CHAPTEE VI 

 THE BORDER VALLEYS OF THE EASTERN ANDES 



On the northeastern border of the Peruvian Andes long moun- 

 tain spurs trail down from the regions of snow to the forested 

 plains of the Amazon. Here are the greatest contrasts in the 



physical and human geog- 

 raphy of the Andean Cordil- 

 lera. So striking is the fact 

 that every serious student 

 of Peru finds himself com- 

 pelled to cross and recross 

 this natural frontier. The 

 thread of an investigation 

 runs irregularly now into 

 one border zone, now into 

 another. Out of the forest 

 came the fierce marauders 

 who in the early period 

 drove back the Inca pioneers. 

 Down into the forest to 

 escape from the Spaniards 

 fled the last Inca and his 

 fugitive court. Here the 

 Jesuit fathers sowed their 

 missions along the forest margin, and watched over them for 

 two hundred years. From the mountain border one rubber 

 project after another has been launched into the vast swampy 

 lowlands threaded by great rivers. As an ethnic boundary 

 the eastern mountain border of Peru and Bolivia has no equal 

 elsewhere in South America. From the earliest antiquity the 

 tribes of the grass-covered mountains and the hordes of the for- 

 ested plains have had strongly divergent customs and speech, that 

 bred enduring hatred and led to frequent and bloody strife. 



68 



Fig. 41 — Regional diagram of the eastern 

 aspect of the Cordillera Vileapampa. See also 

 Fig. 17 of which this is an enlarged section. 



