Lima--with its botanical gardens, condors and llamas in cages, long _allées_ of royal palms, and its cement tennis courts where English people are drinking tea; its venerable university, the oldest in America, and its aimless daily driving around and around the Paséo Colón; its proverbial milk-women in hand-woven shawls among shining cans perched high on ponies, and its craze for _art-nouveau_; its treasuring of Pizarro’s bony remnant (which a guide explains is “_completamente momificato_”) and its earthquake-rooms of solid masonry! Lima--where one discusses at some time or another everything from men-of-war to tapir-skin muffs! Lima--with its mediaeval festivals, when priests’ chanting fills the streets, incense rises, blossoms fall, and candles twinkle in a ray of sunlight! As the old saying goes: “It were possible to die of hunger in Lima, but not to leave it.” PART II IN THE MOUNTAINS “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 measurèd The Amazon huge river, now found true? * * * * * Why then should witless man so much misween That nothing is, but that which he hath seen?” SPENSER CHAPTER I THE HIGH REGIONS I 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 change of climate, but makes short, domestic, vertical journeys instead. Living under his banana groves among his sugar-fields in the lush coast valley, if he feels need of fresher air, he takes a trip up to the temperate zone, where apple orchards and wheat-fields lie spread out in a recess of the mountains, and strawberries redden to perfection. Has he curiosity to see an arctic storm, he goes a little higher, coming out upon the bitter table-land where crests of glaciers cut the sky. The Andes, youngest of mountains--what a weirdly tossed world! All the most obscure and harsh substances of the planet have been heaped up here. The rough places of earth have turned over and reached up where they brush against the firmament. Volcanic power has its domain in these high regions of earth, where nature is in anarchy, possessed of unnatural powers. It is a great, uneasy wilderness, where torrents rattle through daring gorges, only to fall a thousand feet, scattering into a dust of foam. Icicles hang from every joint between the stones.