ISCUCHACA. 



9 



her shoulders ; by the noise it made, I doubt its partiality to beans. The 

 plough is drawn by oxen, yoked by the horns. It is made of two pieces 

 of wood — the handle and coulter are of one piece, into which is jointed 

 the beam ; the coulter is shod with a square plate of iron, without a 

 shear, so that the furrow is made by throwing the soil on both sides, 

 like the North Carolina bull-tongue. On a hill some Indians are plant- 

 ing, while others are carrying up water in large jars from a stream for 

 the purpose of irrigating 1 the vegetables peeping out of the ground. 



Some of the Indians on the road look very sad after their Sunday frolic. 

 A man on horseback, with his wife astride behind him, and her baby 

 slung to her back, looked quite as uncomfortable as his miserable little 

 horse. The road is marked with stones at every league of three miles : 

 some of the measures must have been made on a Monday morning after 

 a frolic. The small towns of Guayocachi and Nahuinpacyo are inhab- 

 ited solely by Indians, and have a ruinous appearance. The streets are 

 pasture-grounds, and decayed old houses serve as roosting-places for 

 buzzards. We had thunder, rain, and hail; the hail-stones as large as 

 peas, and soft, like snow-balls. Lightning flashed all around us in the 

 valley, while the black clouds brought up by the southeast winds were 

 hurried back by a heavy northwest squall. Thermometer- 45°. 



The Indians gather the dung of animals for fuel. Wood is too scarce 

 to burn here. The green waters of the Juaja rush down through deep 

 ravines ; its power is used for a flour mill. The grain is mashed. The 

 branches of a few large cedar trees give shade to the door of the polite 

 old mestizo miller. Descending the river, we came to a beautiful white- 

 washed new stone bridge, with one arch, 30 feet above the stream. 

 Paying a toll of one shilling per mule, we crossed the Juaja into the 

 small town of Iscuchaca. Near the river there are patches of lucerne, 

 and peach trees in blossom. A native of Copenhagen, in Denmark, 

 came forward and invited us to his house. The people had told him 

 his countrymen had arrived. He was silversmith and apothecary, but 

 had been employed by the Peruvian government to construct this beau- 

 tiful stone bridge, which he had finished, and married the first pretty 

 girl on the street leading therefrom, the daughter of a retired officer of 

 the Peruvian army. The bridge across this stream was formerly built 

 of wood. During a revolution, one of the parties set it on fire to the 

 stone foundation. The Copenhagen man gathered a quantity of this 

 stone, made a fire of it in his forge, and heated a piece of iron red hot. 

 He called it brown slate coal ; rather hard ; not good for blacksmith's 

 work ; but the same is used for running an engine at the mines of 

 Castro-Virreyna, in which he is interested. There are thermal springs 



