THE ROAD TO BOLIVIA 



, By William E. Curtls 



{Continued from the June number) 



Ninety per cent of the population of Cuzco are pure Indians, and 

 the Quichua language, spoken l;)y the Incas, is still in common use. 

 The whites, who are comparativel}'' few, are priests and monks, gov- 

 ernment officials, haciendados, and a few foreign shop-keepers, mostly 

 Germans. The old families still retain ancestral homes filled with 

 massive furniture, gilded mirrors, and costly hangings brought to 

 Peru 250 years ago, when it was the richest and most extravagant 

 country on earth and when the nobility and wealth were concentrated 

 at Cuzco. Most of these houses are in a state of advanced decay, for 

 their proprietors are suffering from hereditary and incurable diseases 

 called pride and poverty. Their estates have been ruined b}' neglect 

 and devastation of revolutionary armies, their mines are no longer 

 profitable because of the low price of silver, and now nobody knows 

 and many people wonder where they find the means of sustenance. 

 Their pride will not permit them to work, and their poverty makes 

 it impossible for them to develop the natural resources that lie dor- 

 mant in their property. If tbeir ancestors had shown as much en- 

 ergy in that <levelopment as they displayed in searching the Incas' 

 ruins for treasure, there would have been permanent prosperity. Even 

 now, after 350 3^ears' digging for secret places of concealment, the 

 Spanish inhabitants can always raise mone\^ somehow to pay the ex- 

 penses of further excavations. 



For more than three centuries the inhabitants of that region and 

 the speculators of Europe have been plunging year after year into the 

 icy waters of Lake Urcos to recover a golden cliain of the Inca Huaina 

 Capac, which was thrown there to spite the Spaniards. It was of pure 

 gold, wrought into links about one foot in length and as large as a 

 man's arm, and long enough to stretch twice around the grand plaza 

 in Cuzco, which is nearly as large as Lafa^^ette Square, in the city of 

 Washington. At one time a syndicate was organized, with a capital 

 of 85,000,000, to bore a tunnel to drain the lake. After spending a 

 large sum of money it was found that the mountain was composed 

 almost entirely of living rock, so that the enterprise was abandoned. 



204 



