Peru: a land of contrast

Any statement regarding Peru implies a contrary statement equally valid. Contrast is its characteristic quality, true as to the general aspects of the country and ramifying thro...

“I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be; And such was this wide ocean, and this shor...

The surface of the ocean is unruffled. Only the heaving of its great body suggests the power beneath. But when it confronts the desert cliffs, backed by the world-weight of the...

A certain herb lives for years underground in the desert; it feels no necessity for a leaf-existence. Yet if the parched roots are reached by water, they expand toward the sun i...

The Incas found a rainless desert intersected by fruitful valleys as to-day, each independent, with its own gods, its own king, its own manners and customs, even its own disease...

A towering, scoop-topped wagon, fruit-filled, dragged by nine mules, lurched through the desert. Far in the distance, on the first low swelling of the mighty chain of the Andes,...

While the mysticism of the Middle Ages was expanding in delicate spires of Gothic architecture, the Inca’s empire was exposing its heart of gold to the blaze of a tropical sun....

“Gold,” said Columbus, “constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from purgatory and restoring them to th...

Here lay Lima under a tropical sun, sparkling with treasure, a wilderness of rich carvings and paintings, whose piles of gold and silver shone through the thick perfume of exoti...

The valley of the Rimac, where glisten the towers of Lima, is only one of the river-ways which cross the desert. The river of the ancient oracle Rimac, “he who speaks,” has give...

Lima is the city of bells. Exuberant wedding carols blend their metallic jingle with three solemn peals for the dying. Hoarse, ill-cast bells mingle with bells whose tones drip...

They sat about the dinner table--a delightful, stammering, scientific gentleman, who advised my carrying home some live _camarones_ (crayfish); a young English curate, here to s...

“And daily how through hardy enterprise Many great regions are discoverèd, Which to late age were never mentionèd, Who ever heard of th’ Indian Peru? Or who in venturous vessels...

No Peruvian thinks of zones differing from his own as being remote geographical localities. Peru contains them all. He does not have to travel over the face of the earth for a c...

There is something more mysterious than the sea, and that is the desert; something more mysterious than the desert, and that is the mountains; something more mysterious than the...

The Indian worshipped the Inca, his sovereign, because of his divine origin, being the descendant of Manco Ccapac, founder of his race, who was the son of the Sun. Thus, religio...

No one dared to look upon the Inca, as he radiated the light of his divine Sun-father. He lived and ruled as a deity, representative of God, supreme arbiter of all creatures bre...

“He who gives life; he who gives strength; whose command all the bright gods revere; whose light is immortality; whose shadow is death. He who through his power is the one god o...

Had the Indians of the sixteenth century not known that their overthrow was the will of Pachacamac, the miracles constantly favoring the Spaniards would have forced them to reco...

The land lying between Peru and Brazil is a mystery “although the bounds be known of all sides.... Some say it is a drowned land, full of lakes and watery places; others affirm...

What a “hereditary spell” the jungle has had upon men! How smilingly its beauty allures--and how graciously it repels! Yet its beauty is not merely beauty. It flashes suggestion...

From the mountain-tops the stream leads toward the east over the Eyebrows of the Jungle, La Ceja de la Montaña, letting loose a deluge from its black clouds. Caught between wall...

Since the earth was first moistened by rain, and plants first grew, no limit has been set to the rights of vegetation in the jungle. Its sway is uncontested. It has known no mas...

What a land of silence! The vast forest seems wholly uninhabited save for the chatter of a passing train of harlequin parrots or angry apes. And yet it is not silence. There is...

“There is a strange beast, the which for his great heavinesse, and slownesse in moving, they call _Perico-ligero_, or the little-light-dogge; hee hath three nailes to every hand...