professor R—— of our Middle West, and thereby to change for a bit the means of transportation that had brought me down the long crest of the Andes from far-off Bogotá.

Martinelli of Cuzco, who volunteered to accompany us, owned a coast horse and a wise gray macho, leaving the prefect of the department to obey the telegraphic orders of the president of the republic only to the extent of furnishing another animal tall enough to keep the professor's feet off the ground. This was not so easy as it may sound, for the professor had finally halted in his physical rise in the

Copyright, 1916, by THE CENTURY CO. All rights reserved.

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"How did you manage it?" I asked, in admiration.

"I raised hell," said Martinelli, tightening the girth of his own animal.

"What Peru most needs," mused the professor, who has the happy faculty of now and then giving his professorial vocabulary a furlough, "is about ten thousand of you young fellows educated abroad to come home here and raise hell."

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The stream, which snatched impotently at us as we passed"

enough even in Peru, however, and by the time the third round of anecdotes was ended there broke the street vista and drifted down upon us a Peruvian soldier in full accoutrement on a black mule, leading as sorry and decrepitlooking a chusco as even I had ever seen among these shaggy ponies that masquerade under the name of horse along the Andes. The soldier dismounted. The professor stood gazing abstractedly down upon the animal, no doubt drawing a mental picture of himself in the rôle of Quixote, with the added touch of dragging his toes on the ground over 150 miles of Andine trails. With a snort and a speed which showed that his four years in that Indiana institution unfortunately most favored by the youth of Cuzco permitted to top off their education in the United States had not been entirely misspent, Martinelli was off toward the prefecture. By the time another halfhour had drifted languidly into the past he reappeared, followed by a second soldier and a fine coast horse from the corral of the officers of the garrison.

Plainly the professor was beginning to get a real mental grasp of South America.

Before eight we had transferred the government saddle from the wreck of a chusco to the real horse, and were clattering away over the cobblestones of the City of the Incas, the soldier on his sorrowful little black mule bringing up a funereal rear. This was doing very well indeed. To get off on the same day planned, at any hour whatever, is no small feat in the Andes. Such of Cuzco as had already lifted its frowzy head from the pillow gazed hazy-eyed out upon us as we wound and clashed our stony way up out of the city by that stair-like road down which I had ended my walk across Peru a week before. The morning light fell weirdly upon the City of the Sun below when we came to the notch in the hills where all Indians pause before this last view of the sacred capital of their ancestors to murmur, with bared heads, "O Cuzco, great city, I bid thee adieu!"

As we jogged on in the sunny October morning across the bare, colorful, cool hills of Cuzco toward the lofty pampa beyond, I turned to ask the soldier behind:

"Cómo te llamas?"

"Tomas," he replied with a military salute-"Tomas Cobino, sargento de la Gendarmeria Nacional."

"Can you be that same Tomas who was with the Americans in Machu Picchu?"

"Si, señor, I attended los yanquis three months in their treasure-hunts."

The means has not yet been found of convincing the people of the sierra that any digging about old ruins can have any real motive other than that of seeking the traditional treasures of the Incas.

A few miles out the road was in the throes of "repair" by

a large gang of Indians, under the command of the alguaciles, or constables, of the neighboring hamlets, standing haughtily by, firmly grasping their silvermounted staves of office.

They looked

left shoulders lay that splendid Plain of Anta, rich with cattle and historical memories of the conquistadores. The distant bleat of sheep on a hillside now and then drew the eye to a bedraggled little Indian. shepherdess, armed with her sling, spinning incessantly, unconsciously the crude

"On the opposite side of the impetuous stream were scores of ancient terraces"

not at all unlike men from Mars commanded by sixteenth-century pirates. At first many mule-trains passed us, the leaders wearing about their necks long jangling bells with wooden clappers. The Cuzco Indian, in his dark skin, bare legs, and black-and-red montera, sneaked noiselessly by with the air of a whipped. cur, fawningly removing his flat hat and murmuring an abject "Amripusma." The greeting sounded Quichua, but is merely what becomes of the Spanish "Ave Maria purissima" in the mouth of the aboriginal. The professor showed astonishment to find both sexes removing their hats in salutation, but Martinelli and I had long since learned to expect it.

A few miles out, our trail left the road and swung to the right. Away over our

yarn on her cruder spindle of quinoastalk run through a potato as she edged cautiously away well out of Our reach. These lonely guardians of the flocks are not infrequently pursued with impunity

by native travelers.

In this treeless region the doors of the Indians' dismal mud huts were of stiff, sundried, hairy cowhides. As the world rose higher, even these miserable dwellings died out, and only the bleak, brown uplands of the Andes spread about us on every hand.

In mid-morning we topped a great bare height, from the chilly

summit of which the white-crested central Cordilleras of the Andes stretched like some mighty wall across the entire horizon, the snow-peaks and glaciers thrusting their hoary heads through the banks of clouds less white. Another bleak hour, and a vast Andine valley, like those that had grown familiar to me, yet were always beautiful, opened out before us, in its lap the town of Maras, tinted with the pale red of its aged tile roofs. The great rolling, reddishbrown basin was surrounded by agewrinkled mountain-sides that were specked with little shadowed valleys and perpendicular chacras, or tiny Indian farms, hung on their flanks like small paintings on inclined walls. We halted for dinner with the gobernador, and for chala, as the

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Incas called dried corn-stalks with halfmatured ears, for our animals, and to admire the far-reaching view and the cutstone doorways of mud houses sculptured with bastard Incaic-Christian designs.

We went on again over the high, brown, barren world, the wind-swept summit of each succeeding land-wave bringing again above the horizon the great snow-crested wall that each time seemed near, yet all the jogging day through appeared not a yard nearer. At three we came suddenly to a vast split in the earth into which we began to go down and ever down by acute zigzags and stony cuestas, or slopes, that grew so steep we had to dismount and lead our animals. Soon there lay spread out before and below us the magnificent cañon of the Urubamba, which, rising near Titicaca, flows under many names to add its bit to the giant Amazon. Spring plowing was in progress on the valley floor, walled by mountains. stretching away beyond the reach of eye in each direction. Over this rampart the sun still peered when we reached the level of the river at last and, taking the road. from up the valley, jogged easily along it to Ollantay-tambo.

We rode to the bare, mud-hutted plaza past splendid cut-stone walls of what had

once been palaces little inferior to those of Cuzco. The local "authority" bowed over our paper from the prefect and turned the gobernacion over to us for the night. It was an all but windowless second-story room on the unfurnished plaza, with a springy earth floor laid on poles. Into it shrinking and unwashed alguaciles lugged our baggage and a rheumatic table and bench without once releasing their staves of office. Here, the egg supply of Ollantay-tambo vastly reduced, we spread our saddle blankets and lay down with our heads to the walls, for the slope of the floor was such that to stretch along them would have been to bring up before morning in a tangled confusion in the middle of the room.

With the other half of the seventy-five miles from Cuzco to Mandorpampa before us, we were off betimes in the soft early-summer morning, tinged with coolness from off the half-hidden, snow-clad mountains above as we rode northeast into the sunrise down the right bank of the Urubamba. Gradually, as the morning warmed, the great blue-white glaciers of Piri and its neighbors shook off their night wraps of clouds until above us they stood forth in all their unveiled beauty. The valley narrowed to a cañon, and that to a

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